Five Sept. 11 Suspects to Face Trial in New York

Self-proclaimed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other Guantanamo Bay detainees will be sent to New York to face trial in a civilian federal court, an Obama administration official said Friday.

Attorney General Eric Holder plans to announce the decision later in the morning.

President Obama, speaking in Tokyo, said he will insist that Mohammed be subject to “the most exacting demands of justice” and called the move both a prosecutorial and a national security decision.

“I’m absolutely convinced that Khalid Sheik Mohammad will be subject to the most exacting demands of justice. The American people insist on it. My administration will insist on it,” he said.

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Al Qaeda Calls For Home-made Bomb Attacks in West

The leader of al Qaeda’s wing in the Arabian Peninsula called on militants to attack airports and trains in the West and said they could easily make bombs from household materials, the group’s Internet magazine said.

The Islamist group has been trying to secure small victories to maintain its feared image after its leaders’ threats to carry out large-scale attacks on Western targets have been discounted as words without deeds, analysts say.

Abu Basir Nasser al-Wahayshi, in an article in the e-magazine Sada al-Malahem, also urged militants to assault secular media figures and columnists who promote the policies of rulers in the world’s top oil exporting region.

“You do not need to exert great effort or spend a lot of money to make 10 grams of explosives, more or less. Do not spend a long time searching for materials as they already exist in your mother’s kitchen,” Wahayshi wrote in the article, posted on an Islamist website on Sunday.

“Make them (bombs) in the shape of a bomb you hurl, or detonate through a timer or a remote detonater or a martyrdom-seeker belt or any electrical appliance.”

Wahayshi said bombers should attack countries involved in wars in Muslim countries as well as government figures and security bodies in the Middle East.

via Al Qaeda calls for home-made bomb attacks in West | Reuters.

DHS Reviewing Vulnerability in West Coast Power Grid

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is looking at a report by a research scientist in China that shows how a well-placed attack against a small power subnetwork could trigger a cascading failure of the entire West Coast power grid.

Jian-Wei Wang, a network analyst at China’s Dalian University of Technology, used publicly available information to model how the West Coast power grid and its component subnetworks are connected. Wang and another colleague then investigated how a major outage in one subnetwork would affect adjacent subnetworks, according to an article in New Scientist.

The aim of the research was to study potential weak spots on the West Coast grid, where an outage on one subnetwork would result in a cascading failure across the entire network. A cascading failure occurs when an outage on one network results in an adjacent network becoming overloaded, triggering a similar set of failures across the entire network. The massive blackouts in the Northeast in August 2003, which affected close to 10 million, were the result of such a cascading failure.

Wang’s research was expected to show that an outage in a heavily loaded network would result in smaller surrounding networks becoming overwhelmed and causing cascading blackouts. Instead, what the research showed was that under certain conditions, an attacker targeting a lightly loaded subnetwork would be able to cause far more of the grid to trip and fail, New Scientist reported quoting Wang. The article does not describe Wang’s research (paid subscription required) or any further details of the attack.

Wang did not reply to an e-mailed request for comment seeking details on the report.

Wang’s report, which appears to have been largely overlooked until the publication of the New Scientist article last week, was completed last November and has been available online since March.

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New bin Laden Tape Intercepted, ‘Our Family Pakistan’

A new audio tape, reportedly from Osama bin Laden, entitled ‘Our Family Pakistan’ has been intercepted.

Targeted Actionable Monitoring Center (TAM-C) of the Institute of Terrorism Research and Response is analyzing.

UPDATE:

Osama Bin Laden told Pakistanis their leaders are “allies of Satan” in a newly released tape, urging them to fight the offensive in tribal areas where Al Qaeda and the Taliban are entrenched.

Bin Laden zeroed in on the Swat Valley and the Pashtun tribal belt on the Afghan border for his 32nd taped rant since the 9/11 attacks.

The Pakistani army has fought extremists in Swat who are imposing a brutal version of shariah, or Islamic law. The army has also moved against Waziristan – home turf of Taliban, Al Qaeda leaders and friendly warlords.

“Are you for the establishment of the shariah or are you for those who wage war against it, from America, [Pakistani President] Zardari and his aides?” Bin Laden said, according to a transcript of the tape provided to the Daily News.

“Zardari and his army are the allies of Satan.”

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