David Kenner at Foreign Policy presents the top 4 bad guys in AQAP in Yemen with photos: there's the group's leader, Nasir al-Wuhayshi, cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, former Guantanamo detainee Said al-Shehri (who was released into the Saudi Rehab program but left), Qasim al-Raymi and Hizam Mujali.

Gregory Johnson at Waq al-Waq says:

I think 'Adil al-'Abab, Ibrahim al-Rubaysh and Muhammad al-Rashad are much more important than Anwar al-'Awlaqi and Hizam Mujali. But there is little argument on the top three: Nasir al-Wahayshi, Said Ali al-Shihri and Qasimal-Raymi.

Johnson says al-Raymi is "the single most dangerous individual in the organization." While he was never at Gitmo, his brother is.

I also like this November, 2009 Australian think-tank study on the importance of AQAP's relationship with the tribes in Yemen.[More...]

The New York Times reports some first-hand experiences this week on the world's new virtual battlefield: Airport security.

Will you fly, if you don't have to for work?

I gave it up in January, 2008 after the Iowa caucuses. With one exception in 2008 and two in 2009, I have gone from someone who for years flew somewhere every ten days, sometimes more, to someone who just said "Enough" with the waste of time and the hassle. (I think it was the "arrive at the airport 2 hours before your flight" and having to get your bags to the check-in counter 45 minutes before the flight, as well as the constant lifting of the carry-on bag to get the laptop out at screening and then packing it back in again and remembering the noise-canceling headphones and money spent unnecessarily on magazines and bottles of water and lousy food and always having my arms full, that pushed me over the top.)

And that was before all these new measures. I have no flights planned for 2010. I'm going to try to get through the year without taking any.

How about you? How much time waste and physical inconvenience are you willing to put up with?

OSI Systems, which owns Rapiscan, which makes the Rapiscan WaveScan 200 I described here, just got a new 10 year contract with Puerto Rico for its cargo imaging system, called the Rapid Eagle. But Puerto Rico says it's not for terrorism, but crime, including tax evasion:

Director of the Puerto Rico Ports Authority, Mr. Alvaro Pilar-Vilagran, stated that "the Puerto Rico Ports Authority is implementing this unprecedented scanning program....The program aims to eliminate the import of drugs, illegal weapons and other contraband into Puerto Rico, while affording the Ports Authority a mechanism to fight tax evasion.

In the last three months, the company's stock has grown 67%, from $17.03 to $29.07. I doubt it's peaked yet. And this is interesting: The company's CEO is Deepak Chopra. According to the company on December 30 (Dow Jones Newswire, subscription, no link): [More...]

Update: Overall theme: Here come the whole imaging body scanners. (Added: And, from Napolitano, here come the "behavior analysts," more cops and more dogs.)

President Obama's press conference is starting on the security review of the alleged attempted terror attack by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab on Christmas Day.

You can watch live here.

I'll live blog for a bit, below the fold. [More...]

A senior Yemeni official today in explaining Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's movements, says he got the explosive device during his layover in Lagos, Nigeria when changing planes, not in Yemen. His layover, they have previously said, was 35 minutes.

But the official, Rashad al-Alimi, the deputy prime minister for national security and defense, cited Yemeni investigations and said that the Nigerian, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, had acquired the explosives used in the failed attack not in Yemen, which he left on Dec. 4, but in Nigeria, where he changed planes at the Lagos airport on Dec. 24, boarding a flight to Amsterdam and then Detroit.

There are some inconsistencies. And where was he between December 4 and December 24? Ghana says he arrived there on December 9, from Ethiopia. They believe he had a 4 hour lay-over in Nigeria. (This can't be too hard to check.)

And more speculation on the role of cleric al Awlaki.

The White House is releasing a declassified version of the security review of the alleged attempted terror attack by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab on Christmas Day.

President Obama will speak at 4:30 pm, ET. You can watch him live at the White House website here.

Following the report, Obama is expected to unveil new steps aimed at avoiding further attacks. The BBC also reports that Yemen's Deputy Prime Minister Rashad al-Alimi said today that Abdulmutallab met with cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in Shabwa, the Yemeni province where he lives and that Abdulmutallab was recruited while a student at the University College London (UCL). The Guardian is reporting Yemen may arrest al Awlaki.

Glenn Greenwald:

As President Obama said yesterday, the Government -- just as was true for 9/11 -- had gathered more than enough information to have detected this plot, or at least to have kept Abdulmutallab off airplanes and out of the country. Yet our intelligence agencies -- just as was true for 9/11 -- failed to understand what they had in their possession. Why is that? Because they had too much to process, including too much data wholly unrelated to Terrorism. In other words, our panic-driven need to vest the Government with more and more surveillance power every time we get scared again by Terrorists -- in the name of keeping us safe -- has exactly the opposite effect. Numerous pieces of evidence prove that.

(Emphasis supplied.) Instead of wasting time with silly defenses of intelligence agency bureaucrats (see Ackerman, Spencer), centrist Obama bloggers should heed the President's words and understand the system and the people in the system failed. Just as with torture, which does not work, we have created a system less likely to make us safer, not more. This is systemic failure as well as human failure.

Speaking for me only

The New York Times has published its Sunday Magazine feature article, 9 pages long, by Peter Baker on President Obama's handling of the war on terror. Here's what you need to know:

While setting a one-year deadline to close Guantánamo and formally banning the interrogation methods that had already fallen out of favor, he left the surveillance program intact, embraced the Patriot Act, retained the authority to use renditions and embraced some of Bush’s claims to state secrets. He preserved the military commissions and national security letters he criticized during the campaign, albeit with more due-process safeguards. He plans to hold dozens of suspected terrorists without charges indefinitely. And he expanded Bush’s campaign of unmanned drone strikes against Al Qaeda in the tribal areas of Pakistan. Troop levels in Afghanistan are set to triple on his watch.

Bush Administration Veterans say Obama is not "Bush Lite", he is Bush. [More...]

The ACLU weighed in today on the new TSA airplane security rules, and the increase of whole body imaging scanners.

[T]he government should adhere to longstanding standards of individualized suspicion and enact security measures that are the least threatening to civil liberties and are proven to be effective. Racial profiling and untargeted body scanning do not meet those criteria.

..."We should be focusing on evidence-based, targeted and narrowly tailored investigations based on individualized suspicion, which would be both more consistent with our values and more effective than diverting resources to a system of mass suspicion," said Michael German, national security policy counsel with the ACLU Washington Legislative Office and a former FBI agent. "Overbroad policies such as racial profiling and invasive body scanning for all travelers not only violate our rights and values, they also waste valuable resources and divert attention from real threats."

[More...]

The New York Times reports the suicide bomber who killed 8 people, including 7 CIA agents at a CIA base in Afghanistan last week was indeed an "intelligence asset" -- of the Jordanian Intelligence Service. He had been arrested in Jordan and flipped, so they thought. Instead, he tricked them.

The bomber had been arrested in Jordan and recruited by that country’s intelligence service — which believed that it had turned him into an ally — and then brought to Afghanistan to infiltrate the Qaeda organization by posing as a foreign jihadi.

But the supposed intelligence asset was actually a double-agent who was given explosives by militants in the frontier region between Afghanistan and Pakistan, which he wore to a meeting last Wednesday at Forward Operating Base Chapman, the C.I.A. base in the southeastern province of Khost.

[More...]

Politico reports the TSA announced new security rules for passengers coming to the U.S., and heightened security for those coming from or through certain countries.

All travelers flying into the U.S. from foreign countries will receive tightened random screening, and 100 percent of passengers from 14 terrorism-prone countries will be patted down and have their carry-ons searched, the Obama administration was notifying airlines on Sunday.

The TSA announcement is here.

SA is mandating that every individual flying into the U.S. from anywhere in the world traveling from or through nations that are state sponsors of terrorism or other countries of interest will be required to go through enhanced screening. The directive also increases the use of enhanced screening technologies and mandates threat-based and random screening for passengers on U.S. bound international flights."

[More...]

As al Qaida Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) continues to dominate the news, more news organizations are coming out with primers. Here's one from The New Republic.

A major point that needs to be made more is that this is an off-shoot of the central al Qaida associated with Osama bin Laden.

AQAP represents what many consider Yemen's second generation of Al Qaeda--and while the group may have ties to "Al Qaeda central," the organization appears to act independently. Counterterrorism officials believe AQAP has learned from its recent past and built an organization that can withstand the loss of its leadership. Savvy in delivering its message, the group even has its own magazine, Salah al Malahim (The Echo of Battle), which covers everything from biographies of suicide bombers to advice columns on how to become an Al Qaeda foot soldier.

[More...]