There is something fishy about Saturday's arrest of Jose Pimentel, a 27-year-old U.S. citizen and Manhattan resident accused of plotting to attack U.S. servicemen and police officers. Labeled a "total lone wolf" by Mayor Bloomberg, the NYPD reportedly used a confidential informant and wiretaps to surveil Pimentel for at least two years. The NYPD gathered evidence via Pimentel's "radical" website, his conversations with the informant concerning bomb-building and his alleged motivations to step up his planning after the government's killing of U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki by drone strike in September. So, with this lengthy investigation and seemingly incriminatory evidence -- coupled with the report that Pimentel was arrested a mere hour before finishing building his bomb -- where was the FBI in this ordeal?
Information sharing among the intelligence community was a crucial recommendation of the 9/11 Commission, and the need to "bring down the wall" between federal, state and local intelligence and law enforcement entities was expanded upon in the 2005 WMD Commission Report. These recommendations have sparked numerous changes within the intelligence community -- arguably the most visible of which being the establishment of at least seventy-two "fusion centers" across the country. And the principle behind fusion centers -- information sharing and collaboration among federal, state, local and tribal intelligence and law enforcement entities -- is being mirrored in various localities. Increased information sharing is supposed to pair the expertise and scope of federal agencies with local law enforcement's proximity to local communities to better effectuate investigations of terrorism plots.
But here, the NYPD reportedly tried to get the FBI involved in its investigation of Pimentel at least twice. And both times the FBI refused. Sources state that FBI officials concluded that Pimentel did not have the "predisposition or the ability" to carry out his alleged plot. Yet with the evidence gathered during the NYPD's prolonged stakeout of Pimentel, which purportedly included "numerous conversations" with the informant about Pimentel's wish to build bombs and Pimentel's personal website and blog posts supporting al-Qaida, why couldn't the NYPD convince the FBI -- the agency most experienced in investigating domestic terror plots -- that Pimentel posed a serious threat? Why couldn't the NYPD get the FBI involved in what Mayor Bloomberg referred to as "the type of threat FBI Director Robert Mueller has warned about"?
Restrictions on information sharing likely did not pose a problem, so what did? It does not take much for the FBI to open a terrorism investigation and even less for it to conduct an " assessment ": indeed, the FBI may conduct an assessment solely for the purposes of "detecting, obtaining information about, or preventing or protecting against Federal crimes or threats to the national security." No factual basis is needed -- an assessment may be predicated on an allegation alone that the purported target poses a threat to national security. If that is enough authority for the FBI to collect massive amounts of data on religious, ethnic and national-origin characteristics of countless individuals throughout the country -- and the NYPD's evidence on Pimentel was as compelling as it says it was -- why was that not enough for the FBI to join and support the NYPD in its investigation of Pimentel?
The questions far outnumber the answers, and somewhere the dots just do not connect. Representative Peter King has already come forward with a renewed call to scrutinize "radicalized Muslim converts like Jose Pimentel." Yet in the face of the -- albeit alarming -- details surrounding Pimentel's alleged plot, this incident cannot turn into a campaign among local and federal law enforcement for increased authority to conduct terror investigations. The NYPD and FBI have far more than sufficient tools -- arguably overbroad tools -- to cooperate and investigate true threats. Instead, where one entity cannot convince the other of the severity of a suspected threat, the focus of the inquiry must turn back around to the agency conducting the investigation -- and the target, the evidence, and most importantly, the agency's tactics must be reexamined.
Gabriel Lerner: Latinos: 16% Of Population, But Only 2% Of Homegrown Terrorists
Matthis Chiroux: NYC 'Terror' Suspect Out-Geneva's Manhattan DA
Len Levitt: Kelly on Muslim Spying: Who, Us?
Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens: Pipe Bomb Plot Demonstrates Ongoing Threat From Lone Wolves
Mother of bomb plot suspect Jose Pimentel apologizes to NYers
Terror Suspect's Mom Speaks About Her Son
Jose Pimentel: New York City terror plot to attack NYPD, returning U.S. ...
Or, the rational conclusion to be drawn: The NYPD is better equipped and understands the dynamics of Islamic terrorism much more than the FBI, a federal bureau that has been persistently on the receiving end of righteous lectures from the Obama administration about how Jihad cannot be mentioned in its reports and training manuals and that their number one concern should be alleviating the alienation of the Muslim community.
//The NYPD and FBI have far more than sufficient tools -- arguably overbroad tools -- to cooperate and investigate true threats.//
The true threats, under the eyes of the Obama administration, are members of every other religious group other than Muslims.
You should be glad we have a anti-terrorism task force actually committed to preventing mass murder rather than one akin to a federal agency whose goal has become to disseminate lofty rhetoric about diversity, outreach, and understanding.
to go to war, and concentrate on our own in side the usa?? wow, i can't believe i came
up with that all alone