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BRUSSELS, Belgium Sept. 30 A former pro soccer player who joined the al-Qaida terrorist network was convicted and sentenced to prison Tuesday for plotting to bomb a NATO base believed to contain nuclear weapons. Nizar Trabelsi of Tunisia, who once played professional soccer in Germany, received the maximum sentence of 10 years in prison from a court that also convicted 17 other men and acquitted five others in the largest terrorism trial in Belgium's history. Trabelsi admitted planning to drive a car bomb into the canteen of the Kleine Brogel air base, a Belgian military post used by NATO where...

With five bodies barely cold in Arizona after a madman went on a killing rampage yesterday, hateful liberals are screaming for the death of Sarah Palin. Palin, the Republican Vice Presidential candidate in 2008, has been in the limelight since her rise to nation-wide fame. Angry liberals are now blaming her for assassin Jared Loughner's rampage yesterday, and some are even calling for her death. And no, there was not just one insane person on one insane website, but many cases of wackos calling for the death of Sarah Palin. Like this one from a commenter on TMZ: Or this...

TUSCON, Ariz ( KTLA) -- Jared Lee Loughner, the alleged Tucson gunman, was described Saturday as a politically radical loner. Now an internet trail emerged in which he apparently railed against the US government and told friends: "Please don't be mad at me". There are unconfirmed reports that 22 year old Jared Lee Loughner once met with Rep. Giffords in 2007. A former high school friend said that he had often talked about meeting and talking with the congresswoman. Arizona court records show Loughner has twice been charged with previous offenses. The first, in October 2007, related to the possession...

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...

A Philadelphia man has been charged after allegedly threatening the life of Rep. Eric Cantor, the second-ranking Republican in the House. U.S. Attorney Zane David Memeger said that 38-year-old Norman LaBoon has been charged with two counts of threatening an official of the United States and with transmitting in interstate commerce a threatening communication, according to the The Philadelphia Inquirer. The FBI arrested LaBoon in March after receiving a copy of a YouTube video in which LaBoon made threats about Cantor. Officials tracked the I.P. address to a computer in Philadelphia used by LaBoon, who had previously been arrested for...

OSLO (AFP) - The founder of radical Islamist group Ansar al-Islam was questioned in Oslo by German police ahead of the arrests in Germany of three men suspected of plotting to attack visiting Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allaiwi. German police interrogated Mullah Krekar in Oslo early last week and he is thought to be linked to at least one of the men arrested on Friday on suspicion of planning attacks during Allawi's visit, the Norwegian daily VG reported Sunday. All three have been ordered held over their alleged membership of Ansar al-Islam, described by German authorities as a foreign terrorist...

JEDDAH – Suicide bomber Abdullah Asiri had inserted around half a kilogram of explosives into his own body to carry out his failed assassination attempt of Prince Muhammad Bin Naif, Assistant Minister of Interior for Security Affairs, last week. As more details emerged of the events surrounding the attack that took place at the Prince’s home in Obhur, sources told Okaz newspaper Friday that Asiri’s mobile telephone was equipped with two SIM cards, one of which was used to speak to call members of the terrorist organization in Yemen, and the other to detonate the device located inside Asiri’s rectum...

Ibrahim Hassan Al Asiri --- "believed to be the movement's resident bombmaking expert - skills he first put to chilling use in a suicide attack in which he recruited his own younger brother, Abdullah, 23, to act as the "martyr". The attack was an audacious attempt on the life of the Saudi Deputy Minister of the Interior, Prince Muhammad Abdul Aziz Al-Saud..."

MI6 hired Al Qaeda men to kill Gaddafi: ex-official By Martin Bright LONDON: The British government will this week go to unprecedented lengths to stop a renegade counter-intelligence officer, David Shayler, from making his most devastating claim yet : that the Libyan Islamic cell paid by British intelligence agents to assassinate Colonel Gaddafi in February 1996 were members of Al Qaeda. The Libyan cell is believed to have included one of Osama bin Laden's most trusted lieutenants, Anas al-Liby, who remains on the US government's most wanted list with a reward of $25 million for his capture. Al-Liby lived in...

Startling revelations by French intelligence experts back David Shayler's alleged 'fantasy'about Gadaffi plot Martin Bright, home affairs editor Sunday November 10, 2002 The Observer British intelligence paid large sums of money to an al-Qaeda cell in Libya in a doomed attempt to assassinate Colonel Gadaffi in 1996 and thwarted early attempts to bring Osama bin Laden to justice. The latest claims of MI6 involvement with Libya's fearsome Islamic Fighting Group, which is connected to one of bin Laden's trusted lieutenants, will be embarrassing to the Government, which described similar claims by renegade MI5 officer David Shayler as 'pure fantasy'. The...

Police in Hamburg shut down the notorious al-Quds mosque, renamed the Taiba mosque in 2008, led by German-Syrian national and voluntary imam Mamoun Darkazanli. Darkazanli (a.k.a. Abu Ilyas al-Suri) has been a suspected al-Qaeda operative, primarily as a financier and logistician, in the European Union for close to two decades. Long active in al-Qaeda circles, Darkazanli first surfaced on the radar of Western intelligence agencies when he purportedly helped procure a cargo ship named “Jennifer” for Osama bin Laden as early as 1993 (Hamburger Abendblatt, October 16, 2004). Germany’s Bundeskriminalamt (BKA- Federal Criminal Police Office) admitted that it had been...

IT COULD have been a scene from Gabriel García Márquez’s novella, “Chronicle of a Death Foretold”. But there was nothing magical about the realism of the video recorded by Rodrigo Rosenberg, a Guatemalan lawyer, four days before he was shot dead on Sunday May 10th while cycling on a busy avenue. “If you are hearing this message,” he intoned, “it is because I, Rodrigo Rosenberg Marzano, was assassinated by the president’s private secretary, Gustavo Alejos, and his partner, Gregorio Valdez, with the approval of Álvaro Colom and Sandra de Colom [Guatemala’s president and first lady]”. Political murders are sadly nothing...

SNIPPET: "This past Sunday, six terrorists were captured in Medan, North Sumatra province, by Indonesia's counter-terrorist unit, Special Detachment 88. All were thought to be linked to a paramilitary camp in Aceh that was raided in February and two of them, Pandu Wicaksono Widyan Putro and Bayu Sena, were said to be tied to the twin hotel bombings in Jakarta last July." SNIPPET: "Special Detachment 88 will likely continue its raids in and around Aceh to round up those camp members that have thus far evaded the police dragnet."

<p>HAMMOND, Ind. - A former Purdue University graduate student convicted of threatening to kill President George W. Bush and others in Internet postings has been sentenced to more than four years in prison.</p> <p>Thirty-eight-year-old Vikram S. Buddhi, an Indian national who was living in West Lafayette, was sentenced Friday in U.S. District Court in Hammond to 57 months in prison and 3 years of probation.</p>

HAMMOND, Ind. -- A Federal judge refused to throw out a Purdue University student's indictment on charges alleging he urged the assassination of President George Bush and made threats against other administration officials. Friday's ruling by U.S. District Court Judge James Moody clears the way for Vikram Buddhi's trial to begin June 25 in Moody's Hammond courtroom. Buddhi, an Indian national who was attending advanced engineering classes at Purdue's West Lafayette campus, faces an 11-count complaint for alleged comments he made in an Internet chat room in 2005 and 2006. The indictment alleges that he made threats against the president,...

BOSTON - A pharmacy college graduate conspired with two other men on a terror plot to kill two prominent U.S. politicians and carry out a holy war by attacking shoppers in U.S. malls and American troops in Iraq, prosecutors said Wednesday. But their plans — in which the men used code words like "peanut butter and jelly" for fighting in Somalia and "culinary school" for terrorist camps — were thwarted in part when they could not find training and were unable to buy automatic weapons, authorities said. Tarek Mehanna worked with the men from 2001 to May 2008 on the...

SNIPPET: "Steven Cucuzzella, of North Charleston, pleaded guilty in federal court to sending a threat by mail to destroy the Naval Brig near Charleston. Another charge of threatening to kill former President George W. Bush was dismissed."

In its pages, Omar (and his mother) reveal that the Clinton administration failed in a major assassination attempt of Osama bin Laden, just days after the 1998 East Africa embassy bombings. This is something that has often been speculated but never confirmed. Former insiders like Richard Clarke say Omar bin Laden’s account of the assassination failure appears to be credible. And if this is the case, it might explain a little more about what documents Sandy Berger really had stashed away.

There has been suprisingly little reportage of the actual details of would-be shopping mall terrorist, Mr. Talib Abu Salam Ibn Shareef's mindset and intentions. So as a public service, here the FBI agent's affidavit (pdf file) in easy to read format. Talib Abu Salam Ibn Shareef STATE OF ILLINOIS)) COUNTY OF COOK)AFFIDAVIT1. I, Jared Ruddy, Federal Bureau of Investigation, being duly sworn, state as follows: I am a Special Agent in the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”) and have been so employed for more than two years. I am currently assigned to an FBI Counterterrorism squad as well as the...

John William Yettaw thought he was on a mission from God to save Aung San Suu Kyi. But the American ended up inadvertently extending her house arrest. It started with his now infamous swim in May. Overweight, asthmatic and suffering from borderline diabetes, he arrived at the back door of the Nobel Peace laureate's home and lay down exhausted, with cramps in both legs. Suu Kyi's two companions heard him moaning but let him in only after dawn. Then Suu Kyi herself told him to get out, allowing him to stay two nights when he complained of ill health instead...