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Links between MI5 and Gaddafi’s intelligence during Tony Blair’s government more extensive than previously thought, according to documents

Britain’s intelligence agencies engaged in a series of previously unknown joint operations with Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s government and used the information extracted from rendition victims as evidence during partially secret court proceedings in London, according to an analysis of official documents recovered in Tripoli since the Libyan revolution.

The exhaustive study of the papers from the Libyan government archives shows the links between MI5, MI6 and Gaddafi’s security agencies were far more extensive than previously thought and involved a number of joint operations in which Libyan dissidents were unlawfully detained and allegedly tortured.

At one point, Libyan intelligence agents were invited to operate on British soil, where they worked alongside MI5 and allegedly intimidated a number of Gaddafi opponents who had been granted asylum in the UK.

Previously, MI6 was known to have assisted the dictatorship with the kidnap of two Libyan opposition leaders, who were flown to Tripoli along with their families – including a six-year-old girl and a pregnant woman – in 2004.

However, the research suggests that the fruits of a series of joint clandestine operations also underpinned a significant number of court hearings in London between 2002 and 2007, during which the last Labour government unsuccessfully sought to deport Gaddafi’s opponents on the basis of information extracted from people who had been “rendered” to his jails.

Libyan Islamic Fighting Group.
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UK intelligence agencies sent more 1,600 questions to be put to the two opposition leaders.
In addition, the documents show that four men were subjected to control orders in the UK – a form of curfew – on the basis of information extracted from victims of rendition who had been handed over to the Gaddafi regime.

The papers recovered from the dictatorship’s archives include secret correspondence from MI6, MI5 reports on Libyans living in the UK, a British intelligence assessment marked “UK/Libya Eyes Only – Secret” and official Libyan minutes of meetings between the two countries’ intelligence agencies.

They show that:

• UK intelligence agencies sent more than 1,600 questions to be put to the two opposition leaders, Sami al-Saadi and Abdul Hakim Belhaj, despite having reason to suspect they were being tortured.

• British government lawyers allegedly drew upon the answers to those questions when seeking the deportation of Libyans living in the UK

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• Five men were subjected to control orders in the UK, allegedly on the basis of information extracted from two rendition victims.

• Gaddafi’s agents recorded MI5 as warning in September 2006 that the two countries’ agencies should take steps to ensure that their joint operations would never be “discovered by lawyers or human rights organisations and the media”.

In fact, papers that detail the joint UK-Libyan rendition operations were discovered by the New York-based NGO Human Rights Watch in September 2011, at the height of the Libyan revolution, in an abandoned government office building in Tripoli.

Since then, hundreds more documents have been discovered in government files in Tripoli. A team of London-based lawyers has assembled them into an archive that is forming the basis of a claim for damages on behalf of 12 men who were allegedly kidnapped, tortured, subject to control orders or tricked into travelling to Libya where they were detained and mistreated.

An attempt by government lawyers to have that claim struck out was rejected by the high court in London on Thursday , with the judge, Mr Justice Irwin, ruling that the allegations “are of real potential public concern” and should be heard and dealt with by the courts.

The litigation follows earlier proceedings brought on behalf of the two families who were kidnapped in the far east and flown to Tripoli. One claim was settled when the government paid £2.23m in compensation to al-Saadi and his family; the second is ongoing, despite attempts by government lawyers to have it thrown out of court, with Belhaj suing not only the British government, but also Sir Mark Allen, former head of counter-terrorism at MI6, and Jack Straw, who was foreign secretary at the time of his kidnap.

Abdel Hakim Belhaj is suing the British government.
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Abdel Hakim Belhaj is suing the British government.
Belhaj has offered to settle for just £3, providing he and his wife also receive an unreserved apology. This is highly unlikely to happen, however, as the two rendition operations are also the subject of a three-year Scotland Yard investigation code-named Operation Lydd. Straw has been questioned by detectives: his spokesman says he was interviewed “as a witness”.

Last month, detectives passed a final file to the Crown Prosecution Service. No charges are imminent, however. The CPS said: “The police investigation has lasted almost three years and has produced a large amount of material. These are complex allegations that will require careful consideration, but we will aim to complete our decision-making as soon as is practicably possible.”

The volte-face in UK-Libyan relations was always going to be contentious: the Gaddafi regime had not only helped to arm the IRA, bombed Pan Am Flight 103 over the Scottish town of Lockerbie with the loss of 270 lives in 1988, and harboured the man who murdered a London policewoman, Yvonne Fletcher, four years earlier; it had been responsible for the bombing of a French airliner and a Berlin nightclub, and for several decades had been sending assassins around the world to murder its opponents.

The Tripoli archives show that the rapprochement, which began with the restoration of diplomatic ties in 1999, gathered pace within weeks of the al-Qaida attacks of 9/11. Sir Richard Dearlove, who was head of MI6 at the time, has said that these links were always authorised by government ministers.

The week after the attacks, British intelligence officers met with Moussa Koussa, the head of Libyan intelligence, who offered to provide intelligence from Islamists held in the regime’s jails.

Two months later, British intelligence officers held a three-day conference with their Libyan counterparts at a hotel at a European airport. German and Austrian intelligence officers also attended.

According to the Libyan minutes, the British explained that they could not arrest anyone in the UK – only the police could do that – and that there could be difficulty in obtaining authorisation for Gaddafi’s intelligence officers to operate in the UK. They also added that impending changes to UK law would give them “more leeway” in the near future.

Other documents released under the Freedom of Information Act detail the way in which diplomatic contacts between London and Tripoli developed, with a British trade minister, Mike O’Brien, visiting Tripoli in August 2002, the same month that the dictator’s son, Saif, was admitted as a post-graduate student at the London School of Economics. Blair and Gaddafi spoke by telephone for the first time, chatting for 30 minutes, and in December 2003 the dictator announced publicly that he was abandoning his programme for the development of weapons of mass destruction.

With the war in Iraq going badly, London and Washington were able to suggest that an invasion that had been justified by a need to dismantle a WMD programme that was subsequently found not to exist had at least resulted in another country’s weapons programme being dismantled.

Three months later, in March 2004, the new relationship was sealed by a meeting between Gaddafi and Blair, during which the British prime minister announced that the two countries had found common cause in the fight against terrorism, and the Anglo-Dutch oil giant Shell announced that it had signed a £110m deal for gas exploration rights off the Libyan coast.

However, the Tripoli archive shows that beneath the surface of the new alliance, the Blair government was encouraging ever-closer co-operation between the UK’s intelligence agencies and the intelligence agencies of a dictatorship which had been widely condemned for committing the most serious human rights abuses; MI5 and MI6, and the CIA, would begin to work hand-in-glove with the Libyan External Security Organisation.

Eliza Manningham-Buller, who was head of MI5 during most of the period that the UK’s intelligence agencies were working closely with the Libyan dictatorship, has defended the decision to open talks with Gaddafi on the grounds that it helped to deter him from pursuing his WMD programme. However, when delivering the 2011 Reith Lecture, she added: “There are questions to be answered about the various relationships that developed afterwards and whether the UK supped with a sufficiently long spoon.”

The archive clearly shows that Gaddafi hoped that this intelligence co-operation would result in British assistance in his attempts to round up and imprison Libyans who were living in exile in the UK, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Mali. All of these men were members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), an Islamist organisation that had attempted to assassinate him three times since its foundation in the early 90s. A largely spent force since the late 90s, many of the members of the LIFG had been living peacefully in the UK for more than a decade, having arrived as refugees. Some had been granted British citizenship. Koussa’s agency asked British intelligence to investigate 79 of these men, whom they described as “Libyan heretics”.

Two weeks before Blair’s visit to Libya, Belhaj and his four-and-a-half-months pregnant wife, Fatima Bouchar, were kidnapped in Thailand and flown to Tripoli. Bouchar says she was taped, head to foot, to a stretcher, for the 17-hour flight.

In a follow-up letter to Koussa, Allen claimed credit for the rendition of Belhaj – referring to him as Abu Abd Allah Sadiq, the name by which he is better known in the jihadi world – saying that although “I did not pay for the air cargo”, the intelligence that led to the couple’s capture was British.

Three days after Blair’s visit, al-Saadi was rendered from Hong Kong to Tripoli, along with his wife and four children, the youngest a girl aged six.

Libya’s foreign minister Moussa Koussa was head of Libyan intelligence.
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Libya’s foreign minister Moussa Koussa was head of Libyan intelligence.
Both men say that while being held at Tajoura prison outside Tripoli they were beaten, whipped, subjected to electric shocks, deprived of sleep and threatened.

Belhaj says he was twice interrogated at Tajoura by British intelligence officers. After gesturing that the session was being recorded, Belhaj says he made a number of gestures to show that he was being beaten and suspended by his arms. One of the British officers, a man, is said to have given a thumbs-up signal, while the second, a woman, is said to have nodded.

Belhaj alleges that following one of these encounters he agreed to sign a statement about his associates in the UK after being threatened with a form of torture called the Honda, which involved being locked in a box-like structure whose ceiling and walls could be shrunk, provoking extreme claustrophobia and fear as well as discomfort.

According to the claim being brought against the British government, the attempt to track down other leading members of the LIFG resulted in the intelligence agencies of Libya and the UK throwing their net still wider.

In late 2005, a British citizen of Somali origin and a Libyan living in Ireland were arrested in Saudi Arabia and allegedly tortured while being questioned by Saudi intelligence officers about associates who were members of the LIFG. The men say they were shackled and beaten. The British citizen says he was also interrogated by two British men who declined to identify themselves and who appeared uninterested in his complaints of mistreatment.

Many of the questions put to the two men concerned the whereabouts of Othman Saleh Khalifa, a long-standing member of the LIFG. Khalifa was detained in Mali a few months later and rendered to Libya. The Tripoli archive shows that summaries of his interrogations were sent to British intelligence, and that both MI5 and MI6 submitted questions that they wished to be put to him. A memorandum from MI6 to Koussa’s deputy, Sadegh Krema, was accompanied by questions “which you kindly agreed to pass to your interview team”.

Khalifa says that he was beaten during interrogations for around six months during the second half of 2006 and that he did not see daylight.

The Tripoli archive shows that during the same week that Khalifa was being rendered to Libya, MI5 and MI6 officers met Libyan intelligence officers in Tripoli and informed them that they were to be invited to the UK to conduct joint intelligence operations. The Libyan minutes of the meeting say that MI5 informed them that “London and Manchester are the two hottest spots” for LIFG activity in the country. The aim was to recruit informants within the Libyan community in the UK.

The Libyan minutes of the meeting also say that the British told them: “With your co-operation we should be able to target specific individuals.” The Libyans, meanwhile, said that potential recruits could be “intimidated” through threats to arrest relatives in Libya.

The following August, senior MI5 and MI6 officers and two Libyan intelligence officers met at MI5’s headquarters in London. According to the Libyan minutes, MI5 warned the Libyans that individuals could complain to the police if they believed they were being harassed by MI5, and could also expose the British-Libyan joint operations to the media.

The minutes also state that the British suggested that Libyan intelligence officers should approach potential recruits in the UK, and that if they refused to cooperate, arrangements could be made for the targets to be arrested under anti-terrorism legislation, accused of associating with those same Libyan intelligence officers, and threatened with deportation.

Sami al-Saadi has been paid £2.23m in compensation.
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Sami al-Saadi has been paid £2.23m in compensation.
One of the targets was a 32-year-old Libyan, associated with the LIFG, who had lived in the UK for 10 years and had been a British citizen for six years. The Libyan intelligence officers repeatedly telephoned him, claiming to be consular officials, and he eventually agreed to meet them at the Landmark hotel in Marylebone, London, on 2 September 2006. According to the Libyan notes of this meeting, the British insisted that two MI5 officers, one calling herself Caroline, should be present, so that the target should know that he was the subject of a joint UK-Libyan approach.

The target was told that he was to be given time to think about the approach. In Libya, meanwhile, the target’s brothers, sisters and mother say they were each detained in turn and told that they should persuade him to return to the country.

The Libyan intelligence officers also visited Manchester, calling at the home of another man targeted for recruitment. According to their notes, MI5 warned them not to enter the house but to persuade him to go with them to a public place where they could be photographed together. As he was not at home, the Libyan spies went instead to a mosque in the Didsbury district, where they told the imam that they were importing and exporting books.

On 5 September, shortly before the two Libyan intelligence officers returned home, they had another meeting with their British counterparts. Their notes show that the British warned that steps should be taken jointly to “avoid being trapped in any sort of legal problem [and] to avoid also that those joint plans be discovered by lawyers or human rights organisations and the media”. The Libyans assured MI5 and MI6: “We have effectively reassured them that we will stick by the joint plan to avoid any blame if the operation fails.”

The target says he was approached by “Caroline” and a second MI5 officer on a number of other occasions, but declined to travel to Libya and still lives in west London.

Six Libyan men, the widow of a seventh, and five British citizens of Libyan and Somali origin are bringing a number of claims, which include allegations of false imprisonment, blackmail, misfeasance in public office and conspiracy to assault.

The case is being brought against MI5 and MI6 as well as the Home Office and Foreign Office. Government departments declined to comment on the grounds that the litigation is ongoing.

When making their unsuccessful bid to have the case struck out, government lawyers admitted no liability. They argued that the five claimants who were subjected to control orders were properly considered to pose a threat to the UK’s national security, and denied that the government relied on information from prisoners held in Libya in making that assessment. They also argued that the LIFG had been a threat to the UK. They are expected to appeal Thursday’s high court decision.

Allen has declined to comment on the rendition operations, while Straw says: “At all times I was scrupulous in seeking to carry out my duties in accordance with the law, and I hope to be able to say more about this at an appropriate stage in the future.”

Thursday 22 January 2015 14.24 GMT Last modified on Saturday 7 May 2016 11.17 BST

Find this story at 22 January 2015

© 2016 Guardian News and Media Limited

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‘Jihadi John’ was able to join IS for one simple reason: from Quilliam to al-Muhajiroun, Britain’s loudest extremists have been groomed by the security services
Every time there’s a terrorist attack that makes national headlines, the same talking heads seem to pop up like an obscene game of “whack-a-mole”. Often they appear one after the other across the media circuit, bobbing from celebrity television pundit to erudite newspaper outlet.

A few years ago, BBC Newsnight proudly hosted a “debate” between Maajid Nawaz, director of counter-extremism think-tank, the Quilliam Foundation, and Anjem Choudary, head of the banned Islamist group formerly known as al-Muhajiroun, which has, since its proscription, repeatedly reincarnated itself. One of its more well-known recent incarnations was “Islam4UK”.

Both Nawaz and Choudary have received huge mainstream media attention, generating press headlines, and contributing to major TV news and current affairs shows. But unbeknown to most, they have one thing in common: Britain’s security services. And believe it or not, that bizarre fact explains why the Islamic State’s (IS) celebrity beheader, former west Londoner Mohammed Emwazi – aka “Jihadi John” – got to where he is now.

A tale of two extremists

After renouncing his affiliation with the Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT), Maajid Nawaz co-founded the Quilliam Foundation with his fellow ex-Hizb member, Ed Husain.

The Quilliam Foundation was set-up by Husain and Nawaz in 2008 with significant British government financial support. Its establishment received a massive PR boost from the release of Ed Husain’s memoirs, The Islamist, which rapidly became an international bestseller, generating hundreds of reviews, interviews and articles.

In Ed Husain’s book – much like Maajid Nawaz’s tome Radical released more recently to similar fanfare – Husain recounts his journey from aggrieved young Muslim into Islamist activist, and eventually his total rejection of Islamist ideology.

Both accounts of their journeys of transformation offer provocative and genuine insights. But the British government has played a much more direct role in crafting those accounts than either they, or the government, officially admit.

Government ghostwriters

In late 2013, I interviewed a former senior researcher at the Home Office who revealed that Husain’s The Islamist was “effectively ghostwritten in Whitehall”.

The official told me that in 2006, he was informed by a government colleague “with close ties” to Jack Straw and Gordon Brown that “the draft was written by Ed but then ‘peppered’ by government input”. The civil servant told him “he had seen ‘at least five drafts of the book, and the last one was dramatically different from the first.’”

The draft had, the source said, been manipulated in an explicitly political, pro-government manner. The committee that had input into Ed Husain’s manuscript prior to its official publication included senior government officials from No. 10 Downing Street, the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre, the intelligence services, Foreign & Commonwealth Office and the Home Office.

When I put the question, repeatedly, to Ed Husain as to the veracity of these allegations, he did not respond. I also asked Nawaz whether he was aware of the government’s role in “ghostwriting” Husain’s prose, and whether he underwent a similar experience in the production of Radical. He did not respond either.

While Husain was liaising with British government and intelligence officials over The Islamist from 2006 until the book’s publication in May 2007, his friend Nawaz was at first in prison in Egypt. Nawaz was eventually released in March 2006, declaring his departure from HT just a month before the publication of Husain’s book. Husain took credit for being the prime influence on Nawaz’s decision, and by November 2007, had joined with him becoming Quilliam’s director with Husain as his deputy.

Yet according to Husain, Nawaz played a role in determining parts of the text of The Islamist in the same year it was being edited by government officials. “Before publication, I discussed with my friend and brother-in-faith Maajid the passages in the book,” wrote Husain about the need to verify details of their time in HT.

This is where the chronology of Husain’s and Nawaz’s accounts begin to break down. In Radical, and repeatedly in interviews about his own deradicalisation process, Nawaz says that he firmly and decisively rejected HT’s Islamist ideology while in prison in Egypt. Yet upon his release and return to Britain, Nawaz showed no sign of having reached that decision. Instead, he did the opposite. In April 2006, Nawaz told Sarah Montague on BBC Hardtalk that his detention in Egypt had “convinced [him] even more… that there is a need to establish this Caliphate as soon as possible.” From then on, Nawaz, who was now on HT’s executive committee, participated in dozens of talks and interviews in which he vehemently promoted the Hizb.

I first met Nawaz at a conference on 2 December 2006 organised by the Campaign Against Criminalising Communities (CAMPACC) on the theme of “reclaiming our rights”. I had spoken on a panel about the findings of my book, The London Bombings: An Independent Inquiry, on how British state collusion with Islamist extremists had facilitated the 7/7 attacks. Nawaz had attended the event as an audience member with two other senior HT activists, and in our brief conversation, he spoke of his ongoing work with HT in glowing terms.

By January 2007, Nawaz was at the front of a HT protest at the US embassy in London, condemning US military operations in Iraq and Somalia. He delivered a rousing speech at the protest, demanding an end to “colonial intervention in the Muslim world,” and calling for the establishment of an Islamic caliphate to stand up to such imperialism and end Western support for dictators.

Yet by his own account, throughout this very public agitation on behalf of HT from mid-2006 onwards, Nawaz had in fact rejected the very ideology he was preaching so adamantly. Indeed, in the same period, he was liaising with his friend, Ed Husain – who at that time was still in Jeddah – and helping him with the text of his anti-HT manifesto, The Islamist, which was also being vetted at the highest levels of government.

The British government’s intimate, and secret, relationship with Husain in the year before the publication of his book in 2007 shows that, contrary to his official biography, the Quilliam Foundation founder was embedded in Whitehall long before he was on the public radar. How did he establish connections at this level?

MI5’s Islamist

According to Dr Noman Hanif, a lecturer in international terrorism and political Islam at Birkbeck College, University of London, and an expert on Hizb ut-Tahrir, the group’s presence in Britain likely provided many opportunities for Western intelligence to “penetrate or influence” the movement.

Dr Hanif, whose doctoral thesis was about the group, points out that Husain’s tenure inside HT by his own account occurred “under the leadership of Omar Bakri Mohammed,” the controversial cleric who left the group in 1996 to found al-Muhajiroun, a militant network which to this day has been linked to every major terrorist plot in Britain.

Bakri’s leadership of HT, said Dr Hanif, formed “the most conceptually deviant period of HT’s existence in the UK, diverting quite sharply away from its core ideas,” due to Bakri’s advocacy of violence and his focus on establishing an Islamic state in the UK, goals contrary to HT doctrines.

When Bakri left HT and set-up al-Muhajiroun in 1996, according to John Loftus, a former US Army intelligence officer and Justice Department prosecutor, Bakri was immediately recruited by MI6 to facilitate Islamist activities in the Balkans. And not just Bakri, but also Abu Hamza al-Masri, who was recently convicted in the US on terrorism charges.

When Bakri founded al-Muhajiroun in 1996 with the blessings of Britain’s security services, his co-founder was Anjem Choudary. Choudary was intimately involved in the programme to train and send Britons to fight abroad, and three years later, would boast to the Sunday Telegraph that “some of the training does involve guns and live ammunition”.

Historian Mark Curtis, in his seminal work, Secret Affairs: Britain’s Collusion with Radical Islam, documents how under this arrangement, Bakri trained hundreds of Britons at camps in the UK and the US, and dispatched them to join al-Qaeda affiliated fighters in Bosnia, Kosovo and Chechnya.

Shortly before the 2005 London bombings, Ron Suskind, a Wall Street Journal Pulitizer Prize winning investigative reporter, was told by a senior MI5 official that Bakri was a longtime informant for the secret service who “had helped MI5 on several of its investigations”. Bakri, Suskind adds in his book, The Way of the World, reluctantly conceded the relationship in an interview in Beirut – but Suskind gives no indication that the relationship ever ended.

A senior terrorism lawyer in London who has represented clients in several high-profile terrorism cases told me that both Bakri and Choudary had regular meetings with MI5 officers in the 1990s. The lawyer, who works for a leading firm of solicitors and has regularly liaised with MI5 in the administration of closed court hearings involving secret evidence, said: “Omar Bakri had well over 20 meetings with MI5 from around 1993 to the late 1990s. Anjem Choudary apparently participated in such meetings toward the latter part of the decade. This was actually well-known amongst several senior Islamist leaders in Britain at the time.”

According to Dr Hanif of Birkbeck College, Bakri’s relationship with the intelligence services likely began during his “six-year reign as HT leader in Britain,” which would have “provided British intelligence ample opportunity” to “widely infiltrate the group”. HT had already been a subject of MI6 surveillance abroad “because of its core level of support in Jordan and the consistent level of activity in other areas of the Middle East for over five decades.”

At least some HT members appear to have been aware of Bakri’s intelligence connections, including, it seems, Ed Husain himself. In one passage in The Islamist (p. 116), Husain recounts: “We were also concerned about Omar’s application for political asylum… I raised this with Bernie [another HT member] too. ‘Oh no’, he said, ‘On the contrary. The British are like snakes; they manoeuvre carefully. They need Omar in Britain. More likely, Omar will be the ambassador for the khilafah here or leave to reside in the Islamic state. The kuffar know that – allowing Omar to stay in Britain will give them a good start, a diplomatic advantage, when they have to deal with the Islamic state. Having Omar serves them well for the future. MI5 knows exactly what we’re doing, what we’re about, and yet they have in effect, given us the green light to operate in Britain.”

Husain left HT after Bakri in August 1997. According to Faisal Haque, a British government civil servant and former HT member who knew Ed Husain during his time in the group, Husain had a strong “personal relationship” with Bakri. He did not leave HT for “ideological reasons,” said Haque. “It was more to do with his close personal relationship with Omar Bakri (he left when Bakri was kicked out), pressure from his father and other personal reasons which I don’t want to mention.”

Husain later went on to work for the British Council in the Middle East. From 2003 to 2005, he was in Damascus. During that period, by his own admission, he informed on other British members of HT for agitating against Bashar al-Assad’s regime, resulting in them being deported by Syrian authorities back to Britain. At this time, the CIA and MI6 routinely cooperated with Assad on extraordinary rendition programmes.

Husain then worked for the British Council in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, from late 2005 to the end of 2006.

Throughout that year, according to the former Home Office official I spoke to, Husain was in direct contact with senior Whitehall officials who were vetting his manuscript for The Islamist. By November, Husain posted on DeenPort, an online discussion forum, a now deleted comment referring off-hand to the work of “the secret services” inside HT: “Even within HT in Britain today, there is a huge division between modernisers and more radical elements. The secret services are hopeful that the modernisers can tame the radicals… I foresee another split. And God knows best. I have said more than I should on this subject! Henceforth, my lips are sealed!”

Shortly after, Maajid Nawaz would declare his departure from HT, and would eventually be joined at Quilliam by several others from the group, many of whom according to Nawaz had worked with him and Husain as “a team” behind the scenes at this time.

The ‘ex-jihadists’ who weren’t

Perhaps the biggest problem with Husain’s and Nawaz’s claim to expertise on terrorism was that they were never jihadists. Hizb ut-Tahrir is a non-violent movement for the establishment of a global “caliphate” through social struggle, focusing on the need for political activism in the Muslim world. Whatever the demerits of this rigid political ideology, it had no relationship to the phenomenon of al-Qaeda terrorism.

Nevertheless, Husain and Nawaz, along with their government benefactors, were convinced that those personal experiences of “radicalisation” and “deradicalisation” could by transplanted into the ongoing “war on terror” – even though, in reality neither of them had any idea about the dynamics of an actual terrorist network, and the radicalisation process leading to violent extremism. The result was an utterly misguided and evidence-devoid obsession with rejecting non-violent extremist ideologies as the primary means to prevent terrorism.

Through the Quilliam Foundation, Husain’s and Nawaz’s fundamentalist ideas about non-violent extremism went on to heavily influence official counter-terrorism discourses across the Western world. This was thanks to its million pounds worth of government seed-funding, intensive media coverage, as well as the government pushing Quilliam’s directors and staff to provide “deradicalisation training” to government and security officials in the US and Europe.

In the UK, Quilliam’s approach was taken up by various centre-right and right-wing think-tanks, such as the Centre for Social Cohesion (CCS) and Policy Exchange, all of which played a big role in influencing the government’s Preventing Violent Extremism programme (Prevent).

Exactly how bankrupt this approach is, however, can be determined from Prime Minister David Cameron’s efforts to express his understanding of the risk from non-violent extremism, a major feature of the coalition government’s Orwellian new Counter-Terrorism and Security Act. The latter establishes unprecedented powers of electronic surveillance and the basis for the “Prevent duty,” which calls for all public sector institutions to develop “risk-assessment” profiles of individuals deemed to be “at-risk” of being drawn into non-violent extremism.

In his speech at the UN last year, Cameron explained that counter-terrorism measures must target people who may not “encourage violence, but whose worldview can be used as a justification for it.” As examples of dangerous ideas at the “root cause” of terrorism, Cameron pinpointed “conspiracy theories,” and most outrageously, “The idea that Muslims are persecuted all over the world as a deliberate act of Western policy.”

In other words, if you believe, for instance, that US and British forces have deliberately conducted brutal military operations across the Muslim world resulting in the foreseeable deaths of countless innocent civilians, you are a non-violent extremist.

In an eye-opening academic paper published last year, French terrorism expert and Interior Ministry policy officer Dr Claire Arenes, noted that: “By definition, one may know if radicalisation has been violent only once the point of violence has been reached, at the end of the process. Therefore, since the end-term of radicalisation cannot be determined in advance, a policy intended to fight violent radicalisation entails a structural tendency to fight any form of radicalisation.”

It is precisely this moronic obsession with trying to detect and stop “any form of radicalisation,” however non-violent, that is hampering police and security investigations and overloading them with nonsense “risks”.

Double game

At this point, the memorable vision of Nawaz and Choudary facing off on BBC Newsnight appears not just farcical, but emblematic of how today’s national security crisis has been fuelled and exploited by the bowels of the British secret state.

Over the last decade or so – the very same period that the British state was grooming the “former jihadists who weren’t” so they could be paraded around the media-security-industrial complex bigging up the non-threat of “non-violent extremism” – the CIA and MI6 were coordinating Saudi-led funding to al-Qaeda affiliated extremists across the Middle East and Central Asia to counter Iranian Shiite influence.

From 2005 onwards, US and British intelligence services encouraged a range of covert operations to support Islamist opposition groups, including militants linked to al-Qaeda, to undermine regional Iranian and Syrian influence. By 2009, the focus of these operations shifted to Syria.

As I documented in written evidence to a UK Parliamentary inquiry into Prevent in 2010, one of the recipients of such funding was none other than Omar Bakri, who at the time told one journalist: “Today, angry Lebanese Sunnis ask me to organise their jihad against the Shiites… Al-Qaeda in Lebanon… are the only ones who can defeat Hezbollah.” Simultaneously, Bakri was regularly in touch with his deputy, Anjem Choudary, over the internet and even delivered online speeches to his followers in Britain instructing them to join IS and murder civilians. He has now been detained and charged by Lebanese authorities for establishing terror cells in the country.

Bakri was also deeply involved “with training the mujahideen [fighters] in camps on the Syrian borders and also on the Palestine side.” The trainees included four British Islamists “with professional backgrounds” who would go on to join the war in Syria. Bakri also claimed to have trained “many fighters,” including people from Germany and France, since arriving in Lebanon. Was Mohammed Emwazi among them? Last year, Bakri disciple Mizanur Rahman confirmed that at least five European Muslims who had died fighting under IS in Syria had been Bakri acolytes.

Nevertheless in 2013, it was David Cameron who lifted the arms embargo to support Syria’s rebels. We now know that most of our military aid went to al-Qaeda affiliated Islamists, many with links to extremists at home. The British government itself acknowledged that a “substantial number” of Britons were fighting in Syria, who “will seek to carry out attacks against Western interests… or in Western states”.

Yet according to former British counterterrorism intelligence officer Charles Shoebridge, despite this risk, authorities “turned a blind eye to the travelling of its own jihadists to Syria, notwithstanding ample video etc. evidence of their crimes there,” because it “suited the US and UK’s anti-Assad foreign policy”.

This terror-funnel is what enabled people like Emwazi to travel to Syria and join up with IS – despite being on an MI5 terror watch-list. He had been blocked by the security services from traveling to Kuwait in 2010: why not Syria? Shoebridge, who was a British Army officer before joining the Metropolitan Police, told me that although such overseas terrorism has been illegal in the UK since 2006, “it’s notable that only towards the end of 2013 when IS turned against the West’s preferred rebels, and perhaps also when the tipping point between foreign policy usefulness and MI5 fears of domestic terrorist blowback was reached, did the UK authorities begin to take serious steps to tackle the flow of UK jihadists.”

The US-UK direct and tacit support for jihadists, Shoebridge said, had made Syria the safest place for regional terrorists fearing drone strikes “for more than two years”. Syria was “the only place British jihadists could fight without fear of US drones or arrest back home… likely because, unlike if similar numbers of UK jihadists had been travelling to for example Yemen or Afghanistan, this suited the anti-Assad policy.”

Having watched its own self-fulfilling prophecy unfold with horrifying precision in a string of IS-linked terrorist atrocities against Western hostages and targets, the government now exploits the resulting mayhem to vindicate its bankrupt “counter-extremism” narrative, promoted by hand-picked state-groomed “experts” like Husain and Nawaz.

Their prescription, predictably, is to expand the powers of the police state to identify and “deradicalise” anyone who thinks British foreign policy in the Muslim world is callous, self-serving and indifferent to civilian deaths. Government sources confirm that Nawaz’s input played a key role in David Cameron’s thinking on non-violent extremism, and the latest incarnation of the Prevent strategy; while last year, Husain was, ironically, appointed to the Foreign Office advisory group on freedom of religion or belief.

Meanwhile, Bakri’s deputy Choudary continues to inexplicably run around as Britain’s resident “terror cleric” media darling. His passport belatedly confiscated after a recent pointless police arrest that avoided charging him, he remains free to radicalise thick-headed British Muslims into joining IS, in the comfort that his hate speech will be broadcast widely, no doubt fueling widespread generic suspicion of British Muslims.

If only we could round up the Quilliam and al-Muhajiroun fanatics together, shove them onto a boat, and send them all off cruising to the middle of nowhere, they could have all the fun they want “radicalising” and “deradicalising” each other to their hearts content. And we might get a little peace. And perhaps we could send their handlers with them, too.

– Nafeez Ahmed PhD, is an investigative journalist, international security scholar and bestselling author who tracks what he calls the ‘crisis of civilization.’ He is a winner of the Project Censored Award for Outstanding Investigative Journalism for his Guardian reporting on the intersection of global ecological, energy and economic crises with regional geopolitics and conflicts. He has also written for The Independent, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Scotsman, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, Quartz, Prospect, New Statesman, Le Monde diplomatique, New Internationalist. His work on the root causes and covert operations linked to international terrorism officially contributed to the 9/11 Commission and the 7/7 Coroner’s Inquest.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

Friday 27 February 2015 14:35 UTC

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© Middle East Eye 2014

Van nieuwsblog.burojansen.nl

The case against Begg ‘was going to set a precedent that successfully challenged Britain’s policy on Syria and the meaning of terrorism’

A series of what appears to be translation mistakes and failure to grasp common sense by intelligence services have cost the British government over £1 million and could have landed an innocent man in jail, revealed former Guantanamo Bay detainee Moazzam Begg.

In an opinion column published in the Middle East Eye on Tuesday, Begg, who is currently the director of outreach for UK-based campaigning organisation CAGE, detailed what appears to be unprofessional methods of investigation by the Counter Terrorism Unit (CTU).

“I could have been facing up to 15 years in prison for providing fitness training and a generator to the Syrian rebels, if found guilty,” he wrote.

Begg was further astonished to learn how serious were the accusations levelled against him, given what seemed to be a lack of credible evidence.

“Over 150 police officers were involved. Additionally, the Home Office, the Treasury, the intelligence services and Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) had gone to extraordinary lengths to refuse me bail, freeze my assets and classify me as a Category A high-risk prisoner in HMP Belmarsh, five hours away from home,” he wrote.

It remains unclear why the authorities went to so much trouble when Begg posed no threat, nor was he involved in any wrongdoing. But he did hint in the article the reason for his release.

“The truth is the case was going to collapse on its own merits and was going to set a precedent that successfully challenged Britain’s policy on Syria and the meaning of terrorism,” he wrote.

“The CPS didn’t care about my beliefs, even though they had recorded them, because they needed the charges to fit their narrative and not the truth,” he added.

Tuesday 24 February 2015 19:46 UTC
Last update: Wednesday 25 February 2015 9:17 UTC

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The use of torture is “wrong and never justified”, the former head of the security service MI5 has insisted.
Eliza Manningham-Buller said it should be “utterly rejected even when it may offer the prospect of saving lives”.
Giving the second of her BBC Radio Reith lectures, she acknowledged recent disclosures about alleged British intelligence operations in Libya would “raise widespread concerns”.
“No-one could justify what went on under Gaddafi’s regime,” she added.
Baroness Manningham-Buller’s lectures examine the issues of terrorism and security on the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the United States.
She said that the use of torture had not made the world a safer place, adding that the use of water-boarding by the United States was a “profound mistake” and as a result America lost its “moral authority”.
Allegations have recently emerged that the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) was involved in the rendition of Libyan terror suspects, following the discovery of papers suggesting close ties between MI6, the CIA and the Gaddafi regime.
Find out more

The second of Eliza Manningham-Buller’s Reith Lectures will be broadcast on Tuesday 13 September 2011 at 09:00 BST on BBC Radio 4.
Listen via the Radio 4 website
Download the Reith Lectures podcast
Explore the Reith Lectures archive
Baroness Manningham-Buller, who was director-general of the security service MI5 between 2002 and 2007, stated that she “would like to say more” on the recent allegations.
However, her position made it difficult to do so as she anticipates being called to give evidence to the Gibson Inquiry which will investigate the subject.
Sir Peter Gibson is chair of the ongoing detainee inquiry, which was set up last year by Prime Minister David Cameron to investigate the alleged involvement in torture by UK security agencies.
A statement issued by the inquiry said it would also be considering the new allegations of UK involvement in rendition to Libya. Some of the inquiry will be held in secret to protect intelligence sources and methods.
Following the lecture, which was held in Leeds City Museum, Lady Manningham-Buller answered questions posed by members of the audience.
The Conservative MP, David Davis, asked the former MI5 head if she thought Britain’s resistance to the use of telephone intercept evidence in court had hindered the conviction rate of terrorists in the UK.
Baroness Manningham-Buller replied that MI5 had first suggested the use of intercept evidence in 1988, and she would “still like to see that happen” – but successive British governments have found the idea “procedurally difficult”.
The second of Eliza Manningham-Buller’s Reith Lectures, which is entitled Security, will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Tuesday, 13 September.

8 September 2011

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Wenige Stunden nach den Anschlägen von Paris forderten die ersten Beamten bereits neue Überwachungsmaßnahmen. CIA-Chef Brennan gibt Whistleblower Snowden eine Mitschuld an den Taten. Dabei haben die Dienste offenbar selbst versagt.

Wenn Geheimdienste öffentlich in eigener Sache zu argumentieren versuchen, hat das immer etwas Surreales. Oft treten sie nur in Gestalt ungenannter “hochrangiger Beamter” in Erscheinung, die dem einen oder anderen Medium anonym verraten haben, was sie selbst gerade dringend brauchen – in der Regel geht es um noch mehr Befugnisse.

Geheimdienste sind die einzigen Organisationen, die öffentliche Lobbyarbeit betreiben, ohne konkrete Belege für die Richtigkeit ihrer Behauptungen liefern zu müssen. So auch diesmal.

Noch einmal zu den tragischen Fakten: In Paris haben mehrere Attentäter in der Nacht von Freitag auf Samstag 129 Menschen getötet und Hunderte weitere verletzt. Alle bislang bekannten Attentäter bis auf einen waren dem US-Geheimdienst bekannt, das berichtet zumindest ein amerikanischer Abgeordneter. Die Namen der Täter hätten auf einer amerikanischen Flugverbotsliste (no fly list) gestanden.

Auch den französischen Behörden waren mehrere der Täter und der mutmaßliche Kopf hinter der Terrorserie bekannt. Mehrere von ihnen waren augenscheinlich nach Syrien gereist und von dort offenbar unbemerkt nach Europa zurückgekehrt. Die Täter stammten aus Frankreich und Belgien. Auch der mutmaßliche Drahtzieher der Morde kam aus Belgien, auch er war den dortigen Sicherheitsbehörden bekannt, reiste nach Syrien, trat dort als Protagonist grauenhafter Propagandavideos in Erscheinung und reiste irgendwann unbemerkt nach Europa zurück.

Telefongespräche abgehört, Handy problemlos ausgewertet

Auf die Spur der Terrorverdächtigen, gegen die die französische Polizei am Mittwoch im Pariser Vorort Saint-Denis vorging, kamen die Ermittler dem französischen Oberstaatsanwalt zufolge durch die Auswertungen überwachter Telefongespräche.

In Paris ist offenbar außerdem ein Handy gefunden worden, das die Attentäter am vergangenen Freitag benutzt haben. Französischen Medien zufolge wurde es nahe dem Musikklub Bataclan in einem Mülleimer entdeckt. Auf dem Smartphone sollen sich den Berichten zufolge ein Plan von den Räumen des Bataclan und eine SMS mit den Worten “Wir sind los, wir fangen an” befunden haben. Es hat der französischen Polizei offenbar keine Probleme bereitet, das Handy auszuwerten.

Den Geheimdiensten in Frankreich, Belgien und den USA lagen offenbar zahlreiche Informationen zu den Mördern von Paris vor. Trotzdem konnten die Männer sich unbemerkt bewegen, bewaffnen und organisieren. In Frankreich gibt es bereits seit Jahren eine sehr umfassende Vorratsdatenspeicherung. Sogar Passwörter etwa zu E-Mail-Konten müssen die Anbieter dort 12 Monate lang speichern, Verbindungsdaten sowieso. Außerdem gilt dort seit dem Sommer ein neues Überwachungsgesetz, das die Befugnisse der Geheimdienste noch einmal deutlich ausgeweitet hat.

“Ohne dafür Beweise vorzulegen”

Der Chef des US-Geheimdienstes CIA behauptet nun – ohne dafür einen einzigen Beleg vorweisen zu können: Wenn Edward Snowden den globalen Spähapparat der NSA und ihrer Verbündeten nicht offengelegt hätte, wären die Anschläge von Paris womöglich verhindert worden.

Die “New York Times” veröffentlichte am Sonntag einen Artikel (hier archiviert), in dem unter anderem ungenannte “europäische Beamte” mit der Behauptung zitiert wurden, die Angreifer hätten verschlüsselt kommuniziert. Die “NYT” entfernte den Artikel jedoch wenige Stunden später und ersetzte ihn durch eine Version, in der nur die Rede davon ist, dass “europäische Beamte sagten, dass sie glauben, dass die Angreifer von Paris irgendeine Form verschlüsselter Kommunikation benutzt hätten, ohne dafür Beweise vorzulegen”.

In Deutschland forderte der stellvertretende Vorsitzende der Gewerkschaft der Polizei (GdP), Jörg Radek, schon Stunden nach den Anschlägen von Paris: Um Attentate wie diese zu verhindern, müsse die “unsinnige Debatte über den sogenannten Überwachungsstaat” jetzt vermieden und stattdessen das “eng gefasste Gesetz zur Vorratsdatenspeicherung überdacht” werden. Sein Kollege Arnold Plickert, GdP-Vorsitzender für Nordrhein-Westfalen, stimmte ihm zu und sprach sich für eine Speicherfrist von mindestens einem Jahr aus.

In den USA war vor den Anschlägen von Paris gerade eine Debatte über das Thema Verschlüsselung mit einer Niederlage für die Geheimdienste und das FBI zu Ende gegangen: Die Behörden dort fordern schon seit Längerem, dass es keine Verschlüsselungstechnik geben dürfe, die ihnen verschlossen bleibt, die großen Tech-Konzerne und Bürgerrechtler stellen sich dem entgegen.

“Das könnte sich im Fall eines Terroranschlags ändern”

Die Regierung Obama entschied letztlich, wirksame Verschlüsselung nicht zu verbieten. Schon im August zitierte die “Washington Post” aus einem Schreiben des Anwalts Robert Litt, der für das Büro des US-Geheimdienstdirektors arbeitet. Litt erklärte darin gegenüber Kollegen, dass das “legislative Umfeld” für Anti-Verschlüsselungs-Gesetzgebung derzeit zwar “sehr feindselig” sei, dass sich das aber “im Fall eines Terroranschlags oder eines Verbrechens ändern könnte, wenn dabei nachgewiesen werden kann, dass starke Verschlüsselung die Strafverfolger behindert hat”.

Brennan und seine ungenannten Kollegen nutzen also nun wie von Litt vorgeschlagen die Anschläge von Paris, um ihre Vorstellungen von einer Welt ohne wirksame Verschlüsselung erneut in Szene zu setzen – ohne jedoch Belege dafür vorlegen zu können, dass die Anschläge von Paris mit noch besseren Überwachungsmöglichkeiten womöglich hätten verhindert werden können. Und deutsche Polizisten fordern eine Maßnahme, die in Frankreich seit Jahren umgesetzt ist, die Anschläge aber augenscheinlich nicht verhindern konnte.

Über ihre eigenen offenkundigen Versäumnisse dagegen ist von den Sicherheitsbehörden dies- und jenseits des Atlantiks erwartungsgemäß nichts zu hören.

Unklar bleibt, wie es sein kann, dass bereits als Terrorverdächtige bekannte Männer unbemerkt nach Syrien und zurück reisen konnten. Unklar bleibt, warum man offenbar die Telefone von vermutlich in die Tat verwickelten Personen abhören, die Taten aber dennoch nicht voraussehen konnte. Unklar bleibt, warum der schon 2002 verabschiedete Rahmenbeschluss des Europäischen Rates, in dem eine enge Abstimmung der nationalen Behörden bei der Terrorbekämpfung vereinbart wurde, augenscheinlich nicht befriedigend umgesetzt wurde. Sonst hätten sich französische und belgische Behörden wohl effektiver über die Täter ausgetauscht, die in ihren jeweiligen Ländern lebten.

Lieber “den Verdächtigen” überwachen

Einmal mehr zeigt sich stattdessen: Die Massenüberwachung, die sich, angeführt von der NSA, bei den Diensten als Standardparadigma durchgesetzt hat, läuft augenscheinlich ins Leere. Obwohl sie bereits Informationen über die Täter hatten – wie übrigens auch im Fall der Attentate auf “Charlie Hebdo” im Januar – gelang es den Behörden nicht, sie gezielt so zu überwachen, dass man ihre Taten hätte verhindern können.

Den Standort des Handys eines Verdächtigen zu verfolgen beispielsweise wäre sogar ohne Vorratsdatenspeicherung problemlos möglich. Der nun als Terrorhelfer gescholtene Edward Snowden selbst wirbt übrigens immer wieder für “traditionelle, effektive Überwachung” im Kampf gegen den Terrorismus. Das bedeute, keine Bevölkerung, keine Technik, keinen Dienst zu überwachen, sondern den Verdächtigen.

19. November 2015, 09:59 Uhr
Von Christian Stöcker

Find this story at 19 November 2015

© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2015

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WHENEVER A TERRORIST ATTACK OCCURS, it never takes long for politicians to begin calling for more surveillance powers. The horrendous attacks in Paris last week, which left more than 120 people dead, are no exception to this rule. In recent days, officials in the United Kingdom and the United States have been among those arguing that more surveillance of Internet communications is necessary to prevent further atrocities.

The case for expanded surveillance of communications, however, is complicated by an analysis of recent terrorist attacks. The Intercept has reviewed 10 high-profile jihadi attacks carried out in Western countries between 2013 and 2015 (see below), and in each case some or all of the perpetrators were already known to the authorities before they executed their plot. In other words, most of the terrorists involved were not ghost operatives who sprang from nowhere to commit their crimes; they were already viewed as a potential threat, yet were not subjected to sufficient scrutiny by authorities under existing counterterrorism powers. Some of those involved in last week’s Paris massacre, for instance, were already known to authorities; at least three of the men appear to have been flagged at different times as having been radicalized, but warning signs were ignored.

In the aftermath of a terrorist atrocity, government officials often seem to talk about surveillance as if it were some sort of panacea, a silver bullet. But what they always fail to explain is how, even with mass surveillance systems already in place in countries like France, the United States, and the United Kingdom, attacks still happen. In reality, it is only possible to watch some of the people some of the time, not all of the people all of the time. Even if you had every single person in the world under constant electronic surveillance, you would still need a human being to analyze the data and assess any threats in a timely fashion. And human resources are limited and fallible.

There is no doubt that we live in a dangerous world and that intelligence agencies and the police have a difficult job to do, particularly in the current geopolitical environment. They know about hundreds or thousands of individuals who sympathize with terrorist groups, any one of whom may be plotting an attack, yet they do not appear to have the means to monitor each of these people closely over sustained periods of time. If any lesson can be learned from studying the perpetrators of recent attacks, it is that there needs to be a greater investment in conducting targeted surveillance of known terror suspects and a move away from the constant knee-jerk expansion of dragnet surveillance, which has simply not proven itself to be effective, regardless of the debate about whether it is legal or ethical in the first place.

map-3 Map of 10 recent attacks carried out in Western countries by Islamic extremists. freevectormaps.com
1. Paris attacks: November 13, 2015

Victims: 129 dead. 400+ wounded.
Named suspected perpetrators: Ismaël Omar Mostefaï (29; French), Samy Amimour (28; French), Ibrahim Abdeslam (31; French), Bilal Hadfi (20; French), Abdelhamid Abaaoud (27; Belgian), Salah Abdeslam (26; French).
Weapons: Assault rifles, hand grenades, suicide vests.

Known to authorities? At least three of the men involved in planning and carrying out the French attacks were known to European authorities and at least four were listed in a U.S. terrorism watchlist database. Ismaël Omar Mostefaï, who helped carry out the massacre at the Bataclan concert venue, had been flagged as a radicalization risk in 2010. French police reportedly ignored two warnings about Mostefaï before he carried out the attacks. Some of his friends claimed to have tried to alert French police about his radical views, but said they were told the authorities could do nothing. Samy Amimour, another of the men involved in the Bataclan massacre, had been previously charged with terrorist offenses “after an abortive attempt to travel to Yemen,” according to Paris prosecutors.

The alleged ringleader of the attacks, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, was also well-known to European police. In 2013, he booked a flight from Cologne to Turkey, which was flagged to German authorities because he was reportedly on an EU watchlist. But he was not detained and was able to board the flight. From Turkey, Abaaoud entered Syria, where he joined ISIS. Abaaoud later returned to Europe and was named as a wanted extremist in January following a gun battle in Belgium. In February, he featured prominently in ISIS propaganda magazine Dabiq boasting about how he had been able to evade police detection in Europe.

Others involved in the Paris attacks are also likely to have been on the radar of police and intelligence agencies due to their travels to Syria. Bilal Hadfi, for instance, was living in Belgium after having returned from Syria, where he is believed to have fought with Islamic State militants. Hadfi apparently attended the Instituut Anneessens-Funck college in Brussels; his former history professor recalled that, following the Charlie Hebdo massacre in January 2015, Hadfi defended the attacks. The professor reported him to management due to concerns about his radical views, but management “decided not to intervene, to avoid stigmatizing the young student.” In June, Hadfi reportedly posted on his Facebook page encouraging terrorist attacks: “Those dogs are attacking our civilians everywhere. Strike them in their community of pigs so they can’t feel safe again in their own dreams.” The family of Ibrahim Abdeslam, who detonated a suicide vest inside a cafe during the attacks, said he too had spent “a long time” in Syria before returning to Europe.

Rescue workers gather at victims in the 10th district of Paris, Friday, Nov. 13, 2015. Several dozen people were killed in a series of unprecedented attacks around Paris on Friday, French President Francois Hollande said, announcing that he was closing the country’s borders and declaring a state of emergency. (AP Photo/Jacques Brinon) Rescue workers gather to treat victims in Paris’ 10th arrondissement, Friday, Nov. 13, 2015. Photo: Jacques Brinon/AP
2. Thalys train attack, France: August 21, 2015

Victims: No deaths. Two wounded.
Alleged perpetrator: Ayoub El Khazzani (26; Moroccan).
Weapons: Pistol, assault rifle, box cutter, bottle of petrol.

Known to authorities? Khazzani was reportedly known to European authorities for his Islamic radicalism. While living in Spain, he had come to security agencies’ attention after he was observed defending jihadis and attending a radical mosque in Algeciras, Spain.

French police stand guard along the platform next to a Thalys train of French national railway operator SNCF at the main train station in Arras, northern France, on August 22, 2015, the day after an armed gunman on the train was overpowered by passengers. The gunman opened fire on the train travelling from Amsterdam to Paris, injuring two people before being tackled by several passengers including off-duty American servicemen. AFP PHOTO PHILIPPE HUGUEN (Photo credit should read PHILIPPE HUGUEN/AFP/Getty Images) French police stand guard on the platform next to a Thalys train at the station in Arras, northern France, on Aug. 22, 2015, the day after an armed gunman was overpowered by passengers. Photo: Philippe Huguen/AFP/Getty Images
3. Curtis Culwell Center attack, Garland, Texas: May 3, 2015

Victims: One wounded.
Perpetrators: Elton Simpson (30; American) and Nadir Soofi (34; Pakistani-American).
Weapons: Assault rifles, handguns.

Known to authorities? Elton Simpson had reportedly been placed on the U.S. no-fly list and had been convicted of a terror-related offense in 2011 after being caught discussing traveling to Somalia to engage in violent jihad. Soofi, on the other hand, was reportedly “relatively unknown to federal investigators,” though he lived with Simpson. A third man, Abdul Malik Abdul Kareem, was allegedly responsible for supplying the guns and ammunition used in the attack. Kareem was investigated in 2012 after he was suspected of developing a plot to attack a Super Bowl game in Arizona with explosives.

GARLAND, TX – MAY 4: A member of the FBI Evidence Response Team investigates the crime scene outside of the Curtis Culwell Center after a shooting occurred the day before, on May 04, 2015 in Garland, Texas. During the “Muhammad Art Exhibit and Cartoon Contest,” on May 03, Elton Simpson of Phoenix, Arizonia and Nadir Soofi opened fire, wounding a security guard. Police officers shot and killed Simpson at the scene. The provocative cartoon event was billed by organizers as a free speech event while critics deemed it to be anti-Islamic. (Photo by Ben Torres/Getty Images) An FBI evidence response team member investigates the crime scene after a shooting outside of the Curtis Culwell Center in Garland, Texas, May 4, 2015 . Photo: Ben Torres/Getty Images
4. Shootings in Copenhagen, Denmark: February 14-15, 2015

Victims: Two dead. Five wounded.
Perpetrator: Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein (22; Danish-Jordanian-Palestinian).
Weapons: Assault rifle, pistols.

Known to authorities? Hussein was reportedly well-known to Danish security agencies. Prior to the Copenhagen shootings, he had been imprisoned for stabbing a teenager in the leg on a train. While he was in jail, prison officials filed a concern report to the Danish intelligence agency PET, warning that his behavior had changed and that he had become extremely religious. Two weeks after he was released from jail he went on the shooting rampage that left three dead and five wounded in different parts of Copenhagen. Shortly before the attacks, Hussein had apparently sworn allegiance to ISIS in a post on his Facebook page.

In this image made from TV The lifeless body of a shooting suspect lays on the pavement as Danish police forensic officers examine the scene after Danish police shot and killed the man early Sunday suspected of carrying out shooting attacks at a free speech event and then at a Copenhagen synagogue, in Copenhagen Sunday, Feb. 15, 2015. The suspect is not yet identified by police. A man opened fire Saturday killing a Danish documentary filmmaker and a member of the Scandinavian country’s Jewish community and wounding five police officers in the attacks. (AP Photo / TV2 Norway) NORWAY OUT – DENMARK OUT – TV OUT The body of a shooting suspect lies on the pavement as Danish forensic police officers examine the scene, Feb. 15, 2015, Copenhagen Denmark.Photo: TV2 Norway/AP
5. Shootings in Paris (Charlie Hebdo and Jewish supermarket): January 7-9, 2015

Victims: 17 dead. 20 wounded.
Perpetrators: Chérif Kouachi (32; French), Saïd Kouachi (34; French), Amedy Coulibaly (32; French).
Weapons: Assault rifles, submachine guns, grenade launcher, pistols, shotgun.

Known to authorities? Chérif Kouachi was well-known to French security agencies as an Islamic extremist. In 2005 he was detained trying to board a plane for Syria and in 2008 he was jailed for three years for his role in sending militants to Iraq. Both Chérif and his brother Saïd were alleged to have been involved in a 2010 plot to free from prison Smaïn Ait Ali Belkacem, the French-Algerian extremist responsible for the 1995 Paris metro station bombing. The brothers were never prosecuted over the prison-break plot due to a lack of evidence. In 2011, Saïd traveled to Yemen and allegedly trained with al Qaeda. The U.S. reportedly provided France with intelligence in 2011 showing the brothers received terrorist training in Yemen and French authorities monitored them until the spring of 2014. Amedy Coulibaly was also well-known to the authorities. In 2013 he was sentenced to five years in prison for providing ammunition as part of the 2010 prison-break plot that the Kouachi brothers were also suspected of involvement in. However, Coulibaly reportedly only spent about three months in jail and was released in March 2014.

paris-attack-charlie-hebdo Screen grab of the attack on Charlie Hebdo magazine, Paris, France, Jan. 7, 2015.Photo: Youtube
6. Cafe seige, Sydney, Australia: December 15-16, 2014

Victims: Two dead. Four wounded.
Perpetrator: Man Haron Monis (50; Iranian-Australian).
Weapon: Shotgun.

Known to authorities? Two months prior to taking 17 people hostage in a Sydney cafe, Monis wrote a letter to Australia’s attorney general seeking advice about the legality of communicating with ISIS. He was “well-known” to federal and state police, as well as the Australian Security Intelligence Organization, and had sent “hate letters” to families of Australian soldiers killed in overseas conflicts. Before carrying out his attacks, Monis apparently pledged allegiance on his website to Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. This was reported to Australian authorities, who reviewed Monis’ website and social media posts but (erroneously) concluded he was unlikely to carry out an act of violence.

FILE – In this Dec. 15, 2014 file photo, a hostage runs to an armed tactical response police officers for safety after she escaped from a cafe under siege at Martin Place in the central business district of Sydney, Australia. The man who took 18 people hostage at a Sydney cafe last year was educated and erratic, secretive about his own life and public about his many grievances, and a self-obsessed fabulist who grew increasingly defiant as he edged closer to launching his deadly attack, lawyers told an inquest Monday, May 25, 2015. (AP Photo/Rob Griffith, File) A hostage runs toward tactical response police officers after escaping from a cafe under siege in the central business district of Sydney, Australia, Dec. 15, 2014.Photo: Bob Griffith/AP
7. Canada attacks (Quebec car ramming and parliament shooting): October 20 and 22, 2014

Victims: Two dead. Four injured.
Perpetrators: Michael Zehaf-Bibeau (32; Canadian-Libyan) and Martin Couture-Rouleau (25; Canadian).
Weapons: Rifle, car.

Known to authorities? Couture-Rouleau was known to Canadian authorities prior to an attack in which he rammed two Canadian soldiers, killing one and injuring another. He had reportedly been “considered some kind of threat by the Canadian government” and had posted a variety of pro-jihadi materials on his Facebook page. Police had been monitoring him over concerns that he had become radicalized and his passport had been seized to prevent him from traveling abroad to join militants. Zehaf-Bibeau, who shot dead a soldier at a war memorial near the Canadian parliament, was a habitual offender who had a criminal record for a number of offenses, including robbery and drug possession. Zehaf-Bibeau was reportedly “on the radar” of federal authorities in Canada and his email address had been previously found on the computer hard drive of someone charged with a “terrorist-related offense.”

Image #: 32693473 OTTAWA, CANADA – OCTOBER 22: Police, bystanders and soldiers aid a fallen soldier at the War Memorial as police respond to an apparent terrorist attack on October 22, 2014 in Ottawa, Canada. A GUNMAN is believed to have shot a soldier as he was standing guard at the National War Memorial in Ottawa, Canada, this morning (Wednesday, October 22). It is believed police then chased the man into the main parliament building at Parliament Hill, where more shots were fired. Police are hunting the streets and buildings for further suspects and have asked the public to stay away from the area. There is also a report of shootings at the Rideau Centre mall in downtown, a short distance from the War Memorial. The wounded soldier was taken into an ambulance and treated by medical personnel and is condition is unclear. The incident comes after Canada raised its terror threat level from low to medium after a Muslim convert deliberately ran over two soldiers, killing one of them. Wayne Cuddington/Barcroft Media /Landov Police, bystanders and soldiers aid a fallen soldier at the National War Memorial in Ottawa, Canada, the site of an apparent terrorist attack, Oct. 22, 2014.Photo: Cuddington/Barcroft Media /Landov
8. Jewish Museum killings in Brussels: May 24, 2014

Victims: Four dead.
Perpetrator: Mehdi Nemmouche (29; French)
Weapons: Automatic rifle, handgun.

Known to authorities? Nemmouche had been incarcerated on five occasions in France for various crimes, including armed robbery. In 2013 he had traveled to Syria. When he returned to Europe he was reportedly placed under surveillance by French counterterrorism police, who suspected he had joined with Islamic extremist fighters while in Syria.

A forensic expert enters the site of a shooting, at the Jewish museum in Brussels, Saturday, May 24, 2014. Three people were killed and one seriously injured in a spree of gunfire at the Jewish Museum in Brussels on Saturday, officials said. The attack, which came on the eve of national and European Parliament elections, led officials to raise anti-terror measures.(AP Photo/Yves Logghe) A forensic expert enters the Jewish Museum in Brussels, May 24, 2014. Photo: Yves Logghe/AP
9. Beheading in Woolwich, London: May 22, 2013

Victims: One dead.
Perpetrators: Michael Adebolajo (28; British-Nigerian) and Michael Adebowale (22; British-Nigerian).
Weapons: Cleaver, knives, pistol.

Known to authorities? Both attackers were known to British authorities and were suspected of having been radicalized prior to their murder of soldier Lee Rigby in Woolwich, London. According to a U.K. parliamentary report published following the attack, Adebolajo was investigated under five separate police and security service operations. He was believed to have links to several extremist networks and was suspected of having tried to travel overseas to join a terrorist organization. Adebowale was investigated by British spies after he was identified as having viewed extremist material online. London counterterrorism police also received an uncorroborated tip that Adebowale was affiliated with al Qaeda. Investigators reviewed Adebowale’s cellphone records and apparently did not find anything of interest. But they did not check his landline call records, which if they had would have revealed that he had been in contact with an individual in Yemen linked to al Qaeda. Covert surveillance of both Adebolajo and Adebowale had ceased prior to their attack in London in May 2013, though Adebowale was still the subject of a terrorism-related investigation at the time.

Image #: 22463877 epa03712953 A British police officer carries a knife in an evidence bag close to the scene where a soldier was murdered in John Wilson Street, Woolwich, south-east London, Britain, 23 May 2013. Two attackers with kitchen knives killed a British soldier on a street 22 May in south-east London afternoon in a case that police were treating as a suspected terrorist attack. Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe said officers from the counterterrorist unit were leading the investigation into the ‘shocking and horrific’ slaying in Woolwich with two people arrested. British Prime Minister David Cameron, who was in Paris for a meeting with French President Francois Hollande, cut short the visit to return to London later 22 May. He called the incident ‘shocking’ and ordered a crisis meeting to coordinate British government response. British Home Secretary Theresa May led a meeting of the government’s emergency response committee, with another meeting planned for 23 May. EPA/FACUNDO ARRIZABALAGA /LANDOV A British police officer carries an evidence bag containing a knife near the scene where a soldier was murdered in Woolwich, Britain, May 23, 2013. Photo: Facundo Arrizabalaga/EPA /Landov
10. Boston Marathon bombing: April 15, 2013

Victims: Five dead. 260+ wounded.
Perpetrators: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (19; Kyrgyzstani-American) and Tamerlan Tsarnaev (26; Kyrgyzstani-American).
Weapons: Pressure-cooker bombs, semi-automatic pistol, improvised explosive devices.

Known to authorities? Dzhokhar’s older brother, Tamerlan, who orchestrated the attacks, was placed on two different U.S. government watchlists in late 2011. Russian security agency FSB tipped off the FBI and CIA in 2011 that Tamerlan “was a follower of radical Islam,” and he and his family were subsequently interviewed by American agents, according to the Associated Press. The CIA reportedly “cleared [Tamerlan] of any ties to violent extremism” two years before he and his younger brother carried out the bombing of the marathon.

Image #: 21996457 Runners continue to run towards the finish line of the Boston Marathon as an explosion erupts near the finish line of the race in this photo exclusively licensed to Reuters by photographer Dan Lampariello after he took the photo in Boston, Massachusetts, April 15, 2013. Two simultaneous explosions ripped through the crowd at the finish line of the Boston Marathon on Monday, killing at least two people and injuring dozens on a day when tens of thousands of people pack the streets to watch the world famous race. REUTERS EXCLUSIVE REUTERS/Dan Lampariello (UNITED STATES – Tags: CRIME LAW SPORT ATHLETICS TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY ) MANDATORY CREDIT: REUTERS /STRINGER /LANDOV Boston Marathon participants run toward the finish line as an explosion erupts at the race, Boston, Mass., April 15, 2013. Photo: Dan Lampariello/Reuters /Landov

Ryan Gallagher
Nov. 18 2015, 7:03 p.m.

Find this story at 18 November 2015

Copyright https://theintercept.com/

Van nieuwsblog.burojansen.nl

Authorities knew of at least three of the Paris attackers but did not act – and ignored a warning about a potential attack

Do the arithmetic and it is hard not to feel sympathy for the French intelligence agencies. Every day they face a dilemma created by the gap between available staff and the huge number of suspects.

French intelligence and police have only an estimated 500-600 staff whose task is to physically follow people. But the agencies have about 11,000 people on their books classified as potential threats to national security.

To mount an operation to monitor one person 24-hours-a-day requires about 30 to 40 people. So they have to make hard choices about which people to prioritise.

They often get it right, foiling many plots. But when they get it wrong, as they have twice this year, first in the Charlie Hebdo attack and in last Friday’s massacre, they have come under huge pressure.

French MPs vote to extend state of emergency after Paris attacks
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There will inevitably be an inquiry into the failings. But the French government has already proposed new legislation introducing tougher security measures.

Senior members of the US intelligence community, still smarting from the loss of the bulk data collection of phone records in the Freedom Act this summer, are taking advantage of events in Paris to renew arguments over surveillance.

In New York on Wednesday, the director of the FBI, James Comey, complained that too much of the internet had gone dark. Intelligence and law enforcement agencies both needed faster and better access to communications data, he said.

The stripped down argument is that if you have access to everything, it is easier to keep everyone secure. When there are attacks such as those in Paris, the agencies say they quickly need to search back through data to see who suspects had been talking to, helping to identify the networks and prevent potential other attacks.

French intelligence under scrutiny in wake of Paris attacks
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The problem with this, as with almost every terrorist incident since 9/11, is that the French intelligence agencies already knew at least three of the attackers.

Abelhamid Abaaoud was known as an accomplice of two jihadis killed in Belgium in January. The police had a file on Omar Ismaïl Mostefai even before he travelled to Syria in 2013, while Sami Amimour had been detained in 2012 on suspected terrorist links.

In other words, the failure of the French intelligence agencies is not that they did not have enough data – but that they did not act on what they had.

The three could have been the subject of traditional targeted surveillance. While physical surveillance is difficult in terms of staffing, keeping tabs on their communications is less labour-intensive.

Tracking such suspects does not require the collection of the communications data – phone records, emails, Facebook postings, chat lines – of every French citizen, only the suspects.

One of the key arguments put forward by Comey and earlier in the week by the director of the CIA, John Brennan, is that terrorists have become better at covert communications. But the discarded mobile phone that led police to the St-Denis hideout contained unencrypted text.

CIA chief criticises recent surveillance rollbacks in wake of Paris attacks
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One of the biggest failings was not the French intelligence agencies’ lack of sufficient surveillance powers but the long-running lack of cooperation between European intelligence agencies – and reluctance to share information – due to fears about leaks. When they do cooperate, the process is slow – even over things as simple as translation.

The Iraq government sent warnings to French intelligence about a potential attack that were ignored. Such warnings are regularly received by the agencies struggling to work out which ones reflect a genuine threat.

A more serious omission is the French failure to respond to the Turkish government when it flagged up concern about Mostefai. Added to that is the lack of cooperation between France and Belgium, where some of the attackers were based.

Such failures are where the French and US intelligence agencies should be looking, rather than exploiting the tragedy to make the case for bulk data surveillance.

Ewen MacAskill Defence and intelligence correspondent
Thursday 19 November 2015 18.51 GMT Last modified on Friday 20 November 2015 01.05 GMT

Find this story at 19 November 2015

© 2015 Guardian News and Media Limited

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In January, Turkish authorities detained one of the suicide bombers at Turkey’s border and deported him to Belgium. Brahim Abdeslam, Turkish authorities told Belgian police at the time, had been “radicalized” and was suspected of wanting to join Islamic State in Syria, a Turkish security source told Reuters.

Yet during questioning in Belgium, Abdeslam denied any involvement with militants and was set free. So was his brother Salah – a decision that Belgian authorities say was based on scant evidence that either man had terrorist intentions.

On Nov. 13, Abdeslam blew himself up at Le Comptoir Voltaire bar in Paris, killing himself and wounding one other. Salah is also a suspect in the attacks, claimed by the Islamic State, and is now on the run.

In France, an “S” (State Security) file for people suspected of being a threat to national security had been issued on Ismail Omar Mostefai, who would detonate his explosive vest inside Paris’ Bataclan concert hall. Mostefai, a Frenchman of Algerian descent, was placed on the list in 2010, French police sources say.

Turkish police also considered him a terror suspect with links to Islamic State. Ankara wrote to Paris about him in December 2014 and in June this year, a senior Turkish government official said. The warning went unheeded. Paris answered last week, after the attacks.

A fourth attacker missed at least four weekly check-ins with French police in 2013, before authorities issued an arrest warrant for him. By that time he had left the country.

On any one of these occasions, police, intelligence and security services had an opportunity to detain at least some of the men who launched the attacks.

That they did not, helps explain how a group of Islamist militants was able to organize even as they moved freely among countries within the open borders of Europe’s passport-free Schengen area and beyond.

Taken one by one, each misstep has its own explanation, security services say. They attribute the lapses in communication, inability to keep track of suspected militants and failure to act on intelligence, to a lack of resources in some countries and a surge in the number of would-be jihadis.

But a close examination by Reuters of a series of missed red flags and miscommunications culminating in France’s biggest atrocity since World War Two puts on stark display the mounting difficulties faced by anti-terrorism units across Europe and their future ability to keep the continent safe.

“We’re in a situation where the services are overrun. They expect something to happen, but don’t know where,” said Nathalie Goulet, who heads up the French Senate’s investigation committee into jihadi networks.

Many point to Belgium as a weak link in European security.

“They simply don’t have the same means as Britain’s MI5 or the DGSI (French intelligence agency),” said Louis Caprioli, a former head of the DST, France’s former anti-terrorism unit.

Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel defended his country’s security services and praised them for doing “a difficult and tough job.” French President Francois Hollande also praised his country’s security services, who hunted down and shot dead the man they identified as the ringleader, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, five days after the attacks.

Europol, the European Union’s police agency, says it has been feeding information to the Belgian and French authorities but acknowledges that some member states are better at sharing information than others.

FOCUS ON FIGHTERS RETURNING FROM SYRIA

The focus of investigators over the past few years has been men and women who have grown up in Europe, have European passports and who travel to Syria to train and fight.

As the number of those fighters has increased, authorities have struggled to keep up. The French Interior Ministry estimated about 500 French nationals had traveled to Syria and almost 300 had returned. French authorities reckon up to 1,400 people need 24-hour surveillance. Yet France has only about the same number of officers to carry out the task, a tenth of those needed.

Some 350 people from Belgium have gone to Syria to fight – the highest per capita number in Europe. A Belgian government source said Belgium has a list of 400 people who are in Syria, have returned or are believed to be about to go there. There are another 400-500 people who authorities believe have radicalized. The number of people in the Belgian security services carrying out surveillance is believed to be considerably fewer than this.

The numbers partially explain why many of the attackers in Paris were well-known faces still at large.

The attacks killed 130 people at various locations, including the Bataclan concert hall where 89 concert-goers were gunned down or blown up. Others were killed outside the Stade de France sports stadium and in bars and restaurants around central Paris.

Seven assailants died during the attacks. Abaaoud was killed in a police raid north of Paris on Wednesday along with one other suicide attacker and a woman believed to be his cousin.

Dozens of people have also been detained, some with weapons and explosives, in raids since then.

Abaaoud himself had been well-known to authorities for several years. After a raid in January in the Belgian town of Verviers, police suspected the 28-year-old of plotting to kidnap a police officer and kill him.

In February, Abaaoud said in an interview with an Islamic State magazine that he had returned to Syria after the raid in Verviers. By this time, he knew he was being sought.

If it is true that he returned to Syria from Verviers, Abaaoud made his way back into Europe at some point after January. French authorities did not know this until they were tipped off by Morocco after the attacks.

“If Abaaoud was able to go from Syria to Europe, that means there are failings in the entire European system,” French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said.

WARNINGS

Mostefai, the Bataclan suicide bomber, also traveled back and forth. Although he had eight convictions as a petty criminal, he had never been in prison, a place French authorities can watch for signs of radicalization.

Police say they suspected him of being in Syria between late 2013 and early 2014, before returning to France unnoticed.

In December of last year, Turkey contacted France about Mostefai. They raised an alarm again in June 2015 by letter.

There was no response from French authorities, according to a senior Turkish government official and a security source.

“It seemed there was a connection between this person and Daesh (Islamic State) and we reported it,” the Turkish security source said. “We followed all international procedures. But they (the French) didn’t display the same level of sensitivity.”

French officials declined to comment on this, but say that coordination with Turkey over potential French jihadis has improved markedly in the past year.

Determining how dangerous a person is, and whether they might carry out an attack, is a key challenge for security services, experts say.

“The other difficulty is that if you have nothing concrete for several years, you can’t keep either a sophisticated technical alert system or human resources on a person who makes himself forgotten for three or four years,” said Arnaud Danjean, a former intelligence officer and now a member of the European Parliament.

Bilal Hadfi, who blew himself up outside the Stade de France, was another of the suicide attackers under surveillance.

After visiting Syria in February, the 20-year-old French national, who was living in Belgium, returned to Europe by an unknown route and evaded police even though the Belgian Justice Ministry said microphones had been placed at the house where he was thought to be staying.

Then there’s the case of Sami Amimour. French authorities had launched an official investigation into Amimour’s possible terrorism-related activity in October 2012. Prosecutors suspected him of planning to join militants in Yemen.

Amimour was a bus driver who had been radicalized in a mosque near his hometown of Drancy, north of Paris. Because of the investigation, police had ordered Amimour to check in with them every week. As reported by Reuters on Nov 20, he missed four weekly checks in 2013. But it was only after nearly a month that the authorities put out an international arrest warrant.

By then Amimour was already in Syria. His tracks were picked up a year later, in December 2014, when his father gave an interview to French daily Le Monde describing how he had traveled to Syria but failed to convince his son to return.

THE MEN FROM THE BAR

Police are still looking for Salah Abdeslam, who is known to have survived the attacks.

Until six weeks before the attacks, Salah and his brother Brahim – one of the suicide bombers – were running a bar called Les Beguines on a quiet street in Molenbeek, a low-rent area of Brussels which has been linked with several attacks.

After the attacks, Salah Abdeslam went to ground. Authorities say he was stopped on his way back to Belgium after the Paris attacks, but police waved him on. It is not clear what role he played on the night of the attacks and why he managed to survive.

Two men who were arrested later, Mohamed Amri, 27, and 21-year-old Hamza Attou, said they brought Abdeslam back to Brussels after receiving a call from him saying his car had broken down. Police checks meant they were pulled over three times, including a last check around 9 a.m. near Cambrai just short of the Belgian border.

Missteps did not just happen in France and Belgium.

The Syrian passport found near one of the suicide bombers at the Stade de France had been used by a man registering himself as a refugee on the Greek island of Leros on Oct. 3. That man traveled through Macedonia and claimed asylum in Serbia, counter-intelligence and security sources said.

The French prosecutor has confirmed that fingerprints taken on arrival in Greece showed that man traveled with a second man, who also blew himself up near the Stade de France.

The pair may have reached Paris relatively easily because, at the height of the migration crisis in Europe this year, asylum seekers were rushed across some national borders without checks.

It is unclear whether the passport issued under the name of Ahmad al-Mohammad, a 25-year-old from the Syrian city of Idlib, was genuine or was stolen from a refugee. Whatever the truth, it has helped fuel right-wing criticism in Europe of the number of migrants allowed in this year.

By the time the two men were making their way up through the Balkans to western Europe, France had received more evidence an attack was imminent.

French former anti-terrorism judge Marc Trevidic says a French Islamist he questioned on his return from Syria in August said Islamic State had asked him to carry out an attack on a concert venue.

“The guy admitted that he was asked to hit a rock concert. We didn’t know if it would be Bataclan or another, he didn’t know the exact location that would be designated. But yes, that’s what they asked him to do,” Trevidic told Reuters.

Iraqi Foreign Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari has also said that his country’s intelligence services shared information indicating that France, as well as the United States and Iran, was being targeted for attack. He has not given details.

Germany’s top prosecutor is also investigating allegations that an Algerian man detained at a refugee center in the western town of Arnsberg told Syrian refugees an attack was imminent in the French capital.

Europe is scrambling to respond to the attacks.

France declared a nationwide state of emergency which will now last three months. Police now have the power to conduct searches without obtaining judicial warrants and can hold anyone suspected of posing a threat to security under house arrest for 12 hours a day. Internet sites deemed to incite or advocate “acts of terrorism” can be blocked and public demonstrations banned.

Belgium has also announced a security crackdown, saying it will spend an extra 400 million euros ($430 million) on security and take measures such as stopping the sale of mobile phone cards to anonymous buyers. Police will be allowed to conduct night searches of homes and it is now easier to ban, convict or expel hate preachers.

Whether such measures will be enough is uncertain. Brussels is on high alert this weekend because of what authorities there called the “serious and imminent” threat of attack. In a video last week, Islamic State warned it would strike again.

“When a large operation is prepared, they are told to keep a low profile in the months before. As‎ they are no longer on police radars, it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack,” said Roland Jacquard, president of the Paris-based International Terrorism Observatory.

(Robert-Jan Bartunek reported from Brussels and Orhan Coskun reported from Turkey; additional reporting by Nick Tattersall in Turkey, Alastair Macdonald in Brussels, Silvia Aloisi in Athens; writing by Timothy Heritage; editing by Alessandra Galloni, Simon Robinson, Janet McBride)

World | Sun Nov 22, 2015 5:37am EST Related: WORLD, FRANCE
PARIS | BY JOHN IRISH, ROBERT-JAN BARTUNEK AND ORHAN COSKUN

Find this story at 22 November 2015

Copyright http://www.reuters.com/

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French officials received multiple warnings about Paris attacker Omar Ismail Mostefai before Friday’s terror attack but Turkey didn’t get a response from French authorities until after the attack, a Turkish official said on Monday.

“On Oct. 10, 2014, Turkey received an information request regarding four terror suspects from the French authorities,” a Turkish official told the New York Times. “During the official investigation, the Turkish authorities identified a fifth individual, Omar Ismail Mostefai, and notified their French counterparts twice—in December 2014 and June 2015.”

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Mashable also quoted a senior Turkish official as saying that Mostefai, the first gunman identified in the attack, was known to security officials and that France never followed up on shared information until after the attack took place.

“This is not a time to play the blame game, but we are compelled to share the information to shed light on Omar Ismail Mostefai’s travel history,” the senior official told Mashable. “The case of Omar Ismail Mostefai clearly establishes that intelligence sharing and effective communication are crucial to counter-terrorism efforts. The Turkish government expects closer cooperation from its allies in the future.”

The Associated Press reported a more general warning had been given to coalition countries by senior Iraqi intelligence officials the day before the attack. The warnings were vague, though four Iraqi intelligence officials told the AP that they warned France specifically of an attack and two said they warned France beforehand about details French authorities hadn’t yet made public, including that the planning for the attack occurred in ISIS’s de facto capital of Raqqa, Syria. The officials also said a sleeper cell in France helped the attackers execute the plan after they arrived and the operation included 24 people—19 attackers and five working on planning and logistics.

The AP also reported that a senior French security official responded to the claims by the Iraqi officials by saying French intelligence receives such warnings “all the time” and “every day.”

Belgian’s Justice Minister Koen Geens also reportedly told CNN’s Ivan Watson that authorities knew some of the Paris attackers were foreign fighters in Syria but were unaware they had returned.

“Belgium has a foreign fighters problem,” Geens said.

Writing in Slate on Monday, Brian Michael Jenkins explained why even advanced knowledge about suspected ISIS sympathizers and fighters might not be enough to prevent such attacks:

[O]ne should not underestimate the difficulties of intelligence collection in Europe today. France’s intelligence services are being overwhelmed by the many individuals who have gone to join jihadi fronts in Syria (some of whom have returned), those suspected of preparing to go, and still others suspected of being involved in plotting or supporting terrorist plots. The total number easily runs into the thousands. Keeping every one of them under close surveillance is not possible. Choices have to be made. Some plots will be thwarted. Others will inevitably evade detection.

By Jeremy Stahl
NOV. 16 2015 12:14 PM

Find this story at 16 November 2015

© 2015 The Slate Group LLC

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PARIS — The gunfire had still not subsided, and those who could were running for their lives. But one man was crossing Paris to get close to the scenes of death.

Just after 10 p.m. on Nov. 13, the man, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, parked his rented getaway car in the eastern suburb of Montreuil, leaving behind the Kalashnikov he is believed to have used to shoot diners in central Paris a half-hour before. Apparently unconcerned as security cameras recorded his movements, he boarded the No. 9 subway line and returned to the part of the city that was still under siege. Before the night was over, investigators say, he had walked past the shattered cafes and bloodied concert hall that had been among his targets.

After a year of plotting terror in Europe but only producing four fizzled attempts, Mr. Abaaoud made sure this time was different. This time, he was on the scene, not directing from afar. This time, he monitored his team of assassins — old friends and new zealots — and surveyed the suffering. This time, investigators say, he had prepared for a second wave of assaults days later, and planned to die himself as a suicide bomber in the heart of the Paris region’s business district.

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GRAPHIC
How the Organizer of the Paris Attacks Slipped Through Authorities’ Hands
Abdelhamid Abaaoud, who organized the Nov. 13 terrorist attacks in Paris, crisscrossed Europe and the Middle East, even though he was on a Belgian watch list.

OPEN GRAPHIC
A foot soldier turned lieutenant in the Islamic State’s hierarchy, Mr. Abaaoud, a 28-year-old Belgian, had been under increasing pressure to deliver something big, Western intelligence officials say. “All these operations in 2015 had been failures, embarrassing failures,” said Louis Caprioli, a former deputy head of France’s domestic counterterrorism unit. “He needed to make sure this operation succeeds.”

Two weeks after the attacks, as France buries its dead and a lengthening list of Mr. Abaaoud’s suspected confederates are rounded up, more evidence has emerged about how the group of at least nine militants pulled off the assaults, and the intelligence and security lapses that allowed them to do so.

There had been repeated hints of their intentions and efforts to hone their skills, according to dozens of interviews, court documents and government disclosures. Despite growing alarm in French counterterrorism circles about the threat they posed, the overburdened security apparatus proved ill equipped against an enemy practicing what one official calls “dartboard terrorism,” hurling multiple lethal darts at a distant target until one hits the mark.

In January, the police raided a safehouse in the Belgian town of Verviers, thwarting a plot that proved to be a chilling precursor to the synchronized murder that played out across the French capital 10 months later. The raid uncovered an arsenal that included the ingredients to make the same volatile explosives used in Paris, according to an American intelligence document.

The militants have become “more professional,” learning from their mistakes, said one intelligence official. Earlier this year, a plotter linked to Mr. Abaaoud planned to mow down the congregation at a French church but instead shot himself in the leg. But the gunmen in Paris — a majority of them battle-hardened in Syria — were well trained. After phone taps uncovered the Verviers plan, Mr. Abaaoud began using encryption technology and may have concealed his communications in that way with his Paris team, intelligence officials said.

Continue reading the main story
State of Terror
Articles in this series examine the rise of the Islamic State and life inside the territory it has conquered.

Exploiting Europe’s passport-free zone and patchy intelligence sharing, Mr. Abaaoud and his team moved not just across the Continent, but also to Syria and back. They did so despite being questioned at airports, flagged by security services or pulled over during routine traffic stops.

“Abaaoud was in the database of every single European country, but he returned to Europe like he was going on a vacation to Club Med,” said the mother of an 18-year-old Belgian jihadist who died earlier this year after joining the same Islamic State brigade to which several of the Paris plotters belonged.

The attack in Paris was the deadliest terrorist assault on the Continent in a decade, killing 130 people. It reverberated across the region, forcing Brussels to lock down for four days, spurring Germany to cancel a soccer match and prompting Britain to increase its military budget after years of cutbacks.

Trying to reassure a grieving nation, President François Hollande of France has pledged to defeat the Islamic State’s “cult of death.” Yet intelligence officials warned of the West’s vulnerabilities. Paris, they fear, heralds a new era of terror, one that could play out on the streets of European capitals for years to come.

“They try, they fail, they learn, they try again,” said one French official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “They have patience and they have an army of willing martyrs that feed on an ideology that is immune to bullets.”

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The Expanding Web of Connections Among the Paris Attackers
Warning Signs

Earlier this year, an official at Europol, the Continent’s law enforcement agency, paid an urgent visit to Athens to ask for help tracking down a Belgian named Abdelhamid Abaaoud, according to news media reports.

For months, investigators had been intercepting suspicious calls originating near Pangrati, a neighborhood of Athens, said a retired European official who was briefed on the details.

Mr. Abaaoud, then 27, appeared to be planning an attack in his native land — a possibility considered improbable at first. He seemed like other young Europeans who had joined the Islamic State: a fanatic who made grandiose threats online, but did not have the know-how or the network to pull off mass murder on European soil.

But after the calls were tracked to Verviers, a SWAT team raided a residence there on Jan. 15, turning up evidence of surprising sophistication. The police found automatic weapons, a large quantity of cash, a body camera, multiple cellphones, hand-held radios and fraudulent identification documents, according to a United States Department of Homeland Security intelligence assessment.

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Paris Victims, Remembered
They also found the precursor chemicals for the explosive triacetone triperoxide, or TATP, according to the document, which was the same chemical compound used in the suicide belts in Paris. The compound is highly volatile, according to Claude Moniquet, who spent two decades at the French spy agency D.G.S.E. “If you don’t get it just right, you’ll either blow off your hand, or it won’t go off at all,” Mr. Moniquet said. “It suggests the presence of a bombmaker.”

The discovery set off a manhunt in Greece, but Mr. Abaaoud’s SIM card stopped transmitting immediately after the raid. The police found his DNA in an Athens apartment, according to news media reports. But officials lost his trail.

A few weeks later, Mr. Abaaoud resurfaced in the Islamic State’s online magazine, bragging about having plotted terrorism under the noses of the European authorities. “My name and picture were all over the news yet I was able to stay in their homeland, plan operations against them, and leave safely,” he said.

Until then, said David Thomson, the author of a book on French jihadists, Mr. Abaaoud had been seen inside the Islamic State as nothing special. “They spoke of him as they would of anyone else — and not as an important guy,” Mr. Thomson said.

If anything, he was known mostly for his appearance in a grotesque Islamic State video, whooping and laughing while dragging corpses behind a 4-by-4 truck.

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How ISIS Expanded Its Threat
Yet Europe’s most notorious jihadist was once a hapless delinquent.

In 2010, he planned to break into a garage in the Belgian countryside with a childhood friend. But he slipped off the roof, and the pair were later found soaking wet and nearing hypothermia on a river edge, recalled his former lawyer, Alexandre Château.

The bungled burglary was unremarkable, but the partnership was not: His accomplice was one of two brothers who would later be at Mr. Abaaoud’s side during the Paris attacks.

Mr. Abaaoud’s father said his son began showing signs of extremism after a stint in prison.

On March 23, 2013, the authorities intercepted a call Mr. Abaaoud made on a Turkish cellphone to a friend in Belgium. He said he was leaving for “The Camp,” according to court records. His brother told Belgian security officials that Mr. Abaaoud had said he was going to Syria “to do jihad,” according to a court transcript.

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When the police went to search his home in the Molenbeek district of Brussels months later, the items found inside his abandoned residence included pepper spray, gloves and two crowbars, along with the keys to a stolen Audi and three license plates.

Inscriptions praising the Islamic State, also known as ISIS and ISIL, were on his door. On the wall, the court filing noted, was “a crude drawing of the ISIS flag, drawn with a marker.”

Sometime between late 2013 and early 2014, he joined a brigade called the Mujahedeen Shura Council based in Aleppo, Syria, which would soon pledge allegiance to the Islamic State.

One of his first jobs was searching the bodies of freshly killed troops. “He was in charge of emptying the pockets of cadavers after battle,” Mr. Thomson said.

Even when Mr. Abaaoud — by then called Abou Omar — joined the Katibat al-Battar, or Battar Brigade, an elite squad made up of French-speaking fighters that rose to prominence in 2014 within the Islamic State, his name surfaced only in passing, said Mr. Thomson, who spent months exchanging private messages with the French members of the unit as research for his book.

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In January, the police raided a terrorist safe house in Verviers, Belgium, and uncovered an arsenal of weapons. Credit Olivier Hoslet/European Pressphoto Agency
That changed abruptly after the Verviers plot. Though the operation had failed, Mr. Abaaoud’s ability to travel in and out of Europe impressed his fellow fighters in Syria, turning him from an ordinary soldier into an inspiration. “They would say, ‘Look at Abou Omar,’ ” Mr. Thomson recalled. “By which they meant: ‘If Abou Omar succeeded, then anyone can.’ ”

Battlefield Bonds

Investigators say they believe that it was in Syria that Mr. Abaaoud and most of the Paris attackers found one other.

As early as 2013, a well-established pipeline was funneling young men from Belgium to the Islamic State. Some took out loans with few questions asked from institutions like ING Belgium, where one future jihadist received 15,000 euros, or about $15,800, according to a recent court filing. Others bought cheap “burner” phones that are often discarded in an effort to avoid detection. One man stole flashlights and GoPro cameras, a favored tool for recording atrocities, according to court documents.

They knew to leave via trains or buses to other European countries before boarding flights to Turkey, evading relatively greater scrutiny at airports in their home countries.

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A photograph of Abdelhamid Abaaoud that was published in the Islamic State’s online magazine Dabiq. Credit via Associated Pres
Mr. Abaaoud, for example, accompanied his 13-year-old brother, Younes, to Syria, apparently by first making their way by land to Germany.

On Jan. 20, 2014, they checked in for a flight to Istanbul from Cologne. At passport control, an alert flashed: Mr. Abaaoud was on a Belgian watch list. When he claimed to be visiting family in Turkey, he was allowed to proceed.

Even when suspects are properly classified, they can fall through the cracks because of the lack of a centralized European database. There are currently 1,595 jihadists in the Europol terror database, said Jean-Charles Brisard, who has testified as an expert witness in terrorism trials. The actual number, if European countries shared their information more efficiently, should be well over 6,000, he said.

Many of the future Paris attackers ended up in the Battar brigade in Syria. Only Mr. Abaaoud and the two brothers from Molenbeek, Salah and Ibrahim Abdeslam, appear to have known one other before they were radicalized.

Several came from intact, middle-class families, including Mr. Abaaoud, a shop owner’s son who had been sent to an exclusive Catholic school. Second- and third-generation immigrants of Moroccan and Algerian descent, the attackers included a bus driver, a bar owner and a mechanic for the Brussels Métro. The oldest was 29, the youngest just 20 — he wept, his mother recalls, the day he left for Syria.

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The plotters Clockwise from top left; Samy Amimour, one of the suicide bombers who attacked the Bataclan concert hall; an unidentified man, one of the suicide bombers at the Stade de France stadium; Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the suspected architect of the Paris attacks; Ibrahim Abdeslam, a Bataclan attacker; Ismaël Omar Mostefaï, a Bataclan attacker; an unidentified man suspected of being involved in the attacks; Bilal Hadfi, one of the suicide bombers at the stadium; and Salah Abdeslam, who remains at large. Credit Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Some had criminal records, and their families were reassured at first when they began to show signs of piety.

Mohammed Abdeslam said he had believed his two brothers were cleaning up their act. “When your brother tells you that he will stop drinking, it’s not radicalization,” he told a Belgian broadcaster.

Bilal Hadfi, the youngest of the group, had been smoking and doing drugs until one month before his departure to Syria in January, his mother told the Belgian news media, and started fasting on Mondays and Thursdays.

“He was by no means the cliché you’d expect,” recalled one of his mentors at the Instituut Anneessens-Funck in Brussels, where Mr. Hadfi, 20, was studying to become an electrician. “He didn’t have a beard.” He had “excellent grades” and was “extremely intelligent,” said the professor, who asked to remain anonymous in talking about a student. Then Mr. Hadfi stopped coming to class.

Mr. Hadfi is believed to have arrived in Syria last, on Jan. 15, eventually joining a team that included two hardened French jihadists: Ismaël Omar Mostefaï, a 29-year-old from the Courcouronnes suburb of Paris, and Samy Amimour, a 28-year-old bus driver from Drancy, northeast of the French capital.

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A mosque outside Chartres, France, that was attended by Ismaël Omar Mostefaï, whose contact with hard-line Islamists prompted officials to a database of those considered a potential security risk. Credit Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York Times
Mr. Mostefaï was arrested eight times for petty crimes, and in 2010 his contact with hard-line Islamists at the local mosque prompted officials to add his name to the “S list,” a French database of those considered a potential security risk.

Mr. Amimour’s route to jihad began with an aborted trip to Yemen in 2012. After he stopped reporting to the police station in September 2013 as required, it took a month for an arrest warrant to be issued. By then, he had crossed into Syria — the same day as Mr. Mostefaï, officials say they believe.

As Frenchmen, the two would most likely have come across an older French jihadist who had already made a name for himself in the Islamic State: Fabien Clain, who had been to prison for recruiting fighters from France and Belgium to Iraq a decade ago. Mr. Clain, investigators said, was the speaker in an Islamic State audio recording claiming responsibility for the Paris massacre.

Intelligence officials call him a “bridge” between the French and Belgian jihadists who may have facilitated links between Mr. Abaaoud and his fellow plotters. Described as one of the most senior operatives in the Islamic State hierarchy, he works under Abu Mohammed al-Adnani, the group’s chief of external operations. Mr. Abaaoud was lowlier, “a platoon leader, not the head of the armed forces,” said François Heisbourg, a former defense official and counterterrorism expert.

By August, Mr. Abaaoud’s blueprint and team for attacking Europe may have been nearly ready.

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Marc Trévidic, who served as France’s chief antiterrorism judge until three months ago, said he had heard Mr. Abaaoud’s name numerous times over the past year. Credit Remy De La Mauviniere/Associated Press
That month, Montasser AlDe’emeh, the author of two books on jihad and a former neighbor of Mr. Abaaoud’s in Molenbeek, heard his phone vibrate with a WhatsApp message. It was an audio recording from a Belgian jihadist in the same unit as Mr. Abaaoud.

“This is a message for the Belgian government from the mujahedeen of ISIS,” the audio begins. “It’s not a threat or a stupid thing, or just talk. This is a declaration of war. We have the plans.”

Raising the Alarm

The man who served as France’s chief antiterrorism judge until three months ago had heard Mr. Abaaoud’s name numerous times over the past year. Dozens of young French Muslims returning from Syria were brought to his office for questioning.

“Abaaoud came up all the time,” the judge, Marc Trévidic, recalled in an interview last week. “Especially after the January raids in Verviers.”

Photo

Fans left the Stade de France after the soccer game between France and Germany amid confusion caused by the attacks in the area. Credit Christophe Ena/Associated Press
It was always the same story: Mr. Abaaoud had told his young disciples to “do whatever they can” to inflict death and damage at home. They described him as obsessed. “He was mentioned as someone who wanted, at all cost, to recruit volunteers to carry out attacks in Belgium and France,” said Mr. Trévidic, now vice president of the high court in Lille, northern France.

But there was never a specific target, nor a date for an attack. The mission was always vague.

That changed on Aug. 15. In one of the last interviews the judge conducted, he found himself opposite a young Frenchman who had been handed money, encryption software and the most concrete target to date: “a rock concert hall” in Paris.

The young man, Reda Hame, had been arrested coming back from Syria, accompanied by a Muslim from Belgium. His companion had told the police that Mr. Hame was planning an attack in France.

Mr. Abaaoud had asked Mr. Hame to hit a soft target where he could achieve “maximum casualties.” He had given Mr. Hame an email address to reach him on and a USB stick with an encryption key he was to download on his computer. Mr. Abaaoud had promised further instructions by email on where to obtain weapons for the attack and which specific concert hall to strike.

Photo

Emergency workers removed the bodies of victims at a cafe in Paris. Credit Philippe Wojazer/Reuters
It was two weeks before Paris’s annual Rock en Seine musical festival. Was the target one of dozens of concerts playing over the three-day event in a Paris suburb? Was it one of the city’s many other music venues, like the Bataclan, which had been mentioned as a possible target at least twice before?

Mr. Trévidic placed an urgent call with the domestic intelligence services, the D.G.S.I., and asked them to trace Mr. Abaaoud’s email address.

“From late summer we knew something big was being planned,” said one French intelligence official. “We knew Abaaoud was involved in it but we didn’t know what, or where, or when. Everyone was on high alert.”

The sense of alarm only spread when, six days after Mr. Hame’s interview, a 26-year-old Moroccan, Ayoub El Khazzani, also linked to Mr. Abaaoud, stepped out of the bathroom of a high-speed train barreling toward Paris with a Kalashnikov before being subdued by three Americans.

With hindsight, some suggest the lone-wolf style attacks — single gunmen sent on missions to kill — that were thwarted in recent months were never the main focus. Whatever his intention, Mr. Trévidic said, Mr. Abaaoud “kept security services busy and distracted with these mini-plots while preparing the real attack.”

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Three Hours of Terror in Paris, Moment by Moment
Many of the attacks were just minutes apart.

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The United States had also picked up intelligence in recent months that showed the Islamic State was plotting an attack in France, senior American officials said. But they had nothing specific about targets or timing.

By late September, Mr. Hollande’s government launched airstrikes on Islamic State targets in Syria.

On Oct. 8 and 9, French fighter jets targeted training camps near Raqqa, the stronghold of the self-proclaimed caliphate in Syria. Mr. Hollande has publicly denied that the strikes were targeting an individual. But according to two Western intelligence officials, the hope was also to take out operatives including Mr. Abaaoud.

“When you don’t know where to hit the enemy here, you have to try to hit him over there,” Bernard Squarcini, the former head of France’s domestic intelligence agency, said in an interview.

A Calculated Attack

While the security services had their eyes on Syria, most if not all of Mr. Abaaoud’s team was already back in Europe, quietly putting in place the modern logistics of mass murder.

At least two are believed to have entered through the refugee flow on the Greek island of Leros, where the authorities fingerprinted them in October.

In the period leading up to the attack, the support network expanded — though just how far is not yet clear — to include radicalized family members and loyal friends, landlords and online arms dealers. Mr. Abaaoud’s cousin helped hide him after the attacks before dying alongside him in a police raid. Five friends of Salah Abdeslam, who dumped his suicide vest in a trash can and remains at large as the only surviving member of the attackers, have been arrested in Belgium for allegedly helping him escape. In Germany, one man who may have sold the group assault rifles over the Internet was placed in custody last week.

The plan involved three teams, whose members set off in at least three rental cars from Belgium and booked rooms in at least two locations in and around Paris, including two hotel rooms in the suburb of Alfortville and a house with bunk beds in Bobigny. Like tourists, they used online services including Booking.com and Homelidays.com, with the Abdeslam brothers handling the logistics.

In September, Salah Abdeslam made a foray to the edges of Paris to buy half a dozen electronic components used to make fireworks explode. He spent 390 euros in Les Magiciens du Feu, or “Fire Magicians” shop, said the shop’s in-house lawyer, Frédéric Zajac. “Unlike other clients, he did not ask any questions about how it all worked,” he said.

Mr. Abaaoud had learned from past mistakes: Unlike the plot in January, when his accomplices were still searching for an ice machine to store the TATP explosive, he made sure they had refrigerators. At the Appart’City hotel where four of the attackers stayed, rooms come with a kitchenette.

And rather than sending a single gunman or picking a single target, Mr. Abaaoud sent teams to a variety of locations — hedging the risk of failure and forcing the police to spread themselves thin. “They found out that if you use this ‘swarm theory’ you will exhaust the resources of law enforcement,” explained Ron Sandee, the former chief Al Qaeda analyst for Dutch military intelligence.

The roster for each team suggests more forethought: The two jihadists with more than four years of battlefield experience in Syria between them, Mr. Amimour and Mr. Mostefaï, were assigned the most important target, the Bataclan, with a third, still-unidentified man. Witnesses say they saw the Bataclan gunmen flanking each other, with one fighter reloading his magazine while another kept firing.

By contrast, the attackers at the Stade de France, the national soccer stadium, included the youngest and least experienced jihadist — the 20-year-old Mr. Hadfi. He was dropped off strapped with an explosive belt that needed only detonating. (Neither of the other two suicide bombers at the stadium has been identified.) “They said to themselves, ‘The kids will get as far as they can,’ ” and after that only need to “hit a button,” said Mr. Moniquet, a veteran of France’s intelligence agency who now directs the European Strategic Intelligence and Security Center.

Mr. Abaaoud himself was believed to have gone to a busy stretch of restaurants on the Rue de Charonne, equipped with the Kalashnikov that was later recovered bearing his DNA. Phone records released by the French prosecutor indicate that he left the house at Bobigny in a rented Seat car at 8:38 p.m. accompanied by another still-unidentified attacker and Ibrahim Abdeslam, his accomplice in the bungled garage theft five years ago.

It remains unclear if Mr. Abaaoud joined his troops to fire on the bars and cafes, though it seems likely: Witnesses saw gunmen leaning out of the black Seat rental car, and in front of each shattered establishment, investigators recovered “hundreds” of 7.62-millimeter cartridges, according to the French prosecutor.

Between 8:40 p.m. and 9:21 p.m. the phone “most probably” used by Mr. Abaaoud was in “sustained contact” with the one used by Mr. Hadfi, according to the Paris prosecutor. That was when Mr. Hadfi tried to enter the soccer stadium near Gate D, only to be turned away.

Moments later, at 9:20, he detonated the explosive.

The last attempted call between the two phones came a minute later — the platoon leader checking up on the recruit.

Correction: December 3, 2015
Because of a transcription error, an article on Tuesday about the intelligence and security lapses that allowed the Paris attackers to practice their assault misstated the size of the cartridges recovered by investigators in front of the bars and cafes targeted. They are 7.62 millimeters, not 0.762.

Reporting was contributed by Nabih Bulos, Aurelien Breeden and Lilia Blaise from Paris; Eric Schmitt from Washington; Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura and Andrew Higgins from Brussels; and Alison Smale from Berlin.

Get news and analysis from Europe and around the world delivered to your inbox every day with the Today’s Headlines: European Morning newsletter. Sign up here.

A version of this article appears in print on December 1, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Plot Honed by Trial and Error . Order Reprints| Today’s Paper|Subscribe

By RUKMINI CALLIMACHI, KATRIN BENNHOLD and LAURE FOURQUETNOV. 30, 2015 122
Find this story at 30 November 2015

© 2015 The New York Times Company

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Greek police tried to capture the suspected ringleader of the Paris terror attacks, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, in January but the operation failed.
A Belgian anti-terrorism source told the BBC the Athens operation planned to target Abaaoud before anti-terror raids in Belgium, but that did not happen.
Abaaoud had been directing the Belgian cell by phone from Athens.
Abaaoud died in a battle with French police five days after the 13 November Paris attacks that killed 130 people.
The Greek operation was supposed to have taken place before the one carried out by security forces in Verviers, eastern Belgium, on 15 January. That raid saw an exchange of fire that left two suspected jihadists dead.

DNA samples

Greek authorities were on Abaaoud’s trail, believing him to be running the Belgian cell by mobile phone from Athens.
Anti-terror sources told the BBC that a senior Belgian police officer was in Athens co-ordinating the hunt for Abaaoud with his Greek counterparts before the raid on the Verviers cell.
It remains unclear why or how Abaaoud slipped through the Greek net. There may have been an attempt to track him down to a city centre square by tracing the signal of his mobile phone. But that did not work.
The Greek authorities are not confirming any details – all that is known is that he got away.
Greek police only carried out raids in Athens two days after Verviers, on 17 January.
Earlier that day Belgian media had reported that authorities there were seeking Abaaoud, a Brussels resident of Moroccan origin, who was believed to be in hiding in Greece.
Police in Verviers. 15 Jan 2015Image copyrightEPA
Image caption
The Verviers raid left two suspected jihadists dead
Greek police raided two flats in Athens.
One Algerian man was eventually extradited to Belgium but Abaaoud was not to be found.
It is now known that traces of DNA recovered in both flats match samples recovered from Abaaoud’s body in Paris.
A neighbour at one of the flats, Vasilis Katsanos, said he had seen Abdelhamid Abaaoud in the street outside on at least two occasions.
Abdelhamid Abaaoud had been implicated in four out of six foiled attacks since this spring in France and sentenced to 20 years in prison in absentia, French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve has said.
Abaaoud is not the only link between Greece and the Paris attacks.
Salah Abdeslam – who is still on the run – travelled to Greece by ferry from Italy on 1 August, leaving three days later.
And two of the suicide bombers who attacked the Stade de France crossed by boat from Turkey to the island of Leros in October, posing as refugees.
Much of the detail that has emerged in Athens raises questions about how to create a better exchange of information and closer cooperation between anti-terrorism authorities in different European countries.
But the link with Abaaoud is also a what-might-have-been.
If he had been captured in Athens in January, the attacks in Paris might never have taken place.

By Chris Morris
BBC News, Athens
8 December 2015

Find this story at 8 December 2015

© 2015 BBC

Van nieuwsblog.burojansen.nl

The head of a Serbian arms factory Milojko Brzakovic speaks during an interview with The Associated Press, in Belgrade, Serbia, Thursday, Dec. 10, 2015. Brzakovic of the Zastava arms factory told the Associated Press Thursday that the M92 semi-automatic pistol was traced after its serial number matched the one delivered to an American arms dealer in May 2013.

BELGRADE, Serbia (AP) — In a Dec. 10 story, The Associated Press incorrectly reported that a gun exported by a Serbian manufacturer to a Florida-based company was involved in the Nov. 13 Paris attacks. In fact, the gun in question was not involved in the attacks and has been in Mexican government custody since March of this year, according to U.S. authorities.

The AP report was based on information from the Serbian gun manufacturer Zastava, which cited to AP an advisory from the Serbian Interior Ministry. The advisory quoted Interpol authorities as saying a gun manufactured by Zastava with a particular serial number was used in Paris. The AP story should have made clear that the connection between a Zastava gun with that serial number and the Paris attacks was based only on this advisory.

Zastava said it exported a gun with that serial number to Delray Beach, Florida-based Century Arms in 2013. According to the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the gun was received by Century and eventually sent to a federal firearms licensee in the United States and purchased by an individual in February 2014. In March of this year it was recovered at a crime scene in Mexico and is still in the custody of Mexican officials, ATF said.

Serbian authorities declined to provide any additional details this week on the advisory cited by Zastava or what it was based on. Interpol said it could not provide additional material because it only acts as a clearinghouse for information among police agencies. Interpol said it would defer to the information from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives on the case.

By JOVANA GEC and DUSAN STOJANOVIC
Dec. 18, 2015 2:15 PM EST

find this story at 18 December 2015

© 2015 Associated Press

Van nieuwsblog.burojansen.nl

Many accounts of the investigation into Friday’s Paris terror attacks have described seven attackers who are known to be dead and one suspect, Salah Abdeslam, who’s known to be alive. Those eight individuals constitute the three suicide bombers who attacked the Stade de France area, three who attacked the Bataclan theater, one who blew himself up in a café near the center of the city, and the still-missing Abdeslam, whose role is unclear. But the individuals responsible for the machine-gun attacks on bars and restaurants in Paris’ city center in which more than 30 people were killed have not been identified, while a breaking report from the AP says authorities are now seeking a “second fugitive” who was directly involved in the attacks. From the wire service:
Three French officials told The Associated Press on Tuesday that an analysis of the attacks showed that one person directly involved in them was unaccounted for. The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to provide details about the ongoing investigation, said the second fugitive has not been identified.
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The shooting attacks in the city center were reportedly carried out by gunmen traveling in a black SEAT León car at four restaurants/bars in three different locations: First at the Petit Cambodge restaurant and nearby Carillon bar, then at a pizzeria called Casa Nostra, then at a bar called Belle Équipe. A black SEAT León with three Kalashnikov rifles inside was then found abandoned early Sunday morning in the Paris suburb of Montreuil.

Who were the gunmen traveling in that car and where are they now? One of the men could have been Ibrahim Abdeslam, Salah’s brother, who blew himself up at a café called Comptoir Voltaire near the other shooting sites after the shootings had already taken place. Salah Abdeslam, meanwhile, was apparently stopped on Saturday near the Belgian border in a car with two other men but wasn’t detained because the officers who stopped him didn’t realize or hadn’t been told that he was a suspect. (Abdeslam’s two companions have since been found and arrested, but he’s still missing.) It seems possible that the pair of brothers and the AP’s “second fugitive” had something to do with the restaurant shootings and that Salah Abdeslam could have ditched the SEAT León before fleeing for Belgium. But four days after dozens were killed at Petit Cambodge, Carillon, Casa Nostra, and Belle Équipe, we still don’t know for sure who was responsible for killing them and whether those attackers are still at large.

By Ben Mathis-Lilley
NOV. 17 2015 1:23 PM

Find this story at 17 November 2015

© 2015 The Slate Group LLC.

Van nieuwsblog.burojansen.nl

Les terroristes ont contourné les militaires, qui souhaitaient faire évoluer leur dispositif pour le rendre moins statique. Mais le gouvernement ne voulait pas alors donner l’impression de baisser la garde dans la protection des écoles, juives notamment.

A la suite des attentats du début de l’année, l’opération Sentinelle a été déclenchée le 12 janvier. Mobilisant d’abord 10000 hommes, elle devait s’inscrire dans la durée avec 7000 hommes chargés de la protection d’environ 800 sites sensibles, dont près de la moitié en région parisienne. Suite aux attaques de vendredi, l’Elysée a annoncé l’arrivée de 3000 hommes en renfort.
Comme la Ligne Maginot en 1940, le dispositif militaire de sécurité intérieure a été contourné par l’ennemi. Les terroristes n’ont pas attaqué les sites protégés par l’opération Sentinelle, en particulier ceux de la communauté juive, mais ils ont porté le feu ailleurs. Là où il n’y avait pas de militaires. A cet égard, le Bataclan est un nouveau Sedan.
Les attaques du vendredi 13 soulignent l’impossibilité d’assurer la protection des Français, désormais tous menacés, grâce au déploiement de l’armée dans les rues. L’Elysée peut bien annoncer l’arrivée de 3000 hommes en renfort, qui s’ajouteront aux 7000 déjà engagés, le problème reste entier : quel rôle l’armée peut-elle jouer dans la sécurité intérieure ?
Depuis des mois, ce sujet fait l’objet de discussions entre les responsables gouvernementaux et militaires. Les attentats de Paris vont les relancer, voire les amplifier, parce que la question de l’efficacité du dispositif se pose désormais de manière criante.
Dès les lendemains des attentats contre Charlie et l’Hyper Cacher, les militaires avaient été déployés, dans le cadre de l’opération Sentinelle, pour protéger certains sites sensibles. 7000 militaires (l’équivalent de deux brigades sur les 12 que compte l’armée de terre) l’étaient depuis lors de manière permanente. Au passage, le ministère de la Défense a bénéficié d’une rallonge budgétaire de 4,8 milliards, qui a permis de préserver 18 500 postes. Une mesure très bien accueillie dans la troupe, le chef d’état-major de l’armée de terre, le général Bosser, assurant même les députés de sa « pleine satisfaction ».
Mission de protection ponctuelle. Mais il y a un hic : les soldats professionnels ne sont pas des vigiles ou des supplétifs des forces de police. Si, dans une situation d’urgence, ils peuvent être engagés dans des missions de protection ponctuelle, ils n’ont pas vocation à l’être de manière permanente et massive. Malgré les primes et la médaille qui vient d’être créée, Sentinelle n’est guère populaire dans les casernes. Monter la garde dans les rues de Paris, ce n’est pas ce que les jeunes venaient chercher en s’engageant.
Depuis l’été, les états-majors cherchaient donc à faire évoluer leur dispositif, en le rendant plus mobile, plus réactif, moins « scotché », selon le mot d’un officier. Or, scotchés, les militaires le sont pour l’essentiel devant les sites de la communauté juive. D’où la gêne de tous les responsables sur cette question. Personne ne veut fournir des chiffres précis : environ 800 sites sont concernés par l’opération Sentinelle et parmi eux « une grande majorité de lieux de culte et d’écoles », reconnaît-on au ministère de la Défense. En dehors de la communauté juive, un officier assure que « des dizaines d’églises sont concernées et que les mosquées sont plutôt protégées par des patrouilles » que par une garde permanente. La liste des sites sensibles est fixée par le ministère de l’Intérieur, sur la base du travail des préfets, l’armée agissant ensuite dans le cadre d’une « réquisition ».
Selon les services de renseignement intérieur, la communauté juive, notamment ses écoles, fait toujours l’objet d’une menace très sérieuse. Après l’affaire Ilan Halimi, les attaques de Mohammed Merah contre l’école Ozar Hatorah (4 morts, dont 3 enfants) et d’Amedy Coulibaly contre l’Hyper Cacher (4 morts) ont profondément traumatisé les Français d’origine juive. Ils attendent que la République les protège et les rassure. Mais depuis vendredi, tous les Français sont désormais dans leur cas.
Jusqu’à présent, personne au sommet de l’Etat n’a voulu prendre le risque de retirer un militaire de la protection d’une école juive. L’armée est bel et bien « scotchée », une situation inconfortable du point de vue tactique. Mais, explique un responsable gouvernemental, « si l’Elysée a décidé de préserver des effectifs et d’augmenter le budget de la Défense, c’est pour faire Sentinelle et pas des missions de sécurité intérieure que l’armée s’inventerait », comme la protection des frontières avec les migrants ou le « contrôle de zones » dans les quartiers sensibles.
Rapport au Premier ministre. Une réflexion gouvernementale sur l’engagement de l’armée en France, pilotée par le Secrétariat général de la défense et de la sécurité nationale (SGDSN), est en cours. Elle devait aboutir en janvier à la remise d’un rapport au Premier ministre, fixant le nouveau cadre d’emploi de l’armée sur le territoire national. La nouvelle donne terroriste risque de compliquer encore les choses.
Dix mois après le déclenchement de l’opération Sentinelle, on ne connaît toujours pas les grands principes qui doivent guider l’action militaire sur le sol national, c’est-à-dire face à des Français dans le cadre d’un Etat de droit. « Pour un militaire, un citoyen ne peut pas devenir un adversaire », explique-t-on à l’état-major des armées. « Nous pouvons être engagés pour faire face à la menace terroriste, mais pas dans des missions d’ordre public ». Des généraux ont, un temps, réclamé que les militaires reçoivent certains pouvoirs de police… ce qui revenait à les transformer en gendarmes. L’état d’urgence décrété et la « guerre » dont parle le chef de l’Etat vont-ils faire évoluer les choses dans ce sens ? On se retrouverait alors dans une situation proche de celle des débuts de la guerre d’Algérie, quand les socialistes étaient déjà au pouvoir.
Pour le général Pierre de Villiers, chef d’état-major des armées, « plutôt que de suppléer les forces de sécurité, les armées doivent apporter des savoir-faire complémentaires ». Reste à savoir lesquels ? Personne n’a encore fourni de réponses définitives et convaincantes. « La capacité de travailler jour et nuit, une grande mobilité, un savoir-faire en matière de renseignement – tant humain que via des drones », expliquait récemment le patron de l’armée de terre. Tout ou presque, sauf des gardes statiques permanentes…
L’armée de terre n’est pourtant pas prête à renoncer à cette mission Sentinelle. Par conviction, comme l’exprime le général de Villiers : « La mission des armées, en temps de crise comme en temps de paix, est de protéger tous les Français où qu’ils se trouvent. » Mais aussi par intérêt bien compris. Car Sentinelle lui a permis de sauver ce qui fait le cœur de son identité : ses effectifs.

Jean-Dominique Merchet 15 novembre 2015 à 16h28
Find this story at 15 November 2015

© l’Opinion 2015

Van nieuwsblog.burojansen.nl

And yet intelligence officials and politicians are now saying it could have. They’re wrong.

Since terrorists struck Paris last Friday night, the debate over whether encryption prevents intelligence services from stopping attacks has reignited. The New York Times and Yahoo reported on vague claims that the terrorists’ use of encryption stymied investigators who might have thwarted their plans. CIA Director John Brennan made equally vague comments Monday morning, warning that thanks to the privacy protections of the post-Snowden era, it is now “much more challenging” for intelligence agencies to find terrorists. Jeb Bush piled on, saying that the United States needs to restore its program collecting metadata on U.S. phone calls, even though that program won’t be shut down until the end of this month.

Following a terrorism incident as shocking as the Paris attacks, it is no surprise that politicians and the intelligence establishment would want to widen American spying capabilities. But their arguments are conflating the forest—bulk metadata collection—and the trees: access to individual communications about the attack. To understand why that’s the case, start with this tweet from former NSA and DHS official Stewart Baker: “NSA’s 215 program”—and by association the far larger metadata dragnet of which the domestically focused phone-metadata program is just a small part—“was designed to detect a Mumbai/Paris-style attack.”

Only it didn’t.

The metadata surveillance system appears to have failed before it even got to the encryption stage.
The United States and United Kingdom’s metadata collection that focuses on the Middle East and Europe is far more extensive than the phone dragnet being shut down later this month, and its use has far more permissive rules. This dragnet is mostly limited by technology, not law. And France—which rewrote its surveillance laws after the Charlie Hebdo attack earlier this year—has its own surveillance system. Both are in place, yet neither detected the Nov. 13 plot. This means they failed to alert authorities to the people they should more closely target via both electronic and physical surveillance. In significant part, this system appears to have failed before it even got to the stage at which investigators would need to worry about terrorists’ use of encryption.

To understand why that’s true, it helps to understand how the metadata dragnet relates to surveillance of content as well as human spying.

In most public comments going back to the initial leaks from Edward Snowden (and in Baker’s tweet from the weekend), authorities have made a shaky claim: that the surveillance dragnet is “designed to detect” an attack like Paris. Based on that claimed purpose, their dragnets are failing.

But that claim was always an oversimplification. It oversold the importance of the dragnet, by itself, such that citizens might more willingly tolerate the collection of highly revealing personal details. Because it doesn’t include the actual content of our conversations, call metadata doesn’t seem especially intimate; if it’s the only thing authorities say they need to prevent a big terrorist attack, citizens might easily conclude that they’re fine with the government collecting it. But the claim also served to hide how quickly metadata analysis can lead to the reading of content.

The intelligence community has given us a more nuanced understanding of the purpose of the metadata dragnet, however, in a National Academy of Sciences paper on “Bulk Collection of Signals Intelligence” released earlier this year. President Obama asked for the paper in early 2014 to assess whether the intelligence apparatus could accomplish what it currently does with metadata dragnets (both those conducted in the U.S. and overseas) via more targeted data collection.

The NAS report measured the dragnet in terms of three functions:

Contact chaining, which maps out networks of people based on whom they communicate or even spend time with.

Identifying and keeping current all known identifiers (phone numbers, email addresses, device identifiers, IP addresses, Internet IDs) a person of interest uses. This is done, in part, by using algorithms to match up the communication patterns of different accounts.

“Triaging” the identifiers collected to categorize the urgency of the threat to national security from the party associated with each one.
If the dragnet accomplishes its purpose, it will provide a fairly comprehensive picture of who is communicating or hanging out with whom, connect all the known communications identities of any given person (which is critical to developing a comprehensive picture of someone’s network and the communications tools he uses), and then use those pictures to identify who poses threats that should be followed more closely.

If the metadata dragnet works, that can happen even with encrypted communication.

It’s only through that process that authorities get around to actually reading content. Authorities will use the metadata dragnet, for example, to choose what content to keep from bulk content collection. It’s likely they’ll collect, but maybe not immediately read, communications that are one or two degrees of separation from identifiers of interest just in case it becomes interesting later. Importantly, the NSA will even keep encrypted communications that, because of their metadata, are of interest.

The metadata dragnet also helps the intelligence community decide whom to target in its bulky Section 702 PRISM collection, which last year affected more than 92,000 targets and everyone they communicated with. Here, rather than doing the bulk collection itself, the NSA capitalizes on the fact that much of the world uses American tech companies like Google and Facebook to conduct (and often, store) its online communications. So when the triaging process identifies new foreign identifiers that seem important, NSA can ask the tech companies to preserve and share on an ongoing basis everything that’s associated with that identifier, including more metadata. In most cases, NSA will get the content of communications those identifiers have, which they’ll read and store and pull up again in the future if a related identifier is involved.

There are a few exceptions where officials cannot get the contents of communications via PRISM because they’re encrypted at the user level, rather than server level. The most important of these exceptions are WhatsApp and iMessage (and the latter only if users have opted not to use Apple’s cloud to store their communications), as well as any communications users have encrypted on their own. The NSA can’t get this content from Facebook, Apple, or other providers, but it can get metadata, so for users of interest, surveilers should at least know who is communicating with whom as well as some other useful details about them, though not what they’re saying.

For WhatsApp and iMessage users of interest, as well as those using their own encryption, the intelligence agencies will seek ways to bypass the encryption, often by hacking a user’s device or identifying his IP address and then accessing other devices or Internet accounts using that IP.

Importantly, however, it takes the triaging process or a particular event (like Friday’s attack) to identify users of such importance that the NSA will make the effort to conduct more targeted spying.

Finally, there’s old-fashioned physical surveillance and human intelligence, asking people to spy on others. As reflected by the CIA’s recent decision to add a digital innovation unit, even old-fashioned spying is increasingly guided and assisted by communications technology, both in identifying targets but also finding ways and information to compromise those targets. Numerous declassified reports make it clear the FBI uses the American phone dragnet to identify people who might make useful informants. (It also sometimes uses communications content to find intelligence they can use to coerce that cooperation.) Presumably, other intelligence services do the same.

For targets in a known location that are using very good communications security (by using encryption and ensuring their multiple identities cannot be correlated, not even with geolocation), physical surveillance of known targets (as several of the Paris perpetrators were by authorities) is always an option. The problem with that is it is very time- and labor-intensive—and because France and Belgium have so many potentially dangerous extremists, selecting whom would get that level of attention requires a very good combing process.

It all comes back to this triage, which is in significant part about how well the intelligence community uses that forest of metadata to pick whom it should target.

“Knowing who someone communicates with is metadata, not content, and most encrypted protocols (e.g. WhatsApp, Telegram, etc.) don’t change this,” Nicholas Weaver, a researcher at the International Computer Science Institute at UC–Berkeley explains. “In attempting to identify actual threat actors, ‘this person is communicating with ISIS’ is probably all you need to justify more intensive targeted actions, such as system compromise, that bypass any effects of encryption.”

There are a number of reasons why the dragnet might not work as planned. Some important metadata may be missing, perhaps even from the PlayStation 4 consoles some terrorists have used to communicate, which Belgium’s Interior Minister said has posed particular problems in the days before the attack. (Though there’s no evidence PS4s played a role in this attack.) Some metadata, especially that scraped from content, may be increasingly unavailable if the content itself is encrypted. When individuals keep their online identities rigorously separate, that too makes the dragnet less useful, as it makes it hard to identify a terrorist network. Finally, it may be that the triage process doesn’t always measure the importance of communications effectively.

In any case, news reports on the investigation into Friday’s attacks have suggested that some of the terrorists involved in the attack—even a figure identified as the possible planner—have had some of their communications analyzed already. If so, enough metadata was available to partially map out this network. If investigators know about these communications now, they could have known about them on Thursday, before the attack. And if they did, investigators might have been able to bypass whatever encryption the terrorists did use.

The terrorists who conducted Friday’s attack may well have been using encryption. But if so, it appears that the metadata dragnet failed well before agencies got to any encrypted communications.

By Marcy Wheeler
NOV. 16 2015 10:44 PM

Find this story at 16 November 2015

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