Saturday, August 14, 2010

OBAMA'S SOFT SPOT FOR LA RAZA NARCOMEX TERRORIST AND AL-QAIDA? On Our Open & Undefended Borders

Under New American Management Al-Qaida Now Poses Inner Threat


By PAUL SPERRY
Posted 08/13/2010 08:17 PM ET



Among Americans installed in al-Qaida leadership positions are propagandist Adam Gadahn, left, and Adnan Shukrijumah, believed to be directing U.S.... View Enlarged Image
If al-Qaida looks and sounds different as we approach 9/11's ninth anniversary, it's because it's under new American management. No fewer than four U.S. citizens and a permanent U.S. resident have risen to senior leadership posts.

These five English-speaking leaders are actively planning or facilitating attacks against their countrymen, while recruiting and radicalizing other American turncoats to carry them out.

By remaking itself into an American enterprise, al-Qaida is now more lethal than ever. Its new generation of leaders understands the way America works, having lived here for decades. They have a better sense of our security blind spots. They also know which kinds of attacks will produce both mass panic and maximum economic damage.

Al-Qaida's indigenous rebirth, moreover, befogs our military strategy. We're no longer at war with just a foreign enemy, but fellow Americans recruited by the enemy. They're supplied, in turn, by a seemingly endless stream of homegrown foot soldiers, fed by a native Muslim population once believed quiescent and nonthreatening.

Shockingly, the War on Terror has morphed into a mini-civil war, and it's posing major new challenges to its prosecution. We're now battling our own citizens. How do we deal with wartime traitors? Can the CIA assassinate them? Can it spy on them? What about their civil rights?

This muddies an already muddy war — and it's all part of al-Qaida's plan.

After 9/11, the group vowed to convert our own people against us, something once thought impossible. But it's managed to groom a startling number of American citizens and residents and install them in top leadership slots, including:

• Adnan Shukrijumah: The long-time Florida resident, who obtained a green card while living in the U.S. for more than 15 years, has replaced 9/11 planner Khalid Sheikh Mohammad as chief of al-Qaida's terror operations.

Believed to be directing U.S. terrorist cells from Pakistan, Shukrijumah, 35, recently was indicted as a conspirator in last year's plot to blow up the New York subway. There's a $5 million reward for his capture.

• Adam Gadahn: The California-born Muslim convert assists Shukrijumah and Osama bin Laden as al-Qaida's chief propagandist. He tailors the group's message to American Muslims, as well as disaffected minorities ripe for conversion.

In 2006, Gadahn invoked U.S. Muslims to attack military bases, singling out California's Camp Pendleton as a candidate for "a shooting spree." Three years later, a Muslim soldier went on a shooting spree at Fort Hood. Gadahn, 31, praised the attack and urged more.

The first American to be charged with treason in 50 years, Gadahn is hiding in Pakistan with a $1 million bounty on his head.

• Anwar Awlaki: Articulate and media savvy, the American-born cleric is al-Qaida's top recruiter of Western suicide cells.

Awlaki has recruited or radicalized countless homegrown terrorists, including the Fort Hood shooter and the Times Square bomber, both English-speaking citizens. Authorities also believe he ordered the Christmas airliner attack, which puts Awlaki in the middle of the last three major terror acts on U.S. soil.

Thought to be bin Laden's heir, Awlaki has called on American Muslims to turn against their government, and has even justified killing American civilians. "Jihad against America is binding on every other (American) Muslim," he said.

The 39-year-old Awlaki lived in the U.S. for 21 years before fleeing to Yemen after 9/11. Treasury last month designated him a "key leader of al-Qaida" and froze his assets. He's also on the CIA's terrorist hit list.

• Samir Khan: A U.S. citizen who grew up in New York and Charlotte, N.C., the Web-savvy 24-year-old is now in Yemen helping Awlaki target American audiences as al-Qaida's newest propagandist.

Khan is editor of al-Qaida's splashy new organ, "Inspire," a Webzine that provides jihadists step-by-step instructions in English on making bombs that can elude bomb-sniffing dogs.

• Omar Hammami: The ex-Baptist convert to Islam grew up in the Alabama suburbs before joining al-Qaida.

He's now, at 25, a field commander in Somalia, another key al-Qaida hot spot, where he's recruiting and training U.S. jihadists. His trainees include dozens of Minneapolis college kids, including one who earned the dubious title, "first American suicide bomber."

This new cadre of al-Qaida leaders is enlisting a growing faction of the U.S. Muslim community, many of them African-American and white converts who don't fit the Arab terrorist profile. As many as three dozen U.S. converts are said to have gone through al-Qaida training in Yemen, where they've received Awlaki's blessing. They reportedly include blond-haired, blue-eyed types — fitting a profile of Americans that al-Qaida in the past could only dream of recruiting.

Its recruiting effort is made all the easier by some 15,000 jihadi Web sites — 80% of which are operating off servers based inside the U.S. Across the country, moreover, mosques and Islamic bookstores sell Awlaki's recorded sermons as CD box sets. It's all protected "free speech."

"Jihad is becoming as American as apple pie," Awlaki boasts. More and more, he warns, terror attacks will come "from within" — even within our own military.

Meanwhile, the so-called moderates of the Muslim establishment are sitting on their hands. Major Muslim groups have refused to cooperate in terror probes until the FBI backs off mosques. Their cold war turned hot last fall, when a Muslim leader in Detroit died in a shoot-out with agents, triggering outcry throughout the Muslim community.

It's just a matter of time before a homegrown nut inspired by a radical mosque or Web site overcomes their bomb-making learning curve and successfully detonates one, blowing up a building or a mall or a plane inside America. And then we'll all wonder why more wasn't done to shut down these sites. Of course, by then we'll be sweeping up the remains of victims, and it will be too late.

"America cannot and will not win," Awlaki hisses. With Washington running from the war, disengaging from an enemy that now counts our own citizens among its senior ranks, we cannot afford to dismiss his words as bluster.

• Sperry, formerly IBD Washington bureau chief, is a Hoover Institution media fellow and author of "Infiltration" and "Muslim Mafia."

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Obama administration seeks to quash suit by 9/11 families
By Barry Grey
26 June 2009
The Obama administration has intervened to quash a civil suit filed against Saudi Arabia by survivors and family members of victims of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The suit seeks to hold the Saudi royal family liable, charging that it provided financial and other support to Al Qaeda and was thereby complicit in the hijack bombings that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York and Washington DC.
According to an article by Eric Lichtblau in the June 24 New York Times, documents assembled by lawyers for the 9/11 families “provide new evidence of extensive financial support for Al Qaeda and other extremist groups by members of the Saudi royal family.” However, the article states, the documents may never find their way into court because of legal challenges by Saudi Arabia, which are being supported by the US Justice Department.
The administration is taking extraordinary measures to kill the suit and suppress the evidence of Saudi support for Al Qaeda and complicity in the 9/11 attacks. Last month, the Justice Department sided in court with the Saudi monarchy in seeking to halt further legal action. Moreover, it had copies of American intelligence documents on Saudi finances that had been leaked to lawyers for the families destroyed, and is now seeking to prevent a judge from even looking at the material.
Two federal judges and the Second Circuit Court of Appeals have already ruled against the 7,630 people represented in the lawsuit, rejecting the suit on the grounds that the plaintiffs cannot sue in the US against a sovereign nation and its leaders. The Supreme Court is expected to rule this month on whether to hear an appeal, but the families’ prospects have been weakened by the intervention of the Obama administration, which has called on the court not to hear the plaintiffs’ appeal.
The Times reports that it obtained the new documents from the families’ lawyers, adding that they are among “several hundred thousand pages of investigative material” assembled by the 9/11 families in their long-running suit against the Saudi royal family.
Lichtblau writes that the documents “provide no smoking gun connecting the royal family to the events of September 11, 2001.” However, there is a wealth of evidence in the public record strongly pointing to such a connection. And there is the 28-page, classified section of the 2003 joint congressional inquiry into 9/11 that deals with the Saudi role in the attacks. Lichtblau writes that “the secret section is believed to discuss intelligence on Saudi financial links to two hijackers.”
Then-President George W. Bush ordered that section of the congressional report to be classified, and its contents were blacked out in the findings released to the public by Congress. The Obama administration is continuing this policy of shielding the Saudi monarchy.
Lichtblau reports that the material obtained by the Times from the families’ lawyers includes “thousands of pages of previously undisclosed documents” that provide “an unusually detailed look at some of the evidence.” He cites as one example “internal Treasury Department documents” that show that the International Islamic Relief Organization, a “Saudi charity,” heavily supported by members of the Saudi royal family, “provided ‘support for terrorist organizations’ at least through 2006.”
He gives other examples of evidence of Saudi support for Islamist terrorists in Bosnia in the 1990s and witness statements and intelligence reports of money being given by Saudi princes to the Taliban and to “militants’ activities” in Pakistan and Bosnia during the same decade.
What are the motives behind the Obama administration’s efforts to cover up the connections between the Saudi monarchy and Al Qaeda?
The Justice Department, according to the Times, cites “potentially significant foreign relations consequences” should the 9/11 families’ suit be allowed to go to trial. This is undoubtedly a factor. The US has an immense political and economic interest in protecting the Saudi dictatorship, which is a major American ally in the Middle East, a supporter of Washington’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the world’s biggest producer of oil.
But there is a more immediate and compelling reason for suppressing any exposure of the Saudi connection to Al Qaeda and 9/11. The revelations would undoubtedly shatter the official explanations of the September 11 attacks and point to complicity on the part of US intelligence and security agencies.
Given its longstanding and intimate ties to the Saudi royal family and Saudi intelligence, it is not possible to believe that the CIA would have been unaware of Saudi support for Al Qaeda and at least some of the 19 hijackers, 15 of whom were Saudi nationals, as they were preparing to carry out the attacks on New York and Washington.
The ties between the Saudi and US intelligence establishments were strengthened during the US-backed war against the pro-Soviet regime in Afghanistan, beginning in 1979 and continuing through the 1980s. The US poured billions of dollars in arms and financing into this war, most of it funneled through the ISI, the Pakistani intelligence agency.
The Saudi regime also helped fund the anti-Soviet guerrillas, many of whom were brought to Afghanistan by Islamist forces in the Middle East. Osama bin Laden served as the Saudi regime’s personal emissary in this cause, helping to organize, train and equip Arab volunteers for the Afghan war. The movement now known as Al Qaeda was spawned through the interaction of these three intelligence agencies—the CIA, the ISI and the Saudis.
The bipartisan 9/11 commission, in its July 2004 report, echoed the Bush administration’s whitewash of Saudi ties to the terrorist attacks, declaring that it found “no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually funded” Al Qaeda.
However, in a book published later that year, Intelligence Matters, then-Florida Senator Bob Graham charged the Bush administration with orchestrating a cover-up of Saudi involvement in the September 11 attacks. Graham was at the time the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, which had carried out, along with its House counterpart, the joint congressional investigation into 9/11.
He wrote that “evidence of official Saudi supportî for at least some of the hijackers was ìincontrovertible.” Graham’s charges focused on the extraordinary cases of Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, who were identified as hijackers of American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon.
The two men, both Saudi nationals, are undoubtedly the “two hijackers” to whom Times reporter Lichtblau refers in connection with the secret section of the joint congressional report on 9/11.
Both were known to US intelligence as Al Qaeda operatives at least since 1999. Malaysian agents, acting in concert with the CIA, photographed and videotaped them and others during a 2000 meeting of Islamist terrorist groups in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Nevertheless, after the meeting, al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar were allowed to fly to the US using their own passports and visas issued by US consular authorities in Saudi Arabia. While the CIA knew of their presence in the US, it did not inform the Federal Bureau of Investigation, according to the FBI. (The CIA disputes this claim, insisting that it did alert the FBI). Nor did the CIA inform immigration authorities.
Graham wrote that this was the only time he had ever heard of the FBI refusing to serve a congressional subpoena. He commented, “We were seeing in writing what we had suspected for some time: the White House was directing a cover-up.”
Bush’s extraordinary intervention to block questioning of FBI informant Shaikh was consistent with his administration’s actions in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks, when it allowed chartered planes to ferry some 140 prominent Saudis—including at least a dozen of Osama bin Laden’s relatives—to Boston for evacuation to Saudi Arabia. The pick-up flights were organized at a time when all non-military and non-emergency aviation had been grounded by government order. Bin Laden’s relatives were allowed to leave the country with little or no questioning by the FBI.
Graham did not spell out what “damning” information about the 9/11 conspiracy the informant might have revealed. But the role of the CIA, the FBI and the Bush administration in the case of al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar suggests that it went beyond involvement by the Saudi government. It strongly suggests he was blocked from being questioned out of concern that he would reveal that elements within the US state apparatus knew of plans for an impending hijacking and allowed them to go forward.
Eight years after the attacks, no one has been held accountable for what on its face is the greatest failure of national security in US history. The question is: Was it a failure, or was a decision taken to permit a terrorist attack on US soil in order to provide the pretext for implementing plans for wars abroad and repressive policies at home that had been drawn up well in advance of September 11, 2001?
That a new administration is continuing the policy of shielding the Saudi monarchy and suppressing evidence of its complicity in 9/11 points strongly to the latter explanation.
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