Free Republic

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...

WASHINGTON - The United States played a crucial but almost "invisible" role in finding and killing Abu Sayyaf leader Abu Sabaya by using a tracking device sewn into his backpack's fabric and plotting his movements with unmanned Predators and high-flying surveillance aircraft, The Atlantic magazine reported.In an article in its March issue, the magazine said the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the US military targeted Sabaya, whose real name was Aldam Tilao, and his group after they kidnapped American missionaries Martin and Gracia Burnham and another American Guillermo Sobero in May 2001 holding them for ransom. “His removal by Philippine...

MINDANAO, PHILIPPINES - There are so many links between the Abu Sayyaf Group of the Philippines, which beheaded an American hostage a few months ago, and Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda terrorist network, that on paper they look like the route map for a Peshawar-based airline. The links run from that high, bleak border city in Pakistan to terrorist dens in Afghanistan and Yemen; to murders and bombings in the Philippines; to the first attack on the World Trade Center; to a foiled attempt to assassinate the pope during a 1995 visit to Manila. A captured Abu Sayyaf guerrilla, ...