Underwear Bomber Gets Life Sentence

Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab, the Christmas Day 2009 underwear bomber, will spend the rest of his life behind bars after being sentenced by a federal judge in Detroit on Thursday:



 And on Friday, the FBI preempted an illegal alien from an alleged suicide bomb attack on Capitol Hill:

 

Defense Department: Ft. Hood Massacre was Workplace Violence

Remember when the Obama administration inexplicably renamed a terrorist attack as a man-caused disaster?

Well, believe it or not, U.S. military officials appear to have doubled down on political correctness by referring to the Ft. Hood massacre as merely "workplace violence."

Congressional leaders weren't pleased reports Fox News:

Sen. Susan Collins on Wednesday blasted the Defense Department for classifying the Fort Hood massacre as workplace violence and suggested political correctness is being placed above the security of the nation's Armed Forces at home.

During a joint session of the Senate and House Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday, the Maine Republican referenced a letter from the Defense Department depicting the Fort Hood shootings as workplace violence. She criticized the Obama administration for failing to identify the threat as radical Islam... The chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, Connecticut independent Sen. Joe Lieberman, said the military has become a "direct target of violent Islamist extremism" within the United States.

The BlackFive military blog adds this comment about homegrown terrorism:

I really don’t know what more to say other than I agree with Senator Collins. What happened at Ft. Hood wasn’t a case of “workplace violence”, it was a case of a radicalized Islamist going on a murderous rampage because of his radicalization. It was also a total failure of leaders to recognize the threat and act on it well before it ended in the death of 13 at the Texas military installation.

If the Obama administration was in charge on December 7, 1941, what absurd terminology would they have dreamed up to describe the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor?

Added: Political correctness-bonus coverage:

Administration Considers Flexibility on KSM Trial

The administration may be laying the groundwork for some major backpedaling:

The Obama administration prefers a civilian trial for the alleged 9/11 mastermind, but says that in the face of public and political opposition it must be open to a military tribunal.

In an interview published Monday in The New York Times, Attorney General Eric Holder said, "I have to be more forceful in advocating for why I believe these are trials that should be held on the civilian side."

However, Holder did not rule out a military trial for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, saying, "You have to be flexible." [AP]

As we have pointed out previously, Holder should have recused himself from this entire transaction given that his former law firm represented various detainees.

And administration officials have repeatedly claimed that KSM will be found guilty. Doesn't that taint the jury pool?

Terrorists Wanted Dead Rather Than Alive?

It's obvious that the Obama administration is in total disarray in connection with its confused interrogation policies for enemy combatants and ill-advised plans to put terrorists on trial in civil courts. But according to the Washington Post, the administration has apparently come up with a third way, one that that eliminates all that messy and complicated legal mumbo jumbo:

When a window of opportunity opened to strike the leader of al-Qaeda in East Africa last September, U.S. Special Operations forces prepared several options. They could obliterate his vehicle with an airstrike as he drove through southern Somalia. Or they could fire from helicopters that could land at the scene to confirm the kill. Or they could try to take him alive.

The White House authorized the second option. On the morning of Sept. 14, helicopters flying from a U.S. ship off the Somali coast blew up a car carrying Saleh Ali Nabhan. While several hovered overhead, one set down long enough for troops to scoop up enough of the remains for DNA verification. Moments later, the helicopters were headed back to the ship.

The strike was considered a major success, according to senior administration and military officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the classified operation and other sensitive matters. But the opportunity to interrogate one of the most wanted U.S. terrorism targets was gone forever.

The Nabhan decision was one of a number of similar choices the administration has faced over the past year as President Obama has escalated U.S. attacks on the leadership of al-Qaeda and its allies around the globe. The result has been dozens of targeted killings and no reports of high-value detentions.

Officials: Al Qaeda Attack Within Six Months

Intelligence officials testified on Capitol Hill this week about an imminent homeland security threat:

Al Qaeda can be expected to attempt an attack on the United States in the next three to six months, senior U.S. intelligence officials told Congress Tuesday.

The terrorist organization is deploying operatives to the United States to carry out new attacks from inside the country, including "clean" recruits with a negligible trail of terrorist contacts, CIA Director Leon Panetta said. Al Qaeda is also inspiring homegrown extremists to trigger violence on their own, Panetta added.

The annual assessment of the nation's terror threats provided no startling new terror trends, but amplified growing concerns since the Christmas Day airline attack in Detroit that militants are growing harder to detect and moving more quickly in their plots.

Appeals Court: Millenium Bomber Sentence Not Tough Enough

The San Francisco-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit has a reputation for "going rogue." The Supreme Court has reversed the 9th Circuit more than any other federal appeals court. However, in a complete role reversal, a divided 9th Circuit panel ruled that a lower court was too lenient in meting out a jail term for the so-called Millenium bomber:

The long legal battle of an al-Qaida-trained terrorist convicted in an attempted bombing on the millennium has taken another turn after an appeals court threw out his sentence and removed the trial judge from the case.

The 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals on Tuesday said Ahmed Ressam's 22-year prison sentence is too lenient. Border agents in Washington state arrested the Algerian national in 1999 after he entered the United States from Canada on a ferry with a car packed with explosives. He was convicted of plotting to bomb Los Angeles International Airport.

The appeals court also said Tuesday that it's taking the rare step of assigning the case to another trial judge because it doubts U.S. District Judge John Coughenour's impartiality in the matter.

...the appeals court said Ressam has an extensive criminal history and Coughenour's conclusions were "clearly erroneous." Writing for the majority, Circuit Judge Arthur L. Alarcon said the Coughenour failed to take into account public safety with the 22-year prison sentence....

Ressam's case will be randomly assigned to another federal judge in Seattle in the coming weeks and it's expected that the Algerian national will receive a harsher sentence. A divided three-judge panel of the appeals court ruled Ressam, 41, deserves a much longer prison term because he had reneged on a deal to cooperate with terrorism investigators around the world.

Under federal sentencing guidelines, the defendant faces a prison sentence of 65 years to life. Incredibly, Judge Coughenour is a Reagan appointee.

Backpedaling on KSM Trial?

Newsweek's Michael Isikoff claims that the KSM trial in NYC may not necessarily go forward:

Top administration officials are getting nervous that they may not be able to proceed with one of their most controversial national-security moves: trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other accused 9/11 conspirators in federal court in New York City. Last November Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. portrayed the trial as a way to showcase the American justice system to the world—and to accelerate President Obama's stalled plans to shut down the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay. But because of shifting political winds in Congress, the trial is now "potentially in jeopardy," a senior official, who did not want to be named talking about a sensitive situation, tells NEWSWEEK. The chief concern: that Republicans will renew attempts to strip funding for the trial and, in the aftermath of the bombing attempt aboard Northwest Flight 253, pick up enough support from moderate Democrats to prevail.

Part of the shifting political winds includes the election of Scott Brown to the U.S. Senate from Massachusetts, which occurred after this blog entry was published. Brown opposes giving civilian trials to captured terrorists.

Christmas Day Bomber and Bureaucratic Bungling

It's incredible that this proposed legislation is even necessary, but as the saying goes, it is what it is:

Senator Susan Collins, R-Me., Ranking Member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, introduced legislation Thursday to require that U.S. intelligence officials be consulted following a foreign terrorist’s detention by the United States.

The legislation would address a serious error that occurred in the handling of the so-called Christmas Day terrorist, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who was charged in civilian criminal court.

At a Homeland Security Committee meeting Wednesday, Senator Collins learned during her questioning of witnesses that none of the three top U.S. intelligence officials had been consulted about that important decision. The determination to place Abdulmutallab into the U.S. civilian court system was made without their input or knowledge.

Senator Collins said this mistake “may have prevented the collection of valuable intelligence about future terrorist threats to the United States. Frankly, I was stunned to learn that the decision to place the captured terrorist into the U.S. civilian criminal court system had been made without the input or the knowledge of any of those three top intelligence officials:the Director of National Intelligence, the Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, and the Secretary of Homeland Security."

“These officials were never consulted by the Department of Justice. The decision was made without them.”

Privacy Violations: TSA's New Full-Body Screening Procedures Too "Transparent"?

Privacy and individual rights advocates claim that the Transportation Security Administration has been less than candid about the possible abuse of intrusive airport full-body scanners:

Pushback against the deployment at airports of digital image scanners that show people's naked images through their clothes is gaining steam, bolstered by the Electronic Privacy Information Center's publication of government documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security papers suggest the Transportation Security Administration overstated the privacy protections travelers subjected to the scanners would have.

Contrary to TSA's claims, the controversial backscatter scanners are able to store and send images, according to the documents EPIC obtained. There are 10 variable privacy settings on the device, which presumably can be dialed up or down at the point of operation with the required access code.

Christmas Day Bomber Lawyers Up, Quiets Down

The London Telegraph claims that the Obama administration really blew it by charging the Northwest Airlines underwear bomber in civilian court:

The chance to secure crucial information about al-Qaeda operations in Yemen was lost because the Obama administration decided to charge and prosecute Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab as an ordinary criminal, critics say. He is said to have reduced his co-operation with FBI interrogators on the advice of his government-appointed defence counsel.

The potential significance became chillingly clear this weekend when it was reported that shortly after his detention, he boasted that 20 more young Muslim men were being prepared for similar murderous missions in the Yemen.

The lawyer for the 23-year-old Nigerian entered a formal not guilty plea on Friday to charges that he tried to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner on December 25 – even though he reportedly admitted earlier that he was trained and supplied with the explosives sewn into his underwear by al-Qaeda in the Arab state.

"He was singing like a canary, then we charged him in civilian proceedings, he got a lawyer and shut up," Slade Gorton, a member of the 9/11 Commission that investigated the Sept 2001 terror attacks on the US, told The Sunday Telegraph.

"I find it incomprehensible that this administration is treating terrorism as a law enforcement issue. The president has finally said that we are at war with al-Qaeda. Well, if this is a war, then Abdulmutallab should be treated as a combatant not a criminal."

Intelligence Reviewer Has Major Conflict of Interest

Remember all that cockamamie campaign rhetoric about banning all those horrible lobbyists from the administration? According to Politico, never mind about all that:

President Barack Obama promised a “thorough review” of the government’s terrorist watch list system after a Nigerian man reported to U.S. government officials by his father to have radicalized and gone missing last month was allowed to board a Northwest Airlines flight to Detroit that he later allegedly tried to blow up without any additional security screening.

Yet the individual Obama has chosen to lead the review, White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan, served for 35 years in the CIA, helped design the current watch list system and served as interim director of the National Counterterrorism Center, whose role is under review.

In the three years before joining the Obama administration, Brennan was president and CEO of The Analysis Corp., an intelligence contracting firm that worked closely with the National Counterterrorism Center and other U.S. government intelligence, law enforcement and homeland security agencies on developing terrorism watch lists.

In the meantime, Newsweek claims that Obama received pre-Christmas intel about terror threats to the homeland:

President Barack Obama received a high-level briefing only three days before Christmas about possible holiday-period terrorist threats against the US, Newsweek has learned. The briefing was centered on a written report, produced by US intelligence agencies, entitled "Key Homeland Threats", a senior US official said.

The senior Administration official, who asked for anonymity when discussing sensitive information, said that nowhere in this document was there any mention of Yemen, whose Al-Qaeda affiliate is now believed to have been behind the unsuccessful Christmas Day attempt by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to bring down a transatlantic airliner with a bomb hidden in his underpants. However, the official declined to disclose any other information about the substance of the briefing, including what kind of specific warnings, if any, the President was given about possibly holiday attacks and whether Yemen came up during oral discussions.

By the way, as we've mentioned previously, the media used to go nuts about Bush's Crawford, Texas, vacations, but have they said word one about Obama's extended Hawaiian holiday in the midst of a terror attack?

In a related development, Obama reached back into the Bush administration to appoint Howard Schmidt as White House cybersecurity "czar." Schmidt, a former special cybersecurity advisor to President George W. Bush, specialized in computer security and forensics as an investigator for the FBI, the Air Force, and local law enforcement. In the private sector, he held executive positions related to cyber-security at Microsoft and eBay.

Who Is In Charge Of The Failed System?

If Bush had waited three days to publicly speak about the Northwest Airlines terrorist attack, the media would have demanded his head on a platter. In any event, the London Telegraph gives 10 reasons why the Obama administration gets an F in homeland security:

There is no more solemn duty for an American commander-in-chief than the martialling of “all elements of American power” – the phrase Obama himself used on Monday – to protect the people of the United States. In that key respect, Obama failed on Christmas Day, just as President George W. Bush failed on September 11th (though he succeeded in the seven years after that).

Yes, the buck stops in the Oval Office. Obama may have rather smugly given himself a “B+” for his 2008 performance but he gets an F for the events that led to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab boarding a Detroit-bound plane in Amsterdam with a PETN bomb sewn into his underpants. He said today that a “systemic failure has occurred”. Well, he’s in charge of that system.

...In his studied desire to be the unBush by responding coolly to events like this, Obama is dangerously close to failing as a leader. Yes, it is good not to shoot from the hip and make broad assertions without the facts. But Obama took three days before speaking to the American people, emerging on Monday in between golf and tennis games in Hawaii to deliver a rather tepid address that significantly underplayed what happened. He described Abdulmutallab as an “isolated extremist” who “allegedly tried to ignite an explosive device on his body” – phrases that indicate a legalistic, downplaying approach that alarms rather than reassures. Today’s words showed a lot more fire and desire to get on top of things – we’ll see whether Obama follows through with action. In the meantime, he went snorkelling.

On this side of the Atlantic, Col. Ralph Peters (ret.) warns that we are dealing with the international equivalent of "Bill Ayers and the Weathermen, pampered kids unhappy with the world."

Despite limited Special Operations strikes beyond our recognized combat zones, we still don't accept the nature of the threat from jet-set jihadis. Our leaders and our military are obsessed with holding ground in Afghanistan -- even though al Qaeda's growth areas are in Yemen and Africa.

We voluntarily tie ourselves down, while our enemies focus on mobility. Worse, we've convinced ourselves that development aid (the left's all-purpose medicine) is the key to defeating al Qaeda.

That's utter nonsense. Abdulmutallab's a rich kid. He didn't come from a deprived background, bearing the grievances of the slum. He's a graduate of a top English university. And Osama bin Laden's from a super-rich family. How does building a footbridge in Afghanistan deter them?

The System Didn't Work, But The Passengers Did

Open borders advocate Janet Napolitano, the hapless Homeland Security Secretary, has back-pedaled on her claim that the system worked. Instead (probably after an attitude adjustment from White House spin doctors), she now says the system failed miserably:

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano conceded Monday that the aviation security system failed when a young man on a watch list with a U.S. visa in his pocket and a powerful explosive hidden on his body was allowed to board a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit.

The Obama administration has ordered investigations into the two areas of aviation security — how travelers are placed on watch lists and how passengers are screened — as critics questioned how the 23-year-old Nigerian man charged in the airliner attack was allowed to board the Dec. 25 flight.

A day after saying the system worked, Napolitano backtracked, saying her words had been taken out of context.

Here's the perhaps soon-to-be-former DHS secretary doing damage control on the Today show:

Last year, Ed Rendell, the governor of Pennsylvania, famously said (and then retracted) that Napolitano would be perfect for the job "because for that job, you have to have no life. Janet has no family. Perfect. She can devote, literally, 19-20 hours a day to it." It appears, however, that the governor was incorrect.

Terrorist Foothold in South America

Leaving aside yesterday's attempted terrorist attack on the Northwest Airlines jet, a counterterrorism analyst maintains that Latin America could actually be America's Achilles heel in the war on terrorism:

“There is a growing presence of Islamic activism and fundraising in Latin America,” [former FBI Special Agent James] Conway told Newsmax. “There is a significant presence of human-trafficking organizations that terror cells have and could exploit for movement of people and materials into the United States, and that should be of a major concern to us from a national-security perspective.”

Narco-Terrorist Stimulus Program

Drug traffickers apparent have their own bank bailout plan:

Drugs money worth billions of dollars kept the financial system afloat at the height of the global crisis, the United Nations' drugs and crime tsar has told the Observer.

Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said he has seen evidence that the proceeds of organised crime were "the only liquid investment capital" available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He said that a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result.

This will raise questions about crime's influence on the economic system at times of crisis. It will also prompt further examination of the banking sector as world leaders, including Barack Obama and Gordon Brown, call for new International Monetary Fund regulations. Speaking from his office in Vienna, Costa said evidence that illegal money was being absorbed into the financial system was first drawn to his attention by intelligence agencies and prosecutors around 18 months ago. "In many instances, the money from drugs was the only liquid investment capital. In the second half of 2008, liquidity was the banking system's main problem and hence liquid capital became an important factor," he said.

Some of the evidence put before his office indicated that gang money was used to save some banks from collapse when lending seized up, he said.

Also from the British media, Costa earlier this month warned about drug trafficking in certain areas in Africa:

The head of the UN drugs agency (UNODC) has warned that widespread drug trafficking is transforming Africa into a major crime hub.

Antonio Maria Costa said huge amounts of heroin and cocaine were being traded by "terrorists and anti-government forces" to fund their operations.

He called for a trans-Saharan network to be set up to tackle criminal groups.

The BBC report adds that "drug traffickers have saturated Russia, much of Western Europe, and they are now spreading into Africa."

Related story from the New York Post:

Three accused terrorists arrested in Africa arrived in Manhattan [on December 18] to face charges that they plotted to fund al-Qaeda by smuggling thousands of pounds of cocaine into Europe. Oumar Issa, Harouna Toure and Idriss Abelrahman were captured in Ghana on Wednesday and arrived in the city early this morning. They are expected to appear before a federal judge this afternoon. It's the first time suspected al-Qaeda operatives have been charged in a drug-trafficking plot, prosecutors said.

And now it appears that drug cartels are diversifying into the oil business:

Drug traffickers employing high-tech drills, miles of rubber hose, and a fleet of stolen tanker trucks have siphoned more than $1 billion worth of oil from Mexico’s pipelines over the past two years, in a vast and audacious conspiracy that is bleeding the national treasury, according to US and Mexican law enforcement officials and the state-run oil company.

Using sophisticated smuggling networks, the traffickers have transported a portion of the pilfered petroleum across the border to sell to US companies, some of which knew that it was stolen, according to court documents and interviews with American officials involved in an expanding investigation of oil services firms in Texas.

The widespread theft of Mexico’s most vital national resource by criminal organizations represents a costly new front in President Felipe Calderon’s war against the drug cartels, and it shows how the traffickers are rapidly evolving from traditional narcotics smuggling.

Senate to Investigate Ft. Hood Killing Spree

The inevitable Congressional inquiry into the Ft. Hood massacre:

Sen. Joe Lieberman announced [on November 8] that he intends to lead a congressional investigation into the mass shooting at Fort Hood, saying the attack could qualify as a "terrorist act" rooted in Islamic radicalism -- the worst since 9/11.

The Independent Democrat, who chairs the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, said there were "strong warning signs" that the alleged gunman, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, was an "Islamist extremist."

"If that is true, the murder of these 13 people was a terrorist act and, in fact, it was the most destructive terrorist act to be committed on American soil since 9/11," Lieberman [said].

Meanwhile, in a report on the Hasan case, Stratfor, the global intelligence clearinghouse, says that separating "the wheat from the chaff" is on one of the big problems in national security investigations:

Many leads are based on erroneous information or a misidentification of the suspect — there is a huge issue associated with the confusion caused by the transliteration of Arabic names and the fact that there are many people bearing the same names. Jihadists also have the tendency to use multiple names and identities. And there are many cases in which people will falsely report a person to the FBI out of malice. Because of these factors, national security investigations proceed slowly and usually do not involve much (if any) contact with the suspect and his close associates. If the suspect is a real militant planning a terrorist attack, investigators do not want to tip him off, and if he is innocent, they do not want to sully his reputation by showing up and overtly interviewing everyone he knows. Due to its controversial history of domestic intelligence activities, the FBI has become acutely aware of its responsibility to protect privacy rights and civil liberties guaranteed by the Constitution and other laws.

Stratfor also explains that in a departure from the standard operating procedure, the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command (still known by its old acronym CID) rather than the FBI is running the Hasan investigation:

As the premier law enforcement agency in the United States, the FBI will often assume authority over investigations where there is even a hint of terrorism. Since 9/11, the number of FBI/JTTF offices across the country has been dramatically increased, and the JTTFs are specifically charged with investigating cases that may involve terrorism. Therefore, we find the FBI’s absence in this case to be quite out of the ordinary.

However, with Hasan being a member of the armed forces, the victims being soldiers or army civilian employees and the incident occurring at Fort Hood, the case would seem to fall squarely under the mantle of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). From a prosecutorial perspective, a homicide trial under the UCMJ should be very tidy and could be quickly concluded. It will not involve all the potential loose ends that could pop up in a federal terrorism trial, especially when those loose ends involve what the FBI and CIA knew about Hasan, when they learned it and who they told. Also, politically, there are some who would like to see the Hasan case remain a criminal matter rather than a case of terrorism. Following the shooting death of Luqman Ameen Abdullah [in Detroit] and considering the delicate relationship between Muslim advocacy groups and the U.S. government, some people would rather see Hasan portrayed as a mentally disturbed criminal than as an ideologically driven lone wolf.

Despite the CID taking the lead in prosecuting the case, the classified national security investigation by the CIA and FBI into Hasan and his possible connections to jihadist elements is undoubtedly continuing.

Update: The Army has charged the shooter with 13 premeditated murder counts under the UCMJ (making him eligible for the death penalty if found guilty), but as yet no charges related to terrorism or treason. Additional charges may be forthcoming, however.

Scotland Yard Foils NYS Subway Plot

From the London Telegraph:

British spies have foiled a terrorist plot by a suspected al Qaeda operative to blow up the New York subway.

The plan, which reportedly would have been the biggest attack on America since 9/11, was uncovered after Scotland Yard intercepted an email.

The force alerted the FBI, who launched an operation which led to airport shuttle bus driver Najibullah Zazi, 24, being charged with conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction.

...Zazi, from Denver, Colorado, is understood to have been given instructions by a senior member of al Qaeda in Pakistan over the internet.

Let's hope there were no civil liberties violations in this investigation, right?

The London Telegraph also has this about the Ft. Hood gunman:

Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the gunman who killed 13 at America's Fort Hood military base, once gave a lecture to other doctors in which he said non-believers should be beheaded and have boiling oil poured down their throats.

He also told colleagues at America's top military hospital that non-Muslims were infidels condemned to hell who should be set on fire. The outburst came during an hour-long talk Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, gave on the Koran in front of dozens of other doctors at Walter Reed Army Medical Centre in Washington DC, where he worked for six years before arriving at Fort Hood in July.

Colleagues had expected a discussion on a medical issue but were instead given an extremist interpretation of the Koran, which Hasan appeared to believe.

...One Army doctor who knew him said a fear of appearing discriminatory against a Muslim soldier had stopped fellow officers from filing formal complaints.

As allegations and/or facts like this continue to emerge, it appears that Col. Ralph Peters' somewhat emotional reaction on FNC seems justified:


More from Col. Peters on political correctness in the Army here.

Officials Warn of Homegrown Radicals Trained in Overseas Terrror Camps

According to the Washington Post, the number of recruited terrorists from the West going overseas for paramilitary training is on the increase:

U.S. and European counterterrorism officials say a rising number of Western recruits -- including Americans -- are traveling to Afghanistan and Pakistan to attend paramilitary training camps. The flow of recruits has continued unabated, officials said, in spite of an intensified campaign over the past year by the CIA to eliminate al-Qaeda and Taliban commanders in drone missile attacks.

Since January, at least 30 recruits from Germany have traveled to Pakistan for training, according to German security sources. About 10 people -- not necessarily the same individuals -- have returned to Germany this year, fueling concerns that fresh plots are in the works against European targets.

...European security officials have warned for many years of the threat posed by homegrown radicals who have gone to Afghanistan and Pakistan to wage jihad. Officials in some countries, such as Britain, said they have successfully cracked down on the number of would-be fighters going to South Asia. But others, such as Germany, are seeing a significant increase and struggling to contain it.

Meanwhile, the New York Times has an interesting piece about the Taliban's fundraising techniques:

The Taliban in Afghanistan are running a sophisticated financial network to pay for their insurgent operations, raising hundreds of millions of dollars from the illicit drug trade, kidnappings, extortion and foreign donations that American officials say they are struggling to cut off.

In Afghanistan, the Taliban have imposed an elaborate system to tax the cultivation, processing and shipment of opium, as well as other crops like wheat grown in the territory they control, American and Afghan officials say. In the Middle East, Taliban leaders have sent fund-raisers to Arab countries to keep the insurgency’s coffers brimming with cash.

Estimates of the Taliban’s annual revenue vary widely. Proceeds from the illicit drug trade alone range from $70 million to $400 million a year, according to Pentagon and United Nations officials. By diversifying their revenue stream beyond opium, the Taliban are frustrating American and NATO efforts to weaken the insurgency by cutting off its economic lifelines, the officials say.

Feds Arrest Would-Be Massachusetts Terrorist

The 27-year-old pharmacist busted yesterday in connection with a terror investigation lived in the Boston suburbs with his parents--where they ran a daycare center:

The al-Qaeda reject busted by the feds yesterday is a tinhorn terrorist who lives at home with his parents in the suburbs and talked tough about attacks on shopping malls and government officials - even though he failed to make the cut at terror school and couldn’t find any guns to carry out his big plan, prosecutors said.

Federal authorities allege Tarek Mehanna was rebuffed at least three times as he sought terror training in Yemen, Iraq and Pakistan - including a rejection by the notorious Taliban, which cited his “lack of experience.”

Mehanna, a 27-year-old trained as a pharmacist, lives with his parents in Sudbury in a two-story home with a white picket fence, yet allegedly fancied himself as a jihadist bent on killing innocent Americans because they pay taxes to the government.

The Heritage Foundation says this arrest brings the latest number of known terrorist plots foiled since 9/11 to 27.

Founder: Human Rights Watchdog No Longer Has Credibility

In a New York Times op-ed piece, Robert L. Bernstein, the founder of Human Rights Watch, says the organization has lost its way by no longer distinguishing between open and closed societies and instead adopting a moral equivalence game:

When I stepped aside in 1998, Human Rights Watch was active in 70 countries, most of them closed societies. Now the organization, with increasing frequency, casts aside its important distinction between open and closed societies.

Nowhere is this more evident than in its work in the Middle East. The region is populated by authoritarian regimes with appalling human rights records. Yet in recent years Human Rights Watch has written far more condemnations of Israel for violations of international law than of any other country in the region.

Israel, with a population of 7.4 million, is home to at least 80 human rights organizations, a vibrant free press, a democratically elected government, a judiciary that frequently rules against the government, a politically active academia, multiple political parties and, judging by the amount of news coverage, probably more journalists per capita than any other country in the world — many of whom are there expressly to cover the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Meanwhile, the Arab and Iranian regimes rule over some 350 million people, and most remain brutal, closed and autocratic, permitting little or no internal dissent. The plight of their citizens who would most benefit from the kind of attention a large and well-financed international human rights organization can provide is being ignored as Human Rights Watch’s Middle East division prepares report after report on Israel.

...Leaders of Human Rights Watch know that Hamas and Hezbollah chose to wage war from densely populated areas, deliberately transforming neighborhoods into battlefields. They know that more and better arms are flowing into both Gaza and Lebanon and are poised to strike again. And they know that this militancy continues to deprive Palestinians of any chance for the peaceful and productive life they deserve. Yet Israel, the repeated victim of aggression, faces the brunt of Human Rights Watch’s criticism.