Global News Journal
Beyond the World news headlines
Al Qaeda and the financial crisis
The global financial crisis has become a topic of feverish debate for al Qaeda sympathisers on militant Internet forums.
According to the U.S.-based SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors al Qaeda-linked propaganda on the Web and translates it for the benefit of security analysts and counter-terrorism officials, the militant chat rooms have been buzzing for weeks with excited comment.
“Now Sheikh Osama bin Laden has an historic opportunity to crash America completely. Al Qaeda, which has caused America to be ruined economically in Iraq and Afghanistan, has an opportunity to deliver the fatal blow,” wrote a member of a Turkish militant forum recently. “Al Qaeda could bury America into the landfill of history with an operation similar to or greater than September 11.”
In a discussion on al-Hesbah, a password-protected forum linked to al Qaeda, one participant gloated that the U.S. economy is “on the precipice”, SITE reported.
A foreign policy tell-all from Rice?
NEW YORK - When her eight years in the Bush administration end on Jan. 20, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice plans to write a book about U.S. foreign policy.
Asked in a Reuters interview on Friday if it would be a tell-all memoir and reveal secret meetings in the build-up to the Iraq war, Rice replied: “Tell-all? What’s a tell-all?”
Ex-U.S. spy recalls years on no-fly list
Posted by Randall Mikkelsen
ORLANDO, Fla – Decades of passing lie detector tests and the most stringent background checks count little when it comes to the U.S. no-fly terrorist watch list, the Pentagon’s former spy chief recalled on Monday.
Retired Lt. Gen. Patrick Hughes, once the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and a top Homeland Security Department intelligence official, said after he entered the private sector in 2005 he was denied boarding on a flight because his name was on the no-fly list. It has taken him ever since to clear up the confusion.
