Chuck Yeager's sound barrier anniversary flight video

Feds foil plot to blow up Federal Reserve

NYTIMES: Federal prosecutors on Wednesday accused a 21-year-old Bangladeshi man of conspiring to blow up the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, saying that he tried to detonate what he believed was a 1,000-pound bomb in a van he parked outside the building in Lower Manhattan.

But the entire plot, which began after the man, Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis, came to the United States in January, unfolded under the surveillance of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the New York Police Department as part of an elaborate sting operation, according to court papers.

Mr. Nafis told an F.B.I. informer in July that he had overseas connections to Al Qaeda, according to a criminal complaint unsealed Wednesday afternoon in Federal District Court in Brooklyn.

Mr. Nafis, the complaint said, had been trying to recruit people to form a terrorist cell and sought out Qaeda contacts to help him carry out an attack. One of the people he tried to recruit was the F.B.I. informer, who later introduced him to an F.B.I. undercover agent, according to the complaint.

“The defendant came to this country intent on conducting a terrorist attack on U.S. soil and worked with single-minded determination to carry out his plan,” said Loretta E. Lynch, the United States attorney in Brooklyn, who announced the charges along with officials from the F.B.I. and the New York Police Department. “The defendant thought he was striking a blow to the American economy. He thought he was directing confederates and fellow believers. At every turn, he was wrong, and his extensive efforts to strike at the heart of the nation’s financial system were foiled by effective law enforcement.”

Mr. Nafis was charged with conspiring to use weapons of mass destruction and providing material support to Al Qaeda; he could face up to life in prison if convicted. He was expected to appear in court in Brooklyn later on Wednesday.

A lawyer for Mr. Nafis, Heidi C. Cesare, could not be reached immediately after his arrest.

“Attempting to destroy a landmark building and kill or maim untold numbers of innocent bystanders is about as serious as the imagination can conjure,” said Mary Galligan, the acting assistant director of the F.B.I. office in New York. “It is important to emphasize that the public was never at risk in this case, because two of the defendant’s ‘accomplices’ were actually an F.B.I. source and an F.B.I. undercover agent.”

The undercover agent supplied Mr. Nafis with what Mr. Nafis believed to be 20 50-pound bags of explosives, but which were, in fact, inert, according to the complaint. Mr. Nafis bought components for the bomb’s detonator and surveyed the target in Lower Manhattan on a number of occasions, the complaint said. He repeatedly told the undercover agent that the plan was his own and that he had come to the United States to carry it out.

On Wednesday morning, Mr. Nafis met the undercover agent and drove to a warehouse where Mr. Nafis put together what he believed to be the 1,000-pound bomb, using the 20 bags of an unnamed explosive.

On the way to the warehouse, Mr. Nafis told the agent that he had a “Plan B” — a suicide bombing — in the event that his primary plan to bomb the bank was interrupted by the authorities.

After Mr. Nafis assembled the bomb, the two men drove to the New York Federal Reserve Bank, on Maiden Lane and William Street in Lower Manhattan, about two blocks from Wall Street. Mr. Nafis, the complaint said, armed the device while they were en route to the bank, a 22-story building that resembles an impregnable fortress.

Mr. Nafis and the undercover agent parked the van outside the bank and walked to a nearby hotel, where Mr. Nafis recorded a video statement addressed to the American people that he planned to distribute after the attack. In the statement, he said, “We will not stop until we attain victory or martyrdom.”

Then he tried over and over again to detonate the bomb to no avail, and agents arrested him.

The plot is the latest to fit a model in which, in the process of flushing out people they believe present a risk of committing terrorist acts, federal law enforcement officials have played the role of terrorist enabler — providing targets with encouragement, guidance, money and even, the subjects of sting operations are led to believe, the materials needed to carry out an attack. Though these operations have almost always held up in court, they have come under increasing criticism from those who believe that many of the targets, even some of those who openly espoused violence, would have been unable to execute such plots without substantial assistance from the government.

Both F.B.I. leaders and federal prosecutors have defended the approach as valuable in finding and stopping people predisposed to commit terrorism.

READ THE REST OF THE STORY HERE

Shocking video of Syrian chopper shoot down

Sobering video shows a Syrian Mil Mi-8/17 "HIP" gunship helicopter spiraling toward the ground and exploding in mid-air after being hit at medium/high altitude on a mission near Idlib on Oct. 17.


 

White House was warned of growing Benghazi threat

Reuters) - In the months before the deadly attack in Benghazi, Libya, U.S. and allied intelligence agencies warned the White House and State Department repeatedly that the region was becoming an increasingly dangerous vortex for jihadist groups loosely linked or sympathetic to al Qaeda, according to U.S. officials.

Despite those warnings, and bold public displays by Islamist militants around Benghazi, embassies in the region were advised to project a sense of calm and normalcy in the run-up to the anniversary of the September 11 attacks in the United States.

So brazen was the Islamist presence in the Benghazi area that militants convened what they billed as the "First Annual Conference of Supporters of Shariah (Islamic law)" in the city in early June, promoting the event on Islamist websites.

Pictures from the conference posted on various Internet forums featured convoys flying al Qaeda banners, said Josh Lefkowitz of Flashpoint-Intel.com, a firm that monitors militant websites. Video clips showed vehicles with mounted artillery pieces, he added.

A research report prepared for a Pentagon counter-terrorism unit in August said the Benghazi conference brought together representatives of at least 15 Islamist militias. Among the paper's conclusions: these groups "probably make up the bulk of al Qaeda's network in Libya."

Drawing on multiple public sources, the Library of Congress researchers who drafted the paper also concluded that al Qaeda had used the "lack of security" in Libya to establish training camps there. It also reported that "hundreds of Islamic militants are in and around Derna," where special camps provided recruits with "weapons and physical training."

President Barack Obama's administration has repeatedly said it had no specific advance warning of an attack like the one that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans in Benghazi on the night of September 11.

But the reports of militants' growing clout in eastern Libya, and attempts by violent jihadists to take advantage of fragile new governments across northern Africa following the Arab Spring, appear to raise new questions about whether U.S. embassies took proper security precautions, and if not, why not.

Washington has not definitively placed responsibility for the Benghazi attack on specific individuals or groups among the jihadist factions believed to be operating in or near Libya.

But U.S. officials have said that within hours of the Benghazi attacks, information from communications intercepts and U.S. informants indicated members of at least two groups may have been involved.

One is an al Qaeda offshoot, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb or AQIM, which was founded in Algeria and has region-wide ambitions. The other is a local militant faction called Ansar al-Sharia, which apparently has arms both in Benghazi and in Derna, long a hotbed of radicalism.

Like other militants seeking to take advantage of democratic openings and fragile governments created in last year's Arab Spring, the two groups are apparently seeking to exploit instability in Libya after the fall of dictator Muammar Gaddafi.

The links between these groups, other jihadist organizations and the original core al Qaeda militant group founded by the late Osama bin Laden are murky at best, U.S. officials and private analysts say.

"There is a complex mosaic of extremist groups in North Africa," a U.S. counterterrorism official said. "Given AQIM's interest in expanding its reach, it's not surprising that the group is trying to gain a foothold in Libya."

While hardly sweeping the continent, violent extremist groups appear to have found ungoverned safe havens across north Africa, from Mali in the west to Egypt's Sinai in the east.

In the last month, U.S. embassies in Egypt, Tunisia and Yemen have also witnessed violent attacks.

Questions have been raised about security precautions at diplomatic facilities in those countries as well.

READ THE REST OF THE STORY HERE

Mystery boom mystery widening now to 11 booms

At least eleven military explosions have occurred Monday and Tuesday, a minimum of ten large-caliber ammunition ground-rattling explosions from a Louisiana Military Department bomb recycling plant in the northwestern Louisiana forcing evacuations of at least 600 students, over 400 prisoners and 800 residents of Doyline, and one militaryexplosion injuring a man in Alabama.

"[C]itizens were shaken out of bed and windows were shattered during the late night hours Oct. 15," according to Accuweather.

Jesse Ferrell with Accuweather pulled 3D radar images from GRLevelX software this morning of the "mystery object."

The blast and resulting fire at the underground Explo Systems site at Camp Minden resulted in authorities asking residents of the eastern section of Doyline to leave the area, according to AP.

After the initial blast, more explosions followed about every 10 minutes as the fire was allowed to burn, AP says.

The units where the explosions reportedly cam from are self-contained, partially underground and designed to send any blast upward and not outward to minimalize damage.

Windows shattered in Dixie Inn and Minden.

Sheriff Gary Sexton said home video surveillance cameras as far as 25 miles away captured the sound of the explosion and a glow in the sky.

Officials say they have no idea what caused it to blow.

Explo Systems opened its site in January with a military contract to disassemble bombs and recycle bomb components. It has had other recent explosions at Camp Minden.

The National Guard oversees Camp Minden, its newest military training site.

Camp Minden is a former Louisiana Army Ammunition Plant that produced large-caliber ammunition for the military until closing in 1994.

The facility says on its website:

In 1941, the Federal Government acquired 15,868 acres of farms, farmland and private lands for construction of The Louisiana Army Ammunition Plant (LAAP). In January 2005 the entire area that formally belonged to the U.S. Government as LAAP totaling 14,995 acres was deeded over to the State of Louisiana under the control of the Louisiana Military Department.

"Louisiana took the site over from the federal government last year and it is now occupied by several businesses," says AP.

According to many residents, something come down instead of something blow up.