ABC mysteriously pulls story on Mideast hijacking threat
By
ZUGuide.com
A scene from 1996's "Executive Decision," in which Arab terrorists hijack a Washington-bound Boeing 747
ABC on Tuesday published on its website what seemed to be a major exclusive story by Chief Investigative Correspondent Brian Ross: Law enforcement officials, according to Ross, had been "on a heightened state of alert to a possible hijacking of U.S. carrier flights from the Middle East" -- and as a result the number of air marshals on overseas flights, particularly to Dubai, had in the last few weeks been "greatly ramped up."
But then, just like that, it was gone.
The piece, which ran under the headline "Authorities Were on High Alert for Possible Hijack Attempt" and was sourced to "one senior U.S. official," is simply no longer available on ABC's site. (It has been at least partially preserved on a few outside aggregratorsites.) But even though the story was taken down, ABC told Salon that it stands by the story.
The disappearance of the "High Alert" piece is another wrinkle in the saga of ABC's questionable reporting on the two Yemeni residents of the U.S. who were arrested in Amsterdam this week on suspicions of terrorism that quickly turned out to be unfounded. We previously explained how a Monday night scoop on the case by Ross -- who has a history of passing along bad information on national security cases -- quickly fell apart. (The Monday story quoted an anonymous official saying that the Yemeni men were "almost certainly" on a dry run for a terrorist attack. They have now been cleared.)
ABC spokesman Jeffrey Schneider told Salon on Thursday that the story about the "heightened state of alert" to a Mideast hijacking was simply replaced with the latest information about the Yemeni case (this is the URL where the "heightened alert" story used to live). Despite the fact that the story has been taken off line, the network is not retracting it.
"We fully stand by the reporting on the story. The story was overwritten and overtaken by the changing the story about the Yemeni men in custody. You should not read into that that we backed away," Schneider said.
It is not standard practice to pull a big exclusive story off line.
Contacted by Salon about the pulled ABC story, the Department of Homeland Security would not confirm or deny the thrust of Ross's reporting.
"As we conveyed to the ABC investigative unit on Tuesday, we have no information of a specific, credible threat of hijacking related to Dubai," said DHS Spokesman Matt Chandler. He declined to comment further on whether there is a heightened state of alert.
In any case, the fact that ABC pulled the story did not stop it from spreading online. Here it is on Gawker. Here it is on the blog of the Investigative Project on Terrorism. And here it is on the website of several Michigan newspapers.
A man is led off a plane at Schipol Airport in Amsterdam on Monday after suspicious items turned up in his luggage.
In Amsterdam, two men headed from the United States to Yemen were detained after security staff discovered suspicious items in one of the men's checked luggage.
The story began when security screeners at the airport in Birmingham, Ala., discovered watches, cellphones and a bottle of Pepto-Bismol strangely taped together in a suitcase belonging to 48-year-old Ahmed Mohamed Nasser al Soofi, a U.S. permanent resident. After determining the items posed no threat, al Soofi was allowed to catch his flight from Birmingham to Chicago's O'Hare International Airport, from which he planned to connect onward to Washington-Dulles, and then overseas.
When al Soofi missed his connection at O'Hare, he was rebooked on a United Airlines flight to Amsterdam. His bag, meanwhile, was sent unaccompanied to Dulles, where it was loaded aboard the United plane to Dubai that al Soofi originally intended to catch.
There are rules banning unaccompanied suitcases on planes going overseas, however (a stricture going back to the Lockerbie catastrophe in 1988), and the Dubai-bound jet was forced to return to the gate. When al Soofi's suitcase was offloaded and rescreened, authorities became worried and alerted Dutch officials, who arrested al Soofi upon his arrival in Amsterdam.
Also arrested was Hazem Abdullah Thabi al-Murisi, a Yemeni citizen whose only crime appears to be that he shared Yemini citizenship with al Soofi, and happened to be seated near him. Reportedly the men had never met or spoken before, though both spent several years living near one another in Detroit, among the large Arab-American population there.
Do I believe that al Soofi and al-Murisi were terrorist operatives on a test run, sniffing out weaknesses in airport security? No, I don't. The evidence doesn't point that way.
Ignoring for a moment whether they were unfairly profiled (I don't necessarily feel that way, either, though al-Murisi's detention is a little hard to reconcile), I find the incident strangely comforting. As I've been writing for years, the No. 1 threat to commercial aircraft is, just as it has always been, bombs and explosives. And although we will never be completely protected -- a resourceful enough saboteur will always figure out a way to smuggle deadly components onto an aircraft -- it is heartening to see that our luggage screening protocols actually work, and are effective enough to detect what could have been something dangerous.
Also heartening is the way in which screeners in Birmingham seem to have handled their odd discovery. They checked things out and did not overreact.
Do the Dutch know something we don't, or are they the ones overreacting?
Abdul-Hakim Al-Sadah, Yemen's consul general in Detroit, says that mobile phones and watches are commonly packed together by traveling Arab-Americans (and other cultures too, I should add) as gifts for relatives and friends.
As for al Soofi's Pepto-Bismol, in the end it made sense. Turns out he probably needs it.
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Do you have questions for Salon's aviation expert? Contact Patrick Smith through his website and look for answers in a future column.
Exciting Sarah Palin news: She is going to celebrate 9/11 at Anchorage, Alaska's Dena'ina Center, with famous television clown Glenn Beck! This was the only actual "news" in the lengthy (and often entertaining!) Vanity Fair story about how Sarah Palin is a narcissist whose speaking fees are paid by mysterious fly-by-night PACs.
So what will Glenn and Sarah be talking about at this upcoming event? No one knows. Glenn Beck mentioned on his radio program today that he would be speaking in Alaska, with Sarah Palin, "a week from Saturday." He didn't mention that a week from Saturday is 9/11, because Glenn Beck forgot about 9/11.
Oh, also! Next month is the Iowa Republican Party's annual fall fundraiser. And Sarah Palin will be the keynote speaker! She was invited to do this in 2009, but she never even bothered to get back to them. This year, apparently, something is different.
Either Sarah Palin is running for president, or she and Glenn Beck are just embarking on another of the money-making schemes that they are both deeply devoted to. Almost certainly the latter.
The story from ABC News' investigative unit Monday evening was as startling as it was thinly sourced. Running with a triple byline under the headline "ABC News Exclusive: Two Men on United Flight from Chicago Arrested for 'Preparation of a Terrorist Attack' in Amsterdam," the story began like this:
Two men taken off a Chicago-to-Amsterdam United Airlines flight in the Netherlands have been charged by Dutch police with "preparation of a terrorist attack," U.S. law enforcement officials tell ABC News.
U.S. officials said the two appeared to be travelling with what were termed "mock bombs" in their luggage. "This was almost certainly a dry run, a test," said one senior law enforcement official.
Playing the story as the next big terrorism case, ABC quickly posted mug shots of the two Yemeni-born U.S. residents along with a passenger's cellphone video of them being taken off the plane.
But within 24 hours, the story had fallen apart -- the latest in a string of terrorism exclusives by ABC's Brian Ross that have not held up to scrutiny.
It turns out the incident, involving a pair of Yemeni men, was not "almost certainly a dry run," as ABC reported. Rather, it appears to have been what Pete Williams of NBC termed a "weird set of coincidences." The Wall Street Journal is reporting the men were likely "unsuspecting fliers snared in the high-security net of international air travel." In fact, the two have no apparent connection to each other besides the fact that both missed the same flight and were booked on the same replacement flight to Amsterdam.
Despite the fact that the lead of the original ABC story reported that the men had been "charged" by Dutch police with "preparation of a terrorist attack," it is now clear that they were merely arrested on suspicion of that charge. In an interview with Salon, Ross acknolwedged that there is a difference, but said that U.S. officials had given ABC incorrect information Monday.
"It may be that an arrest is not considered a charge," he said.
The original erroneous story is still up on ABC's website and has not been edited or corrected.
One of the arrested men, Detroit resident Ahmed Mohamed Nasser al Soofi, was carrying $7,000 in cash and had unusual items in his checked in luggage including a cellphone taped to a Pepto-Bismol bottle.
Citing the FBI, Ross referred to the phone and bottle on the World News broadcast Monday evening as "a kind of mock explosive."
Multiple media outlets including the AP have reported that al Soofi had one knife and one box cutter in his checked luggage -- which is legal. In contrast, ABC reported that there were "a box cutter and three large knives" (emphasis ours). It's not clear at this point which report is accurate.
The story as it was originally reported by ABC fit neatly with the Obama administration's new focus on Yemen as a source of terrorism. It was seized on by many right-wing commentators, with the Heritage Foundation's James Jay Carafano concluding at National Review: "[T]his incident should remind us of three indisputable facts: 1) There are terrorists out there; 2) they are trying to kill us; and 3) if we don’t work proactively to stop them, one day they will succeed again."
Ross defended his reporting in an interview with Salon, saying that law enforcement officials genuinely suspected terrorism on Monday. He noted that the two men had been pulled off the plane and that FBI agents were chasing down leads around the country to find out who they were.
"Sometimes when these things break you sort of have to report what you know, adding the best you can that there may be another explanation," he said. "As long as we're current and accurate, that's the best that you can do."
Ross said that he was careful to preface his report on ABC's World News Monday (watch it below) by saying, "There may be a perfectly innocent explanation for what happened."
However, that same segment with Diane Sawyer included this remarkable exchange (emphasis ours):
BRIAN ROSS: It's not clear why they shipped all these things in the bags. But it has raised serious concerns, especially with the approach of the September 11th anniversary.
DIANE SAWYER: They may have been a kind of advance team coming here to try to...
BRIAN ROSS: That is a concern.
It's worth noting that other outlets were far more cautious than ABC. Soon after ABC ran its exclusive story Monday, the New York Times had a piece that said in the second paragraph, "law enforcement officials cautioned on Monday night that the men had not been charged with any crime and that the episode might be a misunderstanding."
This is hardly the first time that Ross has been out front -- and, in hindsight, wrong -- on terrorism stories.
In 2007, Ross ran a now-notorious exclusive interview with former CIA officer Jon Kiriakou about, among other things, the efficacy of waterboarding. That story, hyped uncritically by ABC, was picked up in other media and informed the public debate about waterboarding for years -- until, of course, it turned out to be bogus.
In November, Ross reported that the Fort Hood shooter, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, had attempted to make contact with "people" associated with al-Qaida. That turned out not to be true.
In December, he reported that a released Guantánamo detainee was a mastermind of the attempted Christmas Day bombing. As it turned out, the detainee in question had actually been in the hands of Saudi authorities for months and had no role in the plot. That didn't stop myriad media outlets from picking up the inaccurate story.
Bottom line: When it comes to ABC's terrorism reporting, reader beware.
Here is Ross' initial report on World News Monday evening:
FBI investigators don't believe two Yemeni citizens detained in Amsterdam were on a terrorism test run
By EILEEN SULLIVAN, Associated Press
A U.S. government official says the FBI's investigation of two Yemeni men detained in Amsterdam is finding that it's unlikely they were on a test run for a future terror attack, even as Dutch authorities continued to hold the pair on suspicion of conspiring to commit a terrorist act.
The U.S. official says the two men arrested in Amsterdam did not know each other and were not traveling together.
The official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the ongoing investigation, says both men missed flights to Dulles International Airport from Chicago, and United Airlines then booked them on the same flight to Amsterdam. The men were sitting near each other on the flight.
Another U.S. official, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, says that when Customs officials discovered one passenger was not on the flight from Dulles to Dubai, they called the plane back to the gate and removed his luggage. It was then they discovered suspicious items in his bag.
The suspects allegedly had bomb-making materials and a plan that stretched all the way to Dubai
By ROB GILLIES, Associated Press
A man who appeared on Canada's version of "American Idol" was the third person arrested as part of an alleged plot against targets in Canada and abroad, police said Thursday.
The two other suspects made a brief appearance in court on Thursday on charges they had plans to make bombs and had plans to use them.
Police arrested Hiva Alizadeh and Misbahuddin Ahmed in Ottawa on Wednesday and Khurram Syed Sher in London, Ontario on Thursday. Alizadeh, 30, and Ahmed, 26, appeared in court Thursday. All three are Canadian.
Sher, 28, appeared on the reality show "Canadian Idol" in 2008 in which he sings a comical version of Avril Lavigne's "Complicated," complete with dance moves that include a moonwalk. He told the judges he's from Pakistan and likes hockey, music and acting.
Police allege the men had plans and schematics to make improvised explosive devices. Police seized 50 electronic circuit boards which they say could be used as remote-control triggers for bombs. They said one of the men was trained overseas to make explosive booby traps, but did not specify which one.
Police say they moved in on the men to prevent them from sending money to terror groups in Afghanistan.
"The arrests have prevented the gathering of bombs and the execution of one or many terrorist attacks," RCMP Chief Supt. Serge Therriault said.
Therriault said details on the targets would be released in court. Police allege they conspired with an additional three named individuals to "knowingly facilitate terrorist activities" in Canada and abroad. Police say the plot ranged from Canada to Iran, Afghanistan, Dubai and Pakistan, but did not elaborate.
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said the arrests should remind Canadians that they are not immune to terrorism.
"The networks that threaten us are worldwide. They exist not only in remote countries but they have -- through globalization and through the Internet -- they have links through our country and all through the world," Harper said.
A judge remanded Alizadeh and Ahmed in custody until they appear again, by video, next Wednesday.
Police said Sher is a doctor in St. Thomas, Ontario, and that Ahmed is an X-ray technician in Ottawa.
Ahmed's lawyer, Ian Carter, said the charges are serious and his client, a husband and father, could be put away "for a long time."
"He is in shock. That's all I can say," Carter said.
Police descended on a home in Canada's national capital of Ottawa early Wednesday.
The arrests come four years after the apprehension of the so-called Toronto 18, suspects in a homegrown terror plot that involved the attempted setting off of truck bombs in front of Canada's main stock exchange and two government buildings. The ringleaders and others have been convicted.
Canadian Security Intelligence Service director Dick Fadden alluded to the possibility of other homegrown terrorist cases in comments to a Parliament public safety committee last month.
Resistance from government in Sanaa is likely, despite previous cooperation with U.S. counter-terrorism efforts
By KIMBERLY DOZIER, Associated Press
The White House, in an effort to turn up the heat against al-Qaida's branch in Yemen, is considering adding the CIA's armed Predator drones to the fight, two U.S. officials said Wednesday.
The drones are among CIA resources that could be assigned to an existing mission by U.S. special operations forces, a senior U.S. official told The Associated Press. The official said such options were in the planning stages and would be done only with the cooperation of the Yemeni leadership in Sanaa.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss matters of intelligence.
The fact that the White House is considering supplying CIA weapons and other resources to the clandestine counterterrorist fight in Yemen was first reported in The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal.
Yemen is the base of operations for al-Qaida of the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, the militant group that claimed responsibility for the attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound airliner last Christmas Day and counts American-born rebel cleric Anwar al-Awlaki among its leadership. The U.S. military has been working with the Yemeni counterterrorist forces for years, and that cooperation has increased under the Obama administration.
But officials say the U.S. hasn't yet brought as much pressure to bear against AQAP as they have against its parent organization, Osama bin Laden's Pakistan-based al-Qaida, and that a range of tools and tactics were being considered.
Among the CIA's most lethal tools, armed Predator drones are already hunting high-value militant targets in Pakistan's lawless tribal regions. The idea is to reassign some of those to the U.S. special operations forces assisting local counterterrorist forces in Yemen.
But U.S. officials may have a hard time selling the concept to the Yemeni government in Sanaa, where reports of the potential use of drones has already touched off controversy.
A CIA drone strike made headlines in Yemen, in November 2002, when it killed an American citizen along with a group of al-Qaida operatives. Drones became shorthand in Yemen for a weak government allowing foreign forces to have their way.
Drones would be a "nonstarter," Yemen's ambassador to the United Nations told the AP earlier this year.
"To even posit this theory about U.S. drones only builds support for radicalization," Abdullah al-Saidi said at the time. "Yemen will not allow it."
Yemen's government was caught in the blowback last December when a Yemeni-sanctioned U.S. cruise missile strike killed at least seven al-Qaida operatives in a remote tent camp. The strike also killed dozens of civilians, many of them relatives of the militants.
In another strike, a U.S. missile hit an al-Qaida meeting that included a local Yemeni official whom the Yemen government claimed had been trying to negotiate the militants' surrender.
As a result, U.S. operations were reportedly sharply curtailed and limited to sharing intelligence with Yemeni counterterrorist forces. But a senior U.S. official insisted there had been no appreciable decline in cooperation or action against AQAP. The official said that ebbs and flows in the U.S.-Yemeni relationship are common.
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