WikiLeaks disclosed a January 7, 2010, State Department document, which claimed that Treasury Department Acting Assistant Secretary of the Office of Intelligence and Analysis Howard Mendelsohn “stated that the Taliban receives significant money from narcotics trafficking and extortion, but noted that the U.S. believes that the group also receives significant funds from the Gulf, particularly […]
Category: quotes
1/6/2010
“In January [6] 2010, Kai Eide, the UN special representative for Afghanistan, presented a devastating report to the UN Security Council in which he said that the U.S. emphasis on security over social and developmental issues would doom any efforts to stabilize the country. ‘We will fail,’ he warned the UN. ‘What we need is […]
1/5/2010
“President Obama said Tuesday [January 5, 2010] that the government had sufficient information to uncover the terror plot to bring down a commercial jetliner on Christmas Day, but that intelligence officials had ‘failed to connect those dots.’ ‘This was not a failure to collect intelligence,’ Mr. Obama said after meeting with his national security team […]
1/4/2010
In a New York Times article on January 4, 2010, Professor Sheldon Jacobson “argued that our [aviation security] spending is actually making us less secure. ‘Spending billions of dollars on screening the wrong people uses up finite resources,’ he wrote. ‘If we keep focusing on stopping terrorist tactics rather than stopping the terrorists themselves, the […]
1/2/2010
“When the first two American missile strikes against Qaeda camps in Yemen took place in December 2009, [Yemeni President] Mr. [Ali Abdullah] Saleh publicly claimed that they were Yemeni strikes to avert any anti-American backlash. [Central Command leader] Gen. David H. Petraeus flew to Yemen to thank the president, who promised to keep up the […]
12/31/2009
“In December [31] 2009, a criminal case against former [private security contractor] Blackwater personnel [for their involvement in the killing of 17 Iraqi civilians on September 16, 2007] was dismissed in a 90-page opinion by Judge Richard M. Urbina of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, stating that the ‘government’s mishandling […]
12/31/2009
“Al Qaeda struck a major blow on December 31, 2009, when it used a Jordanian double agent to inflict the worst-ever casualties on the CIA: the man blew himself up at a U.S. base in the southeastern province of Khost [Afghanistan], killing seven CIA officers and a Jordanian military officer.” – Ahmed Rashid, Pakistan on […]
12/30/2009
“The extent of the cooperation between the Pakistani Taliban and al-Qaeda could be seen in the suicide bombing that killed seven CIA officers and contractors in the American base at Khost in eastern Afghanistan on December 30, 2009. The suicide bomber, Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, a Jordanian doctor, was a double agent: information he had […]
12/30/2009
“In 2009 a Jordanian using the nom de guerre Abu Dujannah al Khorasani…persuaded the Jordanian General Intelligence Department (GID) to take him on as a double agent against al Qaeda. Under his real name, Human Khalil Abu Mulal al Balawi, he had previously been a propaganda specialist for al Qaeda’s franchise in Iraq and its […]
12/30/2009
From coverage of classified State Department documents exposed by WikiLeaks: “Saudi Arabia is the world’s largest source of funds for Islamist militant groups such as the Afghan Taliban and Lashkar-e-Taiba [LeT]–but the Saudi government is reluctant to stem the flow of money, according to [Secretary of State] Hillary Clinton. ‘More needs to be done since […]