Al Qaeda Running Short On Cash Support

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A recession-driven income slide? Or a brand in terminal decline? Whatever the origin of its money worries, al-Qaida’s latest appeal for funds reveals a group struggling with a fall in donations for its attacks on the West.

In an audio message posted in militant web forums on June 10, 2009, the group’s leader in Afghanistan Mustafa Abu al-Yazid said militants were short of food, weapons and other supplies needed to fight foreign forces there.

The complaint, the latest appeal by Qaeda leaders in the past 18 months, echoes a June 3 request from Osama bin Laden for supporters’ “charity and support” for the militant network’s operations in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

So little is known about current al-Qaida operations that analysts can only speculate about the reasons for the troubles in its fund-raising, which provided an estimated annual budget of $30 million at the time of the 2001 attacks on U.S. targets.

But most agree it is a combination of tighter curbs on charities in the Arab world, a drop in lucrative al-Qaida kidnapping and extortion campaigns in Iraq and the wallet-thinning effect of recession on donors and sympathizers.

Some speculate it also shows a drop in ideological support.

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CIA Chief Says bin Laden in Pakistan

CIA Director Leon Panetta said on Thursday the U.S. intelligence agency believes al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden is hiding in Pakistan and hopes joint operations with Pakistani forces will find him.

Asked whether he was sure that bin Laden was in Pakistan, Panetta told reporters: “The last information we had, that’s still the case.”

Bin Laden, who has eluded a U.S. manhunt since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, has issued audio and videotapes over the years demonstrating that he is still alive.

Finding bin Laden is “one of our major priorities,” Panetta said. “One of our hopes is that the Pakistanis move in militarily, combined with our operations, we may be able to have a better chance” to find the al Qaeda leader, he said.

Panetta said al Qaeda “remains the most serious security threat” to the United States and its leaders, particularly in Pakistan, continue to plot against America.

There are “a number of people” on the ground in Pakistan providing intelligence on al Qaeda targets to the United States, he said.

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Bin Laden Warns Americans To Be Prepared For Consequences

Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden warned Americans “to be prepared to receive the consequences of the Obama and Bush administrations.” In a new recorded audiotape aired by Arabic Al Jazeera TV Wednesday, June 3 – as Saudi king Abdullah greeted US president Barack Obama on his arrival in Riyadh – bin Laden said Obama had planted the seeds for “revenge and hatred” toward the United States in the Muslim world.

The warning was issued the day before the US president was to deliver a speech to Muslims from Cairo.

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Pakistan to Attack Taliban in Bin Laden’s Lair

Pakistan is to extend its war on the Taliban beyond Swat into the fiercely independent tribal areas bordering Afghanistan where Usama Bin Laden and the Al Qaeda leadership are believed to be hiding.

“We’re going to go into Waziristan, all these regions, with army operations,” President Asif Ali Zardari told The Sunday Times in an interview. “Swat is just the start. It’s a larger war to fight.”

He said Pakistan would need billions of pounds in military assistance and aid for up to 1.7m refugees, the biggest movement of people since the country’s split from India in 1947.

To help take on the militants, the Pakistan army is for the first time to accept counterinsurgency training from British and American troops on its own soil.

“We need to develop our capability and we need much more support,” said Zardari. “We need much, much more than the $1 billion [military aid] we’ve been getting, which is nothing. We’ve got 150,000 troops in [the tribal areas] — just the movement of that number would cost $1 billion.”

Pakistan’s army is geared towards conventional warfare against its old enemy India. There have long been concerns in Whitehall and Washington at its ineffectiveness and lack of commitment against militants.

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U.S. Believes Bin Laden Still Alive

The U.S. strongly believes al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden is still alive, a U.S. counterterrorism official said.

The U.S. view contradicts Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari’s comments today that his country’s intelligence agencies think the terrorist leader is dead.

The U.S. official wouldn’t speculate as to why Zardari made his statements today. Zardari also said that the intelligence agencies didn’t have evidence of bin Laden’s death, according to the state-run Associated Press of Pakistan.

via Source

Osama bin Laden Plotting New Attacks

Osama bin Laden and the core al-Qaida leadership are plotting new attacks against the United States and its allies from safe havens
in Pakistan, a senior US official warned Thursday.

Officials have said President Barack Obama’s new Afghan-Pakistan strategy will focus on destroying safe havens for terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Read more

Report: al Qaeda Recruiting In Uk At Street Level

The al Qaeda terror network is able to “directly recruit British muslims at street level in the UK”, according to a ground-breaking new report by the UK’s premier anti-extremism think-tank.

The research paper produced by the Quilliam Foundation, just published in the US military journal, The Sentinel, says the success of attacks such as 7/7, compared with the failed bombings at Glasgow Airport and London’s West End, is proof of the “direct assistance” from senior al-Qaeda members to British homegrown terrorist, without which “few of these attacks would have ever been viable”.

Author James Brandon also rejects the consensus that al-Qaeda has adopted a strategy of “leaderless jihad”, recruiting and mobilizing followers purely through the internet. While counter-terrorism initiatives introduced since 9/11 have driven the movement underground, Brandon claims the evidence suggests al-Qaeda “continues to operate through a traditional hierarchical structure based on face-to-face contact” and is able to recruit directly in Britain.

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The report compiles evidence based on recent criminal trials to show how most of the major and successful terrorist plots in the post-9/11 era have had direct ties to high level al-Qaeda figures in the Afghanistan and Pakistan border region, calling into question the idea of terrorist self-starters’.

Brandon told the Sunday Herald: “People aren’t radicalised just by watching news about Iraq or Afghanistan or Gaza. It’s a much more complex process than that. And the key thing to understand is that there are actually people out deliberately trying to radicalise other people – people aren’t just self-radicalising. And once you understand that then it’s slightly easier to deal with, because if you can simply tackle the people involved in the radicalisation then the problem to an extent goes away.”

Terror expert David Capitanchik, formerly of Aberdeen university international relations department, said: “Unlike the IRA, which was one organisation and quite easy to infiltrate, it’s difficult to infiltrate al-Qaeda as the groups are very small.”

But professor Alex Schmid, director of St Andrews university’s centre for terrorism studies, criticised Brandon for drawing definitive conclusions from a “nebulous jihadi landscape”. He said: “I have been talking to people with access to classified intelligence and they have given me diametrically opposed accounts regarding the degree of control of core al-Qaeda on plots beyond Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Middle East.”

via Report Claims Alqaeda Can Recruit In Uk At Street Level (from Sunday Herald).

U.S. Zeros In On Chitral Pakistan In Hunt For bin Laden

Where’s Osama? Try Chitral, once a trekkers’ paradise in Pakistan that has been sealed off to outsiders and is now regularly buzzed by American spy drones.

The U.S. won’t say it officially, but an exhaustive Daily News investigation finds the world’s biggest manhunt for the monster who murdered nearly 3,000 people on 9/11 has zeroed in on Chitral’s stunning peaks and deep valleys.

Six U.S. and foreign officials confirmed to The News that northwestern Pakistan’s impenetrable Hindu Kush mountains – which boast some of the world’s tallest climbs – in the Chitral region have been eyed as Bin Laden’s hideout since 2006 by Osama hunters aiming for the big kill.

A lengthy review of evidence, including recent Predator fly-bys, Bin Laden’s tapes since 9/11 and interviews with three dozen experts on Al Qaeda, Pakistan and special operations, point to these vast mountains as the terror chief’s most likely haven.

Captured Al Qaeda leaders have given up as his hideout. “Debriefings of Al Qaeda leaders arrested confirmed this,” said Rohan Gunaratna, author of “Inside Al Qaeda.”

Two senior foreign officials said the nearby town of Kalam also is suspect.

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Where Is Bin Laden – Science May Hold The Answer

Fugitive terrorist Osama bin Laden is most likely hiding out in a walled compound in a Pakistani border town, according to a satellite-aided geographic analysis released today.

A research team led by geographer Thomas Gillespie of the University of California-Los Angeles used geographic analytical tools that have been successful in locating urban criminals and endangered species.

Basing their conclusion on nighttime satellite images and other techniques, the scientists suggest bin Laden may well be in one of three compounds in Parachinar, a town 12 miles from the Pakistan border. The research incorporates public reports of bin Laden’s habits and whereabouts since his flight from the Tora Bora region of Afghanistan in 2001.

The results, reported in the MIT International Review, are being greeted with polite but skeptical interest among people involved in the hunt for bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader behind 9/11. Bin Laden’s whereabouts are considered “one of the most important political questions of our time,” the study notes.

“I’ve never really believed the sitting-in-a-cave theory. That’s the last place you would want to be bottled up,” Gillespie says. The study’s real value, he says, is in combining satellite records of geographic locations, patterns of nighttime electricity use and population-detection methods to produce a technique for locating fugitives.

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Watch Out for Al Qaeda

We’re bombarded with bad news the credit markets could freeze, millions more could lose their jobs, and today’s recession could turn into a depression. But the danger we aren’t hearing about could outweigh them all: the increased risk of a catastrophic terrorist attack.

A careful study of Osama bin Laden’s videos, letters and Internet statements makes clear that Al Qaeda’s goal is more than to terrorize Americans or to drive us out of the Middle East. Bin Laden believes that Al Qaeda can bring about the economic collapse of the United States and to achieve this goal, he has adopted a strategy of targeting America’s financial centers and economic infrastructure.

Bin Laden cites the 9/11 attacks as proof that this strategy can succeed. In a November 2004 videotape broadcast on Al Jazeera, he boasted that Al Qaeda spent $500,000 on the event, while America lost, “according to the lowest estimate, $500 billion … meaning that every dollar of Al Qaeda defeated a million dollars [of America] … besides the loss of a huge number of jobs.”

“America is a superpower, with enormous military strength and vast economic power,” he concluded, “but all this is built on foundations of straw. So it is possible to target those foundations and focus on their weakest points, which, even if you strike only one-tenth of them, then the whole edifice will totter and sway.”

[...]

Al Qaeda’s failure to strike America after seven years creates pressure on the terrorists to act. The lack of another catastrophic attack on the United States, combined with the massive defeat terrorists have suffered in Iraq, sends a message to the Muslim world that Al Qaeda is losing its war with America. The terrorists need to pull off something spectacular to prove that they are still a force and a threat. Al Qaeda’s growing desperation to strike America, and our perceived growing vulnerability, are a dangerous combination.

[...]

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Gaddafi Urges Obama To Open Dialogue With Bin Laden and Taliban

While I don’t believe there is even a remote chance of this happening, it nonetheless amazes me that there is a segment of the population that would actually be in favor of such dialogue.
——-
Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi has advised President Barack Obama to give Osama bin Laden a chance to reform, telling the new president America’s most wanted man was looking for “dialogue.” Read more

Osama Bin Laden Releases New Audio Message

Osama bin Laden says in a new audio message that Israel attacked Gaza because of the “great and swift decline in America’s influence,” CBS News reports.

“Israelis are in a rush to get rid of their enemies in Gaza, and replace them with [Palestinian President Mahmoud] Abbas and his administration, in order for him to protect their backs,” the network quotes bin Laden as saying. “They thus carried out this horrific butchery before the end of Bush’s term in office before the American weakness shows even more.”

Bin Laden, the head of al-Qaeda, has been in hiding since the United States invaded Afghanistan in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. The network says it downloaded the unauthenticated 22-minute-long message from an Islamist website.

The Associated Press says bin Laden criticized governments in the region for keeping Arabs from fighting to “liberate Palestine.”

“There is only one strong way to bring the return of Al-Aqsa and Palestine, and that is jihad in the path of God,” the terrorist leader says, according to AP. “The duty is to urge people to jihad and to enlist the youth into jihad brigades.”

“Muslim nation, you are capable of defeating the Zionist entity with your popular capabilities and your great hidden strength — without the support of [Arab] leaders and despite the fact that most of [the leaders] stand in the barracks of the Crusader-Zionist alliance,” he says.

via Source – USATODAY.com.

Debka Report – G20 Conference Briefed On Possible al Qaeda Terror Attack Plan

An Israeli intelligence site claimed Sunday that “US president-elect Barack Obama, European and Russian heads of states in Washington G20 conference were briefed over the weekend about a probable early al Qaeda attack.”

Isreali intelligence news site, “Debka”, also claimed that “Obama and his team have been advised that a new al Qaeda strike is highly probable in the United States or against a key US target in Europe, North Africa or the Middle East.” Read more

Bin Laden Alive, Hiding and Worried About Own Security

Osama bin Laden is alive and hiding in Pakistan, said CIA chief Michael Hayden today, though the terrorism leader has little oversight of the al Qaeda daily operations.

“American and its friends have taken the fight to the enemy,” Gen. Hayden said in a broad roundup of efforts to fight al Qaeda.

“Al Qaeda has suffered serious setbacks, but it is a determined, adaptive enemy unlike any our nation has ever faced,” he said.

Without directly referring to the CIA’s offensive blitz of unmanned missile attacks in the tribal areas of Pakistan, the CIA boss said the US had successfully isolated the al Qaeda leader bin Laden, referring to him in the present tense.

“He appears to be largely isolated from the day-to-day operations of the organization he leads,” Hayden said in a speech delivered to the Atlantic Council in Washington.

Hayden said the failure to kill or capture bin Laden in the seven years since the 9/11 attacks, could be explained by the “rugged and inaccessible” terrain of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border area and “the fact that bin Laden has worked to avoid detection.”

The CIA director provided no other details but it was the first public indication of the intelligence agency’s growing effort to narrow the focus of the search for bin Laden and other top terror leaders.

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