Saturday, May 8, 2010

Earlier this week it was reported that the Obama White House removed confessed terrorist Faisal Shahzad from the Department of Homeland Security travel lookout list sometime after Barack Obama came into office.

Terrorist Faisal Shahzad had substantial connections to the Taliban, reached out to the Taliban, was influenced by Yemeni terror leader Anwar al Awlaki, made at least a dozen return trips to Pakistan since arriving in the United States in 1999, and he bought a one way ticket with cash to Pakistan.

Now we find out that he was “blogging” and asking for jihad as far back as 2006 but that the Obama Administration took him off the terror watch list anyway.

Terror expert Walid Phares weighed in on the confessed Times Square bomber today in an interview on FOX News:



To be clear, Shahzad was actually commenting on terrorist websites and not actually blogging.

Earlier this week it was discovered that Shahzad was posting on terror websites since 2006.


FOX News reported:

FoxNews.com has uncovered several dozens of postings by a man named Faisal Shahzad on radical Islamist Salafist websites devoted to a variety of different jihadist sects.

Experts suspect this is the same Faisal Shahzad whom authorities have charged with plotting to explode a massive car bomb in New York on Saturday. If so, then he has been educating himself on the Internet for years on the legitimacy of holy war.

Shahzad visited numerous websites devoted to ideological discussion of Islamism and Shariah law. His apparent online posts date back to at least 2006 — three years before the Times Square suspect became a naturalized American citizen.

“If the person on these websites is indeed the suspected bomber, the postings show that he was intellectually thinking about engaging in jihadism for a few years,” said Dr. Walid Phares, director of the Future Terrorism Project at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “Knowing that, the ideology of jihadism often has inspired violence and terrorism…

“These can be coined as Islamist Salafist websites where lots of material is posted, including theological, ideological and political texts and blogs,” Phares said, noting that he saw discussions about fatwas, jihad and other Islamist causes on these sites.”

As Walid Phares said in an interview on FOX and Friends earlier in the week, Faisal was no lone wolf:

“When a guy makes a phone call, he’s no longer a lone wolf. A lone wolf is somebody who doesn’t tell anybody else about the issue. He doesn’t share that information. He made phone calls… He may be deployed as a lone wolf. It is much easier to send one terrorist as 10 terrorists. But, he is not alone with conducting terror.”

If the Obama Administration removed a guy like Faisal Shahzad from the terror watch list sometime after 2008, just what does a guy have to do to make Team Obama’s list?


HATTIP: BigGovernment