Free Republic

http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/meast/10/23/yemen.al.awlaki/

(snip)

“Yemeni-American cleric and militant Anwar al-Awlaki appeared in a new video message Saturday . . .U.S. officials say al-Awlaki helped recruit Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab, the Nigerian man charged with trying to blow up a Northwest Airlines trans-Atlantic flight as it landed in Detroit, Michigan, on Christmas Day. . .The video’s release came on the same day that an American-born al Qaeda spokesman urged Muslims to carry out individual jihad in the United States and Europe in a new video. “My brothers: Know that jihad is your duty as well, and that you have an opportunity to strike the leaders of unbelief and retaliate against them on their own soul, as long as there is no covenant between you and them,” . . . “Here you are in the battlefield, just like the heroes before you like Muhammad Atta and ... Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab, Faisal Shazad and hundreds of others,” Gadahn said, referring to the leader of the 9/11 attacks, the man accused of trying to blow up a plane last Christmas, and the would-be Times Square bomber. . .Both messages come amid increased threats of attacks on Western targets from al Qaeda. This month, the second edition of an online al Qaeda magazine surfaced, featuring frank essays, creatively designed imagery, and ominous terror tips such as using a pickup as a weapon and shooting up a crowded restaurant in Washington. . .”

“Al-Qaida Video Sends Terror Message to Detroit area Muslims”

http://www.myfoxdetroit.com/dpp/news/al-qaida-video-sends-terror-message-to-detroit-area-muslims

(snip)

Gadahn directed his message to Muslims living in “the miserable suburbs of Paris, London, and Detroit.”

Thanks. But sometimes I’d trade an ability to dig up old links or obscure news trivia for an end to forgetting where I put my keys, getting to the grocery store and then forgetting half the list I had memorized, then rolling out of the store realizing I forgot where I parked the car.

Hoping everybody in Germany stays safe. But this might be like 2001 where we think it is coming from one direction and we get hit from the other. The Hamburg cell was in Germany but it migrated here.

Another summer 2001 parallel . . .

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cyberwar/warnings/index.html#codered

(1-19 = 11/9?)

Code Red was a worm with multiple variants that first appeared in July 2001 and ultimately affected nearly 300,000 computers in the U.S. Exploiting a hole in Microsoft’s IIS Web servers, it was time sensitive based on the date: From days 1-19 of the month the worm would propagate; from days 20-27 it would launch a denial of service attack against a particular site, and from day 27 through the end of the month the worm would “sleep,” dormant in the computer. In Code Red’s first variation, the affected computers were programmed to launch a denial of service attack against the White House Web site at a certain date and time. If the assault worked, the hundreds of thousands of pings would have overwhelmed the Internet in nanoseconds. Richard Clarke, the president’s adviser for cyberspace security, worked with the nation’s Internet providers to thwart the attack by blocking traffic to the White House site. Other Web sites were shut down, however, and replaced by a message that read “Hacked by Chinese.”

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cyberwar/interviews/dick.html

The Nimda attack. How did you hear about it, what was it about? What is the significance?

Nimda was actually more significant, but Nimda frankly didn’t get media attention, mainly because Nimda occurred right after Sept. 11. It was another example of the public/private sector cooperation. I was the director of the National Infrastructure Protection Center. I was up to my neck in responding to the events of Sept. 11 through the command post there at the headquarters. Then right on top of that, the Nimda virus struck.

Fortunately, we had built the kind of communication with the private sector that we were sharing information, pushing information out to the NIPC as to what the corrective actions were. Even with all of that, it proliferated across the world at a far greater rate than Code Red did. It rattled the Internet. But again, demonstrated the flexibility of the Internet — it didn’t come down, but it rattled significantly. It caused billions of dollars of damage, and we still don’t know who proliferated that virus.

http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSTRE56709E20090709

South Korea, U.S. Web sites down for 3rd day on attack
Wed Jul 8, 2009 11:34pm EDT

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1890027/posts?page=271#271

http://www.debka.com/headline.php?hid=6169

US, German intel: Al Qaeda plots multiple attacks on US-, Israel-bound airliners
DEBKAfile Special Report

July 7, 2009, 9:54 PM (GMT+02:00)

Western anti-terror agencies have warned that a large group of 15-20 al Qaeda terrorists, trained in Pakistan and Algeria to hijack and blow up airliners, deployed secretly in at least six European and Middle East countries in early July. They are standing ready to carry out multiple terrorist attacks.

The terrorists are believed to have landed in Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Turkey and Egypt.

The dates to watch, local authorities were warned, were July 4, July 7, the fourth anniversary of the 7/7 attacks on the British transport system in which 52 people died, and July 8-9, when the G8 summit meets in the Italian town of L’Aqila. US president Barack Obama will fly in from talks with Russian leaders in Moscow.

Al Qaeda planners, say the Western sources, know it is extremely hard to break through the massive security cordons protecting summit leaders. They are therefore planning to hijack passenger planes of airlines belonging to the targeted states and blow them up in mid-air.

DEBKAfile’s counter-terror sources report the first specific red alert on Saturday, July 4, referred to the possible hijack of Turkish Airways planes taking of from Turkish airports for US destinations or Tel Aviv. Special precautionary measures were put in place at both ends of their routes.

The alert is still in force.

one of the most explicit publicly communicated threats to date . . .

http://in.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idINIndia-40495320090621

Al Qaeda says would use Pakistani nuclear weapons
Mon Jun 22, 2009 2:39am IST (snipped)

DUBAI (Reuters) - If it were in a position to do so, Al Qaeda would use Pakistan’s nuclear weapons in its fight against the United States, a top leader of the group said in remarks aired Sunday. . .

“God willing, the nuclear weapons will not fall into the hands of the Americans and the mujahideen would take them and use them against the Americans,” Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, the leader of al Qaeda’s in Afghanistan, said in an interview with Al Jazeera television.

Abu al-Yazid was responding to a question about U.S. safeguards to seize control over Pakistan’s nuclear weapons in case Islamist fighters came close to doing so. . .

Asked about the group’s plans, the Egyptian militant leader said: “The strategy of the (al Qaeda) organisation in the coming period is the same as in the previous period: to hit the head of the snake, the head of tyranny — the United States. . .

Abu al-Yazid, also known as Abu Saeed al-Masri, said al Qaeda will continue “with large scale operations against the enemy” — by which he meant the United States. . .

Hi. Thanks.

Saw that thing on Venezuela a couple hours ago but couldn’t find anything that confirmed it. Hard to confirm eyewitness reports on the ground when they are constraining and ejecting media. Chavez was being bombastic in support of Ahmadinejad (saw a link somewhere on that twitter feed). But nothing so far on the troops.

There are more eyewitness reports of Palestinian Hamas and Lebanese Hezbollah imported as street muscle to do the dirty work. Would be nice if there were some youtube pics of them but completely understand why a college student wouldn’t want to get close enough to get a good look at their shoulder patches. No sense in being easy target pratice for those thugs.

Like the bumper sticker says:

“If you can read this . . . you are too close”

fyi:

new media feed on Iranian Revolution - - 1st violent nationwide revolt in a (near)-nuclear terror state . . .

http://twitter.com/infordemocracy

There’s probably not just “Af-Pak” (Afghanistan-Pakistan), but “Ir-Pak” (Iran-Pakistan).

You break one and you’ve bought the other . . .

http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/south-asia/pakistan-biggest-threat-to-israel-israeli-fm_100183408.html

Pakistan biggest threat to Israel: Israeli FM
April 23rd, 2009 - 12:56 pm ICT by ANI

Tel Aviv, Apr.23 (ANI): Israel considers Pakistan as its biggest strategic threat rather than Iran.

Expressing concern over the increasing Taliban threat in Pakistan, Israel’s Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq were the three countries from which Israel faces an immediate threat.

“Pakistan is nuclear and unstable and Afghanistan is faced with a potential Taliban takeover, and the combination forms a contiguous area of radicalism ruled in the spirit of Osama bin Laden,” The Daily Times quoted Lieberman, as saying. . .

http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/dc/2009/05/al-qaeda-no-2-now-calls-the-sh.html

. . . U.S. intelligence officials have said Bin Laden is too concerned with his own personal security to oversee Al Qaeda plots, while Zawahiri has increasingly appeared to benefit from protection of current or former Pakistani army or intelligence operatives.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/national-security/story/67379.html

“Clearly we have a rising threat level,” said a U.S. defense official, who requested anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak publicly. “I don’t think it likely that the jihadists will make a mad dash tomorrow (to seize a nuclear site). But in the course of time, I see a rising threat.”

. . . The senior U.S. defense official declined to discuss how the United States would react if militants seized a Pakistani nuclear facility. However, he added: “We have to have a strategy to deal with that. You can be certain that kind of planning is ongoing.” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was less sanguine than the president. She said that the insurgency now poses a “mortal threat” to the United States and the world. “If the worst, the unthinkable, were to happen, and this advancing Taliban encouraged and supported by al Qaida and other extremists were to essentially topple the government for failure to beat them back, then they would have the keys to the nuclear arsenal of Pakistan,” she said in an April 26 interview with Fox News.

http://www.rediff.com/news/2009/may/01guest-can-terrorirsts-get-hold-of-pakistani-nukes.htm

. . . I would divide Pakistan’s nuclear capability into three groups and grade the likely threats to them from the Taliban and other jihadi groups as follows::

a. The nuclear arsenal consisting of its stockpile of nuclear weapons: Their physical security is very tight with American inputs into strengthening it and with US monitoring of the state of physical security. Threat low unless and until the Taliban captures power in Islamabad.

b. Sensitive nuclear establishments such as the Kahuta uranium enrichment plant and the Khusab plutonium facility. Their physical security is equally tight, but there are no American inputs and monitoring. Threat low to medium.

c. Other nuclear establishments such as the Chashma nuclear power station constructed with Chinese assistance and the one at Karachi and the various sites in the NWFP and Balochistan where nuclear waste is stored: Their physical security has not received much attention either from the Pakistanis themselves or from the Americans. Moreover, since the Chinese are associated with some of them, they would not like the US to have any role in their physical security. Threat medium to high.

The greatest danger in my view is the Taliban and other jihadi groups attacking one of these less guarded facilities falling in the third group. They have the capability to target them in order to create panic in the Pakistani population and demonstrate their prowess in the non-Pashtun areas of Pakistan.

India and other regional countries should have strong reasons to be worried over this possibility because the environmental and health hazards arising from a terrorist attack on these facilities would affect not only Pakistan, but also its neighbours. A terrorist-caused Chernobyl is a danger of greater possibility than the terrorists capturing the nuclear arsenal.

Thanks. Looks like this story came out several days ago. It is just a variant of the “he’s not in Pakistan” line they have repeated since 9/11. And “if we had intelligence he was in Pakistan we would get him”. They have us breathing down their necks over the nukes and their inability to keep their house in order. They are trying to deflect all the attention. I wouldn’t trust anything the Pakistanis say at this point with their country coming apart at the seams.

“Bangladesh or Pakistan”

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124105116619871153.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

” . . .Officials don’t have a definite idea of where the outbreak began. On Wednesday, Dr. Lezana said that among the first victims was a Bangladeshi man who worked as a street vendor in Mexico City and got sick in early April. The man, whose identity wasn’t disclosed, met his brother in Merida, Yucatan, in early April and returned to Mexico City. His brother, who is either from Bangladesh or Pakistan, may have been ill, he said.”

http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2009/apr/30/no-headline-—043009pandemic/

” . . .Medical detectives have not zeroed in on where the outbreak began. One of the seven deaths in Mexico directly attributed to swine flu was that of a Bangladeshi immigrant, said Mexico’s chief epidemiologist, who suggested that someone could have brought the virus from Pakistan or Bangladesh.
Miguel Angel Lezana, the epidemiologist, said the unnamed Bangladeshi had lived in Mexico for six months and was recently visited by a brother who arrived from Bangladesh or Pakistan and was reportedly ill. The brother has left Mexico and his whereabouts are unknown, Lezana said.

By March 9, the first symptoms were showing up in the Mexican state of Veracruz, where pig farming is a key industry in mountain hamlets and where small clinics provide the only health care.”

“I got the swine flu shot back in 1976 - will it offer any protection?”

No. This is a different strain (a “novel” flu virus).

” . . .Fukuda, WHO assistant director general, said the situation was moving closer to Phase 5, indicating widespread human-to-human transmission and that a pandemic is indeed “imminent.” . . .”

It was the second emergency meeting in as many days. They went ahead and went to Phase 5 meaning the pandemic is imminent. This is as “real” as it gets.

As someone described it a few years ago, a full-on pandemic (like 1918) will be like a hundred Katrinas hitting a hundred American cities at once (with possibly hundreds of thousands of deaths if it mutates into a tamiflu-resistant variant)

Let’s pray it fizzles out or it is mild like the pandemics of 1889, 1957, and 1968.

But they are acting as if they expect the worst.

Iran is going to get its hands on nuclear weapons.

One way or the other.

http://www.treas.gov/press/releases/hp644.htm

IRGC-Qods Force (IRGC-QF): The Qods Force, a branch of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC; aka Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps), provides material support to the Taliban, Lebanese Hizballah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC).

The Qods Force is the Iranian regime’s primary instrument for providing lethal support to the Taliban. The Qods Force provides weapons and financial support to the Taliban to support anti-U.S. and anti-Coalition activity in Afghanistan. Since at least 2006, Iran has arranged frequent shipments of small arms and associated ammunition, rocket propelled grenades, mortar rounds, 107mm rockets, plastic explosives, and probably man-portable defense systems to the Taliban. This support contravenes Chapter VII UN Security Council obligations. UN Security Council resolution 1267 established sanctions against the Taliban and UN Security Council resolutions 1333 and 1735 imposed arms embargoes against the Taliban. Through Qods Force material support to the Taliban, we believe Iran is seeking to inflict casualties on U.S. and NATO forces.

http://www.jcpa.org/JCPA/Templates/ShowPage.asp?DBID=1&LNGID=1&TMID=111&FID=376&PID=1850&IID=1516

Qods Force Founded to Export the Islamic Revolution

The Qods (Jerusalem) Force was formally set up as a special unit of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in the late 1980s to facilitate the export of the Islamic revolution beyond Iran’s borders. From that point onward, when the IRGC operated abroad, it did so in the framework of the Qods Force. Today the Qods Force’s ideological and strategic link to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad must be understood in the context of Ayatollah Khomeini’s initial ideological and strategic decision to establish the IRGC in February 1979 in order to protect his revolutionary regime and to operate in neighboring countries. Khomeini’s strategy was to set up a separate military command structure linked tightly to the new Islamic leadership in Iran, whose loyalty to the revolution would not be in doubt. At the time, the regular Iranian armed forces were still suspected of containing elements loyal to the former regime of the Shah.

The IRGC thus operated as a parallel force to the regular Iranian military and came to be entrusted with operating the regime’s most sensitive forces and weapon systems, including weapons of mass destruction, Iran’s ballistic missile program, and its foreign insurgency operations. These foreign operations already began under Ayatollah Khomeini. For example, Sheikh Naim Qassem was a founding member of Hizbullah and now serves as its deputy secretary-general; in his book on the organization’s history, he details how Iranian official backing for its establishment “was manifested through the dispatch of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard to Lebanon.”7 The IRGC set up and supervised training camps for Hizbullah in the Bekaa area; Qassem does not even try to distance the Iranian regime from any of this activity. During this period the IRGC was Ayatollah Khomeini’s “prime vehicle for exporting the revolution in all its different forms.”8

Iran’s current supreme leader Ali Khamenei’s personal commitment to the IRGC began during the Iran-Iraq war when, as Iran’s president between 1981 and 1989, he was the regime’s most senior political figure directly involved in the strategic directives of IRGC and Qods Force operations. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was a commander in the IRGC during the Iran-Iraq war, and subsequently became a senior commander in the IRGC’s Qods Force.9

http://www.herzliyaconference.org/_Uploads/2785JerroldPost.ppt

When Ayatollah Khomeini launched his human wave attacks of children, armed only with pink plastic keys to paradise around their necks, this terrifying tactic turned the corner in Iran-Iraq war. It was according to some reports Ahmadinejad that trained the children and purchased some 500,000 pink plastic keys from Taiwan.

http://www.myfoxdfw.com/dpp/news/Possible_Swine_Flu_Cases_in_D

Possible Swine Flu Cases in Dallas
Created On: Sunday, 26 Apr 2009, 4:29 PM CDT (snip)

Peter Daut

DALLAS - Local health officials announced Sunday they have discovered three suspected cases of swine flu in Dallas.

Dallas County Health and Human Services says the possible cases include a 24-year-old, a 7-year-old and a 3-month-old. They do not believe the cases are related. . .

“assassination” . . . September 9, 2001 . . .

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1239710777377&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FPrinter

(snip)

A day after US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned that the Pakistani government was ceding ground to the Taliban, a top Israeli defense official expressed concern on Thursday that the country’s nuclear arsenal would fall into extremist hands and be used to threaten Israel. . .

Israeli defense officials said that while Pakistan was farther away than Iran, Israel needed to be concerned with the political upset there. “This is a major challenge,” one top official told The Jerusalem Post. “If Pakistan’s nuclear weapons falls into hands of radical Islamic elements, this will be a nightmare for the West and will also affect us,” he said. . .

http://washingtontimes.com/news/2009/apr/24/clinton-warns-of-pakistan-nuke-risk/

(snip)

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton warned Thursday that Pakistan has dispersed its nuclear weapons throughout the country, increasing the risk they could fall into terrorist hands as Taliban fighters move closer to the capital. Her comments came as new satellite images suggested Pakistan is increasing its capacity to produce plutonium, a fuel for atomic bombs. . .

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2009%5C04%5C06%5Cstory_6-4-2009_pg7_18

(snip)

LAHORE: Baitullah Mehsud, the brazen Taliban chief based in Waziristan, has been able to escape several attempts to kill and capture him because he has friends in Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, according to a Newsweek report. An “increasingly-emboldened” Mehsud has claimed credit for several attacks in Pakistan and also threatening to attack the US. “Soon we will launch an attack in Washington that will amaze everyone in the world,” he told the Associated Press last week. An unnamed Pakistani official told Newsweek that senior US officials had even shared with their counterparts in Islamabad “some intelligence indicating that renegade ISI elements helped Mehsud’s group train for the December 2007 assassination of Pakistan’s former prime minister Benazir Bhutto”. . .

“Baitullah is very much mixed up in Afghanistan and with Al Qaeda,” said one Afghan Taliban commander, adding that Mehsud was capable of shipping foreign fighters into Afghanistan “and even [farther] west”. . .

” . . .And the survivors will unite under Umar or Usama under the black banners in Khorasan to march on Jerusalem with the entire Islamic world (i.e. coincidentally Jerusalem has been a consistent theme in recent months)

This regional unification will erase the “artificial lines” of Sykes-Picot and “the nine decades of humiliation” and rebirth the “caliphate” under Caliph Umar/Usama/Saad/etc and his/their nuclear arsenal parceled out across the region to defend against the “Crusader” onslaught.”

http://www.military.com/news/article/April-2009/al-qaeda-chief-reveals-afghan-strategy.html?col=1186032310810

Al Qaeda Chief Reveals Afghan Strategy
April 15, 2009
Long War Journal (snipped)

The new commander of al Qaeda’s paramilitary forces that operate in Pakistan and Afghanistan laid out al Qaeda and the Taliban’s strategy to defeat the Coalition and Afghan government.

Abdullah Sa’id, the commander of the Lashkar al Zil, or the Shadow Army, released a statement concerning the status of the fight in Afghanistan. The statement, which has been obtained by The Long War Journal, was issued by Al Fajr Media Center, an official outlet for al Qaeda propaganda, and published on the Islamic Al Fallujah Forum.

The Shadow Army is al Qaeda’s elite paramilitary army. The unit has its roots in the 055 Brigade, which fought conventional battles against the Northern Alliance and US forces in Afghanistan. . .

In the statement, Sa’id is identified as the leader of the Qaidat al-Jihad fi Khorasan, or the base of the jihad in the Khorasan.

The Khorasan is a region that encompasses large areas of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Iran. The Swat valley, where the Taliban have forced the government to impose sharia, is part of this region. Khorasan is considered by jihadis to be the place where they will inflict the first defeat against their enemies in the Muslim version of Armageddon. The final battle is to take place in the Levant - Israel, Syria, and Lebanon.

Mentions of the Khorasan have begun to increase in al Qaeda’s propaganda. After al Qaeda’s defeat in Iraq, the group began shifting its rhetoric from promoting Iraq as the central front in their jihad and have placed the focus on the Khorasan. . .

Sa’id makes few distinctions between Taliban and al Qaeda operations in Afghanistan. He repeatedly calls Taliban leader Mullah Omar the Emir al Mumineen, or the Commander of the Faithful. This title has religious significance among jihadis; the Commander of the Faithful is designated the leader of their Islamist caliphate. Osama bin Laden is thought to have sworn allegiance to Omar. . .

you are welcome

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1890027/posts?page=647#647

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1875105/posts?page=503#503

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1875105/posts?page=973#973