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Ali Saleh Kahlah al Marri, an admitted former al Qaeda operative, has been released from a American jail and permitted to return home to Qatar. No formal statement has been released yet by either government, but it is being reported that al Marri's release was the result of a bilateral agreement between the Qatari and American governments. According to the US Bureau of Prisons, a prisoner with the same name and estimated age (ID number 12194-026) was freed on Friday. Additionally, a source from al Marri's family told the Qatari press he was recently released and arrived in Doha Saturday....

SEATTLE - NBC News is reporting that the Space Needle in Seattle - a high-profile landmark in America's Pacific Northwest - was apparently a target for al-Qaida terrorists. U.S. officials tell NBC News evidence found in Afghanistan uncovered plans to attack the high-profile Space Needle along with other monuments in Washington State, including massive hydroelectric dams, like the Grand Coulee. According to the NBC News report, plans were also found that targeted the Los Angeles International Airport for a second time. An earlier plot to bomb the airport was foiled two years ago when convicted terrorist Ahmed Ressam was arrested ...

WASHINGTON - California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a top member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said she has no information to support White House claims that its secret wiretapping helped thwart a 2002 Los Angeles terrorist attack. President George W. Bush implied in a speech Thursday that information gleaned from the wiretaps helped foil an al-Qaida plot to crash a commercial jetliner into the US Bank Tower. But after a closed-door briefing, Feinstein said she'd heard nothing to indicate a wiretap played any part in foiling the plot. "I have no way of knowing whether it did or not," Feinstein said....

A Malaysian pilot recruited by al-Qaeda to fly a hijacked airliner into the tallest building on the US West Coast pulled out of the plot when he realised it was a suicide mission, security officials in South-East Asia said today. Further details emerged of the plan to target the iconic 73-storey US Bank Building in Los Angeles, revealed by President Bush yesterday in an address to rally support for the War on Terror. Terrorism experts in Malaysia said that Zaini Zakaria, an engineer, was among three men being trained to launch the planned second-wave of Osama bin Laden's assault on...

If you live in L.A. and didn't die in a terrorist attack, you may owe it to the CIA's use of the "enhanced interrogation techniques" that are currently under fire from the Obama administration and the left-wing fringe. In a compelling Op-Ed in Tuesday's Washington Post, Marc A. Thiessen disproves Barack Obama's hollow claim that such techniques "did not make us safer." Rather than following the MSM lead and merely parroting the Obamatons' talking points after the release of previously-classified memos this week, Thiessen actually examined the documents. Thiessen concludes that Obama's contention is "patently false. The proof is in...

Critics of the CIA program are desperate to convince Americans that no valuable information came from the interrogations of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) and other senior terrorists.  They know that if our citizens learn the details of how enhanced interrogations stopped terrorist plots, most would support the CIA program.  A recent Pew poll showed that 71% of Americans believe that there are circumstances under which torture (not just enhanced interrogations, but actual torture) is justifiable to get information from captured terrorists. This is why Timothy Noah of Slate (with Andrew Sullivan cheerleading him on his blog) is at such pains...

WASHINGTON: Chicago's Sears Tower and Los Angeles' Library Tower were to be the next targets after the terrorist attacks on World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, Al-Qaeda's puported operations chief Khalid Shiekh Mohammed now in detention, has told US interrogators, media reports said on Tuesday. The plan for Chicago and Los Angeles were aborted because of the decisive US response to the New York and Washington attacks, Sheikh reportedly told the investigators, the Washington Times said quoting a British newspaper. The US response disrupted the terrorist organisations' plans so thoroughly that it could not proceed, he said.

IT makes a chilling picture. The mastermind behind the September 11 attacks has told interrogators that he and his terrorist nephew leafed through almanacs of US skyscrapers when planning the operation. Sears Tower in Chicago and Library Tower in Los Angeles – which was "blown up" in the film Independence Day – were both potential targets, according to transcripts of interrogations of al-Qa'ida operations chief Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. "We were looking for symbols of economic might," he told his captors. He recounted sitting looking at the books with Ramzi Yusuf, his nephew by marriage, who was the man behind the...

<p>LONDON — Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, al Qaeda's purported operations chief, has told U.S. interrogators that the group had been planning attacks on the Library Tower in Los Angeles and the Sears Tower in Chicago on the heels of the September 11, 2001, terror strikes.</p>