Excerpts: Al Qaeda intent on striking inside U.S.'Supreme leader'Khamenei
threatens Israel.Syria continues sabre-rattling.Iran ignores international
concerns.Outlawed Muslim Brotherhood February 08, 2010

+++SOURCE: WASHINGTON POST 8 Feb.'10:"wounded but dangerous enemy",By Joby
Warrick and Peter Finn
SUBJECT: Al Qaeda intent on striking inside U.S.
QUOTE:"Al Qaeda ...has shifted tactics to focus on small-scale operations
much harder to detect and disrupt".

FULL TEXT:In the past six weeks, Americans have witnessed two jarringly
different -- but completely accurate -- views of al-Qaeda's terrorist
network. One image was that of terrorist leaders being hunted down and
killed by satellite-guided, pilotless aircraft. The other was of an agile
foe slipping past U.S. defenses and increasingly intent on striking inside
the United States.
New assessments of al-Qaeda by the top U.S. counterterrorism experts offer
grounds for both optimism and concern a year after President Obama took
office. Officials say al-Qaeda's ability to wage mass-casualty terrorism has
been undercut by relentless U.S. attacks on the network's leadership,
finances and training camps. But even in its weakened state, the group has
shifted tactics to focus on small-scale operations that are far harder to
detect and disrupt, analysts say.
The deadly November shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Tex., and the failed
Christmas Day attempt to bomb an airliner -- both examples of the low-tech
approach -- have raised the fear level in Washington and across the country.
Some terrorism experts say the worst could be still to come as a wounded
jihadist movement thrashes about in search of a victory.
"The noose is tightening, and al-Qaeda's leadership is accelerating efforts
that were probably in place anyway," said Andy Johnson, former staff
director of the Senate intelligence committee and now national security
director for the Washington think tank Third Way.
In the past year, Johnson said, the "good guys have been scoring the
points," killing key al-Qaeda leaders and disrupting multiple plots. But
pressure on al-Qaeda in Iraq and Pakistan has forced terrorist operatives to
flee to new havens, such as Yemen, and step up the search for weaknesses in
Western defenses. While battered, "the enemy is unwavering and determined,"
he said.
On target:
The U.S. ability to strike al-Qaeda's nerve center was on display recently
with news of the apparent death of the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, a
close ally to al-Qaeda in the lawless frontier along the
Pakistan-Afghanistan border. Hakimullah Mehsud, who suffered severe injuries
in a missile strike in mid-January, was the second leader of the group to
find himself in the path of a CIA Predator aircraft in the past six months.
He also was closely linked to the Dec. 30 suicide bombing that killed seven
CIA officers and contractors in Afghanistan's eastern Khost province.
U.S. drones have struck al-Qaeda and Taliban targets inside Pakistan 12
times this year, putting the Obama administration on a course to surpass
2009's record-setting 53 strikes, according to a tally by the Web site Long
War Journal.
In testimony before two congressional panels last week, top U.S.
intelligence officials said the campaign has shaken al-Qaeda's core
leadership, the small band of hardened terrorists led by Osama bin Laden.
The attacks, combined with a successful squeeze on al-Qaeda's cash supply,
have impeded the group's ability to launch ambitious, complex terrorist
operations on the scale of the Sept. 11, 2001, strikes on the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon, the officials said.
"Intelligence confirms that they are finding it difficult to be able to
engage in the planning and the command-and-control operations to put
together a large attack," CIA Director Leon Panetta said Tuesday in
testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee.
But intelligence officials also warned lawmakers of worrisome new evidence
of al-Qaeda's ability to adapt. In an annual "threat assessment" to
Congress, spy agencies described the emerging threat as more geographically
dispersed and also low-tech, favoring lone operatives and conventional
explosives.
'Short-term plots'

Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair, who presented the
assessment to House and Senate panels, said the attempted bombing of
Northwest Airlines Flight 253 over Detroit is emblematic of an evolving
threat that relies on "small numbers of terrorists, recently recruited and
trained, and short-term plots." The new tactics are less spectacular but
also much harder to detect and disrupt, he said.
The suspect, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, is a Western-educated young man who
was apparently recruited because he had a U.S. visa and no record of ties to
terrorist groups. Officials say that he was trained and equipped by one of
al-Qaeda's rising affiliates, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and that he
had a bomb made of a common military explosive sewn into his underwear,
deliberately designed to thwart the kinds of safeguards put in place after
9/11.
The foiled plot came on the heels of the Fort Hood shooting rampage. That
attack, and the arrest of an Army major apparently inspired by al-Qaeda,
crushed the widely held perception that Americans were immune from the kind
of violent home-grown extremism seen in Muslim enclaves in Western Europe.
Blair acknowledged that intelligence agencies are newly concerned that
Americans may be traveling overseas for training and returning to the United
States to carry out terrorist strikes.
"A handful of individuals and small, discrete cells will seek to mount
attacks each year, with only a small portion of that activity materializing
into violence against the homeland," he said.
Blair testified that he thought another attempted strike by terrorists was
"certain" in the next six months. The assertion was a response to a question
by the Senate intelligence panel's chairman, Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.),
about the likelihood that al-Qaeda would try to launch a major attack on
Americans in the near future. But Blair also suggested that the rash of news
about terrorist plots in recent weeks has created a false impression that
the threat is new.
"We have been warning since September 11 that . . . al-Qaeda-inspired
terrorists remain committed to striking the United States," he said. "What
is different is that we have names and faces to go with that warning. We are
therefore seeing the reality."
Terrorism experts and administration officials have described the Dec. 25
bombing attempt as a wake-up call that helped expose gaps in security that
are now being addressed. But some analysts say the dramatic successes
against al-Qaeda in Pakistan may have led U.S. officials to miss signs that
the terrorist threat was morphing in new directions. Now the administration
is scrambling to respond to both threats at once, said Bruce Hoffman, a
Georgetown University terrorism expert and senior scholar at the Woodrow
Wilson Center.
"Until Northwest Airlines Flight 253, the prevailing assumption was that we
could fight and win by drone attacks. But the threats are diverse and
spreading," Hoffman said. "Both administrations -- Bush and Obama -- had a
tendency to focus on one threat, one enemy, emanating from one place. The
use of predators in Afghanistan and Pakistan is a very effective tactic. But
it's a tactic, and it's not a substitute for a strategy." Staff researcher
Julie Tate contributed to this report.

+++SOURCE: JORDAN TIMES 8 Feb.'10:"Kahmenei: 'Israel's destruction imminent'
"Agence France Presse
QUOTE:"
FULL TEXT:TEHRAN (AFP) - Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said on
Sunday(7 Feb) the destruction of Iran's archfoe Israel was "imminent", and
called for continued resistance against Israel, state media reported. "I am
very optimistic about the future of Palestine and believe Israel is on the
steep path of decline and deterioration," Khamenei told Ramadan Abdullah,
the secretary general of Palestinian resistance group Islamic Jihad. "God
willing, its destruction will be imminent," the Islamic republic's
all-powerful leader said. "Continued resistance and hope for victory should
be taken into consideration." Iran does not recognise Israel, and is a
staunch backer of Palestinian Islamist militants

+++SOURCE: JORDAN TIMES 8 Feb.'10:"Syria would back Lebanon if Israel
attacks -
Assad",Agencies
SUBJECT: Syria continues sabre-rattling.

EXCERPTS:Syria will support Lebanon in the event of any attack from Israel,
President Bashar Assad told the speaker of Beirut's parliament on Sunday(7
Feb), Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported, citing the official SANA news
agency.
"Syria will stand alongside the government and people of Lebanon against any
possible Israeli aggression launched on Lebanon," the agency quoted Assad as
saying to Nabih Berri in Damascus.
Assad and Berri discussed "repeated Israeli threats on countries in the
region and Israeli extremism which can kill chances for peace and bring war
to the region", SANA said.
Israeli officials have warned repeatedly in recent weeks that any attack by
Lebanon's Syrian-backed Hizbollah Shiite movement will spark a tough
response.
Syria and Israel have also been locked in a bitter war of words for several
days.
Foreign Minister Walid Mouallem warned on Wednesday that war against his
country would become a wider conflict. "Israelis, do not test the power of
Syria since you know the war will move into your cities," he said.
His Israeli counterpart Avigdor Lieberman reported on Thursday that any war
would cost Assad his grip on power. "When there is another war, you will not
just lose it, but you and your family will lose power," Lieberman said.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sought to ease tensions on Sunday,
saying that Israel wants peace with all of its neighbours.
"We made peace with Egypt and Jordan and we seek peace with Syria and the
Palestinians," he said.. . .

+++SOURCE: EGYPTIAN GAZETTE 8 Fee.'10:"Iran orders further enrichment of
uranium",Agence France Presse
FULL TEXT:TEHRAN, Iran - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ordered his
country's atomic agency on Sunday(7 Feb) to begin enriching uranium to a
higher level, a move that's likely to deepen international suspicion over
the country's intentions for its nuclear program. Ahmadinejad's latest
pronouncement on the issue of enriched uranium coincided with a call
Sunday(7 Feb) by US Defense Secretary Robert Gates for the international
community to rally together to pressure Iran into abandoning its nuclear
program.
Speaking to reporters during a weeklong European tour, Gates said that "if
the international community will stand together and bring pressure" on Iran,
"I believe there is still time for sanctions to work."
He declined to be specific about the type of sanctions he had in mind, but
explained that the focus should be on putting pressure on the government in
Tehran and not hurting the people.
US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in an interview on CNN's
State of the Union show brodcast Sunday(7 Feb) that increasingly other
nations were beginning to see Iran's nuclear program as a threat.
"The rest of the world has really begun to see Iran the way we see it,"
she said.
In comments broadcast on state television, Ahmadinejad said: "God willing,
20 percent enrichment will start" to meet Iran's needs. He did not give a
date for the start of the enrichment process.
While the 20 percent threshhold is substantially below the 90 percent plus
needed to make fissile warhead material, any move by Iran to enrich to 20
percent would raise international alarm bells because it would bring Iran
substantially closer to weapons capacity.
That is because enriching from 20 percent to weapons grade can be done
much more quickly and with much less equipment than from the low-enriched
stockpile Iran now posesses.
David Albright, whose Washington-based Institute for Science and
International Security tracks suspected proliferators, said that it would
take 2,000 centrifuges about a year to turn Iran's 1.8 ton stockpile of 3.5
percent uranium into enough weapons grade uranium for one warhead. But he
said it would only take 500 to 1,000 centrifuges, and half a year, to move
from 20 percent to 90 percent plus enriched material.

+++SOURCE:EGYPTIAN GAZETTE 8 Feb.'10:"Egypt arrests leading Islamists"
QUOTE:"outlawed Muslim Brotherhood ... has a fifth of seats at the Lower
House of the Egyptian Parliament where its members pose as indepenents"

FULL TEXT:In yet another crackdown,Egyptian Police Monday(8 Feb) detained
more than a dozen members of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood in different
parts of the nation, according to sources inside the group. The detainees in
Cairo include Mahmoud Ezzat, the deputy supreme guide of the group and Essam
Erian, a leading member of the group, they said.
The number of arrests could be higher as more arrests are reported from
other provinces of the nation, said Abdel Moneim Abdel Maqsoud. No comment
was immediately available from the Ministry of the Interior.
The Muslim Brotherhood, an influential opposition power in Egypt, has a
fifth of seats at the People's Assembly (the Lower House of the Egyptian
Parliament) where its members pose as independents.
============
Sue Lerner - Associate, IMRA