Chemicals, weapons, and computers were seized in raids on 23 houses in Sydney and Melbourne Tuesday, following a 16-month investigation.

“I'm satisfied that we have disrupted what I would regard as the final stages of a large-scale terrorist attack, or the launch of a terrorist attack:”

Prosecutor Richard Maidment told the court the men had formed a terrorist group to kill “innocent men and women in Australia”.

He claims they received military-style training in rural Australia and had discussions about bomb-making.

[. . .]

“The members of the Sydney group have been gathering chemicals of a kind that were used in the London Underground bombings,” Mr Maidment said, adding that Abu Bakr was the ringleader of both the Melbourne and Sydney groups.

From California Yankee.

No evidence suggests that the deadly earthquake that rocked Pakistan on Saturday injured or killed the world's top terror leader, Osama bin Laden.

The quake shook the border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan, where bin Laden is believed to be hiding. However, authorities at this point have no information indicating he's been injured or killed, said a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the information's sensitivity.

From California Yankee.

Newsday (via Drudge)

(Reuters)

Top Topics

• Syrian leader Bashar Assad met with representatives from 10 Palestinian militant organizations, and urged them to continue their struggle towards statehood. The meeting came as international pressure on Syria continues to build.

• The Palestinian leadership is blaming Hamas for the assassination of Moussa Arafat, with one official saying “we have confirmed information that Hamas participated in the assassination operation.”

• Bangladesh police seized explosives, jihad material, and over 200 homemade bombs from a house they raided in Dhaka. Since the August 17th bombings, authorities have been cracking down on the banned Islamic group, Jumatul Mujahedin.

• After a 38 year presence, Israeli forces have withdrawn from the Gaza Strip. Thousands of Palestinian security forces began moving in as Palestinians celebrated into the night.

Other topics today include: Hezbollah still refuses to disarm; Iran's involvement in Iraq; al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia; Kudistan trail; Congressional hearings on Iran; Jordanian militants sentenced; 9/11 heroes honored; BRAC report; Islamic law in Ontario; Padilla detention; Liberia elections; Egypt elections; Georgian revolution; militants killed in Pakistan; U.S.-Britain labelled terrorists; Fast food bombings in Karachi; Conflict in Taiwan straights; Anti-terror measures in Australia; ties between London bombers & al Qaeda; Italy allows phone taps; suicide operations and more.

Read the Rest…

Mohammed Mohsen Yahya Zayed, 32, was convicted by a federal jury on March 10 of conspiring to provide material support and resources to al Qaeda and to Hamas.

[. . .]

His colleague Sheikh Mohammed Ali Hassan al-Moayad, 56, was sentenced in July to 75 years and fined $1.25 million in the same case. For each of five counts, al-Moayad received 15-year sentences, each to be served consecutively.

Prosecutor Kelly Moore said during the five-week trial that al-Moayad had ties to al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and had bragged about having “taught him about Islamic law.”

The sheikh was arrested in Germany in 2003 after telling a federal agent posing as an American businessman he would help him funnel money to militants, prosecutors said. The sheikh and Zayed, who prosecutors said worked in tandem, were later extradited to the United States.

Zayed's plea for leniency fell on deaf ears. As he handed down the sentence, Judge Sterling Johnson said:

Everyone all over the world should condemn terrorists and terrorist organizations.

The four men had purchased firearms with silencers, investigated making bombs and were ready to carry out attacks when two of them were caught robbing a gas station to fund the operation, U.S. Attorney Debra Yang told a news conference in Los Angeles.

“The evidence in this case indicates that the conspirators were on the verge of launching their attack,” she said, adding that the arrest had exposed “a chilling plot based on one man's interpretation of Islam.”

From California Yankee.

“To my mind, these operations are closer to suicide than to martyrdom-seeking, and they are taboo and not permissible” for a number of reasons, wrote Syrian-born Abdul Menem Mustafa Halimeh, alias Abu Baseer al-Tartussi, on his website.

The Saudi-owned pan-Arab daily Asharq Al-Awsat, which reported Tartussi's fatwa on Saturday, described him as a top ideologue for Islamist militants and said his edict had provoked angry reactions on Islamist websites, with some accusing him of letting down Al-Qaeda followers.

Tartussi cited several reasons for banning suicide operations including:

Suicide violates dozens of (Islamic) religious texts; and

Suicide bombings often “wrongfully killing innocent and sacred souls, be they Muslim or otherwise.”

From California Yankee.

Today's Winds of War briefing is brought to you by evariste of Discarded Lies.

Top Topics

• The Department of Energy is going to release a whoooole lot of energy, blowing up truck bombs in the desert to figure out whether nuclear site security barriers are vulnerable to them.

• Dress-up time for Putin! Is it a pilot…a seaman…it's a tin-pot autocrat playing games with another tin-pot autocracy! The unprecedented 8-day-long joint military exercise, Peace Mission 2005, involving 10,000 Russian and Chinese troops, started on the 18th. The exercises are meant to send the US a message and sell more weapons. Meanwhile, Russia's defense budget will increase by 22% in FY 2006. Russia and China also want the US to quit its bases in their backyard to free them to pursue influence, resources and regional hegemony. The US is watching. According to the Russians, the scenario for the war games is ostensibly Russia and China are “assisting” a third country that has a terrorist insurgency. I'm sure they'll be very helpful.

• The Taliban are reopening the Afghan front with new tactics, flush with cash and weapons. They're taking a few pages out of the Iraq playbook. The CIS's anti-terror chiefs are concerned. The amnesty for Taliban fighters/government jobs program doesn't appear to be too effective either.

• The Pentagon's latest (and third, so far) 25-year roadmap for the development of unmanned aerial systems (née UAVs). If you're looking for pictures, vital stats and future plans for every unmanned craft in the US arsenal, this is the PDF for you. There are currently well over 1000 unmanned aerial systems in Iraq and Afghanistan. More at DefenseTech, too…

• In the wake of the New Folsom prison terror cell's unraveling plot, questions are being asked more urgently about Islamist recruitment in prison. Over 200 agents are involved in the investigation into the homegrown terrorist cell, a manifestation of Saudi Arabia's insidious war on the United States. According to geostrategy-direct (no link, sorry), the Saudi military is sending 100 officers a month to fight in Iraq. The cell itself may be homegrown, but at least one of the terrorists is not-he's a Pakistani national. Oh, Pakistan.

• JK: Meanwhile, here's some good news from Afghnistan. No, not Chrenkoff - but worthy. Just one of the good folks we're working with to keep these briefings going after Arthur Chrenkoff retires.

Other Topics Today Include:
Turkey holding Zarqawi confederate?; AQ chief in Saudi killed (yes, again); Putin flirts with Jordan; US permanent troop presence in Iraq details; US teams up with 4 countries against MS-13; NYPD & its Middle Eastern employees; ACLU whining; Arab Bank fined; two states of emergency along the border with Mexico; US shopping mall security learns from the Israelis; US mediates release of hundreds of POWs in Morocco; Mugabe tottering; how Binnie got da Bomb; 27 terrorist training camps in Pak sez India; JI US embassy truck-bomb plot thwarted; UK wrings hands as terrorists broadcast demoralizing messages inciting the death of its soldiers in Iraq-from their UK facilities!; IRA doings; UK appoints fox to guard hens; secret spilled; Bakri and Little Bakri still in the news and mucho mucho more…

Read the Rest….

“I can confirm that a rocket flew over the bow of USS Ashland and the rocket impacted in the roof of a warehouse. No sailors or marines were injured,” said Commander Breslau, of the US Fifth Fleet.

[. . .]

The USS Ashland and its sister amphibious ship, the USS Kearsarge, have been docked in Aqaba, Jordan's only sea port, for the past 10 days, witnesses said.

Both ships are reported to have left the port in response to the attack.

According to Bloomberg, second rocket landed at the airport in the neighboring Israeli city of Eilat at about 8:45 a.m. local time, partly exploding and causing unspecified damage.

From California Yankee.

Bloombergreports that the U.S. denied the Hamburg court's request to hear testimony from Ramzi Binalshibh, an alleged mastermind of the attacks, who is held by the U.S. at an undisclosed location after his capture in Pakistan in 2002. The U.S. only sent a summary of minutes from his interrogations that indicate El-Motassadeq may not have known about the attacks.

According to CNN, the U.S. Justice Department faxed the German court summaries of the interrogation of two key detainees: Ramzi Binalshibh and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed:

Binalshibh, believed to be the Hamburg cell's contact with al Qaeda, said “the only members of the Hamburg cell were himself, Atta, al-Shehhi and Jarrah,” according to the summary. He also said, “the activities of the Hamburg group were not known to el-Motassadeq.”

The group was “well known by a number of Arab students,” but “Binalshibh said that the people in question had no knowledge and were not participants in any facet of the operative plans of September 11.”

Mohammed is believed to have masterminded the 9/11 plot, and Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian man, is suspected to have been an al Qaeda contact in Germany.

According to the summary, the Justice Department had “doubts” about some of the testimony, but the summary did not elaborate.

Binalshibh also said that while el-Motassadeq had transferred money on behalf of one of the plotters, he did not know for what purpose. Mohammed told interrogators that Binalshibh had not told el-Motassadeq of the details for security reasons.

Binalshibh gave interrogators a list of more than a dozen names of people who he said had no knowledge of and did not take part in any aspect of the 9/11 plan. The list included Zacarias Moussaoui, a suspect being held in the United States.

From California Yankee.

The New York Times reports the anonymous source for the Able Danger story is Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer.

Northeast Intelligence Network looks at whether or not DOD attorneys had legal authority to stop the dissemination of the information uncovered by Able Danger.
[Caveat: some good research and more than a handful of personal opinion given as analysis]

This is going to get a lot more interesting before it goes away.

Recently, a group of talented young Afghans found themselves abroad as great ambassadors for their country – for both good and bad reasons:

Four young Afghan students did more than merely stun their competitors when they came away with some of the top prizes at an international mathematics competition held recently in Almaty, Kazakhstan. They also changed how students from 22 other countries perceive Afghanistan.

Ahmad Mustafa Naseri and Mustafa Naseri, both 17 (and unrelated), students at the Turkish-run Afghan-Turk School in Kabul, won gold medals while Omid Sadiqyar and Mohammad Rafi Firoz, also 17 and students at a similar school in the northern Shiberghan province, were awarded silver medals following a day-long algebra competition in May.

Ahmad Mustafa said that while he was proud of his gold medal, he was saddened to discover that students from other countries thought of Afghanistan only as the home of terrorism, drugs production and internecine conflict.

“One competitor from Australia told me, ‘I was very surprised that Afghans were taking part in this competition – we always hear that Afghanistan is a major drug producer and a country for terrorists who are always fighting one another,’ ” said Ahmad Mustafa.

But now, Ahmad Mustafa said, the Australian promised to return home and talk of the talented and brave Afghans he had met.

The Australian student is not alone – the negative image of Afghanistan is quite widespread, as the latest Harris Poll shows:

While the U.S. public has been paying a fair amount of attention to the situation in Iraq, they have not been paying as much attention to Afghanistan. However, when asked specifically about the situation in Afghanistan, U.S. adults, on the whole, feel quite negative about the prospects for success.

Sadly, there simply aren't enough gifted math students in Afghanistan to send abroad to unmake the negative image of their country being perpetrated by the Western media. Focusing almost exclusively on drugs and violence might make for exciting news, but it does great disservice both to the people of Afghanistan, who already have to work under great disadvantages to turn around one of the most impoverished nations on earth, but also to the international public, on whose strong support the Afghans are relying to rebuild their country.

Below, the past four weeks’ worth of stories from the other Afghanistan.

• Society
  
• Reconstruction
  
• Humanitarian Aid
  
• The Coalition Troops
  
• Security

Today's Winds of War briefing is brought to you by evariste of Discarded Lies.

Top Topics

• The main planks of Tony Blair's antiterrorist platform. Which he'll need, as his intelligence chiefs are warning him that Britain faces an Islamic insurgency at home, too. Meanwhile, The Sunday Times goes undercover in an academy of hatred.

• California is overhauling its domestic intelligence apparatus, and California's Office of Homeland Security is training private security guards in counterterrorism. Meanwhile, a top California state National Guard commander is accused of trying to set up a renegade intelligence collection system, drawing much controversy.

• Intelligence, Homeland Security-now the State Department is next in line for a major overhaul as the Bush administration seeks to reshape government for the present and future challenges facing the nation. State will move away from its Cold War obsessions, toward a focus on weapons proliferators and terrorists. Its democracy promotion muscle is also to be beefed up.

• India and China are burying the hatchet: an old border dispute has been resolved and the two countries are looking forward to increased trade and investment, as well as a space exploration partnership. And yet, China is engaging in an unprecedented buildup of its capability to wage war on India at the same time.

Other Topics Today Include:
Ahmadinejad gets snubbed, snubs back; Egyptian torture; AIPAC lobbyists charged; Revolution ain't coming to Iran; FBI's translation backlog swells; unwelcome customs laxity; Mauritania coup; Jaish e Mo to hijack jet; India to fence off Banglia; Aus. to join UK, France in terror-preacher eviction measures; Chechnya jihad on Wahhabis; Aus. and Canada want to sell uranium to China; 7 in 10 Guantanamites to be repatriated; Binnie large and in charge sez old pal; the Saudis Knew! and much more…

Read the Rest…

“It is half a mile or so from where a bomb was left on Thursday last week and discovered later by a member of the public.”

The Army are said to be involved as well.