Terror Group That Claimed Kenya Attack Has Recruited Americans Before

[jakeXT]

Source: ABC

The same group that claimed responsibility for an attack on a Kenyan mall this weekend that has claimed at least 62 lives has previously recruited dozens of Americans to join their cause.

U.S. officials estimate that as many as 50 Americans have traveled to training camps in Somalia, the home of the al Qaeda-linked terror group al-Shabaab, over the last six years.

Just last month, al-Shabaab released a video showing three young men claiming to be from Minneapolis who the terror group said later died as martyrs.

"This is the best place to be honestly," one of the men says. "I can only tell you from my experience being here, that you have the best of dreams, you eat the best of food, and you're with the best of the brothers and sisters who came here for the sake of Allah. If you guys only knew how much fun we have over here. This is the real Disneyland, you need to come here and join us and take pleasure in this fun."

Read more: http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/kenya-attack-raises-terror-concerns-us/story?id=20336438

[leveymg]

1. Reminds me a lot of the penetration of Lackawanna Six and Kamal Derwish

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/leveymg/438

First Confirmed Al-Qaeda Figure Killed by Predator was a U.S. Citizen

In November, 2002, a Predator attacked a vehicle in the desert of Yemen. That is the first successful confirmed targeted-killing of al-Qaeda using remotely controlled drone aircraft operated by the CIA. Among those known to be killed was an American citizen from upstate New York named Kamal Derwish. See, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...

In November 2002, the CIA used a Predator fitted with a five-foot-long Hellfire missile to kill a senior al Qaeda leader, Abu Ali al-Harithi, as he was riding in a car in the Yemeni desert. Also killed with Harithi, who was suspected of masterminding the October 2000 attack on the destroyer USS Cole, was a naturalized U.S. citizen, Kamal Derwish.

Derwish, it was determined later, was part of the Lackawanna, N.Y., group of Yemeni men who admitted to training in al Qaeda camps.

< . . .>

- Derwish has been identified as a possible double-agent who was in Afghanistan with bin Laden just weeks before the 9/11 attack. He was one of the first to be silenced. Derwish was a key figure in US intelligence surveillance of al-Qaeda cells inside the U.S., and provided a direct link between the bombings of the USS Cole and 9/11.

Derwish had trained in Afghanistan in 1992 and fought with the U.S.-backed Muslim Army in Bosnia. In the Spring of 2002, U.S. intelligence intercepted communications between him and two important al-Qaida figures, one of them involved in the USS Cole bombing. Derwish had been instrumental in organizing the the Lackawanna 6 into an al-Qaeda sleeper cell. Warrants were issued to conduct round-the-clock surveillance on members of the group.

The FBI monitored phone calls from Derwish in Yemen to some members of the group that appeared to be intended to assess their status or availability. It also intercepted e-mails from one of the group, Mukhtar al-Bakri, who was then in Bahrain. One of them appeared particularly suspicious. The e-mail was entitled "Big Meal" and read in English translation as follows:

"How are you my beloved, God willing you are fine. I would like to remind you of obeying God and keeping him in your heart because the next meal will be very huge. No one will be able to withstand it except those with faith. There are people here who had visions and their visions were explained that this thing will be very strong. No one will be able to bear it." 12


The phone calls and e-mails had the intense interest of the White House, the CIA and the FBI that the Lackawanna group was about to be activated for a major terrorist attack. At this point, the Buffalo FBI field office was required to send briefings on the results of their investigation to FBI Headquarters twice a day, and these were often passed on to the White House in the president's daily threat briefings.

At the request of the CIA, al-Bakri was detained by the Bahrain police, coincidentally on his wedding night. He admitted to having traveled to the Al Farooq camp in late spring and early summer and also gave the names of the rest of the Lackawanna group. Based on al-Bakri's testimony, the six Lackawanna men were arraigned in September, 2002, and charged with providing material support to Al-Qaeda. Somehow, despite the intense surveillance, Derwish was allowed to leave the U.S. and travelled to Yemen, where he was killed by a CIA Predator drone. See, http://www.rjhresearch.com/ADR/counterterr...

[alp227]

3. Here's your wash. post link, fixed.

Surveillance Operation in Pakistan Located and Killed Al Qaeda Official

[leveymg]

4. Thanks. It's in the original DU posting.

The point here is that little escapes the eye of the alphabet agencies, and so many of these guys miraculously are allowed to roam around the world, freely entering and departing the U.S., despite (or because of) intensive U.S. surveillance.

[jakeXT]

5. P2OG ?

What was the US up to? It was part of an operation
some of you may know of already, namely the Pro-
active Pre-emptive Operations Group, known as the
P2OG, or ‘Pee-Twos’ as some people call it. This was
basically a secret, covert programme which was pro
posed by the Defence Science Board, a think-tank for
the Pentagon, in June 2002 to infiltrate, flush out or
even fabricate terrorism. The P2OG documents found
their way into the public domain a few months later
and were subsequently corroborated by Seymour Hersh
in the US, and more recently by Nafeez Ahmed who
wrote about it in the New Internationalist last month.
The first ‘pilot’ test of the P2OG was here in the Algerian
Sahara and Sahel in 2002 and 2003. So, we have
this very duplicitous, highly criminal background of
fabricated of terrorism to legitimise a new front on the
War on Terror in Africa and hence the US’s militarisation
of the continent. You will find countless reports of
it if you dig into the media, especially into those stories
that are focused on the vast, ‘ungoverned’ areas
of Africa: Mali, Niger and Southern Algeria where this
narrative took place.

http://concernedafricascholars.org/docs/bulletin85volman-keenan.pdf

[leveymg]

6. Perhaps the Arab Spring has several inspirations, another is surely A Clean Break

I'd say there is a confluence of interests behind this sort of thing, which is hardly new:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023560182
< . . .>
Certain Obama officials have been pushing direct US military intervention since March 2011, while similar urgings for action against neighboring Mideast countries goes back at least 15 years before that to release in 1996 of a neocon manifesto, A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm written for the then newly installed conservative Likud Party of Benjamin Netanyahu (has Bibi been in and out of the top office for that long, now?). The best-known authors of that planning paper were Richard Perle, the Wurmsers, and Doug Feith, who went on to establish the notorious Pentagon Office of Special Plans (OSP), the DoD unit under Undersecretary for Intelligence Steven Cambone that fabricated much of the intelligence to justify Bush's invasion of Iraq.

"A Clean Break" is a remarkably candid and concise document that accurately predicted U.S. and Israeli policy and actions in the region, particularly events in Syria involving external agitation of internal ethnic conflict, foreign military responses, and Israel "drawing attention" to Syria's WMDs -- all events that have finally come to fruition during the last couple weeks.

The 1996 document extracted below explicitly states that Syria's WMD along with Turkish and Jordanian-sponsored ethnic conflict inside Syria will serve as a pretext for western intervention, leading to the possible breakup of Syria, while at the same time PM Netanyahu should reject U.S. pressures to accept land for peace. That is exactly what has come to pass in 2013.

As A Clean Break makes clear, serial regime change in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and then Iran has long been the goal of a core group of Washington power players in both parties going back to that era. Here's the plan to transform the Mideast (and the U.S.) so as to expand Israel's regional hegemony, along with Turkey and Jordan, with Saudi Arabia the silent partner of the Rightwing parties in Israel, the US, and the UK. This plan of serial regime change was later euphemistically termed, "The Arab Spring", when conditions were deemed ripe for overthrow of a string of governments of states surrounding Israel.

The "Clean Break" document was submitted to then PM Benjamin Netanyahu. It is remarkably prescient, and has come to pass through the wars and covert operations waged by the past two U.S. Administrations, with a few bumps in the road, almost exactly as planned 17 year ago.

Ironically, as alluded to below (and developed at greater length in later sections of the document not excerpted below,) make clear, the ultimate point of neocon regime change is to invert the relationship of Israel with the US, and to make the former autonomous of the constraints imposed by the latter. The U.S. is the ultimate target of Right-wing regime change planned in Israel by the same Neocons advising Netanyahu's Likud Party who went on to carry out the Iraq War WMD fabrications: http://www.israeleconomy.org/strat1.htm

< . . .>

[Thor_MN]

2. The tweet claiming credit has been deemed false

al-Shabaab is denying that they are responsible.

[Sunlei]

7. To me this is the same as any cult attracts some people to their group. we've seen this forever.

don't drink that tea

[Tracer]

8. I believe the guy who's claiming to having such fun...

... is now dead.

Shot by rival gangs.