CI Centre News is on hiatus this week.
Fox News, 26 March 2010: In the last five months U.S. federal authorities have charged several men, some U.S. citizens, of aiding Hezbollah, a State Department designated terrorist group. These arrests have terrorism analysts wondering if Hezbollah is ramping up its U.S. operations.
The first indictments were handed down in Philadelphia in November when four men were charged with conspiracy to support Hezbollah. One of the suspects – Moussa Ali Hamdan is a U.S national from Brooklyn – and all four remain at large. They were charged with conspiracy to export some 1200 colt machine guns to a port in Syria and also with conspiracy to provide material support to Hezbollah through proceeds made from the sale of fake passports and counterfeit money.
Only last month another four men were charged in Miami for illegally exporting electronics goods to a shopping center in Paraguay, which U.S. authorities say is used to funnel money to Hezbollah. According to the US Treasury Department, both the shopping center and its co-owner Muhammad Yusif Abdallah give a portion of the center’s profits to Hezbollah. Abdallah is believed by the US to be a senior leader for Hezbollah in South America.
Just last summer, David Cohen, New York City’s Deputy Police Commissioner on Intelligence (and retired Deputy Director for Operations at the CIA) warned that Hezbollah should not be underestimated. Cohen told a terrorism conference in Manhattan that Hezbollah “…is probably the most capable and disciplined terrorist organization in the world.” Cohen said Hezbollah is closely linked, and works under the direction of the Iranian intelligence services and “poses a continuous danger to New York City.” . . . .
♦ CI CENTRE COURSE: 267–An Introduction to Hezbollah: A Worldwide Terrorist Organization
♦ CI CENTRE COURSE: 270–An Introduction to Iranian Intelligence and Counterintelligence Methodologies
FrontPage, 26 March 2010: Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Vijay Kumar, who is currently running for the U.S. Congress . . . . FP: Vijay Kumar, welcome to Frontpage Interview. You are one of the rare individuals running for office in America who is actually making the issue of Islamic Jihad a significant part of your campaign. Tell us your view of Islamic Jihad and the background you have to make you see it the way you do.
Kumar: I am a native of Hyderabad, India, which is where I first encountered the Muslim culture. We have a substantial number of Muslims there, a higher percentage than most other parts of India, and I began to observe things that troubled me. Later, I traveled a number of Islamic nations, and I lived in Iran from 1976 to 1979, during the Islamic Revolution of Ayatollah Khomeini. I immigrated to the United States in 1979. All my life, I have been interested in political thought. During my travels, I came to realize that Islam is unlike any of the other world religions for a variety of reasons, and they summate to the Islamic ideology behind Jihad.
First, Islam was conceived as a world empire to govern all mankind. It teaches that all the world, and everyone and everything in it, already belongs to Islam–some people just haven’t been made to understand that. Until they have, according to Islam, they are considered “infidels” and inferiors. Put another way, the Islamic view is that all of us in the world are subjects of the Islamic Empire, and those of us who do not acknowledge our subjugation to it must be overcome and brought to submission, through conversion or force. No other religion in the world has such a purpose of world conquest and domination.
Second, Islam does not allow any introspection or self-criticism. It calls for total acceptance, total submission. The very word “Islam” means “submission,” and the word “Muslim” means “one who submits.” The other side of submission, of course, is domination. Islam seeks to dominate every individual and every nation into submission. In that, it shares a key element of slavery, which the civilized world has properly decried and abolished. Such submission is a political act. I am a freeman, and I refuse to submit to Islamic hegemony.
Third, Islam does not have any exit policy for its believers. The act of submission required to become a Muslim is held to be final, irrevocable, and permanent. So criticizing or questioning Islam or its teachings or leaders, or attempting to leave Islam, all are considered severe crimes against Islam, punishable by death.
In contrast, non-Islamic religions allow for dissenting views, introspection, and reasoned debate. In non-Islamic religions, if you so choose, you can leave the faith you were born into without being threatened with physical violence or death. In Islam, both criticism of the faith and apostasy are capital offenses.
All of that is what drives Jihad: Jihad is a permanent war against the unbeliever and his land to bring about his submission. It has been going on for fourteen centuries all over the world, which is why I coined the term “Universal Jihad.” Islam’s Universal Jihad is the single greatest threat to Western civilization and to the entire non-Islamic world in general. It is more dangerous than Nazism and Communism combined.
FP: More dangerous than Nazism and Communism combined? Please explain this perspective. . . . . [ Read it all! ]
New York Times, 15 March 2010: An American charged with helping plan the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India, moved effortlessly between the United States, Pakistan and India for nearly seven years, training at a militant camp in Pakistan on five occasions, according to a plea agreement released by the Justice Department last week.
The odyssey of David C. Headley, 49, included scouting targets in several cities in India and meeting with a senior operative of Al Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal areas. These and other new details of Mr. Headley’s activities, contained in the plea agreement, raise troubling questions about how an American citizen could travel for so long undetected from his home base in Chicago to well-established terrorist training camps in Pakistan.
The document shows that Mr. Headley made two trips to North Waziristan, the heart of Qaeda operations in the tribal area where the United States is still pushing Pakistan for a military offensive to clear out militants. His handlers, the document reveals, included a former Pakistani military commander with ties to a Pakistani extremist group and even Al Qaeda. From there, Mr. Headley not only helped plan the Mumbai attack, it says, but he was put in contact with a Qaeda cell in Europe that may still be operative. The document shows the cell was well supplied with weapons and money and primed for an attack until the moment Mr. Headley was arrested by the F.B.I. at O’Hare airport last October. . . . .
Fox News, 25 March 2010: Several of the more than 100 terror suspects accused of plotting to attack key oil and security facilities in Saudi Arabia were apparently taking their orders from Al Qaeda in Yemen and were ready to strike as soon as they got the go-ahead, a senior Saudi official said Thursday.
In a telephone interview with Fox News, Gen. Mansour Al-Turki, spokesman for the Saudi Ministry of Interior, said the arrest of the alleged plotters not only had prevented the attacks, but broken up a network of Al Qaeda-affiliated radicals that included two suicide bombing cells. He did not dispute news reports indicating that the plotters had been exchanging e-mails with a man in Yemen believed to be a senior leader of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP.
Al-Turki declined to identify which facilities the suspects were allegedly targeting, but he said one of the suspects, a Saudi national, was employed by a private Saudi industrial security company responsible for protecting oil sites and other critical infrastructure. “As an employee, he had access to all of those sites and to current plans for protecting them,” the general said. . . . .
