Adding Up the Ounces of Prevention
By SCOTT SHANE and LOWELL BERGMAN
New York Times
THERE are few counterterrorism success stories more compelling than that of Raed al-Banna, a 32-year-old Jordanian turned away by wary border officers who found “multiple terrorist risk factors” and refused him entry at O’Hare Airport in Chicago in July 2003.
Given Mr. Banna’s fluent English and education as a lawyer, the next chapter in his story might conceivably have been a civil rights complaint. But events took a starkly different turn.
After a suicide car bombing killed 132 people in Hilla, Iraq, in February 2005, the bomber’s severed hand, still chained to the steering wheel, was found in the wreckage. Fingerprints identified the bomber as Mr. Banna, said Robert C. Bonner, who led United States Customs and Border Protection until last year.
“We’ve put some things in place, you bet, that make it more difficult for Al Qaeda to get terrorist operatives in the United States,” Mr. Bonner said. The absence of new attacks, even as terrorist violence worldwide has increased and bombers have struck in Madrid, London and beyond, he said, “is not pure luck.”
If the Banna case appears to show government vigilance at its best, critics say the case of seven men arrested in June in Miami’s Haitian community illustrates government overzealousness in the campaign against terror.
....
And some antiterrorism successes claimed by the government seem distinctly underwhelming.
The four “examples of W.M.D. cases” described in a June Justice Department report on counterterrorism efforts over five years include accounts of two Texas survivalists caught with hazardous chemicals, two Chinese-born American citizens who offered shoulder-fired missiles to an undercover F.B.I. agent, a Washington State engineer who wanted to use poisonous ricin to kill his wife, and an Arizona man whose attempt to make ricin failed but who wore the harmless powder he did make in a vial around his neck.
....
(There's more, here.)
New York Times
THERE are few counterterrorism success stories more compelling than that of Raed al-Banna, a 32-year-old Jordanian turned away by wary border officers who found “multiple terrorist risk factors” and refused him entry at O’Hare Airport in Chicago in July 2003.
Given Mr. Banna’s fluent English and education as a lawyer, the next chapter in his story might conceivably have been a civil rights complaint. But events took a starkly different turn.
After a suicide car bombing killed 132 people in Hilla, Iraq, in February 2005, the bomber’s severed hand, still chained to the steering wheel, was found in the wreckage. Fingerprints identified the bomber as Mr. Banna, said Robert C. Bonner, who led United States Customs and Border Protection until last year.
“We’ve put some things in place, you bet, that make it more difficult for Al Qaeda to get terrorist operatives in the United States,” Mr. Bonner said. The absence of new attacks, even as terrorist violence worldwide has increased and bombers have struck in Madrid, London and beyond, he said, “is not pure luck.”
If the Banna case appears to show government vigilance at its best, critics say the case of seven men arrested in June in Miami’s Haitian community illustrates government overzealousness in the campaign against terror.
....
And some antiterrorism successes claimed by the government seem distinctly underwhelming.
The four “examples of W.M.D. cases” described in a June Justice Department report on counterterrorism efforts over five years include accounts of two Texas survivalists caught with hazardous chemicals, two Chinese-born American citizens who offered shoulder-fired missiles to an undercover F.B.I. agent, a Washington State engineer who wanted to use poisonous ricin to kill his wife, and an Arizona man whose attempt to make ricin failed but who wore the harmless powder he did make in a vial around his neck.
....
(There's more, here.)
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