Posts Tagged ‘Terrorism’

 

Top intel analyst: Pakistan new home base for Al Qaeda

Tom Fingar, the deputy director of national intelligence for analysis, is delivering a “global security assessment” to the House Armed Services Committee today. In his prepared remarks, just released, Fingar singles out Pakistan as the current home base for Al Qaeda, which he calls “the terrorist organization that poses the greatest threats to U.S. interests, […]

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Most Dangerous Theory

As details emerge in the case of Andrew Speaker, the 31-year-old runaway groom with a drug-resistant strain of tuberculosis, more questions arise about whether the nation’s defenses against biological agents, as well as terrorists, are in proper working order, and whether health and homeland-security officials have truly adapted to the unpredictable nature of such threats. […]

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Shadow Hunters

It started with a phone call. On April 23, 2004, a Friday, a man calling himself “Al” contacted the Homeland Security Department in Washington. He claimed that he knew a group of terrorists who were going to blow up a building. Al knew this, he said, because he was once a member of Al Qaeda. […]

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Signals and Noise

People like to say that the world changed on 9/11. That it became a more confusing place. But for two men, as buildings and bodies burned, the world became much clearer.On the morning of September 11, 2001, John Poindexter, a 65-year-old retired rear admiral and President Reagan’s onetime national security adviser, was driving to his […]

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More than Meets the Ear

The National Security Agency’s warantless surveillance program is broader than officials have described. The Bush administration has assiduously avoided any talk about the actual workings of its program to intercept the phone calls and e-mails of people in the United States who are suspected of having links to terrorists abroad. Officials’ unwavering script goes like […]

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Intelligence Designs

In the spring of 2000, a year and a half before the 9/11 attacks, Erik Kleinsmith made a decision that history may judge as a colossal mistake.Then a 35-year-old Army major assigned to a little-known intelligence organization at Fort Belvoir in Virginia, Kleinsmith had compiled an enormous cache of information — most of it electronically […]

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The Private Spy Among Us

To help the government track suspected terrorists and spies who may be visiting or residing in this country, the FBI and the Defense Department for the past three years have been paying a Georgia-based company for access to its vast databases that contain billions of personal records about nearly every person — citizens and noncitizens […]

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The Forgotten War

Underequipped. Underfunded. Overshadowed. Life on the front lines of the drug war.“If you’ve got anything to say, say it now!” Chris Fertig stammered while being electrocuted. Fertig, a Coast Guard lieutenant junior grade, had been riding shotgun in a stubby, 22-foot boat with inflatable sides, plowing through rough Caribbean seas at a neck-snapping 35 knots. […]

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The Worm that Turned

The federal government’s fight against one cyber villain changed its response to online attacks. Wednesday, June 20, 20016:30 a.m.FBI Headquarters,Washington After 23 years as a CIA analyst, having briefed the president and his team on every conceivable threat to national security, Bob Gerber was scared. More scared than he’d been in a long time.Holed up […]

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