Footage of Juhayman Al Otaybi

Amazing footage of Juhayman Al Otaybi (sometimes spelled al-Otaibi or numerous other variants), the ringleader behind the disastrous 1979 siege of Mecca. The footage, originally broadcast on Saudi government-controlled TV, also shows the dead body of the alleged Mahdi Juhayman was promoting with the attack. (The Mahdi is an apocalyptic figure in some strains of Islam.)



For more on this landmark event, see:

The Siege at Mecca Sourcebook (November 2006)

The Siege Of Mecca by Yaroslav Trofimov (September 2007)

Labels: Weblog

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Eyewitness Accounts: The 1990 Shooting of Meir Kahane

The FBI has declassified and released FD-302 transcripts related to the assassination of Jewish radical rabbi Meir Kahane in 1990, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by INTELWIRE. Although the attack was ruled a lone gunman assault at the time, assassin El Sayyid Nosair was lated convicted of taking part in a wider conspiracy to commit terrorist attacks in New York City under the leadership of "blind sheikh" Omar Abdel Rahman. The FBI interviewed several eyewitnesses and two supporters of Nosair, none of whom were identified. Some reports indicated Nosair has attended previous speeches by Kahane. There were several reports of Nosair talking with unidentified individuals and with people attending the lecture, however none of the witnesses reporting seeing Nosair fire the shots that killed Kahane. Despite the fact that the shooting took place in a crowded room, not a single witness at Nosair's trial reported seeing him fire the killing shots, which resulted in his acquittal on a murder charge. Nosair was convicted of other firearms violations in relation with the attack and sentenced to a lengthy prison term.

Read the documents

Labels: El-Sayyid-Nosair, Weblog

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Analyzing the analysts

My old pal Bryan Preston has a good "analysis of the analyis" of the latest al Qaeda videos which can be viewed here (I first spotted it on Internet Haganah).

I take issue with only one point in his analysis, albeit a big one.

Bryan writes:

And wherever you find (al Qaeda's video producers), al Qaeda's capos will be right around the corner. That's another key to how they crank out their videos so frequently: They're not living on opposite sides of Waziristan from one another. The as-Sahab producers and the heavies are probably traveling together, hiding together, and conspiring for world domination together.

That may -- or may not -- be true about Zawahiri, but it's definitely not true about Osama bin Laden. Because Zawahiri and bin Laden are being shot by different cameras.

Zawahiri's videos are crisp, sharp and high resolution. Bin Laden's latest was very much the opposite -- it was clearly done with a low-end camera and done poorly at that -- the video froze about three minutes in and remained frozen for the whole video. Bin Laden's use of audio rather than video in other messages strong indicates that it's neither easy nor convenient for bin Laden to make a video.

So that's an important clue right there -- bin Laden and Zawahiri are not in close proximity and they don't appear to be sharing the same infrastructure resources.

The frequency and quality of Zawahiri's video indicate easy access to equipment and reasonably competent operators. So the two men are not in close proximity to each other. If one of them is close to As-Sahab, Al Qaeda's video production arm, it is almost certainly Zawahiri. But maybe not all that close. Zawahiri's news references are usually a day or two behind.

Production of the videos may account for some of that lag, but I am guessing the videos are couriered on DVD to the production house from at least a few days travel, and I would venture a slightly less confident guess that the production house is in a fixed location.

Zawahiri knows where the producer lives. The producer probably doesn't know where Zawahiri lives -- except that he's within a couple of days travel. Yahya al-Libbi and Adam Gadahn videos feature similar production values to Zawahiri's. While there are no guarantees, this suggests they may be closer to the video operation. Although this is a bit subjective, my read on the Zawahiri videos is that they are generally being filmed at an indoor location. Al-Libbi, however, is almost certainly being filmed outdoors (as revealed by INTELWIRE a few months back). Al-Libbi may be in the same neighborhood as Zawahiri, but likely not in the exact same location.

The video distribution node (while robustly secure thus far) is still very exposed and more vulnerable than other aspects of al Qaeda's infrastructure. It would be beyond foolhardy to allow the video producer to know where Zawahiri or bin Laden is hiding.

Labels: Weblog

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Terry Nichols Will Testify On OKC Bombing

A federal judge will allow Salt Lake City lawyer Jesse Trentadue to interview Terry Nichols and another federal prison inmate about the possibility of additional conspirators in the Oklahoma City bombing. The ruling by Judge Dale Kimball orders that Nichols and prisoner David Paul Hammer (who spoke with Timothy McVeigh before his execution) be permitted but not compelled to testify about the possibility of a wider conspiracy and allegations of federal government misconduct related to the Oklahoma City bombing.

Documents obtained by Trentadue as part of his lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act show that federal government learned from informants that right-wing extremists were considering bombing federal buildings, including the Alfred E. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, prior to McVeigh's April 1995 attack. In an affidavit earlier this year, Nichols additionally alleged that high-ranking FBI officials were complicit in the bombing plot.

Read the court order

Read Terry Nichols' affidavit

Read David Paul Hammer's affidavit

The lawsuit sought to force the FBI to comply with Trentadue's Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for documents pertaining to the Oklahoma City bombing. For a history of that case and copies of all documents released thus far, click here and here.

According to this week's order, the FBI claimed "there no longer existed any 'case or controversy' sufficient to confer subject matter jurisdiction" to the court after the agency's previous document disclosures. The court disagreed, noting that the FBI's responses were marked by a "troubling absence of documents to which other documents referred."

The deposition order is intended to assist Trentadue in identifying additional documents which may have been improperly withheld.

Related: PATCON: How The FBI Infiltrated The Militia Movement

Labels: Weblog

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Judge Michael Mukasey And A Curious Omission In The Omar Abdel-Rahman Trial

There's a new posting on the INTELWIRE Weblog concerning Attorney General Nominee Michael Mukasey, the Omar Abdel Rahman trial and al Qaeda spy Ali Mohamed. If you haven't added the blog RSS feed to your favorites, you can find it here.

The Al Qaeda Spy And The New Attorney General Nominee

Labels: INTELWIRE-Exclusive

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Judge Michael Mukasey And A Curious Omission In The Omar Abdel-Rahman Trial

Former federal judge Michael Mukasey -- President's Bush's new attorney general nominee -- has quite an impressive resume. But his highest profile case is also among his most problematic -- the 1995 prosecution of Blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman.

There's one big fish that got away in that case, and his name is Ali Mohamed, an al Qaeda infiltrator who had trained some of the Rahman conspirators while serving in the U.S. Army at Fort Bragg. Mohamed was also an FBI informant who had provided information about al Qaeda to the FBI in 1993.

Mohamed was listed as an unindicted co-conspirator in US v. Rahman (S5 93 Cr. 181), a trial covering a broad conspiracy that included the World Trade Center bombing and a thwarted June 1993 plot to destroy New York City landmarks.

Mohamed was never called to answer charges in the case -- but he was called to testify.

He didn't show up.

Roger Stavis, defense attorney for El Sayyid Nosair, one of the defendants in the conspiracy, tried to get Ali Mohamed to testify. He sent out private investigators to locate Mohamed and serve a subpoena. Stavis wanted to show that Mohamed had assisted the conspirators as an agent employed by the United States government, which he believed would render harmless the terror cell's jihad training activities on U.S. soil.

The defense investigators couldn't find Mohamed. But the prosecutors did.

The defense problem was laid out by Stavis in open court on September 1, 1995:

  15               MR. STAVIS:  Your Honor, we are requesting a

  16    asked missing witness instruction with regard to Ali

  17    Mohammed.  Ali Mohammed, your Honor will recall, was the

  18    person who came from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, who was

  19    assigned to the United States Army Special Forces --

  20               THE COURT (Mukasey):  Yes, we saw him on that splendid

  21    videotape.

  22               MR. STAVIS:  And trained Mr. Nosair and others

  23    for Afghanistan.  When we attempted, Mr. Barrett attempted

  24    to find Ali Mohammed, he found a friend at Fort Bragg who

  25    knew his wife was in California.  His wife hadn't seen him

   1    for over a year.  We could not bring him in.  Although he

   2    was very much, I would submit, a part of the defense case,

   3    we couldn't bring him in and we understand that he may have

   4    some connection with the government at this time.

   5               THE COURT:  I don't think a missing witness

   6    charge on that gentleman is warranted and I am not going to

   7    give one.

Emphasis added by me. Here's where the story gets interesting. Despite Stavis' inability to locate Mohamed, the prosecutor -- Andrew McCarthy -- had no such problem.

The following stipulation was entered during on March 21, 2001, during US v. Usama bin Laden, the trial for the East African Embassy bombings, a plot which Mohamed played a major role. (He pleaded guilty in exchange for sentencing considerations, but he has subsequently disappeared from the prison system. He had not been sentenced as of last month.)

Paragraph 1. If called as a witness Special Agent Harlan Bell would testify that:

1. In or about 1994 Agent Bell was assigned to the New York office of the FBI and could be reached at telephone number 212-335-2611.

2. In the fall of 1994 Agent Bell sought to arrange an interview of Ali Mohamed by having an FBI agent in California contact Ali Mohamed's wife to advise her that the FBI wished to interview Ali Mohamed.

3. On or about December 9, 1994 he interviewed Ali Mohamed in San Jose, California in the company of Assistant United States Attorney Andrew C. McCarthy who was an Assistant United States Attorney in the Southern District of New York.

4. Ali Mohamed is a person depicted in the photograph in Government Exhibit 4 which photograph is identified as Abu Mohammed.

Paragraph 2. It is further stipulated and agreed that if called to testify as a witness, Assistant United States Attorney Andrew C. McCarthy would testify that:

1. On or about December 22, 1994 his office telephone number was 212-791-1940.

2. On or about December 9, 1994 he attended the interview of Ali Mohamed in California.

3. On or about December 22, 1994 at approximately 5:13 p.m. New York time he sent by facsimile from New York a letter to Ali Mohamed concerning a subpoena that had been served upon Ali Mohamed the prior week.

4. On or about December 22, 1994 at approximately 5:14 p.m. New York time he received by facsimile a copy of the letter he sent to Ali Mohamed reflecting the signature of Ali Mohamed acknowledging receipt of the letter.

Emphasis added. Whose subpoena was this? It's not clear (there are anecdotal reports, but I can't confirm them at this time). What is crystal clear, at any rate, is that the prosecutor was able to reach Ali Mohamed within the same time frame that the defense could not -- just a couple weeks before the Rahman trial began. And it's clear that the prosecution declined to provide this information to the defense.

It's also clear that Mohamed was in close contact with the FBI, possibly cooperating, at a crucial pre-trial period, but that his name showed up on a list of unindicted co-conspirators a couple of months later.

All this apparently chummy activity was going on during a period in which the FBI and INS had arrested Mohammed Jamal Khalifa and Mohamed Loay Bayazid in California, just a short drive from Mohamed's home (where the FBI interview took place). The interview took place on December 9, 1994. Khalifa and Bayazid were arrested on Dec. 16, 1994. Then on Dec. 22, 1994, McCarthy sent Mohamed a letter about that subpoena -- its contents were not disclosed in court.

What was Judge Mukasey's part in all this? The only thing that is certain from the transcripts is that it was happening under his nose. Which is, perhaps, not the sort of attorney general one might seek to replace Alberto Gonzales, for reasons that should be obvious.

UPDATE, April 1, 2008: Andrew McCarthy's new memoir, a, expands on the December 1994 meeting with Ali Mohamed. According to McCarthy's account of the meeting, which is somewhat sparse relative to its emphasis in the book:

The subpoena in question was indeed issued by Nosair's defense.

Mohamed did not disclose anything at the meeting which would have helped the Nosair defense, which is why it wasn't disclosed in the trial under Brady rules.

Few details were disclosed about what Mohamed had to say, except that he discussed Nosair and talked about Osama bin Laden.

McCarthy argues Stavis didn't really want to put Mohamed on the stand, since Mohamed's testimony would actually have undercut the "collusion" defense which was the entire reason Stavis was talking about Mohamed in the first place.

How this squares against Stavis' outright statement that he couldn't locate Mohamed is somewhat unclear, but there's every indication that Mohamed did in fact spend a significant amount of time at his known California residence after the December 1994 meeting. In other words, he shouldn't have been all that hard to find.

This may not be the end of the story on this meeting, but it's an official and fairly straightforward statement which (for now) I simply wanted to add to the record.

THE INFILTRATOR: ALI MOHAMED

Ali Mohamed was an Egyptian Islamic Jihad member and al Qaeda associate who infiltrated the U.S. Army and acted as an informant for the CIA and FBI, even as he took orders from Osama bin Laden and Ayman Al-Zawahiri. INTELWIRE's J.M. Berger exhaustively researched Mohamed's life for the National Geographic Channel in 2006.

Ali Mohamed Sourcebook

Nat Geo DVD, J.M. Berger Lead Researcher

Who Is Ali Mohamed?

Al Qaeda Spy Crafted 9/11 Network

New Link Between Ali Mohamed And 9/11

Who Masterminded 1993 WTC Bombing?

'Coleman Affidavit' on Ali Mohamed

Labels: Weblog

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Blackwater Banned In Iraq; INTELWIRE Flashback

CNN is reporting that private contractor Blackwater USA has been banned from Iraq after an incident that ended in the death of eight Iraqi civilians and the wounding of 14 more.

Apropos of nothing (as far as this story goes), it seemed like a good time to reprint my August 2006 posting that revealed an unusual citation of the company...

Zacarias Mossaoui's notebook -- presented as an exhibit at his recently concluded trial -- contained a phone number for Blackwater USA, the private security contractor that last year provided a golden parachute for pre-9/11 CIA Counterterrorism Director Cofer Black.

The company has run security/paramilitary operations for the U.S. government in such locations as Afghanistan and Iraq.

The company became embroiled in controversy in Iraq, where four of its contractors met with a gory death in Fallujah around the same time that independent contractor Nick Berg met with a similarly gruesome fate. Adding to the strange congruences around Moussaoui, it has been reported that Berg and Moussaoui met at least once in Norman, Oklahoma.

The discovery may best be taken with the proverbial grain of salt, and a large one at that. The phone number is publicly available and connects to a Blackwater training center in North Carolina. Moussaoui was researching physical and combat training options while he was in the United States.

The simplest and most innocent explanation is quite possibly the correct one. Nevertheless, a glimpse of the controversial company's contact information nestled among Moussaoui's handwritten notes inspires the jaw to drop a not-entirely unreasonable manner.

For the full contents of the notebook, click here.

For more about Blackwater, click here, click here or click here.

For more about Mossaoui and Nick Berg, click here.

Labels: Weblog

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'The New Al Qaeda Central'

The Washington Post echoes what you read on INTELWIRE more than three months ago...

One figure attracting interest is a Libyan known as Abu Yahya al-Libi, who gained notoriety after he and three other al-Qaeda prisoners escaped from a high-security U.S. military prison in Bagram in July 2005.

Since then, he has appeared on more than a dozen videos produced by al-Qaeda's media arm. His speeches and treatises are so numerous that some analysts speculate he is being groomed to join bin Laden's inner circle. "Abu Yahya al-Libi is now the most visible face of al-Qaeda, surpassing al-Zawahiri, and in fact all of the jihadists," said Ben Venzke, chief executive of IntelCenter, a private terrorism research group that does work for the U.S. government.

In his videos, Abu Yahya al-Libi dresses the part of a gun-toting holy warrior but has made his reputation as a religious hard-liner. He frequently criticizes other Muslims as heretics; favorite targets include Shiites, Hamas and the Saudi royal family.

"He's young, but he's very smart," Benotman said. "For his career, the sky's the limit."

Labels: Weblog

Posted by J.M. Berger | Permalink

 

Another 9/11 Video Coming

Yet ANOTHER major 9/11-themed video is coming out shortly from Al-Sahab. It appears to feature several lesser lights as well as the now ridiculous flashing question mark.

While this normally signals that someone relatively uninteresting will be appearing, the logo suggests there may be another hijacker's will in the works.

Labels: Weblog

Posted by J.M. Berger | Permalink

 

Scheuer on Bin Laden Video

After reading a series of largely inane commentaries on Osama bin Laden's video statement of last week, it was refreshing to read former CIA chief Michael Scheuer's always blunt and knowledgeable take on the message. It should be required reading for all those who seek to make ideological hay from the video. It is possible to be both patriotic and realistic, and we need a lot more of the latter at this juncture in American history.

Labels: Weblog

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Screencaps from 9/11/07 Al Qaeda Video Featuring Osama bin Laden, Hijacker Walid Al Shehri

Feel free to use these, but please link to the home page if you do. Full-size, high quality caps and NTSC video excerpts are available for broadcasters. Contact me for details.

Labels: Weblog

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Jihadists Get Defensive About OBL Video Release

Jihadists today tried to spin yesterday's confusion about just how the U.S. government got a copy of the latest Osama bin Laden video.

In a posting on a prominent jihadist forum that announces communications from al Qaeda, a spokesman linked to al Qaeda claimed that the video was intentionally sent to television stations before being released online as part of a public relations strategy.

The claim is highly doubtful. Although communiques have been released through television stations in the past, the recipients of such videos always claim credit for obtaining the video first. Instead, reports throughout the day indicated that the government had obtained the video, and the networks obtained the video from the government.

The spokesman, identified only by the online handle "Faithful Correspondent," also denied reports that jihadist message boards had gone offline or experienced other technical difficulties.

The denials came in both Arabic and English (postings in the forum are typically not in English). "As a requested strategy the Video has been sent to TV channels before posting it to the net," the English portion said. "And It is not true that some websites claimed that they have received it in another way."

Reports on INTELWIRE and NBC News yesterday observed disruptions in infrastructure sites and jihadist message boards respectively. INTELWIRE stands by its story.

"Faithful Correspondent" also conceded that there were technical problems with the video quality, an unusual situation given al Qaeda's technical proficiency in previous video communiques. The image of bin Laden freezes for a significant portion of the video, even though the audio and subtitles continue.

According to media reports yesterday, the U.S. government intercepted the video at least 24 hours before its release online today. As reported here yesterday, it appears authorities may have disrupted the video's intended distribution.

Labels: Weblog

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Did The U.S. Block Bin Laden Video?

UPDATES:

ABC: Transcript of Bin Laden Video

Reports have surfaced that U.S. officials have intercepted the new Osama bin Laden video release and are currently analyzing it. It is perhaps not coincidental that the one of the main distribution nodes for al Qaeda videos has been offline for the last several hours.

Typically, news stories describe videos as being released through jihadist message boards. That's not entirely accurate. The videos are announced on jihadist sites, but they are released through a variety of online services that host large file transfers for free.

When al Qaeda's Al Sahab media production arm releases a video, it uploads the video to one service, and then individual jihadists and sympathizers around the world then re-upload the video to a variety of other services.

Most of these services eventually remove the videos for violating their terms of service (by facilitating terrorism). But by the time they do, the videos have been downloaded thousands of times and are then re-uploaded to new services (or to the same service under a different name).

The most reliable of these services is a U.S.-based video file repository, which was knocked offline for several hours, from early this morning through approximately 1:30 p.m. This occurred even as media reports revealed that the U.S. was currently analyzing the new bin Laden tape, which had not yet been announced on the more visible message boards as of 1:30 p.m. Eastern time.

Many bloggers and observers have criticized the U.S.-based Internet service providers for allowing al Qaeda to use their infrastructure for propaganda purposes. But what many of these critics fail to acknowledge is that the government can exploit servers based in the United States much more effectively than those based overseas.

Today's exercise is an excellent example of the other side to that argument. The U.S. not only intercepted the bin Laden video, but it appears to have delayed its public release, buying valuable time to prepare a response.


NBC reports separate video disruption

SECOND UPDATE:

The oddities continue. A three-minute excerpt of the bin Laden video was obtained by NBC, and has been circulating online. At the two-minute mark of the three-minute video, the picture freezes (although the subtitles continue to update). The picture remains frozen for much of the remainder of the video. CNN says voice analysis confirmed bin Laden as the speaker.

The complete video still does not appear to be circulating at many of the major jihadist boards. I could not confirm the whole tape as posted anywhere online, although NBC was referring to it as being "released."

Even before the freeze-up, the video is not well synced to the sound. It's as if bin Laden recorded an audio tape which was then performed by an actor. I don't know if I want to be the person who sticks his neck out to argue this idea, but I wouldn't rule it out. If Bin Laden is hiding under an assumed name in a relatively populated area, it would be a logical strategy.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Having seen the full resolution video, I generally abandon the above train of thought.

Labels: Weblog

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New Bin Laden Tape Promised For 9/11 Anniversary

...or so they say. Over the last six months, there have been several high-profile Web postings that promised "new" videos from bin Laden, only to disappoint with archival releases (albeit, at times, material that had not been seen before).

We will see.

Labels: Weblog

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