by Joe Quinn
31 December 2009
from
SOTT
Website
Strange as it may seem, a couple of weeks ago as
I ruminated on
Obama's broken promise to bring the
troops home, his attempt to out-warmonger the
Bush administration and his plummeting popularity, I thought
to myself:
"you know, what that guy (or rather the
disgruntled US public) needs is a good old fashioned 'Muslim terror
attack'. Preferably one that includes a ranting 'terrorist' message
about Afghanistan and 'slaughtering infidels'. That'll soon silence the
rabble and get them behind Obama's Afghan surge!"
The "bomber's" underwear
And so it was that, as I sipped my eggnog on
Christmas day, I was shockingly unsurprised to read the headlines about an
'underwear bomb' (as shown above).
To adequately address the recent airline "terror attack" in Detroit and the
airborne terror attacks in Yemen we must delve into the topsy turvey
world of the 'war on terror', where black is white, up is down, and shady
Middle Eastern-looking men and your knickers share equal rating on the US
DHS threat-o-meter. In short, it's no easy task. So first of all, let me say
a few words about airports and the old and new airport "security measures".
The nightmare that is modern commercial air travel started with 9/11. Before
this date, air travel was reasonably civilized. There were no long queues
(at least not after check in). We just threw our hand luggage on the
security belt, walked through the scanner and we were done.
After 9/11 however, every commercial airplane became a potential flying bomb
and passengers and their hand luggage had to undergo more extensive
searches. In Dec 2001, the theatrics of the
clearly brain-washed Richard Reid,
aka "the shoe bomber", added the common or garden shoe to the list of
potential terrorist weapons.
Now, the equally bizarre antics of the young
Nigerian Mr. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab has thrown our underwear into
the mix.
Both shoe and knicker bomber attempted to use
PETN (a military explosive) on
their respective flights. As a result, our shoes now go through scanners at
airports and I can only presume that more invasive scanning of our lower
torsos will also be mandated supposedly in an effort to prevent further
knicker attacks.
The problem, however, is this:
PETN, either in shoes or strapped to any part of the body, cannot be
detected by airport scanners. A chemical test is needed. Unless authorities
plan to drastically reconfigure the number and availability of international
flights, there is no chance that chemical tests can be introduced for every
passenger.
Hence we reach our first tentative conclusion:
that the billions of shoes that have been
scanned at airports since 2001, and the billions of pairs of underwear
that will henceforth become objects of official scrutiny, have and will
have had nothing to do with airport security or preventing terrorism.
So what's it all about?
Follow me now, as I metaphorically wade through the vast piles of manure
that constitute the raw material for the official story of the latest
'terror attack'.
The Christmas knicker bomber was not your usual disgruntled Arab or
lowly Muslim acolyte. He was the son of Nigerian banking mogul and
former Nigerian government minister Alhaji Umaru Mutallab, one of the
richest men in Africa.
We're talking one of the African colonial
elite here, an African version of the British "old
boy's network". While in London, his son, the knicker bomber
lived in a ₤4 million apartment in
Mansfield Street, in the city's West End.
'Terrorist' Mutallab
(center) with his young and impressionable friends
He also enjoyed access to visas for several different countries,
including the US.
It is not surprising therefore to learn that
the knicker bomber apparently received special treatment at Amsterdam
airport before he boarded his flight to Detroit.
Eyewitness
Kurt Haskell reported that a sharply
dressed Indian man escorted him to the gate and told the attendant that
the knicker bomber had no passport but needed to get on the flight. The
sharply dressed man was told that he would have to speak to the manager,
which he apparently did and successfully got the young 'terrorist' on
board.
Now this requires some serious string pulling, and all the hoopla in the
press about whether or not the security system worked is just hubris,
because if the knicker bomber appeared at the gate without a passport,
it is unlikely that he went through the normal process up to that point,
including check-in which requires passengers to show their passports.
In all probability he was escorted as a VIP
to the gate by the sharply dressed man. So how do two suspicious looking
terrorists, at least one of them without a passport, get to the gate in
an airport and then onto the flight? The answer is they don't unless
they have some diplomatic credentials or high-level contacts in the
airport.
Guess who runs the security at Amsterdam Schipol airport?
ICTS of course!..., the same
Israeli owned security company that somehow managed to let,
It is also useful to remember that the shoe
bomber was cleared through ICTS and El Al security at Amsterdam airport
on a flight to Tel Aviv in July 2001 for what was apparently an
all-expenses paid week-long trip to the Israeli city. What precisely he
did there remains a mystery.
All of which leads us to our second tentative
conclusion:
The knicker bomber and his handler were not
terrorists. Of course, it all depends on who you think the real
terrorists are...
Moving on to the bomb itself; as mentioned it was PETN, or rather
Pentaerythritol, which is a building block for PETN. To make PETN,
Pentaerythritol must be mixed with concentrated nitric and sulfuric
acids. It is assumed that these acids were in the syringe that the
knicker bomber was attempting to inject, under the cover of a blanket,
into his underpants.
He then attempted to ignite the newly prepared PETN
with some kind of a fuse.
He was apparently unaware that PETN
requires a shock wave rather than heat
or flame to detonate, and a shock wave is best provided by an initiator
explosive. In short, the whole enterprise was doomed to failure from the
beginning.
Since the bomber and his smartly-dressed
handler were able to get to the gate without passports, and are unlikely
to have passed through security, we are left to ponder why the bomber
didn't carry an explosive that required much less preparation, like a
half a stick of dynamite for example.
Below, a short video of what a half stick of
dynamite does to a file cabinet.
Tentative conclusion number three therefore is
that,
the goal was not to actually 'kill infidels'
but rather to reinforce the concept of 'Muslim terrorism'. In fact, it
seems clear at this stage that the combining of terrorism and commercial
air travel is a specific tactic by the real terror masters to maximize
fear.
After all, it is difficult to think of a place where the average
citizen already feels more vulnerable than on a metal tube hurtling
through the air at 35,000 feet.
Add in a wild-eyed 'terrorist' and you
have the optimal psychological conditions for fear-based programming.
In this particular case however, the knicker bomber was far from
wild-eyed. According to the first passenger who attempted to subdue
Mutallab on the plane, he offered no resistance and was docile. He was
"staring into nothing" according to Dutch 'film maker' Jasper Schuringa.
Schuringa also noted that Mutallab was actually on fire but showed no
reaction whatsoever.
This is suggestive of someone who is in some sort
of trance. Indeed, Schuringa stated this explicitly in this interview
but immediately followed it with the words, "I don't want to talk about
that."
How very strange.
Equally strange is
Schuringa's account of how he subdued Mutallab:
As the plane neared its destination of
Detroit, Michigan, he heard a pop that sounded like a firecracker going
off, and someone started yelling:
"Fire! Fire!"
"Around 30 seconds later the smoke started to fill up on the left side
beneath this person," he said.
"I basically reacted directly. I didn't think."
He jumped over the passenger next to him and
lunged over Abdulmutallab's seat,
"Because I was thinking he's trying to blow
up the plane, and I was trying to search his body for any explosives."
"I pulled the object from him and tried to extinguish the fire with my
hands and threw it away. Just to be sure I grabbed him with another attendant and we took him to
first class and there we stripped him and contained him with handcuffs
and we made sure he had no more weapons, no more bombs on him."
"The whole plane was screaming. The suspect, he didn't say a word."
Schuringa said other passengers applauded as he
walked back to his seat.
The reactions of the other passengers seems normal. The reactions of
Schuringa are reminiscent of someone who has been trained in
anti-in-flight-terror tactics.
Jasper Schuringa's camera
image of Mutallab
as he is taken off the plane
According to reports Schuringa was on his way to visit an 'Israeli friend',
Shai Ben-Ami who owns a restaurant in Miami.
The flight landed at around noon on Christmas
day, and by that afternoon Ben-Ami had become Schuringa's impromptu PR
manager, aggressively negotiating fees for interviews and the couple of cell
phone pictures that Schuringa had taken of Mutallab as he was being taken
off the plane.
Eyewitnesses on the flight also reported that after Mutallab was taken off
the plane the FBI arrested another Indian-looking man in Detroit airport.
The FBI has since denied that anyone else was involved.
Patricia Keepman was on the flight with her husband, daughter and two new
adopted children from Ethiopia. She reported that they were sitting about 20
rows behind Mutallab.
Her daughter said that ahead of them was a man who
videotaped the entire flight, including the attempted detonation.
"He sat up and videotaped the entire thing,
very calmly," said Patricia. "We do know that the FBI is looking for him
intensely. Since then, we've heard nothing about it."
Flight 253 passenger Kurt
Haskell and his wife
Passenger Kurt Haskell also reported that a third Indian man was arrested
after the plane landed in Detroit airport.
Haskell also claims that he has
since been visited by the FBI in what appears to be an attempt to silence
him and his report of a third man.
According to CNN, the knicker bomber's father contacted the U.S. Embassy in
Nigeria recently with concerns his son was planning something, that he had
become "radicalized". His pleas apparently fell on deaf ears.
Coincidentally, the Orwellian Patriot Act, passed on the back of
the 9/11
attacks, is up for either renewal or trash-canning in a couple of weeks.
What luck then for Obama, who is secretly very fond of such
draconian
powers, that the knicker bomber happened along, because there is now a very
good chance that the Patriot Act will not only be enthusiastically renewed,
but unanimously so.
There is no chance however that any of these troubling details will be
discussed by the mainstream media, because none of them are relevant to the
story that the US and Israeli governments want us to believe: Yemen is
crawling with "al-Qaeda"!!
Going Global
Initially, all we had was a Nigerian youth and a misguided effort to
detonate what we are told was an explosive compound.
Within 24 hours however,
IntelCenter, a group of
US ex-military and intelligence officials who over the years have somehow
managed to produce many of the "al-Qaeda" videos and messages that they
serendipitously find on "jihadist websites", produced a picture of Mutallab
with what they claim is the flag of the media arm of "al-Qaeda in the
Arabian Peninsula" and a message from the group
claiming Mutallab as one of
their own:
"We tell the American people that since you
support the leaders who kill our women and children... we have come to
slaughter you (and) will strike you with no previous (warning), our
vengeance is near," the statement said.
Scared yet? Well, the people at Intelcenter
really hope you are.
They put a lot of effort into producing these
messages and videos and images.
For example, a 2006 'al-qaeda' video
featuring al-Zawahiri released by Intelcenter was
analyzed by Neal Krawetz,
a researcher and computer security consultant. During a presentation he gave
at the BlackHat security conference in Las Vegas in 2007 about analyzing
digital photographs and video images for alterations and enhancements,
Krawetz showed that the video had been altered in a very interesting way.
Using a program he wrote (and provided on the conference CD-ROM) Krawetz
could print out the quantization tables in a JPEG file (that indicate how
the image was compressed) and determine the last tool that created the image
- that is, the make and model of the camera if the image is original or the
version of Photoshop that was used to alter and re-save the image.
A still from the the
Intelcenter-faked "al-qaeda" video
Krawetz took an image (above) from the 2006 video of al-Zawahiri showing the
Mr Magoo look-alike sitting in front of a desk and banner with writing on
it.
After conducting his error analysis Krawetz was
able to determine that the writing on the banner behind al-Zawahiri's head
was added to the image afterward and at the same time as the logo of
IntelCenter, which released the video.
In short, it seems very likely that
IntelCenter produced the writing on the banner, and probably the entire
video, from whole cloth.
Despite this evidence, we are being asked to believe that the latest message
and photo from 'al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula' that IntelCenter just
happened to find on a "Jihadist internet message board" that links Mutallab
with 'al-Qaeda in Yemen' is authentic!
An image of Mutallab
with
'al-qaeda logo' procured (manufactured?) by Intelcenter
The Yemen government, or rather dictatorship, added its voice to the
subterfuge by claiming that Mutallab was in Yemen from August to December
2009.
Dodgy internet postings, as usual from unnamed 'jihadist
web sites' would have us believe he was putting the final touches to his
knicker bomb under the tutelage of "al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula" and
specifically Anwar al-Awlaki, the US born Muslim lecturer, spiritual leader,
and former imam. The very same al-Awlaki who allegedly corresponded with
Fort Hood mind-programmed patsy
Nidal Malik Hasan.
The very same al-Awlaki who was
allegedly the
spiritual adviser to two of the 9/11 hijackers. Isn't it just wonderful how
it all connects together in one giant web of "Muslim terrorism" that starts
with 9/11?
The fact is, it all does start with 9/11, and the evidence that the 9/11
attacks were perpetrated by elements of the US and Israeli governments is so
abundant that no further discussion is required. How Mutallab actually
passed his time in Yemen is however still open to speculation, and
speculation is always best when some reasonably objective data is marshaled
to back it up.
Data like:
Yemen seizes 'Israel-linked' cell
Tuesday, 7 October 2008
BBC News
Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh has said the security forces have
arrested a group of alleged Islamist militants linked to Israeli
intelligence.
Mr Saleh did not say what evidence had been found to show the group's
links with Israel, a regional enemy of Yemen.
The arrests were connected with an attack on the US embassy in Sanaa
last month which killed at least 18 people, official sources were quoted
saying.
Israel's foreign ministry has rejected the accusation as "totally
ridiculous".
"A terrorist cell was arrested and will
be referred to the judicial authorities for its links with the
Israeli intelligence services," Mr Saleh told a gathering at al-Mukalla
University in Hadramawt province.
"Details of the trial will be announced later. You will hear about
what goes on in the proceedings," he added.
The 17 September attack was the second to
target the US embassy since April. Militants detonated car bombs before
firing rockets at the heavily fortified building.
Mr Saleh did not identify the suspects, but official sources were quoted
saying it was the same cell - led by a militant called Abu al-Ghaith
al-Yamani - whose arrest was announced a week after the attack.
The simple yet ugly truth is that Yemen is now
squarely in the cross-hairs of the US imperial juggernaut.
As to the reason
why, we may need only look to the following report from Feb 2009:
Yemen oil majors mull investments
Yemen's Ministry for Oil and Mineral
Resources has received eight oil investment bids from international
companies, pan-Arab daily al-Hayat quoted Aidarous as saying, four of
which were from oil majors seeking direct negotiations with Yemen.
The companies include Exxon Mobil, Total, and BP, the minister said, but
did not elaborate on the nature of the investments.
Yemen also has significant natural gas reserves
that are in the process of being explored and extracted by French
Multi-national Total.
But perhaps Yemen's most strategically important
asset is its location. Sitting on the southern tip of the Arabian peninsula,
the Yemeni sea port of Aden and the gulf of Aden in general is ideally
located for the transport of the two aforementioned crucially important
commodities.
Over 30% of all crude oil and over 10% of global trade pass
through the Gulf of Aden and control of it gives control over shipping in
the region (think piracy) and access to the coasts of oil-rich East African
nations like Somalia and Sudan.
Yemen, showing the gulf of Aden to the south
and Somalia and Sudan to the
South West
With
climate change, in the form of a glacial rebound or a new 'ice age',
and the massive world-wide social unrest it would cause, looking
increasingly likely in the near future, the
psychopathic elite are
undoubtedly eager to ensure their own comfortable survival at our expense.
Yemen - Yesterday And
Today
Yemen has only existed as an independent country for less than 50 years.
During and after the Second World War, Aden was regarded as the key to the
defense of British imperial interests in the Middle East, the Gulf and the
Indian Ocean.
As late as May 1956 a British junior minister,
Lord Lloyd, stated that,
"for the foreseeable future it would not be
reasonable or sensible or in the interests of the colony's inhabitants
to aspire to any aim beyond that of a considerable degree of internal
self-government." 1
Naturally enough, Yenemis were less than
enthusiastic about being indefinitely subservient to the British.
Historically, Yemen had been split into two governates, North and South
Yemen. In 1956, as long as its then ruler
Imam Ahmed did not interfere, the
British were willing to allow North Yemen relative independence. South Yemen
however was to remain fully British, at least economically.
In response to an increasingly powerful trade
union movement made up of the Arab working class who demanded better wages,
living standards and infrastructure, the British attempted to consolidate
their control in the South by establishing the Federation of South Arabia in
1959, a ramshackle affair made up of the various emirs, sheiks and sultans
who were willing to side with the British against Yemeni nationalist
aspirations in exchange for position and wealth.
British Petroleum had established an oil refinery in 1954 and the wealth
that this resource could and should have provided for the Yemeni people was
instead shipped out to further British strategic interests elsewhere in the
world, leaving much of Yemen's population impoverished.
While the British
governing elite have always (and still do) view all (or rather most)
non-Western peoples as little more than howling savages, like so many other
colonized nations, the Yemeni people had no trouble recognizing the
injustice of the situation.
Faced with an increasingly militant nationalist
movement within both South and North Yemen, the British reacted to the
justified grievances of a mobilized civilian population in the only way they
know how - subterfuge and force.
After a wave of strikes called by the Aden Trades Union Congress (how dare
they!) which were followed by mass arrests, beatings and torture by the
British military, a number of activists and organizations from Aden and
outlying areas came together to establish the National Liberation Front for
Occupied South Yemen or the NLF for short.
The leaders were middle class... clerks,
teachers, officers.2
To deal with the insurgents ('terrorists' in
modern parlance), the British decided on the tried and trusted method of
terrorizing the local population.
They proclaimed the insurgent areas 'proscribed
areas' and dropped leaflets telling the inhabitants to leave (does this
remind you of the tactics of a certain Middle Eastern country in January
2009?).
With that formality completed the Royal Air Force freely rocketed
and bombed the areas, strafing any sign of human activity. Crops were
destroyed, livestock seized and houses blown up, (again, does this remind
you of anything?) When Yemeni farmers began to work their fields at night,
the British military added night-time bombing.3
Search operations were carried out on a large scale in an attempt to
restrict movement of men and weapons by the NLF. Inevitably, these searches
accompanied by racists abuse and physical manhandling further alienated the
population. Stephen Harper, the Daily Express correspondent in Aden, wrote
fondly of the troops that "there's a lot of boot, gun-butt and fist
thumping" but that this wasn't brutality but rather "righteous anger".
An officer recalled how, when troops were banned
from calling the Arabs 'wog', they wittily responded by calling them 'gollies'
instead 4 (see here for the origin and usage of the word
golliwog). The counter-productivity of such abuse always was (and still is)
lost on the British political elite and military and obviously did nothing
to win the 'hearts and minds' of the Yemeni people in their rebelling
against foreign domination.
Another tactic used by the British military (you may recognize this one) was
the deployment of 'Special Branch Sections'.
These were eight to ten man
mobile patrols with an officer in command. Dressed up as Arabs they carried
out raids, searches and attacks against British and Yemeni civilian and
military targets that could then be blamed on the insurgents in an effort to
justify the British oppression. The SAS in its first official deployment
against urban guerillas was also deployed in 'Keeni Meeni' squads (a Swahili
term appropriately meaning 'slithering snakes').
'Keeni Meeni' members were SAS men thought most
likely to be able to pass for Arabs...5
Without intelligence sources within the local Arab population, British
military leaders settled on the inspired idea that torture of prisoners was
the next best thing. This mainly involved beatings of one form or another
but also sensory deprivation techniques that would later be used in the 30
years dirty war in Northern Ireland and more recently in Iraq and
Afghanistan.
At the time, allegations of torture and brutality were made in the British
press against the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, an infantry regiment of
the British Army. The conviction of members of the regiment in 1981 for the
brutal murder of two catholic farmers in Northern Ireland in 1972 led to
revelations about events in Yemen.
The Glasgow Sunday Mail reported that it had,
conducted a careful and comprehensive
investigation including the sworn statements of a dozen soldiers and
officers detailing murder and robbery of local Arabs. A single soldier
admitted shooting dead five unarmed Arab civilians in different
incidents.
Several others said they used morphine injections to kill
captives. Others claimed to be witnesses to the bayoneting to death of
a Arab teenager whose only crime was to be found in a cafe after curfew. 6
Eventually, the British were forced out of Yemen
(at least physically) and the two kingdoms of North and South Yemen were
formally united as the Republic of Yemen on May 22, 1990.
Yemen's complicated history since British
withdrawal and the unification of the North and South is beyond the scope of
this article. Nevertheless, even a brief analysis of the social and
political history of Yemen over the past 50 years is enough to show that the
vast majority of internal conflicts have been over one single issue - civil
rights and the desire of normal people to live a dignified existence free
from oppression and inequality.
When such aspirations conflict (as they
invariably do) with the 'geo-strategic' interests of world powers like the
US, Britain, or the megalomaniacal pseudo-religious and racist ideals of the
state of Israel, normal people lose. 100 years ago, the British elite could
simply crush such popular uprisings and explain it away as just the fall-out
from their munificent efforts to civilize a 'backward people'.
Today however, it is not so easy to fool a
somewhat more enlightened world public and a more convincing argument must
be made. That argument is today called "the world-wide terrorist threat".
In Yemen today, the people that the US, British and Israeli governments
claim are "Muslim terrorists", "al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula",
"al-Qaeda in Yemen" etc. etc., are in fact local tribesmen and their families
who are clamoring for social justice and have been doing so for several
decades.
They would very probably be easily enticed to
put down their arms if they were given economic help and simple concessions
such as roads and schools by the government. But that is too much to ask of
either the global power brokers or Yemen's puppet government.
To give any power to the people is, in the
twisted, greed-driven minds of the global elite, the first step on the road
to the loss of control, and control over normal human beings and our planet
is the lifeblood of our corrupt and psychologically deviant leaders.
And so we are led back to the knicker bomber who, we are told, was trained
by Muslim terrorists in Yemen.
In response to this bogus threat (and indeed
before it even appeared) the US military (and it's Saudi Arabian allies),
like the British military before them, have been
bombing, rocketing and
strafing, not 'al-Qaeda in Yemen', but
ordinary Yemeni civilians and
tribesmen who dared to raise their voices, fists and guns against imperial
and domestic injustice.
Notes
1. Glen Balfour-Paul, The End of Empire in
the Middle East, Cambridge 1991, p.67
2. Joseph Kostiner, The Struggle for South Yemen, London 1984, p. 53
3. John Newsinger, British Counter-Insurgency, Palgrave 2002, p. 117
4. Stephen Harper, Last Sunset, London 1978, p. 85
5. Tony Geraghty, Who Dares Wins, London 1992, p. 400-403
6. David Ledger, Shifting Sands: British in South Arabia 1981,
Peninsular
Comment - Update
The above article was written within a few days of the "Detroit terror
attack". Since then, further details have emerged/been dug up.
Yemen has international
debt totaling almost $6 billion, much of it owed to
the IFC (basically the
World Bank) and the
Paris Club (same thing). What is
most interesting however is that almost ALL of this $6 billion appeared on
Yemen's books in the last 6 months of 2009.
In short, the Yemeni government sold its soul, or more specifically, the
lives of many Yemeni civilians, to the World Bank. What it got in return is
open to debate. When this type of thing happens (which it has, often,
especially in the last 10 years) I like to think that the leaders of the
lucky country in question received first class seats on the "rapture train",
but I could be wrong.
More details about the bomber's father's banking interests have also
appeared. Part of Yemen's debt is financed by the Islamic Development Bank (IDB)
which just happens to be the bank that financed the
opening of Nigeria's
first Islamic Bank, Jaiz Bank, in 2007.
The "bomber's" father is
chairman of
the Board of Directors of Jaiz bank
It's interesting, to say the least, that the father of the underwear bomber
is financially beholden to/in bed with the banking institutions that
recently gave Yemen stacks of cash, cash which said banking institutions
(and the World Bank) probably stood to lose if the Houthi tribesmen in the
North and the various social activist groups throughout Yemen were to
succeed in their aim of homegrown regime change.
-
Could it be that, in bombing Yemen, the US government is simply following
the orders of those mythical bankers?
-
And if so, does that mean that said
mythical international bankers actually exist??!
Having scoured their favorite "jihadist web sites" and message boards, it
seems that the only beef IntelCenter/mainstream media could come up with
on the young underwear bomber was that he was lonely, as opposed to a
radical hate-filled Islamophile jihadist bent on destroying Western
civilization.
Oh well...
However, the FBI did interview him and claimed that:
"he made contact via the internet with a
radical imam in Yemen who then connected him with al Qaeda leaders in a
village north of the country's capital, Sanaa."
So, do we think that was before or after he came
out of the trance?
According to one of his classmates, Mutallab,
"was pretty quiet and didn't socialize much
or have a girlfriend that I knew of. I didn't get to talk to him much on
a personal level. I was really shocked when I saw the reports. You would
never imagine him pulling off something like this."
Strangely enough, I had the same impression, and
I didn't even know him.
One last thing, that is perhaps of note. In September 2008, the Nigerian
government were debating whether or not to allow the Mossad to come and
train Nigerian security forces.
It seems they probably decided to go with
the idea because,
according to one of the Nigerian MPs,
"they (Mossad) are professionals and they
are here to help train our own intelligence agents. I don't see any way
by which their presence in the country [could] pose any threat to our
National Security."
Famous last words perhaps, at least for the
young Mutallab, and the aspirations of the Yemeni people.