Yemen events and connections

[Magda Hassan]

Some interesting comments and commentary from Bill Conroy of Narco News

Breaking down the tale of the underpants bomber


Posted by Bill Conroy - January 9, 2010 at 10:03 pm
Troubled Nigerian kid is blowback from Pakistan’s badlands

David Headley, a U.S. citizen of Pakistani descent, was arrested by the FBI last October for allegedly conspiring to carry out violent acts in Denmark against the newspaper that published controversial cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in 2005.
Headley, a resident of Chicago, is also in the headlights of Indian law enforcers, who suspect he played a role in the attacks on civilians in Mumbai, India, last year that resulted in 166 deaths.
But there is a far larger ball of intrigue that begins to unwind once you begin to pull on the Headley string.
In fact, Headley; the Jordanian doctor [Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi] who on Dec. 30, 2009, blew up himself and half a dozen CIA employees in Khost, Afghanistan; and the recent Nigerian underwear bomber [Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab] all appear to be connected through a pair of militant Pakistanis aligned with the Taliban and Al Qaeda — both working out of the Waziristan province in Pakistan.
The Pakistanis are Rashid Rauf [who has dual citizenship with Pakistan and Britain] and Ilyas Kashmiri.
The acts of violence being perpetrated by Rauf and Kashmiri, and others, appear to be blowback from Pakistani intelligence efforts to manipulate (ineffectively) militant groups along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border to create a force against India’s control of Kashmir. The blowback also stems from more recent Drone attacks in Pakistan being carried out by the U.S. government, which have been successful in taking out Taliban/Al Qaeda operatives but also have raised concerns about collateral damage to civilians, which has supposedly led President Obama to consider putting the brakes on the attacks.
The blowback, as described by the Washington Times:
Like a Frankenstein's monster, these groups [militant Pakistanis led by folks such as Rauf and Kashmiri] have joined forces with the Taliban and al Qaeda to battle the Pakistani government.
And now, it seems, that battle is being taken to the U.S. as well.
Kashmiri, who is a former Pakistani commando [trained by the Brits] turned Al Qaeda operative, can be connected to alleged double agent Headley [whom the press reports and other Narco News sources claim worked simultaneously for Kashmiri and the CIA, though the CIA denies it], and he can be linked to the suicide-bombing mission of Jordanian doctor al-Balawi [also allegedly a double agent, working for both Al Qaeda and the CIA, according to press reports.]

Court records point to Kashmiri's role as Headley’s handler, and the Indian press reports Kashmiri is suspected of helping to "coordinate" the CIA-related suicide bombing in Khost.


Hakimullah Mehsud, a leader of the Al Qaeda-affiliated Pakistan Taliban and a confederate of Kashmiri and Rauf, ha s already publicly stated that his forces orchestrated the attack on the CIA employees in Khost, according to CNN.
That fact prompted this quote in the UK Times:
“Al-Qaeda has revealed that it is capable of running sophisticated clandestine operations with sustained deception,” said Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA officer. “Al-Qaeda did to us exactly what we intended to do to them.”
Mehsud, along with Rauf and Kashmiri, each pop up in the credits of a recent Pakistani newspaper story that contains the following list:
"Pakistan's Top 10 Most Wanted Terrorists Belong to Six Militant And Sectarian [Sunni/Shi'ite] Organizations Linked to Al-Qaeda and the Taliban"
In addition to his alleged role in the suicide bombing that killed more than a half dozen CIA employees in Khost, Kashmiri, according to the Indian press, also is suspected of helping to orchestrate the Mumbai attacks.
Rashid Rauf, curiously, played a key role in the failed transatlantic airline bombing effort of 2006 – in which a number of Brits of Islamic background [some fitting the profile of troubled kids like Abdulmutallab] were recruited to smuggle liquid explosives aboard 10 jets to be detonated, similar to the M.O. in the Nigerian/Northwest case, over U.S. cities.
Rauf, who also operates out of the Waziristan province, like Kashmiri, and also is linked to the Taliban/Al Qaeda, was thought to be dead, until recently, when he showed up, this past November [a month prior to the CIA and Northwest Airlines incidents], allegedly linked to a series of suicide bombings in Pakistan that killed more than 100 innocent people.
So Rauf has connections to and draws recruits from England, which is where Yemen authorities now claim the Nigerian Abdulmutallab was actually recruited for his suicide-bombing mission.
The press coverage linking the Nigerian to the radical Islamic spiritual leader Anwar Al-Walki may well be right, but Anwar has British connections as well [having lived in London for some time after leaving the U.S.], and is considered by some as a leading recruiter for Al Qaeda in Europe, and elsewhere. So the fact that he is in Yemen now seems to be a bit of a distraction — since the central planning for all of these attacks appears to have been orchestrated by players out of the Taliban/Al Qaeda-dominated tribal areas of Pakistan.
Specifically, these plots [Mumbai, Khost, Northwest Airlines, the Danish newspaper] have all the hallmarks of operations spearheaded by longtime militants Kashmiri and/or Rauf, or at least they match their M.O.s from prior violent acts — and, in the case of Khost, Mumbai and the Danish plot, are allegedly directly linked to Kashmiri.
And with respect to Headley and al-Balawi, it appears the CIA may have been caught with its pants down, believing it was working the pair as their assets, when, in fact, U.S. intelligence agents were being worked by Headley and al-Balawi in the interest of Al Qaeda and their Pakistani Taliban affiliates.
One former undercover law enforcer described the situation for Narco News this way:
CIA (has an) astonishing lack of ability in the area of informant handling and the media (has an) equally astonishing inability to grasp this … and where it may lead in the future … the bottom line is that CIA mid and upper-level management — the guys overseeing the field people — are like chess players who cannot see past the first move. A skilled handler of informants must be able to "see" every "likely" variable of blowback....
Adds another law enforcer with intelligence agency experience:
The CIA has some amazing analysts but they are not able to analyze decently because there is not a free flow of information (even today) among agencies. Everyone is concerned about who will get the credit (good or bad.)
Stay tuned ....

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Comments

Connecting the dots

Submitted January 10, 2010 - 12:58 pm by Bill Conroy The story below, which appeared in a mainstream British paper in September of last year (several months prior to the underpants bombers' appearance on the world stage) might be of interest to those looking to connect more dots.
I suspect it's likely that some or all of the training mentioned in the story is/was going on outside a hot war zone like the tribal lands of Pakistan. Yemen sounds like a good getaway for such a camp experience, no?
In any event, this story, from last Sept., is worth a read for additional elucidation:
Rashid Rauf 'training dozens of British terrorist recruits in Pakistan'
Pakistani officials have warned that Rashid Rauf, the terrorist linked to the trans-Atlantic airline bomb plot, has been involved in grooming two dozen British recruits to carry out new attacks.
By Saeed Shah in Bahawalpur and Massoud Ansari in Mirpur
Published: 6:00AM BST 14 Sep 2009
... Rauf is said to be a key lieutenant of the group's leader, explosives expert, Abu Nasir. "He is an explosive expert who has effectively devised methods of explosives using easy-to-get ingredients that are virtually undetectable or can raise no alarms for authorities," said the intelligence source.
... Intercepted emails and text messages between Pakistan and the UK had indicated Rauf's involvement under the name Khalid after the authorities decrypted the communications.

• reply
  

Connecting more dots

Submitted January 12, 2010 - 5:52 pm by Bill Conroy
A reader provided the following comment to the "Underpants Bomber" story:
How many degrees of separation from ISI?
Staying tuned indeed... and, as a Chalmers Johnson reader, with little doubt of the general validity of the blowback thesis where Pakistan’s ISI [Inter-Services Intelligence] is concerned. But can you please say more about the Rauf - Mutallab connection?
The two cited points of similarity -- residence in London and experience with concealed liquid explosives -- are probably shared by a large number of individuals. Presumably your sources have more specific links in mind.
Veteran Lagos editor Reuben Abati prefers to analyse the Nigerian richkid's misadventure in moralistic terms, as a case of a collective "copycat syndrome." [Link here]
National elites have an obvious self-interest to downplay the danger of country's current religious craze, which took off during the political-economic decline of the Babangida and Abacha juntas and accelerated through the second coming of Obasanjo.
The evangelical general's handpicked successor has been incommunicado for the past month and a half in a Saudi ICU and the democracy movement has seized on the Mutallab case as a teachable moment in the struggle for reform. [Links here and here]

My Take and the Zazi Connection

With respect to the question raised about the links between Rauf and the Nigerian kid Mutallab, all I can say on the source front is that the multiple sources [both intel and law enforcement] for the story asked not to be identified.
For a bit more to grab onto beyond unnamed sources, though, for the show-me crowd [and I think that is a perfectly legitimate stance] it’s worth a look at the Najibullah Zazi case, which involves a U.S. resident [who is an Afghan national]. Zazi, according to a federal indictment, was part of a conspiracy that “did knowingly, intentionally and without lawful authority conspire to use one or more weapons of mass destruction” against targets in New York City.
With respect to the conspiracy, the FBI complaint in Zazi’s case states the following:
The FBI is investigating several individuals in the United States, Pakistan and elsewhere, relating to a plot to detonate improvised explosive devices inside the United States. … CBP records further reflect that the defendant ZAZI traveled from Peshawar to John F. Kennedy International Airport (“JFK”) on or about January 15, 2009.
Peshawar is located in the Northwest Frontier Province (“NWFP”) region of Pakistan. During the course of this investigation, I have learned that Al Qaeda maintains training facilities and safe houses within the NWFP, specifically the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).
… The Center for Strategic and International Studies describes the FATA as “ground zero in the U.S. Jihadist war … [and] home to many Al Qaeda operatives, especially the numerous foreigners from the Arab world, Central Asia Muslim areas of the Far East, and even Europe who flock to this war zone fo r training, indoctrination, and sometimes from repression at home.”
According to a Nov. 9, 2009, report in London’s Daily Telegraph, Zazi, along with a group of men arrested in Manchester, England, were “part of a complex network directed from Pakistan.” That network, the paper reports, was allegedly uncovered after a U.S. citizen named Bryant Neal Vinas was arrested in Pakistan in November 2008.
The story continues:
Vinas, 26, also known as “Bashir al-Ameriki,” claims he met Rashid Rauf, the British al-Qaeda commander behind the trans-Atlantic bomb plot. [Emphasis added.]
Vinas had been in Pakistan since 2007 where he admits he received training from al-Qaeda and agreed to become a suicide bomber, plotting to blow up a train on the Long Island Rail Road inside Pennsylvania Station.
A Nov. 15, 2009, report in the Sunday Mercury of Birmingham, England, was even more explicit about the Rauf connection to the planned U.S. attack:
Terror mastermind Rashid Rauf has been linked to a fresh Al Qaida plot to launch attacks on the US. [Emphasis added.]
The Birmingham-born extremist has been named by witnesses due to testify against Najibullah Zazi, who was arrested for plotting suicide bombings in New York.
MI6 officers have linked the plot to a complex terror network said to be directed from Pakistan by Rauf and fellow jihadists.
Now, you always have to continue to beat any theory with the facts and be wary of the sensationalism of the mainstream press in all lands. On the other hand, a wise way to avoid getting burned by fire is to be sensitive to the smoke.
And, in this case, there sure seems to be a lot of smoke following Rauf and his folks over the years.
In any event, given the geographic range of Al Qaida, it seems wiser, more strategic, to pay closer attention to who the real players are, profiling the organizers, and to not spend so much time dwelling on nationality or religiosity — Islam, Yemen or otherwise — which can be disguised, or manipulated, in many ways.
The motivations of the Nigerian kid, in this case, may well have been religious, but that doesn't mean the plan that put him in motion was religious. Violence tends to be about ruthless calculation and power, not spiritual enlightenment, in my experience.
But then, I have always aspired to be humble about my theories and long ago took Gary Webb's advice on such matters:
“I don’t believe in conspiracy theories; I believe in conspiracies.” — Gary Webb
http://narcosphere.narconews.com/notebook/bill-conroy/2010/01/breaking-down-tale-underpants-bomber