Anwar al-Aulaqi, U.S.-Born Cleric Linked To Al-Qaeda, Reported Killed In Yemen

September 30, 2011

The Washington Post

By: Sudarsan Raghavan

Anwar al-Aulaqi, a radical U.S.-born Muslim cleric and one of the most influential al-Qaeda operatives wanted by the United States, was killed Friday in an airstrike in northern Yemen, authorities said, eliminating a prominent recruiter who inspired attacks on U.S. soil.

In Washington, a senior Obama administration official confirmed that Aulaqi is dead.

A U.S. counterterrorism official said intelligence indicates that the 40-year-old cleric, a dual national of the United States and Yemen, perished in an attack on his convoy by a U.S. drone and jet, the Associated Press reported.

The news agency later reported that a second U.S. citizen, who edited an al-Qaeda magazine, was killed with Aulaqi in the airstrike.

The Yemeni Defense Ministry, in a text message sent to journalists, announced that “the terrorist Anwar al- Aulaqi has been killed along with some of his companions,” but did not provide further details. Aulaqi has been falsely reported killed before. He has been the target of previous U.S. strikes and was quoted as laughing off an attempt to kill him in May.

In a separate e-mailed statement, the Yemeni government said Aulaqi was “targeted and killed” five miles from the town of Khashef in Yemen’s northern Jawf province, 87 miles east of the capital Sanaa. The attack, the statement said, was launched at 9:55 a.m. Friday local time.

While the Defense Ministry said Aulaqi was killed in Marib province, other government sources said he was killed in neighboring Jawf province.

A Yemeni security source, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media, said Aulaqi was killed in an airstrike, possibly by an unmanned American drone. The Obama administration in recent months has escalated the use of drones to target al-Qaeda-linked militants in Yemen and Somalia.

If true, Aulaqi’s death would be considered a significant victory in the U.S. war against global terrorism. It comes less than five months after U.S. Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden, leader of the al-Qaeda network, in a raid on his hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

Aulaqi, born in New Mexico to Yemeni parents, has been implicated in helping to motivate several attacks on U.S. soil. He is said to have inspired an Army officer who allegedly killed 13 people in a November 2009 shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Tex., as well as a Ni­ger­ian student accused of attempting to bomb a Detroit-bound airliner the following month and a Pakistani American man who tried to set off a car bomb in New York City in May 2010. Aulaqi has also been linked to an attempt in 2010 to send parcel bombs on cargo plans bound for the United States.

In April 2010, the Obama administration authorized his targeted killing. U.S. officials alleged that he is a top leader in al-Qaeda’s Yemeni wing, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).

Aulaqi, who lived in Virginia and was the imam of the Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Falls Church, left the United States in 2002. He was detained in Yemen in 2006 at the request of the United States but was released later that year. His lectures in English on Islamic scripture have drawn in countless followers online.

In April 2010, the Obama administration authorized his targeted killing. U.S. officials alleged that he was a top leader in al-Qaeda’s Yemeni wing, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

Aulaqi, who lived in Virginia and was the imam of the Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Falls Church, left the United States in 2002. He was detained in Yemen in 2006 at the request of the United States but was released later that year. His lectures in English on Islamic scripture have drawn in countless followers online.

Click here for the full report from The Washington Post

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Al Qaeda Threat Released By WikiLeaks

May 2, 2011

ninemsn 

The mastermind of the 9/11 attacks warned that al-Qaeda has hidden a nuclear bomb in Europe which will unleash a “nuclear hellstorm” if Osama bin Laden is captured, leaked files revealed.

The terror group also planned to make a 9/11 style attack on London’s Heathrow airport by crashing a hijacked airliner into one of the terminals, the files showed.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed told Guantanamo Bay interrogators the terror group would detonate the nuclear device if the al-Qaeda chief was captured or killed, according to the classified files released by the WikiLeaks website.

Sheikh Mohammed, the self-professed mastermind of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, has been held at Guantanamo since 2006 and is to be tried in a military court at the US naval base on Cuba over the attacks.

His nuclear threat was revealed in Britain’s Daily Telegraph newspaper, one of several media outlets which have published the classified assessments of detainees at Guantanamo.

The German weekly Der Spiegel, also citing WikiLeaks, said that Sheikh Mohammed had told his interrogators he had set up two cells for the purpose of attacking Heathrow in 2002.

The aim was to seize control of an airliner shortly after take-off from Heathrow, one of the world’s busiest airports, turn it around and crash it into one of the four terminals.

Sheikh Mohammed said one cell had been formed with the aim of taking flying lessons in Kenya, while the other had been tasked with recruiting participants.

Click here for the full report from ninemsn.

DNA Confirms Osama bin Laden’s Death

May 2, 2011

Associate Press

By Kimberly Dozier & David Espo 

WASHINGTON – Declaring the killing of Osama bin Laden “a good day for America,” President Barack Obama said Monday the world was safer without the al-Qaida terrorist and mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. His administration used DNA testing to help confirm that American forces in Pakistan had in fact killed bin Laden, as U.S. officials sought to erase all doubt.

“Today we are reminded that as a nation there is nothing we can’t do,” Obama said. He hailed the pride of those who broke out in overnight celebrations as the stunning news spread around the globe.

An elite crews of American forces killed bin Laden during a daring raid on Monday. Bin Laden was shot in the head during a firefight and then quickly buried at sea. White House officials were mulling the merits and appropriateness of releasing a photo.

As spontaneous celebrations and expressions of relief gave way to questions about precisely what happened and what comes next, U.S. officials warned that the campaign against terrorism is not nearly over — and that the threat of retaliation was real.

Senior administration officials said the DNA testing alone offered near 100 percent certainty that bin Laden was in fact shot dead. Detailed photo analysis by the CIA, confirmation by a woman believed to be bin Laden’s wife on site, and matching physical features like bin Laden’s height all helped confirmed the identification.

Click here for the full report from Yahoo News.

Four Americans Captured by Pirates Killed

February 23rd, 2011

ABC News

By: Jim Sciutto, Martha Raddatz and Sarah Netter

Four Americans aboard a hijacked yacht off the coast of Somalia were killed by their pirate captors Tuesday, touching off a firefight with a U.S. warship, military officials said.

The Americans were sailing the world on a Christian mission to distribute bibles when they were ambushed Feb. 18 by pirates in dangerous waters nearly 300 miles off the Somali coast. On board the yacht were Jean and Scot Adam from California and Phyllis MacKay and Bob Riggle from Washington state.

U.S. forces and at least one Navy warship that had been tracking the yacht for three days and negotiating with the captors responded to gunfire at approximately 1 a.m. ET Tuesday morning.

American military forces killed two pirates aboard the vessel when they responded to gunfire that was believed to have killed the American yachters. The American forces captured 13 pirates and found the remains of two additional pirates. It is now believed that 19 pirates were involved in the kidnapping.

Nina Crossland, a niece of Phyllis MacKay, said today at a news conference that she had been told her aunt was wounded but alive when the U.S. military boarded the Quest, but died shortly after. Officials have confirmed that two of the Americans onboard the Quest were still alive when the military found them.

“It’s a shock,” Crossland said. “My family is trying to come together to deal with this tragedy.”

Crossland said her aunt was merely a sailor on the boat and was not involved with passing out Bibles. The Adams were known to carry and distribute Bibles along their journeys, according to reports.

U.S. forces responded to a rapidly deteriorating situation onboard the Quest and thought immediate action was necessary to save the lives of the hostages, authorities said. The pirates fired an RPG at the USS Sterett, the American ship most closely monitoring the yacht. At the time the first shot were heard on board the Quest, the Americans were negotiating with the pirates and had two of them onboard the Sterett.

It was unclear what the negotiations covered, but a military official said the pirates were attempting to make their way back to the Somali coast. According to one official, the killings of the Americans onboard came as a surprise since the pirates’ demeanor had been described as “calm.”

A military official said small arms fire was detected by the US forces on the yacht and that it was not directed at the USS Sterett.

It was only after the gunfire was detected, according to the military official, that U.S. special ops forces boarded the Quest and engaged the pirates. Until weapons were fired at the Quest , U.S. forces did not assault the yacht, according to the official.

A timeline released today noted that one of the two pirates killed by special operations forces below deck was killed by a knife. The other was shot.

“As [U.S. Forces] responded to the gunfire, reaching and boarding the Quest, the forces discovered all four hostages had been shot by their captors. Despite immediate steps to provide life-saving care, all four hostages ultimately died of their wounds,” according to a statement released by U.S. Central Command in Tampa, Florida.

“We express our deepest condolences for the innocent lives callously lost aboard the Quest,” said Gen James N. Mattis, U.S. Central Command commander.

Click here for the full report from ABC News

WHO Want Faster, More Flu Vaccine Production

September 10, 2010

The Associated Press

By: Min Lee

The vaccine used to contain the recent swine flu pandemic was effective, but health authorities will need to ramp up the speed and volume of production during the next global outbreak, a World Health Organization official said Monday.

The WHO declared last month that the swine flu pandemic that started in June 2009 was over, after it killed about 18,600 people worldwide, far less than the worse-case scenarios in which authorities said millions could die.

The widespread use of vaccines was critical in limiting the number of casualties, with studies showing they offered protection in up to 95 percent of cases, WHO official David Wood said at a news conference on the sidelines of an influenza conference in Hong Kong.

Some 350 million doses of the vaccine were administered worldwide, according to WHO figures.

“That gives us considerable hope for the future, for the future pandemics, that the technologies that we have to actually make the vaccines are” effective, said Wood, the quality and safety team co-ordinator for the WHO’s immunization and vaccines department.

But while vaccines became available six months after the H1N1 virus strain behind the pandemic was identified in April 2009, that was still too late for some countries, he said. In the case of the U.S., vaccination started on Oct. 5, 2009 — weeks after a second wave of cases hit as schools resumed, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention flu expert Nancy Cox told reporters.

The WHO is studying ways to make vaccines more quickly, Wood said without offering specifics, adding that technological breakthroughs will also speed up the process.

“In the short term, we’ll be able to make some gains of weeks that Nancy was talking about that can make all the difference. In the longer term, we may even have these new technologies that shorten our lag more significantly, so I’m quite optimistic,” Wood said.

The WHO official also said the global healthy body is working on increasing global production capacity beyond the centers of Europe, America and China, targeting countries like India, Indonesia, Thailand, Brazil and Mexico.

The WHO was accused by some of hyping the pandemic, prompting excessive buying of vaccines and antiviral drugs that enriched drug companies. Asked about such accusations, Wood said the organization only advised countries to vaccinate high-risk groups, like health care workers and pregnant women.

“I believe that the recommendations that came from the organization were proportionate to the risks that we had at the time,” he said.

Click here for the complete article

Russians Claim Polish Tragedy Was Pilot Error Before Investigation

April 12, 2010

Dalje.com

By AFP

Speculation surged Saturday on the cause of the plane crash that killed Polish President Lech Kaczynski, with attention focusing on why the crew attempted to land despite thick fog.

As the Kremlin ordered a “detailed” investigation into the deadly crash in Smolensk in western Russia, an air force official said the plane’s pilots had repeatedly ignored instructions from Russian air traffic controllers.

“At a distance of 1.5 kilometres (0.9 miles) the air traffic control group discovered the crew had accelerated its downward descent and begun descending beneath its glide path,” Lieutenant General Alexander Alyoshin, deputy head of Russia’s air force, said in televised remarks.

“The head of the group ordered the crew to return to horizontal flight, and when the crew did not fulfil the instruction, ordered them several times to land at another airport,” Alyoshin said.

“Nonetheless the crew continued to descend. Unfortunately this ended tragically,” he added.

Two other planes were due to land at the same airport on Saturday morning, of which one landed successfully, while the other flew to another airport to avoid the heavy fog in Smolensk, Alyoshin said.

Officials have said a total of 96 people were aboard the plane, including Kaczynski and top Polish military commanders who had been heading to Russia to comemmorate a 1940 massacre of Polish officers by Soviet secret police.

All aboard the ageing Soviet-designed Tupolev Tu-154 Polish government jet were killed, officials said.

Eyewitnesses and Smolensk airport officials who had been awaiting Kaczynski’s arrival since early morning told an AFP reporter that his plane had circled several times in the low visibility.

It made three approaches to land before skimming the treetops and crashing sideways on its fourth descent, they said.

Unnamed sources in the Smolensk region government told Russian news agencies that pilot error was suspected as a cause of the crash.

“The cause of the plane crash was apparently an error by the crew during the approach to landing,” Russian state news agency RIA-Novosti quoted an unnamed official in Smolensk region as saying.

Authorities have found both the plane’s flight recorders, Russia’s top emergency official said, quoted by the Interfax news agency.

“Both the data and the voice recorders were found at the crash site. The analysis of them, which will shed light on the reasons for the disaster, has already begun,” Emergency Minister Sergei Shoigu was quoted as saying.

Such recorders are often called “black boxes” and are used to reconstruct the chain of events that led to a crash.

Meanwhile Russia opened a criminal investigation to determine whether safety violations had led to the crash, as teams of investigators flew to the scene.

Russia’s top investigator Alexander Bastrykin and over 40 senior specialists were headed to the crash site, Russia’s investigative committee said in a statement.

In a separate statement, the committee said it had opened an investigation on possible “violations of aviation safety rules leading to the deaths of two or more people,” a crime punishable with up to seven years in prison.

Kaczynski’s jet had been fully repaired and refurbished in December, the head of the factory that made the planes said.

“Major repairs on Polish President Lech Kaczynski’s Tu-154 plane were carried out in December 2009,” Alexei Gusev, director of the Aviakor aircraft factory in Russia’s southern city of Samara, was quoted as saying by Interfax.

Earlier Saturday, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev ordered a “detailed” investigation into the crash.

Russian officials have vowed their probe will proceed in close cooperation with Polish investigators, and the Russian foreign ministry has said it would expedite processing of visas for them to enter the country.

Click here for the full report.

Record Number of Journalists Murdered Last Year

March 31, 2010

AOL News

By Joseph Schuman

Late on the night of Jan. 7, Mexican newspaper reporter Valentin Valdés Espinosa was driving through downtown Saltillo in the north of the country when his car was intercepted by two SUVs. The men inside forced Valdés and a colleague into one of the SUVs and drove away.

The next morning, Valdés’ body was found at the nearby Motel Marbella. He had been tortured, bound and shot several times, the Committee to Protect Journalists reports. Valdés had recently been part of a team reporting for the local paper, the Zócalo de Saltillo, on a massive army raid at the motel and the drug cartel it targeted. A handwritten note with his body said, “This is going to happen to those who don’t understand. The message is for everyone.”

Valdés was the victim of a growing trend of violence against journalists far from the war zones once perceived as the biggest danger to reporters. Last year, according to a UNESCO report released today, a record number of journalists were killed worldwide.

There were 77 journalists murdered last year, up from 48 in 2008, and the killings of journalists are more often taking place in countries that are officially at peace.

“There is increasing evidence of acts of violence against media professionals in many parts of the world, in particular deliberate attacks by those who do not wish journalists to investigate and reveal information of public interest,” the UNESCO report said. “The killing of journalists is just the tip of the iceberg. Media professionals face many other forms of threats such as intimidation, kidnappings, harassment and physical assaults.”

While the numerical spike last year can mostly be attributed to an ambush in the Philippines that claimed the lives of 30 journalists in one day, the numbers also show that the killing of local journalists is on the rise even as the deaths of war correspondents has been abating in recent years and violence has subsided in Iraq.

At least 80 percent of the 125 murders of journalists in 2008 and 2009 targeted reporters who were trying to uncover and report “information of public interest,” UNESCO said.

At a time when newspapers have been declining in the U.S. and other industrialized countries, UNESCO also noted that print media continued to take a frontline role reporting from dangerous areas. Among the journalists murdered, just 26 percent worked for television, 16 percent for radio and only a few for news agencies and online sites.

Following the Philippines, Mexico had the biggest rise in journalist murders, with 11 in 2008 and 2009, largely due to the drug-related violence that claimed the life of Valdés. The number of journalists killed in Pakistan rose to six from just two in the previous two-year period, and journalist murders in Russia jumped to seven from three.

Click here for the full report.

N. Korean Worker Executed For Sneaking News Out of the Country

March 8, 2010

Guardian.co.uk

By Associated Press

A North Korean factory worker has been executed by firing squad for sneaking news out of the country on his illicit mobile phone, Seoul-based radio said today.

The armaments factory worker was accused of divulging the price of rice and other information on living conditions to a friend who had defected to South Korea years ago, Open Radio for North Korea reported.

The man, surnamed Chong, made calls to the defector using an illegal Chinese mobile phone, according to an unnamed North Korean security agency official cited by the report.

The execution took place by firing squad in late January in Hamhung, according to Open Radio for North Korea. The station broadcasts into North Korea, which tightly controls news.

South Korea’s unification ministry, which handles relations with North Korea, and the national intelligence service, Seoul’s main spy agency, said they could not immediately confirm the report.

Mobile phone use in North Korea is tightly restricted, although the country introduced an advanced network in partnership with Cairo-based Orascom Telecom in 2008. North Koreans who manage to make illegal overseas mobile calls mostly use networks in China.

Open Radio for North Korea said it believes that more than 10,000 North Koreans living near the border with China illicitly possess Chinese mobile phones.

Ha Tae-keung, the broadcaster’s chief, said it was not known to whom in South Korea the information passed on by Chong was eventually delivered.

The North Korean defector said to have received the calls, only identified by the common Korean family name of Kim, may have worked for South Korean government officials, researchers or news outlets, Ha said.

Ha said neither the executed man nor the defector had worked for Open Radio for North Korea.

Click here for the full report.

The Kevin Trudeau Show: 2-23-10

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Big Pharma Researcher Admits to Faking Research!
GlaxoSmithKline Hid Evidence of Avandia Harm
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Hospital Infections Have Killed Over 48,000 People
Acne Drug has Side Effect of Death

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