The Counterterrorism Blog

Massive Explosion in Kabul Near U.S. Embassy (updated)

Last update at 3:40 ET. AP and cable networks reporting massive explosion in Kabul, Afghanistan in diplomatic area of city and near U.S. Embassy - "blast occurred inside the grounds housing the state-run television offices. The building is next to the heavily fortified U.S. Embassy and the base for NATO-led forces in the capital..." One Afgan policeman reported hurt.

The primary reason for our merger, effective tonight, with Bill Roggio's "Fourth Rail" is to cover the ongoing counterterrorism effort in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Africa (Doug Farah has written here often about the Pentagon's Africa activities). Bill will embed with the Marines in Afghanistan next month. We invite reports from our men and women on the ground there.

ARY Gold and Terror Finance

In early 2002 I wrote a story in the Washington Post outlining the role Dubai-based ARY Gold had in helping the Taliban and al Qaeda move their assets out of Afghanistan before U.S. troops took control. The leader of ARY Gold, Abdul Razzak, threatened to sue me, but the story prompted a multinational investigation into the company and the use of gold and other commodities by terrorists and transnational criminal organizations.

Because the investigation was highly classified after it was underway, I have heard little of it in recent years. But now the Asia Times brings news of new developments in the case. The most interesting is tying ARY and Razzak to financial network of A.Q. Kahn, the Pakistani nuclear scientist who sold nuclear secrets and technology to Libya, North Korea, Iran and others.

On Aug. 30, 2005, ARY's status as an associate member of the London Bullion Market Association was revoked. Razzak's group of ARY companies (ARY are the initials of its owner, Abdul Razzak Yacoub, and most of his companies use the name in some form) are under investigation for large-scale money laundering and the operation of illegal hawalas, or money transfer systems. My full blog is here..

Washington Post Live Chat on Terrorist Web Chatter

The Washington Post has invited me to participate in another live online question and answer session on their website to address reader questions about terrorist web chatter.  The session will begin at 11:00am eastern time tomorrow (Wednesday, April 19) and the dialogue can be viewed at the WP online chat site.

CT Blog to Merge With "Fourth Rail" and Move - New Foundation to Fund Our Efforts

Recently, I've had the pleasure to meet Bill Roggio, editor of "The Fourth Rail" and one of the best military bloggers, and get to know him well. After much discussion, we've decided to merge our resources into a single Counterterrorism Blog. This is an excellent opportunity, and our Contributing Experts greatly look forward to working with Bill at the new Counterterrorism Blog. We will be posting at the new Counterterrorism Blog site full time as of Thursday; the site is being redesigned and will go live at midnight Wednesday night Eastern time (or 12:00 am Thursday morning). We will automatically redirect readers to the new site at that time. All of our current features will be available at the new site, and we expect to add more streaming videos and presentations. The new site will be free of commercial ads.

We have also created the Counterterrorism Foundation, which will support our continuing efforts at the Counterterrorism Blog to provide original reporting and increase public awareness of the daily happenings in the Global War on Terror. The Counterterrorism Foundation will also support future embeds with our troops in the field in the major conflict areas of the war. Bill has decided to devote his full-time efforts to the Counterterrorism Foundation, and will depend on your support. Contributions to the Counterterrorism Foundation will be tax deductible. We'll provide more information on the Counterterrorism Foundation in the near future.

Bill will be embedding in Afghanistan some time in mid-May (date and unit to be determined). The war and Coalition reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan is not being covered sufficiently, and in fact the soldiers and Marines fighting there call it "The Forgotten War". This will be an excellent opportunity to see the situation in Afghanistan first-hand and report on the mission of our troops and the progress and setbacks in Afghanistan.

After Afghanistan, he plans on going to Northern Africa to report on the other forgotten war, and then will return to Iraq later in the year.

How Does This Happen?

Senior Counterterrorism officials in several agencies are baffled by a little-noticed development last month: The State Department sent its head of counterterrorism, Ambassador Hank Crumpton, to be the keynote speaker at a conference co-sponosored by the International Institute for Islamic Thought (IIIT). Not only that, as FrontPageMagazine reports, the Pentagon footed the bill for most of the conference.

That is the same institution under investigation by prosecutors in Northern Virginia Safa case. And the main organization supported by Prof. Sami al-Arian, who just reached a plea agreement with prosecutors to admit engaging in a conspiracy to support the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), a designated terrorist organization. Al Arian will likely be sentenced to time served and deported. PIJ just sent a suicide bomber to Israel yesterday, killing at least nine civilians. Not the first PIJ attack, and certainly not the last.

Al Arian's relationship to IIIT was not a passing one. In one letter, IIIT co-founder Taha Jaberl al-Alwani wrote that al Arian is "a part of us and an extension of us." IIIT is an intergral part of the Safa network, the group of Northern Virginia businesses, charities and think tanks that were all run out of one office and shared the same address, run by a group of men with long standing ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and its international financier, Yousef Nada. My full blog is here.

Sami al-Arian Admits His Terrorist Connections (video link added)

I appeared on Bill O'Reilly's show on Fox News Channel to discuss the plea agreement in the Sami al-Arian case. He pleaded guilty to one count of engaging in a conspiracy to provide services to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (a designated terrorist organization during his years of service) including depositing money into its bank accounts, and he lied about his activities. He brought the top-level PIJ terrorists into the U.S., and no "low-level terrorist" (if there is such a thing) could have pulled that off. This agreement contradicts the claims of innocence by him and his supporters. So this plea agreement is a victory for those in and out of government who spotlighted his activities and pursued his prosecution. You can see the video of my "O'Reilly" interview here.

My CT Blog colleague and friend Bill West, who initiated the federal criminal investigation in 1994 as the senior INS agent in the area, sent me his comments and asked me to quote him:

"It is not, as noted in the family's press release today, a 'voluntary departure' from the U.S.; it is a formal removal/deportation. The plea is actually OUTSTANDING! A good portion of the factual base in the plea relates to immigration violation issues linked to PIJ support...a bit of personal vindication in that for me, given the genesis of the criminal investigation against Al-Arian so very long ago: pursuing criminal immigration fraud on the heels of your documentary, 'Jihad in America,' airing on PBS.

The plea really is also a work of art. It encompasses the terrorism-support elements, wraps in the immigration fraud, directly links al-Arian to the PIJ, and identifies al-Arian associates Nafi, Shallah and Al-Najjar officially as PIJ operatives...brilliant!

One possible difficulty in the deportation agreement: Since al-Arian is a stateless Palestinian convicted of a terrorism-support felony, deporting him may become particularly difficult. Toss in the reality of 'Hamas-stan,' assuming the goal is to send him to the Territories, and things become very dicey. Hopefully, ICE, DOJ, and the State Department have been working feverishly behind the scenes to make something work in all this and will be able to boot him soon. If not, and he languishes in ICE detention like Al-Najjar did, notwithstanding the terrorism conviction, it could become another PR nightmare for the federal government."

Here are all files associated with the plea agreement:

Download alarian_conditional_plea_order.pdf
Download alarian_guilty_plea_consent_form.pdf
Download alarian_magistrate_guily_plea_form.pdf
Download alarian_plea_agreement.pdf
Download alarian_plea_unsealing_transcript.pdf

Are We Allowing Iranian Terrorists to Infiltrate While We Plan for War?

Representatives of Iran have said that while the United States may possess the ability to inflict pain on Iran, Iran has the ability to cause pain to the United States. So it shouldn't be a surprise that the Pentagon has been planning for war with Iran for some time. For quite some time the analysts on television spoke about the potential that Iran could send insurgents into Iraq to attack our soldiers. However, most recently, there has been real speculation that if our nation was to launch a military action against Iran to prevent its nuclear program from succeeding, that Iran would send terrorists to the United States to attack our nation within our own borders.

But our nation has a real problem in learning from history. In the late 1970's, when the United States embassy was seized in Tehran, the former INS was tasked with searching for citizens of Iran who were illegally in the United States. I was a special agent of the former INS back then and was one of the many special agents who was assigned to that project. We quickly found out that we did not possess the capability to carry out this essential mission. Our databases were found lacking and we lacked an adequate number of agents to get the job done. We were only able to identify a small percentage of the total number of Iranian citizens believed to have been in our country back then. It was, perhaps understandable that we had a problem coping with that assignment, then. The former INS had never before been tasked with such an assignment.

Today the situation is far different. We saw our deficiencies that we had in determining who was here and we have already suffered several terrorist attacks.

"A History of the Car Bomb" Series Worth Reading

"Asia Times Online" has a two-part series, "A History of the Car Bomb," by American author Mike Davis, in the April 13 and April 18 editions. It's a fascinating history of the car bomb from its first use in September 1920 in New York by Mario Buda, a comrade of famous anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti, through its recent use by Islamic terrorists. Mr. Davis appears unbiased; he will make some uncomfortable in his discussion of its past use by forces now allied with the United States against those Islamic terrorists who use the car bomb today against us. I don't know whether it's new or whether these parts are excerpts from a book, but I recommend it and look forward to readers' comments. I'll update this post if they run other segments. The Wikipedia online encyclopedia has a good article on the car bomb with a table of mass car bombing events. An excerpt from the "Asia Time Online" series :

"Buda's wagon was, in essence, the prototype car bomb: the first use of an inconspicuous vehicle, anonymous in almost any urban setting, to transport large quantities of high explosive into precise range of a high-value target. It was not replicated, as far as I have been able to determine, until January 12, 1947, when the Stern Gang drove a truckload of explosives into a British police station in Haifa, Palestine, killing four and injuring 140. The Stern Gang (a pro-fascist splinter group led by Avraham Stern that broke away from the right-wing Zionist paramilitary Irgun) would soon use truck and car bombs to kill Palestinians as well: a creative atrocity immediately reciprocated by British deserters fighting on the side of Palestinian nationalists.

Vehicle bombs thereafter were used sporadically - producing notable massacres in Saigon (1952), Algiers (1962) and Palermo (1963) - but the gates of hell were only truly opened in 1972, when the Provisional Irish Republican Army accidentally, so the legend goes, improvised the first ammonium nitrate-fuel oil (ANFO) car bomb. These new-generation bombs, requiring only ordinary industrial ingredients and synthetic fertilizer, were cheap to fabricate and astonishingly powerful: they elevated urban terrorism from the artisanal to the industrial level, and made possible sustained blitzes against entire city centers as well as the complete destruction of ferro-concrete skyscrapers and residential blocks.

The car bomb, in other words, suddenly became a semi-strategic weapon that, under certain circumstances, was comparable to air power in its ability to knock out critical urban nodes and headquarters as well as terrorize the populations of entire cities."

Prominent Jihad Forum Announces Arrest of Web Administrator

The Al-Hesbah network media forum has released their sixth official public statement announcing the arrest of a chief web administrator known as Abu Musab al-Mohtaseb.  According to the document, "He was arrested... for spreading truth… The crusaders realized the importance of the threat posed by the Islamic media forums that uncovered their lies and stood in the way of their campaigns of misinformation and deception... due to several recent developments, [Al-Hesbah]’s administrators decided to reopen the network... taking all the precautions they can, in order to reassume their media role."

Click to view English translation of communiqué

See also: - IAI Calls for Resurrection of the Al-Hesbah Forum
- Al-Qaida in Saudi Arabia Denies Being Infiltrated

Al-Qaida Cell Claims Rocket Attack in Israel

A previously unknown group calling itself "Al-Qaida's Committee in Palestine" has claimed responsibility for an alleged rocket attack on a "strategic target" in Israel.  According to a statement from the group, "The operation was kept in secret until now in order to insure the safety of our mujahideen brothers.  We proudly declare the initiation of our attacks and we inform the Zionist enemy to expect more innovative operations.  Let the world realize that jihad in the cause of Allah will not be stopped by borders and walls.  We inform our brothers that we keep our doors open to all brothers who want to declare jihad in the cause of Allah."

Click to view English translation of communiqué c/o Globalterroralert.com