And yet they are all over Africa today!
???????
Some other French president going to have to come back in another 50 years and say sorry?
Now on to the good stuff:
"Attackers seize gas field, hostages in Algeria" by Adam Nossiterand ADAM NOSSITER | New York Times, January 17, 2013
BAMAKO, Mali — The French military assault on Islamist extremists in Mali escalated into a potentially much broader North African conflict on Wednesday when, in retribution, armed attackers in unmarked trucks seized an internationally managed natural gas field in Algeria and took at least 20 foreign hostages, including Americans.
An "Al-CIA-Duh" hit squad!?!
Algerian officials said at least two people, including a Briton, were killed in the assault, which began with a predawn ambush on a bus attempting to ferry gas-field workers to an airport. Hundreds of Algerian security forces were sent to surround the gas-field compound, creating a tense standoff, and the country’s interior minister said there would be no negotiations.
Algeria’s official news agency said at least 20 fighters carried out the attack and mass abduction. There were unconfirmed reports late Wednesday that security forces had tried to storm the gas-field compound and retreated under gunfire from the hostage-takers.
Many details of the assault on the gas field in a barren desert site near Libya’s border remained murky, including the number of hostages, which could be as high as 41, according to claims by the attackers quoted by regional news agencies. US, French, British, Japanese, and Norwegian nationals who worked at the field were known to be among them, officials said.
That's a tell by the intelligence operation that passes for a newspaper over here.
Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta called the gas-field attack a terrorist act and said the United States is considering its response. His statement suggested that the Obama administration could be drawn into a military entanglement in North Africa that it had been seeking to keep at arm’s length — even as it has conceded that the region has become a new haven for extremists affiliated with Al Qaeda.
Yeah, sure, and who benefits?
‘‘It is a very serious matter when Americans are taken hostage along with others,’’ Panetta told reporters during a visit to Italy. ‘‘I want to assure the American people that the United States will take all necessary and proper steps that are required to deal with this situation.’’
The gas-field attack, which seemed to take foreign governments and the British and Norwegian companies that help run the facility completely by surprise, appeared to make good on a pledge by the Islamist militants who seized northern Mali last year to sharply expand their struggle against the West in response to France’s military intervention that began last week.
The hostage-taking potentially broadened the conflict beyond Mali’s borders and raised the possibility of drawing an increasing number of foreign countries into direct involvement, particularly if expatriates working in the vast energy extraction industries of North Africa become targets. It also doubled, at least, the number of non-African hostages that Islamist militants in northern and western Africa have been using as bargaining chips to finance themselves in recent years through ransoms.
But there was no indication that the gas-field attackers wanted money. Instead, in a statement sent to a Mauritanian news agency, they demanded the ‘‘immediate halt of the aggression against our own in Mali.’’
The statement, made by a group called Al Mulathameen, which has links to Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, the North African affiliate of Al Qaeda, claimed it was holding more than 40 ‘‘crusaders’’ — apparently a reference to non-Muslims — ‘‘including seven Americans, two French, two British, as well as other citizens of various European nationalities.’’
The gas-field attack coincided with an escalation of the fight inside Mali, as French ground troops, joined by soldiers of the Malian Army engaged with Islamist fighters in ground combat. The officials said the French-Malian units had begun to beat back the Islamist militant advance southward from northern Mali.
And yet they are still there over five months later. It's all about the gold and other minerals with Mali!
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As for Algeria, natural gas you say. After this they just might need an AmeriKan presence on their soil.
"Algeria’s sudden assault frees some hostages, leaves others dead" by Adam Nossiter and Rick Gladstone | New York Times, January 18, 2013
The Algerians suspected what I did. This is their way of saying nope. Stay out.
BAMAKO, Mali — Without warning other governments, Algeria mounted an assault Thursday on the heavily armed fighters holding American and other hostages at a remote Sahara gas field facility, freeing captives and killing kidnappers but also leaving some of the hostages dead and foreign leaders scrambling to find out the fates of citizens trapped inside.
Hours after the raid, there was still no official word on the number of hostages who were freed, killed, or still held captive....
Despite requests for communication and pleas to consider the safety of their abducted citizens, the United States, Britain, and Japan said they had not been told in advance about the military assault, stirring frustration that the Algerians may have been overly aggressive and caused needless casualties.
But the Algerian government, which has a history of violent suppression of Islamist militancy, stood by its decision to deal forcefully with the kidnappers.
‘‘Those who think we will negotiate with terrorists are delusional,’’ the communications minister, Mohand Said Oublaid, said in an announcement about the assault on the facility near In Amenas, in eastern Algeria, close to the Libyan border. ‘‘Those who think we will surrender to their blackmail are delusional.’’
The midday assault came more than 24 hours after a militant group, which the Algerians said had ties to jihadis in the region, ambushed a bus carrying gas field workers to a nearby airport and then commandeered the compound.
It was one of the boldest abductions of foreign workers in years.
After the raid to free the hostages, the Algerians acknowledged a price had been paid.
‘‘The operation resulted in the neutralization of a large number of terrorists and the liberation of a considerable number of hostages,’’ Oublaid said. ‘‘Unfortunately, we deplore also the death of some, as well as some who were wounded.’’
Algerian national radio described a scene of pandemonium and high alert at the public hospital in the town of In Amenas, where wounded and escaped hostages were sent.
The director of the hospital, Dr. Shahir Moneir, said in the report that wounded foreign hostages were transferred to the capital, Algiers.
In a telephone interview from the hospital, one of the Algerians held captive, who identified himself as Mohamed Elias, said some of the hostages had exploited the chaos created by the Algerian military assault to flee.
‘‘We used the opportunity,’’ he said, ‘‘and we just escaped.’’
Senior US military officials said that aides traveling in London with Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta were struggling to get basic information about the raid, and that an unarmed US Predator drone was monitoring the gas field site....
Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain said his office had not been told ahead of time, an implicit criticism of the Algerian government.
A spokesman said Cameron had learned of the raid through Britain’s own intelligence sources and that ‘‘the Algerians are aware that we would have preferred to have been consulted in advance.’’
Do you always check with them?
A European diplomat involved in the effort to coordinate a Western response to the hostage seizure said the information available to the United States, France, and Britain had been ‘‘confusing at best, and sometimes contradictory.’’
He must be reading an AmeriKan newspaper.
Several Western officials complained that the Algerians appeared to have taken none of the usual care exercised when trying to free hostages with minimal casualties.
Even before reports of the Algerian military’s raid began to emerge, many hostages — Algerian and foreign — were reported to have escaped as the kidnappers failed to persuade Algerian authorities to give them safe passage with their captives....
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"Some Algerian hostages are US citizens" by Adam Nossiterand Rick Gladstone | New York Times, January 19, 2013
BAMAKO, Mali — Defying the Algerian army’s demands to give up, the band of Islamist militant kidnappers who terrorized a remote natural gas field still held at least 10 and possibly dozens of foreign hostages Friday, and a senior Algerian government official said there were no talks planned to end the standoff.
‘‘They are being told to surrender, that’s it,’’ said the official on the third day of the crisis. ‘‘No negotiations. That is a doctrine with us.’’
The United States said for the first time that Americans were among the remaining captives and confirmed the first known death of an American hostage, Frederick Buttaccio, 58, of Katy, Texas. Buttaccio was a Texas-based employee of BP, the British energy company that helped run the complex. France said a French citizen also was known to have been killed.
All foreign governments with citizens at risk were still scrambling for basic information about the missing as they ferried escaped hostages out of the country on military aircraft and urged Algeria to use restraint.
‘‘This is an extremely difficult and dangerous situation,’’ Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said. Describing a telephone conversation she had earlier Friday with Algeria’s prime minister, Abdelmalek Sellal, Clinton said she had emphasized to him that ‘‘the utmost care must be taken to preserve innocent life.’’
Coming out of her mouth that is.... oh, yeah, she's gone for now.
Algeria’s state news agency, APS, said 12 Algerian and foreign workers had been killed since Algerian special forces began an assault against the kidnappers Thursday. It was the highest civilian death toll Algerian officials have provided in the aftermath of the assault, which freed captives and killed kidnappers but also left some hostages dead in one of the worst mass abductions of foreign workers in years.
Previous unofficial estimates of the foreign casualties have ranged from four to 35.
The senior Algerian official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said he believed there were about 10 hostages, under the control of possibly 13 to 15 militants, but he emphasized that ‘‘nothing is certain’’ about the numbers, which have varied wildly since the crisis began. He also said there were other workers on the site ‘‘who are still in hiding’’ but that the Algerian military had secured the residential part of the gas-field complex.
Earlier Friday, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said that not all Americans had been freed. ‘‘We have American hostages,’’ Nuland told reporters, offering the first update on what was known about US citizens since officials confirmed Thursday that seven or eight of them had been inside the gas-field complex.
Nuland also said the United States would not consider a reported offer made by the kidnappers to exchange two Americans for two prominent figures imprisoned in the United States — Omar Abdel Rahman, a sheik convicted of plotting to bomb New York landmarks, and Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani woman convicted of shooting two US soldiers in Afghanistan.
Related:
No Defense For Terrorists
86ing Aafia Siddiqui
So the blind Al-CIA-Duh sheik was brought in by the CIA, and Siddiqui's prints were not on the gun she took away(?) from the FBI man?
It was impossible to confirm that offer, which was reported by the Washington-based SITE Intelligence Group, a service that tracks jihadist activity on the Internet.
See: SITE Institute
Jewish Media Group, SITE, is the first to release another Islamic threat video
And they came up with this, huh?
IS ISRAEL CONTROLLING PHONY TERROR NEWS?
It's their agenda that is reflected in my newspaper.
Intensifying the uncertainties, a spokesman for the militants said Friday that they planned further attacks in Algeria, according to a report by the Mauritanian news agency ANI, which maintains frequent contact with militant groups in the region.
The Algerian military operation to end the gas-field siege was done without consulting foreign governments whose citizens worked at the facility. It has been marked by a fog of conflicting reports, compounded by the remoteness of the facility, near a town called In Amenas hundreds of miles across the desert from the Algerian capital, Algiers, and close to the Libyan border.
The Algerian fighters had been prepared to attack the gas complex for nearly two months, the militants’ spokesman said, according to the ANI report, because they believed that the Algerian government ‘‘was surely going to be the ally of France’’ in the Malian conflict.
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Also see: Former captives relate tales of horror
"Algerian hostage crisis ends violently; Western officials deplore the loss of lives in siege" by Adam Nossiter | New York Times, January 20, 2013
BAMAKO, Mali — The hostage crisis in the Algerian desert reached a bloody conclusion Saturday as the army carried out a final assault on the gas field taken over by Islamist militants, killing 11 of them, but only after they had executed seven hostages, the official Algerian news agency reported.
French, British, and US officials said the Algerian government had told them the military operation was over, but a senior Algerian government official said security forces were ‘‘doing cleanup’’ to make sure no kidnappers were hiding in the sprawling industrial complex.
Western officials deplored the loss of life during the four-day siege, which Philip Hammond, the British defense secretary, called ‘‘appalling and unacceptable.’’
Yeah, it's only acceptable when they do it!
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who appeared with Hammond at a news conference in London, said he did not yet have reliable information about the fate of Americans at the facility, although the Algerian official said two had been found ‘‘safe and sound.’’
In keeping with the Algerian government’s relative silence throughout the crisis — in which some Western hostages were reported summarily shot by kidnappers and others apparently killed in government assaults — there were few details Saturday about how the final act unfolded.
But the provisional death toll, even by the government’s reckoning, was heavy. Out of dozens taken hostage, 23 were dead while 32 kidnappers were killed, according to the government news service.
The government said it had recovered machine guns, rocket launchers, suicide belts, and small arms.
The Algerian news agency report did not give the nationalities of the hostages it said were executed Saturday, and it remained unclear if there were other hostages at the remote plant and whether they were alive. Earlier news reports said at least 10 and as many as dozens of hostages from several nations were in the hands of the kidnappers as of Friday.
US officials had said that ‘‘seven or eight’’ Americans had been at the In Amenas field when it was seized by the militants on Wednesday.
One American, Frederick Buttaccio, 58, of Katy, Texas, was confirmed dead on Friday, and the French government said one of its citizens, identified as Yann Desjeux, had also died before Saturday’s raid. Britain earlier said at least one of its citizens was killed, and an Algerian state news agency said Algerians had also been killed as of Friday.
The Algerian official, who would speak only on the condition of anonymity, said a precise tally of the dead would take time. ‘‘There are corpses that are totally charred,’’ he said. ‘‘We’ve got to do identification work. It’s very difficult.’’ Algerian officials have said some of the kidnappers blew themselves up.
The Algerian news agency said the militants had set fire to part of the complex Friday night, which prompted the military assault Saturday. The raid, if it swept up all the attackers, would bring to an end a siege involving dozens of hostages and kidnappers that drew criticism from Western governments for the tough manner in which it was handled by the Algerian security services.
A militant who claimed responsibility for the attack, and who was blamed by the Algerians for leading it, Mokhtar Belmokhtar, was until recently a leading commander of Al Qaeda’s North and West African branch, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.
One Algerian who managed to escape told France 24 television late Friday night that the kidnappers said, ‘‘We’ve come in the name of Islam, to teach the Americans what Islam is.’’
The haggard-looking man, interviewed at the airport in Algiers, said the kidnappers then immediately executed five hostages.
The militants who attacked the plant said it was in retaliation for French troops sweeping into Mali this month to stop an advance of Islamist rebels south toward the capital. However, the militants later said they had been planning an attack in Algeria for two months on the assumption that the West would intervene in Mali.
The Algerian state oil company, Sonatrach, said Saturday that the attackers had evidently mined the facility with the intention of blowing it up and that the company was working to disable the mines.
The Algerian government has rejected the criticism of its go-it-alone approach, toughest from the British and Japanese governments whose nationals were among those kidnapped, saying they have had years of experience dealing with terrorist attacks.
The Algerian government has also denied that it started the confrontation, saying troops, who began their assault by firing on a convoy, were merely responding to the militants’ attempts to leave the field with hostages.
The government official, however, acknowledged Saturday that the militant attack was of a scale and complexity the country had not experienced
“This was a multinational operation,’’ he said of the kidnappers. ‘‘They’ve come from all over, Tunisia, Egypt, Mauritania. It’s the first time we’ve handled something on this scale.’’
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"Death toll passes 80 in Algeria hostage siege; 25 burned bodies found by troops in desert facility" by Adam Nossiter and Michael Schwirtz | New York Times, January 21, 2013
BAMAKO, Mali — Officials said Sunday that the death toll from the four-day hostage siege at a natural gas-producing complex in the Algerian desert had passed 80, as security forces combing the site discovered more corpses, some badly burned.
The Algerian government said at least 25 more bodies were found Sunday morning, though it was unclear whether they were militants or hostages because they were so disfigured.
Officials also said at least seven American hostages were found safe and five militants were captured, contrary to earlier reports that all the militants had been killed....
Algerian communications minister, Mohamed Said Belaid, told France 24 Television.
The details of the desert standoff and the final battle for the plant remained murky.
Some new details emerged Sunday. The attackers were a multinational group from six countries, Belaid told the official APS news agency. He would not identify the countries by name, but other senior officials said that there were indications that the group originated in northern Mali and was once linked to Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Al Qaeda’s North African branch.
In a statement, the Masked Brigade, which claimed to have planned the takeover, warned of more such attacks against any country backing France’s military intervention in neighboring Mali, where the French are trying to stop an advance by Islamic extremists, the AP reported.
‘‘We stress to our Muslim brothers the necessity to stay away from all the Western companies and complexes for their own safety, and especially the French ones,’’ the statement said.
The group, which is based in Mali, is commanded by an Algerian jihadist, Moktar Belmoktar, who claimed direct responsibility for the attack through spokesmen. Algeria also blamed him for the attack....
Survivors’ accounts of the takeover and the army’s raid were harrowing....
David Plouffe, a senior adviser to President Obama, said Sunday that Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda-affiliated groups remain a threat in North Africa and other parts of the world and that the US is determined to help other countries destroy those networks.
Western leaders called for a decisive and far-reaching response to the attack, indicating a willingness to expand military operations in North Africa to counter deeply rooted Islamist militant groups.
Nothing murky about that, cui bono?
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Also see: Algeria pinpoints leaders in siege on gas facility
It's a total reedit and rewrite from print, and here is why:
Algeria's prime minister said Monday that at least 37 foreign hostages died during the four-day siege in his country, a steep increase from earlier estimates, and the United States government confirmed that three Americans were among them.
Prime Minister Abdelmalek Sellal, also said that five foreigner hostages remained unaccounted for. Twenty-nine kidnappers were killed, including the leader of the group, he said, and three were captured alive during the ordeal that terrorized a remote internationally run gas field refining site in the Sahara desert.
Two of the attackers were Canadian, he said. Canada's government said it was investigating that assertion.
Cut and totally scrubbed from the web:
Algeria's prime minister said Monday that the attack on a Sharan natural gas complex was the work of an international group of Islamic militants, including two Canadians, who were prepared to blow up the facility and head to neighboring Mali with the hostages....
Al-CIA--Duh!
Sellal said the militant group included an explosives team whose members had memorized the layout of the complex, using information from a Nigerian insider.
The prime minister said the assault was planned over two months, and the militants benefited from information from a former driver at the gas facility, which is operated by London's BP, Statoil of Norway, and state-run Sonatrach energy company.
He said the workers were killed one by one in a mass execution.
The final death toll is uncertain because accounts from other governments indicate that more than five workers are still missing.
Sellal said the attackers also included nationals of Algeria, Egypt, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, and Tunisia. The deceased hostages included people from Japan, the Philippines, Colombia, Britain, and France, according to their respective governments.
Back to what the printed Globe gave me:
The prime minister said the leader of the militant band was Bencheneb Mohamed Amine....
Sellal asserted that the attackers had started out in northern Mali -- a claim made by the attackers themselves but initially dismissed by the Algerian authorities as far-fetched because the Malian border is hundreds of miles away.
Hmmmmm!
The prime minister added that the attackers had ultimately crossed into Algeria through its eastern border with Libya, which is much closer to the refining site.
Hmmmmm!
If true, it would serve as a powerful reminder of Libya's instability since the overthrow of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi more than a year ago, and of the enormous distances that complicate the policing of national boundaries in the vast Sahara.
Hmmmmm!
"We would need two NATOs to monitor our borders," Mr. Sellal said.
US on the way with drones!
--MORE--"
Yup, they need a North African Treaty Organization!
"Algeria searches desert for 5 missing foreigners" by Aomar Ouali and Paul Schemm | Associated Press, January 23, 2013
ALGIERS — Algerian forces scoured the Sahara Desert on Tuesday, searching for five foreign energy workers who vanished during a chaotic four-day battle with hostage-taking Islamist militants.
One official said the men might have fled the sprawling complex during the fighting and gotten lost.
The four-day confrontation that began when Al Qaeda-affiliated militants stormed the remote desert natural gas complex and took hostages early last Wednesday, was punctuated by exploding cars, attacks from helicopters, and a final assault by Algerian special forces.
In all, 37 hostages, including an Algerian security guard, and 29 militants were killed, but five other foreign workers remain unaccounted for.
‘‘Are they dead? Did they attempt to flee the site after the attack like some other expatriates? Are they lost in the desert after taking a wrong turn?’’ an official who is part of Prime Minister Abdemalek Sellal’s office wondered. ‘‘These are all questions we ask ourselves, but one thing is sure, everything is being done to know their fate.’’
The official spoke on condition of anonymity.
The Ain Amenas gas plant, jointly run by BP, Norway’s Statoil, and the Algerian state oil company, is located deep in the Sahara, some 800 miles south of the Mediterranean coast, with few population centers nearby.
More than 700 people work at the facility, including 130 foreigners from 26 countries who were targeted by the militants. The Islamists caught as many of those foreign workers as they could and wrapped some with explosives to use as human shields.
Many foreign and Algerian workers hid and then slipped out into the hard featureless desert, eventually reaching the Algerian soldiers who had surrounded the complex.
This part of the Algerian Sahara has none of the romance of the rolling velvet dunes of the Grand Erg Oriental to the north or the wild, twisted rock formations of Tassili N’Ajjer National Park farther south. Instead it is flat, dry, and bitterly cold in the winter, with temperatures dropping to 37 degrees at night.
The hostages could also have died in the fiery shootouts after being draped with explosive belts. Seven of the bodies recovered have yet to be identified because of their degraded condition, authorities said.
The $2 billion natural gas complex, which went online in 2006, showed signs of life again Tuesday. Dozens of workers swarmed in to clean after experts removed explosives that had been planted.
‘‘I observed the damage and it isn’t very serious,’’ Algeria’s energy minister, Youcef Yousfi, said Tuesday during a visit.
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And if you can't overthrow them by force(?):
"Leader’s stroke stirs Algeria politics"Associated Press, April 29, 2013
ALGIERS — The ministroke suffered by Algeria’s president has cast fresh doubt on his perceived ambition to run for a fourth term next year as leader of one of Africa’s largest and richest countries.
The possibility that President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, 76, could step down could affect the stability of this key US ally in the fight against terror but might also open up its long-stagnant politics.
Bouteflika on Saturday had a brief blockage of a cerebral blood vessel known as a transient ischemic attack, which authorities said he quickly recovered from and had no lasting complications. He was sent to a military hospital in Paris for tests, however, and remained there Sunday night.
Algeria’s state news agency has been uncommonly open about the president’s latest health problem but insisted he will be back to work soon.
‘‘He has not had any lasting damage and no motor or sensory function has been impaired,’’ Rachid Bougherbal, director of the Institute of Sports Medicine, told the state news agency.
Such ministrokes’ symptoms include confusion and disorientation. They are brief but can recur. In a third of the cases, a full stroke can happen within a year, according to the American Stroke Association.
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NEXT DAY UPDATE:
"Terrorist gets 37 years in millennium plot; Sentence is third by judge after terms appealed" by Gene Johnson | Associated Press, October 25, 2012
And if you can't overthrow them by force(?):
"Leader’s stroke stirs Algeria politics"Associated Press, April 29, 2013
ALGIERS — The ministroke suffered by Algeria’s president has cast fresh doubt on his perceived ambition to run for a fourth term next year as leader of one of Africa’s largest and richest countries.
The possibility that President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, 76, could step down could affect the stability of this key US ally in the fight against terror but might also open up its long-stagnant politics.
Bouteflika on Saturday had a brief blockage of a cerebral blood vessel known as a transient ischemic attack, which authorities said he quickly recovered from and had no lasting complications. He was sent to a military hospital in Paris for tests, however, and remained there Sunday night.
Algeria’s state news agency has been uncommonly open about the president’s latest health problem but insisted he will be back to work soon.
‘‘He has not had any lasting damage and no motor or sensory function has been impaired,’’ Rachid Bougherbal, director of the Institute of Sports Medicine, told the state news agency.
Such ministrokes’ symptoms include confusion and disorientation. They are brief but can recur. In a third of the cases, a full stroke can happen within a year, according to the American Stroke Association.
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NEXT DAY UPDATE:
"Terrorist gets 37 years in millennium plot; Sentence is third by judge after terms appealed" by Gene Johnson | Associated Press, October 25, 2012
SEATTLE — An Algerian man, whose sentence for plotting to blow up the Los Angeles airport around the turn of the millennium was thrown out for being too lenient, was ordered Wednesday to spend 37 years in prison.
Ahmed Ressam, who had trained with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, was arrested in December 1999 when a customs agent noticed that he appeared suspicious as he drove off a ferry from Canada onto Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. A resulting search turned up a trunk loaded with explosives.
Meaning he worked for the CIA.
Ressam’s capture, after a brief foot chase, prompted fears of a terrorist attack and the cancellation of Seattle’s New Year’s Eve fireworks.
US District Judge John C. Coughenour had twice ordered him to serve a 22-year term; both times the sentence was rejected on appeal.
This time, Ressam’s attorneys conceded that he should face at least three decades to satisfy the appeals courts, but no more than 34 years.
The Justice Department, which previously sought sentences of 35 years and of life in prison, recommended a life sentence again because of the mass murder Ressam intended to inflict. In those pre-Sept. 11 days, it was ‘‘a virtually unimaginable horror,’’ Assistant US Attorney Helen Brunner said.
Even thought they were doing drills outlining all types of threats, and always seem to be doing them when an event "goes live."
‘‘If Mr. Ressam had succeeded,’’ she said, ‘‘it is likely hundreds if not thousands of innocent lives would have been lost.’’
Brunner also argued that Ressam still poses a threat, as evidenced by his recantation of prior cooperation, which forced the government to dismiss charges against two coconspirators.
I'll bet those were the FBI instigators and handlers.
Ressam’s lawyer, Thomas Hillier, disagreed, pointing to a letter Ressam sent the judge this week in which he wrote: ‘‘I am against killing innocent people of any gender, color, or religion. I apologize for my actions.’’
Ressam, who made a similar statement to the court in 2003, did not speak at the hearing Wednesday.
Prosecutors and defense attorneys said they would review the ruling, and neither indicated whether they would appeal....
And now he is silenced in a jail cell until.... when?
Coughenour discredited the government’s argument that Ressam would pose a future threat. He will be eligible for release at about age 64, and his prior cooperation with terrorism investigators would make it difficult for Ressam to become involved in any plot were he so inclined, the judge said.
The sentence also took into account Coughenour’s belief that Ressam stopped cooperating because of the effect of extended solitary confinement. His recantation was a ‘‘deranged protest,’’ rather than a true return to terrorist sympathies, Coughenour said....
Oh, he was tortured after nothing came of his "help."
Ressam’s case has been vexing because he started cooperating after he was convicted and was interviewed more than 70 times by terror investigators from the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Spain, Italy, Germany, and France.
Information he provided helped convict several terror suspects; prompted the famous August 2001 FBI memo titled ‘‘Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S.”; and contributed to the arrest of suspected Osama bin Laden lieutenant Abu Zubaydah, who remains in custody without charges at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Yeah, Clinton laid the groundwork for Bush's false flag.
However, Ressam recanted all of his cooperation when it became clear that the prosecutors were not going to recommend that he serve less than 27 years in prison. That forced the Justice Department to drop charges against two suspected coconspirators, Samir Ait Mohamed and Abu Doha.
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