Pakistani militant group ‘more dangerous than al-Qaeda’: ex-CIA official
July 11, 2012 3 Comments
By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
A former senior official of the United States Central Intelligence Agency has argued that al-Qaeda is no longer the most powerful group in the global Islamist insurgency. Writing in The Daily Beast earlier this month, Bruce Riedel, who served in the CIA for nearly 30 years prior to his retirement in 2006, warned that Lashkar e-Taiba is now “the most dangerous terror group in the world”. In his editorial, the former CIA analyst, who is now a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, said that LeT operates freely inside Pakistan and continues to have strong operational connections with the Pakistani armed forces and the country’s intelligence establishment. Since its founding in 1990, LeT’s traditional political aspiration has been to end Indian rule over the predominantly Muslim state of Jammu and Kashmir, and then integrate the latter with Pakistan. But the group’s aims appeared to expand significantly in November of 2008, when it sent ten heavily armed operatives to Mumbai on speedboats. Once they landed in India’s most populous city, the LeT operatives proceeded to strike nearly a dozen tourist-related targets in well-calculated suicide missions. By the end of the four-day terrorist spree, 166 people —including six Americans and many other Western tourists— had been killed. Riedel views the 2008 Mumbai strike as “the most significant and innovative terrorist attack since 9/11”, and says that it marked LeT’s maturation “from a Punjabi-based Pakistani terror group targeting India exclusively” to an outfit with a global outlook, “targeting the enemies of al Qaeda: the Crusader West, Zionist Israel, and Hindu India”. Today, nearly four years after the Mumbai attacks, LeT maintains a global presence, with active cells throughout the Middle East and Asia, and funding operations in North America, Australia and Europe, claims Riedel. Additionally, LeT does not appear to feel threatened by Washington. Read more of this post
By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
intelNews.org 
Charges dismissed against Israeli general accused of outing Egyptian spy
July 12, 2012 by Joseph Fitsanakis Leave a comment
Israel’s Attorney General has dismissed all charges against a former Director of the country’s Military Intelligence, who had been accused of leaking the identity of an Egyptian spy found dead in London in 2007. General Eli Zeira, 84, had been investigated as a possible source of the leak that identified Egyptian businessman Ashraf Marwan as an Israeli spy who worked in London and Cairo in the 1970s. Marwan, the son-in-law of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, is said to have approached Israeli intelligence agency Mossad in 1969 during a visit to the Israeli embassy in London. On October 5, 1973, he warned his Israeli handlers that Egyptian and Syrian forces would attack the Jewish state on the next day, thus giving Tel Aviv a last-minute warning of what later came to be known as the Yom Kippur War. However, Marwan was found dead underneath the balcony of his London home in June 2007, five years after his alleged espionage activities were revealed in a book by London-based Israeli historian Ahron Bregman. Marwan’s widow claims that her husband was murdered by intelligence operatives. In 2004, the Israeli government initiated an official investigation into the affair, after allegations that General Eli Zeira, the Director of Israel’s Military Intelligence during the Yom Kippur war, was the source that leaked Marwan’s espionage activities to Bregman. The main force behind the allegations against Zeira was Zvi Zamir, Director of the Mossad from 1968 to 1974. In 2011, Zamir, now 87, wrote a book openly accusing General Zeira, not only of leaking Marwarn’s espionage activities, but also of failing to heed the Egyptian’s warnings in time for Israel to adequately prepare for the Yom Kippur war. Read more of this post
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