Al Qaeda Urges Terrorists To Buy Lots Of Guns At Gun Shows

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FROM CROOKS & LIARS:

That popping sound you hear is the heads of NRA loyalists exploding from massive cognitive dissonance, all because of the release this week of a video showing a spokesman for Al Qaeda, Adam Gadahn, urging would-be jihadis to go out and stock up on as many guns as they can get their hands on -- through the gun-show loophole:

America is absolutely awash with easily obtainable firearms. You can go down to a gun show at the local convention center and come away with a fully automatic assault rifle, without a background check, and most likely without having to show an identification card. So what are you waiting for?

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Is Sarah Palin Telling Terrorists Where "Real Americans" live?

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If the goal of terrorist is to kill Americans, may I suggest that they pay special attention to the road map that Sarah Palin has charted for them. It's not the big cities where terrorist will find "Real Americans", it's the small towns like her native Wasilla, Alaska.

And also too, it's the small towns down there in the lower 48 where she campaigned against those anti-American, big city folk. Cities like Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Boston, and Atlanta are full of nothing but Un-America liberals.

According to Palin's rhetoric, al-qaeda would be wasting a perfectly good car bomb in the big cities if "Real Americans" are the target.

Hell, one good Saturday morning pancake breakfast in small town "Real America" could bring out 75% of the cities population to the Piggily-Wiggily parking lot like cattle going to the slaughter house. At least, that's the message that Sarah Palin seems to be un-intentionally communicating.

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NYC Terror Plot: Al-Qaeda Leader In Contact With ZaZi

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The airport shuttle driver accused of plotting a bombing in New York had contacts with al-Qaida that went nearly all the way to the top, to an Osama bin Laden confidant believed to be the terrorist group's leader in Afghanistan, U.S. intelligence officials told The Associated Press.

Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, an Egyptian reputed to be one of the founders of the terrorist network, used a middleman to contact Afghan immigrant Najibullah Zazi as the 24-year-old man hatched a plot to use homemade backpack bombs, perhaps on the city's mass transit system, the two intelligence officials said.

Intelligence officials declined to discuss the nature of the contact or whether al-Yazid contacted Zazi to offer simple encouragement or help with the bombing plot prosecutors say Zazi was pursuing.

Al-Yazid's contact with Zazi indicates that al-Qaida leadership took an intense interest in what U.S. officials have called one of the most serious terrorism threats crafted on U.S. soil since the 9/11 attacks.

"Zazi working with the al-Qaida core is exceptionally alarming," said Daniel Bynam of the Brookings Institution's Saban Center.

"The al-Qaida core is capable of far more effective terrorist attacks than jihadist terrorists acting on their own, and coordination with the core also enables bin Laden to choose the timing to maximize the benefit to his organization."

U.S. intelligence officials said earlier that Zazi had contact with an unnamed senior al-Qaida operative. That helped distinguish Zazi from other would-be terrorists who have acted on their own in planning or attempting U.S. attacks.

The officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the case remains under investigation, declined to describe al-Yazid's specific interaction with Zazi, who has pleaded not guilty to conspiring to use weapons of mass destruction. But one senior U.S. intelligence official said the contact between Zazi and the senior al-Qaida leader occurred through an intermediary.

Just weeks before U.S. intelligence officials identified Zazi as a possible terrorist threat in late August, John Brennan, President Barack Obama's top domestic terrorism adviser, told a Washington audience that "another attack on the U.S. homeland remains the top priority for the al-Qaida senior leadership."

U.S. intelligence officials and prosecutors have said that Zazi was recruited and trained by al-Qaida. They say he and others traveled last year to Pakistan to receive the training.
Prosecutors say Zazi, during meetings with federal investigators before his arrest last month, "admitted that he received instructions from al-Qaida operatives on subjects such as weapons and explosives" during his trip to Pakistan.

Zazi, who is being held without bond in New York while awaiting trial, has denied receiving al-Qaida training or visiting one of the group's training camps. He said before his arrest that he traveled to Pakistan to see his wife, who lives in Peshawar.

In court documents, prosecutors say Zazi is linked to three e-mail accounts that he used to pursue his bomb plot. Investigators say they found nine pages of handwritten bomb-making instructions when searching two of the e-mail accounts. The notes were sent to the e-mail accounts while Zazi was in Pakistan last year, prosecutors say.

The bomb, which can be made of hydrogen peroxide and flour, is similar to the explosives used by terrorists in the 2005 London subway bombings that killed 52 people.
Prosecutors say Zazi accessed the bomb-making instructions and downloaded them on to his computer after moving to the Denver area in January. In a Colorado hotel suite in early September, Zazi contacted someone "on multiple occasions" for help correcting mixtures of bomb ingredients, "each communication more urgent in tone than the last," court papers say.

Al-Yazid, 53, also known as Abu Saeed al-Masri and Sheikh Said, is a well-known al-Qaida figure who initially disagreed with bin Laden's 9/11 plot, according to the 9/11 Commission Report. Al-Yazid was known at the time of the attack as head of al-Qaida's finance committee.
He proclaimed in a June interview with Al-Jazeera television that al-Qaida would use nuclear weapons in its fight against the United States.

A member of Eygpt's radical Islamist movement, al-Yazid took part in the 1981 assassination of President Anwar Sadat, according to "In the Graveyard of Empires," a book by counterterrorism expert Seth G. Jones. He spent three years in prison, where he joined Ayman al-Zawahiri's Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Jones wrote. al-Zawahiri is considered al-Qaida's No. 2 leader, behind Osama bin Laden.

Al-Yazid left Eygpt for Afghanistan in 1988 and later moved to Sudan in 1991 with bin Laden, serving as his accountant. Al-Yazid returned to Afghanistan in 1996 and became a confidant of bin Laden and a member of its Shura Council, according to Jones.

In 2007, al-Yazid took over al-Qaida operations in Afghanistan.

He was reported killed last year in clashes with Pakistani forces near the Afghan border in August 2008 but re-emerged to the surprise of counterterrorism officials.
Terrorism experts say al-Yazid's contact with Zazi in the foiled New York City bombing plot underscores the seriousness of the threat.

"I think that it would suggest the Zazi was taken seriously by Al Qaida, and that they wanted him to feel encouraged and supported," said Charles S. Faddis, who headed the weapons of mass destruction unit at the CIA's Counterterrorism Center until he retired in May 2008.

"It may also have meant that they were attempting to determine to what extent he represented an opportunity to do something inside the United States," Faddis said, who also ran operations against al-Qaida.

"For instance, they may have been trying to figure out if they were looking only at an individual or at someone who represented a larger group of jihadists."

More CIA Documents Fail To Back Up Cheney's Torture Claim

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For what I hope is the last time, former Vice President Dick Cheney has had his claims about his torture policy shot down and yet again not substantiated by another CIA memo released. The former Vice President needs to focus on which federal prison he’ll be spending time in and not spinning an alternate reality, which he has created for himself since leaving office.

On Monday, the CIA released two memos from 2004 and 2005, which Vice President Cheney said would “show specifically what we gained” from the Bush administration’s enhanced interrogation program. As people like Spencer Ackerman noted, those documents didn’t end up showing that at all, however:

Strikingly, they provide little evidence for Cheney’s claims that the “enhanced interrogation” program run by the CIA provided valuable information. In fact, throughout both documents, many passages — though several are incomplete and circumstantial, actually suggest the opposite of Cheney’s contention: that non-abusive techniques actually helped elicit some of the most important information the documents cite in defending the value of the CIA’s interrogations.

Despite the fact that they devoted heavy coverage to Cheney’s initial claims, major media outlets have largely buried these new facts. But as Greg Sargent notes, last night on CNN, even former Bush homeland security adviser Frances Fragos Townsend had to admit that Cheney still hasn’t been vindicated:

It’s very difficult to draw a cause and effect, because it’s not clear when techniques were applied vs. when that information was received. It’s implicit. It seems, when you read the report, that we got the — the — the most critical information after techniques had been applied. But the report doesn’t say that.



Cheney, of course, refuses to back down from his initial claims. Earlier this week he put out a statement saying that “individuals subjected to Enhanced Interrogation Techniques provided the bulk of intelligence we gained about al Qaeda.” However, there is still no evidence that the torture techniques were responsible and necessary for producing the intelligence.

Fox News Panel Blind To All But Al Qaeda

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Fox News assembled an "All Star" panel for a Special Report on domestic terrorism yesterday. The topic was sparked by the arrests of 7 men in North Carolina for supposedly planning acts of terrorism on the behest of Al Qaeda. What seemed to surprise the Fox panel yesterday -- was how successful the suspects were at blending in as regular American neighbors. But not once does it ever seem to cross their minds that this, indeed, has long been a feature of right-wing domestic terrorism in this country.

There's no doubt that the addition of Al Qaeda as a player on the domestic terrorism scene is cause for special concern. America has been fortunate in that, for the most part, its many would-be domestic terrorists have not typically been very competent. Adding a highly competent organization like Al Qaeda to the mix ratchets up the potential danger on this front significantly.

Attorney General Eric Holder was fairly thoughtful in his interview with ABC in addressing this:

"I mean, that's one of the things that's particularly troubling: This whole notion of radicalization of Americans," Holder told ABC News during an interview in his SUV as his motorcade brought him from home to work.

"Leaving this country and going to different parts of the world and then coming back, all, again, in aim of doing harm to the American people, is a great concern."

... Holder said the ever-changing threat of terror and the pressure to keep up with it weighs heavily on his mind as he tries to ensure that the government has done all it can to anticipate the moves of an unpredictable enemy.

"But, you know, in the hierarchy of things, it's hard to figure out how to prioritize these things in some ways," he said. "The constant scream of threats, the kind of things you have to be aware about, the whole notion of radicalization is something that didn't loom as large a few months ago ... as it does now. And that's the shifting nature of threats that keeps you up at night."

Obviously, Holder is focused on these new cases involving international-terror entities. But the dynamic he's describing also fits what has been happening on an increasingly intense basis within the ranks of American right-wing extremist groups since the election of Obama: Not only are people being radicalized by right-wing rhetoric, an increasing number of them are joining organizations that preach the violent overthrow of American democracy -- our genuine enemies within.

People don't need to travel overseas to become violently radicalized in this country. Indeed, there are exponentially many more white Americans who have gone through "radicalization" from white-supremacist, nativist, and anti-abortion organizations than will ever be successfully recruited by Al Qaeda.

Now, there's plenty of evidence the Holder DOJ gets this. But the media -- particularly its right-wing component -- clearly doesn't.

Frequently mentioned on cable, for instance, the past few days has been the New York "terrorism" cell that was busted by the feds a couple of months ago ... except they turned out not to be so much of a "terrorist" cell after all.

Moreover, these cases have been relatively few and far between. We simply can't say that, however, of the regular drumbeat of domestic terrorism we get from the extremist American right -- both in recent months and indeed for many years running.

Now, we all remember how prescient the Homeland Security warning about far-right domestic terrorism proved to be. Yet Janet Napolitano was forced to apologize to the raving wingnuts for having issued it.
But then, right-wingers have been trying whitewash away the existence of these domestic terrorists for some years now.

For the most part, movement conservatives have trouble seeing white right-wing domestic terrorists as just that. The only terrorists who matter, it seems, are those from overseas or with dark skin. (It didn't help, of course, that the Bush DOJ practiced an ugly double standard on this score.)

Which is why, periodically, we continue to see "lone wolves" committing acts of horrific violence, themselves domestic terrorists radicalized not by foreign organizations, but by entities that reside right here in America.
And periodically, the media are surprised by all this. Because they all thought the problem was just Al Qaeda.

Bush Admin Debates Using Military On U.S. Soil

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In early 2002, Bush administration officials debated testing the Constitution by deploying American troops into the Buffalo suburb of Lakawanna to arrest a group of six Yemini men suspected of plotting with Al Qaeda, according to former administration officials.

Some advisers to President George W. Bush, including Vice President Dick Cheney, argued that a president had the power to use the military on domestic soil to sweep up the terrorism suspects, who came to be known as the Lackawanna Six, and declare them enemy combatants.

In early 2001, the six young men had traveled to Afghanistan and spent a few weeks training at an Al Qaeda training camp and studying Islamic Revolutionary Theory.





Bush ultimately decided against the proposal to use military force and it was a good this that he did. The FBI had the home shared by the six young men under 24 hour surveillance for nearly a year, but there was never any suspicious activity.

When the government couldn't tie the group to any terrorist activity, they quietly dropped any charges of the men being an Al Qaeda sleeper cell. Instead, the men were charged for having gone to Afghanistan and purchasing uniforms at the Al Qaeda camp prior to there even being a global war on terror.

A decision to dispatch troops into the streets to make arrests has few precedents in American history, as both the Constitution and subsequent laws restrict the military from being used to conduct domestic raids and seize property.

The Fourth Amendment bans “unreasonable” searches and seizures without probable cause. And the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 generally prohibits the military from acting in a law enforcement capacity.

In the discussions, Dick Cheney and others cited an Oct. 23, 2001, memorandum from the Justice Department that, using a broad interpretation of presidential authority, argued that the domestic use of the military against Al Qaeda would be legal because it served a national security, rather than a law enforcement, purpose.

“The president has ample constitutional and statutory authority to deploy the military against international or foreign terrorists operating within the United States,” the memorandum said. The memorandum — written by the lawyers John C. Yoo and Robert J. Delahunty — was directed to Alberto R. Gonzales, then the White House counsel, who had asked the department about a president’s authority to use the military to combat terrorist activities in the United States.

The memorandum was declassified in March. But the White House debate about the Lackawanna group is the first evidence that top American officials, after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, actually considered using the document to justify deploying the military into an American town to make arrests.

Bush ended up ordering the F.B.I. to make the arrests in Lackawanna, near Buffalo, where the agency had been monitoring a group of Yemeni Americans with suspected Qaeda ties.

The five men arrested there in September 2002, and a sixth arrested nearly simultaneously in Bahrain, but when the Government couldn't tie the men to any terrorists activity, they quietly dropped all charges of the men being an Al Qaeda sleeper cell. The men pleaded guilty to terrorism-related charges, which amounted to them purchasing uniforms at the camp during their visit prior to there even being a global war on terror.

Scott L. Silliman, a Duke University law professor specializing in national security law, said an American president had not deployed the active-duty military on domestic soil in a law enforcement capacity, without specific statutory authority, since the Civil War.

Senior military officials were never consulted, former officials said. Richard B. Myers, a retired general who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in a recent interview that he was unaware of the discussion.

Former officials said the 2002 debate arose partly from Justice Department concerns that there might not be enough evidence to arrest and successfully prosecute the suspects in Lackawanna.

Dick Cheney, the officials said, had argued that the administration would need a lower threshold of evidence to declare them enemy combatants and keep them in military custody.

Earlier that summer, the administration designated Jose Padilla an enemy combatant and sent him to a military brig in South Carolina. Padilla was arrested by civilian agencies on suspicion of plotting an attack using a radioactive bomb.

Those who advocated using the military to arrest the Lackawanna group had legal ammunition: the memorandum by John Yoo and Mr. Delahunty. The lawyers, in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, wrote that the Constitution, the courts and Congress had recognized a president’s authority “to take military actions, domestic as well as foreign, if he determines such actions to be necessary to respond to the terrorist attacks upon the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, and before.”

The document added that the neither the Posse Comitatus Act nor the Fourth Amendment tied a president’s hands. Despite this guidance, some Bush aides bristled at the prospect of troops descending on an American suburb to arrest terrorism suspects.

“What would it look like to have the American military go into an American town and knock on people’s door?” said a second former official in the debate.

Chief James L. Michel of the Lackawanna police agreed. “If we had tanks rolling down the streets of our city,” Chief Michel said, “we would have had pandemonium down here.”

The Lackawanna case was the first after the Sept. 11 attacks in which American intelligence and law enforcement operatives believed they had dismantled a Qaeda cell in the United States.

However, none of the sleeper cell cases prosecuted by the Government ever panned out to anything close to the announcements from the White House regarding the disruption of yet another terrorists sleeper cell on American soil.

In the months before the arrests, George Bush was regularly briefed on the case by Mr. Mueller of the F.B.I. and George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence. The C.I.A. had been tracking the overseas contacts of the Lackawanna group.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed article in March, Mr. Yoo defended his 2001 memorandum and its reasoning, saying that after Sept. 11 the Bush administration faced the real prospect of Qaeda cells undertaking attacks on American soil.

“The possibility of such attacks raised difficult, fundamental questions of constitutional law,” he wrote, “because they might require domestic military operations against an enemy for the first time since the Civil War.”

Cheney's Torture Program Shot Down From Every Angle

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Bruce Fein, the former Deputy Attorney General under Ronald Regan spoke to MSNBC's David Schuster about Dick Cheney's torture program. On the topic of torture, Fein said that Cheney not only clearly knew, he lead the congressional briefing, he authorized, championed, and supported it.

Fein said that here are no exceptions to the torture prohibition. None for ticking time bombs. None for Al Qaeda. None for useful information. In her relentless media tour in defense of her father, Liz Cheney's seems to already understand the simplicity of the Fein's agrument. She focuses more on delivering a national message that her father's efforts have "saved thousands of American lives." and "averted a secondary terrorist attack following 9/11."

In seems as if both Cheney's are trying to create an understanding by the public at large, that while questionable or even outright illegal, the country is in immediate danger should President Obama and his administration not adopt and continue the torture program.

WATCH VIDEO:

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Previously undisclosed Justice Department e-mail messages, interviews and newly declassified documents show that some of the lawyers, including James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general who argued repeatedly that the United States would regret using harsh methods, went along with a 2005 legal opinion asserting that the techniques used by the Central Intelligence Agency were lawful.

That opinion, giving the green light for the C.I.A. to use all 13 methods in interrogating terrorism suspects, including

waterboarding and up to 180 hours of sleep deprivation, "was ready to go out and I concurred," Mr. Comey wrote to a colleague in an April 27, 2005, e-mail message obtained by The New York Times.

While signing off on the techniques, Mr. Comey in his e-mail provided a firsthand account of how he tried unsuccessfully to discourage use of the practices. He made a last-ditch effort to derail the interrogation program, urging Attorney General

Alberto R. Gonzales to argue at a White House meeting in May 2005 that it was "wrong."

"In stark terms I explained to him what this would look like some day and what it would mean for the president and the government," Mr. Comey wrote in a May 31, 2005, e-mail message to his chief of staff, Chuck Rosenberg. He feared that a case could be made "that some of this stuff was simply awful."

The e-mail messages are now in the hands of investigators at the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, which is preparing a report expected to be released this summer on the Bush administration lawyers who approved waterboarding and other harsh methods. The inquiry, under way for nearly five years, will be the Justice Department’s fullest public account of its role in the interrogation program, which

President Obama has ended.

In years of bitter public debate, the department has sometimes seemed like a black-and-white moral battleground over torture. The main authors of memorandums authorizing the methods —

John C. Yoo, Jay S. Bybee and Steven G. Bradbury — have been widely pilloried as facilitators of torture.

Others, including Mr. Comey,

Jack Goldsmith and Daniel Levin, have largely escaped criticism because they raised questions about interrogation and the law. But a closer examination shows a more subtle picture. None of the Justice Department lawyers who reviewed the interrogation question argued that the methods were clearly illegal.

For example:
Mr. Goldsmith, now a

Harvard law professor, unnerved the C.I.A. in June 2004 by withdrawing a 2002 memorandum written by Mr. Yoo that said only pain equal to that produced by organ failure or death qualified as torture.

In addition, in a previously undisclosed letter to the agency, Mr. Goldsmith put a temporary halt to waterboarding. But he left intact a secret companion memorandum from 2002 that actually authorized the harsh methods, leaving the C.I.A. free to use all its methods except waterboarding, including wall-slamming, face-slapping, stress positions and more.

¶Mr. Levin, now in private practice, won public praise with a 2004 memorandum that opened by declaring "torture is abhorrent." But he also wrote a letter to the C.I.A that specifically approved waterboarding in August 2004, and he drafted much of Mr. Bradbury’s lengthy May 2005 opinion authorizing the 13 methods.

¶Mr. Comey, who had forced a 2004 showdown with White House officials over the

National Security Agency’s surveillance program, concurred in that Bradbury opinion. His objections focused on a second legal opinion that authorized combinations of the methods. He expressed "grave reservations" and asked for a week to revise the memorandum, warning Mr. Gonzales that "it would come back to haunt him and the department," Mr. Comey said in a 2005 e-mail message to Mr. Rosenberg.

Justice Department lawyers involved in the opinions felt torn between what was legal and what was advisable, Mr. Levin said. "Obviously you can only do that which is legal," he said in a recent interview. "But that does not mean you should automatically do something simply because it is legal."

The e-mail messages and documents provide new details about a critical year in the interrogation saga, beginning in mid-2004. The C.I.A. inspector general had questioned the legality and effectiveness of the harsh methods, prompting a review of the program. Under intense White House pressure, the Justice Department lawyers in May 2005 approved a series of opinions that reauthorized the harshest practices.

The lawyers had to interpret a 1994 antitorture law written largely with despotic foreign regimes in mind, but used starting in 2002, in effect, as a set of guidelines for American interrogators. The law defined torture as treatment "specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering." By that standard, a succession of Justice Department lawyers concluded that the C.I.A.’s methods did not constitute torture.

The only issues that provoked debate were waterboarding, which Mr. Goldsmith questioned, and some combinations of multiple techniques, which Mr. Comey resisted. Some outside experts agree that the language of the 1994 law is strikingly narrow. "There’s no doubt whatsoever that a great deal of coercive treatment that most people would call torture is not prohibited by the federal antitorture statute," said Benjamin Wittes, a

Brookings Institution scholar who has studied interrogation policy.

But many believe that even under that law, the Justice Department should have recognized that waterboarding, at least, was torture. To argue otherwise, said Brian Z. Tamanaha, a

St. John’s University law professor who has studied the interrogation memorandums, required "extraordinary contortions in language and legal analysis."

Waterboarding, the near-drowning method that Mr. Obama has described as torture, was used on three operatives for Al Qaeda in 2002 and 2003. The C.I.A. never used the technique after it was reauthorized in 2005.

Cheney Points 911 Blame Away From Bush

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Dick Cheney goes on the defensive and blames 911 on Richard Clark, the former counter-terroism chief under President Bill Clinton. Cheney's remarks where spewed while speaking at the National Press Club today, Cheney struck back at Clarke. When asked about Clarke’s argument, Cheney — once again — invoked the "burning ashes" of 9/11 and the victims who leaped to their deaths from the World Trade Center. Then, quite succinctly, Cheney pinned the entire blame for 9/11 on Clarke: WATCH VIDEO


In fact, it was Cheney who "missed" the warning signs, not Clarke. New York Times reporter Philip Shenon’s book, "The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation," reprinted some of Clarke’s emphatic e-mails warning the Bush administration of the al Qaeda threat throughout 2001:

"Bin Ladin Public Profile May Presage Attack" (May 3)

"Terrorist Groups Said Co-operating on US Hostage Plot" (May 23)

"Bin Ladin’s Networks’ Plans Advancing" (May 26)

"Bin Ladin Attacks May Be Imminent" (June 23)

"Bin Ladin and Associates Making Near-Term Threats" (June 25)

"Bin Ladin Planning High-Profile Attacks" (June 30)

"Planning for Bin Ladin Attacks Continues, Despite Delays" (July 2)

Similarly, Time Magazine reported in 2002 that Clarke had an extensive plan to "roll back" al Qaeda —

a plan that languished for months, ignored by senior Bush officials:

Clarke, using a Powerpoint presentation, outlined his thinking to Rice. … In fact, the heading on Slide 14 of the Powerpoint presentation reads, "Response to al Qaeda: Roll back." … The proposals Clarke developed in the winter of 2000-01 were not given another hearing by top decision makers until late April, and then spent another four months making their laborious way through the bureaucracy before they were readied for approval by President Bush.

Cheney needs to check his "recollections" before blaming former employees for the single most devestating attack in American history.