Eric Holder Mirandizes Faisal Shahzad After NYC Terror Plot

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AG Eric Holder Defends Decision To Mirandize NYC Suspect


U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder rejected on Thursday the notion that the investigation into the Times Square bombing case was hindered when authorities informed suspect Faisal Shahzad that he could not be forced to incriminate himself and he has a right to a lawyer. Holder told Congress that Shahzad's cooperation is continuing, and he has provided useful information.

Holder's assertions to a Senate appropriations subcommittee marked a sharp change in tone to the attorney general's recent appearances on Capitol Hill, where he has faced tough questions about his performance.

With what appears to be a success in the Shahzad case, Holder said, "We will continue to pursue a number of leads as we gather intelligence relating to this attempted attack."

"Mr. Shahzad is in fact continuing to cooperate with us," has provided useful information and if convicted, faces a potential life sentence in prison, Holder said.

"There is simply no higher priority than disrupting potential attacks and bringing those who plot them to justice," the attorney general said.


‘Got what they needed’

Separately, a senior U.S. intelligence official said that before investigators read Shahzad his rights, "they got what they needed."

Chief among their check list of questions: finding out whether other imminent attacks were planned, or other operatives assisted Shahzad. After nearly eight hours of questioning, investigators read Shahzad his Miranda rights, so whatever resulted from the subsequent questioning could be used in a future court case.

Speaking on condition of anonymity because the investigation is continuing, the intelligence official said lessons learned in the handling of Dec. 25 bombing suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab case paid off, with a team being brought in immediately to handle the questioning and decide whether and when to read the suspect his rights.

The official credited this with producing the muted response from Capitol Hill, compared to the outcry from Congress over the handling of Abdulmutallab.

At the Senate hearing, Democratic Sen. Barbara Mikulski did raise an issue that has come up in the Shahzad case, that the suspect was able to get aboard an airliner before being arrested, even though investigators already placed had his name on a no-fly list.

The issue "to me is like chalk on a blackboard," said Mikulski.

Emirates airline apparently did not notice the notification from the Transportation Security Administration that Shahzad's name had been added to the list, and Shahzad boarded the Middle East-bound jetliner before federal authorities pulled him off and arrested him.

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‘I am never satisfied’

On Wednesday, the government issued a new requirement for airlines to check the no-fly list more often, a move aimed at closing that security gap in future cases of terror suspects.

"I suspect we would have detected him earlier" had the change already been in effect, Holder said, marking the one aspect of the Shahzad case on which the attorney general conceded a shortcoming.

Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski focused on the no-fly list problem in the apprehension of Shahzad, prompting Holder to declare that "I am never satisfied, even in an operation like this one" that was successful.

The arrest of Shahzad has provided an opportunity for the attorney general and the Obama administration to display a success in the fight against terror following Holder's ill-fated decision last year to put self-declared Sept. 11 attack mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four accused co-conspirators on trial in New York. The White House stopped that effort.

Democrats at the hearing praised Holder for law enforcement's performance on the Shahzad case.

"It was pretty remarkable to see all the pieces come together," said Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy, also a Democrat.

Mikulski called it "amazing" that Shahzad had been taken into custody Monday night in such a short time after the Saturday evening bombing attempt.

Holder cited an earlier thwarted plot to bomb New York City's subway system, in which a key participant, Najibullah Zazi pleaded guilty to terrorism violations.

The Shahzad and Zazi cases reflect "exemplary investigative efforts" by federal agents, law enforcement officers and Justice Department prosecutors, the attorney general said in his prepared remarks.



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Faisal Shahzad Was Motivated By Anger & Money

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Money Woes, Long Silences & A Zeal For Islam


Theirs was an arranged marriage: two well-educated children of prominent Pakistani families set up through a mutual friend. He was the quiet one; she was the one who laughed at parties.

At their wedding in Peshawar six years ago, men and women danced separately but also together, “a rarity at that time,” recalled one guest. “It was such a huge gathering that even their family friends from Qatar came.”

When they returned to the United States, his colleagues at the cosmetics maker Elizabeth Arden celebrated with a small office party.

The husband, Faisal Shahzad, put photographs of his wife, Huma Mian, on his desk at the Arden office in Stamford, Conn. They bought a brand-new house for $273,000, 35 miles away on Long Hill Avenue in Shelton. By the time they moved in, she was pregnant, the neighbors recalled.

As another day passed with Mr. Shahzad talking to investigators about the car bomb he had admitted driving into Times Square on Saturday, details emerged on Wednesday about the couple and their life together, along with speculation about his radicalization. People who knew them, both in Connecticut and in Pakistan, said he had changed in the past year or so, becoming more reserved and more religious as he faced what someone who knows the family well called “their financial troubles.”

Last year, one Pakistani friend said, he even asked his father, Bahar ul-Haq, a retired high-ranking air force pilot in Pakistan, for permission to fight in Afghanistan.

Mr. Haq, now in his 70s, adamantly refused, according to a person familiar with the conversation, saying that he disapproved of the mission and reminding his son that Islam does not permit a man to abandon his wife or children.

As a newlywed, the wedding guest said of Mr. Shahzad by e-mail from Pakistan, “there was no sign of him being extremist or, for that matter, he wasn’t a bit religious.” But in the past couple of years, after changing jobs and fathering two children, Mr. Shahzad “started talking more of Islam.” The guest spoke on the condition he not be identified because of concerns about his safety in the wake of the attempted car bombing.

“The recession had taken a toll on them, I guess,” he wrote in an e-mail message from Pakistan. He said that their money worries became apparent in 2008 or 2009 and that Mr. Shahzad “lost his way during the financial problems.” JPMorgan Chase has since moved to foreclose on the Shelton house, which the couple had abandoned in a hurry, leaving behind clothes and toys.

In February, Mr. Shahzad leased a two-bedroom apartment in Bridgeport, Conn. His landlord said he never saw Mr. Shahzad’s wife. Faiz Ahmad, a friend from the Shahzad family’s ancestral village, Mohib Banda, said that when he last saw Mr. Shahzad, at a wedding a year and a half ago, he was sure that something was wrong. Mr. Shahzad seemed changed, he said, sitting by himself and not talking very much.

He was “completely quiet on the sofa, like someone who has some worries, and undergoing some internal change,” Mr. Ahmad said. “So he was sitting silent, silent. And silence in itself is a question.”

A Pakistani man said that an acquaintance of his who was a friend of the Shahzad family told him that within the past year, Mr. Shahzad had peered critically at a glass of whiskey the friend was holding, indicating a judgmental stance typical for rigid jihadis.

Mr. Shahzad, now 30, appeared to be tracing a familiar arc of frustration, increasing religiosity and, finally, violence. He was born and raised in Pakistan, with a privileged upbringing in a moderate family that lived in at least three places — Karachi, Rawalpindi and Mohib Banda. Mr. Haq, according to Mr. Ahmad, “was a man of modern thinking and of the modern age.”

Family friends interviewed on Wednesday said they believed that Mr. Haq was in hiding in the city of Dera Ghazi Khan in western Pakistan, where the family has wheat fields. Mr. Shahzad’s wife was also believed to be in Pakistan, though her whereabouts was unknown. Dawn, a Pakistani daily, reported that her father had been arrested in Karachi, but Pakistani authorities would not confirm that.

Mr. Shahzad, the youngest of four, was born into a new generation in the years after a military autocrat, Zia ul-Haq, began to inject a rigid version of Islam into Pakistan’s education system. At the same time, hard-line mosques were given money and land, elevating a narrow, often sectarian world view that cast a pall over young Pakistanis.

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Ms. Mian, the oldest of four, was born in Colorado, though she spent summer vacations in Pakistan and lived with her family in Qatar for a while as a child, according to the wedding guest. Her father, Mohammad Asif Mian, earned two master’s degrees at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colo., in the 1980s, and has written four books.

In the best-selling “Project Economics and Decision Analysis,” published in 2002, Mr. Mian thanked family members for their patience and support, adding, “Special thanks to my daughters at the University of Colorado for being on the dean’s list; this has contributed a lot to my enthusiasm.”

Ms. Mian and her sisters, Saba and Hina, all studied at Denver-area colleges and shared a house just off the campus of the University of Colorado in Boulder in 2003 and 2004.

Huma Mian married Mr. Shahzad soon after earning an accounting degree in 2004, and moved to Connecticut, where he was pursuing an M.B.A. at the University of Bridgeport and, on an H-1B visa for highly skilled workers, was working as an operation analyst at Elizabeth Arden, managing and analyzing accounts receivable, according to a résumé obtained by MSNBC.

“I was always surprised, with her having to buy milk for the baby and everything else, how they afforded this on one income,” recalled Brenda J. Thurman, a neighbor in Shelton.

The couple did not socialize much with people on their block. “It was three years before I knew she spoke English,” Ms. Thurman said.

Ms. Thurman said that Ms. Mian left for a couple of months in late 2008 or early 2009, and that Mr. Shahzad told her she was going to Pakistan to have their second child. Within a few months of her return, they packed up and left again last summer. Mr. Shahzad, who had left Elizabeth Arden in 2006 to become a client reporting analyst at Affinion, a financial marketing services company in Norwalk, Conn., quit his job there.

Piles of garbage remained outside the home in Shelton this week, filled with clues about their lives. There were packets of Nair, moisturizer with Arabic writing on the back, a makeup brush, a Japanese cherry blossom scent body spritzer, wrapping paper and gift bags that appeared to be for baby gifts.

There was an envelope addressed to “Faisal, Huma and Alishaba,” which contained a card proclaiming, “Congratulations on your new little girl!”

How, why or where Mr. Shahzad became radicalized remains unclear. Dr. Saud Anwar, the founder of a Pakistani-American association in Connecticut, said that as soon as Mr. Shahzad’s name surfaced in connection with the car bomb, he canvassed Connecticut Muslim and Pakistani groups and found he was not involved with any of them.

But Dr. Anwar said he had been in touch with a university classmate of Mr. Shahzad’s, a man of Pakistani descent who told Dr. Anwar he did not want to be interviewed by reporters. The classmate said he had remained friends with the couple and had noticed something different about Mr. Shahzad about a year ago.

“His personality had changed — he had become more introverted,” Dr. Anwar said the classmate told him. “He had a stronger religious identity, where he felt more strongly and more opinionated about things.” Dr. Anwar said he had asked the classmate whether this change had come through association with a group, and the friend said it seemed to be “on his own that he was learning all these things.”

Mr. Ahmad, the friend from Mohib Banda, speculated that the transformation was rooted in Karachi. An associate of Mr. Shahzad’s was arrested in a mosque believed to have ties with a militant group in Karachi early Tuesday, Pakistani intelligence officials said.

“The question is who has put Faisal in this path?” Mr. Ahmad asked. “The Faisal with the beard that you see, he was not the old Faisal. He was like you, like me, handsome, liberal and an active person.”

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According to Pakistan’s information minister, Mr. Shahzad traveled to Pakistan 13 times in the past seven years. One Pakistani official who knew the family said it was unlikely that Mr. Shahzad would have been radicalized in Pakistan if he was only on short trips, which tend to be dominated by family commitments like weddings; the criminal complaint against him filed on Tuesday says that he returned in February from a five-month stint. It also said Mr. Shahzad had been trained in bomb-making in Waziristan.

Another family friend in Pakistan, Kifayat Ali, called Mr. Shahzad “emotional” and said that he used to carry a dagger around with him as a boy. He speculated that Mr. Shahzad had become enraged by the United States’ military actions, fueled by the Pakistani press blaring conspiracy theories and anti-American vitriol.

“A person sees the brutality of Afghanistan and Iraq,” Mr. Ali noted. “These scenes affect people.”

The résumé posted Wednesday on msnbc.com said Mr. Shahzad held three different positions at Elizabeth Arden over five years starting in mid-2001, and then spent three years at Affinion. At Arden, he said he had “decreased bad debt write-offs by 47 percent” and “recovered over $2.5 mil in ‘lost’ revenue.” At Affinion, he said he prepared “monthly commission forecasting for high-profile Affinion clients such as Citibank, Bank of America, Royal Bank of Scotland, Peoples Bank, US Bank, Wells Fargo and a couple of smaller clients.”

But James Hart, an Affinion spokesman, said “there’s a lot of résumé puffery in there” and that Mr. Shahzad had been “one rung up from entry level” when he left.

A former manager at Elizabeth Arden said that he was the only Pakistani working for the company at the time, but never asked for special accommodation for prayer. And she remembered that on Sept. 11, Mr. Shahzad, like everyone else, huddled around the one radio in the office, listening to bulletins about the attacks on the World Trade Center.

“I think he was just normal,” she recalled. “Isn’t it always the case, though? It’s always the normal ones that you don’t really think they’re going to do something like this.”


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Baghdad Car Bombings Kill At Least 118 People!

Car-rigged bombs. A series of car bombs rip through Iraq's capital. Msnbc.com's Dara Brown reports.

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Iraq relying on hocus pocus bomb detection

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Bomb-rigged cars kill at least 118 in Baghdad


Iraqi police and hospital officials say the coordinated series of attacks against government buildings in Baghdad killed at least 118 people and wounded 261.

Three bomb-rigged cars exploded in quick succession Tuesday, striking the Labor Ministry, a court complex and the new site of Iraq's Finance Ministry -- whose previous building was destroyed in an August blast.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to media.

The blasts came as Iraqi officials prepared to announced the date for next year's parliamentary elections — a move the security forces worry could bring an escalation in attacks seeking to discredit the pro-Western government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

The core of the attacks hit central Baghdad with three bomb-rigged cars exploding in the span of a few minutes.

The targets were the latest assaults directly at Iraq's authorities: the Labor Ministry building, a court complex near the Iraqi-protected Green Zone and the new site of the Finance Ministry, whose previous building was destroyed in major attacks in August.

"Civilians and security personnel have definitely been killed," Baghdad security spokesman Major General Qassim al-Moussawi told Reuters.

An Iraq Police official put the death toll at 112, with 197 people wounded. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to give information to media.

The blasts marked the most serious spate of violence in Baghdad since twin car bombs on Oct. 25 struck outside Baghdad

administration offices, killing at least 155 people.

The breakdown of casualties among the sites was not immediately clear, but the most serious bloodshed had been reported outside the new Finance Ministry building.

About an hour before the Baghdad blasts, a suicide car bomber struck a police patrol in the mostly Sunni district of Dora in southern Baghdad, killing at least four people and injuring five others, said a police official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to media.

Children killed at school

A smaller blast, which some police officials said might have involved the accidental explosion of a hidden stockpile of munitions, killed seven children at a school in the Shiite slum of Sadr City on Monday.

Overall violence has dropped sharply around Iraq in the past year, but insurgents have stepped up attacks at government sites.

Rather than stage frequent smaller-scale attacks against soft targets like marketplaces or mosques, insurgent groups like al-Qaida now appear to be aiming for spectacular and less frequent strikes against heavily defended government targets.



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