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Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula issued fresh threats Monday against the U.S. and its Mideast allies, promising to retaliate against a surge of strikes launched in the past month against its leaders and safe havens in Yemen. The terrorist group also denied statements made by Yemeni authorities late last week that six of al Qaeda's senior leaders in the country, including the man identified as the leader of the group's military operations, had been killed in an air strike. "The Yemeni government has been making many false claims ... against the Mujahedeen leaders in the Arabian Peninsula. The latest...

SHABWA – Yemeni officials told Okaz that the field commander of Al-Qaeda in Yemen, Qassim Al-Rimi and five other senior Al-Qaeda members killed in an airstrike Friday, while continuing its crackdown on the group by arresting three suspected militants. According to the Yemeni officials, the airstrike targeted two cars carrying eight people in Alajasher border area between Saada and Al-Jouf governorates. “Al-Rimi and his companions including Ammar Al-Waili were attempting to infiltrate into Saudi territories,” the officials said, noting Yemeni authorities received intelligence hours before the air force’s strike that killed the six men. However, two of their associates managed...

WASHINGTON — A federal judge has tossed out most of the government’s evidence against a terrorism detainee on grounds his confessions were coerced, allegedly by U.S. forces, before he became a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay.

The first thing President Obama should address at his White House security summit is that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan didn't give a damn about his apologetic overtures to the Muslim world and his efforts toward building a meaningful dialogue to address grievances in the extremist camps. Someone please, throw a cold bucket of ice water on these guys attending the meeting and wake them up! Terrorists don't care about the President's personal persona, his speeches, his commitment to close Gitmo. They could care less about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed getting a civilian trial in New York, or...

The year on the national security front did not end well with a Christmas Day effort to set a Detroit-bound plane on fire. This is not a good news story. The system failed. The U.S. government had a number of red flags about the would-be fire starter, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, but failed to revoke his visa, place him on the no-fly last or flag him for additional screening. Heritage homeland security analyst Jena Bake McNeil reports, “[o]n December 25, a Nigerian student attempted to ignite a mixture of powder and liquid on a Northwest Airlines flight landing in Detroit, Michigan....

A Michigan man who was aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253 says he witnessed Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab trying to board the plane in Amsterdam without a passport. Kurt Haskell of Newport, Mich., who posted an earlier comment about his experience, talked exclusively with MLive.com and confirmed he was on the flight by sending a picture of his boarding pass. He and his wife, Lori, were returning from a safari in Uganda when they boarded the NWA flight on Friday. Haskell said he and his wife were sitting on the ground near their boarding gate in Amsterdam, which is when they...

The Nigerian man accused of trying to ignite an incendiary device aboard a trans-Atlantic jetliner on Friday came to the attention of American officials at least “several weeks ago,” but the initial information was not specific enough to raise alarms that he could potentially carry out a terrorist attack, a senior Obama administration official said on Saturday. The investigative file was opened after the father of the suspect, Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, warned officials at the United States Embassy in Nigeria of his son’s increasingly extremist religious views, the official said. “The information was passed into the system, but the...

Infiltrators given 48-hr ultimatum By Abdul Aziz Al-Rubei’i Major military operations in Jizan are ‘over’ SAUDI-YEMEN BORDER – Prince Khaled Bin Sultan Bin Abdul Aziz, Assistant Minister of Defense and Aviation, said Tuesday that “all major military operations on the border are over.” Prince Khaled said that “only individual efforts carried out by sole infiltrators remain, and they are being dealt with immediately.” Prince Khaled issued a stern warning for an unstated number of infiltrators shored up in the village of Al-Jaberi. “The village will be destroyed over their heads if they do not surrender in 48 hours,” a deadline...

SAUDI-YEMEN BORDER – Saudi forces carried out strikes on 30 armed infiltrators attempting to take areas of Ka’ab Jaber Mountain to the north of Mt. Dokhan at dawn on Sunday. Sources at the front lines said that ground artillery supported by air strikes killed possible infiltrators who were attempting to penetrate a valley leading to areas where the Saudi military was present. The sources said that Saudi forces and paratroopers were continuing their advancement to pursue infiltrators who have reportedly suffered “heavy” losses and have had their supply lines cut off, all of which has led to a “drop in...

DEARBORN, Michigan (Reuters) - At Tuhama's Lebanese deli in Dearborn, and at bakeries and barbershops throughout town, it's no secret the CIA is looking for a few good spies. "There is a lot of talk, and nobody likes it," said Hamze Chehade, a 48-year-old Lebanese-American, taking a bite of his chicken shawarma. In dire need of agents fluent in Arabic, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency has made an unusual public show of its recruiting effort in Dearborn -- a city of 100,000 with the densest Arab population in the United States. The agency has bought full-page ads in Arabic-language newspapers...

Ex-Mossad official sees massive attack on U.S. homeland – www.worldtribune.com WASHINGTON — Yuval Aviv, who predicted the Al Qaida strikes on London's mass transit system in 2005, said he believes Al Qaida was planning a series of mass-casualty strikes throughout the United States. Aviv said the most likely targets were places such as Disneyland, Las Vegas casinos, malls and subways. "The attack will be characterized by simultaneous detonations around the country — terrorists like big impact — involving at least five to eight cities, including rural areas," Aviv, a former Mossad official said. Aviv, responsible for the Israeli offensive against...

MSNBC's Chris Matthews has said some things that would make your scratch your head - like getting a thrill up his leg from a speech given by Barack Obama. However, this one will really make you wonder what he was thinking. On his Nov. 9 broadcast of "Hardball," in an interview with Zuhdi Jasser, president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, Matthews compared the incident of Maj. Nidal M. Hasan at Ft. Hood to Sirhan Sirhan's 1968 assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. "You know, I have a hard time with this because people like Sirhan Sirhan, who is...

A judge in Illinois sentenced an admitted Al Qaeda agent Thursday to less than two years in prison in addition to the six years he already has spent behind bars — much less than the 15 years requested by prosecutors. But U.S. District Judge Michael Mihm said he doesn't think former Bradley graduate student Ali al-Marri has renounced the terrorist group and was likely to attack the U.S. if given the chance. But Mihm also said al-Marri deserved credit for the years he'd spent in isolation in the Navy brig. Prosecutors claimed al-Marri told an Air Force psychiatrist all infidels,...

CBS) Al Qaeda has developed a new tactic that allows suicide bombers to breach even the tightest security, as CBS News correspondent Sheila MacVicar reports. Inside a Saudi palace, the scene was the bloody aftermath of an al Qaeda attack in August aimed at killing Prince Mohammed Bin Nayef, head of Saudi Arabia's counter terrorism operations. To get his bomb into this room, Abdullah Asieri, one of Saudi Arabia's most wanted men, avoided detection by two sets of airport security including metal detectors and palace security. He spent 30 hours in the close company of the prince's own secret service...

FRANKFURT — In a new audio recording, the leader of Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, urged European nations on Friday to withdraw their troops from Afghanistan, with a veiled threat of reprisals and an allusion to past bombings in Madrid and London. The message came as European nations, and particularly Germany, have come under increasing public and political pressures to reconsider their part in the Afghan war. Germany has 4,200 troops in Afghanistan, and domestic pressure to rethink its mission has mounted since German forces called in a NATO airstrike this month that left scores of Afghans dead. For Germany,...

Investigators have discovered a "Jihadi village" of white German al-Qaeda insurgents, including Muslim converts, in Pakistan's tribal areas close to the Afghan border. The village, in Taliban-controlled Waziristan, is run by the notorious al-Qaeda-affiliated Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, which plots raids on Nato forces in Afghanistan. ... Khalid Khawaja, a former Pakistan intelligence officer, who describes himself as a friend of Osama bin Laden, said he was aware of a German contingent and that there were a number of Swedish converts too who had arrived in Pakistan "for Jihad". "The Europeans are there [in Waziristan]. The most dedicated people there...

On the eve of the eight year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, an FBI informant who infiltrated alleged terrorist cells in the U.S. tells ABC News the FBI missed a chance to stop the al Qaeda plot because they focused more on undercover stings than on the man who would later become known as 9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta. Brian Ross reports on the undercover agent in al Qaeda. In an exclusive interview to be broadcast tonight on ABC World News with Charles Gibson and Nightline, former undercover operative Elie Assaad says he spotted and became suspicious of Atta in early...

History-like hindsight-is supposed to be 20:20, but the deliberate partisan, political divide regarding the invasion of Iraq makes that hard. It’s not a new phenomenon. Conspiracy theories-often fueled by politics-still rage over the 911 attacks and the invasion of Iraq. To that end, even if one believes the relationship between Iraq War and 911 attacks is a conspiracy theory, it’s worthwhile to examine if for no other reason than harvesting a better understanding.

Monday, July 13, 2009 The Democrats’ War on the CIA Continues    [Marc Thiessen] Democrats on Capitol Hill have been indignant over the fact that the details of a top-secret CIA program apparently was not fully briefed to Congress. Within weeks of that program being brought to Congress’s attention, key details have now leaked to the news media — thus validating the original decision not to share the details with Congress in the first place. According to the Wall Street Journal, the program which Democrats were so angry about turns out to be an effort “to carry out a 2001 presidential authorization...

This is one of those articles that I really REALLY hope people will read before just commenting on the headline or the quoted sections. In fact, I think it's one of the best articles I've seen on this subject in half a decade. Yes, it's long, detailed, and forces many readers to question their previously held beliefs about regime ties to the Al Queda terrorist network, but it's not the typical anti-Bush/anti-war piece or a woohoo-Bush-was-right piece either. It is EXACTLY why: members of the 911 Commission, Sen Intel Com, as well as others (and why every investigation into the...