By Madison Ruppert: If missiles on top of London apartments, spy drones, warships, LRAD sonic weaponry, and even the potential downing of airliners authorized by British officials including Prime Minister David Cameron himself weren’t enough reasons to avoid the 2012 London Olympics like the plague, here’s another one for you.
According to a report in the Sunday Times, al Qaeda in the Arabian
Peninsula (AQAP) has recruited a Muslim convert from Norway to hijack
and crash a U.S. passenger plane, citing intelligence sources.
However, it is not yet clear if the target is actually any of the
venues in which the Olympic Games are being held or if it is just timed
to coincide with the major event.
It is also unclear if this plot is real or yet another instance of state manufactured terrorism (which is all too common nowadays in the United States) engineered to keep the people in a constant state of fear and blind compliance.
One noteworthy aspect of this report, which was also covered by Israeli news outlet Haaretz, is the focus on AQAP, the group which Anwar al-Awlaki was affiliated with.
For those who don’t remember, Awlaki was the American citizen who
dined at the Pentagon and was later killed by a U.S. drone (which Yemen originally took credit for) based on justifications which are still withheld from the American people (but don’t worry, Attorney General Eric Holder claims it counts as due process).
It is also interesting because Yemen is one of the areas of growing
focus in the global covert drone war and is the same nation where the CIA was seeking the authority to kill people without even knowing who they actually are.
Some interesting cases have been linked to AQAP and their alleged operatives like Awlaki (see this section on Wikipedia covering his alleged terrorist activities) including the latest would-be underwear bomber who was actually working with the CIA.
AQAP has also been used in an attempt to justify the ludicrous new power over the private information of Americans given to the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) in March of this year.
Now the AQAP boogeyman is cropping up in the UK in an alleged suicide plot involving a Norwegian citizen in his mid-30s.
The most insane part of this story, however, is that they allegedly
even have his name: Abu Abdulrahman. Furthermore, they know, according
to the sources quoted by the Sunday Times, that he converted to Islam in
2008 and has been trained at AQAP bases in Yemen over recent months.
According to the intelligence services, the AQAP likely will try to
leverage the fact that Abdulrahman has a clean criminal record and since
he is Norwegian, he would likely be able to travel across borders in
Europe with very little in terms of restrictions.
This is compounded by the fact that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people will be flocking into the UK for the Olympics.
British airports are, furthermore, “suffering from a shortage of
qualified passport officers and authorities have expressed concern that
the border control will be “swamped” around the Olympics and many visitors will not be sufficiently screened upon entrance,” according to Haaretz.
That being said, Jonathan Evans, the head of the British domestic security service roughly equivalent to the FBI known as MI5, recently stated that the Olympics will not be “an easy target.
“The games are not an easy target, and the fact that we have
disrupted multiple terrorist plots here and abroad in recent years
demonstrates that the UK as a whole is not an easy target,” Evans said.
However, this statement didn’t stop him from striking fear into the hearts of the British people.
Evans went on to claim that “in back rooms and in cars on the streets
of this country there is no shortage of individuals talking about
wanting to mount terrorist attacks here,” while also claiming that there
is a major threat posed by Western Muslims who have been radicalized
and trained in Yemen, Sudan and other countries, just to travel back and
carry out attacks.
Unfortunately at this point it seems that there is not all too much we can do but hope that the Olympics will be completely uneventful as far as terrorist activity – either real or manufactured – goes.
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