Terrorism

The Joint Regional Intelligence Center, the first such center in the nation, opened its doors Thursday to help more than 200 law enforcement agencies coordinate their efforts to prevent terrorist attacks. More than 30 intelligence analysts from the FBI, the Los Angeles Police Department, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department and other agencies are already working out of the Norwalk facility. Eventually there will be about 60 staffers at the center.

The LAPD's plan to map Muslim communities in an effort to identify potential hotbeds of extremism departs from the way law enforcement has dealt with local anti-terrorism since 9/11 and prompted widespread skepticism Friday. In a document reviewed Friday by The Times, the LAPD's Los Angeles Police Department's counter-terrorism bureau proposed using U.S.

The alleged Christmas Day airline bomber had purchased a round-trip ticket -- not a one- way fare, as has been widely reported -- the Obama administration told congressional aides in a closed briefing Tuesday. According to a person who attended the meeting, the administration also said it was not unusual for international air travelers to buy their tickets using cash, as Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had done. Up to 20% of overseas flights are cash transactions, Department of Homeland Security officials told House and Senate aides.

Concessionaires and duty-free shops at LAX were hard hit Thursday by a ban on carrying liquids aboard flights. With duty-free sales of liquids under a complete prohibition for much of the day, sales clerks awkwardly warned customers against buying expensive liquor, perfumes and creams. "I'm sorry. We cannot sell this today," one saleswoman told a startled traveler shopping for body lotion at Los Angeles International Airport.

The U.S. Justice Department suffered a major setback in another high-profile terrorist prosecution Monday when its criminal case against five former officials of a now-defunct Islamic charity collapsed into a tangle of legal confusion. U.S. District Judge A. Joe Fish declared a mistrial, but not before it became clear that the government's landmark terrorism finance case -- and one of its most-costly post-9/11 prosecutions -- was in serious trouble.

Saudi Arabia remains the world's leading source of money for Al Qaeda and other extremist networks and has failed to take key steps requested by U.S. officials to stem the flow, the Bush administration's top financial counter-terrorism official said Tuesday. Stuart A.

In a tacit admission that the U.S. squandered a chance to gain valuable information after the failed Christmas Day airliner bombing, the nation's intelligence director testified Wednesday that authorities had been too quick to read the suspect his Miranda rights and grant him access to an attorney. Dennis C. Blair said that a newly created team of elite interrogators should have been called in to question Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, and that top officials in Washington should have been consulted.

U.S. border security officials learned of the alleged extremist links of the suspect in the Christmas Day jetliner bombing attempt as he was airborne from Amsterdam to Detroit and had decided to question him when he landed, officials disclosed Wednesday. The new information shows that border enforcement officials discovered the suspected extremist ties involving the Nigerian, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, in a database despite intelligence failures that have been criticized by President Obama.

U.S. and Canadian officials unveiled a joint plan Monday to tighten security along their lightly guarded 4,000-mile continental border while also working together more closely to stop terrorists from moving to North America. The announcement came one day after the Justice Department released details of a related initiative to protect the traditionally relaxed boundary with an influx of 400 National Guard troops, helicopters and intelligence personnel. Under Monday's accord, U.S.

A federal grand jury in New York indicted a Denver man on a terrorism charge Thursday after federal authorities alleged that he and possibly three others had gone on a buying spree of bomb-making chemicals and were preparing an attack on U.S. soil. The one-count indictment alleges that Najibullah Zazi, 24, worked for more than a year on a plot to detonate a weapon of mass destruction. Justice Department documents did not name the alleged co-conspirators, but said that three other Denver-area residents had bought unusual amounts of chemicals from beauty-supply stores, including hydrogen peroxide and acetone, which can be used to make explosives.

The CIA sequence for a Predator strike ends with a missile but begins with a memo. Usually no more than two or three pages long, it bears the name of a suspected terrorist, the latest intelligence on his activities, and a case for why he should be added to a list of people the agency is trying to kill. The list typically contains about two dozen names, a number that expands each time a new memo is signed by CIA executives on the seventh floor at agency headquarters, and contracts as targets thousands of miles away, in places including Pakistan and Yemen, seem to spontaneously explode.

It is always dangerous to mistake your ideological preferences for shrewd political strategy, but that is precisely what President Obama and his advisors have done with the war on terror. On the right, the prevailing critique of the president's approach to the war on terror is that it is both deeply ideological and unserious. Obama remains fixated on the idea of closing Guantanamo, even if it means keeping irredeemable terrorists in U.S. prisons indefinitely. The administration initially banned the use of the term "war on terror," preferring the ridiculous bureaucratese "overseas contingency operations."

Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden claimed responsibility for the Christmas Day attempt to blow up an American commercial jet in an audiotape broadcast Sunday on Arab television. U.S. intelligence officials quickly raised doubts about Bin Laden's role and suggested the statement was an attempt to score propaganda points for a plot already claimed by an increasingly independent faction of his movement in Yemen. In the clip, Bin Laden said his group was behind the failed attempt allegedly carried out by Nigerian national Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to blow up a Detroit-bound Northwest Airlines flight.

Stepping up pressure on Pakistan to help thwart further terrorist attacks on India, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said Wednesday that the Indian government probably would not show the same level of restraint that it did in 2008 if struck again. Gates said at a news conference that Al Qaeda and other Islamic militant organizations are hoping to ignite a regional clash between Pakistan and India, a confrontation he said must be averted. Gates has praised India's "statesmanship" in the wake of the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attack, which left at least 166 people dead and has been attributed to Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistani-based extremist group aligned with Al Qaeda.

The FBI used a variety of controversial and possibly illegal methods to obtain phone records in terrorism investigations, according to a sharply critical report issued Wednesday by the Justice Department's inspector general. The report by the department's independent watchdog office said the tactics were used by the FBI from 2002 to 2006 and approved by officials at the highest levels of the bureau, including at least four top counter-terrorism officials. In an apparent effort to cut corners, the FBI informally -- and improperly -- used emergency "exigent letters" to phone service providers to obtain at least 2,000 phone records, Inspector General Glenn A. Fine said in the 289-page report.

In a tacit admission that the U.S. squandered a chance to gain valuable information after the failed Christmas Day airliner bombing, the nation's intelligence director testified Wednesday that authorities had been too quick to read the suspect his Miranda rights and grant him access to an attorney. Dennis C. Blair said that a newly created team of elite interrogators should have been called in to question Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, and that top officials in Washington should have been consulted.

The FBI used a variety of controversial and possibly illegal methods to obtain phone records in terrorism investigations, according to a sharply critical report issued Wednesday by the Justice Department's inspector general. The report by the department's independent watchdog office said the tactics were used by the FBI from 2002 to 2006 and approved by officials at the highest levels of the bureau, including at least four top counter-terrorism officials. In an apparent effort to cut corners, the FBI informally -- and improperly -- used emergency "exigent letters" to phone service providers to obtain at least 2,000 phone records, Inspector General Glenn A. Fine said in the 289-page report.

U.S. officials believe that as many as three dozen Americans who converted to Islam while in prison in the United States have traveled to Yemen over the last year, possibly to be trained by Al Qaeda, according to a Senate report. The findings have alarmed U.S. counter-terrorism officials, who think that Al Qaeda has expanded its recruitment efforts in Yemen "to attract nontraditional followers" capable of carrying out more ambitious operations. The report by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee underscores the growing anxiety in the United States about the Al Qaeda offshoot, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which has claimed responsibility for orchestrating the suspected attempted suicide bombing of a U.S. jetliner bound for Detroit from Amsterdam on Christmas Day. "The Christmas Day plot was a nearly catastrophic illustration of a significant new threat from a network previously regarded as a regional danger, rather than an international one," the report concluded.

In the years since their daughter Marla was killed by a Hamas suicide bomber in Jerusalem, Michael and Linda Bennett have had somewhat differing reactions. Linda Bennett has been back twice to Israel, to look at the memorials for her daughter and the other victims of the July 31, 2002, attack at Hebrew University and even to see the cafeteria where it took place. Not to go, she said, would be to surrender to terrorism. Michael Bennett cannot bring himself to visit Israel because he will sense Marla's presence everywhere and his pain will only increase.

As their target, they selected the hub of Afghan governance, a part of downtown Kabul that includes the presidential palace, the Justice Ministry, the central bank and other heavily guarded buildings. Then, on Monday morning, as the heart of the capital bustled with shoppers and Afghans on their way to work, seven Taliban militants with AK-47 assault rifles, grenades, rocket launchers and suicide vests hidden under their shawls unleashed their attack. The militants left five people dead and laid bare Kabul's vulnerability even as the U.S. ratchets up the war to rout the militancy.