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>> ix Preface As I began this book, the United States confronted its most important terrorist threat since 9/11—the attempted suicide bombing of a U.S. jetliner bound for Detroit on Christmas Day, 2009. “This was a serious reminder of the dangers that we face and the nature of those who threaten our homeland,” said President Barack Obama in his first comments on the attempt to kill three hundred passengers aboard the Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam. “This was not a failure to collect intelligence,” explained the president after conferring with his top counterterrorism officials. “It was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence we already had.”1 The intelligence lapses that had allowed twenty-three-year-old Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to board the Amsterdam-to-Detroit flight, carrying undetected explosives and a syringe in his underwear, included a CIA report indicating that the wealthy young Nigerian had recently met with al-Qaeda-affiliated rebels in Yemen known to be planning an attack on the United States.2 Following his arrest, Abdulmutallab told FBI agents that he was trained in Yemen by members of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) who had equipped him with the explosive device and showed him how to conceal it. AQAP instantly released a statement claiming responsibility for the operation, calling Abdulmutallab a “hero” and a “martyr” who had successfully outwitted American intelligence.3 Within the body of intelligence that U.S. analysts failed to “integrate and understand” was the uncomfortable fact that AQAP’s commander—a thirty-six-year-old Saudi named Said Ali al-Shihri—was a former detainee at the U.S. military garrison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Intelligence also included a statement from Shihri’s family who attributed his extremism to the five years he had spent in detention at Guantanamo.4 In effect, the Christmas Day plot was orchestrated by a former inmate radicalized in a U.S.-operated prison. Apart from these intelligence lapses, the Christmas Day plot should have come as no surprise to U.S. intelligence. Five months earlier, in July 2009, following the discovery of several highly publicized terrorist plots originating from U.S. prisons, Attorney General Eric Holder told reporters, “The American people would be surprised at the depth of the [terrorist] threat,” x > xi had “dropped off the radar.” Some of them, it is believed, had joined AQAP. The report advised that these Americans may pose a special danger because they can travel abroad on U.S. passports, return home with “clean skin,” and operate undetected inside American cities and towns. The report said that these radicalized ex-prisoners from America may have joined forces with a group consisting of some two dozen al-Qaeda fighters who had escaped from a Yemen prison in 2000, and some thirty of Saudi Arabia’s most-wanted terrorism suspects, eleven of whom are former Guantanamo detainees. The threat of al-Qaeda and its nearby Somali affiliate, al-Shabaab (Arabic for “the youth”), is also increasing. Most worrisome is that al-Shabaab has recruited a number of Somali Americans from Minneapolis, Minnesota, who may be planning suicide attacks inside the United States. The report concluded that “the Christmas Day plot was a nearly catastrophic illustration of a significant new threat from a network previously regarded as a regional danger, rather than an international one.”10 Weeks later, Saudi Arabian security forces arrested more than a hundred militants as they were planning attacks against the country’s vast southern oil fields. All of them were affiliated with AQAP.11 The intelligence warning on former Guantanamo detainees continued into the next year. According to a 2010 report by the Director of U.S. National Intelligence, 25 percent of released Guantanamo detainees are suspected of terrorist or insurgent activity after their discharge. Because their time at Guantanamo is seen as a badge of honor in the international jihadist community, detainees who leave the camp are treated like “rock stars” and are often elevated to leadership roles in al-Qaeda.12 Much the same can be said of their protégés. On January 24, 2010, no less a figure than Osama bin Laden emerged from hiding to proclaim: “The message delivered to you through the plane of the heroic warrior Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was a confirmation of the previous messages sent by the heroes of September 11.”13 Although the Nigerian’s bombing attempt was a tactical failure, for bin Laden it was a strategic victory inasmuch as...

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