USA > History > 2010 > Terrorism (II)

Legacy of Torture

August 26, 2010
The New York Times

The Bush administration insisted that “enhanced interrogation techniques” — torture — were necessary to extract information from prisoners and keep Americans safe from terrorist attacks. Never mind that it was immoral, did huge damage to this country’s global standing and produced little important intelligence. Now, as we had feared, it is also making it much harder to try and convict accused terrorists.

Because federal judges cannot trust the confessions of prisoners obtained by intense coercion, they are regularly throwing out the government’s cases against Guantánamo Bay prisoners.

A new report prepared jointly by ProPublica and the National Law Journal showed that the government has lost more than half the cases where Guantánamo prisoners have challenged their detention because they were forcibly interrogated. In some cases the physical coercion was applied by foreign agents working at the behest of the United States; in other cases it was by United States agents.

Even in cases where the government later went back and tried to obtain confessions using “clean,” non-coercive methods, judges are saying those confessions too are tainted by the earlier forcible methods. In most cases, the prisoners have not actually walked free because the government is appealing the decisions. But the trend suggests that the government will continue to have a hard time proving its case even against those prisoners who should be detained.

In 2008, the Supreme Court ruled that Guantánamo prisoners could challenge their detention as enemy combatants in federal court, under the constitutional right of habeas corpus. Since then, the government has lost 37 of the 53 habeas cases that have been decided, largely because it could not prove the prisoners were terrorists.

In the 15 cases where prisoners have alleged coercive interrogations, according to the ProPublica report, judges have sided with the prisoners eight times. (There are probably more cases than these, but the judges’ opinions have been too heavily redacted by the government to tell.) Only three detainees in habeas cases have actually been let go.

In one compelling example, Judge Gladys Kessler of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia in November threw out the case against Farhi Saeed bin Mohammed, captured in Pakistan in 2001. The government described Mr. Mohammed as a fighter for Al Qaeda, and Judge Kessler acknowledged there was some evidence he had associated with terrorists.

But the main evidence that he was an active terrorist was supplied by another prisoner, Binyam Mohamed, who Judge Kessler said was repeatedly tortured for two years while being held in Pakistan and Morocco at the behest of the United States. His genitals were mutilated; he was deprived of sleep and food; he was held in stress positions and forced to listen to piercingly loud music.

Because the government did not dispute Binyam Mohamed’s torture — and could not otherwise prove that Farhi Mohammed was actively engaged in fighting for Al Qaeda or the Taliban — she ordered him released. The government is appealing.

At least 50 other Guantánamo prisoners have filed habeas lawsuits. Torture could also affect the trial, if there is one, of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who planned the 9/11 attack.

The decisions speak well of the federal judges who are adhering to civilized legal standards even when the decision to release prisoners is difficult. We hope this demonstrated respect for due process will help repair this country’s battered reputation. Had Bush-era interrogators held to similar standards, there would be fewer dubious detention cases at Guantánamo, and the government would have a much stronger case against those prisoners who are there legitimately.

Legacy of Torture, NYT, 26.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/27/opinion/27fri1.html

Qaeda Leader Indicted

in New York Subway Plot

July 7, 2010
The New York Times
By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM

Meeting with violent Salvadoran gangs in Honduras. Seeking radioactive material at a university in Hamilton, Ontario. Running an import-export business and teaching English — wife and child in tow — in Morocco. Hiding out in Suriname.

These are just some of the points of interest on the trail — or, to be more precise, the rumored trail — of an American citizen who spent part of his youth in Brooklyn, went to college in Florida and has long been on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s most-wanted list, a senior Qaeda operative who over the last seven years has been portrayed as part wraith, part James Bond, and large-scale bogeyman.

On Wednesday, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn formally named that citizen, Adnan G. el-Shukrijumah, in an official case, charging him with crimes that the authorities say were all too real: the bomb plot last summer to attack three New York City subway lines and what they said was a related plot, one that British authorities said included a plan to blow up a shopping center in Manchester, England.

According to a Justice Department news release announcing the charges, Mr. Shukrijumah, 34, was one of a panel of three men overseeing Al Qaeda’s efforts to carry out attacks in the United States and other Western countries.

And in that role, he helped recruit three young men for the subway plot — men who had attended high school together in New York City and had traveled to the tribal areas in Pakistan for terror training, the news release said.

A Saudi-born naturalized American, the elusive Mr. Shukrijumah was the focus of intense attention in the months after the 9/11 attacks because of his citizenship, his knowledge of the United States and, eventually, the realization that he was tied to senior Qaeda operatives and possibly involved in a dirty-bomb plot. United States officials have offered a reward of up to $5 million for information leading to his capture.

But he seemed to drop off the radar screens of law enforcement and intelligence agencies about five years ago, and quickly became the subject of rumors. For a period of time, was reportedly sighted in locales including Panama, Trinidad and Tobago, southern Florida and Yemen. He remains at large, officials said, and some experts believe that he has long been in hiding in the tribal areas, discounting the myriad sightings reported elsewhere around the globe.

“He very much disappeared,” said Evan F. Kohlmann, a veteran terrorism analyst with Flashpoint Global Partners in New York who has consulted for the government, referring to Mr. Shukrijumah. “There were reports of him surfacing all over the place, but I don’t believe he was ever there. I believe he was back in Waziristan, which is the only safe place he could hide.”

The 10-count indictment charges Mr. Shukrijumah and three other men with a range of crimes in connection with the New York subway plot, which prosecutors say Mr. Shukrijumah helped organize, and the planned attack in Manchester.

It supplements an earlier indictment brought in Brooklyn charging the three men he recruited for the subway plot, including Najibullah Zazi, whom prosecutors identified as a central figure in that planned attack.

Both Mr. Zazi and a second defendant, Zarein Ahmedzay, 25, have been cooperating with the F.B.I. and federal prosecutors and probably provided some of the information that led to the new indictment. The third defendant, Adis Medunjanin, 26, plans to go to trial.

The new charges include conspiring to use weapons of mass destruction, conspiring and attempting to commit an act of terrorism across national boundaries, conspiring to provide and providing material support to Al Qaeda and other terrorism-related crimes.

The new charges for the first time link the subway plot with a planned Qaeda attack in Britain and contain the government’s most detailed account to date on the development of the subway conspiracy and the identities of its authors in the tribal areas of Pakistan.

It also describes how Rashid Rauf and Saleh al-Somali — who prosecutors say were then responsible along with Mr. Shukrijumah for planning Qaeda attacks in the United States and other Western countries — communicated from the tribal areas through “an Al Qaeda facilitator” in Peshawar, Pakistan. Both Mr. Rauf and Mr. al-Somali have since been killed in United States drone strikes in the tribal areas, according to officials.

The facilitator, according to the authorities, used the same e-mail account to send coded messages to Mr. Zazi, in Denver and New York, and one of the accused Manchester plotters, Abid Naseer, in Britain.

The facilitator, who was identified in the indictment only as Ahmad or Zahid, was also charged.

The indictment was filed in Federal District Court in Brooklyn, where it is being prosecuted by the office of Loretta E. Lynch, the United States attorney for the Eastern District of New York.

Mr. Naseer was one of 11 men — 10 of them Pakistanis — arrested in April 2009 by British authorities who were investigating the Manchester plot in one of that nation’s most extensive counterterrorism operations since the 9/11 attacks. A fourth defendant in the new indictment, Tariq Ur Rehman, who was arrested at the same time as Mr. Nasser and later deported, is also at large. Mr. Naseer, who fought deportation, was arrested on Wednesday and is currently in custody in Britain. The United States intends to seek his extradition.

    Qaeda Leader Indicted in New York Subway Plot, NYT, 7.7.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/08/nyregion/08terror.html

Courtroom Tirade in Times Sq. Case Gives Insight

July 5, 2010
The New York Times
By BENJAMIN WEISER

When Faisal Shahzad, the suspect in the failed Times Square bombing, pleaded guilty last month, the judge asked whether he knew what he had been doing was a crime.

“I would not consider it a crime,” Mr. Shahzad replied.

Was he aware he had violated United States law? the judge asked.

Mr. Shahzad said he was aware, but added, “I don’t care for the laws of United States.”

It was a revelatory moment in a court case that abruptly ended on June 21, when Mr. Shahzad expounded for more than half an hour on how and why he had tried to detonate a bomb in Times Square on a crowded Saturday evening.

Lawyers, prosecutors and others who have heard such statements, when the defendants are given an opportunity to explain their actions and motivations at length, say they can offer valuable insight into terrorists’ minds, particularly in a case as baffling as Mr. Shahzad’s.

The would-be bomber had cooperated for more than two weeks without counsel and “provided useful information,” Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has said. But then Mr. Shahzad turned around and endorsed attacks on the United States, declaring he was a “Muslim soldier” who believed that killing children was justified in the war against America.

“I don’t recall that I’ve really ever seen or known of someone who was actually an activist operative, a committed jihadist, who in this length of time became converted, showed remorse,” said Mary Jo White, a former United States attorney for the Southern District of New York who oversaw terrorism prosecutions from 1993 to 2002 that led to some 30 convictions.

Ms. White said Mr. Shahzad’s statements recalled a 1998 fatwa by Osama bin Laden directing Muslims to kill Americans, civilian or military, anywhere in the world.

“His allocution really embodies that credo,” she said, “and he’s telling the world that just because he’s pleading guilty under the U.S. criminal justice system, which he doesn’t credit, that does not mean for an instant that he has any remorse for what he did.”

Some of those interviewed suggested that Mr. Shahzad’s statements, delivered in response to questions from a judge, were an attempt to rehabilitate his image among jihadists, given his botched bombing attempt on May 1 and the perception that he gave information to investigators that led to arrests overseas.

“He’s not your conventional criminal who’s trying to receive leniency,” said Thane Rosenbaum, who teaches law at Fordham University and is the author of “The Myth of Moral Justice.”

“His crime is entirely based on some symbolic gesture of hatred and retaliation,” he added. “For him, the only way to validate the symbolism is to publicly proclaim what he wanted to do.”

Joshua L. Dratel, a lawyer who has represented accused terrorists in federal court and at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, said, “It’s not unusual for defendants to have buyer’s remorse between spilling their guts and resolving their case.”

“The evolution of a defendant’s attitude is not scripted like a television show,” Mr. Dratel added. “Everything doesn’t have to fit at the end of the story.”

Another terrorist who pleaded guilty and used the courtroom as a platform for his views was Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker on Sept. 11. At his sentencing in 2006 in Federal District Court in Alexandria, Va., he praised Mr. bin Laden and claimed to be “a mujahid” — the same word Mr. Shahzad used last month in describing himself. And in an earlier hearing, Mr. Moussaoui, who ultimately received a life sentence, testified about his delight at hearing of the grief of victims’ families, and said he would kill Americans again — “anytime, anywhere.”

“You realized the depth of the fanaticism and hatred,” Robert A. Spencer, a former federal prosecutor who cross-examined Mr. Moussaoui, recalled. “It wasn’t that he was trying to distance himself from it and save his life. He was proud of it. He was embracing it. It underscored what we’re up against.”

In the debate over where to try terrorists, critics have said the traditional civilian courts offer terrorists a public platform to spew their hatred. But statements have been made in the military system as well, albeit somewhat less publicly.

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed said in a statement to a closed military panel at Guantánamo in 2007 that he was “responsible for the 9/11 operation, from A to Z,” and offered a rambling confession of his role in a series of other terrorist plots, according to a transcript released later. And in an outburst during an open hearing the next year, another 9/11 detainee, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, called on Mr. bin Laden to “attack the American enemy with all his power.”

Not everyone convicted in a terrorism case takes such a militant stand.

Last month, Syed Hashmi, a former Brooklyn College student, received a 15-year sentence after pleading guilty to conspiring to provide material support to Al Qaeda. He had admitted that while studying in England, he knew a man staying with him was planning to deliver outdoor clothing and other gear to Al Qaeda for use in Afghanistan.

Prosecutors said Mr. Hashmi believed “in Al Qaeda’s terrorist mission” and willingly played a role within the group’s “secretive support network.”

Mr. Hashmi criticized United States government policies and what he called the “cruel” conditions under which he was held pending trial. But he told the judge he had made “a mistake” helping the operative.

“Clearly, I was wrong,” Mr. Hashmi said, “because as a citizen of the United States, I was not Islamically allowed to give that material support to those who waged war against America.”

Although defendants are often given time and leeway to make their statements, which are usually offered at sentencing but may occur during pleas or in other appearances, judges have been known to respond.

When Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, who led the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, called himself an Islamic militant at his sentencing, the judge, Kevin Thomas Duffy, picked up a copy of the Koran from the bench and read several passages aloud, suggesting Mr. Yousef’s acts had violated Islamic teachings.

“Your god is not Allah,” the judge said. “You worship death and destruction.”

On June 21, Mr. Shahzad told Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum that he wanted to read aloud from a piece of paper. But the judge told him not to read it. “I want to know what happened,” she said. “Tell me what you did.”

The judge made clear she wanted to be sure Mr. Shahzad was competent to plead guilty and understood the charges and the rights he was giving up. He will most likely have another opportunity to address her, and the world, at his sentencing in October.

But after that, like so many convicted terrorists before him, he will probably go silent.

Judge Leonie M. Brinkema, who sentenced Mr. Moussaoui, told him: “You came here to be a martyr and to die in a great big bang of glory, but to paraphrase the poet T. S. Eliot, instead, you will die with a whimper. The rest of your life you will spend in prison.”

Mr. Moussaoui began to respond, but Judge Brinkema continued. “You will never again get a chance to speak,” she said, “and that is an appropriate and fair ending.”

    Courtroom Tirade in Times Sq. Case Gives Insight, NYT, 5.7.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/06/nyregion/06shahzad.html

Appeals Court Sides With Detainee

July 3, 2010
The New York Times
By CHARLIE SAVAGE

WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court has sided with a Guantánamo prisoner whose case prompted a major internal argument among Obama administration legal advisers last year over how broadly to define terrorism suspects who may be detained without trial.

Belkacem Bensayah, an Algerian who was arrested in Bosnia in 2001 and accused of helping people who wanted to travel to Afghanistan and join Al Qaeda, cannot be considered part of the terrorist organization based on the evidence the government presented against him, a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit has ruled.

“The government presented no direct evidence of actual communication between Bensayah and any Al Qaeda member, much less evidence suggesting Bensayah communicated with” anyone else to facilitate travel by an Al Qaeda member, Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg wrote in a 17-page opinion that was declassified late last week. Parts of the ruling were censored by the government.

Mark Fleming, a partner at the law firm Wilmer Hale who is representing Mr. Bensayah, praised the ruling and called on the Obama administration to send his client back to Bosnia, where his wife and daughters live.

“We’re very happy with the decision of the Court of Appeals recognizing that the evidence does not justify treating Mr. Bensayah as an enemy combatant,” Mr. Fleming said. “We hope the United States will now do the right thing and release Mr. Bensayah so he can begin to rebuild his life after his long captivity.”

A Justice Department spokesman said the Obama administration was reviewing the ruling and had not yet decided how to respond.

The decision sends Mr. Bensayah’s case for reconsideration by a district judge, Richard J. Leon, who in late 2008 ruled that Mr. Bensayah could be held indefinitely and without trial as a wartime prisoner because he had provided “direct support” to Al Qaeda by trying to facilitate travel. In that same ruling, Judge Leon ordered the release of five other detainees arrested with Mr. Bensayah in Bosnia, saying the government had failed to show that they planned to travel to Afghanistan to fight the United States.

The appeals court’s reversal of Judge Leon’s ruling has added significance because it followed two policy changes about the case that the Obama administration made after taking over from the Bush administration.

In September 2009, just before the appeals court heard arguments in the case, the Obama administration abandoned the argument that Mr. Bensayah could be detained as a substantial “supporter” of Al Qaeda. Instead, it portrayed him as functionally “part” of the terrorist organization — a narrower definition.

That switch followed an internal debate between senior State Department and Pentagon lawyers over whether the Geneva Conventions allow mere supporters of an enemy force, picked up far from any combat zone, to be treated just like members of the enemy organization.

The dispute ended without a clear resolution. But as a compromise, the administration decided not to argue that Mr. Bensayah, at least, could be detained as a supporter, while holding open the theoretical possibility of making that argument in other cases.

Still, Judge Ginsburg’s opinion suggested that the appeals court ruling turned less on the recategorization of Mr. Bensayah’s alleged ties to Al Qaeda than on skepticism about the basic credibility of the evidence the government presented against him.

While the appeal was still pending last year, the Justice Department withdrew its reliance on certain evidence it had presented to Judge Leon, but about which the government had lost confidence for undisclosed reasons, Judge Ginsburg’s opinion said.

The nature of that evidence was redacted from the ruling, but it may have related to accusations that Mr. Bensayah had contact with Abu Zubaydah, another Guantánamo detainee who was once portrayed as a senior member of Al Qaeda, although officials have since lowered their estimation of his importance. A 2004 military document about Mr. Bensayah had accused him of having had phone conversations with Mr. Zubaydah about passports.

The government stuck with other evidence, including a raw intelligence report whose contents were largely redacted from the opinion, as well as accusations that Mr. Bensayah had used fraudulent documents and might have lied about his travel in the early 1990s. But Judge Ginsburg said “the evidence, viewed in isolation or together, is insufficiently corroborative” of the accusation that Mr. Bensayah was part of Al Qaeda.

The uncertainty about his travel history, the judge wrote, “at most undermines Bensayah’s own credibility; no account of his whereabouts ties him to Al Qaeda or suggests he facilitated anyone’s travel during that time. These ‘questions’ in no way demonstrate that Bensayah had ties to and facilitated travel for Al Qaeda in 2001.”

    Appeals Court Sides With Detainee, NYT, 3.7.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/us/04gitmo.html

Closing Guantánamo Fades as a Priority

June 25, 2010
The New York Times
By CHARLIE SAVAGE

WASHINGTON — Stymied by political opposition and focused on competing priorities, the Obama administration has sidelined efforts to close the Guantánamo prison, making it unlikely that President Obama will fulfill his promise to close it before his term ends in 2013.

When the White House acknowledged last year that it would miss Mr. Obama’s initial January 2010 deadline for shutting the prison, it also declared that the detainees would eventually be moved to one in Illinois. But impediments to that plan have mounted in Congress, and the administration is doing little to overcome them.

“There is a lot of inertia” against closing the prison, “and the administration is not putting a lot of energy behind their position that I can see,” said Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and supports the Illinois plan. He added that “the odds are that it will still be open” by the next presidential inauguration.

And Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who also supports shutting it, said the effort is “on life support and it’s unlikely to close any time soon.” He attributed the collapse to some fellow Republicans’ “demagoguery” and the administration’s poor planning and decision-making “paralysis.”

The White House insists it is still determined to shutter the prison. The administration argues that Guantánamo is a symbol in the Muslim world of past detainee abuses, citing military views that its continued operation helps terrorists.

“Our commanders have made clear that closing the detention facility at Guantánamo is a national security imperative, and the president remains committed to achieving that goal,” said a White House spokesman, Ben LaBolt.

Still, some senior officials say privately that the administration has done its part, including identifying the Illinois prison — an empty maximum-security center in Thomson, 150 miles west of Chicago — where the detainees could be held. They blame Congress for failing to execute that endgame.

“The president can’t just wave a magic wand to say that Gitmo will be closed,” said a senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss internal thinking on a sensitive issue.

The politics of closing the prison have clearly soured following the attempted bombings on a plane on Dec. 25 and in Times Square in May, as well as Republican criticism that imprisoning detainees in the United States would endanger Americans. When Mr. Obama took office a slight majority supported closing it. By a March 2010 poll, 60 percent wanted it to stay open.

One administration official argued that the White House was still trying. On May 26, Mr. Obama’s national security adviser, James Jones, sent a letter to the House Appropriations Committee reiterating the case.

But Mr. Levin portrayed the administration as unwilling to make a serious effort to exert its influence, contrasting its muted response to legislative hurdles to closing Guantánamo with “very vocal” threats to veto financing for a fighter jet engine it opposes.

Last year, for example, the administration stood aside as lawmakers restricted the transfer of detainees into the United States except for prosecution. And its response was silence several weeks ago, Mr. Levin said, as the House and Senate Armed Services Committees voted to block money for renovating the Illinois prison to accommodate detainees, and to restrict transfers from Guantánamo to other countries — including, in the Senate version, a bar on Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Somalia. About 130 of the 181 detainees are from those countries.

“They are not really putting their shoulder to the wheel on this issue,” Mr. Levin said of White House officials. “It’s pretty dormant in terms of their public positions.”

Several administration officials expressed hope that political winds might shift if, for example, high-level Qaeda leaders are killed, or if lawmakers focus on how expensive it is to operate a prison at the isolated base.

A recent Pentagon study, obtained by The New York Times, shows taxpayers spent more than $2 billion between 2002 and 2009 on the prison. Administration officials believe taxpayers would save about $180 million a year in operating costs if Guantánamo detainees were held at Thomson, which they hope Congress will allow the Justice Department to buy from the State of Illinois at least for federal inmates.

But in a sign that some may be making peace with keeping Guantánamo open, officials also praise improvements at the prison. An interagency review team brought order to scattered files. Mr. Obama banned brutal interrogations. Congress overhauled military commissions to give defendants more safeguards.

One category — detainees cleared for release who cannot be repatriated for their own safety — is on a path to extinction: allies have accepted 33, and just 22 await resettlement. Another — those who will be held without trials — has been narrowed to 48.

Still, the administration has faced a worsening problem in dealing with the prison’s large Yemeni population, including 58 low-level detainees who would already have been repatriated had they been from a more stable country, officials say.

The administration asked Saudi Arabia to put some Yemenis through a program aimed at rehabilitating jihadists but was rebuffed, officials said. And Mr. Obama imposed a moratorium on Yemen transfers after the failed Dec. 25 attack, planned by a Yemen-based branch of Al Qaeda whose members include two former Guantánamo detainees from Saudi Arabia.

As a result, the Obama administration has been further entangled in practices many of its officials lamented during the Bush administration. A judge this month ordered the government to release a 26-year-old Yemeni imprisoned since 2002, citing overwhelming evidence of his innocence. The Obama team decided last year to release the man, but shifted course after the moratorium. This week, the National Security Council decided to send the man to Yemen in a one-time exception, an official said on Friday.

Meanwhile, discussions have faltered between Mr. Graham and the White House aimed at crafting a bipartisan legislative package that would close Guantánamo while bolstering legal authorities for detaining terrorism suspects without trial.

Mr. Graham said such legislation would build confidence about holding detainees, including future captures, in an untainted prison inside the United States. But the talks lapsed.

“We can’t get anyone to give us a final answer,” he said. “It just goes into a black hole. I don’t know what happens.”

In any case, one senior official said, even if the administration concludes that it will never close the prison, it cannot acknowledge that because it would revive Guantánamo as America’s image in the Muslim world.

“Guantánamo is a negative symbol, but it is much diminished because we are seen as trying to close it,” the official said. “Closing Guantánamo is good, but fighting to close Guantánamo is O.K. Admitting you failed would be the worst.”


Thom Shanker contributed reporting.

    Closing Guantánamo Fades as a Priority, NYT, 25.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/26/us/politics/26gitmo.html

Supreme Court Affirms Ban on Aiding Groups Tied to Terror

June 21, 2010
The New York Times
By ADAM LIPTAK

WASHINGTON — Rejecting a First Amendment challenge, the Supreme Court on Monday upheld a federal law that bars providing “material support” to terrorist organizations.

The decision was the court’s first ruling on the free speech and association rights of American citizens in the context of terrorism since the Sept. 11 attacks.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the majority in the 6-to-3 decision, said the law’s prohibition of providing some forms of intangible assistance to groups said by the State Department to engage in terrorism did not violate the First Amendment.

“At bottom, plaintiffs simply disagree with the considered judgment of Congress and the executive that providing material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization — even seemingly benign support — bolsters the terrorist activities of that organization,” the chief justice wrote. He was joined by Justices John Paul Stevens, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Anthony M. Kennedy and Samuel A. Alito Jr,

“Given the sensitive interests in national security and foreign affairs at stake,” Chief Justice Roberts continued, “the political branches have adequately substantiated their determination that, to serve the government’s interest in preventing terrorism, it was necessary to prohibit providing material support in the form of training, expert advice, personnel, and services to foreign terrorist groups, even if the supporters meant to promote only the groups’ nonviolent ends.”

Justice Stephen G. Breyer took the unusual step of summarizing his dissent from the bench. He wrote that the majority had been too credulous in accepting the government’s argument that national security concerns required restrictions on the challengers’ speech, and “failed to insist upon specific evidence, rather than general assertion.”

In his dissent, joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor, Justice Breyer concluded that the majority “deprives the individuals before us of the protection the First Amendment demands.”

The law was challenged by Ralph D. Fertig, a civil rights activist who said he wanted to help a militant Kurdish group in Turkey find peaceful ways to achieve its goals.

In 1997, Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright designated some 30 groups under the law, including Hamas, Hezbollah, the Khmer Rouge and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party. The United States says the Kurdish group, sometimes called the P.K.K., has engaged in widespread terrorist activities, including bombings and kidnappings, and “has waged a violent insurgency that has claimed over 22,000 lives.”

Since 2001, the government says, it has prosecuted about 150 defendants for violating the material-support law, obtaining roughly 75 convictions.

The federal appeals court in San Francisco ruled in 2007 that bans on training, service and some kinds of expert advice were unconstitutionally vague. But it upheld the bans on personnel and expert advice derived from scientific or technical knowledge.

The cases are Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, No. 08-1498, and Humanitarian Law Project v. Holder, No. 09-89.

    Supreme Court Affirms Ban on Aiding Groups Tied to Terror, NYT, 21.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/22/us/politics/22scotus.html

Where the Times Square Suspect Is Just a Client

June 18, 2010
The New York Times
By BENJAMIN WEISER

When the suspect in the Times Square bombing plot appeared in a packed courtroom last month, the government’s table was full: three prosecutors and an F.B.I. agent sat side by side. At the defense table, the suspect, Faisal Shahzad, sat next to a single federal public defender, Julia L. Gatto. They seemed badly outnumbered.

But if Ms. Gatto felt that way, she gave no evidence of it as she spoke quietly with her client, seemingly oblivious to the crowd of reporters, sketch artists and spectators behind them. Mr. Shahzad looked engaged, listening to her intently.

Ms. Gatto is one of a dozen trial lawyers in the Manhattan federal defenders’ office, which each year, along with an office in White Plains, represents 1,600 people who cannot afford counsel. They find themselves defending suspects in a significant number of the cases brought by the United States attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, with its 150 prosecutors.

“There’s often a sense that it’s David versus Goliath,” said David Patton, a former defender who teaches law at the University of Alabama. “It can be a source of frustration, but it also creates an esprit de corps in the office.”

Sabrina P. Shroff, a defender since 2007, agreed, citing her colleagues’ experience and acumen. “I never feel outnumbered,” she said. “We’re 12, but we’re really good at what we do.”

The assignment of the Shahzad case to the office is a reminder that most federal defendants cannot afford counsel, and somebody has to represent them.

In some cases, the office assigns more than one lawyer. Mr. Shahzad received a second defender, Philip L. Weinstein, shortly after his court appearance. Mr. Weinstein and Ms. Gatto will handle the case as it proceeds on one of several possible paths.

Mr. Shahzad, who was indicted on 10 counts on Thursday and is expected to be arraigned on Monday, could continue to cooperate, as prosecutors say he has been doing, and plead guilty. Or he could challenge his more than two weeks of detention without counsel, even though prosecutors say he “knowingly and voluntarily waived his Miranda rights.” He could even end up going to trial. Both defenders declined to discuss the Shahzad case.

Whatever route he takes, Mr. Shahzad will be backed by an elite office with a history of battling the powerful Southern District prosecutors, including in cases of international terrorism. The office represented a defendant in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing trial, and it was expected to be assigned one of the Sept. 11 detainees from Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, when the government had planned to bring their cases to New York. The office’s White Plains branch is representing a man in a plot to bomb synagogues in the Bronx.

Beyond terrorism, the office has also won the only acquittal in recent years on a capital count in a federal death penalty case in Manhattan. (The defendant was convicted on other charges.) And its defenders in Manhattan and a counterpart office in Brooklyn have won numerous dismissals and acquittals in gun possession cases, in which they successfully challenged the credibility of police accounts.

“I think that office is fabulously effective,” said Gerald L. Shargel, a prominent private defense lawyer. Mr. Shargel said that because the office was involved in so many cases, its lawyers had a better understanding of how the government saw each case, a big help in plea negotiations.

“They know from an institutional perspective what a good deal is,” he said, “and how good a deal you can get.”

Leonard F. Joy, the federal defender who oversees the Manhattan and Brooklyn offices, declined to comment on the Shahzad case, except to say he was uncomfortable that Mr. Shahzad had been held for so long without a lawyer on the basis that he had knowingly waived his rights.

“Who knows what the F.B.I. was promising him?” Mr. Joy said. “It troubles a number of us here. We saw days going by and nothing happening.”

A spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, James Margolin, said of the bureau’s treatment of Mr. Shahzad before his court appearance: “We were very careful to conduct our interaction with the defendant in a way that protected his rights.”

Expecting his office to be assigned the case, Mr. Joy said he called Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan, to express his concerns about Mr. Shahzad’s failure to be brought to court. Mr. Joy said those concerns were alleviated when Mr. Shahzad appeared in court a day or so later. Mr. Joy declined to discuss his conversation with Mr. Bharara, who also would not discuss the Shahzad matter.

Mr. Bharara, who as a line prosecutor once handled cases against Mr. Joy’s office, called the federal defenders “formidable adversaries who always hold us to our proof, as they should.”

“They have earned their reputation as among the finest public defenders in the country,” he said.

The federal defenders typically rotate duty in magistrate’s court, where defendants often first appear, which was how Ms. Gatto received the Shahzad assignment.

She and Mr. Weinstein typify the mix of lawyers in the office. They include veterans from the Legal Aid Society, of which the office was once a part, and younger lawyers from top law schools and judicial clerkships who came out of private practice.

Ms. Gatto, 34, a graduate of the University of Michigan and Georgetown University Law Center, spent several years at Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel before becoming the first associate hired by a relatively new two-person firm, Sercarz & Riopelle, where she handled criminal defense work.

“She’s a terrific lawyer,” Maurice H. Sercarz, her former boss, said. “She is very bright; she has a marvelous feel for people and the nature of the situation and a very engaging personality.”

Since joining the office in 2008, Ms. Gatto has defended clients in other high-profile cases, including a man from Mali who was indicted on charges of supporting Al Qaeda through narcotics trafficking and a man charged as part of an Asian gang who prosecutors said helped carry out the killing of a security guard in Queens in 2001.

But even in the most obscure cases, Ms. Gatto, like Mr. Weinstein, is aggressive in court, attacking the credibility of government witnesses and seeking leniency in sentencing.

In one trial, Ms. Gatto accused police officers of lying about whether a gun could be tied to her client. “You can’t rely on these officers,” she told jurors. “You can’t buy what they’re selling.”

They fudged the truth “to make their arrest stick,” she added.

The jury ultimately could not reach a unanimous verdict, and the case will be retried.

In another case, Ms. Gatto represented a man who pleaded guilty to illegally re-entering the country from Mexico. Prosecutors suggested a sentence of nearly six years, but Ms. Gatto countered that her client had returned for the right reason: to find work to support his family. The man received 17 months.

Mr. Weinstein, 65, a graduate of Cornell and the University of Michigan Law School, ran Legal Aid’s criminal appeals bureau for about a decade before joining the defenders’ office in the mid-1990s. He has handled two dozen federal trials, and he recently represented a Somali man in a prominent piracy case.

William E. Hellerstein, a professor at Brooklyn Law School who had earlier run the appeals bureau and remains a friend, said Mr. Weinstein’s appellate background gave him an eye for the mistakes lawyers make and how to avoid them. He said Mr. Weinstein was a methodical and precise lawyer who did not make himself the focus of a trial.

“He doesn’t break the furniture,” Professor Hellerstein said. “He is a careful, thorough student of the game.”

In a narcotics trial in December, Mr. Weinstein represented a client who was convicted, but the jury rejected the government’s position on the amount of drugs involved, allowing for the man to receive a mandatory five-year sentence instead of a mandatory 10-year term.

Much of Mr. Weinstein’s summation focused on the testimony of two drug dealers who had testified against his client. “You have been told a story,” he argued. “The bottom line, members of the jury, is, if you don’t trust the messenger, you can’t trust the message.”

    Where the Times Square Suspect Is Just a Client, NYT, 18.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/19/nyregion/19defenders.html

New Ground Zero Deal Gives Plaintiffs $712.5 Million

June 10, 2010
The New York Times
By A. G. SULZBERGER and MIREYA NAVARRO

Lawyers for the city and about 10,000 rescue and cleanup workers at ground zero have renegotiated a new settlement under which the city’s insurer kicks in more money and the plaintiffs’ lawyers reduce their legal fees to give the workers more money than the original agreement called for.

After nearly three months of renegotiations, the city’s insurer, the WTC Captive Insurance Company, has agreed to increase its payout to plaintiffs to $712.5 million. The previous terms called for payouts totaling $575 million to $657.5 million.

In addition, the plaintiffs’ lawyers have agreed to reduce their fees to a maximum of 25 percent of the settlement amount, down from the 33.33 percent called for in the contingency fee agreements with their clients. As a result, the plaintiffs will get to keep an additional $50 million.

“This settlement ensures guaranteed, immediate and just compensation to the heroic men and women who performed their duties without consideration of the health implications,” said Marc J. Bern, one of the plaintiffs’ lawyers. “Our commitment to our clients has never wavered in the seven years since we took on this litigation and we have done everything within our power, including reducing the fees we agreed to with each of our clients, to achieve the best possible outcome.”

The parties went back to the negotiating table in March after their original settlement was rejected by Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein of United States District Court in Manhattan, who has been overseeing the cases since 2003. The judge said the old agreement did not offer enough compensation to the plaintiffs.

The workers sued the city and its contractors over respiratory illnesses and other injuries they alleged were sustained at the World Trade Center site because they were not given protective equipment or adequate supervision.

The city filed papers with the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit to challenge Judge Hellerstein’s authority to block the settlement, its lawyers also tried to accommodate him to salvage an agreement that has to be accepted by 95 percent of the plaintiffs.

Judge Hellerstein was kept informed of the newly negotiated terms and has indicated that he believes that the modified settlement is “fair and reasonable,” according to a statement released on Thursday by the lawyers.

    New Ground Zero Deal Gives Plaintiffs $712.5 Million, NYT, 10.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/11/nyregion/11zero.html

Justice Dept. Faults Attack Readiness

June 1, 2010
The New York Times
By ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department’s inspector general has concluded that the department is not fully prepared to respond to a terrorist attack involving an unconventional weapon.

In a report issued on Tuesday, the inspector general said that none of the law enforcement agencies within the department, other than the Federal Bureau of Investigation, had operational response plans in place to deal with such an attack.

The report determined that other than F.B.I. specialists, the department’s staff receives little training on how to respond to a biological, chemical, nuclear or radiological attack; that there is no central oversight plan in place for such a crisis; and that the management of the department’s plan is “uncoordinated and fragmented.”

“The department as a whole does not have policies or plans for responding to a W.M.D. incident,” the 61-page report concluded, referring to weapons of mass destruction.

The report did not address the role of other federal agencies, such as the Defense and Homeland Security Departments, that would also have important roles in dealing with any unconventional terrorist attack.

The Justice Department said that it largely agreed with the critique from its inspector general, Glenn A. Fine, but that it had made meaningful progress in correcting the shortfalls while the report was being compiled.

James A. Baker, an associate deputy attorney general, wrote in a letter dated May 25 that the department largely embraced many of the inspector general’s recommendations. Mr. Baker wrote that one person in the office of the deputy attorney general would be selected in the next few weeks to oversee the department’s emergency response.

The department will also create a committee to review department polices and directives related to emergency response plans and programs, to ensure that they are up to date and effective, he wrote.

The inspector general’s report made it very clear that they are not that way today.

For example, the department designated the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to coordinate the response of federal law enforcement agencies if an unconventional attack overwhelmed state and local authorities.

But the department and the firearms bureau have not assigned specific people to manage those activities, and the bureau has not prepared a list of people who could be deployed or equipment that could be used if such an event took place, the report found.

The report found similar flaws in other law enforcement agencies at the Justice Department, including the Drug Enforcement Administration and the United States Marshals Service.

The inspector general did find that the F.B.I., which is responsible for preventing unconventional attacks in the United States and for responding to any that occur, was well prepared to handle those tasks.

The F.B.I., for instance, has developed various plans, handbooks and other resources to guide its staff, the report found. Specialized training is regularly provided to seasoned veteran agents as well as new hires. And the F.B.I. conducted or participated in more than 900 exercises from 2005 to 2009.

The inspector general’s report also focused on specific preparations to deal with an unconventional attack in the Washington region.

Those findings mirrored the report’s broader conclusions: the F.B.I.’s Washington field office was found to be the only unit of the Justice Department in or near the capital that had a written plan and checklist to respond specifically to a biological, chemical, nuclear or radiological attack there.

    Justice Dept. Faults Attack Readiness, NYT, 1.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/02/us/02terror.html

How Many Warnings Do They Need?

May 30, 2010
The New York Times
 

Some of the Sept. 11 commission’s most glaring warnings about gaps in homeland security continue to be ignored six years after they were hailed as indispensable to the defense against terrorism.

Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, the chairman and vice chairman of the commission, recently reminded the nation of crucial unfinished business. Perhaps most mind-boggling in these days of relentless communications is the continuing inability of first responders to communicate with each other on common radio frequencies. Police officers and firefighters lost their lives in the attack on New York City precisely because of that.

Congress also has failed to improve its oversight of government intelligence by cutting back on the cacophony of 100-plus committees claiming jurisdiction. The risk that a terrorist might unleash toxic clouds endangering hundreds of thousands of lives is nearly as great today as it was before the 2001 attacks.

Instead of adopting strict, mandatory security measures, Congress, so far, has failed even to renew a list of voluntary precautions due to expire in October.

The House passed a measure in November to renew the law but narrowed the categories of companies required to consider safer technologies and report their status to homeland security officials. A companion measure is in the works by Senator Frank Lautenberg, Democrat of New Jersey, but it has not surfaced on the chamber’s priority list as time dwindles. Senate failure to act will roll the issue over to start from scratch in the next Congress.

Some companies, like Clorox, have been exemplary in reducing risks by phasing out chlorine gas with a safer substitute. But most companies have refused to follow. The risks here are too high to ignore. Voluntary compliance is not enough. In addition, the environmental watchdog Greenpeace points out that homeland security safeguards on the nation’s 2,400 drinking water and waste-water treatment plants, many of which use chlorine gas, are exempt from the rules.

The threat of attacks on the homeland is real and present. The nation has gotten lucky twice in recent months when attempts to bring down a plane over Detroit and to explode a bomb in Times Square failed. If that luck runs out, the nation is going to be asking why Washington hasn’t done more. The White House and Congress should be asking those questions, and addressing these gaps, right now.

    How Many Warnings Do They Need?, NYT, 30.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/opinion/31mon2.html

No Terror Evidence Against Some Detainees

May 28, 2010
The New York Times
By CHARLIE SAVAGE

WASHINGTON — The 48 Guantánamo Bay detainees whom the Obama administration has decided to keep holding without trial include several for whom there is no evidence of involvement in any specific terrorist plot, according to a report disclosed Friday.

The report was a 32-page summary of the findings of a task force whose members were drawn from national security agencies across the executive branch. The group worked throughout 2009 to evaluate each of the 240 detainees held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, when the Obama administration took office and to decide their fates.

The task force’s general findings have been known since its report was completed in January. But the report itself was not made public. It was obtained Friday by The Washington Post, which posted the report on its Web site.

Of the 240 detainees, it recommended transferring 126 home or to a third country, prosecuting 36 for crimes, and holding 48 without trial under the laws of war because they are believed to be members of an enemy force. Thirty were Yemenis who have been deemed safe to release as individuals but will continue to be held until security conditions in Yemen stabilize.

About 180 detainees remain at the base today. Of that group, the 48 whom the administration has designated for continued indefinite detention without trial have attracted the greatest controversy, in part because many Democrats sharply criticized that policy when the Bush administration created it after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The report said most such detainees fell into at least one of four categories: they had had a significant organizational role in Al Qaeda or the Taliban; “advanced training or experience” in matters like explosives; they had “expressly stated or otherwise exhibited an intent to reengage in extremist activity upon release;” or they had a “history of engaging in extremist activities or particularly strong ties (either directly or through family members) to extremist organizations.”

The report also cited two primary reasons why the 48 detainees could not be prosecuted. First, it said, the vast majority were captured in combat zones when the focus was warfare, not court cases. While the intelligence against them was deemed credible, it said, evidence was not collected or preserved about them in a form that would be deemed admissible in court or that could prove their guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

“One common problem is that for many of the detainees, there are no witnesses who are available to testify in any proceeding against them,” it said.

Legal limitations also posed a problem for prosecutions, the report said. For example, the task force found no evidence that some detainees had “participated in a specific terrorist plot” or that they had acted to support Al Qaeda after October 2001, when laws criminalizing the general provision of material support to a terrorist group were extended to apply to foreigners overseas. Furthermore, it noted, the statute of limitations for providing material support to terrorists expires after eight years.

The report’s disclosure comes as the Senate Armed Services Committee said it had voted to bar the construction of a military detention facility in Thomson, Ill., in a further blow to the Obama administration’s fading hopes to shutter the Guantánamo prison.

    No Terror Evidence Against Some Detainees, NYT, 29.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/29/us/politics/29gitmo.html

U.S.-Born Cleric Justifies the Killing of Civilians

May 23, 2010
The New York Times
By ERIC LIPTON

WASHINGTON — In a newly released video, Anwar al-Awlaki, the Muslim cleric believed to be an inspiration for a series of recent terrorism plots, justifies the mass killing of American civilians and taunts the authorities to come find him in Yemen.

Terrorism experts said on Sunday that the full video interview, excerpts of which had previously been released, shows an increasing radicalization by Mr. Awlaki, an American-born imam who this year became the first United States citizen to be placed on a Central Intelligence Agency list of terrorists approved as a target for killing.

In his remarks, Mr. Awlaki praises the attempted Christmas Day bombing of a Northwest flight headed to Detroit.

“Those who could have been killed in that plane are a drop in the sea,” Mr. Awlaki said, in a translation provided by the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors statements by jihadists. “And we should treat them the same way they treat us and attack them the same way they attack us.”

Mr. Awlaki has been on record defending attacks on American military targets, both overseas and within the United States. He has praised the Fort Hood, Tex., shootings, carried out in November by an Army psychiatrist with whom Mr. Awlaki had exchanged e-mail messages. But the new video shows that Mr. Awlaki is now urging his supporters not to distinguish between military and civilian targets, citing what he claims are “no less than a million women and children” who had been killed as a result of American military action in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Mr. Awlaki’s sermons have drawn followers in spots around the world. A senior administration official said on Sunday that it had become clear that Mr. Awlaki “is not just someone who seeks to inspire others to undertake murderous acts, but has been and continues to be operational in plans against our interests and against the homeland.”

The interview also shows how tight the collaboration has become between Mr. Awlaki and the Yemen-based group known as Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, said Richard Wachtel, a spokesman for the Middle East Media Research Institute, which also translated the remarks, which were released by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Qaeda leaders there recently released a statement defending Mr. Awlaki and offering him protection.

In the video, Mr. Awlaki said he had cut off telephone communications to avoid being detected.

“If the Americans want me, let them search for me,” he said. “Allah is the best protector.”

Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, made it clear on Sunday that the search for Mr. Awlaki was very much underway. “We are actively trying to find him and many others throughout the world that seek to do our country and to do our interests great harm,” Mr. Gibbs said on the CBS News program “Face the Nation.”

    U.S.-Born Cleric Justifies the Killing of Civilians, NYT, 23.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/24/world/middleeast/24awlaki.html

Tainted Justice

May 23, 2010
The New York Times

If the Obama administration wants to demonstrate that it is practical and just to try some terrorism suspects in military tribunals instead of federal courts, it is off to a very poor start.

Justice Department and Pentagon officials have chosen a troubling case for the first trial under the revisions that were adopted to the Military Commissions Act in 2009 — a Toronto-born Guantánamo Bay detainee named Omar Khadr. Mr. Khadr, 23, has been in detention since he was 15, when he allegedly threw a hand grenade during a firefight in Afghanistan that fatally wounded Sgt. First Class Christopher Speer.

Mr. Khadr was not a mere bystander. He was indoctrinated into armed conflict by his father, a member of Osama bin Laden’s circle who was killed by Pakistani forces in 2003. But if his trial goes forward this summer as scheduled, he will be the first person in decades to be tried by a Western nation for war crimes allegedly committed as a child.

That has drawn justified criticism from United Nations officials and civil liberties and human rights groups. The conditions of Mr. Khadr’s imprisonment have been in clear violation of the Geneva Conventions and international accords on the treatment of children.

During a recent pretrial hearing at Guantánamo, it emerged that his initial questioning at Afghanistan’s Bagram prison occurred while he was sedated for pain and shackled to a stretcher following his hospitalization for severe wounds suffered in the fighting.

His first interrogator, identified at the hearing only as Interrogator One, was an Army sergeant later convicted of detainee abuse in another case. He used threats of rape and death to frighten the teenaged Omar Khadr into talking. Another witness recalled seeing him hooded and handcuffed to his cell with his arms held painfully above his shoulders. When the hood was removed, he testified, he could see that the teenager was crying.

In January, the Supreme Court of Canada condemned the questioning of Mr. Khadr by a Canadian official who then shared the results with American prosecutors. The ruling cited Mr. Khadr’s lack of access to counsel and his inclusion in the military’s notorious “frequent flier” program, which used sleep deprivation to elicit statements about serious criminal charges.

A ruling from the military judge on the admissibility of Mr. Khadr’s statements is not expected for several weeks. But there’s already a bad lingering taste from the hearing, which began just hours after Defense Secretary Robert Gates formally approved a new set of rules for the tribunals and before Mr. Khadr’s lawyers or the judge had a chance to review them. The rules are an improvement over those that governed the Bush commissions, but they have flaws, including the use of hearsay.

During the hearing, the Pentagon barred four reporters from covering any military commission because they printed the name of Interrogator One, even though it has been public for years and is readily available on the Internet. The administration needs to restore the reporters’ credentials.

It also needs to press forward with negotiations on a plea deal. The evidence that Mr. Khadr threw the deadly hand grenade is not clear-cut. Even if it were, it would be impossible to overlook his abuse in custody, and status as a juvenile, which deprived him of mature judgment.

After Mr. Khadr’s eight-year ordeal, it would be no disrespect to Sergeant Speer to return Mr. Khadr to his home country under terms designed to protect public safety and strive for his rehabilitation.

    Tainted Justice, NYT, 23.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/24/opinion/24mon1.html

Appeals Panel Bars Detainees From Access to U.S. Courts

May 21, 2010
The New York Times
By CHARLIE SAVAGE

WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court ruled Friday that three men who had been detained by the United States military for years without trial in Afghanistan had no recourse to American courts. The decision was a broad victory for the Obama administration in its efforts to hold terrorism suspects overseas for indefinite periods without judicial oversight.

The detainees, two Yemenis and a Tunisian who say they were captured outside Afghanistan, contend that they are not terrorists and are being mistakenly imprisoned at the American military prison at Bagram Air Base.

But a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled unanimously that the three had no right to habeas corpus hearings, in which judges would review evidence against them and could order their release. The court reasoned that Bagram was on the sovereign territory of another government and emphasized the “pragmatic obstacles” of giving hearings to detainees “in an active theater of war.”

The ruling dealt a severe blow to wider efforts by lawyers to extend a landmark 2008 Supreme Court ruling granting habeas corpus rights to prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. A lower court judge had previously ruled that the three Bagram detainees were entitled to the same rights, although he had found that others captured in Afghanistan and held there were not.

A lawyer for the detainees, Tina Foster, said that if the precedent stood, Mr. Obama and future presidents would have a free hand to “kidnap people from other parts of the world and lock them away for the rest of their lives” without having to prove in court that their suspicions about such prisoners were accurate.

“The thing that is most disappointing for those of us who have been in the fight for this long is all of the people who used to be opposed to the idea of unlimited executive power during the Bush administration but now seem to have embraced it during this administration,” she said. “We have to remember that Obama is not the last president of the United States.”

Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and an influential lawmaker in the long-running debate over detentions, called the ruling a “big win” and praised the administration for appealing the lower court’s ruling.

“Allowing a noncitizen enemy combatant detained in a combat zone access to American courts would have been a change of historic proportions,” he said. “It also would have dealt a severe blow to our war effort.

“There is a reason we have never allowed enemy prisoners detained overseas in an active war zone to sue in federal court for their release. It simply makes no sense and would be the ultimate act of turning the war into a crime.”

It was not entirely clear how the ruling might affect detention policies for terrorism suspects caught outside Afghanistan or Iraq. While the Obama administration has stepped up the use of Predator drone strikes to kill terrorism suspects and has relied on other countries, like Pakistan, to hold and interrogate suspects who are captured alive, it is not known whether the United States has directly captured anyone outside Afghanistan or Iraq recently — and, if so, where it has taken them.

A Justice Department spokesman, Dean Boyd, would not comment on the decision.

David Rivkin, who filed a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of the Special Forces Association urging the court to side with the government, said the ruling would have broad significance by removing doubts over whether the United States could capture and interrogate terrorism suspects without worrying about having to collect, in dangerous situations, evidence that would later stand up in court.

“This is an excellent decision,” said Mr. Rivkin, who was a White House lawyer in the administration of the first President Bush. “It has restored a considerable degree of sanity to what threatened to be a crazy legal regime that would have deprived the United States, for the first time in history, of the opportunity to capture and detain — outside of the United States, in theaters of war — high-value combatants. That has been solved, and it will apply to many other situations in the future.”

The case was brought on behalf of a Tunisian man who says he was captured in Pakistan in 2002, a Yemeni man who says he was captured in Thailand in 2002, and another Yemeni man who says he was captured in 2003 at another location outside Afghanistan that has not been disclosed. (The government has disputed the second Yemeni’s claim.)

The men’s case was originally heard by Judge John D. Bates of the Federal District Court, an appointee of former President George W. Bush. The Bush and Obama administrations had both urged Judge Bates not to extend habeas corpus rights beyond Guantánamo, arguing that courts should not interfere with military operations inside active combat zones.

But in April 2009, Judge Bates ruled that there was no difference between the three men who had filed suit and Guantánamo prisoners. His decision was limited to non-Afghans captured outside Afghanistan — a category that fits only about a dozen of the roughly 800 detainees at Bagram, officials have said.

In urging the appeals court to let Judge Bates’s decision stand, lawyers for the detainees argued that reversing it would mean that the government would be able “to evade judicial review of executive detention decisions by transferring detainees into active combat zones, thereby granting the executive the power to switch the Constitution on or off at will.”

But in the appeal panel’s decision reversing Judge Bates, Chief Judge David B. Sentelle said there had been no such gamesmanship in the decision to bring the three detainees to Bagram because it happened years before the Supreme Court’s Guantánamo rulings.

Still, he left the door open to approving habeas corpus rights for prisoners taken to prisons other than Guantánamo in the future, writing, “We need make no determination on the importance of this possibility, given that it remains only a possibility; its resolution can await a case in which the claim is a reality rather than speculation.”

Ms. Foster vowed to keep fighting. But Mr. Rivkin said that the detainees’ chances for overturning the decision were dim because the three appeals judges spanned the ideological spectrum: Chief Judge Sentelle, appointed by President Ronald Reagan; Judge Harry T. Edwards, appointed by President Jimmy Carter; and Judge David S. Tatel, appointed by President Bill Clinton.

It could also be difficult to win a reversal by the Supreme Court, where five of the nine justices supported giving habeas rights to detainees in the Guantánamo case. Among the narrow majority in that case was Justice John Paul Stevens, who is retiring.

The nominee to replace him, Elena Kagan, who as solicitor general signed the government’s briefs in the case, would most likely recuse herself from hearing an appeal of the decision, and a four-four split would allow it to stand.

    Appeals Panel Bars Detainees From Access to U.S. Courts, NYT, 21.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/22/world/asia/22detain.html

Times Square Bombing Suspect Appears in Court

May 18, 2010
The New York Times
By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM and BENJAMIN WEISER

Over the last two weeks, the naturalized Pakistani immigrant charged with driving a crude car bomb into Times Square settled into something of a strange daily routine: He signed a piece of paper waiving his right to a lawyer and a speedy court appearance. Then he continued to talk to federal authorities, providing what they have called valuable intelligence.

On Tuesday, that extraordinary routine — which has kept him out of a courtroom, away from a lawyer and out of the public eye — was interrupted. The immigrant, Faisal Shahzad, whose unsuccessful attempt to detonate the car bomb on May 1 wrought chaos among thousands of people in Times Square, appeared in court for the first time, represented by a lawyer.

But the tension and drama that led up to the brief proceeding, including a sweep of the packed fifth-floor courtroom that cleared mobs of reporters and spectators so the room could be secured, far overshadowed the substance of the nine-minute hearing.

Indeed, Mr. Shahzad, 30, a former financial analyst who was raised in a military family in Pakistan and earned degrees from the University of Bridgeport, spoke only one word — “yes” — during his appearance in Manhattan federal court, confirming that the information in an affidavit was the truth.

He seemed calm and looked intently at United States Magistrate Judge James C. Francis IV, who at one point read him his rights, including his right to remain silent, and warned him that anything he said could be used against him.

The hearing came after Mr. Shahzad indicated he was ready to stop waiving his right to a speedy court appearance, people briefed on the matter said. It is known as a presentment, or an initial court appearance on a complaint. Mr. Shahzad was not asked to enter a plea, and did not do so.

As Mr. Shahzad was led into the courtroom, the buzz of conversation among reporters, lawyers and spectators suddenly ceased. The room became so still that the scratch of courtroom artists could be heard.

Clad in a gray sweatshirt and sweat pants and Nike sneakers, Mr. Shahzad sat beside his court-appointed lawyer, Julia L. Gatto, with two United States marshals posted behind him, one of them a towering figure. Four more were lined up along the wall. Across the courtroom, the prosecution table was crowded with four assistant United States attorneys and Andrew P. Pachtman, the Federal Bureau of Investigation agent who swore out the complaint charging Mr. Shahzad with five felonies.

Mr. Shahzad, who has been held at an undisclosed location since his arrest, was arrested on May 3 at Kennedy International Airport aboard a plane that was about to leave for Dubai. He began cooperating with prosecutors and F.B.I. agents and police detectives from Joint Terrorism Task Force a short time later.

The day after the arrest, he was charged in the complaint with one count each of attempting acts of terrorism transcending national boundaries; attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction; using a destructive device in connection with an attempted crime of violence; transporting explosives; and attempting to destroy property with fire and explosives. The first two charges each carry a maximum sentence of life in prison.

Prosecutors said he had admitted receiving bomb-making training in the Pakistani region of Waziristan and driving a Nissan Pathfinder packed with propane, gasoline, fireworks and fertilizer into Times Square at about 6:30 p.m. on May 1, when the bustling crossroads was packed with a Saturday-night throng of tourists.

During the court appearance, Judge Francis asked for the time of Mr. Shahzad’s arrest. An assistant United States attorney, Randall W. Jackson, said he was arrested on May 3 about 11 p.m.

Judge Francis asked whether he had waived speedy presentment “in the interim.”

“That’s correct, your honor,” Mr. Jackson said.

Mr. Jackson told the judge that the government was seeking to detain Mr. Shahzad. Ms. Gatto did not oppose that request, although she left open the possibility of applying later for release on bond. Mr. Shahzad was ordered detained, and he is now being held at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan.

As the hearing ended, Ms. Gatto asked the judge to order that the Federal Bureau of Prisons make sure Mr. Shahzad was provided with halal meals, consistent with a Muslim diet.

    Times Square Bombing Suspect Appears in Court, NYT, 18.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/19/nyregion/19terror.html

The Rights of Terrorism Suspects

May 17, 2010
The New York Times

To the Editor:

Re “The Threat to Miranda” (editorial, May 16):

There is no need to carve out a new exception to the Miranda rule in order to keep us safe from terrorism. The Supreme Court in 1984 established the “public safety” exception, which allows law enforcement to interrogate a suspect without reading him his Miranda rights if there is a threat to public safety. And in 2004, the court held that physical evidence obtained as a result of a confession not preceded by Miranda rights is also admissible. That means that not only can the police find out where the “ticking bomb” is located, but they can also offer it into evidence against the defendant.

We already have adequate tools to protect the American people without weakening Miranda.

Marjorie Cohn
San Diego, May 16, 2010

The writer is a professor of criminal procedure at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and former president of the National Lawyers Guild.

•

To the Editor:

Re “Obama Said to Be Open to New Miranda Look” (news article, May 11):

As the administration considers chipping away at the rights of terrorism suspects, we may well wonder where this will end. As a historian who has studied witchcraft trials in Europe for over 40 years, I am worried.

Four hundred years ago Continental jurists often agreed that witchcraft was such a horrendous crime (it was the terrorism of the day) that suspects did not deserve the legal procedures granted those suspected of ordinary crimes. They created a separate category of crime (the “crimen exceptum”) that allowed for fewer restrictions on torture and fewer safeguards against self-incrimination.

There are of course many reasons witchcraft trials sometimes spiraled out of control, but scholars generally agree that setting up a category of exceptional crimes permitted a vast expansion of convictions whose justice few would defend today.

We must be careful not to repeat this horrific example. Our civil rights exist precisely for dangerous times and for those suspected of terrible crimes.

H. C. Erik Midelfort
Charlottesville, Va., May 12, 2010

The writer is professor emeritus of history at the University of Virginia.

•

To the Editor:

Re “You Have the Right to Remain Constitutional” (Op-Ed, May 13):

Sol Wachtler is right that we should not further erode Miranda warnings. What sense does it make to take away protections for those accused of a crime based on the nature of the crime they’re accused of? If the government can wipe out constitutional protections that are specifically for the accused just by making the accusation, what’s the point?

In the recent Times Square bombing case, I think of the man who was seen on videotape at the scene removing a piece of clothing and looking around. His image was beamed around the world and he was strongly implicated as a suspect, although it now appears that he was just a bystander.

Should the government have been able to pick up this fellow (who could have been any of us) and question him indefinitely without reading him his rights, simply because someone had applied the label “terrorism” to events he had nothing to do with? Not in the America that I believe in.

Warner R. Broaddus
San Diego, May 13, 2010

•

To the Editor:

In discussing the Obama administration’s decision to authorize the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born cleric who is hiding in Yemen, you say that he is “arguably protected” by the Fifth Amendment, which provides that the government shall not deprive a citizen of life, liberty or property without due process of law (“A Legal Debate as C.I.A. Stalks a U.S. Jihadist,” front page, May 14).

There is nothing arguable about it. Mr. Awlaki was born in New Mexico. He is therefore a United States citizen. To say the legal issue is “arguable” is to say there is legitimate doubt as to whether the Constitution prohibits the government from executing citizens who are living outside the United States on the sole basis that the president believes the killing would make the nation more secure.

No matter how incendiary Mr. Awlaki’s rhetoric is, he is not holding a weapon. Targeting him for killing is a lawless act, and the Constitution forbids it.

David R. Dow
Houston, May 14, 2010

The writer is a professor at the University of Houston Law Center.

    The Rights of Terrorism Suspects, NYT, 17.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/18/opinion/l18terror.html

For Car Bomb Suspect, a Long Path to Times Square

May 15, 2010
The New York Times
By ANDREA ELLIOTT, SABRINA TAVERNISE and ANNE BARNARD

This article was reported by Andrea Elliott, Sabrina Tavernise and Anne Barnard, and written by Ms. Elliott.

Just after midnight on Feb. 25, 2006, Faisal Shahzad sent a lengthy e-mail message to a group of friends. The trials of his fellow Muslims weighed on him — the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the plight of Palestinians, the publication in Denmark of cartoons lampooning the Prophet Muhammad.

Mr. Shahzad was wrestling with how to respond. He understood the notion that Islam forbids the killing of innocents, he wrote. But to those who insist only on “peaceful protest,” he posed a question: “Can you tell me a way to save the oppressed? And a way to fight back when rockets are fired at us and Muslim blood flows?

“Everyone knows how the Muslim country bows down to pressure from west. Everyone knows the kind of humiliation we are faced with around the globe.”

Yet by some measures, Mr. Shahzad — a Pakistani immigrant who was then 26 years old — seemed to be thriving in the West. He worked as a financial analyst at Elizabeth Arden, the global cosmetics firm. He had just received his green card, making him a legal resident in the United States. He owned a gleaming new house in Shelton, Conn. His Pakistani-American wife would soon become pregnant with their first child, whom they named Alisheba, or “beautiful sunshine.”

Four years later, Mr. Shahzad stands accused of planting a car bomb in Times Square on a balmy spring evening. After his arrest two days later, on May 3, while trying to flee to Dubai, the few details that surfaced about his life echoed a familiar narrative about radicalization in the West: his anger toward his adopted country seemed to have grown in lockstep with his personal struggles. He had lost his home to foreclosure last year. At the same time he was showing signs of a profound, religiously infused alienation.

But the roots of Mr. Shahzad’s militancy appear to have sprouted long before, according to interviews with relatives, friends, classmates, neighbors, colleagues and government officials, as well as e-mail messages written by Mr. Shahzad that were obtained by The New York Times. His argument with American foreign policy grew after 9/11, even as he enjoyed America’s financial promise and expansive culture. He balanced these dueling emotions with an agility common among his Pakistani immigrant friends.

As Mr. Shahzad became more religious, starting around 2006, he was also turning away from the Pakistan of his youth, friends recalled, distancing himself from the liberal, elite world of his father, Bahar ul-Haq, a retired vice marshal in the Pakistani Air Force.

And while in recent years Mr. Shahzad struggled to pay his bills, it is unclear that his financial hardship played a significant role in his radicalization. He still owned his home and held a full-time job when he began signaling to friends that he wanted to leave the United States.

In April 2009, the same month Mr. Shahzad got his United States citizenship, he sent an e-mail message to friends that foreshadowed his militant destiny. He criticized the views of a moderate Pakistani politician, writing, “I bet when it comes to defending the lands, his opinion would be we should do dialogue.” The politician had “bought into the Western jargon” of calling the mujahedeen, or foreign fighters, “extremist,” wrote Mr. Shahzad, who urged the recipients of the message to find “a proper Sheikh to understand the Quran.”

One of the recipients responded by asking Mr. Shahzad which sheikhs he followed.

Writing in Urdu, Mr. Shahzad replied, “My sheikhs are in the field.” A few months later, he abruptly quit his job and left for Pakistan, where, officials say, he was later trained in bomb-making by the Pakistani Taliban.

But precisely what combination of influences — political, religious and personal — drove Mr. Shahzad to violence remains a mystery, even to those close to him.

“We all know these things, what the geopolitical problems are,” said Mr. Shahzad’s father-in-law, M. A. Mian, 55. “Every day we sit in our living rooms with our friends and we discuss these issues.”

“But to go to this extreme, this is unbelievable,” he said, adding: “He has lovely children. Two really lovely children. As a father I would not be able to afford to lose my children.”

Military Upbringing

Faisal Shahzad grew up somewhat rootless. He identified proudly with his tribal Pashtun heritage, yet knew little of his father’s ancestral village, Mohib Banda, a collection of mud huts ringed by sugar and wheat fields in northwestern Pakistan. Mr. Shahzad’s father, Mr. Haq, had entered the Pakistani Air Force as a common airman before climbing the ranks as a fighter pilot who excelled at midair acrobatics, with posts in England and Saudi Arabia.

By the time Mr. Shahzad was 12, his father had been transferred from Jidda, Saudi Arabia, to the Pakistani city of Quetta, followed by Rawalpindi. As the son of a senior military officer, Mr. Shahzad was swaddled in privilege, tended to by chauffeurs, servants and armed guards in an insular world made up almost exclusively of military families. Mr. Shahzad’s household was a blend of strict and liberal; Mr. Haq, who spoke British-accented English and drank alcohol socially, was stern with his children and quick to anger, friends and former colleagues recalled.

When Mr. Shahzad entered high school in the mid-1990s, his family had settled in Karachi, a throbbing mega-city in the south. By then, Pakistan had plunged into chaos. As political instability and sectarian violence roiled the country, many Pakistanis blamed the United States. After propping up the Pakistani military dictator, Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, in the 1980s, the American government was now imposing hefty sanctions in retaliation for Pakistan’s nuclear program. The economy stalled as anti-Americanism spread.

Mr. Shahzad came of age during Pakistan’s state-sponsored jihad against India’s military in the breakaway region of Kashmir — a conflict that granted legendary status to Pakistani jihadists. “We used to see the mujahedeen as heroes,” said one graduate of Mr. Shahzad’s high school, who, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. “When I look back, I think, ‘What was I thinking? What were we all doing?’ But in that era, it made sense. We all wanted to do something.”

It is unclear how formative these events were for Mr. Shahzad, who continued to lead a somewhat sheltered existence, living with his family in a neighborhood of stately homes fringed by palm trees and bougainvillea. His school, located on a military base, taught the same rigid curriculum — with an anti-Western slant and a strict form of Islamic studies — imposed nationally by General Zia.

After graduating, Mr. Shahzad enrolled in Greenwich University, a business school in Karachi known for drawing affluent underachievers with fancy cars. Mr. Shahzad proved a mediocre student. (In high school, he had gotten D’s in English composition and microeconomics, according to a transcript.) But what he lacked in academic prowess he made up for in ambition, friends recalled; he was determined to finish his degree in the United States. Taking advantage of a partnership between his college and the University of Bridgeport, in Connecticut, Mr. Shahzad applied for a student visa.

On Jan. 16, 1999, at the age of 19, Mr. Shahzad left Pakistan for a new life in America.

Driven to Success

The wide, maple-shaded streets leading to the University of Bridgeport seem a long way from Karachi. The quiet, tidy campus overlooks a tranquil stretch of the Long Island Sound, where ferries pass in the distance.

When Mr. Shahzad started classes there, more than a third of the college’s students were foreigners — 15 of them from Pakistan. Mr. Shahzad stood out. He walked with a confident air, showing off his gym-honed muscles in tight T-shirts. He carried the air of a privileged upbringing, coming off as aloof and, at times, snobbish.

While the Pakistani students stuck together, playing cricket and collecting free meals at the campus mosque, Mr. Shahzad had a wider circle of friends and a fuller social calendar. A skilled cook, he drew students to his dorm room with the scent of his simmering lobia, a Pakistani lentil dish. He worked out obsessively and, on weekends, hit New York City’s Bengali-theme nightclubs. He loved women, recalled a former classmate, and “could drink anyone under the table.” He showed little interest in Islam.

Mr. Shahzad rarely seemed pressed for cash — he had a large television in his dorm room and drove a Mitsubishi Galant. But he still looked for work. Nimble with his hands — he would later take to gardening and painting — he landed a job designing intricate gold pendants for a jeweler at a mall in Milford. While Mr. Shahzad did not seem to distinguish himself academically, he came across as witty, street smart and “fast on his feet,” recalled one classmate. He and his Pakistani peers were chasing the same dream, the classmate said: “Back then, it was all about fast cars and becoming something.”

While Mr. Shahzad seemed eager to carve out a life in his host country, his anger at America flared early. The classmate recalled walking into Mr. Shahzad’s apartment a few days after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 to find him staring at news footage of the planes hitting the towers.

“They had it coming,” Mr. Shahzad said, according to the friend, a Pakistani-American. The friend said Mr. Shahzad believed that Western countries had conspired to mistreat Muslims. “He would just go off,” said the friend, adding that he paid little heed to Mr. Shahzad’s eruptions, dismissing them as a product of his fierce Pashtun pride.

“He was always saying, ‘If these people come to my land, it’s not going to be good,’ ” the friend recalled.

By late 2001, Mr. Shahzad seemed focused on his American future. Having graduated from the University of Bridgeport with a bachelor’s degree in computer applications and information systems, he was working as a clerk for Elizabeth Arden in Stamford. The following year, while holding the same job, Mr. Shahzad began taking night courses at the University of Bridgeport’s business school. He had bought a black Mercedes, as well as a $205,000 condominium in Norwalk. Two years later, Mr. Shahzad sold the apartment at a $56,000 profit.

His broker, Keven Courbois, was struck by Mr. Shahzad’s sense of responsibility, given that he was only 25. “I thought it was great: Look at this guy who is handling a condo on his own,” Mr. Courbois said.

At times, Mr. Shahzad seemed deeply frustrated with his job at Elizabeth Arden, complaining to a friend that the company never raised his $50,000 salary. (The company declined to discuss Mr. Shahzad’s employment.)

In July 2004, three months after selling his condo, Mr. Shahzad bought the gray, two-story house in Shelton, in a quiet, hilly neighborhood of well-tended flower beds and rambling older homes. He was preparing for marriage. His parents agreed on a suitable match: Huma Mian, an ebullient 23-year-old from Denver who had recently graduated with a degree in accounting, and whose Pakistani-American father was a prominent oil industry engineer and economist.

On Dec. 25, 2004, they held a lavish wedding in Peshawar, Mr. Shahzad’s ancestral turf, celebrating with a rare touch of modernity: the women and men danced together.

Mr. Shahzad’s “bachelor days” were behind him, the former classmate recalled. He was ready to settle down.

New Religiosity

Two years later, when Mr. Shahzad wrote the e-mail message telling friends that Muslims must defend themselves from “foreign infidel forces,” he seemed to be living a stable suburban life. That June, he took a new job as an analyst at the Affinion Group, a financial marketing firm in Norwalk, telling a friend that his annual income had jumped to $70,000. Two months later, he finished his master’s degree in business. On weekends, Mr. Shahzad hosted barbecues, mowed his lawn and played badminton in the yard. His wife was pregnant.

Mr. Shahzad had long been critical of American foreign policy. “He was always very upset about the fabrication of the W.M.D. stunt to attack Iraq and killing noncombatants such as the sons and grandson of Saddam Hussein,” said a close relative. In 2003, Mr. Shahzad had been copied on a Google Groups e-mail message bearing photographs of Guantánamo Bay detainees, handcuffed and crouching, below the words “Shame on you, Bush. Shame on You.” The following year, Igor Djuric, a real estate agent who helped him buy his house, recalled that Mr. Shahzad was angered by President George W. Bush and the war in Iraq.

If anything struck Mr. Shahzad’s friends and family as different, it was his new religiosity. He no longer drank, and was praying five times a day, stopping into mosques in Stamford, Norwalk and Bridgeport. Some of his friends thought nothing of it; plenty of Pakistani immigrants went through more spiritual phases. What set Mr. Shahzad apart, they said, was not his Islamic devotion, but the particular religious frame through which he had begun to interpret world events.

His 2006 e-mail message echoed the same arguments found on militant Internet forums: that the West is at war with Islam, and Muslims are suffering humiliation because they have strayed from their religious duty to fight back.

“The crusade has already started against Islam and Muslims with cartoons of our beloved Prophet,” wrote Mr. Shahzad, who went on to quote verses from the Koran as proof of what “Allah commands about fighting for Islam.”

During casual conversations with friends, Mr. Shahzad had taken to citing Islamic theology. He was a fan of Ibn Taymiyyah, a 14th-century scholar who inspired a puritanical following, and Abul Ala Mawdudi, a chief architect of the Islamic revival and founder of Pakistan’s largest Islamic political party, Jamaat-e-Islami.

On visits home, Mr. Shahzad began to clash with his father.

Mr. Haq had long been wary of political Islam, and found his son’s evolution troubling, friends recalled in interviews. The scrutiny went both ways. Mr. Shahzad glared when Mr. Haq once asked him to fetch water to mix with his whiskey, a family friend recalled. “He wanted to change his father,” said the classmate.

By late 2008, Mr. Shahzad seemed to oscillate between contentment and frustration. He doted on his two small children, even changing diapers to the amazement of his more patriarchal relatives. But he felt demeaned at work, complaining of a manager who used to “insult him,” a close relative recalled. He felt that American Muslims were treated differently after 9/11, said the classmate.

“He used to say that when they refer to us, they say ‘Americans of Pakistani origin’ — they don’t say ‘Americans with German origin,’ ” the relative recalled. “These kinds of things, they were all the time cooking in his head.”

During a visit to Pakistan in 2008, Mr. Shahzad gave perhaps the clearest indication yet that he was heading down a militant path. He asked his father for permission to fight in Afghanistan, friends of the father and the relative recalled. Mr. Haq denied the request and appealed to the friends for help in managing his son, they said.

The following year brought a turning point. Back in Connecticut, Mr. Shahzad told his former classmate that he was ready to leave the United States. He was tired of his commute. He found it stressful to keep up mortgage payments on a single income, even though he had urged his wife not to work, said Dr. M. Saud Anwar, a pulmonologist in Connecticut who shares acquaintances with Mr. Shahzad.

“He was like, ‘Why am I paying so much for everything — why am I even here?’ ” the classmate recalled.

As time went on, Mr. Shahzad’s pride kept him from asking for money from either his family or his wife’s, according to a close relative and the classmate. His plan was to wait until he became an American citizen, so he could find lucrative work with an American company in the Middle East and live among Muslims, the classmate recalled.

Mr. Shahzad got his citizenship on April 17, 2009. That same month, he sent the e-mail message to friends saying that his “sheikhs are in the field.” (Dr. Anwar provided portions of the e-mail message, which he obtained from Mr. Shahzad’s friend, to The Times and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.)

Return to Pakistan

Over the next few months, Mr. Shahzad and his wife held yard sales. The marriage appeared to be strained; Mr. Shahzad was pressuring his wife to wear a hijab, Dr. Anwar said. He also insisted that the family return to Pakistan while he searched for a job in the Middle East; his wife wanted him to find the job first, recalled the close relative.

On June 2, Mr. Shahzad called his wife from Kennedy Airport. He said that he was leaving for Pakistan, and that it was her choice whether she wanted to follow him, the relative recalled. Ms. Mian refused. Later that month, she packed up her children and moved to Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, where her parents were living.

Mr. Shahzad stayed with his parents in Peshawar. He appears to have stopped paying his mortgage; the bank foreclosed on his Connecticut home in September. One month later, at a family gathering in Peshawar, Mr. Shahzad seemed angered by the American-led drone strikes along the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, a close friend said. He was “condemning the attacks and the government for not doing anything about it,” the friend said.

Mr. Haq was reassured about his son’s plans when Mr. Shahzad agreed to start working in the family’s farming business. “He bluffed them,” said one of the father’s friends. In December, he left home, saying he would be back in a couple of days, the relative recalled. He never returned.

By then, according to federal investigators, Mr. Shahzad had set himself on a course to attack Times Square.

When he returned to the United States on Feb. 3, he circled back to his first days in America. Looking for work, he dropped by to see the jeweler who had hired him in college. He took out a lease on a small apartment just miles from the university campus. His movements over the next few months remain largely a mystery.

Last week, his landlord, Stanislaw Chomiak, walked through Mr. Shahzad’s apartment, pointing out the spot where he had been building a wooden replica of a mosque. He looked around, as if searching for clues. Mr. Shahzad had been nice, pleasant — a perfect kind of tenant. He had even lined the burners of the stove with aluminum so they would not get tarnished.

“Where are you going to find a guy like this?” the landlord said. “Nice guy and look what happens.”


Reporting was contributed by Jack Begg, Alison Leigh Cowan, Kareem Fahim, Mike McIntire, Sharon Otterman, Ray Rivera, David Rohde, Michael S. Schmidt and Karen Zraick.

    For Car Bomb Suspect, a Long Path to Times Square, NYT, 15.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/nyregion/16suspect.html

The Threat to Miranda

May 14, 2010
The New York Times

For nearly nine years, the threat of international terrorism has fueled a government jackhammer, cutting away at long-established protections of civil liberties. It has been used to justify warrantless wiretapping, an expansion of the state secrets privilege in federal lawsuits, the use of torture, and the indefinite detention of people labeled enemy combatants. None of these actions were necessary to fight terrorism, and neither is a dubious Obama administration proposal to loosen the Miranda rules when questioning terror suspects and to delay presenting suspects to a judge.

A change to a fundamental constitutional protection like Miranda should not be tossed out on a Sunday talk show with few details and a gauzy justification. If Attorney General Eric Holder really wants to change the rules, he owes the public a much better explanation.

At the most basic level, it is not even clear that the warning requirement can be changed, except from the bench. The Miranda warning was the creation of the Supreme Court as a way of enforcing the Fifth Amendment. Since 1966, it has reduced coerced confessions and reminded suspects that they have legal rights.

The Rehnquist court warned against meddling with the rule in a 2000 decision forbidding Congress to overrule the warnings to suspects, which over the decades became an ingrained law enforcement practice.

In 1984, the court itself added a “public safety” exception to Miranda. If there is an overriding threat to public safety and officers need information from a suspect to deal with it, the court said, the officers can get that information before administering the Miranda warnings and still use it in court. We disagreed with that decision, but in the years since, the exception has become a useful tool to deal with imminent threats.

The question now is whether the exception needs to be enlarged to deal with the threat of terrorism. Clearly an unexploded bomb or a terror conspiracy would constitute a safety threat under the existing rule. But must investigators “Mirandize” a suspect before asking about his financing sources, his experience at overseas training camps, his methods of communication? In a world that is differently dangerous than it was in 1984, these seem to fit logically under the existing exception, without requiring a fundamental change to the rule.

Miranda does not seem to be an impediment to good antiterror police work, as Mr. Holder himself noted on Thursday before the House Judiciary Committee. Investigators questioned Faisal Shahzad, the suspect in the Times Square bombing attempt, for three or four hours before giving him a Miranda warning, receiving useful information both before and after the warning. He readily waived his right to a quick hearing before a judge.

Investigators also questioned the suspect in the attempted airliner bombing last Christmas for 50 minutes before his rights were read. After both incidents, there were alarmist and unproven outcries from some politicians that Miranda was a hurdle to the cases.

We hope the Obama administration is not simply reacting to shortsighted pressure. To allay those concerns, it must quickly explain precisely what changes it wants to make, what time limits would be set on any new exceptions, and why the existing rules are inadequate.

    The Threat to Miranda, NYT, 14.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/opinion/16sun1.html

U.S. Decision to Approve Killing of Cleric Causes Unease

May 13, 2010
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration’s decision to authorize the killing by the Central Intelligence Agency of a terrorism suspect who is an American citizen has set off a debate over the legal and political limits of drone missile strikes, a mainstay of the campaign against terrorism.

The notion that the government can, in effect, execute one of its own citizens far from a combat zone, with no judicial process and based on secret intelligence, makes some legal authorities deeply uneasy.

To eavesdrop on the terrorism suspect who was added to the target list, the American-born radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who is hiding in Yemen, intelligence agencies would have to get a court warrant. But designating him for death, as C.I.A. officials did early this year with the National Security Council’s approval, required no judicial review.

“Congress has protected Awlaki’s cellphone calls,” said Vicki Divoll, a former C.I.A. lawyer who now teaches at the United States Naval Academy. “But it has not provided any protections for his life. That makes no sense.”

Administration officials take the view that no legal or constitutional rights can protect Mr. Awlaki, a charismatic preacher who has said it is a religious duty to attack the United States and who the C.I.A. believes is actively plotting violence. The attempted bombing of Times Square on May 1 is the latest of more than a dozen terrorist plots in the West that investigators believe were inspired in part by Mr. Awlaki’s rhetoric.

“American citizenship doesn’t give you carte blanche to wage war against your own country,” said a counterterrorism official who discussed the classified program on condition of anonymity. “If you cast your lot with its enemies, you may well share their fate.”

President Obama, who campaigned for the presidency against George W. Bush-era interrogation and detention practices, has implicitly invited moral and legal scrutiny of his own policies.

But like the debate over torture during the Bush administration, public discussion of what officials call targeted killing has been limited by the secrecy of the C.I.A. drone program. Representative John F. Tierney, who on April 28 held the first Congressional hearing focused on the lawfulness of targeted killing, said he was determined to air the contentious questions publicly and possibly seek legislation to govern such operations.

The reported targeting of Mr. Awlaki “certainly raises the question of what rights a citizen has and what steps must be taken before he’s put on the list,” said Mr. Tierney, Democrat of Massachusetts and chairman of a House subcommittee on national security.

Counterterrorism officials, with the support of Democrats and Republicans in Congress, say the drone missile strikes have proved to be an extraordinarily successful weapon against militants in the tribal areas of Pakistan, the location of all the known C.I.A. strikes except one in Yemen in 2002. By their count, the missiles have killed more than 500 militants since 2008, and a few dozen nearby civilians.

In the fullest administration statement to date, Harold Koh, the State Department’s legal adviser, said in a March 24 speech the drone strikes against Al Qaeda and its allies were lawful as part of the military action authorized by Congress after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, as well as under the general principle of self-defense. By those rules, he said, such targeted killing was not assassination, which is banned by executive order.

But the disclosure last month by news organizations that Mr. Awlaki, 39, had been added to the C.I.A. kill list shifted the terms of the legal debate in several ways. He is located far from hostilities in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the perpetrators of 9/11 are believed to be hiding.

He is alleged to be affiliated with a Yemeni branch of Al Qaeda. Intelligence analysts believe that only recently he began to help plot strikes, including the failed attempt to bomb an airliner on Dec. 25.

Most significantly, he is an American, born in New Mexico, arguably protected by the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee not to be “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” In a traditional war, anyone allied with the enemy, regardless of citizenship, is a legitimate target; German-Americans who fought with the Nazis in World War II were given no special treatment.

But Ms. Divoll, the former C.I.A. lawyer, said some judicial process should be required before the government kills an American away from a traditional battlefield. In addition, she offered a practical argument for a review outside the executive branch: avoiding mistakes.

She noted media reports that C.I.A. officers in 2004 seized a German citizen, Khaled el-Masri, and held him in Afghanistan for months before acknowledging that they had grabbed the wrong man. “What if we had put him on the kill list?” she asked.

Another former C.I.A. lawyer, John Radsan, said prior judicial review of additions to the target list might be unconstitutional. “That sort of review goes to the core of presidential power,” he said. But Mr. Radsan, who teaches at the William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul, said every drone strike should be subject to rigorous internal checks to be “sure beyond a reasonable doubt” that the target is an enemy combatant.

As for the question of whether Mr. Awlaki is a legitimate target, Mr. Radsan said the cleric might not resemble an American fighting in a Nazi uniform. “But if you imagine him making radio speeches for the Germans in World War II, there’s certainly a parallel,” he said.

Beyond the legal debate is the question of whether killing Mr. Awlaki would be a good idea. Many Muslim activists and scholars say it would accord him martyr status and amplify his violent message. Mohamed Elibiary, a Muslim community advocate in Texas who advises law enforcement on countering extremism, said helping the Yemeni authorities arrest Mr. Awlaki would make more sense. “I’m not saying this guy shouldn’t be treated as an enemy,” Mr. Elibiary said. “But there are smarter and stupider ways of eliminating your enemy.”

American officials say an arrest may not be possible. “If we need to stop dangerous terrorists who hide in remote parts of the world, inaccessible to U.S. troops, law enforcement, or any central government,” said the counterterrorism official, “what do you do — cover your ears and wait for a truly devastating explosion in Times Square?”

    U.S. Decision to Approve Killing of Cleric Causes Unease, NYT, 14.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/14/world/14awlaki.html

After 9/11, a Phrase Reverberates Beyond New York

May 10, 2010
The New York Times
By MANNY FERNANDEZ

The Times Square street vendors who alerted the police to a smoking Nissan Pathfinder on May 1 seemed to be acting on a combination of their streetwise instincts, their sense of civic duty, their military training and the advice of Allen Kay.

They did not know Mr. Kay personally. But they were familiar with his work.

As chairman and chief executive of the Manhattan advertising agency Korey Kay & Partners, Mr. Kay has written about half of more than 80 slogans that the company has created since its founding in 1982. The tagline for EmigrantDirect, an online banking division of Emigrant Bank — “More Money for Your Money” — was his. The one for Stuart Weitzman, the women’s shoe maker — “A Little Obsessed With Shoes” — was his, too.

Of course, the vendors who noticed the smoking Pathfinder had a different one in mind: “If You See Something, Say Something.”

The phrase was coined by Mr. Kay for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, one of his company’s clients. The day after Sept. 11, 2001, Mr. Kay sat in his office on Fifth Avenue and wrote the slogan on one of the 3-by-5-inch index cards he carries around to jot down ideas. The company had already done advertising work for the authority, but Mr. Kay created “If You See Something, Say Something” before transit officials even asked. He said he wanted to help prevent another disaster and to do something positive in the aftermath of the attacks.

“The model that I had in my head was ‘Loose Lips Sink Ships,’ ” Mr. Kay said. “I wasn’t born during World War II, but I sure knew the phrase and so did everybody else.”

“In this case,” he added, “I thought it was ironic because we want just the opposite. We want people to talk. I wanted to come up with something that would carry like that. That would be infectious.”

In 2002, the transportation agency saw a need for a security-awareness campaign to encourage customers to report suspicious activity or unattended packages, and they turned to Mr. Kay, who still had the phrase on his index card. By January 2003, the slogan was on posters and placards in subway cars, buses and trains.

It has since become a global phenomenon — the homeland security equivalent of the “Just Do It” Nike advertisement — and has appeared in public transportation systems in Oregon, Texas, Florida, Australia and Canada, among others. Locally, the phrase captured, with six simple words and one comma, the security consciousness and dread of the times, the “I ♥ NY” of post-9/11 New York City.

The transportation authority received a trademark on the slogan from the United States Patent and Trademark Office, though unauthorized uses appear to outnumber authorized ones.

A Google search of the exact phrase produces more than 390,000 results.

The phrase is the name of a song by the alternative-rock group Taking Back Sunday, a critically acclaimed monologue by the performer Mike Daisey and a book about the work of the French photographer Touhami Ennadre. It has been displayed on buses and billboards throughout Ohio, courtesy of the state’s homeland security office. And it has appeared on the flesh of at least one New Yorker, Joy Rumore, 31, who tattooed the slogan (in English and Spanish) on her right leg in 2007, in the same font and style on the subway posters.

“It was just sort of a geeky thing to do,” said Ms. Rumore, the owner of Twelve 28 Tattoo in Brooklyn. “I didn’t get it to make some sort of political statement. I got it because I love the subway. I love New York. It’s just an identifiable logo.”

City leaders, transportation authority officials and marketing experts have praised the line for making New Yorkers more alert to suspicious activity and for helping to reverse the see-something-do-nothing syndrome epitomized by the 1964 killing of Kitty Genovese, whose screams as she was being stabbed to death in Kew Gardens, Queens, were heard by numerous neighbors who failed to call the police.

The campaign urges people to call a counter-terrorism hot line, 1-888-NYC-SAFE. Police officials said 16,191 calls were received last year, down from 27,127 in 2008.

“It’s strong, it’s simple and it’s a call to action,” said Mary Warlick, the chief executive of the One Club, a nonprofit organization that honors creative work in advertising. “At the same time, everybody feels a little bit better because here’s a line of advertising that did some good.”

But the phrase has been criticized by many for fueling paranoia and fear. It has been parodied, mocked and twisted around by artists and activists (“If You Fear Something, You’ll See Something,” reads a flier on www.fulana.org).

“It’s an innocent phrase but it has come to have a real Orwellian tinge,” said Bill Dobbs, a civil liberties and gay rights advocate. “The phrase has come to mean, ‘Go get the cops.’ It’s not an invitation to citizen engagement. It puts everybody under suspicion.

“We New Yorkers do need to bear in mind what happened on 9/11, but common sense and real community, watching out for each other, is the key, not just calling the cops. Common sense saved the day in Times Square, not an ad campaign.”

Mr. Kay said his objective at the time he wrote the line was not to channel Orwell, but rather to save lives. “I’m proud of what it’s done and the potential it has to do more,” he said of the slogan. “Some things you just can’t stop. But if it is stoppable, and that thought makes someone think twice and say something that stops something, that’s its reason for being.”

The transportation authority has spent $2 million to $3 million a year on the “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign for radio, television and print advertisements, with much of the money coming from grants from the federal Homeland Security Department.

Since obtaining the trademark in 2007, the authority has granted permission to use the phrase in public awareness campaigns to 54 organizations in the United States and overseas, like Amtrak, the Chicago Transit Authority, the emergency management office at Stony Brook University and three states in Australia.

The authority has not charged for such uses of the slogan. Some requests have been rejected, including one from a university that wanted to use it to address a series of dormitory burglaries.

“The intent of the slogan is to focus on terrorism activity, not crime, and we felt that use in other spheres would water down its effectiveness,” said Christopher Boylan, an M.T.A. spokesman.

Last year, well before the street vendors were prompted to put Mr. Kay’s slogan into practice, a man at 22nd Street and Park Avenue was seen placing a metal box with wires sticking out of it on a window ledge in front of a subway entrance and then disappearing around the corner. A call was made to the hot line, and officers showed up in less than a minute.

The caller saw something and said something, all while waiting for his wife to come out of the supermarket. It was Mr. Kay.

    After 9/11, a Phrase Reverberates Beyond New York, NYT, 10.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/11/nyregion/11slogan.html

Holder Backs a Miranda Limit for Terror Suspects

May 9, 2010
The New York Times
By CHARLIE SAVAGE

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration said Sunday it would seek a law allowing investigators to interrogate terrorism suspects without informing them of their rights, as Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. flatly asserted that the defendant in the Times Square bombing attempt was trained by the Taliban in Pakistan.

Mr. Holder proposed carving out a broad new exception to the Miranda rights established in a landmark 1966 Supreme Court ruling. It generally forbids prosecutors from using as evidence statements made before suspects have been warned that they have a right to remain silent and to consult a lawyer.

He said interrogators needed greater flexibility to question terrorism suspects than is provided by existing exceptions.

The proposal to ask Congress to loosen the Miranda rule comes against the backdrop of criticism by Republicans who have argued that terrorism suspects — including United States citizens like Faisal Shahzad, the suspect in the Times Square case — should be imprisoned and interrogated as military detainees, rather than handled as ordinary criminal defendants.

For months, the administration has defended the criminal justice system as strong enough to handle terrorism cases. Mr. Holder acknowledged the abrupt shift of tone, characterizing the administration’s stance as a “new priority” and “big news” in an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

“We’re now dealing with international terrorists,” he said, “and I think that we have to think about perhaps modifying the rules that interrogators have and somehow coming up with something that is flexible and is more consistent with the threat that we now face.”

The conclusion that Mr. Shahzad was involved in an international plot appeared to come from investigations that began after his arrest and interrogation, including inquiries into his links with the Taliban in Pakistan.

“We know that they helped facilitate it,” Mr. Holder said of the Times Square bombing attempt. “We know that they helped direct it. And I suspect that we are going to come up with evidence which shows that they helped to finance it. They were intimately involved in this plot.”

Mr. Holder’s statement, and comments by President Obama’s counterterrorism adviser, John O. Brennan, were the highest-level confirmation yet that the authorities believe the Pakistani branch of the Taliban was directly involved. Investigators were still pursuing leads based on what Mr. Shahzad has told them, and the officials did not describe their evidence in detail.

Mr. Brennan appeared to say even more definitively than Mr. Holder did that the Taliban in Pakistan had provided money as well as training and direction.

“He was trained by them,” Mr. Brennan said. “He received funding from them. He was basically directed here to the United States to carry out this attack.”

He added: “We have good cooperation from our Pakistani partners and from others. We’re learning more about this incident every day. We’re hopeful we’re going to be able to identify any other individuals that were involved.”

Even before the attempted Times Square attack, the administration had been stretching the traditional limits of how long suspects may be questioned without being warned of their rights.

After the attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound jet on Dec. 25, for example, the F.B.I. questioned the suspect, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, for about 50 minutes without reading him his rights. And last week, Mr. Brennan said, the F.B.I. interrogated Mr. Shahzad for three or four hours before delivering a Miranda warning.

In both cases, the administration relied on an exception to Miranda for immediate threats to public safety. That exception was established by the Supreme Court in a 1984 case in which a police officer asked a suspect, at the time of his arrest and before reading him his rights, about where he had hidden a gun. The court deemed the defendant’s answer and the gun admissible as evidence against him.

Conservatives have long disliked the Miranda ruling, which is intended to ensure that confessions are not coerced. Its use in terrorism cases has been especially controversial because of concerns that informing a suspect of his rights could interrupt the flow of the interrogation and prompt him to stop disclosing information that might prevent a future attack.

Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York City mayor and Republican presidential candidate, said Sunday on “This Week” on ABC that he supported Mr. Holder’s proposal. However, he also suggested that enacting it would not quell conservative criticism, arguing that it would be even better to hold suspects like Mr. Shahzad as military detainees for lengthier interrogation.

“I would not have given him Miranda warnings after just a couple of hours of questioning,” Mr. Giuliani said. “I would have instead declared him an enemy combatant, asked the president to do that, and at the same time, that would have given us the opportunity to question him for a much longer period of time.”

Any effort to further limit the Miranda rule will be likely to face challenges. In a 2000 case, the Supreme Court voted 7 to 2 to strike down a statute that essentially overruled Miranda by allowing prosecutors to use statements defendants made voluntarily before being read their rights.

Despite the political furor over reading terrorism suspects their Miranda rights, it is not clear that doing so has had a major impact on recent interrogations.

For example, even after Mr. Shahzad was read his rights, he waived them and continued talking. With Mr. Abdulmutallab, who is accused of trying to light a bomb hidden in his undergarments, the pre-Miranda interrogation lasted until he was taken into surgery for the burns he suffered. Afterward, he did not resume cooperating and was also read his Miranda rights, although the sequence of events is uncertain. Relatives later persuaded him to start talking again.

In Congressional testimony last week, Mr. Holder defended the legality of the delays in both cases, noting that the Supreme Court had set no time limit for use of the public-safety exception. But on Sunday, he seemed to indicate uneasiness about the executive branch unilaterally pushing those limits, and called for Congressional action to allow lengthier interrogations without Miranda warnings in international terrorism cases.

“If we are going to have a system that is capable of dealing in a public safety context with this new threat, I think we have to give serious consideration to at least modifying that public safety exception,” Mr. Holder said. “And that’s one of the things that I think we’re going to be reaching out to Congress to do: to come up with a proposal that is both constitutional but that is also relevant to our time and the threat that we now face.”

Philip B. Heymann, a Harvard law professor and high-ranking Justice Department official in the Carter and Clinton administrations, said the Supreme Court was likely to uphold a broader emergency exception for terrorism cases — especially if Congress approved it. “Not having addressed how long the emergency exception can be, the Supreme Court would be very hesitant to disagree with both the president and Congress if there was any reasonable resolution to that question,” he said.

Still, Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said Congress had no authority to “chip away” at the Miranda ruling because it was based in the Constitution. He predicted that any effort to carve a broader exception would be vigorously contested.

“The irony is that this administration supposedly stands for the rule of law and the restoration of America’s legal standing,” he said. And Virginia E. Sloan, president of the bipartisan Constitution Project, said the existing public safety exception to Miranda seemed to be working, so there was no need to erode constitutional protections in ways that could later be expanded to other kinds of criminal suspects.

“It makes good political theater,” she said, “but we need to have a clear problem that we are addressing and a clear justification for any change. I haven’t seen that yet.”


Joseph Berger contributed reporting from New York.

    Holder Backs a Miranda Limit for Terror Suspects, NYT, 9.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/10/us/politics/10holder.html

White House Says Pakistan Taliban Behind NY Bomb

May 9, 2010
Filed at 4:16 p.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Saying they obtained new evidence, senior White House officials said Sunday that the Pakistani Taliban were behind the failed Times Square bombing.

The attempt marks the first time the group has been able to launch an attack on U.S. soil. And while U.S. officials have downplayed the threat -- citing the bomb's lack of sophistication -- the incident in Times Square and Christmas Day airline bomber indicate growing strength by overseas terrorist groups linked to al-Qaida even as the CIA says their operations are seriously degraded.

The finding also raises new questions about the U.S. relationship with Pakistan, which is widely known to have al-Qaida and other terrorist groups operating within its borders.

Concerning the Pakistani Taliban, Attorney General Eric Holder said: ''We know that they helped facilitate it; we know that they helped direct it. And I suspect that we are going to come up with evidence which shows that they helped to finance it. They were intimately involved in this plot.''

John Brennan, the president's homeland security and counterterrorism adviser, made similar remarks, linking the bomber to the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP.

Neither official said what the new evidence was.

Faisal Shahzad, a U.S. citizen of Pakistani descent, is believed to have spent five months in Pakistan before returning to the United States in February and preparing his attack.

Shahzad has told investigators that he trained in the lawless tribal areas of Waziristan, where both al-Qaida and the Pakistani Taliban operate. He was arrested aboard an Emirates Airlines jet in New York just minutes before it was scheduled to take off for Dubai.

After the attack, U.S. officials said they were exploring potential links to terrorist groups overseas but said it was likely that Shahzad was acting alone and that it was an isolated incident.

Last week, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, told NBC News that ''at this point I have no information that it's anything other than a one-off.'' Gen. David Petraeus told The Associated Press that Shahzad apparently operated as a ''lone wolf.''

Brennan on Sunday rejected suggestions that that the attempted bombing shows that terrorist groups overseas were gaining strength.

''They now are relegated to trying to do these unsophisticated attacks, showing that they have inept capabilities in training,'' he said.

The link between an attack on U.S. soil and terrorist groups operating inside Pakistan opens up a new chapter in relations between the two countries. Until recently, administration officials have said they thought Islamabad was doing all it could.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Washington expects more cooperation from Pakistan in fighting terrorism and warned of ''severe consequences'' if an attack on U.S. soil were successful and traced back to the South Asian country.

Brennan said Islamabad was being very cooperative in the investigation but that the U.S. wants to know exactly who may have been helping Shahzad.

''There are a number of terrorist and militant groups operating in Pakistan,'' he said. ''And we need to make sure there's no support being given to them by the Pakistani government.''

Pakistani army spokesman Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, who last week said he doubted the Pakistani Taliban had anything to do with the failed bombing, declined to comment Sunday. He said representatives of the country's civilian government should respond. They were not available for comment.

Brennan would not say whether Shahzad may be connected to fugitive al-Qaida cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, other than to acknowledge his Internet sermons are popular among extremist Muslims.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Pakistan has recently stepped up efforts to root out extremist militants.

''The Pakistanis have been doing so much more than 18 months or two years ago any of us would have expected,'' Gates told reporters at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., this week.

He referred to Pakistani Army offensives, dating to spring 2009, against Taliban extremists in areas near the Afghan border, including in south Waziristan.

Gates said the Obama administration is sticking to its policy of offering to do as much training and other military activity inside Pakistan as the Pakistani government is willing to accept.

''It's their country,'' Gates said. ''They remain in the driver's seat, and they have their foot on the accelerator.''

Brennan spoke on CNN's ''State of the Union,'' ''Fox News Sunday'' and CBS' ''Face the Nation.'' Holder spoke on NBC's ''Meet the Press'' and ABC's ''This Week.'' Clinton's interview with CBS' ''60 Minutes'' is set to air Sunday.

------

Associated Press writer Asif Shahzad in Islamabad contributed to this report.

    White House Says Pakistan Taliban Behind NY Bomb, NYT, 9.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/05/09/us/politics/AP-US-Times-Square-Probe.html

U.S. Pressure Helps Militants Overseas Focus Efforts

May 7, 2010
The New York Times
By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON — When President Obama decided last year to narrow the scope of the nine-year war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, he and his aides settled on a formulation that sounded simple: Eviscerate Al Qaeda, but just “degrade” the Taliban, reversing that movement’s momentum.

Now, after the bungled car-bombing attempt in Times Square with suspected links to the Pakistani Taliban, a new, and disturbing, question is being raised in Washington: Have the stepped-up attacks in Pakistan — notably the Predator drone strikes — actually made Americans less safe? Have they had the perverse consequence of driving lesser insurgencies to think of targeting Times Square and American airliners, not just Kabul and Islamabad? In short, are they inspiring more attacks on America than they prevent?

It is a hard question.

At the time of Mr. Obama’s strategy review, the logic seemed straightforward. Only Al Qaeda had the ambitions and reach to leap the ocean and take the war to America’s skies and streets. In contrast, most of the Taliban and other militant groups were regarded as fragmented, regional insurgencies whose goals stuck close to the territory their tribal ancestors have fought over for centuries.

Six months and a few attempted bombings later, including the near-miss in New York last weekend, nothing looks quite that simple. As commanders remind each other, in all wars the enemy gets a vote, too. Increasingly, it looks like these enemies have voted to combine talents, if not forces. Last week, a senior American intelligence official was saying that the many varieties of insurgents now make up a “witches’ brew” of forces, sharing money handlers, communications experts and, most important in recent times, bomb makers.

Yes, each group still has a separate identity and goal, but those fine distinctions seem less relevant than ever.

The notion that the various groups are at least thinking alike worries Bruce Riedel, who a year ago was a co-author of President Obama’s first review of strategy in the region. “There are two separate movements converging here,” said Mr. Riedel, a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. “The ideology of global jihad has been bought into by more and more militants, even guys who never thought much about the broader world. And that is disturbing, because it is a force multiplier for Al Qaeda.”

Mr. Riedel also notes, “The pressure we’ve put on them in the past year has also drawn them together, meaning that the network of alliances is getting stronger, not weaker.” So what seemed like a mission being narrowed by Mr. Obama, focusing on Al Qaeda and its closest associates (which included the Pakistani Taliban), “now seems like a lot broader mission than it did a year ago.”

Figuring out cause-and-effect when it comes to the motivations of Islamic militants is always tricky. Whenever he was asked whether America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were goading Islamic militants into new attacks, President Bush used to shoot back that neither war was under way on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. When President Obama came into office, the conventional wisdom held that the mere arrival of a black president with some Muslim relatives and an eagerness to engage the Islamic world would be bad news for Al Qaeda and Taliban recruiters. One rarely hears that argument now.

A year after Mr. Obama’s now-famous speech to the Muslim world from Cairo, Pakistanis talk less about outreach than Predator strikes. And White House officials say they suspect that their strategy of raising pressure may explain the amateurish nature of the recent bombing attempts.

The militants, they argue, no longer enjoy the luxury of time to train their bombers. To linger at training camps is to invite being spotted by a Predator. The tale told to interrogators by Faisal Shahzad, the suspect in the Times Square case, suggests that he hooked up with one set of militants and was passed off to another, and given only cursory bomb-making training. “He wasn’t the greatest student, but they weren’t stellar teachers, either,” a senior administration official said last week, after reviewing the interrogation record. What Mr. Shahzad had was the one thing the insurgents most covet: easy, question-free ability to leave and enter the United States on a valid passport.

Of course, the United States might more effectively identify citizens who pose a threat. But, similarly, terrorist groups could find ways to more effectively train recruits. As Mr. Riedel notes: “You don’t need a Ph.D. in electrical engineering to build a car bomb. You don’t even need to be literate.”

Indeed, the Pakistani Taliban have set off plenty of car bombs that worked well against the Pakistani military and intelligence agencies. It was those bombings that finally convinced the Pakistani government to go after the group. In Washington, officials differentiate between the relatively young Pakistani Taliban and the Afghan Taliban, which have deep political roots in its country. “The Pakistani Taliban gets treated like Al Qaeda,” one senior official said. “We aim to destroy it. The Afghan Taliban is different.”

In fact, one Pakistani Taliban leader, Baitullah Mehsud, was killed in a C.I.A. drone attack last summer while receiving a massage on the roof of an apartment building. His successor was believed killed in a similar attack until he showed up on a recent video. As one American intelligence official said, “Those attacks have made it personal for the Pakistani Taliban — so it’s no wonder they are beginning to think about how they can strike back at targets here.”

To the disappointment of many liberals who thought they were electing an antiwar president, Mr. Obama clearly rejects the argument that if he doesn’t stir the hornets’ nest, American cities will not get stung. His first year in office he authorized more Predator strikes — more than 50 — than President Bush did in his last four years in office. In December, accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, Mr. Obama stated that sometimes peace requires war.

“I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people,” he said. Negotiations “could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince Al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms.”

In fact, recent history and the politics of a polarized Washington are pushing Mr. Obama to step up the pressure. The civil war that paved the way for the Afghan Taliban began when President George H. W. Bush pulled out of Afghanistan once the Soviets left. The Taliban took power and began sheltering Osama bin Laden on Bill Clinton’s watch; as vice president, Dick Cheney often criticized Mr. Clinton’s approach to terrorism, saying he dealt with it as a criminal justice issue, not an act of war. The second Bush administration drove the Taliban from power, but the early histories of the Bush years largely agree that the Taliban saw their opportunity to return when the American war on terror refocused on Iraq. Even the United States, they concluded, could not give its all to two wars at once.

That narrative helped form Mr. Obama’s argument, throughout his presidential campaign, that the Afghan-Pakistan border, not the Sunni triangle in Iraq, was the center of global terrorism. That, he said, was where all attacks on the United States and its allies had emanated.

Now, six months after setting his course, Mr. Obama is discovering, on the streets of New York, the deeper meaning of his own words.

    U.S. Pressure Helps Militants Overseas Focus Efforts, NYT, 7.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/weekinreview/09sanger.html

Pakistani Taliban Behind Times Sq. Plot, Holder Says

May 9, 2010
The New York Times
By JOSEPH BERGER

More firmly and publicly than before, senior officials of the Obama administration on Sunday blamed the failed attempt to blow up a bomb in Times Square on the Pakistani Taliban, an accusation that should increase pressure on the Pakistan military to attack the organization in its bastions in the lawless tribal region of North Waziristan.

“We’ve now developed evidence that shows the Pakistani Taliban was behind the attack,” Attorney General Eric Holder said in an interview on ABC television’s news program “This Week.”

Later, appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” he said the Taliban in Pakistan “directed this plot” and may have also financed it. The Pakistani Taliban, he said, was “intimately involved” in the attempt on May 1 by Faisal Shahzad, an American citizen of Pakistani descent, to blow up gasoline and propane tanks secreted inside a Nissan Pathfinder parked on West 45th Street just yards from the heart of Times Square.

John Brennan, President Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser, echoed Mr. Holder’s statements Sunday morning, saying that it appeared that Mr. Shahzad, a resident of Bridgeport, Conn., who spent five months in Pakistan until February, was working for Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP. The TTP is believed by some military intelligence officials to have joined forces with Al Qaeda and may be hiding some of its senior leaders, including Osama bin Laden, who was the motivating force behind the 9/11 attack.

“He was trained by them,” Mr. Brennan said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “He received funding from them. He was basically directed here to the United States to carry out this attack.”

Until now, American officials have speculated that the Pakistan Taliban may have trained Mr. Shahzad during his visit to Pakistan, but Sunday’s statements were their most definitive about the Taliban’s role.

The conclusion that the Pakistani Taliban is behind the attempted bombing “underscores the serious threat that we face from a very determined enemy,” Mr. Brennan said on CNN’s ”State of the Union.”

Mr. Brennan said he saw the failure of the Times Square bombing as proof of the United States’ ability to weaken the Pakistani Taliban rather than solely as evidence of the incompetence of the bomber.

“They have not been able to receive the type of training that would have allowed them to carry out an attack successfully,” he said on “Face the Nation.” “We’ve been able to degrade the capability to train at these camps in south Asia and the Pakistan-Afghan border. So I think they’re opting for these less sophisticated attacks because of the tremendous blows that they have taken.”Mr. Shahzad, who was arrested at Kennedy International Airport aboard an Emirates Airlines airplane bound for Dubai little more than two days after the bomb was discovered, soon told police that he trained in Waziristan, the main base for the Pakistani Taliban and Al Qaeda. Neither Mr. Holder nor Mr. Brennan indicated what new information led them to the firmer conclusions about the role of the Pakistani Taliban.

The Pakistani Taliban was formed in 2007, according to Western diplomats and intelligence officials, with a goal of using tribal areas along the Afghan border to train fighters who would stage assaults against American and NATO forces in Afghanistan. They have also launched bombings and other attacks in Pakistan in an effort to discourage the Pakistan military from overthrowing their refuges in tribal areas like North Waziristan.

While American Predator drone strikes have apparently killed leaders like Baitullah Mehsud, the organization has formed loose alliances with Al Qaeda and other groups to make up what one intelligence official recently called a “witches’ brew,” sharing money and bomb experts and makers. Pakistan’s military offensive and America’s expanded program of drone strikes have hurt the group’s ability to operate in the open, but it also seems to have broadened its mission to strike overseas.

“The Taliban is the local partner of Al Qaeda in Pakistan,” Amir Rana, the director of the Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies, who has tracked militant networks for years, recently said in an interview. “It has no capacity for an international agenda on its own.”

The Pakistani Taliban was mostly active in the Swat Valley and South Waziristan, but after a campaign by the Pakistani army, it relocated largely to North Waziristan. The Obama administration has been exerting pressure on Pakistan to enlarge its offensive to North Waziristan.

The Pakistani Taliban itself has sent mixed signals on whether it oversaw or sponsored the bungled Times Square bombing. In a video released last Sunday, it claimed responsibility, but on Thursday a spokesman for the group denied it played any role, though it did say it was placing suicide bombers in the United States.

“The Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan has had no links with Faisal Shahzad whatsoever,” the spokesman, Azam Tariq, said in a phone call to reporters in Peshawar. “We never imparted training to him, nor had he ever come to us.”

In his television appearances, Mr. Holder simply made what amounted to an announcement about the Pakistani Taliban’s role in the bombing, but he did not elaborate on what evidence he had and was not asked to. He was, however, asked on “Meet the Press” to discuss what could be done to tighten inspections of people traveling to and from Pakistan and whether racial profiling might make the work of security personnel easier.

He pointed out that policing global travel is a challenge because 200,000 people a year travel between Pakistan and the United States. But, he said, racial profiling would not be “good law enforcement.” At least one recent terrorism suspect— Colleen R. LaRose, known by her Internet name, “JihadJane,” who was accused of recruiting Jihaders on the Internet— was a white Pennsylvania woman. Moreover, he said, terrorist groups like the Pakistani Taliban have increasingly been relying on people with “clean skins,” who have no arrest or immigration records that might tip off law enforcement.

Asked whether officials of the Obama administration had initially underestimated the threat posed by Mr. Shahzad’s bombing attempt, Mr. Holder said that even he initially thought the attempt was an isolated case, but he and other officials changed their minds as the “evidence developed.”

Janet Napolitano, the secretary of Homeland Security, in television appearances last Sunday, had called the Times Square incident attempt a “one-off,” while Gen. David H. Petraeus, who oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as the head of the Central Command, had said Shahzad appeared to be a lone wolf.

Mr. Holder defended the decision of investigators to delay informing Mr. Shahzad of the so-called Miranda rights that allow him to remain silent and be represented by a lawyer. Republicans like Rudolph W. Giuliani have argued that Mr. Shahzad should be treated as an “enemy combatant” and not have the rights granted American criminal suspects. Mr. Holder countered that current case law allows investigators to postpone Miranda warnings under a “public safety exception,” and he noted that Mr. Shahzad kept talking to investigators despite the Miranda warning.

    Pakistani Taliban Behind Times Sq. Plot, Holder Says, NYT, 9.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/10/us/politics/10holder.html

Bill Targets Citizenship of Terrorists’ Allies

May 6, 2010
The New York Times
By CHARLIE SAVAGE and CARL HULSE

WASHINGTON — Proposed legislation that would allow the government to revoke American citizenship from people suspected of allying themselves with terrorists set off a legal and political debate Thursday that scrambled some of the usual partisan lines on civil-liberties issues.

The Terrorist Expatriation Act, co-sponsored by Senators Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, and Scott Brown, Republican of Massachusetts, would allow the State Department to revoke the citizenship of people who provide support to terrorist groups like Al Qaeda or who attack the United States or its allies.

Some Democrats expressed openness to the idea, while several Senate Republicans expressed concern. Mr. Brown, who endorsed aggressive tactics against terrorism suspects in his campaign for the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s seat, said the bill was not about politics.

“It reflects the changing nature of war and recent events,” Mr. Brown said Thursday. “War has moved into a new dimension. Individuals who pick up arms — this is what I believe — have effectively denounced their citizenship, and this legislation simply memorializes that effort. So somebody who wants to burn their passport, well, let’s help them along.”

Identical legislation is also being introduced in the House by two Pennsylvania congressmen, Jason Altmire, a Democrat, and Charlie Dent, a Republican. The lawmakers said at a news conference that revoking citizenship would block terrorism suspects from using American passports to re-enter the United States and make them eligible for prosecution before a military commission instead of a civilian court.

Citing with approval news reports that President Obama has signed a secret order authorizing the targeted killing of a radical Yemeni-American cleric, Anwar Al-Awlaki, Mr. Lieberman argued that if that policy was legal — and he said he believed it was — then stripping people of citizenship for joining terrorist organizations should also be acceptable.

Several major Democratic officials spoke positively about the proposal, including Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Noting that the State Department already had the authority to rescind the citizenship of people who declare allegiance to a foreign state, she said the administration would take “a hard look” at extending those powers to cover terrorism suspects.

“United States citizenship is a privilege,” she said. “It is not a right. People who are serving foreign powers — or in this case, foreign terrorists — are clearly in violation, in my personal opinion, of that oath which they swore when they became citizens.”

Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she supported the “spirit” of the measure, although she urged caution and said that the details of the proposal, like what would trigger a loss of citizenship, still needed to be fleshed out.

Several Republican officials, though, were skeptical of the idea. Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the Republican leader, questioned the constitutionality of the proposal.

“If they are a U.S. citizen, until they are convicted of some crime, I don’t see how you would attempt to take their citizenship away,” Mr. Boehner said. “That would be pretty difficult under the U.S. Constitution.”

The proposal would amend an existing, although rarely used, program run by the State Department. It dates to a law enacted by Congress in 1940 that allowed the stripping of citizenship for activities like voting in another country’s elections or joining the army of a nation that is at war with the United States. People who lose their citizenship can contest the decision in court.

The Supreme Court later narrowed the program’s scope, declaring that the Constitution did not allow the government to take away people’s citizenship against their will. The proposal does not alter the requirement of evidence of voluntariness.

That means that if the proposal passed, the State Department would have to cite evidence that a person not only joined Al Qaeda, but also intended to relinquish his citizenship, and the advantages it conveys, to rescind it.

Several legal scholars disagreed about the legality and effectiveness of the proposal.

Kevin R. Johnson, the dean of the law school at the University of California, Davis, argued that it was “of dubious constitutionality” because merely joining or donating to a terrorist group fell short of unequivocal evidence that someone intended to relinquish his citizenship.

Peter H. Schuck, a Yale University law professor, said the Supreme Court might allow Congress to declare that joining Al Qaeda created a presumption that an American intended to relinquish his citizenship, so long as the program allowed the person to rebut that view.

Mr. Lieberman portrayed the proposal as a reaction to increasing involvement in Islamic terrorism by United States citizens, including Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani-American man who was arrested in connection with the failed attempt to set off a car bomb in Times Square last Saturday. Mr. Shahzad was granted American citizenship last year.

However, Mr. Lieberman emphasized, the measure would apply only to people who commit such acts in the future. Senate aides said that it would apply only to acts undertaken overseas.

    Bill Targets Citizenship of Terrorists’ Allies, NYT, 6.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/07/world/07rights.html

Times Sq. Bomb Suspect Is Linked to Militant Cleric

May 6, 2010
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE and MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON — The Pakistani-American man accused of trying to detonate a car bomb in Times Square has told investigators that he drew inspiration from Anwar al-Awlaki, a Yemeni-American cleric whose militant online lectures have been a catalyst for several recent attacks and plots, an American official said Thursday.

The would-be bomber, Faisal Shahzad, was inspired by the violent rhetoric of Mr. Awlaki, said the official, who would speak of the investigation only on condition of anonymity.

“He listened to him, and he did it,” the official said, referring to Saturday’s attempted bombing on a busy street in Times Square.

Friends of Mr. Shahzad have said he became more religious and somber in the last year or so, and asked his father’s permission in 2009 to join the fight in Afghanistan against American and NATO forces. Investigators believe he was trained by the Pakistani Taliban, a militant group that previously focused mainly on Pakistani government targets.

A senior military official said Thursday that Mr. Shahzad has told interrogators that he met with Pakistani Taliban operatives in North Waziristan in December and January. Later he received explosives training from the same operatives, said the official, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the case.

Counterterrorism officials want to know how Mr. Shahzad, a naturalized American citizen who had earned an M.B.A., married and had children and worked in several corporate jobs, came to embrace violence.

It is no surprise to counterterrorism officials to find that an accused terrorist had been influenced by Mr. Awlaki, 39, now hiding in Yemen, who has emerged as perhaps the most prominent English-speaking advocate of violent jihad against the United States.

Earlier this year, the Obama administration took the extraordinary step of authorizing the killing of Mr. Awlaki, making him the first American citizen on the Central Intelligence Agency’s hit list.

Mr. Awlaki’s English-language online lectures and writings have turned up in more than a dozen terrorism investigations in the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada, counterterrorism experts have said. And in two recent United States cases, Mr. Awlaki communicated directly with the accused perpetrator.

Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychiatrist accused of killing 13 people at Fort Hood, Tex., in November, exchanged about 18 e-mail messages with Mr. Awlaki in the year before the shootings, asking among other things whether it would be permissible under Islam to kill American soldiers preparing to fight in Afghanistan. After the shootings, Mr. Awlaki praised Major Hasan as “a hero” on his Web site, which was taken offline by the Internet host company shortly after the posting.

In addition, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian man accused of trying to blow up a trans-Atlantic airliner on Christmas Day, is believed to have met Mr. Awlaki during his training by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

It is unclear whether Mr. Shahzad ever directly communicated with Mr. Awlaki.

A video broadcast on April 26 on Al Jazeera showed Mr. Awlaki speaking in Arabic and accusing the United States of participating with Yemeni forces in two air strikes in December, one of which was directed at a house where Mr. Awlaki was believed to be meeting with leaders of the Al Qaeda branch. The video carried the logo of the media arm of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

Mr. Awlakiwas questioned by the F.B.I. late in 2001 about contacts with three of the Sept. 11 hijackers who had attended his mosques in San Diego and Virginia. He denied any radical ties and denounced the 9/11 attacks in public statements.

He was imprisoned in Yemen in 2006 and 2007, and after his release he was more overtly approving of violence. Last year, he published a tract entitled “44 Ways of Supporting Jihad” that was widely circulated on the Internet.

Mr. Awlaki’s Web site became a favorite for English-speaking Muslims who were curious about jihad, and hundreds of people sent e-mail messages to his site. It is not known whether Mr. Shahzad was among them, and there is no evidence that Mr. Shahzad visited the cleric in Yemen where he was believed to be hiding in a harsh region of desert and mountains.


Eric Schmitt and Souad Mehkennet contributed reporting.

    Times Sq. Bomb Suspect Is Linked to Militant Cleric, NYT, 6.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/07/world/middleeast/07awlaki-.html

Official: NY Car Bomb Suspect Did a Dry Run

May 6, 2010
Filed at 3:38 a.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

NEW YORK (AP) -- In the days before his failed attempt to detonate a car bomb in the heart of Times Square, the man who had recently returned from his native Pakistan did a dry run and dropped off a getaway car blocks from the site, a law enforcement official told The Associated Press.

Faisal Shahzad, now in custody on terrorism and weapons charges, drove a 1993 Nissan Pathfinder to Times Square from Connecticut on April 28, apparently to figure out where would be the best place to leave it later, the official said. He then returned April 30 to drop off a black Isuzu, according to the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the investigation.

The official said Shahzad went back Saturday and left the SUV loaded with firecrackers, gasoline and propane, enough to likely create a fireball and kill nearby tourists and Broadway theatergoers had it gone off successfully.

Shahzad, 30, a Pakistani-American from Connecticut, admitted to rigging the Pathfinder with a crude bomb based on explosives training he received in Pakistan, authorities say. He was pulled off a plane Monday headed for Dubai and has been cooperating with investigators. For a second day Wednesday, he had yet to appear in Manhattan federal court.

Kifyat Ali, a cousin of Shahzad's father, has called the arrest ''a conspiracy.''

Shahzad is believed to have been working alone when he began preparing the attack, almost immediately after returning in February from his native land, authorities said. They said they have yet to find a wider link to extremist groups or to pin down a motive.

''It appears from some of his other activities that March is when he decided to put this plan in motion,'' New York police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said Wednesday. ''He came back from Pakistan Feb. 3, 2010. It may well have been an indicator of putting something catastrophic in motion.''

In leaving Times Square on Saturday, he discovered he left a chain of 20 keys including those to the getaway car and his home in Connecticut in the SUV, and had to take public transit, the official told the AP.

Investigators had already started searching for suspects, when he returned to the scene on Sunday with a second set of keys to pick up the Isuzu, parked about eight blocks from the car bomb site, the official said.

Kelly told a Senate panel that Shahzad bought a gun in March that was found in his Isuzu at Kennedy Airport, suggesting that he was moving ahead on the bombing plot shortly after returning from Pakistan.

Pakistan Ambassador Husain Haqqani said Wednesday that an investigation into Shahzad's links to Pakistan was ongoing. He said an unspecified number of people had been questioned but no one has been arrested or detained in Pakistan. Haqqani spoke to the AP prior to an appearance at Harvard University in Massachusetts.

Asked if any connection had emerged between Shahzad and Qari Hussain Mehsud, the Pakistani Taliban's chief bomb maker who is also in charge of recruiting suicide bombers, Haqqani said ''no such fact had emerged,'' at this point in the investigation.

''I think it's premature to start identifying groups and individuals with whom he might have trained,'' he said.

Haqqani added that it was unlikely that Shahzad or anyone could find a bombmaking facility in the south Waziristan region because that region is now controlled by the Pakistani Army. Shahzad said he was trained in the region, authorities say.

U.S. officials have also been unable to verify whether Shahzad trained to make bombs at a terrorist camp in Pakistan.

Shahzad had previously lived in Shelton, Conn., but got a low-rent apartment in nearby Bridgeport when he returned from Pakistan. His wife and children apparently did not return with him.

Police recovered surveillance video of Shahzad at Times Square moments after the attack, and he's seen in other video in Pennsylvania buying fireworks. Neither videotape has been released.

Interviews Wednesday with business owners and police shed light on purchases Shahzad made of fireworks and a rifle.

On March 8, Shahzad bought six to eight boxes each containing 36 Silver Salute M88 fireworks from Phantom Fireworks in Matamoras, Pa., said store vice president William Wiemer. Even if used together, the fireworks couldn't have caused a large explosion, Wiemer said.

''The M88 he used wouldn't damage a watermelon. Thank goodness he used that,'' said Bruce Zoldan, the company's president.

Each M88 has an amount of pyrotechnic powder that is less than 1/6 the size of an aspirin, the company said. Fireworks purchased illegally can be up to 1,000 times more powerful, they said.

''There's no doubt, had he bought this on the black market, that the outcome in New York would have been totally different,'' Zoldan said.

Shelton police said Shahzad legally bought a Kel-Tech rifle from a dealer after passing a criminal background check and a 14-day waiting period. The owner of the gun shop declined comment.

------

Contributing to this report were Associated Press writers Michael Rubinkam in Allentown, Pa.; Steve LeBlanc in Boston; Tom Hays in New York; John Christoffersen and Eric Tucker in Bridgeport, Conn.; Larry Margasak, Eileen Sullivan and Matt Apuzzo in Washington; and Chris Brummitt in Islamabad.

    Official: NY Car Bomb Suspect Did a Dry Run, NYT, 6.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/05/06/us/AP-US-Times-Square-Car-Bomb.html

Editorial

Fear Itself

May 6, 2010
The New York Times

There are many important and urgent questions about the man accused of trying to set off a car bomb in Times Square.

Officials say Faisal Shahzad admitted to the attempt and said he learned bomb-making at a camp in Pakistan. Is Mr. Shahzad indeed connected to the Pakistani Taliban, which American officials now say seems likely? Was he working with others in this country who may be at large? How did Mr. Shahzad, a naturalized citizen whose family includes a senior Pakistani military officer, end up trying to murder countless people?

There are questions, too, about how the F.B.I. lost track of Mr. Shahzad for a time and why he was allowed to board an international flight despite a special alert issued by United States authorities.

The answers to such questions directly affect the security of Americans, and law enforcement officials are beginning to get them. That hasn’t stopped a familiar group of politicians from cynically trying to use this incident as yet another excuse to weaken the rule of law and this country’s barely recovering reputation.

Lawmakers like Senators John McCain of Arizona and Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut and Representative Peter King of New York were immediately outraged that Mr. Shahzad — a United States citizen accused of an attempted attack on civilians in an American city — was arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and eventually read his Miranda rights.

They are demanding that Mr. Shahzad be declared an illegal enemy combatant, stripped of any rights and brought before a military tribunal. They have opened another round of sneering at “the law enforcement approach” to terrorism. That is contemptuous, first of all, of the police officers whose quick actions may have saved untold numbers and the other people who identified and tracked Mr. Shahzad with amazing speed.

It also ignores reality. According to all reports, Mr. Shahzad started talking even before he was read his rights (“the law enforcement approach” allows investigators to question suspects immediately if there is an imminent threat to the public). When he was read his rights, Mr. Shahzad seems to have kept talking. The Times reported on Wednesday that he waived his right to a speedy arraignment — to go on talking.

To get around the inconvenient fact that Mr. Shahzad is a citizen, Mr. Lieberman is even calling for a law allowing Americans accused (not convicted) of unspecified crimes to be stripped of their citizenship and retroactively deprived of due process under the law.

This is not Mr. Lieberman’s first foray into this dark territory. He is co-author with Mr. McCain of a bill that would require that anyone arrested on any terrorism-related charge, including American citizens, be declared an enemy combatant and tried in a military court.

Let’s be clear about what works and what doesn’t.

There is no evidence that vital intelligence has been lost, or a terrorist attack allowed to happen, because a suspect was questioned lawfully. The men who interrogated top-ranking terrorist suspects following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks said the prisoners gave up their valuable knowledge before being subjected to waterboarding and other illegal acts.

Federal courts have convicted hundreds of people on terrorism-related charges since 2001. The tribunals have obtained one guilty plea from a prisoner who may not have done anything and was subsequently released.

Senators McCain and Lieberman say military trials will show strength. Abandoning democratic institutions in the face of terrorism is an act of surrender. It will not make this country safer. It will make it more vulnerable.

    Fear Itself, NYT, 6.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/06/opinion/06thu1.html

Suspect Was Tracked Through Phone Numbers

May 5, 2010
The New York Times
By PETER BAKER and SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON — Investigators discovered the name of the suspect in the failed Times Square bombing because of a telephone number he provided when he returned to the United States from Pakistan in February, a law enforcement official said Wednesday.

The phone number he gave three months ago was entered in a Customs and Border Protection agency database and came up Monday when investigators were checking the record of calls made to or from the prepaid cellular telephone used by the purchaser — at that point unidentified — of the vehicle used in the failed bombing, the official said.

Only when they matched the phone number did investigators learn that “that was the guy we were looking for,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive investigation.

The phone-record link underscored the combination of investigative skill, increased government integration and sheer luck that helped authorities track down Faisal Shahzad just 53 hours after a vehicle packed with explosives was parked in the heart of Manhattan. Once investigators had Mr. Shahzad’s identity, they were able to put his name on a no-fly list that ultimately led to his being pulled off a plane about to leave the country.

Mr. Shahzad, 30, a Pakistani-American who was naturalized as a United States citizen last year, has been charged with terrorism-related crimes and has waived his right to a speedy arraignment, officials said, meaning that he does not have to be brought to court right away. The government has said Mr. Shahzad admitted receiving bomb-making training in the tribal regions of Pakistan and then driving the car bomb into Times Square over the weekend.

The latest details about how investigators tracked him down add to a detective story worthy of a Hollywood movie. When New York police were alerted to the presence of the smoking Nissan Pathfinder and rendered it safe on Saturday night, they started out without any immediate suspects. The owner had evidently taken steps to avoid being identified, buying the vehicle with cash and apparently removing the visible vehicle identification number.

But after the police found the vehicle number on a hidden part of the engine, they tracked down the Connecticut woman who had sold it. While she did not remember the buyer’s name and had no paperwork from the sale, she did have the number of the phone he had used to contact her. That number led to a prepaid cellphone with no registered owner.

The authorities have said that phone received four calls from Pakistan in the hours before he bought the 17-year-old sport utility vehicle for $1,300. When they ran all the numbers tied to that phone through government databases, the only match they got was the number Mr. Shahzad had given when he returned to the United States on Feb. 3 on an Emirates flight.

Because he was coming from Pakistan, Mr. Shahzad was pulled aside for secondary screening upon arrival, the authorities said. After a Nigerian man tried to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight bound for Detroit on Dec. 25, the federal government mandated additional screening for all passengers arriving from 14 mostly Muslim countries, including Pakistan. That program has since been dropped in favor of a more selective screening system.

Mr. Shahzad was questioned by Customs and Border Protection agents, who in such sessions typically ask where the passenger has been, why he was there, whom he saw and so forth. As part of that process, a report was generated on Mr. Shahzad including all passenger data and at least one phone number that he provided. It was not clear whether the number was the emergency contact number he had given the airline or one that he provided to agents during questioning.

Either way, Customs and Border Protection passed along the data to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which put it in its own database. Three months later, when F.B.I. agents checked the numbers tied to the prepaid telephone, the Customs and Border Protection report came up. The F.B.I. then contacted the agency for more information about Mr. Shahzad.


Reporting for articles on the Times Square bomb case was contributed by Peter Baker, Anne Barnard, Nina Bernstein, Alison Leigh Cowan, Adam B. Ellick, Andrea Elliott, Dan Frosch, Kirk Johnson, Mark Landler, Mike McIntire, Sharon Otterman, Ray Rivera, David E. Sanger, Michael S. Schmidt, Daniel E. Slotnik, Adam Ellick and Karen Zraick.

    Suspect Was Tracked Through Phone Numbers, NYT, 5.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/06/us/06cellphone.html

Evidence Mounts for Taliban Role in Car Bomb Plot

May 5, 2010
The New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI and SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON — American officials said Wednesday that it was very likely that a radical group once thought unable to attack the United States had played a role in the bombing attempt in Times Square, elevating concerns about whether other militant groups could deliver at least a glancing blow on American soil.

Officials said that after two days of intense questioning of the bombing suspect, Faisal Shahzad, evidence was mounting that the group, the Pakistani Taliban, had helped inspire and train Mr. Shahzad in the months before he is alleged to have parked an explosives-filled sport utility vehicle in a busy Manhattan intersection on Saturday night. Officials said Mr. Shahzad had discussed his contacts with the group, and investigators had accumulated other evidence that they would not disclose.

On Wednesday, Mr. Shahzad, the 30-year-old son of a retired senior Pakistani Air Force officer, waived his right to a speedy arraignment, a possible sign of his continuing cooperation with investigators.

As his interrogation continued, Department of Homeland Security officials directed airlines to speed up their checks of new names added to the no-fly list, a requirement that might have prevented Mr. Shahzad from boarding a flight to Dubai on Monday night before his arrest at Kennedy International Airport.

The failed attack has produced a flurry of other proposals to tighten security procedures, including calls by members of Congress to more closely scrutinize passengers who buy tickets with cash, as Mr. Shahzad did. Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, and Senator Scott Brown, Republican of Massachusetts, proposed stripping terrorism suspects of American citizenship, and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg asked Congress to block the sale of firearms and explosives to those on terrorist watch lists.

American officials, speaking about the continuing inquiry only on condition of anonymity, gave few details about what Mr. Shahzad had told investigators, and said their understanding of the plot would evolve as a dragnet spanning two continents gathered more evidence.

One senior Obama administration official cautioned that “there are no smoking guns yet” that the Pakistani Taliban had directed the Times Square bombing. But others said that there were strong indications that Mr. Shahzad knew some members of the group and that they probably had a role in training him.

In a video on Sunday, the Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for the attempted bombing.

One issue that investigators are vigorously pursuing is who provided Mr. Shahzad cash to buy the S.U.V. and his plane ticket to Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. “Somebody’s financially sponsoring him, and that’s the link we’re pursuing,” one official said. “And that would take you on the logic train back to Pak-Taliban authorizations,” the official said, referring to the group.

American officials said it had become increasingly difficult to separate the operations of the militant groups in Pakistan’s tribal areas. The region, they said, has become a stew of like-minded organizations plotting attacks in Pakistani cities, across the border into Afghanistan, and on targets in Western Europe and the United States.

Besides the Pakistani Taliban and Al Qaeda, groups operating in the tribal areas are the Haqqani Network and the Kashmiri groups Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad.

There is no doubt among intelligence officials that the barrage of attacks by C.I.A. drones over the past year has made Pakistan’s Taliban, which goes by the name Tehrik-i-Taliban, increasingly determined to seek revenge by finding any way possible to strike at the United States.

The C.I.A.’s drone program in Pakistan, which was accelerated in 2008 and expanded by President Obama last year, has enjoyed strong bipartisan support in Washington in part because it was perceived as eliminating dangerous militants while keeping Americans safe.

But the attack in December on a C.I.A. base in Afghanistan, and now possibly the failed S.U.V. attack in Manhattan, are reminders that the drones’ very success may be provoking a costly response.

Last March, when the Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud boasted that his group was planning an attack on Washington that would “amaze everyone in the world,” many American officials dismissed his claims as empty bravado. His network, they said, had neither the resources nor the reach to pull off an attack far beyond its base in the mountains of western Pakistan.

But the attempted attack on Saturday has forced something of a reassessment, especially as American officials see militant groups determined to score a propaganda victory by pulling off even the crudest of attacks.

If the Pakistani Taliban was involved in the Times Square bombing plot, the organization is only the latest militant group to expand beyond a local political agenda and strike the United States. The Christmas Day attempt to bomb a Detroit-bound airliner, for instance, was traced to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, whose primary targets had previously been the Saudi and Yemeni governments.

But for such a group, trying for the biggest prize in the jihadist universe — a successful attack on American soil — could have significant payoffs, said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University.

The message may be, “ ‘The U.S. is pounding us with drone attacks, but we’re powerful enough to strike back’; it’s certainly enough to attract ever more recruits to replace those they’re losing,” Mr. Hoffman said.

The Pakistani Taliban has used a relentless campaign of violence to undermine Pakistan’s secular government. The group has been blamed for the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, as well as bombings in Islamabad, Lahore and elsewhere.

As casualties from the Taliban mounted in Pakistan in 2008, officials there pleaded with Washington to begin striking the group with C.I.A. drones. American counterterrorism officials had never considered the group to be a top priority, but last year the Obama administration approved targeted attacks on Pakistani Taliban leaders, in part to win Islamabad’s tacit approval for drone strikes elsewhere in the tribal areas. Mr. Mehsud himself was killed in a C.I.A. drone attack in August.

Some American officials bristled at the idea that the United States had not taken the Pakistani Taliban threat seriously.

“We’ve been pounding their leadership, including figures like Baitullah Mehsud, and their training camps and other facilities,” one American counterterrorism official said. “Those actions have probably taken other people like Shahzad off the board.”

Denis McDonough, the chief of staff for the National Security Council, said the Times Square attempted bombing showed that Pakistan and the United States faced a common enemy, calling it “a pretty stark reminder that the same collection of terrorists that are threatening them are threatening us.”

The administration has been in intensive contact with the Pakistani government, delivering the message that “there are clear links to Pakistan and that we would fully expect them to do what they should do,” the State Department spokesman, Philip J. Crowley, said. Pakistani officials have arrested about a dozen people they believe may be linked to the plot, the authorities have said.

On Wednesday, the American ambassador, Anne W. Patterson, met with Pakistan’s president, Asif Ali Zardari, and Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi, and spoke by phone with the interior minister, A. Rehman Malik. The administration’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard C. Holbrooke, also spoke by phone with Mr. Qureshi.

“The key here is that we’re touching the right bases politically, and we’re getting the right signals back,” a senior official said.

The tracking of Mr. Shahzad and his links to Pakistan began with a fortunate match of phone numbers, a law enforcement official speaking on condition of anonymity said Wednesday.

One number that he had provided when he last entered the United States, in February, was stored in a Customs and Border Protection database. It turned out to match a number on the list of calls to and from a prepaid cellphone that investigators knew belonged to the purchaser of the S.U.V. found on Times Square.

Only when they matched the phone numbers did investigators learn “that that was the guy we were looking for,” said the official, who requested anonymity to discuss the investigation.

The name match allowed security officials to discover Mr. Shahzad aboard the flight to Dubai minutes before takeoff on Monday night. He had been added to the no-fly list at 12:30 p.m. that day, when airlines were directed to check the list for updates. But Emirates airline did not look at the updated list, and sold Mr. Shahzad a ticket for cash at 7:35 p.m. on Monday.

Airlines had been required to check the no-fly list for updates only every 24 hours. The new rule requires that they check within two hours of receiving notification that a high-priority name has been added to the list, Homeland Security officials said.


Reporting for articles on the Times Square bomb case was contributed by Peter Baker, Anne Barnard, Nina Bernstein, Alison Leigh Cowan, Adam B. Ellick, Andrea Elliott, Dan Frosch, Kirk Johnson, Mark Landler, Mike McIntire, Sharon Otterman, Ray Rivera, David E. Sanger, Michael S. Schmidt, Daniel E. Slotnik and Karen Zraick.

    Evidence Mounts for Taliban Role in Car Bomb Plot, NYT, 5.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/06/nyregion/06bomb.html

Suspect’s Gun Proved Easy to Obtain

May 5, 2010
The New York Times
By MICHAEL WILSON and WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM

The mammoth clock-to-wire-to-gasoline-to-propane car bomb that the authorities said Faisal Shahzad hoped would claim many lives in Times Square has been analyzed, diagrammed, prodded and examined. But not long before his arrest, Mr. Shahzad was also equipped with a less-eccentric — and yet more dependably lethal — weapon. And he owned it legally.

It is fearsome looking, a carbine hybrid of a pistol and a long gun with a mouthful of a name: the Kel-Tec Sub Rifle 2000. Mr. Shahzad bought it, new, in March for about $400. It was found in the Isuzu Trooper that he drove to Kennedy International Airport on Monday, loaded, with multiple extra clips.

Because the Kel-Tec Sub Rifle 2000 is classified as a rifle, it required no permit, as pistols do in Connecticut. But with its folding stock, hand grip and appetite for pistol ammunition and not rifle ammunition, the Kel-Tec was about as close as one could get to a pistol that is not technically one.

The authorities have not disclosed, if they have learned, what Mr. Shahzad planned to do with that gun. But some law enforcement experts have surmised that he had it to fire at officers in case he was pulled over.

The Kel-Tec was briefly center stage in Washington on Wednesday as New York’s police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, addressed the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. He said that Mr. Shahzad bought the gun amid obtaining supplies for the bomb.

“It appears from some of his other activities that March is when he decided to put this plan in motion,” Mr. Kelly told the committee. Of the gun, he said, “It may well have been an indicator of putting something catastrophic in motion.”

The terrorists in Mumbai, India, in 2008 carried out a rampage that killed more than 160 people chiefly with the use of automatic weapons. The guns were much more powerful than the one Mr. Shahzad bought, and the strategy was simple: kill as many people as possible in a city crowded with tourists and residents.

Mr. Shahzad — whom the authorities have described as bent on taking American lives — made missteps while he was designing and building his bomb, including buying what looks to be the wrong kind of fertilizer aimed at making the explosion more powerful. But all along he possessed a weapon that could have easily done extreme damage, one rapidly fired round at a time.

The Kel-Tec, while not being capable of producing the far-reaching devastation of a well-constructed car bomb, at least might have produced a measure of Mr. Shahzad’s desired effect.

It was about two months ago when he walked into Valley Firearms in Shelton, Conn., which is on a downtown street beside a tattoo parlor and beneath a karate studio. Two American flags fly in front of the gun store.

Inside were the urban parapets of the trade: metal prison bars behind the windows, glass cases securing the guns. He had not lived in Shelton for nine months, having had lost his home there to foreclosure while on a long trip to Pakistan. For the last month, he had lived 12 miles away, in an apartment in Bridgeport.

On its recording to callers to the store, Valley Firearms described itself as “the area’s largest used gun buyer.”

Mr. Shahzad made his choice of gun and produced his Connecticut driver’s license. He left for a two-week waiting period, and returned March 15, putting down about $400 not for a used gun, but for a new rifle, serial number E7L98, according to a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives tracing report.

The gun was manufactured by Kel-Tec CNC Industries, founded 19 years ago in Cocoa, Fla., which makes semiautomatic pistols, rifles and the Sub 2000, a combination of the two. The gun was designed by George Kellgren, perhaps best known for having designed early versions of the Tec-9 handgun that became a favorite of street criminals and was later banned.

The Kel-Tec gun is about two and a half feet long, but for storage or carrying, the barrel can be folded back over the stock, cutting its length almost in half.

It weighs four pounds unloaded, has front and rear sights for aiming and a grip like one on a pistol. The rifle is unusual in that it fires pistol rounds — in this particular gun’s case, 9-millimeter rounds. It fires as quickly as one can pull the trigger; it is not a machine gun. The number of bullets it holds varies with the size of the magazine. Kel-Tec sells it with 10-round magazines.

It is, in effect, a low-powered rifle. Unlike those of some rifles, its bullets probably would not penetrate a police officer’s bullet-resistant vest, a law enforcement official said.

It was unclear what attracted Mr. Shahzad to that particular gun. “Why not just get a pistol if somebody wants a handgun round?” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment on the case.

One theory: “It looks more intimidating than a pistol. It’s an intimidating-looking contraption. It’s black, it has some plastic and polymer — it has that military look, but all it really is a really big handgun.”

Unlike the Tec-9, it is not frequently used by criminals, the official said. The manufacturer said the long barrel increases accuracy and range. “The superior precision is also very useful against small or partially covered targets at shorter range,” Kel-Tec said on its Web site. “The amount of training to master the SUB 2000 is only a fraction of that required for a handgun.”

A Kel-Tec customer service representative named Bill — company policy allows employees to use first names only so that they cannot be identified and threatened by someone who wants guns — said the Sub 2000 is good for hunting and target shooting. The company sells 2,000 or 3,000 of them a year.

Suggested retail price: $390.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, in his testimony on Wednesday before the Senate committee, urged that suspects on terrorism watch lists be blocked from buying guns and explosives.

“When gun dealers run background checks, should F.B.I. agents have the authority to block sales of guns and explosives to those on the terror watch lists — and deemed too dangerous to fly?” the mayor asked. “I believe strongly that they should.”

Wednesday, the Government Accountability Office has released data showing that suspects on the terror watch lists were able to buy guns and explosives from licensed dealers in the United States more than 1,100 times from 2004 to 2010. Such a statistic seems irrelevant in Mr. Shahzad’s case, as he was on no such list in March.

It is unclear whether, in the 50 days Mr. Shahzad was a registered gun owner, he ever once pulled the trigger.


Reporting for articles on the Times Square bomb case was contributed by Peter Baker, Anne Barnard, Nina Bernstein, Alison Leigh Cowan, Adam B. Ellick, Andrea Elliott, Dan Frosch, Kirk Johnson, Mark Landler, Mike McIntire, Sharon Otterman, Ray Rivera, David E. Sanger, Michael S. Schmidt, Daniel E. Slotnik, Adam Ellick and Karen Zraick.

    Suspect’s Gun Proved Easy to Obtain, NYT, 5.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/06/nyregion/06gun.html

Times Square Bomb Suspect Waives Rapid Court Hearing

May 5, 2010
The New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI, SABRINA TAVERNISE and WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM

A Pakistani-American charged in the failed Times Square car bombing has waived his right to a speedy arraignment and was not expected to appear in court on Wednesday, a person briefed on the case said, adding that no court appearance has been scheduled.

Federal authorities have said that the man, Faisal Shahzad, 30, began cooperating after his arrest late Monday night and has provided valuable intelligence, in addition to admitting that he drove the car bomb into Times Square and received bomb-making training in the tribal regions of Pakistan.

Mr. Shahzad was arrested as he tried to flee the country in a Dubai-bound jet late Monday. Hours later, there were reports that seven or eight people had been arrested in Pakistan, as officials in both countries sought to determine the origins and scope of the plot.

Mr. Shahzad was charged on Tuesday with several terrorism-related crimes. American intelligence officials said that while any ties Mr. Shahzad had to international terrorist groups remained murky, investigators were strongly looking at possible links to the Pakistani Taliban in the attempted attack on Saturday.

If the role is confirmed, it would be the group’s first effort to attack the United States and the first sign of the group’s ability to strike targets beyond Pakistan or Afghanistan.

The disclosure that Mr. Shahzad has waived his right to a speedy arraignment suggests that he is continuing to provide valuable information to Preet Bharara, of the Manhattan United States attorney’s office, which is prosecuting the case, and the F.B.I. agents and police detectives who conducted the investigation.

Under the law, a person who is arrested and charged with a federal crime must be brought before a judge and advised of his or her rights and the charges against them within a reasonable period of time – generally 24 hours or 48 hours if the arrest occurs on a weekend. A defendant can waive that right.

The docket in Mr. Shahzad’s case does not list a defense lawyer and it could not be learned Wednesday morning whether he was represented by one. Janice Oh, a spokeswoman for Mr. Bharara’s office, would not say whether he had been assigned a lawyer or had retained one.

Investigators continued to examine any possible connections between Mr. Shahzad and Pakistani terrorist groups.

A spokesman for the Pakistani military, Gen. Athar Abbas, said Wednesday that Pakistan was investigating Mr. Shahzad’s claims he had been trained in the country’s volatile Waziristan region. General Abbas also cast doubt on claims the Pakistani Taliban were involved, saying in an interview that their capabilities “are questionable.”

In Washington, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly pressed a Senate panel to approve legislation that would make it more difficult for people on terrorist watch lists to buy firearms. Mr. Kelly told senators that Mr. Shazad had purchased a gun in Connecticut in March, shortly after returning from a trip to Pakistan.

Investigators found a 9-millimeter pistol and ammunition in Mr. Shazad’s Isuzu Trooper, which he drove to Kennedy Airport before boarding the flight for Dubai.

Before leaving for Washington, Mr. Bloomberg told reporters that he would also make a case that New York needed a larger share of federal homeland security money.

“If this weekend doesn’t show it, I don’t know what would,” he said.

Mr. Shahzad, a naturalized United States citizen from Pakistan who lived in Bridgeport, Conn., was charged Tuesday with attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction and other federal charges, several related to explosives. He was interrogated without initially being read his Miranda rights under a public safety exception, and he provided what the Federal Bureau of Investigation called “valuable intelligence and evidence.”

He continued talking after being read his rights, the F.B.I. said. The authorities charged him as a civilian, but he did not appear in court and no hearing has been scheduled.

“It is clear that this was a terrorist plot aimed at murdering Americans in one of the busiest places in the country,” Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said at a news conference on Tuesday in Washington.

Mr. Shahzad booked a ticket on his way to Kennedy Airport and bought it with cash when he got there, officials said. He had boarded the plane but was taken off before it taxied away.

Investigators had been trying to find Mr. Shahzad after determining that he was the man who bought a Nissan Pathfinder from a Connecticut woman last month and had parked it just off Broadway on Saturday night packed with gasoline, propane, fertilizer and fireworks. No one was hurt, but officials said the bomb could have been deadly on the crowded streets if it had ignited.

Officials said Mr. Shahzad had been placed on a no-fly list on Monday afternoon, but they declined to explain how he had been allowed to board the plane.

All of the passengers were taken off the plane, and they, their luggage and the Boeing 777 were screened before the flight was allowed to depart, about seven hours late, at 6:29 a.m. Two other men were also interviewed by the authorities but released, according to one law enforcement official.

Mr. Holder said Mr. Shahzad had been providing “useful information” to federal investigators since he was pulled off the plane. Besides saying that he had received training in Pakistan, Mr. Shahzad said he had acted alone, a claim that was still being investigated.

In Pakistan, developments unfolded quickly. Officials identified one of those arrested as Tauhid Ahmed and said he had been in touch with Mr. Shahzad through e-mail and had met him either in the United States or in the Pakistani port city of Karachi.

Another man arrested, Muhammad Rehan, had spent time with Mr. Shahzad during a recent visit there, Pakistani officials said. Mr. Rehan was arrested in Karachi just after morning prayers at a mosque known for its links with the militant group Jaish-e-Muhammad.

Investigators said Mr. Rehan told them that he had rented a pickup truck and driven with Mr. Shahzad to the northwestern city of Peshawar, where they stayed from July 7 to July 22, 2009. The account could not be independently verified. Mr. Shahzad spent four months in Pakistan last year, the authorities said.

Pakistani officials promised to aid the United States “in bringing such culprits to justice,” the Pakistani interior minister, Rehman Malik, said in a telephone interview as he announced the seven or eight arrests.

Mr. Shahzad is believed to be originally from Kashmir and is among a handful of Pakistani-Americans who have recently faced terrorism accusations in the United States or abroad.

The Pakistani Taliban on Sunday released a video taking credit for the Times Square attack, but American officials cautioned on Tuesday that the investigation was still in its early stages, and said it could take days before enough evidence emerged to point to any one group for its role in the plot.

For months, terrorist groups have pledged to exact revenge for the Central Intelligence Agency’s campaign of drone strikes in the Pakistani mountains.

Last year, a C.I.A. drone killed the Pakistani Taliban’s leader, Baitullah Mehsud, and American intelligence officials believe that the group has over the years cultivated close ties to Qaeda leaders. Any ties between Mr. Shahzad and Pakistani militants could add new urgency to American demands that Pakistan root out the web of Al Qaeda and local groups that use the tribal areas to strike at United States troops in Afghanistan and other targets farther abroad.

The United States, which has provided Pakistan with billions of dollars in counterterrorism aid since 2001, has pressed Pakistan to crack down on militants inside its borders, and an American official said Pakistan’s response to this attempted attack would have serious implications for the country’s strategic relationship with the United States.

A detailed 10-page court document outlining the criminal charges describes new details about Mr. Shahzad’s actions in the days leading up to the attempted attack, including how he bought the Nissan Pathfinder that would ultimately help lead investigators to him.

It says that Customs and Border Protection records show that Mr. Shahzad returned from Pakistan on Feb. 3, 2010, after a five-month visit there, flying back on a one-way ticket from Pakistan. He told customs inspectors, the complaint said, that he was visiting his parents.

The complaint, sworn out by Andrew P. Pachtman, an F.B.I. agent assigned to the Joint Terrorism Task Force, says that Mr. Shahzad used a prepaid cellular telephone to contact a Connecticut woman who had placed an online advertisement to sell the vehicle. It described how the phone led investigators to him.

He received four calls from a number in Pakistan hours before he bought the vehicle, the complaint says.

The prepaid cellular phone, according to the complaint, was also used to call a fireworks store in Pennsylvania that sells M-88 firecrackers like those that were used as part of the bomb. The phone was last used on April 28, according to the complaint.

In the Connecticut towns of Shelton and Bridgeport, where Mr. Shahzad had lived, residents described Mr. Shahzad as quiet and unremarkable. One of the last to see him was his landlord, Stanislaw Chomiak.

About three months ago, Mr. Shahzad signed a one-year lease on a second-floor two-bedroom apartment in Bridgeport. Mr. Chomiak usually saw Mr. Shahzad only when the rent was due, but Mr. Chomiak described his tenant as a nice guy who furnished his apartment sparsely and had claimed he made a living selling jewelry in New Haven.

But the evening of the attempted bombing in Times Square, the landlord received a phone call from Mr. Shahzad, who said he was riding the train back from New York City and needed to be let into his apartment because he had lost his keys. Mr. Chomiak lent Mr. Shahzad spare keys, with the two men agreeing to meet up the next day to return them, Mr. Chomiak said.

“He looked nervous, but I thought, of course he’s nervous, he just lost his keys,” Mr. Chomiak, 44, said in an interview at his home, about 15 miles outside of Bridgeport. The men did not end up meeting until about 4 p.m. on Monday, and Mr. Shahzad returned the keys. It was the last time the landlord saw him, and less than eight hours later, Mr. Shahzad was boarding the flight to Dubai.

An official in Pakistan’s Interior Ministry said Mr. Shahzad came to Pakistan in April 2009 and departed on Aug. 5 on an Emirates flight.

At a news conference on Tuesday, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg called the attempted bombing “an act that was designed to kill innocent civilians and designed to strike fear into the hearts of Americans.”

In March, a Pakistani-American man, David C. Headley, pleaded guilty to helping plan the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India. And last December, five young men from Virginia, two of them with Pakistani backgrounds, were arrested in Pakistan on accusations of plotting attacks against targets there and in Afghanistan.

At his news conference, Mr. Bloomberg warned against any backlash against Pakistanis or Muslims in New York, saying, “We will not tolerate any bias.”


Reporting was contributed by Nina Bernstein, Russ Buettner, Alison Leigh Cowan, Dan Frosch, Carlotta Gall, Jason Grant, Jack Healy, Ismail Khan, Angela Macropoulos, Salman Masood, Colin Moynihan, Ray Rivera, Eric Schmitt, Ginger Thompson, Benjamin Weiser, Michael Wilson, Katie Zezima and Karen Zraick.

    Times Square Bomb Suspect Waives Rapid Court Hearing, NYT, 5.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/06/nyregion/06bomb.html

A Renewed Debate Over Suspect Rights

May 4, 2010
The New York Times
By PETER BAKER

WASHINGTON — The arrest of a suspect in the attempted Times Square car bombing revived the volatile political debate over terrorism policy on Tuesday, as President Obama’s supporters and critics squared off over how the nation should handle those plotting against it.

The suspect, Faisal Shahzad, was interrogated without initially being read his Miranda rights under a public safety exception, and provided what the F.B.I. called “valuable intelligence and evidence.”

After investigators determined there was no imminent threat to be headed off, Mr. Shahzad was later read his rights to remain silent, but he waived them and continued talking, the F.B.I. said. Authorities charged him as a civilian on Tuesday, but postponed plans to bring him to court.

The handling of Mr. Shahzad touched off the same sort of argument that followed the attempted Christmas Day bombing of a passenger jet bound for Detroit. Some Republicans urged the Obama administration to interrogate Mr. Shahzad without affording him Miranda rights and to classify him as an enemy combatant, which would allow authorities to detain him indefinitely. But Democrats said his quick arrest and his reported confession showed the system can respond to threats of terrorism without resorting to extraordinary tactics.

“The American people can be assured that the F.B.I. and their partners in this process have all the tools and experience they need to learn everything we can,” Mr. Obama said. “That includes what, if any, connection this individual has to terrorist groups. And it includes collecting critical intelligence as we work to disrupt any future attacks.”

Republicans quickly accused the administration of worrying too much about legal niceties and not enough about public safety.

“We’ve got to be far less interested in protecting the privacy rights of these terrorists than in collecting information that may lead us to details of broader schemes to carry out attacks in the United States,” Senator Christopher S. Bond of Missouri, the ranking Republican on the Senate intelligence committee, said in an interview.

Senator John McCain of Arizona called it a mistake to read Mr. Shahzad his Miranda rights so soon. “When we detain terrorism suspects, our top priority should be finding out what intelligence they have that could prevent future attacks and save American lives,” he said on Sean Hannity’s radio show. “Our priority should not be telling them they have a right to remain silent.”

Representative Peter T. King of New York, the ranking Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee, said in a separate interview that he was troubled by the rush to charge Mr. Shahzad as a civilian. “In these kinds of cases, the first preference should be a military commission because you can get more information,” he said.

But unlike the Nigerian suspect in the Christmas attack, Mr. Shahzad is an American citizen. The Supreme Court has ruled that an American citizen captured in Afghanistan could be detained as an enemy combatant, but it is not clear whether that would apply to citizens detained on American soil.

Under the Military Commissions Act of 2006, only noncitizens can be tried in a military commission, meaning the law would need to be changed to bring Mr. Shahzad before such a tribunal.

Democrats said the Shahzad case dispels the idea that constitutional protections need to be tossed aside in cases of terrorism. “We have proven in this country for a long, long time that you can get very valuable information out of people after you Mirandize them,” Representative Adam Smith, Democrat of Washington, said in an interview. Looking at the results of other interrogations, he said, “you see that what we’re doing is actually very effective.”

In a case of odd allies, Glenn Beck, the conservative Fox News commentator, said Mr. Shahzad was entitled to his rights. “He’s a citizen of the United States, so I say we uphold the laws and the Constitution on citizens,” Mr. Beck said. “He has all the rights under the Constitution. We don’t shred the Constitution when it’s popular.”

The administration is struggling to recalibrate the war against terrorists and to pull back on some of what Mr. Obama considers the excesses of the past. The administration has yet to figure out how to keep its promise to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. And it is reconsidering plans to hold civilian trials in New York City for figures accused of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said Tuesday that he has not ruled out holding 9/11 terror trials in New York. “Unfortunately, New York and Washington, D.C., remain targets of people who would do this nation harm,” he said. “And regardless of where a particular trial is, where a particular event is going to occur, I think that is going to remain true. And it is why we have to be especially vigilant in New York as well as in Washington.”

The White House said that the Central Intelligence Agency and the director of national intelligence were consulted before the decision to read Mr. Shahzad his Miranda rights, and that the high-value interrogation group that specializes in terrorism cases was tapped for its expertise.

Because of the limits on the handling of Mr. Shahzad, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, suggested legislation that would strip the citizenship of Americans tied to terrorism. Speaking on Fox News, he noted that existing law removes citizenship from Americans fighting for enemy militaries.

“It’s time for us to look at whether we want to amend that law to apply it to American citizens who choose to become affiliated with foreign terrorist organizations, whether they should not also be deprived automatically of their citizenship and therefore be deprived of rights that come with that citizenship when they are apprehended and charged with a terrorist act,” he said.

    A Renewed Debate Over Suspect Rights, NYT, 4.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/05/nyregion/05arrest.html

Letters

The New Chapter: A Times Sq. Suspect

May 5, 2010
The New York Times

To the Editor:

Re “Owner of S.U.V. Arrested in Times Sq. Bomb Case” (front page, May 4):

I condemn the recent terrorist plot to bomb Times Square and am relieved that there were no casualties. It is good to see that ordinary citizens and law enforcement agencies combined to prevent a tragedy.

I am a Muslim of Pakistani origin, and it angers and pains me to see that the suspect, Faisal Shahzad, is Pakistani (though a naturalized American citizen).

Attempts to spread terror do great harm to the image of Pakistan and Islam. If the bombing attempt had been successful, what could have been achieved by killing innocent people from all across the world who crowd Times Square?

I want to praise Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who said after Mr. Shahzad’s arrest that no backlash should be tolerated against Pakistanis or Muslims and spoke about the majority of peace-loving American citizens of Pakistani origin. These were the kind of soothing words needed at this juncture.

Pakistan has sacrificed more people in the fight against terrorists and extremists than most nations in the aftermath of Sept. 11 tragedy. The Pakistani Army, intelligence agencies and many ordinary citizens have played a crucial role. We need to win the battle of hearts and minds in the Islamic world. That is the best way to counter terrorists and extremists.

Raza Khan
Melbourne, Australia, May 4, 2010

•

To the Editor:

Rarely have I felt that my identity was such a liability as I do these days. Born to East African Muslim parents of Indian descent, I can hardly say that I am removed from the ramifications of prejudice and racism that this failed attack on New York will bring.

It makes me all the more upset because if you talk to anyone who knows me, despite my being born in Canada, New York is where my heart lies. I am writing to express my frustration about what this means for the rest of us.

I hope that we do not return to those frightening days post-9/11 when fear justified stereotyping based on color and religion.

Moneeza Walji
Toronto, May 4, 2010

•

To the Editor:

The good news is that we’ve now had two cases in the last six months in which acts of terrorism failed and the authorities, with civilian help, acted quickly and efficiently to apprehend the perpetrator.

The bad news is that once again New York and the country are being targeted from abroad and that only the ineptitude of the bomber averted the loss of life.

The lesson for the United States and its allies is that they need to be much more proactive in detecting and disrupting international terrorists at their source. Perhaps all the billions squandered in Iraq and Afghanistan should be reallocated to enhanced homeland security. Otherwise, the next bomb sent our way may go off.

Paul M. Wortman
East Setauket, N.Y., May 4, 2010

•

To the Editor:

A ring of steel for Times Square (“Luck and Vigilance,” editorial, May 4) and the local police joining the Federal Bureau of Investigation to investigate violent cells (“The Terrorist Next Door,” by Michael A. Sheehan, Op-Ed, May 4) can help prevent terrorist attacks. But let’s not forget an effective crime-fighting strategy that worked in Times Square: natural surveillance.

When two street vendors, Duane Jackson and Lance Orton, saw something, they acted. As with block watch, the police need the help of an alert public with eyes on the street to prevent crime and terrorist attacks.

Research shows that when others are around, people assume that someone else will act. More money should go to informing people around the country to attend to their surroundings and to act when they see something suspicious.

Jack L. Nasar
Columbus, Ohio, May 4, 2010


The writer is a professor of city and regional planning at Ohio State University.

    The New Chapter: A Times Sq. Suspect, NYT, 5.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/05/opinion/l05bomb.html

From Suburban Father to a Terrorism Suspect

May 4, 2010
The New York Times
By JAMES BARRON and MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT

They took their places in the wood-paneled courtroom, 58 people from 32 countries. They listened as a federal magistrate banged the gavel and said it was “a wonderful day for the United States”— the day they would become Americans.

The magistrate talked about Thomas Jefferson and told the group that they could run for office — only the presidency and the vice presidency were off limits, according to a tape recording of the proceedings in a Bridgeport, Conn., courtroom last year, on April 17. On her instructions, they raised their right hands and repeated the oath of citizenship.

One man in the group was the Pakistani-born Faisal Shahzad, whose father or grandfather was a Pakistani military official and who, at 29, had spent a decade in the United States, collecting a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree and landing a job with a Connecticut financial marketing company.

He had obtained citizenship through marriage to a woman who was born in Colorado — the authorities say she and their two young children are still in Pakistan, where they believe he was trained in making bombs last year in Waziristan, a tribal area that is a haven for militants.

On Saturday, the authorities said, Mr. Shahzad drove a Nissan Pathfinder packed with explosives and detonators, leaving it in Times Square.

About 7 p.m., as a robot from the bomb squad was being summoned to the S.U.V., Mr. Shahzad called his landlord from the train to Connecticut and said he had lost his keys; in a criminal complaint filed on Tuesday, the authorities said the keys had been locked inside the Pathfinder.

The landlord met him at the apartment that night to let him in. “He looked nervous,” said the landlord, Stanislaw Chomiak, who had rented him a two-bedroom apartment in Bridgeport since Feb. 15. “But I thought, of course he’s nervous, he just lost his keys.”

In nearly a dozen years in this country, Mr. Shahzad had gone to school, held steady jobs, bought and sold real estate, and kept his immigration status in good order, giving no sign to those he interacted with that he had connections to terrorists in Pakistan. Nor was there any indication that he would try to wreak havoc in one of the world’s most crowded places, Times Square.

His neighbors in Connecticut said the things neighbors always say about someone who suddenly turns up in the headlines — he was quiet, he was polite, he went jogging late at night. Like so many others, he lost a house to foreclosure — a real estate broker who helped him buy the house, in Shelton, Conn., in 2004 remembered that Mr. Shahzad did not like President George W. Bush or the Iraq war.

“I didn’t take it for much,” said the broker, Igor Djuric, “because around that time not many people did.”

George LaMonica, a 35-year-old computer consultant, said he bought his two-bedroom condominium in Norwalk, Conn., from Mr. Shahzad for $261,000 in May 2004. A few weeks after he moved in, Mr. LaMonica said, investigators from the national Joint Terrorism Task Force interviewed him, asking for details of the transaction and for information about Mr. Shahzad. It struck Mr. LaMonica as unusual, but he said detectives told him they were simply “checking everything out.”

Mr. Shahzad was born in Pakistan in 1979, though there is some confusion over where. Officials in Pakistan said it was in Nowshera, an area in northern Pakistan known for its Afghan refugee camps. But on a university application that Mr. Shahzad had filled out and that was found in the maggot-covered garbage outside the Shelton house on Tuesday, he listed Karachi.

Pakistani officials said Mr. Shahzad was either a son or a grandson of Baharul Haq, who retired as a vice air marshal in 1992 and then joined the Civil Aviation Authority.

A Pakistani official said Mr. Shahzad might have had affiliations with Ilyas Kashmiri, a militant linked to Al Qaeda who was formerly associated with Lashkar-e-Taiba, an anti-India militant group once nurtured by the Pakistani state. But friends said the family was well respected and nonpolitical.

“Neither Faisal nor his family has ever had any links with any jihadist or religious organization,” one friend said. Another, a lawyer, said that “the family is in a state of shock,” adding, “They believe that their son has been implicated in a fake case.”

Mr. Shahzad apparently went back and forth to Pakistan often, returning most recently in February after what he said was five months visiting his family, prosecutors said. A Pakistani intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity said Mr. Shahzad had traveled with three passports, two from Pakistan and one from the United States; he last secured a Pakistani passport in 2000, describing his nationality as “Kashmiri.”

Mr. Shahzad’s generation grew up in a Pakistan where alcohol had been banned and Islam had been forced into schools and communities as a doctrine and a national glue.

“It’s not that they don’t speak English or aren’t skilled,” a Pakistani official explained. “But in their hearts and in their minds they reject the West. They can’t see a world where they live together; there’s only one way, one right way.”

According to immigration officials, Mr. Shahzad arrived in the United States on Jan. 16, 1999, less than a month after he had been granted a student visa, which requires a criminal background check.

He had previously attended a program in Karachi affiliated with the now-defunct Southeastern University in Washington; a transcript from the spring of 1998, found in the garbage outside the Shelton house, showed that he got D’s in English composition and microeconomics, B’s in Introduction to Accounting and Introduction to Humanities, and a C in statistics.

He enrolled at the University of Bridgeport, where he received a bachelor’s degree in computer science and engineering in 2000, followed by a master’s in business administration in 2005.

“If this hadn’t happened I would have long forgotten him,” said William Greenspan, Mr. Shahzad’s adviser as an undergraduate. “There are a lot of students you get to know; they call you up once in awhile to say hello, they got a nice job. After he left U.B., I never heard anything from him.”

In January 2002 Mr. Shahzad obtained an H1B visa, a coveted status meant for highly skilled workers and good for three years, with a possible extension. Records show that Elizabeth Arden, the cosmetics giant, applied for a visa around that time for a job similar to the one he had there in 2001, arranged through a temporary employment agency called Accountants Inc., according to a timecard found in his trash. Officials at the cosmetics company refused to comment.

In 2006, Mr. Shahzad took a job as a junior financial analyst at Affinion Group in Norwalk, a financial marketing services company. Michael Bush, the company’s director of public relations, said Mr. Shahzad resigned in mid-2009; government officials said he was unemployed and bankrupt by the time of his arrest.

After his marriage, to Huma Mian, he petitioned the immigration agency in 2004 to change his status; he wanted to become a permanent resident, another step on the path to citizenship.

Ms. Mian had just graduated from the University of Colorado at Boulder with a business degree, according to Bronson Hilliard, a university spokesman. She lived in dormitories and in family housing, sharing her quarters with a sister or a cousin, Mr. Hilliard said.

Her parents lived in the Denver suburb of Aurora. A neighbor in their condominium complex, Johnny Wright, remembered that her new husband had visited the family only once before she joined him.

“He seemed educated,” Mr. Wright said. “Didn’t make a lot of conversation.”

The Mians moved out in 2008, leaving a post office box overseas as a forwarding address. Meanwhile, Mr. Shahzad applied for citizenship that October.

Shortly after his naturalization ceremony in the Bridgeport courthouse, his name appeared on a case in another Connecticut court, a foreclosure action by Chase bank.

He and his wife had bought a newly built single-family house on Long Hill Avenue in Shelton in 2004 for $273,000, with a $218,400 mortgage, according to court papers.

They tried to cash in on the real estate boom, listing it for sale for $329,000 in 2006. It did not sell, said Frank DelVecchio, an agent who picked up the listing in 2008. The price then was $299,000. Later it was marked down to $285,000, and finally, $284,500.

In Shelton, neighbors remembered Mr. Shahzad’s walking early in the morning in sandals and loose-fitting shirts, and jogging late at night in black athletic clothes; his wife wore a long dress and a shawl covering her hair. They had toys in their garage and a little swimming pool in the back; last summer, friends went over for barbecues.

“He wasn’t unfriendly,” said Debbie Bussolari, a 55-year-old dental technician who lives across the street. “He seemed a little different.”

The family had several tag sales last summer, offering knickknacks and kid stuff, “things that you would give to Goodwill,” said Mary Ann Galich, 55, who lives behind the house.

“She was outside dealing with the people, and he was dealing with the money,” Ms. Galich recalled.

Davon Reid, 17, who lives next door, said the family moved in December: “It seemed like they picked up everything very quickly.” A few months later, a real estate broker let him in to check the place out, and it was a wreck.

“There was spoiled food and milk everywhere,” he said. “They just left everything. They left clothes in closets, the kids’ shoes, the woman’s shoes. And the kids’ toys.”

Three months ago, Mr. Shahzad signed a one-year lease on the two-bedroom apartment in Bridgeport. Mr. Chomiak, the landlord, said he usually saw Mr. Shahzad only when the rent was due, but he described him as a nice guy who furnished the apartment sparsely, and said he made a living selling jewelry in New Haven.

Other details took on significance in light of the arrest. When Mr. Chomiak went looking for Mr. Shahzad on Monday, he noticed a distributor cap and two small bags of fertilizer in the garage.

Mr. Shahzad, Mr. Chomiak said, mentioned that he wanted to grow tomatoes.


Reporting was contributed by Alison Leigh Cowan from New York, and Ray Rivera, Michael S. Schmidt and Karen Zraick from Connecticut.

    From Suburban Father to a Terrorism Suspect, NYT, 4.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/05/nyregion/05profile.html

Smoking Car to an Arrest in 53 Hours

May 4, 2010
The New York Times
By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM and AL BAKER

The keys found in the ignition of the sport utility vehicle that was left to explode in Times Square on Saturday evening did more than just start cars: one opened the front door to Faisal Shahzad’s home.

The young woman in Bridgeport who last month sold Mr. Shahzad the rusting 1993 Nissan Pathfinder prosecutors say he used in the failed attack did not remember his name. But she had his telephone number.

That number was traced back to a prepaid cellular phone purchased by Mr. Shahzad, one that received four calls from Pakistan in the hours before he bought the S.U.V.

It was 53 hours and 20 minutes from the moment the authorities say Mr. Shahzad, undetected, left his failed car bomb in the heart of Manhattan until the moment he was taken off a plane at Kennedy Airport and charged with trying to kill untold numbers of the city’s residents and tourists.

“In the real world,” said the New York police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, whose detectives investigated the case with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, “53 is a pretty good number.”

In the most basic calculus, the success of the investigation of the attempted car bombing in Times Square is measured by the authorities only one way: a suspect was caught and charged, and now faces life in prison if convicted.

But based on interviews and court records, those 53 hours included good breaks, dead ends, real scares, plain detective work and high-tech sophistication. There were moments of keen insight, and perhaps fearsome oversight.

The police detectives and federal agents of the Joint Terrorist Task Force, for instance, interviewed the occupants of 242 rooms of the Marriott Marquis and 92 staff workers. They spoke to theatergoers from the stages of two Broadway plays to determine if anyone had glimpsed a man fleeing the Pathfinder shortly after 6:30 p.m. on Saturday.

They did a 24-hour street canvass and fanned out to Pennsylvania and other places to talk to manufacturers of the bomb’s components: two clocks, three propane tanks, gas cans, a gun box, M88 firecrackers.

But according to several people with knowledge of the investigation, federal agents who had Mr. Shahzad under surveillance lost him at one point, a development that probably allowed him to make it to the airport and briefly board the plane bound for the Middle East.

Spokesmen for the F.B.I. in New York and Washington would not comment on any possible lapse in surveillance.

If the lapse occurred, it was not final, or fatal. Mr. Shahzad, according to court papers, confessed to trying to set off a bomb in Times Square shortly after he was taken off the plane.

The route to that capture began in Midtown Manhattan, just off Broadway on a warm night of high drama.

At 6:28 p.m. on Saturday, the authorities say Mr. Shahzad steered his newly acquired Pathfinder west on West 45th Street, in Times Square, a move caught on film by a police security camera as it crossed Broadway.

He bailed out seconds later. Then a street vendor — wearing an “I love New York T-shirt” — waved down a mounted officer, who saw the white smoke collecting inside the still idling vehicle and made a call that got the bomb squad there by about 7 p.m.

It took the bomb squad, according to court papers, eight hours of work simply to render the S.U.V. safe enough to approach. Once the authorities did, they found keys hanging from the ignition. Hours later, after they towed the car to a Queens forensic garage, they found an even more important clue when a police Auto Crime Unit detective crawled underneath the vehicle.

“The break in this case took place when a New York City detective was able to go under the vehicle and get the hidden VIN number,” Mr. Kelly said at a news conference in Washington on Tuesday. “This identified the owner of record, who in turn, as we know, sold it to the suspect.”

It had been something of a feat to get the city’s most senior officials to the scene of the attempted bombing.

Mr. Kelly had been in Washington, for the annual White House Correspondents Dinner, when his cellphone rang. At 8 p.m., he walked over to where his boss, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, was sitting and spread the news. At 10:55 p.m. the two men left, taking the mayor’s private jet and touching down at 12:20 a.m. at La Guardia Airport.

Fifteen minutes later, the two men, still in fancy suits, were inside a drab storage area of a building on West 44th Street, pulling up folding chairs with police and F.B.I. investigators around a Formica table and reviewing X-ray photos of the Pathfinder’s contents.

And soon, investigators fanned out to find the driver.

All Sunday afternoon, the agents and police searched for the Pathfinder’s owner of record — a man they knew had bought it used from a lot in Connecticut. By 6 p.m., they found the man, in Bridgeport. He said it was his daughter they needed.

“I give it to her,” the man, Lagnes Colas, said in an interview, noting that she had decided to sell it recently so she could get a better car.

Within 20 minutes, the investigators were talking with his daughter, Peggy.

She said she met on April 24 with a man who answered her online advertisements. He bargained the price down to $1,300 from $1,800, she told investigators. He paid with $100 bills. He looked Middle Eastern or Hispanic. And it was, investigators learned, a strange transaction: one conducted in a supermarket parking lot, without paperwork or receipts, and involving a man who explained that a bill of sale was unnecessary and who seemed uninterested in the vehicle’s long-term prospects.

Mr. Shahzad, according to court papers, “inspected the interior seating and cargo area” but not the engine. He was told the chassis was not in good shape, but he bought it anyway.

“I thought maybe he might bring the car back,” Mr. Colas said in an interview.

The investigative trail was warming up.

Later Sunday, a sketch artist was brought in from the Connecticut State Police to work with Ms. Colas on a portrait of the man who had bought the S.U.V. The work was promising.

On Monday, police and federal agents were back. Now, they had photographs of six men. She picked out the one of Mr. Shahzad, the court papers said.

Meanwhile, officials dug through Verizon Wireless records to learn more about the number she provided, one they found was attached to a prepaid phone activated April 16.

Though they declined to say precisely how they tracked such an anonymous number, they established not only that Mr. Shahzad was the buyer of the Pathfinder, but also that he got four phone calls from a Pakistani number associated with him in the hour before he made his final calls to arrange the purchase of the vehicle, according to the papers.

But there was more. The records had logged a call made by Mr. Shahzad’s disposable cellphone on April 25, the day after he bought the Pathfinder. It was to a rural Pennsylvania fireworks store, “that sells M-88 fireworks,” the court papers said.

Such fireworks were a part of the bomb in the Pathfinder: the would-be detonator.

On Monday, F.B.I. agents spoke to Mr. Shahzad’s landlord in Bridgeport, the court papers said. In an interview, the landlord, Stanislaw Chomiak, 44, said his tenant had signed a one-year lease for a two-bedroom apartment on the second floor around three months ago.

“He said he’d recently come from his country,” Mr. Chomiak said.

Soon after interviewing the landlord on Monday, investigators first “got eyes on” Mr. Shahzad, according to law enforcement officials. He was in another car, one registered in his name, returning to his apartment from the grocery store.

Exactly how long investigators had him under surveillance is unclear. But officials said investigators watched him come home and go inside his house. He emerged later to get back in his car, headed south.

It seems clear, according to interviews with a variety of officials, the investigators must have lost track of Mr. Shahzad at some point. He made it all the way down the jetway and into his seat.

Before the plane pulled away from the gate, though, investigators had caught up with him. He was taken out of his seat and into custody.

The 53 hours of work and uncertainty were over.

    Smoking Car to an Arrest in 53 Hours, NYT, 4.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/05/nyregion/05tictoc.html

Lapses Allowed Suspect to Board Plane

May 4, 2010
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON — Why was Faisal Shahzad permitted to board a flight for Dubai some 24 hours after investigators of the Times Square terrorism case learned he might be connected to the attempted bombing?

Though Mr. Shahzad was stopped before he could fly away, there were at least two significant lapses in the security response of the government and the airline that allowed him to come close to making his escape, officials of the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other agencies said on Tuesday.

First, an F.B.I. surveillance team that had found Mr. Shahzad in Connecticut lost track of him — it is not clear for how long — before he drove to John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, the officials said. As a result, investigators did not know he was planning to fly abroad until a final passenger list was sent to officials at the federal Customs and Border Protection agency minutes before takeoff.

In addition, the airline he was flying, Emirates, failed to act on an electronic message at midday on Monday notifying all carriers to check the no-fly list for an important added name, the officials said. That meant lost opportunities to flag him when he made a reservation and paid for his ticket in cash several hours before departure.

Top Obama administration officials and some members of Congress on Tuesday praised the government’s handling of the investigation, noting that Mr. Shahzad was identified, tracked and arrested before he could escape.

But Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, while saying he was reluctant to criticize those in charge of airport security, added: “Clearly the guy was on the plane and shouldn’t have been. We got lucky.”

Senator Susan M. Collins, Republican of Maine, said she applauded the work of law enforcement officials in quickly solving the case. Still, she added, “A key question for me is why this suspect was allowed to board the plane in the first place. There appears to be a troubling gap between the time they had his name and the time he got on the plane.”

At a news conference in Washington, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said that despite the break in physical surveillance, he had never been concerned that Mr. Shahzad would get away.

“I was here all yesterday and through much of last night, and was aware of the tracking that was going on,” Mr. Holder said. “And I was never in any fear that we were in danger of losing him.”

Janet Napolitano, the Homeland Security secretary, called the capture of the accused terrorist “a great team effort.” She added: “The law enforcement work in this case was truly exemplary.”

While the officials emphasized the successful outcome to the chase, a more detailed account, in interviews with officials who spoke of the continuing investigation mostly on condition of anonymity, gave a mixed picture.

On Sunday night, about 24 hours after the smoking Nissan Pathfinder was left on a bustling Manhattan street, investigators identified Mr. Shahzad as the buyer of the car. While the vehicle identification number had been removed from the passenger compartment, a detective found a duplicate number on the engine block.

But at that point, officials said, they were uncertain of Mr. Shahzad’s role and did not think they had enough evidence to arrest him and charge him with a crime. Instead, they began an urgent manhunt; F.B.I. agents located Mr. Shahzad in Bridgeport, Conn., and began to follow him.

It remained uncertain Tuesday night at what time Mr. Shahzad had been found and when he was lost. Paul Bresson, an F.B.I. spokesman, declined to comment on the surveillance issue.

But at about 12:30 p.m. on Monday, more certain that Mr. Shahzad was the suspected terrorist, investigators asked the Department of Homeland Security to put him on the no-fly list. Three minutes later, the department sent airlines, including Emirates, an electronic notification that they should check the no-fly list for an update. At about 4:30 p.m., more information was added to the list, including Mr. Shahzad’s passport number, officials said.

Workers at Emirates evidently did not check the list, because at 6:30 p.m., Mr. Shahzad called the airline and booked a flight to Pakistan via Dubai, officials said. At 7:35 p.m., he arrived at the airport, paid cash for his ticket and was given a boarding pass.

Airlines are not required to report cash purchases, a Homeland Security official said. Emirates actually did report Mr. Shahzad’s purchase to the Transportation Security Administration — but only hours later, when he was already in custody, the official said.

Mr. Shahzad had evaded the surveillance effort and bought his ticket seven hours after his name went on the no-fly list. But the system gives security officials one more chance to stop a dangerous passenger.

As is routine, when boarding was completed for the flight, Emirates Flight EK202, the final passenger manifest was sent to the National Targeting Center, operated in Virginia by Customs and Border Protection. There, at about 11 p.m., analysts discovered that Mr. Shahzad was on the no-fly list and had just boarded a plane.

They sounded the alarm, and minutes later, with the jet still at the gate, its door was opened and agents came aboard and took Mr. Shahzad into custody, officials said. The airliner then pulled away from the gate but was called back.

“Actually I have a message for you to go back to the gate immediately,” an air traffic controller told the pilot, according to a recording posted to the Web by LiveATC.net, which tracks air communications. “I don’t know exactly why, but you can call your company for the reason,” the controller added.

After the plane was called back, the authorities removed two more passengers. They were questioned and cleared. They and all the rest of the passengers were rescreened, as was the baggage, and the flight took off about seven hours late.

An Emirates spokeswoman, who said she was not allowed to speak on the record, declined to comment on the claims by government officials that the airline had neglected to recheck the no-fly list. “Emirates takes every necessary precaution to ensure the safety and well-being of its passengers and crew and regrets the inconvenience caused,” the airline said in a statement.

One long-planned change in security procedures may reduce the chances of a repeat failure to check an updated no-fly list, officials said. The Transportation Security Administration is taking over the job of checking passenger manifests against the no-fly list under its Secure Flight program.

Such checks are currently being done by the T.S.A. for domestic flights, and the agency is scheduled to be checking all international flights by the end of the year, agency officials said.

    Lapses Allowed Suspect to Board Plane, NYT, 4.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/05/nyregion/05plane.html

Terrorism Suspect, Charged, Said to Admit to Role in Plot

May 4, 2010
The New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI, SABRINA TAVERNISE and JACK HEALY

This article is by Mark Mazzetti, Sabrina Tavernise and Jack Healy.

A Pakistani-American man arrested in the failed Times Square car bombing has admitted his role in the attempted attack and said he received explosives training in Pakistan, the authorities said Tuesday.

The man, Faisal Shahzad, 30, was arrested as he tried to flee the country in a Dubai-bound jet late Monday. Hours later, there were reports that seven or eight people had been arrested in Pakistan, as officials in both countries sought to determine the origins and scope of the plot.

Mr. Shahzad was charged on Tuesday with several terrorism-related crimes. American intelligence officials said that while any ties Mr. Shahzad had to international terrorist groups remained murky, investigators were strongly looking at possible links to the Pakistani Taliban in the attempted attack on Saturday.

If the role is confirmed, it would be the group’s first effort to attack the United States and the first sign of the group’s ability to strike targets beyond Pakistan or Afghanistan.

The Pakistani Taliban is a different organization from the Taliban groups that the United States is battling in Afghanistan.

Mr. Shahzad’s ability to board an international flight despite being the target of a major terrorism investigation was the result of at least two lapses in the response by the government and the airline, Emirates.

Mr. Shahzad, a naturalized United States citizen from Pakistan who lived in Bridgeport, Conn., was charged with attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction and other federal charges, several related to explosives. He was interrogated without initially being read his Miranda rights under a public safety exception, and he provided what the Federal Bureau of Investigation called “valuable intelligence and evidence.”

He continued talking after being read his rights, the F.B.I. said. The authorities charged him as a civilian, but he did not appear in court and no hearing has been scheduled.

“It is clear that this was a terrorist plot aimed at murdering Americans in one of the busiest places in the country,” Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said at a news conference on Tuesday in Washington.

Mr. Shahzad booked a ticket on his way to Kennedy Airport and bought it with cash when he got there, officials said. He had boarded the plane but was taken off before it taxied away.

Investigators had been trying to find Mr. Shahzad after determining that he was the man who bought a Nissan Pathfinder from a Connecticut woman last month and had parked it just off Broadway on Saturday night packed with gasoline, propane, fertilizer and fireworks. No one was hurt, but officials said the bomb could have been deadly on the crowded streets if it had ignited.

Officials said Mr. Shahzad had been placed on a no-fly list on Monday afternoon, but they declined to explain how he had been allowed to board the plane.

An Isuzu Trooper that Mr. Shahzad had apparently driven to the airport was found in a parking lot. Inside the Trooper, investigators discovered a Kel-Tec 9-millimeter pistol, with a folding stock and a rifle barrel, along with several spare magazines of ammunition, an official said. Fearing the Izuzu might be rigged to explode, officials briefly cordoned off the area around it.

All of the passengers were taken off the plane, and they, their luggage and the Boeing 777 were screened before the flight was allowed to depart, about seven hours late, at 6:29 a.m. Two other men were also interviewed by the authorities but released, according to one law enforcement official.

Mr. Holder said Mr. Shahzad had been providing “useful information” to federal investigators since he was pulled off the plane. Besides saying that he had received training in Pakistan, Mr. Shahzad said he had acted alone, a claim that was still being investigated.

In Pakistan, developments unfolded quickly. Officials identified one of those arrested as Tauhid Ahmed and said he had been in touch with Mr. Shahzad through e-mail and had met him either in the United States or in the Pakistani port city of Karachi.

Another man arrested, Muhammad Rehan, had spent time with Mr. Shahzad during a recent visit there, Pakistani officials said. Mr. Rehan was arrested in Karachi just after morning prayers at a mosque known for its links with the militant group Jaish-e-Muhammad.

Investigators said Mr. Rehan told them that he had rented a pickup truck and driven with Mr. Shahzad to the northwestern city of Peshawar, where they stayed from July 7 to July 22, 2009. The account could not be independently verified. Mr. Shahzad spent four months in Pakistan last year, the authorities said.

Pakistani officials promised to aid the United States “in bringing such culprits to justice,” the Pakistani interior minister, Rehman Malik, said in a telephone interview as he announced the seven or eight arrests.

Mr. Shahzad is believed to be originally from Kashmir and is among a handful of Pakistani-Americans who have recently faced terrorism accusations in the United States or abroad.

The Pakistani Taliban on Sunday released a video taking credit for the Times Square attack, but American officials cautioned on Tuesday that the investigation was still in its early stages, and said it could take days before enough evidence emerged to point to any one group for its role in the plot.

For months, terrorist groups have pledged to exact revenge for the Central Intelligence Agency’s campaign of drone strikes in the Pakistani mountains.

Last year, a C.I.A. drone killed the Pakistani Taliban’s leader, Baitullah Mehsud, and American intelligence officials believe that the group has over the years cultivated close ties to Qaeda leaders. Any ties between Mr. Shahzad and Pakistani militants could add new urgency to American demands that Pakistan root out the web of Al Qaeda and local groups that use the tribal areas to strike at United States troops in Afghanistan and other targets farther abroad.

The United States, which has provided Pakistan with billions of dollars in counterterrorism aid since 2001, has pressed Pakistan to crack down on militants inside its borders, and an American official said Pakistan’s response to this attempted attack would have serious implications for the country’s strategic relationship with the United States.

A detailed 10-page court document outlining the criminal charges describes new details about Mr. Shahzad’s actions in the days leading up to the attempted attack, including how he bought the Nissan Pathfinder that would ultimately help lead investigators to him.

It says that Customs and Border Protection records show that Mr. Shahzad returned from Pakistan on Feb. 3, 2010, after a five-month visit there, flying back on a one-way ticket from Pakistan. He told customs inspectors, the complaint said, that he was visiting his parents.

The complaint, sworn out by Andrew P. Pachtman, an F.B.I. agent assigned to the Joint Terrorism Task Force, says that Mr. Shahzad used a prepaid cellular telephone to contact a Connecticut woman who had placed an online advertisement to sell the vehicle. It described how the phone led investigators to him.

He received four calls from a number in Pakistan hours before he bought the vehicle, the complaint says.

The prepaid cellular phone, according to the complaint, was also used to call a fireworks store in Pennsylvania that sells M-88 firecrackers like those that were used as part of the bomb. The phone was last used on April 28, according to the complaint.

In the Connecticut towns of Shelton and Bridgeport, where Mr. Shahzad had lived, residents described Mr. Shahzad as quiet and unremarkable. One of the last to see him was his landlord, Stanislaw Chomiak.

About three months ago, Mr. Shahzad signed a one-year lease on a second-floor two-bedroom apartment in Bridgeport. Mr. Chomiak usually saw Mr. Shahzad only when the rent was due, but Mr. Chomiak described his tenant as a nice guy who furnished his apartment sparsely and had claimed he made a living selling jewelry in New Haven.

But the evening of the attempted bombing in Times Square, the landlord received a phone call from Mr. Shahzad, who said he was riding the train back from New York City and needed to be let into his apartment because he had lost his keys. Mr. Chomiak lent Mr. Shahzad spare keys, with the two men agreeing to meet up the next day to return them, Mr. Chomiak said.

“He looked nervous, but I thought, of course he’s nervous, he just lost his keys,” Mr. Chomiak, 44, said in an interview at his home, about 15 miles outside of Bridgeport. The men did not end up meeting until about 4 p.m. on Monday, and Mr. Shahzad returned the keys. It was the last time the landlord saw him, and less than eight hours later, Mr. Shahzad was boarding the flight to Dubai.

An official in Pakistan’s Interior Ministry said Mr. Shahzad came to Pakistan in April 2009 and departed on Aug. 5 on an Emirates flight.

At a news conference on Tuesday, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg called the attempted bombing “an act that was designed to kill innocent civilians and designed to strike fear into the hearts of Americans.”

In March, a Pakistani-American man, David C. Headley, pleaded guilty to helping plan the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India. And last December, five young men from Virginia, two of them with Pakistani backgrounds, were arrested in Pakistan on accusations of plotting attacks against targets there and in Afghanistan.

At his news conference, Mr. Bloomberg warned against any backlash against Pakistanis or Muslims in New York, saying, “We will not tolerate any bias.”

Reporting was contributed by Nina Bernstein, Russ Buettner, Alison Leigh Cowan, Dan Frosch, Carlotta Gall, Jason Grant, Ismail Khan, Angela Macropoulos, Salman Masood, Colin Moynihan, Ray Rivera, Eric Schmitt, Ginger Thompson, Benjamin Weiser, Michael Wilson, Katie Zezima and Karen Zraick.

    Terrorism Suspect, Charged, Said to Admit to Role in Plot, NYT, 4.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/05/nyregion/05bomb.html

Op-Ed Contributor

The Terrorist Next Door

May 4, 2010
The New York Times
By MICHAEL A. SHEEHAN

WHILE it’s possible that this weekend’s failed car-bomb incident in Times Square was part of a complicated international terrorist plot, the unsophisticated nature of the device has given rise to a much-needed discussion about the threat of “home grown” and “lone wolf” violence in the United States.

The subject leads many to throw up their hands: how, short of creating a police state, can we prevent a lone deranged person from making a crude bomb and parking it somewhere?

The truth, though, is that we are not helpless: standard police vigilance and public alertness can play a role, but the real key to minimizing the damage such people can accomplish is to keep these disaffected individuals from making connections with larger networks.

“Home grown” terrorists are natives or longtime residents who belong to groups that espouse a particular agenda or radical ideology. “Lone wolf” terrorists, on the other hand, usually operate by themselves and are not formally associated with a movement. In either case, they are people who live and move among us every day, secretly working in their basements or garages devising bombs or more dangerous weapons.

Lone wolves can be very hard to find. The Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski, lived in a shack in the mountains of Montana during the 17 years he sent 16 package bombs that killed three people and wounded 23 others. Eric Rudolph, who set off bombs at the Olympics in Atlanta, a gay bar and several abortion clinics, was a fugitive in the Appalachians for more than five years before his arrest by a North Carolina policeman in 2003. Timothy McVeigh, with a very small cell of two or three people, was able to build the powerful truck bomb that killed 168 people in Oklahoma City in 1995.

Fortunately, these men, in terms of determination and ability, were the exceptions. Most lone wolves are as incompetent as they are disturbed, and their attacks, like that on Saturday, tend to fizzle out. Even if a lone wolf terrorist is successful, the attack is a calamity for the victims and their families, but without connection to a larger organization, it will not represent a strategic threat to the United States.

So law enforcement has to focus on preventing sophisticated terrorist organizations from establishing a presence within the United States. The good news is that we know how to do this. The bad news is we aren’t doing it enough. No other American city even attempts to do what New York has accomplished. The New York Police Department’s intelligence and counterterrorism units, working both with the F.B.I. and independently, manage a network of informant and undercover operatives around the area. It was no accident that last year when a Denver man who was planning to bomb the New York subway system arrived in the city, the F.B.I. was aware of his travels, and a radical cleric he met with was already a police informant.

Of course, other American cities don’t have a police force with the manpower and experience of ours, but they can still do more. Small cities can act independently or work with the F.B.I.’s 50 or so joint terrorism task forces to set up investigative teams — just a handful of officers in most cities — to identify violent cells within their jurisdictions. They know how to do it: the techniques and legal authorities to run informants and undercover agents and to install wiretaps on phones and computers are the same as police departments have long used to infiltrate the mob and drug trafficking organizations.

So why have so few cities done what New York has, even on a smaller scale? Two reasons: money and political risk. Despite great gains across the country in recent years, cities are still under pressure to reduce street crime and are thus reluctant to put their best officers on terrorist investigations that may well come to naught. Many think that counterterrorism is the job, and financial responsibility, of the federal government alone.

In addition, some are wary of the political risk involved in running intelligence investigations against citizens and legal residents who may be involved only in legitimate political dissonance — a cherished right of all Americans.

But if we are going to prevent the next domestic terrorist attack, we will need to get beyond these concerns. For society as a whole, paying for a handful of detectives at the local level is far more efficient than spending billions inside the Beltway on bloated bureaucracies and large-scale defensive measures that will most likely have little practical effect. And while issues of civil liberties are important, they can be managed with close legal oversight of terrorism investigations.

As the New York case reminds us, there are people out there with the intent to kill. The job of law enforcement is to catch them before they are successful, and if that is not possible, to prevent them from becoming a real strategic threat rather than a small but deadly menace to our society. While we hope we can find lone wolves before they attack, we also need to reduce the threat they pose by identifying, infiltrating and crushing any terrorist organization before it can mount a sophisticated operation, or before it provides deadly technical support and training to the next Times Square bomber.

Michael A. Sheehan, a former deputy commissioner for counterterrorism with the New York Police Department, is a security consultant and the director of the Madison Policy Forum, a national security policy group.

    The Terrorist Next Door, NYT, 4.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/04/opinion/04sheehan.html

Man Held in NYC Car Bomb Attack to Appear in Court
 

May 4, 2010
Filed at 5:15 a.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

NEW YORK (AP) -- A U.S. citizen from Pakistan accused of driving a bomb-laden SUV into Times Square and parking it on a street lined with restaurants and Broadway theaters was to appear in court Tuesday to face charges for his failed attempt to set off a massive fireball and kill Americans, federal authorities said.

The suspect, Faisal Shahzad, was taken into custody late Monday by FBI agents and New York Police Department detectives while trying to leave the country, according to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and other officials. He was identified by customs agents at John F. Kennedy International Airport and was stopped before boarding a flight to Dubai, Holder said early Tuesday in Washington, D.C.

Shahzad is a naturalized U.S. citizen and had recently returned from a five-month trip to Pakistan, where he had a wife, according to law enforcement officials who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the investigation into the failed car bombing.

Shahzad was being held in New York overnight and couldn't be contacted. A phone number at a listed address for Shahzad in Shelton, Conn., wasn't in service.

The U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan was handling the case and said Shahzad would appear in court Tuesday, but the charges were not made public. FBI agents searched the home at a known address for Shahzad in Bridgeport, Conn., early Tuesday, said Kimberly Mertz, the special agent in charge for the FBI in Connecticut. She wouldn't answer questions about the search.

Law enforcement officials say Shahzad bought the SUV, a 1993 Nissan Pathfinder, from a Connecticut man about three weeks ago and paid cash. The officials spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the case.

The vehicle identification number had been removed from the Pathfinder's dashboard, but it was stamped on the engine, and investigators used it to find the owner of record, who told them he had sold the vehicle to a stranger.

As the SUV buyer came into focus, investigators backed off other leads, although Holder said U.S. authorities ''will not rest until we have brought everyone responsible to justice,'' suggesting additional suspects are being sought.

The SUV was parked on Saturday night on a busy midtown Manhattan street near a theater showing ''The Lion King.'' The explosive device inside it had cheap-looking alarm clocks connected to a 16-ounce can filled with fireworks, which were apparently intended to detonate gas cans and set propane tanks afire in a chain reaction ''to cause mayhem, to create casualties,'' police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said.

A metal rifle cabinet placed in the SUV's cargo area was packed with fertilizer, but NYPD bomb experts believe it was not a type volatile enough to explode like the ammonium nitrate grade fertilizer used in previous terrorist bombings.

Police said the SUV bomb could have produced ''a significant fireball'' and sprayed shrapnel with enough force to kill pedestrians and knock out windows.

A vendor alerted a police officer to the parked SUV, which was smoking. Times Square, clogged with tourists on a warm evening, was shut down for 10 hours. A bomb squad dismantled the explosive device, and no one was hurt.

But Holder said Americans should remain vigilant.

''It's clear,'' he said, ''that the intent behind this terrorist act was to kill Americans.''

The Pakistani Taliban appeared to claim responsibility in videos that surfaced after the weekend scare, monitoring groups said, but police had no evidence to support the claims.

The SUV was parked near offices of Viacom Inc., which owns Comedy Central. The network recently aired an episode of the animated show ''South Park'' that the group Revolution Muslim had complained insulted the Prophet Muhammad by depicting him in a bear costume.

The date of the botched bombing, May 1, was International Workers Day, a traditional date for political demonstrations, and thousands of people had rallied for immigration reform that day in New York.

    Man Held in NYC Car Bomb Attack to Appear in Court, NYT, 4.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/05/04/us/AP-US-Times-Square-Car-Bomb.html

Arrest Made in Times Square Bomb Case

May 4, 2010
The New York Times
By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM, MARK MAZZETTI and PETER BAKER

Federal agents and police detectives arrested a Connecticut man, a naturalized United States citizen from Pakistan, shortly before midnight Monday for driving a car bomb into Times Square on Saturday evening in what turned out to be an unsuccessful attack, Justice Department officials announced.

The man, Faisal Shahzad, 30, was believed to have recently bought the 1993 Nissan Pathfinder that was found loaded with gasoline, propane, fireworks and fertilizer in the heart of Times Square, a person briefed on the investigation said.

Mr. Shahzad was taken into custody at Kennedy Airport as he tried to board a flight to Dubai, U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said in an early morning statement delivered at the Justice Department in Washington. Charges against Mr. Shahzad, who had returned recently from a trip to Pakistan, were not announced.

“Over the course of the day today, we have gathered significant additional evidence that led to tonight’s arrest,” Mr. Holder said an early morning statement delivered at the Justice Department in Washington. “The investigation is ongoing, as are our attempts to gather useful intelligence, and we continue to pursue a number of leads.

“But it’s clear that the intent behind this terrorist act was to kill Americans,” he said.

The authorities began focusing on Mr. Shahzad after they tracked the sport utility vehicle to its previously registered owner in Bridgeport, Conn., who had advertised it for sale on several Web sites. He paid cash, and the sale was handled without any formal paperwork.

The former owner told investigators that it appeared the buyer was of Middle Eastern or Hispanic descent, but could not recall his name. It was unclear how agents from the Joint Terrorist Task Force identified Mr. Shahzad. Federal authorities provided few details on Monday night about the arrest, the suspect or the scope of any conspiracy in the failed attack.

The authorities have been exploring whether the man or others who might have been involved in the attempted bombing had been in contact with people or groups overseas, according to federal officials.

The investigation was shifted on Monday to the control of the international terrorism branch of the Joint Terrorism Task Force, a multiagency group led by the Justice Department, according to two federal officials.

“As we move forward, we will focus on not just holding those responsible for it accountable, but also on obtaining any intelligence about terrorist organizations overseas,” Mr. Holder said.

Officials cautioned that the investigation of possible international contacts did not mean they had established a connection to a known terrorist group..

“It’s a prominent lead that they’re following, the international association,” said a senior official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a continuing investigation. “But there’s still a lot of information being gathered.”

Mr. Shahzad was set to appear in federal court in Manhattan on Tuesday to be formally charged, according to a joint statement issued by the office of the Manhattan United States attorney Preet Bharara, the F.B.I. and the New York Police Department.

The statement said Mr. Shahzad was taken into custody at the airport after he was identified by the Department of Homeland Security’s U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

On Monday, prior to the arrest, there was a sweeping response to the attempted attack in the tourist-packed city-within-a-city of Times Square — including an increased police presence, vehicle inspections and a touch of panic from veteran New Yorkers when a manhole fire flared five blocks from the scene of the failed bombing. Consolidated Edison blamed faulty wiring for the fire.

The recent sale of the Pathfinder began online. An advertisement that appears to be for the vehicle, which had 141,000 miles on the odometer and was listed for sale at $1,300 on at least two Web sites, emphasized that it was in good condition — “CLEAN inside and out!!” — with a recently repaired alternator and a new gas pump, distributor and front tires. “It does have some rust as you can see in the picture,” the seller allowed on NothingButCars.net, “but other than that, it runs great.” The other advertisement appeared on Craigslist.

In Bridgeport, the seller refused to answer questions. “You can’t interview her,” said an unidentified man at the woman’s two-story, white clapboard house. “She already talked to the F.B.I.”

The police earlier on Monday continued sifting through footage from 82 city cameras mounted from 34th Street to 51st Street between Avenue of the Americas and Eighth Avenue, and from untold number of business and tourist cameras.

But investigators appeared to have begun to assign less significance to a man who appeared to be in his 40s who was seen on one video, and it may well be because they were close to arresting the Connecticut man.

The man in the video was seen walking away from the area where the Pathfinder was parked and through Shubert Alley, which runs between 44th and 45th Streets. He looked over his shoulder at least twice and pulled off a shirt, revealing a red T-shirt underneath.

The New York police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, said investigators still wanted to speak to that man, but acknowledged that he might not be connected to the failed bombing. Paul J. Browne, the department’s top spokesman, said the police had stopped looking for additional video in the area that might have tracked the man’s movements.

“It may turn out that he was just somebody in the area, but not connected with the car bomb,” Mr. Browne said.

Before the arrest occurred, the police had said they might release footage of a man running north on Broadway at the time that a fire broke out in the Pathfinder.

The materials found in the Pathfinder were to be sent to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s laboratory in Quantico, Va., for analysis, the police said.

Janet Napolitano, the homeland security secretary, had said on the “Today” show that it was premature to label any person or group as suspect. “Right now, every lead has to be pursued,” she said. “I caution against premature decisions one way or the other.”

    Arrest Made in Times Square Bomb Case, NYT, 4.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/05/nyregion/05bomb.html

Owner of S.U.V. Holding Bomb Material Is Located

May 3, 2010
The New York Times
By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM, WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM and AL BAKER.

This article is by Michael M. Grynbaum, William K. Rashbaum and Al Baker.

The police and F.B.I. investigators have tracked down the owner of the 1993 Nissan Pathfinder that contained the makings of a crude car bomb discovered in Times Square over the weekend, but that person is not considered a suspect, the police said on Monday.

“We’ve identified and spoken to the registered owner,” said Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman, who stressed that the police had not yet identified a suspect or a motive. Nonetheless, the resolution of the vehicle’s provenance is a significant advancement in the 38-hour-old investigation.

Investigators continue to review surveillance footage from Saturday evening, when the car bomb was found, that showed a white man who appeared to be in his 40s walking away from the area as he looked over his shoulder and removed a layer of clothing. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. seemed optimistic in comments he made Monday morning. “I think that we have made really substantial progress, Mr. Holder told reporters in Washington. “We have some good leads."

Raymond W. Kelly, the New York City police commissioner, said on Sunday that officers found gasoline, propane, firecrackers and simple alarm clocks in the Nissan sport utility vehicle, as well as eight bags of a granular substance, later determined to be nonexplosive grade of fertilizer, inside a 55-inch-tall metal gun locker.

The bomb, Mr. Kelly said, “would have caused casualties, a significant fireball.”

The materials will be sent to the F.B.I. laboratory in Quantico, Va., on Monday for analysis, Mr. Kelly said in an interview Monday morning with WCBS Radio. “They’ve got the top laboratory in the world to do these sorts of examinations, and we’ll keep some samples here,” he said.

Detectives flew by helicopter to Pennsylvania to interview a tourist who shot video that they believe show the same man who changed his clothing leaving the area near the S.U.V. “We have seen the video and we’re looking to put that out,” Mr. Kelly said. Asked if the video was important to the investigation, he said, “It depends on what other people see in that video. Not so much what we see.”

Speaking on the “Today” show, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg cautioned that “the person on the tape may not become a suspect.”

“There are millions of people that come through Times Square,” the mayor said. “This person happened to be in a position which a camera got a good shot of him, and maybe he had something to do with it, but there’s a very good chance that he did not. We’re exploring a lot of leads.”

Had the bomb exploded, said Mr. Browne, there was “a good possibility of people being killed, windows shattered, but not resulting in a building collapse.”

While the authorities said they were treating the failed bombing — described as a “one-off” by Janet Napolitano, the homeland security secretary — as a potential terrorist attack, they said there was no evidence of a continued threat to the city.

Additional patrols will be placed in Midtown, Mr. Kelly said, but no significant increase in the city’s police presence is planned. Detectives conducted what is known as a “24-hour canvass” on Sunday night and Monday morning, but Mr. Kelly did not divulge any new leads Monday morning. The police also planned to visit nearby businesses that were closed over the weekend to review footage from their cameras.

No motive had been determined in the attempted bombing, and federal and local officials said there was no evidence to support a claim of responsibility issued Sunday by a Pakistani Taliban group that has a reputation for making far-fetched attempts to take credit for attacks.

The police and F.B.I. officials are also investigating a separate tip received by a news organization, but Mr. Kelly said it had not turned up any suspects.

Investigators were reviewing surveillance footage that showed an unidentified man walking away from West 45th Street, where the Nissan Pathfinder had been parked. The police said the man was a “person of interest.” The man was seen in Shubert Alley, which runs between 44th and 45th Streets, looking furtively over his shoulder and removing a dark shirt, revealing a red one underneath, officials said. The man then stuffed the dark shirt into a bag, officials said.

“We just felt that person warranted an interview,” Mr. Kelly said. “It could be perfectly innocent.”

Asked if he considered the failed bombing the work of terrorists, Mr. Kelly said: “A terrorist act doesn’t necessarily have to be conducted by an organization. An individual can do it on their own.”

All Broadway shows ran as scheduled on Sunday.

Two street vendors had flagged down a mounted police officer after they noticed smoke coming from the Pathfinder, which had been parked haphazardly at the curb with its engine running and its flashers on. The area was cleared so the police could examine the vehicle, which was first seen on video surveillance cameras at 6:28 p.m., heading west on West 45th Street.

The Pathfinder was brought to a forensics center in Jamaica, Queens, where investigators were scouring it for DNA evidence and hairs, fibers and fingerprints. No fingerprints had been found as of Sunday night, officials said.

F.B.I. agents and detectives from the Joint Terrorist Task Force were also trying to determine where the three canisters of propane and two red plastic five-gallon containers of gasoline in the Pathfinder had been purchased.

The gun locker, which weighed about 75 pounds empty and upward of 200 pounds with the eight bags of fertilizer in it, could provide important clues because it can probably be more easily traced than many of the other items found in the S.U.V. “There are lots of different fertilizers that are out there,” Mr. Kelly said, emphasizing that this particular fertilizer did not appear to be explosive.

The weight of the locker and the material inside raised questions as to whether it might have required more than one person to load it into the vehicle.

Identifying the owner of the Pathfinder was achieved through the S.U.V.’s vehicle identification number, which had been stripped from the car’s dashboard but was stamped on other car parts, like the engine block and axle.

Initially, investigators believed that the last owner was in Texas and had donated the car to a charity in North Carolina, one official said. But that information proved to be incorrect.

The license plate on the S.U.V. was connected to a different vehicle that was awaiting repairs in Stratford, Conn., where F.B.I. agents and the local police awoke the owner of the repair shop at 3 a.m. Sunday.

The shop owner, Wayne LeBlanc, who runs Kramer’s Used Auto Parts, said the authorities had seized a black Ford F-150 pickup truck. “We’re trying to help them identify who took the plates,” he said.

The S.U.V. had no E-ZPass, but license plate readers and cameras at the area’s tollbooths were being checked to determine where the car had entered Manhattan, one official said.

Most of the ingredients of the explosive device could have been bought at a home-supply store. The canisters of propane were similar to those used for barbecue grills. The firecrackers were consumer-grade M-88s sold legally in some states, including Pennsylvania.

The device was found in the back of the S.U.V., Mr. Kelly said, with the gasoline cans closest to the back seat and the gun locker behind them. The fertilizer was in clear plastic bags bearing the logo of a store that the police declined to identify.

The wires from battery-powered fluorescent clocks ran into the gun locker, where a metal pressure-cooker pot contained a thicket of wires and more M-88s, Mr. Kelly said.

“The detonation device, it was believed that the timers would ignite the can of explosives, and that would cause the five-gallon cans to go on fire and then explode the propane tanks and have some effect on that rifle box,” Mr. Kelly said.

Investigators believed that the fuses on the firecrackers had been lighted, but they did not explode, officials said. The burning fuses apparently ignited a portion of the Pathfinder’s interior, causing a small fire that filled the inside with smoke, one law enforcement official said.

Another official said that pops heard by a firefighter as he approached the vehicle might have been made by the fireworks failing to fully detonate.

Investigators were reviewing similarities between the incident in Times Square and coordinated attacks in the summer of 2007 at a Glasgow airport and a London neighborhood of nightclubs and theaters. Both attacks involved cars containing propane and gasoline that did not explode. Those attacks, the authorities believed, had their roots in Iraq.

“You can find similarities among different attacks, but there is nothing that we have at this point that has established that link,” Mr. Browne said.

Mayor Bloomberg said that “so far, there is no evidence that any of this has anything to do with one of the recognized terrorist organizations.”

Meanwhile, a Homeland Security official said that the Transportation Security Administration had increased security outside airports to counter threats like car bombs.

The agency held a conference call Sunday night with federal officials at airports in the New York City region to discuss increased security at departure gates.

The authorities said they are studying hundreds of hours of surveillance footage from 82 cameras mounted from 34th Street to 51st Street between Avenue of the Americas and Eighth Avenue, including images of the man leaving the scene of the S.U.V. that were shot by the tourist in Times Square. The police and F.B.I. officials were also investigating a 911 call placed around 4 a.m. Sunday that described the failed bombing as a diversion before a bigger explosion, two law enforcement officials said, although Mr. Kelly said there was no record of that call.

The S.U.V. was parked near the headquarters of Viacom, fueling suspicions that the attack was related to a controversy surrounding “South Park,” the Comedy Central cartoon program that recently censored an episode that portrayed the Prophet Muhammad. Viacom owns Comedy Central, and the police have not ruled out the connection.


Michael Wilson contributed reporting.

    Owner of S.U.V. Holding Bomb Material Is Located, NYT, 3.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/04/nyregion/04bomb.html

Police Seek Man Taped Near Bomb Scene

May 2, 2010
The New York Times
By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM, WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM and AL BAKER

This article is by Michael M. Grynbaum, William K. Rashbaum and Al Baker.

Law enforcement officials offered a more detailed description of the makeup of the failed car bomb found in Times Square on Saturday night, and said they were reviewing surveillance footage that showed a white man who appeared to be in his 40s walking away from the area as he looked over his shoulder and removed a layer of clothing.

Raymond W. Kelly, the New York City police commissioner, said on Sunday that the materials found in the Nissan Pathfinder — gasoline, propane, firecrackers and simple alarm clocks — also included eight bags of a granular substance, later determined to be nonexplosive grade of fertilizer, inside a 55-inch-tall metal gun locker.

The bomb, Mr. Kelly said, “would have caused casualties, a significant fireball.”

Had it exploded, said Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman, “It would have been, in all likelihood, a good possibility of people being killed, windows shattered, but not resulting in a building collapse.”

While the authorities said they were treating the failed bombing — described as a “one-off” by Janet Napolitano, the homeland security secretary — as a potential terrorist attack, they said there was no evidence of a continued threat to the city.

Additional patrols will be placed in Midtown, Mr. Kelly said, but no significant increase in the city’s police presence was planned.

F.B.I. agents and detectives had identified and were seeking to interview the owner of the Pathfinder, which was traced to Connecticut. The owner’s name was not made public.

No motive had been determined in the attempted bombing, and federal and local officials said there was no evidence to support a claim of responsibility issued Sunday by a Pakistani Taliban group that has a reputation for making far-fetched attempts to take credit for attacks.

The police and F.B.I. officials are also investigating a separate tip received by a news organization, but Mr. Kelly said it had not turned up any suspects.

Investigators were reviewing surveillance footage that showed an unidentified man walking away from West 45th Street, where the Nissan Pathfinder had been parked. The police said the man was a “person of interest.” The man was seen in Shubert Alley, which runs between 44th and 45th Streets, looking furtively over his shoulder and removing a dark shirt, revealing a red one underneath, officials said. The man then stuffed the dark shirt into a bag, officials said.

Asked if he considered the failed bombing the work of terrorists, Mr. Kelly said: “A terrorist act doesn’t necessarily have to be conducted by an organization. An individual can do it on their own.”

Mr. Kelly held his briefing as Times Square experienced an uneasy return to normalcy after a night of high drama that saw the evacuation of thousands of tourists and theatergoers. All Broadway shows ran as scheduled on Sunday, playing on streets where, just hours before, onlookers watched behind orange netting as a police bomb squad used a robot to break into the smoke-filled Pathfinder, which was discovered about 6:30 p.m.

Two street vendors had flagged down a mounted police officer after they noticed smoke coming from the Pathfinder, which had been parked haphazardly at the curb with its engine running and its flashers on. The area was cleared so the police could examine the vehicle, which was first seen on video surveillance cameras at 6:28 p.m., heading west on West 45th Street.

The Pathfinder was brought to a forensics center in Jamaica, Queens, where investigators were scouring it for DNA evidence and hairs, fibers and fingerprints. No fingerprints have yet been found, officials said, but analysis was in its early stages.

F.B.I. agents and detectives from the Joint Terrorist Task Force were also trying to determine where the three canisters of propane and two red plastic five-gallon containers of gasoline in the Pathfinder had been purchased.

The gun locker, which weighed about 75 pounds empty and upward of 200 pounds with the eight bags of fertilizer in it, could provide important clues because it was likely to be more easily traced than many of the other items found in the S.U.V.

The weight of the locker and the material inside raised questions as to whether it might have required more than one person to load it into the vehicle.

Identifying the owner of the Pathfinder — an important development, according to one official — was achieved through the S.U.V.’s vehicle identification number, which had been stripped from the car’s dashboard but was stamped on other car parts, like the engine block and axle.

Initially, investigators believed the last owner was in Texas and had donated the car to a charity in North Carolina, one official said. But that information proved to be incorrect.

The license plate on the S.U.V. was connected to a different vehicle that was awaiting repairs in Stratford, Conn., where F.B.I. agents and the local police awoke the owner of the repair shop at 3 a.m. Sunday.

The shop owner, Wayne LeBlanc, who runs Kramer’s Used Auto Parts, said that the authorities had seized a black Ford F-150 pickup truck. “We’re trying to help them identify who took the plates,” he said.

The S.U.V. had no E-ZPass, but license plate readers and cameras at the area’s tollbooths were being checked to determine where the car had entered Manhattan, one official said.

Most of the ingredients of the explosive device could have been bought at a home-supply store. The canisters of propane were similar to those used for barbecue grills. The firecrackers were consumer-grade M-88s sold legally in some states, including Pennsylvania.

The device was found in the back of the S.U.V., Mr. Kelly said, with the gasoline cans closest to the back seat and the gun locker behind them. The fertilizer was in clear plastic bags bearing the logo of a store that the police declined to identify.

The wires from battery-powered fluorescent clocks ran into the gun locker, where a metal pressure-cooker pot contained a thicket of wires and more M-88s, Mr. Kelly said.

“The detonation device, it was believed that the timers would ignite the can of explosives, and that would cause the five-gallon cans to go on fire and then explode the propane tanks and have some effect on that rifle box,” Mr. Kelly said.

Investigators believed that the fuses on the firecrackers had been lighted, but they did not explode, officials said. The burning fuses apparently ignited a portion of the Pathfinder’s interior, causing a small fire that filled the inside with smoke, one law enforcement official said.

Another official said that pops heard by a firefighter as he approached the vehicle might have been made by the fireworks failing to fully detonate.

Investigators were reviewing similarities between the incident in Times Square and coordinated attacks in the summer of 2007 at a Glasgow airport and a London neighborhood of nightclubs and theaters. Both attacks involved cars containing propane and gasoline that did not explode. Those attacks, the authorities believed, had their roots in Iraq.

“You can find similarities among different attacks, but there is nothing that we have at this point that has established that link,” Mr. Browne said.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said that “so far, there is no evidence that any of this has anything to do with one of the recognized terrorist organizations.”

Meanwhile, a Homeland Security official said that the Transportation Security Administration had increased security outside airports to counter threats like car bombs.

The agency held a conference call Sunday night with federal officials at airports in the New York City region to discuss increased security at departure gates.

The authorities said they are studying hundreds of hours of surveillance footage from more than 80 cameras, including images of the man leaving the scene of the S.U.V. that were shot by a tourist in Times Square. Detectives flew by helicopter to Pennsylvania to interview the tourist.

The police and F.B.I. officials were also investigating a 911 call placed around 4 a.m. Sunday that described the failed bombing as a diversion before a bigger explosion, two law enforcement officials said, although Mr. Kelly said there was no record of that call.

The S.U.V. was parked near the headquarters of Viacom, fueling suspicions that the attack was related to a controversy surrounding “South Park,” the Comedy Central cartoon program that recently censored an episode that portrayed the Prophet Muhammad. Viacom owns Comedy Central, and police have not ruled out the connection.


Reporting was contributed by Michael Barbaro, Micah Cohen, Patrick Healy, Steve Kenny, Ray Rivera and Michael S. Schmidt in New York and Eric Lipton in Washington.

    Police Seek Man Taped Near Bomb Scene, NYT, 2.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/03/nyregion/03timessquare.html

U.S. Joins Search for Times Sq. Suspect

May 2, 2010
The New York Times
By AL BAKER, WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM and MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM

Federal authorities have joined the search for a suspect who planted a crude car bomb of propane, gasoline and fireworks in a Nissan Pathfinder found smoking in the heart of Times Square on Saturday evening, prompting the evacuation of thousands of tourists and theatergoers on a warm and busy night.

Although the device had apparently started to detonate, there was no explosion, and early on Sunday the authorities were reviewing surveillance tapes and forensic evidence as they sought out a motive.

“We are very lucky,” Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said at a 2:15 a.m. press conference. “We avoided what could have been a very deadly event.”

A large swath of Midtown — from 43rd Street to 48th Street, and from Sixth to Eighth Avenues — was closed for much of the evening after the Pathfinder was discovered just off Broadway on 45th Street. Several theaters and stores, as well as a portion of the Marriott Marquis Hotel, were evacuated. The streets and hotels have since reopened.

Federal authorities said the incident appeared to be an isolated one, and that there was no evidence of an ongoing threat to the city.

“We are treating it as if it could be a potential terrorist attack,” Janet Napolitano, the Homeland Security secretary, told CNN, one of several television appearances she made on Sunday morning.

The bomb itself was not a sophisticated device, Ms. Napolitano said on ABC’s “This Week.” She said there was no clear sense about how large the explosion might have been. “Right now, we have no evidence other than it is a one-off,” she said.

On Sunday, police and F.B.I. officials were also investigating a 911 call placed at around 4 .a.m. on Sunday, several officials said. The caller, who one official said sounded intelligent, admonished the 911 dispatcher not to interrupt him until he was finished and then said there would be a massive explosion soon and the car in Times Square was only a diversion.

The call came from a payphone at West 53rd Street and Seventh Avenue, which detectives have since dusted for fingerprints, the officials said.

It remained unclear what link, if any, existed between the caller and the failed car bomb from hours earlier, the officials said.

The Pathfinder was towed by police to a forensic facility in Jamaica, Queens, where investigators are scouring it for fingerprints and other DNA evidence, such as skin cells, saliva, blood or hair follicles. No prints have yet been found, officials said, but the analysis is still in its early stages.

The authorities were also examining the incendiary materials discovered inside the Pathfinder by a police bomb squad on Sunday: three canisters of propane, similar to those used for barbecue grills, and two red five-gallon cans of gasoline.

Consumer-grade fireworks, resembling a model known as M-80s, were taped around the outside of the gasoline cans, according to several people briefed on the contents of the car. Two clocks with batteries, including one that resembled a child’s toy, were connected to the device by small wires.

Investigators believe that the fuses on the firecrackers had been lit, but they did not explode, the people said. The burning fuses apparently ignited a portion of the car’s interior, causing a small fire that filled the inside of the car with smoke, one law enforcement official said.

Another official said that the popping noises heard by a firefighter as he approached the vehicle may have been made by the fireworks failing to fully detonate.

Investigators were reviewing similarities between the incident in Times Square and coordinated attacks in the summer of 2007 that targeted a Glasgow airport and a neighborhood in London of nightclubs and theaters. Both incidents involved cars containing propane and gasoline that did not explode. Those attacks, the authorities believed, had their roots in Iraq.

“You can find similarities among different attacks, but there is nothing that we have at this point that has established that link,” said Deputy Commissioner Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman, who noted that the London and Glasgow incidents stand out among the others the department is reviewing.

Investigators from Homeland Security are also collaborating on the case.

Mr. Bloomberg plans to treat the mounted officer who discovered the car bomb to a dinner on Sunday night at a restaurant in Times Square, to demonstrate, aides said, that the area is safe and has returned to a state of normalcy. They will eat at Blue Fin, at the W Hotel on 47th Street, around 7 p.m.

The incident unfolded on Saturday as the mayor and Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly attended the black-tie White House correspondents’ dinner in Washington. At the event, Mr. Kelly repeatedly left the ballroom to receive updates from his deputies in New York, and he briefed Mr. Bloomberg several times.

As the seriousness of the threat became apparent, the two cut short their evening plans and flew back to Manhattan, arriving around 12:30 a.m. Mr. Bloomberg addressed reporters at the late-night press conference in his formal attire of a tuxedo and red bow tie.

According to city officials, the dark green Nissan S.U.V. first appeared on video surveillance cameras at 6:28 p.m., driving west on 45th Street.

Moments later, a T-shirt vendor on the sidewalk saw smoke coming out of vents near the back seat of the S.U.V., which was now parked awkwardly at the curb with its engine running and its hazard lights on. The vendor called to a mounted police officer, the mayor said, who smelled gunpowder when he approached the S.U.V. and called for assistance. The police began evacuating Times Square, starting with businesses along Seventh Avenue, including a Foot Locker store and a McDonald’s.

Police officers from the emergency service unit and firefighters flooded the area and were troubled by the hazard lights and running engine, and by the fact that the S.U.V. was oddly angled in the street. At this point, a firefighter from Ladder 4 reported hearing several “pops” from within the vehicle. The police also learned that the Pathfinder had the wrong license plates on it.

Members of the Police Department’s bomb squad donned protective gear, broke the Pathfinder’s back windows and sent in a “robotic device” to “observe” it, said Mr. Browne, the police spokesman.

Inside, they discovered the cans of propane and gasoline, along with consumer-grade fireworks — the apparent source of the “pops” — and the rudimentary timing device, the mayor said. He said the device “looked amateurish.”

Mr. Browne said: “It appeared it was in the process of detonating, but it malfunctioned.”

Bomb squad officers also discovered a two-by-two-by-four-foot metal box — described as a “gun locker” — in the S.U.V. that was taken to the Police Department’s firing range at Rodman’s Neck in the Bronx to be examined. It was not immediately known what, if anything, was inside it, but officials said that technicians from the bomb squad might attempt to open or detonate it.

The other components of the bomb are also being examined at the firing range.

Officials said they had no reports of anyone seen running from the vehicle. Mr. Kelly said police were scouring the area for any additional videotapes but noted that the S.U.V.’s windows were tinted, which could further hamper any efforts to identify those inside. Some of the surveillance cameras nearby were located in closed businesses, and the mayor made clear it would take time to review all available tapes.

“We have no idea who did this or why,” Mr. Bloomberg said.

Kevin B. Barry, a former supervisor in the New York Police Department bomb squad, said that if the device had functioned, “it would be more of an incendiary event” than an explosion.

The license plates on the Nissan were registered to another vehicle — a Ford pickup truck that was taken to a junkyard near Bridgeport, Conn., within the last two weeks, according to a law enforcement official. The previous owner of the Ford was interviewed Saturday night by the F.B.I., but it did not appear he was regarded as a suspect. Still, the junkyard was considered a primary target of the initial investigation.

The S.U.V.’s standard vehicle identification number had been removed, Mr. Bloomberg said, and investigators were examining the vehicle to see if the number appeared elsewhere.

The White House said President Obama had been briefed on the episode and had pledged federal assistance in the investigation.

Around 6:30 a.m. on Sunday, the T-shirt vendor who first alerted the police returned to the scene, along with several other vendors whom he worked with.

“I’m fed up,” said the vendor, who declined to give his name, but said that he was a Vietnam veteran. “We’ve been up since 6 a.m. of yesterday morning.”

The vendor, who wore a white fedora, had a limp and walked with a cane, was swarmed by television cameras as he tried to make his way to a taxicab on 44th Street.

As he got into the taxi, he was asked by a reporter what he had to say to New Yorkers.

“See something, say something,” he said.

Times Square on a Saturday night is one of the busiest and most populated locations in the city, and has long been seen as a likely target for some kind of attack.

Most of the streets that had been closed around Times Square reopened around 5:15 a.m.; traffic on 45th Street opened at 7:30 a.m., about 90 minutes after the Pathfinder had been towed away.

For most of the night, a maze of metal barricades kept pedestrians south of 43rd Street. In the center of Times Square, dozens of police and fire vehicles were parked on Broadway and Seventh Avenue, but in Times Square between 42nd and 43rd Streets, tourists milled or sat at tables, much as they do on any other Saturday night. On Eighth Avenue at around 11:30 p.m., people carrying theater playbills were directed west on 44th Street out to Eighth Avenue.

On Eighth Avenue police officers used large pieces of orange netting to corral pedestrians and separate them from traffic.

Many people stayed to watch after being shut out of Broadway shows or prevented from getting back to their hotels, trading rumors about what was happening. Many guests at the New York Marriott Marquis hotel at 1535 Broadway were being kept in an auditorium at the hotel, Mr. Kelly said.

Some theaters were evacuated, but many were not, according to a spokeswoman for the Broadway League, the trade group of theater owners and producers. The spokeswoman, Elisa Shevitz, said she would not have all the details about how many theaters were affected until Sunday.

For some Broadway shows the curtains went up 15 to 30 minutes late. Shows that started late included “Red” and “God of Carnage” — which are both playing at houses on the block of 45th Street where the bomb was found — and “In the Heights.”

Onlookers crowded against the barricades, taking pictures with cellphones, although only a swarm of fire trucks and police cars was visible.

Pota Manolakos, an accountant from Montreal, was not able to return to her room at the Edison Hotel with her husband and 6-year-old son for several hours.

She said she asked a police officer what was going on, and the officer told her: “Lady, take your kid and get out of here. There’s a threat, take your kid and get out of here.”

“We have nothing with us except for what we have on,” Ms. Manolakos said.

Gabrielle Zecha and Taj Heniser, visiting from Seattle, had tickets to see “Next to Normal” at the Booth Theater on 45th Street but could not get into the 8 p.m. show because the area was blocked off. But they made the best of the spectacle. “It’s a whole different kind of show,” Ms. Heniser said, adding, “It’s almost the equivalent of a $150 show.”

A group of people on a high school senior trip from Jacksonville, Fla., said they were stuck for about an hour and a half in the Bubba Gump restaurant at 44th Street and Seventh Avenue.

“A lot of people were getting tense who were there longer than we were,” said Billy Wilkerson, 39, a police sergeant in Jacksonville and a chaperone for the trip. “It’s so good to get out, but it was exhilarating.”

He said he was impressed by his New York counterparts. “I just sat back and learned a lot,” he said.

Fabyane Pereira, 35, a tourist from Brazil, said the episode would not deter her from another visit. “I feel sorry for America,” she said. “I’m at your guys’ side.”

In December, the police closed Times Square for nearly two hours as they investigated a suspiciously parked van, delaying the rehearsal of the New Year’s ball drop. However, the van turned out to contain nothing but clothing.


Reporting was contributed by Michael Barbaro, Micah Cohen, Patrick Healy, Steve Kenny, Ray Rivera and Michael S. Schmidt in New York and Eric Lipton in Washington.

    U.S. Joins Search for Times Sq. Suspect, NYT, 2.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/03/nyregion/03timessquare.html

Vendors Who Alerted Police Called Heroes

May 2, 2010
The New York Times
By COREY KILGANNON and MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT

Even in Times Square, where little seems unusual, the Nissan Pathfinder parked just off Broadway on the south side of 45th Street — engine running, hazard lights flashing, driver nowhere to be found — looked suspicious to the sidewalk vendors who regularly work this area.

And it was the keen eyes of at least two of them — both disabled Vietnam War veterans who say they are accustomed to alerting local police officers to pickpockets and hustlers — that helped point the authorities to the Pathfinder, illegally and unusually parked next to their merchandise of inexpensive handbags and $2.99 “I Love NY” T-shirts.

Shortly before 6:30 p.m. on Saturday, the vendors — Lance Orton and Duane Jackson, who both served during the Vietnam War and now rely on special sidewalk vending privileges for disabled veterans — said they told nearby officers about the Pathfinder, which had begun filling with smoke and then emitted sparks and popping sounds.

Over the next several hours, numerous firefighters and police officers — from patrol officers to those in specialized units — all did their part in minimizing the potential damage and handling a volatile situation. And on Sunday night, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg honored one of the officers, Wayne Rhatigan, by taking him to dinner in Times Square.

But in a city hungry for heroes, the spotlight first turned to the vendors. Mr. Orton, a purveyor of T-shirts, ran from the limelight early Sunday morning as he spurned reporters’ questions while gathering his merchandise on a table near where the Pathfinder was parked.

When asked if he was proud of his actions, Mr. Orton, who said he had been selling on the street for about 20 years, replied: “Of course, man. I’m a veteran. What do you think?”

Mr. Jackson, on the other hand, embraced his newfound celebrity, receiving an endless line of people congratulating him while he sold cheap handbags, watches and pashmina scarves all day Sunday.

He told and retold his story to tourists, reporters and customers: how he heard the “pop, pop, pop” coming from the vehicle, and then detected “the smell of a cherry bomb or firecracker or something.”

“There are a bunch of us disabled vets selling here, and we’re used to being vigilant because we all know that freedom isn’t free,” said Mr. Jackson, 58, of Buchanan, N.Y.

“All of us vets here are the eyes and ears for the cops,” he said. “Whether it’s three-card monte games or thieves, we know the cops here by first name — we have their cell numbers,” said Mr. Jackson, who said that he had been a street vendor many years.

He spoke of his time in the Vietnam War — he served in the Navy from 1970 to 1973 aboard the aircraft carrier Ranger — and how as a street vendor he tended to a table near the World Trade Center during both the bombing in 1993 and the terrorist attack in 2001.

Officer Rhatigan was reserved about his role. He told reporters of the team effort involved — he referred to “guys with bomb suits” as “incredible heroes” — and recalled his first thoughts as he approached the Pathfinder.

He said the vehicle “reeked of gunpowder” and seemed oddly abandoned — “a little bit more than just a parked car with a cigarette in the ashtray.”

“It was just a combined effort of everybody,” he added. “That’s what we do.”

The first firefighters who arrived were responding to a report of a car fire at the site, but realized upon arrival that explosives could be in the vehicle, said Tom Meara, a battalion chief, who was at the scene.

Lt. Mike Barvels of Engine Company 54, also at the scene, said firefighters moved people away and readied fire hoses, but then decided to leave the vehicle untouched since the popping and sparking indicated the possible presence of a bomb.

“We took a defensive position and cleared people away,” Lieutenant Barvels said.

On 45th Street on Sunday, tourists seemed aware of the vendors’ role in alerting the police. Mr. Orton was not working at his usual spot, but Mr. Jackson was.

At his vending table, one tourist, Wayne Jackson, a self-described born-again Christian from Saskatchewan, prayed with Mr. Jackson for several minutes and asked God to “alert us to more attempts on this brave country.”

Several police officers, in bulletproof vests, shook the vendor’s hand. A woman with a British accent rushed up and said: “Are you the one who saved us? Thank you.”

“It could have been a lot worse,” Mr. Jackson told a bank of television cameras and then turned to say to a customer, “That’s $8 on the watches.”

As for Mr. Orton, he rested on Sunday at a relative’s house, leaving others to talk on his behalf. “When he was in Vietnam, he said they had to make decisions and judgments from their gut, from their own feelings,” said Miriam Cintron, the mother of Mr. Orton’s son. “His instinct was telling him something’s not right. I guess he was right.”

She said Mr. Orton would mediate disputes between the police and other vendors, and when something did not look right, he would alert the police. “He always said, ‘Downtown is where they’re going to come to, and I’m going to be right there,’ ” Ms. Cintron said.

When Mr. Orton left Times Square about 7 a.m. on Sunday, he did so to a hero’s reception. As he walked down the street, employees from Junior’s restaurant stood outside applauding him. He briefly entered the restaurant before heading toward 44th Street.

Using a cane and wearing a white fedora, Mr. Orton limped away and hopped a cab home to the Bronx, but not before repeating a terror-watch mantra: “See something, say something.”

    Vendors Who Alerted Police Called Heroes, NYT, 2.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/03/nyregion/03vendor.html

Bomb Scare Reveals Another Side of Times Square

May 2, 2010
The New York Times
By COLIN MOYNIHAN and MICAH COHEN

On a typical warm weekend night, Times Square teems with visitors: theater fans taking a post-show stroll down Broadway; tourists staying in high-rise hotels; suburban teenagers who gather to gawk at the jumbo-sized neon signs that fill the square with light.

But when the police noticed white smoke billowing from a dark-green Nissan Pathfinder on 45th Street near Seventh Avenue, and then discovered the makings of a crude car bomb inside, the normal hubbub was replaced by a different sort of spectacle.

Twelve blocks, from West 43rd Street to West 48th Street between Sixth Avenue and Eighth Avenue, were cordoned off with metal barricades. The streets and pedestrian malls were filled with ambulances, fire trucks and cars and vans full of police officers. Teams of officers wearing helmets and carrying automatic rifles stood on corners. The bomb squad showed up with a remote-controlled robot and officers wearing blast-proof suits.

Onlookers assembled, leaning against the barricade, posing for pictures and asking one another what was going on. The neon lights still flickered, competing with the flashing lights of the emergency vehicles. Tourists still showed up for a glimpse of the square. But for a few hours in the dead of night, with traffic diverted and throngs dispersed, the center of Times Square was quiet. Well, almost quiet.

Bruno St. Clara, a 25-year-old carpenter from Brazil, wandered through the crowd near the police substation on West 43rd Street. He said he had walked north from his hotel on West 34th Street.

“We saw on television that there was a bomb,” he said. “I just wanted to check it out.”

Outside the sealed-off zone, plenty of other travelers were second-guessing their decision to book a room in Times Square. Many people staying there spent the better part of the night waiting to hear when they would be permitted to return to their rooms.

Then there were those who willingly lingered, captivated by the drama playing out in front of them. Christina Paiva, from Carle Place, on Long Island, spent her 17th birthday glued to the barricades with a group of friends. Originally, they said, they had planned to visit M&M World at West 48th Street and Broadway, but they found themselves instead directed south by police officers as emergency vehicles arrived, lights flashing and sirens blaring.

“It’s very upsetting,” Ms. Paiva said.

But why had the group chosen to stay?

“It’s scary,” Sabrina Papez, 17, clarified. “But it’s also intriguing.”

As the hour grew later, the crowd thinned. An ABC news ticker near 44th Street read: “NYC’s Times Square evacuated in bomb scare.” The Dow Jones ticker reported on the Kentucky Derby. Around 2 a.m. a group of friends from Walled Lake, Mich., arrived, eager to see Times Square.

“I expected it to be overwhelmingly crowded,” said Erica Mitchell, 23.

Her friend, Chelsea Gaunt, agreed.

“I never knew a city could be this quiet,” she said.

    Bomb Scare Reveals Another Side of Times Square, NYT, 2.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/03/nyregion/03scene.html

U.S. Approves Targeted Killing of American Cleric

April 6, 2010
The New York Times

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration has taken the extraordinary step of authorizing the targeted killing of an American citizen, the radical Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who is believed to have shifted from encouraging attacks on the United States to directly participating in them, intelligence and counterterrorism officials said Tuesday.

Mr. Awlaki, who was born in New Mexico and spent years in the United States as an imam, is in hiding in Yemen. He has been the focus of intense scrutiny since he was linked to Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychiatrist accused of killing 13 people at Fort Hood, Tex., in November, and then to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian man charged with trying to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner on Dec. 25.

American counterterrorism officials say Mr. Awlaki is an operative of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the affiliate of the terror network in Yemen and Saudi Arabia. They say they believe that he has become a recruiter for the terrorist network, feeding prospects into plots aimed at the United States and at Americans abroad, the officials said.

It is extremely rare, if not unprecedented, for an American to be approved for targeted killing, officials said. A former senior legal official in the administration of George W. Bush said he did not know of any American who was approved for targeted killing under the former president.

But the director of national intelligence, Dennis C. Blair, told a House hearing in February that such a step was possible. “We take direct actions against terrorists in the intelligence community,” he said. “If we think that direct action will involve killing an American, we get specific permission to do that.” He did not name Mr. Awlaki as a target.

The step taken against Mr. Awlaki, which occurred earlier this year, is a vivid illustration of his rise to prominence in the constellation of terrorist leaders. But his popularity as a cleric, whose lectures on Islamic scripture have a large following among English-speaking Muslims, means any action against him could rebound against the United States in the larger ideological campaign against Al Qaeda.

The possibility that Mr. Awlaki might be added to the target list was reported by The Los Angeles Times in January, and Reuters reported on Tuesday that he was approved for capture or killing.

“The danger Awlaki poses to this country is no longer confined to words,” said an American official, who like other current and former officials interviewed for this article spoke of the classified counterterrorism measures on the condition of anonymity. “He’s gotten involved in plots.”

The official added: “The United States works, exactly as the American people expect, to overcome threats to their security, and this individual — through his own actions — has become one. Awlaki knows what he’s done, and he knows he won’t be met with handshakes and flowers. None of this should surprise anyone.”

As a general principle, international law permits the use of lethal force against individuals and groups that pose an imminent threat to a country, and officials said that was the standard used in adding names to the list of targets. In addition, Congress approved the use of military force against Al Qaeda after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. People on the target list are considered to be military enemies of the United States and therefore not subject to the ban on political assassination first approved by President Gerald R. Ford.

Both the C.I.A. and the military maintain lists of terrorists linked to Al Qaeda and its affiliates who are approved for capture or killing, former officials said. But because Mr. Awlaki is an American, his inclusion on those lists had to be approved by the National Security Council, the officials said.

At a panel discussion in Washington on Tuesday, Representative Jane Harman, Democrat of California and chairwoman of a House subcommittee on homeland security, called Mr. Awlaki “probably the person, the terrorist, who would be terrorist No. 1 in terms of threat against us.”

    U.S. Approves Targeted Killing of American Cleric, NYT, 6.4.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/07/world/middleeast/07yemen.html

Court Ruling on Wiretap Is a Challenge for Obama

April 1, 2010
The New York Times
By JAMES RISEN and CHARLIE SAVAGE

WASHINGTON — As a presidential candidate, Senator Barack Obama declared that it was “unconstitutional and illegal” for the Bush administration to conduct warrantless surveillance of Americans. Many of his supporters said likewise.

But since Mr. Obama won the election, administration officials have avoided repeating that position. They have sidestepped questions about the legality of the program in Congressional testimony. And in lawsuits over the program, they followed a strategy intended to avoid ever answering the question by asking courts to dismiss the lawsuits because the litigation could reveal national security secrets.

But the ruling on Wednesday by a federal judge that one instance of such spying had been “unlawful electronic surveillance” may force onto the table a discussion of how aggressively the Obama administration should continue to defend from judicial review the contentious Bush-era counterterrorism policy.

David Golove, a New York University law professor who specializes in executive power issues, said the ruling had highlighted the “awkwardness” of the Obama administration’s ambivalent stance toward its predecessor’s surveillance program.

“They have a lot of discomfort with the legal arguments the Bush administration made, but they’ve tried to avoid having to acknowledge too publicly those differences or to air them in court,” he said.

Representative Rush Holt, a New Jersey Democrat who is the chairman of the House Select Intelligence Oversight Panel and a critic of the warrantless-wiretapping program, said: “Where does this leave the Obama administration? That’s a good question.”

The administration does not yet have to make any decision about what to do about the case because the judge, Vaughn Walker, has not yet entered a final order. He has given the plaintiffs until April 16 to decide whether to drop other claims and to submit a proposal for damages the government owes them.

But if the ruling stands, the Obama administration will have to decide whether to appeal it — thereby trying to wipe the decision off the books.

Decisions about appeals are usually made by Solicitor General Elena Kagan, but current and former officials said the deliberations were virtually certain to reach Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and the White House.

There are some reasons that the administration might appeal, legal specialists said. Among them, it may not want Judge Walker’s narrow interpretation of the state secrets privilege to stand because it might influence other cases, and appealing on those narrow grounds would allow the administration to still avoid engaging on whether the program was legal.

In addition, the administration may fear political attacks from the right if it agrees to pay damages to the plaintiffs, which include an Islamic charity in Oregon, Al Haramain, which the government has said had links to Al Qaeda. (The charity is defunct and its assets are frozen, however.)

But several legal specialists said that the administration may instead want to let the ruling stand. That would terminate a case that has been a political headache for the administration since the month after Mr. Obama took office, when the Justice Department’s decision to keep pressing forward with the Bush administration’s assertion of the state secrets privilege in the matter created an uproar among liberals.

A decision not to appeal would also ensure that the ruling against the government went no higher than a district court judge’s decision, which — unlike one by an appeals court — would not set a binding precedent.

“This is a very hard decision for them,” said John P. Elwood, a Justice Department lawyer in the Bush administration. “The thing that makes it hard to appeal is that they apparently are of two minds about it and don’t want to be pinned down on what they think of it now, but also the fact that they might end up with just as bad a precedent from the court one rung up.”

Still, if the administration lets the judgment stand, Mr. Holder — who in 2008 said Mr. Bush had authorized the National Security Agency’s wiretapping program in “direct defiance of federal law” — would be left with a ruling from a federal judge that such warrantless wiretapping by government officials was illegal. That could prompt calls to begin a criminal investigation. It is a felony to violate the surveillance law requiring warrants.

“Despite the government trying to throw up every procedural roadblock imaginable in this case, the judge has ruled that the Bush administration broke the law,” Senator Russ Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat who is on both the Senate Judiciary and Intelligence Committees, said Thursday.

Most of the lawsuits brought against the government over the program in the past have faltered because the plaintiffs could not prove that they were spied upon.

But Jon Eisenberg, a lawyer for Al Haramain, observed Thursday that if Mr. Holder chose to open a criminal investigation, he could easily obtain all the evidence of wrongdoing he needed.

“If Holder wanted to be really aggressive, he could go into the Justice Department’s files and pick out some of the people who were wiretapped and prosecute those cases,” Mr. Eisenberg said. “But do they want to do that? No. The Obama administration made a decision a long time ago that they are not going to prosecute Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program.”

Mr. Holder already faced a similar decision over whether to investigate Central Intelligence Agency interrogators who conducted harsh interrogations of detainees during the Bush years despite antitorture laws.

But Mr. Holder decided not to investigate any interrogators for conduct that at the time had been blessed as lawful by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. That office wrote similar memorandums declaring that warrantless surveillance was lawful, and Mr. Golove, the New York University law professor, said that precedent was likely to be repeated.

“I assume Holder would say there is the same rationale — if they were acting under Office of Legal Counsel authority, we’re not going to investigate them,” he said. “Does he have to announce that? I don’t know — it depends on how much political pressure is brought to bear.”

    Court Ruling on Wiretap Is a Challenge for Obama, NYT, 2.4.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/02/us/politics/02nsa.html