Tag Archives: Al Qaeda

News

Mounties arrest terrorism suspects in Ottawa, Canada

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The Mounties always get their man
The Mounties always get their man

Story here from AFP.

Excerpt:

The three men arrested over a terror plot in Canada were in possession of bomb-making materials and at least one has links to a group fighting Western forces in Afghanistan, officials said Thursday.

Hiva Alizadeh, 30, and Misbahuddin Ahmed, 26, were arrested in police raids on their suburban Ottawa homes Wednesday morning, and formally charged with “terrorist offences” on Thursday during brief court appearances.

A third Canadian national, Khuram Sher, 28, of London, Ontario was arrested on Thursday.

“Investigators have grounds to believe that Alizadeh, Ahmed and Sher are part of a domestic terrorist group operating in Canada,” Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) superintendent Serge Therriault told a press conference.

“We also believe that Alizadeh is a member of, and remains in contact with, a terrorist group with links to the conflict in Afghanistan,” he said.

Police said the accused were in possession of a horde of material for making improvised explosive devices, including schematics, videos, drawings, instructions, books and electrical components.

During raids on the homes of the suspects, authorities said they also seized more than 50 electronic circuit boards that could be used in remote detonators.

This “large amount of terrorist documentation and manuals” demonstrates that the suspects “intended to construct an explosive device or explosive devices for terrorist purposes,” said Therriault.

Police also said they had evidence a member of the cell had received bomb-making training abroad, but they did not specify which suspect or where and when the training allegedly took place.

[…]Alizadeh, Ahmed and Sher were arrested following a year-long investigation by the RCMP, Canada’s spy agency and several police forces across the country.

Raymond Boisvert, assistant director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), said the intelligence that led to the arrest of the trio was provided to the RCMP.

Police said they arrested them this week to prevent one suspect from providing financial support to “terrorist counterparts” for the purchase of weapons for use against coalition forces in Afghanistan.

“This group posed a real and serious threat to the citizens of the national capital region and Canada’s national security,” said Therriault.

“Our criminal investigation and arrests prevented the assembly of any bombs and the terrorist attack or attacks from being carried out.”

Here’s the latest: Ottawa was a potential target for the group. Keep in mind that Ottawa is the capital of Canada, about an hour north of the northern tip of New York state.

News

How the British government funds radical Islam

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Story from National Review. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

The East London Mosque is one of the largest and most influential of Islamic institutions in Britain. It has a Muslim Centre, a meeting place which acts a bit like a college, offering lectures and sermons at which like-minded people may meet. One who gave lectures there was Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born Islamist imam whose fingerprints have turned up in more than one place. He groomed Maj. Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood killer, and we now learn that the Detroit would-be bomber, Umar Abdulmutallab, while a student in London between 2005 and 2008 listened to a number of video-link lectures given by al-Awlaki at this mosque’s Muslim Centre. By then, al-Awlaki was communicating at long distance from Yemen where he had taken refuge, and become affiliated to al-Qaeda. And when Abdul Mutallab himself went to Yemen where he was trained and equipped as a suicide bomber, he had personal contact with al-Awlaki, evidently his mentor.

The authorities ought to have been able to pick this up. Far worse than their laxity, however, is the fact that in the past two years, according to the Sunday Telegraph, the Muslim Centre has received at least 60,000 pounds from a government initiative known as Preventing Violent Extremism. The intention is to fund moderates to oppose extremists, but the very opposite has happened. Violent extremism has been subsidized. In the last two years, al-Awlaki has addressed at least two gatherings at the Centre via video-link, including one last year called “The End of Time,” advertised with a poster showing the destruction of New York.

This is why you don’t elect secular leftists from the British Labour Party to run national security.

News

Has political correctness made the FBI impotent against real terrorist threats?

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I am a huge fan of FBI, or at least I was, until I read this story from the Weekly Standard. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

On Monday, ABC News first reported that Fort Hood shooter Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan had reached out to al Qaeda associates prior to his attack. There were good reasons to speculate that one of these al Qaeda figures is Anwar al Awlaki — an al Qaeda recruiter who acted as a “spiritual advisor” to two of the 9/11 hijackers. Awlaki preached at a mosque Hasan attended in 2001 and praised Hasan’s attack on his web site Monday morning.

It turns out that informed speculation was correct, according to the Associated Press and the New York Times. Beginning in December of last year, authorities found that Hasan communicated with Awlaki “10 to 20 times.” But no formal investigation was ever launched. Why?

Well, because the FBI thought that talking to an Al-Quaeda recruiter isn’t really such a big deal.

The WS article notes that the FBI investigated Awlaki TWICE:

…Awlaki and his mosques had substantive ties to three of the 9/11 hijackers and the terrorist who was responsible for coordinating their activities.

[…]The FBI investigated Awlaki again after the September 11 attacks and found there was a lot of “smoke,” but told the 9/11 Commission and the Congressional Joint Inquiry that they did not have enough evidence to detain him.

[…]Now we have a third failure. Despite the fact that Hasan had reached out to Awlaki, who had been investigated twice before because of his ties to al Qaeda, “no formal investigation” into the Hasan-Awlaki connection was ever launched.

Remember the DHS report about the threat of terrorism from conservatives? If you favored immigration law enforcement, small government, personal responsibility, responsible firearm ownership, and right to life, then the DHS report said that you were a potential terrorist. Refresh your memory here. But what does DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano do when actual terrorism occurs?

According to the Associated Press: (H/T Dinocrat via ECM)

The U.S. Homeland Security secretary says she is working to prevent a possible wave of anti-Muslim sentiment after the shootings at Fort Hood in Texas. Janet Napolitano says her agency is working with groups across the United States to try to deflect any backlash against American Muslims following Thursday’s rampage by Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, a Muslim who reportedly expressed growing dismay over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The shootings left 13 people dead and 29 wounded.

Actually, if you count the unborn child that one woman who died was carrying, it’s FOURTEEN dead.

Is it any wonder that Michele Bachmann has called on Napolitano to resign?

Can Democrats be trusted to keep America safe from threats? They seem to think that actual terrorists are victims, and that conservatives are the real terrorists.