A year and a half ago, I warned that if you bought certain beauty supplies–hydrogen peroxide and acetone–you might be a terrorism suspect. I’m going to make a wildarsed guess and suggest that the Federal Government is doing a nationwide search to find out everyone who is buying large amounts of certain kinds of beauty [...]

Let’s look at the following two examples of men arrested in the last week to see how the federal crime “Use of a Weapon of Mass Destruction” is used. Mohamed Osman Mohamud: Mohamud was arrested Friday on charges of “attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction” for trying to detonate what he believed to [...]

Main Justice reports that Pat Leahy and DOJ’s Inspector General Glenn Fine have been chatting about further IG review of the FBI’s use of the several PATRIOT provisions that were contentious issues in last years attempt to reauthorize the PATRIOT Act. This means that Fine is going to do what the legislation would have mandated–conduct [...]

Faisal Shahzad was arrested just before midnight on May 3. On May 5, the Pakistani newspaper Dawn reported that one of Shahzad’s friends and his father-in-law, Iftikhar Mian (elsewhere named as Mohammad Asif Mian), had been detained by Pakistani intelligence. The same report describes a meeting that took place on May 4, at which Pakistani [...]

When I was out tromping around Yosemite (!!) on Friday, one of Najibullah Zazi’s co-conspirators, Zarein Ahmedzay, plead guilty to two terrorism-related charges. Mark that up as yet another counterterrorism victory for civilian courts. But it’s more than that. As Isikoff and Hosenball emphasize, the government revealed on Friday that Zazi and Ahmedzay received instructions [...]

I happened to get lost, end up in DC, and show up to cover the Constitution Project’s annual dinner, particularly Attorney General Eric Holder’s keynote (see here for the [!]Breaking [!]News on that front). Before I get into that, I just wanted to note how gratifying it is to be in a crowd of DC [...]

This WaPo story–which tells how Mohamedou Ould Slahi and Tariq al-Sawah got special privileges and too much fast food at Gitmo in exchange for cooperation–focuses on the things the detainees get, like Subway sandwiches, their own mint garden, and their own compound. (h/t cs) But it really points to one more reason why civilian trials [...]

And all resolved using civilian law enforcement. From the DOJ press release: The Justice Department announced that Najibullah Zazi pleaded guilty today in the Eastern District of New York to a three-count superseding information charging him with conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction (explosive bombs) against persons or property in the United States, conspiracy [...]

The AP is reporting that Najibullah Zazi, who was arrested last September as he was preparing to deploy bombs made out of beauty supply derived TATP, will plead guilty later today. Which means that less than a year after a person allegedly trained in Pakistani al Qaeda-affiliated training camps tried to attack in the US, [...]

Another article obediently tying the Zazi investigation to the PATRIOT reauthorization.