More Evidence Team Obama Stopped Shahzad Monitoring Begun Under Bush-Clinton

As I posted yesterday, there was a disturbing blurb in a NY Times article that indicated Faisal Shahzad, the now infamous Times Square Bomber, was under surveillance as a potential terrorist during the Bush administration.

JTTF’s typically surveillance an individual – especially a US Citizen – under the FIS Court authorization. These authorizations have to be renewed every 90 days or so by the US Attorney General. As has been noted before (see here, here and here for details) the Obama administration began shutting down Bush-era terrorists investigations last year as they debated how to reduce our nation’s surveillance of terrorists threats. The person who killed 14 people at Ft Hood last fall was one such suspect whose JTTF investigation was suspiciously shut down around this time last year.

There is more evidence which seems to point at changes made by the Obama administration in terms of their monitoring Mr. Shahzad. For example, after being on the terrorist watch list for almost a decade, Shahzad was removed from that list sometime after 2008, according to CBS News:

Major Update: Reader thfries notes this next bit is probably satire. I did was not able to get to the source story (still on travel with very narrow posting windows) so from here on I would ignore it. - end update

Now there is another damning tidbit out that confirms that Federal Investigators may have been blinded and hamstrung by the lack of FIS Court authorization to fully monitor this threat:

OK, why is this disturbing? Well Twitter, Facebook and other social networks are probably considered to be in the public domain, since individuals freely volunteer to communicate with others openly. It therefore may not require a FIS Court warrant to monitor. The idea someone could block government monitoring on Twitter using one of its privacy settings is another indication this was not a full up surveillance. The government can get past that little barrier.

The fact is someone was trying to keep and eye on Shahzad, but possibly without the full authority of the JTTF and FIS Court. Someone was trying to monitor this guy. Someone who may have disagreed with the decision to pull back from the Bush era level of concern. - end suspicious reference

I also don’t think this has the smell of a JTTF in progress given all the phone calls from America to Pakistan should have been detected by NSA, and that 5 month training stint Shahzad did in Pakistan. These too should have had a JTTF on the edge of its seat – if it was active.

This might be why the administration was playing catch up with Shahzad, even after the bomb was detected and were only lucky to find a phone number connection to lead them to him.

15 Responses to “More Evidence Team Obama Stopped Shahzad Monitoring Begun Under Bush-Clinton”

From Hotair...pointed out in the comments at Stratasphere:

Unbelievable: Shahzad reportedly had contact with Awlaki too

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posted at 5:16 pm on May 6, 2010 by Allahpundit

That’s three plots in a row with this degenerate’s fingerprints on them. He was Nidal Hasan’s terrorist sherpa and, according to some reports, actively recruited Abdulmutallab for the Flight 253 attack. Now this.

As a friend said on Twitter, he’s like the Tony Robbins of jihad.

Accused Times Square Bomber Faisal Shahzad linked up with the Pakistani Taliban through the internet, ABC News has been told by law enforcement and intelligence sources close to the investigation. Once the Taliban identified him as more valuable in the U.S. than in Pakistan, they trained him to return to execute his bomb attack.
But according to these sources, Shahzad also had a web of jihadist contacts that included big names tied to terror attacks in the U.S. and abroad, including the figure who has emerged as a central figure in many recent domestic terror attempts – radical American-born Muslim cleric Anwar Awlaki…
According to a person briefed on the FBI interrogation, Shahzad has told federal agents that he was angry at the CIA missile strikes carried out in Pakistan and suffered a personal crisis in his life. He has reportedly said he carried out the attempted bombing because he was under duress and that he feared for his family’s safety if he didn’t fulfill the mission.

That’s the best explanation I’ve heard yet for why the bomb was such a dud. Maybe he had misgivings about going through with it but felt obliged to do something lest his wife and daughter back in Pakistan suffer the consequences of him chickening out. So he compromised, driving the bomb into NYC but using bum fertilizer and rigging it so that it wouldn’t go off. (Apparently, the wires on his time bomb weren’t connected to anything.) That way, he could come back to the Taliban and say, “Hey, I tried,” and hopefully that would be good enough. Another possibility: Shahzad really is some kind of mouth-breathing imbecile. Seems far-fetched, I know, but read this CNN story about him setting up a getaway car in advance … and then leaving the keys to it in the car-bomb SUV. Dude. Maybe that’s why the Taliban is claiming today that he’s not one of their guys? Just sheer embarrassment?

Meanwhile, a footnote to yesterday’s post about Shahzad supposedly being angry about the drone campaign in Pakistan. Remember, according to a friend of his, he’s had a beef with U.S. foreign policy dating back several years. But look what the Anchoress caught in a report from CNN:

Any grudge Shahzad may have held against the United States appears to have developed recently, according to a senior U.S. official who is familiar with the investigation but not authorized to speak publicly.
The investigation has found nothing to indicate that Shahzad had any long-standing grudge or anger toward the United States, the official said.
“What we know is, the dynamic appeared to have changed in the last year,” the official said.

That jibes with a NYT profile of Shahzad claiming that his radicalization only happened within the past year or so. According to a friend of his, money problems caused by the recession may have led him to “lose his way,” which I suppose is plausible. People under stress turn to religion for comfort and this tool may have turned a bit too far. But then, as James Lileks notes, there’s really only one religion these days where “too far” means a body count. Exit quotation: “CNN chatterboxes later ruminated that the fellow had a hard life in the U.S. — couldn’t get a good job, had his house foreclosed on. Granted. But this has happened to many during the Great Recession, and 99.99999% don’t sit down and conclude: ‘Well, it’s Pakistan for fertilizer bomb training, then.’”

Update: Needless to say, we’re well past the point where people e-mailing Awlaki via his website for “spiritual advice” can be safely shrugged off. He’s a high-profile jihadi now; anyone in contact with him, even for apparently innocent Koranic questions, is suspicious.

Update: People are e-mailing us in a frenzy over yesterday’s CBS story noting that Shahzad was removed from the DHS travel lookout list in 2008. Supposedly, this is somehow Obama’s fault. I’m not sure why given that Obama wasn’t sworn in until January 2009, but in any case, I don’t know how the travel lookout list works. It may be that you’re only on there for a set period of time and are automatically removed if you do nothing to invite further suspicion.

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