The U.S. government has announced they are seeking an al-Qaeda terrorist in connection with the 2012 Benghazi terrorist attack.
Muhammed Jamal was arrested last fall in Egypt and imprisoned by the Egyptian government for terrorist activity but has since disappeared. Various intelligence reports say he is still in Egypt while others place him inside Yemen.
Four Americans were killed in the September 11, 2012 attack on the Benghazi embassy.
The release from the government about the hunt for an Al Qaeda terrorist in the attack is seen as a direct rebuke of a New York Times story that said al Qaeda had no connection to the terrorist attack. The newspaper had been receiving criticism from elected officials in both political parties saying that intelligence confirmed the involvement of al Qaeda.
A federal judge cited the September 11th terrorist attacks in his ruling that bulk collection of American’s telephone information was legal.
U.S. District Judge William Pauley of New York said the National Security Agency’s program is the government’s counter-punch to al-Qaeda’s use of technology to plot attacks against Americans. He cited al-Qaeda’s decentralized network and that it plots many of its attacks remotely.
“This blunt tool only works because it collects everything,” Pauley said. “The collection is broad, but the scope of counterterrorism investigations is unprecedented.”
The ruling counters a ruling earlier this month from a different federal judge who had granted a preliminary injunction against the program. The Washington, D.C. based judge said the program likely violates the fourth amendment to the Constitution.
The judge said the NSA had intercepted seven calls from 9/11 hijackers but thought they were overseas because they could not collect information they can collect now.
Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula did something almost unheard of for a terrorist organization: they apologized for an attack.
The group attacked the Yemeni Ministry of Defense on December 5th but one of their members apparently decided to attack a nearby hospital as part of the assault. The bombing and shooting in Sanaa left dozens of people dead.
The leader of AQAP released a video Sunday saying that the hospital assault was the mistake of one lone fighter and that he had orders not to attack the hospital or a nearby mosque.
“We confess to this mistake and fault. We offer our apologies and condolences to the families of the victims,” leader Qassim Al-Raimi said in the video. “We did not want your lost ones; we did not target them on purpose. This is not of our religion or our morals.”
Raimi went on to say the terrorist organization would financially compensate those killed in the hospital attack.
A group of Islamists have captured the ancient quarter of the Christian town of Maaloula and are holding nuns hostage inside a monastery.
Reports say terrorists linked to the al-Qaeda affiliated al-Nursa Front stormed the Greek Orthodox monastery of Mar Thecla and are keeping the nuns hostage. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says the Islamists captured the town after four days of intense fighting.
The capture of the town reportedly was part of a rebel surge to obtain control of a central Syrian Highway between Damascus and Homs.
The government capturing the highway is seen as a key objective for the al-Assad government as it would allow the country’s cache of chemical weapons to be transported for removal and destruction.
“Security remains a key challenge for all. The destruction of a chemical weapons program has never taken place under such challenging and dangerous conditions,” Sigrid Kaag, head of the joint mission of the U.N. and Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons told OPCW delegates.
The FBI is reporting that several dozen suspected terrorist bombmakers have been allowed to enter the United States under the guise of being war refugees.
The FBI discovered two al-Qaeda terrorists living in Bowling Green, Kentucky in 2009 and the men admitting being part of a group that made improvised explosive devices (IEDs) targeting American troops.
The discovery of the terrorists led the FBI to back through every piece of evidence collected in Iraq connected to IEDs. The specialists looked at over 100,000 IEDs collected in war zones to find fingerprints that could be used to check against databases of refugees.
An ABC news investigation had discovered the two terrorists had slipped through the U.S. refugee screening system even though they had been detained during the war by Iraqi authorities for terrorist related activities.
State and federal officials rushed to say that despite the FBI’s “dozen of counter-terrorism investigations like [Bowling Green]” that most of the refugees from Iraq are peaceful, law abiding residents.
An al-Qaeda linked rebel group in Syria was in such a rush to post a violent video, they accidentally beheaded a commander of a fellow rebel group.
The members of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham asked fellow rebel groups for “understanding and forgiveness” for the killing of their ally and putting his head on display.
A spokesman for the Islamic State of Iraq said that Mohammed Fares had believed he had been captured by pro-Assad fighters and asked them to kill him.
Meanwhile, the Syrian government announced they were working with Russia to bring all sides to the table in Geneva for a second major peace conference. The U.S. and Russia have been trying to broker a peace conference since May.
The United States has officially designated the Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram as a “foreign terrorist organization” in a step designed to help Nigeria eliminate the group.
The move means that U.S. regulatory agencies can block business and financial transactions with the group. They can also seize assets of the organization that are found in U.S. owned companies or banks.
The state department said in a press statement that this is “only one tool in what must be a comprehensive approach by the Nigerian government to counter these groups.”
The group had not been given the official designation because the U.S. had considered the group only a domestic terror group. The move by the state department comes from the belief that the group has been working on an international agenda since connecting with al-Qaeda.
Kenya’s air force destroyed a training base for the al-Qaeda related Islamic terrorist group Al-Shabab.
Kenyan Defense Force spokesman Col. Cyrus Oguna said that the training camp housed about 300 recruits but he was unable to confirm the number of deaths. He speculated that the total number of terrorists killed and wounded would be available by early next week.
Al-Shabab is responsible for an attack on a Nairobi mall last month that killed 67 people.
Col. Oguna said that the attack on the terrorist camp is the first in a planned series of military actions against training camps of the terrorist group.
Terrorist group al-Qaeda is seeing a resurgence in Iraq.
The terror group and its affiliates detonated nine separate car bombs on Sunday at various markets and police checkpoints in Baghdad killing dozens.
The campaign of violence by the terrorists has resulted in more than 5,300 Iraqis being killed in 2013. Local officials worry of worsening security conditions, as the government appears unable to stop the terrorist network in the two years since American troops withdrew from the country.
An interior ministry official told the Washington Post that 40 people died in attacks on neighborhoods in Baghdad while 14 soldiers were killed in Mosul when a homicide bomber drove a car into a group of troops.
The violence from terrorists was on the wane after a US troop surge in the 2000s helped Sunni fighters turn the tide against al-Qaeda but over the last year violence has escalated as sectarian groups choose sides.
The terrorist groups have been strengthened by the release of hundreds of captured members through various prison raids.
A large scale military operation has been launched in northern Mali in an attempt to keep Islamic terrorists from being able to regroup and attack the country’s government.
French, Malian and United Nations forces are working through the north of the country after a series of terrorist attacks by al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. The terror group last launched a homicide bombing of a United Nations Stabilization Mission at a Malian military base. Civilians and two Chadian peacekeepers were killed.
A U.N. spokesman said the offensive against the terrorists is aimed at preventing a resurgence of the terrorist group. French troops drove the terrorists out of the major cities in northern Mali earlier this year just before the terrorists could attack the nation’s capital.
French military staff said that today’s action was the first major combined effort of the three military groups. They also said this was the first in a regular series of actions that will be taken to keep the terrorist group from being able to establish any kind of permanent influence in the region.