A blog for all seasons; A blog for one; A blog for all. As the 11th most informative blog on the planet, I have a seared memory of throwing my Time 2006 Man of the Year Award over the railing at Time Warner Center.
Justice. Only Justice Shall Thou Pursue
One of al Qaeda's leading ideologues and recruiters, Anwar al-Awlaki, was apparently the target of yet another UAV airstrike today, but was unsuccessful in eliminating the man whose writings on Islam inspired the Fort Hood shooter Major Hassan, the Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad, Christmas day bomber Abdul Farouk Abdul Mutallab, among others. He's also linked with the 9/11 attacks in that he was apparently the spiritual adviser for at least two of the 19 hijackers.
That it comes so quickly after the raid on Osama bin Laden could be a coincidence, or it could mean that the US is exploiting the terabytes of data collected in the raid that killed the al Qaeda leader.
The attack does not appear to have killed Mr. Awlaki, the officials said, but may have killed operatives of Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen.
It was the first American strike in Yemen using a remotely piloted drone since 2002, when the C.I.A. struck a car carrying a group of suspected militants, including an American citizen, who were believed to have Qaeda ties. And the attack came just three days after American commandos invaded a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, and killed Osama bin Laden, the founder of Al Qaeda.
The attack on Thursday was part of a clandestine Pentagon program to hunt members of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the group believed responsible for a number of failed attempts to strike the United States, including the thwarted plot to blow up a trans-Atlantic jet on Dec. 25, 2009, as it was preparing to land in Detroit.
Although Mr. Awlaki is not thought to be one of the group’s senior leaders, he has been made a target by American military and intelligence operatives because he has recruited English-speaking Islamist militants to Yemen to carry out attacks overseas. His radical sermons, broadcast on the Internet, have a large global following.
The Obama administration has taken the rare step of approving Mr. Awlaki’s killing, even though he is an American citizen.
Awlaki has made his reputation as being a top recruiter for al Qaeda and exploiting jihadi sentiments online.
CNN reports that the Awlaki raid was not due to information garnered from the bin Laden raid. Further, this particular UAV airstrike was under the command of the Pentagon, not the CIA.
Faisal Shahzad will learn his punishment today when the court announces his sentence. Shahzad had already entered a guilty plea on 10 counts relating to his attempted bombing in Times Square. The bomb failed to detonate properly, which meant that New Yorkers and visitors to the area were spared a gruesome fate:
A dramatic videotape of the FBI-staged test blast in June has become a key piece of evidence against Shahzad, who faces a mandatory life prison term at his sentencing Tuesday in Manhattan federal court.
Technicians studied Shahzad's design before using it to build a working model they say demonstrated his deadly intent.
"Had the bombing played out as Shahzad had so carefully planned, the lives of numerous residents and visitors of the city would have been lost and countless others would have been forever traumatized," prosecutors wrote in court papers.
Shahzad's bomb fizzled before it could do any harm, doomed by faulty wiring and ingredients such as a low-grade fertilizer that couldn't explode.
The Pakistan-born Shahzad hasn't disputed the allegations while under interrogation and taking a guilty plea.
In fact, "he spoke with pride" about the scheme, in which he bragged that he wanted to kill at least 40 people, the government said in a sentencing memo. If he escaped arrest, he added, he hoped to set off another bomb two weeks later in a second, undisclosed location.
"While it is impossible to calculate precisely the impact of Shahzad's bomb had it detonated, the controlled detonation ... demonstrated that those effects would have been devastating to the surrounding area," prosecutors wrote.
Calling himself a Muslim solider, a defiant Shahzad pleaded guilty in June to 10 terrorism and weapons counts, some of which carry mandatory life sentences.
Shahzad had received terror training and financial assistance overseas. He claims that the Pakistan Taliban provided him with more than $15,000 and five days of explosives training late last year and early this year, months after he became a U.S. citizen. He had planned the attack using widely available web feeds and had planned the attack to coincide with when the area would be heavily trafficked with tourists.
The sentencing comes just a day after a UAV airstrike apparently killed a German terror cell that was in the Pakistani frontier province of Waziristan in the town of Mir Ali. Pakistan continues to be a hub of terrorism, and the latest European travel warnings are related as well. Al Qaeda has mutated its efforts to strike at targets around the world to try and carry out attacks. No high level al Qaeda or Taliban were killed in the latest strike, but the elimination of the German cell could have thwarted a major attack down the road. Western intel agencies are concerned that al Qaeda will attempt to carry out Mumbai-style attacks (using a cadre of terrorists to attack hotels and other soft targets to inflict maximum casualties).
UPDATE: Shahzad has gotten life in prison. He was unrepentant to the last - he said: "Brace yourselves, the war with Muslims has just begun," just before the judge handed down the six life sentences.
Shahzad, like many other Islamic terrorists, ignores that the bulk of victims of their terror campaigns are fellow Muslims, but they chalk it up to acceptable losses in a larger campaign of jihad against the West as they promote their version of fundamentalist Islam.
The FBI has conducted tests using the same basic design in Faisal Shahzad's failed Times Square bomb in rural Pennsylvania and came to the conclusion that the City dodged a huge bullet. As the NY Post reports:
Had he built the Times Square device the way he had originally intended to, terrorist Faisal Shahzad, would have turned his SUV and nearby vehicles into a fatal spray of razor-sharp fragments and transformed building windows into glass guillotines hurtling to the streets, cutting down hundreds of people walking by.
The results were discovered after feds composed the type of bomb Shahzad set out to make -- with the exact components he had initially intended to use -- and exploded it in Pennsylvania last month.
"It would have been the biggest thing ever to happen in this country since Sept. 11," another source said.
"It definitely would have been bigger than [the 1995] Oklahoma City" bombing of the federal building that killed 168 people, the source said. "There would have been a lot of casualties."
The main reason the bomb didn't detonate properly was that Shahzad substituted cheaper and more easily obtainable materials for the ones that he originally hoped to use.
That's both reassuring and troubling. It's reassuring that the components to make a truly devastating bomb aren't easily obtainable. It's troubling that he still nearly managed to carry off the bombing to devastating consequences.
Calling himself a Muslim soldier, a defiant Pakistan-born U.S. citizen pleaded guilty Monday to carrying out the failed Times Square car bombing and left a sinister warning that unless the U.S. leaves Muslim lands alone, "we will be attacking U.S."
Wearing a white skull cap, prison smocks and a dark beard, Faisal Shahzad entered the plea in U.S. District Court in Manhattan just days after a federal grand jury indicted him on 10 terrorism and weapons counts, some of which carried mandatory life prison sentences. He pleaded guilty to them all.
U.S. District Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum challenged Shahzad repeatedly with questions such as whether he had worried about killing children in Times Square.
"One has to understand where I'm coming from," Shahzad calmly replied. "I consider myself ... a Muslim soldier."
The 30-year-old described his effort to set off a bomb in an SUV he parked in Times Square on May 1, saying he chose the warm Saturday night because it would be crowded with people he could injure or kill. He said he conspired with the Pakistan Taliban, which provided more than $15,000 to fund his operation.
He explained that he packed his vehicle with three separate bomb components, hoping to set off a fertilizer-fueled bomb packed in a gun cabinet, a set of propane tanks and gas canisters rigged with fireworks to explode into a fireball. He also revealed he was carrying a folding assault rifle for "self-defense."
Shahzad said he lit a fuse and waited 2 1/2 to five minutes for the bomb to erupt.
"I was waiting to hear a sound but I didn't hear a sound. ... So I walked to Grand Central and went home," he said.
Shahzad dismissed the judge's question about the children by saying the U.S. didn't care when children were killed in Muslim countries.
"It's a war. I am part of the answer to the U.S. terrorizing the Muslim nations and the Muslim people," he said. "On behalf of that, I'm revenging the attack. Living in the United States, Americans only care about their people, but they don't care about the people elsewhere in the world when they die."
Cedarbaum also asked Shahzad if he understood that the people in Times Square might not have anything to do with what happened overseas.
"The people select the government. We consider them all the same," Shahzad said during the hour-long hearing.
Shahzad didn't particularly care about how many Muslims murdered each other in sectarian violence in places like Iraq or Afghanistan or Iran, but he's complaining about when the US goes after those who are responsible for carrying out terrorist attacks against the US?
It's an ignorance of the fact that Muslim terrorists carried out attacks against the US for decades before the US responded with force to go after the terror regimes.
But this is the twisted ideology that Shahzad and his coreligionists have adopted. It's a hatred of all things America, despite all the things that the US had done for them.
Shahzad faces life in prison when he is sentenced later this year.
Just weeks after the failed car bombing of New York's Times Square, the Department of Homeland Security says "the number and pace of attempted attacks against the United States over the past nine months have surpassed the number of attempts during any other previous one-year period."
That grim assessment is contained in an unclassified DHS intelligence memo prepared for various law enforcement groups, which says terror groups are expected to try attacks inside the United States with "increased frequency."
CNN obtained a copy of the document, dated May 21, which goes on to warn, "we have to operate under the premise that other operatives are in the country and could advance plotting with little or no warning."
The intelligence note says recent attempted terror attacks have used operatives and tactics which made the plots hard to detect.
The document specifically mentions the cases of Afghan national Najibullah Zazi, who pleaded guilty in February to plotting attacks on New York's subways, and Times Square bombing suspect Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani-American.
The intelligence report says both men spent significant time in the United States and were familiar with their alleged targets. Furthermore, the plots involved materials that can be commonly purchased in America without causing suspicion.
The document also says Shahzad and Zazi had short periods of training overseas "compared to lengthier training cycles for earlier operations, reducing our ability to detect their activities."
Many of these plots involve US citizens or legal immigrants who went overseas to receive terror training in places like Pakistan or Yemen and/or received funding from overseas but may or may not have been part of an official terror group like al Qaeda. Rather, they are lone wolf or affiliated terrorists who do not have direct ties to terror groups.
This makes the intel operations to detect and thwart such attacks all the more difficult. In the case of Shahzad, it was only a bomb that failed to properly detonate that prevented the loss of life. The short training cycles means that the terrorists might not have the training necessary to complete their missions, but it makes detection even more difficult.
It also points to the possibility of exposing the terror training camps because more people are flowing through in shorter time, but it also means that tracking those individuals becomes more difficult.
National security relies on gathering intel and thwarting attacks before they reach US shores. That means carrying out clandestine operations to track and eliminate terror training camps and the terror masters in the Middle East and places like Pakistan - the very sort of operation approved by Gen. David Petraeus (and published by the NY Times), which undermines the ability of such clandestine operations to be successful.
Officials said that after two days of intense questioning of the bombing suspect, Faisal Shahzad, evidence was mounting that the group, the Pakistani Taliban, had helped inspire and train Mr. Shahzad in the months before he is alleged to have parked an explosives-filled sport utility vehicle in a busy Manhattan intersection on Saturday night. Officials said Mr. Shahzad had discussed his contacts with the group, and investigators had accumulated other evidence that they would not disclose.
On Wednesday, Mr. Shahzad, the 30-year-old son of a retired senior Pakistani Air Force officer, waived his right to a speedy arraignment, a possible sign of his continuing cooperation with investigators.
As his interrogation continued, Department of Homeland Security officials directed airlines to speed up their checks of new names added to the no-fly list, a requirement that might have prevented Mr. Shahzad from boarding a flight to Dubai on Monday night before his arrest at Kennedy International Airport.
The failed attack has produced a flurry of other proposals to tighten security procedures, including calls by members of Congress to more closely scrutinize passengers who buy tickets with cash, as Mr. Shahzad did. Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, and Senator Scott Brown, Republican of Massachusetts, proposed stripping terrorism suspects of American citizenship, and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg asked Congress to block the sale of firearms and explosives to those on terrorist watch lists.
The whole notion of stripping terrorism suspects of American citizenship is nonsense. There is a wholly appropriate crime that takes such actions into account, and that is treason. The US Constitution sets forth explicitly the crime of treason:
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.
The Congress shall have Power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted.
By taking up arms against the United States and working with the Taliban and received terror training at one of their terror camps in Pakistan's frontier provinces, Shahzad committed treason. He admitted to the actions of carrying out the bombing, which is an open admission (and if he allocutes in court, then the conditions for a treason conviction are met). People like Sen. John McCain and Joe Lieberman are stoking out space for campaign slogans and trying to show that they're tough on terrorists, but they could have also been tough by simply calling for the imposition of the appropriate criminal sanctions - treason.
So, why did Shahzad decide to join the jihad? Well, the Daily News reports that he was slowly radicalized because of the war on terror and personal failures. After downplaying the links, the US is now focusing on Shahzad's travels to Pakistan and his contacts there. Someone was providing him with the financial support upon his return to the US, and that has to be fully investigated.
It's also come to light that Shahzad made a dry run the day before, and even then botched things. He left the keys to his getaway car in the Pathfinder.
The source, who did not explain how Shahzad had attempted to set off the bomb, said he then took a number of turns and wound up entering Times Square by driving south down Seventh Avenue. The source said Shahzad told investigators he turned right onto 45th Street toward Eighth Avenue because he saw a place to pull over.
It's unclear why Shahzad left the Pathfinder's engine running and hazard lights blinking.
But because of an incredible goof, Shahzad couldn't use his escape car. He had accidentally left the keys to that vehicle in the Pathfinder that he thought was about to blow up, the source said.
He apparently went to a train station, where he boarded a Metro North train back to Connecticut.
That fortuitous goof on his part gave investigators still another piece of evidence to tie the attack to Shahzad.
But officials could have called all the airlines themselves in such a critical situation — they've done it before.
This would have put Shahzad on the radar of the carriers, and it could have prevented him from being able to board the Emirates plane headed for Dubai.
The FBI asked the TSA not to make the calls, according to an administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss the ongoing investigation. The FBI did let the TSA call a few domestic air carriers, which did not include Emirates.
It's possible that the FBI didn't want to compromise their investigation and hoped to perhaps catch any potential coconspirators and that alerting the airline might have tipped off Shahzad and others to the investigation. Still, there wasn't much more that the airline could do under the circumstances since it was the TSA responsibility to clear the flight's manifest.
While Faisal Shahzad claims to have acted alone, investigators are looking at potential links overseas, particularly in Pakistan. Authorities in Pakistan had arrested several of his relatives in connection with his arrest at JFK airport as he was trying to leave the country via Dubai.
Shahzad told authorities he acted alone, but officials said he had spent five months in Pakistan of late and Kelly said Shahzad had a wife and two children living in Peshawar.
The United States and Pakistan will try to trace Shahzad's path to Times Square, determine how he ended up in a militant training camp in Pakistan and which group influenced him, in hopes of preventing future attacks.
Shahzad, a former financial analyst who worked in the U.S. state of Connecticut, is the son of a retired vice air marshal, affording him a special status in Pakistan, where the military is the most powerful and influential institution.
Security officials said Shahzad's parents resided in Peshawar, the city hit hardest by Pakistani Taliban suicide bombings. They said Shahzad also has a residency identification card from commercial hub Karachi.
Pakistani Interior Minister Rehman Malik said Shahzad's family "are on our radar."
"He is not from a radical or illiterate family. He is from an educated family. We are looking into how he got radicalized," he told Reuters.
JPMorgan Chase's mortgage unit sued Shahzad in September last year to foreclose on his three bedroom home in Shelton, Connecticut, court documents and county records show.
The bomb was in a sports utility vehicle that prosecutors said Shahzad bought three weeks ago in Connecticut for $1,300.
Workers at Emirates evidently did not check the list, because at 6:30 p.m., Mr. Shahzad called the airline and booked a flight to Pakistan via Dubai, officials said. At 7:35 p.m., he arrived at the airport, paid cash for his ticket and was given a boarding pass.
Airlines are not required to report cash purchases, a Homeland Security official said. Emirates actually did report Mr. Shahzad’s purchase to the Transportation Security Administration — but only hours later, when he was already in custody, the official said.
Mr. Shahzad had evaded the surveillance effort and bought his ticket seven hours after his name went on the no-fly list. But the system gives security officials one more chance to stop a dangerous passenger.
As is routine, when boarding was completed for the flight, Emirates Flight EK202, the final passenger manifest was sent to the National Targeting Center, operated in Virginia by Customs and Border Protection. There, at about 11 p.m., analysts discovered that Mr. Shahzad was on the no-fly list and had just boarded a plane.
They sounded the alarm, and minutes later, with the jet still at the gate, its door was opened and agents came aboard and took Mr. Shahzad into custody, officials said. The airliner then pulled away from the gate but was called back.
“Actually I have a message for you to go back to the gate immediately,” an air traffic controller told the pilot, according to a recording posted to the Web by LiveATC.net, which tracks air communications. “I don’t know exactly why, but you can call your company for the reason,” the controller added.
After the plane was called back, the authorities removed two more passengers. They were questioned and cleared. They and all the rest of the passengers were rescreened, as was the baggage, and the flight took off about seven hours late.
There were multiple layers of security involved here, and while several layers didn't manage to prevent him from boarding the flight, he was still captured before the flight took off. Investigators and political leaders need to look at how and why the system was not more efficient and how the notification system could be better improved - whether it is providing clearer and more urgent notifications, better voice communication with those at the gate, or a combination of factors.
Clearly, the law enforcement job of tracking down the terrorist responsible for the attack did a great job of tracing leads that pointed to Shahzad and did so with remarkable speed, but that was due in part to the failure of the bomb to explode - leaving a veritable smorgasbord of evidence that detailed the history of the Nissan Pathfinder, its origin, and ultimately Shahzad's identification as the prime suspect.
The charges in the criminal complaint are as follows:
Now, there are questions as to why he carried out the attack in the first place. Some are speculating that it may have been because of ongoing UAV airstrikes against the Taliban in Pakistan that have targeted Taliban and al Qaeda along the frontier provinces. He also admits to training with Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, which is one of the major extremist Islamic groups in his native Pakistan. The criminal complaint states that he trained in Waziristan, and Bill Roggio notes that it was likely North Waziristan, which is littered with more than 150 Taliban and al Qaeda camps. In fact, it appears that Tehrik-i-Taliban is the latest cover name for Mehsud's Taliban faction.
I think it should be even more frequent, and the technology is present to make this pretty much instantaneous, but this is a step in the right direction.
Investigators were able to track wannabe terrorist Faisal Shahzad through his anonymous, pre-paid cell phone — exactly how, they won’t say. But there was a tantalizing explanation posted — and then quickly yanked — from the website of WCBS TV. “In the end, it was secret Army intelligence planes that did him in. Armed with his cell phone number, they circled the skies over the New York area, intercepting a call to Emirates Airlines reservations, before scrambling to catch him at John F. Kennedy International Airport.”
Jeremy Scahill, relying on a source in U.S. Special Operations, says those planes were likely RC-12s, equipped with a Guardrail Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) system. The planes are designed to pluck all kinds of communications from the air. But from the ground, they could easily be mistaken for an executive aircraft. The RC-12 is based on the Hawker-Beechcraft King Air B200 suit-carrier. And while earlier versions of the aircraft were covered in odd-looking antennas, the latest aircraft are far less conspicuous.
Variants of the planes are at the center of “Project Liberty,” a crash project by the Air Force to send more airborne spies to Afghanistan. The first of an estimated 37 aircraft began flying there last December.
“It sucks up everything. We’ve got these things in Jalalabad [Afghanistan]. We routinely fly these things over Khandahar. When I say everything, I mean BlueTooth would be effected, even the wave length that PlayStation controllers are on. They suck up everything. That’s the point,” Scahill’s source tells him.
Also, the video that was released the day after the failed attack showing a man taking off a dark colored shirt in Shubert Alley around the block from the SUV may have reassured Shahzad that the authorities weren't on to him at that point giving him a false sense of confidence.
Meanwhile, an official with knowledge of the investigation told The Associated Press that the video police released right after the botched bombing of a man shedding his shirt near the SUV had the effect of falsely reassuring the real suspect he wasn't a target.
The unidentified man -- whom Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly referred to in his first briefing after the failed bombing as someone police sought to interview -- is now not believed to be involved with the attack, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the case. Police have not interviewed the man.
So, we now have an idea of why the JTTF was interested in Shahzad in 2004 but what happened that he wasn't on the lookout list in 2010? Was his name dropped, but only added in conjunction with the investigation and if so, why was his name dropped?
A Pakistan-born U.S. citizen accused of driving a bomb-laden SUV into Times Square and parking it on a street lined with restaurants and Broadway theaters was to appear in court Tuesday to face charges that he tried to set off a massive fireball and kill Americans, federal authorities said.
The suspect, Faisal Shahzad, was taken into custody late Monday by FBI agents and New York Police Department detectives at Kennedy Airport while trying to board a flight to Dubai, according to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and other officials. He was identified by customs agents and stopped before boarding, Holder said early Tuesday in Washington.
Shahzad is a naturalized U.S. citizen and had recently returned from a five-month trip to Pakistan, where he had a wife, according to law enforcement officials who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the investigation into the failed car bombing.
The U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan was handling the case and said Shahzad would appear in court Tuesday, but the charges were not made public. FBI agents searched the home at a known address for Shahzad in Bridgeport, Conn., early Tuesday, said agent Kimberly Mertz, who wouldn't answer questions about the search.
Authorities removed filled plastic bags from the house overnight in a mixed-race, working-class neighborhood of multi-family homes in Connecticut's largest city. A bomb squad came and went without entering as local police and FBI agents gathered in the cordoned-off street.
It was the use of a disposable cellphone that led the FBI to the suspect. Shahzad will be in federal court today to face charges and it was believed that he had bought the Nissan Pathfinder about three weeks ago for cash via Craigslist.
The person seen in a video taken from the Junior's Restaurant on Shubert Alley doesn't appear to be involved in the bombing.
Mr. Shahzad, 30, a naturalized United States citizen from Pakistan, told the authorities that he had acted alone, but hours after he was arrested, security officials in Karachi, Pakistan, said they arrested a Pakistani man who had spent time with Mr. Shahzad during a recent visit there.
Investigators said they arrested the man, Muhammad Rehan, in a mosque in the North Nazimabad area just after morning prayers. The mosque is known for its links with the militant group Jaish-e-Muhammad.
Investigators said Mr. Rehan told them that he had rented a pickup truck and driven with Mr. Shahzad to the northwestern city of Peshawar, where they stayed from July 7 to July 22, 2009. The account could not be independently verified.
Pakistani television reported that as many as eight people had been arrested there on Tuesday, but those reports could not be immediately confirmed.
Moreover, there's no way to know whether those arrests are connected with the Times Square plot. Curiously, Jaish-e-Muhammad is more well known for its terrorism in connection with the disputed territories Jammu and Kashmir along the Line of Control with India than terrorism relating to the US.
How did investigators zero-in on Shahzad? Officials said they found a bevy of evidence by examining that same SUV. NYPD officials say the VIN – or vehicle identification number – was scratched off the dashboard, but was also stamped on the engine block.
Agents tracked down the SUV's most recent registered owner, a 19-year-old Bridgeport, Conn. woman. She told them Shahzad responded to her online Craigslist ad for the SUV and that he bought it on April 24th for $1,300 cash and paid for it in $100 bills.
His arrest was actually part of a law enforcement operation to not only nab Shahzad, but any potential accomplices here in the US:
Emirates Airlines flight 202 out of John F. Kennedy International Airport, which was bound for Dubai, rolled back from the gate at around 11:45 on Monday night. Shahzad was presumably all buckled in, ready to leave the country and ultimately return to his native Pakistan.
CBS 2 has learned that investigators were already onto Shahzad and laid low, hoping he would make contact with an accomplice. Airport authorities had already instructed the pilots that they were not to take off.
UPDATE:
There has been some dispute over exactly where Shahzad was taken into custody and whether he actually made it on the plane.
According to the latest reports, he was allowed to board and be seated aboard the Emirates Air Flt 202 before law enforcement noticed that he was on the no-fly list and should not be allowed to fly:
As federal agents closed in, Faisal Shahzad was aboard Emirates Flight 202. He reserved a ticket on the way to John F. Kennedy International Airport, paid cash on arrival and walked through security without being stopped. By the time Customs and Border Protection officials spotted Shahzad's name on the passenger list and recognized him as the bombing suspect they were looking for, he was in his seat and the plane was preparing to leave the gate.
But it didn't. At the last minute, the pilot was notified, the jetliner's door was opened and Shahzad was taken into custody.
After authorities pulled Shahzad off the plane, he admitted he was behind the crude Times Square car bomb, officials said. He also claimed to have been trained at a terror camp in Pakistan's lawless tribal region of Waziristan, according to court documents. That raised increased concern that the bombing was an international terror plot.
Shahzad, a Pakistani-born U.S. citizen, was charged Tuesday with terrorism and attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction in Saturday evening's failed Times Square bombing. According to a federal complaint, he confessed to buying an SUV, rigging it with a homemade bomb and driving it into the busy area where he tried to detonate it.
The Obama administration played down the fact that Shahzad, a U.S. citizen born in Pakistan, had made it aboard the plane. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano wouldn't talk about it, other than to say Customs officials prevented the plane from taking off. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said the security system has fallback procedures in place for times like this, and they worked.
The plane wasn't going to take off, but it is disconcerting that he managed to get on the plane at all.
