FBI Says Somali al-Qaeda May Attack Hotels

FBI Says Somali al-Qaeda May Attack Hotels

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
June 17, 2011

Authorities in the United States are warning that al-Qaeda in Somalia plans to launch a Mumbai-style attack on the Ritz Carlton in London.

Information about the attack was allegedly obtained from computer accessories and other materials gathered at the checkpoint in Mogadishu where Fazul Abdullah Mohammed was killed last week.

Mohammed was said to be the leader of al-Qaeda in East Africa. He was under indictment in the United States for his alleged participation in the 1998 United States embassy bombings in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya. The attack killed 224 people, including 12 Americans. The U.S. government offered a $5 million reward for information leading to his arrest.

On Thursday, the FBI met with hotel-industry leaders in New York City to brief them on the latest intelligence from Somalia. A similar briefing is set for Friday in Washington, D.C., and other such briefings are expected in other US cities, according to Fox News.

The supposed threat on hotels in London and America comes after it was reported that the Arabic-language Ansar al-Mujahideen internet forum had posted a “hit list” of American executives, officials and companies with connections to the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

DHS spokesman Chris Ortman said in an email to Fox News that the list was not an indication of an imminent attack.

The United States claims al-Qaeda has moved into Algeria, Eritrea, Somalia, Kenya and the Sudan. The Libyan Islamic Fighting Group announced in 2007 that they had joined al-Qaeda. In March, Abdel-Hakim al-Hasidi, the Libyan rebel leader supported by NATO and the U.S., said al-Qaeda members who fought against U.S. troops in Iraq are part of the effort to topple or kill Gaddafi. On June 1, the U.S. said it is concerned weapons from the conflict in Libya will end up in the hands of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.

The globalists are in the process of exporting their wars from Afghanistan and Pakistan into Africa. The U.S. Africa Command, which includes all 53 African nations except for Egypt, has explicitly stated that it plans to bring “access to markets in free, fair, and competitive ways,” in other words import the neoliberal agenda at gunpoint to the impoverished continent.

AFRICOM, as the U.S. Africa Command is now known, began operations on October 1, 2008. “The U.S. maintains at least 2,500 troops in Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti and in late 2009 deployed over 100 troops, Reaper unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) equipped for guided bombs and missiles and three P-3 Orion anti-submarine and maritime surveillance aircraft to Seychelles,” Rick Rozoff wrote in January.

Last week the Joint Special Operations Command at the Pentagon and the CIA announced they plan to launch drone attacks in Yemen, across the Aden Sea from the Horn of Africa.

In fact, the U.S. used drones in Yemen prior to this announcement. In May, a drone attack in southern Yemen targeted Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born cleric who dined at the Pentagon. Yemen’s Defense Ministry confirmed the drone attack killed two al-Qaeda members, identifying them as brothers Musa’id and Abdullah Mubarak al-Daghari.

In addition, the Russian Information Agency Novosti confirmed in December of 2009 that a classified cooperation agreement allowed the U.S. to fly cruise missiles, fighter jets or unmanned armed drones against targets in the country, but it would remain publicly silent on its role in the airstrikes.

The drone attacks, according to national security experts quoted by CBS on Thursday, are “very likely a harbinger of things to come.” CBS underscored the effort to move the war on terror into Africa when it noted that “the United States wants to head off any alliance between Yemen’s extremists and those operating in Somalia across the Gulf of Aden.”

In January of 2010, Rozoff wrote that “the United States and its NATO allies have laid the groundwork for increased naval, air and ground operations in the Horn of Africa and the Gulf of Aden” and has contrived an “Afghanistan-Pakistan-Somalia-Yemen connection” in order to expand its endless war on manufactured terror. “Western governments are sparing no effort to fabricate or exaggerate links between the numerous armed conflicts in the Horn of Africa.”

The death of Fazul Abdullah Mohammed and his supposed trove of intelligence information, including a sensational but extremely unlikely attack on the Ritz Carlton in London, is the latest exaggerated link.

The “duty to inform” the hotel industry in the United States is simply another attempt by the Department of Homeland Security and the anti-terrorism industry – a growth industry during an economic depression – to hype exaggerated threats and also provide a political foundation for expanding military presence and operations into new territory.