Al Qaeda Group Claims Responsibility

The Saudi arm of Al Qaeda — also known as Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula — has apparently taken responsibility for the failed attempt to blow up a Detroit-bound plane on Christmas Eve.

First reported on the website of SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks militant groups (unfortunately their site is by subscription so I’m including The New York Times story about what SITE is reporting), the group calls Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab a “wealthy youth of Nigerian decent” reacting to “unjust aggression on the Arabian Peninsula.”

The group also states the plan would have worked if not for a “technical fault.”

The threat of Al Qaeda in the Arabian peninsula and the importance of the area to Al Qaeda is nothing new..

In 2006, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence released a report, “Al Qaeda: The Many Faces of an Islamist Extremist Threat” that pointed out the numerous times Osama bin Laden had spoken of the peninsula.

When he first delcared jihad against the United States, bin Laden titled it, “Declaration of Jihad Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Mosques: Expel Heretics from the Arabian Peninsula.”

According to a report by the Virginia-based GlobalSecurity.org, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula would like to overthrow the Saudi government, eventually “liberate” Jerusalem and unite the world’s Muslims. The report states that the Saudi government often downplayed the threat posed by the group until a series of deadly attacks in 2003, forced them to come to terms with the danger.

Over the summer, The New York Times reported that US officials were seeing dozens of Al Qaeda fighters and leaders leaving Pakistan and relocating to Yemen and Somalia, both of which were considered safe havens.

Then, in August, AQAP was believed to be behind an attempted suicide attack on the Saudi head of security, a member of the royal family. The powerful explosive, PETN, was a key component in both that attack and the one on the Detroit bound flight, leading analysts to draw connections between them.

And in October, CNN’s terrorism expert, Peter Bergen, warned the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that: “Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula,’ which has taken a punishing beating from the Saudi government in the past several years, remains capable of pulling off significant attacks.”

Clearly, that is the case.

Nicknames and Wikipedia in Blackwater Pretrial Fights

From whether the government should be allowed to refer to nicknames of the defendants to whether the defense should be allowed to introduce a spreadsheet from Wikipedia listing every suicide bombing attack in Iraq between 2003 and 2008, lawyers on both sides in the upcoming trial of five employees of the company formerly known as Blackwater charged with killing Iraqi citizens are busy felling forests.

The charges stem from a September 2007 shooting in Baghdad that killed at least 17 Iraqi civilians as a Blackwater convoy sped through a traffic circle.

A sixth Blackwater employee, Jeremy Ridgeway, pleaded guilty and told prosecutors how he and other guards used “automatic weapons and grenade launchers on unarmed civilians.”

With the trial scheduled for February. both sides have been heating up the legal rhetoric, arguing what can and can’t be introduced at trial.

In papers filed last Friday, the government charged that defense lawyers plan to “shift the focus of this trial from the shooting at Nisur Square to a history of war violence in Iraq, and introduce news media accounts of thousands of insurgent attacks in Iraq between 2003 and the present day.”

According to prosecutors, ” in recent discovery, the defendants have turned over:

“CNN web pages purporting to list every US soldier casualty in Iraq… including accidential deaths from helicopter crashes, friendly fire, etc.. an internet web page listing every contracor death in Iraq… including accidental deaths, heart attacks, etc…Wikipedia web pages listing every suicide bombing n Iraq… virtually none o which involved attacks on US contractors… and a 120-page spreadsheet that lists approximately 1,030 insurgent attacks in Baghdad based on various internet news reports — which again, describes very few, if any, suicide car bomb attacks on US contractor armored convoys.”

And, prosecutors state that more than 150 of those attacks occurred after the 2007 shooting and “therefore could not have any relevance to this case.”

Meanwhile, prosecutors have indicated that they are considering dropping the charges and while there are indications that they plan to do that so they can file new charges, defense lawyers, of course, see it differently, writing in papers that the case had become”untenable not merely because of a fundamental lack of inculpatory evidence, but also because, among other things, the trial team repeatedly mischaracterized the testimony of witnesses and excluded exculpatory evidence from the grand jury that indicted in the case.”

Defense lawyers also don’t want prosecutors to be able to tell jurors that one defendant allegedly is called “Extreme” and another, “Savage Viking.”

“Evidence of these alleged nicknames has nothing to do with any of the issues that will be presented at trial,” wrote defense lawyers.

And, of that wasn’t enough, the government is trying to get the judge in the case to close a January 7th hearing to the press and public, arguing that opening it up could result in classified information being disclosed.