Category: Spooks
Was former San Diego imam in the Predator's sights?
Spotted this in the WSJ:
Who gets on the drone approved “kill lists” is decided by a complex interagency process involving the CIA, Pentagon and White House. We hear the U.S. could have taken out the radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki after his contacts with Fort Hood shooter Major Nidal Hassan came to light in November, missing the chance by not authorizing the strike. Perhaps al-Awlaki’s U.S. citizenship gave U.S. officials pause, but after he joined the jihad he became an enemy and his passport irrelevant. (emphasis added)
So the U.S. had a bead on former San Diego imam/grad student/FBI investigative subject? Might this explain the confused initial reports from the Embassy of Yemen that Awlaki had been at the site of a Dec. 24 airstrike?
Pentagon blames FBI in DC for al-Awlaki mixup
Remember the public back-and-forth between the FBI in San Diego and Washington over who dropped the ball on the Fort Hood shooter’s e-mails to a radical cleric in Yemen? CBS’ David Martin (author of the best CIA book evah) has this:
(CBS) Less than a month after major Nidal Hasan allegedly killed 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas, the Pentagon’s top intelligence officer sent the White House a report detailing an earlier failure to connect the dots. It reads like a dress rehearsal for the Detroit bomber case, reports CBS News chief national security correspondent David Martin.
According to that still-classified report, the terrorism task force responsible for determining whether Hasan posed a threat never saw all 18 e-mails he exchanged with that radical Yemeni cleric Awlaki whose communications were being monitored under a court ordered wiretap.
After the Washington task force decided Hasan was not dangerous, it never asked to see his subsequent communications with Alwaki….
None of the e-mails specifically mentioned Hasan’s plans for a shooting rampage at Fort Hood, but because he was a member of the military the FBI showed them to a Pentagon investigator with the note “comm” written on it. To the FBI that meant “commissioned officer.” The Pentagon investigator thought it meant “communication.”
As a result, there were no red flags that an army officer was e-mailing a radical cleric suspected of being a talent spotter for al Qaeda.
Bottom line: the lessons of the Fort Hood shootings were not learned in time to avert the near disaster on Christmas day.
Bottom line No. 2: The FBI and Pentagon aren’t speaking the language.
The story doesn’t say it but the report is by the Pentagon’s top spook, USDI James R. Clapper.
What is PETN?
The suspect in the attempted bombing of Northwest Flight 253 used a highly explosive substance called PETN, a law enforcement official told CBS News Saturday.
PETN (Pentaerythritol tetranitrate) is a high-grade explosive used for commercial and military purposes.
PETN, which usually is a white powder, can be ignited with a hammer blow and is often used by itself as a detonator.
Virtually odorless, it is very difficult to detect, making it the terrorist weapon of choice.
ABC News reports that the device involved more than 80 grams of PETN (about 3 ounces).
For reference, investigators suspect that 11 ounces of Semtex (mostly PETN) was used to bring down Pan Am103 in 1988.
Richard Reid, the “shoe bomber” who tried to bring down American Airlines Flight 63 on Dec. 22, 2001 had 8 or 10 ounces of easily-made triacetone triperoxide (TATP) and PETN (detonating cord).
Reid’s shoe was supposed to be detonated by a fuse, which failed to light, but an FBI-DHS report cited by Time magazine notes that “TATP or HMTD may be placed in a tube or syringe body in contact with a bare bulb filament, such as that obtained from inside a Christmas tree light bulb, to produce an explosion. … Terrorists have used peroxide-based explosive both as a main charge (weighing in excess of 20 pounds) and improvised detonators.”
In the Flight 253 attack, PETN appears to have been used as a secondary explosive with the syringe apparently serving as primary.
Witnesses described the syringe as “smoking.” The Nigerian suspect accused in the attack was trying to ignite the PETN with some sort of hot liquid in the syringe.
Since PETN’s autoignition temperature is 190 degrees (far less than a match) and the suspect suffered burns exactly why the device didn’t explode is a bit of a mystery.
Anwar al-Awlaki Reported Killed in Airstrike
An airstrike in Yemen reportedly killed and “targeted” former San Diego imam Anwar al-Awlaki, the man who served as a “spiritual advisor” to 9/11 hijackers and praised Fort Hood shooter Maj. Nidal Hasan as a “hero.” Background: Al-Awlaki timeline.
UPDATE: Al Jazeera reports that Awlaki is alive.
SANAA (Reuters) – “Anwar al-Awlaki is suspected to be dead,” the official said of the cleric who was on the run in Yemen, where he was on the government’s most-wanted list of terrorist suspects.
Yemen Observer: “The house of the US Fort Hood shooter’s mentor, Sheikh Anwar al-Awlaki, was raided and demolished….
Fox News.com: U.S. officials believe radical cleric Anwar Awlaki was “probably” one of dozens of militants killed in the strike, a source confirmed to FOX News.
Embassy of Yemen: Today, Yemeni fighter jets launched an aerial assault at 4:30 AM, on a remote location in the province of Shabwa. The assault targeted a meeting of senior Al-Qaeda operatives, 403 miles south east of Sana’a, the capital of Yemen. Preliminary reports suggest that the strike targeted scores of Yemeni and foreign Al-Qaeda operatives. Nasser Al-Wuhayshi, the regional Al-Qaeda leader and his deputy, Saeed Al-Shihri, alongside Anwar Al-Awlaki were presumed to be at the site. Among those targeted was Mohammed Saleh Oumair who publicly spoke couple of days ago at a rally in the province of Abyan. Reports added that the purpose of the above mentioned meeting was to plan a retaliation operation after government forces raided their hideouts last week. Less than a week ago, Yemeni forces carried out simultaneous raids killing and detaining militants in an Al-Qaeda hideouts in the provinces of Abyan and Sana’a.
SANA’A, Dec. 24 (Saba) – Yemeni Air forces carried out early on Thursday an air strike in Rafdh area of al-Said districts in Shabwa governorate killing about 30 al-Qaeda suspects from Yemeni and foreign nationalities.
An official source in the Supreme Security Committee said that the strike targeted a hideout of al-Qaeda, in which the al-Qaeda members have been holding a meeting attended by the terrorists Nasir al-Whaishi and Said al-Shihri, Saudi national.
According to the source, al-Qaeda meeting was to plan implementing a number of terrorist operations against Yemeni and foreign interests, including important economic facilities.
AFP: “Saudis and Iranians at the Wadi Rafadh meeting were also among the dead,” said the source, without going into detail.
A second security source told AFP the raid had been launched after residents had tipped the authorities off about the meeting.
The New York Times says the early morning raids were carried out with “intelligence provided in part by the United States,” while AP reports that U.S. and Saudi intelligence provided help.
END
The reports follow an interview with Awlaki broadcast by Al-Jazeera. Awlaki said that Maj. Nidal Hasan contacted him in December 2007 asking whether killing American soldiers and officers was a “religiously legitimate act.”
Q: “So he asked you that question about a year before the operation was carried out?”
A: “Yes. And I wondered how the American security agencies, who claim to be able to read car license plate numbers from space, everywhere in the world, I wondered how [they did not reveal this].”
Awlaki provided copies of the e-mails to Al-Jazeera.
FBI Finger-Pointing over Anwar Awlaki
Intelligence sharing is a bit like a game of hot potato: If you get stuck with it, you’ll get burned.
FBI officials in San Diego recently caught just such a hot potato when they intercepted e-mails between Maj. Nidal Hasan, the accused Fort Hood shooter, and a radical former San Diego imam named Anwar al-Awlaki.
These intercepts are among the government’s biggest secrets. Yet, at the same time, it would be surprising if Hasan and Nidal didn’t know that their communications were likely to be intercepted.
Awlaki had been an FBI counter-terrorism target for years. As an imam in San Diego in 2000, Awlaki served as a “spiritual advisor” to three 9/11 hijackers.
The FBI has asked him numerous times about his contacts with the hijackers, including when agents visited him in 2007 in a Yemeni prison. The intercepts were made about a year after he got out of prison. Today, he is said to be hiding in Yemen.
As for Hasan, he was a psychiatrist in the military. His contacts with Awlaki were viewed as consistent with some research he was conducting as a psychiatric resident at the U.S. Army’s Walter Reed Medical Center. A 2007 slideshow he gave at Walter Reed was titled “The Koranic World View As It Relates to Muslims in the U.S. Military.”
As many as 20 e-mails between Hasan and Awlaki were intercepted by the San Diego Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) between December 2008 and May 2009. The communications were deemed “consistent with research being conducted by Major Hasan in his position as a psychiatrist at the Walter Reed Medical Center,” the FBI says.
After the shooting that killed 13 people, a blog post on Aulaki’s website praised Hasan as a “hero.”
The communications between Awlaki and Hasan were never shared with the Defense Department, even though a member of the Defense Criminal Investigative Service was on the multi-agency San Diego JTTF.
CIA Director William Webster is conducting a review to find out what happened. According to The Washington Post, Webster will have the authority to make recommendations about possible changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which governs the highly sensitive communications intercepts at issue.
Awlaki is particularly troublesome for investigators because he is a U.S. citizen, born in New Mexico in 1971. As a result of that circumstance, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act required the JTTF to apply for a court order of surveillance at the secret FISA court or a certification from the U.S. attorney general. Investigators were required to present evidence that Awlaki was “an agent of a foreign power, or an officer or employee of a foreign power.”
Al-Qaida qualifies as a foreign power, and Charles Allen, a former CIA official and US Undersecretary of Homeland Security for Intelligence and Analysis, declared last year that Awlaki was part of al-Qaida’s reach into the U.S. homeland.
So, they got a warrant. Great. What good is such intelligence if you don’t use it?
In Hasan’s case, an investigator and a supervisor concluded that Hasan was not involved in terrorist activities or planning.
Further dissemination of the information “was neither sought nor authorized.” In plain English, the JTTF FBI supervisor wouldn’t let the folks from the Defense Department on his task force tell their commanders about the e-mails.
Officials in San Diego told Voice of San Diego’s Kelly Thornton that their counterparts in Washington are to blame:
One federal source described the probe this way: “Webster is going to investigate the Fort Hood guy and al-Aulaqi and whether the FBI screwed up. They’re saying San Diego failed to communicate the e-mails — but San Diego pestered the shit out of them, sending e-mails multiple times. The Washington field office didn’t do anything on it.”
The Washington Post reported Dec. 1 that members of Congress have identified “at least two troubling e-mails” that were intercepted by the San Diego FBI but not shared with Washington.
In a tit-for-tat battle, Thornton’s anonymous San Diego sources responded by saying that everything was fully communicated to Washington, which had “computer access” to everything San Diego had.
The Voice of San Diego, however, leaves out crucial background found in reports by the 9/11 Commission and Congressional Joint Inquiry on 9/11:
In June 1999, the FBI in San Diego investigated Awlaki after learning that he may have been contacted by a man who bought a satellite phone bin Laden used in the 1990s.
During its investigation, FBI learned that Awlaki knew individuals from the Holy Land Foundation and others involved in raising money for the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas. Sources alleged that Awlaki had other extremist connections.
In early 2000, Awlaki was visited by a subject of a Los Angeles FBI investigation closely associated with Blind Sheikh [Omar Abdel] Rahman.
Around the time Awlaki was holding closed door meetings in San Diego with two of the hijackers, the FBI closed its investigation, stating “the imam … does not meet the criterion for [further] investigation.”
It wouldn’t be the first time that the FBI in San Diego misjudged Awlaki. Then again, no one bothered to tell the FBI in San Diego about two of the 9/11 hijackers whom the CIA had tracked from Bangkok to Los Angeles in 2000 until it was too late.
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