by Barry Rubin
How do we know that the attack at Fort Hood was an act of Islamist terrorism? Simple, Major Nidal Hassan told us so. You've seen reports of a long list of things he did and said along these lines. But what's most amazing of all is this:
Hassan is the first terrorist in history to give an academic lecture[1] explaining why he was about to attack. Yet that still isn't enough for too many people — including the president of the United States — to understand that the murderous assault at Fort Hood was a Jihad attack.
It was reported that the audience was shocked and frightened by his lecture. He was supposed to speak on some medical topic yet instead talked on the topic: "The Koranic World View as it Relates to Muslims in the U.S. Military." All you have to do is look at the 50 Power Point slides[1] and they tell you everything you need to know.
It is quite a good talk. He's logical and presents his evidence. This is clearly not the work of a mad man or a fool, though there's still a note of ambiguity in it. He's still working out what to do in his own mind and is trying to figure out if he has a way out other than in effect deserting the U.S. army and becoming a Jihad warrior. Ultimately, he concluded that he could not be a proper Muslim without killing American soldiers. Obviously, other Muslims could reach different conclusions but Hassan strongly grounds himself in Islamic texts.
In a sense, Hassan's lecture was a cry for help: Can anyone show me another way out? Can anyone refute my interpretation of Islam? One Muslim in the audience reportedly tried to do so. But unless these issues are openly discussed and debated — rather than swept under the rug — more people will die.
In fact, I'd recommend that teachers use this lecture in teaching classes on both Islam and Islamist politics. .
Follow along with me and you'll understand everything.
Hassan deals with three topics: What Islam teaches Muslims, how Muslims view the wars in Afghanistan and Iran, how this might affect Muslims in the U.S. military. [Slide 2] Hassan defines Jihad, showing how silly are the claims that it only means a personal struggle to behave better. It also signifies holy war, of course. [Slide 5].
Now here's Hassan's central theme. Muslims cannot fight in an infidel army against other Muslims. And Hassan himself says that it's getting hard for Muslims in the U.S. military to justify doing so. [Slide 11] Obviously, Hassan was deciding that he couldn't do so.
He then quotes the Koran extensively to prove the point. Allah will punish anyone who kills a Muslim [Slide 12]. Hassan then gives four examples of Muslim soldiers who broke under the strain. One who killed fellow American soldiers (which Hassan would himself do), one accused of espionage (but was acquitted), one who deserted, and one who refused deployment to Iraq. [Slide 13]
Quoting the Koran, Hassan next provides a number of quotations to show that the believer must obey Allah. If they do, they will enjoy great delights (though he left out the 72 virgins, there's one quote hinting at pederasty), and if they don't they will suffer torments of Hell.
Finally, he gets into the heavy stuff. Hassan introduces the concept of "defensive Jihad" which is a core element in radical Islamist thinking and has especially been promoted by Usama bin Ladin and al-Qaida. [Slides 37-39]. If others attack and oppress Muslims, then it is the duty of all Muslims to fight them. September 11 was justified by its perpetrators by saying that the United States had attacked Muslims and therefore it was mandatory to kill Americans in return.
And here is the crux of the matter: Verse 60:08, "Allah forbids you...from dealing kindly and justly" with those who fight Muslims." [Slide 40]
If Nidal Hassan believed this and would follow it, he must — to be a proper Muslim in his eyes — pick up a gun and join the Jihad, Muslim side. He was not shooting Americans because he caught battle fatigue from American soldiers he treated. Think about it. To have done so, Hassan would have had to sympathize with them, thinking about what it would be like for him if he'd been fighting...Muslims in Iraq or Afghanistan. But that was precisely his problem. He sympathized with the other side.
Being ordered to ship out to one of these countries, Hassan now had to decide: which side are you on? Would he choose the side of Allah and the Muslims, to be rewarded in Heaven? Or would he join with the infidels, to be punished with Hell and to betray his religion? He made his decision.
It is interesting that no Muslim debate has developed over a very simple issue: What if two groups of Muslims are fighting, cannot one side with one group, even if it has non-Muslim allies? After all, Americans are not going to Iraq or Afghanistan simply to "kill Muslims" but to defend Muslims from being killed. The Saudis, Kuwaitis, and Egyptians had no problem with using Western troops to save them from Saddam Hussein's Iraq in 1991, for example. The Iraqi and Afghan governments, made up of pious Muslims, do the same thing.
Arab nationalists who are Muslims can take this position more easily. But for Islamists the problem is not some abstraction but knowledge that they are fighting a battle to seize control of all Muslim-majority states and indeed perhaps of the entire world.
The true problem, then, is not that some Muslims help infidels kill Muslims, but that some Muslims help infidels kill Islamists. But Hassan never considered this point, which could be quite persuasive to other Muslims in Western militaries.
So, in his thinking, how might Hassan have escaped from that stark choice? Hassan answers that question. Quoting the Koran, he indicated that if the Americans ended the wars, then that would be okay and no killing would be necessary. [Slide 42]
Another alternative is if the Americans accepted Islam or agreed to become subservient to Muslim rulers (dhimmis) and paid a special tax [Slide 43-44].
The third alternative would be if the Muslim Messiah came, destroyed Christianity as a false religion and set off the post-history utopia. [Slide 45]. He didn't mention another part of this description, which was the murder of all Jews.
A digression is appropriate here. Hassan, although a Palestinian, has never been quoted as attacking Israel or the Jews. This is one more reminder that this struggle isn't all just about Israel. But it also tells something important about Hassan which also applies to many Muslim radicals in Europe. Hassan is an American. As such he has no other nationality, neither Palestinian nor Arab. He doesn't support Hamas or Fatah. But he has a religion that directs his thinking. That's why he is an Islamist and why he supports a generalized Islamist revolutionary movement, al-Qaida.
As one moderate Muslim from Canada pointed out, the clothes he wore the day before committing his Jihad attack was not (as some sources put it in a silly manner) some martyr or even Arab garb but the clothing of Pakistan and Afghanistan. He is an al-Qaida Jihadi, having changed sides in the War on Terror.
Hassan was no fool or blind fanatic. Indeed, he presents a sophisticated view. For example, he quotes contradictory Quranic verses, one suggesting that all religions can enter Heaven; another that all non-Muslims will go to Hell [Slide 47].
His conclusion takes on tremendous significance in light of what would happen at Fort Hood. He writes:
"If Muslim groups can convince Muslims that they are fighting for God against injustices of the 'infidels'; i.e., the enemies of Islam, then Muslims can become a potent adversary ie: suicide bombing, etc."
And of course, these groups did so convince Hassan. [Slide 48]
Why? Hassan tells us:
"God expects full loyalty. Promises heaven and threatens with Hell. Muslims may seem moderate (compromising) but God is not." [Slide 49]
And at the very end, he proposes what might have been his own escape route:
"Recommendation: Department of Defense should allow Muslim soldiers the option of being released as 'Conscientious objectors' to increase troop morale and decrease adverse events." [Slide 50]
If that had existed for Hassan, I think, he would not have killed people. This proposal is worth debating, though it has negative implications too, of course. But then he had other options. He could have resigned his commission, deserted, or refused deployment as a conscientious objector and gone to prison. In fact, Hassan himself cited individuals who had done the last two.
Consequently, Hassan's lecture also tells us why Muslims can choose not to be Jihadists, though this requires ignoring or rationalizing clear, religiously binding commandments in their religion or by being basically secular people of Muslim background. This is the kind of solution found in Christianity and Judaism, of course.
Hassan was too pious and consistent to take this way out. The answer to his personal behavior must be found in a mix of psychological factors and political-religious beliefs. The fact is, however, that he clearly did see himself as a Jihad warrior in the end. The existence of psycological factors in no way negates the importance of religious considerations.
All terrorists have some psychological forces working to make them follow such a path. Yet if not for ideological — and in the case of Islamists, religious — beliefs they never would have become terrorists. In contrast, criminals have psychological factors plus material goals, while mentally ill people who commit crimes are compelled by purely psychogical factors. Hassan does not fit either of those two categories.
Equally, his action cannot be attributed to a "misreading" or "heretical" interpretation of Islam. To read this lecture is to understand how carefully and self-critically he approached the issues. Anything so obviously false or deviant from mainstream Islam would simply not appeal to so many Muslims. Hassan was looking for a way out in the texts and listed the "loopholes" he did find: either the United States must not fight anyone who was a Muslim or it must let him out of the military.
What Hassan neglected was an explanation that lay outside what his strict reading of the Muslim texts would allow him to say: the United States must fight, in general, because the Islamists have been the aggressors. And the United States is actually fighting as allies with one group of (more moderate) Muslims against another (of radical Islamists). Yet the texts always deal with the Muslim community as a united whole (the umma), an interpretation that just doesn't correspond with reality. Indeed and ironically, this view enables Islamists to themselves kill thousands of Muslims all over the world!
The fact that Hassan's lecture has not been the centerpiece of the whole post-massacre debate is a true example of how impoverished are the "experts," journalists, and politicians at dealing with these issues. Of course, without exploring the Islamic factor, they're wasting everyone's time. They're also going to be wasting quite a few lives.
Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal.
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
Middle East and Terrorism.com
Showing posts with label Ft. Hood. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ft. Hood. Show all posts
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Friday, January 22, 2010
Useless Fort Hood Leaves Americans Unprotected
Townhall.com
by Diana West
Do you believe in 'radical Islam'?" the famous Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders once asked me.
The occasion was a banquet last summer at the Reagan Library outside of Los Angeles where later that evening Wilders would receive a Hero of Conscience award from the American Freedom Alliance. I would have the honor of introducing him. "What did you say?" I could barely hear him over the speaker at the podium elaborating on the perils of, yes, "radical Islam."
"'Radical Islam,'" he repeated. "Do you think there is 'radical Islam,' or only 'Islam'"? Me, I'm an "only Islam" kind of gal, as I told him. Who am I to argue with Muslims ranging from terror-cleric Abu Qatada to Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan? Erdogan is particularly interesting as a democratically elected Islamic leader who eschews all word-modifiers of Islam including "moderate," the adjective the media often applies to his AKP political party. "These descriptions are very ugly," Erdogan said in 2007. "It is offensive and an insult to our religion. There is no moderate or immoderate Islam. Islam is Islam, and that's it." Erdogan has also bluntly rejected descriptions of Turkey itself as an example of "moderate Islam," saying last April: "It is unacceptable for us to agree with such a definition. Turkey has never been a country to represent such a concept. Moreover, Islam cannot be classified as moderate or not."
I mention this now because after the fireworks over Scott Brown's U.S. Senate victory in Massachusetts have died down, we will have to return to the same, old, equal parts humdrum and deadly wrangle over how to think, talk about and grapple with Islam in what remains a post-9/11 world.
Two related events took place just as the Massachusetts miracle sucked the oxygen from non-election news excepting Haiti coverage. First, the Pentagon report on the Fort Hood massacre came out. It is 86 pages long and doesn't mention the words "Muslim," "Islam," "jihad," "Sharia" (Islamic law), "Koran" -- despite the fact that we know, among other things, that the killer, who initiated his massacre with a cry of "Allahu Akbar," was a Muslim inspired by Islam to perform an act of jihad as sanctioned by Sharia derived from the Koran.
These facts, however, rate official silence. So what else is new? From the Bush years to the present, see-no-Islam denial has turned U.S. government attempts to assess and discuss national security issues into Kabuki gibberish, a perpetual exercise in make-believe that the core doctrines and traditional institutions of Islam -- not "radical Islam," not "Islamism," not other aliases -- pose no threat to the core doctrines and traditional institutions of the non-Islamic Free World. Naturally, mum's the Pentagon word over jihad at Fort Hood. Or, rather, "self-radicalization" is the word. It is mentioned more than a dozen times in the report.
I can't imagine a greater dereliction of duty than this failure of U.S. government leaders to recognize, articulate and defend against what in military parlance is known as the "enemy threat doctrine." But this dereliction, this failure will trigger no investigations or court proceedings on how and why our leaders consistently mask, soft-soap and otherwise fail to assess and repel the existential threat posed by the imposition or accommodation of these same Islamic doctrines.
Talk about irony: Within days of the report's release, one of the few politicians in the world who understands, articulates and fights the imposition and accommodation of these same Islamic doctrines went on trial in the Netherlands for doing exactly that.
I refer again to Geert Wilders, now enmeshed in a Kafkaesque court trial in which the Dutch government is subverting its own democratic institutions -- namely, freedom of speech and the will of the people -- in an effort to shut down Wilders and his political opposition to the Islamization of the Netherlands. The government's case rests on Wilders' increasingly successful efforts to win support for his anti-Islamization program from the Dutch people through speeches, writings and the short film "Fitna" (easily viewable online) -- a body of work that only a tyrannical, Islamically correct government could designate as "evidence" of a crime.
How Dutch government officials must envy America's Sharia-compliant public servants who willingly generate see-no-Islam blather such as the Fort Hood report.
They can have it.
by Diana West
Do you believe in 'radical Islam'?" the famous Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders once asked me.
The occasion was a banquet last summer at the Reagan Library outside of Los Angeles where later that evening Wilders would receive a Hero of Conscience award from the American Freedom Alliance. I would have the honor of introducing him. "What did you say?" I could barely hear him over the speaker at the podium elaborating on the perils of, yes, "radical Islam."
"'Radical Islam,'" he repeated. "Do you think there is 'radical Islam,' or only 'Islam'"? Me, I'm an "only Islam" kind of gal, as I told him. Who am I to argue with Muslims ranging from terror-cleric Abu Qatada to Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan? Erdogan is particularly interesting as a democratically elected Islamic leader who eschews all word-modifiers of Islam including "moderate," the adjective the media often applies to his AKP political party. "These descriptions are very ugly," Erdogan said in 2007. "It is offensive and an insult to our religion. There is no moderate or immoderate Islam. Islam is Islam, and that's it." Erdogan has also bluntly rejected descriptions of Turkey itself as an example of "moderate Islam," saying last April: "It is unacceptable for us to agree with such a definition. Turkey has never been a country to represent such a concept. Moreover, Islam cannot be classified as moderate or not."
I mention this now because after the fireworks over Scott Brown's U.S. Senate victory in Massachusetts have died down, we will have to return to the same, old, equal parts humdrum and deadly wrangle over how to think, talk about and grapple with Islam in what remains a post-9/11 world.
Two related events took place just as the Massachusetts miracle sucked the oxygen from non-election news excepting Haiti coverage. First, the Pentagon report on the Fort Hood massacre came out. It is 86 pages long and doesn't mention the words "Muslim," "Islam," "jihad," "Sharia" (Islamic law), "Koran" -- despite the fact that we know, among other things, that the killer, who initiated his massacre with a cry of "Allahu Akbar," was a Muslim inspired by Islam to perform an act of jihad as sanctioned by Sharia derived from the Koran.
These facts, however, rate official silence. So what else is new? From the Bush years to the present, see-no-Islam denial has turned U.S. government attempts to assess and discuss national security issues into Kabuki gibberish, a perpetual exercise in make-believe that the core doctrines and traditional institutions of Islam -- not "radical Islam," not "Islamism," not other aliases -- pose no threat to the core doctrines and traditional institutions of the non-Islamic Free World. Naturally, mum's the Pentagon word over jihad at Fort Hood. Or, rather, "self-radicalization" is the word. It is mentioned more than a dozen times in the report.
I can't imagine a greater dereliction of duty than this failure of U.S. government leaders to recognize, articulate and defend against what in military parlance is known as the "enemy threat doctrine." But this dereliction, this failure will trigger no investigations or court proceedings on how and why our leaders consistently mask, soft-soap and otherwise fail to assess and repel the existential threat posed by the imposition or accommodation of these same Islamic doctrines.
Talk about irony: Within days of the report's release, one of the few politicians in the world who understands, articulates and fights the imposition and accommodation of these same Islamic doctrines went on trial in the Netherlands for doing exactly that.
I refer again to Geert Wilders, now enmeshed in a Kafkaesque court trial in which the Dutch government is subverting its own democratic institutions -- namely, freedom of speech and the will of the people -- in an effort to shut down Wilders and his political opposition to the Islamization of the Netherlands. The government's case rests on Wilders' increasingly successful efforts to win support for his anti-Islamization program from the Dutch people through speeches, writings and the short film "Fitna" (easily viewable online) -- a body of work that only a tyrannical, Islamically correct government could designate as "evidence" of a crime.
How Dutch government officials must envy America's Sharia-compliant public servants who willingly generate see-no-Islam blather such as the Fort Hood report.
They can have it.
Thursday, January 21, 2010
No mention of Islam in official Fort Hood Report
Protecting the Force, Lessons Learned from Fort Hood
Canada Free PressBy Doug Hagmann Tuesday, January 19, 2010
On 15 January, 2010, the U.S. Military released its 86-page report “Protecting the Force, Lessons Learned from Fort Hood,” an independent review by the Department of Defense of the causes behind the November 5, 2009 massacre by Islamic terrorist insider Nidal Malik HASAN. Thirteen were murdered, plus one unborn child and another 43 were injured.
Omitted from the report was any direct reference to Islam, Islamic terrorism, or the motives of HASAN, which were clearly influenced by his beliefs or interpretation of the Muslim ideology.
These obvious omissions were explained by two of the report’s authors, former Army Secretary Togo West and former Navy’s Admiral, Vernon Clark, who spoke to reporters last week when the report was released. According to the investigators, they didn’t “drill down into HASAN’s motives.” Any person of reason would be compelled to ask why motive was not a factor in this investigation, when it must be considered as one of the primary factors in any normal investigation.
The reason is obvious and became abundantly clear from the minute Barack Hussein Obama addressed the nation on the day of the massacre. To address HASAN’s motives would require a level of honesty about the Islamic ideology this administration is unwilling to discuss: true believers in fundamentalist Islam cannot legitimately serve in our armed forces due to a conflict of ideological interest.
The fact that the authors intentionally omitted any doctrinal based assessment of the killings should be an indictment of not only the authors, but of our current administration. To purposely omit the Islamic motivation that was the sole basis of HASAN’s murderous rampage is not only disingenuous, but traitorous as it places our armed forces at risk for future killings, sabotage, and treason. Therefore, the report is either a clear exhibit of our senior leadership’s knowledge deficit pertaining to the ideology of enemy we are fighting, or illustrates just how deeply entrenched the enemy really is within our military infrastructure and political bodies of policy and oversight.
Doug Hagmann Most recent columns
Copyright © Douglas Hagmann
Douglas Hagmann, founder & director of the Northeast Intelligence Network, and a multi-state licensed private investigative agency. Doug began using his investigative skills and training to fight terrorism and increase public awareness through his website.
Doug can be reached at: director@homelandsecurityus.com
Friday, January 15, 2010
Gates: Report on Fort Hood Shooting Reveals Serious Internal 'Shortcomings'
Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan is seen in this 2007 photo. (AP)Fox News.com
The Pentagon's review of the deadly Fort Hood shooting reveals serious "shortcomings" in the military's ability to stop foreign extremists from trying to use its own soldiers against the United States, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Friday.
The Pentagon's review of the deadly Fort Hood shooting reveals serious "shortcomings" in the military's ability to stop foreign extremists from trying to use its own soldiers against the United States, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Friday.
He said military supervisors are not properly focused on the threat posed by self-radicalization and need to better understand the behavioral warning signs. And he warned that extremists are changing their tactics in an attempt to hit the United States.
"It ... reveals shortcomings in the way the department is prepared to defend against threats posed by external influences operating on members of our military community," he said. "We have not done enough to adapt to the evolving domestic internal security threat to American troops and military facilities."
He said the first responders in the Nov. 5 shooting deserve "recognition" for preventing an "awful situation from becoming even worse," but that the report raises "serious questions" about whether the military is prepared for similar attacks, particularly "multiple, simultaneous incidents."
As many as eight Army officers could face discipline for failing to do anything when the alleged shooter in the rampage at Fort Hood displayed erratic behavior early in his military career, officials confirmed. The behavior included poor performance and extreme religious views.
The report on what went wrong in the case of Army Maj. Nidal Hasan, who is accused in the shootings that killed 13 people at the Army base in Texas on Nov. 5, is expected to be released Friday.Several midlevel officers overlooked or failed to act on red flags in Hasan's lax work habits and fixation on religion, the officials said Thursday. Hasan was an odd duck and a loner who was passed along from office to office and job to job despite professional failings that included missed or failed exams and physical fitness requirements, the review found.
Findings about Hasan and those who supervised him are contained in a confidential addendum to a larger report about the Pentagon's handling of potential extremism in the ranks and readiness to handle the sort of mass casualties Hasan allegedly inflicted.
An official familiar with both documents detailed their findings on condition of anonymity because the larger unclassified report has not yet been released, and the one dealing with Hasan in detail will not be publicly released.
Earlier, another official familiar with the findings said the five to eight officers who could face discipline were supervisors who knew about Hasan's shortcomings and looked the other way or who did not fully reflect concerns about Hasan in professional evaluations.
The officers supervised Hasan when he was a medical student and during his early work as an Army psychiatrist at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington.
Findings about Hasan are limited to a one-page summary in the main report. The report, called "Protecting the Force," concludes that the Defense Department had outdated and ineffective means to identify threats from inside as opposed to outside the military. It also says the department's means of sharing and collating information about a potential troublemaker are inadequate, one official said.
The inquiry also questions whether the Pentagon is fully committed to FBI-run Joint Terrorism Task Forces. The report calls on the Defense Department to fully staff those teams of investigators, analysts, linguists and others so the Pentagon can quickly see information collected across government agencies about potential links between troops and terrorist or extremist groups.
The report found that although the emergency response at Fort Hood was generally good, there are gaps elsewhere and sometimes a failure to link emergency response operations on military installations with those in the surrounding communities.
The findings are the result of two months of work by a panel convened by Gates to look for holes in Pentagon policies and procedures revealed by the Hasan case. The review, which was led by retired Adm. Vernon E. Clark and former Army secretary Togo D. West Jr., did not consider whether the shootings were an act of terrorism and did not delve into allegations that Hasan was in contact with a radical cleric in Yemen. Those questions are part of the separate criminal case against Hasan.
Hasan got passing grades and a promotion in part because disturbing information about his behavior and performance was not recorded by superiors or properly passed to others who might have stepped in, the report found.
As Hasan's training progressed, his strident views on Islam became more pronounced as did worries about his competence as a medical professional. Yet his superiors continued to give him positive performance evaluations that kept him moving through the ranks and led to his eventual assignment at Fort Hood.
Recent statistics show the Army rarely blocks junior officers from promotion, especially in the medical corps.
The report does not answer whether intervention by one of Hasan's superiors might have prevented the shootings, one official said.
Hasan nonetheless earned some good reviews from patients and colleagues. His promotion to major was based on an incomplete personnel file, one official said, but also on performance markers that Hasan had met, if barely.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Thursday, December 24, 2009
Imam Linked to Ft. Hood Rampage Believed Among 30 Al Qaeda Killed in Airstrike
Thursday, December 24, 2009 Fox News
The radical Muslim imam linked to the rampage at Fort Hood is believed to have been killed in a Yemen airstrike that may have also taken out the region's top Al Qaeda leader and 30 other militants, a security official told Reuters on Thursday.
The raid in Yemen's east targeted an Al Qaeda leadership meeting held to organize terror attacks. It is believed to have killed Anwar al-Awlaki and at least two senior members in the organization, including the leader of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
"Awlaki is suspected to be dead [in the air raid]," Reuters quoted an unnamed Yemeni official as saying.
The head of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Nasser al-Wahishi and his deputy, Saeed al-Saudi Shahrani, were present at the meeting and are believed to have died, but their deaths could not immediately be confirmed.
"The raid was carried out as dozens of members of Al Qaeda were meeting in Wadi Rafadh," a source told AFP, referring to a rugged location about 400 miles east of the capital.
"Members of the group's leadership, including Saad al-Fathani and Mohammad Ahmed Saleh al-Omir, were among those killed," he was quoted as saying.
"Saudis and Iranians at the Wadi Rafadh meeting were also among the dead," said the source, without going into detail.
In an interview posted on Al Jazeera's web site, al-Awlaki said he received an email from Maj. Nidal Hasan on Dec. 17, 2008, "asking for an edict regarding the [possibility] of a Muslim soldier [killing] colleagues who serve with him in the American army."
Awlaki, born in the U.S., said subsequent emails "mentioned the religious justifications for targeting the Jews with missiles"
A Yemeni official, also speaking on condition of anonymity to AFP, said those attending the meeting "planned to launch terrorist attacks against economic installations in Yemen, in retaliation for Yemeni strikes launched last week."
On Dec. 17, warplanes and security forces on the ground attacked what authorities said was an Al Qaeda training camp in the area of Mahsad in the southern province of Abyan. Saleh el-Shamsy, a provincial security official, said at least 30 suspected militants were killed. Witnesses, however, put the number killed at over 60 in the heaviest strike and said the dead were mostly civilians.
Much like the effort with Pakistan's Frontier Corps, the U.S. military has boosted its counterterrorism training for Yemeni forces, and is providing more intelligence, which probably includes surveillance by unmanned drones, according to U.S. officials and analysts.
The Yemeni Interior Ministry said 25 suspected Al Qaeda members were arrested Wednesday in San'a and it has set up checkpoints in the capital to control traffic flow as part of a campaign to clamp down on terrorism.
The United States has repeatedly called on Yemen to take stronger action against Al Qaeda, whose fighters have taken advantage of the central government's weakness and increasingly found refuge here in the past year. Worries over the growing presence are compounded by fears that Yemen could collapse into turmoil from its multiple conflicts and increasing poverty and become another Afghanistan, giving the militants even freer reign.
The country was scene of one of Al Qaeda's most dramatic pre-9/11 attacks, the 2000 suicide bombing of the destroyer USS Cole off the Aden coast that killed 17 American sailors. The government allied itself with Washington in the war on terror, but U.S officials have complained that it often strikes deals with militants.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Report: Hasan asked about killing troops in ’08
NBC News
updated 7:24 p.m. ET, Wed., Dec . 23, 2009
A radical Muslim cleric claims Army psychiatrist Maj. Nidal Hasan asked him about killing American soldiers nearly a year before Hasan allegedly shot to death 13 fellow soldiers at Fort Hood.
In an interview Wednesday with the Arabic-language news network Al-Jazeera, Anwar al-Awlaki, considered a key recruiter for al-Qaida, said Hasan asked him in a December 2008 e-mail "whether killing American soldiers and officers is lawful or not" under Islamic law.
In the interview, Al-Awlaki then appears to taunt U.S. intelligence and security, saying, "I wonder where were the American security forces that one day claimed they can read the numbers of any license plate, anywhere in the world, from space."
He also said he first met Hasan about nine years ago when he was imam at an Islamic center in Washington, D.C.
An English translation of the interview was provided by Evan Kohlmann, a terrorism analyst for NBC News.
Al-Awlaki is a New Mexico native who graduated from Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colo., in 1994 with a bachelor's degree in civil engineering. In 2002, he moved to Yemen, where he is at large.
Intelligence officials believe al-Awlaki is living in an al-Qaida camp between the Yemeni cities of Shabwa and Mareb.
Al-Awlaki's claim would contradict statements by the FBI, which determined that discussions in intercepted e-mails between Hasan and al-Awlaki were mostly about research being conducted by Hasan and philosophical. Based on that, the FBI said, a Joint Terrorism Task Force determined Hasan "was not involved in terrorist activities or terrorist planning" and chose not to launch an investigation of Hasan.
Click for related content
Read English translation of interview with al-Awlaki
In the Al-Jazeera interview, Awlaki denies any claims that he recruited or worked with Hasan for the Fort Hood attack. "I did not recruit Nidal Hasan, but America did with its crimes and injustice, and this is what America does not want to admit.
Hasan, a Muslim Army psychiatrist, faces 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted premeditated murder in connection with the Nov. 5 shooting attack at the Texas military facility. He remains under guard at a San Antonio military hospital, where he is paralyzed from the waist down due to injuries suffered in the attack.
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
updated 7:24 p.m. ET, Wed., Dec . 23, 2009
A radical Muslim cleric claims Army psychiatrist Maj. Nidal Hasan asked him about killing American soldiers nearly a year before Hasan allegedly shot to death 13 fellow soldiers at Fort Hood.
In an interview Wednesday with the Arabic-language news network Al-Jazeera, Anwar al-Awlaki, considered a key recruiter for al-Qaida, said Hasan asked him in a December 2008 e-mail "whether killing American soldiers and officers is lawful or not" under Islamic law.
In the interview, Al-Awlaki then appears to taunt U.S. intelligence and security, saying, "I wonder where were the American security forces that one day claimed they can read the numbers of any license plate, anywhere in the world, from space."
He also said he first met Hasan about nine years ago when he was imam at an Islamic center in Washington, D.C.
An English translation of the interview was provided by Evan Kohlmann, a terrorism analyst for NBC News.
Al-Awlaki is a New Mexico native who graduated from Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colo., in 1994 with a bachelor's degree in civil engineering. In 2002, he moved to Yemen, where he is at large.
Intelligence officials believe al-Awlaki is living in an al-Qaida camp between the Yemeni cities of Shabwa and Mareb.
Al-Awlaki's claim would contradict statements by the FBI, which determined that discussions in intercepted e-mails between Hasan and al-Awlaki were mostly about research being conducted by Hasan and philosophical. Based on that, the FBI said, a Joint Terrorism Task Force determined Hasan "was not involved in terrorist activities or terrorist planning" and chose not to launch an investigation of Hasan.
Click for related content
Read English translation of interview with al-Awlaki
In the Al-Jazeera interview, Awlaki denies any claims that he recruited or worked with Hasan for the Fort Hood attack. "I did not recruit Nidal Hasan, but America did with its crimes and injustice, and this is what America does not want to admit.
Hasan, a Muslim Army psychiatrist, faces 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted premeditated murder in connection with the Nov. 5 shooting attack at the Texas military facility. He remains under guard at a San Antonio military hospital, where he is paralyzed from the waist down due to injuries suffered in the attack.
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