By The Portland Tribune Editorial PORTLAND, Ore. — In 2005 the Portland City Council voted to pull out of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force – leaving not only Portland, but also the region, with a void of local engagement in investigating and preventing acts of terrorism. That absence should end this week as the…
By Allan Lengel ticklethewire.com Goodbye Code Orange, Code Yellow. We’ll hardly miss ya. Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano is set Wednesday to announce the new terrorism advisory warnings that will replace the color coded ones many citizens became numb to. Authorities said they will include a clear statement on the nature of the threat,…
By Allan Lengel ticklethewire.com Sixteen years ago today, America was served up one horrific surprise: The bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City: 168 people died. It was shocker. At the time — April 19, 1995 – as a reporter at the Detroit News, I called around to federal law enforcement people,…
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
By Allan Lengel ticklethewire.com Despite all the advances, human error can still trump modern technology. The Portland Oregonian reports that the FBI’s efforts last July to record Mohamed Mohamud first talking about taking part in a terrorist bombing plot in Portland failed because the tape recorder went dead. “Put simply,” the government wrote in court…
By Allan Lengel ticklethewire.com WASHINGTON — An FBI memo issued in December says investigators can interrogate domestic-terror suspects longer without giving them a Miranda warning, according to a Wall Street Journal report by Evan Perez. The FBI memo said the policy applies to “exceptional cases” where investigators “conclude that continued unwarned interrogation is necessary to…
By Allan Lengel ticklethewire.com He may not be Mel Gibson, but terrorist suspect Adis Medunjanin might have done something sort of Mel Gibson-like after he was arrested last year in connection with an alleged al-Qaeda-sanctioned plot to blow up New York’s subway system. The New York Daily News reports that FBI agent Aaron Spivack testified…
By Allan Lengel ticklethewire.com Ralph Boelter, head of the Minneapolis FBI, who headed up a large scale probe into counterterrorism involving local Somalis heading overseas to fight with a terrorist organization, is headed east to Washington to become the agency’s deputy assistant director in charge of counterterrorism, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported. Boelter told the…
