Feel Good Story: 10 suspected al-Qaida operatives in Yemen killed in 'Jihadi Work Accident'

It  appears the bomb they were building exploded prematurely...

Via Reuters:

More than 10 suspected al-Qaida operatives were killed by an explosion in a house in south Yemen where they were making bombs, and at least six others died in two strikes from US drones, tribal and official sources said on Sunday.

A bomb ripped through a house in the province of al-Bayda on Saturday night, the state news agency Saba and a local official said.

Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) is considered by Western governments to be one of the most active and dangerous wings of the global network founded by Osama bin Laden and has attempted a number of attacks against US targets.

The house destroyed in al Bayda had been used for making bombs, an official from the area told Reuters on Sunday.

“We heard a massive explosion that terrified people and when we went to the house it was destroyed and everyone there was dead,” the official said.

Al-Qaida spikes the football over U.S. Iraq withdrawal

Al-Qaida spikes the football over U.S. Iraq withdrawal.

BAGHDAD (AP) — The U.S. pulled its troops out of Iraq because its economy is collapsing and it needed to save money, an al-Qaida front group said in a message posted on its website Wednesday, its first online comment since the U.S. completed its pullout last month after nine years of war.

Al-Qaida was one of the main U.S. enemies in Iraq. It was behind some of the deadliest attacks on U.S. soldiers, Iraqi security forces and American-backed government institutions. Since the U.S. pullout, al-Qaida and other Sunni militants have stepped up attacks on Shiites, killing more than 170 people since the beginning of the year and raising concern that the surge in violence and an escalating political crisis might deteriorate into a civil war.

In an audio message, a spokesman for al-Qaida’s Islamic State of Iraq who identified himself as Abu Mohammed al-Adnani said “America has been defeated in Iraq.” Keep on reading…

Al-Qaida tells Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to knock-off the 9/11 truther stuff

Looks like Al-Qaida wants all full credit for their murder of almost 300 Americans.

Al-Qaida has sent a message to the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, asking him to stop spreading conspiracy theories about the 9/11 attacks.

Iranian media on Wednesday reported quotes from what appears to be an article published in the latest issue of the al-Qaida English language magazine, Inspire, which described Ahmadinejad's remarks over the 11 September attacks as "ridiculous".

In his UN general assembly speech last week, Ahmadinejad cast doubt over the official version of the 2001 attacks.

Canada PM Stephen Harper: Biggest security threat to Canada a decade after 9/11 is Islamic terrorism

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper understand the threat still posed by al-Qaida and other Islamic radicals. As for out president Obama, not so much.

(CBC) — In an exclusive interview with CBC News, Prime Minister Stephen Harper says the biggest security threat to Canada a decade after 9/11 is Islamic terrorism.

In a wide-ranging interview with CBC chief correspondent Peter Mansbridge that will air in its entirety on The National Thursday night, Harper says Canada is safer than it was on Sept. 11, 2001, when al-Qaeda attacked the U.S., but that “the major threat is still Islamicism.”

“There are other threats out there, but that is the one that I can tell you occupies the security apparatus most regularly in terms of actual terrorist threats,” Harper said.

Harper cautioned that terrorist threats can “come out of the blue” from a different source, such as the recent Norway attacks, where a lone gunman who hated Muslims killed 77 people.

But Harper said terrorism by Islamic radicals is still the top threat, though a “diffuse” one.

President Obama thinks "lone wolf" gunmen are the biggest threat to America now. Notice how the words Islamic and Muslim are not even mentioned.

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama said Tuesday that a “lone wolf” terror attack in the U.S. is more likely than a major coordinated effort like the Sept. 11 attacks nearly a decade ago. 

With the nation preparing to observe the 10th anniversary of hijacked airliners crashing in New York and Washington and along the Pennsylvania countryside, Obama said the government is in a state of heightened awareness.

“The biggest concern we have right now is not the launching of a major terrorist operation, although that risk is always there,” the president said in an interview with CNN.

“The risk that we’re especially concerned over right now is the lone wolf terrorist, somebody with a single weapon being able to carry out wide-scale massacres of the sort that we saw in Norway recently,” he said. “You know, when you’ve got one person who is deranged or driven by a hateful ideology, they can do a lot of damage, and it’s a lot harder to trace those lone wolf operators.”

Al-Qaida threatens Drone Manufacturer Executives

AeroVironment Inc. manufacturers several done aircraft used in the war on terror. Al-Qaida has threatened to attack 11 of their senior staff.

Times of India reported:

Al-Qaida militants could target senior executives of a US company that builds unmanned surveillance aircraft, a media report said.

The terror group threatened to attack 11 senior staff at the AeroVironment Inc. (AV), based in Monrovia near Los Angeles, Xinhua reported quoting San Gabriel Valley Tribune on Friday.

AV makes a variety of unmanned surveillance aircraft systems, including the Dragon Eye, Raven, Wasp and Puma AE, that are used by US forces in the war on terrorism.

Top US military leaders and AeroVironment CEO Timothy Conver and other executives have been identified as targets on several jihadist websites, the Tribune said citing a blog post on Homeland Security Today, a New York-based website that follows security issues.

Monrovia city officials said security at the facility would be beefed up over the July 4 weekend after the threats surfaced on a jihadist website.

NPR: "al-Qaida had excellent HR benefits"

Al-Qaida's obsession with keeping records may be their eventual downfall. We are still waiting to find out what was on Osama's hard drive besides porn. NPR's spin on the story is "al-Qaida had excellent HR benefits." No word if life insurance is among the benefits.

(NPR) - When U.S. commandos stormed Osama bin Laden’s compound earlier this month, they spent much of their time on the ground shoving papers, CDs and thumb drives into huge document bags strung around their necks. That sweep was considered an integral part of the operation, and it confirmed what the intelligence community had long believed: that bin Laden was obsessive about documenting everything.

From its earliest days, al-Qaida leaders insisted on receipts. If fighters were buying a car for an operation, or even disc drives and floppy disks for their computers, they were required to return to base with a precise accounting of everything they had spent.

. . . Al-Qaida “didn’t function as a traditional or typical terrorist organization did,” he says. “It functioned really like a multinational. On the eve of 9/11, for example, the State Department has stated that al-Qaida had 60 offices worldwide. I mean, in essence it was a multinational.”

More proof of its corporate structure: As odd as it sounds, al-Qaida had excellent HR benefits. The seized documents showed that al-Qaida paid an unusual amount of attention to its fighters and their families. Married members were allowed to have seven days of vacation for every three weeks worked. Bachelors got five days off a month.

Married members also got a salary of $108 a month. The pay was smaller for single men and larger if the fighters had more than one wife. Now that the organization has less money and is under such pressure, it is unclear whether the benefits are as generous as they used to be.