Nigerian Plane Underpants Bomber - Mind Control Suspect? LIHOP?

[Ed Jewett]

What made me sick was O-bomb-A's statement that we'd hunt down anyone who wanted to kill innocent women and children etc.

[Keith Millea]

I just heard on the TV news a general saying that
Yemen is a big threat to our security, and we are
going to have to invade them.

Once it took attacking the WTC. Now all it takes
is a guy with bad underwear.

Jack

Little Joe should start by enlisting HIS kids and grandkids.I bet he wouldn't be runnin' his mouth off then!!!!!!

http://www.commondreams.org/further/2009/12/28-0

12.28.09
But Will the US Media Go Along, Joe?

Posted on Raw Story by Stephen C. Webster:

Speaking on Fox News Sunday, Senator Joeseph Lieberman (I-CT), who leads the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, has a vision of "tomorrow's war."
"Somebody in our government said to me in Sana’a, the capital of Yemen, Iraq was yesterday’s war," Lieberman explained. "Afghanistan is today’s war. If we don’t act preemptively, Yemen will be tomorrow’s war. That’s the danger we face."
Senator Arlen Specter (D-PA), also appearing on the program, seemed to agree, calling an attack against Yemen "something we should consider."
"Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan -- the Army officer who killed 13 people in a shooting rampage at Fort Hood in November -- was linked to Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical Muslim cleric now based in Yemen," The Hill noted.
Unnamed administration officials told US media in the aftermath of the thwarted attack that their suspect had confessed to traveling to Yemen and receiving training by Al-Qaeda.
Lieberman's saber rattling against Yemen is "likely to be echoed in the days ahead as a growing number of neoconservative and conservative foreign policy voices have used the attempted airline attack to call into question the tactics Obama has applied to curb terrorism," Sam Stein added.
In a borderline-livid post, Firedoglake writer Spencer Ackerman assailed Lieberman's hawkish stance. "Is it a mistake to respond to this with more than ridicule? Maybe, but if not: it’s a ludicrously blithe and cost-free assertion to say that we need to take preemptive action in Yemen. What the fuck does Joe Lieberman know about Yemen? What does anyone in the Washington policy community know about Yemen? Fucking nothing except that (a) there is an apparently growing al-Qaeda presence there; Abdulmutallab told investigators that he got hooked up with his botched explosive there; the USS Cole was bombed there; there’s an important port there; and… that’s it."
"The good news is that while progressives basically need Joe Lieberman’s vote in the Senate to pass domestic legislation, thus giving him a ton of leverage over what happens, nobody needs to listen to him about Yemen," blogger Matt Yglesias opined.

:ridinghorse:

[Peter Lemkin]

Endless War means endless profits for Them - endless poverty for us, and endless deaths and misery worldwide :bandit:

I'm sure there are still plenty of 'Nations of Opportunity' [Nations we haven't attacked yet, or recently] we can invent a reason to invade.

Pure evil. Pure US :eating: Pure Empire

When will most Americans wake up and realize we are the most Occupied and (self)invaded Nation - and get rid of the parasites within killing the Planet, Killing the Planet's Peoples, Killing US, and having killed/oppressed/imprisoned/propagandized/impoverished so many?!

[Peter Lemkin]

AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to the Middle Eastern nation of Yemen, the latest target of US-backed military strikes against suspected al-Qaeda sites. ABC News reports that President Obama directly ordered two cruise missile attacks in Yemen last week. According to the New York Times, the United States gave Yemeni forces military hardware and intelligence to carry out the attack.

The Yemeni government says the raids targeted al-Qaeda training camps and foiled a planned series of suicide bombings. Admiral Mike Mullen praised the attacks, citing concerns that Yemen was becoming, quote, “another safe haven for terrorism.”

The main target of the attacks, al-Qaeda member Qasim al Rim, was not among those killed, but a local Yemeni official said Sunday that over two-thirds of the dead were civilians, including twenty-three children and seventeen women.

At a speech last month announcing the escalation of the war in Afghanistan, President Obama hinted at a possible attack on Yemen.


PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Violent extremism will not be finished quickly, and it extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan. America will have to show our strength in the way that we end wars and prevent conflict, not just how we wage wars. We’ll have to be nimble and precise in our use of military power. Where al-Qaeda and its allies attempt to establish a foothold, whether in Somalia or Yemen or elsewhere, they must be confronted by growing pressure and strong partnerships.



AMY GOODMAN: Last week’s strikes on alleged al-Qaeda hideouts come in the midst of the Yemeni government’s battle against a rebellion in the north and a growing secessionist movement in the south. Saudi Arabia is backing Yemen’s five-year-old war in the north, and Yemeni rebel forces claim that Saudi air strikes Sunday night killed fifty-four people.

For more, I’m joined now from Baltimore, Maryland by Professor Charles Schmitz. He teaches geography at Towson University He’s a specialist on Yemen and president of the American Institute of Yemeni Studies.

Professor Schmitz, welcome to Democracy Now! Explain the significance of the US attacks on Yemen last week.


CHARLES SCHMITZ: I think the attacks are significant, given what President Obama said in Oslo and the quote that you just gave. I think it is a new strategy, developing new strategy, that the United States become directly involved in attacks in Yemen. The United States has attacked Yemen in the past. We used one of the first Predator strikes within Yemen in 2002, I believe it was. But this seems to be a new policy.


AMY GOODMAN: And what has been the response in Yemen? First, I believe it was the Yemeni government saying it was just the Yemeni military that engaged in this. And what is the relationship between the United States and the Yemen government?


CHARLES SCHMITZ: The relationship between the Yemeni government and the United States is quite ambiguous. It’s been kind of a back-and-forth dance for a long time. The Yemeni government has cooperated with the United States in the war on terror. And the Yemeni government was fighting its own sort of war on terror prior to 9/11. And when there were doubts expressed in Washington in the early days after 9/11, the Yemeni president went to Washington. There was a conversation between the Yemeni president and President Bush, in which the Yemeni president assured President Bush that the Yemeni government would assist in the war on terror. There’s been disagreements on what exactly that means. And so, it is an ambiguous relationship.

The United States does supply Yemen with anti-terror equipment, with military equipment. It tends to be equipment that’s geared to deal with surveillance, with control of borders, coast guard, anti-terror units, and not sort of conventional warfare weaponry.

In terms of the reaction in Yemen, Yemen is in a very difficult political situation right now, and so the reaction in Yemen is very much refracted through the lens of domestic politics. And as you mentioned, there’s a rebellion in the south. One of the strikes was in Abyan in the south, which is an area where the secessionist—civil disobedience, secessional movement is quite strong. And there, people on the ground saw lots of civilian casualties, and they saw this as the United States backing what have been rather repressive tactics of the Yemeni regime of the movement in the south. The al-Houthi in the north also criticized it. They equate it with, as you mentioned, the Saudi air strikes in the north that also killed civilian casualties. So, you have to understand that within Yemen—


AMY GOODMAN: Explain who the Houthi are. Professor Schmitz, explain who the Houthi are.


CHARLES SCHMITZ: The al-Houthi are part – they’re Zaydis. They are—we can say it’s part of a Zaydi revivalist movement. The Zaydis are Shia. Most of North Yemen is Zaydi; somewhere between 30 to 40 percent of North Yemen is Zaydi. The president and most of the top military are also Zaydi. So it’s really a political conflict.

But the Zaydi in Sa’dah, they are the old religious aristocracy. Yemen was ruled by a religious aristocracy for about a thousand years. And in 1962, there was a republican coup that established the republic. What’s interesting is, in that, following that coup, there was a proxy war between Egypt and Saudi Arabia, in which the Saudis backed, in essence, the Zaydis in the north, the Zaydi aristocracy, because the Zaydi aristocracy was royalists, and the Saudi government was supporting royalism against the republican trends in Yemen. The republic won.

Now, sort of some of those same folks, the Saudis are against. The Yemeni government, in fact, the president supported this guy, al-Houthi Badreddin, the guy who began this movement. He supported them between 1997 and 2004, because he saw them as a counterweight against Wahhabi and Salafist movements that were in the north that the president had initially backed, but then was worried about them getting too strong. So the situation is quite complex.

We can say that the rebellion in the north is about a region who feels marginalized, who was at the losing end of a civil war in the ’60s, and who feels that their religious identity and their sort of political, economic survival is at risk, that this government has not done what it is asked to do in terms of bringing development, that it discriminates against it, that it feels that it has to take matters into its own hands.


AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Charles Schmitz, who is a professor of geography at Towson University in Baltimore, also president of the American Institute for Yemeni Studies.

So, is the US working with Saudi Arabia hand-in-hand in Yemen? And is al-Qaeda there? Is al-Qaeda training there? And the effects of these attacks, like last week’s, the US on the civilian population? Does it radicalize them?


CHARLES SCHMITZ: The Saudis have a long relationship with Yemen. They have also an ambiguous relationship with Yemen. The Saudi—the relationship between Saudi Arabia and Yemen is somewhat like the relationship between the United States and Mexico. Mexico is a very poor country, somewhat unstable, and its problems spill into the United States. That’s the fear of the Saudis, that Yemen is going to destabilize and that its problems will spill into Saudi Arabia. The Saudis are also sometimes afraid of a strong, united Yemeni state, so they have an ambiguous relationship to Saudi Arabia.

The United States followed Saudi policy, basically let the Saudis tell us what to do, until the ’90s, when Yemen unified. It was a divided Cold War state, a north and a south. The south was a Soviet satellite state. And when Yemen unified, the United States started to develop an independent policy. So, no, the United States has its own policy that is somewhat different than the Saudi policy in Yemen.

In terms of the radicalization, one of the—one of the difficulties of US policy—we see this, I think, in Pakistan, as well—is that, you know, what is our endgame in the war on terror? The endgame in the war on terror, of course, is stability and peace and prosperity, to get people to buy into the system, to feel that the regime that they live in they have a stake in. And in Yemen—


AMY GOODMAN: We have ten seconds.


CHARLES SCHMITZ: In Yemen, we’re afraid that the regime is going to fall, and so we want to take our own action, but that may also de-legitimize the regime. So we’re playing a delicate balance here.


AMY GOODMAN: Charles Schmitz, I want to thank you for being with us, professor of geography at Towson University and specialist on Yemen, president of the American Institute for Yemeni Studies.

[Magda Hassan]

Detroit jet terrorist attack was staged

The recent failed attack on a US passenger jet traveling from Amsterdam to Detroit was a set-up provocation controlled by US intelligence, author and journalist Webster Tarpley stated to RT.“[The terrorist’s] father, a rich Nigerian banker, went to the US embassy in Nigeria on November 19 and said ‘my son is in Yemen in a terrorist camp, do something about this.’ Nevertheless, the son is allowed to buy a ticket in Ghana, paying cash, $2,800, for a one-way ticket,” Tarpley said.After that, a mentally deficient young man who doubtfully could make it from one gate to another managed to illegally enter Nigeria and get on a plane to Amsterdam.“There was a well-dressed Indian man who brought him to the gate and said, ‘my friend does not have a passport, get him on, he is Sudanese, we do this all the time – that is impossible!”
http://vodpod.com/watch/2761182-detroit-...chamberlin

[Peter Lemkin]

Detroit jet terrorist attack was staged

The recent failed attack on a US passenger jet traveling from Amsterdam to Detroit was a set-up provocation controlled by US intelligence, author and journalist Webster Tarpley stated to RT.“[The terrorist’s] father, a rich Nigerian banker, went to the US embassy in Nigeria on November 19 and said ‘my son is in Yemen in a terrorist camp, do something about this.’ Nevertheless, the son is allowed to buy a ticket in Ghana, paying cash, $2,800, for a one-way ticket,” Tarpley said.After that, a mentally deficient young man who doubtfully could make it from one gate to another managed to illegally enter Nigeria and get on a plane to Amsterdam.“There was a well-dressed Indian man who brought him to the gate and said, ‘my friend does not have a passport, get him on, he is Sudanese, we do this all the time – that is impossible!”
http://vodpod.com/watch/2761182-detroit-...chamberlin

Two possibilities come to mind:
1) He was sent thinking he was participating in a mission or, more likely, a drill - in order for American Right-Wing elements to bomb Obama.
2) That this is an invented act to justify the continued war against Yemen [started afresh a few weeks ago].
3) That 1) and 2) were done together by the same National Security [Warfare] State. The one that Killed JFK, RFK, King and millions around the world we don't know by name - and continues to.

That he got on a flight without a passport and with explosive are the most informative elements. I predict the facts of how will never be made public....as they point to the very entities that would present such evidence. Obama has best watch his backside. As much as he is in the pockets of the bankers, Oligarchy and intelligence apparat, he has big enemies who'd prefer an out and out fascist like their darling Bush.

[Jan Klimkowski]

It's not been reported yet, but I was watching the Dutch news conference and a Dutch official (not sure if he was govt or airport) stated, in answer to a question, that Mutallab was travelling on an Italian passport.

An Italian passport? For a Nigerian who'd spent several years at university in England?

The Dutch officials were also adamant that they don't have access to "global terror no-fly lists", and that the lists that do exist are partial rather than global or universal. In short, there is no global no-fly list.

The Dutch officials stated that several areas of security which are being criticized as too "lax" were so precisely because of either American or EU pressure.

Obama's comments about "totally unacceptable... systemic failure" reveal that Mutallab was definitely known to American intelligence.

"When our government has information on a known extremist and that information is not shared and acted upon as it should have been, so that this extremist boards a plane with dangerous explosives that could cost nearly 300 lives, a systemic failure has occurred and I consider that totally unacceptable," Obama said.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/dec...roit-plane

Mutallab was being tracked or perhaps even run by intelligence agents - almost certainly British as well as American given that he was head of University College London's Islamic association.

So, it's boiling down to either fuck up or false flag. :evil:

[Jan Klimkowski]

For the record, and fwiw, here's the official legend of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab - as fed to MSM.

Rich and privileged - the gilded life of would-be plane bomber

Banker's son expressed approval of 9/11 to teacher

MI5 combing databases for alternative identities

Peter Walker, Xan Rice and Richard Norton-Taylor
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 27 December 2009

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's path towards apparent Islamist militancy took him to University College London and a luxury block just off the city's Oxford Street.

But no part of his life was so seemingly anomalous to a would-be terrorist as the manicured lawns and tennis courts of the British International school in Togo, where he is believed to have first expressed extreme views.

Today, investigators were trying to establish exactly what provoked him to try to detonate an explosive device as a Northwest Airlines jet made its final descent into Detroit airport on Christmas Day.

It certainly wasn't a life of poverty. He was born in extreme privilege, of the sort few Nigerians could ever dream of, and his education reflected this. His father, Umaru Mutallab, 70, is one of the country's most respected businessmen, who retired earlier this month as chairman of Nigeria's FirstBank, the oldest bank in the country, with offices in London, Paris and Beijing.

While the family comes from Katsina state in the Muslim-dominated north of Nigeria, where funding of hardline Islamist schools by Saudi Arabia and Iran has raised concerns of militancy among young people, Abdulmutallab first became noticeably religious while studying abroad at a very different institution.

He undertook his secondary education as a boarder at the British school in Lomé, Togo's capital, which is mostly staffed by teachers from the UK and attracts wealthy students from across west Africa. Set up in 1983, the school gives pupils a decidedly English-style curriculum, taught in air-conditioned classrooms set amid grassy grounds which also feature a swimming pool and tennis courts.

While pursuing his international baccalaureat, with impressive results, Abdulmutallab's preaching to his schoolmates earned him the nickname "Alfa" – a local name for Islamic scholars, according to Nigeria's This Day newspaper.

Michael Rimmer, who taught Abdulmutallab history, and escorted him and other pupils on a school trip to the UK, said the teenager had been a model student who was keen, polite and eager to learn. However, Rimmer recalled a classroom discussion on Afghanistan's then-Taliban leaders following the September 11 attacks in 2001. All the other students, Muslims included, expressed their abhorrence of the regime, he said.

"But [Abdulmutallab], actually, thought that they had it right and he thought their views were acceptable. I thought he was maybe just trying to play devil's advocate ... At the time I just thought, well, when people are young they can have silly views," he told BBC radio.

Rimmer said that on hearing about his former pupil's arrest he was angry both with him and "the nutters who put these silly ideas in his head".

He said: "He's got wonderful parents, he comes from a lovely family, he's got lots of friends, he had everything going for him. He's a fine-looking lad, very bright. I expected great things from him and he's thrown all this away. His parents will be absolutely devastated. He should have thought about this."

According to a series of reports, after attending UCL, which has confirmed that a student of the same name studied mechanical engineering between 2005 and 2008, Abdulmutallab moved on to Egypt and Dubai, from where he severed ties with a family that was becoming increasingly concerned by his views. He also reportedly told US investigators that he was trained by al-Qaida in Yemen before the alleged attack.

Nigeria's government said today that Abdulmutallab had been living outside the country "for a while" and only returned on Thursday, shortly before he left again on his way to Detroit.

This Day quoted unnamed members of Abdulmutallab's family as saying his father was so concerned at the young man's views that six months ago he reported his fears to both the US embassy in Abuja and Nigerian security agencies. Umaru Mutallab, who began his working career as an accountant with Fuller Jenks Beecroft and Co in London in the 1960s and also served as a minister in the Nigerian government for a time, said he was "really disturbed" to learn his son had been arrested and was talking to Nigerian officials about their investigations.

The newspaper spoke to another unnamed relative who said the family had become concerned in recent years that Abdulmutallab was involved with Boko Haram, a militant Islamist group also known as the Nigerian Taliban, which seeks to impose sharia law across the country. Hundreds of people were killed when security forces tried to crack down on the group in July this year.

"We know Farouk's extreme views and were always apprehensive of where it may lead him to," the relative said. "He has maintained his distance from us and we never bothered him much. He wanted to be left alone so we respect his wishes."

Any warnings were not, it seems, relayed to the UK. Abdulmutallab tried to return to Britain as a student in May this year and was refused entry, but only because UK Border Agency officials considered the educational institution he applied for to be bogus. His name, or the name he gave, did not appear on MI5 or counter-terrorist radar screens, according to officials.

MI5 is continuing to trawl its databases to see if there is any trace of Abdulmutallab's movements in Britain and communications he had with friends or associates here. The agency's officers have not immediately found any links, the Guardian understands. Counter-terrorist officers said one of the problems was that he may not have used that name either in documents or in conversations. They are looking for what one official called "fragments of information".

MI5 has devoted extra resources to the case to find out as much as they can about the young Nigerian, and are particularly keen to uncover information in two main areas: Abdulmutallab's relations with al-Qaida, if any, and how he managed to avoid security checks before boarding the plane. "The question is, to what extent is he linked to al-Qaida. He says he is but the term can cover a very broad spectrum," said a Whitehall official.

It is not unknown for people from privileged backgrounds to become involved with al-Qaida, for example with Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman Zawahiri. However, it seems that Abdulmutallab had no direct links with the al-Qaida core leadership based on the Afghan-Pakistan border, where most of Britain's suicide bombers or convicted terrorists trained.

Abdulmutallab's actions were condemned by Nigeria's government, which has ordered an investigation into the incident. A spokesman for the senate, Ayogu Eze, called it a "strange act of terrorism".

"We are at a loss as to where he got this strange habit, because Nigeria abhors terrorism in all its ramifications," he said.

Nigeria's civil aviation authority said yesterday that Abdulmutallab bought his ticket at the KLM office in Accra, Ghana, just over a week before he travelled and paid the $2,831 (£1,775) fare in cash.

Religious leaders across faiths also added strong criticism. Muslims constitute about half of Nigeria's 155 million people, with Christians slightly fewer. In recent years thousands of people have been killed in Muslim-Christian violence.

One of the most prominent incidents occurred in Abdulmutallab's home state, where a woman was sentenced to death by stoning for alleged adultery in 2002. The decision – which was later overturned – caused several Miss World contestants to withdraw from the beauty pageant, which was being held in Nigeria the same year.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/dec/27...ane-bomber

[Peter Lemkin]

It's not been reported yet, but I was watching the Dutch news conference and a Dutch official (not sure if he was govt or airport) stated, in answer to a question, that Mutallab was travelling on an Italian passport.

An Italian passport? For a Nigerian who'd spent several years at university in England?

The Dutch officials were also adamant that they don't have access to "global terror no-fly lists", and that the lists that do exist are partial rather than global or universal. In short, there is no global no-fly list.

The Dutch officials stated that several areas of security which are being criticized as too "lax" were so precisely because of either American or EU pressure.

Obama's comments about "totally unacceptable... systemic failure" reveal that Mutallab was definitely known to American intelligence.

"When our government has information on a known extremist and that information is not shared and acted upon as it should have been, so that this extremist boards a plane with dangerous explosives that could cost nearly 300 lives, a systemic failure has occurred and I consider that totally unacceptable," Obama said.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/dec...roit-plane

Mutallab was being tracked or perhaps even run by intelligence agents - almost certainly British as well as American given that he was head of University College London's Islamic association.

So, it's boiling down to either fuck up or false flag. :evil:

I vote false-flag. But on the 'up' side I see great potential to recover from my very recent loss of job at my university [apparently for my political views by the new Chancellor who supported Bush - even with large contributions] by selling a fashion line of 'bomber briefs'.....

[Ed Jewett]

... I see great potential to recover from my very recent loss of job at my university [apparently for my political views by the new Chancellor who supported Bush - even with large contributions] by selling a fashion line of 'bomber briefs'.....

There may be a DARPA fund that will help you. Design it with two pouches, each with its own chemical bag, that can mix and flow at the pull of a string. The detonator can be built into the elastics. I bet the marketplace will go ..... nuts.