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January 20th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda
“Aslam Awan was a senior al-Qaeda external operations planner who was working
on attacks against the West. His death reduces al-Qaeda’s thinning bench of
another operative devoted to plotting the death of innocent civilians,” a US
official said.
Several previous alleged chiefs of external operations for al Qaeda have been
caught or killed in drone attacks or counter-terrorism operations, the most
notorious being Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, alleged mastermind of the Sept 11,
2001 attacks on New York and Washington DC Mohammed was captured and is
being held by US authorities in the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba detention facility.
Because their role in arranging operations involves interacting with militants
in the field, external operations chiefs of al Qaeda have found themselves
more vulnerable to exposure and counter-attacks by security forces than the
movement’s most senior leaders, who until bin Laden’s demise last year
appeared to be able to move about the region and issue provocative audio and
video messages with near-impunity.
A Pakistani security source based in the country’s border region said that
Awan was the remaining member of an al Qaeda cell Pakistani authorities have
been trying to roll up since 2008.
“We thought he was very close to Ayman al-Zawahiri,” the source said,
referring to al Qaeda’s current leader and bin Laden’s long-time deputy, a
former Egyptian doctor.
However, a US source said that American experts did not believe that Awan was
particularly close to al-Zawahiri.
The drone strike that targeted Awan was one of two such attacks last week, in
what U.S. sources indicated was a resumption of the U.S. drone campaign
following the eight-week pause. In the other drone strike, also in North
Waziristan, a group of “foreign fighters” sympathetic to the Taliban and al
Qaeda, some of Uzbek ethnicity, were targeted on Jan. 12.
The targeted militants were believed to be travelling, possibly in preparation
for an operation near Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, and some were
injured or killed in the attack, the US source said.
US officials said they could not confirm news reports, based on claims from
Pakistani sources, that Hakimullah Mehsud, leader of the TTP, Pakistan’s
most potent domestic affiliate of the Taliban movement, was also killed in
the June 12 attack. Pakistani and US sources said that Mehsud was not
targeted in the drone strike, and one Pakistani source said: “He is alive.
Hakimullah is alive.”
US officials insisted that the drone strike lull did not represent an official
moratorium on such operations by the Obama administration. The officials
maintained that any fall-off in the pace of such operations was related to
the availability of intelligence and operating conditions, such as weather.
However, some officials did privately acknowledge that the drone lull was at
least in part calculated to try to improve strained relations between
Washington and Islamabad, which had been on a downswing for much of last
year in the wake of Pakistan’s detention of a CIA operative and the secret
U.S. commando raid on bin Laden’s Pakistani hideout.
Relations plummeted to a new low following a late November incident in which
24 Pakistani troops were killed accidentally in a NATO aerial attack on
border outposts.
Some US and Pakistani officials say that both governments are making efforts
to improve relations. As part of this process, a US official said, it is
possible that some permanent tweaks could be made in the US drone program
which could slow the pace of attacks.
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