Jay Carney: Benghazi Happened A Long Time Ago

Bulgarian press names bomber: Mehdi Ghezali:RELEASED FROM GITMO

From: The Times of Israel

Bulgarian media on Thursday named the suicide bomber who blew up a bus full of Israeli tourists, killing five Israelis and a local bus driver, in the Black Sea resort of Burgas on Wednesday as 36-year-old Mehdi Ghezali.

Ghezali reportedly arrived in Bulgaria five weeks before the bombing and arrived at the airport via taxi, Channel 2 reported. He was also reportedly given the bomb by someone else, but no further details were provided.

There was no independent confirmation of the veracity of the information. The reports surfaced soon after Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had publicly accused Hezbollah, directed by Iran, of responsibility for the bombing. The Prime Minister’s Office made no comment on the reports.

The Bulgarian reports, rapidly picked up by Hebrew media, posited various versions of how the bomber had detonated the bomb, including the suggestion that the bomber had not intended to die in the blast, but may have wanted to place the bomb on the bus and flee.

Ghezali has a Wikipedia page, which describes him as a Swedish citizen, with Algerian and Finnish origins. He had been held at the US’s Guantanamo Bay detainment camp on Cuba from 2002 to 2004, having previously studied at a Muslim religious school and mosque in Britain, and traveled to Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, it says. He was taken into custody on suspicion of being an al-Qaeda agent, having been arrested along with a number of other al-Qaeda operatives.

Weekly Standard: Sweden Pressured Suicide Bomber's Release From Gitmo

From: The Weekly Standard

With a black baseball cap pulled tight over a mop of stringy long hair and a patchy, close-cropped beard, Mehdi-Muhammed Ghezali looked more like a Metallica roadie than a disciple of Ayman al-Zawahiri. He addressed the scrum of reporters in a clipped, heavily accented Swedish and accused the American government of wrongly detaining him for three years and "physically and mentally" torturing him. A book about his experiences was in the works; a documentary crew, cobbling together a film about American human rights abuses, had requested an audience; and his legal team was plotting a lawsuit against Donald Rumsfeld.

It was 2004, and Ghezali was a free man.

In late 2001, Ghezali, a Swedish national, had been detained during the battle at Tora Bora, Afghanistan, handed over to the American military, and sent to the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay. According to his lawyers, he was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Although he spoke none of the local languages, Ghezali told his captors, in the midst of the Taliban's retreat into the mountainous hinterlands of Afghanistan, he had crossed that country's border with Pakistan to study Islam.

After an intense lobbying effort by Swedish prime minister Göran Persson--and a vague promise that the country's intelligence services would keep a watchful eye on him--Ghezali was delivered to Sweden (on the government's private Gulfstream jet). The Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter noted that Ghezali had achieved "rock star status" upon returning to his homeland, a native victim of America's rapacious imperialism. And after two-plus years in isolation, the emotionally fragile former prisoner would be happy to discover "that a majority of Swedes were glad that he was home."

Anwar al-Awlaki, U.S.-Born Terror Leader, Killed in Yemen

Anwar Al- Awlaki Killed!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Anwar Al-Awlaki, the terrorism suspect who was controversially placed on the United States’ kill or capture list (the first US citizen to be so “honored”), has been killed, according to reports confirmed by government officials. Al-Awlaki was killed by a US missile strike in Yemen, near the Saudi border. A high-level operative of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Al-Awlaki was linked to the Fort Hood shooting, and unsuccessful underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.

From CBS News:

Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S.-born radical Islamic preacher who rose to the highest level of al Qaeda’s franchise in Yemen, has been killed.

Al-Awlaki, born in New Mexico, has been linked to al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’s (AQAP) attempted bombing of a U.S. passenger jet over Detroit on Christmas day, 2009, and was thought to be a leader of the group.

A U.S. government official confirms to CBS News senior security correspondent David Martin that al-Awlaki was killed. Yemen’s Defense Ministry was first to tell CBS News of the strike, but given previous reports which turned out to be erroneous, the relatively rapid U.S. confirmation is crucial, and bolsters witness accounts that it was a U.S. drone strike that killed the al Qaeda figure.

The Associated Press reported that an unidentified source said the U.S. believes al-Awlaki was killed in a strike by U.S. jets and drones on his convoy.

Al-Awlaki’s killing is a further sign of success for the US in the fight against al Qaeda, and a demoralizing blow for the terrorist organization that committed the attacks on 9/11. The American-Yemeni cleric was a highly visible figure for al Qaeda.

The killing of Al-Awlaki is just the latest in a long string of Obama administration successes in the war on terror, but while this news will be celebrated by many, but will also likely spark some controversy. President Obama’s decision to order the killing of Al-Awlaki was met with a sizable amount of criticism, on the basis that as a US citizen, the cleric was entitled to due process.

How did this news break? Well Fox News was first to report on Al-Awaki’s death at 4:37 AM, shortly followed by CNN at 4:41 and MSNBC at 5:30. Watch Fox and Friends report below, courtesy of Fox News:

Threats Claim Nuclear Bombs Hidden All Over U.S.

From: CBS Chicago

CHICAGO (CBS 2) – The threats came in the mail and to date, there have been 25 letters that warn of nuclear bombs destroying America.

People who got them called the FBI and CBS 2′s Kristyn Hartman learned, the Bureau’s Chicago office is leading the investigation.

FBI Special Agent Andre Zavala said, “Yes, they alarmed a lot of people.”

Attorney Tracy Rizzo was alarmed. A number of days ago, an envelope, with a Chicago postmark and a hand-written address to her private investigations firm, came in the mail.

Rebel Commander in Libya Fought Against U.S. in Afghanistan

From: Pajamas Media

Shortly after unrest broke out in eastern Libya in mid-February, reports emerged that an “Islamic Emirate” had been declared in the eastern Libyan town of Darnah and that, furthermore, the alleged head of that Emirate, Abdul-Hakim al-Hasadi, was a former detainee at the American prison camp in Guantánamo. The reports, which originated from Libyan government sources, were largely ignored or dismissed in the Western media.

Now, however, al-Hasadi has admitted in an interview with the Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore that he fought against American forces in Afghanistan. (Hat-tip: Thomas Joscelyn at the Weekly Standard.) Al-Hasadi says that he is the person responsible for the defense of Darnah — not the town’s “Emir.” In a previous interview with Canada’s Globe and Mail, he claimed to have a force of about 1,000 men and to have commanded rebel units in battles around the town of Bin Jawad.

“I have never been at Guantánamo,” al-Hasadi explained to Il Sole 24 Ore. “I was captured in 2002 in Peshawar in Pakistan, while I was returning from Afghanistan where I fought against the foreign invasion. I was turned over to the Americans, detained for a few months in Islamabad, then turned over to Libya and released from prison in 2008.”

Al-Hasadi’s account is largely confirmed by investigations conducted by Praveen Swami, the diplomatic editor of the British daily The Telegraph. Swami originally wrote about al-Hasadi’s background in the Afghan jihad in a March 21 column. In response to a query from the present author, Swami was able to obtain confirmation of al-Hasadi’s arrest and transfer to Libya from what he describes as a “senior source” in the Afghan government.

According to a separate UK intelligence source contacted by Swami, al-Hasadi was released by the Libyan government as part of a deal that was struck with the al-Qaeda-affiliated Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIGF). The LIGF has long opposed the rule of Muammar al-Gaddafi in Libya.

On February 25, al-Hasadi had issued an ambiguous statement claiming that he had been a “political prisoner” and accusing the “Dictator Gaddafi” of spreading “lies.” Al-Jazeera provides an English translation of the statement here. (Scroll down to “12:46pm”.) A video of al-Hasadi reading his statement is available here.

In his more recent remarks to Il Sole 24 Ore, al-Hasadi admits not only to fighting against U.S. troops in Afghanistan, but also to recruiting Libyans to fight against American forces in Iraq. As noted in my earlier PJM report here, captured al-Qaeda personnel records show that al-Hasadi’s hometown of Darnah sent more foreign fighters to fight with al-Qaeda in Iraq than any other foreign city or town and “far and away the largest per capita number of fighters.” Al-Hasadi told Il Sole 24 Ore that he personally recruited “around 25” Libyans to fight in Iraq. “Some have come back and today are on the front at Ajdabiya,” al-Hasadi explained, “They are patriots and good Muslims, not terrorists.” “The members of al-Qaeda are also good Muslims and are fighting against the invader,” al-Hasadi added.

The revelations about al-Hasadi’s involvement in the anti-American jihad are particularly troubling in light of clear evidence that Western forces are coordinating their attacks on Libyan government targets with rebel forces.

Reporting from the outskirts of Ajdabiya yesterday, Antoine Estève of the French news channel i-Télé noted that just “minutes” after rebel positions had been hit by artillery fire from Libyan government forces, the Libyan government positions were then bombarded by coalition aircraft. (Estève’s report can be viewed here.) In a March 19 dispatch from Benghazi for the Italian daily Corriere della Sera, correspondent Lorenzo Cremonesi cites rebel leaders as saying that they were given the opportunity to provide NATO with a map indicating enemy targets that they wanted bombed.