Free Republic

Once more the spoiler. Despite the earnest persuasion of the White House to preserve a useful weapon in the war against the terrorists, the New York Times has revealed the workings of a covert surveillance program, indisputably within the law, to use administrative subpoenas to examine, through a Belgian financial consortium known by the acronym SWIFT, the financing of international terrorism. Once the story was out, the Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal covered it as well. Now the program is damaged, perhaps severely so, and the financing of terror is harder to track. This is another unnecessary leak,...

'CIA island jail' to be probed A UK parliamentary committee is to investigate allegations that US authorities held 'terrorist' suspects in secret prisons on an Indian Ocean island leased by the US from Britain, officials said. Reprieve, a British legal charity, says the CIA detained suspected al-Qaeda members at an airbase on the island of Diego Garcia. Reprieve says at least three al-Qaeda linked prisoners - Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah and Hambali - were held on the island with the consent of British authorities. George Bush, the US president, admitted in 2006 the CIA had held the three and...

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KUALA LUMPUR: Police have arrested Wan Min Wan Mat, a key leader of Kumpulan Militant Malaysia (KMM) during an operation in Kota Baru Friday morning. Inspector-general of police Tan Sri Norian Mai said the 42-year-old former Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) lecturer was arrested at about 9.30am. Police are looking for eight suspects who are key KMM members and are offering a RM50,000 reward for information on each leader.

Jakarta - Riduan “Hambali” Isamudin is the mastermind who planned the massacre in Bali in 2002, and the attacks against Christian churches and buildings in 2000. The accusation comes from Mubarok and Ali Imron, both members of Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), who say they are willing to testify against the operational chief of the Islamic fundamentalist movement in southeast Asia, who is being held in the detention center in Guantanamo. Mubarok and Ali Imron are being held in the prison in Jakarta, where they are serving a life sentence for their involvement in the attack against churches in the country. In...

Yazid Sufaat helped Zacharias Moussaoui obtain the visa he used to enter the United States and funded him, housed two 9/11 hijackers while they were en route to the U.S., acquired tons of ammonium nitrate for the Singapore bombing plot, and, in 2001, attempted to obtain Anthrax for al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Now, he is walking around Malaysia a free man. Reuters, December 10, 2008: KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (Reuters) — Malaysia has released five men held on suspicion of terrorism, including one who has been linked to the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States, the country’s home minister said...

Excerpt from book: “The anthrax spores in the letter to Daschle were so professionally refined, the Central Intelligence Agency believed the powder must have been sent by an experienced terrorist organization, most probably Al Qaeda, as a sequel to the group’s September 11 attacks. During a [October 17] meeting of the White House’s National Security Council that day, Cheney, who was sitting in for the President because Bush was traveling abroad, urged everyone to keep this inflammatory speculation secret. ... They thought Cheney had already been lethally infected. ... *** Cheney in particular was so stricken by the potential for...

Canadian admits to plotting attacksReport details role of St. Catharines man  Stewart Bell, National Post.   Friday, January 10, 2003 A Canadian man has confessed he was sent to Southeast Asia by al-Qaeda to organize a terrorist cell that plotted a massive assault that involved setting off simultaneous truck bombs at six Western buildings in Singapore. A 50-page report released yesterday by the government of Singapore provides the first official details of the terrorist activities of Mohammed Mansour Jabarah, a 20-year-old student from St. Catharines. It said Mr. Jabarah had admitted he was dispatched by al-Qaeda after Sept. 11 to...

August 7, 2004THE OVERVIEWBin Laden Sent Suspect to U.S., Officials Say By DOUGLAS JEHL and WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM ASHINGTON, Aug. 6 - American intelligence officials now believe that Issa al-Hindi, the alleged Qaeda operative now in British custody, was dispatched to the United States in early 2001 by the mastermind of the Sept. 11 plot at the direction of Osama bin Laden to case potential targets in New York City, senior government officials said Friday. The officials said that Mr. Hindi was the same person as the figure identified in the Sept. 11 commission report as Issa al-Britani. The...

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) — Malaysia has extended for two more years the imprisonment of a terror suspect linked to al-Qaeda's attempts to produce chemical and biological weapons, saying he has more information about terrorist operations. Yazid Sufaat, a U.S.-trained biochemist and former Malaysian army captain, was arrested in late 2001 as he returned home from Afghanistan, where officials say he was working on a biological and chemical weapons program for al-Qaeda that was ended by the U.S.-led war. Since then, he has been held without trial under Malaysia's Internal Security Act on accusations of being a member of Jemaah...

HAMBALI, the mastermind behind the 2002 Bali bombing, has been transferred to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba from a secret CIA prison and is expected to face a military trial. For more than two years since Thai authorities captured Hambali, also known as Riduan Isamuddin, and handed him over to US authorities, the Bush administration has refused to comment on his whereabouts. But President George W.Bush admitted yesterday that Hambali, Jemaah Islamiah's operational commander and senior al-Qa'ida leader, had been held in a secret CIA detention system outside the US - believed to be in eastern Europe - along with 13...

Jakarta, 13 March (AKI) - Terrorism and the Palestinian question top the agenda of the US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice's visit to Indonesia. Rice is scheduled to arrive in Jakarta on Monday evening. In the days preceeding the visit, Rice expressed Washington's appreciation for the firm way in which Jakarta has been fighting the threat of global terrorism. Rice also said that she was ready to discuss any assistance Washington can provide Jakarta in the fight against terrorism. On the occasion of Rice's visit, Jakarta is also expected to ask, yet again, for access to Riduan Isamuddin, better known...

How US stopped Hambali Natalie O'Brien and Patrick Walters February 11, 2006 IT should have been no surprise that the Southeast Asian terror group Jemaah Islamiah and its operations chief Hambali were named by US President George W. Bush as the figures behind a 2002 plot to fly a plane into California's tallest building. JI and Hambali, mastermind of the Bali bombing, were not only intimately connected with al-Qa'ida's chief strategist Khalid Sheik Mohammed in the plan to destroy the US Bank Tower in Los Angeles, they had been in cahoots for years, planning to blow up US airliners and...

ABC News is reporting that Current and former CIA officers speaking to ABC News on the condition of confidentiality say the United States scrambled to get all the suspects off European soil before Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived there today. The officers say 11 top al Qaeda suspects have now been moved to a new CIA facility in the North African desert. The disgrunted intelligence officers even disclosed an actual list of 12 high-value targets allegedly held by the CIA, and ABC is reporting it : Abu Zubaydah: Held first in Thailand then Poland Ibn Al-Shaykh al-Libi: Held in...

A KEY Jemaah Islamiah operative sent to Australia by captured terrorist leader Hambali to set up a terror cell has been questioned by Australian Federal Police investigating the activities of the Sydney and Melbourne suspects charged last week. Two AFP officers flew to Kuala Lumpur in August to question Azman Hashim, the JI military expert who ran a paramilitary weapons training camp for Australians in the Blue Mountains. Reports out of Malaysia have said that Hashim, who has been detained under Malaysia's Internal Security Act, had revealed that some Australians had trained in the camp in 2002. The AFP yesterday...

Government counterterrorism officials gave new details on Friday of what the White House said was a foiled 2002 plot to fly hijacked airplanes into targets on the West Coast, but their account suggested that the Bush administration might not have understood the dimensions of the plot until two major terror suspects were caught in 2003. Both suspects, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Riduan Isamuddin, better known as Hambali, had been involved in plans for such an attack, they said. President Bush referred obliquely to the planning in a speech on Thursday, when he said the United States and its partners had...

AHMED HIKMAT SHAKIR IS A shadowy figure who provided logistical assistance to one, maybe two, of the 9/11 hijackers. Years before, he had received a phone call from the Jersey City, New Jersey, safehouse of the plotters who would soon, in February 1993, park a truck bomb in the basement of the World Trade Center. The safehouse was the apartment of Musab Yasin, brother of Abdul Rahman Yasin, who scorched his own leg while mixing the chemicals for the 1993 bomb.When Shakir was arrested shortly after the 9/11 attacks, his "pocket litter," in the parlance of the investigators, included contact...

A Cambodian court has sentenced the Indonesian Islamist known as Hambali and three others to life in jail for planning bomb attacks in Phnom Penh. Hambali, already in US custody, was convicted in absentia over plans to attack the UK embassy in Cambodia. A lawyer for the other defendants, two Thais and a Cambodian, said they may launch an appeal. Hambali is regarded as a key member of Jemaah Islamiah, the Asian militant group said to have ties to al-Qaeda. The Indonesian authorities suspect him of involvement in the 2002 Bali nightclub bombings, which killed 202 people. He was arrested...

Indonesian police arrest Hambali keyman JAKARTA (Indonesia) - Indonesian police have arrested a key associate of alleged South-east Asian terror mastermind Hambali on an island in the country's far north-east, Koran Tempo newspaper reported on Wednesday. Adrian Ali, alias Amin, was arrested on Tinakareng, in the north Sulawesi province, after police found equipment used to make identity papers in his house, the paper quoted local police as saying. Two other suspects were arrested with Ali. The report did not say when the arrests took place, nor what the men would be charged with. Tinakareng lies just south of the Philippine's...

Jemaah Islamiyah has tried in the last year to carry out terror attacks in Southeast Asia, but failed because of a lack of funds and support from other militant groups, and an absence of planners among its ranks, officials said. The al-Qaida-linked organization's ability to mount attacks was severely dented by the arrest of scores of militants after September 11, 2001, including Hambali, the group's alleged operations chief, a Malaysian government official told The Associated Press on Friday. Remnants of Jemaah Islamiyah have made several unsuccessful attempts to regroup in Indonesia so they could launch more strikes, the official said...