U.S. Drone Strike In Somalia Targets Al - Shabab Leader

Al - ShaMob blood gets uppity in the hood - Obama snuffs CIA mutineer    

WASHINGTON POST
By Craig Whitlock
09/02/2014

The Pentagon said Tuesday that it tried to kill the leader of the militant group al-Shabab in an air attack in Somalia, firing several Hellfire missiles and dropping other munitions on an encampment in the southern part of the country.

Zubeyr battalion commander takes thumb break

It was unclear, however, whether the target of the strikes, Mukhtar Abu Zubeyr, a jihadist leader widely known as Ahmed Abdi Godane, perished in Monday’s operation. 

“We are still assessing the results,” said Rear Adm. John Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary.

Kirby said that U.S. drones and other aircraft destroyed the suspected al-Shabab compound as well as a vehicle that was in the vicinity. 

He bluntly acknowledged that the purpose of the mission was to kill Godane, who as the leader of the movement asserted responsibility for killing dozens of people at an upscale Nairobi mall last year and other attacks in the region.

“The principal target was Mr. Godane,” Kirby said. Godane’s death, he added, would be “a very significant blow to their network, to their organization, and, we believe, to their ability to continue to conduct terrorist attacks.”

Al-Shabab, which means “the Youth” in Arabic, is a jihadist movement that controls large portions of Somalia, a chronically unstable country on the Horn of Africa with a weak central government. The group has lost its previous grip on the capital of Mogadishu and has receded largely into rural areas over the past two years, while at the same time escalating its plots and attacks elsewhere in east Africa.

Although Godane has sworn allegiance to al-Qaeda, U.S. counterterrorism officials have been divided over how much of a direct threat al-Shabab poses to the United States. In remarks to reporters at the Pentagon, Kirby said al-Shabab represented a broad threat beyond Somalia and that it had targeted U.S. personnel in East Africa, as well as United Nations officials.

"I'ze gwine dig fo mah Obama roots, blood!" - Baby ShaMob

“This action was taken because of the history of terrorist attacks and violence that this organization is responsible for and continues to be responsible for,” Kirby said. There were conflicting reports from Somalia on whether Godane survived the attack. 

A spokesman for al-Shabab told the Associated Press that he was present at the site of the strike but declined to say whether he was killed or injured. Pentagon officials said they would be cautious before drawing any definitive conclusions. Several al-Qaeda leaders have been reported killed in drone strikes in the past in Yemen, Pakistan and elsewhere, only to resurface later on, very much alive.

Somali officials said the strike took place near the port city of Barawe, an al-Shabab stronghold. Kirby would not identify what specific types of aircraft took part in the operation, but said no U.S. forces were on the ground.

Nearly one year ago, on Oct. 5, Navy SEALs raided a seaside house in Barawe in an attempt to capture Abdulkadir Mohamed Abdulkadir, a Kenyan native and senior al-Shabab commander. That raid sparked a gunfight but was unsuccessful; U.S. officials said the SEALs withdrew because the risk of harming bystanders had become too great.

"Whey be 1400 Pennsylcania Ave., mo' fo?"

The State Department has offered a $7 million reward for information leading to Godane’s arrest. 

It has identified Godane as a 37-year-old native of Hargeysa, Somalia who has led al-Shabab since 2007. 

Among other aliases, he goes by the name Ahmed Abdi Aw Mohamed.

Counterterrorism officials and analysts said that Godane has been a particularly ruthless jihadi leader who has eliminated several rivals within al-Shabab, either by killing them or forcing them to go underground.

Hussein Mahmoud Sheikh-Ali, the senior counterterrorism adviser for Somalia’s federal government, said Godane was especially ambitious and had tried to position himself as a key leader within the broader al-Qaeda movement. At the same time, he said it would be difficult for al-Shabab to replace him because he had consolidated so much power and had killed so many would-be successors.

“The organization is a one-man organization--Godane and nobody else,” Sheikh-Ali said Tuesday during an event at the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank. Under Godane’s leadership, he added, al-Shabab has “become more efficient and potent in many ways. But on the other hand, they’ve also become more vulnerable.”

Sheikh-Ali said the government of Somalia was likewise still trying to confirm Godane’s fate, but that if he is dead, it would move quickly to reach out to less hard-line al-Shabab figures in an attempt to reconcile with at least some factions of the movement.

"We be kickin' ass and takin' names blood!"

“His killing would be a game-changer,” he said. “They’re going to struggle and there’s going to be huge opportunity for the government to take advantage.” The U.S. military frequently conducts drone surveillance flights over Somalia, but airstrikes and ground raids are relatively uncommon. 

The Pentagon has a large drone base at Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, which borders Somalia on the Horn of Africa. The U.S. military also flies surveillance drones over Somalia from a base in Ethi­o­pia.

The Pentagon quietly deployed a small team of advisers to Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, last October to coordinate operations with African troops fighting to wrest control of the country from al-Shabab.

The deployment marked the first time regular U.S. troops have been stationed in the war-ravaged country since 1993, when two helicopters were shot down and 18 Americans were killed in the “Black Hawk Down” disaster. U.S. commandos have intermittently conducted raids and operations in the country as well, but the military has kept their activities cloaked in secrecy.

An earlier version of this article incorrectly described Mukhtar Abu Zubeyr as a native of Kenya.

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ISIS America’s New Terror Brand : Endless Propaganda Fuels Bogus "War On Terror'"

Trained, funded and ARMED by Obama's murdering CIA and U.S. TAXPAYERS, White House "ISIS" creation has backfired with the executions of American journalists in a failed attempt to justify further American military incursions into Iraq and Syria - Obama and Brennan can no longer control their rabid, feral terrorist dogs and expat Americans of all professions will now pay the price    

PRESS TV
09/02/2014

In the wake of World War I, erstwhile propagandist and political scientist Harold Lasswell famously defined propaganda as “the management of collective attitudes” and the “control over opinion” through “the manipulation of significant symbols.” The extent to which this tradition is enthusiastically upheld in the West and the United States in particular is remarkable.

The American public is consistently propagandized by its government and corporate news media on the most vital of contemporary issues and events.

Deception on such a scale would be of little consequence if the US were not the most powerful economic and military force on earth.

A case in point is the hysteria Western news media are attempting to create concerning the threat posed by the mercenary-terrorist army now being promoted as the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria, or “ISIS.”

As was the case with the US intelligence asset and bogey publicized as “Al Qaeda,” and Al Qaeda’s Syrian adjunct, “Al Nusra,” such entities are — apparently by design — inadequately investigated and defined by major news media. Absent meaningful historical context they usefully serve as another raison d’ểtre for America’s terminal “War on Terror.”

A seemingly obvious feature of such terrorist forces left unexamined by corporate media is that they are observably comprised of the same or comparable personnel unleashed elsewhere throughout the Middle East as part of a strategy proposed during the George W. Bush administration in 2007.

With the above observations in mind, ISIS is well-financed, militarily proficient, and equipped with modern vehicles and weaponry. It also exhibits an uncanny degree of media savvy in terms of propagating its message in professional-looking videos and on platforms such as YouTube and Twitter. “Western intelligence services,” the New York Times reports, claim to be “worried about their extraordinary command of seemingly less lethal weapons: state-of-the-art videos, ground images shot from drones, and multilingual Twitter messages.”

Along these lines, ISIS even received a largely sympathetic portrayal in a five-part series produced and aired by the Rupert Murdoch-backed Vice News. Indeed, Vice News’ “The Spread of the Caliphate” is reminiscent of the public relations-style reportage produced via the “embedding” of corporate news media personnel with US and allied forces during the 2003 conquest of Iraq.

The overt support of ISIS, combined with the fact that it is battling the same Syrian government the Obama administration overtly sought to wage war against just one year ago, strongly suggest the organization’s sponsorship by Western intelligence and military interests.

ISIS’s curious features are readily apparent to non-Western news outlets and citizenries. For example, Iran’s Press TV recently asked its readership, “Why does the ISIL have such easy access to Twitter, YouTube and other social media to propagate its ideologies?” The answer choices are, “1) Because the ISIL has very capable technicians who can best use social media, or 2) Because the US and Britain have provided the ISIL with unrestricted social media platform[s].” Note that the first choice is the overarching assumption of Western media outlets. Yet perhaps unsurprisingly, 90 percent of Press TV readers selected choice two.

No such queries are so much as alluded to by major corporate media, all of which are united in the notion that ISIS is an essentially indigenous phenomenon. Yet as coverage of the events of September 11, 2001 and subsequent state-sponsored terrorism indicates, such media are essentially a component of the national security state, their reports and broadcast scripts all but overtly written by intelligence and military organizations.

In the wake of 9/11 US news media seldom asked about the origins of Al Qaeda — particularly how it was a product of US intelligence agencies. With the history of Al Qaeda omitted, the Bush administration was permitted to wage war on Afghanistan almost immediately following those staged attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

Yet as is much the case with today’s manufactured ISIS phenomenon, that history was readily available, and its careful public examination might have implicated the United States intelligence community in the 9/11 attacks. “During the Cold War, but also in its aftermath,” Michel Chossudovsky observes, the CIA — using Pakistan’s military intelligence apparatus as a “go between” — played a key role in training the Mujhadeen. In turn, the CIA-sponsored guerrilla training was integrated with the teachings of Islam. Both the Clinton and Bush administrations have consistently supported the “Militant Islamic Base”, including Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda, as part of their foreign policy agenda. The links between Osama bin Laden and the Clinton administration in Bosnia and Kosovo are well documented by congressional records.

As the United States and world approach the thirteenth anniversary of the most momentous false flag in modern history, the American public would be well-served to remind itself that ISIS is the new Al Qaeda — in other words, the new pretext that will in all likelihood be used by to take police state measures at home and military aggression abroad to new, perhaps unprecedented, levels.

With the above in mind, it is telling that one of the US government’s greatest fears isn’t ISIS at all. “The FBI’s most recent threat assessment for domestic terrorism makes no reference to Islamist terror threats,” the Washington Free Beacon reports, “despite last year’s Boston Marathon bombing and the 2009 Fort Hood shooting — both carried out by radical Muslim Americans.”

Instead, the nation’s foremost law enforcement agency is preoccupied with what it deems “domestic extremism” exhibited by its own subjects. A primary manifestation of such “extremism” is possessing the curiosity to discern and seek out truths and information amidst the barrage of manipulated symbols the government and corporate-controlled media use to undermine a potentially informed public.

AN/GJH

This news bureau contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc.  We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.

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Second American Journalist Beheaded By ISIS COWARD TERRORIST SCUM

Now every wanna-be terrorist and their goat are gunning to behead American journalists and become instant internet death porn stars:  NOTICE TO ALL WANNA-BE TERRORISTS IN ASEAN, INDONESIA AND WORLDWIDE - 5TH ESTATE JOURNALISTS HAVE NOW ARMED THEMSELVES AND WILL KILL ALL ATTACKERS SHOOTING FIRST AND ASKING QUESTIONS LATER; THE 5TH ESTATE URGES ALL INTERNATIONAL JOURNALISTS TO ARM THEMSELVES AGAINST THESE COWARD TERRORIST SCUM, WE MUST NOW TAKE OUR SECURITY INTO OUR OWN HANDS

RT
09/02/2014

A new video has been posted on the internet purported to show Islamic State militants beheading American journalist Steven Sotloff.

One DEAD TERRORIST:  This coward scumbag will DIE

The Associated Press and the SITE Intel Group, an organization that tracks the online activity of terrorist groups, both reported on Tuesday that the Islamic 

State has posted a video of the execution barely two weeks after the group formerly known as ISIS published a similar clip of American photojournalist James Foley suffering the same fate.

“I’m back, Obama, and I’m back because of your arrogant foreign policy towards the Islamic State,” a masked militant believed to be the same who executed Foley addresses the president in the latest video.

Kneeling in an orange jump suit, Sotloff is seen in the clip reading a statement to the president as Foley did before him.

“Obama, your foreign policy of intervention in Iraq was supposed to be for preservation of American lives and interests, so why is it that I am paying the price of your interference with my life?” Sotloff asks.

"As your missiles continue to strike our people, our knife will continue to strike necks of your people," the masked man says before killing Sotloff. Another captured civilian — David Cawthorne Haines of the UK — will be the next murdered unless "this evil alliance of America against the Islamic State" ends, militants warn in the video.

The White House could not immediately confirm the authenticity of the latest video, “A Second Message to America,” but press secretary Joshua Earnest said during a briefing on Tuesday that the administration’s “thoughts and prayers” are with Sotloff’s family. Jen Psaki, a spokesperson for the US Department of State, said she was “sickened” by the news.

A 31-year-old freelance journalist who has written for Time magazine and the Christian Science Monitor, among others, Sotloff was kidnapped near Aleppo, Syria in August 2013. According to a profile published in the New York Times last month, Sotloff’s family tried desperately during the last year to keep his abduction quiet due to fears that the publicity would endanger him further, but changed course recently after the Islamic State warned that he’d be among the next executed lest the United State end its campaign against the militants.

This American journalist will now kill terrorists  ON SIGHT

Upon release of the Foley video last month, the Islamic State demanded that US President Barack Obama cease attacks on the group or else risk Sotloff becoming the next casualty of the group’s violent campaign in Iraq and Syria.

Sotloff’s fate, a militant warned Pres. Obama last month, “depends on your next decision.” 

In response, Sotloff’s mother posted a minute-and-a-half-long video plea asking Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi to release her son.

“You, the caliph, can grant amnesty. I ask you please to release my child. I ask you to use your authority to spare his life,” Shirley Sotloff pleaded.

The US has since ramped up its attacks on the Islamic State, and international efforts are expected to be discussed by NATO member state’s during this week’s summit in Wales. During Tuesday’s State Dept. briefing, Psaki said that Pres. Obama has so far authorized at least 100 air strikes in Iraq against the Islamic State.

This news bureau contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc.  We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.

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