Posts Tagged ‘terrorism’
 
April 22, 2013 0

Inspire Magazine: A Staple Of Domestic Terror

Pres­sure Cooker Bomb From Inspire Magazine

Update — April 23: Fed­eral law enforce­ment offi­cials have report­edly con­firmed that Dzhokhar Tsar­naev and his brother got bomb-making instruc­tions from Inspire magazine.

Shortly after author­i­ties revealed that pres­sure cook­ers were used in the explo­sives det­o­nated at the Boston Marathon last week, numer­ous media out­lets began to report and spec­u­late that the bombs matched designs in Al Qaeda in the Ara­bian Penin­sula’s English-language ter­ror mag­a­zine, Inspire.

Let’s be clear, there is still no evi­dence that broth­ers Tamer­lan and Dzkhokhar Tsar­naev read the ter­ror­ist mag­a­zine or used its pres­sure cooker instruc­tions, which are not unique to Inspire. How­ever, the Tsarnaev’s online activ­ity and social media pro­files indi­cate some fas­ci­na­tion with mil­i­tancy and Islam that are con­sis­tent with other mes­sages of Inspire.

Numer­ous inter­na­tional and domes­tic extrem­ists moti­vated by rad­i­cal inter­pre­ta­tions of Islam have been influ­enced by the mag­a­zine and, in some cases, report­edly uti­lized the bomb mak­ing instruc­tions in their attempts to carry out attacks. In the United States, for example:

  • In Novem­ber 2012, Raees Qazi was arrested along with his brother, She­heryar, for allegedly plot­ting a bomb attack against unspec­i­fied tar­gets in New York City.  Raees report­edly admit­ted hav­ing read Inspire mag­a­zine, and a search of his home turned up bomb-making com­po­nents con­sis­tent with instruc­tions that can be found in an issue of Inspire he had read.
  • In Novem­ber 2011, Jose Pimentel was arrested and charged with state-level ter­ror­ism offenses in New York after he allegedly came close to com­plet­ing three bombs based on an Inspire design. Pimentel’s web­site, “True Islam,” also reposted PDF copies of Inspire mag­a­zine. Pimentel appar­ently had planned to attack return­ing U.S. mil­i­tary per­son­nel, post office and police targets. He is still await­ing trial.
  • In July 2011, Naser Jason Abdo was arrested at a motel in Killeen, Texas, where author­i­ties claimed that he was plot­ting to attack a restau­rant fre­quented by mil­i­tary per­son­nel based at Fort Hood.  Bomb mak­ing com­po­nents were recov­ered from the motel room. The arti­cle “How to Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom” from the first issue of Inspire mag­a­zine was report­edly also found in his room. Abdo has since been sen­tenced to life-in-prison for his attempted attack.
  • Adel Daoud, who was arrested in Sep­tem­ber 2012 and charged with plot­ting to bomb a Chicago-area bar, sent his friends copies of the mag­a­zine in order to “brain­wash them,” and called Inspire “the best mag­a­zine I have read.”

Inspire’s solic­i­ta­tion for reader con­tri­bu­tions have also played a role in the rad­i­cal­iza­tion process of other would be bombers in the U.S.

  • Mohamed Osman Mohamud, who was con­victed of attempt­ing to bomb the 2010 Christ­mas Tree Light­ing in Port­land, Ore­gon, allegedly wrote and sub­mit­ted an arti­cle to Inspire, although it was not published.
  • Quazi Nafis, who pleaded guilty to attempt­ing to bomb the New York Fed­eral Reserve Build­ing in Octo­ber 2012, also wrote an arti­cle that he sup­pos­edly planned to sub­mit to Inspire after his attack in which he described his desire to “destroy America.”

Most recently, in Novem­ber 2012, four men from South­ern Cal­i­for­nia were arrested and charged with plan­ning to travel abroad to Afghanistan to fight along­side the Tal­iban and Al Qaeda. Accord­ing to the crim­i­nal com­plaint, the inves­ti­ga­tion began in Jan­u­ary 2012 when one of the men was searched as he crossed the U.S.-Mexico bor­der and was found to have a copy of Inspire in his possession.

Samir Khan, a 24-year-old Amer­i­can known for dis­trib­ut­ing ter­ror­ist pro­pa­ganda mate­r­ial online, was the prin­ci­pal author of Inspire before he was killed by a U.S. drone strike on Sep­tem­ber 30, 2011.

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April 19, 2013 1

Profile Of Boston Bombers Emerges

Even as the man­hunt for Dzhokhar Tsar­naev con­tin­ues, a por­trait of him and his brother, Tamer­lan, the alleged per­pe­tra­tors of Monday’s Boston Marathon bomb­ing, has begun to emerge.

Based on social media pro­files appar­ently belong­ing to them, the broth­ers were inter­ested in mil­i­tancy, Islam and Chech­nya, a region in Russia.

The two report­edly came to the United States as refugees in the early 2000s, per­haps a cou­ple of years apart, after flee­ing the vio­lence in the Cau­ca­sus.  Both appeared to main­tain close ties to their eth­nic home­land. The younger brother, Dzhokhar, included the seal of his home­town soc­cer team as the back­ground of his Twit­ter account. The older, Tamer­lan, expressed his hope for Chechen inde­pen­dence and included books about Chech­nya about on his Ama­zon wish list.

The broth­ers were also prac­tic­ing Mus­lims, post­ing mes­sages about Islam and Ramadan on var­i­ous social media pro­files. There is an indi­ca­tion that Tamer­lan may have had a more rad­i­cal streak, reflected in his YouTube playlist fea­tur­ing videos by a rad­i­cal cleric liv­ing in Aus­tralia and videos about join­ing an Islamic army to help estab­lish a Caliphate as well as a playlist on “Ter­ror­ists” (the videos of which had pre­vi­ously been deleted by YouTube).

A more com­plete pro­file on the broth­ers can be found here: Social Media Pro­files Shed Light on Broth­ers Accused in Boston Marathon Attack.

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March 11, 2013 0

Detained Al Qaeda Spokesman Justified Anti-Jewish Ideology

Screen­shot of Abu Ghaith, Bin Laden and Ayman Al-Zawahiri from video claim­ing respon­si­bil­ity for 9/11

Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, a for­mer Al Qaeda spokesman and Osama bin Laden’s son-in-law, was detained last week by U.S. author­i­ties in Jor­dan after being deported from Turkey to his native Kuwait.

Abu Ghaith’s state­ments on behalf of Al Qaeda, which ceased after he fled to Iran in 2002, demon­strated how the ter­ror­ist group’s ide­ol­ogy was rooted in the hatred of Jews, often link­ing Al Qaeda’s oppo­si­tion to Amer­ica with its ani­mos­ity to Jews and Israel.

In the 2001 state­ment claim­ing respon­si­bil­ity for the 9/11 attacks, Abu Ghaith said that the attacks were in response to “the Islamic Nation hav­ing been groan­ing in pain for more than 80 years under the yoke of the joint Jewish-Crusader aggres­sion” and the “Jew­ish occu­pa­tion” of Palestine.  He warned that attacks against the United States would con­tinue unless the United States met three con­di­tions:  stop­ping “its sup­port for the Jews,” lift­ing the embargo on Iraq, and the with­drawal of the United States from “our land.”

Abu Ghaith also released a state­ment claim­ing respon­si­bil­i­ty­for an Al Qaeda attack on a syn­a­gogue in Tunisia, which killed 19 tourists in April 2002 and said it was revenge for the deaths of Palestinians. In the state­ment, he promised that “as long as Amer­ica insists on its unjust and biased pol­icy towards Mus­lims in favor of Jews and Chris­tians around the world then, God will­ing, we will con­tinue to hit it any­where in the world.” 

Abu Ghaith, who is now in New York City await­ing trial, is charged with con­spir­ing to kill United States nation­als. Pros­e­cu­tors are essen­tially argu­ing that “the core pur­pose of Al Qaeda… is to sup­port vio­lent attacks against prop­erty and nation­als, both mil­i­tary and civil­ian, of the United States and other coun­tries” and that Abu Ghaith was a mem­ber of Al Qaeda with a close rela­tion­ship to bin Laden.

He has pleaded not guilty, and faces a pos­si­ble life sen­tence if convicted.

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