In New York, a Turf War in the Battle Against Terrorism

By Dafna Linzer
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 22, 2008; A01

NEW YORK -- Not long after Sept. 11, 2001, as New York City began to build a counterterrorism effort to rival those of most nations, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly decided to put an end to the department's reliance on the FBI for classified data coming in from Washington.

Kelly, who was working to protect the city against another attack, wanted his own access to the stream of threat reporting concerning New York. The solution was to install a classified-information vault, like the FBI's, at the headquarters of the New York City Police Department.

Kelly made the request in the spring of 2002 and waited six years for an answer. After questions from The Washington Post for this story, the FBI said it has decided to approve the vault, a specially designed, guarded room known as a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility.

No other police department in the United States has responded to the threats of terrorism in quite the same way as the NYPD -- or clashed as sharply with the nation's primary counterterrorism agency, the FBI.

A thousand NYPD officers are assigned full time to operations drawing on the traditional missions of the CIA and the FBI. The department's liaison officers have been deployed from Nairobi to Singapore, while its networks of domestic informants stretch across the five boroughs of New York City.

In the past seven years, Kelly and his deputies have formed close working relationships with key intelligence agencies and the Department of Homeland Security. The NYPD has so many native foreign-language speakers that it lends translators to the Pentagon.

But the FBI, protective of turf and disdainful of local initiative, froze Kelly's department out of two New York-related terrorism investigations, officials say. When more than 100 top police detectives joined the FBI's joint terrorism task force, they were initially not permitted to read the bureau's case files.

"People have information, and they want to control information," Kelly said in an interview at police headquarters, just five blocks from where the World Trade Center once stood. "Controlling information is power, and they don't want to let it go -- it is as fundamental as that."

Working largely on its own, the NYPD has transformed an unmarked Brooklyn warehouse into a counterterrorism center with a national and global reach. In a second facility in Manhattan, the department runs undercover operations, recruits spies and houses intelligence analysts.

Inside police headquarters is a high-tech situation room where rows of computer monitors give off a moody blue light and floor-to-ceiling television screens beam images from around the world. It is staffed 24 hours a day with officers tracking local and international threats, as well as the movements of as many as a dozen NYPD detectives on foreign assignments.

During a recent interview there, Kelly and David Cohen, the deputy commissioner for intelligence, were interrupted by a liaison officer calling from the scene of a suicide bombing in Israel to report on a new technique employed by the bomber.

Successes include the arrest in 2004 of two Muslim men on charges of plotting to blow up a subway station near the Republican National Convention, and the arrest and deportation in 2003 of two Iranian men who were filming a subway track in Queens, Cohen said. The former probe, in which one of the men pleaded guilty and the other received a 30-year prison term, was based on a year of undercover work by one of Cohen's top detectives.

"Local law enforcement is best placed to gather ground-level intelligence," said Roger Cressey, the principal deputy to the counterterrorism chief at the National Security Council from 1999 to November 2001. "Only when you combine that with what you are getting at the federal level will you create a holistic picture of the threat. NYPD has done that and is a model for other major metropolitan cities to follow."

For Kelly, the vast and pricey operation fulfills a pledge to protect the city and provide its 8 million residents with a sense of security. Kelly, a former Marine and a Customs Service chief in the Clinton administration, is serving his second stint as commissioner and often chides himself and the city for not being more aggressive after the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

He said he is not prepared to rely entirely on others for the city's protection. "We just see ourselves very much at risk here, the top of the target list," he said.
Shut Out of Local Cases

In March 2003, working from information gleaned by the CIA, NYPD detectives and FBI agents investigated and then arrested a Pakistani national named Uzair Paracha. Investigators said Paracha had been working with several senior al-Qaeda suspects, including Majid Khan -- whose family lives in the Baltimore area -- on plots that included blowing up gas stations on the East Coast.

The detectives and agents learned enough to tip off the CIA to the whereabouts of Paracha's father, a businessman and alleged al-Qaeda financier who investigators said had met with Osama bin Laden. Four months after the younger Paracha's arrest, the CIA picked up Saifullah Paracha in Thailand and then secretly rendered him to a CIA prison at Bagram air base in Afghanistan.

NYPD detectives had previously been to Bagram, with Pentagon permission, to interview detainees connected to New York. But the Paracha case was treated differently. For the first time, the FBI blocked detectives from joining a bureau interrogator who was traveling to Bagram to interview the elder Paracha.

The FBI agent in charge in New York, Joe Billy, said the interrogator would brief detectives on her discoveries, but she went on extended leave after her return, according to a former NYPD official. As a result, whatever detail was extracted about the Paracha family's contacts or intentions in New York went unreported to the police, the official said.

"We wanted to send our lead detective on the case to Bagram with the FBI agent to talk to Paracha," said James Waters, a deputy commissioner and the senior ranking NYPD officer in the joint task force. But "the FBI just didn't want the NYPD there."

The ban on NYPD visits to Bagram, where hundreds of prisoners were detained by the CIA and the U.S. military, lasted two years and outraged New York detectives working on the task force, two officials recalled in interviews. By the time access was restored, Paracha had been moved to the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. New York detectives interviewed him there, years after his arrest.

FBI spokesman John Miller said: "There were a number of issues and agencies involved in the Paracha case. We worked through it, and we're all fine now."

Just as the Paracha investigation was getting underway, FBI agents in Ohio were secretly questioning a Kashmiri-born truck driver named Iyman Faris. On orders from Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the orchestrator of al-Qaeda's attacks against the United States, Faris plotted to help bring down the Brooklyn Bridge, prosecutors later alleged.

After two scouting trips, Faris reported back to Mohammed that security in New York was too tight to carry out the attack, prosecutors said in court documents. In May 2003, two months after Faris was secretly detained, then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft held a news conference to announce his indictment for allegedly planning an al-Qaeda attack in New York.

The NYPD was stunned -- the department had not been told about the plot or Faris's visits to New York. Although Faris was cooperating with federal agents in Ohio, the FBI in New York was not following up on his contacts in the city, where he stayed during his visits and where he might have tried to buy explosives.

For months afterward, top NYPD officials -- Michael Sheehan, an ex-Army Ranger who had served as the State Department's top counterterrorism official, and Cohen, a former deputy director of the CIA -- sought access to Faris so detectives could question him about his trips. They also wanted Faris's computer, phone and address book. They were turned away.

The Justice Department moved swiftly against Faris, and he was sentenced just six months after his arrest. By the time the NYPD finally questioned him, he was serving a 20-year sentence, claiming that his guilty plea had been an error and refusing to cooperate. "We'll never even know what we missed, what leads we might have pulled," said a senior NYPD official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid creating tensions with FBI colleagues.

Asked for comment, FBI spokesman Miller said: "We realigned the way headquarters communicates with the field offices on terrorism matters, and it's unlikely that glitch could occur today."
NYPD's Global Reach

On a whiteboard in Cohen's office at One Police Plaza is a list of locations that currently trouble him. None of them are in the United States, and few of them are noted publicly by intelligence officials or counterterrorism experts in Washington.

Working with detectives posted overseas, undercover officers in New York and informants, Cohen has identified towns in South Africa, Yemen, Egypt, Jordan and Morocco that he wants NYPD officers to know. If they arrest anyone who has been to those towns, he wants to be told.

Cohen, the only person to have led the CIA's clandestine service and its analytical division, still drinks coffee out of a CIA mug. He said his work with the NYPD has given him a sense of professional freedom and accomplishment that is hard to achieve in the bureaucratized intelligence world of Washington.

A fifth of Cohen's staff was born overseas. He has 70 Arabic speakers working on counterterrorism cases, and lends some to the Defense Department and foreign intelligence agencies.

The NYPD's foreign contacts provoked early FBI complaints, particularly when the department embedded homicide detectives with Britain's Scotland Yard, Israel's Shin Bet and other overseas security services.

"The FBI had essentially a monopoly on counterterrorism work nationally, and all of a sudden this local police department shows up and is beginning to send persons around the world, is developing a system of listening posts and trip wires, and to use the most benign word I can find, they were miffed," Cohen said.

But, recently, officials in the FBI and the NYPD said the bitterness that plagued their first years after the 2001 attacks has faded. The NYPD has successfully obtained $100 million in federal funds for its counterterrorism effort.

Both departments credit the improvement to a pivotal meeting, 2 1/2 years ago, between Kelly and FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III that coincided with a change in the FBI's top staff in New York.

Mark Mershan, the FBI's assistant director in charge of New York, said he and Mueller discussed whether the NYPD's practice of posting detectives overseas was harming the bureau, and decided it was not.

Mershan said senior officials at the FBI opposed giving the NYPD its own Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) because it would have allowed the department to "bypass the FBI and establish its own links with the intelligence community. Clearly that has happened anyway, so I have called David Cohen and told him that we will be pleased to certify the SCIF."

Mershan emphasized that the FBI's task force has become highly cooperative in the past several years. Last month, he signed travel orders for a bureau agent and an NYPD detective to go to the Horn of Africa to investigate a new lead in the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings. "They are going together, as partners," he said.

Staff researcher Julie Tate in Washington contributed to this report.

Domestic terror groups in disarray after Sept. 11

After the violent mayhem of the '90s, right-wing extremist groups are less active. Some believe the 2001 attacks diverted rage away from the U.S. government and toward foreigners.
By Richard A. Serrano
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

March 11, 2008

RENO — Three years after foreign terrorists killed nearly 3,000 Americans in the Sept. 11 attacks, Steve Holten left the San Francisco Bay Area, drove east through the Tahoe National Forest, skirted the Truckee River and settled himself in Reno. Here he proclaimed himself a lieutenant colonel of the local chapter of Aryan Nations. He sent an e-mail to area newspapers declaring war on the federal government, the media and the Jews.

But no war came. Holten's career as a domestic terrorist was short and uneventful. FBI agents promptly arrested him, and a federal grand jury indicted him for transmitting a threatening e-mail. He pleaded guilty and served four months in prison. After getting out he contracted the AIDS virus, and he was rearrested, this time for soliciting a man for sex in a nearby city park.

With shaved head and Nazi lightning-bolt tattoos on his neck, Holten is emblematic of how far the anti-government terrorism movement has sunk in the years since the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center.

Richard Butler was a lion of the movement. He built the Church of Jesus Christ Christian/Aryan Nations from a barbed-wire-encircled compound in Hayden, Idaho, into a hate empire. But when he died in September 2004, at age 86, he left a depleted organization with two factions feuding over the detritus.

John Trochmann, once an omnipresent face of hatred for the government, still has the iron-gray beard and fiery eyes from the days when he helped found the Militia of Montana. Today he drives a 13-year-old black Suburban to gun shows in the Pacific Northwest to hawk anti-government pamphlets or sell log cabins to get by. He still believes, but at 64, he doesn't act.

"9/11," he said in an interview at his home near Montana's Bitterroot Mountains. "Boy, did it ever change things."

Though violent extremist groups have been around in America for decades, they surged in the 1990s, a decade of spectacular domestic mayhem -- at a cabin in Ruby Ridge, Idaho; on a compound outside Waco, Texas; in downtown Oklahoma City. Their heroes were men like Timothy McVeigh, Theodore Kaczynski and Eric Rudolph.

Today the groups are shadows of themselves, with many of their leaders dead, imprisoned, disillusioned or just inept.

Many observers attribute that to Sept. 11, for diverting the rage of disaffected Americans away from the U.S. government and toward foreigners, and for fueling the subsequent Patriot Act-driven crackdown. Others say the movement began to crumble earlier, when the Y2K disaster, a favorite prediction of conspiracy theorists, failed to materialize.

And part of the collapse may have just been human nature. "Many of the people had such huge egos that they didn't know how to work together and keep the movement going," said Chip Berlet, a senior analyst at the liberal Political Research Associates think tank who specializes in the study of right-wing networks. "So it basically unraveled."

In contrast to the 1990s, this decade has seen only a smattering of arrests of isolated plotters, caught before they could act. Syracuse University tracked domestic terrorism prosecutions over the last five years and found them down by 47%. California and Oregon were the leading states for prosecutions in 2006, with eight each.

In some cases those fomenting hate have directed their vitriol at immigration across the Mexican border. There also are environmental and animal-rights extremists, and in the first months after Sept. 11 there was a spike in racial attacks against Muslims.

The Department of Justice recently compiled a summary on foreign and domestic terrorism for 2002 through 2005. They found that 23 of the 24 attacks committed by domestic groups were perpetrated by "special-interest extremists active in the animal-rights and environmental movements"; the other was a white supremacist's firebombing of a synagogue in Oklahoma City. None was carried out by the traditional anti-government elements popular in the 1990s.

The report was filled with details of plots in three dozen major cases of foreign terrorism operations in the U.S. All drew intense public scrutiny: Jose Padilla was arrested in Chicago, Al Qaeda cells were dispersed in the Pacific Northwest, and in upstate New York half a dozen men were prosecuted for attending an overseas Al Qaeda training camp.

The domestic cases were generally much smaller matters that garnered few headlines and, like the Holten arrest in Reno, did not nearly approach the potential danger posed by foreign conspirators.

The FBI remains vigilant, said Assistant Director John J. Miller, against terrorists of all stripes. "Not every terrorist needs to be linked to an organized group like Al Qaeda to kill the innocent."

The decade of anti-government terrorism was nearing a close in 1999 as extremists traveled the country and spread messages on the Internet, railing that the Y2K computer glitch was a secret federal operation to shut down the country when the clock ticked past midnight, Dec. 31, 1999. They met at conventions and preparedness expos warning that the nation's economy would collapse, that Washington politicians and "the Jews" would enrich themselves -- that chaos would follow.

But when the calendar rolled over to 2000 and nothing collapsed, many of their followers turned away.

On June 11, 2001, McVeigh, the man whom many extremists idolized for blowing up the federal building in Oklahoma City, was executed by the federal government. His body count, 168 victims, was the largest at its time, and many of them were government workers. His act seemed unmatchable.

But three months later, on Sept. 11, 2001, Osama bin Laden sent four airplanes on suicide missions. With so many more dead, the enemy now from beyond American borders, a patriotic nation galvanized to fight the terrorists abroad.

The aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks also brought stronger law enforcement tools, most notably the Patriot Act, and reinforced FBI field offices with Joint Task Forces to seek and destroy unfolding terrorist plots.

Though hate groups might not be as in-your-face as before, said Mark Pitcavage, investigative research director of the Anti-Defamation League, the FBI and local police continue making arrests.

"We definitely found that 9/11 had one positive aspect," he said. "It caused us to raise awareness."

Many extremists contend the Sept. 11 attacks were orchestrated by the government itself in a devious plan to pass the Patriot Act and weaken the 2nd Amendment right to own guns.

Norman "Dave" Somerville, tied to a militia in northern Michigan, armed himself at a small compound with machine guns and ammunition after the attacks. The former Special Forces veteran kept photos of President Bush and then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld with rifle-scope cross hairs on their faces.

In fall 2003, authorities arrested him on weapons charges. He is serving an 80-month sentence at a federal prison medical center in Kentucky and will be 55 by the time he gets out. His job is washing dishes. "Prison sucks," he lamented.

In an interview, he insisted his only crime was not registering his firearms, and he alleged that the government had used Sept. 11 to create public distrust of Americans who challenged authority. It is a common complaint among anti-government conspiracy theorists.

"When it happened, we thought the world was coming to an end. But it was a fraud," he said. "I've seen demolition jobs and how buildings come down. And there's no way those buildings came down without extra explosives. It was done for purposes of greed, for helping the Jews, for taking over the oil."

Others have sought to link themselves with foreign terrorists, finding common ground in their hatred of America. Ronald Grecula of Bangor, Pa., tried to arm an Al Qaeda operative with explosives. The operative turned out to be an FBI undercover agent. Grecula was sentenced to five years after a federal judge heard him on the surveillance tapes.

"I have a suitcase full of stuff," Grecula boasted in an AmeriSuites hotel room in Houston. He compared himself to the slave Spartacus who revolted against the Roman Empire "I have no loyalty for America," he declared. "This government is the most wicked and worst it has ever been."

Now at the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kan., Grecula claims he was set up. Yet Grecula, 71, rails on. "I have something to give the world and I'm going to give it to them, whether they like it or not," he said. "Never give Americans what they want. Give them what they need."

His rhetoric, he bragged, makes him a bit of a star in prison. "They think I'm a terrorist in here, that I'll blow up a city where their family lives," he laughed.

Others, like Holten in Reno, admit mistakes.

"The enemy is still the United States," he said. But he concedes that his declaration of war was ill-conceived and that perhaps the heyday of the domestic terrorism movement was past.

"I made poor choices," said Holten, 43.

He pledged to clean up his life but not his style. "I didn't throw my beliefs in the trash can," he said.

His attorney, Fredilyn Sison, said Holten never scared her, never fit the profile of a bomb thrower. "I remember he had a sweet mom and he was devoted to her," she said.

Asked why the movement lost steam, she offered this: "I wonder if they just are mere wannabes. A lot of them are just young and trying to figure out life, you know."

Perhaps they are like Demetrius Van Crocker, incarcerated in a federal prison in Terre Haute, Ind., until 2030 for attempting to acquire chemical weapons and explosives to destroy government buildings.

Explaining himself in a letter, he said: "I just wanted an M-16 to play with."

richard.serrano@latimes.com

Analysis: DHS stages cyberwar exercise

Published: March 10, 2008 at 11:28 AM

By SHAUN WATERMAN
UPI Homeland and National Security Editor
WASHINGTON, March 10 (UPI) -- Officials from 18 federal agencies, nine states, four foreign governments and more than three dozen private companies will take part in a cyberwar exercise staged by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security this week.

The war game, codenamed Cyber Storm II, will run Monday to Thursday, based at U.S. Secret Service headquarters in Washington. It is the second DHS biannual cyber-exercise, designed to test the ability of federal agencies and their partners in state, local and foreign governments and the private sector to respond to and recover from cyberattacks on their computer networks.

"The goal of Cyber Storm II is to examine the processes, procedures, tools, and organizational response to a multi-sector coordinated attack through, and on, the global cyber infrastructure," says a fact sheet from the department.

Details of the planning for the event are closely held, in part to avoid tipping off participants. The fact sheet says only that the exercise -- the culmination of more than 18 months of planning led by DHS' National Cyber Security Division -- will simulate a series of coordinated physical and cyberattacks on IT and communications systems and chemical, rail and pipeline infrastructure.

The attacker is not identified, but has "a specific political and economic agenda," says the fact sheet. In the last Cyber Storm exercise in 2006, the enemy was an anarchistic coalition of "hacktivists" -- politically motivated hackers -- called the Worldwide Anti-Globalization Alliance, joined by a number of "independent actors."

In the scenario, the attackers penetrated state health records' databases, attacked Federal Aviation Administration systems and defaced newspaper sites.

"Key elements of the hacker attack plan were to strike at trusted cyber systems that were used to control both physical infrastructures and digital commerce and services," says the DHS' after-action report, released in September 2006. "The attackers focused on maximizing economic harm and fomenting general distrust of big business and government by disrupting services and misleading news media and other information outlets."

The choice of adversary -- which the report stressed "was neither a forecast of any particular threats … currently existing nor an expression of any specific concerns" -- raised some eyebrows. Among U.S. military planners, nation states, and in particular China, are considered the actually existing adversaries with the most significant capabilities to launch attacks on, or through, the Internet.

One report, by Washington Post blogger Brian Krebs, said Cyber Storm II will feature a nation-state attacker, but a DHS official familiar with the planning said only that this was "a possibility."

The official added that the adversary was "more sophisticated" than in 2006. The scenario was "designed to examine the response to some of the threats that are out there in the real world," he said.

Having a nation-state adversary would make sense, former DHS preparedness chief George Foresman told UPI.

"The top candidates for adversaries would be states, terrorist groups and criminal enterprises" as they were in the real world, said Foresman, who was only involved in the very early stages of planning the event.

As in 2006, the attacks this week will be simulated on special systems set up for the exercise "and will not impact any live networks," says the fact sheet.

Participants in the exercise, which consists of a series of detailed scenarios unfolding according to a strict timetable, will learn of developments via more than 1,700 pre-scripted "injects" in the form of phone calls or e-mails from exercise managers, or through a mock TV news channel set up for the event.

But some of what players will learn from the channel will be bogus, former DHS official Jerry Dixon told Krebs' Security Fix blog.

"They'll inject some red herring attacks and information to throw intelligence analysts and companies off the trail of the real attackers," said Dixon, who helped plan the exercise.

The $6 million event will involve thousands of participants across the world, including from departments of the Australian, British, Canadian and New Zealand governments, and from U.S. agencies including the Department of Defense, CIA, National Security Agency and FBI.

Foresman said the foreign countries participating, all signatories to the 1947 UKUSA intelligence-sharing accords with the United States, were chosen because "there is a shared basis by which you can deal with classified information."

In Australia, which has ramped up its level of participation since the last exercise in 2006, officials from the federal police, Attorney General's Department and AUSCERT -- the Australian national Computer Emergency Response Team -- will all take part, Attorney General Robert McClelland told a news conference Friday.

In New Zealand, participating agencies include the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Ministry of Health, the Customs Service and the New Zealand Defense Forces, according to ComputerWorld.co.nz.

Companies taking part include ANZ National Bank, Cisco Systems Inc., which owns much U.S. Internet infrastructure, Dow Chemical, IBM, computer security firm McAfee, software giant Microsoft and Verizon.

International and private-sector participation is essential, said Foresman. "A cyberattack against the United States with real-world effects inside our borders can be launched from anywhere in the world," he said, adding that the attacks would target or utilize infrastructure owned by the private sector.

Cyber-warfare is "inherently international and inherently private (sector)," he said.

The 2006 after-action report said Cyber Storm I was designed to test basic elements of communication and decision-making in a complex environment of interdependent systems and multiple stakeholders. "Effective response to the scenario was designed to require rapid communications and de-confliction of critical information between players in all sectors and organizations, as well as strategic integration of information to gain accurate situational awareness," it said.

"It's all about the information," Foresman said, adding that "the ability to communicate highly technical information in real-time" between government officials without a common vocabulary had been a major challenge identified by Cyber Storm I.

"Collaboration between the government and the private sector" was something planners continued to wrestle with. "We haven't mastered that piece yet," he said.

Chertoff: Terrorism Prevention Efforts Successful

By Spencer S. Hsu and William Branigin
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, March 6, 2008; 3:01 PM

The United States has successfully lowered the risk of a large-scale domestic terrorist attack in the near future, one of the reasons there has been an increase in attacks by Islamic extremists in Europe, Homeland Security Michael Chertoff said today.

Improvements in U.S. traveler screening and border security have shifted the focus of al-Qaeda operatives and sympathizers to Europe, which is perceived as a more open target, Chertoff told a group of Washington Post editors.

"We have significantly reduced the risk of a major attack in the short term," Chertoff said before meeting with President Bush to mark the fifth anniversary of the Homeland Security Department's creation.

In a speech commemorating the anniversary, Bush renewed his lobbying for a bill that would provide immunity from lawsuits to telecommunications companies that turned over information on their customers to the federal government after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The bill would extend modifications of a surveillance law that expired last month.

"To stop new attacks on America, we need to know who the terrorists are talking to, what they're saying and what they're planning," Bush told DHS employees at DAR Constitution Hall in Washington. For that, the government needs the cooperation of private companies, he said, but some of them are being sued for billions of dollars for allegedly violating customers' privacy.

"Allowing these lawsuits to proceed would be unfair," as well as "unwise" and "dangerous," Bush said. Although a bipartisan majority in the Senate passed a "good bill," he said, House Democratic leaders blocked a vote on it last month, saying they needed another 21 days to deal with it. That "deadline" arrives Saturday, Bush said.

A previous House version of the bill did not include the immunity provision that the White House has demanded.

"If House leaders are serious about security, they need to meet the deadline they set for themselves, pass a bill and get it to my desk this Saturday," Bush said.

He also warned against complacency about terrorism, urging Americans to "remember that the danger to our country has not passed."

Listing a number of steps he said his administration has taken to prevent future terrorist attacks, Bush asserted that "we have made our borders more secure," unified terrorism databases and improved the detection of counterfeit travel documents.

He also pointed to programs to prevent the smuggling of biological, chemical, radiological or nuclear weapons into the nation's cities.

"We are determined to stop the world's most dangerous men from striking America with the world's most dangerous weapons," Bush said.

Chertoff also highlighted what he said was the department's effectiveness in keeping would-be attackers at bay.

"It's not impossible, but for terrorists who typically operate in being very careful because they don't want their plots disrupted, we have made it harder for them to come in," he said.

Chertoff likened the reaction to a car thief who passes over a locked vehicle set with an alarm and anti-theft devices and decides to steal the one next to it.

"One of the reasons we're seeing more attacks in Europe is because they think it's easier," he said, citing almost annual attacks since 2004 in Madrid, London and Glasgow and disrupted plots in Denmark, Germany, Italy, France and Portugal.

However, the intention of al-Qaeda and affiliated groups to strike at U.S. targets has not diminished, Chertoff warned, repeating U.S. intelligence assessments last year. For example, a disrupted Britain-based plot to smuggle liquid explosives onto transatlantic airliners in 2006 would have caused deaths on the scale of the Sept. 11 attacks, he said.

While al-Qaeda's capability is "uneven" and less than what it was before 2001, it is rebounding somewhat in the frontier areas of Pakistan, he said.

Chertoff's remarks come as Washington is pushing 27 of its European and other allies to accept tighter security requirements on travelers who can now visit the United States as tourists without visas. The restrictions include electronic check-in with authorities days before travel.

He also warned against complacency, saying al Qaeda inspired extremists are "continuing to refine themselves and improve themselves. If we don't do more than we're doing, if we stop, eventually that risk is going to start to increase."

Information on Port Security in the Caribbean Basin, GAO-07-804R, June 29, 2007

Referred to as our "third border," the Caribbean Basin has significant maritime links with the United States. Given these links and the region's proximity, the United States is particularly interested in ensuring that the ports in the Caribbean Basin--through which goods bound for this country's ports and cruise ships carrying its citizens must travel--are secure. Section 233 (c) of the Security and Accountability for Every Port Act of 2006 (SAFE Port Act) requires GAO to report on various security-related aspects of Caribbean Basin ports. Our specific objectives were to identify and describe the (1) threats and security concerns in the Caribbean Basin related to port security, (2) actions that foreign governments and local stakeholders have taken in the Caribbean Basin to implement international port security requirements and the challenges that remain, (3) activities reported to be under way by U.S. government agencies to enhance port security in the Caribbean Basin, and (4) potential economic impacts of port security and terrorist attacks in the Caribbean Basin. Between March 29 and April 13, 2007, we briefed Congress on the results of our work to address these objectives. This report summarizes the information provided during those discussions. We conducted our work from October 2006 through June 2007 in accordance with generally accepted government auditing standards.

While intelligence sources report that no specific, credible terrorist threats to maritime security exist in the Caribbean Basin, the officials we spoke to indicated that there are a number of security concerns that could affect port security in the region. Caribbean ports contain a variety of facilities such as cargo facilities, cruise ship terminals, and facilities that handle petroleum products and liquefied natural gas. Additionally, several Caribbean ports are among the top cruise ship destinations in the world. Given the volume and value of this maritime trade, the facilities and infrastructure of the maritime transportation system may be attractive targets for a terrorist attack. Our prior work on maritime security issues has revealed that the three most likely modes of attack in the port environment are a suicide attack using an explosive-laden vehicle or vessel, a standoff attack using small arms or rockets, and the traditional armed assault. Beyond the types of facilities and modes of attack to be considered, officials we spoke to identified a number of overarching security concerns that relate to the Caribbean Basin as a whole. Among these concerns are (1) the level of corruption that exists in some Caribbean nations to undermine the rule of law in these countries, (2) organized gang activity occurring in proximity to or within port facilities, and (3) the geographic proximity of many Caribbean countries, which has made them transit countries for cocaine and heroin destined for U.S. markets. Other security concerns in the Caribbean Basin mentioned by U.S. agency officials include stowaways, illegal migration, and the growing influence of Islamic radical groups and other foreign terrorist organizations.