Intel Wars (27 page)

Reflecting on these events a year later, one of Blair's former deputies said, “It just proved that the laws of physics were wrong. Shit does roll uphill.”

On Saturday, May 1, 2010, at 9:30 P.M.
, the senior duty officer in the White House Situation Room called the National Security Council duty officer upstairs in the West Wing to tell him that three hours earlier the New York Police Department had found a 1993 Nissan Pathfinder parked at the crowded intersection of 45th Street and Broadway in the heart of Times Square containing a large homemade car bomb made from gasoline, propane, fireworks, and 250 pounds of the fertilizer ammonium nitrate, which was the same explosive used by Timothy McVeigh when he blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, killing 168 people.

According to the first reports from the New York Police Department, the bomb had failed to detonate but had started a fire inside the vehicle. Two street vendors, Duane Jackson and Lance Orton, noticed a plume of smoke coming from the backseat of the vehicle and alerted a nearby mounted police officer. The bomb squad was called in, and the device was disarmed without any difficulty.

The Sit Room senior watch officer immediately called John O. Brennan
, the president's special assistant for homeland security and counterterrorism, and briefed him over the secure telephone on what was known so far. It took a little more than an hour for Brennan to drive to the White House and read through the rapidly accumulating stack of reporting from the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the New York Police Department's command center in downtown Manhattan. At 10:44 P.M., Brennan spoke briefly on the phone with David Cohen, the deputy commissioner for intelligence of the NYPD, to get the latest update, then called President Obama in the White House residence to give him a brief rundown on what was known at that point. It was the beginning of a long and arduous three days.

It took the FBI less than forty-eight hours to trace the ownership of the Nissan Pathfinder to a thirty-year-old naturalized American citizen from Pakistan named Faisal Shahzad, who was living in suburban Connecticut in the town of Shelton. Shahzad was immediately put under surveillance by the FBI and his name placed on the “Do Not Fly” watch list maintained by the Transportation Security Agency (TSA).

On Monday, May 3, Shahzad slipped his surveillance and drove to New York City on the first leg of a trip to get himself out of the country. Somehow, he managed to buy a ticket on the Emirates Airlines midnight flight to Dubai with a connection to Pakistan at the ticket counter at John F. Kennedy International Airport and board the aircraft without triggering any alert. But just as the plane was due to depart, the names of all the passengers on the flight were checked again against the TSA “Do Not Fly” watch list, and this time Shahzad's name triggered alarm bells. U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents raced to the gate and boarded the Emirates Air airliner and arrested Shahzad without a struggle. Twenty minutes later Shahzad was booked and formally charged with being the culprit behind the abortive Times Square bombing.

A memorandum on the case sent to President Obama and his homeland security policy team noted with concern that Shahzad had not had any problem getting his hands on either a handgun or the explosives for his bomb, highlighting the fact that ten years after 9/11 there are still virtually no controls in place to ensure that people like Shahzad can't get hold of these materials. In 1953, there were an estimated 10 million handguns in the United States. Today, there are an estimated 65–66 million guns in private hands in the United States, with 2.5 million new handguns being sold every year.

Shahzad had no problem buying 250 pounds of the fertilizer ammonium nitrate for his crude but potentially deadly bomb. If Shahzad's car bomb had detonated, the carnage would have been unimaginable. The only reason that dozens if not hundreds of people were not killed on the crowded sidewalks of Times Square that Saturday evening was Shahzad's crass ineptitude as a bomb maker.

Shahzad was a blank page as far as the U.S. intelligence community and state and law enforcement agencies were concerned. No one in the U.S. intelligence community or law enforcement had ever heard of Faisal Shahzad before May 1, 2010. According to a senior White House counterterrorism official, “Shahzad wasn't on our radar screen … NSA was not intercepting his phone calls or monitoring his e-mails. The CIA didn't know he was in Pakistan training to be a suicide bomber. Treasury did not take any note of the money being wired to him from Pakistan. And the FBI, state and local law enforcement had no file on him because he had never done anything wrong … He was the perfect terrorist recruit.”

The FBI only learned later from Shahzad that he had returned to his native Pakistan in October 2009 for what he told friends was a family visit that lasted five months. In December 2009, he slipped away for five days to undergo an intensive course in explosives at a Pakistani Taliban training facility outside the town of Miram Shah in North Waziristan. After his training was completed, he went back to his family home to spend the holidays with his father and the rest of his family. Two months later Shahzad flew back to the United States, not telling anyone in his family that he was now a full-fledged terrorist. On February 25, 2010, a week after he had returned from Pakistan, Shahzad received $5,000 in cash that had been wired to him by a Pakistani Taliban operative in Pakistan. Six weeks later, on April 10, Shahzad got another $7,000 in cash that had been wired to him from Pakistan. Neither of these cash transfers was detected by the U.S. intelligence community because the amounts were so small.

Coming only four months after Abdulmutallab's abortive attempt to detonate a bomb on a Northwest Airlines plane over Detroit, Shahzad's admission that he was working for the Pakistani Taliban came as a major shock for the U.S. intelligence community. In early April 2009, four months before he was killed in Pakistan by a Hellfire missile fired by a CIA unmanned drone, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, Baitullah Mehsud, had issued a warning that his group was planning to strike targets in Washington, D.C., itself. Mehsud's threat was dismissed at the time by senior U.S. intelligence officials, with one official telling the Senate intelligence committee behind closed doors in executive session that the threat was “blather.” When Shahzad admitted that he was a Pakistani Taliban operative, the officials at the National Counterterrorism Center who had dismissed Mehsud's claims a year earlier were not forthcoming with an apology for having dismissed the threat so casually. Such is the way government bureaucracies work, where accountability for mistakes is often a fungible concept.

After his arrest, Shahzad made no effort to defend himself and cooperated fully with his FBI interrogators, telling them that he had nothing to hide. Shahzad admitted that his attempt at terrorism was a simple act of revenge, born of raw hatred that was not meant to right a wrong or to achieve anything tangible other than killing as many people as he could. He admitted that the bombing was planned specifically to generate as much carnage as possible. When asked later about whether he had any moral doubts about the killing of innocent civilians, such as women and children, Shahzad told his interrogators that not only was it justified, it was necessary.

At his arraignment in U.S. District Court in New York City, Shahzad freely admitted that he was the Times Square bomber, telling the presiding judge that he did what he did because he was convinced that his adopted country was trying to destroy Islam. When it came time to face judgment, Shahzad pleaded guilty to all the charges against him, and on October 5, 2010, he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. His parting words to the court were a warning, stating that he would not be the last man to try to exact some measure of revenge for what he thought the United States was doing in the Muslim world.

Seen in retrospect, Faisal Shahzad was simply giving voice to what an entire generation of Muslims, not just the young and disenfranchised, now take as gospel. Tens of millions of Muslims, regardless of their age, social status, educational level, tribal affiliation, or country of origin, honestly believe that America is trying to destroy their religion. By failing to mount any form of an effective, sustained public diplomacy program to counter this perception, the U.S. government conceded defeat without even bothering to fight for the hearts and minds of the Muslim world. In short, the United States has now replaced Israel as the symbol of all that is evil throughout the Muslim world, giving al Qaeda, the Taliban, and every other like-minded terrorist group a virtually limitless supply of recruits and financial backers for the foreseeable future.

Even many of America's allies in the Arab world implicitly believe that there is something insidious about the U.S. government's policies in the region. One Pakistani intelligence official interviewed in 2009 made no secret of his view that “America will not be satisfied until we are all dead.” A government minister in Yemen felt the same way, stating, “You [the United States] did not invade France or Germany when they disagreed with you,” referring to the failure of these two countries to support the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. “You do not bomb Tel Aviv when the Israelis kill innocent Palestinians … So why are we different?”

Most alarmingly, this view of the U.S. role in the Arab world is beginning to permeate the thinking of young Arab Americans here at home. This sentiment reared its ugly head at a 2009 book signing in Washington, D.C., when an American-born student of Egyptian extraction attending Georgetown University asked me a question one frequently hears across the length and breadth of the Arab world, “Why does America hate Islam?”

Since 9/11, U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials have returned over and over again to one particularly troublesome question: Do the more than 3 million Muslims living in the United States (some estimates of the number of Muslim Americans run as high as 6 million people) constitute a potential terrorist fifth column in our midst? In the corridors of power in Washington, it is a vitally important and at the same time an enormously politically sensitive issue because it has to some degree driven the U.S. intelligence community's and our nation's law enforcement efforts to protect America from terrorist attacks over the past decade.

No government official in Washington that I have spoken to over the past several years honestly believes that the 3 million Muslim Americans constitute a fifth column. The vast majority of Muslim Americans have eagerly embraced America's democratic and multicultural traditions while at the same time proudly preserving their religious and cultural heritage. As a demographic group, they tend to be better educated than most, professionally or business oriented, economically successful, and very politically astute. Like many of their fellow Americans, Muslim Americans have tended to vote in presidential elections with their pocketbooks, hence their conservative voting habits. With a few notable exceptions, such as Senator Robert F. Kennedy's killer Sirhan Sirhan, Muslim Americans have historically rejected political violence and extremist religious views.

Until relatively recently, very few American Muslims have been involved in terrorist plots. A 2010 study done by the RAND Corporation found that between 9/11 and the end of 2009, only 125 Muslim Americans, many of whom were career criminals who had converted to Islam in prison, had been implicated in forty-six separate cases of plotting to commit terrorist acts in the United States. According to the study's author, Brian Michael Jenkins, the fact that a little more than one hundred Muslim Americans have been involved in terrorist plots indicated “
an American Muslim population that remains hostile to jihadist ideology
and its exhortations to violence.”

However, things have been slowly but inexorably changing since 9/11. Muslim American political and community leaders sadly remember what happened during the state of siege that pervaded America after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when the FBI and state and local law enforcement agencies furiously scoured the country looking for al Qaeda sleeper cells widely believed at the time to be hiding within the large Arab American populations in New York City, Detroit, Miami, and Los Angeles.

For all the time and effort, the FBI found only a few al Qaeda operatives in the United States. There was a thirty-two-year-old Muslim convert with a long criminal record named José Padilla, who was arrested by the FBI at Chicago O'Hare International Airport as he was returning from an al Qaeda terrorism training camp in Pakistan. Four months later, in September 2002, the FBI arrested six Americans of Yemeni descent living in Lackawanna, New York, who had received terrorist training at an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan before 9/11.

Thousands of ordinary Muslim illegal immigrants and political refugees living in the United States were caught up in the FBI and law enforcement dragnet, arrested, and held incommunicado in prison for months, often in solitary confinement. Their legal right of habeas corpus was declared null and void. They were detained without bond or access to legal counsel. Their right to a speedy court hearing and adjudication of their cases was suspended. Their families were not told what had become of them. They just disappeared from work or off the streets without notice.

Almost 70 percent of these unfortunates were eventually deported en masse in one of the more shameful and underreported episodes in American history, leaving behind wives and children, many of whom had been born in the United States, who suddenly had to make do without their husbands. For example, one third of the Pakistani and Bangladeshi natives living in the Brooklyn neighborhood known as “Little Pakistan” were arrested and deported in the months after 9/11. By the end of 2002, an estimated 45,000 residents of Little Pakistan had been deported or left voluntarily for countries like Canada, which had a more tolerant attitude toward immigrants from South Asia. Not one of them was ever proven to have any affiliation with al Qaeda or any other terrorist group. Their only crime was that they all had overstayed their visas and were working illegally in this country.