Oops is now a terrorist term

Scott Shane and Eric Schmitt have a couple of articles in The New York Times about the latest bomb:

The suicide bomber dispatched by the Yemen branch of al-Qaeda last month to blow up a United States-bound airliner was actually an intelligence agent for Saudi Arabia who infiltrated the terrorist group and volunteered for the mission, American and foreign officials have said.
In an extraordinary intelligence coup, the double agent left Yemen last month, traveling by way of the United Arab Emirates, and delivered both the innovative bomb designed for his aviation attack and inside information on the group’s leaders, locations, methods and plans to the Central Intelligence Agency, Saudi intelligence, and allied foreign intelligence agencies.
Officials said the agent, whose identity they would not disclose, works for the Saudi intelligence service, which has cooperated closely with the CIA for several years against the terrorist group in Yemen. He operated in Yemen with the full knowledge of the CIA, but not under its direct supervision, officials said.
After spending weeks at the center of al-Qaeda’s most dangerous affiliate, the intelligence agent provided critical information that permitted the CIA to direct the drone strike that killed Fahd Mohammed Ahmed al-Quso, the group’s external operations director and a suspect in the bombing of the USS Cole, an American destroyer, in Yemen in 2000.
He also handed over the bomb, designed by the group’s top explosives expert to be undetectable at airport security checks, to the FBI, which is analyzing its properties at its laboratory at Quantico, Virginia. The agent is now safe in Saudi Arabia, officials said. The bombing plot was kept secret for weeks by the CIA and other agencies because they feared retaliation against the agent and his family— not, as some commentators have suggested, because the Obama administration wanted to schedule an announcement of the foiled plot, American officials said.
Officials said that the risk to the agent and his relatives had now been “mitigated”, evidently by moving both him and his family to safe locations.
But American intelligence officials were angry about the disclosure of the al-Qaeda plot, first reported by The Associated Press, which had held the story for several days at the request of the CIA. They feared the leak would discourage foreign intelligence services from cooperating with the United States on risky missions in the future, said Representative Peter T. King, a New York Republican and chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee. “We are talking about compromising methods and sources and causing our partners to be leery about working with us,” said King, who spoke with reporters about the plot after he was briefed by counterterrorism officials. King, who called the bomb plot “one of the most tightly held operations I’ve seen in my years in the House,” said he was told that government officials planned to investigate the source of the original leak. The CIA declined to comment.
Intelligence officials believe that the explosive is the latest effort of the group’s skilled bomb maker, Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri, who is also believed to have designed the explosives used in the failed bombing attempt on an airliner over Detroit on 25 December 2009, and packed into printer cartridges and placed on cargo planes in October of 2010.
A senior American official said the new device was sewn into “custom-fit” underwear and would have been very hard to detect, even in a careful pat-down. Unlike the device used in the unsuccessful 2009 attack, this bomb could be detonated in two ways, in case one failed, the official said. The main charge was a high-grade military explosive that “undoubtedly would have brought down an aircraft,” the official said.
Forensic experts at the FBI’s bomb laboratory are assessing whether the bomb could have evaded screening machines and security measures revamped after the failed 2009 plot. One American official said the bureau’s initial analysis indicated that if updated security protocols designed to detect a wider range of possible threats were properly conducted, the measures “most likely would have detected” the device.
The Transportation Security Administration has repeated a security message previously sent to airlines and foreign governments. The security guidance notes that al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula still intends to attack the United States, probably using commercial aviation, and warns TSA agents to look out for explosives in cargo, concealed in clothing, or surgically implanted, officials said.
Over the past eight months, American counterterrorism officials have monitored with growing alarm a rising number of electronic intercepts and tips from informants suggesting that al-Qaeda’s branch in Yemen has been ramping up plots to attack the United States. “There was increasing concern about the chatter, more and more intelligence” that al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula “was moving with renewed energy to carry out some kind of attack against homeland, using airliners and concealed explosives,” said one senior administration official. Working with foreign allies, the Obama administration quietly tightened airport security.
The ominous signs followed months of political chaos in Yemen during which the al-Qaeda branch and its militant allies seized effective control over large areas of the country, giving the terrorist group a broader base from which to plot attacks against both the Yemeni government and the United States.
Senior American counterterrorism and military officials have expressed concern that al-Qaeda’s growing number of training camps, including small compounds, have churned out dozens of new fighters who, in turn, help expand the area under the insurgents’ control. Officials fear that the camps could also train al-Qaeda operatives for external operations against targets in Europe and the United States. “Certainly when they hold terrain, it makes training more safe and secure than on disputed terrain; therefore, more and better training,” said one senior American military official.
The Yemeni government’s control over the hinterlands southeast of the capital, Sana'a, has always been tenuous, but over the past year it has receded almost entirely. With the authorities focused on political turmoil in the capital, many soldiers fled their posts, and jihadists began asserting control.
For more than a year the town of Jaar— along with several smaller settlements— has been controlled by militants who operate under the banner Ansar al-Sharia, which is variously described as a wing of al-Qaeda’s Yemeni branch or as an allied group.
One prominent tribal mediator from Shabwa Province, reached by phone, said Ansar al-Sharia controlled all the checkpoints on Yemen’s southern coast between Aden and Balhaf, and as far north as Ataq. Recently, militants attacked several army bases and outposts in the south, killing twenty soldiers and capturing two dozen, The Associated Press reported. Local tribal figures described the attacks as revenge for the killing of Quso.
Control in the south often appears to be shared between militants, local tribes, and members of the southern independence movement, which is largely secular. But al-Qaeda militants and their allies appear to operate freely even in areas they do not fully control, possibly including Aden, the south’s major city. Aden has become a bastion of open opposition to the government, with the flag of the independence movement, once rigidly banned, now flying from houses across the city.

and this:

The Central Intelligence Agency, working closely with foreign partners, thwarted a plot by the branch of al-Qaeda in Yemen to smuggle an experimental bomb aboard an airliner bound for the United States, intelligence officials said.
The intelligence services detected the scheme as it took shape in mid-April, officials said, and the explosive device was seized in the Middle East outside Yemen about a week ago before it could be deployed.
It appeared that al-Qaeda leaders had dispatched a suicide bomber from Yemen with instructions to board a flight to the United States with the device under his clothes, but that he had been stopped before reaching an airport. Representative Peter T. King, a Republican from New York and chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, said counterterrorism officials had said of the bomber: “We don’t have to worry about him anymore.” He is alive, officials said, but they would not to say whether he was in foreign custody.
But the disclosure was a worrisome sign that al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula remains determined to attack the United States even after a CIA drone strike in Yemen in September killed its two operatives who were American citizens, Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan. American officials said the group had established new training camps after seizing territory in recent months as a result of the upheaval from the Arab Spring.
Officials said they believed that the new device was the work of the group’s skilled bomb maker, Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri, who has long been a target of American counterterrorism efforts. Asiri is also believed to have designed the explosives used in two previous attempts to take down airliners bound for the United States.
The plot was disclosed a day after an American drone strike in Yemen killed Fahd Mohammed Ahmed al-Quso, who was wanted for the bombing of the destroyer Cole in Yemen in 2000 and had replaced Awlaki as the external operations chief for the al-Qaeda branch. Though the device was seized close to the anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaeda founder, officials said they had picked up no intelligence suggesting that the plot had been timed to the 2 May anniversary or motivated by revenge.
Officials would not explain the delay in revealing the plot, saying that discussing the case in too much detail could endanger counterterrorism operations.
The Associated Press, which broke the news Monday afternoon, said that it had uncovered the existence of the bomb last week, but that the White House and the CIA had asked it not to publish the news immediately because the intelligence operation was still under way. Once officials said those concerns had been allayed, The A.P. reported, it decided to disclose the plot despite requests from the Obama administration to wait for an official announcement on Tuesday.
The FBI said its explosive experts were conducting “technical and forensics analysis” on the device to understand whether it was an advance over previous bombs designed by AQAP, as the Yemen branch odesigned to escape detection at airport security, American officials said.
Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who is chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was briefed on the plot and said the bomb was “a new design and very difficult to detect by magnetometer”, the conventional type of metal detector still used in most world airports.
A senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said “the sophistication of the IED is concerning,” using the abbreviation for an improvised explosive device. The Department of Homeland Security said it had “no specific, credible information regarding an active terrorist plot against the US at this time.”
The latest plot underscored statements by President Obama’s counterterrorism adviser, John O. Brennan, that the Yemen affiliate of al-Qaeda remains the most active and dangerous terrorist group targeting the United States. The White House said Brennan had repeatedly briefed the president on the latest plot since its detection.
A National Security Council spokeswoman, Caitlin Hayden, said Obama “thanks all intelligence and counterterrorism professionals involved for their outstanding work and for serving with the extraordinary skill and commitment that their enormous responsibilities demand.”
On 25 December 2009, a Nigerian militant trained by the al-Qaeda branch in Yemen, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, ignited explosives hidden in his underwear aboard a jetliner headed for Detroit, but only succeeded in burning himself. In October of 2010, authorities, acting on a tip from Saudi Arabian intelligence, found bombs packed inside computer printer cartridges en route from Yemen to Chicago; the devices were removed from cargo planes in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates and the East Midlands Airport in Britain.
In addition, in August of 2009, a member of AQAP blew himself up in Saudi Arabia in an unsuccessful attack against Mohammed bin Nayef, Saudi Arabia’s counterterrorism chief.
Saudi intelligence has closely cooperated with the Obama administration in counterterrorism efforts in Yemen. American officials declined to say which foreign intelligence services had helped foil the latest plot.
The senior administration official said that in contrast to the attack on 25 December 2009, and the printer plot, the CIA and its foreign partners had been “carefully monitoring this from early on”. While it showed that the terrorist group still intended to take down an airliner, the official suggested that American counterterrorism officials had gained the upper hand, at least for now. “We have robust intelligence on their operations, and we killed their external operations chief,” the official said.
King, of the Homeland Security Committee, said information on the unfolding case had been “tightly held”, without the usual briefings for members of Congress on continuing operations until recently. He said officials “were shocked that this had gotten out” before the planned announcement.
A senior law enforcement official said it was unclear if the al-Qaeda group in Yemen had built more of the devices. “If they built one, they probably built more,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the operation’s delicate nature. “That’s the scary part.”f the terrorist network is known. It contained no metal parts and had a different kind of detonator, 

Rico says this guy, whoever and wherever he may be hiding, is so dead...