Threat Matrix: July 2007

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Threat Matrix:
July 2007

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US Steps Up Security Following Attack in Britain

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff made appearances on several television talk shows.

He told ABC's This Week program there is no indication of a linkage between the events in Britain and any specific attacks on the United States. "We do not have, at this point, specific, credible intelligence that there is an attack, a particular attack, focused on this country," he said.

But at the same time, speaking on CNN's Late Edition program, Chertoff said U.S. authorities are concerned about the threat of terrorism, especially in the coming months. "We have had a number of al-Qaida leaders quite publicly talking about how they want to carry out their threats against the West. So, given that and given the history that we have had over past summers, with attacks in Britain, I think we were clearly focused on this as a possibility," he said. Full story...

	More United Kingdom Attacks Possible
	More US Air Marshals on Flights to Europe
	Officials: Car Bomb Plot Bears al Qaida's Trademark

[Cindy]

Thanks for the post and the link milford421.

[Cindy]

Thank you for the ping to the link and article, Oorang and Callmejoe.

[Velveeta]

We had a pretty big storm blow through Chicago right at rush hour.

Hopefully, it’s a weather issue.

Thanks for the ping.

[milford421]

Not a thing yet in New York...

[Oorang]

You're most welcome Cindy.

________________________________

Suspected terror cell under 'constant watch' (Australia)
July 11, 2007

A POTENTIAL terrorist threat could be posed by a group of 20 to 25 Australian men and women now under constant surveillance, according to an intelligence source. The intelligence source and several government figures have told The Bulletin magazine that the "highly dangerous" group has been assessed as posing a potential terrorist threat to national security.

The group is the subject of detailed counter-intelligence phone, email and mail intercepts, and constant surveillance, The Bulletin reports. "Have those 20 or 25 people been in contact with a bombmaker or vice versa? No," the intelligence source is quoted as saying. "But that is what authorities are on the lookout for.

"The public might assume that bombmaking is simple. Well, it is simple to make a simple bomb, but the truly effective VBIEDs (vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices) take some expertise - the sort of expertise gained in Iraq and Afghanistan."

The people do not include the doctors recently questioned in relation to the British bombs, the magazine reports. A government figure privy to Australia's tightly held counter-terrorism intelligence assessments is quoted as saying: "We don't have any specific intelligence on any plot. But there are people in Australia, perhaps 22 to 25, who we know have evil intentions and who are capable of carrying out very bad acts."

Intelligence officials believe the APEC meeting later this year would be an appealing target, the magazine says. Asia Pacific leaders will converge on Sydney in September for the meeting. Security will be especially tight when 21 world leaders, including United States President George W Bush, Chinese President Hu Jintao and Russian President Vladimir Putin, attend the APEC leaders summit on the weekend of September 8 and 9.

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,22054707-5013109,00.html

[Oorang]

S.F. police at the scene of suspicious device along the waterfront (california)
July 10, 2007 9:44 PM ET

SAN FRANCISCO - A police bomb squad is at the scene of a suspicious device near a newspaper rack at the Ferry Building along the San Francisco waterfront.

A spokesman for the San Francisco police department says some evacuations are underway in that area as authorities deal with the device. The All-Star baseball game is happening just a few blocks away at AT & T Park, so there are a lot of people in the downtown area today.

http://www.kesq.com/Global/story.asp?S=6771945&nav=9qrx

Portland Bomb Squad Detonates Suspicious Package (Oregon)
7/10/2007

Portland's bomb squad detonated a suspicious package near the federal courthouse Tuesday afternoon. The package was found behind the building that houses the Chamber of Commerce, Bullmoose Music and Videoport. That's right across the street from U.S. District Court.

The package contained batteries, circuit boards and wires, but no explosives. A similar incident took place on June 8th in Falmouth. As it did then, the bomb squad used a so-called disruptor, firing a concentrated burst of water to break up the device.

http://www.wcsh6.com/news/article.aspx?storyid=65869

[callmejoe]

Thanks. That LA Times article at the link cut the last few paragraphs regarding the shift in planning from DHS to the administration. I pasted them below. Truly frightening that FEMA/DHS was “handling” this. I’m sure that after 9/11, all the top levels of the executive branch have/had their plans in place. But the rest of the government underneath them is another matter. You cannot keep a country of 300 million people together for long with a just few hundred people bunkered down in military facilities. That isn’t a functioning government. That’s Baghdad in 2003.

The fact that Congress did nothing to close the fatal constitutional vulnerability exposed by 9/11 has in fact, continued to make it (and all of DC) an extremely attractive target. There is a long line of constitutional succession for the Presidency, and Senators can be replaced within 24 hours by gubernatorial appointment, but House members cannot be replaced except by special elections which (in the best of circumstances) takes months.

Without a quorum to constitute a legitimate House of Representatives, you have a recipe for constitutional chaos and no fully functioning legislative branch to either legitimize, amend, check or expand executive power in time of martial law (for those who think this is not a problem at the moment, Pelosi is now second in line to the Presidency and Bobby Byrd is third - - and we will have a new President in 18 months). Imagine any individual with unchecked power in time of unprecedented national crisis and you see the problem of legitimacy.

They could have reduced this threat by passing legislation to allow for appointed replacements as with the Senate, but in the name of ideological purity, the GOP leadership refused to do so. So the bullseye remains.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/09/AR2007050902719_pf.html

Bush Changes Continuity Plan
Administration, Not DHS, Would Run Shadow Government

By Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 10, 2007; A12 (excerpt)

. . . Norman J. Ornstein, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and an adviser to an independent Continuity of Government Commission, said the order “is a more explicit embrace of what has been since 9/11 an implicit but fairly clear set of assumptions.”

He added, “My frustration is that those assumptions have not gripped the Congress in the same way.”

Other former Bush administration officials said the directive formalizes a shift of authority away from the Department of Homeland Security to the White House.

Under an executive order dating to the Reagan administration, responsibility for coordinating, implementing and exercising such plans was originally charged to the Federal Emergency Management Agency and later DHS, the Congressional Research Service noted in a 2005 report on a pending DHS reorganization.

The new directive gives the job of coordinating policy to the president’s assistant for homeland security and counterterrorism — Frances Fragos Townsend, who will assume the title of national continuity coordinator — in consultation with Bush’s national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, with the support of the White House’s Homeland Security Council staff. Townsend is to produce an implementation plan within 90 days. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff will continue to coordinate operations and activities, the directive said.

[Oorang]

Briton marries bin Laden’s son
July 11, 2007

A British woman has married a son of Osama bin Laden after a holiday romance and is to apply for a visa so that he can visit Britain, The Times has learnt.

Jane Felix-Browne, a 51-year-old grandmother and parish councillor from Cheshire, has until now kept her marriage to Omar Ossama bin Laden, 27, secret from everyone apart from her immediate family and close friends. But she has now agreed to speak about her relationship with bin Laden’s fourth eldest son.

Excerpted

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article2056380.ece

FBI databases being sifted to identify risks posed by possible terrorists
July 10, 2007

WASHINGTON – The FBI is gathering and sorting information about Americans to help search for potential terrorists, insurance cheats and crooked pharmacists, according to a government report obtained Tuesday.

Records about identity thefts, real estate transactions, motor vehicle accidents and complaints about Internet drug companies are being searched for common threads to aid law enforcement officials, the Justice Department said in a report to Congress on the agency's data-mining practices. In addition, the report disclosed government plans to build a new database to assess the risk posed by people identified as potential or suspected terrorists.

All but one of the databases – the one to track terrorists – have been up and running for several years, the report showed. The lone exception is the System to Assess Risk, or STAR, program to rate the threat posed by people already identified as suspected terrorists or named on terror watch lists.

The system, still under construction, is designed to help counterterror investigators save time by narrowing the field of people who pose the greatest potential threat and will not label anyone a terrorist, Boyd said.

Excerpted

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/nation/20070710-1803-fbi-datamining.html

[callmejoe]

No problem.

It was also posted on another thread a few days ago but wanted to put it in context with the other posts/links.

[Velveeta]

I’m pretty much caught up with today’s posts.
Thank you all very much for the pings, it so helpful when scanning for important news.

“Go back to Bojinka”

*Ahmed, who worked as an aeronautical engineer in Bangalore before coming to the UK*

Regarding the London threat from Zawahiri:
Where is the “center of London”?

The historical center of London is now a relatively small area still known as the City, which covers only about 2.6 sq km (about 1 sq mi). The City is capitalized, to distinguish it from the larger metropolis. This is where London began as a Roman colonial town around ad 50, at the point where the Romans built the first bridge in London. Today this area is one of the world’s leading financial centers. Most of the financial activities are crowded along Threadneedle Street, near the intersection known as the Bank, which includes the huge Bank of England complex, the Royal Exchange, and the Stock Exchange. The permanent residential population of the City is now less than 6000, but about 350,000 commute here daily to work. The only large residential portion of the City is the Barbican Centre, a concrete complex of towers, parking garages, and pedestrian walkways located on the northern edge of the City. The Barbican was built to replace older buildings destroyed in World War II (1939-1945), when the Germans heavily bombed London.
http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761574117/London_(England).html

Chertoff: Take 2 Tums and get back to work.

7/11, 8/11, 9/11, 10/12? Who knows - but it’s coming.

Time to restock supplies.

[Velveeta]

Storms race through Chicago area

A line of storms moved through the Chicago area this evening, bringing heavy rain, hail, and wind gusts over 60 m.p.h., signaling the beginning of the end of the recent heat wave.

The storms caused delays at Chicago’s two airports and at their height had knocked out power to about 15,000 Commonwealth Edison customers.

The system moved rapidly from west to east ahead of a cold front, prompting storm and flood warnings in DeKalb and Kane Counties, National Weather Service meteorologist Casey Sullivan said. Wind gusts of up to 60 m.p.h. were reported in Sugar Grove, along with frequent lightning, penny-size hail and torrential downpours, he said.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-070710weatherjul10,1,2328308.story?coll=chi-news-hed

It was a wild storm - I pulled over under a viaduct for about 20 minutes til it lightened up a bit. Gave up on the drive home and parked myself at a coffee shop for a while. The streets were flooding within about 5 minutes, the downpours were so massive.

[texpat72]

Saw a clip of him last night on fox news channel, one of his speeches from September 2001. He has aged a lot in 6 years.

[milford421]

Thanks for the info. Perhaps the Chicago delay was legit then?

Here in New York, there have been no storms...weatherman on news channel even looked incredulous and remarked that all three airports were closed due to the weather...he looked around and said, “weather?” Now being told that 3 airports were closed due to bad weather south of NY...

[PGalt]

Thanks very much for the ping, Ian. Outstanding source of information. Thanks to all who make it happen.

[GOPJ]

The messages appeared to be emergency action messages, coded communications sent by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to U.S. Air Force strategic nuclear forces. The messages sent June 26 included 174 characters, much longer than normal 30-character messages, and amateur radio monitors say they have not seen the size of this message since the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Air Force Maj. Tom Knowles, a U.S. Strategic Command spokesman, said there were no large-scale exercises going on that would account for what were likely “routine” messages.

How could a message this unusual be considered "routine"?

[milford421]

Got info from Velveeta about storms in Chicago...nothing here in New York...at all. Now the story is storms south of NY...haven’t seen any.

[milford421]

I wasn’t aware of the Syria information. Thanks for posting it. I’ll keep you in mind for future pings.

[milford421]

“Listened to report out of NYC news. It sounds like the delays have been ongoing since afternoon when there were storms. I think it does make sense. Once delays start they pile up at other airports and aren’t simple to erase.”

Would make sense if there were storms...there weren’t.

[callmejoe]

“Regarding the London threat from Zawahiri:
Where is the “center of London”?

The historical center of London is now a relatively small area still known as the City, which covers only about 2.6 sq km (about 1 sq mi). The City is capitalized, to distinguish it from the larger metropolis. This is where London began as a Roman colonial town around ad 50, at the point where the Romans built the first bridge in London.”

Washington DC = Roman Architecture

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1143498849735&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

. . . Al-Zawahri - Osama bin Laden’s deputy in al-Qaida, who is believed to be hiding in Afghanistan or Pakistan - said he was making the video to mark the fourth anniversary of the December 2001 battle of Tora Bora, in which US forces besieged bin Laden and al-Qaida fighters in mountainous caves of Afghanistan. He denounced Bush as the “Caesar of Washington” and accused him of lying about progress in the war on terror.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1687360.ece

Spy chiefs warn that one operative had said he was planning an attack on “a par with Hiroshima and Nagasaki” in an attempt to “shake the Roman throne”, a reference to the West. . .

http://memritv.netstrategies.com/report/en/2188.htm

Al-Zawahiri begins the interview by announcing that “the empire of evil is about to end and a new dawn is about break over mankind, [which will be] liberated from the Caesars of the White House and Europe and from the Zionists.” He adds that the imminent defeat of the Americans in Iraq and the establishment of the Islamic State of Iraq are important milestones on the way to reviving the Islamic Caliphate. . .

[milford421]

But the ground stop was actually much later...late afternoon/early evening. Again...no storms here.

Thanks for the link...interesting read.