http://www.crusade-media.com/news1.html

Consider the religious fatwa titled “A Treatise on the Legal Status of Using Weapons of Mass Destruction Against Infidelsâ€Â? that Osama bin Laden secured from Shaykh Nasir bin Hamd al-Fahd, a young and prominent Saudi cleric justifying the use of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) against Americans, in May 2003 – Why would Bin Ladan look for such a fatwa?

These stories appear to be a collusion, or mutual exploitation, between people on both sides who are in the fear business.

The Jawa Report has been keeping an updated running story on this issue – they crossed the American-Mexican border, one of the blog’s readers had visually identified one of the two terrorist in some town north of Texas, and so forth and such. Are stories like this any different than all of the warnings leading up to 2004 elections?

OK, the authors of the article in the Canada Free Press are Paul L. Williams and David Dastych. Their bios:

Long time investigative journalist, Paul L. Williams is the author of such best-selling books as The Dunces of Doomsday, The Al Qaeda Connection , Osama’s Revenge: The Next 9/11. He has been the subject of a PBS documentary and the subject of programs on the Discovery and History channels. He is a frequent guest on such national news networks as Fox News, MSNBC, and NPR.

(International journalist David M. Dastych writes for Poland’s acclaimed weekly, Wprost. His columns appear regularly in the Edmonton-based Polish Panorama.) He can be reached at: David.dastych@aster.pl

The Dunces of Doomsday! Now there’s a title for you.

Northeast Intelligence Network is sponsoring a symposium in Las Vegas in November at which journalist Hamid Mir will be the featured speaker. This symposium reminds me very much of this one that I learned about at Kobayashi Maru, also quite alarmist.

Another report on the Northeast Intelligence Network site suggests that Al Qaeda has discussed tainting food as a method of attack on accessible websites — and that the current spinach scare could be their doing! This begins to sound really paranoid.

NEIN was founded by “veteran private investigator Douglas J. Hagmann,” who runs a podcast on Enigma Radio Network called “Homeland Security Weekly.”

Here’s Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir’s bio on Wikipedia. Included:

Mir recently claimed–in an interview with independent online news source CanadianFreePress.com–that Al-Qaeda has acquired three so called “suitcase nukes” from Russia and have successfully smuggled them to Europe. Mr. Mir claims that they have possessed these weapons since long before the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington and that they were originally intended to be targeted against London, Paris and Los Angeles.

Mr. Mir also claims that Al-Qaeda has 23 sleeper agents inside the United States (minus the 19 who died carrying out the 9/11 attacks) and that these terrorists already have enough radioactive material for six “dirty bombs.”

The U.S. State Department website posts an interview Mir did with Secretary Condoleezza Rice in March 2005, so he isn’t a complete flake. Mir has spoken out in Pakistan in favor of women’s rights and decrying his country’s lack of democracy.

On the other hand, he perpetuates a number of conspiracy theories, e.g that Iran is now secretly helping Al Qaeda and that Russia is sending weapons to the Taliban as revenge for the U.S. supporting the mujaheddin in the ’80s.

Just a guess: there’s a market for this kind of rumor in certain corners of the Right, and there are people who are happy to supply it. It suits al Qaeda to have an outlet for this saber-rattling, and perhaps it also suits some in the U.S. government — who knows? To be continued.

OK, the authors of the article in the Canada Free Press are Paul L. Williams and David Dastych. Their bios:

Just a guess: there’s a market for this kind of rumor in certain corners of the Right, and there are people who are happy to supply it. It suits al Qaeda to have an outlet for this saber-rattling, and perhaps it also suits some in the U.S. government — who knows? To be continued.

Maybe they’re just a bunch of retired Plame’s who want to play political games?

The Canada free press front page screams right wing tabloid nut job.

And I have a very hard time believing an Al Qaeda leader would give us chapter and verse this way.