May 05 2010
Did President Obama & Eric Holder Suspend Another Bush Era Terrorist Investigation?
We all know AG Eric Holder’s ‘Justice’ Department (sort of a oxymoron these days) closed down Bush era terrorist investigations into Major Nidal Hasan (killer in the Ft Hood Massacre) and probably also into radical US-born cleric al Aulaqi (see here, here and here for details). It is pretty obvious that shutting down the surveillance of these American traitors working with our enemies also gave Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab an opening to nearly bring down a plane full of passengers on Christmas Day as it landed in Detroit, MI.
Reader Frogg1 points out a very disturbing blurb inside a New York Times article chronicling the Times Square Bomber’s past:
George LaMonica, a 35-year-old computer consultant, said he bought his two-bedroom condominium in Norwalk, Conn., from Mr. Shahzad for $261,000 in May 2004. A few weeks after he moved in, Mr. LaMonica said, investigators from the national Joint Terrorism Task Force interviewed him, asking for details of the transaction and for information about Mr. Shahzad. It struck Mr. LaMonica as unusual, but he said detectives told him they were simply “checking everything out.â€
Emphasis mine. Shahzad was under surveillance by the Bush administration, that is why the was an active Joint Terrorism Task Force investigation in 2004. And I doubt it was ever suspended under President Bush given this:
Mr. Shahzad apparently went back and forth to Pakistan often, returning most recently in February after what he said was five months visiting his family, prosecutors said. A Pakistani intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity said Mr. Shahzad had traveled with three passports, two from Pakistan and one from the United States; he last secured a Pakistani passport in 2000, describing his nationality as “Kashmiri.â€
You don’t go back and forth to Pakistan with connections like this without being at least checked. It appears the Pakistanis were assisting the US in monitoring this character. So how is it he was able to get within a bum detonator’s distance from killing lots of people? Is this why the Pakistani arrests of his cohorts was so quick, yet the US is fumbling around looking for allies or other threats?
And it seems there may be a link between Shahzad and the failed NY City Subway Bomber Zazi.
Mr. Shahzad only recently became a US citizen last year, around the time Holder started closing down investigations. This act of resisting terrorists leads linked to Americans fits the pre 9-11 pattern of incompetence in the Obama administration. An administration filled with people who think President Bush went too far in protecting Americans from terrorist attack. Of course, all of us we avoided death and mutilation, pain and loss, would disagree that there was too much protection under Bush. I am sure the families of the victims in the Ft Hood massacre would have preferred Hasan and al Aulaqi were monitored instead of ignored.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Free To Prosper. Free To Prosper said: Did President Obama & Eric Holder Suspend Another Bush Era Terrorist Investigation? http://bit.ly/bVukga :: Strata-sphere […]
AJ,
See this e-mail to Instapundit:
I was curious about Shahzad’s background.
This AP report above suggests that his wife is Pashtun.
And Shehzad seems to be one of the sub-tribes of the Ghilzai federation.
The Ghilzai is the main tribal group supporting the Taliban. It’s Mullah Omar’s tribe.
i.e. Shahzad might indeed be our first true American Taliban.
If people are going to start profiling Pakistanis, we might as well identify the correct group. Maybe there are some experts among your readers.
I would call this hard confirmation that;
a) The Obama Administration shut down Bush Administration terrorist relative/blood line tracing investigative policies and,
b) They haven’t gotten around to restarting them yet.
Those sound like good reasons to stay away from airline travel and NY City around the July 4th holiday.
Trent and AJ,
In addition, I remember reading Monday that a loaded 9mm was found in Shahzad’s abandoned car near JFK. If he bought the gun, instead of stealing it or obtaining it illegally, there should be a record of this transaction. Even at gun shows, people need to run gun purchasers through the FBI’s NICS system, and that hits off of other bureau investigations.
Same thing happened with Nidal Hasan. He had a couple of pistols (one assumes purchased legally), and the bureau had at one time inquired into him, indicating there was some kind of open case on him. That should have automatically flagged as soon as he was run through the instant check system to purchase a gun. Of course, we don’t know why or how there was a break-down because the Obama administration is stonewalling the congressional investigation into Ft. Hood by Lieberman’s committee.
Apologize for being off topic for this post, but an interesting report is out on the Deepwater Horizon disaster – the survivors are starting to talk about what it was like just before they evacuated.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/business/deepwaterhorizon/6990221.html
One of the scariest but most fascinating parts of the story to me is the report that the generator engines began to race uncontrollably just before the main explosion, because I’ve seen that up close and personal like.
You are in deep, deep, doo doo if you’re anywhere in the area when that starts to happen. Best advice is run as fast as you can if you’re on land or jump if you’re at sea. Because a big, big boom is coming. (actually, I didn’t but I was cocky enough to think I could salvage things and somehow got lucky enough to do it. In hindsight, I should have run)
What happens is that when a big gas leak starts it often doesn’t ignite immediately – but it turns the entire atmosphere in the area into a combustible fuel, something like the MOAB fuel air bomb but even bigger. If you don’t hear the leak, the first clue this is happening is that all of the engines start to race out of control – and any diesels can’t be turned off! That’s because they have no controlling spark system like a gasoline motor, and they no longer need fuel since the air itself is now their fuel. The engine begins to race and race and unless you’re quick enough to jam rags and old coveralls into the intake systems (that’s what I did) it is going to blow – first the engines and then the entire rig. When it happened to me and my crew, we still had working cutoff valves on the wellhead which could be closed, although we lost about $80K worth of equipment downhole by doing it. Head office wasn’t happy about that. But that’s how we got out of that situation.
The Deepwater Horizon crew tried that – but the shear rams on the BOP stack failed. We still don’t know why, but they were the failsafe – the last line of defense. When they failed, everything was lost.
Of course, even if you are able to shut off all the engines (offshore rigs are powered by several engines like you’d find on a diesel locomotive, btw) you’re still screwed because it’s the middle of the night and you’re in the middle of a huge machine (the rig) that now has no power at all. Which sounds like what happened next.
And it’s no surprise it ignited – a rig is too big, there are too many possible ignition points, and all it takes is one spark to set the whole thing off. Now that the survivors are saying that all the generators were racing out of control and all of the electrical systems blowing just before the explosion, it’s really only surprising that so many men were able to make it off that rig alive.
AJ,
The Obama/Eric Holder Justice Department read Shahzad his miranda rights.
See below fro Byrin York:
Administration officials point out that Shahzad is a naturalized American citizen and thus is entitled to the full range of U.S. constitutional rights. That’s not entirely accurate. While being an American citizen means that Shahzad will ultimately be tried in civilian court — the Military Commissions Act applies only to aliens — there is no reason that Shahzad could not be declared an enemy combatant, held indefinitely and questioned at length during that period without Miranda rights. “He couldn’t be prosecuted in military court,†says the aide, “but he could be held for intelligence interrogation purposes.†The aide points out that Yaser Esam Hamdi, who was captured in Afghanistan, was a U.S. citizen, and the Supreme Court ruled that he could be held as an enemy combatant, although he had the right to challenge that designation in court.
So in the case of Shahzad, authorities are holding a Pakistani man who has been a naturalized citizen for the last year, much of which he spent in Pakistan apparently training for an attack on the U.S., who returned to this country to attempt to set off a bomb in the most heavily populated location imaginable, and who was headed back to Pakistan when he was caught. The courts have said such a man, a U.S. citizen, can be designated an enemy combatant. But so far, the Obama administration — just as it did in Detroit — has declined to take that course.
The Washington Examiner link:
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/for-justice-department-times-square-case-is-christmas-day-all-over-again-92851279.html#ixzz0n44P8TZP
The Obama Administration’s senior DoJ leadership (AG Holder aong others) is too Left-ideological to learn from it’s mistakes before a lot of Americans are killed and they are being blamed for it.
That rural countryside for the July 4th holiday is looking better and better.
Shehzad’s wife graduated from a University of Colorado in 2004, I read. I wonder if she knew Zazi, there is a Muslim training facility in Southern Colorado.
Shahzad managed to shake his Federal/NYPD sureveillance.
That is why he was let on the flight to Dubai.
See:
http://gatewaypundit.firstthings.com/2010/05/us-officials-lost-track-of-shahzad-let-suspect-on-plane-bound-to-dubai/
[…] A.J. Strata notes: Shahzad was under surveillance by the Bush administration, that is why the was an active Joint Terrorism Task Force investigation in 2004. And I doubt it was ever suspended under President Bush given this: […]
Another one bites the dust.
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/onpolitics/post/2010/05/report-obey-to-retire-from-house-/1
If the Obama administration is not willing to address the issue…..Islam is the issue….then it cannot prevent the problem. This is a war of ideology, not criminal behavior. We must trat this as a war, not as a criminal investigation, or we will never win.
http://scottfactor.com
Well, the problem is this guy never did anything suspicious like complain about the healthcare bill or listen to Rush Limbaugh. But don’t worry, Holder has got the REAL threats to America (the Tea Baggers, er Parties) under his eagle eye.
If he was on the watch list since 1999, why was he granted citizenship in 2007?
Because Patch……the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing?
[…] what happened after 2008 that caused DHS to lose track of Shahzad? AJ Strata suspects that Shahzad’s case may have been one of a number of Bush administration investigations that […]
I thought he was made a citizen *last* year…
[…] 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. George LaMonica, a 35-year-old computer consultant, said he bought his two-bedroom condominium in Norwalk, Conn., from Mr. Shahzad for $261,000 in May 2004. A few weeks after he moved in, Mr. LaMonica said, investigators from the national Joint Terrorism Task Force [JTTF] interviewed him, asking for details of the transaction and for information about Mr. Shahzad. It struck Mr. LaMonica as unusual, but he said detectives told him they were simply “checking everything out.†[…]