• Pirates winning war off Somali coast

    The hugely expensive effort against the Somali pirates — a fleet of 40 warships from 30 countries is patrolling the waters near Somalia — has failed to slow down the rate of piracy; Somali attacks had soared dramatically in the past three years — from 40 attacks in 2007 to a reported 218 attacks last year; the Somali buccaneers are roaming over a much bigger territory and causing greater damage; the average ransom payment to the Somalis has doubled to $5 million; they are holding their hostages for up to 120 days — twice as long as in the past; they even used a hijacked freighter to attack a naval warship that was escorting supplies for African peacekeepers; the increasingly brazen pirates are currently holding 26 vessels and 609 hostages off the coast of Somalia; there is growing evidence that Somalia’s Islamic militants, including the feared al-Shabab radical group, are beginning to use piracy to raise money for their relentless rebellion against Somalia’s government

  • Former Guyana politician sentenced in JFK terror plot

    Abdul Kadir, a former member of Guyana’s parliament, was sentenced to life in prison for participating in a plot to blow up the jet fuel supply tank system at JFK airport; the two other plotters are also of Guyanese origin: one, a former baggage handler at JFK, will be sentenced in late January; the other, Adnam Shukrijumah, has now been promoted to chief of al Qaeda’s global operations

  • Radical Islamist group kills 3 hospital employees in fresh Nigeria attack

    A radical Islamist sect which has claimed responsibility for Christmas Eve bombings of Nigerian churches is behind the killing of three more people at a hospital, police said on Wednesday; the Boko Haram group — the name means “Western education is sinful” in the Hausa language spoken across northern Nigeria — is loosely modeled on the Taliban movement in Afghanistan; it demands the introduction of Islamic law across Nigeria

  • Islamic terrorism spreads in Nigeria

    Nigeria, with a population of 150 million, is the most populous country in Africa, the eighth most populous country in the world, and the most populous country in the world in which the majority of the population is black; Nigeria’s population is almost evenly split between Muslims in the north and the predominantly Christian south; radical Islamic groups have increased their influence in the north by attacking law enforcement units and killing politicians, civil servants, teachers, and others who, according to the Islamists, stand in the way of the imposition of Sharia law in the north; in the past few years these groups have been pushing south, extending their terror campaign to central Nigeria, in the nation’s “middle belt,” where dozens of ethnic groups vie for control of fertile lands.

  • White House: U.S. "in much better position" on terrorism

    The White House sought to reassure the traveling public that it has fixed security lapses that led to the foiled bomb attack aboard a U.S.-bound jetliner last Christmas; John Brennan, the president’s chief counterterrorism and homeland security adviser, said the country’s security infrastructure has improved since Nigerian-born Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab smuggled explosives hidden in his underwear onto an airplane headed for Detroit; Brennan: “What we have seen recently is increased focus, I think, on the part of terrorist groups to try to carry out some of these smaller-scale attacks…. And so we are staying very focused on our ability to detect those types of attacks and stop them whether or not they’re by individuals or part of a larger, organizational effort”

  • Holder: threat of homegrown terrorism "keeps me up at night"

    U.S. attorney general Eric Holder says the danger of homegrown terror “keeps me up at night”: “The threat has changed from simply worrying about foreigners coming here, to worrying about people in the United States, American citizens — raised here, born here, and who for whatever reason, have decided that they are going to become radicalized and take up arms against the nation in which they were born”; the attorney general said that of 126 people who have been charged with allegations related to terrorism in the past 24 months, 50 had been American citizens; Holder dismissed criticism of recent FBI sting operations, which some have argued employed the use of illegal “entrapment,” offering that “options are always given all along the way for them to say, ‘You know what, I have changed my mind. I don’t want to do it’”

  • Terror plot a "wake-up call" -- but experts differ on lessons to be drawn

    Experts debate the significance of the terror attempt on Flight 253 last Christmas; Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University, called it a “daring” plan that was “as close to an aviation disaster as we’ve been since 9/11”; to Hoffman, Flight 253 was a “wake-up call”; Bruce Schneier, who is a critic of many of the security measures initiated by DHS, says the real lesson of Flight 253 is that “Two things have made us safer since 9/11: reinforcing cockpit doors and convincing passengers they can fight back”; Schneier says technology is not the answer: “We can’t continue to let terrorists spend $4,000 to change their tactics and we spend $100 million in airport security in response. That’s not sustainable”

  • Representative Peter King, incoming Homeland Security Committee chairman

    Representative Peter King (R-New York), the incoming chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, was interviewed by Homeland Security NewsWire’s editor-in-chief, Ben Frankel; King’s top three priorities as chairman: examine radicalization in the U.S. Muslim community; air cargo security; and measures to prevent the detonation of dirty bombs in American cities

  • U.S. anxious over terror attacks during holidays

    Counterterrorism officials are tracking threats to the United States and Europe from al Qaeda and affiliated groups during the holiday season; the FBI and DHS have alerted state and local law enforcers to be wary of suspicious behavior and to change security measures regularly to interfere with any terrorist plans; the warning was sent in a bulletin Wednesday; there is specific intelligence of other attacks being planned against Europe during the holiday season, according to U.S. officials say

  • King: House Homeland Security panel will be vigorous, demanding

    Long Island congressman Peter King will take over as the new chair of the House Homeland Security Committee — New York state’s lone chairman in the new Congress (and even this only until 2012, when he will be term-limited out of the chairman’s chair, unless he gets a waiver from the Republican leadership); he has been a vocal critic of the Obama administration on a number of issues over the last two years, and says he plans for a much more vigorous — and possibly controversial — committee when he re-takes the gavel; King expressed concern about Obama administration officials’ response to what he calls the “incalculable damage” caused by the massive document leak released by WikiLeaks; “Considering how fast they moved [to file a laswsuit] on Arizona’s immigration law and how determined they were to move against our CIA agents—- there is definitely something missing here,” he asserted

  • Gitmo repeat offender rate rises sharply

    The number of Guantanamo Bay detainees returning to the battlefield continues to grow at an extraordinary rate; new report from the director of U.S. national intelligence says that 150 of the 598 detainees who have been transferred out of Guantanamo’s detention camps, about 25 percent, are now confirmed or suspected of returning to the battlefield; of that group, 13 are dead and 54 are again in custody, while 83 remain at large; CIA director Leon Panetta said the biggest concern is ex-detainees who not only return to the battlefield but take up leadership positions within al Qaeda, a reference to the terror group’s branch in Yemen, where at least two leaders are Saudis and former Guantanamo detainees

  • Judge throws out suit aiming the bar U.S. from killing al-Awlaki

    Anwar al Awlaki, the New Mexico-born fire-brand Islamic cleric, from his hideout in Yemen, has been urging Muslims to kill Americans; the Obama administration has placed him on its capture-or-kill hit list, and U.S. special forces and intelligence operatives have been searching for him; the cleric’s father, Nasser al Awlaki of Yemen, sued the U.S. government, arguing that international law and the Constitution prevented the administration from unilaterally targeting his son for death unless he presents a specific imminent threat to life or physical safety and there are no other means to stop him; the suit also tried to force the government to disclose standards for determining whether U.S. citizens like his son can be targeted for death; a federal judge has thrown out the law suit, writing in his opinion: “The serious issues regarding the merits of the alleged authorization of the targeted killing of a U.S. citizen overseas must await another day or another nonjudicial forum”

  • Al Qaeda seeks to surgically implant bombs into "martyrs'" bodies

    Al Qaeda operatives are looking for ways to defeat the growing number of full-body scanners at airports around the world; they recently tried to deploy a pair of kamikaze canines on a U.S.-bound airplane from Baghdad airport; the bombs were placed inside the dogs’ bodies, but the plot failed because the bombs were so poorly stitched inside the dogs, that the dogs died; Web sites affiliated with al Qaeda are now calling of doctors and scientists sympathetic to the organization to help it devise ways for surgically stitching bombs inside human beings, to usher in what one of the organization’s operatives calls a “new kind of terrorism”

  • Portland reconsiders relations with FBI's terrorism task force

    Five years ago the mayor of Portland, Oregon, decided not to participate in the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force because of concerns about civil liberties; the past weekend’s capture of a 19-year old after he attempted to detonate what he thought was a vehicle bomb near a tree-lighting ceremony in Portland’s Pioneer Courthouse has led the mayor to reconsider his decision

  • Exploding garbage truck in Florida not act of terrorism

    An explosion on an Orlando, Florida garbage truck raise fears that the garbage-truck crew had stumbled on an underground bomb factory which had foolishly thrown some of its products in the rubbish — or that the explosion presaged a fearful terror wave campaign of exploding bins or municipal vehicles; police investigation finds that the explosion was caused by a local resident foolishly disposing of a pressurized container in their garbage