CQ Behind the Lines

From CQ Homeland Security

Behind the Lines for Friday, July 22, 2011 — 3 P.M. By David C. Morrison, Special to Congressional Quarterly Offshoring: Al-Zawahiri's al Qaeda expected to focus on "U.S. and Western targets overseas, where plots are easier to execute than on the U.S. homeland" . . . Cutting edge: Airport screening meme of the week seems to be "large and lethal" knives breezing through checkpoints . . . Th-th-th-that's all folks: Al Qaeda sympathizers plan to produce children's cartoon film to inspire young Muslim viewers to wage anti-Western jihad. These and other stories lead today's homeland security coverage. --------------------------------- U.S. counterterrorists expect al Qaeda's new leader to prioritize "attacking U.S. and Western targets overseas, where plots are easier to execute than on the U.S. homeland," The Wall Street Journal's Siobhan Gorman, Julian E. Barnes and Adam Entous spotlight. "A nuclear retaliatory strike may be just what a terrorist group like al Qaeda wants the United States to do. The devastation that would follow such a strike would be used as propaganda to prove that the United States is the great Satan," Farhan Ali assesses in Eurasia Review. Feds: NSA whistleblower Thomas A. Drake tells The Washington Times' Shaun Waterman that continuing mismanagement has turned the electronic spy agency into "the Enron of the U.S. intelligence community." Senior House Republicans criticize the Obama administration for a counterterror tack that "incentivizes" killing terrorism suspects rather than catching and interrogating them, The Wall Street Journal's Julian E. Barnes relates. A House Foreign Affairs measure would block U.S. aid to Pakistan, Egypt, Lebanon, Yemen and the Palestinian Authority unless the White House shows that they are cooperating in the war on terrorism, The Associated Press' Donna Cassata recounts. Homies: Bay Area labor unions demand that ICE brake its accelerating business payroll audits checking for illegal immigrant employees, The Oakland Tribune's Paul T. Rosynsky reports. CBP has announced a "Don't Be Fooled" campaign, designed to encourage public vigilance against human trafficking in local communities, The Orange County (Calif.) Register's Cindy Carcamo recounts. FEMA has approved just 23 percent of the requests for assistance in the three months since tornadoes tore across North Carolina killing 24 people, Cullen Browder reports for Raleigh's WRAL News. State and local: In its first 17 hours, an Arizona website to solicit funds for border fencing, modeled on a site that sought donations to defend the state's 2010 immigration law, racked up 884 donations totaling $39,085, Capitol Media Services spotlights. The recall election of Arizona Senate president and border hawk Russell Pearce could be the biggest race of the 2011 cycle, The Washington Times spotlights. Indiana A.G. Greg Zoeller won't appeal a federal judge's decision to temporarily block a tough new state immigration law, The Evansville Courier & Press recounts. The Atlanta City Council has voted to network thousands of public and private security cameras throughout the city, the Journal-Constitution recounts. Arkansas County, Ark. emergecrats are hoping to use DHS grantage to replace all frequencies currently using 150-512 MHz, The Stuttgart Daily Leader leads. Chasing the dime: Increasingly, South Florida bail bondsmen don't return money paid by relatives of detained foreign nationals with immigration holds, The Miami Herald mentions. A Phoenix Chamber of Commerce big warns that bizzes will continue to suffer from states' jumbled approach to immigration, unless the feds weigh in, The Cronkite News Service recounts. Virginia's Homeland Security Capital Corp. has found a buyer for its wholly owned subsidiary, Safety and Ecology Holdings, The Washington Business Journal relates. As the terror threat spirals, Britain's electronic intel agency is losing "whizz kid" specialists to Google, Microsoft and Amazon because they can triple their pay, The Daily Telegraph tells. Bugs 'n bombs: Four days after stating in court documents that Bruce Ivins lacked the equipment to perfect the anthrax powder used in the 2001 attacks, Justice says it still believes he was the sole perpetrator, The Frederick (Md.) News-Post notes. The "catchy theme" chosen for Truman State University's Summer Talent Academy for Professions in Health is "bioterrorism," Kirksville (Mo.)'s KTVO 3 News chirps. "Body bombs may prove to be as difficult for would-be attackers to use with the desired effect as they are for airport screeners to detect," Bloomberg reports — and let The Daily Telegraph remind that this threat meme actually dates to 2009. For the third time this year, Iran claims it shot down a U.S. drone snooping on its nuclear facilities, Danger Room reports. Close air support: A woman inadvertently walked a four-inch switchblade through a San Diego International TSA checkpoint, KGTV 10 News tells — while Columbia (S.C.)'s WISTV 10 reports "a very large and lethal knife" sailing undetected past Myrtle Beach International screeners, and Gizmodo hails a new Swiss Army knife concealing a USB drive in "a TSA-friendly, bladeless design." Security at smaller airports is "spotty or even nonexistent," with many lacking perimeter lighting and full fencing, The Middletown (Ohio) Journal mentions. New security gates coming to the general aviation section of Colorado's Grand Junction Regional Airport rile pilots and small-business owners, the Sentinel says. "When I asked if I could at least have a female agent do the honors [of an enhanced pat-down], I think it got me on the terrorist watch list," a Honolulu Star-Advertiser columnist cracks. Waterworld: Connecticut aldermen "have unanimously accepted $600,000 in federal funds for a homeland security boat, despite concerns from critics about maintenance costs and staffing issues," The Greenwich Time updates. Hudson River boaters are protesting "years of post-9/11 harassment by multiple police agencies working with millions of government dollars spent to boost maritime patrols," AP reports. DHS announced this week that it has established a task force to identify and investigate potential threats and contraband entering Virginia's ports, The Norfolk Virginian-Pilot reports. The Port of Anchorage lost a Coast Guard anti-terrorism unit based there, a casualty of federal budget cuts, KTUU 2 News tells — as The Delaware County (Pa.) Daily Times sees Boeing contracted to build an integrated surveillance system along the north segment of the Delaware River. Courts and rights: A man suspected of planting two bombs at Colorado Mills Mall in June appeared in federal court this week, Denver's ABC 7 News notes. In its last term, the Supremes again reversed or vacated most of the decisions tendered by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, a majority of the differences hinging on readings of the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, the L.A. Times surveys — as Threat Level sees that same appeals bench ruling a man wrongly convicted for making online threats against Barack Obama two weeks before his 2008 election as president. The father of convicted terrorism supporter David Hicks accuses Australian authorities of persecuting his son, ABC Melbourne mentions. Over there: The verdict is expected today on three accused eco-terrorists on trial under heavy security for an alleged plot to blow up an IBM nanotech research center near Zurich, swissinfo informs. Seventeen years after 85 people died in Argentina's worst terrorist attack, their relatives criticized both Iran and their own government for failing to solve the crime, AP reports — as CNN sees Iran hinting at new evidence in the case. A Chinese government think-tank "has finally broken the deafening silence" about the role of Pakistan in the continuous spate of violence in China's majority-Muslim Xinjiang province, The Times of India informs. Kultur Kanyon: Al Qaeda sympathizers plan to produce a children's cartoon film to inspire young Muslim viewers to take up violent jihad against the West, Reuters reports. ("Move over Foreskin Man; there's a new cartoon warrior in town," The Jewish Chronicle cracks.) A new Hollywood action thriller will be based on last year's assassination of a Hamas leader in Dubai, Al Arabiya relates. "Captain America's 21st-century exploits have pitted him against domestic terrorism as well as the Red Skull," The Houston Chronicle notes in a profile keyed to today's opening of Joe Johnston's "Captain America: The First Avenger" (Paramount). Telling a tale in which "terror, karma and the afterlife intertwine," Karan Razdan's Hindi horror flick, "Warning" (Omkar Investments), "deals with the lives of two men who die within a space of a few seconds — a jihadi and an ordinary person," Express India previews. Between the Covers: The first few chapters of Daniel Silva's latest thriller, "Portrait of a Spy" (Harper) "explore the potential terrorist strategy: multiple suicide bombings, with conventional weapons, that take place in different European cities," The American Thinker curtain-raises. J.K. Rowling, who published the first "Harry Potter" novel in 1997, "couldn't have predicted Sept. 11, or the Bush administration's reliance on torture to prosecute the War on Terror," The Atlantic assesses. In Douglas E. Richards' "Wired" (Paragon Press) "former special-forces operative David Desh is reactivated for one last mission: to find the enigmatic genius behind a bioterror plot that threatens millions," The San Francisco Chronicle relays. "Since 9/11, lots of hard work has been done on 'link analysis' as a way of detecting and delineating terrorist networks, nodes and points of vulnerability. David Ignatius makes this fact a key to his new novel, 'Bloodmoney' [W.W. Norton]," Foreign Policy points out. Dear Hamid Letter: "In what officials said was the 'only way' to move on from what has become a 'sad and unpleasant' situation, all 100,000 U.S. military and intelligence personnel crept out of their barracks in the dead of night Sunday and quietly slipped out of Afghanistan, The Onion reports. "U.S. commanders explained their sudden pullout in a short, handwritten note left behind at Bagram Airfield, their largest base of operations in the country. 'By the time you read this, we will be gone,' the note to the nation of Afghanistan read in part. 'We regret any pain this may cause you, but this was something we needed to do. We couldn't go on like this forever. We still care about you very much, but, in the end, we feel this is for the best,' the note continued. 'Please, just know that we are truly sorry and that we wish you all the greatest of happiness in the future.' See, also in The Onion: "Congress Spotted Leaving Gay Nightclub." 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