"JIHAD JANE" Aka Colleen LaRose Receives 10 Yr Sentence For Murder Plot To Defend MUSLIMS (AL QAEDA Is On The Rise)

#JihadJane

A Pennsylvania Woman who coined herself "JIHAD JANE" , was sentenced to 10 yrs in Prison for plotting to KILL a Man she claims offended Muslims.


ARTICLE: "Jihad Jane Gets Reduced Sentence For Cooperation"

A Pennsylvania woman who called herself "Jihad Jane" online and plotted to kill a Swedish artist was sentenced Monday to 10 years in prison after telling a judge she was once obsessed with Jihad.

Colleen LaRose had faced a potential life term.

But Judge Petrese Tucker accepted a government request to reduce the sentence, because of her extensive cooperation with investigators.

Prosecutors still asked for decades in prison, fearing she remains dangerous.

LaRose, 50, of Pennsburg, Pa., told the judge she once had thought about jihad from morning to night, saying she was "in a trance."

"I don't want to be into jihad no more," she said.

She was sentenced to 10 years in prison plus five years of supervised release. She could be out in a little over four years, given the more than four years she has already served and the potential for time off for good behavior.

Prosecutors depicted LaRose as a "lonely and isolated" woman who sought excitement by joining the jihadist cause. She was flattered to get an assignment to kill a foe of Islam.

U.S. investigators say she participated in a 2009 conspiracy to target artist Lars Vilks over his series of drawings depicting the Muslim prophet Muhammad as a dog. Muslim extremists in Iraq had offered a $100,000 reward for anyone who killed Vilks, who was never attacked.

The Justice Department said Ali Charaf Damache, who was living in Ireland, recruited LaRose and another U.S. woman via jihadist websites.

Damache married the other woman, Jamie Paulin Ramirez, in a Muslim ceremony on the day she arrived in Ireland from Colorado that same month.

LaRose left the terror cell in Ireland after about six weeks not because she thought better of the murder plot, but because she "grew frustrated because her co-conspirators were not ready for action," Assistant U.S. Attorney Jennifer Arbittier Williams said Monday.

Others need to know, she said, that "if you plot to kill someone, you are going to receive decades behind bars - decades - even if you cooperate," Williams said.

Public defender Mark Wilson, though, said LaRose has come to understand the true, peaceful tenets of Islam and said "there's virtually no chance that she would ever be involved in violent jihad ever again."

Judge Tucker said she had no doubt LaRose, who stalked Vilks online, would have killed him had she had the chance.

"The fact that out of boredom, or out of being housebound, she took to the computer and communicated with the people she communicated with, and hatched this mission, is just unbelievable," Tucker said.

LaRose returned to Philadelphia in 2009 to surrender, becoming one of the few women ever charged in the U.S. with terrorist activities. Her arrest was kept secret and the indictment unsealed only after Paulin-Ramirez and the six others were rounded up in Ireland months later.

Paulin-Ramirez and another co-defendant, Maryland teen Mohammad Hassan Khalid, are scheduled to be sentenced this week in Philadelphia.

The March 2010 indictment charged LaRose with conspiring with jihadist fighters and pledging to commit murder in the name of a Muslim holy war, or jihad. The indictment was announced hours after authorities arrested seven suspected terrorists in Ireland allegedly linked to LaRose.

In e-mails recovered by the FBI over 15 months, LaRose agreed to marry an online contact from South Asia so he could move to Europe. She also agreed to become a martyr, the indictment said.

The man she had agreed to marry told her in a March 2009 e-mail to go to Sweden to find the artist, Lars Vilks, who had depicted the Prophet Muhammad with the body of a dog, the indictment said.

Vilks has questioned the sophistication of the plotters but said he is glad LaRose never got to him.

LaRose pleaded guilty Tuesday to four counts: conspiracy to support terrorists, conspiracy to kill in a foreign country, lying to investigators and attempted identity theft.

LaRose, born in Michigan, moved to Texas as a girl and had married twice by age 24. Her first marriage came at 16, to a man twice her age. Both unions were long over by the time she met Pennsylvanian Kurt Gorman in 2005.

LaRose lived with Gorman and his father, caring for the older man while Gorman worked at his family's small business, Gorman said last year. He called her a "good-hearted person" who mostly stayed around the house.

But her online ties grew to a loose band of allegedly violent co-conspirators from around the world, prosecutors said. They found her after she posted a YouTube video in June 2008 saying she was "desperate to do something somehow to help" ease the suffering of Muslims, the indictment said.

Despite Web images that show LaRose in a Muslim head covering, Gorman said he never picked up on any Muslim leanings. She did not attended religious services of any kind, he said. Gorman said he sensed nothing amiss in their five-year relationship — until LaRose fled days after his father's funeral.

LaRose had removed the hard drive from her computer and set off for Europe, according to the indictment. She had swiped Gorman's passport and planned to give it to the co-conspirator she had agreed to marry, the indictment said.

It's unclear how she was able to travel overseas, given that the FBI, presumably tipped to her online postings, had interviewed her in July 2009. According to the indictment, she then denied soliciting funds for any terrorist causes or making the postings ascribed to "JihadJane."

By Sept. 30, 2009, she wrote online that it would be "an honour & great pleasure to die or kill for" her intended spouse, the indictment said. "Only death will stop me here that I am so close to the target!" she is accused of writing.

She was arrested the following month upon her return to the U.S.


Sources: CBS News, ReutersTV, Youtube

Mohammed Merah Shot Dead By French Police! Was On U.S. "No-Fly" List

Suspect in French Killings Slain as Police Storm Apartment After 30-Hour Siege

Mohammed Merah, a 23-year-old former garage mechanic who claimed responsibility for the brutal slayings of four men and three children, was shot dead on Thursday when security forces stormed the apartment where he had barricaded himself for more than 30 hours.

The death of Mr. Merah brought a violent end to a series of events that transfixed France, but also left unsettling questions about potential lapses by intelligence services, and the lives they may have cost.

Mr. Merah, a Frenchman of Algerian descent who claimed ties to Al Qaeda but apparently acted alone, was struck in the head by a bullet in the final moments of a fierce firefight, said François Molins, the prosecutor who led the investigation into the killings. Mr. Merah was found dead on the ground after leaping from the apartment through a low window, still firing, according to the interior minister, Claude Guéant. A Colt .45 pistol was found near him, with just two rounds remaining and an empty magazine nearby.

The authorities said they had hoped to take Mr. Merah alive, seeking information about homegrown terrorists and his shadowy path to Islamic radicalism. While the difficulty in preventing attacks by such “lone wolf” killers is widely acknowledged, Mr. Merah, who had traveled to both Pakistan and Afghanistan, was in fact well known to the French police and intelligence services.

The foreign minister, Alain Juppé, told French radio before the raid on Thursday morning: “I can understand that one might wonder if there was a lapse or not. We need to bring clarity to this.”

Mr. Molins and other officials seemed at pains to explain why Mr. Merah had failed to attract the attention of investigators earlier, especially before he killed his final four victims, including three children, at a Jewish school on Monday.

“He’s not an individual who went to Afghanistan and Pakistan by taking the usual paths, which are obtained by certain facilitators and monitored by specialized services,” Mr. Molins said. “He figured it out all on his own.”

Yet, Mr. Molins said on Wednesday that Mr. Merah was arrested some years ago in Afghanistan by the Afghan police and turned over to the American military, which transferred him to the French authorities. He had also been on the United States government’s no-fly list for “some time,” an American law enforcement official said on Thursday, speaking on condition of anonymity because he did not want to be identified discussing national security matters. It is not clear whether the United States authorities shared that information with their French counterparts.

Asked why Mr. Merah had not been under closer scrutiny in France, Mr. Molins said that “thousands” of French people travel to Afghanistan and Pakistan, explaining that France does not have the resources to monitor all of them.

Several terrorism experts disagreed, saying that Mr. Merah appeared to have been overlooked or underestimated, and adding that only about 15 to 30 men with a similar profile travel from France to the region each year.

“We’re not good enough at detecting them,” said Laurent Montet, a director and instructor at the Institute of High Studies in Criminology.

Mr. Molins also acknowledged that Mr. Merah was known to have “jihadist sympathies,” and had been questioned by intelligence services as recently as November, after returning from two months in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The officials apparently accepted his explanation that he had been there as a tourist.

Mr. Merah procured a prodigious stock of firearms and ammunition — including several automatic weapons, which are rare in France — activity that is most likely to have involved contact with criminal groups and ought to have drawn the attention of French intelligence, said Mr. Montet, the criminologist.

There were also suggestions that more effective data analysis might have led the police to Mr. Merah in time to prevent his last murders. He was identified as a suspect only Monday afternoon, after the final four killings, according to Mr. Molins. Yet investigators had been in possession of the evidence that led them to him — an Internet trail that connected him to the first killing — since Saturday.

“Something might have been possible, here one can wonder a bit, in effect,” said Alain Bauer, a criminologist with the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers.

French law is highly protective of personal privacy, Mr. Bauer noted, and French intelligence services are restricted in their ability to mine databases for potential threats, and take a more qualitative approach.

“In the United States, it’s the system that counts,” the antiterrorism magistrate Marc Trévidic said in an interview last year. “In France, it’s the men.”

Mr. Merah killed with shocking coldness, witnesses said, shooting each of his seven victims with a round to the head at point-blank range and filming his exploits, Mr. Molins said. According to the prosecutor, in the first recording Mr. Merah can be heard telling his victim, a soldier, “You kill my brothers; I’m killing you.”

In a video from the second shooting, which left two paratroopers dead and one critically wounded, Mr. Merah departs from the scene on a powerful motor scooter shouting, “God is great!”

Just before noon on Thursday, officers entered Mr. Merah’s apartment through a front door and windows, said Mr. Guéant, the interior minister. As the police reached the bathroom, Mr. Merah surged out “firing with extreme violence,” Mr. Guéant said.

More than 300 rounds reportedly were discharged in the firefight. One officer was slightly wounded, and two others were in shock.

Over the course of the siege, which began in the predawn darkness, Mr. Merah made a series of disclosures, officials said, claiming the seven killings and saying he had planned at least three more. The killings, he said, were meant to avenge the suffering of Palestinian children and to protest French intervention abroad as well as the banning of the full Islamic veil in France.

While he had earlier indicated that he hoped to live, just before 11 p.m. on Wednesday, Mr. Merah told the police he did not fear death. “I will go to paradise,” he said, according to Mr. Molins. At that point, he ceased communicating with negotiators. The raid began just under 12 hours later.

The authorities found ammunition of various calibers in the apartment, along with materials for gasoline bombs and several empty bullet clips. At his death, he wore a bullet-proof vest, a black djellaba, or traditional robe, and jeans, Mr. Molins said.

Investigators will now seek to determine if Mr. Merah indeed acted alone, as he insisted. Mr. Merah’s brother Abdelkader, 29, whom the authorities have described as a known Islamist radical with connections to jihadi networks, remains in police custody, along with his mother and a friend. Explosives were found in a car belonging to Abdelkader.

Earlier in the investigation, the authorities suspected both Merah brothers of potential involvement.

On Tuesday, the two were identified as primary suspects in the case, Mr. Molins said.

Plans were made late that night to arrest them, along with their mother. Even then, however, investigators had been unable to determine which of the two brothers was the man they were seeking.

It was not until Mr.Merah opened fired on the police agents sent to capture him that he became the prime suspect.


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Sources: CNN, NY Times, Russia Today, Youtube, Google Maps

French Jewish School Assassin Is Islamic Extremist Linked To Jihadist Group

French Police Say They Have Cornered Suspect in School Shooting

A 23-year-old man suspected in the methodical killings of four men and three children in this region over the past 10 days barricaded himself in a small apartment building in Toulouse early Wednesday as negotiators tried to secure his surrender.

In a standoff that stretched past 12 hours, he fired several heavy volleys at the hundreds of police officers ringing the building, injuring two, though neither seriously. At one point the suspect threw a .45-caliber pistol from the window, the same kind used in each of the three attacks.

Officials identified the man in French media reports as Mohammed Merah, a French national of Algerian descent. Interior Minister Claude Guéant, speaking at the site, said the man told negotiators that he belonged to Al Qaeda and that the attacks were meant to avenge the deaths of Palestinian children and to protest French military deployments abroad.

Investigators believe the suspect was the motorcyclist behind the killings of three paratroopers in Toulouse and the nearby city of Montauben, all three of Arab descent, over the past 10 days ago. They also believe he conducted an attack on Monday outside a Jewish school that killed a rabbi, two of his young children, and an 8-year-old girl. The gunman held the girl by the hair to execute, pausing to switch to a 9-millimeter gun when his .45 jammed. Investigators believe he was wearing a camera around his neck at the school to record his murders.

The chief editor of France 24 said in a televised interview that she had spoken by telephone to a man who claimed to be the shooter in the hours before the police surrounded his building. “He was calm, was speaking in very good French and punctuated by Arabic expressions,” said the editor, Ebba Kalondo. She said he spoke of planning more attacks and that he intended to post video of his killings online.

The suspect had traveled to Pakistan and Afghanistan and called himself a mujahedeen, or freedom fighter, and had been under surveillance by the French domestic intelligence service for several years, Mr. Guéant said, “though nothing whatsoever allowed us to think he was at the point of committing a criminal act.” He became a suspect on Monday afternoon, after investigators traced an IP address, used in connection with the killing of the first paratrooper 10 days ago, to the suspect’s mother, according to Pierre-Henry Brandet, a spokesman for Mr. Guéant.

Aviv Zonabend, the vice president of the local branch of the Crif, France’s most prominent Jewish organization, who met with Mr. Guéant on Wednesday morning, gave a slightly different account, saying that investigators apparently had been unable to locate the suspect before the shootings on Monday.

The police action started shortly after 3 a.m. on Wednesday after lengthy planning late Tuesday night, officials said.

The suspect’s mother was taken to the building by police in the hope that she would help persuade the man to surrender, Mr. Guéant said, but she declined to speak to him, saying that he had refused to listen to her in the past. The suspect’s brother, who was known locally for his radical religious ideology, was detained with a friend outside Toulouse for questioning on Monday, Mr. Guéant said, without giving details. The mother was also being questioned Wednesday afternoon, according to the prosecutor leading the investigation.

President Nicolas Sarkozy presided over a funeral service for the three paratroopers in nearby Montauban on Wednesday. A fourth paratrooper was critically wounded in the attacks in that city; he was black.

The bodies of those killed at the school were flown overnight to Israel for burial. They were Rabbi Jonathan Sandler, 30, a religious instructor; his two sons, Arye, 6, and Gabriel, 3; and Miriam Monsonego, 8, the daughter of the school’s principal. Rabbi Sandler was a French citizen; the three children had dual French-Israeli nationality.

Mr. Sarkozy had ordered the region’s security alert to the high level of “scarlet,” giving security forces wide powers that include the authority to close some public places, halt and search buses and trains and deploy combined patrols of police officers and soldiers. Police officers were ordered to guard Muslim and Jewish schools and places of worship across the region.

A French lawyer in Toulouse told the BFMTV broadcaster that he had represented a teenage Mr. Merah multiple times for relatively petty crimes. The lawyer, Christian Etelin, said, “I defended him multiple times in juvenile court for thefts and for violence, for the kinds of delinquency that is common in these neighborhoods.”

Before the authorities said on Wednesday that their prime suspect claimed ties to Al Qaeda, many analysts had speculated that he might have been motivated by extreme right-wing passions coinciding with the presidential elections.

After the shootings on Monday, the main candidates in the French presidential campaign, including Mr. Sarkozy, suspended their campaigns as political debate swirled around whether the killings were somehow inspired by anti-immigrant rhetoric. The campaign has been long and heated, and Mr. Sarkozy has been trying to win back voters who drifted to the far-right National Front party.

It remained unclear what the effect of the killings would be on the election, which is only a few weeks away. Nor was it clear whether they would further stoke anti-Muslim rhetoric in the country. Muslims complain widely of feeling vilified by some political elements, on the right in particular, and the anti-immigration far right has been gaining unprecedented popularity in recent months. Some analysts have suggested that the deaths could cause a calming of the political discourse.

In Paris on Wednesday morning, Mr. Sarkozy met with Jewish and Muslim leaders and called for restraint and solidarity among the populace. “We must be united,” he said in a brief address. “We must yield neither to easy falsehoods nor to vengeance.”

Before meeting with Mr. Sarkozy, Richard Prasquier, the national head of Crif, the Jewish organization, said: “It is absolutely excluded that we confuse this character — and the Islamist, jihadist, Al -Qaeda-linked movement he represents — and the Islam of France, which is a religion like all other religions.”

“These acts are in total contradiction with the foundations of this religion,” said Mohammed Moussaoui, the president of the French Council for the Muslim Faith, who also met with Mr. Sarkozy.


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Karzai's Brother Assassinated For Cooperating With CIA (Conspiracy)

Ahmad Wali Karzai's assassination leaves a big headache for Nato


His assassination in Kandahar removes an embarrassment but leaves behind an even bigger headache: how to fill the political and security vacuum left behind.

He had long been Kandahar’s power broker and a crucial pillar in the web of personal alliances that his half-brother, President Hamid Karzai, relied upon to project his influence.

As a result, it is impossible to overstate his importance in the south of Afghanistan and his central role in Nato efforts to see off the Taliban in their spiritual home.

His death removed an ally in a key region just as America begins withdraw some 33,000 troops.

At one stage, though, Nato commanders hoped to persuade President Karzai to dump his half-brother, and so rid his regime of the non-stop allegations of corruption and vice emanating from the head of Kandahar’s provincial council.

In the end – like elsewhere in Afghanistan - they were forced to do a grubby deal, accepting him warts and all in return for the influence he could wield among the local Pashtun population.

“He’s the proverbial 800lb gorilla and he’s in the middle of a lot of rooms. He’s the mafia don, the family fixer, the troubleshooter,” said one Nato officer describing the pragmatic approach.

Last year, he proved himself a staunch supporter of Nato and the US, as international forces cleared the Taliban from around Kandahar.

Now, his death with only encourage the Taliban, who already have one eye on the calendar and the eventual withdrawal of Nato forces in 2014.

The timing could not be worse, just as the US begins searching for a political solution after a decade of war.

Hasan Askari Rizvi, a Pakistani analyst, said the death of an ally in such a crucial city would hugely disrupt Nato strategy.

“At the end of the day, he was very close to the president. Kandahar is hugely important and President Karzai needed someone there he could trust,” he said.

“If Kandahar cannot be controlled then the withdrawal schedule will be thrown out.”



Reports link Karzai's brother to heroin trade

When Afghan security forces found an enormous cache of heroin hidden beneath concrete blocks in a tractor-trailer outside Kandahar in 2004, the local Afghan commander quickly impounded the truck and notified his boss.

Before long, the commander, Habibullah Jan, received a telephone call from Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of President Hamid Karzai, asking him to release the vehicle and the drugs, Jan later told American investigators, according to notes from the debriefing obtained by The New York Times. He said he complied after getting a phone call from an aide to President Karzai directing him to release the truck.

Two years later, American and Afghan counternarcotics forces stopped another truck, this time near Kabul, finding more than 110 pounds of heroin. Soon after the seizure, United States investigators told other American officials that they had discovered links between the drug shipment and a bodyguard believed to be an intermediary for Ahmed Wali Karzai, according to a participant in the briefing.

The assertions about the involvement of the president's brother in the incidents were never investigated, according to American and Afghan officials, even though allegations that he has benefited from narcotics trafficking have circulated widely in Afghanistan.

Both President Karzai and Ahmed Wali Karzai, now the chief of the Kandahar Provincial Council, the governing body for the region that includes Afghanistan's second largest city, dismiss the allegations as politically motivated attacks by longtime foes.

"I am not a drug dealer, I never was and I never will be," the president's brother said in a recent phone interview. "I am a victim of vicious politics."

But the assertions about him have deeply worried top American officials in Kabul and in Washington. The United States officials fear that perceptions that the Afghan president might be protecting his brother are damaging his credibility and undermining efforts by the United States to buttress his government, which has been under siege from rivals and a Taliban insurgency fueled by drug money, several senior Bush administration officials said. Their concerns have intensified as American troops have been deployed to the country in growing numbers.

"What appears to be a fairly common Afghan public perception of corruption inside their government is a tremendously corrosive element working against establishing long-term confidence in that government — a very serious matter," said Lieutenant General David Barno, who was commander of coalition military forces in Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005 and is now retired. "That could be problematic strategically for the United States."

The White House says it believes that Ahmed Wali Karzai is involved in drug trafficking, and American officials have repeatedly warned President Karzai that his brother is a political liability, two senior Bush administration officials said in interviews last week.

Numerous reports link Ahmed Wali Karzai to the drug trade, according to current and former officials from the White House, the State Department and the United States Embassy in Afghanistan, who would speak only on the condition of anonymity. In meetings with President Karzai, including a 2006 session with the United States ambassador, the Central Intelligence Agency's station chief and their British counterparts, American officials have talked about the allegations in hopes that the president might move his brother out of the country, said several people who took part in or were briefed on the talks.

"We thought the concern expressed to Karzai might be enough to get him out of there," one official said. But President Karzai has resisted, demanding clear-cut evidence of wrongdoing, several officials said. "We don't have the kind of hard, direct evidence that you could take to get a criminal indictment," a White House official said. "That allows Karzai to say, where's your proof?"

Neither the Drug Enforcement Administration, which conducts counternarcotics efforts in Afghanistan, nor the fledgling Afghan anti-drug agency has pursued investigations into the accusations against the president's brother.

Several American investigators said senior officials at the DEA and the office of the Director of National Intelligence complained to them that the White House favored a hands-off approach toward Ahmed Wali Karzai because of the political delicacy of the matter. But White House officials dispute that, instead citing limited DEA resources in Kandahar and southern Afghanistan and the absence of political will in the Afghan government to go after major drug suspects as the reasons for the lack of an inquiry.

"We invested considerable resources into building Afghan capability to conduct such investigations and consistently encouraged Karzai to take on the big fish and address widespread Afghan suspicions about the link between his brother and narcotics," said Meghan O'Sullivan, who was the coordinator for Afghanistan and Iraq at the National Security Council until last year.

Humayun Hamidzada, press secretary for President Karzai, denied that the president's brother was involved in drug trafficking or that the president had intervened to help him. "People have made allegations without proof," Hamidzada said.

Spokesmen for the Drug Enforcement Administration, the State Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment.

An Informant's Tip

The concerns about Ahmed Wali Karzai have surfaced recently because of the imprisonment of an informant who tipped off American and Afghan investigators to the drug-filled truck outside Kabul in 2006.

The informant, Hajji Aman Kheri, was arrested a year later on charges of plotting to kill an Afghan vice president in 2002. The Afghan Supreme Court recently ordered him freed for lack of evidence, but he has not been released. Nearly 100 political leaders in his home region protested his continued incarceration last month.

Kheri, in a phone interview from jail in Kabul, said he had been an informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration and United States intelligence agencies, an assertion confirmed by American counternarcotics and intelligence officials. Several of those officials, frustrated that the Bush administration was not pressing for Kheri's release, came forward to disclose his role in the drug seizure.

Ever since the American-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, critics have charged that the Bush administration has failed to take aggressive action against the Afghan narcotics trade, because of both opposition from the Karzai government and reluctance by the United States military to get bogged down by eradication and interdiction efforts that would antagonize local warlords and Afghan poppy farmers. Now, Afghanistan provides about 95 percent of the world's supply of heroin.

Just as the Taliban have benefited from money produced by the drug trade, so have many officials in the Karzai government, according to American and Afghan officials. Thomas Schweich, a former senior State Department counternarcotics official, wrote in The New York Times Magazine in July that drug traffickers were buying off hundreds of police chiefs, judges and other officials. "Narco-corruption went to the top of the Afghan government," he said.

Suspicions of Corruption

Of the suspicions about Ahmed Wali Karzai, Representative Mark Steven Kirk, an Illinois Republican who has focused on the Afghan drug problem in Congress, said, "I would ask people in the Bush administration and the DEA about him, and they would say, 'We think he's dirty.' "

In the two drug seizures in 2004 and 2006, millions of dollars' worth of heroin was found. In April 2006, Jan, by then a member of the Afghan Parliament, met with American investigators at a DEA safe house in Kabul and was asked to describe the events surrounding the 2004 drug discovery, according to notes from the debriefing session. He told the Americans that after impounding the truck, he received calls from Ahmed Wali Karzai and Shaida Mohammad, an aide to President Karzai, according to the notes.

Jan later became a political opponent of President Karzai, and in a 2007 speech in Parliament he accused Ahmed Wali Karzai of involvement in the drug trade. Jan was shot to death in July as he drove from a guesthouse to his main residence in Kandahar Province. The Taliban were suspected in the assassination.

Mohammad, in a recent interview in Washington, dismissed Jan's account, saying that Jan had fabricated the story about being pressured to release the drug shipment in order to damage President Karzai.

But Khan Mohammad, the former Afghan commander in Kandahar who was Jan's superior in 2004, said in a recent interview that Jan reported at the time that he had received a call from the Karzai aide ordering him to release the drug cache. Khan Mohammad recalled that Jan believed that the call had been instigated by Ahmed Wali Karzai, not the president.

"This was a very heavy issue," Mohammad said.

He provided the same account in an October 2004 interview with The Christian Science Monitor. Mohammad said that after a subordinate captured a large shipment of heroin about two months earlier, the official received repeated telephone calls from Ahmed Wali Karzai. "He was saying, 'This heroin belongs to me, you should release it,' " the newspaper quoted Mohammad as saying.

Languishing in Detention

In 2006, Kheri, the Afghan informant, tipped off American counternarcotics agents to another drug shipment. Kheri, who had proved so valuable to the United States that his family had been resettled in Virginia in 2004, briefly returned to Afghanistan in 2006.

The heroin in the truck that was seized was to be delivered to Ahmed Wali Karzai's bodyguard in the village of Maidan Shahr, and then transported to Kandahar, one of the Afghans involved in the deal later told American investigators, according to notes of his debriefing. Several Afghans — the drivers and the truck's owner — were arrested by Afghan authorities, but no action was taken against Karzai or his bodyguard, who investigators believe serves as a middleman, the American officials said.

In 2007, Kheri visited Afghanistan again, once again serving as an American informant, the officials said. This time, however, he was arrested by the Karzai government and charged in the 2002 assassination of Hajji Abdul Qadir, an Afghan vice president, who had been a political rival of Kheri's brother, Hajji Zaman, a former militia commander and a powerful figure in eastern Afghanistan.

Kheri, in the phone interview from Kabul, denied any involvement in the killing and said his arrest was politically motivated. He maintained that the president's brother was involved in the heroin trade.

"It's no secret about Wali Karzai and drugs," said Kheri, who speaks English. "A lot of people in the Afghan government are involved in drug trafficking."

Kheri's continued detention, despite the Afghan court's order to release him, has frustrated some of the American investigators who worked with him.

In recent months, they have met with officials at the State Department and the office of the Director of National Intelligence seeking to persuade the Bush administration to intervene with the Karzai government to release Kheri.

"We have just left a really valuable informant sitting in jail to rot," one investigator said.


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Sources: NY Times, Russia Today, Telegraph.co.uk, Youtube, Google Maps

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Wasn't Afraid Of Death! R.I.P.

43 Years Ago Today Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Was Assassinated By Some Government Paid Fool!

"Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!"

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., April 3, 1968. R.I.P.



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In last speech, Martin Luther King Jr. 'not concerned' about early death

Forty-three years ago Monday, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tenn. He was there to support a garbage collectors' strike, and on the night before his death gave what would be his final sermon. Amid the call for for African-Americans to boycott businesses that mistreated workers, he delivered a sermon, without notes, that focused on his life and disavowed any concern that he might be killed for his role in the fight for civil rights.

"Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now,” the Rev. Mr. King said that evening. “I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!”

Now known as "I've Been to the Mountaintop,” the sermon was called King's "most apocalyptic" by King scholar James Washington. It was not the first time King had spoken publicly about his possible early death, though those close to him say King certainly did not expect the April 3 sermon to be his last.

"He always knew some speech would be his last," wrote Andrew Young, who was with King in Memphis. "Was he afraid? Not on your life!"

King had received death threats for years and had already survived one assassination attempt. In 1958, a black woman who apparently suffered from mental illness stabbed him at a book signing, nearly killing him. In its report on the incident, The New York Times wrote, momentously, that the wound was so severe that King would have died had he sneezed.

In his last sermon, King reflected on that experience, recalling that a ninth-grade girl wrote him afterward to say she was glad he hadn’t sneezed. King used that experience to reflect on his career and the civil rights movement.

"I too am happy that I didn't sneeze. Because if I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been around here in 1960, when students all over the South started sitting-in at lunch counters," said King. "If I had sneezed I wouldn't have been here in 1963, when the black people of Birmingham, Alabama, aroused[OR ROUSED?] the conscience of this nation, and brought into being the Civil Rights Bill. If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have had a chance later that year, in August, to try to tell America about a dream that I had had."

After the sermon, King took His seat. His friend Benjamin Hooks recalled that King's words had elicited surprising emotions in both listeners and speaker.

"To my surprise, when I got a little closer, I saw tears streaming down his face," Mr. Hook said in a speech a decade later. "Grown men were sitting there weeping openly because of the power of this man who spoke on that night."


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Sources: Christian Science Monitor, Youtube, Google Maps

Malcolm X & Dr. Martin Luther King Jr: "Striking Similarities" (Videos)

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Sources: Politeach Production Co., Youtube, Google Maps

Malcolm X Documentary: "Make It Plain" (Videos)

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Sources: Youtube, Google Maps

Man Plotting To Kill President Obama Is Arrested (View Felony Complaint Doc)

Huffington Post----

SALT LAKE CITY — Authorities have arrested a man who allegedly told bank tellers while cleaning out his savings account in Utah that he was on a mission to kill President Barack Obama.

The Secret Service said Daniel James Murray, 36, was arrested Friday outside a casino in Laughlin, Nev., a gambling town 100 miles from Las Vegas on the Nevada-Arizona line.

He was charged Thursday in Salt Lake City with a federal count of conveying threats while talking to tellers last month at Zions First National Bank in St. George, Utah.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Barbara Bearnson said Murray was in federal custody in Nevada and likely will get a court date there Monday. Neither Bearnson nor the Secret Service would discuss whether Murray was considered to be a serious threat.

Charging documents say Murray, originally from Rexford, N.Y., is the registered owner of eight guns.

He was described by his father and former neighbors in Rexford as troubled but not dangerous, known for strolling down a street wearing a cape while talking to himself.

"He's sick. He's been sick for about 10 years," Michael Murray, his father, told the Times Union of Albany, N.Y.

In charging documents filed Thursday, the Secret Service said Daniel Murray made bizarre statements while opening _ and then closing within two weeks _ an $85,000 savings account.

First, he demanded to know if Zions First National Bank was solvent, saying, "I'm sure if citizens happen to lose their money, they will rise up and we could see killing and deaths," bank tellers told a Secret Service agent.

On May 27, as a teller counted out bills no larger than $50, Murray delivered a rambling discourse on the probability of economic and social disorder, ending with "We are on a mission to kill the president of the United States," a bank employee told the Secret Service.

The next day, Murray withdrew the remaining $72,000 and closed his account.

In Washington, Secret Service spokesman Malcolm Wiley said Murray offered no resistance when he was arrested at 7 p.m. Friday on a warrant in the parking lot of the Riverside Hotel and Casino in Laughlin, Nev. Wiley wouldn't offer any further details. It wasn't clear if Murray had a lawyer.

Note: To view the Felony Complaint document filed against Murray look here.


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Sources: Huffington Post, Day Life, Daily Gazette, Google Maps