Jason Overdorf

“Reacting to the news of the killing of Osama bin Laden “deep inside Pakistan” — in what I hear is a closely guarded town with a school for Pakistani military cadets — India’s home minister said that the final proof that the terrorist leader had been hiding in Pakistan only confirms India’s long-standing position that Pakistan actively harbors and supports terrorist groups.”

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatches/globalpost-blogs/bric-yard/india-osama-death-underlines-our-concern-terrorists-find-sanct

A TV grab from the Qatar-based Al-Jazeera news channel dated June17, 2005, showing Al Qaeda No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahiri delivering a speech at an undisclosed location with a machine gun next to him. (Al Jazeera/AFP/Getty Images)

[Ayman al Zawahiri] “… is the likely successor to bin Laden, according to high-level national security officials both current and retired.

… the clear goal he has been actively pursuing is to carry out an attack on America using a Weapon of Mass Destruction (WMD) or, as a so-called “dirty bomb” is often referred to, a Weapon of Mass Effect (WME).

Based on interviews with a half dozen counterterrorism officials and experts with deep knowledge of Zawahiri, a portrait emerges of a leader who has for at least three years been quietly and effectively building the groundwork — theological and scientific — for Al Qaeda to complete an attack using WMD.

In 2008, Zawahiri wrote a book which presented his own theological grounding for the deployment of a nuclear weapon in America, and Al Qaeda’s sense of the religious justification for killing as many people as possible.

The book is a glimpse inside the religious fervor of a leader who is in many ways more ambitious than bin Laden was in trying to produce a “spectacular” terrorist event that will exceed the death and destruction caused on Sept. 11.”

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/opinion/columnists/110503/zawahiri-osama-bin-laden-al-qaeda

By ALISSA J. RUBIN

KABUL, Afghanistan — The Afghanistan government escalated its criticism of Pakistan on Wednesday, publicly questioning for the first time how the Pakistanis could assure the security of their own nuclear weapons if they did not even know that Osama bin Laden, the world’s most wanted terrorist, had been hiding in a compound in a Pakistani military town less than an hour from their own capital.

“If the Pakistani intelligence agency does not know about a home located 10 meters or 100 meters away from its national military academy, where for the last six years the biggest terrorist is living, how can this country take care of its strategic weapons?” General Azimi said.

He added that if Pakistan’s intelligence did in fact know the whereabouts of Bin Laden, then “they are playing a double game.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/05/world/asia/05afghanistan.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss

“There has been some controversy over the Muslim Brotherhood reaction to the death of Osama Bin Laden. So I thought it’d be useful to translate their Arabic press release and explain what’s going on.” -Ibn Larry

Statement from the Muslim Brotherhood on the Assassination of Sheikh Osama Bin Laden (May 2, 2011)

The entire world and especially Muslims have experienced and been concerned by a malicious media campaign that conflates Islam with terrorism and describes Muslims as violent since connecting the events of September 11th to Al Qaeda.

Today, the American President announced that special forces from the American Marines successfully assassinated Osama Bin Laden, a woman, and children along with a number of companions. We now find ourselves facing a new situation.

Read the rest of this entry »

By Joshua Keating

“ABC scores the inevitable post-OBL interview with Gary Faulkner, the Colorado man who achieved international notoriety last year when he was arrested by Pakistani authorities trying to cross the Afghan border armed with only a samurai sword on a religious inspired quest to kill the al Qaeda leader. Faulkner response to the news is basically, “I loosened it”:

“I had a major hand and play in this wonderful thing, getting him out of the mountains and down to the valleys… Someone had to get him out of there. That’s where I came in,” Gary Faulkner of Greeley, Colorado, told ABC News. “I scared the squirrel out of his hole, he popped his head up and he got capped.

Read the rest of this entry »

“Arab reaction to the killing of Osama bin Laden is only in its infancy less than 48 hours after President Obama announced the event itself to the world. To draw conclusions about how the strike will impact US-Arab relations or the future of Islamist terrorist groups would be premature. However three major Arab media reactions have appeared thus far in response to the strike on Osama bin Laden.

1) Reaction is not monolithic. “The Arabs” have a diverse range of opinions on the strike, as do their editorialists.

2) Osama Bin Laden is widely seen as a symbol rather than a threat. Editorials across the political spectrum discuss Osama Bin Laden’s role as a symbol which the US used to prosecute the War on Terror. This is a critical difference from the Western media, who portray Bin Laden as a “terrorist mastermind.”

3) The strike evokes a fear of American power. Many editorials are cynical about the way in which the US used Osama Bin Laden as an excuse to prosecute the War on Terror. At the heart of this cynicism is a fear of the ease and impunity with which the US executed the strike.

The Arab media largely does not support Bin Laden, but they hesitate to commend the use of American power which was required to kill him. While necessary, the force used in the strike was something out of an action movie. For some Arabs, this hearkens back to the cowboy-ish rhetoric and policies of the Bush administration, evoking fear and a mistrust of the West.

http://thecamelsnose.blogspot.com/2011/05/bin-laden-arabic-editorials-post-2-of-2.html

“He died in his style of “Leader of the Mujahideen” in his luxury house, and not on the battlefield, or in Jihad…he died with his wife, and three individuals, the opposite of how he had betrayed our people, and the Muslim people whom he sent to die one after the next for years, he and the sheikhs of evil and terrorists.”
– Tareq al-Homayed

“Finally, Obama was victorious in this epic moment, which is what the previous president George Bush himself [had wanted]. But fortune came to Obama, whom the American far right accused of being “Half-Muslim” or a secret Muslim!”
– Mashary al-Zaidi

“It was strange when yesterday Ismail Haniyeh, head of the Hamas movement, in response to the announcement of the death of Bin Laden, described him as a Mujahid and condemned his killing, since we had not heard before that jihad allows randomly killing civilians, explosions, and sabotage.”
– Ali Ibrahim

http://thecamelsnose.blogspot.com/2011/05/arab-editorial-roundup-post-1-of-2.html

“To clash with the Arab regimes is not an integral path in al-Qaeda’s program which turned from Jihad of the near enemy (systems) to the far enemy (the United States).”
– Yasser al-Za’atra

http://thecamelsnose.blogspot.com/2011/05/arab-editorial-roundup-post-1-of-2.html