ASIA TIMES:
READ IT ALLAl-Qaeda has plans for its new recruit
By Syed Saleem Shahzad
ISLAMABAD -With the United States on the brink of taking a decision on whether to send an additional 40,000 troops to Afghanistan, and with the leadership of al-Qaeda redefining its vision eight years after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the US, a new phase in al-Qaeda's war is likely to begin.
Soon after top al-Qaeda commander Ilyas Kashmiri surfaced for an exclusive interview with Asia Times Online (see Al-Qaeda's guerrilla chief lays out strategy Asia Times Online, October 15) to deny that he had been killed in a missile attack by a US Predator drone, US agents exposed a plot to use an American national for terrorist attacks in Denmark and India.
According to reports, the man, identified as David Coleman Headley, was one of two suspects arrested last month by the Joint Terrorism Task Force of the Federal Bureau of Investigation
(FBI) at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport before he boarded a flight to Philadelphia, from where he was said to be going to travel to Pakistan to meet his handlers, including Ilyas.
Headley's alleged partner in the claimed terror plot, which included plans to attack the Danish newspaper that published cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, was a Pakistani-Canadian named Tahawwur Hussain Rana, also a Chicago resident.