The latest raid in Riverside, CA on members of the La Familia drug cartel has resulted in the seizure of $3.4 million dollars, 730 pounds of meth, and more than 400 weapons from members of the organization.
As part of Project Coronado, dozens of raids like these have been conducted over the last couple of days in 19 states and have “involved more than 3,000 federal agents and police officers… resulting in the arrests of more than 300 people.”
Click here for more on this story.
BBC News reports that French authorities have arrested a French nuclear physicist of Algerian descent on charges of “criminal association with a terrorist enterprise.”
He was workng at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern), “Europe’s main centre for the study of atomic physics…at the Cern laboratory which houses the giant Large Hadron Collider.”
Authorities have been quick to emphasize that his work “did not bring him into contact with anything that could be used for terrorism.”
Officials noted that he had not been at work for most of the year, claiming illness, but he was in contact via email.
[J]udicial sources told the AFP news agency that agents had come across him during a separate inquiry into the recruitment of would-be Islamist militants who wanted to fight in Afghanistan.The physicist had exchanged messages over the internet with people known to be close to al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb [AQiLIM] and expressed a desire to carry out attacks, but had “not got to the stage of carrying out material acts of preparation”, one said.
For more on al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb [AQiLIM] click here.
John Avlon, former chief speechwriter for Rudy Giuliani, poses this question in his CNN article about the increasing presence and impact of political fringe extremists in this culture.
This point is particularly prescient in an age where certain pro-Islamists seek to foster divisiveness in America. So much for “United We Stand.”
And in what I call entertainment news, ABC reports that Allen Stanford, the former Texas billionaire of the infamous Stanford financial group incarcerated for perpetrating fraud amounting to a “massive Ponzi scheme,” was hospitalized after a jail fight with another inmate in the private detention facility north of Houston where he is serving time. His injuries reportedly were non life-threatening. I’m sure many of Stanford’s victims are singing the praises of the guy who gave him a beat down.
Update: NYDaily News on how Bernie Madoff is doing…
Stanford (right) used to stock "Brilliant Brunette" shampoo in his office bathroom. Moral: never take the claims of your shampoo too seriously.
CBS and NYDailyNews.com report that as part of a joint terror task force investigation, the FBI and NYPD raided homes in Queens, NY amid terror threats and pursuant to a search warrant. One of the homes belonged to an Assad Niazi, a self-employed antiques dealer, who insisted that he was not the target of the search but “has roommates that may have been targeted.”
“The raids came after an individual under surveillance for alleged links to al-Qaida came to New York City over the weekend and left the area, Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., said.”
Silicon Valley start-up Palantir makes news with the WSJ (click to view video) as it contracts with the CIA and other agencies. Recently their data analysis software was used to expose a network of suicide bombers.
H/T: Rhetorican.com
…the new TLC show focusing on female members of the force and ” the more confrontational perks of police work.”
Click here for an article critiquing the reality series.
Police are set to review (note they didn’t say reopen) the “cold case” of Stones guitarist Brian Jones’s death after “the emergence of new evidence.”
In 1969, Jones was deemed to have died “by misadventure” when his body was found at the bottom of a private swimming pool on a farm/estate in East Sussex, U.K.
Click here for NME article.
H/T: Rhetorican.com for the excellent heads up as always
The Washington Post article details how Khalid Sheikh Mohammed gave “terrorist tutorials” to intelligence officers and even occasionally used a blackboard and scolded any officers with poor note-taking abilities.
Reuters reports on this new development in the hijacking of the Maltese-registered, Russian-crewed cargo ship off the coast of France.
H/T: Rhetorican.com for the excellent tips as always…
…including some leaders of prominent drug cartels including Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman-Loera, Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada-Garcia and Arturo Beltran-Leyva, high level members of the Sinaloa organization. The DOJ, ICE, and DEA filed charges in New York and Chicago today, August 20, 2009.
Click here for Washington Post story
…was OUTstanding. I just saw it and can’t wait to see it again. Now one of the great war films not really about war at all. Off topic, I know. Go see it!
Surrounded.
I say this because, just like in Showtime’s original series “Sleeper Cell,” a rather unassuming looking white guy was indicted as a firmly-ensconced member of a U.S.-based group of jihadis accused of supporting violent jihad overseas.
Daniel Patrick Boyd, 39, was arrested Monday with his two sons and four other North Carolina men. Prosecutors accused them of military-style training at home and plotting “violent jihad” through a series of terror attacks abroad.
Recruiting him was one of their best ideas ever – they relied on people assuming he was in the business of plotting landscaping rather than a series of violent jihad attacks. It is that sort of lazy prejudice that keeps getting us into trouble.
Kudos to the unsung agents who nabbed them.
All kinds of wrong!
I wish it were a set-up to some joke where they all walk into a bar and there’s a competition about who’s going to get into heaven first. But it’s not, and at this point, the only one with a shot at paradise would have to be the kidney.
CBS News Blogs and The Consumerist (great pic): Scores of people in New Jersey and New York were arrested in a massive public corruption scandal, “including three New Jersey mayors, two state assemblymen and five rabbis.”
Various schemes were involved including money laundering, organ trafficking, and political corruption. Did I mention there were rabbis? And kidneys? I’m still gob-smacked about it all.
A special thanks to the many who ended up here by googling: “kidney rabbis jokes.”
Earlier this year I did some pieces on the Somali pirates who hijacked the Saudi-owned Sirius Star and the Shabab Islamists who pursued them, ostensibly to punish them for attacking a Muslim company, in reality to demand a share of the loot.
Now it seems that the Shabab have migrated to Kenya and are posing a threat to westerners there. Click here for story.
…although they can’t confirm, Indonesian police believe they’ve recovered a laptop belonging to one of the bombers responsible for the hotel attacks in Jakarta on Friday, July 17. The discovered the laptop in one of the hotel rooms in the Ritz Carlton, the site of one of the attacks.
Click here for story.
Go figure. Does the Arab media think the Muslim Uighurs aren’t …Muslim enough? Maybe: after all, the Saudi Arab Times did distinguish them as “co-religionists.” Hrm, anti-Asian bias?
Or maybe, as the Time article suggests, state-sponsored publications don’t want to focus on it because of political, economic, or trade interests:
According to U.S. government statistics, China is both Iran and Sudan’s biggest trade partner, and either the main or secondary source of imports for most of the other countries in the region.
This is not to say that some of the radicals in the region haven’t noticed. This week, “al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb this week called for attacks on Han Chinese in North Africa in retaliation for Muslim deaths.”
I’d be interested to see how this develops. Will al Qaeda and other militant groups turn their sights to China and start recruiting Uighurs en masse into their training camps (if they haven’t already)? The Chinese don’t mess around when it comes to terrorists. Or pirates, for that matter. I have a feeling it’ll get really ugly (and hopefully entertaining).
The NYT reports that since 2001 the C.I.A. had “vague” plans to assassinate members of al Qaeda’s senior leadership.
The Rhetorican notes that the Times reported on this in 2002 (and that Congress knew about it and some say authorized it; I’m not going that far).
Anyway, the plans were never carried out and C.I.A. Director Panetta cancelled it shortly after learning about it.
Current and former officials said that the program was designed as a more “surgical” solution to eliminating terrorists than missile strikes with armed Predator drones, which cannot be used in cities and have occasionally resulted in dozens of civilian casualties.
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