the narrative progresses

Aha, the Defne Bayrak "Western" photo, which appears to my eyes a bad photoshop experiment, followed by her high profile interview on teevee... PLUS Sarkozy's obsession with 2000 veiled Muslim women in France, who should remove their veils in public places because it's dangerous, makes a lot more sense now.

Now that we know al qaeda is training women to attack The West.

LONDON: Al-Qaida in Yemen has trained a group of woman suicide bombers with 'non-Arab' appearance to attack Western targets, including airliners and power stations, US officials have warned.

Details of the bombers emerged just hours after Britain raised the UK threat state to "severe" [naturally! timing is everything - ed.] amid fears that al-Qaida was planning a wave of attacks against western targets, 'The Sunday Telegraph' reported.

The woman suicide bombers, who may be travelling on Western passports, have been prepared for their missions by al-Qaida's branch in Yemen responsible for the botched Christmas Day attempt to blow up a US airliner, it said.

US officials quoted by the paper as saying that airliners and all forms of transport could be targeted as well as sports stadia, ports and power stations.

The report came as Foreign Ministers from across the world, including external affairs minister S M Krishna, are preparing to meet in London this week for two conferences to discuss the threat of terrorism in both Yemen and Afghanistan.

But official sources insisted that there was no specific intelligence which suggested that either conference was a potential target.

I covered the sports stadia idea here.

You may also notice that since these suspected women terrorists will be traveling on Western passports, that now further justifies the increased vigilance and scrutiny of: women with Western passports. Not a few people. Happy trails.

Though the terrorism could come from Yemen or Africa or Southeast Asia, it will surely be linked back to Pakistan, which our officials and experts assure us remains the heart of al qaeda.

by Sharon Weinberger, a national security reporter based in Washington

(Jan. 20) – The attempted Christmas Day bombing of a U.S.-bound flight may have increased the visibility of the Yemen-based wing of Al Qaida, but Pakistan's tribal area remains the terrorist organization's strongest base of support, a senior U.S. counterterrorism official said today.

"I would still say the [Federally Administered Tribal Areas] FATA is the beating heart of al-Qaida," Daniel Benjamin, the State Department's coordinator for counterterrorism, told a group of journalists this morning.

Al-Qaida still has closer ties to the tribal areas of Pakistan than with any other affiliate group, said Benjamin, who previously served on President Clinton's National Security Council and has co-written two books that trace the rise of al-Qaida.

...On Tuesday, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee released a report saying that three dozen Americans traveled to Yemen to train with al-Qaida. And in congressional testimony today, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center said that analysts had been looking at threats from al-Qaida in Yemen for several months, but failed to make the connection to Abdulmutallab.

Damn, not that Human Error again...

And see? Now we know that some of those three dozen American terrorists-in-training may have been women.

And notice how the narrative develops in an orderly fashion, like a well-oiled machine.

[For additional context see: foreshadowing, pakistan is being totally screwed, and india so important. also: the flames burning all around]