Starting Points: Terrorism

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Apr 15, 2010

CQ - Behind the Lines for Thursday, April 15, 2010

By David C. Morrison, Special to Congressional Quarterly

FYI: White House warns state and local governments to expect no "significant federal response" for 24-72 hours after a terrorist nuke blast . . . Release the Kraken: A.G. Holder says New York City "not off the table" as venue for 9/11 plotter trials . . . Victimizing the blamer: After 9/11, American Muslims somehow "became prime victims of those terror attacks -- isolated, fearful, targets of hostility," columnist scoffs. These and other stories lead today's homeland security coverage.

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The White House has warned state and local governments to expect no “significant federal response” at the scene of a terrorist nuclear attack for the first 24-72 hours, USA Today’s Steve Sternberg learns from a planning guide. By skimping on details, President Obama has contrived to make nuclear terror seem a more immediate danger than it really may be, The Associated Press’ Anne Gearan fact checks — and see The Washington Times’ Bill Gertz and Eli Lake on the same. Even as Obama rings the tocsin on an al Qaeda nuke strike, “emergency public health preparedness for a catastrophic, mass casualty attack . . . continues to deteriorate,” Homeland Security Today’s Anthony L. Kimery adds.

Feds: “In contrast to the Bush administration’s record on protecting the public, we are less safe under the Obama administration,” J.D. Gordon opines for FOX News, offering five reasons why so — while an exercised Bay Area IndyMedia poster sees Obama “evidently seeking a new pseudo-legal justification for the policy of state murder.” A.G. Eric H. Holder, meanwhile, reignited debate by telling a Senate panel yesterday that NYC is “not off the table” as a venue for 9/11 trials, The Washington Post’s Spencer Hsu reports. The CIA deputy director who has overseen agency counterterror efforts since 9/11 will retire next month, to be replaced by a career analyst, the Post’s Greg Miller also mentions.

Homies: Janet Napolitano said Tuesday that DHS is incorporating civil liberties protections at the outset of all efforts to protect against terrorism, rather than shoehorning them in after the fact, The Charlottesville (Va.) Daily Progress’ Brian McNeill reports — while The Cambridge Chronicle says she will be in Boston today. “Immigration is always a contentious topic. But [ICE] has drawn an unusual amount of criticism from both sides in recent weeks,” Jude Joffe-Block surveys for San Francisco’s KALW News. The Coast Guard’s “souped up” Alert and Warning System transmits local or nationwide alerts about security threats via e-mail and phone, Government Computer News’ William Jackson spotlights — as Federal Computer Week’s Ben Bain belatedly finds GAO praising TSA’s implementation of Secure Flight.

State and local: “After a year of waiting for that initial interview,” a longtime Buchanan County (Mo.) sheriff’s deputy is on his way to becoming an officer in DHS’s Federal Protective Service, The St. Joseph News-Press proudly profiles. (“Should Congress federalize the building security force, much like it did to airport screeners in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks?” Federal Times, relatedly, polls readers.) “The best thing the Obama administration can do with 287(g) is abandon it. Let cops be cops and let [ICE] do the job that it was created to do,” a Palm Beach Post editorial adjures in re: immigration enforcement outsourcing — as The Chicago Tribune notes that the names of suspects booked at most major suburban Chicago jails now will be run through ICE databases to deport those here illegally.

Ivory (Watch) Towers: “In his online lectures, Anwar al-Awlaki looks like a passionate professor [but] terrorism specialists say [he] could be more influential than Osama bin Laden,” The Washington Times spotlights. (The Yemen-based Awlaki “was educated in the United States with taxpayers money,” FOX News also finds.) Using blueprints from actual stadiums, the University of Southern Mississippi’s SportEvac simulation software provides virtual 3D stadiums, packed with as many as 70,000 avatars programmed to respond to terror threats as unpredictably as humans would, redOrbit spotlights. John Federici, physics professor at New Jersey’s Science and Technology University, terms terahertz rays a critical technology in the defense against suicide bombers, Homeland Security Newswire profiles.

Bugs ‘n bombs: Officials continue probing a “white powdery substance” found leaking out of an envelope at the Helena, Mont., Federal Reserve Bank, the Independent-Record records — while San Antonio’s WOAI News says a “suspicious white powder” that emptied a police substation turns out to be “just candy.” The Dayton (Ohio) P.D.’s bomb squad, meantime, is assisting the FBI and ATF in a multi-state investigation related to an explosives trafficking ring, the Daily News notes. Aside from the fact of its existence, nearly everything about the Biological Sciences Experts Group, non-governmental scientists who advise the intel community on biothreats and weapons, is classified, Secrecy News spotlights — as OfficialWire takes note of a market report rating 66 key and niche players worldwide that vend counter-bioterror products and services.

Close air support: A security breach at Tampa International yesterday was caused by a missing training device, the Tribune tells — as the Inquirer sees a former TSA security officer being handed six months behind federal bars for stealing $100 from carry-on luggage she was screening at Philadelphia’s airport. About 93 percent of Americans are willing to sacrifice some level of privacy to increase security when traveling by air, Travel Agent Central cites from research conducted by Unisys Corporation — while The Sydney Morning Herald reports that same survey finding Aussies, too, willing to bare it all at the airport. Screeners at Helsinki-Vantaa Airport will stay away from their jobs tomorrow to support a strike by fellow union members, YLE relates. EasyJet, meanwhile, has praised security at Manchester Airport “following a bust-up with bosses at Liverpool John Lennon,” which the budget airline accuses of fostering revenue-murdering checkpoint delays, The Manchester Evening News notes.

Coming and going: Instead of playing a canned notice urging Yankees fans to “take the plane to the game” on Tuesday, Metro-North sparked no small alarm with a miscued message urging commuters “to leave the station immediately and maintain a distance of at least 300 feet,” The Norwalk (Conn.) Hour relates. “One southbound lane of Flatbush Avenue that was eliminated after 9/11 to provide a security zone around the city’s emergency call center will soon be returned to drivers,” The Brooklyn Paper reports. The Ryder transport firm is pushing for greater government-private cooperation on U.S.-Mexico border security “to help beef up the integrity of cross-border shipments,” Fleet Owner recounts — while Canadian Transportation & Logistics sees truckers, law enforcers and insurers examining cargo crime activity in Canada for possible solutions.

Over there: Obama has given Treasury broader power to deal with pirates and Islamist insurgents as security deteriorates in Somalia, AP reports. Having termed the 9/11 terrorist attacks “a big fabrication,” Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has now formally asked the U.N.’s secretary general to investigate that day’s events, The New York Times notes. According to a survey, less than half of Singaporeans polled know the practical steps to take in event of terrorist attack, Channel NewsAsia notes. The al Qaeda-linked Abu Sayyaf Group killed 11 people in a terror assault on a southern Philippines city, The Long War Journal relates.

Over here: The lead suspect in last year’s alleged plot to bomb Bronx synagogues said he wanted to shoot President Bush “700 times” and repeatedly called Osama bin Laden “my brother,” NBC New York quotes prosecutors. DHS officials and lawmakers have been warning for months that law enforcement agencies are unprepared to deal with a mounting threat from homegrown terrorists and extremist groups, The Detroit News notes. “Since the events of Sept. 11, we’ve seen the growth of a view that American Muslims became prime victims of those terror attacks — isolated, fearful, targets of hostility, The Wall Street Journal’s Dorothy Rabinowitz rebukes. Imagine if the would-be cop-killers of the Hutaree militia “were not Christian extremists, but American Muslims?” the American Muslim mag Illume instructs.

Holy Wars: A religious studies prof proposes to call Islamic terrorists “hirabists,” not “jihadists,” to make it clear they have nothing to do with Koranic religion, United Press International profiles. “The horrid attacks of 9/11 led to the cry: Why do they hate us? The recent bombings in the Moscow subway remind us that terrorism is most often a political tool used to advance political ends,” Doug Bandow essays in The Huffington Post. Violent attacks against Jews worldwide more than doubled last year, AP has a Tel Aviv University study released Sunday saying. Islamist terror organizations, resurgent Sufi groups, the widespread use of English and cultural shifts are all playing a role in changing the face of Islam, Ali A. Allawi assesses for The Globalist. The persecution of fundamentalist Islamists across North Africa, in the name of fighting terrorism, is sowing the seeds for future instability, a Foreign Policy piece warns.

Courts and rights: Michigan’s A.G. has tapped a veteran prosecutor to investigate the FBI’s fatal shooting of a Dearborn imam after Wayne County declined involvement, The Detroit Free Press reports — as The Detroit News, again, hears the underpants bomber being allowed a laptop computer to prepare his defense. At a U.S. Marshals awards ceremony Tuesday, A.G. Holder praised the court security officer who died protecting the fed courthouse in Las Vegas in January, Main Justice mentions. NYC’s lawyers went to a federal appeals court yesterday to challenge a judge’s authority to block settlement of Ground Zero responder suits, the Times tells.

Shoes, shirt, no service: “The U.N. Security Council has adopted a resolution banning wearing shoes on board of planes and while attending press conferences and speeches — it is known as ‘the shoes resolution,’” The Spoof spoofs. “America and Israel have wanted a tougher resolution compelling people to be barefoot, but after the intervention of human rights and civil rights pressure groups, the resolution allowed the wearing of slippers. A U.N. official has commented on the resolution: A bomb can’t be hidden in a slipper and a slipper can’t inflict serious injury when thrown at someone. Also being light, a slipper may fall short of its target. And at least one reporter sees the slippers manufacturers lobby is behind the resolution and says the shoe manufacturers have tried to veto it.” Read, also, in The Onion: “Post Office Extends Hours To 3 A.M. To Attract Late-Night Bar Crowd.”

Source: CQ Homeland Security

Apr 13, 2010

CQ - Behind the Lines for Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Image via Wikipedia

By David C. Morrison, Special to Congressional Quarterly

Seeing is not believing: Mexican drug cartels using "cloned" Border Patrol vehicles to smuggle drugs into the United States, DHS warns . . . The Mole People: Subterranean beat cops defend against terror attacks in Gotham's intricate underground mass transit network . . . Good old days: Once a "proud, independent" agency but now folded into DHS, CBP "ain't what it used to be -- and that ain't good," maven maintains. These and other stories lead today's homeland security coverage.

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Aviation security is far from cheap, Bruce Kennedy affirms in Daily Finance, observing, e.g., that scrambling an F-16 to shadow a potentially imperiled airliner costs $7,500 per hour. The creation of a federal airport security service after 9/11 “came with a massive conflict of interest: TSA serves as both the aviation-security regulator and the provider of key security. Who’s watching the watchmen?” a Washington Times op-ed observes. Cultural, political and legal differences must be set aside to heighten global aviation security, Agence France-Presse hears DHS’s Janet Napolitano urging African aviation ministers in Nigeria on Sunday.

Feds: CBP agents along the Texas border were warned that Mexican drug cartels are using “cloned” Border Patrol vehicles to smuggle drugs into the United States, according to docs obtain by the Washington Examiner’s Sara A. Carter. Before it was folded into DHS in 2003, CBP was a “proud, independent” agency, but it now “ain’t what it used to be — and that ain’t good,” DC Velocity’s Toby Gooley quotes a D.C. trade attorney. The Pentagon will brief House Armed Services members on the investigation into whether defense attorneys for Guantanamo detainees endangered CIA interrogators, The Washington Times’ Bill Gertz relates.

Going to extremes: The Hutaree militia “is only one among a number of separatist, terrorist and hate groups that view police as their No. 1 target for attack,” Madeleine Gruen observes in a Baltimore Sun op-ed — as The New York Daily News’ Rocco Parascandola and Joe Kemp say MS-13 may have issued a hit on the NYPD. Two members of the Michigan militia charged with plotting to assassinate law-enforcers are ex-servicemen, Newsweek notes — and recall the controversy excited last spring when a DHS report on right-wing extremists referenced just such a nexus. “Liberal MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow will host an April 19 special on Timothy McVeigh’s 1995 act of terrorism and how it ‘puts into perspective the threat posed by anti-government extremism,’” NewsBusters’ Scott Whitlock reprovingly relates.

State and local: From unmarked access tunnels, NYPD beat cops defend against terror attacks in the city’s intricate underground mass transit network, The Associated Press spotlights. Security measures imposed at the Nevada Capitol after a threatening letter will remain while the FBI investigates, and possibly longer, The Nevada Appeal notes. A proposed $5.5 million cut to New Jersey’s homeland security office could cost twice that when DHS matching grants are factored in, The Newark Star-Ledger relates. Ex-Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura raised eyebrows last week by asserting that the United States has been “practicing terrorism for 50 years, only we call it ‘foreign policy,’” The Minnesota Independent mentions.

Bid-ness: “Do you want to think about the United States as the nation that fights terrorism or the nation you want to do business with?” Mona Charen, in a Tennessean op-ed, scornfully quotes a National Security Council staffer’s rhetorical question. Basque separatists are “supposed to be out of business, at least the terrorism business. But ETA’s money-making operations are still active, and most of them are illegal,” The Strategy Page reports. A report tracking cyber-espionage against U.S. defense contractors finds unmanned aerial vehicles likely to remain a principle target of foreign collection, Homeland Security Newswire notes. Systems integrator SDI has inked a $2.3 million contract for an Airport Response Coordination Center at LAX, Security Systems News notes.

Close air support: “The case of the Qatari diplomat at least establishes the principle that egregious behavior justifies authorities being able to use their judgment to deter potential terrorists,” a Wall Street Journal columnist comments. Next time you fly, “avoid the temptation to fall into the usual pattern of griping. Remember that these pesky procedures are really a small price to pay,” Orlando’s Central Florida Future enjoins. “It’s rude when a distracted or lazy person holds up the [checkpoint] line, but it’s also rude to roll your eyes, let out exaggerated sighs, etc. Your being a jerk won’t make the line move any faster,” The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette admonishes.

Coming and going: Chilling new details about the foiled al Qaeda plot to blow up Gotham’s busiest subways have emerged as a fourth suspect was quietly arrested in Pakistan, The N.Y. Daily News also learns. “One need only travel through Grand Central Station at any time to recognize the enormity of the risk. A suicide attack . . . involving a simple explosive or chemical-biological agent would be catastrophic,” a Boston Herald columnist comments. As Canada prepares to host two major global events this summer, the Mounties are hoping the trucking industry can play a role in assisting security by reporting any irregular activity, Today’s Trucking tells. Days after murdered rancher Robert Krentz was buried, “his family and others are still waiting for troops to be deployed to the border,” The Arizona Daily Star leads.

Bugs ‘n bombs: With the Ag Department counting 656,475 beef raisers alone, “there are a lot of livestock operations that could potentially be under threat from natural disasters/emergencies or agroterrorism,” Cattle Network notes. “A rogue crop duster, someone tossing an infected rag over the loafing lot fence, or an upset employee with access to a food processing facility could conceivably commit an act of agroterror,” Homeland Security Newswire leads. Since 2001, members of the American Chemistry Council have led the way on security, investing more than $8 billion on facility security enhancements, an official assures in a Houston Chronicle letter.

Know nukes: “Does the Secret Service have too much power to disrupt life in Washington?” a Washington Post blogger asks in re: intense security at the ongoing Nuclear Security Summit. If al Qaeda acquired nuclear weapons, it “would have no compunction at using them,” Reuters hears President Obama predicting — as ABC News finds barely half of Americans viewing nuclear terrorism as a top-level threat. Even as the United States and other nations press the issue, “there have been doubts within the international community about the immediacy of the threat posed by nuclear terrorism,” a U.S. specialist tells Global Security Newswire — while AP quotes experts chiding that such complacency slows efforts to lock down the makings of atomic bombs, and see Newsweek on nuclear terrorism as “an afterthought.”

Ways and means: White House authorization for assassinating a U.S.-born imam “raises an important legal question: Is it legal in the war on terror for the United States to target an American citizen?” The Christian Science Monitor’s Gordon Lubold muses. The director of NYU’s Center on Law and Security tells The Washington Independent’s Spencer Ackerman that you can’t just revoke citizenship and, anyway, assassination of the Yemen-based cleric is a looming national security blunder. “In an effort to soften the playing field in their favor, terrorist, separatist, and hate groups will continue targeting police,” The Counterterrorism Blog’s Madeleine Gruen maintains. “Was the reaction to an Arab diplomat’s ill-timed smoke break aboard a flight to Denver overkill, unnecessarily alarming the entire country, inconveniencing passengers and squandering the taxpayers’ money?” The New York Times’ Scott Shane poses.

Talking terror: With mounting evidence of the role of women in terrorist operations, “it is essential that counterterrorism experts not rely on outdated racial and gender profiles to protect Americans,” Joyce Davis advises in a Harrisburg (Pa.) Patriot-News op-ed. “When it comes to terrorism, men and women have much in common,” ABC News’ Patrik Jonsson adds. That the 168 deaths in Oklahoma City “were the result of Americans killing Americans in the name of America has made the incident in some ways harder for the nation to process than 9/11 and the less-complicated enemy, al Qaeda, The Observer’s Ed Vulliamy explores. Obama administration plans “to expel certain religiously charged words, such as ‘Islamic extremism’ . . . is a mistake that only adds ambiguity to the fight against global terrorists,” The Grand Junction (Colo.) Daily Sentinel editorializes. “If we continue to find words to obfuscate the threat, we will lose the capacity to address it,” Alan Caruba similarly inveighs for Right Side News.

Courts and rights: A court ruling has revealed that a convicted Ohio terrorist had ties to an al Qaeda suspect who met with some of the 9/11 hijackers, AP relates. Police fabricated evidence to incriminate five Americans facing trial in Pakistan on terror charges, lawyers representing the men will argue in court this week, ANI informs. President George W. Bush and senior officials covered up that hundreds of innocent men were sent to Guantanamo because they feared that releasing them would harm the broader war on terror, The Times of London says it has learned. “The thing that first strikes you about Guantanamo Bay’s “Camp Justice” is what an extraordinary effort was made to create something that never needed to exist,” The Seminal, relatedly, leads.

It’s the end of the world as we know it (and we feel fine): “The European Organization for Nuclear Research, has announced a successful run of the $10-billion dollar Large Hadron Collider, which has been plagued for years with both technical problems and predictions that its use will cause the destruction of the known universe,” Unconfirmed Sources confirms. “And while scientists cheered as the collider directed two proton beams into each other at three times more force than ever before, naysayers expressed a grim satisfaction as the known universe did indeed implode, just as they predicted . . . The end of the universe as we know it also has its bright side, of course. Fears of global warming have decreased markedly, as there is no longer a globe to warm, the glut of foreclosed and existing homes have eased dramatically and the crisis in the Middle East has disappeared, along with the rest of everything else. Plus, and most happily of all, you’ll never get stuck reading any of this writer’s crap again.”

Source: CQ Homeland Security

Apr 7, 2010

Ensnared by Error on Growing U.S. Watch List - NYTimes.com

Image by mathowie via Flickr

By MIKE McINTIRE

Rahinah Ibrahim, a Stanford University doctoral student, arrived at San Francisco International Airport with her 14-year-old daughter for a 9 a.m. flight home to Malaysia. She asked for a wheelchair, having recently had a hysterectomy.

Instead, when a ticket agent found her name on the no-fly list, Ms. Ibrahim was handcuffed, searched and jailed amid a flurry of phone calls involving the local police, the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security. Two hours after her flight left, Ms. Ibrahim was released without explanation. She flew to Malaysia the next day.

But when she tried to return to the United States, she discovered that her visa had been revoked. And when she complained that she did not belong on a terrorist watch list, the government’s response came a year later in a form letter saying only that her case had been reviewed and that any changes warranted had been made.

Every year, thousands of people find themselves caught up in the government’s terrorist screening process. Some are legitimate targets of concern, others are victims of errors in judgment or simple mistaken identity.

Either way, their numbers are likely to rise as the Obama administration recalibrates the standards for identifying potential terrorists, in response to intelligence failures that let a would-be bomber fly to Detroit from Amsterdam last Christmas. On Friday, the administration altered rules for identifying which passengers flying to the United States should face extra scrutiny at the gate. And it is reviewing ways to make it easier to place suspects on the watch list.

“The entire federal government is leaning very far forward on putting people on lists,” Russell E. Travers, a deputy director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said at a recent Senate hearing. Before the attempted attack on Christmas, Mr. Travers said, “I never had anybody tell me that the list was too small.”

Now, he added, “It’s getting bigger, and it will get even bigger.”

Even as the universe of those identified as a risk expands, the decision-making involved remains so secretive that people cannot be told whether they are on the watch list, why they may be on it or even whether they have been removed. The secrecy, government officials say, keeps terrorists off balance. But civil liberties advocates say it can hide mistakes and keep people wrongly singled out from seeking redress.

Now, five years after Ms. Ibrahim’s arrest at the United Airlines ticket counter, a lawsuit she filed is chipping away at that wall of secrecy. While judges have dismissed many similar cases, a federal appeals court let hers proceed, endorsing a new legal strategy for challenging placement on the watch list. In December, a federal judge scoffed at the government’s claim for secrecy and ordered it to release files on Ms. Ibrahim’s detention.

Ms. Ibrahim’s case has also raised legal questions about detaining people whose names appear on the no-fly list, and it casts light on the role of private contractors in deciding whether someone should be held. The police in San Francisco said they had acted on the instructions of a contractor working for the Homeland Security Department.

The government is fighting back, and there is no guarantee that Ms. Ibrahim, a 44-year-old mother of four, will ever learn more about what happened. However, an examination of her case, along with documents from other lawsuits, government audits and official testimony, offers some broad hints about the murky system.

The watch list is actually a succession of lists, beginning with the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, or TIDE, a centralized database of potential suspects. Mr. Travers said that about 10,000 names come in daily through intelligence reports, but that a large percentage are dismissed because they are based on “some combination of circular reporting, poison pens, mistaken identities, lies and so forth.”

Analysts at the counterterrorism center then work with the Terrorist Screening Center of the F.B.I. to add names to what is called the consolidated watch list, which may have any number of consequences for those on it, like questioning by the police during a traffic stop or additional screening crossing the border. That list, in turn, has various subsets, including the no-fly list and the selectee list, which requires passengers to undergo extra screening.

The consolidated list has the names of more than 400,000 people, about 97 percent of them foreigners, while the no-fly and selectee lists have about 6,000 and 20,000, respectively.

The standards for adding names to the lists have gone through a cycle of tightening, then relaxing. After the Sept. 11 attacks, hundreds of names were added with few guidelines, eventually leading to complaints that too many innocent travelers were being stopped. Two years ago, the government developed a reasonable suspicion standard and secret protocols for applying it; their last major revision was outlined in a 72-page memorandum in February 2009 that clarified the “minimum substantive derogatory criteria.”

A federal official involved in the process said that under those rules, associating with a known or suspected terrorist was not enough to warrant being listed; there had to be evidence that the person supported terrorism. The criteria also generally require more than a single source of “derogatory information,” said the official, who requested anonymity to discuss security matters.

A task force formed after the Christmas Day episode is considering changes to the process, including making it easier to label suspects extremists and giving greater weight to credible “single-source walk-ins,” the official said. The suspect in the attempted bombing, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was known to American intelligence analysts because his father, a banker in Nigeria, had reported him to the authorities, but he had not been placed on the watch list.

Putting United States citizens on the watch list requires more than just a single tip, although one tip could prompt an investigation that eventually leads to placement on the list. Local police officers are encouraged to file “suspicious activity reports” with the F.B.I. or the Homeland Security Department, which finances about 70 intergovernmental intelligence cooperatives nationwide.

While federal policies prohibit profiling, a wide range of innocent activities can be deemed suspicious. Guidelines distributed by several cooperatives advise landlords to be alert for tenants who prefer ground-floor apartments and have little furniture. Among the warning signs listed by one in Ohio are “immersion in a purely Muslim environment” and the “study of technical subjects” like engineering.

By such standards, Erich Scherfen could look suspicious. A veteran of the Persian Gulf war and a commercial pilot from Pennsylvania, Mr. Scherfen converted to Islam and married a Pakistani-born woman, Rubina Tureen, who runs a small business selling religious books. They have taken part in Islamic conferences and interfaith seminars.

In May 2006, a co-worker told the state police that Mr. Scherfen had retrofitted the family car to carry bombs, court records show. (He said he had simply removed a broken seat from his old Mazda.) Not long after, Mr. Scherfen and Ms. Tureen began being detained at airports, jeopardizing his job.

The couple filed a lawsuit, and his job was saved after a judge was given secret evidence that apparently indicated that Mr. Scherfen had been taken off the selectee list.

“I think some ill-informed people were putting the dots together and came to faulty conclusions,” Ms. Tureen said.

Their lawsuit cited rulings in Ms. Ibrahim’s case as precedents.

A Muslim who came to the United States to study civil engineering, Ms. Ibrahim impressed colleagues at Stanford. “Of all the people you could think of who might be on a list of terrorism suspects, she would be pretty close to the bottom,” said Raymond Levitt, one of her faculty advisers.

The judge presiding over her lawsuit appeared skeptical, too.

“It looks like to me it was a monumental mistake, and they identified the wrong person,” the judge, William H. Alsup of Federal District Court in San Francisco, said at a hearing in December. “I’m just guessing.”

The authorities will not say why they singled out Ms. Ibrahim. A week before her scheduled flight to Malaysia in January 2005, she was visited by two F.B.I. agents, said her lawyer, Marwa Elzankaly.

“They actually claimed they did not know why they were there to interview her,” Ms. Elzankaly said, “and basically just asked her a few background questions about herself, her family, her line of work, her travel plans and her education.”

When the airport ticket agent discovered her name on the no-fly list, he called the San Francisco police, who contacted the Transportation Security Administration in Washington. There, they reached a watch officer working for U.S. Investigations Services, one of several private contractors the agency has hired for its 24-hour operations center.

The contractors’ duties “include receiving telephone inquiries and providing direction as to how to handle passengers,” said Kristin Lee, an agency spokeswoman.

The police incident report says the watch officer told the police to “deny the flight to Ibrahim, contact the F.B.I. and detain her for further questioning.” She was driven to a police substation, where she was searched and placed in a holding cell. Eventually, an F.B.I. agent told the police to let her go, adding that she was being moved to the selectee list and could fly home.

Outraged, she decided to sue for wrongful arrest and to find out why she was on the list. But the law creating the T.S.A. made it virtually impossible to mount a legal challenge against it.

Instead, Ms. Ibrahim’s lawsuit focused on the F.B.I.’s Terrorist Screening Center, which does not have the same legal protections. After much of her case was thrown out, a divided United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reinstated it.

“If your name or my name or anybody’s name in this courtroom were put on that list, we would suffer grievously,” the chief judge, Alex Kozinski, said at a hearing in April 2008. “And we want to have some way of going to our government and possibly to our courts and saying, ‘Look, I shouldn’t be on that list.’ ”

Another issue raised by Ms. Ibrahim’s case is whether inclusion on the no-fly list is sufficient grounds for arrest. At a hearing last December, government lawyers agreed that it was not, although the courts generally allow brief detentions for investigative purposes.

The police, as part of their defense, offered to explain why they detained Ms. Ibrahim, but the F.B.I. and Department of Homeland Security refuse to allow it.

Meanwhile, Ms. Ibrahim earned her doctorate from Stanford but has been unable to return to the United States to participate in the lawsuit. Her lawyers said in a court filing that when she applied for a new visa last September, American Embassy officials in Kuala Lumpur questioned her about the suit, asking what it would take to settle it.

Last month, Ms. Ibrahim accepted a $225,000 settlement from the San Francisco police and U.S. Investigations Services. But she is pursuing her claims against the federal government. None of the defendants’ lawyers would comment for this article.

At the December hearing, Judge Alsup showed his displeasure at the government, telling Justice Department lawyers that they were abusing the secrecy privilege.

“You’re holding onto this five-year-old information like, you know, like another 9/11 is going to happen if you somehow release it,” the judge said, according to a transcript. “That’s just baloney.”

Alexander Tikhomirov's life illustrates challenge radical Islam poses in Russia

Image by doodledubz collective via Flickr

By Philip P. Pan
Wednesday, April 7, 2010; A08

MOSCOW -- He had been a bright but lonely child from a sleepy city near the Mongolian border, in a Buddhist region of Russia far from the nation's Muslim centers. But by the time he was killed last month, thousands of miles away in the volatile North Caucasus, Alexander Tikhomirov had become the face of an Islamist insurgency.

After two young women blew themselves up on the Moscow subway last week, killing 40 people in the city's worst terrorist attack in years, investigators said they suspected that Tikhomirov had recruited and trained them, and perhaps dozens of other suicide bombers.

How the schoolboy whom neighbors called Sascha became the tech-savvy militant known as Sayid Buryatsky remains a question wrapped in rumor and speculation. But the outline of Tikhomirov's journey from the Siberian steppes to the mountains of Chechnya provides a sense of the challenge that radical Islam poses in Russia and the speed with which the insurgency in the nation's southwest is changing.

In less than two years with the rebels, Tikhomirov became their most effective propagandist, drawing in young Muslims with his fluent Russian, colloquial interpretations of Islam and mastery of the Internet. When security forces gunned him down last month at age 27, the guerrillas immediately cast him as a martyr.

Even in death, he remains influential. The rebel leader Doku Umarov has vowed fresh attacks in the Russian heartland by the brigade of suicide bombers that Tikhomirov helped revive. And he remains a digital legend, with his writings and videos preserved on the Web and his DVDs sold outside mosques across the former Soviet Union.

Neighbors in Ulan Ude, capital of the Siberian province of Buryatia, remember Tikhomirov as an awkward boy from a troubled family. His father was Buryat, an ethnic minority related to Mongols, and died soon after he was born. His mother, said to be an ethnic Russian, struggled to make ends meet at a local market.

One resident, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of police scrutiny, said Tikhomirov's interest in Islam came after he was forced to drop out of high school and attend vocational school. Others traced it to a stepfather from the Caucasus.

But in a letter posted on a rebel Web site, Tikhomirov's mother said he was simply drawn in by a library copy of the Koran when he was 17. "That same year, he started to search for people who could tell him anything about Islam," she wrote.

Tikhomirov may have had an early brush with Islamic extremism and Russia's heavy-handed efforts to stamp it out. An Uzbek preacher named Bakhtiyar Umarov moved to his city about the time he converted, and Tikhomirov studied with him, acquaintances said. After Umarov caused a stir by trying to build a mosque, Russia deported the preacher to Uzbekistan, where he was jailed on charges of "terrorist propaganda." But his defenders insist that he is a moderate and could not have radicalized Tikhomirov.

In his late teens, Tikhomirov moved to Moscow, where he attended an Islamic college that the authorities later closed in a crackdown on suspected extremism. He then traveled to Cairo, where he studied Arabic and attended lectures by Muslim scholars, one of whom he cited years later to justify violence in the name of Islam.

In 2003, he returned to Moscow, telling friends that the Egyptian authorities had kicked him out for his religious activities. He took the Muslim name Sayid, calling himself Sayid Buryatsky.

But he seemed far from ready to join the rebels in the North Caucasus. Investigators say he took a job as a low-level assistant to the Russian Council of Muftis, which unites the nation's Muslim spiritual boards.

Suppressed by the czars and the Communists, Islam has enjoyed a fitful rebirth in Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union. Most of the nation's estimated 20 million Muslims are ethnic minorities who adhere to a moderate branch of the faith. But radical views have made inroads, fueled by foreign proselytizers and frustration with state-backed spiritual leaders.

Acquaintances say Tikhomirov embraced a movement known as Salafism, which argues that Islam has been corrupted over the centuries and urges a return to the stricter practices of the earliest Muslims. The movement is popular among young Muslims in Russia, but the security forces often target its adherents as extremists.

Russia's traditional Islamic leaders have tried to steer young people toward moderate views, but a severe shortage of mosques, due in part to state limits, has made that difficult. In Moscow, six mosques serve as many as 3 million believers, the largest Muslim population of any city in Europe.

Aslam Ezhaev, director of an Islamic publishing house, said Tikhomirov voiced frustration with Muslim officialdom and eventually returned to Buryatia, where he took a job as a warehouse guard and offered to translate Arabic books for him.

Ezhaev suggested that Tikhomirov start a podcast for his Web site, Radio Islam. Tikhomirov proved be a talented preacher; his lectures were an immediate hit.

Ezhaev said he opposed violence and forbade Tikhomirov to discuss jihad. "It was easy for him to stay within the limits," he said. "I didn't see any signs of fanaticism."

On the Web, radicals criticized Tikhomirov for refusing to talk about Russia's brutal efforts to crush the insurgency in the Caucasus, where rebels in 2007 declared jihad to establish an Islamist emirate.

In the spring of 2008, Tikhomirov received a recruitment video from a senior rebel commander. "I considered it probably three or five seconds," he recalled in a video of his own, then concluded that God was challenging him to back up his sermons with action.

Because of his mixed ethnicity, he quickly became a powerful symbol for an insurgency trying to expand beyond Chechnya to the rest of the Caucasus. His sermons, which he filmed in combat gear, weaved scripture with sarcasm, striking a chord in an impoverished Muslim region brimming with resentment against the security forces.

Tikhomirov called the screams of injured enemies "music for the ears" and detailed his central role in the campaign of suicide bombings that began last summer with the revival of Riyad-us Saliheen, a brigade that once staged attacks across Russia.

"While I am alive," he wrote in December, "I will do everything possible so that the ranks of Riyad-us Saliheen are broadened and new waves of mujaheddin go on to martyrdom operations."

On March 2, when security forces surrounded him and other fighters in a village in Ingushetia, Tikhomirov recorded a final sermon on his mobile phone, officials said. The authorities recovered the phone, along with a 50-liter barrel of explosives.

CQ - Behind the Lines for Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Image by Pieter Musterd (bezoek onze tentoonstelling) via Flickr

By David C. Morrison, Special to Congressional Quarterly

Heydays: Michigan Christian militia could have been plotting to commemorate Oklahoma City blast -- or uprisings at Lexington and Concord . . . Not close enough for government work: DHS has inspected just a dozen of 6,000 chemical facilities it says require special security . . . Ditto: Of 15 hypothetical terrorist attack scenarios identified by DHS, incident planning was completed only for one. These and other stories lead today's homeland security coverage.

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“Whether the Apocalyptic Hutarees’ alleged plan to attack police was meant to coincide with the 15th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing may never be known, [but] the possibility is inescapable,” The Tulsa World’s Randy Krehbiel leads. The date of the anniversary, April 19, is shared with the first shots fired at Lexington and Concord, The New York Observer’s Joe Conason reminds, while All Hands relays word that DHS’s Janet Napolitano will attend this year’s commemoration in O.C.

Homies: Almost a decade after 9/11, DHS has inspected just a dozen of the 6,000 chemical facilities it says require special security measures, The Houston Chronicle’s Monica Hatcher spotlights — Homeland Security Newswire reports that Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee is planning hearings. The department has also identified 15 hypothetical terrorist attack scenarios, but it has completed incident planning work on only one, which envisions explosions similar to Moscow’s metro bombing, Government Security News’ Jacob Goodwin relates. One year after the Conficker botnet was front-page news around the world, DHS is preparing a report examining efforts to keep the destructive zombie-maker in check, Computerworld’s Robert McMillan mentions.

Feds: The Obama administration has authorized operations to capture or kill a U.S.-born Muslim cleric based in Yemen, Reuters’ Adam Entous reports. About to transfer to DHS’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis, the ODNI’s chief strategist Patrick C. Neary contributes an essay to Studies in Intelligence diagnosing the ills of the post-9/11 intelligence community, The Washington Post reports — and see Security Management’s Matthew Harwood on the same. Efforts to overhaul U.S. intel ops are “very much a work in progress” and “true information sharing” has barely started, CongressDaily’s Chris Strohm hears top spy Dennis Blair saying yesterday. The Post’s Jeff Stein, meantime, chronicles the long-running legal travails of “Peter B.,” a one-time deep-cover CIA counterterrorist who alleges he was unfairly fired in 2002.

State and Local: The statewide head of the Ohio Defense Force militia assures The Dayton Daily News that “his group is in business to help the police in times of crisis, not to kill them” — as the founder of the Indiana Militia informs The Merrillville Post-Tribune that “most militias form with the intent to uphold the U.S. Constitution,” and a Daily Illini op-ed argues that “one bad militia group doesn’t speak for them all.” Arizona’s A.G. tells The Associated Press that the slaying of a southern Arizona rancher was the work of a drug cartel scout, but the Cochise County Sheriff sees no evidence supporting that theory. Mississippi’s Emergency Management chief says all entities that may have been overpaid FEMA grant money related to Hurricane Katrina have been contacted, but that resolving the issue could take a year or more, The Jackson Clarion-Ledger updates.

Follow the Money: A federal court ruling on warrantless wiretapping may dismantle a five-year probe into a defunct charity’s financial support for terror outfits, Right Side News frets. New Delhi last week froze 18 allegedly terror-linked bank accounts under India’s stringent Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, Press Trust of India informs — as Asia Times sees subcontinental terrorist outfits reviving older methods of garnering funds, most notably extortion. “They say sunlight is the best disinfectant. Nowhere is that truer than in Iran. We must have transparency from firms doing business in Iran,” the president of United Against Nuclear Iran inveighs in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Treasury last week imposed new sanctions on an al Qaeda associate who helped smuggle foreign fighters into Iraq and a German jailed for plotting to bomb American targets there, AP reports.

Bugs ‘n Bombs: Authorities have traced to Brooklyn the mailing location of the March 25 anthrax letter hoax that caused Rep. Anthony Weiner’s Queens office to temporarily shut down, The New York Post relays. “Our adversaries — no, our enemies — have but one goal: to kill us,” Lancaster Farming has an FBI official addressing the annual Virginia Agroterrorism Conference. Even as the FDA increases inspections and growers focus on food safety, the walnut industry is focusing on traceability, Food Safety News notes. Using operating manuals for the Russian 107mm Katyusha rocket, an al Qaeda Web site tutors British fanatics on building cruise missiles with solid fuel engines, ANI notes.

Know Nukes: Thermo Fisher Scientific has been awarded two U.S. patents for radiation instruments that can help protect the public against nuclear terrorism, Nuclear Street says. The hard-negotiated U.S.-Russian nuke arms pact being inked Thursday “took so long to conclude it has jeopardized Obama’s chances of achieving another nuclear goal: Senate ratification of a nuclear test ban treaty,” AP analyzes. “The most serious threat America faces is nuclear terrorism from Iran, either a nuclear EMP attack launched by missile or a warhead smuggled into a city,” Family Security Matters leads.

Close Air Support: Security officers at Tulsa International chased down and arrested a man who threatened at a checkpoint April 4 to detonate a bomb in a gym bag, The Tulsa World tells — as The Cleveland Plain Dealer learns that the gun found in Cleveland Browns lineman Shaun Rogers’ carry-on at another airport security checkpoint was cocked and loaded. North Carolina’s Charlotte-Douglas International will close a checkpoint throughout April for expansion and renovations, WBTV 3 News notes. The full-body scanners that DHS is deploying since the Dec. 25 bomb threat are not the best devices available, Maine Public Broadcasting Network quotes Sen. Susan Collins — while The Bangor Daily News says Collins is right to say that new screening procedures for international arrivals “won’t help much if U.S. agencies don’t share information.”

Coming and Going: Although some subway stations in the United States have been outfitted with a bio-chemical threat detection system, its installation isn’t presently supported by DHS funding or transit authority budgets, Global Security Newswire notes — as The Infrastructurist concludes that “there’s still an elephant in the room when it comes to adapting sophisticated technologies on a large scale: cost.” The Arizona rancher killing, meantime, has drawn fresh scrutiny to the patchwork of fencing along the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border, FOX News spotlights.

Cyberia: The European Union is funding research aimed at detecting suspicious behavior on board aircraft using “a combination of cameras, microphones, explosives detectors and a sophisticated computer system,” The Daily Telegraph relates. “For Israel’s chief of military intelligence, ‘cyberspace has become the fifth dimension of warfare, following land, sea, air and space,’” Aviation Week leads. “Over the next three years, the DHS is slated to hire 1,000 cybersecurity professionals and has extended offers to roughly 200 individuals so far,” eWeek updates — while U.S. News runs a point-counterpoint debate on the question: “Should the U.S. be prepared for offensive cyberwarfare?” See a sidebar, as well, on six vulnerable potential terrorist targets.

Terror Tech: “The most extensive and sophisticated video surveillance system in the United States . . . is transforming what it means to be in public in Chicago,” AP spotlights. The EPA is working with a Pentagon agency on anthrax sporicides, the deputy director of its National Homeland Security Research Center writes in Armed With Science in regards to interagency collaboration on bioterror R&D. Homeland Security Watch ponders “What Zombies Can Teach About Homeland Security,” drawing on the (actually serious) Canadian academic paper, “Mathematical Modelling of an Outbreak of Zombie Infection.” In Afghanistan, meanwhile, “evidence shows that while drone strikes wear down the will of insurgents, they also give policymakers the illusion of quick, seemingly costless success,” Asia Times assesses.

Over There: Monday’s attack on the U.S. consulate in Peshawar marked “the first most-coordinated and well-planned direct strike on a U.S. interest in Pakistan,” Foreign Policy essays. Obama administration plans to train a covert Indonesian army counterterror unit could violate the Leahy Amendment, the Los Angeles Times hears human rights advocates fretting. According to Canada’s Tourism Commission, visits from Americans dropped by 9 percent in 2009 and increased U.S. ID hassles at the border would seem to be the cause, The Bangor Daily News notes. The Canadian lawyer who forced the U.S. government to admit that Abu Zubaydah is not an al Qaeda terrorist says the revelation could seriously jeopardize Ottawa’s case against Mohamed Harkat, the Citizen says.

Courts and Rights: The Supremes have declined to take the case of a Saudi defendant in Colorado whose lawyer was barred from questioning a prospective juror about a likely bias against Muslims, The Christian Science Monitor mentions. A Philadelphia man who threatened Rep. Eric Cantor and his family via YouTube has been found incompetent to stand trial, the Inquirer informs — as The Seattle Times sees a Washington State man charged with threatening to kill Sen. Patty Murray over her support for the health care overhaul. A migrant aid agency says two Uighur brothers resettled in Switzerland from Guantanamo Bay are studying French and settling in, AP reports — while Agence France-Presse learns that some Gitmo detainees are setting aside food as a donation to Haiti’s earthquake victims. Justice included non-terrorists on a list backing up administration claims that hundreds of terrorists have been convicted in criminal courts, Cybercast News Service contends.

Patriot Ponies: “A Christian militia, made up entirely of horses, was arrested today for planning a stampede through the middle of Main Street, USA, on July 4th,” The Spoof (a bit inexplicably) spoofs. “The leader of the herd, known only as Star, has confessed his organization was intent on creating anarchy by going to a series of 4th of July parades around the U.S. and causing a few flighty horses to break. Then, the group of militant mustangs would follow through with a general equine panic culminating in chaos throughout the country causing widespread property damage. The alleged co-conspirators and their ages are Duke 5, Bandit 7, Doc 9, Ollie 12, and Red 8. All those arrested could face punishments ranging from 15 years to life in a maximum security pen surrounded by electrical fencing.”

Source: CQ Homeland Security