DC Security Scare Results In Arrest At Metro Station

A security scare Tuesday night, in Northwest D.C. resulted in the arrest of a man after he threatened to blow up the Friendship Heights Metro station, according to a criminal complaint in the case.

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It was a chaotic scene Tuesday night in Friendship Heights when three blocks of Wisconsin Avenue Northwest were cleared of cars and pedestrians. Adjacent buildings and restaurants were evacuated, including both Mazza Gallerie and Chevy Chase Pavilion.

It all happened because of a young man who was caught on camera by FOX 5 sitting in on the sidewalk along Wisconsin Avenue wearing a blue sweater and handcuffs.

Police say the man’s name is Ahamed Ali, based on a driver license from Bangladesh. Witnesses and police say Ali had been hanging around Chevy Chase Pavilion for a couple of days, taking notes, making threats, and acting strangely.

Now, according to a police report obtained by FOX 5, more is known about what had concerned passersby and police.

Investigators say Ali was overheard calling out: “I’m not scared to die! I will kill you! I will blow people up and the Metro!”

“He made some statements, threatening individuals,” said Sgt. Guy Poirier of the Joint Terrorist Task Force. “At that point we had to take him at his word, what he meant.”

Sgt. Poirier says this was not an overblown response.

“Metropolitan Police Department takes everything serious,” he said. “We take it as a real event until we can prove otherwise.”

Police say they arrested Ali while he sat near the Starbucks kiosk inside the Chevy Chase Pavilion, only steps from the Friendship Heights Metro station.

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Homeland Security Seeks 1000 Cybersecurity Pros

The Department of Homeland Security  has been given the go-ahead to hire up to 1,000 new cybersecurity pros over the next three years, secretary Janet Napolitano said today.

The new hiring authority will let DHS, a key agency in the nation’s cybersecurity strategy, fill positions in risk and strategic analysis, incident response, vulnerability detection, intelligence, investigation, and network and systems engineering.

The agency says it doesn’t currently foresee having to fill all 1,000 positions, but Homeland Security for the National Protection and Programs Directorate and director of the National Cyber Security Center Phil Reitinger told InformationWeek last month that hiring qualified cybersecurity pros was his top priority.

“I have some awesome people here at DHS, we have a great team, but we just don’t have enough of them yet, and we’re in strict competition with the private sector to get the best and brightest to work on these issues,” Reitinger said. “I’m a firm believer that organizations succeed or fail based on the people you have.

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DoD, Homeland Security Negotiate Pact to Help Keep Country Safe

An agreement between the departments of Defense and Homeland Security that calls for sharing some intelligence data with emergency operations centers nationwide is part of post-9/11 efforts to harden America against another terrorist attack, senior department officials said recently.

The more than 60 emergency operations centers — also known as “fusion centers” — are managed by state and local agencies. The centers collect information that can be used to combat terrorist threats or for responding to natural or man-made disasters.

Both the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 and the 9/11 Commission report published in 2004 state “that we were not doing sufficient information sharing between federal agencies and state and local agencies,” Michael McDaniel, deputy assistant secretary of defense for homeland defense strategy and force planning, said during a recent interview with The Pentagon Channel and American Forces Press Service reporters.

DHS became involved in helping state and local officials establish fusion centers in their jurisdictions, McDaniel said. “That was great as a first step. But, one of the questions still was: ‘How do you share this information?’” he said.

“The whole concept of a fusion center – what’s inherent in the word ‘fusion’ – is a collaboration of information across multiple agencies at multiple levels,” McDaniel said, “so that that information comes to a common center-of-gravity, if you will, and at that point is shared,” as needed, with analysts from different agencies, including those working at the state and local level.

Much of the nation’s intelligence-gathering capability is contained within the Defense Department, McDaniel said. The Defense Department and DHS, he said, have been collaborating over the past few years to provide intelligence information to state- and local-agency analysts.

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Plane Delayed In Lynchburg After Suspicious Comments

A flight heading to Charlotte from Lynchburg had to be delayed because of comments made by a passenger.

The 23-year-old man was in the lobby of the airport around 2:30 Sunday afternoon when he was overheard talking on his cell phone. Witnesses say he told whomever he was speaking with that the plane wouldn’t make it to Charlotte and that it would fall out of the sky.

He broke his phone in half when he was approached by Transportation Security Administration officials. He told them he had he was God, but he was injured so he couldn’t show them his powers.

He then told deputies with the Campbell County Sheriff’s Office that he had been treated at a mental hospital in West Virginia.

The man was taken to Lynchburg General Hospital on an emergency custody order for a mental evaluation. He was not charged with anything.

Explosives trained dogs searched his luggage, his car, and the airplane, but they didn’t find anything suspicious.

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Pakistan Strife Raises U.S. Doubts on Nuclear Arms

As the insurgency of the Taliban and Al Qaeda spreads in Pakistan, senior American officials say they are increasingly concerned about new vulnerabilities for Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, including the potential for militants to snatch a weapon in transport or to insert sympathizers into laboratories or fuel-production facilities.

The officials emphasized that there was no reason to believe that the arsenal, most of which is south of the capital, Islamabad, faced an imminent threat. President Obama said last week that he remained confident that keeping the country’s nuclear infrastructure secure was the top priority of Pakistan’s armed forces.

But the United States does not know where all of Pakistan’s nuclear sites are located, and its concerns have intensified in the last two weeks since the Taliban entered Buner, a district 60 miles from the capital. The spread of the insurgency has left American officials less willing to accept blanket assurances from Pakistan that the weapons are safe.

Pakistani officials have continued to deflect American requests for more details about the location and security of the country’s nuclear sites, the officials said.

Some of the Pakistani reluctance, they said, stemmed from longstanding concern that the United States might be tempted to seize or destroy Pakistan’s arsenal if the insurgency appeared about to engulf areas near Pakistan’s nuclear sites. But they said the most senior American and Pakistani officials had not yet engaged on the issue, a process that may begin this week, with President Asif Ali Zardari scheduled to visit Mr. Obama in Washington on Wednesday.

“We are largely relying on assurances, the same assurances we have been hearing for years,” said one senior official who was involved in the dialogue with Pakistan during the Bush years, and remains involved today. “The worse things get, the more strongly they hew to the line, ‘Don’t worry, we’ve got it under control.’ ”

In public, the administration has only hinted at those concerns, repeating the formulation that the Bush administration used: that it has faith in the Pakistani Army.

“I’m confident that we can make sure that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is secure,” Mr. Obama said Wednesday, “primarily, initially, because the Pakistani Army, I think, recognizes the hazards of those weapons falling into the wrong hands.” He added: “We’ve got strong military-to-military consultation and cooperation.”

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Next Two Weeks Critical to Pakistan’s Survival

Gen. David Petraeus, commander of U.S. Central Command, has told U.S. officials the next two weeks are critical to determining whether the Pakistani government will survive.

See related story here -  Taliban Nuclear Nightmare

“The Pakistanis have run out of excuses” and are “finally getting serious” about combating the threat from Taliban and Al Qaeda extremists operating out of Northwest Pakistan, the general added.

But Petraeus also said wearily that “we’ve heard it all before” from the Pakistanis and he is looking to see concrete action by the government to destroy the Taliban in the next two weeks before determining the United States’ next course of action, which is presently set on propping up the Pakistani government and military with counterinsurgency training and foreign aid.

Petraeus made these assessment in talks with lawmakers and Obama administration officials this week, according to individuals familiar with the discussions.

They said Petraeus and senior administration officials believe the Pakistani army, led by Chief of Staff Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, is “superior” to the civilian government, led by President Ali Zardari, and could conceivably survive even if Zardari’s government falls to the Taliban.

American officials have watched with anxiety as Taliban fighters advanced earlier this month to within 70 miles of the capital city of Islamabad. In recent days, the Pakistani army has sought to reverse that tide, retaking control over strategic points in the district of Buner even as the Taliban struck back by kidnapping scores of police and paramilitary troops.

The see-saw nature of the battles Wednesday demonstrated to U.S. officials that, as one put it to FOX News, “even with intent and superior technology, the capability may not be there” for the Pakistani army to defeat the extremists.

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Woman, 20, Jailed In SFA Massacre Threat

A 20-year-old Stephen F. Austin State University student was in jail Thursday, a day after her arrest on allegations that she posted signs on and near campus last week that threatened a deadly mass shooting.

Jennifer Grant, a sophomore from Palestine, is a tenant of The Grove, the off-campus apartment complex where several signs appeared April 16. They warned that “10 people will be killed and shot at The Grove.”

A notice on the university Web site said campus police arrested Grant and booked her into the Nacogdoches County Jail. The District Attorney’s Office had no record of an attorney for Grant. A jail official said she was being arraigned Thursday morning.

The signs were found on the second anniversary of the Virginia Tech massacre that left 32 people dead.

SFA Police Chief Marc Cossich said in Thursday’s Nacogdoches Daily Sentinel the investigation remained active but that no more arrests were expected. Cossich said information leading to the arrest came from a variety of sources.

Officials said it was too early to comment on a possible motive.

A student who said he knew Grant said he was surprised by the arrest.

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Report: al Qaeda Recruiting In Uk At Street Level

The al Qaeda terror network is able to “directly recruit British muslims at street level in the UK”, according to a ground-breaking new report by the UK’s premier anti-extremism think-tank.

The research paper produced by the Quilliam Foundation, just published in the US military journal, The Sentinel, says the success of attacks such as 7/7, compared with the failed bombings at Glasgow Airport and London’s West End, is proof of the “direct assistance” from senior al-Qaeda members to British homegrown terrorist, without which “few of these attacks would have ever been viable”.

Author James Brandon also rejects the consensus that al-Qaeda has adopted a strategy of “leaderless jihad”, recruiting and mobilizing followers purely through the internet. While counter-terrorism initiatives introduced since 9/11 have driven the movement underground, Brandon claims the evidence suggests al-Qaeda “continues to operate through a traditional hierarchical structure based on face-to-face contact” and is able to recruit directly in Britain.

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The report compiles evidence based on recent criminal trials to show how most of the major and successful terrorist plots in the post-9/11 era have had direct ties to high level al-Qaeda figures in the Afghanistan and Pakistan border region, calling into question the idea of terrorist self-starters’.

Brandon told the Sunday Herald: “People aren’t radicalised just by watching news about Iraq or Afghanistan or Gaza. It’s a much more complex process than that. And the key thing to understand is that there are actually people out deliberately trying to radicalise other people – people aren’t just self-radicalising. And once you understand that then it’s slightly easier to deal with, because if you can simply tackle the people involved in the radicalisation then the problem to an extent goes away.”

Terror expert David Capitanchik, formerly of Aberdeen university international relations department, said: “Unlike the IRA, which was one organisation and quite easy to infiltrate, it’s difficult to infiltrate al-Qaeda as the groups are very small.”

But professor Alex Schmid, director of St Andrews university’s centre for terrorism studies, criticised Brandon for drawing definitive conclusions from a “nebulous jihadi landscape”. He said: “I have been talking to people with access to classified intelligence and they have given me diametrically opposed accounts regarding the degree of control of core al-Qaeda on plots beyond Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Middle East.”

via Report Claims Alqaeda Can Recruit In Uk At Street Level (from Sunday Herald).

TSA Ramps Up Passenger Screening – Insists No Specific Threat

The Transportation Security Administration said Wednesday it is screening more passengers at airport gates, but not because of any specific threat.

Gate screening — which can involve anything from identification checks to hand-wand metal detectors — was implemented after Sept. 11 as an additional layer of security. It all but disappeared in 2003, when the TSA began screening all checked bags.

Although the TSA follows a “risk-based approach” when adding security measures, TSA spokeswoman Lara Uselding told the Associated Press that the move to restore random gate checks developed “as the agency evolved,” not because of a specific threat. The TSA collects intelligence from the FBI as well as state, local and national government agencies when forming new procedures.

The gate checks for passengers follow the establishment of an employee security program in 2007, which included random screenings. The checks aim to prevent weapons or other contraband being passed from an employee to a passenger before boarding, among other risks.

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Watch Out for Al Qaeda

We’re bombarded with bad news the credit markets could freeze, millions more could lose their jobs, and today’s recession could turn into a depression. But the danger we aren’t hearing about could outweigh them all: the increased risk of a catastrophic terrorist attack.

A careful study of Osama bin Laden’s videos, letters and Internet statements makes clear that Al Qaeda’s goal is more than to terrorize Americans or to drive us out of the Middle East. Bin Laden believes that Al Qaeda can bring about the economic collapse of the United States and to achieve this goal, he has adopted a strategy of targeting America’s financial centers and economic infrastructure.

Bin Laden cites the 9/11 attacks as proof that this strategy can succeed. In a November 2004 videotape broadcast on Al Jazeera, he boasted that Al Qaeda spent $500,000 on the event, while America lost, “according to the lowest estimate, $500 billion … meaning that every dollar of Al Qaeda defeated a million dollars [of America] … besides the loss of a huge number of jobs.”

“America is a superpower, with enormous military strength and vast economic power,” he concluded, “but all this is built on foundations of straw. So it is possible to target those foundations and focus on their weakest points, which, even if you strike only one-tenth of them, then the whole edifice will totter and sway.”

[...]

Al Qaeda’s failure to strike America after seven years creates pressure on the terrorists to act. The lack of another catastrophic attack on the United States, combined with the massive defeat terrorists have suffered in Iraq, sends a message to the Muslim world that Al Qaeda is losing its war with America. The terrorists need to pull off something spectacular to prove that they are still a force and a threat. Al Qaeda’s growing desperation to strike America, and our perceived growing vulnerability, are a dangerous combination.

[...]

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