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Because several top Sunni leaders - including Saleh al-Mutlaq, head of a secular coalition that includes former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi - are among those now banned from running in the election, the move is being widely perceived by the country's Sunnis as an attempt by the Shi'ite-dominated government to limit the expected gains by Sunni parties in the coming contest. And it also appears that the targets of the commission are more than just Sunni politicians but also rivals of President Nouri al-Maliki and his supporters on the Accountability and Justice Commission (including its co-chair...
...meeting, the heads of the intelligence agencies admitted to a string of mistakes that brought Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab within a fortuitous malfunction of blowing up Flight 253 over Detroit. The National Security Agency had known from an intercept in Yemen that al-Qaeda had recruited a Nigerian to carry out a terrorist attack; another intercept had suggested some sort of attack around Christmas. The State Department had learned from the U.S. embassy in Abuja, Nigeria, that the son of a prominent Nigerian banker had joined extremists in Yemen. The CIA had even produced a background report on Abdulmutallab. All this...
This week the trial of Aafia Siddiqui, once one of the most wanted women in the war on terrorism, begins in a federal courtroom in Manhattan. Siddiqui, 37, an MIT-educated neuroscientist and suspected al-Qaeda operative, is charged with attempted murder for allegedly shooting at a group of U.S. soldiers and FBI agents in Afghanistan. The incident occurred in the city of Ghazni in July 2008, after she was detained by local police near one of the city's mosques on suspicion that she was a suicide bomber. At the time of her arrest, she allegedly had with...
Siddiqui has done little to clarify the mystery of her disappearance. After resurfacing in Ghazni in 2008, she gave conflicting accounts of her absence. According to court records filed by the government, she allegedly told FBI agents who questioned her in Afghanistan that she was the wife of Ammar al-Baluchi, a nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Al-Baluchi is one of the five accused 9/11 plotters who are expected to face trial in the same courthouse as Siddiqui. She has also alternately claimed that she was kidnapped by U.S. intelligence, kidnapped by Pakistani intelligence and that she was working...
...been highly anticipated, especially in Pakistan, it is unlikely to resolve any of the bigger mysteries surrounding her disappearance. Prosecutors have tailored the case narrowly to the shooting incident in Ghazni and told Judge Richard Berman last week they will avoid any mention of her suspected ties to al-Qaeda. The government's scenario of the shooting in Ghazni has been vigorously disputed by her defense attorneys, who at a pretrial hearing last week offered a preview of their case, saying there were no fingerprints or forensic evidence on the gun that would indicate Siddiqui ever even held...