NY Bomb suspect nearly escaped US on Dubai flight?
Well that's the skuttlebutt this evening on the intertubes. But is it really correct?
I've been pouring over the stories for the past hour or so. Pretty interesting stuff. But then I saw this, over the fold:
When I clicked on the link to go read the article at the Nation, I got this:
Here's the link for the above story for people that want to check back. I hope to read it soon.
Hmmmm...
Despite the suspect nearly managing to leave the country, Mr Holder denied he would have escaped.
"I was never in any fear that we were in danger of losing him," he said.
Update [2010-5-5 4:13:36 by banderson]: OK, this is irresponsible and y'all can kick me. I probably deserve it. But I've done some more reading over at FDL and this particular bit of info illuminated this story for me and I think I have a suspicion about what actually went down.
beowulf May 4th, 2010 at 7:51 pm
Cell phones– analog unenecrypted / digital encrypted, everything is digital these days so you need a warrant and the cooperation of the wireless carrier to eavesdropped… Geolocating a phone is absurdly easy, no Guardrail-equipped RC-12s required, the carrier pings the phone number and can identify the location via triangulation or GPS chip, you don’t actually have to place a call for your phone to be trackable...
That makes sense to me. That was my suspicion. And if so, I think it could be pretty central to this particular story, if it ever becomes more than a cached story on google.
So therefore Eric Holder's comment makes sense to me.
Here's my theory about how they ran the operation on Shahzad. I think they backed the FBI off at the end, and gave Shahzad a bit of rope on the leash hoping he'd contact someone if he felt he was getting away, getting out of the country. I'm guessing they had special forces on him throughout, in some reliable form or another. If it was a special forces operation, I imagine not everyone in the FBI would necessarily have been in the know.
So personally, I suspect they possibly never "lost" Shahzad, if the Nation article means what I think it means, given the comments in the diary below. I wonder if certain news agencies who jumped to that conclusion are going to have any egg on their face or if this goes a different direction altogether?
Update [2010-5-5 13:14:33 by banderson]: Great minds think alike? I should be so lucky. But Jeremy Scahill seems to be wondering the same thing I'm wondering (note: the Nation article is up now for anyone who wants to read it):
This is all entirely plausible. But what if that is not the entire story? At this point, this is just a thought, a possibility to ponder: It could be that the Feds lost track of Shahzad, but that other US forces, namely US military special operations forces (perhaps JSOC), were tracking him and waiting to see if he made any calls, met with any contacts, took any action while he was still a free man.
Update [2010-5-5 15:23:23 by banderson]: Some more pieces of the puzzle?
He was hauled off a Dubai-bound plane Monday night, after he was allowed to board despite being under surveillance and placed on the federal no-fly list.
Interesting. So now he was under surveillance while at the airport?
An official with knowledge of the investigation says publicized video of a man shedding his shirt near the failed Times Square car bomb may have had the effect of falsely reassuring the real suspect that he wasn't a target.
...
The official says authorities didn't intend to use the video as a ruse.
Despite their denials about intelligence operations procedures, I'm starting to think the intelligence agencies involved fed the media the story about the white male to try and give Shahzad a false sense of security in hopes that he'd contact an associate and betray some of his connections.
I think this is possibly why they had the FBI back off and may have turned it over to special forces at the end of the operation. This whole thing about "just barely" finding him again before the plane took off is very difficult to believe. Are we really that lucky, or was the admin really just that clever?