Counter Terrorism

WASHINGTON -- The unauthorized disclosure of a counter-terrorism operation in Yemen last year compromised an exceedingly rare and valuable espionage achievement: an informant who had earned the trust of hardened terrorists, according to U.S. officials. His information was said to have led to the U.S. drone strike that killed a senior Al Qaeda leader, Fahd Mohammed Ahmed Quso, on May 6, 2012. U.S. officials say Quso had helped direct the terrorist attack on the Cole, a U.S. Navy guided missile destroyer, in a Yemeni harbor in October 2000.

WASHINGTON -- The unauthorized disclosure of a counter-terrorism operation in Yemen last year compromised an exceedingly rare and valuable espionage achievement: an informant who had earned the trust of hardened terrorists, according to U.S. officials. His information was said to have led to the U.S. drone strike that killed a senior Al Qaeda leader, Fahd Mohammed Ahmed Quso, on May 6, 2012. U.S. officials say Quso had helped direct the terrorist attack on the Cole, a U.S. Navy guided missile destroyer, in a Yemeni harbor in October 2000.

WASHINGTON - Skilled in tracking foreign terrorists, Jarret Brachman once was a sought-after expert on Al Qaeda, advising several federal agencies and speaking regularly around the country. Now the former research director of the Combating Terrorism Center, a think tank at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, has turned his focus away from Islamic militants. He spends most of his time consulting with federal, state and local law enforcement agencies about threats from domestic extremists and antigovernment militias.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of two brothers accused of bombing the Boston Marathon, told investigators that the pair had originally planned to mount an attack on the Fourth of July, a U.S. counter-terrorism official said Thursday. Meanwhile, another counter-terrorism official said that Russian intelligence officials believe Tsarnaev's older brother, Tamerlan, may have met with militants while visiting Russia in 2012. Authorities have scoured the background of the 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev for potential sources of radicalization in the years leading up to the bombings that left three people dead and more than 260 others wounded.

WASHINGTON -- President Obama doesn't refer to "drones" in his State of the Union speech, but he alluded to the targeted killing of suspected terrorists when he said, "where necessary, through a range of capabilities, we will continue to take direct action against those terrorists who pose the gravest threat to Americans. " Obama said his administration was seeking to "forge a durable legal and policy framework to guide our counter-terrorism operations. " Four years into the effort, no such framework yet exists for what remains an officially secret process run by the White House and the CIA. LIVE STREAM: Watch the State of the Union   "I recognize that in our democracy, no one should just take my word that we're doing things the right way," Obama added.

WASHINGTON - President Obama's top counter-terrorism advisor Monday defended using drones to launch missiles against militants in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, saying the growing use of armed unmanned aircraft had saved American lives and caused few civilian casualties. The comments by John Brennan, coming shortly before the first anniversary of the U.S. Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden, marks the first time a senior White House official has spoken at length in public about widely reported but officially secret drone operations.

The Obama administration has concluded in a newly released counter-terrorism strategy that precision strikes and raids, rather than large land wars, are the most effective way to defeat Al Qaeda. “Al Qaeda seeks to bleed us financially by drawing us into long, costly wars that also inflame anti-American sentiment,” John Brennan, President Obama’s counter-terrorism advisor, said in a speech Wednesday unveiling the new strategy. “Going forward, we will be mindful that if our nation is threatened, our best offense won’t always be deploying large armies abroad but delivering targeted, surgical pressure to the groups that threaten us.” Brennan, a longtime former CIA officer, spoke at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, as the White House posted the new strategy on its website.

The House Intelligence Committee launched an investigation Friday into a secret CIA effort to assemble paramilitary teams to kill Al Qaeda leaders -- a probe that will focus in part on whether agency officials were instructed by former Vice President Dick Cheney to hide the program from Congress. The program, launched after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was ended by new agency Director Leon E. Panetta last month, shortly after he learned about it and before it became operational.

When Jeffery H. Moran goes to work each day, he swipes his security badge, passes into an airtight chamber, opens a bombproof door and enters a lab full of deadly toxins. As chief of the counter-terrorism laboratory at the Arkansas Department of Health — one of 62 such federally funded labs in the country — he heads two dozen chemists who are on constant alert for the release of pestilence or poisons in the United States. Armed with $2 million worth of new equipment, Moran concocts gruesome tests to keep his team sharp.

Los Angeles Police Department officials acknowledged Wednesday that they disbanded a counter-terrorism unit earlier this year as part of Chief Charlie Beck's efforts to put more patrol officers on the streets amid budget cuts. The Protective Security Task Force team consisted of about two dozen plainclothes cops who were dispatched to provide a "cloak" of high-level security at buildings or events that had been threatened or were otherwise believed to be at risk, said Deputy Chief Michael Downing, head of the LAPD's Counter Terrorism and Criminal Intelligence Bureau.

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa - It was the catastrophe everyone knew was coming yet no one seemed able to stop. According to analysts, a violent Islamist militia was partly to blame for thousands of deaths in Somalia's food crisis from 2010 to 2012, but so was U.S. anti-terrorism policy. The effect of nations' collective failure to grapple with the complex problems of getting aid into famine-stricken southern Somalia has only now been established: Nearly 260,000 people died, half of them children younger than 5, according to a report released Thursday by the U.S.-based Famine Early Warning System Network, or FEWS NET, and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.

WASHINGTON - The CIA and departments of Justice and Homeland Security have begun a high-level internal review of whether intelligence was mishandled prior to the Boston Marathon bombings, though President Obama and his top advisors said they had seen nothing to suggest counter-terrorism agencies did anything wrong. Obama said at a White House news conference that the review would seek to answer whether "additional things … could have been done" that "might have prevented" the two bombings that killed three people and injured more than 260 others on April 15. "We want to go back and we want to review every step that was taken," Obama said.

A terrorist attack is like a national Rorschach test. Everybody sees in it what they want - usually something that proves a point they've been making all along. Even before the Tsarnaev brothers were identified as the perpetrators of the Boston Marathon bombings, speculation about the unknown attackers fell mostly into two camps: They could be Muslim jihadists, or they could be American anti-tax extremists. Guess which suggestion came from liberals and which from conservatives. Once real suspects were identified, pundits and public officials appropriated the bombings to support their worldviews, citing it to support positions on U.S. counter-terrorism policy, immigration reform and even the endless battle over the budget.

WASHINGTON - Skilled in tracking foreign terrorists, Jarret Brachman once was a sought-after expert on Al Qaeda, advising several federal agencies and speaking regularly around the country. Now the former research director of the Combating Terrorism Center, a think tank at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, has turned his focus away from Islamic militants. He spends most of his time consulting with federal, state and local law enforcement agencies about threats from domestic extremists and antigovernment militias.

WASHINGTON -- The Senate Intelligence Committee voted 12 to 3 on Tuesday to approve John Brennan's as the next CIA director, ending weeks of delay and setting the stage for the full Senate to vote on Brennan's nomination later this week. The committee approved Brennan's nomination in a closed-door hearing after the White House belatedly agreed to give the House and Senate Intelligence committees access to classified Justice Department opinions that the Obama administration used to justify the targeted killing of American terror suspects overseas.

WASHINGTON - Declaring that the nation is stronger “after years of grueling recession,” President Obama advocated an array of modest second-term initiatives Tuesday night that he said wouldn't bust the federal budget. There were no sweeping new initiatives. In a one-hour speech that weighed in at a hefty 6,600 words, the president focused at length on domestic issues, including gun control, voting rights, education, immigration and economic development. “Nothing I'm proposing tonight should increase our deficit by a single dime.

Counter-terrorism analysts still lack the data-search tools that might have kept a bomb-wearing Al Qaeda operative from boarding a Detroit-bound airliner nine months ago, and probably won't have them any time soon, U.S. officials acknowledge. At the same time, officials say the terrorist threat against the U.S. is becoming more complex, with a greater risk from home-grown militants whose low profiles make sophisticated intelligence analysis more important than ever. "It frustrates me," said former Republican New Jersey Gov. Thomas H. Kean, who co-chaired the Sept.

WASHINGTON -- President Obama doesn't refer to "drones" in his State of the Union speech, but he alluded to the targeted killing of suspected terrorists when he said, "where necessary, through a range of capabilities, we will continue to take direct action against those terrorists who pose the gravest threat to Americans. " Obama said his administration was seeking to "forge a durable legal and policy framework to guide our counter-terrorism operations. " Four years into the effort, no such framework yet exists for what remains an officially secret process run by the White House and the CIA. LIVE STREAM: Watch the State of the Union   "I recognize that in our democracy, no one should just take my word that we're doing things the right way," Obama added.

When John Brennan, the White House counter-terrorism advisor, appears Thursday at confirmation hearings to become the CIA's next director, Americans will have a rare opportunity to learn new details about the intelligence agency's secret rendition and detention program. Brennan served in the CIA while the George W. Bush administration was "rendering" terrorism suspects - nabbing them off streets around the world to be secretly detained and interrogated, sometimes using torture, while in the custody of the CIA or foreign governments.