Bomb plot against JFK airport thwarted

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FBI Feared JFK Plotters Linked to Top Terrorist
June 02, 2007 FBI agents feared but never confirmed the three men accused of plotting to attack John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York were linked to one of the most wanted al Qaeda leaders, Adnan Shukrijumah, known to have operated out of Guyana and Trinidad.

Officials tell the Blotter on ABCNews.com that they heard repeated references to "Adnan" during the extensive wiretaps conducted on the suspects' telephone conversations, including calls to Guyana and Trinidad. There is a $5 million reward for information on Shukrijumah, who officials consider extremely dangerous because of the years he spent living in the Miami area and his known ties to al Qaeda. Some of the 9/ll hijackers attended a south Florida mosque run by Shukrijumah's now deceased father. Shukrijumah left the United States just a few months before September 2001.

A FBI spokesperson in Miami said the squad assigned to track Shukrijumah was aware of the case but that "no connection" to the wanted al Qaeda suspect was found in the JFK case. The spokesperson said the best available information is that Shukrijumah is with top al Qaeda leaders along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. Authorities in New York today announced arrests in the ongoing counterterror investigation of a plot to blow up the jet fuel pipeline that runs through JFK Airport, officials said.

The plot, authorities stress, was not at an operational stage, and the plotters, who included a former airport employee, had no ability to execute it. The investigation, which appears to have been ongoing for at least two years, was brought to a conclusion when one suspect was about to leave jurisdictions where U.S. authorities had the ability to monitor his activities. Sources said the plotters had "indirect" links to overseas terror elements, and the plot had links to Guyana, Trinidad and possibly Germany.

The Blotter

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Granny says any o' them Muslimaniacs comes aroun' here an' she gonna kick `em to kingdom come!

Qaida Web ad warns of 'big surprise'
3 Aug 2007, A new Al Qaida propaganda ad featuring a digitally altered photograph of George Bush and Pervez Musharraf standing in front of a burning White House, was posted on the Internet.

The brief clip from Al Qaida's "as Sahab" propaganda arm juxtaposes the doctored photo of Bush and Musharraf along with previously seen images of Al Qaida's top leadership — Osama bin Laden, Ayman al Zawahri and Adam Gadahn — as well as a photo of an SUV in a motorcade. There is no additional information provided in the ad, and it closes with the words, "Soon — God willing," written across the screen and repeated several times.

Following the recent failed London-Glasgow terror plot, US intelligence officials have been paying closer attention to the now frequent propaganda releases from as Sahab, studying the videos for hidden clues or signals. The full video is expected to be released on the Web in the next 24 to 48 hours. Meanwhile, Iraqi troops killed a local Al Qaida warlord and US soldiers arrested two of the extremist network's chieftains as a suicide car bomber struck police in one of the group's strongholds on Thursday.

Al Qaida crackdowns were announced after a series of car bombings killed more than 80 people in Baghdad on Wednesday, which served as a bloody backdrop to mounting political crisis in Iraq's shrinking coalition government. A militant known as Safi, touted as Al-Qaida in Iraq's emir of Mosul, was killed in a shootout with Iraqi soldiers on Wednesday after he and two cohorts were spotted driving in the country's third largest city, the US military said.

Source

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From the people who have to deal with terrorism everyday...

US Military Commanders Bemoan Lack of Concern About Terror Threat
February 20, 2008 - While Islamic fundamentalist terrorists are seeking to destroy the Western way of life, Americans are more concerned about the life of movie stars and going out for a hamburger than issues crucial to their freedom, several senior retired American military officers said here.

"We know far more in the United States about what Britney Spears is doing than we know about the issues," said retired U.S. Coast Guard Rear Adm. Norman Saunders. Speaking to a small group of reporters on the sidelines of the fifth annual Jerusalem Conference, Saunders said that the U.S. faces a "very serious challenge from the fanatical Muslim population that would seek to do away with the way of life of the Western World as we know it." "We listen to our presidential candidates - [in] what is probably a very critical election for our country if not the world - talk constantly about change without any definition of what that represents. What would they change? How would they confront the threats? Are there new ideas that they would bring forward?" Saunders asked.

Saunders, a former commanding officer of the U.S. Coast Guard who is responsible for a number of Homeland Defense and Security matters, said that Americans need to understand the issues. "I'd like them to take their minds off whatever it is that keeps them occupied today and pay attention to what really is going on in the world and understand that and evaluate it for themselves," Saunders said. Saunders said he did not believe that the media even understood the issues or reports on them. "I'd like a fairly good assessment of what really the world situation is, what the intention of some of these forces that we see out there are with regard to our population, the size of the threat, some of the options that face us," he said.

But Saunders is not the only senior military official that is concerned that Americans aren't paying attention to things that really matter. It's not clear if Americans even understand "how serious this adversary is," said retired U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Harley Davis. "I think our very freedom is at stake and our way of life. "Too many times we have forgotten or seem to have forgotten about 9/11 and the fact that it did happen," said Davis, who served in a number of command and staff assignments, including the 2nd Armored Division, 1st Cavalry Division, 101st Airborne Division and 5th and 10th Special Forces Groups.

"Because of sacrifices of a lot of people across the U.S. as well as overseas, I think we've staved off any further attacks, but you never know when it's going to come," Davis added. "We go about being happy, driving our cars. We're going to get hamburgers or whatever it is," Davis said. The threat of terrorism is not in front of Americans all the time as it is in front of Israelis, he said. The press could help the situation "by reporting the facts without opinions, of the liberal side," Davis said.

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Not if but when it will happen...

Catastrophic Nuclear Terrorism 'Inevitable,' Says Expert
April 25, 2008 - If a major metropolitan area suffers a nuclear attack, the consequent catastrophe would overwhelm America's ability to respond, various experts have said.

Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) agreed that such an attack would be devastating, but he said deterrence can work by threatening retaliation against the states that produced the weapon. Clifford May, president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a conservative group, told Cybercast News Service that "the ramifications" of a nuclear attack on a major metropolitan area in the United States "would be catastrophic. Should an American city be wiped out, the death toll in the next terrorist attack would rise from 3,000 to 100,000."

"America would survive as a nation," he said, "but it would never again be the same." At a hearing in the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee this month, Ashton Carter, co-chairman of the Preventive Defense Project at Harvard University, said that the "scale of this disaster would quickly overwhelm even the most prepared city, and state governments." He also predicted that in the wake of such an attack, Americans would evacuate cities and disperse throughout the country.

Carter added that over the past five years, the possibility of a nuclear attack has "surely" grown. North Korea has become a nuclear power and Iran is attempting to do the same. Pakistan could potentially lose its nuclear technology to terrorists should the state disintegrate, and Russia's Soviet-era nuclear material remains unsecured. He then predicted that should a Hiroshima-grade bomb of 10 kilotons be detonated on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. -- the grassy stretch of public space that extends from the U.S. Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial -- an area within a two-mile radius would be destroyed.

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Forewarned is forearmed...

Congress: Al-Qaeda Using Internet to Recruit Terrorists in the US
May 09, 2008 - Using a video montage showing mass executions, bomb-making, and a promise to "slit the throats of Americans and Jews," two U.S. lawmakers unveiled a report that says homegrown violent Islamic extremism poses an increasing threat to the safety of the American people.

The bipartisan report by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs was unveiled by Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) at a press conference on Capitol Hill Thursday. Lieberman and Collins told reporters that al Qaeda and other Islamic terrorist groups are using the Internet to recruit and train extremists in the United States.

Lieberman defined "homegrown" terrorists as American citizens or long-term residents. "The sophisticated use of the Internet by international terrorist organizations and their followers is increasingly a cause of this homegrown terrorism," he said. The Internet, the report says, gives disaffected people who have access to a computer a way "to identify and connect with networks throughout the world ... and gain expertise that previously was available only in overseas training camps."

"What makes it so troubling is we don't know how many people are being radicalized," Collins said, "because it's very difficult to track." The report calls for better coordination to meet the growing threat. "We need a well-coordinated national plan to counter terrorists' use of the Internet and to isolate and discredit their violent ideology and, of course, the means to stop them before they carry out their violent, hate-filled acts against this country and its citizens," Lieberman said. Lieberman and Collins also called on American Muslim leaders to help counter the threat.

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