Al Qaeda: Explosives Expert Among 4 Afghanistan Leaders Killed

The following news item should help set right anyone's mythology that the US in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere are hurting "poor innocent Arab shepherds" who only want to raise sheep, raise a family, and spread peace throughout the world. May righteous Jews and Americans continue to capture and kill our enemies in al-Qaeda, the civilization-hating Muslim terror network. Via FoxNews:

Al Qaeda confirmed in a Web statement Sunday the death of a senior commander known as a top explosives and poisons expert, who is believed to have been killed in a U.S. airstrike in Pakistan last week.

The statement said Abu Khabab al-Masri and three other commanders were killed. It did not give details on when or how they were killed, but Pakistani authorities have said they believe al-Masri died in an American airstrike last Monday on a compound near the Afghan border.

Pakistani officials have said six people were killed in that strike, in the country's lawless South Waziristan tribal region.

Al-Masri, an Egyptian militant whose real name is Midhat Mursi, had a $5 million bounty on his head from the United States. He is accused of training terrorists to use poisons and explosives, and is believed to have trained homicide bombers who killed 17 American sailors on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000.

He is also believed to have helped run Al Qaeda's Darunta training camp in eastern Afghanistan, until the camp was abandoned amid the 2001 U.S. invasion of the country. There he is thought to have conducted experiments in chemical and biological weapons, testing materials on dogs.

For more on Al-Masri' s relationship to Osama bin Laden, see this. In addition, although the Weekly Standard incorrectly reported Abu Khaba al-Masri's death in 2006, their article, here, on the criminal legacy of his life is a must read for anyone who wants to know more about the militaristic core of Islam and how it institutionalizes homicide.

Former FBI supervisory agent: U.S. ambassador to Yemen in 2000 hindered FBI investigation into USS Cole bombing

Via JihadWatch:

A naive and muddleheaded multiculturalist ambassador impedes anti-terror efforts. "Coddling Terrorists In Yemen," by Ali H. Soufan, an FBI supervisory special agent from 1997 to May 2005, in the Washington Post:

Seven years after al-Qaeda terrorists Jamal al-Badawi and Fahd al-Quso confessed to me their crucial involvement in the bombing of the USS Cole, and three years after they were convicted in a Yemeni court -- where a judge imposed a death sentence on Badawi -- they, along with many other al-Qaeda terrorists, are free. On Oct. 12, 2000, when I flew to Yemen to lead the FBI's Cole investigation, I had no idea how uncooperative the Yemeni government would initially be. Nor could I have imagined how disconnected from reality the U.S. ambassador to Yemen then, Barbara K. Bodine, would prove.

I have hesitated in the past to share my view of the conflict between Bodine and the FBI's counterterrorism leader, John O'Neill. I feel compelled, however, to respond to Bodine's recent comments, which slander the efforts of many dedicated counterterrorism agents and divert attention from the significant terrorist problem within Yemen, our "ally" in the "war on terror."

A recent Post report on Yemen allowing al-Qaeda operatives to go free offered insight into the challenges the FBI faced. Bodine was quoted in the article not urging the Yemeni government to rearrest the terrorists but, instead, denigrating the agents who investigated the attack. She faulted the FBI as being slow to trust Yemeni authorities and said agents were "dealing with a bureaucracy and a culture they didn't understand. . . . We had one group working on a New York minute, and another on a 4,000-year-old history."

In fact, our team included several Arab American agents who understood the culture and the region. Even so, such comments were irrelevant. The FBI left Yemen with the terrorists in jail.

It is true that while tracking the terrorists we worked "on a New York minute." We owed that much to the sailors murdered on the Cole and to all innocent people who remained targets as long as the terrorists were free.

It is also true that we did not trust some Yemeni officials. We had good reason not to:

When the FBI arrived in Yemen, some government officials tried to convince us that the explosion had been caused by a malfunction in the Cole's operating systems. Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh even asked the U.S. government for money to clean up port damage the United States "caused."...

Read it all.

Two Sentenced to Death for Cole Bombing

Folks, a Yemeni judge sentenced two men to death and four others to prison terms ranging from five to 10 years Wednesday for orchestrating the 2000 suicide bombing of the USS Cole, an attack blamed on bin Laden's terror network.

Saudi-born Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who is in U.S. custody at an undisclosed location, and Jamal al-Badawi, a 35-year-old Yemeni, were both sentenced to death for plotting, preparing and involvement in the bombing, which killed 17 U.S. sailors as their destroyer refueled in the southern Yemeni port of Aden.

And folks, this happened under BJ Clinton's watch, as did the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, and the American embassy bombings in Africa.

In fact, the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, the "Black September" terror attack during the Munich Olympics, which killed 11 Israeli athletes and a U.S. citizen, the destruction of the Buddhist statues in Afghanistan by the Taliban, the murder of 300,000 Iraqi's bodies which were found in mass graves, and the ongoing slaughter of Sudanese Christians, and the persecution, murder, beheadings of Jews by Muslims since the time of Mohammed's birth, ALL occurred before Bush was in office.

So to all the democRATS and the libs out there who blame terror is on the rise because of Bush, go back to your miserable tiny lives and start focusing the blame on where it belongs: Islam's ceaseless intolerance of other people, nations, ideas and beliefs.

Two Sentenced to Death for Cole Bombing