| Behind the Lines for Wednesday, Oct. 20, 2010 — 3 P.M. Life of Abu Riley: Osama bin Laden and deputy reportedly living comfortably in North Waziristan under protection of Pakistani spooks . . . Gotterdammerung: "If certain conditions obtain, a particularly contagious virus would spread across the planet and infect every single person on earth in one year" . . . QED: "When the American taxpayer is inadvertently financing the Taliban, it's time to review our strategy in Afghanistan." These and other stories lead today's homeland security coverage. --------------------------------- Osama bin Laden and Co. are living comfortably in North Waziristan under the protection of Pakistan’s intel service, The Christian Science Monitor’s Jonathan Adams hears a top NATO official telling CNN’s Barbara Starr — while The New York Daily News’ James Gordon Meek learns that the CIA has hunted for bin Laden in remote northwestern Pakistan on the basis of at least two credible recent sightings. “The resurfacing of rumors about the location of the greatest villain of our age reminds us just what a massive story the resurfacing of the man would be,” Foreign Policy’s David Rothkopf adds. Feds: Authorities are searching for whoever directed high-power rifle fire through Pentagon windows early Tuesday a.m., The Washington Post’s Christy Goodman and Maria Glod recount — while The Manassas News & Messenger explores possible links to shots fired into a Virginia Marine Corps museum over the weekend. Three weeks before a Jordanian double agent set off a bomb at a remote Afghani CIA base last December, an agent had received warnings that the man might be working for al Qaeda, Politics Daily’s David Wood hears CIA chief Leon Panetta disclosing. Citing surveillance compliance lapses, securicrats want to beef up a federal law requiring call carriers to ensure that their networks can be wiretapped, The New York Times’ Charlie Savage reports. Homies: DHS’s Janet Napolitano said Monday an overhaul of immigration laws would afford a chance to strengthen enforcement tools such as employer penalties, The San Diego Union-Tribune’s Morgan Lee relates. The $600 million DHS ramp-up Congress approved in August “still shortchanges a number of border security priorities,” GOP Sens. John McCain and Jon Kyl complain in an Arizona Republic op-ed. Not even DHS, despite a years-long effort to whittle down department data centers, knows how many actually remain, FierceGovernmentIT’s David Perera sees an IG report rebuking — while CongressDaily’s Chris Strohm reports that of 72 intel fusion centers, only 28 boast privacy and civil liberties plans approved by DHS. Follow the money: The faith-based organization behind the National Prayer Breakfast vigorously denies new allegations that foreign trips and other lawmaker activities may have been funded by a terrorist organization, The Hill reports. “When the American taxpayer is inadvertently financing the Taliban, it’s time to review our strategy in Afghanistan,” a Times columnist nags. Legal judgments against North Korea in civil cases related to assorted acts of terror add up to more than $500 million, but not a dime has been collected, the Los Angeles Times surveys. “Without letting fly a single piece of shrapnel or spilling a drop of blood, terrorist organizations are able to create a financial drain on governments and individuals that few of us can even conceptualize,” The Sheaf assesses. State and local: The Texas sheriff leading the U.S. investigation into the fatal shooting of an American on a border lake accuses Mexican officials of discouraging a fuller inquiry, USA Today tells. An ICE program that scans local jails for illegal immigrants is being expanded across Texas, “the latest front in the nation’s battle over immigration policy,” The Wall Street Journal spotlights. Clifton Residents on Call, that Jersey town’s health emergency response corps, is offering Incident Command System training to interested volunteers next week, The Bergen County Record records. New Jersey’s Charlotteburg Township, meanwhile, has accepted a $109,700 DHS Buffer Zone Protection Program grant to assist local cops in their “continued protection of the Charlotteburg Reservoir,” the Record further relates. Bugs ‘n bombs: The powdery substance that prompted evacuation of the NAACP’s D.C. offices Monday “turns out to have been nothing more than tea,” the Post reports. PG&E has outlined plans to upgrade its California pipelines to boost safety and security, a month after eight people were killed by an explosion, Homeland Security News Wire relays. “If certain conditions obtain, a particularly contagious virus would spread across the planet and infect every single person on earth in one year,” Popular Science quotes a brooding biostatistician. Harassment of young students with food allergies “amounts to assault and battery, and could even be construed as an act of terrorism,” an About essayist assails. “Every month we lose about the same number of our fellow citizens in motor vehicle accidents as in the tragedy of 9/11 [but] no one has yet called for a ‘war on traffic deaths,’” a Hill op-ed objects. Close air support: The Pinnacle Airlines flight that was diverted Sunday to Grand Forks carried three Saudi aviation students, and cabin crew falsely concluded a smoke detector had been sabotaged, The Associated Press reports. Sea-Tac airport’s north security checkpoint has been closed to allow installation of full-body scanners, The Olympian observes. Perhaps the best thing about the Screwpop 4-in-1 keychain tool is the maker’s claim it will sail through airport security, SlashGear spotlights. Israeli P.M. Binyamin Netanyahu airs concerns that aircraft flying near the Gaza Strip may be exposed to anti-aircraft fire, The Jerusalem Post reports — while Expatica sees French aviation flics busting a ticketless Polish man on the tarmac at Paris Charles de Gaulle airport after he sought to board a U.S.-bound flight. Coming and going: TSA’s Highway and Motor Carrier Division is developing five new regional school transportation security exercises to be staged over the next year, School Transportation News notes. Ten years on, the Navy “says it has made improvements in port security measures, but is it enough to prevent another Cole-style attack? The answer depends on who you talk to,” Norfolk’s WAVY 10 News leads. The Port of Brisbane is eyeing a suite of biometric systems including facial and iris recognition to avert manual checks during elevated security incidents, ZDNet notes. South Korea will raise its harbor security posture to the highest level during next month’s G-20 summit to counter potential terrorist threats, The Yonhap News Agency relates. Terror tech: ZDNet’s David Gewirtz refuses to get his boxers in a bunch just because DHS’s Social Network Monitoring Center scrutinized Facebook for pre-inaugural threats to President Obama’s inauguration, demanding: “What do you have to hide?” The Army earlier this year steered a $31 million contract to a psychologist whose work underpinned the Bush administration’s torture program, Salon slams. Skeptical securicrats reckon Brit spooks’ recent warning that a cyberattack could be “the next Pearl Harbor” was timed to coincide with announcement of comprehensive spending review cuts, The Register relates. Was the Stuxnet cyber-assault on Tehran’s new nuke plant “an instrument of foreign policy by some country? If so, was it what got Iran back to the table to negotiate?” Defense Tech ponders. Gizmotronica: A new survivor detection device developed to pull people quickly from under collapsed buildings “could literally be a lifeline for victims of future earthquakes, landslides or terrorist attacks,” Homeland Security News Wire relays. “It looks like a piece of riot-control gear. It’s got a computerized inboard targeting system. It can kill someone from 2,300 feet away, while he takes cover. And it’s on its way to the Afghanistan war,” Danger Room teasingly leads — as The Engineer sees Teledyne Technologies winning a $25.5 million Pentagon bid to design a .50 caliber “smart bullet” that can nail moving targets in high winds. For years, military and police bomb squads have used large robots to investigate suspicious objects; now smaller military robots are being adopted by SWAT teams, The Wall Street Journal spotlights. “The single greatest structural threat to our cozy Western democracy isn’t terrorism,” it’s mounting middle-class reliance on and replacement by robots, Co.Design contends. Courts and rights: A federal judge yesterday handed a 24-year prison sentence to a Jordanian national who tried to blow up a downtown Dallas skyscraper, mostly rejecting defense claims he was mentally ill, the Morning News notes. Canada needs to stamp out “homegrown radicalism” before it becomes a problem and do so where it often breeds — inside prisons, The Vancouver Sun sees a report advocating. France’s supreme court, meantime, ruled Tuesday that police can no longer interrogate terror suspects absent a lawyer, The Washington Post recounts — as Agence France-Presse hears German federal prosecutors charging eight people with providing propaganda support to al Qaeda and other terror outfits. Over there: A court in Yemen has sentenced an al Qaedaite to death for involvement in terror attacks and manufacturing explosives, The Jerusalem Post reports. An Indian government report gives the strongest indication to date of official Pakistani involvement in the 2008 Mumbai attack, which killed 166 people, AP relates. “Iraq’s sole revenue stream, its sprawling grid of [4,660 miles] of pipelines and associated oilfields, processing plants and export installations, are a security nightmare,” The Sydney Morning Herald surveys. The top U.N. official in Iraq survived a roadside bomb yesterday following a meeting with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, The Christian Science Monitor says. Hollywood ending: “In response to Republican claims that President Obama hasn’t done enough to stop terrorists from making bombs in the United States, press secretary Robert Gibbs announced today that Carl Spackler has been named Bomb Czar, The Spoof spoofs. “Spackler, famous for his abortive attempts to blast out the living quarters occupied by a calculating rodent in the movie, ‘Caddyshack,’ is expected to provide insights into the minds of Islamic terrorists who have been driving New Yorkers crazy with their attempts to blow them up with homemade bombs akin to what Spackler used in the movie. Although Carl was ultimately unsuccessful in his attempts to blow this pest up, it wasn’t his fault that the wily rodent was able to dodge death. The president, who claims he has viewed ‘Caddyshack’ at least a dozen times since he was elected, thinks, that Spackler, along with Janet Napolitano, will make the citizens of our country at least as safe as those in Mexico.” |
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