osama bin laden

Ahmed al Darbi, the brother-in-law of one of the 9/11 hijackers, supposedly plotted a never-realized 2001-2002 attack on an unnamed ship in the Strait of Hormuz. He also allegedly met Osama bin Laden and trained at an al-Qaeda camp. And he’s been imprisoned by the U.S. military since 2003 waiting to be tried on [...]

Last month, a federal court judge ordered the Defense Department to release a 47-year-old father of two with a heart condition who the court ruled had been imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay for the past seven years without justification.
On Monday, the Obama administration said it plans to appeal the judge’s ruling.
Back in August, I noted that [...]

Following on the heels of Osama bin Laden’s latest diatribe, counterterrorism analyst Evan Kohlmann flags a new message from another al-Qaeda figure — this one apparently an American — that’s just straight racist:
Now, the GIMF has released a new document written by Ben Williams, titled, “Obama, What’s Up?” During his essay, Ben Williams referred to [...]

The NEFA Foundation has a translation of the new Osama bin Laden tape. bin Laden’s message might even be considered cynical in light of how he keeps going back to the radical-Salafist well, particularly on the role of Israel in al-Qaeda’s imagination. (”First, I say: we have shown and declared many times over more than [...]

Osama bin Laden just released a new diatribe, available for download here if you’re interested, and it apparently hits the notes you’d expect: endless war if the United States continues the fight in Afghanistan; President Obama is no different than George W. Bush; “neo-conservatives and the Israel Lobby” control the United States through their iniquity, [...]

Late last week, in a decision that got some attention over the weekend, U.S. District Court Judge Ricardo Urbina ruled that a Pakistani man who has been held at the Guantanamo Bay prison since 2004 has the right to submit written questions to self-described 9/11 mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. After all, the government’s case rests [...]

On Monday a federal court judge ordered the Department of Defense to release a 47-year-old father of two with a heart condition who it has imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay for the past seven years without justification.

Blink and you’ll miss this, from National Security Adviser Jim Jones’ “Meet The Press” appearance yesterday:
MR. GREGORY:  Is it still your belief that Osama bin Laden is in Pakistan?
GEN.  JONES:  That one’s a little bit more elusive.  We are still very much on the hunt.  We think that he’s still in that general region.  But [...]

Mike Scheuer’s Google Alerts must be going crazy after his Glenn Beck appearance, because he left this message in the comment thread on my earlier post:
Spencer, What I tried to say on FOX last night is what I said in my last two books. I believe that our governing elite has a single foreign policy [...]

I have a lot of respect for Michael Scheuer. Scheuer, the first leader of the CIA’s Usama Bin Laden Unit (with the old-school spelling) in the 1990s, knows a lot about al-Qaeda, and in two books after 9/11 he proposed, simply, listening to what al-Qaeda leaders were saying as a guide to informing strategy. When [...]