SUMMARY: At the end of a brutal campaign to retake Mosul in Iraq, and as the fight for Raqqa continues, where does the battle against the Islamic State stand? Judy Woodruff speaks with Special Presidential Envoy Brett McGurk, who says the Islamic State is “radically shrinking” and that President Trump's decision to delegate rapid decision-making has greatly assisted their efforts.
SUMMARY: Investigators say they have "very important" clues to what drove an attacker to bomb a concert in Manchester, England. But they face an unwelcome obstacle; intelligence leaks to the American press, fueling a diplomatic fight, and a pause in intelligence sharing. Ciaran Jenkins of Independent Television News reports, and William Brangham talks to former FBI counterterrorism investigator Ali Soufan.
SUMMARY: Passengers flying out of 10 specific airports in the Middle East can no longer take large electronic devices in their carry-on luggage, according to a new rule from the Department of Homeland Security. The British announced a similar rule, but included different airports. William Brangham gets insight from Matthew Olsen, former Director of the National Counterterrorism Center.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM (NewsHour): Passengers flying out of these airports can no longer take large electronic devices, things like laptops or mobile gaming devices or tablets, on board with them. Those devices have to be in checked luggage only. Cell phones are still allowed on board.
The new restrictions apply to flights from 10 specific airports in Jordan, Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Morocco, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. The British today announced a similar move, but they included some different airports in their ban.
We turn now to Matthew Olsen for more on this. He was the Director of the National Counterterrorism Center during the Obama administration. And he now teaches at Harvard University.
Welcome.
I wonder if you could just tell me a little bit, what is going on here?
MATTHEW OLSEN, Former Director, National Counterterrorism Center: Well, it would appear that, almost certainly, there is some new intelligence that the intelligence community has gathered, whether on its own or from one of our partners in the region, that has given the government, in particular the Department of Homeland Security, increased concern about the possibility that a terrorist organization has developed some type of bomb that it can hide in a device like a laptop.
You know, whether that is brand-new intelligence or maybe just new analysis of existing intelligence, it's hard to say, but, certainly, there is some new piece of information that has given the government more cause for concern in this particular context.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM:I mean, clearly, it also seems that we have lost faith in these particular airports, either in their ability to screen luggage or their ability to weed out infiltrators amongst their staff. Is that right?
MATTHEW OLSEN: Well, we have always had concern about airports in this region, and we have always placed additional screening requirements on flights that leave from these airports and don't stop before reaching the United States.
But the truth is that the best place to stop a terrorist attack, a plot like this, is at the earliest possible stage, where you can have intelligence that allows you to identify those individuals who are responsible for the plot.
The last opportunity really is at those airports, and really you are at least hoping that you're going to be able to stop a bomb once it reaches the airport gate.
Veteran European law enforcement officials, one of them Muslim, reflect on the roots of the Paris attacks, the tense aftermath and the debate about the effectiveness of counterterror forces.
PARIS — Ten days after the Paris terror attacks, Europe remains on edge. Police in Belgium, anticipating a similar assault, are on highest alert as they press the hunt for the surviving attacker with the help of law enforcement in neighboring nations. In France, the massive investigation continues. Spain and other nations have intensified defenses against a terror offensive against the West by the Islamic State. Weary, tense and somber after the bloodshed, top law enforcement officials from three countries spoke to ProPublica about the threat and response. Three asked for anonymity because of the dangers they face and because they are not authorized to speak publicly.
Belgium
The counterterror investigator was exhausted.
He had spent days hunting for Salah Abdeslam, the remaining fugitive in the Paris attacks. The other suspects are dead. They included Abdeslam’s brother, who blew himself up during the massacre in Paris, and his old friend Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the suspected ringleader from Belgium, who died in a fierce gunfight with French police.
But Abdeslam remained on the run, last spotted in Belgium and believed to be wearing an explosives belt like the attackers who killed and died in Paris. A human bomb ready to explode. The fugitive was one of the main reasons Belgian authorities raised the terror alert in Brussels to its maximum level Saturday. The subway system shut down. Soccer games were canceled. Authorities urged people to stay inside and avoid crowded places. Teams of soldiers and police patrolled empty streets looking for Abdeslam and other Belgians suspected of plotting imminent suicide attacks.
“It’s very weird he’s still alive,” the investigator said. “Maybe he has another mission. He’s violent. Very dangerous.”
The investigator had been working in a command post with French police deployed to Belgium to exchange information. He had participated in raids and searches, poring through data from confiscated phones and computers. The week had been a blur. He and his colleagues were still coming to the grips with a grim reality: The extremist underworld of Belgium had helped spawn the most devastating attack on European soil since the Madrid train bombings of 2004.
In addition to the physical danger, it was demoralizing to see an unprecedented swarm of foreign media on the streets of Brussels, to hear complaints that Belgian law enforcement hadn’t done more to prevent the attacks.
“There has been a lot of criticism of us,” the investigator said. “But we don’t have big budgets. We are just a small service. We are overwhelmed. We are trying our hardest; stepping on the gas, as we say in Belgium.”
Abaaoud, from the tough suburb of Molenbeek, had been a top investigative target since January, when police killed two Islamic State gunmen in the city of Verviers and foiled a plot launched by the Belgian ringleader. A court convicted Abaaoud in absentia, making him one of Europe’s most wanted men. Yet he slipped back from his base in Syria to lead the Paris rampage.
Police believe Abaaoud had been back in Europe for two or three months. He was part of a team of French and Belgian foreign fighters in Syria who trained and deployed operatives on a string of plots targeting their homelands during the past two years.
Investigators are trying to figure out why Abaaoud shifted from a remote shot-caller to a frontline fighter. Perhaps senior figures in the Islamic State sacrificed him in order to ensure the success of a terror spectacular, the investigator said.
“He was a member of a command group. Not the top guy,” he said. “If he’s the top guy, he’s never going to come back to do some shooting in France. He was like a field supervisor. A criminal who had connections in the robbery underworld, who knew France and Europe well.”
“You can’t just leave Syria like that,” he said. “You need clearance.”
As they hunted for the fugitive Abdeslam, Belgian police were well aware that more suicide bombers took part in the Paris attacks than had ever struck at once on European soil. The investigator was perplexed about why three suicide bombers hadn’t done more damage at the France-Germany soccer match at the Stade de France the night of Nov 13. The trio failed to get inside the stadium, and killed only one victim despite the presence of crowds.
“Two of them may have blown themselves up because they were running,” he said. “TATP [explosive] is unstable if you run and do crazy things; it can blow up. It may have been unintentional.”
Another Belgian counterterror official said the mindset of his prey was no mystery.
“The Islamic State gives criminals an opportunity to avenge themselves,” the senior official said, his voice full of disgust. “It’s a pretext for hate. A chance to shoot cops, the bourgeoisie, the infidels, everyone they’ve always hated and resented. They have the same psychology as the mass killers you have in the United States. But they do it as a group, not as individuals.”
France
A few days after the Paris attacks, Commandant Mohamed Douhane talked to two colleagues in the forensic division of the French national police.
They were experienced, hard-nosed crime scene investigators accustomed to all manner of mayhem and bloodshed. But no amount of experience was enough for the task of working the scene at the Bataclan music hall, a slaughterhouse where three terrorists killed 89 concert-goers.
“It was the ultimate carnage,” Douhane said. “They were exhausted, obliterated. They had to go through that scene systematically and collect and record evidence. Think about what that was like. They didn’t sleep for two days.”
Douhane, the secretary general of the Synergie Officers police union, has a rare perspective. He’s one of the highest-ranking officers of Muslim descent in the French police, the son of an immigrant bus driver from Algeria. He believes the Paris attacks will cause an unprecedented backlash against extremism among French Muslims.
The reaction among Muslims has been stronger than after the attacks in January that killed 17 people at the Charlie Hebdo magazine and a Jewish grocery, Douhane said. One victim in those attacks was a policewoman.
The new strike on Paris, ordered this time by Islamic State leaders, “was an attack on the French people, on young people, working neighborhoods, on the art of French living,” he said.
French Muslims were shocked and saddened after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, Douhane said. But some had misgivings about the worldwide “I am Charlie” campaign in solidarity with the satirical magazine, which published caricatures of the Prophet Mohamed seen as blasphemous by many Muslims. Feelings were more muted in slums where deprivation and alienation intertwine with criminality and extremism, he said. Anti-Semitism is a sad reality among angry youths in those areas, Douhane said.
“They think that by attacking a grocery they are fighting for their community,” he said. “This mentality is well-ingrained. A rather sizable minority of young Muslims manifests a brutal, violent and cretinous anti-Semitism.”
Terrorists try to worsen divisions in French society, Douhane said.
“The great majority of French Muslims are completely integrated in France,” he said. “The bad guys want a clash of civilizations. The Muslim community is taken hostage. They are viewed with suspicion by non-Muslims, but the Islamists say they are not true Muslims.”
The proximity and power of jihad in Syria has forced French law enforcement to dig in as never before against the nexus of crime and terror.
“The fact is, any little punk from the slums can go off to Syria,” Douhane said. “There are more dangerous people than ever who are capable of committing an attack. The border between gangsterism and terrorism has blurred.”
The attacks have highlighted flaws in the French counterterror apparatus. Like other law enforcement officials, Douhane wonders if a recent major overhaul of the domestic intelligence system may have weakened the defenses.
Until 2008, the counterterror system worked like this: A powerful agency called the DST conducted both intelligence and investigations of major terrorist activity — a role similar to the FBI’s in this country. A second agency, the general intelligence division of the national police, played a key part with a far-flung grid of officers monitoring extremism and criminality.
Known as the RG, the intelligence division detected street-level threats with a mix of aggressive spying and open engagement with mosques and Muslim leaders. At the same time, the RG was the heir of the Napoleonic political police. The division spied on labor unions, students and politicians, and even did its own opinion polls. It also fought turf battles with the DST.
Deciding it was time for reform, French spymasters carried out an ambitious fusion of the two agencies. The result today is the General Directorate of Internal Security, known in France as the DGSI. The super-agency has consolidated operations, reduced infighting and eliminated political excesses. But in the process, nationwide intelligence-gathering has suffered at a time of increasing threats, some critics say.
“There has been a loss of effectiveness,” Douhane said. “The reform was necessary, but it was too fast … Especially in the provinces, the intelligence units have been destabilized. They are less operational than before.”
Spain
The counterterror chief was worried about the Madrid-Barcelona soccer game. And not just because he’s a Real Madrid fan.
The match between rival powerhouses is a soccer classic watched by a global audience estimated as high as 400 million. After the suicide bombings outside the Paris stadium, it seems clear that Islamic State sees soccer games as vulnerable, high-profile targets. Spanish authorities deployed more than 2,500 police and security guards for Saturday’s game, an unprecedented show of force at a Spanish sporting event.
“We are ready,” the counterterror chief said. “We know how bad it could have been if the bombers in Paris had gained entry to the stadium. That part of the plot seemed amateurish, thankfully.”
The match in Madrid transpired without incident.
The Paris attacks, which killed 130, are not the worst terror strike in the history of mainland Europe. That sad honor goes to Madrid, where a crew of radicalized Moroccan drug dealers and al Qaida connected militants planted bombs on commuter trains on March 11, 2004. The death toll was 191.
The skillfully timed attack played a role in the upset victory of the Socialist Party in elections three days later. Voters expressed anger at the governing center-right party for its military presence in Iraq and initial mixed signals about whether Basque or Islamic terrorists were responsible. Police pursued the bombers for a nerve-wracking three weeks. The fugitives blew themselves up during a police siege, killing a SWAT team officer.
“The Madrid attack was more sophisticated,” the counterterror chief said. “They used technology, telephones that had been altered for the bombs. They stayed on the loose after the attack, trying to strike again. And there was the planning to affect the elections. But what is significant in Paris is that this is an attack by the Islamic State. It represents a qualitative leap.”
Measured by the number of foreign fighters, the threat in Spain is less intense than in France or Belgium. Spanish police have identified 138 fighters who have gone to Syria compared to about 2,000 jihadis from France. Belgium has counted about 500, the largest proportionate contingent from Europe.
Nonetheless, Moroccans are plentiful in the Islamic State. Abaaoud and other attackers in Paris were of Moroccan origin and had links to the country. Spain’s geography as a crossroads into Europe from Morocco makes it vulnerable. Most Spanish foreign fighters come from Ceuta and Melilla, Spain’s territorial enclaves in northern Morocco. They are often grouped with European and Moroccan militants in Syria.
Like many others in European law enforcement, the Spanish counterterror chief is aghast at the ease with which terrorists elude Europe’s border controls. At least two of the suicide bombers in Paris are thought to have used Syrian documents and entered via Greece in the chaotic flow of Syrian refugees.
“We have the reality of a union like the United States, but different legislation among countries,” he said. “Entering Europe is easy.”
An urgent question: How did Abaaoud cross the continent unnoticed to lead the plot? He may simply have used the authentic passport of someone who resembled him, the counterterror chief said.
“The Islamic State has acquired an enormous amount of blank passports, both Syrian and Iraqi,” he said. “They are authentic. They also have a lot of authentic European passports at their disposal. They confiscate the passport of every foreign fighter who arrives, so they have a stock of nationalities, and they can use them to provide a fake identity based on resemblance.”
The Paris rampage reflected the savagery of the Islamic State’s reign in Syria and Iraq. Yet, not every foreign fighter returns bent on mass murder.
“We have had guys come back who are repentant,” he said. “They are disgusted. They surrendered to police when they got back. They said, ‘I’d rather go to jail here. I can’t stand what I saw in Syria.’ ”
Nonetheless, Spanish police have arrested militants accused of preparing attacks after radicalizing on the Internet without direct contact with the Islamic State. After being arrested at the Warsaw airport upon his return from fighting in Syria, a militant married to a Spanish woman admitted that Islamic State leaders told him to do reconnaissance on potential targets in Europe. The group’s new aggressiveness requires a higher level of vigilance.
“It’s a new strategy,” the counterterror official. “They have intensified their activity. They want to do actions in the West.”
SUMMARY: Syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks join Judy Woodruff to discuss the week’s news, including the latest acts of terror by Islamic State, a speech by President Obama on the way religion, including Christianity, has been used to justify violence, and why some Republican politicians spoke against mandating vaccination in the wake of a measles outbreak.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): I want to ask quickly both of you about what the president said at this prayer breakfast yesterday, got a lot of attention. He was attempting to talk about — saying that terrible things have been done in the name of Christianity, in the name of all religions, including Christianity, David.
And he talked about the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition, slavery. Republicans jumped on this and said false equivalency, you should be focusing on what extreme Muslims are doing today, and not talking about Christianity.
DAVID BROOKS, New York Times columnist: I think, if the President had come as an atheist to attack religion and to attack Christianity, the Republicans would have a point. That’s not what a president should be doing.
But that’s not how he came. He has used that prayer breakfast year after year to talk about his own faith, his own faith journey, his own struggles. He’s used it — he has come as a Christian. And the things he said were things — I have never met a Christian who disagreed with what he issued, that the religion has been perverted, that we have to walk humbly before the face of the lord, that God’s purposes are mysterious to us.
This is not like some tangential, weird belief. This is at the core of every Christian’s faith and every Jew’s faith. And so what he said was utterly normal and admirable and a recognition of historical fact and an urge towards some humility. And so I thought the protests were manufactured and falsely manufactured.
MARK SHIELDS, syndicated columnist: The Bible says, slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling. That was used by slaveholders and by the defenders of slavery in this country. They quoted the Bible, and that terrible things have been done in the name of Christianity.
The Crusades are hardly one of the proudest chapters of Christianity. But I think what the President said is accurate. I do think that he’s been somewhat reluctant to acknowledge and admit and confront that this is an Islamic terrorist, that it is a perversion and to address that.
But I thought the response — I mean, these are the same people who are constantly criticizing the Islamic State people for not joining in the coalition, and saying you have got to condemn them. I just thought that it was over the top and undeserved.
-----
MARK SHIELDS: Judy, there’s a rhetoric in this country. It’s been on the ascent for almost a generation or more. And that is individual freedom, government interference, stay out of our lives, leave us alone, anything from Washington, you have to oppose, a federal mandate.
And, you know, that has become the rhetoric. And that was their response. The reality is quite simple. Americans do feel that the government is a pain in the neck and too much red tape and keep them out of their lives. But a trace of botulism found in one can of tuna fish outside of Pocatello, Idaho, and the universal American reaction is, where the hell is the federal government? I want a report in my office in 24 hours, or heads will roll.
We want a small, effective, efficient federal government on our side 24 hours a day, cheap. In 1988, there were 350,000 cases of polio in this world. In 2012, there were 213. That’s because of vaccination. That’s because of Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin and the federal government and the public — public effort in health.
And that to me is — this is the reality. It’s beyond ideology. They were slaves to ideology. And Christie hasn’t — just doesn’t have his footing. With Paul, it’s sort of an excess of where he comes from and where he treads and what he believes. But I think Christie comes off even worse than Paul or anybody else.
The un-vetted computer engineer plugged into law enforcement networks and a database of 5 million Arizona drivers in a possible breach that was kept secret for years.
Lizhong Fan’s desk was among a crowd of cubicles at the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center in Phoenix. For five months in 2007, the Chinese national and computer programmer opened his laptop and enjoyed access to a wide range of sensitive information, including the Arizona driver’s license database, other law enforcement databases, and potentially a roster of intelligence analysts and investigators.
The facility had been set up by state and local authorities in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks, and so, out of concerns about security, Fan had been assigned a team of minders to watch him nearly every moment inside the center. Fan, hired as a contract employee specializing in facial recognition technology, was even accompanied to the bathroom.
However, no one stood in Fan’s way when he packed his equipment one day in early June 2007, then returned home to Beijing.
There’s a lot that remains mysterious about Fan’s brief tenure as a computer programmer at the Arizona counterterrorism center. No one has explained why Arizona law enforcement officials gave a Chinese national access to such protected information. Nor has anyone said whether Fan copied any of the potentially sensitive materials he had access to.
But the people responsible for hiring Fan say one thing is clear: The privacy of as many as 5 million Arizona residents and other citizens has been exposed. Fan, they said, was authorized to use the state’s driver’s license database as part of his work on a facial recognition technology. He often took that material home, and they fear he took it back to China.
Under Arizona law, then-Gov. Janet Napolitano and Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, whose agencies admitted Fan into the intelligence center, were required to disclose to the public any “unauthorized acquisition and access to unencrypted or unredacted computerized data” that includes names and other personal information.
To this day, they have not.
Terry Goddard, attorney general of Arizona in 2007, said Fan’s access and disappearance should have been reported to his office, but it was not. Arizona law puts the attorney general in charge of enforcing disclosure.
The state was supposed to have scrubbed drivers' names and addresses from the license data. State officials denied requests to discuss the extent of the data breach, including what personal information was in the files.
In fact, a review of records shows that David Hendershott, who was second-in-command at the sheriff’s office, moved aggressively to maintain silence, a silence that has now lasted some seven years. Two weeks after Fan departed, Hendershott directed others in writing not to discuss Fan and the possible breach. In an email to the outside contractor that had hired Fan, Hendershott wrote: “Keep this between us and only us.”
Even among administrators at the Phoenix center, very few learned that the Chinese programmer had left the country or that their own personal information might have traveled with him. Mikel Longman, the former criminal investigations chief at the Arizona Department of Public Safety, said he received no warning about the incident.
“That really is outrageous,” Longman said. “Every Arizona resident who had a driver’s license or state-issued ID card and all that identifying stuff is potentially compromised. That’s a huge breach.”
Napolitano, who went on to serve as President Barack Obama’s secretary of Homeland Security, did not reply to multiple interview requests.
Hendershott, Arpaio’s longtime chief deputy, hung up on a reporter when reached by telephone. The sheriff’s office fired Hendershott in 2011 over an array of alleged misconduct. And he in turn filed suit in 2012, saying his legitimate law enforcement work had been mischaracterized as abuses of power. His suit was dismissed earlier this year. Today, he sells real estate in west Phoenix.
Col. Robert Halliday, the director of the Arizona Department of Public Safety who formally oversaw the operations of the intelligence center at the time Fan worked there, also did not respond to repeated interview requests.
Current officials with a handful of agencies involved with the intelligence center offered a variety of reasons for declining to answer questions about Fan and the possible breach.
The public safety agency initially denied that any potential breach had happened, then said the matter was the subject of a confidential FBI investigation. Later still, the department argued the case was a personnel matter, and thus the agency would not comment as a matter of policy. The sheriff’s office said that during the time that Hendershott was still working for the agency, he never reported anything about Fan – his hiring, his work or his flight.
Seven years after the potential breach, then, it is still unclear how closely law enforcement looked into the incident or what steps, if any, it took as a result. The FBI opened a probe shortly after Fan’s disappearance, according to records and a former federal investigator, but the bureau has never made its findings public.
Perryn Collier, spokesman for the FBI’s Phoenix office, said the bureau won’t comment on investigations involving Fan.
Chinese espionage has made news in recent months as federal investigators have revealed successful assaults by hackers against businesses and government. Last March, homeland security officials in Washington discovered that cyber attackers later traced to China had accessed data on federal workers who’ve applied for top-secret clearance. These electronic break-ins were conducted remotely, continents away from the servers holding the data.
How the Phoenix intelligence center found itself vulnerable to a serious security breach, however, was neither much of a technological feat nor, it seems, the result of masterful espionage. Indeed, an investigation by The Center for Investigative Reporting and ProPublica – built on more than 50 interviews and the examination of thousands of pages of federal investigative reports, criminal and civil court filings, internal correspondence and immigration records – shows the episode at the intelligence center came off rather easily.
John Lewis arrived as the FBI’s special agent in charge of the Phoenix division in the spring of 2006. Lewis, now director of security for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the San Francisco Bay Area, had a vague recollection of a contractor or subcontractor working at the center. But he said he did not specifically recall that the person was a foreign national, nor did he have any “immediate recollection” of a security breach.
“No one ever sat in my office and asked about having a foreign national inside the fusion center. That’s nuts,” Lewis said, adding that if he had been asked, his response would have been, “Can we do a little bit better guys?”
The chance that Fan made off with a raft of sensitive material was made possible by a set of cozy relationships – among a tainted sheriff’s official, a dubious technology startup company and a woman who U.S. government officials think is a Chinese spy.
I am Retired U.S. Navy (22yrs) and a Vietnam Veteran. After my Navy retirement I was in the computer related industry, now retired. In 2000 I was a registered Republican and voted for George W. Bush. Six months of having Bush in the Whitehouse forced me to re-evaluate my political stance. I had always thought of myself as a Moderate Republican, but was a Republican by "default" NOT because of close examination of the GOP. Due to what has happened in America since 2000, I now consider myself a progressive, and registered as a Non-Affiliated voter.
*Anti-First Amendment policies that attempt to turn America into a theocracy by enshrining ANY religious belief as law.
* Any attempt to suppress human or Constitutional rights.
* Any law or policy that supports discrimination based on religion, ethnicity, race/color, gender, sexual orientation, or any law that does NOT support Equal Treatment under the law.
*Any law or policy that attempts to suppress Freedom of the Press or Free Speech.
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