Free Republic

Sure, we as a nation have always killed people. A lot of people. But no president has ever waged war by killing enemies one by one, targeting them individually for execution, wherever they are. The Obama administration has taken pains to tell us, over and over again, that they are careful, scrupulous of our laws, and determined to avoid the loss of collateral, innocent lives. They're careful because when it comes to waging war on individuals, the distinction between war and murder becomes a fine one. Especially when, on occasion, the individuals we target are Americans and when, in one...

TEL AVIV – There is a common threat that links the Sept. 11, 2012, Benghazi attack to both the Boston Marathon bombings and the terror assault on the In Amenas gas facility in southern Algeria in January. The thread runs through al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, one of the most deadly members of the al-Qaida conglomerate. AQAP previously attempted several major attacks within the U.S. The group was the first al-Qaida member to comment on the Benghazi attack, releasing a statement arguing the assaults on the U.S. mission and nearby CIA annex were revenge for the death of...

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has told investigators that he and his brother were influenced by the Internet sermons of the notorious preacher Anwar al-Awlaki, Daniel Klaidman reports. Plus: the feds now know who “Misha” is.

Authorities believe neither brother had links to terror groups. However, two U.S. officials said Tuesday that Tamerlan Tsarnaev - who died last week in a gunbattle - frequently looked at extremist websites, including Inspire magazine, an English-language online publication produced by al-Qaida's Yemen affiliate. The magazine has endorsed lone-wolf terror attacks.

To borrow a line from Dennis Green, they are who we thought they were. From his hospital bed, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has acknowledged his role in planting the explosives near the marathon finish line on April 15, the officials said. The first successful large-scale bombing in the post-Sept. 11, 2001, era, the Boston attack killed three people and wounded more than 250 others.The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe an ongoing investigation, said Dzhokhar and his older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was killed by police as the two attempted to avoid capture, do not appear to have been...

The controversial imam of a prominent mosque in Arlington, Va., has urged immigrant Muslims in the United States to wage war for Islam. “The enemies of Allah are lining up. The question for us is, are we lining [up] or are we afraid because they may call us terrorists?” Shaker Elsayed told a crowd of Ethiopian Muslims during a lecture at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Va. “Let me give you the good news: they are already calling us terrorists anyway. Whether you sitting at home, watching TV, drinking coffee, sleeping or playing with your kids, you are a...

New light is being shed on the 2001 anthrax attacks in a fascinating open letter to Ayman al Zawahiri of al Qaeda, written by a jihadi living in London. Numan Bin Uthman, a former leader of an armed Islamic group in Libya, provides yet more evidence that the global Islamic jihad movement is losing its resolve.  But the letter contains a startling admission. Uthman tells us of a conversation he had with al Qaeda leaders before the 9/11 attacks in which he urged them not to use WMD. From AKI News: Uthman also said that he had taken part in...

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...

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....

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...

Devin Zentmyer of Illinois wants an end to American democracy.A conference convened last month by the Islamic extremist group Hizb-ut Tahrir in Chicago cheered the fall of secular governments in the Middle East and the political rise of groups advocating for the re-imposition of Islamic law and the revival of the global caliphate, such as the Muslim Brotherhood. The speakers at the conference also endorsed a similar program in the West, particularly America.One of the attendees at the conference is doing his part to make that dream of Islamic rule in America a reality.Devin Zentmyer, who also goes by his...

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 other words, the independent panel in the Fort Hood jihad massacre said it's OK to slaughter US soldiers in the cause of Islam just as long as ....... you don't offend Islam. Major Hassan was a self-proclained soldier of allah. He came out as a jihadi on grand rounds. The other doctors who worked with him would whisper among themselves that he was a ticking time bomb, but were reluctant to report him lest they be labeled racistislamophobicantimuslimbigots. And this dhimmi panel agreed. Regardless of the facts: Below, Major Hasan's Islamic power point presentation, made on grand rounds. Hasanonislam.bmp...

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...

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...

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

U.S. Drone Strike in Yemen Reportedly Was Aimed at Radical Cleric Seen as Post-Bin Laden Threat Published May 06, 2011 | The Wall Street Journal A U.S. drone strike in Yemen on Thursday was aimed at killing Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born radical cleric who is suspected of orchestrating terrorist attacks on the U.S, but the missile missed its target, Yemeni and U.S. officials told the Wall Street Journal. The drone strike comes less than a week after U.S. Navy SEALs killed Usama bin Laden at a compound in Pakistan. Had the drone strike in Yemen been successful, the U.S. would...

A poor, agrarian, landlocked country in South America with a nearly 100 percent Christian population is hardly the place one would expect to become a hotbed of Islamic extremism in the Western Hemisphere. But a recent report by the Open Source Center (OSC) of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence says it's so. .... One Muslim leader named in the OSC report is Mahmud Amer Abusharar, founder of the Centro Islamico Boliviano (CIB) in Santa Cruz. Abusharar emigrated from the Palestinian territories in 1974 and claims to have built Bolivia’s first mosque in 1994 so that he would...

Ahmed Omar Abul Ali, the Virginia Muslim charged with conspiring to assassinate President Bush, met several times with Zubayr al-Rimi—Al Qaeda’s number two man in Saudi Arabia, killed in a shootout with Saudi forces in September 2003: Abu Ali linked to Saudi Arabia al Qaeda leader. (Hat tip: The Jawa Report.) A Falls Church man accused of conspiring to assassinate President Bush met several times with an al Qaeda leader in Saudi Arabia who once was the target of a global manhunt and a key suspect in an attack that killed nine Americans in Riyadh, law-enforcement authorities said. Ahmed Omar...

ASHINGTON, June 7— A re-examination of years of terrorist plots and attacks around the world, including the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, suggests that American intelligence agencies profoundly underestimated Al Qaeda's reach and aspirations for more than a decade as it grew from obscurity into a global terrorist threat, lawmakers and investigators said this week.As Congressional investigators look back far beyond the series of signals missed before the Sept. 11 attacks, they are seeking answers to many questions about Al Qaeda that law enforcement and intelligence agencies still cannot answer themselves, officials said.In particular, they said, Congressional investigators are trying...