Posted on 07/22/2005 12:05:50 PM PDT by crazyhorse691
The hunt for a suspect with links to both Oregon and the London bombings shows why Portland is way off base
Maybe international police suspicions about Haroon Rashid Aswat will turn out to be unfounded. Maybe he had nothing to do with the July 7 London bomb attacks or the attempts to establish a terrorist training camp halfway around the world in a remote corner of Southern Oregon.
Either way, Portland's mayor and City Council majority should be paying close attention to the Aswat case. It magnifies everything that's wrong about the city's decision to pull Portland police off the FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Force.
Haroon Rashid Aswat is not a name you've seen in the newspaper before Thursday's front-page story by Les Zaitz of The Oregonian. Zaitz reported that a law enforcement official confirmed to him that Aswat was the man referred to as "co-conspirator #3" last year in court papers related to the alleged conspiracy to build an al-Qaida camp near the tiny Klamath County community of Bly.
And why should Portland Mayor Tom Potter and his council colleagues care about any of this? They should care because the Aswat story shows in stark relief how the global struggle against fanatical Islamic terrorism is very much a local concern and responsibility.
On Thursday, at the request of British investigators, Pakistani authorities were searching for Aswat, who reportedly had been in close contact with the four suicide bombers in London just before their attacks. Aswat is also a former senior aide to one of Britain's most militant Islamic clerics, Abu Hamza al-Masri, who is now facing extradition to the United States on charges of conspiring to build the jihadist training camp at Bly.
As an unindicted co-conspirator in the Oregon case, Aswat is believed to have visited Bly in November 1999 to check out the 160-acre ranch property, Zaitz reported. For reasons still unclear, the training camp never materialized, but now "co-conspirator #3" turns up as the subject of the intense worldwide manhunt in the British bomb attacks.
The Times of London, quoting unidentified intelligence sources, said Aswat visited the British hometowns of the four London bombers and selected their targets. The newspaper also reported there had been up to 20 phone calls between Aswat and two of the bombers just before the attacks.
These developments are relevant in Portland, where opponents of putting city police on the FBI-led task force have denigrated the seriousness of accusations against local radicals convicted of terrorist activities. Portland's critics have made light of the clumsiness and fruitlessness of the local conspirators. They have pointed out over and over that Portland's jihadists were mostly "just wannabes" -- American citizens, born in the USA.
But the London mass murderers were British citizens, born on British soil. "Wannabes." Apparently, all they needed was some expert assistance from someone like Haroon Rashid Aswat, the man with the links to Oregon.
Potter is a former police chief and shouldn't have much trouble connecting those dots. He should do exactly that before the end of the year, when it's time for the city to revisit its decision to withdraw from the anti-terrorism task force.
I'm surprised that there is no connection between George Galloway and the London bombings.
Absolute madness! Better dead than than politically incorrect crowd howling at the moon during day light again.
Related Link...
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1447222/posts
"London bomb suspect linked to Ore. terror camp"
kgw.com ^ | Wednesday, July 20, 2005 | By kgw.com, NBC and CNN Staff (Spaltter)
Posted on 07/20/2005 6:41:28 PM PDT by Splatter
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