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How a U.S. Citizen Came to Be in America’s Cross Hairs By MARK MAZZETTI, CHARLIE SAVAGE and SCOTT SHANE WASHINGTON — One morning in late September 2011, a group of American drones took off from an airstrip the C.I.A. had built in the remote southern expanse of Saudi Arabia. The drones crossed the border into Yemen, and were soon hovering over a group of trucks clustered in a desert patch of Jawf Province, a region of the impoverished country once renowned for breeding Arabian horses. A group of men who had just finished breakfast scrambled to get to their trucks....

SNIPPET: "A seventh man, aged 20, was arrested on Thursday and continues to be questioned." SNIPPET: "Irfan Nasser, 30, from Sparkhill, and Irfan Khalid, 26, from Sparkbrook, are accused of travelling to Pakistan for terrorism training, including bomb making, and weapons and poison making; as well making a martyrdom video and planning a bombing campaign. Ashik Ali, 26, from Balsall Heath, and Rahi Ahmed, 25, from Moseley, face charges related to planning a bombing campaign in the UK, including constructing a home-made explosive device for terrorist acts and stating an intention to be suicide bombers. Two other suspects - Bahader...

A federal judge in Manhattan refused on Wednesday to require the Justice Department to disclose a memorandum providing the legal justification for the targeted killing of a United States citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, who died in a drone strike in Yemen in 2011. “I can find no way around the thicket of laws and precedents that effectively allow the executive branch of our government to proclaim as perfectly lawful certain actions that seem on their face incompatible with our Constitution and laws while keeping the reasons for their conclusion a secret,” she wrote. “The Alice-in-Wonderland nature of this pronouncement is not...

In congressional testimony on January 20, the nation’s top intelligence official, Dennis Blair, acknowledged that the U.S. government mishandled the interrogation of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian terrorist who tried to blow up a plane over Detroit on Christmas Day. Specifically, Blair was not happy that Abdulmutallab was charged as a common criminal and read his rights, rather than being questioned by the elite interrogation unit announced by President Obama as a replacement for the CIA teams used by the Bush administration. “I’d been a part of the deliberations which established this high-value interrogation unit [HIG],” Blair explained at a...

NOTE The following text is a quote: Alabama Men Arrested on Terrorism Charges U.S. Attorney’s Office December 11, 2012 Southern District of Alabama MOBILE, AL—U.S. Attorney Kenyen R. Brown of the Southern District of Alabama and Stephen E. Richardson, Special Agent in Charge of the Mobile Division of the FBI, announced that Mohammad Abdul Rahman Abukhdair, 25, and Randy Wilson, also known as Rasheed Wilson, 25, both U.S. citizens living in Mobile, were arrested today on terrorism charges filed in the Southern District of Alabama. A criminal complaint signed on December 10, 2012, charges Abukhdair and Wilson with conspiring to...

An MI6 agent who managed to infiltrate al-Qaeda in a bid to kill one of its leaders was told by his British bosses they would not assassinate him because it could be against the law. Terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki was encouraging attacks on the West and also recruiting young Muslims to carry them out, but despite being able to murder him, Morten Storm was blocked by London, it has emerged. Storm says he was told by his bosses in the UK: “We do not involve ourselves in encouraging people to participate in jihad and we don’t involve ourselves in killings abroad....

SNIPPET: "They are: Soheil Omar Kabir, 34, a Pomona man who is an American citizen from Afghanistan; Ralph Deleon, 23, an Ontario man who was born in the Philippines; Miguel Alejandro Santana Vidriales, 21, an Upland man who was born in Mexico and whose was U.S. citizenship was pending; and Arifeen David Gojali, 21, of Riverside." SNIPPET: "The three men followed the essays of the now-deceased al-Qaida leader Anwar Al-Awlaqi, who led terrorist operations in the Arabian Peninsula." SNIPPET: "Santana and Deleon told the plot to a confidential informant working for the FBI, according to the complaint." SNIPPET: "In order...

4 Southern California Men Held In Plot To Join Al Qaeda, Taliban Four men with ties to Southern California have been charged with plotting to join Al Qaeda and the Taliban to commit "violent jihad" and target Americans, the FBI said Monday night. One of the men, Sohiel Omar Kabir, 34, allegedly traveled in July to Afghanistan, where he arranged for terrorist training to be conducted with Al Qaeda and Taliban operatives, according to a complaint unsealed Monday in U.S. District Court in Riverside. Kabir, who lived in Pomona, is a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Afghanistan, federal authorities said....

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Team Obama's Justification For Killing A 16-Year-Old American In A Drone Strike Is StunningMichael Kelley | Oct. 24, 2012, 2:04 PM Former White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, a senior adviser to President Obama's reelection campaign, recently became the first person on Team Obama to address the killing of 16-year-old American citizen Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, Conor Friedersdorf of the The Atlantic reports. Abdulrahman was the son of New Mexico-born cleric and al-Qaeda propagandist Anwar al-Alwaki. Both were killed in separate drone strikes last year. A reporter asked Gibbs: "Do you think that the killing of Anwar al-Alwaki's 16-year-old son, who was...

SNIPPET: "New York City is the center of a public uproar as Internet blogger Pamela Gellar rises with an “anti-jihad” ad campaign." SNIPPET: "Gellar and her group are protesting the Jihad, which in definition is the religious duty of Muslims. According to the Dictionary of Islam, jihad is defined as “A religious war with those who are unbelievers in the mission of Muhammad . . . enjoined especially for the purpose of advancing Islam and repelling evil from Muslims.” The literal meaning of jihad, according to the British Broadcasting Network, “is struggle or effort, and it means much more than...

Its hero and editor are dead, but the al-Qaida magazine, Inspire, continues to do just that. According to the complaint filed in federal district court in New York, Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis, 21, a student from Bangladesh arrested Wednesday and charged with trying to blow up the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in ManhattanÂ’s Financial District, was the latest Islamist militant to try to follow the example of the radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and the English-language magazine, Inspire, created in his honor. Quazi Nafis, who came to the United States last January on a student visa, had big...

Updated at 8 p.m. ET: NEW YORK - A suspected terrorist parked a van packed with what he thought was a 1,000-pound bomb next to the Federal Reserve building in Lower Manhattan and tried to detonate it Wednesday morning before he was arrested in a terror sting operation, authorities said. The suspect, 21-year-old Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis, is a Bangladeshi national who came to the U.S. on a student visa in January for the specific purpose of launching a terror attack here, authorities said. He allegedly told an undercover agent last month that he hoped the attack would disrupt...

A Chicago teen was arrested in Chicago for trying to blow up a bar with a car bomb. News 9 reported: Undercover FBI agents arrested an 18-year-old American man who tried to detonate what he believed was a car bomb outside a downtown Chicago bar, federal prosecutors said Saturday. Adel Daoud, a U.S. citizen from the Chicago suburb of Hillside, was arrested Friday night in an undercover operation in which agents pretending to be extremists provided him with a phony car bomb. The U.S. District Attorney’s Office in Chicago announced the arrest Saturday and said the device was inert and...

Brief thoughts/quotes from the last 11 years. "Looking away, not caring, or hoping for the best are not viable options in fighting terrorism (in general) and the global jihad (specifically). Terrorism must be fought head on 24/7 and preventing terrorism is far better than just reacting to one terror-related event after another." -Cindy (July 1, 2011) ~ "WHAT DID I LEARN from the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001? OPINION: I have learned that more Americans love America than the lame-stream media will ever let on. I have learned that America's military is the finest in the world. I have...

FORT HOOD — A string of witnesses in an evidentiary hearing identified Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan as the triggerman at a Fort Hood deployment center that left 45 dead and injured. As his trial nears almost three years later, few here argue over his guilt. They wonder why a psychiatrist would gun down fellow soldiers. Rep. John Carter, R-Round Rock can explain it. He calls Hasan a domestic terrorist, something prosecutors have never claimed, and says those avoiding the term are indulging in political correctness. “Believe me, my friend, if somebody had jumped up and said, ‘Praise God and...

In the early morning hours of October 10, 2002, Anwar al-Awlaki, the notorious al Qaeda operative, was detained by U.S. Customs agents when he arrived at JFK International Airport in New York City after a flight from Saudi Arabia. At the time, he was a prime suspect in the 9/11 attacks and had been placed on terrorist watch-lists. Nevertheless, the Bush Justice Department directed Customs to release him. That decision enabled Awlaki to continue his jihadist campaign against the United States until he was finally killed in Yemen last September, in an American drone attack. For nearly a decade since...

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is expected Monday to provide the most detailed explanation yet of the Obama administration’s secret decision-making leading up to the targeted killing of a U.S. citizen last year in Yemen. Holder’s speech Monday afternoon at Northwestern Law School in Chicago is the result of months of internal Obama administration deliberations over how much can be made public about the decisions leading up to the strike. The Justice Department wrote a still-classified memo that provided the legal rationale for the targeting of American-born Anwar al-Awlaki that also included intelligence material about his operational role within...

A 26-year-old Chicago man was trying to help finance al-Qaida and hoped to blow himself up in a suicide mission, authorities say. Shaker Masri was arrested Tuesday evening and charged by federal prosecutors on Wednesday with knowingly intending to use a weapon of mass destruction outside the United States. Authorities said Masri told an FBI informant that he planned to go to Somalia and help al-Qaida, and asked the informant for money to help buy guns once they got there. He also told the informant that he hoped to become a martyr by wearing a suicide vest, the criminal complaint...

SNIPPET: "In July, the British government warned that Al Qaeda’s exploitation of social networking websites is on the rise." SNIPPET: "The massive and multifarious network of websites and social media has presented a challenge to authorities in trying to combat it. Additionally, civil liberty concerns have conflicted with government efforts to spy on communications. Reducing terrorist activity on social media sites has been particularly difficult because users have adopted new forms of communication to conform with the new formats. Many Arabic speakers on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and other sites use Arabizi, a form of colloquial Arabic written in the Latin...