'Underwear bomber' was working for the CIA

'Underwear bomber' was working for the CIA

replica louis vuitton Bomber involved in plot to attack US-bound jet was working as an informer with Saudi intelligence and the CIA, it has emerged Paul Harris and Ed Pilkington in New York The Guardian, Wednesday 9 May 2012 Article history About this articleClose 'Underwear bomber' was working for the CIAThis article appeared on p19 of the Main section section of the Guardian on Wednesday 9 May 2012. It was published on guardian.co.uk at 01.05 BST on Wednesday 9 May 2012. It was last modified at 01.13 BST on Wednesday 9 May 2012.'Underwear bomber' involved in a plot to attack jet was in fact working as an undercover informer with the CIA, it has emerged. Photograph: Yahya Arhab/EPA A would-be "underwear bomber" involved in a plot to attack a US-based jet was in fact working as an undercover informer with Saudi intelligence and the CIA, it has emerged.The revelation is the latest twist in an increasingly bizarre story about the disruption of an apparent attempt by al-Qaida to strike at a high-profile American target using a sophisticated device hidden in the clothing of an attacker.The plot, which the White House said on Monday had involved the seizing of an underwear bomb by authorities in the Middle East sometime in the last 10 days, had caused alarm throughout the US.It has also been linked to a suspected US drone strike in Yemen where two Yemeni members of al-Qaida were killed by a missile attack on their car on Sunday, one of them a senior militant, Fahd Mohammed Ahmed al-Quso.But the news that the individual at the heart of the bomb plot was in fact an informer for US intelligence is likely to raise just as many questions as it answers.

fake louis vuitton bags Citing US and Yemeni officials, Associated Press reported that the unnamed informant was working under cover for the Saudis and the CIA when he was given the bomb, which was of a new non-metallic type aimed at getting past airport security.The informant then turned the device over to his handlers and has left Yemen, the officials told the news agency. The LA Times, which first broke the news that the plot had been a "sting operation", said that the bomb plan had also provided the intelligence leads that allowed the strike on Quso.Earlier John Brennan, Barack Obama's top counter-terrorism adviser and a former CIA official, told ABC's Good Morning America that authorities are "confident that neither the device nor the intended user of this device pose a threat to us".US officials have said the plot was detected in its early stages and that no American airliner was ever at risk.The FBI is conducting forensic tests on the bomb as a first step towards discovering whether it would have cleared existing airport scanning systems. Dianne Feinstein, the Democratic senator for California who heads the Senate intelligence committee, gave an early hint when she said that she had been briefed about the device which she called "undetectable".But AP quoted an unnamed US official as saying current detection methods probably would have spotted the shape of the explosive in the latest device.

fake louis vuitton shoes Just how major an escalation in threat is posed by the bomb remains unclear. Security sources have told news agencies that it was a step up in levels of sophistication from the original underwear bomb that was used in a failed attempt to blow up an airliner over Detroit on Christmas Day in 2009.The device used a more refined detonation system, and Brennan said "it was a threat from a standpoint of the design".When it comes to who made the device the focus is on an al-Qaida's offshoot, Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Matthew Levitt, a counter-terrorism expert at the Washington Institute, said that the interception of the plot amounted to a significant achievement for US security agencies.He said: "The FBI is holding the device, which suggests that this was done by having boots on the ground. This was a sophisticated operation that shows we are making in-roads in serious places."Levitt, who was involved as a senior analyst in the FBI's investigation into 9/11, said that it was natural to be sceptical in a presidential election year about security announcements. "But this was not political, it didn't come from the White House and my sense was that it was a really unique success," he said.Levitt said that the spotlight would now be even more intense on Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri, AQAP's assumed bomb-making chief, who is thought to be hiding out in Yemen.Asiri is believed to have been the creator of the Detroit underwear bomb as well as explosives that were packed into printer cartridges bound for Chicago in 2010.The cliché about children’s book writers is that they’re sensitive, mewling types — wearers of cardigans, dispensing uplift as if it were Purell hand sanitizer.

fake louis vuitton sunglasses Times Topic: Maurice SendakThe best, of course, from the Brothers Grimm through Roald Dahl and the brilliant Maurice Sendak, who died on Tuesday, have always been exactly the opposite. Their stuff is anarchic and verges on the nightmarish. These writers want children to take themselves seriously. They want them to grow up a bit, starting now. Mr. Sendak’s books weren’t in my house when I was a child, an omission that, I have come to realize, was a perverse kind of gift. I got to discover them while reading them aloud, approximately 250 times each, to my two children. “Children are made readers,” the writer Emilie Buchwald said, “on the laps of their parents.” I was made a Sendak devotee with my children on my lap, and I could sense their delight reinforcing my own.His acknowledged classic is “Where the Wild Things Are” (1963), about Max, who is sent to bed without supper only to find that a tangled forest and a wild sea sprout from his imagination. He stares down fanged monsters by looking into their yellow eyes without blinking. He is made “the king of all wild things.” He throws what is surely the greatest dance party in kid-lit history, engaging the monsters in a “wild rumpus” that Don Cornelius, the creator of “Soul Train,” would envy. I’ve loved some of the things that Mr. Sendak would later say about “Where the Wild Things Are.” In 2006, for example, he wondered aloud to a New Yorker writer, Cynthia Zarin, about where Max would be now.“My God, Max would be what now, 48?” Mr. Sendak said. “He’s still unmarried, he’s living in Brooklyn. He’s a computer maven. He’s totally ungifted. He wears a wolf suit when he’s at home with his mother!” You don’t have to agree with that assessment — I bet Max became a marine biologist and resembles Richard Dreyfuss in “Jaws” — to find it terrific.

fake louis vuitton jewelry The gifted British critic Francis Spufford called “Where the Wild Things Are,” correctly, “one of the very few picture books to make an entirely deliberate, and beautiful, use of the psychoanalytic story of anger.” In her New Yorker article, Ms. Zarin proposed that Max was a youthful version of early Philip Roth neurotics like Neil Klugman in “Goodbye, Columbus” and Alexander Portnoy in “Portnoy’s Complaint.” There’s a dissertation topic for the student willing to take it on.The Sendak book that most resonated with my children and me is “In the Night Kitchen” (1970). It’s about a boy named Mickey who floats free of his bed and down into a surreal kitchen staffed with what seem to be Oliver Hardy look-alikes with Hitler mustaches. They almost succeed in baking him into a “morning cake.” The whole thing is supple and serene and terrifying at the same time.“In the Night Kitchen” has become contentious, among people I hope never to meet, for its mild nudity: We get peeks at Mickey’s penis and testicles. Some have also objected to its would-be sexual innuendo (milk, phallic bottles and the like), and it was on the American Library Association’s list of the “most frequently challenged books” of the 1990s. Like me, the children of these people can have the distinct joy of discovering this book for themselves in a few decades. It makes a plangent kind of poetry out of its visions and lingers in the mind. It roots around, with marvelous sensitivity and wit, in issues of vulnerability and security. As an added bonus, it proposes cake as breakfast food.Many people who met Mr. Sendak over the years remarked that he resembled one of his own characters. That is, he was a shaggy and somewhat ornery beast, and he didn’t mellow as he aged. If you’d like a hit of vast and undiluted pleasure, watch Mr. Sendak’s two-part interview, taped this year, with Stephen Colbert.Last year Mr. Sendak told Emma Brockes, a reporter for The Guardian, who asked him about electronic books: “I hate them. It’s like making believe there’s another kind of sex. There isn’t another kind of sex. There isn’t another kind of book! A book is a book is a book.”Some of Mr. Sendak’s relatives died in the Holocaust, and from an early age he was acquainted with death. “I cry a lot because I miss people,” he once said. “They die and I can’t stop them. They leave me and I love them more.” Mr. Sendak, like Max, was the king of all wild things. It’s impossible not to miss him already.