Charged with conspiring to kill Americans after 9/11
al Qaeda
Mich. Man Demands $25M for Knowing bin Laden’s Location
Said he tipped off federal officials to Abbottabad in 2003
When “No Acts of Terror” Actually Means “This Act of Terror”
When bad things happen, it’s human nature to accentuate the positive, as Johnny Mercer put it. That’s precisely what the Obama Administration did following the September 11 killing of U.S. ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens and …
Is Syria’s Civil War Leaching Into Iraq?
Vivienne Walt reports:
For months, Syrian opposition groups have smuggled weapons and fighters into the country across the borders of Turkey and Lebanon. Now another of Syria’s influential neighbors—Iraq—says its territory is being used as a base for al-Qaeda attacks against the regime of President Bashar Assad. Speaking to a
…
“We are fighting a war in the FATA.”
Drone Ops: Getting Better All the Time
The dust has settled near the North Waziristan village of Hassu Khel, where a U.S. Hellfire missile killed al-Qaeda’s No. 2, Abu Yahya al-Libi, on Monday. The recent flurry of unacknowledged U.S. drone attacks scored its biggest prize since Navy SEALs took out Osama bin Laden 13 months ago, leaving the White House to flex its might …
White House Says al-Qaeda’s No. 2 Killed
A drone strike in Pakistan has netted a big fish: al-Qaeda’s No. 2, Abu Yahya al-Libi, according to White House spokesman Jay Carney.
Asked about al-Libi’s reported death at Tuesday’s White House briefing, Carney initially was equivocal: “I can tell you that our intelligence community has intelligence that leads them to …
Vest-Bomb Slaughter
You can hear the suicide bomb that killed more than 100 Yemeni paramilitary troops detonate two seconds into this video. That’s a staggering death toll for an explosive-packed vest. The troops were either tightly packed around the bomber, or it was an especially nasty device.
That’s in keeping with the work of Yemeni-based Ibrahim …
How America Settles Down Somalia (And, By Extension the Piracy Problem)
Letters from Abbottabad: Bin Laden’s Bleak Final Days
The latest batch of Osama bin Laden documents shows what you’d expect from a one-time terror mastermind whose best years were behind him. He’d spent six years confined to a house with several of his wives, and where the only way he could get outside was to walk inside the walled compound, or atop the walled rooftop.
Nearly 200 …
The Man Who Believed Himself
TOKYO – Wars can attract some odd, fringe characters, but I never met anyone stranger or more out on the fringe than Jonathan Keith Idema, who died recently in Mexico of complications from AIDS.
A career con artist and military wannabe, Idema showed up early during the war in Afghanistan. He posed variously as a government …
Squawking SEAL
CNN chum Barbara Starr has the inside skinny on the new book purporting to detail the inside skinny of how the Osama bin Laden raid went down – as told by a former SEAL. Author Chuck Pfarrer claims to have spoken to some Navy SEALs who conducted the raid. It seems his story has more holes in it than the post-raid bin Laden.
For All You Iran-Is-Winning Types, The Sad Truth
You get two variants of this logic: 1) if the US leaves Iraq, Iran wins automatically (or it’s won already because the Shiite majority actually rules); and 2) even more than al-Qaeda, Iran is the real beneficiary of the Arab Spring.
Both judgments are wrong in the way that America’s capacity for frantic self-doubt and self-blame …