Washington Post, 12 Jan 10: A high-level Pentagon inquiry into the Fort Hood shootings that left 13 people dead has concluded that the military should focus more resources on identifying service members who might pose a threat to their colleagues and outlines a series of steps the Pentagon should take to prevent future attacks, Pentagon officials said.
The study, which will be presented to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen on Wednesday, is expected to be publicly released Thursday. One of the report’s conclusions is that officer performance evaluations, which often obscure shortcomings in order to preserve officers’ careers, need to be more forthright and honest, officials familiar with the report said.
The inquiry, which was led by retired Adm. Vernon Clark and former Army secretary Togo West, also calls on the Pentagon to ensure that it fully staffs FBI-run Joint Terrorism Task Forces so that information collected by other government agencies about potential contacts between troops and terrorist groups is shared promptly with the Defense Department. And it recommends that the Defense Department designate one place to coordinate with other government agencies and assess internal threats. . . . .
Toronto Star, 12 Jan 10: Accused terrorist Shareef Abdelhaleem was opposed to adding metal chips to bombs targeting downtown Toronto, because of the potential for mass carnage, but said if some people died it would be “good,” a Brampton court was told this morning. Police agent Shaher Elsohemy testified that the 34-year-old Mississauga man told him fatalities would show authorities that members of the so-called Toronto 18 were a force to be reckoned with.
Elsohemy also said Abdelhaleem had turned to his father for advice about whether such an attack was Islamically correct and had been assured that, “If civilians happen to be there, that is their destiny.” . . .
. . . . Court heard Abdelhaleem morally struggled with Amara’s plans to attack innocent civilians and sought advice from his father, who operated an Islamic school in Mississauga. Days after their coffee shop chat, Abdelhaleem confided that he had asked his father if “physical action in Canada, an attack on Canadian soil” was Islamic, said Elsohemy.
“Abdelhaleem said he obtained a religious fatwa from his father,” recalled the witness, a former student of the Islamic school. “His father told him there’s nothing wrong with it, in other words it’s acceptable…. And if civilians happen to be there, that is their destiny. Abdelhaleem told Elsohemy that he had no doubt about the Islamic correctness of such a scheme after receiving the fatwa, which is a religious opinion concerning Islamic law.
Elsohemy, currently in the witness protection program, said Abdelhaleem told him that if the intent was to kill civilians there were more “logical” ways of doing so than packing trucks with fertilizer bombs destined to strike the Toronto Stock Exchange, the Front St. office of Canada’s spy agency and an military base near Hwy 401. Instead, Abdelhaleem suggested targeting Square One Shopping Centre in Mississauga, a football field or poisoning food at a factory, said the witness. . . . . .
FBI, 12 Jan 10: The following op-ed, published on January 11, 2010 in The New York Post, was written by former FBI Assistant Director James Kallstrom. Kallstrom, who is currently a member of the FBI Director’s Advisory Group, was also director of the New York Homeland Security Agency.
Ever since 9/11, critics have suggested that the FBI isn’t up to its task as our nation’s lead counterterrorism agency. Yet, as the nation focused on the failures of the intelligence community in the Christmas Day bombing attempt over Detroit, last Friday saw two more arrests in the ongoing FBI investigation of a plot to bomb New York City first exposed by the September arrest of Najibullah Zazi.
It’s easy to stand on the periphery, without the benefit of real-world experience, and render judgments with the benefit of hindsight. But counterterrorism cases are extremely complex and often require a relatively quick series of judgments, often with incomplete information. Counterterror investigations and intelligence gathering aren’t black and white, simple, or easy. . . . .
Washington Post, 12 Jan 10: Somehow, he conned the Jordanian secret service into thinking he was their agent. Then he conned the CIA into thinking he was their agent, too. After that, he conned both the Jordanians and the Americans — his “enemies,” he told al-Jazeera — into believing he could track down leaders of al-Qaeda. Nevertheless, by far the most intriguing thing about Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi — the suicide bomber who killed eight people at a CIA base in Khost, Afghanistan, two weeks ago — is his wife, Defne Bayrak.
“My husband was anti-American; so am I.” That was what Bayrak told the editors of Newsweek’s Turkish edition last week. Bayrak is a 31-year-old Turkish journalist and Turkish-Arabic translator who says she met her late husband in an Internet chat room. Her publications include articles for Islamist publications and a book called “Bin Laden: Che Guevara of the East.” Unlike others in her family, she wears a black chador, which in Turkey is not merely religious clothing but also a political symbol. She is no shrinking wallflower. “I am proud of my husband, he carried out a great operation in this war. I hope Allah will accept his martyrdom, if he has become a martyr,” she told reporters in Istanbul.
Bayrak is a shining example of what might be called the international jihadi elite: She is educated, eloquent, has connections across the Islamic world — Istanbul, Amman, Peshawar — yet is not exactly part of the global economy. She shares these traits not only with her husband — a doctor who was the son of middle-class, English-speaking Jordanians — but also with others featured recently in the news. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, for example, grew up in a wealthy Nigerian family and studied at University College London before trying to blow up a Northwest Airlines plane on Christmas Day.
Ahmed Saeed Omar Sheikh (“Sheikh Omar”) was born in Britain and studied at elite high schools there and in Pakistan and dropped out of the London School of Economics before murdering American journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan in 2002. Army Maj. Nidal Hasan was born in Arlington, graduated from Virginia Tech and did his psychiatric residency at Walter Reed before killing 13 people in a shooting rampage at Fort Hood.
These people are not the wretched of the Earth. Nor do they have much in common, sociologically speaking, with the illiterate warlords of Waziristan. They haven’t emerged from repressive Islamic societies such as Iran, or been forced to live under extreme forms of sharia law, as in Saudi Arabia. On the contrary, they are children of ambitious, “Westernized” parents who sacrificed for their education. . . . .
. . . . . In recent years, the emergence of this international jihadi elite has often been blamed on European immigration and assimilation policies or, rather, the lack of them: Several of the Sept. 11 bombers were radicalized in Hamburg; the 2005 London Tube bombers were born in Britain. There are other European examples. But the case of Bayrak, who was educated in a secular Muslim society — and that of Hasan, who is American — suggests that this elite has a much broader base and radical Islam potentially a much wider appeal.
The case of Bayrak and her ilk also suggests the need for another kind of anti-terrorism strategy. Too often, we still consider public diplomacy to be a sort of public relations activity, the “promotion” of American values. Instead, we should think about it as an argument. The Bayraks and Balawis of this world are engaged in constant debates — in Internet chat rooms, in the halls of publishing houses, in mosques. Are they hearing enough counterarguments? Are we helping the people who make the counterarguments? I suspect that they don’t and I’m certain that we aren’t — nearly a decade after Sept. 11 — and that has to change. Intellectuals may wear glasses and read books, but neither prevents them from throwing bombs — or from strapping them inside their underwear.
Wall Street Journal, 11 Jan 10: It is now clear that the failed terrorist attack by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab on Christmas Day was directed by al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). The reasons for the sudden resurgence of this previously almost extinct chapter of the global jihad network lie not in Yemen, though—where AQAP is based—but across the border in Saudi Arabia.
For three years the Saudi Kingdom has been experimenting with a deradicalization program for captured Islamist terrorists in the CARE Rehabilitation Center. Rather than turning the jihadists into productive members of society, however, the center has replenished the terrorists’ troops by releasing some extremists who immediately rejoined al Qaeda. Unwilling to challenge their own brand of radical Islam, Wahhabism, the Saudis don’t seem ideologically best equipped to resocialize Islamist terrorists. . . . .
. . . .The triumphalism surrounding the center, however, came to an abrupt end last year when two of its graduates, Said Ali al-Shihri and Abu Hareth Muhammad al-Awfi, appeared in an al-Qaeda video. “By Allah, imprisonment only increased our persistence in our principles for which we went out, did jihad for, and were imprisoned for,” Said al-Shihri declared. Statements from al Qaeda now identify him as the terror group’s deputy leader in the Arabian Peninsula. The Saudi government concedes that a total of 11 graduates from the Care Center have now returned to al Qaeda. That much was inevitable. . . . .
