"Human rights court spotlights CIA prison network; Terror suspects are victims, lawyers say" by Greg Keller | Associated Press, December 04, 2013
STRASBOURG, France — Europe’s human rights court shone a rare public light Tuesday on the secret network of European prisons that the CIA used to interrogate terror suspects, reviving memories and questions about the ‘‘extraordinary renditions’’ that angered many on this continent.
Not for long because this is a one-day wonder in my printed papers.
At Tuesday’s hearing, lawyers for two terror suspects currently held by the United States in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, accused Poland of human rights abuses. The lawyers say the suspects fell victim to the CIA’s program to kidnap terror suspects and transfer them to third countries, and allege they were tortured in a remote Polish prison.
Related:
"Former US intelligence officials said that Nashiri was captured in Dubai in November 2002 and first taken to another CIA secret prison in Afghanistan known as the Salt Pit. After a brief stay, he was flown to a CIA prison in Thailand before being taken to Poland on Dec. 5, 2002, along with accused terrorist Abu Zubayda, the former officials said. According to the former intelligence officials and an internal CIA special review of the program, an agency officer named Albert revved a bitless power drill near the head of a naked and hooded Nashiri while he was held in the Polish prison. The CIA officer also took an unloaded semiautomatic handgun to the cell where Nashiri was shackled and racked the weapon’s ammunition chamber once or twice next to his head, the review reported."
The case marks the first time Europe’s role in the CIA’s ‘‘extraordinary rendition’’ of terror suspects reached the European Court of Human Rights. The program, which occurred at the height of former President George W. Bush’s war on terrorism, upset many Europeans.
I'm still waiting for the U.S. and U.N. trials.
All the prisons were closed by May 2006. Interrogations at sea have replaced CIA black sites as the US government’s preferred method for holding suspected terrorists and questioning them without access to lawyers.
Yes, folks, US torture continues under Obummer and he is doing it in international waters to avoid the law. But he's better than Bush.
One of the cases heard at Tuesday’s trial concerns 48-year-old Saudi national Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who currently faces terror charges in the United States for allegedly orchestrating the Al Qaeda attack on the USS Cole in 2000, a bombing in the Yemeni port of Aden that killed 17 sailors and wounded 37.
See: The USS Cole bombing against the backdrop of Israeli "Black Propaganda" Operations
Did you also know that Israel did 9/11?
The second case involves 42-year-old Abu Zubaydah, a Palestinian also held in Guantanamo. Zubaydah has never been charged with a crime.
The way these guys throw the names that most Americans don't understand around, one begins to wonder whether they are not all CIA ghosts, always ready for death and resurrection.
A declassified report released in 2009 showed the CIA deemed Nashiri and Zubaydah as ‘‘high value detainees’’ meaning they are held under ultra-secure conditions in a secret section of Guantanamo known as Camp 7.
By the land of freedom, liberty, openness, truth, and transparency?
Both men say they were brought to Poland in December 2002, where they were detained and subjected to harsh questioning in a Polish military installation in Stare Kiejkuty, a village set in a lush area of woods and lakes in the country’s remote northeast.
Sort of like a wolf's lair, right?
There they were subject to mock executions, waterboarding, and other tortures, including being told their families would be arrested and sexually abused, said Amrit Singh, a lawyer representing Nashiri.
These guys will never get out because they have scars.
‘‘This case is an opportunity to break the conspiracy of silence’’ about the participation of some European governments in the CIA’s rendition program, Singh said. ‘‘These acts occurred on Polish territory with the acquiescence and connivance of the Polish authorities.’’
There are no such things! I know because my government told me so!
Polish prosecutor Janusz Sliwa said that Poland should be allowed to complete its own investigation into the claims before having them taken up by Europe’s human rights court. Sliwa is leading the Polish investigation, which has gone on for five years without an outcome.
Lawyers for the terror suspects are asking the court to condemn Poland for various abuses of rights guaranteed by Europe’s Convention on Human Rights.
Former CIA officials have told the Associated Press that a prison in Poland operated from December 2002 until the fall of 2003. Human rights groups believe about eight terror suspects were held in Poland, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Throw that confession out because he was tortured.
Polish leaders in office at the time — former President Aleksander Kwasniewski and former Prime Minister Leszek Miller — denied the prison’s existence.
In his memoir ‘‘Decision Points’’ former President George W. Bush writes that he ordered the CIA to subject about 100 terror detainees to harsh interrogation techniques, arguing the methods did not constitute unlawful torture and that they produced intelligence that prevented further attacks.
He admits he's a war criminal -- and nothing is done.
--more--"
Now on to Syria:
"Panel warns about abuses in Syria; Officials say rebels, government make opponents vanish" by John Heilprin and Barbara Surk | Associated Press, December 20, 2013
GENEVA — A panel of UN investigators said Thursday that it believes the Syrian government is committing a crime against humanity by making people systematically vanish, and that rebels have also recently begun making their opponents disappear.
In a report based on interviews with survivors and family members of victims, the panel said the war tactic being used by President Bashar Assad’s government amounts to a crime against humanity because it is part of a policy of spreading terror and mental anguish among those left wondering about their loved ones.
Rebel groups such as the Al Qaeda-linked Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant that control large parts of northern Syria also have begun seizing people and running secret prisons, the panel said.
Related:
"In a separate development Wednesday, Iraqi intelligence officials released letters indicating that the shadowy leader of a powerful Al Qaeda group fighting in Syria sought to kidnap United Nations workers and scrawled out plans for his aides to take over in the event of his death. The officials also released the first known photograph of the Nusra Front leader, Abu Mohammed Golani, the head of one of the most powerful bands of radicals fighting the Syrian government."
But until recently, it said, most of the opposition has been committing war crimes, a lesser category of violations, by abducting human rights advocates, journalists, activists, humanitarian workers, religious leaders, and perceived supporters of Assad’s government.
A hallmark of a CIA-funded insurgency.
Those are war crimes because they are not systematic, the victims tend to be taken as hostages for ransom or prisoner exchanges, and their existence isn’t concealed, the panel said.
In other words, their war crimes not as bad as Assad.
Syria’s main opposition group in exile, the Western-backed Syrian National Coalition, said any opposition group illegally seizing and holding innocent civilians is violating the goals of the Syrian uprising.
It said in a statement that the coalition does not consider the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant a part of the opposition: ‘‘Its actions serve the regime’s interests.’’
In the case of the Syrian government, the panel chaired by Brazilian diplomat and scholar Paulo Sergio Pinheiro said it found ‘‘a consistent countrywide pattern’’ of Syrian security, armed forces, and progovernment militia seizing people in mass arrests or house searches and at checkpoints and hospitals, then making them disappear — and denying that they even exist.
Reminds one of Stalinist Russia under Jewish Bolshevism.
Most of the victims have been young men, and panel member Karen Koning AbuZayd said that based on ‘‘consistent reports’’ of how and where people are disappearing, the panel assumes ‘‘most of them’’ have been tortured in prison.
Now it's looking like a CIA rendition program.
‘‘It appears to be a policy because it’s so widespread. It’s around the country,’’ she said. ‘‘We know there are thousands, but we have no idea how many are in detention.’’
The UN panel pressed Syria’s government to provide information and called on both sides to stop the practice, and said it could ‘‘only hint at the scope of the crisis . . . and the state of fear in which ordinary citizens live.’’
Feels like home.
In Damascus, Deputy Foreign Minister Faysal Mikdad blasted the United Nations, telling Syrian state TV that the world body’s role in the crisis is ‘‘disgraceful.’’
Among the cases cited by the panel were a 60-year-old woman put in Homs prison for asking about her missing son and an air force defector who described orders not to provide information about the whereabouts of detainees or to speak to their relatives.
--more--"
Related:
"Thursday’s offensive began when a Chechen suicide bomber from the Al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front attacked the prison gates, according to the Observatory."
Some of them reappeared, and Chechen = CIA-Duh
"Backlash against extremists growing among Syria rebels" by Zeina Karam | Associated Press, January 11, 2014
BEIRUT — With nearly 500 people reported killed in a week of rebel infighting, many Syrians barricaded themselves in their homes Friday, while others emerged from mosques angrily accusing an Al Qaeda-linked group of hijacking their revolution.
That is what CIA-Duh does best!
The rebel-on-rebel clashes have overshadowed the battle against President Bashar Assad and underscore the perils for civilians caught in the crossfire of two parallel wars.
The violence, which pits fighters from Islamist groups and mainstream factions against the feared Al Qaeda-linked Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, have spread across four provinces in opposition-held parts of northern Syria.
Looking more and more like an ancillary benefit to deposing Saddam Hussein was to establish a base of operations for covert CIA-Duh operations across the region -- and beyond?
The infighting is helping Assad, whose forces have clawed back some of the ground lost to rebels in recent months as they bombard the north and other opposition regions with warplanes, heavy artillery, and crude explosives-filled barrels dropped over neighborhoods.
‘‘The revolution has been derailed,’’ said Abdullah Hasan, a self-described secular activist in the northern town of Maskaneh, where fighters from the Al Qaeda-linked group swept in last month. ‘‘None of the groups fighting in Syria represent me now,’’ he said, adding that he was hopeful the infighting would help purge extremists from the ranks of the rebels.
The latest bout of violence broke out a week ago across northern Syria and is the most serious among opponents of Assad since the civil war began….
The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and another Al Qaeda-linked group — Jabhat al-Nusra, or the Nusra Front — initially joined forces with moderate rebels fighting to oust Assad in a conflict that began in March 2011 as a popular uprising but became a civil war.
No it is not. It's outside groups coming in through Turkey with arms.
The extremists proved well-organized and efficient fighters, giving the ragtag rebels a boost. But the Iraqi-based Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which includes many foreign fighters, has alienated many Syrians over the past several months by using brutal tactics to impose its strict interpretation of Islamic law.
--more--"
"UN inquiry links Assad to war crimes; Investigator says evidence ‘massive,’ blame widespread" by John Heilprin | Associated Press, December 03, 2013
GENEVA — A growing body of evidence collected by UN investigators points to the involvement of senior Syrian officials, including President Bashar Assad, in crimes against humanity and war crimes, the UN’s top human rights official said Monday.
It's both, but since the JU.N. serves those powers that support the insurgency the rebels are generally ignored.
The statement by Navi Pillay, who heads the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, adds to the pressure for quicker action on Syria ahead of a key peace conference planned for Geneva in January. The conference, brought on by combined UN, US, and Russian diplomacy, would for the first time bring the Assad government and opponents together for face-to-face negotiations.
Yeah, you ready to let the US government go ahead and invade yet?
We did the chemical weapons and humanitarian excuses below and they didn't take. This do it for you?
‘‘As we look around the world at the end of 2013, we see examples of situations where that readiness of the international community to act in time is already being sorely tested,’’ Pillay told a news conference that touched on trouble spots around the world.
‘‘In addition to Syria, where the scale and viciousness of the abuses being perpetrated by elements on both sides almost defies belief, the situation in the Central African Republic is deteriorating rapidly, and the alarm bells are ringing loud and clear.’’
I'll be getting the charade of the C.A.R. soon.
Pillay said the Syrian abuses — suspected massacres, chemical attacks, torture, rape, and a litany of other horrors — are being well documented by an expert UN panel of investigators.
‘‘They’ve produced massive evidence,’’ she said. ‘‘They point to the fact that the evidence indicates responsibility at the highest level of government, including the head of state.’’
I'm no longer believing in the U.N., and even if true, I'm tired of the hypocrisy and double-standards. Finding it prominent in my war-promoting me$$anger doesn't help things, either.
Faisal Mekdad, Syria’s deputy foreign minister, was dismissive of Pillay’s remarks. ‘‘She has been talking nonsense for a long time and we don’t listen to her,’’ he said in The Hague.
(Blog editor smiles)
Pillay said the lists of suspected criminals are handed to her on a confidential basis and will remain sealed until requested by international or national authorities for a ‘‘credible investigation’’ and then possibly used for prosecution.
Pillay said she worries about striking the right balance in determining how long to keep the information secret.
Maybe the NSA should hire her.
The lists ‘‘rightly belongs to the people who suffered violations,’’ she said, but they also must be kept sealed ‘‘to preserve the presumption of innocence’’ until proper judicial probes can be done that could lead to trial.
Pillay and the four-member UN panel on Syria war crimes chaired by Brazilian diplomat and scholar Paulo Sergio Pinheiro has previously said Assad’s government and supporters and the rebels who oppose them have committed heinous war crimes during the nearly 3-year-old civil war in Syria that has killed more than 100,000 people.
Oh, the rebels did it, too. Glad to see you got around to that.
But this time, Pillay specifically referred to the president — though she was careful to say she hadn’t singled him out as a possible suspect on the secret lists.
Any prosecution before the International Criminal Court at The Hague appears to be a long way off because Syria is not a member of the court, so it would require the UN Security Council to refer the matter.
The 15-nation council did so once before in the case of Sudan, in 2005, but would be unlikely to do so in Syria’s case because its key ally Russia is one of the council’s five permanent members that wield a veto.
Also Monday, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon reported progress toward the elimination of Syria’s chemical weapons but said meeting the mid-2014 deadline under the ‘‘volatile’’ security conditions in the war-torn country would require an ‘‘unprecedented effort’’ by the international community.
In a letter to the Security Council, Ban also expressed concern about the safety of staff from the United Nations and the chemical weapons watchdog overseeing Syria’s planned destruction of chemical weapons.
He said ‘‘Syrian authorities are being encouraged to consider alternative options to ensure the safety and security of inland transportation for the chemical material.’’
Ban also said ‘‘full clarity’’ on plans to remove the chemical material from Syria and destroy it elsewhere ‘‘is critical, including the location for destruction.’’
Pillay said Syria and North Korea — the two countries being investigated by a UN investigative panel — represent two of the world’s worst human rights violations, but she also cited concerns with Central African Republic and Bangladesh.
Other places that require the world’s attention, she said, are the large-scale expulsions of migrants from Saudi Arabia, the high number of migrant laborer deaths building World Cup stadiums in Qatar, and continuing political exploitation of xenophobia and racism in Europe and other developed regions.
They don't like it when someone else does it.
--more--"
Related:
"Syria’s children tortured, abused by both sides, UN says" by Barbara Surk | Associated Press, February 06, 2014
BEIRUT — Children in Syria have been tortured, sexually abused, and subjected to indiscriminate attacks by President Bashar Assad’s forces, as well as recruited for combat and terrorist operations by the rebels fighting to topple him during the country’s nearly three-year-old conflict, a new United Nations report said.
The report to the UN Security Council by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon highlights the plight of children in the conflict from the beginning of the uprising against Assad in March 2011 until Nov. 15, 2013. It was given to the council this week and posted on the UN website Tuesday.
So good to see the U.N. care about the children.
Ban said Syrian children have been subjected to ‘‘unspeakable and unacceptable’’ suffering during that time. ‘‘Violations must come to an end now,’’ he said....
As they continue.
--more--"
Related: Human rights lawyer abducted in rebel-held Syrian area
At least the nuns are safe.
""Human rights group critical of response to Syrian crisis" by Melissa Eddy and Chris Cottrell | New York Times, January 22, 2014
BERLIN — A team of legal and forensic specialists commissioned by the government of Qatar said Monday that thousands of photographs showing scarred, emaciated corpses offered direct evidence of mass torture by Syrian government forces.
Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, which has its headquarters in New York, said the images were consistent with what his organization had seen when it visited detention centers in Syria. The photographs, provided to the Syrian opposition by a man who described himself as a defector from Assad’s security forces, highlight the importance of opening Syrian detention facilities to international inspection, he said.
Like Amer... i.... Ka.... ummm, never mind.
Who is Human Rights Watch anyway?
Now I understand why they are so prominent in my newspaper.
Speaking at a press conference in Berlin, Roth said that Western governments, and especially the United States, had not spoken out strongly enough about the violence for fear that it could endanger peace talks.
Well, its credibility has cratered and is nonexistent, so it's kinda hard to, well, you know....
“It is essential that the mass atrocities being committed in Syria be a parallel focus of any diplomatic effort,” Roth said. He called for an end to the indiscriminate killing of civilians and an opening of Syria’s borders for humanitarian aid....
No, no, no, no military action, no escalation of war. Sorry. Tell the CIA to call of the Duhgs.
In addition to Syria, the group’s report also condemned what it called “lip service” paid to democracy by the governments of Egypt and Myanmar.
Translation: Sissi is of the reservation, and Myanmar must be cozying up to China again.
Human Rights Watch said the rest of the world had done too little to intervene in Syria to protect civilians, in contrast with the efforts mounted by France, the United States, and the United Nations in African countries like the Central African Republic and South Sudan.
Sudan should be appearing again here sometime soon.
President Obama’s record on national security issues was criticized in the report, from the continued existence of the detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to what the group called the unlawful killing of civilians through drone attacks in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia.
Got a whole 2nd-to-last paragraph did it?
The group also faulted the “virtually unchecked mass electronic surveillance” that was revealed by documents released by Edward J. Snowden.
Don't try getting on my good side now.
"Americans in Syrian war viewed as potential US security risks" by Emery P. Dalesio | Associated Press, December 01, 2013
RALEIGH, N.C. — Federal officials said Americans are joining the bloody civil war in Syria, raising the chances they could become radicalized by Al Qaeda-linked militant groups and return to the United States as battle-hardened security risks.
The State Department said it has no estimates of how many Americans have taken up weapons to fight military units loyal to Syrian President Bashar Assad in the nearly 3-year-old war that has killed more than 100,000 people.
Other estimates — from an arm of the British defense consultant IHS Jane’s and from experts at a nonprofit think tank in London — put the number of Americans at about two dozen. The IHS group says Al Qaeda-linked fighters number about 15,000, with total anti-Assad force at 100,000 or more.
This year, at least three Americans have been charged with planning to fight beside Jabhat al-Nusrah — a radical Islamic organization that the United States considers a foreign terrorist group — against Assad. The most recent case involves a Pakistan-born North Carolina man arrested on his way to Lebanon.
At a Senate homeland security committee hearing last month, Senator Thomas Carper, a Democrat from Delaware, said: ‘‘We know that American citizens as well as Canadian and European nationals have taken up arms in Syria, in Yemen, and in Somalia. The threat that these individuals could return home to carry out attacks is real and troubling.’’
The hearing came about two weeks after the FBI and other officers arrested Basit Sheikh, 29, at the Raleigh-Durham International Airport on charges he was on his way to join Jabhat al-Nusrah. Sheikh, a legal resident of the United States, had lived quietly, without a criminal record, in a Raleigh suburb for five years before his Nov. 2 arrest.
A similar arrest came in April in Chicago. And in September, authorities in Virginia released an Army veteran accused of fighting alongside the group after a secret plea deal.
In August, outgoing FBI chief Robert Mueller told ABC News that he was concerned about Americans fighting in Syria, specifically ‘‘the associations they will make and, secondly, the expertise they will develop, and whether or not they will utilize those associations, utilize that expertise, to undertake an attack on the homeland.’’
I'm so, so sick of this $hit.
Current FBI Director James Comey said last month that he worried about Syria becoming a repeat of Afghanistan in the 1980s, after the Soviet invasion, with foreign fighters attracted there to train.
Yes, if a big bang blows up a city or something else in AmeriKa, it will be Syria -- and by extension, Iran -- behind it. That will be my agenda-pushing, war-promoting, mouthpiece media narrative. It writes itself.
In the case of Sheikh, his North Carolina home is not considered a breeding ground for terrorist activity.
But Aaron Zelin, who works for both the London-based International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, notes that Sheikh lived about three hours from the hometown of Samir Khan, the editor of an English-language Al Qaeda magazine who was killed in a drone attack in Yemen.
Just contact Langley for a subscription.
Related: Washington Institute for Near East Policy
The founder is the AmeriKan representative and former AIPAC member that Israel won't allow in the room?
Sheikh has been charged with planning to assist a group that the State Department has declared a terrorist organization.
It is not illegal for Americans who also hold citizenship in another country to fight in that country’s military. But American citizenship can be lost for voluntarily serving in foreign armed forces hostile to the United States.
Yeah, better off joining a private security firm and working for the empire.
For five months this year, Sheikh did not know he was being monitored as he posted messages and videos on Facebook expressing support for jihadi militants fighting Assad’s forces, according to a Nov. 2 sworn affidavit by FBI Special Agent Jason Maslow in support of the warrant to arrest Sheikh.
What has he been living in, a cave? He's never heard of Edward Snowden?
--more--"
Related:
"French intelligence is in close contact with western nations, from European neighbors to the United States and Australia, to try to spot would-be jihadists and track those who return and present a potential danger. Many of the alleged would-be jihadists are clearly amateurs."
Yeah, no shit!
"Fearing that the handful of Americans who have returned to the United States pose a threat because they may have received extensive training and jihadi indoctrination, the FBI is conducting costly round-the-clock surveillance on a small number of these people, according to the officials."
All that wasting of time and mopey as they shepherd their assets around.
Related:
"Four US officials said the American suspected terrorist is in a country that refuses US military action on its soil and that has proved to be unable to go after him. Obama’s new policy says American suspected terrorists overseas can only be killed by the military, not the CIA, creating a policy conundrum for the White House. The senior administration official confirmed that the Justice Department was working to build a case against the suspect."
Who and where could that be (what do they mean they don't have a case yet)?
See: Al Qaeda rejection may alter US options
"Al Qaeda cuts ties to group dividing Syria’s rebels; Islamic State’s tactics said to anger leader" by Rick Gladstone | New York Times, February 04, 2014
NEW YORK — Al Qaeda’s top leadership moved publicly on Monday to sever the organization’s relationship with its Syrian affiliate, which has been widely blamed in recent months for stoking rebel infighting in Syria’s civil war.
In a statement distributed on jihadist websites, the Al Qaeda leadership said it no longer had any connection with the affiliate, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which has asserted an increasingly important role in the Syrian conflict and stoked the enmity of other groups fighting to topple the government of President Bashar Assad.
Although the authenticity of the statement could not be confirmed, the SITE Intelligence Group, an organization that tracks jihadist communications on the Internet, posted a summary of the statement on its website, suggesting it was credible.
Meaning this is ALL CRAP!
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.
The motivation for breaking the relationship appeared to reflect the Al Qaeda leadership’s own effort to assert more influence over the jihadist elements of the Syrian insurgency and not side with one faction or another.
The statement said Al Qaeda disapproved of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and had “ordered it to stop” acting in Al Qaeda’s name.
According to a translation of the statement quoted by the Associated Press, Al Qaeda condemned the rebel infighting in Syria....
I'll bet they are.
In early January, another Al Qaeda-linked group in Syria, the Nusra Front, proposed a cease-fire in the rebel infighting and the establishment of a special Islamic court to resolve any disputes, but that solution apparently never advanced.
Monday’s announcement also appeared to be a move by Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri to reassert the terror group’s control of the jihad movement across the Middle East amid a rapid increase in extremist groups over the past three years.
That would be Zawahiri, the tool of the CIA and MI6.
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the head of Al Qaeda’s branch in Iraq, formed the Islamic State last spring despite direct orders by Zawahri not to do so. Zawahri named the Nusra Front as Al Qaeda’s branch in Syria.
Didn't they kill that guy already, or was it just a misspelled name again?
Now, the break will probably spark a competition for resources and fighters between the two sides in what has become a civil war within a civil war. The test for Zawahri’s influence will be whether his decision leads fighters to quit the Islamic State.
Washington has viewed the increasing influence of Islamic extremism in Syria’s rebel movement with unease.
Then stop funding and fomenting it, duh!
Yesterday, State Department spokesman Jen Psaki noted that both the Islamic State and the Nusra Front are considered terrorist organizations....
Heck of a game they got going, huh?
--more--"
Related:
"French intelligence is in close contact with western nations, from European neighbors to the United States and Australia, to try to spot would-be jihadists and track those who return and present a potential danger. Many of the alleged would-be jihadists are clearly amateurs."
Yeah, no shit!
"Fearing that the handful of Americans who have returned to the United States pose a threat because they may have received extensive training and jihadi indoctrination, the FBI is conducting costly round-the-clock surveillance on a small number of these people, according to the officials."
All that wasting of time and mopey as they shepherd their assets around.
Related:
"Four US officials said the American suspected terrorist is in a country that refuses US military action on its soil and that has proved to be unable to go after him. Obama’s new policy says American suspected terrorists overseas can only be killed by the military, not the CIA, creating a policy conundrum for the White House. The senior administration official confirmed that the Justice Department was working to build a case against the suspect."
Who and where could that be (what do they mean they don't have a case yet)?
See: Al Qaeda rejection may alter US options
"Al Qaeda cuts ties to group dividing Syria’s rebels; Islamic State’s tactics said to anger leader" by Rick Gladstone | New York Times, February 04, 2014
NEW YORK — Al Qaeda’s top leadership moved publicly on Monday to sever the organization’s relationship with its Syrian affiliate, which has been widely blamed in recent months for stoking rebel infighting in Syria’s civil war.
In a statement distributed on jihadist websites, the Al Qaeda leadership said it no longer had any connection with the affiliate, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which has asserted an increasingly important role in the Syrian conflict and stoked the enmity of other groups fighting to topple the government of President Bashar Assad.
Although the authenticity of the statement could not be confirmed, the SITE Intelligence Group, an organization that tracks jihadist communications on the Internet, posted a summary of the statement on its website, suggesting it was credible.
Meaning this is ALL CRAP!
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.
The motivation for breaking the relationship appeared to reflect the Al Qaeda leadership’s own effort to assert more influence over the jihadist elements of the Syrian insurgency and not side with one faction or another.
The statement said Al Qaeda disapproved of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and had “ordered it to stop” acting in Al Qaeda’s name.
According to a translation of the statement quoted by the Associated Press, Al Qaeda condemned the rebel infighting in Syria....
I'll bet they are.
In early January, another Al Qaeda-linked group in Syria, the Nusra Front, proposed a cease-fire in the rebel infighting and the establishment of a special Islamic court to resolve any disputes, but that solution apparently never advanced.
Monday’s announcement also appeared to be a move by Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri to reassert the terror group’s control of the jihad movement across the Middle East amid a rapid increase in extremist groups over the past three years.
That would be Zawahiri, the tool of the CIA and MI6.
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the head of Al Qaeda’s branch in Iraq, formed the Islamic State last spring despite direct orders by Zawahri not to do so. Zawahri named the Nusra Front as Al Qaeda’s branch in Syria.
Didn't they kill that guy already, or was it just a misspelled name again?
Now, the break will probably spark a competition for resources and fighters between the two sides in what has become a civil war within a civil war. The test for Zawahri’s influence will be whether his decision leads fighters to quit the Islamic State.
Washington has viewed the increasing influence of Islamic extremism in Syria’s rebel movement with unease.
Then stop funding and fomenting it, duh!
Yesterday, State Department spokesman Jen Psaki noted that both the Islamic State and the Nusra Front are considered terrorist organizations....
Heck of a game they got going, huh?
--more--"
