
GUANTANAMO BAY, CUBA -- Pentagon officials preparing for next month's arraignment of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other accused terrorists charged with plotting the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, are expecting about 600 journalists to apply for the 60 spaces available for members of the media at Guantanamo Bay's Camp Justice.
The military has not yet begun accepting credentials requests for the KSM arraignment, which is scheduled to begin on May 5, but one Pentagon public affairs official already received 100 inquires from press.
Last week's pre-trial hearings for Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the Saudi Arabian man accused of plotting the 2000 attack on the USS Cole, served as a sort of dry run for Guantanamo's media operation, though the five reporters who attended represented just 1/12th of the 60-person capacity.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)The man arrested in an FBI terror sting just as he was allegedly about to attempt what he thought would be a suicide attack on the U.S. Capitol had several other targets in mind before he eventually settled on his final plan, according to federal authorities.
An affidavit from an FBI agent filed in federal court Friday says that Amine El Khalifi planned to explode a bomb at an office building in Alexandria that contained military offices, then wanted to attack a synagogue, then decided to target an Army general, then a government building, then a restaurant next to that building because it was frequented by military officials.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)The Obama administration thinks many in the liberal blogosphere are mistaken in their belief that the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) signed by the president on New Year's Eve authorizes the indefinite detention of citizens captured on U.S. soil.
Many progressive and libertarians have argued that the NDAA codifies the president's ability to detain a U.S. citizen captured on American soil until the war on terrorism is declared over. The administration believes that the NDAA doesn't specifically allow for the indefinite detention of American citizens, but concedes that it doesn't specifically ban the practice either.
A senior administration official maintained in an interview with TPM that the NDAA "changes nothing" about the legal question of whether the government could allow for the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens captured in the United States.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)FBI representatives met once again with Muslim and Arab-American leaders at Bureau headquarters on Monday to update them on the progress they have made to rid their counterterrorism training programs of anti-Muslim material.
One participant described the meeting, organized by FBI's Community Relations Division, as "lengthy and positive."
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)Administration officials are continuing to express concern that section 1032 of the National Defense Authorization Act passed by the Senate Thursday night will present big problems for counterterrorism officials in their efforts to stop future attacks. The Senate killed an amendment that would have explicitly said U.S. citizens can't be held in custody indefinitely but passed language that said the law on the mater hasn't changed.
The White House confirmed to TPM on Friday morning that their veto threat still stands. They believe that the "unnecessary, untested, and legally controversial" restrictions that would mandate certain terrorist suspects go into military custody would "disrupt the Executive branch's ability to enforce the law and impose unwise and unwarranted restrictions on the U.S. Government's ability to aggressively combat international terrorism."
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)The plot Rezwan Ferdaus allegedly developed to fly remote controlled planes carrying C-4 explosives into the Pentagon and the dome of the Capitol might have been far-fetched, but a federal judge has ruled he's still a danger to the community and agreed to the government's request to detain him.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)When he wasn't smoking pot with the New York Police Department's confidential informant or trying to manually cut off the tip of his penis, "lone wolf" terror suspect Jose Pimentel was running a jihadist website on Google's Blogger platform.
Now Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) wants Google to implement a policy explicitly banning terrorist material on their Blogger servers and set up a YouTube-style "flag" system to bring such material to Google's attention.
TPM obtained a letter sent by Lieberman, chair of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, to Google CEO Larry Page on Tuesday calling for him to make some changes to their policy.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)Jose Pimentel wasn't exactly hiding.
The 27-year-old accused of plotting to attack New York with pipe bombs was operating a website that espoused his beliefs in committing terror against the U.S. and was relatively well known in law enforcement circles.
Federal authorities passed on the case -- with one source telling TPM on Sunday night that the FBI passed several times, and an official telling the Associated Press on Monday that Pimentel "didn't have the predisposition or the ability to do anything on his own." That's leaving observers wondering what exactly the feds didn't like about the case and setting up another squabble in the long-running turf war between the New York Police Department and the FBI.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)In an effort to stomp out anti-Muslim counterterrorism training at the the FBI, the bureau is calling in reinforcements.
Spencer Ackerman reports over at Wired that the FBI is turning to the Army's Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, a request that "represents a frank admission from the FBI that it requires outside help to reform."
The bureau, Ackerman reports, reached out to Bill Braniff, a retired Army captain who directs Practitioner Education at West Point. He "spent much of October in meetings at Bureau Headquarters in Washington D.C. designing what a source familiar with the process describes as 'guidelines for objectionable material' to exclude from agent training." He continues:
In its eight-year history, the CTC has built a reputation as a non-ideological haven for rigorous, data-driven counterterrorism research. It compiled perhaps the most thorough profile ever of the foreign fighters that flocked to Iraq, based on captured military documents. Its monthly newsletter, the CTC Sentinel, is widely read in counterterrorism circles. Not only does CTC teach the Army's cadets at West Point, who will have to distinguish between Muslim civilians and insurgents in warzones, it consults for state and local police -- and the FBI.
An FBI official told TPM that the Army's role in the review is a bit "overstated." In a statement provided by the bureau, the FBI said a "core review team included FBI and non-FBI personnel with academic training in areas of Islamic studies and Arab history" which "established guidelines to provide concrete enterprise-wide guidance on the training of counterterrorism and countering violent extremism topics."
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) just released a massive trove of FBI documents indicating that anti-Muslim training materials have spread pretty far and wide within the bureau over the past several years and that analysts have been targeting areas based on racial and ethnic demographics.
It's all part of the ACLU's new "Mapping the FBI" initiative, which "aims to expose misconduct and abuse of authority by the bureau." They say the documents show that the FBI "has been targeting American communities for investigation based on race, ethnicity, national origin and religion" and that analysts "across the country are associating criminal behaviors with certain racial and ethnic groups and then using U.S. census data and other demographic information to map where those communities are located to investigate them."
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)Conservative shock jock Bryan Fischer whipped out his best anti-Muslim rhetoric at the Values Voter Summit on Saturday.
Some highlights:
"Christians and Muslims do not believe in the same God."
"I believe it's important that we have a president who understands that Islam is not a religion of peace, but a religion of war and violence and death."
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)Undercover FBI agents have helped and informants have watched as alleged wanna-be terrorists form some pretty bizarre and improbable terror plots in the years since Sept. 11. But the plot 26-year-old Rezwan Ferdaus allegedly hatched to fly model airplanes loaded with C-4 into the Pentagon and the dome of the Capitol might be the most unlikely yet.
"I'm hard pressed to think of a case that I looked at that I would describe as more outlandish than this one," Trevor Aaronson, who wrote an extensive report for Mother Jones after studying 508 federal terrorism cases over the past decade, told TPM. "As far as sting operations, this has been one of the more outlandish."
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)The last time Rezwan Ferdaus, the 26-year-old Massachusetts man accused of plotting to attack the U.S. Capitol and the Pentagon with C-4 loaded model airplanes, had a run-in with the law was when he and two other students poured concrete in front of 10 doors to his high school in 2003.
Ferdaus, nicknamed "Bollywood," was the original drummer of the Goosepimp Orchestra when the band formed in 2004 until he "moved on to become a devout spiritual practitioner," according to the band's website. He also apparently played drums with a punk band named Silk Road, which has songs named "No Pilot" and "Gaza Dozer."
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)Updated: 5:55PM
Rezwan Ferdaus, a 26-year-old Massachusetts resident was arrested in an FBI sting on Wednesday after allegedly plotting to use large remote controlled model airplanes packed with C-4 plastic explosives to attack the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol.
Ferdaus allegedly traveled to Washington, D.C. to take photos of his targets in May 2011, all while under FBI surveillance. The Northeastern University graduate allegedly began planning to commit "jihad" against the United States in early 2010 and obtained mobile phones that he modified to act as an electrical switch for an IED.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)The NYPD's counterterrorism unit has the means to take down an aircraft "in a very extreme situation," according to New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)A secret program in the NYPD surveilled and documented the day-to-day lives American citizens in Moroccan communities, the Associated Press reports.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)Perhaps file this one under wishful thinking: Attorney General Eric Holder told the European Parliament on Tuesday that the Obama administration is hoping to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay before the 2012 election.
The Obama administration, Holder said, wants to close the facility "as quickly as possible, recognizing that we will face substantial pressure."
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)The FBI's William Gawthrop, the analyst-turned-trainer-turned-analyst who was responsible for the "one time only" anti-Muslim counterterrorism training session for 37 agents earlier this year, gave another presentation in June to dozens of law enforcement officials at a public-privately sponsored session in New York City, Spencer Ackerman and Noah Shachtman report for Wired.
At his presentation, in which Gawthrop said he was speaking in his capacity as a private citizen and not as an FBI analyst, he said the U.S. wastes "a lot of analytic effort talking about the type of weapon, the timing, the tactics. All of that is irrelevant ... if you have an Islamic motivation for actions."
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)Two Muslim groups that have had generally positive relationships with the federal government have separately written the Justice Department and the FBI asking for investigations of anti-Muslim information used in FBI counterterrorism training.
Salam Al-Marayti, president of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), wrote FBI Director Robert Mueller asking for an immediate internal investigation and a reassessment of the vetting process of trainers.
Al-Marayti wrote that MPAC was "greatly concerned" about the training materials used by the FBI, which he said employed "highly selective use of quotes and sources from Islamic scripture; and, Dangerously false and reductive presentation of one of the most vibrant and visible faith communities in America."
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)The CIA has launched an internal investigation into whether the agency broke any laws by closely cooperating with the NYPD's antiterrorism operations in Muslim communities after September 11.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Susan Collins (R-ME) aren't messing around when it comes to stopping federal dollars from flowing to anti-Muslim terrorism training. In a letter to Obama on Tuesday, the duo said that if the administration can't develop criteria to keep bigoted information out of counter-terrorism training, they'll "consider drafting a legislative mandate or even imposing standards by statute."
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)An expert witness for the federal government in the case against alleged "underwear bomber" Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab has constructed a version of the bomb the Nigerian 24-year-old allegedly tried to set off on a plane en route to Detroit on Christmas Day 2009.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) inserted a little-noticed provision into the National Defense Authorization Act that would put all terror suspects into immediate military custody, the National Journal reports.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)The New York Police Department, with help from the CIA, is running antiterrorism operations outside of their jurisdiction that target ethnic communities in a way the federal government can't, Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo report for the Associated Press.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)Updated: August 17, 2011, 9:45AM
The FBI's decision not to immediately advise a suspected terrorist of his Miranda rights upon his arrest has upset a federal judge and caused prosecutors to agree not to use statements he made prior to being advised of his rights in court.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)Pennsylvania 22-year-old Emerson Begolly pleaded guilty last week to soliciting others to engage in acts of terrorism and to attempting to use a firearm in an assault on FBI agents.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)The FBI was telling new bureau recruits as recently as Jan. 2009 that Islam "transforms [a] country's culture into 7th Century Arabian ways" and recommending a book written by one of Norwegian terrorism suspect Anders Behring Breivik's favorite authors as well as the Complete Idiot's Guide To Understanding Islam.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)Federal prosecutors have charged Emerson Begolly, the Nazi uniform wearing Pennsylvania man being held for allegedly biting an FBI agent who tried to question him about his activity on jihadist websites, with inciting violent attacks in the United States.
An indictment announced on Thursday by the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia charges that Begolly used an extremist web forum to solicited others to engage in acts of terrorism and disseminated instructions for making different kinds of explosives that could be used in terrorist attacks.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)The Justice Department is accusing Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of taking out of context comments by Attorney General Eric Holder's about using the civilian court system to try terrorism suspects.
McConnell, in an op-ed for the Washington Post, accused Holder of making an "audacious" claim about the war on terrorism during his speech before the American Constitution Society last week.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT) are requesting information on the federal funding of counterterrorism training programs following a report on trainers who espouse anti-Muslim views during training sessions for local cops.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)For the first time since the Justice Department relaxed the requirements in December on when federal law enforcement have to inform terrorism suspects of their Miranda rights, a reporter has seen a copy of the guidance issued by Attorney General Eric Holder and reports it gives FBI agents more latitude and flexibility in delaying informing suspects of their right to remain silent.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (1)Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) asked FBI Director Robert Mueller on Wednesday whether the bureau had any outreach programs specifically for the Baptist or Catholic communities like it did with the Muslim community.
"How is your outreach going with the Baptists or the Catholics?" Gohmert inquired.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (1)There's been an explosion of both state and federal money flowing into counterterrorism training for law enforcement in the years since Sept. 11. But it is becoming increasingly clear that some of the experts who are providing counterterrorism training for local law enforcement officers are sometimes not well vetted and have provided training which is based on bias against all Muslims and relies on falsehoods and exaggerations.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)Khalid Ali-M Aldawsari, the 20-year-old who allegedly plotted to target the home of former President George W. Bush and attack other locations in the U.S. with improvised explosive devices led a seemingly lonely life in Texas after he arrived from Saudi Arabia in 2008. But the criminal complaint reveals that he may have compensated, in part, by starting a blog -- and that his alleged online activities had a decidedly darker side.
The investigation into Aldawsari appears to have started when the Carolina Biological Supply (CBS) reported a suspicious attempted purchase of the chemical phenol. Between December 2010 and January 2011, Aldawsari bought a number of items from Amazon.com that could seemingly be used to develop a weapon.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Rep. Peter King (R-NY) said Tuesday that he plans to move forward with a series of hearings to examine the threat of Islamic radicalization, and said he "will not allow political correctness to obscure a real and dangerous threat to the safety and security of the citizens of the United States."
Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-MS) wrote a letter to King earlier this month asking him to expand the purpose of the hearings into "a broad-based examination of domestic extremist groups regardless of their ideological underpinnings."
But King said that the hearings will serve an important purpose, and that the committee "cannot ignore the fact that al Qaeda is actively attempting to recruit individuals living within the Muslim American community to commit acts of terror."
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)Nine months after it was first floated by the Obama administration, a plan to "modernize" Miranda rights doesn't seem to be going anywhere in the legislative branch. But Attorney General Eric Holder issued a guidance a few months ago that the Justice Department says sets no specific time limit on the so-called public safety exception.
The Justice Department has indicated that the guidance, which is still not public, takes care of most of the issues about which they were concerned without any input from Congress or the courts.
"While law enforcement has been employing this practice for some time - including during the Dec. 25 attempted bombing, we wanted to make clear this guidance and undertook process to refine it and once that process was complete - sent it out," Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd told TPM.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)The New York Police Department has used a movie that portrays Muslim-Americans as jihadis hell-bent on destroying the United States from within in its counter-terrorism training for officers.
The Village Voice reports today that the NYPD has shown "The Third Jihad" to officers taking their mandatory counter-terrorism courses.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)A bomb found on the route of a Martin Luther King Day parade in Spokane, Wash., was left in an act of "domestic terrorism," an FBI spokesman said today.
"Clearly the confluence of the parade route, the timing, the fact that the device was likely placed on that route roughly an hour before the parade ... falls squarely within the realm of domestic terrorism," Frank Harrill, the special agent in charge of FBI operations in Spokane, told TPM.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)Instant messaging conversations allegedly written by Emerson Begolly reveal him as anti-Semitic, extreme, armed and dangerous. But they also reveal what he claimed was the genesis of his extremist views: an interaction with a Christian pastor who was a registered sex offender.
Begolly's is a cautionary tale about the threat of homegrown terrorism: the radicalized 21-year-old college student reportedly obsessed over violence and martyrdom and said he was disgusted by a country where "homosexuality... abortion... assisted suicide, whores, and dru(g)s r all legal."
But it's also the strange story of a loner living on a farm in a small Pennsylvania town who had easy access to weapons and vented his frustrations with his family (a father who dressed him up in Nazi regalia and hit him as a child and an estranged mother with reported mental health issues of her own) in jihadist web forums.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)Nobody was more surprised than 21-year-old Emerson Begolly when he cleared an Federal Bureau of Investigation background check and was allowed to purchase an AK-47 assault rifle last year. After all, he'd been a moderator and contributor on Islamic extremist web forums, posted songs praising suicide bombers, discussed his jihad fantasies in the open and even made an appearance in Newsweek under a pseudonym that his grandmother clipped and saved. He knew for a fact "the man" was onto him.
"i honestly think that the day the[y] ended the hold and sold me the gun someone at the FBI showed up to work drunk," Begolly wrote on a jihadist web forum under the name Abu Nancy (the name of his imaginary daughter), according to transcripts filed by the feds yesterday.
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