UK Terror Plot: American Connections?

ABC News is report­ing this morn­ing that the FBI is look­ing into poten­tial con­nec­tions between the plot­ters in the UK and peo­ple in the United States:

U.S. law enforce­ment sources tell ABC News the FBI is inves­ti­gat­ing new leads that involve a pos­si­ble con­nec­tion between peo­ple in the United States, in major east coast cities, and the London bomb plot­ters.
In an inter­view with ABC News this morn­ing, White House Homeland Security Advisor Fran Townsend said while there is cur­rently no indi­ca­tion of any plot­ting in the United States, she con­firmed, “There are leads that the FBI is running.”

There’s also new infor­ma­tion today on the depth of the con­nec­tions to al-​​Qaeda and Pakistani mil­i­tant groups to this plot, at the link above and in this Times of London piece.
Other devel­op­ing news over the last few hours:
1. The US Embassy in India released an advi­sory warn­ing American cit­i­zens of a pend­ing al-​​Qaeda attack in Delhi and/​or Mumbai. No evi­dence so far of a direct con­nec­tion to this plot.
2. The NSA was appar­ently involved with inter­cept­ing the group’s com­mu­ni­ca­tions. (Note to those who think this has any­thing to do with recent NSA con­tro­ver­sies: it doesn’t. This is what the NSA has always done. The NSA does sur­veil­lance on British sub­jects with the British government’s con­sent, and the UK’s GCHQ returns the favor when nec­es­sary. The new NSA ter­ror­ist sur­veil­lance pro­gram is con­tro­ver­sial pri­mar­ily because it is the NSA directly con­duct­ing domes­tic sur­veil­lance on U.S. per­sons.)
3. British trans­port author­i­ties are debat­ing about how to tran­si­tion the emer­gency avi­a­tion secu­rity mea­sures into sus­tain­able poli­cies.
4. DHS gets good marks for its ini­tial response yes­ter­day in a WaPo story.
For more updates, check my usual site, Homeland Security Watch. And keep tabs on ABC News, the Times of London, TIME, and the Guardian, which have pro­vided the best media cov­er­age of the story so far.
UPDATE 3:37 PM EST 8/​11: This ABC News piece updates their ear­lier post, and sug­gests that there are actu­ally no real U.S.-based leads:

In the last sev­eral weeks, the FBI dis­patched over 200 agents from FBI Headquarters and had agents in every FBI field office run­ning down leads and look­ing for any angle or con­nec­tion to the U.K. plot and sus­pects, accord­ing to FBI and Justice Department offi­cials.
As part of this effort, MI-​​5 and British secu­rity ser­vices pro­vided a list of the sus­pects’ names to U.S. offi­cials. The FBI, ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and other agen­cies spread around the intel­li­gence com­mu­nity ran the names through all of their var­i­ous data­bases look­ing for any infor­ma­tion draw­ing a nexus between the U.K. sus­pects and any U.S. indi­vid­u­als or other U.S. con­nec­tions. There were some hits for phone calls made to rel­a­tives who live in the U.S., but so far none of these leads has devel­oped any evi­dence of ter­ror­ism or plot­ting inside the United States.
According to one Justice source, as the FBI looked for leads, there was a spike in the num­ber of FISA appli­ca­tions sub­mit­ted to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to estab­lish court-​​approved secret wire­taps and sur­veil­lance on poten­tial ter­ror­ism sus­pects.
As noted yes­ter­day, at this time, counter-​​terrorism offi­cials have not been able to find any links inside the U.S. asso­ci­ated with this plot.

– Christian Beckner

August 11th, 2006 | Homeland Security | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.