PRNewsWire : National Geographic Channel Presents Never-Before-Heard Revelations from U.S. Authorities on Plot to Blow Up Almost 10 Passenger Jets

National Geographic Channel Presents Never-Before-Heard Revelations from U.S. Authorities on Plot to Blow Up Almost 10 Passenger Jets

The Liquid Bomb Plot Presents Exclusive Interviews With CIA and Homeland Security Agents on the Chilling and Tense Global Surveillance Operation That Uncovered a Plot to Kill More Than 2,000 People

August 16, 2011

The Liquid Bomb Plot Premieres This Sunday, August 21, 2011, at 9 P.M. EDT/PDT on National Geographic Channel

WASHINGTON, Aug. 16, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- In the summer of 2006, as many as 18 conspirators planned to simultaneously blow up almost 10 airplanes by bringing hydrogen peroxide-injected soda-bottles-turned-bombs onto flights bound from London to the U.S. and Canada. Now, National Geographic Channel (NGC) — with unprecedented access to undercover agents and top officials from the CIA, Homeland Security and British Counter-Terror Command — goes inside the true story behind the largest and most sophisticated terrorism plot since September 11, 2001, which changed airline security measures around the world.

The Liquid Bomb Plot details how a threat that began as a British counterterrorist investigation evolved into a global emergency. In the U.S., President Bush's administration, the CIA and the Department of Homeland Security worked feverishly to protect America from an attack on the scale of 9/11.

With remarkable access to the highest-level officials involved in foiling the terrorists — some of whom have given NGC their only interview on the plot — the complete details behind the operation are revealed. Interviews include, from the U.S., General Michael Hayden, former director, CIA; Michael Chertoff, former secretary, Department of Homeland Security; Robert Grenier, former Islamabad station chief, CIA; Kip Hawley, former director, Transportation Security Administration; and Charlie Allen, chief intelligence officer, Department of Homeland Security. Top U.K. interviews include Lord John Reid, former home secretary and former defense secretary, Britain; Andy Hayman, former assistant commissioner for specialist operations, Metropolitan Police; and Peter Clarke, OBE, former national co-coordinator of terrorist investigations, Metropolitan Police.

Now, for the first time, U.S. officials recount how they essentially forced the hand of the British to arrest the suspected terrorists ahead of schedule by making a secret trip to Pakistan. General Michael Hayden was working closely with the British government on Operation Overt, the largest surveillance operation in U.K history, with more than 200 agents involved in surveillance alone, not to mention the senior officials on both sides of the pond monitoring the situation.

General Hayden discusses on camera for the only time how he visited Pakistan and met with the head of the Pakistan Intelligence Agency without alerting the British, who had requested more time to gather evidence. During Hayden's trip, Rashid Rauf, the key Al Qaeda operative in the plot, was arrested by the Pakistani authorities, thus compelling the British to move into the "arrest phase" ahead of plan before those involved found out they might be compromised.

"The British had always suspected the Americans were behind Rauf's arrest, but this is the first and only time a senior U.S. figure has discussed the arrest publicly," explains Executive Producer Louise Norman, who worked for more than a year to gain access to the true details behind the terror plot from both the U.S. and British governments. "The Liquid Bomb Plot is by far the most comprehensive, detailed report on how this incredible terror plot was foiled. I thought I knew the full story, but what happened behind the scenes has never been fully reported until now."

The resulting arrests led to 11 terrorism-related convictions and a mountain of evidence, including 26,000 exhibits from 102 property searches, 80 seized computers and related devices, and 15,000 CDs, 500 disks and 14,000 gigs of data.

The arrests also made news around the world and changed air travel in the most substantial way since 9/11—including passengers not being allowed to go through airport security with more than 3.4 ounces of liquid.

For more information, visit www.natgeotv.com.

SOURCE National Geographic Channel

Harper's : Six Questions for Jane Mayer, Author of The Dark Side

Six Questions for Jane Mayer, Author of The Dark Side

By Scott Horton | July 14, 2008

In a series of gripping articles, Jane Mayer has chronicled the Bush Administration’s grim and furtive dealings with torture and has exposed both the individuals within the administration who “made it happen” (a group that starts with Vice President Cheney and his chief of staff, David Addington), the team of psychologists who put together the palette of techniques, and the Fox television program “24,” which was developed to help sell it to the American public. In a new book, The Dark Side, Mayer puts together the major conclusions from her articles and fills in a number of important gaps. Most significantly, we learn the details on the torture techniques and the drama behind the fierce and lingering struggle within the administration over torture, and we learn that many within the administration recognized the potential criminal accountability they faced over these torture tactics and moved frantically to protect themselves from possible future prosecution. I put six questions to Jane Mayer on the subject of her book, The Dark Side.

1. Reports have circulated for some time that the Red Cross examination of the CIA’s highly coercive interrogation regime—what President Bush likes to call “The Program”—concluded that it was “tantamount to torture.” But you write that the Red Cross categorically described the program as “torture.” The Red Cross is notoriously tight-lipped about its reports, and you do not cite your source or even note that you examined the report. Do you believe that the threat of criminal prosecution drove the Bush Administration’s crafting of the Military Commissions Act?

Whether anyone involved in the Bush Administration’s interrogation and detention program will be prosecuted is as much a political question as a legal one. Right now in Italy the CIA agents involved in the rendition of Abu Omar are facing criminal charges, which is obviously an unmitigated nightmare for the Bush Administration. But to get that far it took an extraordinarily independent and politically fearless local prosecutor, Armando Spataro. I may be wrong, but I personally doubt there will be large-scale legal repercussions inside America for those who devised and implemented “The Program.” Activists will be angry at me for saying this, but as someone who has covered politics in Washington, D.C., for two decades, I would be surprised if there is the political appetite for going after public servants who convinced themselves that they were acting in the best interests of the country, and had legal authority to do so. An additional complicating factor is that key members of Congress sanctioned this program, so many of those who might ordinarily be counted on to lead the charge are themselves compromised.

Much will depend on who the next president and attorney general are, and how much pressure they feel. At the very least, as a journalist, I hope that the records are opened, and all the legal memos released (several crucial ones remain secret) so that the country can learn its own history here. My guess is that the real accountability for President Bush will be in the history books, not the court room.

As for the damning Red Cross report, as I make clear to readers in the book, I have not personally read it, because as you say, it is very closely held. I have instead relied upon multiple sources who are knowledgeable about it. Adding to the confidence I have concerning it is the specificity, and consistency of the details, as well as confirmation I was able to get from additional independent sources familiar with the treatment of the detainees. For instance, Abu Zubayda claimed to have been locked in a tiny cage, in which he had to remain doubled up for long periods of time, prior to the period when he was waterboarded. This account—which he gave to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)—was confirmed to me independently by a former CIA officer familiar with his interrogation. It also is consistent with the chronology of legal actions taken inside the Justice Department. Incidentally, being caged only made him angry, according to the former CIA source. The sadistic treatment of Abu Zubayda also seems to have affected him psychologically in bizarre ways. Two sources said that he became sexually obsessive, masturbating so much his captors feared he would injure himself. One described him as acting “like a monkey at the zoo.” A physician was called in for consultation—one of many instances in which health professionals have played truly disturbing roles in this program. (I personally feel that the medical and psychological professionals who have used their skills to further a program designed to cause pain and suffering should be a high priority in terms of accountability. It has long been a ghastly aspect of torture, worldwide, that doctors and other medical professionals often assist. The licensing boards and professional societies are worthless, in my view, if they don’t demand serious investigations of such unethical uses of science.)

The reaction of top Bush Administration officials to the ICRC report, from what I can gather, has been defensive and dismissive. They reject the ICRC’s legal analysis as incorrect. Yet my reporting shows that inside the White House there has been growing fear of criminal prosecution, particularly after the Supreme Court ruled in the Hamdan case that the Geneva Conventions applied to the treatment of the detainees. This nervousness resulted in the successful effort to add retroactive immunity to the Military Commission Act. Cheney personally spearheaded this effort. Fear of the consequences of exposure also weighed heavily in discussions about whether to shut the CIA program down. In White House meetings, Cheney warned that if they transferred the CIA’s prisoners to Guantanamo, “people will want to know where they have been—and what we’ve been doing with them.” Alberto Gonzales, a source said, “scared” everyone about the possibility of war crimes prosecutions. It was on their minds.

2. You have patiently traced the torture techniques used by the CIA back to two psychologists, James Mitchell and John Bruce Jessen—you describe them as ”good looking, clean-cut, polite Mormons”—who reverse-engineered their techniques out of the SERE (survival, evasion, resistance, escape) program used to train U.S. pilots in self-defense. In Dark Side, you identify an approach called “Learned Helplessness” as the model they used, and you note that its author, Prof. Martin Seligman, made a visit to the SERE school and spoke with Mitchell and Jessen as the program was being formed. Seligman is a former president of the American Psychological Association (APA), which is the sole association of health care professionals to buck condemnation of “The Program” and to resist calls that its members not be involved in it. Do you believe that Seligman’s proximity to the torture program helps explain the difficulty that APA has in rejecting it?

Central… was the work of one of America’s best-known and most successful psychologists, Martin Seligman, the former president of the American Psychological Association… Seligman and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania pioneered work on a theory he called “Learned Helplessness.” He did experiments with dogs in which he used electric shocks to destroy their will to escape… In the spring of 2002, the period during which the CIA was probing what it could do to Zubaydah, Seligman was invited by the CIA to speak at the Navy’s SERE school in San Diego. According to… and Air Force colonel… “Learned Helplessness was his whole paradigm… It starts with isolation. They they eliminate the prisoner’s ability to forecast the future… It creates dread and dependency. It was the KGB model.”
—From The Dark Side

It was completely fascinating to me to learn that Martin Seligman, one of the most esteemed psychologists in the country, a former head of the APA, was connected to the CIA after 9/11. Seligman is known for work he did back in the 1960’s at the University of Pennsylvania in a theory he called “Learned Helplessness.” He and colleagues conducted experiments on caged dogs, in which they used electric charges to shock them randomly. He discovered that the random mistreatment destroyed the dogs emotionally to the point where they no longer had the will to escape, even when offered a way out. Seligman confirmed for me, by email, that in the spring of 2002, as the CIA was trying to figure out how to interrogate its first major high-value detainee, Abu Zubayda, he was brought in to speak about his theories to a high-level confab apparently organized by CIA officials, at the Navy’s SERE School in San Diego. He said his talk lasted some three hours. Seligman said his talk was focused on how to help U.S. soldiers resist torture—not on how to breakdown resistance in detainees.

But, according to numerous sources (who are quoted on the record in The Dark Side), Seligman’s theories were cited admiringly soon after by James Mitchell, the psychologist whom the CIA put on contract to advise on its secret interrogation protocol. Eyewitnesses describe Mitchell as quoting Seligman’s theories of “Learned Helplessness” as useful in showing how to break the resistance of detainees’ to interrogation. One source recounts Mitchell specifically touting the experiments done on dogs in the context of how to treat detainees.

Through a lawyer, Mitchell has denied that these theories guided his and the CIA’s use of such coercive measures as close confinement, psychological manipulation, and calibrated pain. But Mitchell confirmed, when I spoke to him, that he admired Seligman’s work.

Among the U.S. Government’s interrogation techniques that seem to echo these experiments are the uses of random maltreatment—taking away any predictable schedule from detainees so that they have no idea what time it is, no sense of when meals are delivered, no idea if it is day or night, as well as manipulating temperature, sound, sleep, and using isolation, all of which are meant to cause psychic stress that would erode a prisoner’s resistance to being interrogated and foster total dependency upon an interrogator. Perhaps just coincidentally, the detainees have described other ways in which they were treated like dogs—the use of dog cages and of a collar and leash.

3. This week Scott McClellan, Bush’s press secretary, so famous for pronouncing that “we do not torture,” issued a retraction in an interview with ABC’s Jake Tapper, admitting that he could not “honestly deny” the Administration’s acceptance and use of torture techniques. President Bush has specifically defended the program with a series of claims concerning Abu Zubaydah. Do his claims stand up to scrutiny?

President Bush has repeatedly defended the need to use “enhanced interrogations” in order to get life-saving intelligence, and has pointed to Abu Zubayda’s case as an example. I went over the claims in this case carefully, and found them highly dubious. Bush claimed three breakthroughs from coercive tactics used on Abu Zubayda.

First, he said, Abu Zubayda told the CIA that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was the terrorist behind the 9/11 plot. But, if one reads the 9/11 Commission’s detailed report on what information had reached the CIA prior to the 9/11 attacks, it is clear that the CIA already had this information.

Second, President Bush said that Abu Zubayda revealed that an American-born Al Qaeda figure was on his way to attack America. This is widely understood to be a reference to Jose Padilla. But numerous published accounts indicate that Abu Zubayda gave this information to interrogators prior to being physically coerced. So it’s not accurate to describe it as an argument for coercion.

Third, the President said Abu Zubayda gave up information leading to the capture of another top Al Qaeda terrorist, Ramsi Bin Al Shibh. But circumstantial evidence, as well as previously published accounts, suggest that Bin Al Shibh was more likely located by the United States as the result of an interview he gave to Al Jazeera.

Meanwhile, although President Bush has argued that “enhanced” interrogation had led to numerous breakthroughs he has never publicly acknowledged the false and fabricated intelligence it has yielded, too. One former top CIA official told me, “Ninety percent of what we got was crap.”

4. You spend more time showing how the torture process compromised lawyers than how it compromised health care professionals. One of the more revealing cases involves Jessica Radack, a young career attorney in the Justice Department’s Honors Program, who dispensed ethics advice concerning plans for the interrogation of John Walker Lindh. It seems that her advice was contrary to the ethical views of senior Bush Administration lawyers, and you note that when a federal judge demanded to see the internal Department of Justice records relating to the matter, all of Radack’s emails, including the advice actually dispensed, had been deleted and the hard copies removed, and none of this was furnished to the court. Did the Justice Department ever undertake an internal probe into the obstruction?

Radack was in some ways an early guinea pig showing how high the costs were for anyone—including administration lawyers—who dissented from the Bush Administration’s determination to rewrite the rules for the treatment of terrorists. Her job in the department was to give ethical advice. She was asked whether an FBI officer in Afghanistan could interrogate John Walker Lindh and use his statements against him in any future trial. By the time she was asked this, however, as she knew, Lindh’s father had already hired a lawyer to represent him. So she concluded that it would not be proper for the FBI to question him outside the presence of his counsel.

To her amazement, the FBI agent went ahead and did so anyway, and then the prosecutors in the Justice Department proceeded to use Lindh’s statements against him in their criminal prosecution. She told me, “It was like ethics were out the window. After 9/11, it was, like, ‘anything goes’ in the name of terrorism. It felt like they’d made up their minds to get him, regardless of the process.” Radack believed that the role of the ethics office was to “rein in the cowboys” whose zeal to stop criminals sometimes led them to overstep legal boundaries. “But after 9/11 we were bending ethics to fit our needs,” she said. “Something wrong was going on. It wasn’t just fishy—it stank.”

What happened next was truly scary. She tried to ensure that a judge overseeing the case, who asked for all information regarding the Department’s handling of Lindh, was given the full record, including her own contrary advice. But instead, she said she found that her superiors at Justice sent the judge only selective portions of the record, excluding her contrary opinion. Her case files, she said, were tampered with, and documents missing. Among the senior Justice Department officials who were sent her files, she said was Alice Fisher, a deputy to Michael Chertoff who followed him as head of the Department’s Criminal Division.

Michael Chertoff, who was the head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division when Zubayda was caught, downplayed his role… But according to a top CIA official directly involved at the time, as well as a former top Justice Department official involved in a secondhand war, Chertoff was consulted extensively about detainees’ treatment. The former senior Agency official said with disgust, “Chertoff, and Gonzales, and all these other guys act like they know nothing about this now, but they were all in the room. They’re moonwalking backwards so fast, Michael Jackson would be proud of them.”
—From The Dark Side

Radack complained about what she thought were serious omissions of the record being withheld from the judge. Within weeks of disagreeing with the top Justice Department officials, Radack went from having been singled out for praise, to being hounded out of the department. Radack got a job in private practice, but after her story appeared in Newsweek, with copies of some of her emails, the Justice Department opened a leak investigation. The U.S. Attorney then opened a criminal investigation. Radack has since become an advocate for whistle-blowers’ rights. But the episode served as a warning to anyone in the government who stood in the way of the so-called, “New Paradigm.” It is unclear to me what sort of investigation, if any, there has been of this case, including of the potential obstruction.

5. In a recent speech in Boston, Attorney General Mukasey tried to excuse John Yoo, David Addington, and other key players in the Bush Administration torture team by arguing they were operating under intense pressure and were motivated only by a desire to protect the country. But isn’t it obvious that the “War Council” seized upon 9/11 and the war mood that prevailed in its wake as an opportunity to test-pilot their constitutionally-untenable views of presidential power and authority and the irrelevance of international law?

After interviewing hundreds of sources in and around the Bush White House, I think it is clear that many of the legal steps taken by the so-called “War Council” were less a “New Paradigm,” as Alberto Gonzales dubbed it, than an old political wish list, consisting of grievances that Cheney and his legal adviser, David Addington, had been compiling for decades. Cheney in particular had been chafing at the post-Watergate reforms, and had longed to restore the executive branch powers Nixon had assumed, constituting what historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called “the Imperial Presidency.”

Before September 11, 2001, these extreme political positions would not have stood a change of being instituted—they would never have survived democratic scrutiny. But by September 12, 2001, President Bush and Vice President Cheney were extraordinarily empowered. Political opposition evaporated as critics feared being labeled anti-patriotic or worse. It’s a familiar dynamic in American history—not unlike the shameful abridgement of civil liberties represented by FDR’s internment of Americans of Japanese ancestry. One of the strongest quotes in the book, I think, comes from Philip Zelikow, the former executive director of the 9/11 Commission, former counselor to Secretary of State Condi Rice, and a historian who teaches at the University of Virginia. He suggests in time that America’s descent into torture will be viewed like the internment of the Japanese, because they happened for similar reasons. As he puts it, “Fear and anxiety were exploited by zealots and fools.”

6. One of the lingering mysteries in Washington has been what happened to the CIA internal probe into homicides involving the program. You note that CIA Inspector General (IG) John Helgerson undertook a study and initially concluded, just as the Red Cross and most legal authorities in the United States and around the world, that the program was illegal and raised serious war crimes issues. Helgerson was summoned repeatedly to meet privately with Vice President Cheney, the man who provided the impetus for the program, and it appears as a result of these meetings the IG’s report was simply shut down. Would those probes have brought into question the Justice Department’s specific approval of torture techniques used by the CIA–approval that involved not just John Yoo, but much more specifically Michael Chertoff and Alice Fisher, the two figures who ran the criminal division?

The fact that John Helgerson—the inspector general at the CIA who is supposed to act as an independent watchdog—was called in by Cheney to discuss his tough report in 2004 is definitely surprising news. Asked for comment, Helgerson through the CIA spokesman denied he felt pressured in any way by Cheney. But others I interviewed have described the IG’s office to me as extremely politicized. They have also suggested it was very unusual that the Vice President interjected himself into the work of the IG. Fred Hitz, who had the same post in previous administrations, told me that no vice president had ever met with him. He thought it highly unusual.

Helgerson’s 2004 report had been described to me as very disturbing, the size of two Manhattan phone books, and full of terrible descriptions of mistreatment. The confirmation that Helgerson was called in to talk with Cheney about it proves that–as early as then–the Vice President’s office was fully aware that there were allegations of serious wrongdoing in The Program.

We know that in addition, the IG investigated several alleged homicides involving CIA detainees, and that Helgerson’s office forwarded several to the Justice Department for further consideration and potential prosecution. The only case so far that has been prosecuted in the criminal courts is that involving David Passaro—a low-level CIA contractor, not a full official in the Agency. Why have there been no charges filed? It’s a question to which one would expect that Congress and the public would like some answers. Sources suggested to me that, as you imply, it is highly uncomfortable for top Bush Justice officials to prosecute these cases because, inevitably, it means shining a light on what those same officials sanctioned. Chertoff’s role in particular seems ripe for investigation. Alice Fisher’s role also seems of interest. Much remains to be uncovered.

WaPo : Chertoff: Terrorism Prevention Efforts Successful

Chertoff: Terrorism Prevention Efforts Successful

By Spencer S. Hsu and William Branigin | Washington Post Staff Writers | March 6, 2008

The United States has successfully lowered the risk of a large-scale domestic terrorist attack in the near future, one of the reasons there has been an increase in attacks by Islamic extremists in Europe, Homeland Security Michael Chertoff said today.

Improvements in U.S. traveler screening and border security have shifted the focus of al-Qaeda operatives and sympathizers to Europe, which is perceived as a more open target, Chertoff told a group of Washington Post editors.

"We have significantly reduced the risk of a major attack in the short term," Chertoff said before meeting with President Bush to mark the fifth anniversary of the Homeland Security Department's creation.

In a speech commemorating the anniversary, Bush renewed his lobbying for a bill that would provide immunity from lawsuits to telecommunications companies that turned over information on their customers to the federal government after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The bill would extend modifications of a surveillance law that expired last month.

"To stop new attacks on America, we need to know who the terrorists are talking to, what they're saying and what they're planning," Bush told DHS employees at DAR Constitution Hall in Washington. For that, the government needs the cooperation of private companies, he said, but some of them are being sued for billions of dollars for allegedly violating customers' privacy.

"Allowing these lawsuits to proceed would be unfair," as well as "unwise" and "dangerous," Bush said. Although a bipartisan majority in the Senate passed a "good bill," he said, House Democratic leaders blocked a vote on it last month, saying they needed another 21 days to deal with it. That "deadline" arrives Saturday, Bush said.

A previous House version of the bill did not include the immunity provision that the White House has demanded.

"If House leaders are serious about security, they need to meet the deadline they set for themselves, pass a bill and get it to my desk this Saturday," Bush said.

He also warned against complacency about terrorism, urging Americans to "remember that the danger to our country has not passed."

Listing a number of steps he said his administration has taken to prevent future terrorist attacks, Bush asserted that "we have made our borders more secure," unified terrorism databases and improved the detection of counterfeit travel documents.

He also pointed to programs to prevent the smuggling of biological, chemical, radiological or nuclear weapons into the nation's cities.

"We are determined to stop the world's most dangerous men from striking America with the world's most dangerous weapons," Bush said.

Chertoff also highlighted what he said was the department's effectiveness in keeping would-be attackers at bay.

"It's not impossible, but for terrorists who typically operate in being very careful because they don't want their plots disrupted, we have made it harder for them to come in," he said.

Chertoff likened the reaction to a car thief who passes over a locked vehicle set with an alarm and anti-theft devices and decides to steal the one next to it.

"One of the reasons we're seeing more attacks in Europe is because they think it's easier," he said, citing almost annual attacks since 2004 in Madrid, London and Glasgow and disrupted plots in Denmark, Germany, Italy, France and Portugal.

However, the intention of al-Qaeda and affiliated groups to strike at U.S. targets has not diminished, Chertoff warned, repeating U.S. intelligence assessments last year. For example, a disrupted Britain-based plot to smuggle liquid explosives onto transatlantic airliners in 2006 would have caused deaths on the scale of the Sept. 11 attacks, he said.

While al-Qaeda's capability is "uneven" and less than what it was before 2001, it is rebounding somewhat in the frontier areas of Pakistan, he said.

Chertoff's remarks come as Washington is pushing 27 of its European and other allies to accept tighter security requirements on travelers who can now visit the United States as tourists without visas. The restrictions include electronic check-in with authorities days before travel.

He also warned against complacency, saying al Qaeda inspired extremists are "continuing to refine themselves and improve themselves. If we don't do more than we're doing, if we stop, eventually that risk is going to start to increase."

NYT : Chertoff Pushed Spitzer to Bend on License Idea

Chertoff Pushed Spitzer to Bend on License Idea

By DANNY HAKIM | October 31, 2007

ALBANY, Oct. 30 — The phone call from a top aide to Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security, came two weeks ago, and the message was clear: The department was concerned that Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s plan to grant driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants would undermine a federal initiative to roll out a new highly secure, nationally recognized license.

The prospect of Mr. Chertoff coming out publicly against Mr. Spitzer’s plan caused deep anxiety among Spitzer administration officials, said Michael A. L. Balboni, the governor’s deputy secretary for public safety, who received the call.

The governor and his aides felt they had few options.

The license plan had already set off angry attacks from Republicans and unease among Democratic allies, and had made the governor a target of national groups rallying for tougher immigration policies.

Mr. Spitzer agreed with Mr. Chertoff to a compromise plan on Friday under which the state would offer three levels of driver’s licenses beginning next year, including a limited license that illegal immigrants could obtain but that could not be used to board airplanes or cross borders.

The announcement has done little to quiet the fury Mr. Spitzer set off on Sept. 21 when he declared, without consulting the Legislature, that New York would offer driver’s licenses to the hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants living in the state, as a way of making the roads safer and bringing them “out of the shadows.”

An examination of five weeks of policy twists, during which Mr. Spitzer alienated allies and emboldened enemies, reveals a governor almost stubbornly certain of himself and disinclined to consult with those who could be helpful in politically selling or smoothing the way for a divisive initiative.

Most lawmakers first heard about the initial policy when the governor announced it, saying, “The D.M.V. is not the I.N.S.”

County clerks who would have to carry out the policy were not consulted. Nor was Mr. Chertoff’s department.

“There’s a very consistent pattern here of not consulting with his friends,” said Assemblyman Richard L. Brodsky, a Westchester Democrat. “I must say, at this point, people don’t understand what the thinking and the planning was.”

Aides to the governor, speaking on condition of anonymity, said they had not foreseen the intensity of opposition the license plan would touch off.

Mr. Spitzer saw it as simply keeping a promise he had made during his campaign last year.

And it was consistent with his desire, after battling the Legislature for a frustrating six months, to govern by exercising the powers of the executive agencies under his control, without legislative interference.

His policy advisers and David J. Swarts, the motor vehicles commissioner, worked quietly on the policy for several months. They presented it to the governor, and then he moved on it.

“We finished, got to a conclusion, said, ‘O.K., now let’s announce it,’” Mr. Spitzer recalled in a recent interview. “It was not a whole lot more than that.”

It did not take long for opponents to make themselves heard. Within a week, county clerks began to rebel. Even New York’s mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg, typically a friendly voice, raised concerns.

Though they acknowledge that they failed to anticipate the reaction fully, Mr. Spitzer and his staff also argue that the issue is so visceral that laying more groundwork might not have made much difference.

“I don’t think it would matter if Lou Dobbs saw us standing next to some police chief,” said one aide to the governor, referring to the CNN anchor, who has been leading an almost nightly crusade against Mr. Spitzer’s policy.

The governor moved to shore up support, enlisting Latino lawmakers and other Democrats to appear with him at press conferences. He also tried to rally them in closed-door meetings before a special legislative session last week.

State Senator Ruben Diaz Sr., a conservative lawmaker from the Bronx, strongly defended the governor, arguing for the policy in emotional language on the Senate floor.

Mr. Diaz took aim at the governor’s chief political rival, Joseph L. Bruno, the Senate majority leader, for first supporting the plan and then reversing himself.

But even as Mr. Diaz and others stood up for Mr. Spitzer, talks had begun with the Department of Homeland Security about revising the plan.

Mr. Balboni, a former Republican senator, said he was initially “not enthused about the idea” of having the state adopt the national Real ID card, which has been opposed by some civil liberties groups and immigration advocates. But he came to believe, he said, that it was a way of getting illegal immigrants into the system.

The Spitzer aides also felt they had gained key concessions on Real ID. They included getting the Department of Homeland Security to forgo forcing states to start using more expensive material for their licenses and to ease the timeline so the state did not need to immediately increase staffing levels at the Department of Motor Vehicles, which would have been costly.

But when the governor’s new plan was announced, he lost support from just about everyone. Those who stood by granting the licenses to illegal immigrants felt betrayed. Those Democrats uneasy with the initial plan wondered if this change would solve the problem.

And opponents of the initial plan either declared victory, or vowed to continue to block Mr. Spitzer from issuing any kind of license to illegal immigrants.

Again, many allies felt they were not given a heads up that the announcement was coming.

“I believed the governor, I trusted him,” said Mr. Diaz. “Bruno has been good to me, but I criticized him. Now I’m going to have to go back to the Senate floor and apologize because the governor decided to turn his back on us and make a deal with Washington.”

Assemblyman José R. Peralta, a Queens Democrat, said, “We went out there to defend undocumented immigrants and individuals who were being targeted as far as not being allowed to get licenses, and we were on the road to doing that until this agreement with the federal government.”

Even Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, the Legislature’s top Democrat, and David A. Paterson, the lieutenant governor, were not told that there would be a shift in strategy until late Friday, the night before the governor announced the deal.

To try to smooth some of the anger, Mr. Spitzer invited Mr. Diaz and a half-dozen other lawmakers, most of them Hispanic and defenders of the original plan, to an Upper East Side diner on Sunday morning to explain his decision.

Feelings were frayed, and the meeting grew emotional. At one point, Mr. Spitzer asked Mr. Diaz to lower his voice because they were in a public place.

“You made me make a fool out of myself,” Mr. Diaz told the governor.

Mr. Spitzer and his aides told the lawmakers that they had been reluctant to send word of the new proposal before they completed negotiations with the Bush administration, which took until the end of the day Friday. And they were clearly worried about what Mr. Chertoff would do if they did not go along.

While Mr. Spitzer tries to repair ties with his old allies, his handling of the issue has only made his Republican foes more determined to keep after him. And, given that the new license system is a year off, and legislative approval will likely be necessary to finance part of it, Albany could see many more months of intense argument over the issue.

“I really don’t believe this is the end of the story,” said Senator Eric T. Schneiderman, a Manhattan Democrat.

Nicholas Confessore contributed reporting.

Reuters : Al Qaeda threat to U.S. rebounds despite lull

Al Qaeda threat to U.S. rebounds despite lull

By Randall Mikkelsen | September 10, 2007

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - With Osama bin Laden's ability to grab attention undiminished six years after the September 11 attacks, al Qaeda is bleeding the U.S. military in Iraq while regrouping with aims of another strike on the United States.

U.S. intelligence agencies and other analysts say security improvements and international efforts against al Qaeda have helped prevent another major U.S. attack, but only so far.

The ability of bin Laden's network to attack the West is rebounding, they say, and it has already met what some analysts describe as a goal of luring the United States into a damaging Middle East war that would cripple U.S. influence in the region.

Al Qaeda has also inspired cells and sympathizers who may be unable to strike on the scale of September 11 but can nevertheless cause death and destruction.

"Al Qaeda ... while weaker than it was on 9/11, is growing again in strength," U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said in congressional testimony last week that echoed an official U.S. intelligence estimate in July.

"America faces a continued threat," he said.

In a reminder of al Qaeda's ability to grab attention, bin Laden last week issued a video saying the United States was vulnerable and Americans should embrace Islam to avert war.

Bin Laden made no overt threats, but security analysts said the message could be a call for new attacks. White House homeland security adviser Fran Townsend rejected that view and described bin Laden as "virtually impotent."

Bin Laden escaped a U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan after the September 11 attacks, and U.S. intelligence agencies believe al Qaeda has rebuilt in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border area.

U.S. President George W. Bush, who said after the September 11 attacks he wanted bin Laden dead or alive, shifted his focus to Iraq and cast it as the central front in a war on terrorism.

TAKING THE BAIT

That shift may have played into bin Laden's hands.

"Part of what bin Laden's strategy is, is to bait us into situations where we bleed. Iraq is a godsend for al Qaeda. We took the bait," said security analyst P.J. Crowley of the Center for American Progress, a Democratic-leaning think tank.

The Iraq war made it easier for al Qaeda to kill Americans, through its al Qaeda in Iraq affiliate which is among the groups fighting U.S. forces in Iraq, said Mike German, a former FBI counterterrorism agent. German is now a policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union and adjunct professor at the National Defense University.

The war also created a rallying cry at a time bin Laden was crippled by loss of al Qaeda's Afghanistan sanctuary.

"No conflict drains more time, attention, blood, treasure and support for our worldwide counterterrorism efforts than the war in Iraq. It has become a powerful recruiting and training tool for al Qaeda," Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, co-chairmen of the U.S. government's September 11 investigation commission, wrote in a Washington Post opinion piece on Sunday.

The United States has made slow but real progress in detecting and preventing attacks within the United States, Kean and Hamilton wrote. Airline security has been tightened, and authorities are keeping a closer watch on potential attackers.

Among U.S. plots which authorities say they have disrupted were plans this year to attack Fort Dix military base in New Jersey and John F. Kennedy airport in New York. Both plots were attributed at least in part to Islamist elements, but neither was linked to al Qaeda.

Internationally, attack plots in Germany and Denmark with suspected ties to al Qaeda were broken up just last week.

INTERNATIONAL DEBATE

But other policies have drawn international criticism and debate over what critics call an assault on civil liberties.

Congressional Democrats say the Bush administration has overreached in its electronic and satellite surveillance, which German says have sapped money from more effective enforcement programs.

Internationally, "U.S. foreign policy has not stemmed the rising tide of extremism in the Muslim world," Kean and Hamilton wrote. "Instead we have lost ground."

They cited the "poisonous" example of the Guantanamo prison for terrorism suspects and an insufficient effort to broker an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal as fuel for Islamist grievances.

© Reuters 2007. All rights reserved.

Chicago Tribune : Partial transcript of Chertoff's remarks

Partial transcript of Chertoff's remarks

Tribune staff report | July 10, 2007

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff met with the Tribune editorial board on Tuesday for a wide-ranging interview covering immigration, security measures, and the prospects of a terrorist strike on the U.S. Here is a partial transcript of what he had to say.

Risk of attack

We could easily be attacked. The intent to attack us remains as strong as it was on September 10, 2001. We've done a lot to degrade the enemy's capability but the enemy has also done a lot to retool its capability. You look at their activities around the world-bombings in North Africa from Al Qaeda, conflict in Somalia with radical Islamist groups contending for control over Somalia, training activity taking place in South Asia, the Taliban continuing to try to regain control of parts of Afghanistan.

I think if you look at that picture you see an enemy that is improving itself just as we're improving ourselves. They can't afford to remain static just as we can't afford to remain static. Our edge is technology and the vigilance of the ordinary citizen. The foundation of all we do is our determination to continue to pay attention to this issue and be willing to tolerate a reasonable amount, not an excessive amount, but a reasonable amount of inconvenience and cost in order to maintain homeland security.

If we get into a road where everybody's attitude is, 'I'm interested in homeland security but not if it's going to cost me anything, not if it's going to inconvenience me, not if it's going to be in my backyard,' then we get complacency and I guarantee we will lose the race with the terrorists. The one thing they have in abundance is fanatic devotion to their cause. They continue to harbor grievances over events that happened six or seven hundred years ago, and if we go into the attitude of 'let's get over it, it's time to move onto something else,' then we will lose this competition about our ability to secure ourselves from those terrorist attacks.

Official resistance

We've got a host of measures in place, but we're starting to get some resistance. The 9/11 Commission said that in the hands of a terrorist, a phony document is a weapon. Yesterday someone brought into my audience four North Carolina driver's licenses that had been picked up. Each of them looked valid to anybody except someone who had a lot of sophisticated tools. They all had the same picture of the same person and they had four different names. As long as we allow driver's licenses to be at a level of security where you can basically get one made on any college campus in the country, we are throwing the door open for people who want to pretend to be somebody else.

Summer risk

I believe we're entering a period this summer of increased risk. We've seen a lot more public statements from Al Qaeda. There are a lot of reasons to speculate about that but one reason that occurs to me is that they're feeling more comfortable and raising expectations. In the last August, and in prior summers, we've had attacks against the West, which suggests that summer seems to be appealing to them. I think we do see increased activity in South Asia, so we do worry about whether they are rebuilding their capabilities. We've struck at them and degraded them, but they rebuild. All these things have given me kind of a gut feeling that we are in a period of increased vulnerability.

Radicals and Iraq

People who were going to become radicalized and who were going to becoming suicide bombers did not need the war in Iraq to do that. It may be a good rhetorical device now, but in the absence of that, they would have been radicalized over Afghanistan, or as Bin Laden was, they would have been radicalized over Armenia and Saudi Arabia, or over the existence of the state of Israel.

There are many excuses for radicalization. That's not to say they're an explanation, but I don't think that our going into Iraq created, suddenly, a rationale that didn't exist before. I do think that obviously we're mindful that obviously there is Al Qaeda in Iraq, there are operatives who are becoming battle-hardened and getting more experience. We do worry, particularly if we were to take the pressure off there, that they would begin to look elsewhere for a fight. Whatever your views about the war, in the situation where we currently find ourselves, it would be Pollyannaish to believe that our departure from Iraq is going to settle all those people down and they're going to say, now we can get back to picnicking. They're just going to carry the fight elsewhere.

Copyright © 2007, Chicago Tribune

Chicago Tribune : Chertoff bases 'gut feeling' on history, Al Qaeda statements

Homeland Security chief warns of 'increased risk’
Chertoff bases 'gut feeling' on history, Al Qaeda statements

By E.A. Torriero | Tribune staff reporter | July 11, 2007

Fearing complacency among the American people over possible terror threats, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said in Chicago Tuesday that the nation faces a heightened chance of an attack this summer.

"I believe we are entering a period this summer of increased risk," Chertoff told the Chicago Tribune's editorial board in an unusually blunt and frank assessment of America's terror threat level.

"Summertime seems to be appealing to them," he said of al-Qaeda. "We do worry that they are rebuilding their activities."

Still, Chertoff said there are not enough indications of an imminent plot to raise the current threat levels nationwide. And he indicated that his remarks were based on "a gut feeling" formed by past seasonal patterns of terrorist attacks, recent al-Qaeda statements, and intelligence he did not disclose.

There is an assessment "not of a specific threat, but of increased vulnerability," he added.

There have been reports already that suggest intelligence warnings at a similar level to the summer before Sept. 11, 2001 and that al-Qaeda may be mobilizing.

In recent days, ABC news reported that a secret law enforcement report prepared for homeland security warns that al-Qaeda is preparing a "spectacular" summer attack. On Tuesday, ABC News also reported that "new intelligence suggests a small al-Qaeda cell is on its way to the United States, or may already be here."

Chertoff sternly echoed those sentiments at the Tribune.

"We've seen a lot more public statements from Al Qaeda," he said. "There are a lot of reasons to speculate about that but one reason that occurs to me is that they're feeling more comfortable and raising expectations.

"We could easily be attacked," Chertoff added. "The intent to attack us remains as strong as it was on Sept. 10, 2001."

The dire warnings and Chertoff's comments come as the Bush administration faces political and business opposition over its immigration and border policies that have security implications.

With stiff blowback on those issues, the administration has been unsuccessful in efforts to enact broader security measures - ones opponents fear are too costly, unnecessary and infringe on people's rights.

In a wide-ranging interview with the Tribune that lasted more than an hour, Chertoff said, too, that the recent failure of Congress to pass an immigration bill has negative repercussions for homeland security and will lead to continued federal crackdowns on illegal immigrants.

Resistance has built as well, he said, from business and travel interests blocking his proposals to tighten security at the borders - especially at the crossings with Canada.

In the end, Chertoff argued, Americans must soon decide between enduring greater inconvenience and costs or allowing terrorists easier access to the borders. He warned against increasing resistence to security measures based on comfort and self-centered motives.

"If you get to complacency then I guarantee you we will lose the race with the terrorists," he said.

A recent terror plot in London and Scotland has America's defense system on alert, Chertoff said. He urged Americans to be attentive if something appears suspicious.

"If you look at that picture you see an enemy that is improving itself just as we're improving ourselves," he said. "They can't afford to remain static just as we can't afford to remain static."

On a local level, Chertoff cited Chicago's technologically savvy police department and its use of street-corner, blue-lighted cameras as a blueprint for strong homeland security.

"I think the use of cameras here and other technologies is a model for the country," he said.

Over the next 18 months, as the Bush administration draws to a close, Chertoff said he plans to put security tradeoff options before the American public.

"The public has to make the choices," he said.

If border crossings are not tightened with stricter document regulation because of economic oppositions from business interests, then Chertoff predicts possible dire consequences.

"What do you think is going to happen to your business when a guy comes across the border with a phony document and blows up a target in Buffalo or Detroit?" he asked. "Do you think the American public is then going to allow the border to remain open?"

There will be security repercussions from Congress' failure to pass immigration reform. Chertoff hoped granting a path to citizenship to illegal immigrants would cut away "the tall grass" hiding criminal elements among the undocumented workers.

But now, Chertoff said, his agency must uphold current laws and that means a further crackdown on workplaces.

"We are going to do more law enforcement actions," he said.

Conceding the raids are "going to be ugly" and tear parents from their children who wonder why they have not returned from work, Chertoff warned: "the consequences are going to be tough from an economic and humanitarian standpoint."

Noting that he was disappointed at Congress' failure to pass a bill, Chertoff singled out committees that included members like Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Sen. Max Baucus (D-Montana) as impediments to his homeland security initiatives.

Letters released Tuesday to the Tribune from Grassley's office reveal a bickering back and forth between Chertoff and the senators in June. The senators wrote that Chertoff was misleading in his characterization of their efforts to amend the immigration bill. Their intention, they said, was to avoid burdening employers with expensive checks of all employees and or force the release of tax information on employees.

With the bill tabled, Chertoff said he plans to now concentrate on a variety of security plans including filling in security gaps by more closely monitoring private aircraft entering the United States and intensifying coastal checks in less secure areas outside of the strictly-patrolled ports.

"We have done a lot to degrade the enemy's capability," he said. "But the enemy has also done a lot to retool its capability...It leads me to feel we ought to be more vigilant."

etorriero@tribune.com

CHENEY DETERMINED TO STRIKE IN US WITH WMD THIS SUMMER

CHENEY DETERMINED TO STRIKE IN US WITH WMD THIS SUMMER
ONLY IMPEACHMENT AND REMOVAL, OR A GENERAL STRIKE, CAN STOP HIM

The greatest threat now is "a 9/11 occurring with a group of terrorists armed not with airline tickets and box cutters, but with a nuclear weapon in the middle of one of our own cities."
Dick Cheney on Face the Nation, CBS, April 15, 2007

By Webster G. Tarpley | July 21, 2007

A few days ago, a group of lawyers from western Massachusetts met with the local congressman, Democrat John Olver. Their request was that Olver take part in the urgent effort to impeach Bush and Cheney. Olver responded by saying that he had no intention of doing anything to support impeachment. He went further, offering the information that the United States would soon attack Iran, and that these hostilities would be followed by the imposition of a martial law regime here.

According to reports in the British press, the Cheney war party has gained the upper hand in the secret councils of the Bush White House, pushing aside the purported hesitations of Miss Rice, Secretary Gates, and the NATO allies to chart a direct course towards war with Iran:

'The balance in the internal White House debate over Iran has shifted back in favour of military action before President George Bush leaves office in 18 months, the Guardian has learned. The shift follows an internal review involving the White House, the Pentagon and the state department over the last month. Although the Bush administration is in deep trouble over Iraq, it remains focused on Iran. A well-placed source in Washington said: "Bush is not going to leave office with Iran still in limbo." ...at a meeting of the White House, Pentagon and state department last month, Mr Cheney expressed frustration at the lack of progress and Mr Bush sided with him. "The balance has tilted. There is cause for concern," the source said this week. ... "Cheney has limited capital left, but if he wanted to use all his capital on this one issue, he could still have an impact," said Patrick Cronin, the director of studies at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.' ("Cheney pushes Bush to act on Iran; Military solution back in favour as Rice loses out; President 'not prepared to leave conflict unresolved'", Guardian, July 16, 2007.)

Deluded supporters of the Democratic Party may soon have to throw away their pathetic countdown clocks, those self-consoling little devices that remind them of how much time remains until noon on January 20, 2009, the moment when it is thought that Bush will finally leave office. These countdown clocks make no provision for the Cheney doctrine, which calls for a new super 9/11 with weapons of mass destruction in the US, to be used as the pretext for a nuclear attack on Iran and for martial law at home. Those who think the Republicans cannot hold the White House in 2008 have forgotten that neocons always prefer a coup d'etat to an election. As Cheney told Bob Schieffer of CBS's Face the Nation on April 15, 2007:

'The greatest threat now is "a 9/11 occurring with a group of terrorists armed not with airline tickets and box cutters, but with a nuclear weapon in the middle of one of our own cities."'

Pelosi and Reid need to toss out their fatuous countdown clocks, and get out their impeachment stopwatches - fast.

CHERTOFF'S GUT FEELING FOR TERRORISM

Integral to the Cheney strategy has always been to orchestrate a climate of public terror. As Cheney told WLS in Chicago on Friday April 13: It's important that people remember 9/11." 9/11 remains the basis of every one of Cheney's intrigues. One of Cheney's terror facilitators in this sense is Michael Chertoff, the cadaverous Secretary of Homeland Security. Although an experienced bureaucrat, Chertoff is now contemplating his navel as he searches for new ways to intimidate the American people, who have essentially no natural enemies at all, into the hallucination that they face an acute existential threat of being wiped out from one moment to the next. Chertoff told the editorial board of the Chicago Tribune - once the voice of isolationism - that the US faces an increased danger of attack in the summer of 2007. This wild fabrication, not based on any specific information of any kind that he could cite, Chertoff called his "gut feeling ... the nation faces a heightened chance of an attack this summer." "I believe we are entering a period this summer of increased risk," said Chertoff. "Summertime seems to be appealing to them. ... We worry that they are rebuilding their activities." The desperate demagogues of the Republican Party are facing a hecatomb at the polls in November 2008. Their idea seems to be that of the fascist Prime Minister Aznar of Spain in March 2004: if you are sure to lose an election, stage a terror attack, declare martial law, and perpetuate your power that way. Aznar was stopped by a general strike of about one third of the entire Spanish people. If all else fails, would Americans be capable of a mass strike against war and dictatorship? We may soon find out.
Chertoff's troubled gut has already given rise to a White House interagency group of top intelligence and law enforcement functionaries that meets every Friday afternoon at 1PM. Will this committee run the coup? Reports followed of dozens of FBI agents fanning out to pursue a "worry list" of some seven hundred alleged leads, including 100 in the New York area. Some of these derived from the recent British terror stunts in London and Glasgow used by MI-5 and MI-6 to smooth the transition from the Tony Blair quasi-police state to the Gordon Brown version of the same thing. MI-5 and MI-6 displayed the same mixture of comic ineptitude and phlegmatic homicide which was their hallmark during the long years when London was the prey of bombs by the "Irish Republican Army," now revealed to have been top-heavy with government intelligence agents who called the shots. The Glasgow airport event consisted of a burning car crashed into a building, the films of which were shown all afternoon the by the US cable news networks. One was tempted to propose a caption: "Only one burning car - a good day on the Cross-Bronx Expressway." Yet for one burning car, the world was supposed to stop. These British events had been preceded by several weeks of hysteria about allegedly looming terror attacks against US installations in the Rhein-Main area of Germany, featuring the Wiesbaden spa, all based on CIA claims made to the government in Berlin and relentlessly trumpeted through the controlled media.

A NEW 9/11 THE KEY TO BOLSTERING WESTERN RESOLVE

Chertoff's rationale was illuminated by an interview with Lt. Colonel Doug Delaney, the chair of the war studies program at the Royal Military College in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, a NATO intelligence center. Delaney was addressing the problems raised by the rising Canadian losses in Afghanistan, but he provided a valuable window into the minds of military planners when he observed, in the words of the interviewer: "It may well be that the key to bolstering Western resolve is another terrorist attack like 9/11 or the London transit bombings of two years ago, he says. If nothing happens, it will be harder still to say this [Canadian meddling in Afghanistan] is necessary." In other words, it may be time for a new false flag synthetic terror operation to gin up hysteria in North America to permit the present bankrupt elites to retain power and further grind down any spirit of popular resistance to such irrational rule. Chertoff's fear-mongering was backed up by ousted Republican senator and notorious scoundrel Rick Santorum, who told a radio interviewer that "between now and November, a lot of things are going to happen, and I believe that by this time next year, the American public is going to have a very different view of this war." Chertoff's reckless and inflammatory ventriloquism was the harbinger of the new US National Intelligence Estimate issued on July 17.

THE BOOZ ALLEN NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE ESTIMATE: "AL QAEDA" THREAT TO USA LOOMS

This pitiful NIE ranks with the lying NIEs issued before the attack on Iraq in 2003 as a tissue of lies and prevarications. The main thesis is that al Qaeda branches around the world are striving to infiltrate more operatives into the US for terror attacks on the US "homeland:" "Although we have discovered only a handful of individuals in the United States with ties to al Qaeda senior leadership since 9/11, we judge that al Qaeda will intensify its efforts to put operatives here," opines the declassified summary of the underlying secret screed. "As a result, we judge that the United States currently is in a heightened threat environment." (cnn.com, July 17) The new faked NIE has been produced under the supervision of Admiral Michael McConnell, the current US intelligence czar, whose credentials include ten years at Booz Allen Hamilton, the premier private military firm. Some analysts have asked what was going on at Booz Allen on September 11, 2001, and in the days leading up to that event, and what McConnell personally might have been working on. Back on January 7, 2007, Raw Story had portrayed the newly-nominated McConnell as a Cheney asset, and quoted CIA old boy Vince Cannistraro calling the McConnell nomination "a disaster." In the same article, CIA vet Larry Johnson predicted that McConnell, a weak manager, would cave in to Bush-Cheney on key issues. The fabrications of the new NIE have been assisted by Cheney's office, by convicted Iran-contra felon Elliot Abrams (now a dominant personality inside the Bush White House), by Abrams' military aide Gen. Kevin Bergner, and by other neocon assets.

Intelligence community veteran Philip Giraldi of the CIA has dismissed the new NIE with its talk of "high impact plots" against the US as "a tour de force of misinformation disguised as fact." Giraldi also noted: "It is possibly no coincidence that there has been a significant increase in the anti-Iran rhetoric emanating from both the Bush administration and Congress over the past few weeks, mostly seeking to establish a casus belli by contending that Iran is masterminding lethal attacks against US troops in Iran and NATO forces in Afghanistan." (antiwar.com, July 17)

CHENEY'S PERSIAN ADVENTURE

A nuclear attack on Iran remains the central obsession of the George Shultz-Rupert Murdoch-Cheney faction. On July 10, the Pentagon announced that it would be sending another aircraft carrier battle group, this time that of the USS Enterprise, to the waters off Iran. This means that whenever that carrier joins the two already there, three US attack carriers will be within striking range of Iranian targets. The Pentagon followed up shortly thereafter with another statement, assuring the world that soon only one carrier would patrol off Iran. But that was only a dubious promise, and in the meantime the three carriers would shortly be ready to attack.

On July 10, the Washington Post and Reuters stoked international hysteria with reports that mysterious and sinister tunnels were being built by the Iranian authorities near one of the suspected nuclear facilities of Natanz. These reports were accompanied by aerial photographs and satellite imaging that has been gussied up with labels to make them look as much as possible like the famous U-2 photographs of Soviet medium-range missiles in Cuba back in October 1962. The claim was that the supposed tunnel "could be used to hide and protect key nuclear components." The implication was that the Iranian atomic bomb could not be far off, a notion for which there is no proof.

In the late winter, Pelosi, House Majority Leader Stenny Hoyer and Reid had bowed to the demands of AIPAC, the subversive pro-Israeli lobbying organization whose employees have been implicated in espionage, and removed from the defense bill a provision warning Bush that he was required to consult Congress before attacking Iran. A similar provision pushed for a while by Senator Webb of Virginia has also disappeared from view. As for the Republican presidential candidates, on June 7 they - with the solitary exception of maverick Ron Paul - outbid one another in enthusiasm for a nuclear attack on Iran. These ultra-Hitlerian outbursts occurred in response to manipulation by Wolf Blitzer, an obvious asset of the war party. For the good of the American people, the warmonger GOP candidates, along with Blitzer, should have been hauled away at once in a net by burly orderlies in white coats.

CHENEY'S BREAKAWAY ALLY CHARADE

A key component of Cheney's argument is that Israel may soon strike unilaterally against Iran with a sneak attack deploying nuclear weapons, breaking the post-1945 taboo on atomic bombs. This would represent the old "breakaway ally" scenario, by which Israel presents the US with such an attack as a fait accompli, and then expects Washington to enter the war on the side of the Israeli aggressors. Cheney's talking point is that the US must be ready to strike because the Israelis are going to act on their own anyway. The lying nature of Cheney's line is shown by Bush's remark to Chirac at the St. Petersburg G-8 summit in July 2006, when Bush was adamant that the Israeli aggression against Lebanon then ongoing was not an Israeli-conceived war, but rather a US war which had been assigned to Israel as a proxy and surrogate for the US. According to Will Thomas, a dress rehearsal for the breakaway ally charade occurred on January 7, 2007 when Israeli warplanes flew over Iraq and manifested the intention to "go downtown" - meaning an apparent nuclear strike into Iran. At some point the Israelis were allegedly told by the US to go back, and they desisted from the attempt. This reported incident came shortly before the US raided the Iranian consulate in Irbil in northern Iraq, illegally arresting Iranian diplomats. Around the same time, reports that an Iranian missile had hit a US ship caused a stir on Wall Street, while Iran reported shooting down another US drone over its territory. (infowars.com, willthomas.net)

The Israeli war party is represented first of all by Avigdor Lieberman, the Minister of Strategic Threats who is himself a strategic threat. On Friday July 13, a day of ill omen, Lieberman boasted before a group of NATO and European Union officials that Israel had received a green light from the U.S. and Europe for an Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear facilities. "If we start military operations against Iran alone, then Europe and the U.S. will support us," said Lieberman. According to Israel Today magazine, Lieberman argued that ongoing hostilities in Iraq and Afghanistan are "going to prevent the leaders of countries in Europe and America from deciding on the use of force to destroy Iran's nuclear facilities," so they are telling Israel to "prevent the threat herself."

Another Israeli incendiary is Brigadier General Yossi Kuperwasser, the former head of the Research Division of Israeli Military Intelligence. On July 10, Kuperwasser told the Jerusalem Post that economic sanctions alone will not stop Iran, and that the window of opportunity to launch a military strike against Iran's nuclear installations was running out. Kuperwasser claimed that Iran is "very close" to the technological threshold for enriching uranium at an industrial level. The Iranians will then be able to manufacture a nuclear device within two to three years, according to Kuperwasser. "The program's vulnerability to a military operation is diminishing as time passes," Kuperwasser said, "and they are very close to the point that they will be able to enrich uranium at an industrial level."

EL BARADEI WARNS AGAINST NEOCON "NEW CRAZIES"

This kind of thinking in the US, UK, and Israel was what Dr. Mohamed El Baradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, had in mind when he issued his famnous June 2, 2007 warning about a coming attack on Iran: "I wake every morning and see 100 Iraqis innocent civilians are dying ...I have no brief other than to make sure we don't go into another war or that we go crazy into killing each other. You do not want to give additional argument to new crazies who say 'let's go and bomb Iran.' " And who are the "new crazies"? "Those who have extreme views and say the only solution is to impose your will by force." It is not possible to "bomb knowledge."

A grave doubt casts its shadow over any scenario of US nuclear attack on Iran: as William Thomas reported last February, the fuses of cheap Chinese silicon chips now being used by the US military in ships, tanks, planes, and other applications may be too weak to resist the high levels of electromagnetic pulse (emp) which would be unleashed by a nuclear bombardment of the Iranian nuclear sites. The outsourced chips, coherent with the Rumsfeld "war on the cheap" strategy, could cripple a large proportion of the US Central Command's military hardware, with disruptive effects that would reach back to the command's Florida headquarters and possibly to the Pentagon. (rense.com, February 21, 2007, and willthomas.net) If these report are correct, US nuclear bombers might crash, the the carriers that launched them might suddenly find themselves dead in the water, quite indepen dent of what the Iranians might do.

CHENEY'S LEBANON-SYRIA GAMBIT

In addition to the hypothesis of an attack on Iran, there is also the immediate threat to Iran's ally, Syria. According to a UPI dispatch dated July 9 under the byline of Claude Salhani, numerous signs currently point towards hostilities between Israel and the Damascus government, with a renewed Israeli attack on Lebanon a likely element in this strategy. According to former State Department official Dennis Ross, "there is a risk of war" between Syria and Israel in the summer. Ross told YnetNews, Yedioth Ahronoth's Internet edition: "no one has made any decisions, but the Syrians are positioning themselves for war." The neocon exoteric New York Sun claimed to cite a supposed Syrian official saying that added that, by allegedly pulling Syrian nationals out of Lebanon by mid-July, "Damascus is preparing for Israeli retaliation following Syrian guerilla attacks and for a larger war with the Jewish state in August or September." "If Israel doesn't vacate the strategic Golan Heights before September, Syrian guerillas will immediately launch 'resistance operations' against the Golan's Jewish communities," the alleged Syrian added. These remarks reflect scenarios being developed by the Israelis.

But the Masada party of national suicide is not the only game in town for Israelis. On July 11, an anonymous leaker from inside Israeli Military Intelligence warned his associates to remember their ignominious defeat at the hands of Hezbollah in last summer's war. According to this source, "war with Syria would be ten times worse than with Hezbollah."

THE ATTACK ON PAKISTAN: MIDSUMMER OF NEOCON MADNESS

Cheney also has the option of attacking into Pakistan. Cheney had visited Pakistan at the end of February with an obvious ultimatum to General Musharraf to get ready to mount a land war against Iran this summer. Equally and immediately obvious was the fact that Musharraf, who considers himself the heir to the great Mustafa Kemal Ataturk of Turkey, had told the Vice President to go Cheney himself. With Pakistan refusing to attack its neighbor, Cheney suddenly discovered that Osama bin Laden was being protected by Musharraf! The US-UK destabilization of Pakistan began in grand style, with the New York Times helpfully publishing lists of generals whom Washington would be delighted to see take power in a putsch in Islamabad. Pawns of the destabilization included the Chief Justice of Pakistan, reputed to be a British agent, and riots by lawyers in business suits. Then came the slaughter at the Red Mosque, staged by the usual CIA/MI-6 fundamentalists. Pakistan, under tremendous pressure from the US, has announced a military crackdown on so-called Taliban forces in the northern tribal areas of Waziristan, an enterprise sure to stir up a hornet's nest of resistance even if none had been there before. The neocons demanded that the US invade Pakistan, under the pretext of looking for Osama bin Laden. On July 12, neocon fascist madman William Kristol told Fox News: "I think the president's going to have to take military action there over the next few weeks or months.... Bush has to disrupt that sanctuary. I think, frankly, we won't even tell Musharraf. We'll do what we have to do in Western Pakistan and Musharraf can say, 'Hey, they didn't tell me.'" Ironically, bin Laden's second in command, reputed MI-6 speaking tube Ayman al Zawahiri, at around the same time issued a fatwa declaring jihad against Musharraf's Pakistani regime. If Musharraf was haboring Osama, why would al Qaeda declare war against Musharraf? The answer is what it has always been: "al Qaeda" is a troupe of agents provocateurs founded by the CIA and the British, and remains so until this day. As for the neocon plan to attack Pakistan, it is the very midsummer of madness: if Iran has three time the population of Iraq, Pakistan with 164 million is more than five times more numerous than Iraq. If the neocon plans succeed, the US would soon be at war with almost 300 million people - far too many for the hollow US force of 10 divisions, whatever technology they might possess.

WARNINGS: RON PAUL, PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS, CINDY SHEEHAN, PAT BUCHANAN
Among other authoritative voices across the political spectrum warning of an imminent Bush-Cheney attack on Iran:

Republican Congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul commented to Alex Jones: "I think we're in great danger of it. We're in danger in many ways, the attack on our civil liberties here at home, the foreign policy that's in shambles and our obligations overseas and commitment which endangers our troops and our national defense."

Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under the Reagan Administration, wrote in his latest column: "Unless Congress immediately impeaches Bush and Cheney, a year from now the US could be a dictatorial police state at war with Iran. Bush has put in place all the necessary measures for dictatorship in the form of 'executive orders' that are triggered whenever Bush declares a national emergency. Recent statements by Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff, former Republican senator Rick Santorum and others suggest that Americans might expect a series of staged, or false flag, 'terrorist' events in the near future." (Paul Craig Roberts, "Impeach Now or Face the End of Constitutional Democracy," Counterpunch, July 16, 2007) In a July 19 interview with Thomm Hartmann of Air America, Roberts cited Bush's July 17 executive order, which allows the US regime to seize the property of anyone found to be interfering with the reconstruction of Iraq. This radio warning was reported by the RIA-Novosti news agency of Moscow in numerous languages. The Moscow summary, dated July 20, begins: "A former Reagan official has issued a public warning that the Bush administration is preparing to orchestrate a staged terrorist attack in the United States, transform the country into a dictatorship, and launch a war with Iran within a year."

Pat Buchanan is convinced that the danger of a new war provocation by Bush-Cheney will come in August, when the Democratic Congress will conveniently be out of Washington and on vacation. Buchanan asks important questions:
Is the United States provoking war with Iran, to begin while the Congress is conveniently on its August recess? One recalls that it was in August 1964, after the Republicans nominated Barry Goldwater, that the Tonkin Gulf incident occurred.
Has Bush secretly authorized covert attacks inside Iran? Are U.S. and Israeli agents in Kurdistan behind the attacks across the border to provoke Iran? On July 11, Iranian troops clashed with Kurd rebels inside Iran, and the Iranians fired artillery back into Iraq.
Is this yet another abdication by Congress of its moral and constitutional duty to decide when and whether America goes to war?
Why is Congress going on vacation? Why are a Democratic-controlled House and Senate not asking these questions in public hearings? Why is Congress letting Bush and Vice President Cheney decide whether we launch a third war in the Middle East? Or is Congress in on it?" ("Tonkin Gulf II and the Guns of August?," World Net Daily, July 17, 2007)
Based on the John Olver remarks, the Democrats are in on it. As for Buchanan, he should say these things on MSNBC.

Also warning of new war provocations was Cindy Sheehan, who was traveling towards Washington DC to declare her challenge to failed House Speaker Pelosi. She commented that there was a "distinct possibility" that America will be hit with another staged terror attack that will allow Bush to enact the martial law provisions he recently imposed by executive order. These measures allow Bush to declare a domestic state of emergency in response to virtually any minor incident anywhere in the world. (Paul Joseph Watson, Prison Planet, July 12, 2007, "Sheehan: Distinct Chance Of Staged Attack, Martial Law; Peace Mom warns of false flag terror as she prepares to take on sell-out Pelosi.")

BUSH ANTICS STUN REPUBLICANS FROM THE HILL

This past week, the tenant of the White House showed new signs of mental instability by barging in to a routine meeting between White House communication director Ed Gillespie, spokesman Tony Snow, and a group of Republican congressional leaders. Bush was there to insist that everybody stay the course of Iraq.
"It was stunning," said one GOP aide who attended the meeting. "We couldn't believe he came in." "We kept looking at each other, amazed he came in," said another Republican colleague. According to one press account, "Bush was described as folksy, adamant and mildly profane as he interrupted the meeting.... His message: the policy on Iraq isn't changing. He is not backing down and no one on Capitol Hill should be confused into thinking he is letting up."

A new threat to US policy comes from the formidable Turkish military establishment, which is sick and tired of constant cross-border attacks by PKK Kurdish terrorists operating from the Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq. The US, UK, and Israelis are using the PKK for terror operations into Kurdish territories of Iran. These PKK terrorist are paid and armed directly by the US military, bringing any notion of a US "war on terror" to a new nadir of absurdity. For some time, the Turks have been lobbing shells and raiding into Kurdish Iraq. 140,000 Turkish troops are massed along the border in question, and if Turkish patience runs out, the Kurds will be crushed.

US IRAQ SUPPLY LINES IN GRAVE DANGER

Washington still cultivates delusions of grandeur: the moment of truth for Iraq will be in mid-September, or perhaps in November or December.... But, as one British writer once put it, what if the bear blows first? What if US forces in Iraq experience catastrophic military defeat at some point in the future? What if it takes the form of pocketing or encirclement, the "Dunkirk if you're lucky, Stalingrad if you're not so lucky" outcome?

It is not clear whether or when Iraqi resistance forces will move decisively to attack the Achilles heel of the US occupation forces, the 400-mile truck convoys between Kuwait City and Baghdad, but the longer the US forces continue their present futile efforts, the more likely this tragic outcome will become. These are trucks driven by Pakistanis, Turks, Bangladeshis, and Filipinos, and protected by private military contractors - by poorly armed mercenaries. A recent report by Jim Michaels in USA Today indicates that the strategy most dangerous to the US forces is indeed gaining ground among the resistance: Michaels writes that "attacks on supply convoys protected by private security companies in Iraq have more than tripled as the U.S. government depends more on armed civilian guards to secure reconstruction and other missions. There were 869 such attacks from the beginning of June 2006 to the end of May this year. For the preceding 12 months, there were 281 attacks." Of all the news coming out of Iraq, this is perhaps the most ominous. Any military debacle by the US forces in Iraq would be immediately blamed on Iran, and would infallibly be seized upon by Cheney as a pretext for massive retaliation against Iran.


DOLLAR HYPERINFLATION A FACTOR

An important contributing factor in the Cheneyac war hysteria is the beginning of dollar hyperinflation. Two Bear Sterns hedge funds have blown up, wiping out $9 billion of capital in a few days, and Helicopter Ben Bernanke of the Federal Reserve says that the subprime mortgage bubble meltdown will lead to $100 billion in losses by US banks, and this is clearly a lowball figure. Two analysts quoted by the Toronto Globe and Mail on July 19 suggest that the entire US banking establishment may now be looking at a 15% to 20% devaluation because of mortgage-related losses. Only frenetic pumping in of new dollar liquidity by Helicopter Ben and his men is staving off big bankruptcies, but this sloshing liquidity spells hyperinflation . The Dow has passed 14,000, but the dollar has also reached an all-time low of almost $1.40 to a euro, with a 26-year low against the British pound. With oil well above $75 and gold above $680 per ounce, while raw materials and food prices skyrocket, the US may soon resemble Germany of 1923, when people took their money to the grocery store in a wheelbarrow, and brought home their purchases in their pocket. Small wonder that the worldwide dumping of the bankrupt US dollar continues apace, with Iran now asking Japan to pay for oil transactions in yen, cutting Wall Street out of another lucrative commodity flow.

US SITUATION TRAGIC

These points bring into sharp relief the dire predicament of our tragically drifting country in the summer of 2007, a summer which Cheney's backers and controllers are determined to transform into the Summer of Fear. Skeptics may object that they have heard all this before - in the spring and the autumn of 2004, in the late summer of 2005, and in March-April of 2007 - and that so far the general war with Iran had not occurred. This is true, but it is no argument against the urgency of the warnings that the present writer and others have issued from time to time over the last three years. It only shows that the world has been lurching and careening along the edge of a much wider war in the Middle East since about May of 2004 at the latest. For much of this time we have lived in the shadow of the Cheney doctrine, which calls for a nuclear attack on Iran in the wake of a new super 9/11 terrorist provocation (coming from the bowels of the US intelligence community) - as revealed by Philip Giraldi in The American Conservative in August of 2005. Each time some combination of internal US institutional resistance and inertia, objections by NATO allies, and foreign threats or pressure have somehow avoid the worst. So far we have muddled through. But Cheney's backers and controllers - the ones designated as the Cheneyacs in this analysis - have unfailingly pulled themselves together after each rebuff, and have marshaled their forces for a new drive over the brink of the abyss. As long as Bush and Cheney are in power, as long as the 9/11 rogue networks in the US intelligence community continue their work unpurged and undisturbed, we will face one war emergency after another, until the likely moment when humanity's luck runs out. Under any political system committed to its own survival, each of the Cheneyac war drives over the past three years should have lead to the impeachment, removal from office, and indictment of the dour and snarling old reprobate himself, and a general mop-up of his followers. It is the fact that the corrupt and cowardly parliamentary cretins of the Democratic Party have failed to impeach and oust Bush-Cheney over the last six months since they took power which represents the most immediate cause of the fix we are now in. Congressman Kucinich has introduced the needed articles against Cheney, but the Pelosi-Reid opportunists have been hostile to this needed measure. It is time for honest activists to join with the Philadelphia Platform to get on with the business at hand before martial law is imposed by these neocon fascist madmen, since by then it may be too late.

BRZEZINSKI: "A TERRORIST ACT IN THE US BLAMED ON IRAN"

The Democratic Party Congressional leadership has known all about Cheney's plans for six months or more, as can be shown from the public record. On February 1, 2007, Zbigniew Brzezinski warned the Senate Foreign Relations Committee of ongoing machinations designed to procure war with Iran and beyond: "A plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran involves Iraqi failure to meet the benchmarks, followed by accusations of Iranian responsibility for the failure; then by some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the US blamed on Iran; culminating in a 'defensive' US action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan." Over the past half year, events have followed Brzezinski's scenario closely. Blaming Iran for the missed benchmarks in Iraq is now the daily stock in trade of the Bush administration and the US Central Command, who whine continuously about Iranian interference in Iraq. There have been several military provocations in Iraq which the US has tried to pin on Iran, most notably March 23, 2007 incident involving 15 British Royal Navy and Royal Marines personnel who were taken into custody by the Iranians. This incident was a part of Cheney's winter-spring war drive, which peaked with two US B-1 bombers deliberately violating Iranian airspace over the city of Abadan in oil-rich Khuzestan province on March 31. This crisis was defused by a mobilization of persons of good will around the world, with Russian President Putin and the RIA-Novosti news agency playing a critical role. In particular, a pointed March 28 warning from Putin to Bush about attacking Iran created enough uncertainty in Washington about how Moscow might respond to nuclear aggression against Iran so that cooler heads than Cheney's prevailed.

FIGHT BACK WITH THE PHILADELPHIA PLATFORM

That leaves us with Brzezinski's third scenario point: a terrorist act in the US blamed on Iran. What Brzezinski is talking about here is high treason, insurrection , genocide, high crimes against humanity under US law and the Nuremberg Code. Why has he not been called upon to tell all he knows about this sinister plot, so obviously operating through the Cheney-Addington office, and through Eliot Abrams at the White House? Because the Democrats who heard that warning - Senators Biden, Dodd, and Obama on the committee, plus Hillary Clinton - have done nothing to raise a hue and cry, hold hearings, issue subpoenas, demand documents, or begin impeachment hearings against those involved. The Democratic Party must therefore be seen as fully complicit under the Nuremberg Code in any future crimes by Cheney regarding a wider war in the Middle East. The Democratic Party has failed, and the viable peace movement must now organize independently on a multi-issue basis including 9/11 truth, as called for in the July 4, 2007 Philadelphia Platform, which can be seen at actindependent.org.

"It is surely vital to get to the bottom of the conspiracy, and bring the villains to justice, if only at the bar of history." -- Murray Rothbard

City Journal : On the Front Line in the War on Terrorism

On the Front Line in the War on Terrorism

Cops in New York and Los Angeles offer America two models for preventing another 9/11.

Judith Miller | City Journal | Summer 2007

Three time zones, 3,000 miles, and a cultural galaxy apart, New York and Los Angeles face a common threat: along with Washington, D.C., they’re the chief American targets of Islamic terror. And both cities boast top cops, sometime rivals—the cities are fiercely competitive—who know that ensuring that a dog doesn’t bark will determine their legacies. After investing millions of dollars in homeland security, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly of New York and Chief William J. Bratton of L.A. can both claim counterterror successes. What can we learn from their approaches? And will they be able to continue preventing terrorist attacks in their cities?

On the face of it, the nation’s two biggest metropolitan forces seem to have adopted kindred counterterrorism strategies. Both have roving SWAT or “Emergency Service Unit” teams, equipped with gas masks and antidotes to chemical and biological agents. Both have set up “fusion” centers to screen threats and monitor secret intelligence and “open-source” information, including radical Internet sites, and both have started programs to identify and protect likely targets. Both have tried to integrate private security experts into their work. Both conduct surveillance that would have been legally questionable before September 11. Both have sought to enlist support from mainstream Muslims and have encouraged various private firms to report suspicious activity.

Yet despite such similarities, the terror-fighting approaches of New York and L.A., like the cities themselves, reflect very different traditions, styles, and, above all, resources. New York, which knows the price of failure and thus has a heightened “threat perception,” sets the gold standard for counterterrorism—and has the funding and manpower to do it. Kelly, 65, views his highest priority as ensuring that al-Qaida doesn’t hit the city again. “When your city has been attacked, the threat is always with you,” he tells me. Deploying its own informants, undercover terror-busters, and a small army of analysts, New York tries to locate and neutralize pockets of militancy even before potentially violent individuals can form radical cells—a “preventive” approach, as Kelly calls it, that is the most effective way that police departments, small or large, can help fight terror.

In L.A., a city that has never been attacked, terrorism is a less pressing concern than gang violence and other crime. Lacking the political incentive, and hence the resources, to wage his own war on terror, Bratton, 59, has instead pooled scarce funds, manpower, and information with federal and other agencies—an approach that federal officials hold up as a model for police departments that can’t afford New York’s investment.

Both cities can claim victories that underscore the central role that law enforcement can—and should—play in homeland security. Just this June, the NYPD and the FBI announced that they had foiled a new Islamic terror plot against New York, this time to blow up fuel-tank farms at John F. Kennedy International Airport. While the plot was extremely unlikely to succeed—law enforcement had penetrated it from the start—the arrests revealed that Trinidad and other Caribbean ports have become fertile ground for Islamic militancy. Since September 11, the NYPD has broken up at least seven terror plots. What the LAPD calls its “coming of age” terrorism case—as yet not widely reported—commenced with a concerned landlord’s call just days after September 11. It eventually led police investigators to a small group of Islamic militants who may have provided support for the 9/11 hijackers (see box).

Yet neither Kelly nor Bratton can rest on his laurels. Those playing defense must be constantly vigilant, while al-Qaida and like-minded militants need to be lucky only once.

Size matters. The NYPD has long been one of the world’s largest law enforcement agencies. On September 11, 2001, it was employing some 50,000 people—36,000 sworn officers and about 14,000 civilians—to protect more than 8 million people. The next five largest U.S. police departments combined don’t have as many employees, Bratton ruefully observes. His own adopted city of L.A.—he’s originally from Boston—has a civilian and sworn force of 12,800 covering a city of nearly 4 million. As the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF), a Washington-based think tank, concludes in a new report, the NYPD has the resources “to do things that other departments cannot.”

Shortly after taking office under Mayor Michael Bloomberg in January 2002, Kelly began his second tour of duty as Gotham’s top cop by drawing on those considerable resources to revamp and expand the NYPD’s terror-fighting capabilities. He hired two key counterterrorism deputies from Washington, D.C.: David Cohen, a former deputy director of the CIA’s operations wing, to head the NYPD’s Intelligence Division; and Michael Sheehan, former State Department head of counterterrorism, to run the force’s new Counter Terrorism Bureau. Then he assigned more than 1,000 people to their units, the largest deployment of any American city to combat terrorism. With funds from the Police Foundation, a private group, he also sent liaison officers overseas to work alongside police departments in some of the cities most frequently targeted by terror, including Amman, London, and Singapore.

Each day, the Counter Terrorism Bureau’s 205 officers analyze worldwide threats to determine how many officers should deploy where; provide training for all members of the force; assess risks to targets; and develop plans for protecting key sites in and near the city. Much of the NYPD’s recent counterterrorism work has focused on the financial district in lower Manhattan, home to 75 of the city’s 367 most sensitive sites, information about which is kept in a giant red binder, the “Red Book.” Kelly is weighing a plan to erect a “ring of steel”—cameras, random screenings, and sophisticated sensors like those that London installed after its own subway and bus terror attacks in 2005—to help protect the 1.5-square-mile district and its 1 trillion daily financial transactions. The city is also spending $250 million to install cameras in its subway and transit system.

The cutting edge of the NYPD’s antiterrorism efforts, though, is David Cohen’s Intelligence Division. “We’re looking at ‘clusters,’ at how and where people get together, what they do and where they go, how they raise funds,” Kelly says during an interview at One Police Plaza. “This analytical work is not being done anywhere else in government. It’s all about prevention.”

Before September 11, the Intelligence Division mainly developed intelligence on narcotics and violent crimes, and sought to protect visiting dignitaries to the city—a glorified “escort service,” Kelly once scoffed. Now, its personnel devote 95 percent of their time to terrorism investigations, the PERF report concludes (and sources confirm). Kelly says that the division has 23 civilian intelligence analysts, with master’s degrees and higher from Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, and other universities; some have come from leading think tanks, even from the CIA—giving the force a capability, he says, “that exists no place else.” The division’s “field intelligence officers,” one assigned to each of the NYPD’s 76 precincts, keep tabs on people, crimes, and arrests that might have terrorism links. “Core Collection” officers develop confidential informants, who could give early warning about people being radicalized by militant associates or websites.

Cohen’s division also supervises undercover agents who infiltrate potentially violent groups. The identities of these covert warriors, and other details of the program, remain fiercely guarded secrets. But information occasionally turns up in federal prosecutions, such as the NYPD’s use of an undercover agent in helping to foil the June JFK airport conspiracy, and of both a Bangladeshi undercover officer and an Egyptian-born confidential informant in disrupting a 2004 plot by Islamic terrorists to bomb the Herald Square subway station. “I want at least 1,000 to 2,000 to die in one day,” one of the accused told the informant in the subway case, a stunned New York jury heard last year. Though the men had not acquired explosives, police arrested them shortly before the Republican national convention in August 2004, after nearly two years of surveillance. The key plotter, Shahawar Matin Siraj, a 22-year-old Pakistani, recently received a 30-year sentence. “This is the kind of homegrown, lone-wolf case that starts way below federal radar,” Cohen says. “But had these two guys acted on their intentions”—to “fuck this country very bad,” as Siraj threatened on tape—“a lot of New Yorkers would have died and been injured.”

Undercover work capitalizes on the NYPD’s 870-plus civilian and uniformed speakers of Albanian, Arabic, Bengali, Farsi, Pashto, Turkish, and Urdu—more linguists than the FBI’s New York field office employs. Of the 470 or so in uniform, more than 200 are “master linguists” in high-priority languages. The latest police academy class boasted graduates hailing from 65 countries, Cohen notes. Some will doubtless work for the division’s Cyber Intelligence Unit, a 25-person group situated in unmarked headquarters in a Chelsea industrial building; others may wind up in the Prison Intelligence program at Rikers Island, where they will work with officials from probations, the New York State Police, and other agencies to monitor the spread of militancy.

Richard Falkenrath, a counterterrorism expert who worked in the Bush White House and succeeded Deputy Commissioner Sheehan last year, says that New York’s intelligence efforts are “awe-inspiring,” beyond anything he’s seen at the local, state, and even federal levels. “New York is far more action-oriented than the feds,” he says, “partly because it’s a lot easier and faster to take action.” Even rivals like Bratton, who served as New York’s police commissioner in the mid-nineties before falling out with his boss, Rudy Giuliani, share the admiration. “The NYPD’s intelligence operation is widely regarded as the gold standard,” Bratton concluded in an article coauthored for the Manhattan Institute (City Journal’s publisher) last fall.

What Bratton criticizes—and he’s not alone—is the NYPD’s alleged refusal to give other law enforcement agencies access to the intelligence that it has so doggedly gathered. “New York has perfected an array of intelligence-gathering initiatives,” he observes. “My concern is that at the federal level, there are too few dots to connect, and in New York, what they collect is not being shared. As a result, law enforcement is not being formed by this information.”

Kelly dismisses this as “old criticism.” But neither he nor his deputies deny that for years after September 11, relations between the department and the FBI were rancorous. The NYPD blames the strain on FBI resentment of Kelly’s creation of what are basically a miniature FBI and CIA within the force. After Kelly tried unsuccessfully to take over the FBI-run Joint Terrorism Task Force—the nation’s first alliance between the bureau and local law enforcement, dating back to 1979—he stationed NYPD detectives overseas and authorized Cohen’s division to conduct its own surveillance and infiltration operations, despite FBI opposition. “For a long while,” Cohen says, “their attitude was: ‘If you’re not under our control, you’re out of control.’ ”

Kelly’s view that combating terrorism was “something we have to do ourselves” partly reflected the devastating effect of pre-9/11 intelligence failures on the law enforcement community. Not only did thousands of civilians die on 9/11; the city’s fire department lost 343 firefighters—the largest loss of life in one day in history for emergency responders; the Port Authority police suffered 37 deaths, the largest loss of life in one day in history for police; the NYPD itself lost 23 officers, the second-largest loss historically. “ ‘Trust us’ was no longer acceptable after 9/11,” observes Sheehan, who is writing a book on counterterrorism, Crush the Cell.

Tensions also grew between the FBI and Sheehan’s Counter Terrorism Bureau. In the summer of 2003, officials said, the FBI passed an unverified tip to the CTB that a “dirty bomb” might be on its way to New York. When Sheehan called a Friday afternoon meeting to discuss a possible deployment to the city of local, state, and federal investigators, emergency-response personnel, and nuclear-detection technology, the FBI began downplaying the threat. Furious, Kelly, Cohen, and Sheehan decided to use the tip to test the city’s emergency-response and intelligence teams in a massive drill. “What we learned from that episode was that when and if we needed federal assets, we were still on our own, even after 9/11,” a former senior city official complains.

Relations continued to deteriorate until the FBI replaced its senior leadership in New York in May 2005. Mark Mershon became the new head of the FBI’s 2,000-person New York field office (the bureau’s largest), and Joseph Demarest, Jr. took over its counterterrorism division. Both determined to repair what they saw as a crucial partnership. A turning point, both sides agree, came in November 2005, when FBI director Robert Mueller III visited the NYPD and had a private sit-down with Kelly. “The director was impressed by New York’s programs,” Demarest says. Mueller agreed with Kelly that New York was “big enough and enough of a target to warrant some independence,” an NYPD official recalled.

The FBI began seeing Cohen’s Intelligence Division not as a rival or nuisance but as an additional source of vital intelligence. Mueller also blessed Mershon’s desire to make the FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Force, with its 180 FBI and 125 police members, more inclusive. The senior-ranking NYPD official on the task force even became its “comanager.” “You get a real buy-in,” explains Demarest. “Important decisions are no longer made alone.” Cohen adds: “It’s hard to overstate how far we’ve come from the animosity of the early days.” He estimates that, though the FBI has the “first right of refusal” on tips and leads—35,000 have come in since the city set up its counter-terrorism hotline five years ago—the NYPD has pursued almost two-thirds of them.

NYPD officials insist that the department doesn’t deserve its reputation for arrogance and that its counterterrorism programs have always required cooperation with private businesses and other law enforcement agencies. Since launching Operation Nexus in 2002, notes Cohen, the NYPD has visited more than 30,000 businesses in New York and beyond, encouraging them to report suspicious purchases or other potentially terrorism-related activity.

Another initiative, Operation Shield, helps area businesses assess, and revise, security. The program also shares unclassified intelligence and security tips with private security firms. “Shield is all about sharing with the private sector on a real-time basis,” Kelly says. “Two days after the bombings in Mumbai”—the devastating simultaneous bombings of seven trains in India last year that killed over 200 and wounded hundreds more—“our lieutenant did a teleconference from there with 100 Shield members in our pressroom, giving more specifics about the attack than anyone else had.” A recent session, with more than 500 in attendance, discussed the chlorine bombs that American forces have faced in Iraq.

New York’s “fusion center,” the nation’s first, now includes counterterrorism reps from approximately 40 local, state, and federal agencies. The NYPD coordinates, too, with the numerous agencies that operate the city’s massive public transportation system, with its 6.5 million daily riders. The NYPD protects that system mostly with its own funds, since the federal government has spent only $386 million nationally on transit security—far less than the $24 billion it has spent bolstering aviation security. In 2007, Falkenrath disclosed in March, there had already been 22 subway bomb threats and 31 intelligence leads on subway attack plots.

Despite these outreach efforts, state officials and leaders in other cities still occasionally grumble that the NYPD is reluctant to work with other police departments or, more often, that it neglects to inform them about its operations on their turf. Michael Sheehan, quoting his former colleague Cohen, responds: “There is no such thing as intelligence sharing; there is only intelligence trading.” Even small police forces can develop useful tips and leads with the proper skills and a little creativity, he points out; that’s why the NYPD has invested considerable resources to train and work with police from the tristate area. “But yes,” Sheehan acknowledges, “we prefer to work with people who are seriously in the game—those that run informants and collect real information, rather than just circulate watered-down, nonspecific threat information provided by the Department of Homeland Security.”

Getting more partners “in the game” is the goal of Operation Sentry, the NYPD’s discreet new effort to forge counterterrorism partnerships within a 200-mile radius of the city. Recognizing that the 9/11 attacks began not in New York but in Boston and Portland, Maine, Kelly invited law enforcement officials from counties and cities as far away as Baltimore to a three-day meeting late last year to discuss such issues as the radicalization of Muslim youth and what New York has learned about how to identify terrorism-related conduct.

Francisco Ortiz, New Haven’s police chief, calls Sentry “invaluable.” Through Sentry, he now gets updates on regional threats as they unfold, as well as invitations to bimonthly sessions in New York featuring the latest threat assessments and training courses on improving security at sensitive sites. “They’re helping us become a better listening post in Connecticut for New York,” he says. Ortiz now intends to use some of his own 400-officer force to start a version of New York’s Nexus program to sensitize local businesses to potential threats. New York police trainers have already visited New Haven to help.

Utica police chief C. Allen Pylman finds the Sentry sessions “eye-opening”—particularly one that focused on the “Toronto 18” plot, disrupted last year, to behead the Canadian prime minister, bomb high-profile targets, and conduct random shootings in shopping malls. “My city of 65,000 people is not likely to be a target of terrorism,” Pylman notes. “But are there people here who may be supporting radical causes? Yes, I think so.”

In many ways, Los Angeles and New York might as well be on different planets. Tim Connors, the director of the Manhattan Institute’s Center for Policing Terrorism, which has been advising the LAPD, argues that differences of geography, history, politics, and culture result in dramatically different attitudes toward, and resources for, fighting terrorism.

The sheer mass of sprawling territory that William Bratton’s 12,800-member force and other law enforcement agencies must cover is daunting. “What is New York at its widest—40 miles?” asks L.A. city councilman Jack Weiss, a champion of Bratton’s campaign for more funds and flexibility for the LAPD, especially its counter-terrorism efforts. “The city of Los Angeles alone is some 450 square miles. The county is 4,000 square miles, with 88 incorporated and unincorporated cities and the world’s seventh-largest economy. We have 45 separate police departments.” The FBI’s L.A. field office must protect 18 million residents in seven separate counties, says its head, J. Stephen Tidwell. “Ray Kelly has an army of 37,000. Well, nobody has an army here, so no one can do it by himself.”

“You’re talking about protecting a county that has multiple climates,” agrees John Sullivan, a lieutenant in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and an early champion of intelligence sharing and of redefining police as “first preventers” of terrorism. The county, he points out, contains 85 percent of California’s critical assets.

Civic culture and history also constrain Bratton’s terrorism-fighting capabilities. The LAPD’s notorious resort to illegal surveillance in the past led to extremely tight legal restrictions on whom it could monitor, and for what kinds of suspected offenses. Bratton is trying to loosen those restrictions, but Angelenos remain deeply suspicious of the police. Further, while most New Yorkers witnessed the 9/11 attacks, spent months breathing in air thick with ashes and the stench of scorched metal, lost friends and relatives, or knew people who knew victims, for Angelenos the day was “a disaster movie,” says Amy Zegart, a counterterrorism expert at UCLA. Terrorism—except in the L.A.-based TV show 24—is something that happens to others, not to them.

Another constriction is L.A.’s byzantine political system, dominated by competing fiefdoms and myriad jurisdictions with overlapping responsibilities. The California Highway Patrol, for example, polices the freeways that dissect Bratton’s territory. The Port of Los Angeles, through which some 45 percent of the nation’s cargo passes, has its own police force. So do the area’s airports. The biggest, best-funded local law enforcement office in the city isn’t even Bratton’s LAPD; it’s the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, which has a sworn and civilian force of 16,216. And Sheriff Leroy Baca, a savvy elected politician, enjoys a $2.1 billion yearly budget—twice the LAPD’s. Of its $1.2 billion budget, the LAPD spends roughly $24 million on counter-terrorism; New York spends $204 million.

The Police Commission, a five-member panel appointed by the mayor, chooses Los Angeles’s chief cop and is likely to endorse Bratton for a second five-year term. But it’s the 15-member city council that approves Bratton’s budget and personnel levels. While Bratton could in theory shift officers from gang duty to counter-terrorism, Weiss tells me, it would be difficult without the council’s blessing. Nor can Bratton unilaterally create an LAPD career path in intelligence, as New York has done. Sacramento, seat of the state government, also wields far greater leverage over Los Angeles than Albany does over New York. “Everyone has a view on what we should and should not be doing,” Bratton says. “Even the L.A. Times seems to think it runs the police force.”

Such limitations make Bratton’s progress on counterterrorism since his appointment five years ago all the more remarkable. Working with Weiss and a handful of other supporters, he has added 75 officers permanently to the group of 33 who worked on terrorism before 9/11, and he has won the authority to hire or shift another 44 later. Still, the perpetual shortage of manpower and funds has made “sharing,” “jointness,” and “force multiplier” Bratton mantras. He has relentlessly sought to forge closer ties with other law enforcement and public-safety agencies in the region, particularly the FBI. “In this department, you need to justify exclusion,” Bratton says. The FBI’s Tidwell describes law enforcement cooperation in L.A. as “almost genetic,” a tradition, reinforced by Bratton and Baca, forged by decades of joint responses to earthquakes, fires, floods, and other natural disasters that plague the Southland. On the Joint Terrorism Task Force squads, to which Bratton has assigned some 15 officers, the FBI clearly leads. “And that doesn’t cause anyone any problems here,” Tidwell maintains. His office, too, has changed its own attitude toward sharing intelligence. “Our motto used to be ‘restrict and share what you must.’ It’s the opposite today.” Tensions between the LAPD and the Department of Homeland Security have also eased somewhat after DHS secretary Michael Chertoff met last year with the chiefs of the nation’s 15 largest police departments.

Homeland Security now has an official stationed full-time at L.A.’s crown jewel of “jointness”: the Joint Regional Intelligence Center, or “Jay-Rick,” which both Bratton and Chertoff hold up as a model for similar fusion centers soon to be operational in more than three dozen U.S. cities. Launched with a $4 million Homeland Security grant and opened last year in a concrete federal building in Norwalk, a 45-minute drive (without traffic) from downtown L.A., the center has 16 LAPD staffers and some 30 designees from other law enforcement and public-safety agencies. Inside, it resembles a modern-day newsroom: a vast open working space, shoulder-level partitions separating the analysts’ gray desks, computer screens everywhere, and wall-mounted television monitors showing various American and foreign-language news broadcasts.

The JRIC’s analysts don’t conduct investigations; instead, they vet tips and leads—nearly 25 new ones per week—to identify the 1 percent that prove serious. If someone threatens to spread anthrax in the city, for instance, the JRIC’s “threat squad” of some 20 analysts from federal and local agencies tries to figure out if the danger is real. Is the threat written or oral? From someone who seems scientifically knowledgeable? Have hospitals reported people with flu-like symptoms or who are having trouble breathing? Are adequate antibiotics on hand?

The JRIC’s heavy workload troubles Amy Zegart, among others. “The track-every-lead, confiscate-every-toenail-clipper approach may be a political winner, but it’s a counterterrorism loser,” she says. “Officials need to narrow the scope of inquiry to avoid more wild-goose chases rather than conduct them.” Experts also complain that it’s hard to tell who leads the JRIC. In theory, the LAPD, the sheriff’s office, and the FBI “comanage” the center. But what that might mean in an actual crisis is far from clear.

Moreover, the JRIC’s remote location makes it an unlikely assembly point in an emergency. John Miller, Bratton’s former deputy for counterterrorism and now an assistant FBI director in Washington, D.C., denies that the center’s location had anything to do with low rents, as some critics have charged. The choice of Norwalk, he says, ensured that the JRIC would be near, but not too near, logical targets in downtown and West L.A. Also, some officials say, since the FBI-led Joint Drug Intelligence Group already had an office in the building, it was relatively cheap and easy to link the bureau’s classified and unclassified computer lines to the fusion center’s. “The concept is right; the people are right; and they’ll grow into it,” Miller says.

However, staffing shortages prevent the center from operating “24/7,” as envisaged. Getting security clearances has also been a problem, according to Robert Fox, the LAPD lieutenant who comanages the center. “Clearances can take a year,” he says.

Al-Qaida in Hollywood?

A source of both frustration and pride within the LAPD, the “Hollywood case”—details of which haven’t yet become public—shows how good police work can break up terrorist networks. But this tangled saga also highlights unanswered questions that continue to surround the 9/11 plot. Two senior detectives from the LAPD’s Anti-Terrorism Intelligence Section agreed to discuss the case, provided that they weren’t identified by name, since both remain active terrorism investigators.

The inquiry, they say, began three days after 9/11, when the manager of an apartment building in the heart of Hollywood called the police about a group of French-speaking North Africans who kept rotating into and out of one of his units. Immediately after 9/11, he told police, the men shaved their beards, changed out of traditional Islamic garb, and stopped praying openly and attending the King Fahd mosque, one of the area’s largest, in neighboring Culver City. The manager also claimed that he’d seen the renters remove a license plate from their car, which they pushed to a side street, off the busier boulevard where they usually parked it.

The police quietly sent an officer with a bomb-sniffing dog. The car was clean, but the police impounded it, anyway, for failing to display its plates. They became more suspicious after a series of visits to the apartment. Located in a slightly run-down four-story building in a soon-to-be-gentrified neighborhood, it had no furniture save bedrolls on the floor—“earmarks of a classic safe house,” one of the detectives points out. Posters of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, a known al-Qaida target, and New York’s glittering skyline adorned the walls. One officer spotted a pair of suitcases in the hallway: the luggage tags showed that they had been on a plane coming from Germany.

Learning that 9/11 bomber Mohammad Atta had belonged to a radical cell in Hamburg, “we knew enough to be worried,” a detective recalls. One of the North Africans, questioned by the police, claimed that the luggage belonged to his brother, who had recently arrived from Germany. But the police found no trace of the brother, either at the apartment or anywhere in L.A.

The North Africans told other inconsistent stories. Virtually all were jobless; several had registered to obtain pilot’s licenses or shown an interest in doing so. (The police later learned that enrolling in pilot’s school was a quick way of securing a student visa.) One was already a pilot. A police check of public records disclosed that he had claimed on an application to have attended a Florida flight school that, it later turned out, one of the 9/11 hijackers had also attended. Public records also showed that he had registered at an address in Arizona, not far from where a second hijacker had gone to flight school. “It wasn’t enough for the FBI at the start, but it was for us,” a detective notes.

The LAPD put the apartment and its residents—as well as their friends and associates, some 250 people in all—under surveillance. Eventually, it assigned more than 150 investigators and support employees to the case. Their focus eventually narrowed to a core of eight or ten suspects. “We knew we were dealing with a network of some kind,” a detective says. But investigators couldn’t prove that the group that they were watching was, as they suspected, an al-Qaida support cell in the heart of Hollywood.

When the police discovered that two of the men initially questioned were in the country illegally, they arrested them. One by one, others under surveillance were quietly arrested on various criminal charges—identity theft, illegal gun possession, and marriage and insurance fraud—none of which even mentioned terrorism. In some cases, immigration authorities deported the men on immigration charges. In other cases, suspects pleaded guilty and went to jail, or voluntarily left the country. One of the two men originally arrested on immigration charges bailed himself out of jail. The second secretly tried to obtain firearms in prison. Deported in 2002, both have now disappeared.

The investigation soon focused on a man who seemed to be at the cell’s hub—Qualid Benomrane, a North African taxi driver mentioned in a footnote of the 9/11 Commission Report. Arrested on immigration charges in early 2002, he told the police that prior to the attacks he had driven “two Saudis” around L.A. and to San Diego’s Sea World, after being introduced to them by Fahad al-Thumairy, a diplomat at the Saudi consulate in Los Angeles. Benomrane also told police that someone at the consulate had asked al-Thumairy to take care of the two men.

According to the 9/11 report, Benomrane, shown pictures of Khaled al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, two of the 9/11 hijackers, at first pulled their photos out of the group he was shown, but later claimed not to recognize them. The 9/11 commission investigators concluded that “the hypothesis that Benomrane’s ‘two Saudis’ were Hazmi and Midhar” couldn’t be substantiated.

But the LAPD detectives who investigated the case remain convinced that Benomrane and al-Thumairy were militants in the al-Qaida support network and that Benomrane’s passengers were, in fact, the two hijackers. “Our investigation found, for instance, that Benomrane had taken photos of the structural supports of the Golden Gate Bridge during a trip to northern California,” a detective says. The LAPD also discovered that Benomrane had taken his two Saudi passengers to a gas station where one of the two San Diego–based hijackers had worked before heading east to carry out his deadly mission. (The FBI, which participated in the investigation, declined comment since the inquiry was classified, but a commission investigator said that the bureau has no record of such a side trip.)

The LAPD investigators decided to question Benomrane in jail once more, but they never got the chance: he was deported on the eve of their visit to see him (a textbook example of one part of government’s not talking to another). Benomrane, too, has disappeared. But using standard policing tactics and procedures, the LAPD investigators broke up what they believe was a cell that supported al-Qaida’s 9/11 mission in ways still not fully understood. “We did all the right things without knowing it,” a detective notes, calling the case the LAPD’s “coming of age” in counterterrorism.

“Only the police are close enough to the ground to be able to go after terrorists like this by using standard criminal investigations,” argues Stephan C. Margolis, who now heads the LAPD’s Anti-Terrorism Intelligence Section. “The FBI has 12,000 agents for the entire country, only some of whom do counterterrorism. Local and state law enforcement includes some 800,000 people who know their territory. We are destined to be frontline soldiers in what could be a very long and complicated war.”

Operation Archangel, a second pillar of the LAPD’s counterterrorism effort (also financed by millions in Homeland Security funds), uses sophisticated computer software to identify, prioritize, and protect vulnerable targets—so far, 500 of them, ranging from Disneyland to nuclear plants, officials say. Archangel asks the owners and operators of these sites to provide the latest structural information—floor plans, air-conditioning and electrical-system locations, entrances and stairwells, and so on—which goes into a massive database; the software then assesses vulnerabilities and devises deterrence and prevention strategies, as well as emergency response plans. “We’re basically doing what we did before, but on steroids,” says Tom McDonald, the LAPD lieutenant who runs Archangel and sees it, as many federal officials do, as something that other cities can emulate.

If such a system sounds obvious, it isn’t, Miller points out. For instance, during the Columbine massacre, students had to help police sketch the school’s floor plan on top of a squad car with a marker. “Archangel is the kind of automated system you would need in an emergency,” Miller says.

But Archangel, located in the deliberately nondescript basement of an office building in West L.A., operates with just 15 people—one-third its projected staffing—and not around the clock. “We are hurt, not just in this program, by the fact that our city does not permit federal Homeland Security funds to pay for full-time city employees,” says Michael Downing, who spent time in London studying terrorism before taking command of the LAPD’s Counter-Terrorism and Criminal Intelligence Bureau this spring. “Resources are definitely a challenge.”

Another, adds McDonald, is the reluctance of some private businesses to associate openly with his program, fearing that being identified as targets will drive away business. Such concerns rule out L.A.’s adoption of the NYPD’s “in-your-face” exercises, like its random deployments of heavily armed police and vehicles to sites around the city. Bearing names like “Atlas” and “Hercules,” these displays of force, says Kelly, deter terrorists by showing them that New York is just too tough a target. “There’s less fear here than in New York, and less interest in generating fear,” says William McSweeney, chief of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department’s Office of Homeland Security.

The lack of public urgency means that Bratton must work doubly hard to get the counterterrorism manpower, money, and information that he needs. And that, in turn, has involved lots of travel, for which he has faced criticism. While Kelly is famously a homebody—he’s taken no vacation since starting in October 2002 and has made only five day trips from the city since then—Bratton was out of town more than a third of 2005, and nearly as often last year. Staunchly defended by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Bratton says that the LAPD and the city benefit from the information and cooperation that he gets from his travels. The explanation has satisfied most critics. Nor do Angelenos balk at their chief’s $300,000-plus salary, much heftier than Commissioner Kelly’s $189,700.

Continuing to promote “jointness,” Bratton is now trying to get several cities to pool resources to station detectives overseas, as New York has for several years; these liaison officers would share their reports among those who helped finance their posts. Supported by the Manhattan Institute and the Department of Homeland Security, he is also planning a national police academy in Los Angeles to train police from across the country in intelligence-led policing skills. “The nation’s 18,000 local police departments have been crying out for such advanced training and broader strategic guidance,” says Jerry Ratcliffe, who teaches at Temple University and attended the first planning meeting.

Despite their differences, both the NYPD and the LAPD agree that a key way to crush incipient terrorist cells and thwart terrorism is to use local laws and follow locally generated leads, which, after all, is what good police departments do best. Relying on this low-key approach, Downing says, the LAPD has arrested some 200 American citizens and foreigners with suspected ties to terrorist groups since September 11. At present, he adds, his division has 54 open intelligence cases, involving at least 250 “persons of interest.” One of the most celebrated examples of the strategy is the 2005 Torrance case, in which the arrest of two men for robbing a gas station in that city eventually unraveled a militant Islamic plot to attack U.S. military facilities, synagogues, and other places where Jews gather in Los Angeles County. But L.A., Downing admits, still lacks the resources to develop its own undercover agents and informants. “We do that with the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force,” he says.

Because most American cities resemble L.A. more than they do New York, Bratton’s priority of pooling resources and information is likely to be a more attractive, if less ambitious, model than New York City’s approach, which includes running its own undercover counter-terrorism operations. But Washington has begun to acknowledge the virtue of New York’s argument that thwarting terrorism requires better local intelligence about what potentially dangerous groups and individuals are planning. Last year, the Department of Homeland Security’s “Urban Area Security Initiative” began to offer grants to help local police strengthen their ability to collect and analyze intelligence. Our cities, L.A. and New York included, will be safer for it.

Research for this article was supported by the Brunie Fund for New York Journalism.