Homeland Security/Defence/Defense

[buglerbilly]

UK Terror Sweep Uncovers Suicide Bomb Plot

September 27, 2011

Long War Journal|by Wes Bruer and Bill Roggio

Six British men who were detained during raids in Birmingham last week have been linked to an al Qaeda cell in Pakistan, and were planning to carry out suicide attacks. One additional suspect is being questioned by British authorities in connection with the plot.

Last week, six British men of Pakistani origin and a woman were arrested during an intelligence-driven counterterrorism operation led by the UK's West Midlands Counter Terrorism Unit [see Threat Matrix report, UK terror sweep nets 7 suspects]. Few details were known about the suspects or the terror plot at the time of the arrests, but as the suspects are scheduled to appear in West London Magistrates Court on Monday, more information has become available.

The purported terror cell is believed by security sources to be a part of an al Qaeda suicide bomb plot under the direction of terrorist leaders in Pakistan, according the BBC. Prior to the arrests, the suspects had been under MI5 surveillance for "several weeks," and phone conversations were recorded that led officials to believe the cell was moving toward executing the plan but had "not yet reached the goal line."

Ashik Ali, 26, and Irfan Nasser, 30, are accused of orchestrating a bombing campaign in which Ali had stated his intention to carry out a suicide attack.

Along with Irfan Khalid, 26, Irfan Nasser has also been accused of preparing for an act of terrorism, and the two men are alleged to have traveled to Pakistan for terror training and received guidance on bomb making. They are also said to have made a martyrdom film in connection with the plot.

Rahin Ahmed, 25, is accused of fundraising to support the planned terror attacks as well as helping others travel to Pakistan for terror training.

Mohammed Rizwan, 32, and Bahader Ali, 28 (Ashik's brother), are both charged with withholding information since July 29, 2011 that could have prevented the planning of a terrorist act.

A seventh man, 20, was arrested on Thursday and continues to be questioned by authorities for his role in the plot. Under UK terror law, officers have until Sept. 29 to continue questioning the man before he has to be charged or released.

The status of the woman who was detained last week has not been disclosed. Last week, it was reported that the woman was being held under Terrorism Act 2000 for failing to disclose information relating to the plot.

Of the 14 homes searched by police, one belonged to Mohammed Irfan. In 2008, Irfan was sentenced to four years in prison for plotting to kidnap a British soldier and behead him "like a pig," live on the Internet. He was released after serving less than two years and was not rearrested in connection with this case.

While the location of the training camp in Pakistan that was attended by Khalid and Nasser has not been disclosed, Western jihadists are known to train in the Mir Ali and Datta Khel areas in Pakistan's Taliban-controlled tribal agency of North Waziristan. And a jihadist who was set to become the head of the so-called Islamic Army of Great Britain, an al Qaeda branch, was killed by unmanned US strike aircraft in the Datta Khel area of North Waziristan on Sept. 8, 2010 [see LWJ report, British, German jihadists involved in Europe plot killed in Predator strikes].

Abdul Jabbar, the short-lived leader of the Islamic Army of Great Britain, was said to have been present at a meeting attended by more than 300 jihadists, including members of al Qaeda and the Taliban, several months before he was killed. At that meeting, he was appointed the leader of the Islamic Army of Great Britain and was tasked with carrying out terror attacks in Britain, France, and Germany, using assault rifles and suicide vests.

Jabbar had earlier survived a drone strike on a militant training camp run by Hafiz Gul Bahadur, a commander allied with the Haqqani Network, an Afghan Taliban faction considered one of the most effective forces battling Western troops in Afghanistan.

© Copyright 2011 Long War Journal. All rights reserved.

[buglerbilly]

Man Charged After 4,150 Pounds of Explosives Found

September 28, 2011

Associated Press|by John Flesher

TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. -- Federal authorities say a Michigan man bought and hid more than 4,000 pounds of explosives with enough potential firepower to equal the Oklahoma City bombing and told an undercover informant that "when the government takes over, we will be mercenaries."

John Francis Lechner, 64, was arrested last week on a charge of possessing explosives while facing other charges and ordered held following a U.S. District Court hearing Monday. His attorney said Lechner, a builder and farmer from Sault Ste. Marie in the Upper Peninsula, obtained the materials years ago for construction projects.

"He's not a terrorist, he's not a mercenary, he's not some freedom fighter," defense attorney Charles Malette told The Associated Press on Tuesday. "He intended no type of violence, pro- or anti-government. The man is not like that."

Prosecutors and agents with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives did not accuse Lechner of plotting to detonate the mixture of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil. Assistant U.S. Attorney Maarten Vermaat told the AP he had "no idea" what Lechner planned to do with the materials.

The federal charges were filed about a month after Lechner was booked on several counts in Chippewa County, including larceny by false pretense, assaulting and resisting officers, falsely reporting a felony and being a habitual offender. Malette said those charges arose from incidents linked to Lechner's pending divorce.

In an affidavit dealing with the federal charges, ATF agent Timothy DeClaire said an informant told the Chippewa County Sheriff's Department that Lechner asked for help moving the explosive mixture from Sault Ste. Marie and hiding it in Dafter, a village a few miles away. The informant wore a recording device while performing the task Sept. 20. The affidavit said a sheriff's detective listened to the recording and heard Lechner's remark about "mercenaries."

DeClaire said he obtained a search warrant the same day and found 83 bags of the mixture, each weighing about 50 pounds. The combined weight was about 4,150 pounds. The next day, he found a supply of explosive boosters, detonating cord and blasting caps at Lechner's mother's nearby home. Another box of blasting caps was recovered in Sault Ste. Marie, he said.

During the hearing, U.S. Magistrate Judge Timothy Greeley asked how big an explosion could result from detonating the materials.

"The quantity we're talking about would be at least that of an Oklahoma City bombing or more," DeClaire replied, according to The Mining Journal of Marquette.

Sonja Everitt, resident agent in charge of ATF's field office in Grand Rapids, told the AP she agreed with DeClaire. If correctly packaged and detonated, "4,100 pounds could cause a substantial amount of damage," Everitt said.

DeClaire's affidavit said several of the bags bore labels from companies in Iowa and Ohio. Federal law prohibits a person charged with a crime punishable by more than one year in prison from possessing an explosive shipped across state lines.

He also testified that Lechner traveled twice to Cuba in 2008, both times flying from Toronto, The Mining Journal reported.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Timothy Greeley approved Vermaat's request to keep Lechner in jail, describing the Cuba trips as "troubling."

"He was making efforts to hide [the explosives] from the ATF, as the testimony indicates, and made anti-government statements," Greeley said, according to the newspaper. "There is significant evidence of a danger to the community, which has gone unrebutted."

Malette said he told his client not to respond during the hearing. But he said Lechner bought the ammonium nitrate and oil more than five years ago.

"It's one of the safest materials used for demolition involved with construction," Malette said. "Many types of chemicals could be used to make a bomb. I think that comment [about Oklahoma City] was made to make people think he was a terrorist."

Lechner's clash with local authorities began in late May.

County Prosecutor Brian Peppler said Lechner had been collecting rent on a house he didn't own, which resulted in the larceny by false pretense charge. The owner of the house asked police to remove him from the property. That led to a disturbance and the charge of assaulting an officer, Peppler said. Lechner was charged with falsely reporting a felony after he accused the county sheriff of trying to ram his vehicle during the incident, the prosecutor said.

Peppler declined to identify the homeowner, but Malette said it was Lechner's estranged wife. He said ownership of the dwelling was being contested in court.

Malette said his client filed a lawsuit against the sheriff's department and the county over the incident at the home and complained about it during a county board meeting.

"Mr. Lechner is one of those guys that speaks his mind," Malette said. "He doesn't pull any punches, and I think he's rubbed a few people in the area the wrong way."

© Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved.

[buglerbilly]

Man with links to al-Qaeda preacher arrested

Dylan Welch

September 29, 2011.

A SYDNEY man with ''demonstrated connections'' to one of the world's most wanted terrorist preachers has been arrested by police over allegations he broke into a cash machine.

Milad bin Ahmad-Shah al-Ahmadzai was arrested after three other men were prevented from robbing a cash van at gunpoint in western Sydney yesterday.

Mr al-Ahmadzai, 21, is alleged by ASIO to have had contact with the Yemen-based al-Qaeda preacher Anwar al-Awlaki.

Awlaki is of great concern to intelligence agencies due to his ability to use the internet to radicalise young Muslim men in Western countries. He is seen as such a threat that last year he was placed on a CIA ''catch or kill'' list.

Last year Mr al-Ahmadzai was one of 23 Australian residents whom ASIO judged of such concern that it alerted US authorities to them. But yesterday morning Mr al-Ahmadzai was in a different type of trouble, arrested by detectives from the NSW police robbery squad at his home in Ermington.

He was arrested shortly after three other men, aged between 24 and 29, were found by police in a Cecil Hills carpark. The three men were in two stolen cars and police allege they found a rifle, two handguns and several balaclavas. An armoured cash van was in the carpark. The three were charged with robbery and firearms offences.

Policesearched Mr al-Ahmadzai's home and five other locations, seizing a Subaru WRX, a pistol, ammunition, Australian and US currency, a pill press, anabolic steroids, two-way radios, laptop computers, mobile phones and passports. All four are due to face Sydney courts today.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/national/man-with-links-to-alqaeda-preacher-arrested-20110928-1kxm0.html#ixzz1ZGP6jLgK

[buglerbilly]

Mass. man accused of plotting to hit Pentagon and Capitol with drone aircraft

By Peter Finn,

A 26-year-old physics graduate and model hobbyist from Massachusetts was arrested Wednesday in an FBI undercover operation and accused of planning to build small, explosive-laden drones to attack the Pentagon and the Capitol, according to an FBI affidavit and law enforcement officials.

Rezwan Ferdaus, a U.S.-born citizen of South Asian background, traveled to Washington last May to conduct surveillance and intended to launch three small GPS-guided aircraft from East Potomac Park — two against the Pentagon and one against the Capitol, according to a detailed plan he gave to the FBI.

The alleged attack would have represented a rare attempt to strike the United States with a technology that successive administrations have deployed against suspected terrorists and insurgents in a half-dozen countries, ranging from Afghanistan to Yemen, over the past decade.

When he was arrested in Framingham, Mass., Ferdaus had already acquired one remote-controlled aircraft, a small-scale model of the F-86 Sabre, a Cold War-era U.S. fighter jet, the FBI affidavit said. He was also planning to expand his attack to include an immediate follow-on assault at both sites with two three-man teams wielding automatic weapons, the FBI said.

In recent years, the FBI has increasingly relied on undercover operatives to build cases against suspected terrorists, an approach that officials say has been effective in preventing attacks. Undercover law enforcement operatives have secretly befriended those suspected of plotting terrorist attacks and, in some case, made available the means to carry them out. These methods have drawn criticism from some Muslims who accuse the government of unfairly targeting their community, and from defense lawyers who say such tactics can constitute entrapment.

The FBI undercover agents provided Ferdaus with the money to buy the drones, but law enforcement officials said Ferdaus came up with the idea for the attack. Prosecutors said Ferdaus “was presented with multiple opportunities to back out of his plan, including being told that his attack would likely kill women and children,” but that he “never wavered in his desire to carry out the attacks.”

A graduate of Northeastern University in Boston who lived in the basement of his parents’ home in Ashland, Mass., Ferdaus began planning to commit violent jihad against the United States in early 2010 after viewing radical Web sites and videos, the FBI said.

In a series of recorded conversations with a former felon who was cooperating with the FBI and two undercover agents, Ferdaus described Americans as the “enemies of Allah” and said he wanted to “decapitate” the U.S. government’s “military center,” according to the affidavit.

Ferdaus believed the undercover FBI agents were recruiters for al-Qaeda, and Ferdaus supplied them with seven mobile phones that he modified to act as electrical switches for improvised explosive devices in Iraq.

A law enforcement official said the devices could have worked as intended. “He had some capabilities,” said the official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing case.

In a meeting with the FBI agents, Ferdaus “appeared gratified” when he was told, falsely, that the first phone was used in an attack that killed three U.S. soldiers in Iraq and and injured four or five others. After he handed over each successive phone, he wanted to know how the devices had performed, according to the affidavit.

Attempts to reach Ferdaus’s family in Ashland were unsuccessful.

Ferdaus had an initial appearance in federal court in Worcester, Mass., on Wednesday and is scheduled to have a detention hearing Monday.

“I want the public to understand that Mr. Ferdaus’s conduct, as alleged in the complaint, is not reflective of a particular culture, community or religion,”said Carmen M. Ortiz, the U.S. attorney for Massachusetts.

Rep. Peter T. King (R-N.Y.), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said the case demonstrated a need for broad vigilance. “The fact that Ferdaus is a very well-educated physicist should serve as a reminder to us that the threat of Islamic terrorism transcends socioeconomics and does not only emanate from the poor and underprivileged.”

In January 2011, the FBI alleged, Ferdaus told the cooperating witness about his plans. “It’s a small, drone aircraft that would be programmed at that target . . .that can carry a good enough payload and it will detonate on impact,” Ferdaus said, according to the affidavit. At a separate meeting, Ferdaus showed the cooperating witness the “electrical components and remote-controlled cars that he built and said he “used to be into robotics.”

In March, the cooperating witness introduced Ferdaus to the two undercover agents who referred to Osama bin Laden as “our boss.” One of the agents is referred to in the affidavit as “Brother Hussein.”

Ferdaus told the agents that he been considering for some time using drones to stage an attack. Drones have been considered by other American militants. Christopher Paul, an Ohio native who joined al-Qaeda and pleaded guilty in 2008 to conspiracy, researched remote-controlled model helicopters and remote-controlled boats, according to law enforcement officials.

After his trip to Washington, Ferdaus presented the agents with a detailed plan, annotated with numerous pictures, on two thumb drives. The plan contained an introductory “abstract,” and various sections including “Hardware and Aircraft configuration” and “Software Overview.” The FBI described it as “extremely detailed” and “well-written.”

Ferdaus rented a storage facility in Framingham to build the drones. He was taking delivery there of C-4 explosive and AK-47 automatic weapons from the undercover officers when he was arrested.

Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

[buglerbilly]

More on this.............

Plot to Fly Model Planes Filled with C-4 Explosives into the Pentagon Foiled

Posted on September 29, 2011 by The Editor


F-86 Sabre - Photo: US Department of Justice/Reuters

Yesterday the FBI arrested Rezwan Ferdaus for a plot involving an attack on the Pentagon and the US Capitol using explosives mounted on remotely piloted model aircraft, bombing bridges in Washington, DC, and killing politicians; and for attempting to kill US soldiers overseas.

Ferdaus, a US citizen living in Ashland, Mass., was under the impression that he was working with al Qaeda operatives.

An FBI affidavit outlines the investigation of Ferdaus, which resulted in his arrest on Sept. 28 for several terrorism-related offenses. According to the affidavit provided by Intelwire, Ferdaus is charged with attempting to injure and destroy federal governmental buildings using an explosive; attempting to injure and destroy national defense premises; and attempting to provide material support and resources to a foreign terrorist organization.

The court document states that “no later that in or about March 2011 and continuing until in or about September 2011, Ferdaus did maliciously attempt to damage and destroy buildings, to wit, the Pentagon and U.S. Capitol Building.” The affidavit continues:

Beginning in or about June 2011 and continuing through or about September 2011, Ferdaus did knowingly and unlawfully attempt to provide material support and resources … to wit, detonation devices, communications equipment, weapons, training, and expert assistance and advice to a foreign terrorist organization, namely al Qaeda. Ferdaus gave these items to undercover employees of the FBI (“UCE1,” “UCE2,” and collectively “UCEs”), who he believed were members of al Qaeda, and did so intending that they would use the devices against U.S. service members serving overseas.

Throughout the entire investigation, Ferdaus was under the impression that the FBI undercover employees were members and recruiters for al Qaeda, to the point where the agents explained to Ferdaus that his “boss has just been killed,” referring to the death of Osama bin Laden in May. In another conversation, UCE1 asked Ferdaus: “Who do you think me and brother Hussein are?” His response was, “I think you guys are wonderful brothers; and I feel utterly privileged to have met you… men of the past…excellent men of the past. And to be more specific, I think you are al Qaeda.”


Rezwan Ferdaus Photo: New York Daily News

A 26-year-old graduate from Northeastern University with a degree in physics, Ferdaus described to the undercover employees his path to jihad. Ferdaus explained that around the beginning of 2010, his viewing of jihadist videos and websites had radicalized him and convinced him that America is evil and that jihad is the only solution.

Ferdaus also expressed an interest in traveling to Afghanistan to conduct training in a technical manner to assist “overseas brothers,” whether by teaching physics or making something with technology, according to his recorded conversations with FBI informants.

His goal was to attack America’s “military center” and kill as many “kafirs” as possible. Using remote-controlled aircraft, Ferdaus planned to attack the Pentagon and US Capitol Building by filling the aircraft with C-4 explosive. The aircraft in question are the model F-4 Phantom and F-86 Sabre. Ranging from about five to seven feet in length, these aircraft are replicas of US military fighter jets; Ferdaus described as being similar to “small drone airplanes” that could be guided by GPS using Google Earth.


Phantom Photo: US Attorney's Office District of Massachusetts via AFP/Getty Images

“It’s a small, drone aircraft that would be programmed at that target and it can just hit that… a model airplane that can carry a good enough payload and it will detonate on impact,” he explained.

In May and June 2011, FBI undercover agents obtained two thumb drives given to them by Ferdaus that included detailed instructions on how he planned to attack two of the highest-profile targets in America. The plan included “order of actions” that were divided into 15 separate steps, along with a timeline. He planned to exact a psychological toll on America by killing women and children, whom he described as “enemies of Allah,” telling the agents “I just can’t stop; there is no other choice for me.”

Around the same time, Ferdaus traveled to Washington, DC to conduct surveillance on his targets and possible launch locations for his aircraft. There, FBI agents monitored and photographed Ferdaus staking out and taking photos of his targets and potential launch sites.

Between May and September 2011, with funds provided to him by the FBI, Ferdaus acquired the following: an F-86 Sabre remote-controlled aircraft; 25 pounds of C-4 explosive; six AK-47′s; and grenades. In addition, using a number of different aliases, including “Dave Winfield,” Ferdaus obtained a false PayPal account, rented a storage facility, and explained his purposes for ordering the aircraft for his nonexistent son. The AK-47′s would be used to “carry out the rest” of the plan to “take care of the politicians.” His plan was to assemble six people in two teams to “open up on them” and take out everyone. Ferdaus also planned to set aside nine pounds of C-4 to blow up bridges surrounding the Pentagon, presumably to hinder the efforts of first responders.

Ferdaus is also alleged to have designed and supplied more than seven modified mobile phones to the undercover agents for use in detonating homemade bombs. The undercover agents revealed that Ferdaus had explained his method of removing the backs of the phones and soldering wires, making the phones capable of sending electrical currents which detonate the explosive devices. A training video was filmed by the agents showing Ferdaus giving detailed instructions on how to manufacture the phone detonators to assist “brothers overseas.”

On June 27, 2011, FBI agents furthered their case against Ferdaus by falsely claiming that the detonator he provided “had succeeded in killing three U.S. soldiers and injuring four or five others in Iraq.” Ferdaus quickly responded, “That was exactly what I wanted and I feel so blessed.” The undercover agents went on to describe Ferdaus’ excitement and anxious demeanor to hear if any of his other explosive detonators had led to the deaths of any more American soldiers.

Sources: The Long War Journal, The Daily Beast

[buglerbilly]

Alleged Pentagon Plotter Pleads Not Guilty

October 04, 2011

Associated Press|by Denise Lavoie



WORCESTER, Mass. - A man accused of plotting to fly explosives-packed remote-controlled model planes into the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol pleaded not guilty Monday.

The bail hearing that had been scheduled for Rezwan Ferdaus, of Ashland, was delayed for several weeks because his lawyer, Catherine Byrne, asked for more time to prepare.

Authorities said Ferdaus, a 26-year-old Muslim American with a physics degree from Northeastern University, was arrested in Framingham last week after federal agents posing as al-Qaida members delivered what he believed was 24 pounds of C-4 explosive. They said the public was never in danger from the plot.

Byrne said the case was "orchestrated and facilitated by the government."

"We have asked for a continuance for additional time in order to prepare and to further investigate so that we can present a more complete picture of what happened," she told reporters as she left the federal courthouse Monday.

The arrest was the latest in a string of terror arrests to emerge from similar sting operations. A federal affidavit says Ferdaus began planning jihad, or holy war, against the U.S. in early 2010 after becoming convinced through jihadi websites and videos that America was evil.

A group of nearly a dozen family members and friends attended Ferdaus' court appearance. Several women, including his mother, wept as the charges against him were read. They shouted "We love you!" as he was led out of the courtroom; he quietly answered, "I love you, too."

Also in attendance were the parents of Tarek Mehanna, another Massachusetts man arrested in a different terror plot. They said they did not know Ferdaus' family but went to show their support. Mehanna is scheduled for trial later this month; authorities say he conspired to provide material support to al-Qaida and kill U.S. troops in Iraq.

Ferdaus faces as much as 100 years in prison on charges including attempting to damage and destroy national defense premises and attempting to provide material support to terrorists. A detention hearing is set for Oct. 20.

© Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved.

[buglerbilly]

200 suicide bombers 'planning attacks in UK'

At least 200 potential terrorists are actively planning suicide attacks while living freely in Britain, intelligence chiefs have warned ministers.


Court artist's impression of Irfan Nasser, left, and Irfan Khalid, right, who were arrested over an alleged UK suicide bombing plot Photo: PA

A senior intelligence source has revealed that the figure is a "conservative" estimate of the threat facing the country from UK-based Islamist suicide bombers.

The would-be killers are among 2,000 extremists who the security services have said are based in Britain and actively planning terrorist activity of some kind.

The figures are contained within a secret government report on the "enduring terrorist threat" facing the UK from al-Qaeda and affiliated organisations, The Sunday Telegraph has been told.

While the deaths of Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki may have left al-Qaeda without a charismatic leader, both the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, and the Security Service, MI5, believe the organisation remains as dangerous as ever.

The warning comes as Britain begins preparations for next year's 2012 Olympic Games, which has been described by MI5 as the biggest security operation in the country's history.

But senior sources believe that rather than targeting Olympic venues, where security will be extremely high, terrorists will be tempted to attack areas where crowds are likely to congregate such as train stations and public events.

If terrorists were to mount an attack in Britain of the kind seen in other countries, by packing a single explosive vest with hundreds of ball bearings then detonating it in a crowded enclosed area such as a station terminus at rush hour, they could kill up to 120 people according to one explosives expert.

The 200 British residents thought to be planning suicide attacks, either within the UK or overseas, represent one in 10 of the wider group of 2,000 terrorist plotters.

The intelligence source added that suicide bombers would only be stopped by either a "chance encounter" or by an intelligence-led investigation. But he added that if a terrorist cell was properly organised and secure there was very little the authorities could do to prevent an attack.

The latest disclosure follows the arrest of six men from Birmingham who were remanded in custody two weeks ago over an alleged UK suicide bombing plot.

Two of the six, Irfan Nasser and Irfan Khalid, are accused of preparing for an act of terrorism, including travelling to Pakistan for training in terrorism, making a martyrdom video and planning a bombing campaign. They are also accused of "being concerned in constructing" a home-made explosive device for terrorist acts and stating an intention to be a suicide bomber.

Earlier this year, classified intelligence documents disclosed by the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks, showed that MI6 officers believed that Britain was facing a wave of suicide attacks from British-based Muslim extremists who had been trained in terrorist camps in Pakistan.

One report quoted an MI6 officer's briefing to US officials in which he said: "The internal threat is growing more dangerous because some extremists are conducting non-lethal training without ever leaving the country. Should these extremists then decide to become suicide operatives, HMG [Her Majesty's Government] intelligence resources, eavesdropping and surveillance would be hard pressed to find them on any 'radar screen'."

One intelligence official told this newspaper: "We may have only had one 'successful' suicide attack in Britain but the tactic remains an enduring threat. This is a generational problem we are facing. The terrorists are learning all the time and adapting their tactics. They now operate a cell structure and there security is very tight.

"Suicide bombers know the signs we will be looking for. So they don't pray in the moments before an attack, there will be no heavy coats in summer and they are becoming much more security aware. For every countermeasure we develop they create a new 'measure'. They will always be looking for our exposed flank."

Intelligence experts believe that suicide bombers are motivated by a number of factors including politics, religion, poverty, finance and social factors.

Research has shown that they can be drawn from all social strata and can range from the well-educated to the mentally impaired. In Iraq and Afghanistan, young children and women have been recruited, while in London, the 7/7 bombers who killed 52 people and injured hundreds more in four coordinated attacks on the Tube and bus network came from stable backgrounds with close families.

Another classified report, details of which have been passed to this newspaper, stated that suicide attacks had developed as the weapon of choice for al-Qaeda and its supporters because of the level of fear that such attacks can engender.

The report cited examples of past suicide attacks which were perceived by the organisations which mounted them as having produced successful outcomes, such as the Beirut barracks bombing of 1983 which was followed by the withdrawal of US forces from Lebanon.

[buglerbilly]

Nigerian Pleads Guilty to Underwear Bomb Attack

October 12, 2011

Associated Press|by Ed White



DETROIT - A Nigerian man said Wednesday he tried to bring down an international flight over Detroit with a bomb in his underwear in retaliation for the killing of Muslims worldwide, taking a federal court by surprise as he pleaded guilty on the second day of his trial.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who had never denied the accusations against him, calmly answered questions from U.S. District Judge Nancy Edmunds before pleading guilty to all eight charges he faced, including conspiracy to commit terrorism and attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction.

He then told the court that the underwear bomb was a "blessed weapon to save the lives of innocent Muslims."

"The United States should be warned that if they continue to persist and promote the blasphemy of Mohammed and the prophets ... the United States should await a great calamity that will befall them through the hands of the mujahedeen soon," said Abdulmutallab, who faces a mandatory sentence of life in prison.

"If you laugh with us now we will laugh with you later on the day of judgment," he said.

Outside court, defense attorney Anthony Chambers said Abdulmutallab, who had chosen to represent himself and was being assisted by Chambers, pleaded guilty against the lawyer's wishes.

"We wanted to continue the trial but we respect his decision," Chambers said.

Abdulmutallab, who told the judge he is 25, said he carried a bomb in his underwear onto Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on Christmas 2009 with the intention of killing the nearly 300 people on board. The bomb didn't work, and passengers jumped on Abdulmutallab when they saw smoke and fire.

The evidence was stacked high. Abdulmutallab was badly burned on a plane full of witnesses. The government said he told FBI agents he was working for al-Qaida and directed by Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical, American-born Muslim cleric recently killed by the U.S. in Yemen. There were also photos of his scorched shorts as well as video of Abdulmutallab explaining his suicide mission before departing for the U.S.

In September 2010, Abdulmutallab suggested he wanted to plead guilty to some charges. But he didn't, and instead dropped his four-lawyer, publicly financed defense team and decided to represent himself. He said relying on others wasn't in his best interest.

His lawyers at the time said they had talked to prosecutors about a possible plea deal. Abdulmutallab had asked the judge what he needed to do to plead guilty to some charges but nothing happened and a trial was set.

Passenger Lori Haskell, 34, of Newport, Mich., watched Abdulmutallab's plea by video in an overflow room Wednesday. She called his statement in court "chilling" but not surprising.

"I'm just really relieved that it's done with," Haskell said.

Abdulmutallab had written a few court filings in his own hand, including a request to be judged by Islamic law. He at times appeared agitated in court, declaring that Osama bin Laden and al-Awlaki are alive. He also objected to trial testimony from experts who would have discussed al-Qaida and martyrdom.

On Tuesday, a passenger on Flight 253 testified that Abdulmutallab took a long bathroom break in the plane, during which prosecutors say he was preparing for death.

"I thought he was freshening up for arrival in Detroit. ... We had less than an hour to go," said passenger Mike Zantow of Madison, Wis.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Jonathan Tukel said the son of a wealthy Nigerian banker believed his calling that day was martyrdom.

"He was preparing to die and enter heaven," Tukel said. "He purified himself. He washed. He brushed his teeth. He put on perfume."

After returning to his seat, Abdulmutallab pushed a syringe plunger into the chemical bomb, an action that produced a loud "pop" sound, then flames and smoke, the prosecutor said.

"Then all hell broke loose. While the fireball was on him, the defendant sat there. He didn't move. He was expressionless. He was completely blank," Tukel said.

The government says Abdulmutallab willingly explained the plot twice, first to U.S. border officers who took him off the plane and then in more detail to FBI agents who interviewed him at a hospital for 50 minutes, following treatment for serious burns to his groin.

Abdulmutallab told authorities he trained in Yemen, home base for Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, and was influenced by al-Awlaki, who was killed in a Sept. 30 U.S. military air strike.

Following the strike, a U.S. official outlined new details of al-Awlaki's involvement against the U.S., including Abdulmutallab's mission. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters, said al-Awlaki specifically directed Abdulmutallab to detonate an explosive device over U.S. airspace to maximize casualties.

Officials have said al-Awlaki was believed to be at a gathering of al-Qaida figures in Yemen's Shabwa mountains a day before the attack, after which bin Laden appeared in a video declaring Abdulmutallab a "hero." Abdulmutallab also has been lauded by al-Qaida's English-language Web magazine Inspire, whose editor was killed along with al-Awlaki.

---

Associated Press writers David Runk in Detroit and Matt Apuzzo in Washington contributed to this report.

© Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved.

[buglerbilly]

US Northern Border Checks Scaled Back

October 29, 2011

Associated Press|by Gene Johnson

SEATTLE -- The U.S. Border Patrol has quietly stopped its controversial practice of routinely searching buses, trains and airports for illegal immigrants at transportation hubs along the northern border and in the nation's interior, preventing agents from using what had long been an effective tool for tracking down people here illegally, The Associated Press has learned.

Current and former Border Patrol agents said field offices around the country began receiving the order last month - soon after the Obama administration announced that to ease an overburdened immigration system, it would allow many illegal immigrants to remain in the country while it focuses on deporting those who have committed crimes.

The routine bus, train and airport checks typically involved agents milling about and questioning people who appeared suspicious, and had long been criticized by immigrant rights groups. Critics said the tactic amounted to racial profiling and violated travelers' civil liberties.

But agents said it was an effective way to catch unlawful immigrants, including smugglers and possible terrorists, who had evaded detection at the border, as well as people who had overstayed their visas. Often, those who evade initial detection head quickly for the nearest public transportation in hopes of reaching other parts of the country.

Halting the practice has baffled the agents, especially in some stations along the northern border - from Bellingham, Wash., to Houlton, Maine - where the so-called "transportation checks" have been the bulk of their everyday duties. The Border Patrol is authorized to check vehicles within 100 miles of the border.

The order has not been made public, but two agents described it to the AP on condition of because the government does not authorize them to speak to the media. The union that represents Border Patrol agents planned to issue a news release about the change Monday.

"Orders have been sent out from Border Patrol headquarters in Washington, D.C., to Border Patrol sectors nationwide that checks of transportation hubs and systems located away from the southwest border of the United States will only be conducted if there is intelligence indicating a threat," the release says.

Those who have received the orders said agents may still go to train and bus stations and airports if they have specific "actionable intelligence" that there is an illegal immigrant there who recently entered the country. An agent in Washington state said it's not clear how agents are supposed to glean such intelligence, and even if they did, under the new directive they still require clearance from Washington, D.C., headquarters before they can respond.

A U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman, Bill Brooks, repeatedly insisted that any shift in enforcement tactics does not amount to a change in policy as local commanders still have authority to aggressively pursue illegal immigrants near the border and at transportation hubs.

"It's up to the local commander to position his agents the way he wants to position them. What we've done is gone to a risk-based posture," he said.

In a separate statement, the agency said, "Conducting intelligence-based transportation checks allows the Border Patrol to use their technology and personnel resources more effectively, especially in areas with limited resources."

Shawn Moran, vice president of the union that represents agents, was outraged at the changes.

"Stated plainly, Border Patrol managers are increasing the layers of bureaucracy and making it as difficult as possible for Border Patrol agents to conduct their core duties," the National Border Patrol Council's statement said. "The only risks being managed by this move are too many apprehensions, negative media attention and complaints generated by immigrant rights groups."

The Border Patrol, which patrols outside the official ports of entry handled by customs officers, has dramatically beefed up its staffing since 9/11, doubling to more than 20,000 agents nationally. Along the northern border, the number has jumped from about 300 in the late 1990s to more than 2,200.

At the same time, the number of Border Patrol arrests nationwide has been falling - from nearly 1.2 million in 2005 to 463,000 in 2010, and 97 percent of them at the southern border, according to the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Immigration Statistics. The office cited the recession as a likely factor in the drop.

Along the northern border last fiscal year, the agency made 7,431 arrests. It was not immediately clear how many stemmed from routine transportation checks. The public affairs office for the Border Patrol's Blaine sector said it doesn't break down the data that way.

But of 673 arrests in the sector, roughly 200 were from routine transportation checks, according to a Washington state-based Border Patrol agent who has been with the agency for more than 20 years and spoke to the AP.

Until receiving the new directive, the Bellingham office, about 25 miles from the Canadian border, kept agents at the bus and train station, and at the local airport 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Now, the agents have little work to do, the agent said.

The situation is similar in upstate New York, where an agent told the AP - also on the condition of anonymity - that a senior manager relayed the new directive during a morning roll call last month. Since then, instead of checking buses or trains, agents have spent shifts sitting in their vehicles gazing out at Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, where few illegal immigrants cross.

"They're already bored," the agent said. "You grab the paper every day and you go do the crossword."

In the Buffalo sector, where there were more than 2,400 arrests in fiscal 2010, as many as half were from routine transportation checks, the agent estimated.

The change was immediately obvious to Jack Barker, who manages the Greyhound and Trailways bus station in Rochester, N.Y. For the past six years, he said, Border Patrol agents boarded nearly every bus in and out of the station looking for illegal immigrants.

Last month - one day after the 10th anniversary of 9/11 and all of the hype that surrounded it - the agents stopped coming. They haven't been back since, Barker said.

"What's changed that they're no longer needed here?" Barker asked. "I haven't been able to get an answer from anybody."

Doug Honig, spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington, welcomed the news.

"If the Border Patrol is indeed not boarding buses and trains and engaging in the random questioning of people, that's a step in the right direction," he said. "People shouldn't be questioned by government officials when there's no reason to believe they've done anything wrong."

Kent Lundgren, chairman of the National Association of Former Border Patrol Officers, said the transportation checks have been a staple of the agency for 60 years. His organization has heard from agents around the country complaining of the change, he said.

Gene Davis, a retired deputy chief in the Border Patrol's sector in Blaine, Wash., emphasized how effective the checks can be. He noted that a check of the Bellingham bus station in 1997 yielded an arrest of Palestinian Gazi Ibrahim Abu Mezer. Abu Mezer skipped out on a $5,000 bond - only to turn up later in Brooklyn, where New York police shot him as he prepared to bomb the city's subway system. Davis also noted that would-be millennium bomb suspect Ahmed Ressam was arrested at the border in late 1999 when he left a ferry from British Columbia to Washington in a rented car full of explosives.

"We've had two terrorists who have come through the northern border here. To put these restraints on agents being able to talk to people is just ridiculous," Davis said. "Abu Mezer got out, but that just shows you the potential that's there with the transportation checks."

The Border Patrol informed officials at the Bellingham airport on Thursday that from now on they would only be allowed to come to the airport "if there's an action that needs their assistance," said airport manager Daniel Zenk.

"I'm shocked," Zenk said. "We welcome the security presence the Border Patrol provides."

Contributing to this report were Associated Press writers Alicia Caldwell in Washington, D.C., Manuel Valdes in Seattle, Ben Dobbin in Rochester, N.Y., and Carolyn Thompson from Buffalo, N.Y.

© Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved.

[buglerbilly]

US Homeland Security Gets 3 New Predators

Posted on October 31, 2011 by The Editor

The Homeland Security Department is adding three surveillance unmanned aircraft to a domestic fleet chiefly used to patrol the border with Mexico even though officials acknowledge they don’t have enough pilots to operate the seven Predators they already possess.The new aircraft are being purchased after lobbying by members of the so-called ‘drone caucus’ in Congress, many from districts in Southern California, a major hub of the unmanned aircraft industry.

“We didn’t ask for them,” said a Homeland Security official who spoke on condition of anonymity to speak frankly. Officials said the Customs and Border Protection Office of Air and Marine, which operates the aircraft, has enough pilots to fly the current fleet only five days a week.

Congress approved $32 million to buy the new aircraft last August. But the authorization did not include money to train or hire new pilots or crews, or to buy spare parts, officials said. Every unmanned aircraft requires not just a ground-based pilot, but a platoon of surveillance analysts, sensor operators and a maintenance crew.

Mind-bogglingly STUPID! :shakehead

Homeland Security officials say they ultimately hope to deploy 18 to 24 unmanned aircraft along the borders. For now, however, they say that they must shift money from other programmes to buy the satellite bandwidth required to fly the seven aircraft they use. ”That is year-by-year, hand-to-mouth living,” said a federal law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to speak to the press.

Customs and Border Protection has paid $240 million to manufacturer General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc., a private company in San Diego, for unmanned aircraft and maintenance since 2005, according to government contract data.

Since 2005, the company’s political action committee has given $1.6 million to campaigns of members of Congress, including some in the ‘drone caucus’, according to data provided by the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan organization in Washington that tracks political fundraising. Some privacy watchdog groups suggest the contributions are driving the policy, a charge lawmakers deny.

“This is a symptom of how surveillance technology is spreading around the U.S.,” said Jay Stanley, a senior analyst on privacy and technology at the American Civil Liberties Union. “A lot of times it is not being pulled by people on the ground. It is being pushed from above by people who want to sell it.”

The newest Predator B was scheduled to arrive in Corpus Christi, Texas, on Wednesday night. Another Predator was slated for delivery to Sierra Vista, Ariz., before the end of the year. A third aircraft, a version of a Predator B called a Guardian that is designed to fly over the open ocean, will be based at Cape Canaveral, Florida, early next year to help track boats used by drug runners.

The ‘drone caucus’, officially the Congressional Unmanned Systems Caucus, has 50 members, including 10 representing Southern California. They seek to expand the government’s use of unmanned aircraft in domestic airspace. ”I would rather use technology to patrol the border than use a 14th century technology like a fence,” Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) said in a telephone interview Wednesday. Cuellar leads the bipartisan caucus with Rep. Howard P. “Buck” McKeon (R-Santa Clarita).

Rep. Brian P. Bilbray (R-Carlsbad) says the CIA’s use of armed Predators against militants in Pakistan has made the drone a kind of folk hero for many Americans. General Atomics is headquartered in his district.

“If you could register the Predator for president, both parties would be trying to endorse it,” he said.

Source: LA times

[buglerbilly]

FBI Releases Video, Papers on Russian Spy Ring

October 31, 2011

Associated Press|by Douglas Birch and Pete Yost

WASHINGTON - FBI surveillance tapes, photos and documents released Monday show members of a ring of Russian sleeper spies secretly exchanging information and money during a counterintelligence probe that lasted about a decade and ended in the biggest spy swap since the Cold War.

The tapes show a January 2010 shopping trip to Macy's in New York City's Herald Square by former New York real estate agent Anna Chapman, whose role in the spy saga turned her into an international celebrity. She bought leggings and tried on hats at the New York department store, investigators wrote in a document, and transmitted coded messages while sitting in a coffee shop.

On another occasion, Chapman is visible in a video setting up her laptop computer at a Barnes and Noble. "Technical coverage indicated that a computer signal began broadcasting at the same time," noted part of a heavily redacted FBI report on the incident, apparently showing an effort by Chapman to communicate with her handlers.

Other photos and video from the surveillance operation, which the FBI called "Ghost Stories," show some of the 10 other conspirators burying money in a patch of weeds, handing off documents in what looks like a subway tunnel, meeting during a stroll around Columbus Circle or just taking their kids for a walk.

Video here: http://www.clipsyndicate.com/video/playlist/8178/2979277

A photo of one spy, Donald Heathfield of Cambridge, Mass., shows him at what appears to be a university graduation ceremony. Heathfield received a degree from Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government in 2000. The school revoked the degree a month after the FBI rolled up the spy ring in June 2010.

Called illegals because they took civilian jobs instead of operating inside Russian embassies and military missions, the spies settled into quiet lives in middle-class neighborhoods.

Their long-range assignment from Moscow: burrow deep into U.S. society and cultivate contacts with academics, entrepreneurs and government policymakers on subjects from defense to finance.

While the deep cover agents didn't steal any secrets, an FBI counterintelligence official told The Associated Press they were making progress.

They "were getting very close to penetrating U.S. policymaking circles" through a friend of an unnamed member of President Barack Obama's Cabinet, FBI assistant director for counterintelligence C. Frank Figliuzzi told The Associated Press.

He did not give details, but Russian spy Cynthia Murphy of Montclair, N.J. provided financial planning for a venture capitalist with close ties to Bill and Hillary Clinton.

The investigation's code name, Ghost Stories, was an apparent reference to the ring's efforts to blend invisibly into the fabric of American society. An FBI spokesman said the decision to release the material on Halloween was coincidental.

The linchpin in the case was Col. Alexander Poteyev, a highly placed U.S. mole in Russian foreign intelligence, who betrayed the spy ring even as he ran it. He abruptly fled Moscow just days before the FBI rolled up the deep cover operation on June 27, 2010. Poteyev's role in exposing the illegals program only emerged last June when a Russian military court convicted him in absentia for high treason and desertion.

The U.S. swapped the 10 deep cover agents arrested by federal agents for four Russians imprisoned for spying for the West at a remote corner of a Vienna airport on July 9, in a scene reminiscent of the carefully choreographed exchange of spies at Berlin's Glienicke Bridge during the Cold War.

While freed Soviet spies typically kept a low profile after their return to Moscow, Chapman became a lingerie model, corporate spokeswoman and television personality. Heathfield, whose real name is Andrey Bezrukov, lists himself as an adviser to the president of a major Russian oil company on his LinkedIn account.

President Dmitry Medvedev awarded the 10 freed spies Russia's highest honors at a Kremlin ceremony.

The swap was Washington's idea, raised when U.S. law enforcement officials told President Barack Obama that it was time to start planning the arrests.

The case was brought to a swift conclusion before it could complicate the president's campaign to "reset" U.S. relations with Russia, strained by years of tensions over U.S. foreign policy and the 2008 Russian-Georgian war. All 10 of the captured spies were charged with failing to register as foreign agents.

An 11th suspect, Christopher Metsos, who claimed to be a Canadian citizen and delivered money and equipment to the sleeper agents, vanished after a court in Cyprus freed him on bail. The FBI released surveillance photos of Metsos on Monday.

Attorney General Eric Holder said officials decided to arrest the spies because one was preparing to leave the U.S. and there was concern that "we would not be able to get him back."

Both Holder and Figliuzzi said that the spies represented a real threat to U.S. security.

"This was a massive investigation that spanned the entire field offices of the FBI," Figliuzzi said Monday. "Resources were dedicated in multiple field offices, multiple counter-intelligence squads across the nation and certainly here in Washington at FBI headquarters."

But former Soviet intelligence officials now living in the West scratched their heads over what Russia hoped to gain from its ring.

"In my view this whole operation was a waste of human resources, money and just put Russia in a ridiculous situation," said Oleg Kalugin, a former KGB major general who spied against the U.S. during the Soviet era, in an interview earlier this year. He now lives near Washington.

Alexander Vassiliev, a former KGB officer and journalist who has written extensively about Soviet spying in America, said the illegals were supposed to act as talent spotters and scouts, identifying Americans in positions of power who might be recruited to spill secrets for financial reasons or through blackmail.

Spies with the protection of diplomatic credentials would handle the more delicate task of recruiting and handling the agents.

Moscow's ultimate aim, Vassiliev said, was probably to cultivate a source who could provide day-by-day intelligence on what the president's inner circle was thinking and planning in response to the latest international crisis. But he said there was no evidence the Kremlin made any progress toward that goal.

"How are you going to recruit someone like that, on what basis? That's quite a successful person. Why should he spy for the Russians? I can't see any reason."

Vassiliev said Russia's intelligence services seem unable to shake their Soviet-era habits. "The current practice of the Russian espionage agency is based on the practices which existed before 1945," said Vassiliev, who now lives in London. "It's so outdated."

The 10 Russian illegals included:

- Chapman, the daughter of a Russian diplomat, who worked as a real estate agent in New York City. After she was caught, photos of the redhead's social life and travels were splashed all over the tabloids. Following her return to Russia, Chapman worked as a model, became the celebrity face of a Moscow bank and joined the leadership of the youth wing of the main pro-Kremlin party.

- Vicky Pelaez and Juan Lazaro, of Yonkers, N.Y. He briefly taught a class on Latin American and Caribbean politics at Baruch College. She wrote pieces highly critical of U.S. policy in Latin America as a columnist for one of the United States' best-known Spanish-language newspapers, El Diario La Prensa.

- Michael Zottoli and Patricia Mills of Arlington, Va. He had worked at a telecommunications firm. The couple raised a young son and toddler in their high-rise apartment.

- Richard and Cynthia Murphy of Montclair, N.J. He mostly stayed home with their two pre-teen children while she worked for a lower Manhattan-based accounting firm that offered tax advice. As part of her job, she provided financial planning for a venture capitalist with close ties to Bill and Hillary Clinton.

- Donald Howard Heathfield and Tracey Lee Ann Foley of Cambridge, Mass. He worked in sales for an international management consulting firm and peddled strategic planning software to U.S. corporations, and graduated from the John F. Kennedy School of Government. She was a real estate agent.

-Mikhail Semenko of Arlington, Va., who spoke Russian, English, Spanish, Chinese and Portuguese. He worked at the Travel All Russia travel agency, where co-workers described him as "clumsy" and "quirky."

In return for the return of the illegals, Moscow freed four Russians after they signed statements admitting to spying for the U.S. or Britain.

The U.S. spies included Alexander Zaporozhsky, a former colonel and deputy chief of Russian foreign intelligence's American section, who had retired in 1997 and moved to suburban Baltimore in 2001. He was arrested after he returned to Moscow for what he thought was a reunion with KGB colleagues and was sentenced in 2003 to 18 years in prison for espionage.

Zaporozhsky may have provided information leading to the capture of Robert Hansen and Aldrich Ames, two of the most damaging spies ever caught in the U.S.

Gennady Vasilenko, a former KGB officer who worked in Washington and Latin America, was accused by Hansen of spying for the U.S. He was arrested in Havana in 1988, but released from Moscow's notorious Lefortovo prison after six months for lack of evidence. But suspicions lingered, and Vasilenko was arrested again in 2006 in Moscow and sentenced to three years in prison for illegal weapons possession and resistance to authorities.

Vasilenko now has a home in Leesburg, Va. He declined the Associated Press' request for an interview.

Arms control researcher Igor Sutyagin worked for what may have been a British-based CIA front, and he denies being a spy, saying he didn't pass along any information that wasn't available through open sources. He told reporters he signed a confession out of concern he would otherwise ruin the swap for the others - and for fear of abuse and misery in the three years remaining in his prison term.

The fourth was Sergei Skripal, a former colonel for Russian military intelligence, the GRU. He was sentenced in 2006 to 13 years in prison for passing the names of other Russian agents to British intelligence. Skripal, now about 60, is said to be suffering from diabetes. Both Skripal and Sutyagin went to Britain following their release.

U.S. officials have not commented on the Poteyev case.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who was a KGB foreign intelligence officer during the Soviet era, lashed out at Poteyev last December.

"Those people sacrificed their lives to serve the Motherland, and there happened to be an animal who betrayed them," he said. "How will he live with it all his life, how will he look his children in the eye? Swine!"

© Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved.

[buglerbilly]

US Homeland Security Department Plans to Cover Entire Canada Border by UAS Flights

Posted on November 1, 2011 by The Editor

The Homeland Security Department plans to fly sensor-mounted unmanned aircraft along a greater expanse of the 5,500-mile border with Canada to spot illegal activity, DHS officials told members of Congress last Friday.Along the rugged northern border, remotely controlled planes are better than ground patrols or piloted aircraft at detecting drug smugglers and potential terrorists, according to federal officials.

With a so-called certification of authorization, or waiver, from the Federal Aviation Administration, “we now have the ability to operate them on the northern border between Spokane, Wash., and Minnesota,” said John S. Beutlich, director of the northern region office of air and marine operations at Customs and Border Protection. Beutlich testified at a House Homeland Security subcommittee field hearing in Detroit.

FAA has formed an interagency committee to examine expanding unmanned aircraft access to airspace across the country, the Government Accountability Office reported last month.

“We are actively working with the FAA to bridge that gap that is between the eastern edge of the current certificate of authorization area in Minnesota down to the area in New York,” where DHS also has limited unmanned flight operations, Beutlich said. “This is a very heavily air-trafficked area when you consider the amount of commercial aviation. So we’re working with the FAA, because of the safety concerns that we have to have for the general aviation airspace to make that happen.”

Presently, two unmanned aircraft systems operate out of Grand Forks Air Force Base in North Dakota, according to DHS officials. Homeland Security expects to grow its nationwide fleet of seven systems to 24 by fiscal 2016, GAO auditors reported.

Lawmakers have said they are concerned about ongoing trafficking of high-potency narcotics along the Canadian border and the potential poisoning of the Great Lakes region’s water supply by terrorists. “Our drinking water system, it’s open, it’s vulnerable,” Rep. Hansen Clarke, D-Mich., said at the hearing.

The northern border’s thickly forested mountains, recreational trails that provide concealment, and small vessels that blend in with summer boating and winter ice fishing make it more difficult for ground patrols to monitor than the southern border.

The benefits of unmanned flights over piloted aircraft include better coverage, more precise imagery and longer mission durations, according to GAO. Predator systems can fly up to 30 hours because they do not have to land to change pilots. But remotely operated vehicles are not as good at seeing and avoiding other aircraft, the auditors noted.

Source: Nextgov

[buglerbilly]

Dutch Customs Deploys AS&E’s Z Backscatter Van to Scan Airplanes for Threats and Contraband

New Application for ZBV System Provides Customs Agencies with Effective Screening Solution

09:33 GMT, November 1, 2011 AMSTERDAM | American Science and Engineering, Inc. (“AS&E”) a leading worldwide supplier of innovative X-ray detection solutions, announced today that the Dutch Customs Administration in the Netherlands will deploy their recently purchased Z Backscatter Van (ZBV) mobile X-ray screening system to inspect commercial and cargo airplanes. The system will scan in real-time a variety of aircraft to reveal organic threats and contraband hidden in the structure of the airplane. This is the second ZBV system deployed by Dutch Customs — the other is currently in use at the Port of Rotterdam.

“Dutch Customs is leveraging the ZBV system’s flexible, mobile design to scan airplanes of all sizes for drugs and contraband,” said Anthony Fabiano, AS&E’s President and CEO. “Working closely with our clients, we provide creative and innovative solutions for their complex detection requirements. This new application for the ZBV system provides Dutch Customs with a trend setting solution for their unique inspection needs. Customers around the world continue to find new ways to use the ZBV system to better secure their borders to improve security in their countries.”

AS&E’s Z Backscatter Van (ZBV) —The Most Maneuverable, Versatile, Mobile X-ray Detection System

A breakthrough in X-ray detection technology, AS&E’s Z Backscatter Van is the number one selling non-intrusive cargo and vehicle inspection system on the market. The ZBV system is a low-cost, highly effective screening system built into a commercially available delivery van. The ZBV system allows for immediate deployment in response to security threats, and its high throughput capability facilitates rapid inspections. The ZBV system has an unprecedented level of worldwide success with over 560 systems sold to 115 customers in 53 countries.

The ZBV system employs AS&E’s innovative Z Backscatter technology, which reveals organic threats and contraband that transmission X-rays miss — such as explosives and drugs — and provides photo-like imaging for rapid analysis. The system can drive by and scan a variety of aircraft sizes and configurations and can reveal organic contraband hidden in the structure of an aircraft.

[buglerbilly]

Military Policeman Held in Espionage Case

November 02, 2011

Anchorage Daily News

ANCHORAGE, Alaska -- A 22-year-old Army military policeman from Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson is in custody in Anchorage on suspicion of espionage, an FBI spokesman said Tuesday.

The Soldier, Spc. William Colton Millay, was booked in the Anchorage jail at 8 p.m. Friday. He's being held without bail, a jail spokesman said.

An Army spokesman said Millay, from Owensboro, Ky., had been arrested at 6:30 a.m. Friday on Elmendorf-Richardson by special agents from the Army counterintelligence service and the Army Criminal Investigation Command.

Eric Gonzalez, spokesman for the FBI in Anchorage, said Millay was arrested following an investigation by the FBI and Army counterintelligence. He said the case is being handled in the military justice system.

Neither the Army nor the FBI would describe the nature of the allegations against Millay and no charging documents were available. The spokesman for the Anchorage jail, run by the Alaska Department of Corrections, said Millay was being held under a long-standing agreement with federal authorities. He said he had no information on any charges Millay might be facing.

Millay was assigned to the 164th Military Police Company, part of the 793rd Military Police Battalion of the new 2nd Engineer Brigade at Elmendorf-Richardson, according to Lt. Col. William Coppernoll, a spokesman for the Army in Alaska.

Most of that 170-member MP company, the "Arctic Enforcers," left in March for a 12-month deployment to Afghanistan, mainly to train police there. The company lost four Soldiers in a roadside bomb attack in Laghman Province in June.

Coppernoll said Millay was assigned to the company's rear detachment, the small group of Soldiers who remain behind at their home base during a deployment.

Bloggers commenting on Millay since Army Times reported his arrest have linked him to the WikiLeaks case in which a Soldier is accused of supplying hundreds of thousands of sensitive documents to the website.

But Gonzalez said there was no connection. "This has nothing to do with WikiLeaks," he said, but wouldn't elaborate.

Coppernoll also declined to provide specifics. "We are still very early in the legal process," he said in an email message.

In a prepared statement, Mary Frances Rook, the FBI special agent in charge of the Anchorage field office, said Millay's arrest "was the result of the close working relationship between the FBI and its military partners in Alaska. Through this ongoing partnership, we are better able to protect our nation."

© Copyright 2011 Anchorage Daily News. All rights reserved.

[buglerbilly]

The Terrorist Threat Beneath The Waves

(Source: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments; issued November 2, 2011)

The world’s vast undersea energy infrastructure—oil and gas platforms, wellheads, pipelines and pumps—is now vulnerable to attack by cheap submarines and unmanned vehicles.

Nearly 60 years ago the classic television documentary series “Victory at Sea” first recounted the U.S. Navy’s exploits during World War II. Several episodes highlighted the Battle of the Atlantic against German submarines that were waging guerrilla war at sea. Their objective: destroy allied cargo ships providing an economic lifeline from America to Britain.

The German submarines pursued a form of warfare known as commerce raiding, attacking the enemy’s economic assets at sea. The U.S., British and Canadian navies won the Battle of the Atlantic, thanks to their use of convoys and exploitation of advances in antisubmarine warfare technology and tactics—but only after suffering horrendous losses in blood and treasure.

At war’s end, the United States emerged as far and away the world’s predominant naval power. Since then the U.S. commitment to providing unfettered access to the world’s seas to all nations has enabled an era of economic globalization and growth.

Memories of a time when access to the seas was not guaranteed have faded. Yet much has changed in the past 60 years. Two developments in particular suggest a growing need for the United States and other peaceful nations to begin thinking anew about how to defend their maritime commerce, albeit under very different circumstances.

The first development is the emergence of an undersea economy. Two years after World War II, in 1947, the first offshore discovery of oil out of sight of land occurred in the Gulf of Mexico. Today nearly 30% of U.S. oil production and 15% of gas production is produced from wells on the Outer Continental Shelf. Globally, some 30% of the world’s oil output comes from offshore production.

An enormous amount of capital investment has gone into creating this undersea energy infrastructure. This includes the oil platforms that drill, extract and temporarily store oil and gas, as well as the oil and gas wellheads, pipelines and pumps required to transfer the product from its undersea location to shore.

This vast infrastructure was built with the assumption that while it would have to weather natural disasters, it would not be a target in war. In military parlance, much of the infrastructure comprises “soft” targets that would not require much in the way of explosives to cause significant, and perhaps catastrophic, damage. Fortunately many of these targets have not been easy to reach—until now.

This brings us to the second development: the diffusion of military technology and weaponry that can threaten the undersea economy with a new form of commerce raiding.

In recent years, Latin-American narco-cartels have begun moving their cargo by submarine. While not even remotely in a class with the U.S. Navy’s submarines, these simple boats are nevertheless capable of operating undersea in littoral waters while moving tons of cocaine. They have a range of up to 2,000 miles and cost but a few million dollars to build. These submarines can submerge to depths of a few dozen feet, which is sufficient to make detection difficult, allowing them to approach offshore oil platforms with little or no warning.

Even more disturbing is the proliferation of unmanned underwater vehicles, or UUVs, which were once almost exclusively operated by Western militaries. With the growth of the undersea economy, civilian development and production took off in the 1980s. UUVs are now widely used for a variety of commercial and scientific purposes.

These UUVs are perhaps best known for their role in locating sunken ships. Unlike the small submarines operated by narco-cartels, UUVs can descend to the ocean floor. If adapted for military purposes, they could carry mines and other explosives, as well as cameras and electronic sensors. They are also becoming cheaper, with a wide variety of systems available for sale in the private sector.

Then there are naval mines, now manufactured in more than 30 countries. Some producers, like Russia, are developing mines with better sensors, target-recognition systems, stealthy coatings, and self-propulsion systems to enable them to move about. But mines don’t need to be sophisticated to be effective, especially against the thousands of soft targets populating the continental shelf.

While narco-cartels are interested in making money, not war, this is not the case with radical nonstate entities or their state sponsors. Some groups, including al Qaeda, seek to achieve victory not by defeating their enemies on the battlefield but by inflicting unacceptable pain or damage, either against defenseless civilians or economic infrastructure. Toward this end, radical Islamists have undertaken attacks, employing far less sophisticated means and with minimal success, on an oil tanker in the Gulf of Aden in October 2002 and Saudi oil production facilities in February 2006. Should the U.S. find itself in a confrontation with Iran, it might employ proxies to achieve similar ends.

For a relatively small effort on their part, in short, America’s enemies could potentially impose enormous costs on its undersea economy, including loss of energy resources, damaged infrastructure and environmental degradation.

This nascent threat to America’s undersea energy assets demands attention before it arrives on the nation’s doorstep. The Department of Homeland Security, in coordination with the Defense Department, should explore the cost and feasibility of options for defending the undersea energy economy, so they can move quickly to build a defensive shield if the need arises. The intelligence community should monitor the threat by focusing on the proliferation of undersea means of attack, especially as it pertains to radical nonstate entities. On the diplomatic front, efforts should be made to engage in this effort friendly states that have significant undersea energy assets of their own, such as Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Norway and the United Kingdom.

Given the stakes involved, just as the U.S. and its allies developed the forces, capabilities and methods needed to defend their economic assets at sea during the Battle of the Atlantic, a similar effort is needed now with respect to America’s undersea economic interests. The alternative is to hope for the best—and hope is not a strategy.

-ends-

[buglerbilly]

Three senior UK Border Agency officials suspended

Three senior UK Border Agency officials have been suspended amid claims that crucial vetting procedures to stop terrorists and foreign criminals entering Britain were secretly abandoned this summer.


Three senior UK Border Agency officials have been suspended amid claims that crucial vetting procedures to stop terrorists and foreign criminals entering Britain were secretly abandoned this summer.c Photo: PA

By Murray Wardrop

11:50PM GMT 04 Nov 2011

It is feared that hundreds of thousands of foreigners swept into the country in the past four months without having their passports scrutinised.

Border guards at airports and ports were ordered not to bother checking biometric chips on passports of citizens from outside the EU, it is claimed

Staff were also allegedly instructed not to compare fingerprints or other personal details against the Home Office’s database of terror suspects and illegal immigrants.

The decisions were taken without the knowledge of ministers and were designed to cut down queues at busy ports and airports and avoid complaints by holidaymakers and tourists during the peak holiday season, it is understood.

Brodie Clark has been suspended from his £135,000-a-year job as head of Border Force, part of the UK Border Agency (UKBA), after allegedly confirming that he had authorised stopping specific checks at ports including Heathrow and Calais.

Graeme Kyle, the director of the UKBA at Heathrow, and Carole Upshall, director of the Border Force South and European Operation, have also been suspended on the orders of Theresa May, the Home Secretary.

The Home Office last night said it had launched an investigation into the claims but refused to comment on the allegations.

"Head of UKBA Border Force Brodie Clark has been suspended," it simply said in a statement.

The disclosure raises the prospect that criminals banned from Britain managed to sneak into the country between July and the beginning of this month, while vetting procedures were relaxed.

It comes just a day after the Home Affairs Select Committee delivered a damning report, criticising the UKBA for failing to deport foreign prisoners from Britain.

Keith Vaz, chairman of committee, last night described the suspensions as "extraordinary" and said he would be questioning the Home Secretary on the issue.

The Labour MP said: "The border police are supposed to keep people out, not let people in.

“These developments are extraordinary in that they involve such senior members of the UK Border Agency.

"Only a day after the publication of our report which concluded that the Border Agency continues to fail we have this remarkable news.

"We will question the Home Secretary about this on Tuesday when she comes before the Committee.

"If her answers do not satisfy us I am sure the Committee will want to conduct its own inquiry.”

It is claimed that UKBA staff were told not to check details on people’s passports against the Home Office’s so-called Warnings Index, which contains the names of excluded foreign nationals and individuals of concern.

The range of checks in question is a combination of standard measures applied to all passengers and additional “risk-based” procedures used at the discretion of border officers.

The regular measures include checking the passenger’s passport and biometric chip, which establishes if the picture inside the passport is the same as that electronically stored by the Home Office.

Biometric chips are fitted as standard in all new passports and are deemed vital in identifying fraudsters and illegal immigrants trying to enter the country on forged or stolen passports.

Extra measures such as the verification of fingerprints are mandatory for anyone from outside of the EU.

Earlier this year, ministers approved a pilot scheme allowing border staff to exercise greater discretion in vetting EU nationals, which would mean they would not automatically have to check biometric chips in their passports.

However, ministers insisted all other passengers would continue to have their passport and biometric chip checked, as well as being run through the Warnings Index.

It is alleged that between July and this month, checks were relaxed for non-EU nationals.

Government figures disclosed this week that more than a quarter of the foreign prisoners who should have been deported last year are still in Britain.

UKBA figures showed that, in the 12 months to the end of March, 1,300 foreign national prisoners were released from jail and were due to be deported, but 350 of these, or 27 per cent, were still in the country.

MPs on the home affairs select committee criticised the agency for losing track of asylum seekers and migrants.

The figures showed that the number of "lost" cases had increased from 18,000 in November 2010 to 124,000 now, a figure "roughly equivalent to the population of Cambridge".

Mr Vaz said: "The UK Border Agency is still not providing the efficient, effective service that Parliament expects.

"A fit for purpose immigration system needs to keep track of applicants rather than allowing them to go missing."

Figures published last week showed that, overall, 3,775 former foreign prisoners who should have been deported had been released from custody and were living in the community.

The UKBA said the number of foreign criminals who are not deported or cannot be deported at the end of their sentence is increasing.

[buglerbilly]

Alaska Soldier Charged With Spying

November 08, 2011

Anchorage Daily News



ANCHORAGE, Alaska -- The Army said Monday that it had formally charged an Anchorage Soldier with attempted espionage, accusing him of providing national defense information to a person he thought was a foreign intelligence agent.

Spc. William C. Millay, 22, was also charged with five other criminal violations related to the espionage investigation by Army Counterintelligence agents, the Air Force Office of Special Investigations and the FBI. Among them: lying to investigators and asking another service member for classified information and physical objects that he could provide the "agent." An Army spokesman in Alaska declined to provide the actual charging documents, a step in military proceedings that could result in a court martial for Millay. Instead, the Army provided a two-page summary of the charges.

In the prepared statement, the Army said Millay, a military policeman from Owensboro, Ky., turned over only unclassified material to the purported spy.

"Millay had access to the information through the course of his normal duties both stateside and on a previous deployment, and although the information was unclassified, Millay believed that it could be used to the advantage of a foreign nation," the Army statement said.

The Army didn't say which foreign power Millay thought he was assisting.

The description of the charges imply, though don't say directly, that Millay was targeted in an undercover sting by government agents. And the Army's statement about the charges didn't say the United States could have been hurt by Millay's actions, only that a foreign power would have benefitted. It couldn't be determined from the statement whether the foreign country was hostile to the United States or even an ally.

Millay has been held in the Anchorage jail since his arrest Oct. 28.

Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, he won't have to enter a plea until after an investigation hearing -- a so-called Article 32 hearing -- expected after the new year, said his attorney, Stephen Karns, of Dallas.

Karns said in an email message Monday that he had just received the charges and had not been able to speak yet to Millay.

"I also haven't received any of the evidence, so it's difficult to comment at this time other than to say that my client is innocent," Karns wrote. "The charges sound far worse than what I think anyone who knows him would say he's capable of doing."

Karns said Millay was "a simple young kid from Kentucky, who loves his country and has followed in his brother's footsteps in joining the Army."

According to the Army, Millay was attached to the 164th Military Police Company, 793rd Military Police Battalion, 2nd Engineer Brigade, which deployed to Afghanistan in March. Millay has one previous combat deployment -- in Iraq from December 2009 to July 2010.

He joined the Army in November 2007, had basic training at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri, and served in Korea and Fort Stewart, Ga., before arriving at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in May, two months after his new company had deployed. He served in the 164th's rear detachment, the small group of Soldiers in a unit who remain behind to support the ones overseas.

The Army's statement didn't say when Millay came under suspicion or why.

But it said he failed to report to superiors his multiple contacts with someone he believed to be a foreign intelligence agent.

The attempted espionage charge said Millay "communicated and transmitted unclassified national defense information to an individual whom he believed was a foreign intelligence agent, with the intent to aid a foreign nation."

A related charged of communicating defense information said Millay, "having been entrusted with unclassified national defense information that could be used to the advantage of a foreign nation, willfully communicated the information to persons not entitled to receive it."

Under the Fifth Amendment, Soldiers have fewer protections than civilians against self-incrimination, especially during times of war. The charge against Millay of providing false official statements said he failed to tell Army counterintelligence agents the "full scope" of his efforts to contact "foreign governments" and the "full nature" of what he told the supposed spy.

He was also charged with concealing two firearms and ammunition in his barracks room.

© Copyright 2011 Anchorage Daily News. All rights reserved.

[buglerbilly]

Australian's passport seized in Jordan

Dylan Welch

November 14, 2011 - 1:29PM .


Passport confiscated ... Ismail al-Wahwah.

Jordanian authorities have confiscated the passport of an Australian citizen who is a member of a Muslim group that advocates a global Islamic caliphate.

Ismail al-Wahwah, from Bankstown, is a member of the global organisation Hizb ut-Tahrir (Liberation Party).

His passport was confiscated on Thursday when he arrived at Amman airport.

He had been on the Haj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia and had returned to Jordan to visit family before returning to Australia.

He was not arrested but is unable to leave the country and is staying with family.

The Australian spokesman for Hizb ut-Tahrir, Uthman Badar, criticised the confiscation in a statement this afternoon and alleged Jordan's main spy agency, the General Intelligence Directorate, was involved.

"The corrupt and illegitimate ruling systems, which represent neither Islam nor Muslims, need to be uprooted entirely and replaced with the system of Islam which safeguards the rights and dignity of all citizens," he said.

Comment is being sought from the Australian Foreign Affairs Department.

The group is banned in numerous Middle Eastern countries including Jordan.

Dylan Welch is the National Security Correspondent.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/world/australians-passport-seized-in-jordan-20111114-1nevm.html#ixzz1deGCKkB6

[buglerbilly]

Ares

A Defense Technology Blog

Border Patrol Eyeing Surplus Military Gear

Posted by Paul McLeary at 11/15/2011 2:14 PM CST



With the American military presence in Iraq ending next month (!), and the return of over two million pieces of military gear from that conflict, the Department of Homeland Security and some members of Congress are starting to look longingly at those full containers of gear heading home.

During a hearing this morning of the House Armed Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Border and Maritime Security, Rep. Henry Cuellar, (D-Tx.) said that “as our military is drawing down we should use DoD equipment to see if it can fill a capabilities gap here at home” along the U.S.-Mexican border, adding that he would like to see some aerostats deployed along the border to assist with surveillance.

The DoD’s Paul Stockton, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense added that “we have a historic opportunity” to transfer technologies to the border that “the public has already paid to develop.” He called the deployment of military vehicles, sensors, radars, and other communications equipment a “one stop shopping opportunity” for Dept. of Homeland Security, adding that more than 17,000 federal, state, and local agencies have already received $2.6 billion worth of DoD equipment in recent years, with $600 million of that coming in 2011 alone.

This haul includes:

Twenty-seven light armored vehicles (V-150s and V-300s), worth $500,000 each.

Three C-12 aircraft worth $4 million each.

Tactical vehicles and five helicopters, worth approximately $5 million.

An excess DoD Mark II robot, originally valued at $55,000.

DoD radiological detection instrumentation and equipment.

Approximately 1,231 night vision devices on loan to 429 agencies in 48 states.

But the most interesting part of the hearing came when the witnesses talked about just how much the Border Patrol and DHS work with a host of Pentagon offices to develop equipment, conduct training exercises, and share equipment and information.

Mark Borkowski Asst. Commissioner of the DHS’ Office of Technology Innovation and Acquisition specifically singled out NORTHCOM’s Joint Task Force-North as “kind of a liaison” between the Border Patrol and various Pentagon offices. JTF-North conducts DoD training exercises “that we are able to take advantage of… there is a continuing relationship with JTF-North which we have become to depend and rely on,” he said. Borkowski listed a whole host of programs that the Pentagon and the DHS are working together on, including the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Naval Research Lab, TRADOC, the U.S. Naval Air Systems Command, USAF Air Combat Command, among many others. Most interesting is the “ongoing effort” is the development of the Cross Border Secure Communications Network (CBSCN) Project, which is being managed by the DHS, the U.S. Northern Command and the government of Mexico. The idea is to install microwave equipment on both sides of the border in ten border cities “for the purpose of addressing the need for a long-term solution to cross border communications” at the local level in tracking suspects and developing cross-border situational awareness.

One DoD office that is missing, surprisingly, is the US Army Program Executive Office Integration, which runs the Army’s Network Integration Exercise technology testing program at Ft. Bliss, Tx.—which just so happens to be the same place that JTF-North calls home. One would think there are some interesting conversations going on in El Paso, no?

[buglerbilly]

Terror suspect charged over New York bomb plot

New York police have arrested a man trying to build a pipe bomb with instructions from an al Qaeda magazine which he planned to use against U.S. soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.


It is claimed Jose Pimentel was an al-Qaeda sympathiser who was targeting police and postal facilities

12:17AM GMT 21 Nov 2011

The suspect - identified as Jose Pimentel, 27 - was charged with three terrorism-related counts and two other counts, court documents said.

Beyond soldiers, his intended targets were allegedly police officers and post offices, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said at a joint news conference with New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and District Attorney Cyrus Vance, the chief prosecutor for Manhattan.

Pimentel had been under surveillance since May 2009 and was a "lone wolf" who got instructions on building a pipe bomb from "Inspire" magazine, published by al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Kelly said.

Pimentel was arrested on Saturday, Bloomberg said.

In an interview with New York police, Pimentel admitted he "took active steps to build the bomb, including shaving the match heads and drilling holes in the pipes" and was "one hour away from completing it," the court documents said.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks by al Qaeda militants in 2001, New York City has considered itself a prime target and has developed extensive intelligence and counterterrorism divisions within the New York Police Department.

New Yorkers have grown accustomed to heightened security and regular announcements that authorities have foiled plots to attack the city.

Most planned attacks - such as that linked to the September 2009 arrest of Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan-born man who was a permanent U.S. resident living in Colorado who plotted a suicide bomb attack on the New York subway system - were aspirational. Zazi later pleaded guilty.

But some, such as the failed May 2010 attempt to bomb the city's Times Square, were closer to being carried out.

In that case, a Pakistani-born U.S. citizen, Faisal Shahzad, drove a sport utility vehicle packed with a crude bomb into the heart of Times Square on a crowded Saturday evening. The bomb failed to go off and was discovered by passersby.

The suspect was later arrested and pleaded guilty.

[buglerbilly]

Post-9/11 Tradeoff: Security vs. Civil Liberties

November 20, 2011

Associated Press|by David Crary



NEW YORK -- In the early months after the 9/11 terror attacks, America's visceral reaction was to gird for a relentless, whatever-it-takes quest to punish those responsible and prevent any recurrences.

To a striking extent, those goals have been achieved. Yet over the years, Americans have also learned about trade-offs, about decisions and practices that placed national security on a higher plane than civil liberties and, in the view of some, above the rule of law.

It's by no means the first time in U.S. history that security concerns spawned tactics that, when brought to light, troubled Americans. But the past decade has been notable, even in historical context, for the scope and durability of boundary-pushing practices.

Abroad, there were secret prisons and renditions of terror suspects, the use of waterboarding and other interrogation techniques that critics denounced as torture, and the egregious abuse of detainees by U.S. military personnel at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and elsewhere.

At home, there has been widespread warrantless wiretapping authorized by the National Security Agency and the issuance of more than 200,000 national security letters ordering an array of Americans - including business owners and librarians - to turn over confidential records.

Now, in the very city that suffered most on 9/11, new information has emerged about the New York Police Department's intelligence operations - ramped up after the attacks in ways that critics say amount to racial and ethnic profiling, though the department denies that charge.

Since August, an Associated Press investigation has revealed a vast NYPD intelligence-collecting effort targeting the city's Muslims. Police have conducted surveillance of entire Muslim neighborhoods, monitoring where people eat, pray and get their hair cut. Dozens of mosques and Muslim student groups were infiltrated. The CIA helped develop some of the programs.

The FBI also has intelligence-gathering operations that target Muslim and other ethnic communities. Both the bureau and the NYPD defend the programs as conforming to guidelines on profiling, while critics brand the tactics as unconstitutional and ineffective.

"Targeting entire communities for investigation based on erroneous stereotypes produces flawed intelligence," says Michael German, a former FBI agent who's now senior policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. "Law enforcement programs based on evidence and facts are effective, and a system of bias and mass suspicion is not."

The FBI, which in 2003 was authorized to conduct racial and ethnic profiling in national security investigations, says its community assessments are legal and vital. "Certain terrorist and criminal groups are comprised of persons primarily from a particular ethnic or geographic community, which must be taken into account when trying to determine if there are threats to the United States," the bureau said in response to ACLU criticism.

But some feel the perpetual safety-vs.-civil-liberties balancing act has been knocked askew since 9/11. In a recent assessment of national security response to the terror attacks, the ACLU faulted policies it said had undermined the Constitution.

"We lost our way when, instead of addressing the challenge of terrorism consistent with our values, our government chose the path of torture and targeted killing ... of warrantless government spying and the entrenchment of a national surveillance state," its report said. "That is not who we are, or who we want to be."

To be sure, Americans have been spied on before by their law enforcement and security agencies, usually in periods of national anxiety.

During the Red Scare of 1919-20, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer responded to labor unrest and bombings - including an attack on his own house - by overseeing mass roundups of thousands of suspected anarchists and communists, hundreds of whom were deported. In the aftermath of the raids, he was assailed by eminent legal experts for allowing raids without warrants and for denying detainees legal representation.

In the 1950s, the FBI under the leadership of J. Edgar Hoover abetted Sen. Joe McCarthy and other zealous anti-communists with various domestic spying tactics, including opening of mail and unauthorized wiretaps. The bureau also kept civil rights leaders under surveillance during the late `50s and 1960s, again claiming in some cases that unproven communist ties represented a security threat.

Many of these covert FBI activities took place under the aegis of its covert Counter Intelligence Program, known as COINTELPRO. Its targets included the Nation of Islam, Students for a Democratic Society and various groups opposed to the Vietnam War.

A Senate committee headed by Frank Church, D-Idaho, investigated COINTELPRO in 1975-76 and denounced it as a "sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association."

To civil libertarians, the upsurge of post-9/11 intelligence-gathering is distinctive from these previous endeavors in some key respects. To a large extent, it has the imprimatur of Congress, in the form of the Patriot Act and other legislation, and it makes use of astounding technical advances that have vastly broadened surveillance capabilities.

"What we've seen is an unprecedented perfect storm of a sense of national vulnerability, coupled with technological developments that have made specter of 1984 look kind of hokey," said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. "We don't know what the lasting effect will be ... We don't know how permanent the `new normal' is."

Nationally, civil liberties advocates have taken numerous legal steps, including lawsuits, to challenge some of the federal surveillance practices or find out more about their scope. In New York, some elected officials are calling for federal and state investigations of the NYPD spying on Muslim neighborhoods.

Yet top politicians - including President Barack Obama and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg - are generally reluctant to criticize homeland security operations.

"I believe we should do what we have to do to keep us safe. And we have to be consistent with the Constitution and with people's rights," Bloomberg said ahead of the 10th anniversary commemorations of 9/11.

"We live in a dangerous world," he added, "and we have to be very proactive in making sure that we prevent terrorism."

Many Americans seem to agree. According to a poll in September by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, two-thirds of Americans say it's fitting to sacrifice some privacy and freedoms in the fight against terrorism.

The bottom line, say those who support the post-9/11 tactics, is the government's success in thwarting new terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. James Jay Carafano, a security expert with the conservative Heritage Foundation, credits aggressive surveillance for helping uncover roughly 40 terror plots since 2001.

"Do we live with more surveillance than we used to? You could make a case for that," he said. "But it's very difficult to make a serious case we've migrated to a state where civil liberties have been impinged because of the war on terror."

Peter Chase tries to make precisely that case. Longtime director of the public library in Plainville, Conn., he was one of four Connecticut librarians who sued the federal government after they received a national security letter demanding some library patrons' computer records without a court order.

More than 200,000 of those FBI directives, which place their recipients under gag orders, have been issued since 2003. Chase and his colleagues are among a tiny handful who have fought back in court and gained the right to speak out about their case.

"When people come in to public libraries, they expect that what they're going to borrow is confidential," said Chase, 61. "Letting others know what they're reading is like spying on the voting booth, it's like spying on what they are thinking."

Tim Lynch, head of the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute's Project on Criminal Justice and an expert on civil liberties, says most Americans are unaware of the extent to which basic liberties are being undermined by new, security-motivated legal precedents.

"The average person only comes face-to-face with some of these policies at the airport," he said. "They feel, `Oh, it hasn't been that bad.'

"But those of us trained in the law are alarmed," Lynch said. "Lawmakers are too willing to pass laws that would give more power to the FBI and the executive branch."

Such a law, critics say, was the sweeping Patriot Act, which was swiftly drafted after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and signed into law on Oct. 26th of that year. Among its provisions, it allows government agents to conduct broad searches for records in national security investigations without court warrants.

The only Senate vote against the act was cast by Wisconsin Democrat Russ Feingold, who lost his seat in 2010. This fall, in the forward to a report by a Muslim-American legal advocacy group, Feingold blasted the Patriot Act as "a blatant power-grab that gave unprecedented, unchecked power to the government to arrest, detain and spy on our nation's citizens."

A few current senators have called for the act to be reined in, but Congress this year reauthorized some of its most controversial provisions - such as roving wiretaps to monitor multiple communication devices. A Senate committee also rejected an effort by Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, and Mark Udall, D-Colo., to obtain more information from top security officials about what they describe as secret interpretations of domestic surveillance law.

Some of the post-9/11 intelligence operations potentially affect almost all Americans, such as so-called data-mining systems capable of sifting through vast quantities of personal records.

"Fusion centers" have been set up in every state since 9/11 for the purpose of sharing tips, crime reports and other information among federal, state and local law enforcement agencies. In some cases, the military and private companies have participated.

The centers' purpose is to spot potentially dangerous individuals or patterns that might otherwise have been overlooked, and thus avoid a repeat of missed opportunities before the 9/11 attacks. However, civil liberties advocates have voiced fears that the centers could be used to spy on Americans who have no link to suspected terrorism, and some missteps have been documented.

In 2009, Missouri's fusion center asserted that some supporters of GOP Rep. Ron Paul of Texas posed a security threat. In Tennessee, the ACLU affiliate sent a letter to public schools warning them not to celebrate Christmas as a religious holiday; the state fusion center put the communication on a map of "terrorism events and other suspicious activity."

Overall, however, it is the Muslim-American community that considers itself the prime target of heightened surveillance efforts.

The concerns are summarized in an impassioned report titled "Losing Liberty," released last month by Muslim Advocates, a San Francisco-based legal advocacy group.

"The Patriot Act opened the floodgates to a plethora of discriminatory and invasive laws, policies, and practices in the name of national security of which Muslims and those perceived to be Muslim have borne the brunt," says the report. "It is difficult to find a Muslim today who has not been contacted by law enforcement or affected by these policies."

The executive director of Muslim Advocates, Farhana Khera, hopes Congress will hold hearings on a bill recently introduced by Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., that would prohibit racial, ethnic and religious profiling at the federal and state level.

"Much of what the FBI has been doing has been shrouded in secrecy, and the American people have a right to know how these unprecedented powers are being used," Khera said. "We have something pretty special in our country and its founding principles, and we need to return to them."

Targets of the NYPD surveillance range from obscure Moroccan immigrants in hard-scrabble New York neighborhoods to Reda Shata, a New York-area imam. Shata eagerly cooperated with the police and FBI, invited officers to his mosque for breakfast, even dined with Mayor Bloomberg - yet according to NYPD files examined by the AP, he was under police surveillance at the time.

"You were loving people very much, and then all of a sudden you get shocked," Shata said last month after learning he was monitored. "It's a bitter feeling."

The NYPD has defended its surveillance efforts as vital to the city's security, while insisting its actions are lawful and respectful.

"The value we place on privacy rights and other constitutional protections is part of what motivates the work of counterterrorism," Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly told city councilors recently. "It would be counterproductive in the extreme if we violated those freedoms in the course of our work to defend New York."

Among the prominent Muslims affected by intensified post-9/11 security is Jawad Khaki, who for 20 years was a globe-trotting executive with Microsoft Corp. before leaving in 2009 to found a nonprofit community group.

Starting in 2007, Khaki says he was subjected to intensive airport interrogations and searches each time he returned to the U.S. from abroad, including inspections of data on his smartphone. One customs agent advised him to cut back on his travels if he didn't like the hassles, he says.

Against the advice of his attorney, Khaki decided to go public with his dismay.

"It's not just about my individual rights - it's about everybody's rights," said Khaki, a native of Tanzania who moved to the U.S. in 1985 and lives in the Seattle suburb of Sammamish.

"I chose to become an American citizen," he said. "One of my patriotic duties is to uphold the constitution, and the constitution is about justice and liberty for all."

© Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved.

[buglerbilly]

'Al-Qaida Sympathizer' Accused of NYC Bomb Plots

November 21, 2011

Associated Press|by Tom McElroy



NEW YORK -- An "al-Qaida sympathizer" accused of plotting to bomb police and post offices in New York City as well as U.S. troops returning home remained in police custody after an arraignment Sunday on numerous terrorism-related charges.

Jose Pimentel of Manhattan was described by Mayor Michael Bloomberg at a news conference announcing Pimentel's arrest as "a 27-year-old al-Qaida sympathizer" who was motivated by terrorist propaganda and resentment of U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said police had to move quickly to arrest Pimentel on Saturday because he was ready to carry out his plan.

"He was in fact putting this bomb together," Kelly said. "He was drilling holes and it would have been not appropriate for us to let him walk out the door with that bomb."

Ten years after 9/11, New York remains a prime terrorism target. Bloomberg said at least 14 terrorist plots, including the latest alleged scheme, have targeted the city since the Sept. 11 attacks. No attack has been successful, however. Pakistani immigrant Faisal Shahzad is serving a life sentence for trying to detonate a car bomb in Times Square in May 2010.

Kelly said Sunday that Pimentel was energized and motivated to carry out his plan by the Sept. 30 killing of al-Qaida's U.S.-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki.

"He decided to build the bomb August of this year, but clearly he jacked up his speed after the elimination of al-Awlaki," Kelly said.

A U.S. citizen originally from the Dominican Republic, Pimentel was "plotting to bomb police patrol cars and also postal facilities as well as targeted members of our armed services returning from abroad," Bloomberg said.

New York police had him under surveillance for at least a year and were working with a confidential informant; no injury to anyone or damage to property is alleged, Kelly said. In addition, authorities have no evidence that Pimentel was working with anyone else, the mayor said.

"He appears to be a total lone wolf," the mayor said. "He was not part of a larger conspiracy emanating from abroad."

At Pimentel's arraignment, his lawyer Joseph Zablocki said his client's behavior leading up to the arrest was not that of a conspirator trying to conceal some violent scheme. Zablocki said Pimentel was public about his activities and was not trying to hide anything.

"I don't believe that this case is nearly as strong as the people believe," Zablocki said. "He [Pimentel] has this very public online profile. ... This is not the way you go about committing a terrorist attack."

Pimentel, also known as Muhammad Yusuf, was denied bail and remained in custody. The bearded, bespectacled man wore a black T-shirt and black drawstring pants and smiled at times during the proceeding. His mother and brother attended the arraignment, Zablocki said.

Pimentel is accused of having an explosive device Saturday when he was arrested, one he planned to use against others and property to terrorize the public. The charges accuse him of conspiracy going back at least to October 2010, and include first-degree criminal possession of a weapon as a crime of terrorism, and soliciting support for a terrorist act.

Bloomberg said at the news conference that Pimentel represents the type of threat FBI Director Robert Mueller has warned about as U.S. forces erode the ability of terrorists to carry out large scale attacks.

"This is just another example of New York City because we are an iconic city ... this is a city that people would want to take away our freedoms gravitate to and focus on," Bloomberg said.

Kelly said a confidential informant had numerous conversations with Pimentel on Sept. 7 in which he expressed interest in building small bombs and targeting banks, government and police buildings.

Pimentel also posted on his website trueislam1.com and on blogs his support of al-Qaida and belief in jihad, and promoted an online magazine article that described in detail how to make a bomb, Kelly said.

Among his Internet postings, the commissioner said, was an article that states: "People have to understand that America and its allies are all legitimate targets in warfare."

The New York Police Department's Intelligence Division was involved in the arrest. Kelly said Pimentel spent most of his years in Manhattan and lived about five years in Schenectady. He said police in the Albany area tipped New York City police off to Pimentel's activities.

Asked why federal authorities were not involved in the case, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. said there was communication with them but his office felt that given the timeline "it was appropriate to proceed under state charges."

About 1,000 of the city's roughly 35,000 officers are assigned each day to counterterrorism operations. The NYPD also sends officers overseas to report on how other cities deal with terrorism. Through federal grants and city funding, the NYPD has spent millions of dollars on technology to outfit the department with the latest tools -- from portable radiation detectors to the network of hundreds of cameras that can track suspicious activity.

Alexis Smith, 22, who lives in an apartment in the same building as Pimentel, said she was shocked that he was a suspect in a terrorist plot. "He was always very courteous to us," she said, adding that Pimentel helped her carry groceries and luggage into the building.

"It's nice to know he was only working alone," she said.

-- Associated Press writers Jennifer Peltz and Colleen Long and AP video journalist David R. Martin contributed to this report from New York. AP writer Samantha Gross also contributed to this report.

© Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved.

[buglerbilly]

FBI saw no Threat in NYC Bomb Suspect

November 22, 2011

Associated Press|by Tom Hays

NEW YORK -- Federal authorities declined to pursue a case against an "al-Qaida sympathizer" accused of wanting to bomb police stations and post offices in New York City because they believed he was mentally unstable and incapable of pulling off the alleged plot, two law enforcement officials said Monday.

New York Police Department investigators sought to get the FBI involved at least twice as their undercover investigation of Jose Pimentel unfolded, the officials said. Both times, the FBI concluded that he wasn't a serious threat, they said.

The FBI concluded that 27-year-old Pimentel "didn't have the predisposition or the ability to do anything on his own," one of the officials said.

The officials were not authorized to speak about the case and spoke on condition of anonymity. The FBI's New York office declined to comment on Monday. New York City authorities said that the FBI was involved in the case, but did not specifically say they declined to pursue the charges.

"We just believed that we couldn't let it go any further. We had to act," said Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly.

New York authorities said Pimentel was motivated by terrorist propaganda and resentment of U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. Authorities said police had to move quickly to arrest Pimentel on Saturday - because he was approximately one hour from being able to detonate explosives.

"He was in fact putting this bomb together," Kelly said. "He was drilling holes and it would have been not appropriate for us to let him walk out the door with that bomb."

The suspect was being held after his arraignment on numerous terrorism-related charges. His lawyer Joseph Zablocki said his client's behavior leading up to the arrest was not that of a conspirator trying to conceal some violent scheme. Zablocki said Pimentel was public about his activities and was not trying to hide anything.

"I don't believe that this case is nearly as strong as the people believe," Zablocki said. "He (Pimentel) has this very public online profile. ... This is not the way you go about committing a terrorist attack."

Authorities characterized him in a different way. The unemployed U.S. citizen was born in the Dominican Republic and later converted to Islam. They said he was energized and motivated to carry out his plan by the Sept. 30 killing of al-Qaida's U.S.-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki.

"He decided to build the bomb August of this year, but clearly he jacked up his speed after the elimination of al-Awlaki," Kelly said.

He plotted to bomb police patrol cars and postal facilities, targeted soldiers returning home from abroad, and also talked of bombing a police station in Bayonne, N.J., authorizes said.

New York police had him under surveillance for at least a year and were working with a confidential informant; no injury to anyone or damage to property is suspected, Kelly said. In addition, authorities have no evidence that Pimentel was working with anyone else.

"He appears to be a total lone wolf," the mayor said. "He was not part of a larger conspiracy emanating from abroad."

Pimentel, also known as Muhammad Yusuf, was denied bail. The bearded, bespectacled man wore a black T-shirt and black drawstring pants and smiled at times during the proceeding. His mother and brother attended the arraignment, his lawyer said.

Pimentel was accused of having an explosive device Saturday when he was arrested, one he planned to use against others and property to terrorize the public. The charges accuse him of conspiracy going back at least to October 2010, and include first-degree criminal possession of a weapon as a crime of terrorism, and soliciting support for a terrorist act.

Kelly said a confidential informant had numerous conversations with Pimentel on Sept. 7 in which he expressed interest in building small bombs and targeting banks, government and police buildings.

Pimentel also posted on his website trueislam1.com and on blogs his support of al-Qaida and belief in jihad, and promoted an online magazine article that described in detail how to make a bomb, Kelly said.

Among his Internet postings, the commissioner said, was an article that states: "People have to understand that America and its allies are all legitimate targets in warfare."

The New York Police Department's Intelligence Division was involved in the arrest. Kelly said Pimentel spent most of his years in Manhattan and lived about five years in Schenectady. He said police in the Albany area tipped New York City police off to Pimentel's activities.

New York City remains a prime terrorist target a decade after the Sept. 11 attack. Mayor Michael Bloomberg said there have been at least 14 foiled plots against the city, including the latest suspected scheme. The most serious threats came from Pakistani immigrant Faisal Shahzad who tried to detonate a car bomb in Times Square in May 2010 and is now serving a life sentence, and Najibullah Zazi, who targeted the subway system a year earlier. Zazi pleaded guilty to federal terrorism charges and is awaiting sentencing.

Asked why federal authorities were not involved in the case, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. said there was communication with them but his office felt that given the timeline "it was appropriate to proceed under state charges."

In another state terrorism prosecution, two men were arrested in May after they allegedly told an undercover detective about their desire to attack synagogues.

A grand jury declined to indict Ahmed Ferhani and Mohamed Mamdouh on the most serious charge initially brought against them - a high-level terror conspiracy count that carried the potential for life in prison without parole. They were, however, indicted on lesser state terror and hate crime charges, including one punishable by up to 32 years behind bars.

Attorneys for Ferhani said hate crime charges and a rarely used state terrorism law were misapplied to what they have called a case of police entrapment.

Alexis Smith, 22, who lives in an apartment in the same building as Pimentel, said she was shocked that he was a suspect in a terrorist plot. "He was always very courteous to us," she said, adding that Pimentel helped her carry groceries and luggage into the building.

"It's nice to know he was only working alone," she said.

© Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved.

[buglerbilly]

Napolitano Says Lone Wolf Terror Threat Growing

December 03, 2011

Associated Press|by Angela Charlton

PARIS -- U.S. Homeland Security Director Janet Napolitano said Friday that the risk of "lone wolf" attackers, with no ties to known extremist networks or grand conspiracies, is on the rise as the global terrorist threat has shifted.

Such risks, Napolitano said in an interview in Paris, heighten the need to keep dangerous travelers from reaching the United States, and she urged European partners to finalize a deal on sharing passenger data that has met resistance over privacy concerns.

Napolitano acknowledged shifts in the terror threat this year, but said the changes had little to do with the uprisings that have overturned the old order in countries around the Arab world and opened up new opportunities for extremist groups.

Asked about the greatest current threats to the United States, she said one from al-Qaida has morphed. "From a U.S. perspective, over the last several years we have had more attacks emanating from AQAP (al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula) than from core al-Qaida," she told The Associated Press.

"There's been a lot of evolution over the past three years," she said. "The thing that's most noticeable to me is the growth of the lone wolf," the single attacker who lives in the United States or elsewhere who is not part of a larger global conspiracy or network, she said.

She named no examples, but it's a phenomenon that is increasingly the focus of international anti-terror operations.

A former U.S. Army psychiatrist is the sole suspect in deadly shootings at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009. In March, a Kosovo Albanian acting alone fatally shot two American airmen in Frankfurt, Germany. In April, a remote-control bomb exploded in a Marrakech cafe popular with tourists, killing 17 people, mostly foreigners - an attack devised by a Moroccan who was inspired by al-Qaida and tried unsuccessfully for years to join the international terror network before returning to Morocco to devise an attack of his own.

One threat that has remained constant, Napolitano stressed, is that of terrorists reaching U.S. territory. She said the agreement with the EU on sharing data on air passengers for flights from Europe to America is needed to "make sure these global networks and global systems that we all rely on remain safe."

She stressed that such data aided high-profile U.S. terrorist investigations in recent years, including that into Najibullah Zazi, who admitted plotting to bomb New York subways, and David Headley, who was involved in the 2008 Mumbai, India, terrorist attack.

The United States and European Union initialed a new agreement on Nov. 17 after a previous accord from 2007 had to be renegotiated because of changes in EU legislation, and amid criticism that it allowed U.S. authorities too much insight into the private data of EU citizens.

The new deal sets clear limits to what data can be used by U.S. authorities and for how long, and allows passengers to obtain access to their records to correct and delete them.

The accord must still be endorsed by the EU Council - the heads of state, expected to sign off easily later this month - and the European Parliament, where a small group of legislators remains opposed.

The U.S. effort won support Friday from France's interior minister, who acknowledged that Europe gets spillover benefits from the tough U.S. line on terrorism. Claude Gueant said the U.S. made concessions to European concerns about privacy and agreed to share some data with Europe.

"I think this is accord is really a win-win," he told reporters after meeting with Napolitano and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder.

Napolitano and Holder were in Paris for a meeting with counterparts from the so-called G-6 countries: Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Poland and Spain.

Associated Press writer Jamey Keaten contributed to this report.

© Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved.

[buglerbilly]

Suspect in Frankfurt Shootings Described as Quiet, Not Violent

December 05, 2011

Stars and Stripes|by Nancy Montgomery and Mike Abrams

FRANKFURT, Germany -- A former teacher, former employer and former classmates of the Kosovo Albanian charged with killing two U.S. airmen at Frankfurt Airport last March testified Monday at his trial that he was quiet and reserved and not at all violent.

At the start of his trial in August, Arid Uka, 21, confessed to killing Senior Airman Nicholas Alden, 25, and Airman 1st Class Zachary Cuddeback, 21, who was the driver of the bus that was to take a group of airmen to Ramstein en route to a deployment in Afghanistan. Uka is also charged with three counts of attempted murder. Staff Sgt. Kristoffer Schneider and Senior Airman Edgar Veguilla were wounded in the March 2 shooting. When Uka pointed the gun at another airman, Staff Sgt. Trevor Brewer, 23, the gun jammed.

Uka told the court in August that he was influenced by jihadist propaganda on the Internet. He said he wanted to prevent American servicemembers from going to Afghanistan, where he said he believed they would rape Muslim girls.

In testimony Monday, a former teacher of Uka's said Uka had not been especially interested in politics or Iraq in class, and had missed a lot of school.

Margit Kablan, Uka's former employer at the Green Crescent organization, which offers care primarily to Muslim immigrants, where he worked in 2009 and 2010, said Uka had been quiet, dependable and that two patients he had helped liked him.

His friends said he and they spent their time playing video games, especially "Call of Duty," a warfare video game.

One 19-year-old friend said Uka had sent him videos of operations in Iraq that Uka was convinced showed Americans killing civilians. He said Uka was angry about the war in Iraq and what he said the Americans were doing there, but that he did not dislike Americans in general.

A forensic psychiatrist, although present in the courtroom, did not testify as scheduled on Monday. Court officials said he would testify on Dec. 19.

A murder conviction in Germany carries a life sentence. But parole is possible after 15 years, and there is no sentence of "life without parole."

The trial is scheduled to continue intermittently through January.

[buglerbilly]

Aussie 'Cleric' to Face Trial for Troop Hate Mail

December 06, 2011

Agence France-Presse

A self-styled Muslim cleric accused of sending hate mail to the families of Australian soldiers killed in Afghanistan on Tuesday lost a bid to have his case dropped on free speech grounds.

Iranian-born Man Haron Monis, also known as Sheikh Haron, is facing 13 offensive and harassing conduct charges relating to letters he sent to the widows and other bereaved relatives of soldiers killed in Afghanistan.

The letters referred to the fallen troops as criminals, murderers and killers who were fighting a war of invasion, describing one as "1,000 times worse than a pig".

A number were also sent to politicians, including one which described the Black Saturday February 2009 wildfires in Australia as divine vengeance for the execution of militant bombers in Indonesia.

Monis, who claims to be an Islamic spiritual leader, tried to get the charges quashed in the Court of Criminal Appeal, arguing that they infringed his "implied constitutional freedom of political communication".

But a three-judge panel led by Chief Justice Tom Bathurst ruled that his appeal should be dismissed.

"Words which are calculated or would be likely to arouse significant anger, significant resentment, outrage, disgust or hatred in the mind of a reasonable person have the potential to... at the very least cause an emotional reaction in the recipient from which the recipient is entitled to protection," Bathurst said.

"Such a limitation does not impose a significant fetter on political communication that would ordinarily be expected to take place in an ordered democratic society.

"And to the extent that it does limit such communications it is not incompatible with the maintenance of the system of government prescribed by the constitution."

Australia has about 1,500 soldiers in Afghanistan, mentoring local troops in the restive southern province of Uruzgan, with 32 so far killed in the conflict.

The case will now be sent back to the District Court to continue.

© Copyright 2011 Agence France-Presse. All rights reserved.

[buglerbilly]

Insider: $56 Billion Later, Airport Security Is Junk

By Spencer Ackerman December 6, 2011 | 6:30 am



The Department of Homeland Security has spent billions since 9/11 trying to keep dangerous people and dangerous explosives off airplanes, and treating us all air travelers like potential terrorists in the process. But according to a former security adviser to a leading airline, the terrorists have changed the game — and the government hasn’t yet caught on.

According to Ben Brandt, a former adviser to Delta, the airlines and the feds should be less concerned with what gels your aunt puts in her carry-on, and more concerned about lax screening for terrorist sympathizers among the airlines’ own work force. They should be worried about terrorists shipping their bombs in air cargo. And they should be worried about terrorists shooting or bombing airports without ever crossing the security gates.

Brandt says aviation security needs a fundamental overhaul. Not only is the aviation industry failing to keep up with the new terrorist tactics, TSA’s regimen of scanning and groping is causing a public backlash. “From the public’s perspective, this kind of refocusing would reduce the amount of screening they have to put up with in the United States,” Brandt tells Danger Room, “and refocus it where it’s needed.”

In the new issue of the CTC Sentinel, a wonky security newsletter published by West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center, Brandt all but indicts his former industry and its government protectors. “Government regulators suffer from a lack of imagination in anticipating and mitigating emergent and existing threats” to air travel, he writes.

Think first about what aviation security is. Since 9/11, it’s largely been a line of defense ahead of a departure gate to keep dangerous people and dangerous materials off a plane. By Brandt’s calculations, it’s cost $56 billion since 9/11. In one sense, it’s worked as planned: No planes have been blown up or hijacked for a decade.

But the last several years’ worth of plots on the friendly skies indicate the terrorists have switched their game plans. In January, a suicide bomber didn’t try to board a plane at Moscow’s Domodedovo airport. He detonated before going through security, in the crowded entranceway, killing 35 people and wounding over 150 more. Last fall, al-Qaida’s Yemen branch skipped the boarding call and shipped bombs packed in printer cartridges back to the States.

Less conspicuously, terrorists have started to infiltrate the airlines and airports themselves. Rajib Karim, for instance, worked as an IT specialist for British Airways. But inspired by al-Qaida YouTube preacher Anwar al-Awlaki, Karim offered to help al-Qaida sneak bombs aboard planes at London’s Heathrow airport, and claimed to have support from sympathetic airport workers. The airlines and airports barely conduct employee background checks, Brandt claims — and of course, none of those employees need to go through a “porno scanner,” get a pat-down or have their luggage rifled through.

Speaking of those scanners: We all remember how on Christmas Day 2009, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab packed explosives into his underwear and headed on a flight to Detroit. That plot that failed only because of Abdulmutallab’s inability to light himself on fire. That’s how we got the invasive new scanners, which seek to catch the explosives or components that traditional metal detectors miss. But Brandt says they’re not so great: They “detect only two popular explosive compounds,” he writes. (He declines to name them in the interest of public safety; the Department of Homeland Security opted not to comment on Brandt.) Explosives detection equipment “is also not designed to detect the components of improvised incendiary devices (IIDs), making the use of these correspondingly attractive to terrorists.”

TSA is trying to get away from its stigma of being the guys who grope and photograph you. It’s taking the porno out of the scanners by getting rid of the “nude” imaging displays. Its director, John Pistole, talks about becoming an “intelligence driven” agency that compiles behavioral profiles of potential terrorists and — someday — targeting its toughest screening on only those who fit the profile. Kids no longer have to take their shoes off before boarding a plane.

Just one problem, according to Brandt: The behavioral science is no panacea. “The scientific community is divided as to whether behavioral detection of terrorists is viable,” he writes. According to the Government Accountability Office, TSA put together a behavioral profiling program “without first validating the scientific basis for identifying suspicious passengers in an airport environment.” Even if the science was sound, the office found last year, TSA officers “lack a mechanism to input data on suspicious passengers into a database used by TSA analysts and also lack a means to obtain information from the Transportation System Operations Center on a timely basis.”

Pistole talks about creating a “robust and multi-layered system” of defense, in case a certain measure fails. That’s a worthy effort, but it needs even more layers, Brandt argues. Abdulmutallab boarded his flight in Amsterdam — taking advantage of its relatively lax security, a harbinger of threats to come. ”Given that most aviation-focused attacks are likely to originate outside the U.S., it would seem to make more sense to upgrade screening for U.S. airline operations at those airports,” Brandt says.

None of this is going to be easy, or cheap. Brandt proposes that the government subsidize airlines for better employee background checks or explosives detection tech. But that’s could strike taxpayers as a bailout.

On the other hand, he and Pistole actually share the same headspace, so it’s possible that TSA will buy his overall critique. “The best defense is still developing solid intelligence on terrorist groups interested in targeting aviation,” Brandt says. Beats treating us all like terrorists.

Photo: Flickr/Inha Leex Hale

[buglerbilly]

Experts: Al-Qaida Minting Few Militants Online

December 07, 2011

Agence France-Presse

Al-Qaida's online propaganda is minting few militants willing to go out and actually carry out attacks but is a valuable source for intelligence agencies and law enforcement, U.S. experts said Tuesday.

"Thankfully, the vast majority of youth who watch and read al-Qaida propaganda are either unaffected or choose not to act," William McCants, an analyst for the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA), told a congressional panel.

"We don't have reason to believe that large numbers are being swayed by this propaganda, much less going the extra step and taking action," McCants told the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence.

In calling the hearing on "Jihadist Use of Social Media," the subcommittee chairman, Rep. Patrick Meehan, said it would focus on "government and private-sector efforts to minimize jihadi content on mainstream websites."

"We cannot ignore the reality that we've been unable to effectively prevent jihadi videos and messages from being spread on popular social media websites like YouTube and Facebook," Meehan said in his opening statement.

But McCants and two other al-Qaida experts who testified before the House panel said it would be largely counterproductive to try to scrub the Internet of al-Qaida-linked activity.

"The first priority should be monitoring and not taking down content," said McCants, the analyst for the CNA, a federally funded research and development center for the Navy and Marine Corps.

He said U.S. law enforcement has "done a fair job in finding al-Qaida supporters online and arresting them before they hurt anyone."

"Focus more on following the smoke and looking for the fires of criminal activity," McCants said. "And focus less on removing incendiary material."

Brian Jenkins, a senior adviser at the Rand Corporation, said "many would-be jihadists begin their journey on the Internet.

"Of these, a few go beyond the Internet to seek training abroad or to plot terrorist attacks here," Jenkins said. "But overall the response in America to al-Qaida's intense marketing campaign thus far has not amounted to very much.

"Al-Qaida has created a virtual army which has remained virtual," he said.

"That doesn't mean, however, that we ought to be sanguine about the future on this," Jenkins said. "This is something that requires continual monitoring.

"And so rather than devoting vast resources to shutting down content and being dragged into a frustrating game of Whac-a-Mole -- as we shut down sites they open up new ones -- instead, we probably should devote our resources to facilitating intelligence collection and criminal investigations," he said.

Al-Qaida's reliance on the Internet may be working against the group in some ways, according to the experts.

The Internet offers al-Qaida sympathizers "the means of vicariously participating in the jihadist struggle without incurring personal risks," Jenkins said, making it a "kind of psychologically satisfying video game."

Andrew Weisburd, director of the Society for Internet Research, told the panel that YouTube is "perceived as something of a risk because it's where jihadist content can be put in front of a mainstream audience."

"There's always some concern that this content is going to be appealing to some people who otherwise might not be exposed to it," he said.

"How great a risk that is I think is easily overstated," he said. "I'm not particularly alarmed about it."

McCants said it would become more difficult to monitor jihadist activity as participants gravitated from open discussion forums to closed social networking sites such as Facebook.

"It's a lot more difficult to gain access," he said. "I mean you can't just make a friend request and expect it to be answered."

Weisburd said the Sept. 30 death of U.S.-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen in a suspected U.S. airstrike was a big blow to al-Qaida's propaganda machine.

Awlaki, leader of external operations for al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, was "particularly good at taking the core message of what they call global jihad and synthesizing it and speaking directly to his followers.

"Because he worked in English first and foremost, his material was accessible to everybody who doesn't read and write and speak Arabic, which is a much larger potential audience for his message," Weisburd said.

U.S. investigators have alleged that U.S. Army Maj. Nidal Hasan, accused of killing 13 people and wounding 32 at Fort Hood, Texas, in November 2009 had been in contact with Awlaki.

© Copyright 2011 Agence France-Presse. All rights reserved.

[buglerbilly]

Lawmakers Frustrated Military Not Tackling Homegrown Terror

December 07, 2011

Military.com|by Matthew Cox



Lawmakers from both houses of Congress hammered Pentagon officials Wednesday for failing to identify and prevent home-grown Islamist extremists from attacking military communities inside the United States.

For the first time, the Senate and House Homeland Security committees held a joint hearing to "examine the emerging and growing danger to our men and women serving in uniform," New York Republican Congressman Peter King, chairman of House Committee on Homeland Security said.

"We have an obligation to act in response to alarming new evidence concerning a new threat from radicalization, both within the military and as well as against military personnel and their families residing in the United States," King said. "More than five Islamist terror plots have been disrupted involving U.S. Military insiders in the past decade. … The total number of radicalized troops is more than publically realized or acknowledged."

The hearing took place on the 70th anniversary of Japan's attack on the U.S. Naval Base at Pearl Harbor, a tragedy that led the America into World War II. The attack also prompted the United States to place Japanese Americans into prison camps to prevent them from becoming a threat to the national security.

Lawmakers drove home their point again and again by referencing the Nov. 5, 2009 Fort Hood, Texas shooting in which Army Maj. Nidal Hasan killed 13 of his fellow soldiers, and event many call a terrorist attack.

"The U.S. military has become a direct target of violent Islamist extremists here at home," said Sen. Joseph Lieberman, chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs.

In its recruiting efforts, al Qaeda often portrays the members of U.S. military as war criminals, said Army Lt. Col. Reid Sawyer, director of the Combating Terrorism Center at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, describing the growing threat posed by self-radicalized service members.

"Insider threats are not only dangerous because of their access, which is certainly crucial to their attacks, but it is a combination of access and knowledge of their organization that enables these plots to be significantly more dangerous," he told lawmakers.

In addition to the Hassan case, committee members also referenced the case of Army Pvt. William Andrew Long, who was shot and killed in a 2009 terrorist attack on a military recruiting center in Little Rock, Arkansas. Long's killer, Carlos Leon Bledsoe, or Abdulhakim Muhammad, is serving life in prison after pleading guilty. According to Bledsoe's father, who testified at a House Homeland Security Committee hearing in March, Carlos Bledsoe grew up a Baptist in Memphis, converted to Islam, and became radicalized in Nashville. He travelled to Yemen in 2007 where he was arrested by Yemeni authorities in 2008. Following his deportation from Yemen in 2009, he attacked the Little Rock recruiting center, killing Long and wounding Pvt. Quinton Ezeagwula.

Defense officials testifying at the hearing assured lawmakers that since the shooting, the military has taken steps to ensure personnel can identify behavior that could indicate whether a fellow service member might be becoming radicalized. But officials were very careful to avoid linking behaviors to Islam.

"We are not at war with Islam. We are at war with al Qaeda," said Paul Stockton, assistant secretary of defense for Homeland Defense and Americas' Security Affairs, Office of Undersecretary of Defense for Policy.

But many lawmakers appeared frustrated that the military is being too "politically correct" when identifying these extremists.

One exchange between Stockton and California Republican Congressman Daniel Lungren underscored that frustration.

"Secretary Stockton, are we at war with violent Islamist extremists?" Lungren asked.

Stockton answered "No sir. We are at war with al Qaeda."

Lungren countered with "Ok my question is is al Qaeda -- can it be described as an exponent of violent Islamist extremism? … How does al Qaeda define itself? Are they dedicated to violent Islamist extremism?"

"I'll make it as clear as I can; we are not at war with Islam," Stockdale said. "Al Qaeda would love to convince Muslims around the world that America is at war with Islam, that is a prime propaganda tool, and I am not going to aid and abet that effort to advance their propaganda goal. … Sir with great respect, I don't believe it is helpful to frame our adversary as Islamic with any set of qualifiers."

But not all lawmakers at the hearing were eager to paint Islam as the enemy.

"Focusing on the followers of one religion as the only credible threat to the nation's security is inaccurate, narrow and blocks consideration of emerging threats," said Mississippi Democratic Congressman Ben Thompson, describing how America owes its military personnel a clear understanding of "their mission and a clear definition of their enemy."

"That enemy is not a religion and their mission is not to defeat an ideology. And while some of my colleagues appear to have difficulty grasping this, I am glad that our military people understand it."

© Copyright 2011 Military.com. All rights reserved.

[buglerbilly]

Government to Overhaul Anti-Terror Training By Spring

By Spencer Ackerman Email Author December 8, 2011 | 3:27 pm



By the spring, the entire federal government will have new standards for counterterrorism training, the result of a White House push to scrap instructions that called mainstream Muslims violent and likened Islam to the Death Star.

A White House plan for counteracting homegrown terrorism released on Thursday said the new training will purge “offensive and inaccurate information” and disseminate new standards for training down to local law enforcement and even community groups.

The White House has tasked the Department of Homeland Security to provide a curriculum for what it calls “Countering Violent Extremism,” or CVE, “to be integrated into existing training programs for Federal law enforcement.” By the spring, Homeland Security will create an “online portal” to unite “government officials and law enforcement with communities targeted by violent extremist radicalization, which will be used to share relevant information.”

Obama administration officials told reporters on background that local leaders are more likely to know before the feds about attempts at radicalization in their communities — hence both the new training and the web portal.

Danger Room reported last week that the White House ordered a government-wide scrub of counterterrorism training materials that broadly portrayed Islam and Muslims as little different from al-Qaida. An FBI intelligence official, William Gawthrop, taught that al-Qaida was “irrelevant” compared to the threat from Islam itself, and instructed at Quantico that mainstream Muslims are “violent.” Similar material emerged at the Justice Department and at military education centers. Various counterterrorism experts have said such training jeopardizes the U.S. ability to defeat al-Qaida, as did Attorney General Eric Holder.

Whether Muslim communities trust the government enough to participate in that “community of interest” is an open question. For years, the FBI has secretly surveilled mosques and mapped the non-criminal activity of Muslim communities, all while giving lip service to seeking Muslim cooperation on counterterrorism. The exposure of the anti-Islam training materials left some community leaders who had worked with the FBI feeling betrayed. That’s not a good sign for a White House anti-radicalization strategy that can’t succeed without community support.

Photo: Georgia National Guard

[buglerbilly]

Man Pleads Guilty in Terror Plot Against Recruiting Station

December 09, 2011

Associated Press|by Gene Johnson

SEATTLE -- A mentally ill petty thief pleaded guilty Thursday to federal charges that he joined another man in planning to attack a Seattle military recruiting station with machine guns and grenades -- a plot inspired by the 2009 massacre at Fort Hood, authorities say.

"Why don't we all just go into there with guns blazing and just lay everybody down," Walli Mujahidh said in one conversation recorded by investigators. "Whoever gets laid down, gets laid down."

The Los Angeles man faces 27 to 32 years after pleading guilty to three charges: conspiracy to kill officers of the United States, conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction and unlawful possession of a firearm.

"The FBI is pleased that Mr. Mujahidh accepted responsibility for his actions, but this case remains a chilling reminder that there is constant work to be done," said Laura M. Laughlin, special agent in charge of the agency's Seattle office.

Mujahidh, 33, has a long history of "chronic, relentless" mental illness, including 12 stays at psychiatric hospitals, said his attorney, Michele Shaw. He has been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder with bipolar tendencies, she said.

"Walli is very ashamed of his behavior and has wanted to accept responsibility for his participation," Shaw said. "He had a fundamental misunderstanding of Islam."

Mujahidh was arrested in June after taking a bus from L.A. to Seattle to participate in the attack. He and his co-defendant, Khalid Abdul-Latif of Seattle, were busted in an FBI sting when they arrived at a warehouse garage to pick up machine guns to use in the attack, authorities said.

The man who was to supply them with the weapons had alerted Seattle police about the plot, and continued acting as a confidential police informant.

Authorities say the defendants were influenced in part by the massacre at Fort Hood, Texas, and the recent prosecutions of Washington state-based Soldiers for the deaths of three Afghan civilians. They planned the attack for weeks and fantasized about the media attention they'd receive, according to a federal complaint.

The alleged target, the Military Entrance Processing Station in Seattle, was a recruiting station for all military branches. The pair initially planned an attack on Joint Base Lewis-McChord, but later shifted to what they considered an easier target, the complaint said.

Mujahidh confessed shortly after his arrest.

Abdul-Latif is also known as Joseph Anthony Davis, and Walli Mujahidh is also known as Frederick Domingue Jr.

Prosecutors did not divulge how the suspects became acquainted, though Mujahidh formerly lived in Seattle. Mujahidh had multiple convictions of theft in Riverside County, Calif.

Abdul-Latif, 33, has a criminal record and a troubled family past, but allegations that he plotted a terrorist attack surprised those who knew him. He appears to have posted several videos on YouTube expressing sympathy for al-Qaida's leader in Yemen and excitement about a radical interpretation of Islam.

Abdul-Latif was scheduled to face trial next May. Mujahidh is due for sentencing in April.

© Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved.

[buglerbilly]

'We were lambs to the slaughter'

Eamonn Duff

December 11, 2011.

INVESTIGATION


Frontline ... officers at the scene of the shootout. Photo: Nick Moir

MOMENTS before a Sydney police officer was shot by a terrorism suspect, he and three colleagues were assured there was ''no information'' to suggest their target might be armed. That advice came from the then head of the Counter Terrorism Co-ordination Command, Mark Jenkins.

A series of leaked classified police documents reveal how wrong he was. The Sun-Herald has obtained the buried police files which - six years after the bungled counter-terrorism raid - reveal how Detective Chief Superintendent Jenkins ''placed the lives of the four officers in jeopardy''. According to a Critical Incident Investigation, he knew that the suspect, Omar Baladjam, was violent, often armed and part of an interstate terrorist cell, which had been stockpiling bomb-making chemicals.

On the morning of November 8, 2005, authorities had raided 16 suspects across NSW and Victoria. Baladjam was the last remaining target in Australia's largest ever counter-terrorism operation.


Omar Baladjam, since convicted of a terrorist plot.

More than 400 special operations officers were in the area that day, but Mr Jenkins diverted four community police from Green Valley police station - two male sergeants and two female senior constables - to arrest Baladjam. He did not tell them who the target was, nor why he was wanted. ''We were like lambs to the slaughter,'' one of the officers would say later. Sergeant Adam Wolsey and his crew approached Baladjam in Wilson Road, Green Valley. Baladjam pulled out a pistol and started shooting, hitting Sergeant Wolsey in the hand. Baladjam was shot in return fire.

An internal investigation recommended ''managerial action'' be considered against Mr Jenkins. He has since been awarded the Australian Police Medal and promoted to assistant commissioner. All four police, meanwhile, have left the force medically unfit, with varying degrees of psychological trauma.

''We were thrown blind into a critical situation,'' Adam Wolsey told The Sun-Herald. Breaking down during his first public remarks about the ordeal, he said: ''It destroyed my career, my spirit, my life. I'm sorry but, even today, I cannot bring myself to revisit it.''

The internal investigation concluded Mr Jenkins ''failed in his duty of care'' to the crew from Green Valley by ''not adequately warning them of the dangers'' or ''information he was privy to''.

Mr Jenkins has declined to talk to The Sun-Herald. In a 2006 interview, recorded as part of the investigation into his conduct, he acknowledged he was aware of a number of warnings relating to Baladjam at the time he briefed the crew. He added that, with the benefit of hindsight, he ''wished'' he had provided more information.

Mr Jenkins made a name for himself in the force with his tireless investigative work that led to the conviction of Phuong Ngo for ordering the assassination of his political rival in the Labor Party, the Cabramatta MP John Newman, in 1994.

Mr Jenkins received further praise while running the Australian Crime Commission's firearms trafficking unit and by 2005 was being touted as a possible successor to police commissioner Ken Moroney. But that year Mr Jenkins was head of the counter-terrorism command and suddenly found himself at the centre of the critical incident investigation.

After completing the report in May 2006, the homicide Detective Inspector Hans Rupp concluded that Mr Jenkins be considered for ''managerial action'' for ''not adequately warning'' the officers about a job ''he knew was inherently dangerous''. Under police guidelines, such action can vary from a reprimand to loss of rank or transfer. Inspector Rupp's finding was backed by the then assistant commissioner and now deputy commissioner David Owens.

The finalised report was forwarded to the former head of the Professional Standards Command, Catherine Burn, now Deputy Commissioner. Asked what action she took, NSW Police responded yesterday with the following statement authorised by Ms Burn: ''Managerial counselling was conducted in regard to communications issues that arose out of this incident. There was a critical incident investigation, the matter was the subject of a complaint process and management action was ultimately undertaken by way of counselling.''

Mr Jenkins left his counter-terrorism post in 2006, became Local Area Commander at Blacktown and was awarded the Australian Police Medal in the 2007 Australia Day Honours for distinguished service. He is now an assistant commissioner.

In 2008, Baladjam pleaded guilty to four terrorism charges: acquiring ammunition in preparation for a terrorist act; acquiring chemicals in preparation for a terrorist act; possessing documents, images and videos connected with preparation of a terrorist act; and possessing guns, chemicals and phones connected with the preparation for a terrorist act. He was sentenced to 18 years and eight months' jail. With non-parole, he will be eligible for parole in late 2019.

But Baladjam will have another day in court on Friday this week when the shooting of Sergeant Wolsey reaches its legal conclusion. Finally Baladjam will be sentenced for that crime.

He had been charged with two counts of shooting with intent to murder, carrying a maximum life sentence; and two counts of shooting with intent to inflict grievous bodily harm. But in September - to the widespread anger of police - Judge Leonie Flannery found there was ''a reasonable possibility'' Baladjam did not deliberately shoot at the officer. She instead found him guilty of lesser firearms offences.

In her judgment, she accepted the accused's evidence that he was in a ''pretty frantic and paranoid state'' and was not aware of the presence of the officer he shot on the roadway, as his attention was focused on the louder of the two officers, and that ''he fired a warning shot in panic'' before Baladjam himself was struck in the neck by a police bullet.

The gunfight became one of the final scenes in Operation Pandennis, the joint hunt for terrorists involving ASIO, Australian Federal Police, and the NSW and Victorian police forces.

Regardless of Friday's result, Adam Wolsey and his three colleagues are still serving their sentence.

eduff@sunherald.com.au

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/we-were-lambs-to-the-slaughter-20111210-1ooon.html#ixzz1g8o1mpu4

[buglerbilly]

Canadian Accused of Conspiring in US Terror Case

December 10, 2011

Associated Press by Tom Hays

NEW YORK -- A man in custody in Canada was indicted on Friday on U.S. charges that he helped coordinate Tunisian jihadists believed responsible for separate suicide attacks in Iraq in 2009 that killed five American soldiers outside a U.S. base and seven people at an Iraqi police complex.

Faruq Khalil Muhammad `Isa, a 38-year-old Canadian citizen and Iraqi national, was arrested in January on a U.S. warrant after an investigation by authorities in New York, Canada and Tunisia. Muhammad `Isa is being held in Edmonton, Alberta, where he's fighting extradition to federal court in Brooklyn to face charges of conspiring to kill Americans and providing material support to terrorists.

Muhammad `Isa never left Canada as part of the alleged conspiracy, and his attorney said Friday that the United States has no jurisdiction.

"All the evidence was gathered here," said the Edmonton lawyer, Bob Aloneissi, said in a phone interview. "There's just no tie. ... This should be done for a legal reason and not a political reason."

An extradition request made public Friday offered fresh details on wiretap evidence and an interview of Muhammad `Isa that U.S. authorities claim link him to the terror network. Authorities say the group used a suicide bomber to detonate an explosives-laden truck outside the gate of the U.S. base in Mosul, Iraq, on April 10, 2009, killing the five soldiers, and it also staged a suicide bombing on the Iraqi police station on March 31, 2009.

The evidence shows that "the goal of the attacks was to compel the United States government to remove its armed forces from Iraq," the extradition request says.

A U.S. Department of Justice investigator interviewed Muhammad `Isa on Jan. 19 with an FBI agent and a Royal Canadian Mounted Police corporal present, the request says. The interview "was conducted in compliance with United States law," with Muhammad `Isa signing a waiver before voluntarily answering questions, it says.

During the interview, Muhammad `Isa admitted he corresponded by email from Canada with two of the terrorists while they were in Syria, and knew that they were on a mission to kill Americans, the paperwork says. The documents allege he corresponded with "facilitators" who were trying to get the attackers into Iraq, and wired one of them $700.

On wiretaps, Muhammad `Isa was overheard last year discussing with someone in Iraq how he used code words when discussing the Iraq operation, the papers say.

"For example, when I want to name the brothers, I say the farmers - because they plant metal and harvest metal and flesh," the papers quote him as saying. He also explained that he used the term "married" to mean "in the afterlife."

U.S. authorities alleged that the day after the attack that killed the five soldiers, Muhammad `Isa asked in an electronic communication, "Did you hear about the huge incident yesterday? Is it known?" He also identified the bomber as "one of the Tunisian brothers," to which a facilitator responded, "Praise God."

Muhammad `Isa told investigators in the interview that by "huge incident" he meant an explosion, the papers say.

The papers add: "When asked if he believed that it was a religious duty for Muslims to travel to Iraq and fight Americans, (Muhammad `Isa) stated that he believed it was the duty for every Muslim who lived in Iraq to fight American `invaders.'"

The indictment comes at a time when Congress, over Obama administration objections, is pushing policies to ramp up the military's role in the handling of captured terrorism suspects. A House-passed bill would require military tribunals to try suspected terrorists. A Senate-passed bill would mandate military custody for those captured, even in the United States, and linked to al-Qaida or its affiliates.

Members of the House and Senate are negotiating a final version of the bill that could include those provisions. They hope to complete their work by early next week.

If convicted in a civilian court, Muhammad `Isa faces life in prison.

---

Associated Press Writer Donna Cassata contributed to this report.

© Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved.

[buglerbilly]

Obama Seeking Flexibility on Terror Suspects

December 09, 2011

Associated Press|by Donna Cassata



WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama has personally appealed to lawmakers for changes in a sweeping defense bill that would mandate military custody for some captured terrorism suspects, saying he needs greater flexibility to prosecute the war on terror, administration and congressional officials said Friday.

The president has led a full-court press this week by his senior national security team, including Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and FBI Director Robert Mueller, in asking for revisions to the bill as House and Senate negotiators move swiftly to complete a final version. The White House has threatened a veto of the legislation over provisions requiring military custody for captured terrorism suspects as well as other restrictions on executive authority.

Obama spoke to Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich. Clinton and Panetta also spoke to Levin, and Mueller has met with Republican Sens. John McCain of Arizona, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private conservations.

The escalating fight between the White House and Congress reflects the politically charged dispute over whether to treat suspected terrorists as prisoners of war or criminals.

The administration insists that the military, law enforcement and intelligence agents need flexibility in prosecuting the war on terror. Obama has pointed to his administration's successes in eliminating Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida figure Anwar al-Awlaki. Republicans counter that their efforts are necessary to respond to an evolving, post-Sept. 11 threat, and that Obama has failed to produce a consistent policy on handling terror suspects.

The Senate bill would require that the military take custody of a suspect deemed to be a member of al-Qaida or its affiliates and involved in plotting or committing attacks on the United States, with an exemption for U.S. citizens. The bill does allow the executive branch to waive the military's authority based on national security and hold a suspect in civilian custody, but the administration argues that is insufficient.

"We want to work with the Senate to ensure our counterterrorism professionals have the tools and flexibility they need to keep America safe," National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor said Friday.

As negotiators have raced to finish the bill, administration officials have offered various changes to the provisions but have had little success in persuading lawmakers. One potential change was to limit the cases in which the military custody provision would apply.

The legislation also would deny suspected terrorists, even U.S. citizens seized within the nation's borders, the right to trial and subject them to indefinite detention.

The administration also is seeking changes to potential sanctions on Iran, penalties that the Senate passed on a 100-0 vote last week.

The bill would go after foreign financial institutions that do business with Iran's central bank by barring them from opening or maintaining correspondent operations in the United States. It would apply to foreign central banks only for transactions that involve the sale or purchase of petroleum or petroleum products.

The petroleum penalties would only apply if the president, in six months, determines there is a sufficient alternative supply and if the country with jurisdiction over the financial institution has not significantly reduced its purchases of Iranian oil. It also allows the president to waive the penalties based on national security.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, in a Dec. 1 letter to senators, said the administration opposed the measure in its current form because it would undermine its effort to bring international pressure on Iran. He also warned that the penalties could actually boost oil prices and benefit Iran financially.

"Iran's greatest economic resource is its oil exports," Geithner wrote. "Sales of crude oil line the regime's pockets, sustain its human rights abuses and feed its nuclear ambitions like no other sector of the Iranian economy."

The administration is seeking both substantive and technical changes, including delaying implementation of all the penalties for six months.

Overall, the Senate bill would authorize money for military personnel, weapons systems, national security programs in the Energy Department, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the fiscal year that began Oct. 1. Reflecting a period of austerity and a winding down of decade-old conflicts, the bill is $27 billion less than President Barack Obama requested and $43 billion less than Congress gave the Pentagon this year.

© Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved.

[buglerbilly]

Israeli military base attacked by Jewish extremists in West Bank

Attack came hours after settlers stormed monument as some say 'homegrown terrorism' is now greatest threat to security

Phoebe Greenwood in Jerusalem

guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 13 December 2011 17.56 GMT

A gang of 50 Jewish settlers and rightwing activists have broken into an army base near the Israeli settlement of Kedumim in the West bank, setting fire to tyres and hurling rocks at both Israeli soldiers and Palestinians.

One settler forced open the door of a jeep carrying the Efraim Regional Brigade's commander, who was hit in the head with a rock and suffered minor injuries. Soldiers managed to force the group back outside the base after several minutes but by the time Israeli police arrived at the scene, most of the attackers had fled. Only two were arrested.

The attack is the latest in a wave of violent retributions exacted by extremist Jewish settler groups against Palestinians and the Israeli Defence Forces in response to government policy to evacuate illegal outposts in the West Bank. A spokesperson for the Israeli military said it was the most serious assault on its forces by Jewish activists to date.

Israel's defence minister, Ehud Barak, described the incident as "homegrown terror", which he warned would not be tolerated. "We will capture those responsible and they will stand trial," he vowed. "They endangered lives and their actions threaten to damage the delicate relations Israel has with its neighbours."

Hours after the attack, prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu called an emergency meeting to address the mounting threat posed by extremists. "The situation is intolerable," he told assembled ministers. "We must take care of these rioters with a firm hand. We will not tolerate a situation in which IDF officers and soldiers are attacked and distracted from protecting Israeli citizens."

The attack at Efraim took place just hours after 17 members of an extreme settler movement, the Hill Top Youth, stormed a religious monument on the border with Jordan. The group cut through a barbed-wire fence surrounding marking a closed military zone and seized the Qasr al-Yahud church, thought to be the site of Jesus's baptism by Saint John. Two minors were released and 15 other activists were detained for questioning by Israeli police.

They were protesting against Jordanian involvement in the ongoing debate over the Mughrabi Bridge, which leads from the Western Wall to the Temple Mount but was deemed unsafe and closed by the Jerusalem municipality this week.

Jordan has warned Israel that it should not make any changes to the bridge without first consulting Palestinian authorities. The settlers were warning Jordan not to involve themselves in matters concerning the Temple Mount.

While the rabbinate in Jerusalem has not yet commented on Tuesday's attacks, several senior rabbis warn they are indicative of a rise in religious extremism that threatens to destroy the Zionisit movement in Israel. In a similar attack in September, extremists broke into an Israeli army base near Nablus and cut the cables of 12 army vehicles.

Mosheh Lichtenstein, a prominent Israeli rabbi, claims this surge in violence can be understood as an expression of mounting frustration with a government decisions to withdraw from sections of Judea and Samaria but is both immoral and counter-productive.

"We believe we have a right to be here but that right must be won through moral means," Lichtenstein said. "I am very concerned by this violence, which runs against Jewish ethics."

Yaakov Peri, formerly head of the Israeli intelligence agency Shin Bet, says that moral judgments aside, unless dramatic actions is taken by the the government, army and intelligence to address this trend, extreme settler groups may drive Israel towards religious conflict. For this reason, he claims Jewish extremists now pose a greater threat to Israeli security than terrorism.

"An active terrorist is relatively easy for intelligence forces to find and stop. But when you are burning a mosque or cutting down olive trees, using weapons bought from any grocery store, it makes the job of the intelligence services much more complicated", he said. "[This violence] is becoming so extreme and so dangerous I am afraid it will become a religious war."

[buglerbilly]

Father of al-Qaida’s YouTube Preacher: I’m Not Violent

By Spencer Ackerman Email Author December 14, 2011 | 6:30 am

Good on you Civil Liberties Union, make sure the "oppressed" can continue their oppression we, the west, must be at fault cos, well, we are the West! Ah jus' lurv apologists..................:cuckoo

Nassar al-Awlaki may have made an online video encouraging people to follow in the footsteps of his dead son Anwar, al-Qaida’s infamous online propagandist. But he wants Danger Room to know that he’s not similarly calling for the deaths of Americans. He just thinks his son’s message was all about peace and harmony.

Danger Room “recently misunderstood me to be endorsing violence,” al-Awlaki wrote to us through his lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union, “but that was not what I intended, nor is that what I have ever endorsed.”

Last week, Danger Room came across the elder al-Awlaki’s six-minute online video, titled “A Message From Dr. Nassar al-Awlaki To The Muslims Of The U.K.” Awlaki praised his son Anwar, whom the United States recently killed in a Yemen missile strike, as following the “path of Allah.” He urged viewers, “It is the job of all of us to spread his knowledge and keep it alive.”

But Nassar insists he wasn’t talking about the part of his son’s “simple and straightforward message” that advocated murdering Americans — about which he doesn’t have much to say.

“For years, my son gave lectures on Islam and how Muslims in the West can abide by their faith and live in accordance with the laws of Western societies,” Nassar al-Awlaki says in his statement, which was also released to CNN. “He also criticized U.S. foreign policy and called for justice for victims of unlawful wars and other abuses. These aspects of his sermons were important and true.”

Full disclosure: The ACLU both represents Nassar al-Awlaki — last year, they unsuccessfully sued to compel the government to state why it could legally kill Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen — and employs my wife. My wife did not work on the al-Awlaki lawsuit.

Nassar al-Awlaki, who now lives in Yemen, elides saying whether the portions of his son’s sermons that called for killing Americans were “important and true.” On YouTube videos, Anwar al-Awlaki urged, “Do not consult anyone in killing the Americans. Fighting Satan does not require a jurisprudence. It does not require consulting. It does not need a prayer for the cause. They are the party of Satan, and fighting them is a matter of time.”

Anwar al-Awlaki was in communication with Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan — later blogging that Nasan was a “hero” for killing Americans — and would-be Christmas bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. Those were hardly examples of “how Muslims in the West can abide by their faith and live in accordance with the laws of Western societies.”

U.S. officials claimed that Anwar al-Awlaki maintained an operational role in al-Qaida, justifying his killing, but have never offered evidence backing it up.

The most recent issue of Inspire, al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula’s English-language magazine, quotes Anwar al-Awlaki saying it’s obligatory for Muslims to kill anyone who “insult[s]” the Prophet Mohammed. “We will fight for him, we will instigate, we will bomb and we will assassinate,” the younger al-Awlaki said. (.PDF)

It’s good that Nassar al-Awlaki says he never “intended” to promote violence. But as long as he portrays his son’s message as a peaceful one, or one voicing mere “criticism” of U.S. foreign policy, then he’s hardly denouncing violence, either. Anwar al-Awlaki did not merely seek “justice” for innocent victims of war. He encouraged people to cause more innocent victims.

Even the propagandists of terror have fathers. No doubt Nassar al-Awlaki is grieving for both his son and his 16-year old grandson, who was also killed in a missile attack. And we’ve been skeptical about whether killing Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen, was legal. But that doesn’t mean anyone should whitewash Anwar al-Awlaki’s preachings — especially in a web video calling for his death not to “go in vain.”

[buglerbilly]

DOD Takes Southern Border Support to Air

(Source: U.S Department of Defense; issued December 20, 2011)

WASHINGTON --- Defense Department and National Guard support to southwest U.S. border security will change in the next few months from a ground effort to primarily air, Defense and Homeland Security officials said today.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection is the lead federal agency charged with defending the southwest U.S border with Mexico, but the Defense Department, specifically the National Guard, works closely in support of the effort, and has since 2010.

But the mission has changed, said Paul Stockton, assistant secretary of defense for homeland defense and Americas’ security affairs. Customs, he said, has beefed up its manpower and technical abilities and no longer needs the numbers of National Guard personnel on the ground.

“CBP has changed the kind of support that it is asking the Department of Defense to provide,” he said, “and DOD is transitioning to much more effective support … that not only matches up to what CBP needs, but provides more flexibility against an adaptive adversary.”

The border is better protected because of the cooperative relationship between defense and homeland security, said David Aguilar, the Customs and Border Protection agency’s deputy commissioner.

“Over the last year, we had over 1,200 National Guard representatives on the line with us,” Aguilar said. Under the new system, he said, fewer than 300 Guardsmen are needed.

The Guardsmen worked with border police to man entry identification teams. These are fixed positions and were what was required at the time. But times change, and now the Border Patrol requires aerial platforms to provide intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and mobility ability.

This mission will begin around the first of the year and completely transition by March, Aguilar said.

“There will be a ramp down of the static [entry identification teams] and the boots on the ground related to those [teams], but a ramp-up on the aerial support and platforms,” he said.

Border Patrol Chief Michael Fisher said the patrol has grown to 21,450 officers. The aviation assets will focus at first on detection and monitoring capabilities, he said. Guardsmen will fly specially equipped OH-58 and UH-72 helicopters with a detection radius of 6 and 12 nautical miles, respectively. In addition, Guardsmen will fly RC-26 fixed-wing aircraft with detection and monitoring capability of 12 nautical miles.

Such capability will enable the Border Patrol to work in more challenging terrain and give the patrol a faster reaction time to prevent illegal activities. These airborne assets will be able to look way over the horizon of a person on the ground and be able to flow personnel into an area.

Defense officials will continue to work with Customs and Border Protection officials to figure the mix of aircraft and capabilities and where the aircraft and ground stations will be.

The new National Guard mission will end Dec. 31, 2012, officials said.

-ends-

[buglerbilly]

Appeals Court Upholds Convictions in Fort Dix Plot

December 28, 2011

Associated Press|by Geoff Mulvihill

TRENTON, N.J. - A federal appeals panel on Wednesday upheld the convictions and sentences of five Muslim men accused of planning to attack Fort Dix or other military bases, though it threw out a charge against one defendant.

The main issue was prosecutors' use of wiretaps obtained under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a part of the Patriot Act aimed largely at gathering foreign intelligence.

The recordings were a major piece of a 2 1/2-month trial for the five men, all Muslim immigrants who grew up in the New Jersey suburbs of Philadelphia.

The men - Mohamad Shnewer, Serdar Tatar, and brothers Dritan, Eljvir and Shain Duka - were arrested in May 2007. In 2008, a federal jury in Camden, N.J., convicted them of conspiring to kill U.S. military personnel at Fort Dix. All but Tatar are serving life terms.

Defense lawyers said it was unconstitutional to use the recordings in a domestic criminal case and that it may have been impossible to convict the men without the evidence.

But in a unanimous ruling written by Judge Marjorie O. Rendell, a three-judge panel of the Philadelphia-based 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed. The challenged search "was conducted in objectively reasonable reliance on a duly authorized statute," and therefore admissible at trial, Rendell wrote.

Another major issue came from an error that federal prosecutors acknowledged in January: Three of the men were convicted of attempted possession of firearms in furtherance of a crime, but the law in question does not have a provision that outlaws attempted possession.

In the case of that count against Dritan and Shain Duka, the judges said defense lawyers should have raised it before the trial judge. Since they didn't, the judges said, it should not be overturned. The judges also said that there was evidence at trial that the two actually possessed weapons.

But the case of Shnewer was different. The court ruled that there was no evidence he possessed the weapons. As a result, his weapons conviction was dismissed, along with the 30-year prison term that went with it.

He is still serving a life term.

Richard Sparaco, a lawyer for Tatar, said Wednesday that he would consult with his client but expected he would file an appeal. Rocco Cipparone, who represents Shnewer, said he would likely pursue an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court on the parts of the conviction that were upheld.

© Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved.

[buglerbilly]

Ares

A Defense Technology Blog

The Costs of Border Surveillance

Posted by Paul McLeary at 12/29/2011 12:43 PM CST


Lousiania National Guard and a New Orleans police office fly over the city in a brand-new Lakota helicopter

It’s all a numbers game in the Department of Defense these days. And with budgets about to lose a significant number of zeros, the DoD is looking for cost savings anywhere it can.

Take a look at this new partnership between the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the DoD. The Pentagon is pulling its 1,200 National Guard troops off the southwest border, while deploying more aerial assets to make up for the lost boots on the ground. According to Army officials, this will reduce the cost of the Guard’s border operations from $1.2 billion a year to (at most) $60 million.

The 1,200 Guardsmen — who will be pulled off the border by March — mostly staffed static inspection points out in the southwest desert, and were able to radio in reports of suspicious movement to local law enforcement or Border Patrol agents.

Instead, the DoD now says that it is assigning an unspecified number of specially equipped OH-58A Kiowa and brand-new UH-72 Lakota helicopters, along with RC-26B fixed-wing aircraft, to monitor the border. The Guard already has 144 Kiowas dedicated to the counterdrug mission across the country, and of these, 116 are “fully outfitted and specially equipped” for the mission, according to the 2011 Army Posture Statement. The Guard also flies 11 RC-26B’s, although it is not known how many will be dedicated to this border mission.

Lt. Col. Kerry Dull, chief of the Army National Guard Counterdrug Aviation Program, told me this week that while the Guard is still considering which assets it will employ, the Kiowa and Lakota (which is replacing the Kiowa) come with modified Electro-Optical/Infra-Red (EO/IR) systems and law enforcement-compatible radios. The Lakota, Dull said, “exceeds everything that the Kiowa was capable of doing. It has a better EO/IR system on it, it has a better radio package on it, and it has Full Motion Video capability,” so it can pass video to ground units in real time.

The Lakotas are also outfitted with a Mission Equipment Package that its maker, Eurocopter, describes as “a centerline electro-optical infrared sensor, a 30-million candlepower searchlight, analog/digital video downlink, rear observers’ console with a 15-inch display, an enhanced tactical communications suite, an onboard digital video recorder, 10.4-inch auxiliary displays for the pilot and co-pilot, and a video management system.” Not bad, huh?

The fixed-wing RC-26B also comes outfitted with FLIR’s Star SAFIRE HD system along with the capability to transmit full-motion video, a mission operations system and a moving map.

Not only are these packages going to provide more surveillance over a larger area, but they come with those huge cost savings, as well.

Consider that $60 million for the entire 2012 calendar year as compared to the price tag DHS pays for flying nine $20 million Predator B remotely piloted aircraft along border areas.

In June, the DHS Predator flights reached a milestone of 10,000 hours, and DHS recently reported that the Preds have assisted in the capture of 4,865 undocumented immigrants and 238 drug smugglers since they went wheels up in 2005. But let’s put that in perspective. Given that 327,577 illegal border crossers were nabbed along the southwest border in fiscal 2011 alone, that 4,846 over the past six years doesn’t look all that significant.

But more importantly, there’s the price tag for these operations. It costs the DHS $3,600 an hour to fly a Predator, according to a recent piece by The Washington Post’s William Booth, which adds up to about $7,054 for each person caught. On top of that number, the U.S. government has also spent $240 million to maintain those Predators. The cost per apprehension looks even worse if you peek at a recent Government Accountability Office report that outlines a program called “Big Miguel” run by U.S. Northern Command's Joint Task Force North, headquartered at Fort Bliss, Texas. The task force leased a Cessna aircraft outfitted with an infrared sensor for $1.2 million a year, and the piloted aircraft was then able to assist in the capture of as many as 8,000 people flowing across the border while assisting in the seizure of $54 million in marijuana during that one year alone. The takeaway? Big Miguel identified illegal movements across the border at a cost of about $230 a head.

This isn’t to throw the DHS Predator program under the bus, but given the success of Big Miguel, and the Guard’s deployment of cost-effective manned rotary- and fixed-wing assets to the border, and one wonders if the newest and the most tricked-out drones really have to be the answer to every surveillance question. Money talks, and given the budgets about to be handed down by Washington, you can bet that this newest Guard mission — and the Predator mission — are going to be put under the microscope.

[buglerbilly]

US Customs and Border Protection Agency Plans 24 Predators by 2016

Posted on December 29, 2011 by The Editor



Federal law enforcement authorities are rapidly expanding a military-style unmanned aerial reconnaissance operation along the US-Mexico border.

Fans of the Predators say the $20 million aircraft are a perfect platform to keep a watchful eye on America’s rugged borders, but critics say the drones are expensive, invasive and finicky toys that have done little — compared with what Border Patrol agents do on the ground — to stem the flow of illegal immigrants, drug smugglers or terrorists.

Eight Predators fly for the Customs and Border Protection agency — five, and soon to be six, along the southwestern border. After a slow rollout that began in 2005, drones now patrol most of the southern boundary, from Yuma, Arizona, to Brownsville, Texas.

For supporters, Predators are the new, sexy, futuristic fix for immigration control. They are irresistible to border hawks and the “Drone Caucus” in Congress, who consider the aircraft a must-have technology to meet the threat of spillover violence — yet unrealized — from Mexican drug cartels.

Rep. Brian Bilbray (R-Calif.) has said that the drones are so popular that a Predator could be elected president. Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Tex.) pronounced domestic drones “invaluable.” Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) called them “ideal for border security and counter-drug missions.” Texas Gov. Rick Perry, a GOP presidential contender, argues that the solution to security along the frontier is not a border fence but more Predators.

In his trips to testify on Capitol Hill, Michael Kostelnik, the retired Air Force general and former test pilot who runs the Office of Air and Marine for the CBP, said he has never been challenged in Congress about the appropriate use of domestic drones. “Instead, the question is: Why can’t we have more of them in my district?” Kostelnik said.

Planning documents for the CBP envision as many as 24 Predators and their maritime variants in the air by 2016, giving the agency the ability to deploy a drone anywhere over the continental United States within three hours.

The drones, though operated by the CBP, have been deployed to assist sister law enforcement agencies. This month, the Los Angeles Times reported that Predators were used in North Dakota to help police run down a trio of ordinary crime suspects in a cow pasture.

One of the first Predators deployed by the border service crashed in 2006 when its remote pilot, a contractor for the plane manufacturer General Atomics, turned off the engine by mistake. The plane missed a residential area by 1,000 feet as it plunged.

U.S. protocols require the drones to stay on the American side of the Rio Grande. “We don’t do Mexico,” said Lothar Eckardt, director of the Homeland Security Department’s National Air Security Operations Center in Corpus Christi.

But the aerial platforms do peer a little over the fence into Mexico.

What can they see? “We can see cows, pigs, coyotes, sometimes rabbits,” Lothar said. “At 20,000 feet, you can see windshield wipers, you can see if a person is running or walking, you can see backpacks sometimes. We can see Border Patrol, but not their uniforms, and so we can communicate with them and say, ‘Wave your arms,’ and that way we can distinguish between our guys and the bad guys.”

Despite its initial reluctance, the Federal Aviation Administration allows the drones to fly a high-altitude corridor along the Mexican and Canadian borders but forbids them over congested urban areas — for safety, not privacy, concerns. Because of the orientation of the runway at the Corpus Christi Naval Air Station, the Predators are grounded when the wind direction requires them to pass over a neighboring suburb.

The Predators reached a milestone in June, having flown 10,000 hours. The Homeland Security Department reported that their drone operations have led to the apprehension of 4,865 undocumented immigrants and 238 drug smugglers since the program began.

Those numbers are not very impressive. A total of 327,577 illegal migrants were caught at the southwestern border in fiscal 2011, meaning the drones have contributed only to a fraction of arrests.

With an hour of flight time costing $3,600, it costs about $7,054 for each illegal immigrant or smuggler caught, based on numbers calculated from a recent Government Accountability Office report to Congress. The government has spent $240 million buying and maintaining its domestic drones, not including their operation.

It is hard to put a dollar value on the services the Predators can supply, Kostelnik said, citing as an example a scenario in which a nuclear reactor, like the one in Japan damaged by the earthquake and tsunami in March, needed to be inspected from the air.

“What is the value of a ‘can’t be seen, can’t be heard’ technology when you absolutely, really need it?” Kostelnik said. “The unmanned aircraft does things nothing else can do.”

The authors of the GAO report were not so sure. They highlighted an obscure programme called “Big Miguel” run by the Joint Task Force North out of the Army’s Biggs Field in El Paso that leased a piloted Cessna with an infrared sensor that cost $1.2 million for the year and assisted in the capture of 6,500 to 8,000 undocumented immigrants and seizure of $54 million in marijuana, according to defense officials. That would make the Big Miguel cost per illegal immigrant caught about $230.

“Congress and the taxpayers ought to demand some kind of real cost-benefit analysis of drones,” said Tom Barry, director of the TransBorder Project at the Center for International Policy, a Washington think tank, who has studied the domestic Predator program. “My sense is that they would conclude these aircraft aren’t worth the money.”

Source: The Washington Post

[buglerbilly]

New fencing doesn’t stop illegal crossings


Reuters - People arrive at the Friendship Park in Tijuana, near the double steel fence that separates the city from San Diego.

By Nick Miroff, Friday, December 30, 7:17 PM

CALEXICO, Calif. — A decade ago, when illegal immigration from Mexico was at an all-time high, this stretch of border was as good a place as any to sneak into the United States.

Migrants and smugglers could slip through the alfalfa fields outside town or plow their pickup trucks through the desert, where the biggest worries were stuck tires and getting safely across the irrigation canals.

But in the past five years, the international border here has become a harder, tougher, taller barrier — an American Great Wall. Miles of steel fencing now ride the desolate sand dunes west of Calexico, and to the east, giant jack-shaped “Normandy” barriers block off old smuggling routes, named for their resemblance to the defenses that once lined the beaches of northern France in World War II.

Overall, the United States has added 413 miles of new fencing to its southern boundary since 2006, raising to 649 miles the total length of border that has some form of man-made barrier to people or vehicles. The Rio Grande creates a natural partition along another 1,252 miles, and the government has been putting new fencing there, too.

Now the question is: How much more should be built?

Border Patrol officials say current plans call for the construction of just one more mile of fence, in Texas. But as the contentious issue of illegal immigration takes an increasingly central role in Republican debates, several GOP candidates have renewed calls to fence the entire 1,969-mile boundary.

President Obama has made light of such proposals, saying fence advocates won’t be satisfied until the U.S. builds “a moat” stocked with “alligators.” But leading Republican candidates Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich have vowed to barricade the entire U.S.-Mexico divide, with Gingrich signing a pledge to install a “double fence” while campaigning in Iowa earlier this month.

With such an endeavor projected to cost tens of billions of dollars, this stretch of California desert might be as good a place as any to assess how the existing border fence actually works.

Border Patrol agents here say that while the new barriers have been successful at stopping vehicles, it is not the case that smugglers and illegal migrants simply go to the place in the desert where the fence ends, and walk around it.

“Anywhere is a good place to sneak across if we’re not watching,” said Special Agent Jonathan Creiglow, a Border Patrol officer assigned to the agency’s El Centro sector here.

Along one stretch of desert here where vehicle barriers were installed, the number of “drive thru” incursions plunged from 350 in 2007 to four so far this year.

But there are also sections of 18-foot fencing right in the middle of downtown Calexico, opposite its sprawling sister city of Mexicali, where border jumpers can be up and over the wall in a matter of seconds, melting into shops and residential streets once they land on the other side.

At night, smugglers toss Hail Marys of pot-stuffed footballs and fling golf-ball-sized heroin nuggets over to waiting receivers. Stealthy ultra-light aircraft bomb the lettuce fields outside town with bundles of dope, then swoop back into Mexico, well below radar but high above the fence.

Then there are rugged sections in the desert where fencing is porous or nonexistent, but crossings rare. And those who do try to slip through are assiduously tracked by the Border Patrol’s growing array of sensors, high-powered night-vision cameras and surveillance aircraft.

In short, agents say, fencing is a tool and a first line of defense, but it does not bestow border security by its mere existence. “Without the fencing we wouldn’t have as much time, but nothing is going to stop them from going over or cutting through it,” explained Creiglow, who, at 26, is one of the many recent hires at the Border Patrol, which has doubled in size since 2002, with 18,500 of its 21,500 agents now deployed along the U.S.-Mexico frontier.

A costly barrier

Most of the barrier does not sit on the actual international boundary, but slightly north of it, allowing maintenance workers to access both sides without technically crossing into Mexico. Upkeep for the existing 649 miles of fencing is projected to cost $6.5 billion over the next 20 years, according to a 2009 report by the Government Accounting Office, and U.S. Homeland Security officials say the fence was breached 4,037 times in the government’s 2010 fiscal year, at an average cost of $1,800 per repair.

With most of the remaining unfenced stretch of border in Texas, the debate has shifted to the question of walling off the Rio Grande. Even in areas where the river can be shallow enough to wade across, putting a fence along the river’s sinuous levees is both costly and unpopular with local ranchers who want to preserve riparian access for thirsty cattle.

In Arizona, where Border Patrol agents catch more illegal migrants than anywhere else, lawmakers are soliciting public donations to put barriers along the remaining unfenced 82 miles of the state’s 370-mile boundary with Mexico. Such a structure would need to climb up and over steep mountain areas where construction costs are exorbitant and the deterrent value is questionable, enforcement experts say.

“I think the question is: What are you trying to achieve? Just to be able to say that you built a fence on top of a mountain?” said Thad Bingle, who was the Border Patrol’s chief of staff from 2007 to 2009. “If someone climbs 10,000 feet to the top of a mountain they aren’t going to be deterred by a 10-foot fence.”

Construction in rugged areas is made even more pricey because every stretch of new fence needs an accompanying road for maintenance and patrols, he added.

Fewer arrests

While the agency tallies the number of migrants it catches, it does not plot the locations of those apprehensions. But after hitting an all-time high of 1.6 million apprehensions in the government’s 2000 fiscal year, the number of arrests dropped to 327,577 in the 2011 period which ended Sept. 30, the lowest level since 1972.

Migration experts attribute the decline primarily to the weak U.S. job market — especially the lack of construction jobs — as well as growing fears of kidnapping gangs in northern Mexico. At the same time, average family sizes have fallen dramatically in Mexico, employment opportunities have improved, and the United States is letting more Mexicans in through the front door.

Mexican workers received 516,000 temporary work visas in 2010, “the highest number since the Bracero Program of the late 1950s,” said Douglas Massey, an expert on Mexican migration at Princeton University.

Tougher enforcement on the U.S. side has also been a factor, driving up the costs of getting across as well as the difficultly. But smugglers on the Mexico side say the fence is hardly their biggest concern.

“There’s too much surveillance now,” said Luis, a husky guide-for-hire known as a pollero, standing in the Niños Heroes park in downtown Mexicali, where recent deportees and would-be border crossers gather. “The Migra [Border Patrol] has cameras everywhere,” he said.

Luis wouldn’t give his last name, but he said for $500 smugglers will get migrants over the fence by creating elaborate diversions for the Border Patrol and deploying teams of helpers with roll-up ladders and ropes, even forming cheerleader-style human pyramids Better yet, Luis said, for $3,000 a guide will take you over the fence and through the desert at night, and $6,000 buys a legitimate U.S. visa rented from a look-alike with legal status.

“There’s always a way in,” he said with a wily grin.

[buglerbilly]

US Customs and Border Protection Wants Ku Band Beyond Line of Sight Digital Datalink System

Posted on December 30, 2011 by The Editor

US Customs and Border Protection issued a draft RFP for the purpose of acquiring a Ku Band Beyond Line of Sight Digital Datalink (BLOSDD) System.

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) currently operates a fleet of manned and unmanned aircraft, including manned P-3 and DHC-8 patrol aircraft and the Predator B Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS). Each of these platforms has an electro-optical imaging sensor, but only the Predator B UAS has the capability to transmit the sensor video to the CBP ground facilities for exploitation.

The purpose of the Ku Band BLOSDD System effort is to design, develop, install, and test software and a hardware system that will provide a Ku Bandwidth, satellite-based, datalink capability for P-3 Long Range Tracker (LRTs), P-3 Airborne Early Warning (AEW), and DHC-8 (200 and 300 series) aircraft as well as the necessary ground-based operation centers. The Ku Band BLOSDD System will assist CBP mission operators to rapidly and efficiently deliver and receive point-to-point and general broadcast data sets, thereby enabling all operators in the field and decision makers in operations centers to have “near real-time” access to audio-visual information required to effectively perform the mission of protecting the homeland.

Source: FedBizOpps

[buglerbilly]

UAS Ineffective in Tracking Maoists in Chhattisgarh, India

Posted on January 4, 2012 by The Editor

In the second week of December, an unmanned aircraft flew over the Maoist-hit areas of Dantewada district in Chhattisgarh, picking up images of village dwellings and human movement.

At the National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO) control room the information was treated as a major breakthrough since the drones deployed in the area had so far failed to provide sufficient intelligence inputs. The state and paramilitary forces were also convinced that the images were of a Naxal camp. An operation was immediately planned. Surprise and speed were to be the key elements.

The operation was to be similar in nature to the ones successfully undertaken by the US-led allied forces in Afghanistan and Pakistan. A surrendered Maoist was also quizzed to clear the doubts about the target location.

Armed with the visuals provided by the Heron drone, a team of two units, comprising paramilitary was dispatched on foot to encircle and sanitize Teriwal village in Dantewada. Another 125 personnel were to be air dropped at the assembly area which was some kilometres away from the presumed Naxal camp at Teriwal, as was indicated by the footage relayed by the UAV.



But on December 19, an air force MI-17 helicopter with armed personnel on board came under fire while it was carrying out its 10th sortie. Two shots hit the rotor of the helicopter. The men had a lucky escape.

The sudden attack on the chopper caught the forces off guard. The UAV images clearly did not provide any indication of Maoist movement in the area, which was chosen to drop security personnel and was far away from the presumed rebel camp. The drone image virtually led the forces into a trap. The suspicion about the images grew when it was discovered that the presumed Naxal camp was a nondescript village.

“Several huts and human movement were captured by the UAV cameras in Teriwal village. So it was presumed that it could be a Naxal camp,” a government source said. Chhattisgarh inspector general of police (Bastar range) T. J. Longkumer said: “Given all the factors, the operation was successful. I will not be able to comment on the UAV images. But it is very difficult to differentiate between a Naxal hideout and a normal settlement.”

On the effective use of the UAVs in the war against Naxals, Longkumer stated: “We have just started getting footage from the UAV. It’s too early to talk about the drones’ success in getting live information.” Officially, it was shown as a successful operation as seven obsolete muzzle- loading rifles, generally used in hunting, were seized and made to look like Naxal weapons. But the inside story was to the contrary.

This fiasco has raised questions on the drone-backed operations in Maoist areas. The UAVs were procured by the Indian armed forces for high altitude land surveillance and maritime patrol missions. But they are proving unsuccessful in tracking down Maoists since the infra- red rays emitted by the synthetic aperture radar operate with perfection in a clear landscape, but are unable to penetrate foliage in the jungle, an officer aware of the development, said.

“Images provided by drones are not actionable since it cannot penetrate foliage and many a times we have dumped these images and videos since there were nothing that could have helped us. In the Chhattisgarh operation, it gave us pictures of huts and people, but who will judge if they were really Maoists?” a senior officer said.

Another officer involved in the Naxal operation in Chhattisgarh was even more critical. ”Even if the UAV spots human beings, the question is what to do with that information? You just cannot shoot at anything that the drone spots in the jungle. This is our own country and we are not an American in Afghanistan,” he said.

The tough terrain in the jungle also makes it difficult for the forces to cover the un-motorable distance on foot. The speed of movement in the jungle, depending on the terrain, could be as slow as a couple of kilometres an hour. By the time the forces reach the spot, the Naxals could be somewhere else, the officer added.

Source: India Today

[buglerbilly]

US Customs and Border Protection Gets 6th Predator B

Posted on January 5, 2012 by The Editor

Video can be seen here: http://www.uasvision.com/2012/01/05/us-customs-and-border-protection-gets-6th-predator-b/#more-10006

US Customs and Border Protection received its ninth unmanned aircraft late December, the fourth at National Air Security Operations Center in Sierra Vista, Arizona. Flights performed from this location will provide critical aerial surveillance to CBP border security personnel on the ground along the Southwest border. The arrival of the Predator-B marks the second of two unmanned aircraft earmarked in the supplemental budget provisions identified in August 2010.

CBP’s unmanned aircraft systems operate under several FAA-approved Certificates of Authorization that enable CBP to deploy a UAS in the national airspace. On the southwest border, the first certificate allows access into Texas from Arizona to just west of the Big Bend border area. The second certificate enables CBP to launch and recover a UAS from Naval Air Station Corpus Christi, Texas, and to operate along the entire Texas land border with Mexico, the coast, and over open water.

On the southwest border, CBP now operates a total of six Predator-B aircraft from Sierra Vista, and Corpus Christi. The missions from these two centers will allow CBP to deploy its unmanned aircraft from the eastern tip of California across the common Mexican land borders of Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas.

CBP identified Arizona as a location for its ninth UAS because it will allow for the greatest support of the CBP Air and Marine Strategic Plan to secure the shared land border between U.S. and Mexico, and will allow for the most effective execution of counter-drug operations and Homeland Security missions.

Additionally, basing a fourth UAS in Sierra Vista will best posture CBP for rapid deployment throughout the southern tier of the U.S. and the Western Hemisphere. This operational capability increases CBP’s ability to provide disaster relief and humanitarian support in the Gulf Coast region. Since the inception of the UAS programme, CBP has flown more than 12,000 UAS hours in support of border security operations and CBP partners in disaster relief and emergency response, including various state governments and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The efforts of this programme has led to the total seizure of approximately 46,600 pounds of illicit drugs and the detention of approximately 7,500 individuals suspected in engaging in illegal activity along the Southwest border.

Sources: Press Release, KVOA Tucson Arizona. [The video was supplied to KVOA courtesy of US Customs and Border Protection Office of Public Affairs - Visual Communications Division]

[buglerbilly]

US Customs and Border Protection Agency Seeks to Extend Predator Flights Over California

Posted on January 11, 2012 by The Editor



US Customs and Border Protection officials are looking to expand the use of remotely piloted surveillance aircraft to cover nearly all of California, allowing the unmanned aircraft to fly over the last major section of the Southwest border.

The agency’s Office of Air and Marine expects the Federal Aviation Administration this year to permit it to extend its unmanned aircraft operations into airspace just east of the San Diego metropolitan area, border agency spokeswoman Gina Gray said.

The border agency has a fleet of nine Predator B aircraft, including one deployed late last month to Arizona and another in October in Texas. Officials anticipate another aircraft will be deployed this summer in Florida. The aircraft, which can stay aloft for 20 hours, already patrol about 1,200 miles along the Southwest border from just east of El Centro in southeastern California to the Gulf of Mexico.

The agency flew more unmanned aircraft missions in the 2011 fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30, than any other year. More than 100 personnel are trained on the aircraft system, according to Department of Homeland Security records.

Customs and Border Protection Assistant Commissioner Michael C. Kostelnik, a retired U.S. Air Force major general who oversees the agency’s air and marine operations, including the unmanned aircraft program, testified in July 2010 that no other agency aircraft has the capabilities of the Predator B.

The unmanned aircraft operations “provide leading-edge capabilities to homeland security missions,” Kostelnik said.

The border agency’s unmanned aircraft programme, in operation since 2005, has four so-called Certificates of Authorization issued by the FAA to fly along the southern border. The border agency also has unmanned aircraft operating on the northern border.

Such approvals are required by the FAA for public-use aircraft – such as planes used by law enforcement, universities or land agencies – to fly in the national airspace. For Customs and Border Protection, the border-region airspace extends about 15 miles into the United States.

FAA spokesman Les Dorr Jr. declined to comment on the border agency’s proposed use of the airspace, citing agency policy to not discuss such matters because of privacy concerns or law enforcement-sensitive operations. As of September, there were 285 certificates issued to 85 users nationwide.

Source: California Watch

[buglerbilly]

DHS monitoring of social media concerns civil liberties advocates

By Ellen Nakashima, Saturday, January 14, 7:32 AM

Civil liberties advocates are raising concerns that the Department of Homeland Security’s three-year-old practice of monitoring social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter could extend to tracking public reaction to news events and reports that “reflect adversely” on the U.S. government.

The activists, who obtained DHS documents through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, say one document in particular, a February 2010 analyst handbook, touts as a good example of “capturing public reaction” the monitoring of Facebook and other sites for public sentiment about the possible transfer of Guantanamo detainees to a Michigan prison.

A senior DHS official said the department does not monitor dissent or gather reports tracking citizens’ views. He said such reporting would not be useful in the types of emergencies to which officials need to respond. Officials also said that the analyst handbook is no longer in use and that the current version does not include the Guantanamo detainee reaction or similar examples.

With the explosion of digital media, DHS has joined other intelligence and law enforcement agencies in monitoring blogs and social media, which is seen as a valuable tool in anticipating trends and threats that affect homeland security, such as flu pandemics or a bomb plot.

But monitoring for “positive and negative reports” on U.S. agencies falls outside the department’s mission to “secure the nation,” said the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which obtained a copy of a contract and related material describing DHS’s social media monitoring through its FOIA suit.

According to the documents, the department’s Office of Operations Coordination and Planning awarded a contract in 2010 to Fairfax-based General Dynamics’ Advanced Information Systems. The company’s task is to provide media and social media monitoring support to Homeland Security’s National Operations Center (NOC) on a “24/7/365 basis” to enhance DHS’s “situational awareness, fusion and analysis and decision support” to senior leaders.

“The language in the documents makes it quite clear that they are looking for media reports that are critical of the agency and the U.S. government more broadly,” said Ginger McCall, director of EPIC’s open government program. “This is entirely outside of the bounds of the agency’s statutory duties, and it could have a substantial chilling effect on legitimate dissent and freedom of speech.”

But John Cohen, a senior counterterrorism adviser to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, said that in his three years on the job, during which he has received every social media summary the NOC has produced, he has never seen a report summarizing negative views of DHS or any other governmental agency. Such reports, he said, “would not be the type of reporting I would consider helpful” in forming an operational response to some event or emergency.

“What I generally get are reports regarding hazmat spills, natural disasters, suspicious packages and street closures, active shooter situations, bomb threats,” Cohen said. “That is the type of information being pulled off social media.”

There is one sense in which reports of “adverse” publicity might be useful, he said: for example, alerting senior officials to the arrest of an off-duty officer for discharging his weapon.

The $11.3 million General Dynamics contract began in 2010 with a four-year renewal option. It states that the firm should provide daily social network summaries, weekly data reports and a monthly status report.The work is being done for DHS’s Office of Operations Coordination and Planning.

General Dynamics referred a request for comment to the department.

A year ago, the department released a report describing privacy guidelines on its social media monitoring program. For instance, information that can identify an individual may be collected if it “lends credibility” to the report. Officials said that would generally be provided to operational officials responding to an emergency.

[buglerbilly]

Homeland Security Wants To Spy On 4 Square Miles At Once

By Spencer Ackerman

January 23, 2012 | 6:05 pm



It’s not just for the Afghanistan and Iraq wars anymore. The Department of Homeland Security is interested in a camera package that can peek in on almost four square miles of (Constitutionally-protected) American territory for long, long stretches of time.

Homeland Security doesn’t have a particular system in mind. Right now, it’s just soliciting “industry feedback” on what a formal call for such a “Wide Area Surveillance System” might look like. But it’s the latest indication of how powerful military surveillance technology, developed to find foreign insurgents and terrorists, is migrating to the home front.

The Department of Homeland Security says it’s interested in a system that can see between between five to ten square kilometers — that’s between two and four square miles, roughly the size of Brooklyn, New York’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood — in its “persistent mode.” By “persistent,” it means the cameras should stare at the area in question for an unspecified number of hours to collect what the military likes to call “pattern of life” data — that is, what “normal” activity looks like for a given area. Persistence typically depends on how long the vehicle carrying the camera suite can stay aloft; DHS wants something that can fit into a manned P-3 Orion spy plane or a Predator drone — of which it has a couple. When not in “persistent mode,” the cameras ought to be able to see much, much further: “long linear areas, tens to hundreds of kilometers in extent, such as open, remote borders.”

If it’s starting to sound reminiscent of the spy tools the military has used in Iraq and Afghanistan, it should. Homeland Security wants the video collected by the system to beam down in “near real time” — 12 seconds or quicker — to a “control room (T) or to a control room and beyond line of sight (BLOS) ruggedized mobile receiver on the ground,” just as military spy gear does. The camera should shift to infrared mode for nighttime snooping, and contain “automated, real time, motion detection capability that cues a spotter imager for target identification.” Tests for the system will take place in Nogales, Arizona.



The range of this system isn’t as vast as the newest, latest cameras that the military either has or is developing. The Army’s super-powerful ARGUS camera, heading to Afghanistan, can look out at 36 square miles at a time; the Air Force’s Gorgon Stare looks out on an entire city at once. On deck are the military’s fleet of spy blimps, which will will generate 274 terabytes of information every hour. Compared to that, the Department of Homeland Security is positively myopic.

But. Those systems are used against insurgents, who are not protected by the Fourth Amendment’s prohibitions on unreasonable searches. Even if the wide-area surveillance DHS is after is just used at borders or airports, those are still places where Americans go about their business, under the presumption that they’re not living in a government panopticon.

It’s also ironic: the Department of Homeland Security actually isn’t so hot on its own drone fleet. When Danger Room asked an official at the department’s science directorate about using spy drones to spot bombs inside the U.S., she replied, “A case has to be made that they’re economically feasible, not intrusive and acceptable to the public.”

Still, what’s military technology one day is law-enforcement tech the next. As I reported for Playboy last month, more and more cop shops are buying spy drones, and increasingly, the Federal Aviation Administration is approving their use for domestic flights.

That also means that federal and local police can expect to replicate some of the military’s more frustrating aspects of persistent spying — namely, the constant, massive backlog of real-time video they’ll need to analyze. It’s gotten so bad that the Pentagon’s mad scientist shop, Darpa, is trying to automate cameras so human analysts aren’t constantly drinking from a fire hose of spy data.

Still, privacy advocates might soon have a whole new tech-driven battle with the Department of Homeland Security on their hands. It’s hardly clear from the pre-solicitation that the department only expects to operate the cameras after getting a court order — or if it thinks it needs one in the first place. And even if the department isn’t necessarily after the uber-powerful ARGUS or Gorgon Stare cameras, that might only be a matter of time. The wars will end; the spy tech won’t. And it might be keeping tabs on your neighborhood next.

Photo: Flickr/Jonathan MacIntosh; BAE Systems via Ares

[buglerbilly]

Lockheed Martin delivers upgraded CBP P-3 Orion

23 January 2012 - 16:38 by the Shephard News Team



Lockheed Martin has announced that the fourth P-3 Orion to undergo the Mid-Life Upgrade (MLU) modification programme has been completed and delivered to the US Customs and Border Protection agency two months ahead of schedule.

The P-3 Orion will join the CBP P-3 MLU fleet that supports homeland security and drug interdiction missions. In FY 2011, CBP Office of Air and Marine (OAM) P-3 aircraft were directly involved in the interdiction of more than 153,000 pounds of drugs seized or disrupted.

According to the company, the MLU programme replaces all fatigue life-limiting structures with enhanced-design components and incorporates a new metal alloy that is five times more corrosion resistant than the original material, greatly reducing the cost of ownership for P-3 operators. The MLU solution removes current aircraft flight restrictions and extends the structural service life of the P-3 up to 15,000 hours, adding more than 20 years of operational use.

The P-3 Orion is the standard for maritime patrol and reconnaissance, and is used for homeland security, hurricane reconnaissance, anti-piracy operations, humanitarian relief, search and rescue, intelligence gathering, antisubmarine warfare and, recently, to assist in air traffic control and natural disaster relief support.

[buglerbilly]

New road win for Border Patrol, airborne Soldiers

January 26, 2012

By Natalie Lakosil, Fort Huachuca Scout


The first phase of a new road being constructed by 40 airborne engineers from Alaska will pave the way for quicker Border Patrol response times along the U.S. and Mexico border.

FORT HUACHUCA, Ariz. (Army News Service, Jan. 26, 2012) -- The first phase of a new road being constructed by 40 airborne engineers from Alaska will pave the way for quicker Border Patrol response times along the U.S. and Mexico border.

The Soldiers of 1st Platoon, 84th Engineer Support Company, 6th Engineer Battalion (Combat) (Airborne), 2nd Engineer Brigade, based at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson Alaska, arrived at Fort Huachuca, Jan. 6, to execute a Joint Task Force North engineer mission in support of the U.S. Border Patrol's Tucson Sector.

The Soldiers have begun construction on close to a mile stretch of road for the U.S. Border Patrol, said Steven Passement, of the U.S. Border Patrol.

"The road will facilitate a quicker reaction time for agents responding to illegal crossings and drug trafficking," Passement said.

The mission is scheduled to be completed Feb. 24 and is the first part of a three-part effort.

"We have done the cutting, clearing and grubbing," said 2nd Lt. Michelle Zak, mission commander, 84th Engineer Support Company, 6th Engineer Battalion (Combat) (Airborne). "Incoming units will do drainage and the shaping of the road."

Zak said the Army effort on behalf of the Border Patrol is beneficial to both agencies.

"This is definitely a win-win situation to support the Border Patrol and get training at the same time," she added. "This is important because the Soldiers need to know how to operate in tight spaces and steep hills, and we get that here."

"This is an opportunity to get real world training that the Soldiers can use overseas, and Border Patrol gets a new all-weather road," Passement said.

Passement said Border Patrol agents drive on whatever roads are accessible, and when there aren't roads to drive on, agents "get out and hike it."

"In the past it would have taken an hour or two hours to drive what just took us 10 minutes, because of the new road," Passement said. "During the monsoon season, roads get washed out and we have to go around, but they are creating all-weather roads that should hold up for a while."

There have been some challenges with the terrain and with getting heavy pieces of equipment into the work areas, but Zak said the team has "made a lot of headway" in their work, and added that "it's been a great training opportunity for us because we don't get this type of terrain or training in Alaska."

The mission site is located three miles west of the Nogales Mariposa Port of Entry, along the U.S. and Mexico border.

[buglerbilly]

German Court Sentences Airmen's Killer to Life

February 10, 2012

Associated Press|by David McHugh



FRANKFURT, Germany - An Islamic extremist who killed two U.S. Airmen in an attack at Frankfurt airport last year was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison Friday.

Arid Uka, 22, was also convicted of attempted murder and serious bodily harm for wounding two other servicemen and for taking aim at a third before his 9mm pistol jammed.

Uka killed Senior Airman Nicholas J. Alden, 25, from South Carolina, and Airman 1st Class Zachary R. Cuddeback, 21, from Virginia in the March 2 attack on an Air Force security team headed for Afghanistan as its members boarded a bus at the airport.

Staff Sgt. Kristoffer Schneider survived devastating injuries from a head wound. Another airman, Edgar Veguilla, was hit in the jaw and arm.

Judge Thomas Sagebiel ruled at the state court in Frankfurt that the circumstances of the killing mean Uka bears "particularly severe guilt."

That means he won't immediately be eligible for parole after 15 years as is usual in Germany, but must wait several more years for his behavior and possibility for rehabilitation to be reviewed.

Life sentences without a chance for parole are not possible under German law.

In his ruling, Sagebiel cited the fact that Uka shot unarmed people - from behind in Alden's case - and the severity of the injuries and disabilities suffered by Schneider and Veguilla.

Sagebiel also noted that only the pistol's malfunction kept Uka from killing several more people trapped on the bus.

Uka, brought to court in a dark hooded sweat shirt and black sweater, smiled and chatted with his lawyers before and after the sentence was announced. He then sat with his eyes closed and his head down as the judge detailed his reasoning.

Nicholas Alden's brother, Joe Alden of Indianapolis, Indiana, told journalists afterward he felt that the maximum sentence possible meant that "justice has been served. I wish there was more they could do, but he got the maximum."

Uka briefly met Alden's gaze in the courtroom but looked away, he said. "He couldn't look me in the eye, and that's what a coward does."

"I'm satisfied. I'm at peace. There's a huge weight off our shoulders," Alden said.

His sister, Kelseyanne Alden of Calhoun Falls, South Carolina, said she was "disgusted at the way he smiled in the courtroom.

"It's like a joke to him. It's not a joke to us," she said. "We lost our brother." Alden also left behind a widow and two small children.

Prosecutors said Uka, an ethnic Albanian born in Kosovo who grew up in Germany, was an example of a lone-wolf extremist who became radicalized on his own by reading and watching jihadist propaganda on the Internet. During the trial, they introduced as evidence dozens of files containing songs and written material pulled from his cell phone, music player and computer.

Uka, who worked as a temporary mail sorter at the airport, testified that he wanted to stop U.S. service personnel from going to Afghanistan after viewing a video on Facebook that purported to show American soldiers raping a teenage Muslim girl. It turned out to be a scene from the 2007 Brian De Palma anti-war film "Redacted," taken out of context.

Although Germany has experienced scores of terrorist attacks in past decades, largely from leftist groups like the Red Army Faction, the airport attack was the first attributed to an Islamic extremist.

Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, there have been about a half-dozen other jihadist plots that were either thwarted or failed - including a 2007 plan to kill Americans at the U.S. Air Force's Ramstein Air Base.

The airmen at Frankfurt airport were part of a security team traveling from an air base at Lakenheath in Britain.

As they loaded their bus in front of the airport, Uka approached the soldiers and asked for a cigarette, then asked if the group was headed for Afghanistan. Told that it was, Uka pulled a pistol from his backpack and shot the unarmed Alden in the back of the head from 1.5 meters (4 feet) away.

He boarded the bus and killed Cuddeback, the driver, before turning the gun on Schneider and Veguilla. The weapon jammed as he pointed it at Staff Sgt. Trevor Brewer, who testified that Uka had "hate in his eyes" and said "Allahu akbar" - Arabic for "God is great."

Schneider, who testified by video link from an Air Force base in Grand Forks, North Dakota, was shot in the right temple and lost the sight in one eye. The right side of his face had to be rebuilt with titanium and titanium mesh, and he testified he suffers continuing eye and head pain and has had a seizure. Part of his skull above the right temple had to be removed during treatment.

© Copyright 2012 Associated Press. All rights reserved.

[buglerbilly]

Uzbek pleads guilty to Obama kill plot

February 11, 2012 - 1:15PM Read later

A man from Uzbekistan who pleaded guilty on Friday to plotting to kill US President Barack Obama with an automatic rifle claimed he was acting at the direction of an Islamic terror group in his home country.

Authorities said Ulugbek Kodirov had discussed trying to kill the president as he campaigned for re-election because he would be out in public more often.

Kodirov entered the plea during a hearing in Birmingham, Alabama before US District Judge Abdul K. Kallon, an Obama appointee.


Kill plot ... Barack Obama Photo: Reuters

Defence lawyer Lance Bell said the 22-year-old Kodirov avoided a potential life sentence by pleading guilty. He faces up to 30 years in prison, though Bell expected Kodirov to be jailed for about half that time.

The judge also told Kodirov that he would face deportation once he was released from prison.

Kodirov pleaded guilty to three counts: threatening to kill the president, possessing an automatic weapon, and providing material support to terrorists. Four other charges were dropped as part of the deal.


Guilty: Ulugbek Kodirov.

The plea agreement says that in July 2011 Kodirov began communicating with a person known as "the Emir". Kodirov said the person was a member of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, which has been designated a terrorist organisation by the US State Department. The agreement does not reveal the identity of "the Emir" or say whether the US government believes he actually is an Uzbek terrorist.

The Emir "asked Kodirov if there was anything Kodirov could do about President Obama since Kodirov was closer geographically to the president than the Emir".

Kodirov and the person discussed possible ways to kill Obama, including from long distance using a sniper rifle.

The agreement says Kodirov became disheartened when he realised how expensive sniper rifles are and realised he lacked the skill to pull off the shot. Kodirov then decided he could shoot the president from a closer distance in public.

"Kodirov said that he did not care if he got shot and killed, as long as he killed President Obama," according to the plea deal.

Kodirov then struck up a friendship with another person in Birmingham who spoke Uzbek, and the two often attended a mosque together. The two often looked at jihadist websites and videos on Kodirov's laptop, the agreement says.

On July 11, after the two went to a mosque in Birmingham to pray, Kodirov asked his friend to buy a gun for him so he could kill Obama.

Kodirov told the person he "knew this was what he was supposed to do for Islam", the plea agreement says.

Bell said Kodirov regretted what happened and "accepted responsibility for the charges he pled guilty to".

Kodirov, who was arrested in July, was accused of making four separate threats against Obama within a five-day period when he was meeting either with a witness who went to police or an undercover officer.

US lawyer Joyce Vance said Kodirov's threats were serious enough that law enforcement officers felt they had to intervene.

"He had developed a plan, he was reaching out to other individuals for aid and acquiring firepower necessary to kill the president," Vance said.

A complaint said Kodirov contacted an unidentified person trying to buy weapons in early July. Accompanied by the witness, Kodirov purchased a Sendra M115A1 automatic rifle from an undercover agent at a Birmingham motel on July 13, when authorities said the final threat was made against the president. The agent also gave Kodirov four hand grenades with the powder removed.

Authorities say Kodirov was in the US illegally because he obtained a student visa but never enrolled in school.

Islamic terrorists have been linked to sporadic violence in Uzbekistan for more than a decade, according to the State Department.

AP

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/world/uzbek-pleads-guilty-to-obama-kill-plot-20120211-1sy1k.html#ixzz1m37cVaW0

[buglerbilly]

Ares

A Defense Technology Blog

The Border Budget Battle

Posted by Paul McLeary at 2/14/2012 10:56 AM CST



Lost amid the buzz over the Pentagon’s budget request yesterday was the request of another pretty important national security organization: the sprawling, 22 agency behemoth that is the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

The DHS’s budget request—$44.9 billion for fiscal year 2013—could almost be a rounding error in the Pentagon’s $613 billion submission, but it covers lots of important programs, some of which don’t look too different from its DoD counterparts.

On the sea, the Coast Guard’s overall budget remains largely stable, falling a hair from $10 billion in 2012 to $9.6 billion in 2013, while requesting the decommissioning of several older ships. On the chopping block are two Cutters, three Patrol Boats, and three HU-25 aircraft -- which will be replaced by three new HC-144A aircraft made by EADS North America. To replace some of these maritime capabilities the Coast Guard is asking for $658 million for a sixth new National Security Cutter and $8 million to begin the procurement of a desperately needed polar icebreaker, since the department says that it recognizes “the criticality of the Arctic as a strategic national priority, given increasing presence and interest by other nations, the preponderance of natural resources available in this region, and increasing maritime commercial and recreational activity.”

Then there’s the arm of the DHS that gets the majority of the press attention: Customs and Border Protection (CBP). The folks who keep watch on our borders have submitted a request that remains pretty flat from last year, with a $272 million increase proposed to bring it up to $11.9 billion.

Since the Southwest border remains an obvious priority, the CBP wants $92 million to purchase sensor technologies “tailored to the distinct terrain and population density of each border region.” The budget asks for at least one Integrated Fixed Tower as described in the Arizona Technology Plan that the CBP put together when its SBInet border surveillance system was cancelled in 2011. The Department also requests $40 million for its Tactical Communications program which seeks to build an open architecture system “that will increase interoperability with other law enforcement, expand coverage, and improve agent safety in the Houston, El Paso, and Rio Grande Valley sectors,” in Texas.

The DHS is also requesting over $66 million for upgrades and new buys of its fleet of P-3 Orion; King Air 350 CER; and UH-60 A-L Black Hawk aircraft. Finally—and significantly—the White House wants to restore some of the funding that the DHS’ Science and Technology Directorate lost in 2012. The 2013 request of $831 million is a big bump up from 2012’s $668 million, with all of that extra cash earmarked for projects like countering homemade explosives, cybersecurity, biological defense, and technologies for first responders.

[buglerbilly]

Federal agents arrest Amine El Khalifi; he allegedly planned to bomb Capitol


The FBI and the U.S. Capitol Police arrested a Moroccan man Friday in downtown Washington after a lengthy investigation into an alleged plot to carry out a shooting spree and a suicide bombing at the Capitol.

By Sari Horwitz, William Wan and Del Quentin Wilber, Saturday, February 18, 2:55 AM

Federal authorities on Friday arrested a 29-year-old Moroccan man in an alleged plot to carry out a suicide bombing at the U.S. Capitol, the latest in a series of terrorism-related arrests resulting from undercover sting operations.

For more than a year, Amine El Khalifi, of Alexandria, considered attacking targets including a synagogue, an Alexandria building with military offices and a Washington restaurant frequented by military officials, authorities said. When arrested a few blocks from the Capitol around lunchtime on Friday, he was carrying what he believed to be a loaded automatic weapon and a suicide vest ready for detonation.

The gun and vest were provided not by al-Qaeda, as Khalifi had been told, but by undercover FBI agents who rendered them inoperable, authorities said.

They said Khalifi had been the subject of a lengthy investigation and never posed a threat to the public. On Friday afternoon, he made an initial court appearance in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, where he was charged with attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction against federal property. He faces life in prison if convicted.

Khalifi “allegedly believed he was working with al-Qaeda,” said Neil H. MacBride, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. Khalifi “devised the plot, the targets and the methods on his own.”

In several recent terrorism sting operations, critics have accused federal investigators of provoking suspects and, in some cases, suggesting possible targets or tactics. Legal experts say the FBI sometimes walks a fine line in such cases.

“You want to be very sure that the narrative is not substantially provided by the government,” said Karen Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School, who studies terrorism sting operations. “There’s a lot of gray area in these cases.”

But officials said Friday that Khalifi, who allegedly conducted surveillance on the Capitol and engaged in methodical planning, was no unwitting victim.

Khalifi arrived in the United States when he was 16 and was living as an illegal immigrant in Northern Virginia, having overstayed his visitor’s visa for years, officials said. In 2010, he was evicted from an Arlington apartment after having failed to pay rent.

The landlord of that apartment, Frank Dynda, a retired patent lawyer, said, “He was getting mysterious packages labeled ‘books,’ but I didn’t think there were books in them.”

Dynda said he thought Khalifi was “suspicious and hostile,” and Dynda reported Khalifi to Arlington police. Two officers visited Dynda’s apartment building soon after the report but told him there was no reason to pursue the matter, he said.

It was unclear how Khalifi came to the attention of federal authorities. According to the criminal complaint filed in court Friday, a confidential source reported to the FBI in January 2011 that Khalifi had met at a residence in Arlington with individuals, one of whom produced what appeared to be an AK-47 assault rifle, two revolvers and ammunition.

When one of the other individuals expressed the sentiment that “the ‘war on terrorism’ was a ‘war on Muslims’ and said that the group needed to be ready for war,” Khalifi reportedly agreed, according to the complaint.

Khalifi “sought to be associated with an armed extremist group” and was introduced on Dec. 1, 2011, to a man called Yusuf, who was an undercover law enforcement officer.

According to the criminal complaint, during meetings with the undercover officer, Khalifi indicated his desire to conduct an operation in which he could carry out a shooting rampage in a restaurant. That restaurant — like the synagogue — was not identified in court documents.

On Jan. 15, Khalifi told undercover agents that he had modified his plans for the attack and wanted to conduct a suicide bombing at the Capitol, according to the complaint. It said that on that same day, at a quarry in West Virginia, Khalifi carried out a test bombing using a cellphone as a detonation device; the test bomb exploded, and Khalifi expressed a desire for a larger explosion in his attack.

On Friday, before preparing for what he allegedly considered a “martyrdom” mission, Khalifi prayed at Dar Al-Hijrah, a Northern Virginia mosque, according to its imam, Johari Abdul-Malik, who said he learned of Khalifi’s presence in an afternoon phone call from the FBI. “They said that the guy prayed at the mosque this morning,” Abdul-Malik said. “They said they’ve been following him for a long time now, and he’s not a regular attender at our mosque nor any other mosque.”

Khalifi was driven into downtown Washington by Yusuf and another man who was working undercover with the FBI. Afterward, Khalifi began walking alone toward the Capitol but quickly was arrested, authorities said.

“There is no doubt that this guy was committed,” said a law enforcement official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the investigation.

Following the arrest, FBI agents and Arlington police raided a red-brick rambler on Randolph Street in the Douglas Park neighborhood, near a wooded area with trails and a creek. Agents were seen going in and out of the house and searching the back yard. Arlington police said they were assisting with a search warrant.

As news of the arrest spread, several members of the mosque Khalifi visited expressed concern that they could be thrust into the spotlight once again, even though Khalifi was not thought to have been a regular worshiper at the mosque.

Dar Al-Hijrah has weathered repeated criticism for ties to worshipers who were found to have been terrorism suspects. The mosque’s leaders have noted that, as one of the largest mosques in the Mid-Atlantic, it attracts worshipers from all over, including many who attend infrequently.

In the past year, federal agents have arrested at least 20 people in the United States on terrorism-related charges, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee. Washington has been the alleged target in at least two terrorism cases. In one, a Massachusetts man of Bangladeshi descent was arrested for allegedly plotting to fly explosives-packed model planes into the Pentagon and the Capitol. In the other, Farooque Ahmed, a Pakistani American from Ashburn, attempted to bomb Washington area Metro stations. In both of those cases, the FBI relied on undercover agents.

Ashraf Nubani, a Muslim lawyer in Washington who has defended terrorism suspects in similar cases in the past, said he has has watched with alarm the increase of such FBI stings.

“It’s controlled from beginning to end by FBI. But you can’t create a terrorism case and then say you stopped it,” Nubani said. “Had the FBI not been involved, through their manipulation or informants, would the same thing have happened? Would there be attempted violence? They have their sights on certain people, the ones who talk big talk.”

Dean Boyd, a spokesman for the Justice Department, said the affidavit in the Khalifi case makes clear that “at each step, it was the defendant who proposed the alleged plot and sought help in obtaining the weapons to carry it out.”

“Whenever we conduct an undercover operation of this sort, we fully anticipate that allegations of entrapment will be raised as a defense, and we conduct the investigation accordingly to assure that entrapment does not occur,” he said.

Khalifi is due in court Wednesday afternoon for a preliminary hearing.

Staff writers William Branigin, Jason Ukman, Jeremy Borden, Katherine Driessen, Allison Klein, Erica W. Morrison, Dan Morse and Clarence Williams and staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

[buglerbilly]

DHS vows to cancel border project if technologies seem high risk

By Aliya Sternstein 02/21/2012

The Homeland Security Department plans to scrap a second attempt at a failed $1 billion virtual fence along the border with Mexico if officials are unable to find technologies already on the market that can operate in the rugged Southwest.

The department has not released a formal request for the work yet, but DHS' Customs and Border Protection informed contractors on Feb. 16 that the government is not willing to risk another money-losing venture. In a strongly worded update to an earlier draft, DHS officials said they want technology that is ready for activation right off the production line.

The new initiative involves deploying camera-studded towers along the U.S.-Mexico border capable of flagging illegal activity under the harsh conditions that foiled the project's predecessor, the Secure Border Initiative network.

This month's notice repeatedly stresses DHS does NOT -- in all caps -- want technologies that require engineering. "First and foremost, CBP is NOT interested in any kind of a system development," the update states. "CBP will cancel the solicitation rather than procure an ineffective or high-risk offering."

DHS first issued requirements for the job in a December 2011 draft request for proposals. The new notice describes the department's long-term approach for border technology and asks that vendors fashion their proposals to fit within that goal. It also pushes back the date for issuance of a final RFP from February to March 7.

The strategy, officials say, envisions this deployment as a test bed for potential improvements under future contracts: "Instant procurements of nondevelopmental systems will provide a sort of technology baseline, which CBP can use to assess the value of potential enhancements in the future," the document states. "CBP has not forsaken technology development and improvement . . . But technology development is NOT an interest for the systems which are the subject of this solicitation."

Unlike SBInet, the tower equipment used in the new project will not be networked, according to officials. Though, networking may be added as an enhancement if the initial operation works. "For now, the intent is to avoid 'overshooting' mission needs at all costs by delivering low-risk systems that can give immediate support to the overall border security mission," the notice states.

DHS officials abandoned SBInet in January 2011, after a yearlong review found the one-size-fits-all approach to standing up towers across the Southwest border would not work. Federal auditors and lawmakers had long faulted the management and design of the project, which began in 2006. Going forward, installations are expected to suit the weather and landscape of each surveillance location.

The new system must be able to function around-the-clock under all weather, terrain, vegetation and lighting conditions, solicitation documents state.

Officials say they are willing to consider contractors that cannot cater to every request, noting that the government recognizes "it is unlikely that there are existing (nondevelopmental) systems that meet ALL of its aspirations and desires." While there are a few must-haves, the department is looking for a proposal that offers the best mix of capabilities at a reasonable price.

The non-negotiable requirements include the system's ability to pinpoint an average-size adult within five miles at night, even if the view is 95 percent obstructed for up to three seconds. The equipment also must be able to endure sustained wind speeds of up to 10 miles per hour and gusts up to 15 miles per hour.

After SBInet suffered technical problems, officials realized that defense contractors and other industrial manufacturers probably could have provided similar -- yet functional -- products, officials say.

"Industry (often in response to military needs) appears to have many already available systems that could provide the type of capabilities offered by portions of SBInet, although they may not meet all of the aspirations for SBInet," the notice states.

Aspiring contractors are asked to demonstrate that their equipment can automatically see and track walking humans; people traveling on animals, and moving automobiles such as motorcycles and ATVs. The system also should be able to provide CBP personnel with live video of such observations so they can send responders.

The Obama administration is requesting $327 million for border security, fencing, infrastructure and technology in its 2013 budget proposal, less than the $400 million in appropriations that Congress recently granted for the remainder of the fiscal year.

[buglerbilly]

Obama orders waivers to new rules on detaining terrorism suspects


 Human rights groups organized events to mark the 10th anniversary of the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, while detainees engaged in peaceful demonstrations.

By Sari Horwitz and Peter Finn, Wednesday, February 29, 5:32 AM

President Obama issued an order Tuesday night laying out broad new waivers that allow U.S. law enforcement agencies to retain custody of al-Qaeda terrorism suspects rather than turn them over to the military.

The new waivers are Obama’s response to a law passed by Congress last year that requires that alleged al-Qaeda terrorists who are not U.S. citizens be held in military custody rather than being processed through the civilian court system. Key GOP senators said Tuesday night that the president’s measures raised “significant concerns,” and they vowed to hold a hearing to scrutinize them.

U.S. law enforcement officials had feared that the law on sending alleged al-Qaeda members to military custody would inhibit their ability to get suspects to cooperate. The White House threatened to veto the measure, part of the 2012 Defense Authorization Act.

In December, a compromise was reached between Sens. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.), requiring military custody for non-U.S. citizens who are suspected members of al-Qaeda or its affiliates and who have planned or carried out an attack against the United States or its coalition partners — unless the president waives that provision.

On Tuesday night, Obama issued the rules for the waivers, which are so broad that the transfer of any suspect into military custody is now likely to be rare.

“This is essentially a 3,450-word line-item veto, rendering the mandatory military detention provision mostly moot,” said Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch.

The order waives the military requirement in seven situations, including when following it will impede counterterrorism cooperation or discourage an individual from cooperating or confessing; when a foreign government will not extradite a suspect if the United States places him in military custody; when a suspect is a legal permanent resident arrested for actions in the United States; and when an individual has been arrested by state or local law enforcement.

In addition, the attorney general can decide on more reasons to issue waivers.

McCain, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) and Sen. Kelly Ayote (R-N.H.) said in a statement that the new waiver regulations might contradict the intent of the legislation passed last year and “will require a hearing in the Senate Armed Services Committee.”

In other news Tuesday, the first high-value detainee at Guantanamo Bay has reached a plea agreement with prosecutors to serve no more than 25 years on war crimes charges if he meets his part of the deal, according to newly released documents and military officials.

Military court documents provide a limited window into the pretrial agreement that Majid Khan, a former Baltimore resident, signed this month.

A senior Pentagon official called the convening authority has agreed as part of the deal that he will not approve a sentence in excess of 25 years, officials said. Khan is likely to serve considerably less than 25 years, but the exact term specified in the plea remains sealed. Among other provisions, he will have to testify against other detainees, according to the officials, who would discuss the issue only on the condition of anonymity.

Khan, a Pakistani citizen and legal resident of the United States, was captured in Pakistan in 2003 and later held by the CIA at a secret prison overseas. .

He allegedly planned terrorist strikes on the United States with Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Mohammed and Khan, a graduate of Owings Mills High School in suburban Baltimore,intended to target underground gasoline storage tanks, according to the military.

Staff Writer Julie Tate contributed to this report. Finn reported from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

[buglerbilly]

U.S. Wants You to Hunt Fugitives With Twitter

By Noah Shachtman Email Author March 1, 2012 | 6:30 am


Tag Challenge co-founder J.R. deLara. Photo: Jenna Isaacson Pfueller/Wired.com

A worldwide manhunt kicks off at the end of March — a search across America and Europe for five fugitives, identifiable only by their mugshots. The successful team of trackers not only gets a $5,000 bounty from the U.S. State Department. They demonstrate to the planet’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies that they can hunt down fleeting suspects using nothing but their wits and social media connections.

The “Tag Challenge” isn’t the first contest designed to show how a networked crowd can unearth seemingly obscure information in a hurry. But this simulation may be the one with the widest scope — and the most relevance to government agencies.

Five jewel thieves are at large in New York, London, Washington, Stockholm, and Bratislava: That’s the (rather thin) conceit behind the Tag Challenge. At 8 a.m. local time in each city on March 31, contest organizers will release a picture of the local burglar. Contestants will then have 12 hours to scour their cities, find each of the volunteer crooks, and upload photos of them to the Challenge’s website.

Exactly how teams will pull off this manhunt, even the Challenge’s organizer’s aren’t sure; finding one man among millions won’t be easy. But it’s clear that the job will require dozens and dozens of sleuths, and a way to share tips almost instantly.

“How will teams mobilize and coordinate this network?” project organizer J.R. deLara asks. “Unknown.”

Cops have routinely shared mugshots with one another — and with the general public — for ages. But distributing the photos globally, and hoping for an instant capture in five places at once? That’s anything but routine.

Even previous contests — like the one Wired ran in 2009 — seem relatively simple, in comparison. Wired’s writer-on-the-lam Evan was a known commodity, at large for a full month, and spilling clues along the way. The Tag Challenge’s five fugitives in the will only be known by their faces, and will have to be caught in half a day.

Darpa’s $40,000 “Network Challenge,” launched around the same time as Wired’s, was a nationwide hunt to find 10 giant, red balloons. Some U.S. intelligence professionals considered the task to be “impossible by conventional intelligence-gathering methods” because of there were so many possible locations for the balloons, and so few clues. Of course, the balloons didn’t hide or move around. These runaways will.

George Washington University graduate student J.R. deLara looked at these contests — and others — as part of a State Department-sponsored conference on trans-Atlantic security and social media. The contests “were making these claims about the ability of social networks to accomplish real-time tasks in real life. That this wasn’t just a parlor trick,” deLara tells Danger Room.

“So we thought: Let’s test this. Let’s test this question,” he adds. “Could you really use these strategies to find a person of interest, a vehicle of interest, or some actionable intelligence?”

A proposal quickly followed, and State Department funding followed quickly after that.

Already, similar contests have sparked considerable interest in military, law enforcement, and intelligence circles. When a team from MIT won the Network Challenge — by recruiting 4,400 to help in the hunt — it was the first time many in the American government realized the power of social media to mobilize large groups of people. The MIT crew became the darlings of Darpa; several team members were sent to Kabul to help run a secret intelligence program that relied on seemingly-obscure data to gauge the vitality of the Afghan insurgency.

So get ready, manhunters. This challenge may lead in all sorts of unexpected directions.

[buglerbilly]

Angry Birds, Meet Jailbirds: New App Helps You Snitch on Your Friends

By Spencer Ackerman Email Author March 2, 2012 | 10:30 am


Photo: Flickr/Miss_hg

"He stole my lunch, I tell you! He's gotta be an enemy of the State!!!" .............wow! can't wait to try this one out next time I'm in the USA...............

In less time than it takes to play a turn in Words With Friends, smartphone users can report a “suspicious person” to the West Virginia Department of Homeland Security.

The domestic counterterrorism agency’s West Virginia branch, in association with the West Virginia governor’s office, unveiled a new mobile app called the Suspicious Activity Reporting Application this week. “With the assistance of our citizens, important information can quickly get into the hands of our law enforcement community allowing them to provide better protection,” Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin said in a statement. The app is available in the Apple App Store and the Android Market.

I downloaded it onto my phone. The interface is simple. After informing you that you should dial 911 for an actual emergency and asking if you want to submit your geolocation information, the app is fundamentally a camera function. You can annotate the image you capture with date and location (if you didn’t enable the auto-geolocation function); additional details like a “Subject’s” name, gender, eye color, “hair style” and more; and vehicle information if applicable. And you can submit your own information, allowing the authorities to contact you, or choose to submit it anonymously.

Once you click the green “Submit Report” bar, the picture you’ve snapped and the information you’ve recorded goes to the West Virginia Intelligence Fusion Center, a partnership between state law enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security. “The longer you wait the less accurate eyewitness information becomes and evidence fades,” the fusion center’s director, Thom Kirk, said in the statement.

This isn’t the first time that law enforcement has branched out into mobile applications. Kentucky’s state homeland security division launched “Eyes and Ears on Kentucky” for the iPhone last year. Its interface is different, but its functionality is the same.

On its face, there’s nothing about the app that protects either the civil liberties of citizens or the busy schedules of West Virginia homeland security operatives. You don’t have to affirm that you have evidence of a crime, or even a suspected crime, to send information to the Fusion Center. Nor is it clear how long the Fusion Center can keep information on U.S. citizens or persons sent to it through the app. (More broadly, the guidelines for the nationwide network of homeland security Fusion Centers don’t spell out so-called “minimization” procedures for any of the information they collect.)

In other words, there’s nothing in the app to stop you from snapping a picture of your annoying neighbor and sending it to the attention of federal and state counterterrorism agents in West Virginia, who can keep information on your neighbor’s face, body and perhaps his vehicle for an unspecified period of time.

It’s also unclear why West Virginia thinks its citizens need app-based suspicious activity reporting. A February study from the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security at Duke University found that not a single plot or alleged plot involving Muslim-American terrorism occurred in the state in 2011. (.PDF) A Washington Post investigative project in 2010 found that West Virginia was one of only 15 states that has no terrorism convictions in state or federal courts since 9/11 and ranked 36th in states receiving federal homeland-security cash in 2009.

“We’re currently looking at our other services to see what else makes sense to move to the mobile platform,” the state’s homeland security director, Jimmy Gianato, said in the statement. It might not be long before the Department of Homeland Security — which has been exploring new spy tools derived from the military — follows suit on a national level.

[buglerbilly]

NYC Man Gets 27 years in Homegrown Terror Case

March 03, 2012

Associated Press|by Tom Hays

NEW YORK -- A New York City man was sentenced to 27 years in prison Friday for traveling to the Middle East in a failed bid to join al-Qaida and avenge abuse of Muslims by killing American troops.

"I wish I had not gone down that path," Betim Kaziu told U.S. District Judge John Gleason before hearing the sentence in federal court in Brooklyn. "I completely regret what I did in that phase of my life."

But Gleason said it was first time he'd hear the defendant express remorse - and that it wasn't convincing.

"You grew up in Brooklyn and you decided to murder your own country's soldiers," Gleason said. "There's still an element of defiance in you. ... You're still way too proud of becoming a jihadist."

The government had sought a life term, arguing that Kaziu could resume his quest to commit terrorism if given anything less.

A jury found the 24-year-old Kaziu guilty last year of conspiracy to provide material support to a terrorist organization and other charges last year at a trial that featured the testimony of a would-be terrorist and childhood friend of the defendant who became a government cooperator.

Unlike the cases of Najibullah Zazi, mastermind of a foiled suicide attack on New York City subways, or Faisal Shahzad, the failed Times Square bomber, Kaziu's case received little attention, in part because the plot didn't get far. But his story had many of the same themes of homegrown terrorism.

Kaziu and star witness Sulejah Hadzovic were two U.S.-born sons of Islamic immigrants from the former Yugoslavia who met in sixth grade. By 2008, "they pursued a growing interest in radical Islam" and began searching the Internet for opportunities to take up arms against U.S. troops.

"We were upset at what was happening in places like Abu Ghraib prison and Guantanamo Bay, how they were humiliating and torturing Muslims there," Hadzovic testified. "It's what ultimately made us want to go and fight in jihad."

The pair traveled in 2009 to Egypt, where Hadzovic they attended school, sought to obtain AK-47s and considered whether to take up arms in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Palestine or Somalia.

Hadzovic said he began to waver after hearing President Barack Obama's speech in Cairo in 2009 that extended a hand of friendship to Islam. Kaziu, he said, told him: "Don't let (the speech) fool you. It's like throwing sand in your eyes to blind you from the truth."

Defying his friend, Hadzovic returned to New York. About three week later, federal authorities approached him and demanded answers about his travels. He eventually agreed to plead guilty and cooperate.

Prosecutors say that once on his own, Kaziu tried, but failed, to join al-Qaida groups in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Balkans. He eventually made his way to Kosovo.

On the Albanian coast, he recorded a video that a prosecutor described as "his goodbye, contemplating how he would soon depart for paradise - a reward for those who die a martyr," and had bought a plane ticket to Pakistan. But he was captured local authorities before he could make the trip.

The defense claimed the alleged martyrdom video and other home videos shot by Kaziu were made in jest. His lawyers also argued that most of evidence against their client was widely distributed anti-American propaganda.

© Copyright 2012 Associated Press. All rights reserved.

[buglerbilly]

Denmark brings murder charges in Mohammed cartoon plot

Danish prosecutors have charged four men for "attempted terrorism" over plans to kill the staff of a newspaper that carried controversial cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed.


A policecar stands outside a building in Herlev, Denmark where four suspects were arrested Photo: EPA

7:00AM GMT 04 Mar 2012

The four men, all residents of Sweden and arrested in December 2010, had planned to "kill a large number of people" at the Jyllands-Posten daily, prosecutors said.

Judge Elisabet Michelsen said the trial would start on April 13. The accused are a 44-year-old Tunisian, a Swede of Lebanese origin aged 29, a 30-year-old Swede and a Swede of Tunisian origin aged 37.

Jyllands-Posten published a dozen cartoons in 2005 of the Prophet Mohammed that triggered violent and sometimes deadly protests around the world.

Three of the four men arrived in Copenhagen on December 29, 2010 in a rented car from Stockholm.

They planned to storm the office of the newspaper, located in the heart of the capital, and "kill as many people as possible".

[buglerbilly]

Ares

A Defense Technology Blog

Border Tech Plan Taking Shape

Posted by Paul McLeary at 3/19/2012 7:26 AM CDT



When discussing the Department of Homeland Security’s SBInet border security program, Mark Borkowski doesn’t pull any punches. “We frankly did not have a strong capacity to [develop the technologies], and that was part of the issue,” says the assistant commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection's technology office. “We probably could not defend the requirements we put forth with SBInet. It seemed like good things to do, but in retrospect, we really couldn’t say why we aspired to that.”

Launched in 2005 in an ambitious effort to line the border with a series of integrated fixed camera systems and sensors, the program was canceled by Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano in January 2011 with only a 53-mile segment being operational in Arizona. Those 53 miles cost taxpayers about $1 billion. In one of the last Lead Systems Integrator projects, Boeing had been brought aboard to manage the program in 2006, and prototype towers were installed in Arizona in February 2008. But a string of technical problems, cost issues and environmental concerns would doom the project.

The scuttling of the program led to a complete rethink of the department's border strategy. In many ways, the new plan for acquiring technology looks strikingly like the U.S. Army’s new acquisition plan: define capability gaps and then put the word out to industry to see what mature technologies they have already developed that might fit the bill. In other words, the DHS isn’t interested in developing new technologies. Rather, it will “start by using what technologies are available and using our experience with that to decide if [we] want something more.” Like the Army, DHS wants industry “to come and tell us what they have that is available to produce today,” he adds. “We want them to commit to what it will perform, and if we pick them we’ll hold them to that commitment on a firm fixed-price contract.”

Two of the largest items on Borkowski’s list are technologies that already exist in some form—Integrated Fixed Towers (IFT) and the Remote Video Surveillance System (RVSS). The government already operates both systems, but is looking for upgrades.

In a presolicitation notice released in February (the formal request for proposals is expected later this month), the DHS said that it wants sensors that can “detect and track” moving objects while providing near-real-time video back to operator workstations. The government says it plans to award the IFT contract by the end of fiscal 2012. The list of companies that has declared interest in the program reads like a who’s who of the defense industry, including Boeing, L-3, EADS, ITT, Harris, General Dynamics, Qinetiq, BAE Systems, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon.

In February, the DHS also posted a solicitation to upgrade its aging RVSSs, which Borkowsli says are “obsolescent—you can’t even find spare parts for them.” The RVSS makes use of multiple color cameras and thermal infrared detection video cameras.

DHS has come under fire for failing to take into account life-cycle costs when buying new equipment, but Borkowski says that will no longer be the case. “We considered 10 years of life-cycle costs as part of our estimate,” he says. “We asked the bidders to provide us options to continue to sustain these systems year to year until we can evolve to where we can pick that up under our existing capabilities to do operations and maintenance and drive the cost down that way.”

The plans have been made, and the requirements mostly set. (And don't forget those Strykers sent to the border or the big, new National Guard deployment to the border region.) Now comes the hard part: choosing which technologies to buy and getting them in place.

[buglerbilly]

War Surplus Sought for US Border Security

March 28, 2012

Washington Times|by Jerry Seper

Two Texas lawmakers, joined by 17 border sheriffs from Texas, Arizona and New Mexico, have asked Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta to authorize the shipment of surplus equipment being returned from the war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan to the border with Mexico as a matter of "national security."

Reps. Ted Poe, a Republican, and Henry Cuellar, a Democrat, said in a letter the massive drawdown of U.S. forces has resulted in the shipment of more than 1.5 million pieces of equipment out of Iraq over the past year and that nearly 900,000 items remain - all of which would be useful to federal, state and local law enforcement in their efforts to secure the border with Mexico.

The surplus equipment includes, among other combat gear, Humvees, weapons, communications trailers, observation platforms and night-vision goggles.

Mr. Poe also introduced a House resolution known as the Send Act that would direct the Defense Department to make 10 percent of certain equipment returning from Iraq available for use by law enforcement agencies that patrol the nation's southern border.

"We have brought this right to the secretary of defense because border security is a national security issue," Mr. Poe said. "State and local officials are on the front lines of the southern border fighting to protect Americans from spillover violence from Mexico.

"They do the best they can with what they've got, but they are outmanned and outgunned by the drug cartels and they are desperate for more resources," he said.

Mr. Poe said that for years the American people have invested their money in equipment that has been used to defend the borders of other nations and it was time that same equipment be used to secure the United States.

Mr. Cuellar said he joined with Mr. Poe and the border sheriffs to "help reinforce collaboration" with Mr. Panetta for the "betterment of our border communities."

"If we want to boost border security, we have to help law enforcement agencies beef up their resources to meet this demand. We cannot have one without the other," said Mr. Cuellar. "We intend to keep the lines of communication open with the Defense Department so we can help our border law enforcement agencies navigate the equipment application process."

In January, Mr. Cuellar hosted a meeting with Defense Department Assistant Undersecretary Paul N. Stockton in Laredo, Texas, to brief local law enforcement agencies on programs available through the Defense Department's Domestic Preparedness Support Initiative. More than 100 officers, including border federal law enforcement agents, participated.

The Domestic Preparedness Support Initiative coordinates Defense Department efforts to identify, evaluate, deploy and transfer technology, items and equipment to federal, state and local first responders. The initiative fulfills Congress' intent to support public safety and homeland security by leveraging taxpayer investments in defense technology and equipment.

© Copyright 2012 Washington Times. All rights reserved.

[buglerbilly]

DHS Uses Wartime Mega-Camera to Watch Border

By Spencer Ackerman Email Author April 2, 2012 | 6:30 am


The Department of Homeland Security wants to mount a powerful camera on a Raven Aerostar blimp like this to spy on miles of border at once. Photo: Raven

One legacy of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars has arrived on the southern border of the United States. The Department of Homeland Security recently completed tests of a powerful camera, one that cut its teeth in the war zones, that captures video of entire miles of border in a single frame. DHS thinks mega-cameras on blimps and aerostats might be the future of border security — if its analysts can only keep up with the glut of data they’ll gather.

The system itself, a wide-area surveillance camera suite known as Kestrel, earned its stripes during the wars. That got DHS interested. “You had this imager flying that was able to archive and save imagery and reconstruct [bomb] emplacement so troops could go after [insurgents] later,” John Applebee, who manages the border camera program for DHS, tells Danger Room. “It also was used for other things every day, like troop protection or perimeter protection, just as we imagine its uses along the continental borders of the United States.”

So for a week of tests, the department mounted Logos Technologies’ Kestrel imager on a 75-foot long Raven Aerostar aerostat tethered 2000 feet above the Arizona desert. DHS reports in a statement that Kestrel helped spot “more than 100 illegal attempted entries and alleged illicit activities in progress.”

“We can see miles from this with a single image frame,” Applebee enthuses. “Within every pixel, you have high-resolution, good, detailed resolution, like high-d-caliber imagery. In every frame, across the frame.”

This is hardly the first time that wartime surveillance technology has made its way home from the battlefield. DHS flies unarmed drones above the northern and southern U.S. borders, snapping pictures. (They carry an “excellent camera system,” Applebee allows, but unlike Kestrel, “you need to know where to point it.”) Police departments nationwide have started using smaller spy drones as well. Earlier this year, DHS expressed interest in camera systems that can spy on four square miles at once, well within the range of the military’s new mega-cameras. Kestrel’s 360-degree camera suite is a step in that direction.

But the migration of those military tools comes the migration of some of the military’s problems. Specifically: the “persistent” video taken by the powerful cameras creates a fire hose of data that analysts struggle to interpret.

And if the glut of video overwhelms the military, DHS — whose annual budget is under $60 billion, an order of magnitude less than the Pentagon’s — is in deep trouble. Applebee is up front about it. “They have the people,” he says. “We do not.”

The answer, he hopes, will come from software. “We’re looking closely at the developments in the military and intelligence communities for ways the software and analysis can be automated, so can we use software tools as a tripwire to signal us and call agent to attention once [the camera observes] a movement has occurred in a given region,” Applebee says. Darpa, the Pentagon’s blue-sky researchers, for instance, are interested in something akin to a “thinking camera” that pre-sorts imagery according to an algorithm based on what an analyst hopes to find.

And perhaps after those pre-selecting imagery tools come online for the military, it won’t take long before civilian law enforcement puts them to use. Applebee certainly hopes so. He sees the wide-eyed Kestrel as a huge help for “securing large areas from illegal intrusion.” Imagine what the next generation of cameras will let him see.

[buglerbilly]

Abu Hamza can be extradited to US, human rights court rules

Radical cleric can be sent to US to face terrorism charges, along with four other men held in Britain

Vikram Dodd

guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 10 April 2012 10.07 BST


The US alleges Abu Hamza aided the taking of 16 western tourists as hostages in Yemen. Photograph: John Stillwell/PA

Don't cheer too loud, the whole of the European Court is a joke, a bunch of non-legal Political appointee's........the fact the UK Judiciary kowtow's to them is a sick joke and the UK people repeatedly pay the price in hard cash or fatal consequences...........

Abu Hamza, the radical cleric who became the face of violent extremism in Britain, can be extradited to the US to face terrorism charges, the European court of human rights has ruled.

The court in Strasbourg said the human rights of Hamza and four other men held in Britain – Babar Ahmad, Syed Talha Ahsan, Adel Abdel Bary and Khaled al-Fawwaz – would not be violated if sent to the US to stand trial. European judges decided they needed more information about the mental health of Haroon Aswat, an aide to Hamza, before reaching a decision on him.

The ruling clears the last realistic obstacle to Hamza's extradition.

The men have the right to appeal to the grand chamber of the European court and have three months to make an application.

Babar Ahmad's sister said they would appeal the ruling. An appeal has only a slim chance of success, but it could delay extradition for months.

Nazia Ahmad, 27, told the Guardian: "I think we will be taking that avenue." She said the family, from Tooting, south London, would fight on. "We're very disappointed, we're going to carry on fighting for Babar," she said.

Ahmad said her brother should be prosecuted in the UK, and claimed the Crown Prosecution Service had not considered significant parts of the evidence against him, when it decided he should not face charges in Britain.

She said: "His case should have been dealt with by the authorities in the UK. They gathered the evidence, they gave it to the US, and they should have looked at it and decided if he should be put on trial in the UK."

Ahmad said her brother's case represented a "serious abuse of process". She called for a public inquiry and for ministers to answer her famiy's questions.

David Cameron welcomed the court's ruling. Speaking during a trade mission to south-east Asia, he said: "I am very pleased with the news. It is quite right that we have proper legal processes, although sometimes one can get frustrated with how long they take."

The home secretary, Theresa May, said the government "will work to ensure that the suspects are handed over to the US authorities as quickly as possible".

Hamza, who controlled the Finsbury Park mosque in north London and turned it into a factory for violent jihad, was sentenced to seven years' imprisonment in Britain after being convicted in 2006 of inciting hatred.

The previous government had wanted him sent to the US before his jail term had been completed, but the extradition was halted after his lawyers went to the European court.

The European court of human rights halted extradition proceedings in July 2010, arguing it needed more time to consider complaints that transferring Hamza and others wanted in the US risked breaching their rights by exposing them to possible life imprisonment without parole and solitary confinement.

Ahmad, who the US claims ran a website allegedly raising funds for Islamic extremists, is a computer expert from south London. He has been on remand and refused bail since his arrest in August 2004 on a US extradition warrant.

He was awarded £60,000 in compensation because of the violence British police used during his arrest in December 2003, during which he was punched, kicked and throttled. His case has been supported by the former transport minister Sadiq Khan, who is a family friend and Labour frontbencher.

In the Hamza case, the US has had to given written assurances that it will not impose the death penalty or place the suspects before Guantánamo Bay-style military tribunals.

The US alleges Hamza was in contact with Taliban and al-Qaida terrorists and aided the taking of 16 western tourists as hostages in Yemen in December 1998, an incident that ended in the deaths of three Britons. He is also charged with attempting to set up a training camp for "violent jihad" in Oregon in 1999, along with Aswat.

The court in Strasbourg had considered the cases of the four men for over four years.

In a press release, the court said: "The European court of human rights held, unanimously, that there would be: no violation of article three (prohibition of inhuman and degrading treatment) of the European convention on human rights as a result of conditions of detention at ADX Florence (a "supermax" prison in the US) – if Mr Ahmad, Mr Ahsan, Mr Abu Hamza, Mr Bary and Mr Al-Fawwaz were extradited to the USA; and, no violation of article three of the convention as a result of the length of their possible sentences if Mr Ahmad, Mr Ahsan, Abu Hamza, Mr Bary and Mr Al-Fawwaz were extradited."

The court said it wanted more information on Aswat before reaching a judgment: "The court adjourned its examination of Mr Aswat's application as it required further submissions from the parties, on the relevance of his schizophrenia and detention at Broadmoor hospital to his complaint concerning detention at ADX."

[buglerbilly]

Dozen killed, 120 wounded in Russia's Caucasus by twin blasts

At least a dozen people were killed and more than 120 wounded in a double car bombing in Russia's North Caucasus, the deadliest militant strike for months in the troubled region.


The site of two blasts in the Dagestan capital Makhachkala Photo: ABDULA MAGOMEDOV/AFP/GettyImages

11:31AM BST 04 May 2012

The massive blasts late on Thursday outside Dagestan's main city, which authorities said may have been triggered by suicide bombers, sent huge yellow flames into the night sky, reduced cars to burned wreckage and left a crater in the ground, television pictures showed.

Investigators said 12 people died, while the emergencies ministry put the death toll at 13.

The latest attacks come just days before President Dmitry Medvedev cedes the Kremlin to strongman leader Vladimir Putin who once famously pledged to "wipe out (militants) in the outhouse."

Investigators said the first blast went off on the outskirts of the city of Makhachkala when a car laden with explosives was detonated near a traffic police post at 10:10 pm (1810 GMT) damaging nearby buildings and cars but causing no fatalities.

The second car bomb went off 15 minutes later hitting policemen, rescue workers and passers-by who gathered had at the scene, investigators said.

Regional police said in a statement that the first blast went off when a suicide bomber parked and detonated his Mitshubishi vehicle near from the traffic police post.

A representative of the Dagestani regional investigators, speaking to AFP, refused to confirm the report but said investigators believed that a suicide bomber caused the second blast when he drove a vehicle into the crowd.

State television said it appeared that the initial blast was aimed at attracting emergency workers and security forces to the scene who were then hit by a more powerful second explosion.

"As a result of the second blast, 12 people died including seven policemen, three employees of the region emergencies ministry's rescue service and two local residents," the Moscow-based investigators said in a statement, adding that more than 100 were injured.

A spokesman for the regional emergencies ministry told AFP that the blasts killed 13 people, while another one was considered missing.

Another 122 people were injured, and 83 were hospitalised, the emergencies ministry said.

The twin attacks appeared to bear the hallmarks of bombings conducted by radical militants fighting the Kremlin in the Caucasus where they seek to establish an Islamist state.

The blasts were by far the deadliest attacks in the Caucasus this year and deal a huge blow to Kremlin hopes of restoring relative stability to a region that has been a headache for Moscow since the collapse of the USSR.

The Kremlin has repeatedly vowed to root out insurgents but attacks on officials have become a near-daily occurrence in the Caucasus over the past few years.

"Dmitry Medvedev tasked the head of Dagestan, Magomedsalam Magomedov, with rendering all necessary assistance to families of those killed and wounded as a result of the terrorist acts in Makhachkala," the Kremlin said in a statement.

Mr Putin once said "I sometimes feel sorry" for the militants because of the lack of opportunities available to them in the impoverished Caucasus.

The Kremlin fought two wars against separatist rebels in Chechnya in the 1990s but the insurgency has now become more Islamist in tone and has spread to neighbouring regions such as Ingushetia and Dagestan.

Source: AFP

[buglerbilly]

Md. Teenager Pleads Guilty in Terror Case

May 04, 2012

Associated Press|by Maryclaire Dale



PHILADELPHIA - A teen from Pakistan with a once-bright future in the U.S. pleaded guilty Friday to terrorism charges for helping an American woman dubbed "Jihad Jane" support an Irish terror cell planning to wage a Muslim holy war in Europe.

Mohammad Hassan Khalid had won a full scholarship to prestigious Johns Hopkins University before the FBI arrested him last summer at 17, making him the rare juvenile held in federal custody.

Khalid, now 18, faces up to 15 years in prison after pleading guilty to a single count of conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists. In a secret life online, the high school honors student had agreed to raise money and recruit terrorists for jihad.

"It's absolutely tragic," defense lawyer Jeffrey M. Lindy said after the plea. "Was he feeling lonely after coming from Pakistan? Absolutely. But he was not a loner. He wasn't the big man on campus, or captain of the football team. But he wasn't a black trench-coat wearing loner."

Khalid lived with his hard-working parents and siblings in a cramped apartment in Ellicott City, Md., while building an alternate life online.

He met Colleen LaRose in a chat room when he was 15 and began corresponding with her. LaRose, who dubbed herself "Jihad Jane," lived with a boyfriend in small-town Pennsylvania, but had secretly converted to Islam and was appearing in jihadist YouTube videos. She faces life in prison after admitting last year that she had plotted to kill a Swedish artist whose cartoon had offended Muslims.

In court Friday, prosecutors said that Khalid once received a package from LaRose, removed a passport from it and then forwarded other items to co-conspirators. He wanted to deliver the passport to them himself, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jennifer Arbittier Williams said.

"Khalid also sought confirmation from LaRose that her `brothers' are REAL muhahids," or jihadists, Williams said. Khalid also helped LaRose remove online jihadist posts after the FBI interviewed her, she said.

The government recovered extensive electronic communications between the parties, she said.

Messages sent on July 19, 2009, detail co-defendant Ali Charaf Damache, known as the Black Flag, telling Khalid their group would be a "professional organized team" training with either al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb or the Islamic State of Iraq.

Damache instructed Khalid to recruit men and women with passports who could travel through Europe. Khalid then sent out at least one questionnaire that he forwarded to LaRose.

Damache remains in Irish custody on an unrelated phone threat charge, U.S. authorities said.

Khalid and his family are legal immigrants, but his parents and three siblings had become naturalized U.S. citizens, some recently, while he had not. He therefore faces likely deportation when he leaves prison, U.S. District Judge Petrese B. Tucker warned him.

Khalid, a thin teen with glasses and closely cropped hair, said he understood. His family was not in court for the brief hearing. His sentencing is on hold indefinitely, perhaps because Damache awaits extradition to the U.S.

Khalid had been offered a full scholarship to Johns Hopkins while a student at Mount Hebron High School, where his teachers recalled his strong work ethic. Online, he was investigating various ideologies, as other young people might dabble with socialism or communism, Lindy said.

"He was experimenting with an ideology from his cultural background," Lindy said. "It was his misfortune to meet (LaRose)."

LaRose, of Pennsburg, Pa., was being watched by the FBI after posting online videos in which she vowed to kill or die for the jihadist cause.

LaRose was arrested in November 2009 after returning to the United States from Ireland, where authorities said she traveled after agreeing to marry an online contact from South Asia and become a martyr. LaRose intended to murder Swedish artist Lars Vilks for depicting the prophet Muhammad with the body of a dog, authorities said.

Investigators said there's no evidence LaRose ever made it to Sweden.

Damache, an Irish citizen from Algeria married another American woman, Jamie Paulin-Ramirez, of Colorado, after she moved to Waterford, Ireland, to meet him. Paulin-Ramirez has also pleaded guilty to providing material aid to terrorists.

Neither she nor LaRose has been sentenced.

The American women were sought for their Western looks and passports, authorities have said.

© Copyright 2012 Associated Press. All rights reserved.

[buglerbilly]

Counterterrorism expert sees much to be done

By Greg Miller, Friday, May 18, 9:46 AM

Andrew Liepman, who is stepping down Friday as deputy director of the National Counterterrorism Center, has spent much of his tenure monitoring a near-constant stream of threats, including the latest al-Qaeda plot to blow up an airplane with an underwear bomb.

But as his six-year stint winds down, Liepman has increasingly sought to look past the latest threat data at longer-term questions, including what and how long it will take for the conflict with al-Qaeda to end.

Al-Qaeda’s core organization in Pakistan was staggered last year by the death of Osama bin Laden and the toll of CIA drone strikes. But in an interview, Liepman said that predictions of al-Qaeda’s demise seem increasingly premature.

“The mission hasn’t been accomplished, al-Qaeda hasn’t been strategically defeated,” Liepman said. “We’ll be done when the bin Laden global jihadist ideology no longer resonates at all.

“I think we’re a ways away from that,” he said.

Liepman, 55, is being replaced by Nicholas Rasmussen, a senior counterterrorism adviser to President Obama who has played a leading role in shaping policies, including the escalating drone campaign against al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen. The transition between the two at NCTC began this week.

Liepman’s departure marks the culmination of a three-decade career, one that followed an unlikely path from studying forestry as an undergraduate at the University of California at Berkeley to a series of high-level positions at the CIA.

Before arriving at NCTC, Liepman served as deputy director of the CIA’s counterterrorism center, which runs the agency’s drone campaign. He also led the CIA’s Office of Iraq Analysis, a position he assumed shortly after President George W. Bush appeared under a “Mission Accomplished” banner on an aircraft carrier. Under Liepman, the CIA delivered a series of increasingly pessimistic assessments of the progress of the war.

Liepman is a California native with a baritone voice and a bald head. His parents’ Jewish families fled Europe in 1938 for Shanghai and relocated to San Francisco a decade after that.

A food aficionado, Liepman traces his fondness for cooking to his mother’s Viennese recipes and his father’s career as a U.S. Army pastry chef and manager of the officer’s club in Carmel, Calif.

Liepman was hired by the CIA in 1982 as an imagery analyst, based largely on a single college course he had taken in photogrammetry, which taught the use of aerial images to map and measure forests along California’s coast.

He said he likely would never have considered working for the CIA if he hadn’t moved to Washington with his wife after she took a job with the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Liepman joined NCTC in 2006, two years after the center was created to solve the intelligence-sharing problems that had plagued U.S. spy agencies leading up to the Sept. 11 plot.

At the time, NCTC was regarded warily by other agencies. It struggled to recruit analysts; they worried that accepting a position there might derail their careers.

Current and former NCTC officials said Liepman — who attracted a loyal following in each of his CIA assignments — helped overcome those obstacles. The number of analysts has tripled, to more than 300.

The hiring surge was due to “his ability to recruit and mentor people,” said Michael Leiter, who served as director of NCTC until last year.

“Senior executive officers from the CIA actively sought Andy to work for,” he said. “He protected them, helped them get good jobs when they went back to their core agencies.”

Leiter’s successor, Matthew Olsen, said Liepman tutored him on aspects of his job, including how to brief the president. “He helped me find my way,” Olsen said.

Liepman’s tenure hasn’t been entirely smooth. NCTC faced harsh criticism after failing to detect an al-Qaeda plot to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day, 2009.

Liepman said his “biggest trepidation” is the blame and potentially damaging consequences that NCTC and other organizations could face if a terrorist plot were to succeed. “We’re a better organization and we’re bigger,” Liepman said. “But there’s still a dangerous enemy out there. At some point, some smart terrorist is going to get through.”