An Interesting Few Days for Al-Awlaki

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Earlier today, bmaz and I asked a series of questions about the significance of Anwar al-Awlaki’s name on the list of US citizens who can be assassinated with no due process.

bmaz: So, the US can put Awlaki on a list for death by assassination, but couldn’t, and apparently still cannot, form the basis to prosecute him criminally??

ew: And cannot prosecute him having had a tap on his phones going back–at the very least–at least a year?

ew: I wonder if [the targeting of Awlaki] is what happened to the William Webster inquiry into Awlaki’s communications with Nidal Hasan?

Today, Declassifed blog’s Mark Coatney asked a related question that I had earlier raised: Why was the Administration, immediately, so chatty about the Underwear Bomber, even while it remains very close-lipped about Nidal Hasan? (The Administration–though not, apparently, Webster–was supposed to brief the Intelligence Committees on the Hasan investigation today, which I guess makes it safe to assume Dana Priest’s article came up in the briefing, if Congress didn’t already know about the assassinations of American citizens.)

Capitol Hill officials say that the Obama White House and relevant government agencies have been very cooperative in supplying congressional oversight committees with a torrent of information—both raw intelligence and law-enforcement material and results of internal administration inquiries—about alleged would-be Christmas Day underpants airplane bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. President Obama and other senior administration officials have said that in the months before Abdulmutallab boarded his flight from Amsterdam to Detroit, U.S. agencies had collected various “bits and pieces” of intelligence, which, had they been properly knitted together, might well have enabled U.S. authorities to foil Abdulmutallab’s attempted airplane bombing before he boarded his flight.

By contrast, the same officials allege that the administration has been relatively tightfisted with information, both from raw intelligence and law-enforcement files and from postmassacre investigations, on the background of the accused Fort Hood shooter. Congressional officials say they don’t know why the administration has been more reticent about Fort Hood than about the failed underpants attack, but that the contrast between how the cases have been treated up until now has been striking.

I’m glad I wasn’t the only one noticing the disparity in treatment of the two extremists.

More interesting than the confirmation that I’m not crazy in seeing the disparity, though, is the timeline revealed in several recent details on Al-Awlaki.

December 17, 2008: Nidal Hasan sends first email to al-Awlaki “asking for an edict regarding the [possibility] of a Muslim soldier killing his colleagues who serve with him in the American army”

November 5, 2009: Hasan killings in Ft. Hood

November 8, 2009: Al-Awlaki blesses Hasan’s killings

November 19, 2009: Underwear Bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s father alerts US embassy of his concerns about his son

December 4, 2009:  Abdulmutallab leaves Yemen, having met with al Qaeda Arabian Peninsula members, possibly including al-Awlaki

December 22, 2009: FBI Deputy Director John Pistole provides classified briefing to Senate Homeland Security Committee on Fort Hood

December 23 (?), 2009: Al-Awlaki does interview with al-Jazeera that is subsequently posted to many jihadi forums

December 24, 2009: Strike in Yemen mistakenly thought to have hit al-Awlaki

December 25, 2009: Abdulmutallab attempts to blow up plane outside of Detroit

December 26, 2009: Crazy Pete Hoekstra says there may have been ties between al-Awlaki and Abdulmutallab

After December 24 but before end of 2009: Al-Awlaki added to JSOC list of those to be killed or captured

December 29: Moonie Times reports that al-Awlaki blessed Abdulmutallab’s plot beforehand (based on intelligence source)

If you match this timeline with the assertion that Awlaki had some tie with Abdulmutallab and that he was placed on the assassination list(s) just after Abdulmutallab’s attempted attack, then it seems clear that, after al-Awlaki’s ties to Hasan became clear, and after the attempted attack in Detroit, the Obama Administration almost immediately placed him on the list. Read more →

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The List of US Citizens Targeted for Killing (or Capture)

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This Dana Priest article is interesting for the way it fleshes out the way the US is working in Yemen (primarily), Pakistan, and Somalia. But note this line, which she kind of buries in there.

As part of the operations, Obama approved a Dec. 24 strike against a compound where a U.S. citizen, Anwar al-Aulaqi, was thought to be meeting with other regional al-Qaeda leaders. Although he was not the focus of the strike and was not killed, he has since been added to a shortlist of U.S. citizens specifically targeted for killing or capture by the JSOC, military officials said. [my emphasis]

That is, somewhere there’s a list of Americans who, the President has determined, can be killed with no due process.

Priest goes on much later in the article.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush gave the CIA, and later the military, authority to kill U.S. citizens abroad if strong evidence existed that an American was involved in organizing or carrying out terrorist actions against the United States or U.S. interests, military and intelligence officials said. The evidence has to meet a certain, defined threshold. The person, for instance, has to pose “a continuing and imminent threat to U.S. persons and interests,” said one former intelligence official.

The Obama administration has adopted the same stance. If a U.S. citizen joins al-Qaeda, “it doesn’t really change anything from the standpoint of whether we can target them,” a senior administration official said. “They are then part of the enemy.”

Both the CIA and the JSOC maintain lists of individuals, called “High Value Targets” and “High Value Individuals,” whom they seek to kill or capture. The JSOC list includes three Americans, including Aulaqi, whose name was added late last year. As of several months ago, the CIA list included three U.S. citizens, and an intelligence official said that Aulaqi’s name has now been added. [Update, February 17, 2010: WaPo has since retracted the report that CIA had US citizens on its kill list.]

Of course, they said Jose Padilla had close ties to al Qaeda, but those turned out to be more tenuous than originally claimed. Likewise the case against John Walker Lindh. And there are any number of “aspirational” terrorists whom officials have claimed had joined al Qaeda.

But I guess the tenuousness of those ties don’t really matter, when the President can dial up the assassination of an American citizen.

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The Crotch-Bomber and Nidal Hasan Reviews

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The White House has released its summary of the intelligence review on the Christmas Crotch Bomber (and here is Obama’s order for corrective action). The big take-away is:

The US Government had sufficient information prior to the attempted December 25 attack to have potentially disrupted the AGAP attack.

But, the summary says, the Watch List system and the Intelligence Community are not broken; they just need to be improved.

All well and good.

But I’m curious by the quick turnaround on this report and the lack of any similar unclassified summary of the report on Nidal Hasan’s successful attack. For that matter, William Webster is still working on his review of the Hasan attack (which I understand to be a follow-up to just this kind of initial review).

Does that mean whatever the review found, preliminarily, could not be published? Meanwhile, the military has just appointed a “sanity board” to review Hasan’s competence to stand trial.

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Jordan: CIA Attacker Was Pissed about Civilian Deaths

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As Time admits, the story the Jordanians are telling about the CIA suicide bomber,Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawim may simply be their attempt at spin. Nevertheless, they’re saying that al-Balawi was not a double agent; rather he attacked the base because he was angry about all the civilian deaths

The Jordanians say that in December, al-Balawi requested an urgent meeting with the CIA and his Jordanian go-between, Captain Sharif Ali bin Zeid, reportedly a relation of the royal Jordanian family. To whet their appetite, al-Balawi dangled a tantalizing piece of information: he claimed to have “some information” on the whereabouts of al-Zawahiri, these sources say.

So why did al-Balawi, a seemingly trusted agent, switch sides? The Jordanian intelligence sources who spoke to TIME speculate that al-Balawi had become enraged at the Americans for killing a high number of civilians in their hunt for al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders. And al-Balawi, who felt partly responsible for these deaths because of his role in pointing out the targeted villages in which al-Qaeda militants had been hiding, may have been consumed by guilt. “It’s very possible that he decided to take revenge for the death of these Muslim civilians,” says a senior Jordanian official.
I expect these stories are going to remain very fluid for some time.
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Crazy Pete Hoekstra Called On His Efforts to Profit Off of Terrorism

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I was in my holiday lull last week when the man who wants to be my Governor, Crazy Pete Hoekstra, callously tried to fundraise off of an attempted attack on a flight bound for Michigan.

My promise to you, as your governor, my first duty and most solemn responsibility is to keep Michigan safe!

For almost a decade I have been a leader on National Security and at the forefront of the war on terror. I understand the real and continuing threat radical jihadists pose to our great state of Michigan and our great Nation.

I have pledged that I will do “everything possible” to prevent these terrorists from coming to Michigan.

But I need your help.

If you agree that we need a Governor who will stand up the Obama/Pelosi efforts to weaken our security please make a most generous contribution of $25, $50, $100 or even $250 to my campaign.

Thankfully, for a change, the TradMed was not lulled by Crazy Pete’s fear-mongering. Here’s Terry Moran asking Crazy Pete why he tried to profit off of an attempted terrorist attack aimed at Michigan.

Someone should have told Crazy Pete that filibustering as shamelessly as he did here is a skill best used in the Senate, not in the Governor’s mansion.

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It All Depends on Your Definition of Failure

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Politico is now aiding the fear-mongerers in declaring the Obama’s Administration’s response to a failed terrorist attack a failure (one, two, three, four, balanced by this).

And yet, little mention of the successes the Obama Administration has had: preventing Najibullah Zazi’s alleged attack attempt, rooting out efforts to recruit Somali youth from Minnesota, catching several self-radicalizing Americans. Indeed, the frenzy surrounding the Obama Administration’s failure to prevent a failed attack seems to exceed that surrounding questions about the handling of Nidal Hasan.

Meanwhile, there’s also little mention of the recent reports showing how badly the Bush Administration screwed up the Afghan war–a massive strategic failure that has allowed al Qaeda to sustain its threat. And real hypocrisy about the Bush Administration response to equivalent events, like the Shoe Bomber.

Right Wing Breaking News!! Failure failure failure (if you don’t look closely at all)!!!

But note the silence, thus far, about a real Obama Administration failure. (h/t Calculated Risk)

The Obama administration’s $75 billion program to protect homeowners from foreclosure has been widely pronounced a disappointment, and some economists and real estate experts now contend it has done more harm than good.

Since President Obama announced the program in February, it has lowered mortgage payments on a trial basis for hundreds of thousands of people but has largely failed to provide permanent relief. Critics increasingly argue that the program, Making Home Affordable, has raised false hopes among people who simply cannot afford their homes.

As a result, desperate homeowners have sent payments to banks in often-futile efforts to keep their homes, which some see as wasting dollars they could have saved in preparation for moving to cheaper rental residences. Some borrowers have seen their credit tarnished while falsely assuming that loan modifications involved no negative reports to credit agencies.

Some experts argue the program has impeded economic recovery by delaying a wrenching yet cleansing process through which borrowers give up unaffordable homes and banks fully reckon with their disastrous bets on real estate, enabling money to flow more freely through the financial system.

The Obama Administration’s unwillingness to force the banks sucking at the federal teat to take a haircut on mortgages whose value had been blown out of proportion by a captive mortgage industry is a damning failure, one that may lead us into a double dip recession, one which forces more and more families into dire circumstances. Even if you only care about national security, narrowly defined (as Republicans and Lieberman appear to), if the failure to solve the foreclosure crisis extends the recession, it’ll make it a lot harder to pay for all the cool war toys that seem to give fear-mongers big woodies.

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Obama Appoints Fox To Evaluate Terror Watchlist Henhouse

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fox-and-chicken-richardson-300x288Barack Obama, doing his best to make Dick Cheney’s questions about leadership look rational, has assigned John Brennan to conduct the Administration’s ballyhooed investigation into the claimed failure of the terrorist watchlist program in the Christmas Fruit Of The Loom Bomber incident.

What’s wrong with this picture? Throw a dart in any direction and you will find something.Politico gives the unsettling details:

President Barack Obama promised a “thorough review” of the government’s terrorist watch-list system after a Nigerian man reported to US government officials by his father to have radicalized and gone missing last month was allowed to board a Northwest Airlines flight to Detroit that he later tried to blow up without any additional security screening.

Yet the individual Obama has chosen to lead the review, White House counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan, served for 25 years in the CIA, helped design the current watch-list system and served as interim director of the National Counterterrorism Center, whose role is under review.

In the three years before joining the Obama administration, Brennan was president and CEO of The Analysis Corporation, an intelligence contracting firm that worked closely with the National Counterterrorism Center and other US government intelligence, law enforcement and homeland security agencies on developing terrorism watch-lists.

“Each and every day, TAC makes important contributions in the counterterrorism (CT) and national security realm by supporting national watchlisting activities as well as other CT requirements,” the company’s Web site states.

According to financial disclosures forms released by the White House, Brennan served as president and CEO of TAC from November 2005 until January 2009, when Obama named him to the White House terrorism and homeland security job. The disclosures show that Brennan reported earning a $783,000 annual salary from the Analysis Corporation in 2008. ….

One former senior intelligence official told POLITICO it is “unsavory to see Obama put Brennan in charge of a review of this matter since it is possible that NCTC or TAC could have failed in their responsibilities.”

Oy. “Unsavory”? Ya think? This is akin to a law school final exam where you try to identify all the conflicts of interest in the given situation. But there is not enough time to hit them all. Do not fret, the crack White House ethics team has looked at Brennan and determined Read more →

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Brandon Mayfield Gets Hosed By The 9th Circuit

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As Fatster noticed, the Ninth Circuit has ruled against Brandon Mayfield on his attempt to hold the PATRIOT Act declared unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment.

Mayfield was a former suspect in the 2004 Madrid train bombings. After the Madrid bombings, the Spanish National Police (“SNP”) recovered fingerprints from a plastic bag containing explosive detonators. The SNP submitted digital photographs of the fingerprints to Interpol Madrid, which subsequently transmitted them to the FBI in Quantico, Virginia. The FBI searched fingerprints in its system and, among other possibilities, produced Mayfield, an US citizen and lawyer from the Portland Oregon area, as an alleged match. FBI surveillance agents began to watch Mayfield and follow him and members of his family when they traveled to and from the mosque, Mayfield’s law office, the children’s schools, and other family activities. The FBI also applied to the Foreign Intelligence Security Court (“FISC”) for authorization to surreptitiously place electronic listening devices in the Mayfield family home; searched the home while nobody was there; obtained private and protected information about the Mayfields from third parties; searched Mayfield’s law offices; and placed wiretaps on his office and home phones. The application for the FISC order was personally approved by John Ashcroft, then the Attorney General of the United States.

The Spanish SNP, however, looked at the FBI evidence and found it lacking evidentiary credibility. In spite of this fact, the FBI submitted an affidavit to a US Federal court, stating that experts considered the identification of Mayfield 100% positive, intentionally failing to advise that the SNP had reached a diametrically opposite conclusion. As a result, Mayfield was arrested and held on a material witness warrant, and the public informed of his identity and supposed involvement in the bombings. Over two weeks later, the SNP conclusively matched the fingerprint to an unrelated Algerian citizen and Mayfield was absolved. Mayfield sued the US Government under numerous theories including that the PATRIOT Act was unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment. The government, being in an egregiously bad position, settled with Mayfield and even allowed the unusual provision that he could maintain the Fourth Amendment challenge to PATRIOT, but could only obtain declaratory relief, not monetary damages.

Mayfield pressed his complaint seeking a declaration that PATRIOT was unconstitutional under his stipulated facts, and the District Court of Oregon, in denying the government’s motion to dismiss and granting Mayfield’s motion for summary judgment, agreed with Mayfield and ruled in his favor. The government appealed to the 9th Circuit arguing that the trial court had no jurisdiction because Mayfield had already been compensated, that the court erred in finding PATRIOT unconstitutional and that other matters, in totality, placed the matter outside of the court’s power to award redress. These arguments were proffered by the government in spite of it having knowingly and specifically agreeing that Mayfield intended to raise and argue said issues and agreeing in their unusual settlement agreement to let him do so.

The usually enlightened 9th Circuit, this time took it upon itself to contrive and contort a way Read more →

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The New SWIFT Agreement

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Last night I went to bed before I looked at the new SWIFT Agreement giving the US access to all of Europe’s finance data to track for terrorists. Here’s that agreement and here’s a Q&A document about what the agreement does. The agreement is instructive both for what it suggests about the negotiations between the US and EU, but also for what it suggests about the protections the US is willing to grant citizens of other countries that it is not extending to its own citizens.

This is a temporary extension

This is not a permanent agreement. This is a 9 month extension of the SWIFT agreement from February 1 of next year for nine months, meaning the new EU government will begin negotiations on a proposed new agreement immediately.

in July of this year the 27 Member States of the European Union unanimously gave the EU Presidency a mandate to negotiate an agreement with the United States to ensure the transfer of the data and thereby the continuation of the TFTP. In July, it was not known when or indeed whether the Lisbon Treaty would come into force. Accordingly, the mandate is based on the legal mechanism of the EU Treaty which will cease to exist on 1 December when the Lisbon Treaty enters into force. To ensure that the European Parliament is able to exercise its new powers under the new Treaty in this regard, the envisaged Agreement is for a maximum duration of 9 months. The Commission will come forward with a new proposed mandate in early 2010 for a subsequent agreement based on the Lisbon Treaty. [my emphasis]

Note that “maximum duration” language. I’m guessing the US is going to try to bulldoze an agreement through ASAP, presumably before the new government (or, more importantly, activists) settles in.

The envisaged Agreement has a short duration in order to ensure that the European Parliament’s new powers under the Lisbon Treaty will apply to any possible longer term agreement which might replace the envisaged Agreement.

It’ll be interesting to see whether this agreement gets better, or worse, in the coming months.

The agreement claims the data is not used for data-mining

Here’s what the agreement claims the US does with this data.

The [Terrorist Finance Tracking Program] does not involve data mining or any other type of algorithmic or automated profiling or computer filtering. The U.S. Treasury shall ensure the protection of personal data by means of the following safeguards, which shall be applied without discrimination, in particular on the basis of nationality or country of residence.

(a) Provided data shall be processed exclusively for the prevention, investigation, detection, or prosecution of terrorism or its financing;

(b) All searches of Provided Data shall be based upon pre-existing information or evidence which demonstrates a reason to believe that the subject of the search has a nexus to terrorism or its financing;

(c) Each individual TFTP search of Provided Data shall be narrowly tailored, shall demonstrate a reason to believe that the subject of the search has a nexus to terrorism or its financing, and shall be logged, including such nexus to terrorism or its financing required to initiate the search;

(d) Provided data shall be maintained in a secure physical environment, stored separately from any other data, with high-level systems and physical intrusion controls to prevent unauthorized access to the data;

(e) Access to Provided Data shall be limited to analysts investigating terrorism or its financing and to persons involved in the technical support, management, and oversight of the TFTP;

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Late Night: High Seas Hijinx – Pirates and Monkeys Attack!

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images.thumbnailArrrrr. Thats right matey, teh pirates be back. It was just last April that US flagged ship the Maersk Alabama was seized by Somali pirates causing a five day standoff finally resolved when Navy snipers took out the pirates which by then had the Maersk captain hostage in a lifeboat. The Maersk, its captain, crew and cargo were all intact and saved.

That was then, this is now; and now the Maersk Alabama, yep the same damn ship, has been involved in yet another pirate attack. This time, however, the pesky pirates were fended off by an onboard security team. From The Guardian:

Somali pirates attacked the container ship Maersk Alabama today for the second time in seven months. Private guards on board the US-flagged ship repelled the attack with gunfire and a high-decibel noise device.
…
Four pirates in a skiff attacked the ship again today at about 6.30am local time, opening fire with automatic weapons from about 300 yards away, a statement from the US Fifth Fleet in Bahrain said. A security team repelled the attack by using evasive manoeuvres, small-arms fire and a Long Range Acoustic Device, which can beam earsplitting alarm tones.

Vice Admiral Bill Gortney of the US naval forces central command said the Maersk Alabama had followed the maritime industry’s best practices in having a security team on board. “This is a great example of how merchant mariners can take proactive action to prevent being attacked and why we recommend that ships follow industry best practices if they’re in high-risk areas,” he said in a statement.

Roger Middleton, a piracy expert at the Chatham House thinktank in London, said the international maritime community was solidly against armed guards, but that American ships have taken a different line.

Aye, they be rough seas for teh Alabama, but she made it through unscathed this time. If you are wondering why the Maersk Alabama was back at it on the same route, refer back to this old post, which explains that when transporting American humanitarian relief supplies, organizations must use a ship chartered in the US, US flagged, and American crew pursuant to US law. There are not that many available for this task, and the Alabama is one of them. Fascinating factoid: the respective captains of the Alabama for the two pirate attacks are good friends and side by side classmates together at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy. Go figure.

And that is not the only news from the haunts of Davy Jones on the front burner today. Oh no. Back in March, as you may recall, an US submarine had a little ooopsie and collided with an US warship. Turns out it was because those randy sailors were too busy kickin out the jams with their rigged up juke joint boom boxes in the control rooms. From the New York Times the results of the Navy investigation are announced:

The crew aboard a U.S. submarine made dozens of errors before the vessel collided with an American warship in the Persian Gulf, an accident that exposed lax leaders who tolerated sleeping, slouching and a radio room rigged with music speakers, a Navy review found.

Navy investigators placed blame for the March collision on the submarine’s ”ineffective and negligent command leadership,” including what they called a lack of standards and failure to adequately plan for crossing the busy Strait of Hormuz.

Radios? Wacky behavior? The Straits of Hormuz?? Oh yeah, you just know the real culprit is The Filipino Monkey! Oh, and by the way, that darn Filipino Monkey haunts the Potomac too!

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