It has been in the rumor stage for over an hour, and some outlets are now reporting that the hunt for the Charlie Hebdo terrorists is over.
NBC Newshas confirmed with senior counterterrorism officials that one of the terrorists was killed and two have been arrested.
One of the suspects in the Paris attack on Charlie Hebdo magazine has been killed and the two others are in custody, two senior U.S. counterterrorism officials told NBC News on Wednesday.
Authorities earlier had identified the three men as Said Kouachi and Cherif Kouachi, both French and in their early 30s, and Hamyd Mourad, 18, whose nationality wasn’t immediately clear.
One of the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to publicly discuss the investigation, told The Associated Press that the men were linked to a Yemeni terrorist network. Cherif Kouachi was convicted in 2008 of terrorism charges for helping funnel fighters to Iraq’s insurgency and sentenced to 18 months in prison.
Fox news had not yet confirmed the report when Greta Van Susteren went on the air, this evening.
ter a long day of rapidly changing information, U.S. counterterrorism officials said Wednesday night that they cannot be certain of the status of the three suspects in the Paris attack on Charlie Hebdo magazine. Information from French sources has been contradictory, they said.
Earlier Wednesday, two senior U.S. counterterrorism officials told NBC News that one of the suspects in the attack had been killed and that two others were in custody. However, the officials later said the information that was the basis of that account could not be confirmed.
Police raided two apartments in the north western suburbs of Paris on Wednesday afternoon – one, at 4.30pm, in Seine-Saint-Denis, and the other in Gennevilliers, in the Hauts-de-Seine region.
No one was arrested.
Local media also reported that the search was continuing in Reims, the town famous for producing Champagne, 100 miles east of Paris.
According to regional newspaper L’Union-L’Ardennais, police thought they may have identified three suspects in the attack, and one of them was from Reims.
As Obama continues to let all the terrorists out of Guantanamo, it is now reported that the one of the two brothers who stormed Charlie Hebdo, Cherif Kouachi, was a jihadis fighters in Iraq.
Cherif was reportedly part of an Iraqi jihadi network dismantled in the nearby 19th arrondissement of Paris. He was sentenced to three years in prison with 18 months suspended in relation to terror charges in May 2008.
The two brothers are Franco-Algerians who came back from Syria this summer.
Hamyd Mourad, 18, is of no fixed abode. Last year, he reportedly was enrolled in a lycée in Charleville-Mezières around 50 miles from the Champagne capital of Reims, northeastern France. Police were reportedly hunting for him in Reims last night. The nationality of the youngest is unknown.
Their identity cards were circulating widely on Twitter.
Earlier police conducted searches in the Paris suburbs of Pantin, in Seine-Saint-Denis, where the assailants were thought to have driven to.
They also conducted searches in Genevilliers, northwest of Paris.
Social media last night, people were reporting a significant presence of CRS anti-terror police in Reims. Another Twitter user suggested that there was an “incessant” helicopter surveillance.
23.10 Unconfirmed reports that two suspects have been arrested and a third killed
22.50: More on the raid in Reims from our reporting team in France
Elite French forces were last night reportedly besieging the three Charlie Hebdo attackers in Reims, eastern France amid reports all three had been “identified and located” after an identity card was found in their getaway car.
Security sources told several French media that a police operation with the elite RAID anti-terror squad was underway in Reims, with two of the three attackers reported to be holed up in the neighbourhood of Croix Rouge in Reims. Helicopters were flying over the site where they were thought to be hiding.
The operation started at 11pm.
Just hours after two of three masked and heavily armed gunmen walked into the satirical weekly’s offices and shot dead 12 people, their identities had been widely reported in French media, but not confirmed by French authorities.
UPDATE:
Or not….
23.45 Increasing confusion over what is happening in Reims, with police seen leaving the apartment block. iTele, a French news station, says that police were not carrying out a full scale assault on the building, but searching the scene for DNA samples.
As a matter of fact. They appear to be rather defiant.
Thousands jammed a public square in Paris on Wednesday night to show support for the victims of a deadly terror attack on a French satirical newspaper as authorities continued a massive manhunt for three masked gunmen.
At least 15,000 gathered at the Place de la République on Wednesday evening for a vigil after three gunmen, wearing hoods and armed with Kalashnikov automatic rifles, stormed the offices of Charlie Hebdo shouting Islamic phrases and killing 12 people.
“Bill, when you said ‘good morning’, my instinct was, ‘no this is not a good morning.’ It’s a terrible morning. It’s a bad morning for press freedom, for freedom of information. It’s bad because the terrorists won! The terrorists won, this morning,” he despaired.
He continued, “even if the terrorists are tracked down and killed – and I hope they are killed and they die miserably – the end result of this is we are going to continue to self-censor….if we had guts, those cartoons would be reprinted on the front page of the NY Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the LA Times tomorrow. They won’t be.”
Peters declared, “brave journalists will die, and cowardly ones will profit.”
He went on to say that terrorism is getting more and more pervasive and sophisticated. “This was a military operation…these weren’t amateurs.”
“The bottom line is, we have lost the will to fight,” he continued. “We’re in a period of strategic decadence. We’re worried that maybe our interrogations are too harsh. Were’ worried about hurting people’s feelings, and they’re slaughtering people.”
“This was an attack on brave journalists, but every day dozens and hundreds of people are slaughtered around the world by Islamic extremists and we will not come to grips with it. Our president will not come to grips with it. Journalism will not come to grips with it. Even our military is lawyer-addled, lawyer-ridden, and worried about offending our enemies. This is a civilizational struggle — it’s our job to defend civilization against barbarians.”
The story so far: 12 people, including two policemen, have been murdered at the offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo by two hooded men wielding AK47s. In 2011 the magazine was firebombed after running a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad. Charlie Hebdo’s most recent tweet, before the latest attack, was a cartoon featuring the leader of Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Rep.John Boehner was narrowly elected for another term as Speaker, even though over 60% of Republicans wanted him gone according to most polls. Boehner’s chief leverage was his ability to retaliate against those challenging him, and with his re-election, that’s already begun.
A better and more effective leader might have taken a look at the widespread dissatisfaction with him and attempted to bridge the gap, but that is apparently not who John Boehner is.
How long can a political party continue to ignore and disrespect its base and continue to win elections? I think we’re about to find out.
Welcome to the Watcher’s Council, a blogging group consisting of some of the most incisive blogs in the ‘sphere, and the longest running group of its kind in existence. Every week, the members nominate two posts each, one written by themselves and one written by someone from outside the group for consideration by the whole Council.Then we vote on the best two posts, with the results appearing on Friday morning.
Council News:
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Tom White At Virginia Right! scored big time as Rush Limbaugh linked to an article in Young Conservatives that featured Tom’s video on the Blame America video shown in Hanover Va schools.Council Akbar!
You can, too! Want to see your work appear on the Watcher’s Council homepage in our weekly contest listing? Didn’t get nominated by a Council member? No worries.
To bring something to my attention, simply head over to Joshuapundit and post the title and a link to the piece you want considered along with an e-mail address (mandatory, but of course it won’t be published) in the comments section no later than Monday 6PM PST in order to be considered for our honorable mention category. Then return the favor by creating a post on your site linking to the Watcher’s Council contest for the week when it comes out on Wednesday morning
Simple, no?
It’s a great way of exposing your best work to Watcher’s Council readers and Council members while grabbing the increased traffic and notoriety. And how good is that, eh?
In an interview with John Sexton at Breitbart.com, former CBS reporter and Emmy Award winning investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson said she’s not going to go away quietly and let the Regime do to other Americans, what they did to her..
She announced on Monday she is suing the Department of Justice and the U.S. Postal service for allegedly hacking into her computers.
Sexton asked her about the lawsuit – of which there is more than one part – an administrative claim against the DOJ and the U.S. Postal Service and a separate lawsuit for a violation of her constitutional rights.
“What would be the remedy?” Sexton asked.
Attkisson:There are criminal implications to some of the allegations, but my attorney explained to me it would be up to the Department of Justice to bring criminal charges against itself. We don’t think that’s going to happen. So the only remedy we have is probably the civil aspect, which would be financial, monetary damages. And if there’s no monetary damages listed in the lawsuit, that would be because they don’t require it up front as they did for the administrative claim. Just from our viewpoint, and I’ve discussed this with at length with my attorney, our goal is public awareness, getting some answers, getting at the truth and making it a little harder for this to happen to somebody else in the future.
I put in bold the saddest, and most tragic part of this whole thing. Our Department of Justice is so gut-wrenchingly criminally corrupt – it can and will commit criminal acts against fellow Americans, and as long as the media refuses to hold them accountable, their crimes will go uninvestigated and largely unnotied. The Obama administration can engage in as much criminal activity as they want and the media will let them. The MSM as a whole (a few individual reporters excepted) has done an amazing job “looking the other way” for the past six years and they have no problem throwing one of their own under the bus to protect President Boyfriend’s agenda to fundamentally transform America. In the unlikely chance a Republican is elected in 2016, they’ll start (over)doing their jobs again.
I think back to the Bush administration when then Attorney General John Ashcroft was savaged by the media because the Justice Department decided to hide the statue of a naked Lady Justice behind curtains during speeches and other events. The official reason was that the curtains were meant to improve the Great Hall’s backdrop for televised events, but critics viciously derided Ashcroft for being an unsophisticated prude. The ridicule that poor man endured. StatueGate was the big DOJ controversy of the day.
In 2005, Bush’s second Attorney General Alberto Gonzales thought he’d make friends with the media by removing the curtains, making the naked statue visible during public events, again. A lot of good that did him.
When Gonzales fired eight DOJ attorneys in 2006, Democrats had a massive hissy fit and an out-of-control media firestorm ensued. Mind you – Clinton canned 93 attorneys within the first week or two of his inauguration in 1993. But because this was a Republican administration, the nontroversy stayed in the news until Gonzales was hounded out of office.
The Democrat media complex knows how to get results when they want to.
Incidentally, the Obama DOJ went back to the practice of covering up Lady Justice in January of 2014, but hardly anyone noticed. Moreover, in Holder, we have an attorney general who refuses to fire bad prosecutorseven those “whose intentional or reckless prosecutorial misconduct has been confirmed in court.” (Why is he still there?)
Holder lets militant black power groups like the New Black Panthers run wild throughout the land threatening white people, lies to Congress about smuggling weapons to drug cartels, works with the IRS to target conservative groups, spies on journalists’ telephone calls, hacks at least one investigative journalists’ computers and spies on her with Skype. And the media’s reaction to all this is to roll their eyes and look at their watch. OMG. Whatever!
An effort to “controversialize” Attkisson’s allegations about the breach of her computers has been underway for some time.
I also just think the whole dynamic I find very strange, to keep all of the skepticism on anything I or my experts say and none of it on those, whoever they may be, who actually did the intrusion. There’s no outrage about the intrusion. You don’t see these same reporters saying, how could this happen in America? Instead, they say: how dare you say these things happened to you.It’s the craziest dynamic really.
Well it’s not like the the DOJ covered up a nude statue with a curtain, or anything. Oh wait – that’s right – they did do that..
Attkisson had this to say about her attorney:
I know my attorney spoke to one reporter and the reporter asked well, how are you getting paid? And he said I’m doing this on a contingency. Then the reporter said, you must think then that you’re going to win. And he said, I would do this regardless because this is such an important case. And then the reporter asked what’s your political affiliation? And he said, I’m a Democrat and I voted for Bill Clinton and I voted for Obama and I’m going to vote for Hillary but this is way more important than all of those things. And he said, based on the evidence he’d seen, this is the worst abuse that the government has done to a citizen in the 30 years he’s been practicing law. And he said he would take the case if he wasn’t paid at all to do it.
BN: Obviously, he’s seen all the documents.
Attkisson: Yeah. He’s the one that’s gathering everything… It’s going directly from the forensic experts to him and then to me.
BN: And he clearly believes this happened.
Attkisson: There’s no doubt in his mind. It may be an uphill battle but he said, and I agree with him, what we’re trying to do is just not go away quietly and let this happen to other people without it being challenged and answered to some degree.
Via Newsmax, Attkisson discussed her lawsuit against the Obama Administration over her computer hacking.
Disparagement of sources and reporters advancing the story via friendly bloggers and reporters. (Attkisson calls this technique “controversialization.”) Attkisson has been a prime subject of the technique of controversialization. She is speaking from personal experience recounted in the book. Attkisson singles out Media Matters as the prime mover of administration spin into the mainstream media. As Attkisson demonstrates, however, MM’s power derives from the complicity and cooperation of MM’s media allies, i.e., the Obama administration’s media allies.
• And then we have this (page 278): “Perhaps the greatest PR coup of all is that the administration’s expert spinners successfully lead the media by the nose down the path of concluding there’s no true controversy unless there’s a paper trail that lays blame directly on the president’s desk. Time and again, with each scandal and each damaging fact, Democrats and the White House read from the script that says ‘there’s no evidence President Obama knew’ or ‘there’s no evidence of direct White House involvement.’ Anything short of a signed confession from the president is deemed a phony Republican scandal, and those who dare to ask questions are crazies, partisans, or conspiracy theorists.”
• One more quote (also from page 278): “Under President Obama, the press dutifully regurgitates the line ‘no evidence of White House involvement,’ ignoring the fact that if any proof exists, it would be difficult to come by under an administration that fails to properly respond to Freedom of Information Act requests, routinely withholds documents from Congress, and claims executive privilege to keep documents secret.”
Nice Deb 