• Obama administration renews drone campaign in Yemen

    Responding to intelligence information about planned terrorist attacks by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), information which led to the closure of twenty-two U.S. embassies in the Middle East and North Africa and a travel warning issued by the Department of State, the Obama administration has launched a series of drone strikes in Yemen over the past ten days.

  • Govt.: lawyer jailed for helping imprisoned terrorist not entitled to medical early release

    The government told U.S. District Judge John Koeltl that he does not have the authority to release an ailing disbarred civil rights lawyer who is currently serving a 10-year prison sentence for allowing a imprisoned Egyptian sheik to communicate with his followers. Lynne Stewart, 73, is suffering a recurrence of her breast cancer, but the government says that she is not telling the truth when she says she has only eighteen months to live.

  • First charges filed in Benghazi attack

    Eleven months after the attack, U.S. federal officials have filed the first charges in the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya on 11 September 2012. Among those charged is Ahmed Abu Khattala, a prominent Libyan militia leader. Others named as defendants were not disclosed. The charges initially were sought in New York months ago, and are still under seal. Attorney General Eric Holder had promised congressional leaders earlier this year that the Justice Department would soon publicize the action the Justice Department would be taking.

  • Boko Haram leader deposed following cease-fire agreement with Nigerian government

    Sheikh Abubakar Shekau, the leader of Nigeria’s Boko Haram, appears to have been deposed by more moderate members of the Islamic group. The change of leadership follows a cease-fire agreement between the Islamic organization and the Nigerian government, reached in talks on 25-26 June. Violence has continued however, and Boko Haram, which since 2009 has been conducting an increasingly violent campaign against the Nigerian government and Western influence in the country, may split as more radical elements decide to create a new militia.

  • Interpol issues global alert following nine al Qaeda-linked prison breakouts

    Interpol, in a statement issued from the organization’s headquarters in Lyon, France, urged law enforcement agencies around the world to show “increased vigilance,” following prison breakouts over the past nine month in nine countries, including Iraq (22 July), Libya (27 July), and Pakistan (31 July). More than 2,500 terrorists have escaped in these nine prison breakouts.

  • FBI terrorism unit investigates animal rights group after pheasant farm attack

    An FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force has launched an investigating after an animal rights group announced on its Web site that its members cut open fencing around a and releasing more than a dozen pheasants from the aviary at Ash Grove Pheasant Farm and Orchard in Riverside, California. The incident took place 22 July.

  • U.S. closes 21 embassies, issues travel alert following “credible” al Qaeda threat

    The U.S. State Department issued a travel alert Friday warning al Qaeda may launch attacks in the Middle East, North Africa, and several other places. The department also closed twenty-one embassies and consulates this weekend. “Current information suggests that Al Qaeda and affiliated organizations continue to plan terrorist attacks both in the region and beyond, and that they may focus efforts to conduct attacks in the period between now and the end of August,” the State Department said in a statement.

  • Two Chicago terrorism cases bring the issue of expanded surveillance to the fore

    A Chicago attorney representing a teenager facing terrorism charges raised concerns during a pre-trial hearing about whether expanded surveillance methods were used in her client’s case. This is the second time in less than a month that the issue of expanded surveillance methods was brought up in a Chicago terrorism case.

  • Details of al Qaeda’s “next generation” bomb, aborted effort to take out its designer, emerge

    Al Qaeda engineers have been working on designing a sophisticated bomb powerful enough to bring down passenger planes but which is designed to avoid detection by explosives detection machines or trained dogs at airports. “All of our explosive detection equipment wasn’t calibrated to detect [this type of bomb]” TSA director John Pistole said. “And all of our 800 bomb-sniffing dogs had not been trained for that specific type.” A CIA informant inside a Yemeni cell of al Qaeda volunteered to place the bomb on a U.S.-bound plane, but instead delivered it to his CIA handlers in Saudi Arabia. A CIA effort to learn more about the bomb maker, Ibrahim Hassan Asiri, and take him out was aborted when someone leaked the story to AP. The news service refused pleas by the administration to postpone publication of the story until the end of the operation. The AP did agree to delay publication by a week to ten days to allow the CIA to extricate the agent and his family from Saudi Arabia to safety before publication. Asiri and his bomb-making assistants are still at large.

  • Ukrainian man in U.K. court charged with anti-Muslim terrorism

    Pavlo Lapshyn, a 25-year-old postgraduate student from Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine, appeared in a Westminster, U.K. court Tuesday and charged with the terror-related April murder of an 82-year-old Mohammed Saleem as Saleem was walking home from a mosque. Lapshyn has also been charged with three additional offenses related to three explosions near mosques in Walsall, Wolverhampton, and Tipton.

  • Florida teen indicted on terrorism charges

    Shelton Thomas Bell, 19, of Jacksonville, Florida has been indicted on federal charges of conspiring to provide material support to terrorists. The indictment claims Bell planned to travel to Arabian Peninsula and join Ansar Al-Sharia (AAS), an alias for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, to take part in “jihad.”

  • DHS raises Phoenix’s terror-risk ranking

    DHS has raised Phoenix’s terrorist risk assessment three spots, from number eighteen to number fifteen. The change will entitle the city to $5.5 million in a federal security grant, $1.5 million more than it received from the same grant last year.

  • Pa. man sentenced to 8 ½ years for running a terrorism-promoting Internet forum

    A western Pennsylvania man has been sentenced to eight and a half years in prison for leading an Internet forum which promoted terrorist attacks against American military and civilian targets. Emerson Begolly, 24, of Redbank Township was also convicted of having a concealed gun and biting an FBI agent when he was arrested in 2011.

  • OBL: Hiding in plain sight

    Osama bin Laden had been living in his walled Abbottabad compound for nearly ten years, within sight of an elite Pakistani military academy, and gone completely unnoticed. According to a scathing official Pakistani report, the incompetence and negligence of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) failed to realize that the world’s most sought-after terrorist leader had been living in Pakistan, until he was killed in a night-time raid by U.S. Navy SEALs on 2 May 2011.

  • Giuliani says political correctness hampers fight against domestic terrorists

    The Department of Defense initially described Army Major Nidal Hassan’s Fort Hood shooting spree as “terrorism,” but quickly changed that definition to “workplace violence.” Testifying before a congressional panel, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani criticized DoD’s decision, and political correctness more generally, saying that “You can’t fight an enemy you don’t acknowledge.”