The Allmendinger Chronicles

PESHAWAR: Pakistan’s Taliban have threatened to avenge the death of their leader in a US missile strike, as experts warned Wednesday of possible attacks by a new leadership keen to prove its strength.

Hakimullah Mehsud late Tuesday declared himself new chief of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) militia, confirming for the first time that Baitullah Mehsud was killed this month.

‘We will take revenge and soon. We will give our reply to this drone attack to America,’ Hakimullah Mehsud told AFP.

On Wednesday another Taliban leader, Wali-ur Rehman, backed Hakimullah’s claim and said he had been appointed rebel chief in the insurgent stronghold of South Waziristan.

‘Myself and the whole of the Taliban movement announced its support for Hakimullah. He is now our new head,’ said Rehman.

‘All the Taliban are united. There are no differences among us… We will continue our struggle against the enemy and our main enemy is America and all those who support, help and side with America against Muslims.’—AFP

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SEATTLE – Two men arrested Friday night during a bizarre shooting spree along Interstate 5 in North Seattle may have been planning to fire at vehicles driving up and down the freeway, police said Sunday.

“One theory is that maybe they were going to snipe at people as they were driving by on I-5,” Seattle Police Department spokeswoman Renee Witt told KOMO News.

Investigators also found a hidden campsite the suspects had built in a wooded area near North Seattle Community College, Witt said.

Trash and debris litters the remnants of the suspect’s campsite.

She said the positioning of the camp also lends credence to the idea that the suspects planned a sniper attack on the freeway.

But she cautioned that it is just a theory at this point. “We don’t know,” she said. “One good thing is they’re both in custody,” she added.

Both suspects are being held in the King County Jail following the Friday night shooting spree only yards from Interstate 5 near North Seattle Community College.

One of the suspects was found with an AK-47 assault rifle and multiple rounds of ammunition, police said.

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Aug 7, 2009

If Baitullah Mehsud, the Pakistani Taliban’s most dangerous and powerful leader, was indeed killed by a U.S. Predator drone strike earlier this week, the biggest loser of all may be Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda. For the past eight years, the group had depended on Mehsud, his close allies, and other sympathetic tribals to protect it in South Waziristan after its previous host, Mullah Mohammed Omar, was chased from Afghanistan by American bombs in late 2001. With Mehsud gone, Al Qaeda could be in trouble. “Mehsud’s death means the tent sheltering Al Qaeda has collapsed,” an Afghan Taliban intelligence officer who had met Mehsud many times tells NEWSWEEK. “Without a doubt he was Al Qaeda’s No. 1 guy in Pakistan,” adds Mahmood Shah, a retired Pakistani Army brigadier and a former chief of the Federally Administered Tribal Area, or FATA, Mehsud’s base.

Mehsud, whom Shah describes as being a short, slightly overweight Type-A diabetic in his late 30s, proved to be an even better host for Al Qaeda than Omar. When Omar was clearly controlling the Taliban before September 11, 2001, he was believed to have been surprised by bin Laden’s attack on New York and Washington. Mehsud, by contrast, didn’t just let bin Laden operate in his domain; he cultivated a symbiotic relationship with Al Qaeda. Bin Laden provided Mehsud and his allies with funds, Al Qaeda’s operational planners, and ideological and military experts (some of them veterans of the first Iraq War). Bin Laden’s operatives quickly became key players in Mehsud’s deadly insurgent operation on both sides of the border. In Afghanistan, they furnished fighters and suicide bombers to attack U.S., NATO, and Afghan troops. In Pakistan, gunmen and suicide bombers were sent to hit Pakistani security forces, military, police, and civilian targets. Mehsud got so caught up in Al Qaeda’s rhetoric that the normally quiet commander threatened in a statement last March, which few took seriously, to extend his operations to include “an attack in Washington that would amaze everyone.”

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Wednesday, August 12, 2009

AP

Ehsanul Islam Sadequee poses in front of the U.S. Capitol in a video recorded by his friend, a convicted terrorist, during their 2005 trip to Washington.

A jury found a 23-year-old man guilty Wednesday of aiding terrorist groups and sending tapes of U.S. landmarks abroad.

Ehsanul Islam Sadequee, who represented himself during his trial on charges of supporting overseas terrorists by using a video camera to scout national landmarks for terror attacks told jurors Tuesday that he never helped terrorists and said comments he made in jihadist online forums were harmless chatter.

Sadequee said during closing arguments that video shot during a trip with a friend to Washington was “amateurish and useless.”

“We were immature young guys who had imaginations running wild,” said Ehsanul Islam Sadequee, who faces up to 60 years in prison. “But I was not then, and am not now, a terrorist.”

After listening to six days of testimony, the jury of nine men and three women spent three hours deliberating Tuesday afternoon but did not reach a verdict.

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WASHINGTON: Pakistan’s nuclear facilities have already been attacked at least thrice by its home-grown extremists and terrorists in little reported incidents over the last two years, even as the world remains divided over the safety and security of the nuclear weapons in the troubled country, according to western analysts.

The incidents, tracked by Shaun Gregory, a professor at Bradford University in UK, include an attack on the nuclear missile storage facility at Sargodha on November 1, 2007, an attack on Pakistan’s nuclear airbase at Kamra by a suicide bomber on December 10, 2007, and perhaps most significantly the August 20, 2008 attack when Pakistani Taliban suicide bombers blew up several entry points to one of the armament complexes at the Wah cantonment, considered one of Pakistan’s main nuclear weapons assembly.

These attacks have occurred even as Pakistan has taken several steps to secure and fortify its nuclear weapons against potential attacks, particularly by the United States and India, says Gregory.

In fact, the attacks have received so little attention that Peter Bergen, the eminent terrorism expert who reviewed Gregory’s paper first published in West Point’s Counter Terrorism Center Sentinel, said “he (Gregory) points out something that was news to me (and shouldn’t have been) which is that a series of attacks on Pakistan’s nuclear weapons facilities have already happened.”

Pakistan insists that its nuclear weapons are fully secured and there is no chance of them falling into the hands of the extremists or terrorists.

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