Washington Post, 19 Nov 09: A Senate committee on Thursday morning launched the first public hearing into the Fort Hood shooting attack with a focus on the perils of homegrown extremism and “political correctness” and with partial cooperation from the Obama administration.
The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hopes to probe what the government knew about shooting suspect Army Maj. Nidal Hasan and whether federal agencies either missed key warning signs or failed to communicate with each other before the attack. The panel heard from five experts on terrorism and homeland security.
Committee Chairman Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) started the hearing by calling the investigation “as serious as any this committee has even undertaken.”
“The purpose of our investigation is to determine whether that attack could have been prevented, whether the federal agencies and employees involved missed signals or failed to connect the dots in a way that enabled Hasan to carry out his deadly plan,” he said. “If we find such negligence we will make recommendations to guarantee, as best we can, that they never occur again.” . . . . .
. . . . . . “I worry about a sense of political correctness … in a post-9/11 world,” said Frances Fragos Townsend, the White House homeland security advisor during the Bush administration.
Retired Gen. John Keane recalled instances during his Army career when possible over-sensitivity to issues of ethnicity and religion made military leaders blind to potential threats.
“This is not about Muslims and their religion … nor is it about the 10,000 Muslims in the military who are, quite frankly, not seen as Muslims but as soldiers, sailors and airmen,” Keane said. “This is fundamentally about jihadist extremism, which is at odds with the values of America.”
Detroit News, 19 Nov 09: A former Ford Motor Co. employee was arraigned today in U.S. District Court on charges of stealing up to $32 million worth of trade secrets that he allegedly tried to sell to Chinese competitors.
Xiang Dong Yu, also known as Mike Yu, 47, of Beijing, China, was a Ford product engineer for 10 years. He left the company and moved to China in 2007, allegedly taking with him computerized copies of about 4,000 pages of confidential documents.
Yu was arrest last month at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport when he returned from China. The government says a laptop computer he was carrying contained thousands of pages of proprietary Ford documents and a large number of confidential documents belonging to another company not named today in court.
Yu was indicted in October on theft of trade secrets, attempted theft of trade secrets and unauthorized access to a protected computer. . . . .
. . . . . Government agents discovered on his computer an application for Canadian citizenship and passport, which Corken theorized could lead to an escape. Corken also told the judge Yu fraudulently obtained a Michigan drivers license when he renewed a license he has held during the years he lived and worked here. . . . .
According to a federal indictment, Yu had access to “sensitive Ford design documents.” He is alleged to have made electronic copies of “system design specification documents” prior to leaving his job in Dearborn in 2007. The documents contained proprietary information about Ford’s engine and transmission mounting subsystems, electrical distribution systems, power supplies, electrical subsystems and generic body modules.
Prosecutors allege Yu started taking documents to the industrial city of Shenzhen, China, as early as 2005. Officials say he was hired in 2007 by PCE Industry Inc., a California-based subsidiary of a Taiwanese electronics company, Foxconn.
The government contends Yu tried to use the documents in 2008 to land a job with another Chinese company, Shanghai Automotive Industry Corp. He eventually was hired by Chinese automaker Beijing Automotive Corp.
DiscoverBlog, 19 Nov 09: Former government physicist P. Leonardo Mascheroni, an outspoken critic of U.S. nuclear strategy, is in the FBI’s crosshairs. In October, the feds raided his home, seizing computers, documents, books, and cell phones. The FBI hasn’t publicly stated what it’s investigating, but Mascheroni maintains that he’s been wrongly accused of nuclear espionage because he gave a CD with sensitive information to the Venezuelan government.
Just what was on the disk? Well, during his days as a scientist, Mascheroni championed hydrogen-fluoride laser fusion, which in theory could produce a cleaner and more reliable nuclear weapons arsenal. He pitched it to Congress in 2007, and when they shot him down, an alleged Venezuelan representative agreed to pay him $800,000 for a laser study, according to Mascheroni. He says he delivered a CD containing only unclassified documents, but was never paid. Mascheroni claims none of that matters since he was never going to build the laser–the whole thing was a ploy to get the United States to take his technology seriously, he says. Well, they are taking him seriously now.
Mascheroni isn’t the only scientist who has been accused of espionage. Click through for more tales of scientists who turned spy. . . . . .
US Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, 19 Nov 09:
Thursday, November 19, 2009
10:00 AM
Dirksen Senate Office Building, room 342
Witnesses
Panel 1
- General John M. Keane, USA, Retired
Former Vice Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army - Mitchell D. Silber [view testimony]
Director of Intelligence Analysis
New York City Police Department - Frances Fragos Townsend
Former Assistant to President George W. Bush for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism - The Honorable Juan Carlos Zarate [view testimony]
Senior Advisor, Center for Strategic and International Studies
Former Deputy National Security Advisor for Combating Terrorism - Brian Michael Jenkins [view testimony]
Senior Advisor
RAND Corporation
Wall Street Journal, 19 Nov 09: Defense Secretary Robert Gates is to formally announce a Pentagon-wide effort this afternoon to see if officials could have done more to prevent the Fort Hood shootings and to develop new ways of identifying potentially dangerous troops.
The new probe is designed to closely examine the military’s overall handling of suspected Fort Hood shooter Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who is accused of killing 13 people at the base and wounding dozens of others earlier this month.
But a military official said Mr. Gates wanted the review to extend beyond the Fort Hood case and also look at broader questions about how the military identifies, tracks and potentially moves against troops who may have violent tendencies or radical beliefs. . . . .
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This important course includes an honest, detailed discussion of the radicalization process and how Islam is used by extremists to justify militant Jihadism.362: Informant Development for Law Enforcement Officers to Fight Terrorism
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