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Government officials are investigating a mysterious company that has bought around 55,000 acres of dry farmland around a USAF base in California. Travis Air Force base, northeast of San Francisco, houses large transport aircraft used for refueling smaller planes and sending aid and munitions around the world. Starting in 2018, a company called Flannery Associates LLC has spent around $800million buying swathes of land around the base, leaving local, state and federal officials flummoxed as to who they are and what they want with it. An attorney representing Flannery told The Wall Street Journal the company is controlled by US...

The arrest of two southern California men last week who were planning to travel to Syria to join the Islamic State brings the number of U.S.-based individuals involved in international terror-related cases this year to 40. (UPDATE: with the arrest of Houston-area Asher Abid Khan late Monday for supporting ISIS, the tally is now 41.)This number highlights the metastasizing Islamic terror threat in the American homeland. At the current pace, by the end of June — halfway through 2015 — the number of cases will exceed the number from the past two years combined (48). <-- PJM_300_by_250_middle --> The Islamic...

EXCLUSIVE: Four New York City men were arrested Wednesday in connection with an alleged plot to blow up New York City synagogues and other city locations, WNBC's Jonathan Dienst has learned. Raids by the FBI-NYPD Joint Terrorist Task Force in the Bronx captured the suspected ringleader and three followers in what law enforcement sources are calling a homegrown terrorist plot. Investigators stress the suspects' meetings had been infiltrated early on and there was "no chance" the alleged plot could succeed. Investigators said several of the suspects are Muslims who allegedly talked about destroying two Jewish temples, including at least one...

NEW YORK — For nearly a year, Shahed Hussain would slip into his role as a wealthy Pakistani businessman and head for Newburgh. He was “Maqsood” when he arrived at local mosque Masjid Al-Ikhlas driving a BMW, or maybe Hummer depending on the day. He was there to listen for Islamic extremism and report back to the FBI, he said. Hussain testified on Friday in the federal trial of four Newburgh men accused of trying to shoot down planes at Stewart Air National Guard Base and blow up a synagogue and Jewish center in the Bronx. The men — James...

<p>No info at link yet, just came across the TV. Investigators believe that the poisoners where Arabic translators! ROP strikes again???</p>

A third man charged in a plot to attack Southern California military sites and other targets pleaded guilty Monday to a terrorism conspiracy charge. Gregory Vernon Patterson, 23, entered his plea in U.S. District Court in Santa Ana to one count of conspiring to levy war against the U.S. government through terrorism. He also pleaded guilty to conspiring to use a firearm during that offense. Patterson could face up to 25 years in prison when he is sentenced on April 14, prosecutors said. Two other men - Kevin James, 31, and Levar Haley Washington, 28 - pleaded guilty in the...

Police have smashed a suspected al Qaeda terror cell nursing a "profound hatred of US citizens" plotting to bomb civilian and military jets. The force of the planned explosions would have been worse than the train bombings in Madrid and the Tube and bus attacks in London on 7 July, 2005, according to German security sources. Those attacks killed 191 and 52 people respectively. Three men aged 22, 28 and 29 have been arrested in Germany days before they planned to strike, and bomb-making equipment and explosives have been seized. The arrests come a day after Danish police conducted raids...

THE FOILING OF AN Islamist terrorist plot this week in Germany is noteworthy for several reasons that may not have been obvious from the headlines. The first is the involvement of an ethnic Turk. On Tuesday, police in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia seized three men identified as a Turk and two German converts to Islam (under German court rules, their full names were not released). While the activity of converts in terrorism is not new, the Turkish community in Germany has so far been free of the plague of religious extremism. Turkish and Kurdish immigrants to Germany and...

Three men have been arrested for planning attacks on Frankfurt's international airport and the U.S. military base in Ramstein, the German Defense Minister said Wednesday. "There was an imminent threat," Franz Josef Jung told Germany's ARD broadcaster. He declined to elaborate. Two of the suspects had German citizenship while the third was Pakistani, Germany's Sudwestrundfunk public broadcaster said. German federal prosecutors said they had arrested three suspected members of "an Islamic motivated terrorist organization." It was not immediately clear whether the three were suspected of having links to al Qaeda. Sudwestrundfunk said the men were arrested Tuesday evening and were...

By JEFFREY GOLD – 6 hours ago CAMDEN, N.J. (AP) — An anonymous jury will hear the case of six men accused of plotting to attack soldiers at Fort Dix, a federal judge ruled Thursday. U.S. District Judge Robert B. Kugler rejected defense complaints that such a jury would be biased. He agreed with federal prosecutors that the trial presents an exceptional case and could create apprehensive jurors. Several factors led to his decision, including pretrial publicity, he said. The six were arrested in May and charged with planning to raid the New Jersey military installation, which is being used...

A look at the Fort Dix suspects By INQUIRER STAFF A closer look at the men charged with plotting to attack Fort Dix. The information was provided by the U.S. Department of Justice: • Mohamad Ibrahim Shnewer, 22, of Cherry Hill. He was born in Jordan, is a U.S. citizen, and is employed as a taxicab driver in Philadelphia. • Eljvir Duka, 23, of Cherry Hill, also goes by "Elvis Duka" and "Sulayman," was born in the former Yugoslavia. Duka is illegally residing in the United States and operates businesses known as Qadr. Inc., Colonial Roofing and National Roofing, all...

CAMDEN, N.J. - Six Muslim men suspected of plotting to massacre U.S. soldiers at Fort Dix were ordered held without bail Friday. Prosecutors argued that the men, all born outside the United States, pose a flight risk. They are being held at a federal detention center in Philadelphia. The men were arrested Monday night during what the FBI said was an attempt to buy AK-47 machine guns, M-16s and other weapons. They targeted Fort Dix, a post 25 miles east of Philadelphia that is used primarily to train reservists, partly because one of them had delivered pizzas there and was...

March 24, 2008, 5:00 a.m. Chilling ConfirmationYes, Saddam Hussein was an Islamofascist threat. By Deroy Murdock As Operation Iraqi Freedom is now five years old, a new study confirms that ousting Saddam Hussein was justified and vital to U.S. national security. Though war critics hate to admit it, the Baathist dictator was up to his mustache in aid for Islamofascist terrorism. As a report from the Institute for Defense Analyses explains, “captured Iraqi documents uncovered strong evidence that links the regime of Saddam Hussein to regional and global terrorism.” IDA’s review of some 600,000 documents discovered in Iraq since...

SUSPECTED French terrorist Willie Brigitte tried to get information from his wife, former soldier Melanie Brown about the top-secret spy facility at Pine Gap, French police sources say. During her four days of interrogation by French officials in Paris last month, police said Ms Brown recalled incidents with Brigitte in Sydney that, on reflection, seemed suspicious to her. In particular, Ms Brown is understood to have told French interrogators that Brigitte questioned her at length about the US-Australian electronic intelligence station at Pine Gap, near Alice Springs. He asked her if she had ever been inside the base when...

‘Pakistani terror suspect had bomb plans’ SYDNEY: A Pakistani-born man accused of planning terrorist attacks had maps of Australia’s power grid, aerial photographs of defence installations and bomb-making instructions in his possession when he was arrested, a court was told here on Tuesday. Architect Faheem Khalid Lodhi, 34, was also alleged in October 2001 to have acted “in an apparent official capacity” at a training camp in Lahore, operated by the banned terrorist organisation Lashkar-e-Taiba. “The camp specialised in urban warfare,” prosecutor Richard Maidment told Sydney’s Central Local Court at the opening of a committal hearing to decide if there...

Two Atlanta-area men met with Islamic extremists in Toronto, where they discussed "strategic locations in the United States suitable for a terrorist strike," according to an FBI affidavit made public Friday. Syed Haris Ahmed and Ehsanul Islam Sadequee -- U.S. citizens from the Atlanta area -- met with at least three other targets of FBI terrorism investigations during a trip to Toronto last month, according to the affidavit. The affidavit said the men discussed attacks against oil refineries and military bases. They also planned to travel to Pakistan for military training at a terrorist camp, which authorities said the 21-year-old...

The latest in a stream of eye-opening Iraqi documents shows Saddam Hussein's regime was planning suicide attacks on U.S. interests six months before 9-11. Why won't Washington get the word out?Last month the Pentagon began releasing records captured during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Among the documents is a letter dated March 11, 2001, written by Abdel Magid Hammod Ali, one of Saddam's air force generals.According to an unofficial translation, Page 6 of the letter asks for "the names of those who desire to volunteer for suicide mission to liberate Palestine and to strike American interests." Assuming the document's accuracy, this shows...

Homegrown terrorist Jeffrey Leon Battle considered America the “land of the kaffirs,” or unbelievers, and the American people “pigs.” He once lamented to an acquaintance—who happened to be a government informant—that the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks did not sufficiently damage the U.S. economy. “This is the land of the enemy,” he said of his own country in a May 8, 2002, conversation secretly recorded by the government. He explained to a friend how his “burning desire” to become an Islamic martyr had inspired his aborted quest to join forces with al Qaeda in Afghanistan, where he could kill American...

ETROIT, Aug. 29 — For nearly a year, the three foreigners picked up at an apartment here a week after the Sept. 11 attacks seemed like just another group of Arab men caught up in the government dragnet. They languished in prison while facing charges that seemed minor; federal agents had actually been looking for the previous occupant when they raided the apartment.But at least one thing appears to have separated the Detroit trio from hundreds of other Arabs swept up by the government in the last year: a cooperative witness. A fourth Arab man who once lived with...