For nearly a year, a middle-aged woman from suburban Philadelphia used her computer to fashion a new, frightening identity, federal court documents say.
The stream of Internet messages in which she sought assistance to wage violent jihad in Asia and Europe literally transformed her, the documents allege, from 46-year-old Colleen LaRose to “Jihad Jane.”
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The still images are “a phenomenal body of work” that show a new, wide-angle look at the towers’ collapse and the gray dust clouds that shrouded the city afterward, said Jan Seidler Ramirez, the chief curator of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, which is compiling a digital archive of attack coverage. The photos [...]

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As the administration fiddles and fumbles with its soft- on-terror policies at home, one Obama-blessed campaign abroad is hitting al Qaeda and its franchises hard: the drone war.
On Tuesday, an up-the-ante wave of attacks fired 18 missiles from Unmanned Aerial Systems. (UAS is our term of the week for drones.) The strike hit a terrorist [...]

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America’s top intelligence official told lawmakers on Tuesday that Al Qaeda and its affiliates had made it a high priority to attempt a large-scale attack on American soil within the next six months.
Senators Warned of Terrorist Attack on U.S. by July – NYTimes.com

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The first step toward preventing a nuclear 9/11 is believing it could happen.
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Thinking about risks we face today, we should reflect on the major conclusion of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission established to investigate that catastrophe. The U.S. national security establishment’s principal failure prior to Sept. 11, 2001, was, the commission found, a “failure of imagination.“ [...]

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In the last three days, the governments of eleven countries have scrambled to elevate their preparedness levels for Islamist terror, or enforced extraordinarily stringent security measures. Another six governments have pursued these steps without fanfare.
DEBKAfile – Rush of terror alerts on three continents plus Middle East

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A former U.S. General and a member of the Iran Policy Committee said on Saturday that he wants all Muslim men between 18 and 28 to be strip-searched at airports.
Speaking on Fox News over the weekend, retired Lieutenant General with the United States Air Force and Fox News Military Analyst, Thomas McInerney, urged the US [...]

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Like the Nigerian bomber Umar Abdulmutallab, the Saudi minister’s would-be assassin, Abdullah Hassan Tali’ al-Asiri (al Qaeda-styled Abu Khair), who did not survive the attack, used explosives hidden in his underwear to fool the prince’s bodyguards. He won an audience with the prince by posing as an informant, the same trick used by the Taliban [...]

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Our insistence that “Islam’s a religion of peace” would have been cold comfort to the family members of those passengers had the bomb detonated as planned.
Contrast our political correctness with Abdulmutallab’s choice of Christmas for his intended massacre. Our troops stand down on Muslim holidays. A captive terrorist merely has to claim that a [...]

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DEBKAfile’s counter-terror sources note that in the past year, Washington was strangely deaf to a flood of notices from Saudi, Egyptian and Yemeni security agencies warning that al Qaeda networks had established themselves in Yemen and so gained a jumping-off base into the Arabian peninsula and across the strategic Gulf of Aden. The network was [...]

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