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A Pakistani private television station and international networks have apparently aired Saturday the final video message of the man believed to be the suicide bomber who killed seven U.S intelligence agents in eastern Afghanistan more than a week ago. The authenticity of the video could not be confirmed.

The man in the newly released video is identified as Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, who blew himself up inside a key U.S base in an eastern Afghan region bordering Pakistan.
  
The video shows the Jordanian national sitting next to the current commander of the Pakistani Taliban Hakimullah Mehsud.  In the tape, Balawi says he intends to avenge the killing of former Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud. He also claims he turned down large sums of money to defend his faith.

"The Jordanian and American intelligence services offered me millions of dollars to work with them and spy on mujahadeen here," he said. "But,  Al-Hamdu Lil-lah [thank God], I came to the mujahadeen and I told them everything and we arranged together this attack to make the Americans understand that the belief of Allah, that eman [faith] which we hold, the fatwah that we strive for cannot be exchanged for all the wealth in the world."

Intelligence officials say Balawi was a double agent, posing as a Jordanian informant but working for the al-Qaida terror network.

On December 30, he was invited for a meeting inside a U.S facility in the Afghan border province of Khost. Instead, Balawi blew himself up at the meeting, killing seven agents of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and a Jordanian intelligence officer. The CIA base chief was among those killed in the attack.

Both the al-Qaida and Taliban fighters have claimed responsibility for the suicide bombing, saying it was meant to avenge the deaths of their top commanders, including Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the outlawed Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan or TTP.

Mehsud was killed in August last year when a missile fired by a suspected U.S drone targeted his hideout in Pakistan's volatile South Waziristan tribal region. His successor, Hakimullah Mehsud, appearing in Balawai's final video message is wanted by the Pakistani security forces.

A major military offensive in South Waziristan is underway and has killed hundreds of Taliban fighters but has not been able to capture or kill Hakimullah Mehsud or any of his key deputies.
 
Former Pakistani ambassador to Afghanistan, Ayaz Wazir, belongs to the Waziristan region. While questioning the authenticity of the video message he says the suicide attack inside the U.S base in Afghanistan, and the fact that the Pakistani Taliban commander Mehsud is still at large, raises questions about the counter-terrorism intelligence operations.

"If you recall a claim was made by [an] al-Qaida representative that they have done it and TTP also has made a claim that we have done it," he said. "Now this video shows this fellow [Balawi] with Hakimullah Mehsud. But anyway the significance obviously is there for both Pakistan and for America. It speaks I would say for failure on the part of intelligence agencies."

Experts in Pakistan believe the involvement of the local Taliban in the attack on a CIA base in Afghanistan could mean more pressure on Islamabad to intensify its crackdown on militants to secure the border areas.

The CIA facility was located opposite to the Waziristan tribal region and was reportedly playing a key role in gathering intelligence information to guide U.S. unmanned spy planes to launch drone strikes on al-Qaida and Afghan militants hiding on the Pakistani side of the border.
source-http://www1.voanews.com/

The man who is accused of trying to bomb an American airliner on Christmas Day made his first appearance in court on Friday.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's trial will be another important test case of America's ability to try terrorist suspects in civilian courts.

It should all go well - just as the trial of Richard Reid and Zacarias Moussaoui proceeded without incident.

But the Christmas Day bomb attempt is clearly asking pointed questions of America's ability to defend itself, and the contribution made to that defence by its spies.

Scattered info

US President Barack Obama said on Thursday that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab boarded that plane at Schiphol airport in Amsterdam because of failures in America's intelligence system.


John Brennan
The intelligence fell through the cracks. This happened in more than one organisation.
John Brennan
Deputy National Security Adviser for Homeland Security

But his words strongly suggested he believes the intelligence system is not fatally flawed, rather it just needs strengthening.

"The US government had the information scattered throughout the system to potentially uncover this plot and disrupt the attack. Rather than a failure to collect or share intelligence, this was a failure to connect and understand the intelligence we already had."

Indeed, information about Mr Abdulmutallab - his radical leanings, his presence in Yemen, his contacts with extremist clerics - was in numerous US intelligence system databases.

But those fragments of knowledge floated on a huge tide of intelligence that swirls through the system every day. They never came together to form a coherent picture.

Familiar ring

All this sounds rather familiar. Was it not this inability to "connect the dots" that led to 9/11? No, says John Brennan, the president's counter-terrorism adviser.

He told journalists that before 9/11, information was jealously guarded by different intelligence agencies, and never shared.

Today, information sharing is not the problem, he insisted.


Instruction sign inside a body scanner at Schiphol airport
It may be unreasonable, even unfair, to blame the president for the failure of Dutch security officers to stop an alleged would-be suicide bomber. But that is what will happen.

In fact, so much information moves through the intelligence apparatus that analysts complain of feeling swamped and the bright little shards of knowledge that could prevent a plot from materialising can get lost.

"The intelligence fell through the cracks. This happened in more than one organisation. This contributed to the larger failure to connect the fragments of intelligence that could have revealed the plot, Abdulmutallab's extremist views, AQAP's (al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula) involvement with the Nigerian, its desire to strike the US homeland."

Mr Brennan draws a fine distinction between two sorts of bureaucratic failure. And it is perhaps a distinction that many Americans will find hard to grasp.

It may also be difficult for President Obama to convince Americans that yet another series of tweaks to the intelligence bureaucracy are an adequate response to the latest attempt on US lives.

Winslow Wheeler, an analyst at the Center for Defense Information in Washington, writes that the bureaucratic approach is horribly flawed.

"You see, no-one is responsible for the mistake," he says. "It is processes that need changing, right?"

"When you want to pretend to reform something, fiddle with the organisational chart, which relieves the people who should be held accountable, earns you their praise for being oh-so-wise, and gets you to the next screw up."

Intelligence under attack

US intelligence has been bloodied in any number of ways in the last few weeks. Seven CIA officers lost their lives when an operation they were running in Afghanistan went horribly wrong and their own agent blew them up.

And then, eerily, a report appeared written weeks earlier by frustrated military officers which argued that intelligence collection and analysis in Afghanistan is grossly inadequate.

Maj-Gen Michael Flynn and Capt Matt Pottinger wrote that the US intelligence community "is only marginally relevant to strategy" in Afghanistan.

They wrote that "the vast intelligence apparatus is unable to answer fundamental questions about the environment in which US and allied forces operate and the people they seek to persuade".

The officers released the report not through their chain of command but through a private think tank, which lent it a curiously devastating impact.

So, in the course of a few months we have seen accounts of intelligence failures at the operational, analytical, and systemic level - all on garish public display.

For the Obama administration, all this is rather corrosive. It may be unreasonable, even unfair, to blame the president for the failure of Dutch security officers to stop an alleged would-be suicide bomber. But that is what will happen.

Political priority

Mr Obama is a Democrat, and Democrats seem perennially vulnerable to accusations of weakness on national security from their political opponents.

Consider this: weeks after Mr Obama announced 30,000 more troops would fight in Afghanistan, former Vice-President Dick Cheney accused him of "trying to pretend we are not at war".

The accusation, strange though it seems, continues to bounce around the internet echo chamber.

Towards the end of Mr Obama's speech on Thursday, he sought to recapture a sense of leadership and purpose in his national security policy.

"We will strengthen our defences but we will not succumb to a siege mentality that sacrifices the open society and liberties and values that we cherish as Americans," he said.

Bombings and intelligence failures have rammed national security back to the heart of America's political debate as we enter this election year.

Treacherous times for America's spies and the leaders who are accountable for their actions and their failures
source-http://news.bbc.co.uk