The Lockerbie bomber was at the centre of a fresh row last night after it emerged he is taking a cancer-busting drug that could keep him alive for FIVE more years.
Terminally ill Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi was prescribed chemotherapy treatment Taxotere after returning to Libya.
But yesterday reports claimed Megrahi wasn’t given the drug while he was in Greenock prison – amid claims he could have been kept behind bars if he had taken the medication.
Last night Tory justice spokesman Bill Aitken demanded answers from Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill.
An American charged in Yemen with being a member of Al Qaeda had worked at nuclear power plants in the U.S., a spokesman for a group of plants in New Jersey said Thursday. But a state official said the man did not breach security there.
Sharif Mobley, a 26-year-old natural-born U.S. citizen, was arrested in Yemen earlier this month and is accused of killing a guard in an attempt to break out of a hospital.
The FBI, the State Department and other authorities said they were trying to gather information about Mobley. But the allegations appeared to illustrate a phenomenon U.S. intelligence officials have warned about: American Muslims becoming radicalized and joining terrorist movements overseas.
A Pennsylvania woman known to authorities as “JihadJane” has been charged in federal court with using the Internet to recruit jihadist fighters to carry out murders and violent attacks overseas.
The woman, Colleen R. LaRose, was charged with conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists, conspiracy to kill in a foreign country, making false statements to a government official and attempted identity theft, according to the indictment, unsealed Monday.
Sources tell Fox News the “Swedish citizen” who “JihadJane” was allegedly looking to kill is Lars Vilks, who drew one of the controversial Prophet Muhammad cartoons. There was a series of arrests in Ireland earlier Tuesday that are reportedly connected to LaRose’s case.
Two Republican lawmakers are seeking to have charges dropped against three Navy SEALs facing court-martial for accusations of abusing a terror suspect arrested for an ambush killing of U.S. contractors in Iraq.
The SEALs — Special Warfare Operators 2nd Class Matthew McCabe and Jonathan Keefe and Special Warfare Operator 1st Class Julio Huertas — were part of a team that in September 2009 captured Ahmed Hashim Abed, the Al Qaeda terrorist behind the murder and mutilation of four Blackwater USA contractors in Fallujah in 2004.
The contractors’ bodies were burned and left hanging from a bridge. The image came to symbolize the rise of Al Qaeda in Iraq and the brutality of the enemy Americans face there.
On vote of 315-97, the House of Representatives approved the bill, a day after it cleared the Senate. It now heads to President Barack Obama to sign into law.
The Obama administration wanted to extend the measure because of provisions it says are important in tracking suspected terrorists, including roving wiretaps to track multiple communications devices. But some lawmakers wanted additional privacy measures to protect against abuses.
With the Patriot Act provisions set to expire on Sunday, lawmakers agreed to extend them for a year, and effectively put off a showdown on efforts to bolster safeguards.
Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, announced today that it has received the first batch of documents from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) regarding congressional “Torture Briefings.” The CIA produced the documents pursuant to a previous court order in Judicial Watch’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the CIA (Judicial Watch v. Central Intelligence Agency, Case: 1:09-cv-01352). The court order stipulates that documents pertaining to congressional briefings on “enhanced interrogation techniques” must be provided to Judicial Watch by April 15. Additional documents are forthcoming.
According to the documents, previously marked “Top Secret,” between 2001 and 2007, the CIA briefed at least 68 members of Congress on the CIA interrogation program, including so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques.” The documents include the dates of all congressional briefings and, in some cases, the members of Congress in attendance and the specific subjects discussed. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who previously denied she was briefed by the CIA on the use of these techniques, is specifically referenced in a briefing that took place on April 24, 2002, regarding the “ongoing interrogations of Abu Zubaydah.” Zubaydah had been subjected to the enhanced interrogation techniques.
Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, who is suffering from terminal prostate cancer, no longer receives hospital treatment after ending the course of chemotherapy that he had been given after returning to his homeland last August.
Professor Karol Sikora, the London-based doctor who examined Megrahi and predicted he would be dead by last October, admitted this weekend that the fact the bomber is still alive might be “difficult” for the families of the 270 victims of the attack.
The latest disclosure will incense many of the relatives of those who died in the bomb blast in December 1988 when Pan Am Flight 103 exploded in mid air over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 243 passengers, 16 crew and 11 people on the ground.
Most did not want Megrahi released and they suspected he would live longer than the predicted three months.
It well known that Mossad has a history of participating in assassinations and using forgein passports when they do so. After the brutal murder of the Olympic team in 1972, they took out those responsible. In the 1960’s they kidnapped Nazi Adolf Eichmann from Argentina so he could be brought to trial and executed.
Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, the “now dead” terrorist, was an illegal smuggler of arms for Hamas. He helped found the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades- militant wings of Hamas, and was involved in the kidnapping and murder of two Israeli soldiers, Sa’adon and Sasportas, during the first Palestinian intifada in 1989. It is also believed he was involved in smuggling arms from Sudan to Gaza in 2009.
Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was found dead on January 20, 2010 in his hotel room in Dubai.
Taliban insurgents are increasingly using civilians as human shields as they fight allied troops trying to take the militants’ southern stronghold of Marjah, an Afghan official said Wednesday as military squads resumed painstaking house-to-house searches.
About 15,000 NATO and Afghan troops are taking part in the offensive around Marjah, which has an estimated 80,000 inhabitants and was the largest town in southern Helmand province under Taliban control. NATO hopes to rush in aid and public services as soon as the town is secured to try to win the loyalty of the population.
With the assault in its fifth day, insurgents are firing at Afghan troops from inside or next to compounds where women and children appear to have been ordered to stand on a roof or in a window, said Gen. Mohiudin Ghori, the brigade commander for Afghan troops in Marjah.
Taliban fighters stepped up counterattacks Monday against Marines and Afghan soldiers in the militant stronghold of Marjah, slowing the allied advance to a crawl despite Afghan government claims that the insurgents are broken and on the run.
Taliban fighters appeared to be slipping under cover of darkness into compounds already deemed free of weapons and explosives, then opening fire on the Marines from behind U.S. lines.
Also on Monday, NATO said five civilians were accidentally killed and two wounded by an airstrike when they were mistakenly believed to have been planting roadside bombs in Kandahar province, east of the Marjah offensive.
President Obama is planning to insert himself into the debate about where to try the accused mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, three administration officials said Thursday, signaling a recognition that the administration had mishandled the process and triggered a political backlash.
Obama initially had asked Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to choose the site of the trial in an effort to maintain an independent Justice Department. But the White House has been taken aback by the intense criticism from political opponents and local officials of Holder’s decision to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed in a civilian courtroom in New York.
Administration officials acknowledge that Holder and Obama advisers were unable to build political support for the trial. And Holder, in an interview Thursday, left open the possibility that Mohammed’s trial could be switched to a military commission, although he said that is not his personal and legal preference.
In an oped in USA Today, John Brennan — Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism — responds to critics of the Obama administration’s counterterrorism policies by saying “Politically motivated criticism and unfounded fear-mongering only serve the goals of al-Qaeda.”
Brennan writes that, “Terrorists are not 100-feet tall. Nor do they deserve the abject fear they seek to instill.”
In the oped, titled “‘We need no lectures’: Administration disrupts terrorists’ plots, takes fight to them abroad,” Brennan writes that politics “should never get in the way of national security. But too many in Washington are now misrepresenting the facts to score political points, instead of coming together to keep us safe.”
The administration op-ed is in response to a USA Today editorial entitled “National security team fails to inspire confidence; Officials’ handling of Christmas Day attack looks like amateur hour.”
Brennan provides a detailed defense of the administration’s handling of failed Christmas Day bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab whom, he says, was “thoroughly interrogated and provided important information.”
He suggests that many critics are hypocritical and clueless.
