Free Republic

The just assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki was a defining moment for American Muslims. We should have been leading the cheers -- but instead many of our self-appointed “spokesmen” squandered their bandwidth. This one is personal. As one of us, Awlaki’s extreme form of Islamism swayed many Muslims to hate America and the West. Worse -- in flagrant defiance of the central tenets of our Islam -- he taught many Muslims to diminish the value of human life. Yet where most Americans saw a traitor who turned on his nation in order to fight our sons and daughters on the battlefield,...

(CNN) -- The son of U.S.-born militant cleric Anwar Al-Awlaki was among those killed in a trio of drone attacks in southern Yemen on Friday night, a security official said. The attacks, carried out in the Shabwa district, killed seven suspected militants, the defense ministry said. It would not confirm that Abdul Rahman Anwar Awlaki was among them. The senior security official in Shabwa, who did not want to be named because he is not authorized to speak to the media, said the younger Awlaki had been hiding in the mountains of Shabwa for more than eight months. He had...

Obama’s State Department (run by Hillary Clinton) has contacted the family of al-Qaeda propagandist and recruiter Samir Khan to “express its condolences” to his family. Samir Khan a right hand man to Anwar al-Awlaki, was killed along with his jihadist buddy in an air strike in Yemen that took place on September 30.

The Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution is unequivocal: no American shall "be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." No amount of ducking and diving will evade the inescapable fact that, for the first time, U.S. military officials in an aggressive overreach of constitutional authority deliberately targeted an American citizen for killing. And no amount of legalistic wordplay will alter the reality that al-Awlaki was denied due process. (No, Mr Gingrich, the signing of a death warrant by an American President does not constitute "due process," except perhaps in North Korea or Iran. Our...

[Hitchens is hard core when it comes to Islamists!] Probably because it mainly provides the kind of short-term cinematic satisfaction that characterizes the Hellfire terminus, the flashy ending of al-Qaida’s main media star has only led to the reopening of some pressing questions about the nature of the jihadi menace. It has also forced us to confront the idea of words as weapons, and the relationship between ideas and actions, in a world of conscienceless criminal violence that operates without employing any code or precedent of its own. To phrase the essence of the problem succinctly, you are perhaps more...

http://internet-haganah.com/harchives/007413.html "Whither the jihadi forums?" SNIPPET: "There are currently only three jihadi forums that are sufficiently active and well-connected to be of any interest whatsoever. Why we claim to be on the verge of defeating al-Qaida while simultaneously watching passively as they use these forums to regroup and regenerate is beyond me. These are the forums three: • al-Fidaa, a forum created by al-Qaida core. That it is directly linked to al-Qaida by definition moves it to the top of the list. Current membership: 2,462, all of whom can be considered "active" if only because they just joined the forum....

The killing on Friday of Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen described as a powerful al-Qaeda terrorist, has stirred considerable debate about whether it's appropriate for a president to order an American assassinated. Evidently, Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain shares those concerns. The above video was recorded just after the first nationally televised GOP presidential debate of the 2012 campaign cycle, held in Greenville South Carolina on May 5 of this year, according to its YouTube page. "He should be charged. And since he's an American citizen, he should be tried in our courts," Cain said of al-Awlaki. When asked if...

Outside the U.S. government, President Obama's order to kill American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki without due process has proved controversial, with experts in law and war reaching different conclusions. Inside the Obama Administration, however, disagreement was apparently absent, or so say anonymous sources quoted by the Washington Post. "The Justice Department wrote a secret memorandum authorizing the lethal targeting of Anwar al-Aulaqi, the American-born radical cleric who was killed by a U.S. drone strike Friday, according to administration officials," the newspaper reported. "The document was produced following a review of the legal issues raised by striking a U.S. citizen and involved...

SNIPPET: "AN EXTREMIST Islamic group suspected of planning a crime spree across Sydney to raise money for the Taliban has been uncovered by counter-terrorism police. The Sunday Telegraph can reveal that NSW Police and national security agencies have been investigating the group members for over a year, with the case currently active. The extremists have been the subject of a top secret operation led by the NSW Police Force, ASIO, Australian Federal Police and the NSW Crime Commission. A group of men, aged between 20 and 30, all Australian citizens of Middle Eastern-descent, have been identified as the core members."...

The American government at the direction of the President targeted and killed an American citizen who was an unlawful combatant and a terrorist. This was a good thing in this case, but it also opened the barn door for the President deciding to kill an American citizen acting as prosecutor, judge, jury and in effect executioner without any judicial review or due process (especially interesting considering the President and his administrations instance on treating other terrorists as common criminals and giving them full due process and civilian trials== until that blew up and the Congress told them they couldn't bring...

For once we’re all in agreement this guy was a terrorist. But a reminder is in order of just who Awlaki was not so long ago. Just before the 9/11 attacks, he was the imam of the large Falls Church mosque in northern Virginia. He was the Muslim chaplain at George Washington University. The New York Times reported that, a few weeks before 9/11, Awlaki preached a sermon in the U.S. Capitol. After the 9/11 attacks, Awlaki was widely believed to be a moderate. He was first imam to pray at the U.S. Capitol with the Congressional Muslim Staff Association...

For once we’re all in agreement this guy was a terrorist. But a reminder is in order of just who Awlaki was not so long ago. Just before the 9/11 attacks, he was the imam of the large Falls Church mosque in northern Virginia. He was the Muslim chaplain at George Washington University. The New York Times reported that, a few weeks before 9/11, Awlaki preached a sermon in the U.S. Capitol. After the 9/11 attacks, Awlaki was widely believed to be a moderate. He was first imam to pray at the U.S. Capitol with the Congressional Muslim Staff Association...

Tapper to Carney: "Do you not see at all... does the Administration not see at all how a president asserting that he has the right to kill an American citizen without due process and that he's not going to even explain why he thinks that he has that right, is troublesome to some people?"... http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=14642685

WASHINGTON (AP) — An American-born cleric killed in Yemen played a "significant operational role" in plotting and inspiring attacks on the United States, U.S. officials said Friday, as they disclosed detailed intelligence to justify the killing of a U.S. citizen.

Terror mastermind and senior Al-Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki is dead a senior U.S. official confirms. Al-Awlaki, a U.S.-born Islamic militant cleric who became a prominent figure in Al-Qaeda's most active branch, using his fluent English and Internet savvy to draw recruits to carry out attacks in the United States, was killed Friday in the mountains of Yemen, American and Yemeni officials said. excerpt - Yemeni security officials and local tribal leaders said al-Awlaki was killed in an air strike on his convoy that they believed was carried out by the Americans. They said pilotless drones had been seen over the...

ASPEN, Colo. (AP) — The top commander of U.S. special operations forces said Wednesday that Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida is bloodied and "nearing its end," but he warned the next generation of militants could keep special operations fighting for a decade to come. Navy SEAL Adm. Eric T. Olson described the killing of bin Laden by a special operations raid on May 2 as a near-killing blow for what he called "al-Qaida 1.0," as created by bin Laden and led from his hideout in Pakistan. Olson said the group had already lost steam because of the revolts of the Arab...

I never give time frames, because you never know where you'll have sufficient evidence to go public with a prosecution, " Mueller said.

SEATTLE -- Men from Washington and California have been arrested in plot to attack a Seattle military recruiting station, the Department of Justice says. Justice Department officials said the two men, who were arrested late Wednesday night, took possession of machine guns that they purchased and planned to use in an attack on the Military Entrance Processing Station on East Marginal Way and that the two also planned to use grenades in the attack. Here's the complete news release from the Department of Justice: Two men were arrested late last night and are charged by criminal complaint with terrorism and...

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration has intensified the American covert war in Yemen, exploiting a growing power vacuum in the country to strike at militant suspects with armed drones and fighter jets, according to American officials. The acceleration of the American campaign in recent weeks comes amid a violent conflict in Yemen that has left the government in Sana, a United States ally, struggling to cling to power. Yemeni troops that had been battling militants linked to Al Qaeda in the south have been pulled back to the capital, and American officials see the strikes as one of the few...

A Saudi linguist convicted of sexually assaulting a housekeeper and keeping her a virtual slave for four years won a 20-year reduction in his prison sentence Friday, and his defence attorneys hope it means he'll be released from prison soon. District Judge J. Mark Hannen sentenced Homaidan al-Turki to between eight years and life in prison during a hearing Friday in Centennial. Hannen cited al-Turki's good behaviour in prison in cutting the sentence from its original 28 years to life. ... Al-Turki insists he is innocent and a victim of anti-Muslim sentiment. His case has angered Saudi authorities — several...