Umar Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian who used an underwear bomb in a failed attempt to blow up an airplane flying into Detroit, “previously had been in Yemen, where he had contact with the branch of bin Laden’s group called al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Earlier intelligence had focused solely on that branch conducting terrorist […]
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 CIA thought it had its best chance yet to strike at [al-Qaida second-in-command Ayman] al-Zawahri last year [2009] when a doctor working with Jordanian intelligence claimed to offer new details suggesting the terrorist leader suffered from diabetes. The former and current U.S. officials said there were already indications al-Zawahri might have the disease. CIA […]
12/30/2009
“[T]he suicide bomber who killed eight people inside a CIA base in Afghanistan [on December 30, 2009] was a Jordanian doctor recruited by Jordanian intelligence to support U.S. efforts against al-Qaida. The bombing killed seven CIA employees–four officers and three contracted security guards–and a Jordanian intelligence officer, Ali bin Zaid, according to a second former […]
12/30/2009
WikiLeaks disclosed a secret paper signed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on December 30, 2009, which read: “While the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) takes seriously the threat of terrorism within Saudi Arabia, it has been an ongoing challenge to persuade Saudi officials to treat terrorist financing emanating from Saudi Arabia as a strategic […]