Author: Mike Levine

Federal authorities have arrested a Colorado nursing student with alleged dreams of joining Al Qaeda as she arrived on U.S. soil Friday afternoon, FOX News has learned.

31-year-old Jamie Paulin-Ramirez was one of several people detained in Ireland last month, accused of joining a group of radical Islamists there planning to assassinate a Swedish cartoonist.

Federal prosecutors in Pennsylvania have now now charged her with conspiracy to provide material support to a terrorist group.

Her mother told Fox News three weeks ago that Paulin-Ramirez was an “insecure” person who “had no idea what she was getting herself into.”

Last month, Irish authorities arrested Paulin-Ramirez and six others in a series of raids for allegedly plotting with to claim a $100,000 Al Qaeda bounty by killing the Swedish cartoonist who drew the prophet Mohammed as a dog.

Irish authorities subsequently released her.

At the same time, a Pennsylvania woman was charged in the United States with conspiring to commit murder in the name of a Muslim holy war, or jihad.

46-year-old Colleen LaRose, who dubbed herself “Jihad Jane,” allegedly shared her radical views online and tried to recruit others through the Internet.

According to her sister, LaRose suffered from depression and attempted suicide in 2005 after the death of her father.

As for Paulin-Ramirez, her mother described her as someone who was “lonely and wanted to get someone to love her.”

“Jamie is not an evil person,” Christine Mott said. “She was sucked into something that she had no idea what she was getting herself into.”

Paulin-Ramirez fled the United States with her six-year-old son, and Mott blamed her daughter’s Algerian husband, whom she said had radical views, for the alleged involvement in the terrorist plot.

One person with knowledge of the case called Paulin-Ramirez “pretty much the most tangential” of the group accused of plotting to kill the cartoonist.

On Friday, her U.S.-bound plane was supposed to land at an airport on the East Coast around 3pm ET. Authorities planned to arrest her upon arrival.

It’s unclear if Paulin-Ramirez, dubbed “Jihad Jamie” by some, was expecting her arrest, which would suggest a deal with U.S. authorities had been reached.

She was expected to have her initial appearance late Friday in federal court in Philadelphia.

Two weeks after a conservative group disparaged Justice Department lawyers who previously represented terror suspects, Attorney General Eric Holder on Friday weighed in for the first time, calling such lawyers “patriots.”

“Those who reaffirm our nation’s most essential and enduring values do not deserve to have their own values questioned,” Holder told a group of lawyers who offer “pro bono,” or voluntary, legal services. “Let me be clear about this: Lawyers who provide counsel for the unpopular are, and should be treated as what they are: patriots.”

The crowd, gathered to honor Holder with an award from the Washington-based Pro Bono Institute, erupted in applause.

For months the Justice Department had been refusing to identify seven politically-appointed attorneys who previously represented or advocated for terror suspects.

On March 2, a conservative group led by Liz Cheney, daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, released a video condemning the Justice Department for its “secrecy.”

“So who did President Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder, hire?” the group, Keep America Safe, said in the video. “Whose values do they share?”

The video dubbed the seven unknown lawyers “The Al Qaeda 7.”

On Friday, Holder took issue with such rhetoric.

“Advancing the cause of justice sometimes means working for the sake of the fairness and integrity of our system of justice,” Holder said. “This is why lawyers who accept our professional responsibility to protect the rule of law, the right to counsel, and access to our courts — even when this requires defending unpopular positions or clients — deserve the praise and gratitude of all Americans. They also deserve respect.”

A week earlier, some of the Obama administration’s most outspoken critics came to the defense of Holder and the Justice Department lawyers criticized in the Keep America Safe video.

“The past several days have seen a shameful series of attacks on attorneys in the Department of Justice,” said a statement signed by several conservative lawyers and former officials who worked under Republican administrations.

Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, who has condemned Holder’s handling of recent terrorism cases, called the video “shoddy and dangerous” in a Wall Street Journal op-ed on March 10.

Responding to the statement from conservative lawyers and officials, Keep America Safe Spokesman Aaron Harison said it was “absurd” for lawyers “to go out in public and argue that voluntarily representing detainees is somehow good for America.”

Since November 2009, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) had been trying to uncover politically-appointed lawyers within the Justice Department who advocated for detainees at Guantanamo Bay or elsewhere.

In a subsequent letter to Grassley, Assistant Attorney General Ron Weich declined to identify seven of nine such lawyers, insisting that no political appointee at the Justice Department “would permit or has permitted any prior affiliation to interfere with the vital task of protecting national security, and any suggestion to the contrary is absolutely false.”

He also said that any suggestions of a “conflict of interest” are “an apparent misapprehension” of legal standards, adding that all political appointees have taken pledges to meet ethical standards.

Fox News was the first to identify the seven unknown lawyers.

An extensive review of court documents and media reports by Fox News suggests that many of the seven previously unidentified lawyers played only minor or short-lived roles in advocating for detainees.

Asked at the time whether any of the seven lawyers now work on detainee-related issues, a Justice Department spokesman declined to comment.

At a black-tie dinner in Washington on Wednesday, Vice President Joe Biden became the highest-ranking administration official to address the controversy, even if in jest.

He said of Liz Cheney, “Now she’s questioning if Tom Brady is a real Patriot,” referencing the star quarterback for the New England Patriots.

The Obama administration is not the first to hire lawyers who represented or advocated for terror suspects. Three such lawyers were hired by the Bush administration and now work in the Solicitor General’s office, the Office of Legal Counsel and the Civil Rights Division.

Keep America Safe is operated by Cheney, Debra Burlingame, whose brother was killed in the 9/11 attacks, and Bill Kristol, a Fox News contributor.

The self-proclaimed “lawyer” for 10 Americans arrested in Haiti has been arrested himself in the Dominican Republic, and he is expected to come to the United States to face justice, Fox News has learned exclusively.

Jorge Puello was arrested last night in the Dominican Republic, after being under surveillance for “some time” by authorities there, sources told Fox News.

After 10 Baptist missionaries were taken into custody by Haitian police in January for allegedly trying to smuggle dozens of children out of the earthquake-ravaged country, Puello announced that he was their defense counsel.

But news of his criminal history, including warrants for past immigration violations inside the United States, soon began to surface, and he fled from Haiti to the Dominican Republic.

Interpol, the international police agency, recently issued a warrant for Puello’s arrest, and officials from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the U.S. Marshals Service have been working with Dominican Republic officials to hammer out an extradition deal, according to the sources.

The warrant approved by Interpol covers federal charges filed against Puello in Vermont in 2002.

He was arrested at the time for alleged human trafficking, after he was caught trying to smuggle people over the Canadian border into the United States, one source said.

But a Canadian judge ordered his release pending extradition to the United States, and he then fled.

U.S. authorities didn’t know where to find him until news coverage of the earthquake in Haiti, and his involvement, brought him to their attention again.

U.S. and international officials are currently working out the final details for Puello’s extradition to the United States. It’s unclear when he would actually arrive on U.S. soil.

In February, Puello told the New York Times from an unverified location that he was not guilty of anything, and he vowed to turn himself in soon to prove he had done nothing wrong.

“All I’m waiting for is for my lawyer to tell me, ‘Surrender,’ ” he said.

But, according to the New York Times, he then “abruptly disappeared” after it turned out he was not a lawyer at all.

Puello could not fully explain why he became involved in the Americans’ case when he knew arrest warrants were out for him, the New York Times said.

Nine of the 10 Americans held in January, most of them from Idaho, have since been released. The group’s leader remains jailed in Haiti.

Meanwhile, Puello is under investigation by other countries, including El Salvador, for alleged human trafficking involving sex tourism.

The FBI has launched an internal investigation into a top official at the bureau’s largest office, Fox News has learned.

Since January the FBI has been looking into a relationship between Joseph Demarest, the Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI’s New York field office, and a lower-level FBI employee, according to a source familiar with the situation.

The investigation centers not on the relationship itself but on issues raised after the relationship began, the source said. The issues being investigated do not include any allegations of abuse or threats, according to the source.

The investigation was first reported by two Web sites that focus on law enforcement matters, MainJustice.com and TickleTheWire.com.

Asked about the investigation, a spokesman for the FBI’s New York field office told Fox News he couldn’t comment.

“We do not comment on personnel issues,” Supervisory Special Agent Rich Kolko said.

Demarest has been temporarily reassigned to FBI headquarters in Washington.

According to MainJustice.com, Demarest and the lower-level employee, described as “involved in intelligence,” offered different accounts of their relationship.

Demarest was married as of October 2006, but he is no longer married.

He took the top spot with the New York field office in December 2008, after a 20-year career with the FBI and then a short stint in the private sector.

“Joe Demarest has a strong national security and criminal investigative background with deep roots in New York,” FBI Director Robert Mueller said in a statement after appointing Demarest to become Assistant Director in Charge.

Following the 9/11 attacks, Demarest was selected as one of two FBI officials to lead a multi-agency investigation into the attacks, managing more than 400 federal, state and local investigators as they investigated thousands of leads each day, according to an FBI press release in December 2008.

Demarest then served in several terrorism-related positions at FBI headquarters and the New York field office, before leaving in early 2008 to become head of international security at Goldman Sachs. His time there lasted only a matter of months.

Under Demarest’s leadership, the FBI’s New York field office has dealt with several high-profile terrorism cases, including the arrest of 25-year-old Najibullah Zazi, the Colorado airport shuttle bus driver who recently pleaded guilty to planning a bomb attack on the New York City subway system.

Usama bin Laden will never be captured alive, Attorney General Eric Holder told lawmakers on Tuesday.

“The possibility of capturing him alive is infinitesimal,” Holder said. “He will be killed by us, or he will be killed by his own people so that he is not captured by us. We know that. … The possibility simply does not exist.”

That assessment, which Holder said was based on “all the intelligence I have had to review,” came during an often-heated hearing of a House Appropriations subcommittee.

Republicans pressed Holder over recent decisions to prosecute terrorism suspects in civilian courts, and they suggested he intends to treat terrorism suspects as “common criminals.”

Holder said such suggestions tend to “get my blood boiling,” calling them “anything but the truth.”

He said the “apt” comparison is to mass murderers like Charles Manson, who is currently serving a life sentence for orchestrating a killing spree in the 1960s.

Trying to explain the analogy, Holder said mass murderers like Manson still reserve the right to go before a jury and have the charges against them proved beyond a reasonable doubt.

Holder was asked whether that means Usama bin Laden, if captured, would be tried in a civilian court and afforded the same rights as Charles Manson.

“In some ways I think they’re comparable people, in some ways,” Holder said.

Rep. John Culberson, R-Tex., called that response “incredible.”

“This is where the disconnect between this administration in your mindset is so completely opposite that of where the vast majority of the American people are,” Culberson said. “This is war, and in a time of war we as a nation have never given Constitutional rights to foreign nationals, enemy soldiers, certainly captured overseas.”

Holder insisted there is no major split between the administration and the American people, and he said he understands the nation is at war.

“That is why we have 30,000 additional troops in Afghanistan, why we are taking all kinds of other measures — some of which I can’t talk about — in Pakistan,” Holder said. “We are not fighting this from a law enforcement, preventive mode. We are using law enforcement as one of the tools, but we are also using military means to defeat this enemy.”

As for the Charles Manson analogy, Holder said he was simply trying to think of a mass murderer.

“The comparison is not [between] the average American and these terrorists,” he said. “The comparison is between people who have committed the most heinous acts and have been charged in [civilian] courts.”

Still, Culberson found the Charles Manson analogy ill-advised.

“By granting Usama bin Laden the right to appear in a U.S. courtroom, you are clothing Usama bin Laden with the protections of the U.S. Constitution,” he said.

Holder characterized the whole discussion as outside “reality.”

“You’re talking about a hypothetical that will never occur,” he said. “The reality is that we will be reading Miranda rights to the corpse of Usama bin laden. He will never be in an American courtroom. That’s a reality.”

Holder may be the first U.S. official to say unequivocally that bin Laden will never be captured alive, but he is not the first to raise such a possibility.

In October 2001, shortly after the 9/11 attacks, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said bin Laden may never be captured, adding that capturing or killing the Al Qaeda leader would be “very difficult.”

“It’s a big world,” he told USA Today. “There are lots of countries. He’s got a lot of money, he’s got a lot of people who support him and I just don’t know whether we’ll be successful. Clearly, it would be highly desirable to find him.”

Despite new threats aimed at America and growing concerns over Al Qaeda’s influence in war-ravaged Somalia, the U.S. government announced on Friday that it would not be offering any “direct support” to the fragile government there.

“This is not an American conflict,” Assistant Secretary Johnnie Carson told reporters. “It will be up to the Somalis to ultimately resolve this conflict.”

The State Department organized a “special briefing” with reporters on Friday to address recent media reports that, according to Carson, suggested U.S. forces are offering on-the-ground assistance to the transitional Somali government, which has been engaged in a bloody power-struggle with Islamic insurgents since forming in 2004.

“These reports have not accurately reflected or portrayed our policy positon and what we are doing in that country,” Carson said.

Carson, one of the State Department’s experts on African issues, said the U.S. government has not and “will not” be providing “direct support” for either a military offensive “that is apparently under way now” or “any potential military offensives” in Somalia.

In addition, he said, the U.S. government has not received any “formal or informal” requests from the Somali government for any kind of “air support,” American assistance on the ground or U.S.-backed airstrikes.

But Carson acknowledged that the United States has contributed “limited military support” and played “a supporting role” against al-Shabaab, an Al Qaeda-linked group that recently pledged its allegiance to Usama bin Laden and has captured territory in Southern Somalia.

Specifically, Carson said the U.S. government has “supported the training” of Somali forces outside Somalia and has helped the African Union, which has peacekeeping forces in Somalia, acquire “non-lethal” military equipment, including communications devices and uniforms.

“We do so in the firm belief that the [Somali government] seeks to end the violence in Somalia that is caused by al-Shabaab and other extremist organizations,” Carson said. “However, the United States does not plan, does not direct and does not coordinate the military operations of the [Somali government]. There is no desire to Americanize the conflict in Somalia.”

While visiting the United States in September, Somali President Sharif Sheikh Ahmed suggested such “limited” assistance is not enough.

“The world, the international community, seems not to be ready to do something serious about Somalia,” he told a crowd at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “You can imagine the costs or the needs for resources for war, and the resources we have, have always been limited.”

On Tuesday, a spokesman for al-Shabaab insisted his group is “not afraid” of U.S. forces if they decide to become directly involved in the East African country.

“If they come to Somalia, they need to know that those who fought them in 1993 and dragged their bodies in the streets of Mogadishu are still present and ready to drag their dead bodies again,” Ali Mahmoud Rajhi told Al Jazeera, alluding to 18 U.S. soldiers who were killed in Somalia’s capital after the United States intervened in the country’s civil war at the time.

Somalia has had no stable government since 1991, when dictator Siad Barre was ousted from power. The transitional government has had trouble keeping Muslim militants at bay, and in 2006 fighting with al-Shabaab intensified after Western-backed Ethiopian forces invaded the country. U.S. officials say if al-Shabaab prevails, Somalia could turn into a haven for Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups.

While Carson said al-Shabaab has “chosen to reject the peace process” in order to “impose their own vision for the future” of Somalia, he suggested some al-Shabaab fighters could be persuaded to put down their arms.

“It is important to recognize that al-Shabaab, which no doubt is carrying out many terrorist activities in that country, is not a homogenous, monolithic group that is comprised of individuals who completely share the same political philosophy from top to bottom,” he said.

The U.S. government is particularly interested in al-Shabaab because the group has been actively recruiting inside the United States and other Western countries.

For more than a year, the FBI has been investigating how dozens of Americans from the Minneapolis area and elsewhere were recruited to train and fight alongside al-Shabaab.

In October 2008, 27-year-old college student Shirwa Ahmed of Minneapolis became “the first known American suicide bomber” when he blew himself up in Somalia, killing dozens, according to the FBI. Since then several Minneapolis natives have returned to the United States and been arrested by federal authorities. Others have been killed in Somalia, according to their families.

FBI Director Robert Mueller has acknowledged that al-Shabaab “would like to undertake operations outside of Somalia.” But U.S. officials have said repeatedly there is no intelligence to suggest al-Shabaab is plotting attacks inside the United States.

Carson echoed that assessment on Friday.

“The young Somalis who were recrutied in this country to go back to Somalia to fight went back to fight against the Ethiopoian incursion that occured in that country,” he said. “They did not go back to protest or to fight against any kind of U.S. policy in that country. And it’s very clear that they went back for Somali, nationalistic reasons.”

A day after Republicans on Capitol Hill said they were “deeply concerned” over news that, during his confirmation process, Attorney General Eric Holder failed to disclose work on a terrorism-related legal brief, the Justice Department revealed Friday that the problem was wider than previously known.

“It has come to our attention that some but not all briefs submitted to the Supreme Court by or on behalf of Attorney General Holder … [were supplied] in the course of his confirmation process last year,” Assistant Attorney General Ron Weich said in a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, which vets judicial nominees. “We regret the omission.”

The letter was accompanied by six more recently-identified briefs, only one of which was filed in a terrorism-related case.

Some Republicans were blunt in their criticism Thursday after revelations that a single terrorism-related brief had been omitted from Holder’s response to a Senate Judiciary Committee questionnaire last year.

“Are we expected to believe that then-nominee Holder, with only a handful of Supreme Court briefs to his name, forgot about his role in one of this country’s most publicized terrorism cases?” asked Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz. “To me that strains credulity.”

A Justice Department spokeswoman said the seven briefs were “inadvertently not supplied to the committee.”

On Wednesday, as reports of the first-known omission began to emerge, a Justice Department spokesman offered more details.

“In preparing thousands of pages for submission, it was unfortunately and inadvertently missed,” Matt Miller said in a statement. “In any event, the attorney general has publicly discussed his positions on detention policy on many occasions, including at his confirmation hearing.”

In fact, Holder discussed the issue at length during his confirmation hearings in January 2009, promising to fight terrorism “within the letter and the spirit of the Constitution.”

“Adherence to the rule of law strengthens security by depriving terrorist organizations of their prime recruiting tools,” he said. “America must remain a beacon to the world. We will lead by strength. We will lead by wisdom. And we will lead by example.”

In addition, during those hearings, Holder and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., discussed future decisions over the “form to try people and how to interrogate them,” as Graham put it.

Still, the two terrorism-related “amicus briefs” filed with the Supreme Court in 2004 and 2005 resonate years later as Holder finds himself defending the handling of some recent terrorism cases, particularly the interrogation of alleged “Christmas Day bomber” Umar F. Abdulmutallab.

The briefs — signed by Holder, former Attorney General Janet Reno and other Clinton-era officials — argued that the president lacked authority to hold Jose Padilla, a U.S citizen declared an “enemy combatant,” indefinitely without charge.

In making their case, Holder and the others insisted that using federal courts to fight terrorism, which includes providing Miranda rights to terror suspects, would not “impair” the government’s ability to obtain intelligence, which they called “the primary tool for preventing terrorist attacks.”

“Many terrorists who have been arrested and provided counsel have decided to cooperate and provide valuable information to the government,” the 2004 brief said. “Over the last decade, the investigative, detention, and prosecutive authorities (of the federal court system) have been used in many cases not only to identify, arrest, and punish persons who have committed terrorist acts, but to disrupt and thwart terrorism before it can occur.”

But the brief did acknowledge a possible risk in such use of the federal court system — a risk, the brief said, that is outweighed by the advantages.

“It may be true that in some cases the government will not be able to obtain information from citizens who are informed of their right to counsel, or that obtaining that information may be delayed,” the brief said, noting that a lower federal court characterized such a scenario as speculative. “But this is an inherent consequence of the limitation of executive power. No doubt many other steps could be taken that would increase our security, and could enable us to prevent terrorist attacks that might otherwise occur. But our nation has always been prepared to accept some risk as the price of guaranteeing that the executive does not have arbitrary power to imprison citizens.”

That assertion does not reflect the same level of certainty that Holder has expressed recently about the ability of the federal court system to obtain intelligence and fight terrorism.

“I am confident that … the decision to address Mr. Abdulmutallab’s actions through our criminal justice system has not, and will not, compromise our ability to obtain information needed to detect and prevent future attacks,” Holder said in a Feb. 3 letter to lawmakers. “Neither advising Abdulmutallab of his Miranda rights nor granting him access to counsel prevents us from obtaining intelligence from him.”

Holder recently said Abdulmutallab has been providing “very useful” information to counterterrorism officials after being persuaded to cooperate with authorities.

After President Obama nominated Holder to be attorney general, the Senate Judiciary Committee sent Holder a 47-page questionnaire, including a request for any briefs he had filed with the Supreme Court “in connection with your practice.”

In response, Holder said he participated in a total of five such briefs, none of which dealt with terrorism-related issues. He signed a statement saying the information he provided was accurate and complete “to the best of my knowledge.”

But it turns out Holder participated in at least 12 briefs filed with the Supreme Court, two of which dealt with terrorism-related issues.

“It is simply unacceptable that briefs in such significant cases were not provided to the Committee so that they could be discussed during his confirmation hearings,” said a spokesman for Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, adding that the omissions will be “a significant issue” when Holder appears before the committee on Mar. 23.

Nevertheless, Miller suggested Holder has always been open about his views on fighting terrorism.

“The attorney general has said many times publicly (that) the government has ample lawful ability to detain and interrogate terrorists and disrupt attacks without resorting to making claims of executive power that strain the Constitution,” Miller said.

In fact, in Holder’s response to the Senate Judiciary Committee questionnaire, he listed a number of speeches in which he strongly condemned the Bush administration’s tactics against terrorism and promised a new way forward.

“Unfortunately, in the last few years we have lost our way, with respect to our commitment to the Constitution and to the rule of law,” he told a left-leaning crowd at the 2008 American Constitution Society conference in Washington, D.C., an event noted in Holder’s questionnaire. “The rule of law is not, as some have seen it, an obstacle to be overcome. … As Americans, we should bring people to justice and not hide them away from justice.”

Holder’s remarks from that event became the centerpiece of a recent ad from the conservative group Keep America Safe, questioning Holder’s decision to hire lawyers who previously represented or advocated for detainees at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere.

During his confirmation more than a year ago, Attorney General Eric Holder failed to notify lawmakers he had contributed to a legal brief dealing with the use of federal courts in fighting terrorism, the Justice Department acknowledged on Wednesday.

“The brief should have been disclosed as part of the confirmation process,” Justice Department spokesman Matt Miller said in a statement. “In preparing thousands of pages for submission, it was unfortunately and inadvertently missed.”

Still, the “amicus brief,” filed with the Supreme Court in 2004, resonates years later as Holder finds himself defending the handling of some recent terrorism cases, particularly the interrogation of alleged “Christmas Day bomber” Umar F. Abdulmutallab.
 
The brief – filed by Holder, then a private attorney, former Attorney General Janet Reno and two other Clinton-era officials – argued that the President lacks authority to hold Jose Padilla, a U.S citizen declared an “enemy combatant,” indefinitely without charge.

In making their case, Holder and the others argued that using federal courts to fight terrorism, which includes providing Miranda rights to terror suspects, would not “impair” the government’s ability to obtain intelligence, which they called “the primary tool for preventing terrorist attacks.”

“Many terrorists who have been arrested and provided counsel have decided to cooperate and provide valuable information to the government,” their brief said. “Over the last decade, the investigative, detention, and prosecutive authorities [of the federal court system] have been used in many cases not only to identify, arrest, and punish persons who have committed terrorist acts, but to disrupt and thwart terrorism before it can occur.”

But the brief did acknowledge a possible risk in such use of the federal court system – a risk, the brief said, that is outweighed by the advantages.

“It may be true that in some cases the government will not be able to obtain information from citizens who are informed of their right to counsel, or that obtaining that information may be delayed,” the brief said, noting that a lower federal court characterized such a scenario as speculative. “But this is an inherent consequence of the limitation of Executive power. No doubt many other steps could be taken that would increase our security, and could enable us to prevent terrorist attacks that might otherwise occur. But our Nation has always been prepared to accept some risk as the price of guaranteeing that the Executive does not have arbitrary power to imprison citizens.”

That assertion does not reflect the same level of certainty that Holder has expressed recently about the ability of the federal court system to obtain intelligence and fight terrorism.

“I am confident that … the decision to address Mr. Abdulmutallab’s actions through our criminal justice system has not, and will not, compromise our ability to obtain information needed to detect and prevent future attacks,” Holder said in a Feb. 3 letter to lawmakers. “Neither advising Abdulmutallab of his Miranda rights nor granting him access to counsel prevents us from obtaining intelligence from him.”

In fact, Holder recently said, Abdulmutallab has been providing “very useful” information to counterterrorism officials after being persuaded to cooperate with authorities.

Two former Bush Administration officials accused Holder of being disingenuous.

 “Now that Holder is attorney general, he no longer acknowledges the risks to national security of treating terrorists as criminals,” former White House Press Secretary Dana Perino and former Deputy White House Counsel Bill Burck said in a column posted on the National Review web site Wednesday. “Holder could never admit that now, of course.”

After President Obama nominated Holder to be Attorney General, the Senate Judiciary Committee sent Holder a 47-page questionnaire, including a request for any briefs he had filed with the Supreme Court “in connection with your practice.”

In response, Holder said he participated in a total of five such briefs, none of which dealt with terrorism-related issues. He did not include the Padilla brief, and he signed a statement saying the information he provided was accurate and complete “to the best of my knowledge.”

Perino and Burck called Holder’s failure to notify lawmakers about the brief “disappointing and perhaps troubling.”

“Had Holder disclosed these briefs to the Senate Judiciary Committee, no doubt he would have been extensively questioned about the views expressed in them,” they said.

Miller, though, suggested Holder has always been open about his views on such subjects, and lawmakers knew where he stood during the confirmation process.

“The Attorney General has publicly discussed his positions on detention policy on many occasions, including at his confirmation hearing,” Miller said. “As the brief noted and as the Attorney General has said many times publicly, the government has ample lawful ability to detain and interrogate terrorists and disrupt attacks without resorting to making claims of executive power that strain the Constitution.”

In fact, during confirmation hearings with the Senate Judiciary Committee in January 2009, Holder promised to fight terrorism “within the letter and the spirit of the Constitution.”

“Adherence to the rule of law strengthens security by depriving terrorist organizations of their prime recruiting tools,” he said. “America must remain a beacon to the world. We will lead by strength. We will lead by wisdom. And we will lead by example.”

In addition, Holder and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) engaged in a lengthy discussion of how to interrogate and detain terror suspects, including the use of the federal court system.

“Now, as we decide what form to try people and how to interrogate them, and how to detain them, the only thing I ask of this new administration is that we not criminalize the war,” Graham told Holder.

“[I’ve] struggled with that, and continue to struggle with that,” Holder said. “How do we deal in an appropriate way with somebody who we know is a danger to this country, and yet be true to our values?”

Some of the Obama Administration’s most outspoken critics have come to the defense of nine Justice Department lawyers criticized for previously representing or advocating on behalf of terrorism detainees.

“The past several days have seen a shameful series of attacks on attorneys in the Department of Justice,” said a statement signed by several conservative lawyers and former officials who worked under Republican administrations. “We consider these attacks both unjust to the individuals in question and destructive of any attempt to build lasting mechanisms for counterterrorism adjudications.”

This comes a week after Fox News identified all nine politically-appointed Justice Department attorneys who previously represented or advocated for terror suspects.

The Justice Department had been refusing to identify seven of the nine lawyers, prompting a conservative group led by Liz Cheney, daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, to release a video condemning the Justice Department.

“So who did President Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder, hire?” the group, Keep America Safe, said in the video. “Whose values do they share?”

The video dubbed the seven previously unknown lawyers “The Al Qaeda 7.”

Among the 20 attorneys, former officials and “policy specialists” who signed the statement defending the Justice Department lawyers were at least three people who have strongly criticized the Obama Administration’s handling of terrorism issues.

David Rivkin, a former Justice Department official in the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush Administrations, recently called the handling of the attempted Christmas Day bombing “utterly incompetent,” “appalling,” and “very depressing” since “the security of American people” is at stake.

“What’s even worse in my perspective is they’re defending it,” he said on Fox News in January. “They’ve learned nothing from this experience.”

In November, Rivkin authored an op-ed with Lee Casey, another former Justice Department official who signed onto the latest statement, blasting Holder’s now-withering decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other alleged 9/11 conspirators in civilian court.

The op-ed, published in The Washington Examiner, called the decision “a mistake” and “a very bad deal for the country” that carries “profound implications for the United States’ ability to defend itself in the future.”

Rivkin and Casey are now partners in the Washington office of the firm Baker & Hostetler.

Similarly, Charles “Cully” Stimson, a former Defense Department official who now works at The Heritage Foundation, was a strong critic of Holder’s decision, telling Fox News recently that the decision was made out of “naivete” and “irrational exuberance.”

Months before that, he said the Obama Administration’s approach to fighting terrorism amounts to “laying down our arms.”

But he and the others took a different tone in the statement issued Monday defending Justice Department lawyers.

“The American tradition of zealous representation of unpopular clients is at least as old as John Adams’s representation of the British soldiers charged in the Boston massacre,” said the statement, which was released by the Brookings Institution. “People come to serve in the Justice Department with a diverse array of prior private clients. That is one of the department’s strengths.”

In addition, the statement said, suggesting that the Justice Department “should not employ talented lawyers who have advocated on behalf of detainees maligns the patriotism of people who have taken honorable positions” on legal questions in the fight against terrorism, some of which have reached the Supreme Court.

Responding to the statement, a spokesman for Keep America Safe said it’s “absurd” for lawyers “to go out in public and argue that voluntarily representing detainees is somehow good for America.”

“They are trying to shift this debate away from the issues raised by the ad onto grounds they feel comfortable arguing, namely the nobility of the entire legal profession,” said the spokesman for Keep America Safe, which in addition to Cheney is run by Debra Burlingame, whose brother was killed in the 9/11 attacks, and Bill Kristol, a Fox News contributor.

The attorneys and former officials defending the Justice Department lawyers are not all critics of the Obama Administration. In fact, at least two of the former officials have publicly supported the effort to close detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay.

Some of the more notable names who signed the statement on Monday are Philip Zelikow, the former State Department lawyer who has strongly criticized the George W. Bush Administration, Ken Starr, the former Solicitor General who investigated the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and former White House official Brad Berenson, who was once an official with The Federalist Society.

“Their ridiculous assertions I’m sure will only remind Americans of why they hold lawyers and Washington in such high regard,” said the Keep America Safe spokesman, Aaron Harison.

For several months, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) had been trying to uncover politically-appointed lawyers within the Justice Department who advocated for Guantanamo Bay detainees or other terror suspects.

In a recent letter to Grassley, Assistant Attorney General Ron Weich declined to identify seven of nine such lawyers, insisting that no political appointee at the Justice Department “would permit or has permitted any prior affiliation to interfere with the vital task of protecting national security, and any suggestion to the contrary is absolutely false.”

He also said that any suggestions of a “conflict of interest” are “an apparent misapprehension” of legal standards, adding that all political appointees have taken pledges to meet ethical standards.

An extensive review of court documents and media reports by Fox News suggests many of the seven previously unidentified lawyers played only minor or short-lived roles in advocating for detainees.

Asked last week whether any of the seven lawyers now work on detainee-related issues, a Justice Department spokesman declined to comment.

The Obama Administration is not the first to hire lawyers who represented or advocated for terror suspects. Three such lawyers were hired by the Bush Administration and now work in the Solicitor General’s office, the Office of Legal Counsel and the Civil Rights Division.

A day after a conservative group released a video condemning the Justice Department for refusing to identify seven lawyers who previously represented or advocated for terror suspects, Fox News has uncovered the identities of the seven lawyers.

The names were confirmed by a Justice Department spokesman, who said “politics has overtaken facts and reality” in a tug-of-war over the lawyers’ identities.

“Department of Justice attorneys work around the clock to keep this country safe, and it is offensive that their patriotism is being questioned,” said Justice Department Spokesman Matt Miller.

The video by the group Keep America Safe, which dubbed the seven lawyers “The Al Qaeda 7,” is the latest salvo in a lengthty political battle.

For several months, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) has led an effort to uncover politically-appointed lawyers within the Justice Department who have advocated for Guantanamo Bay detainees or other terror suspects.

“The administration has made many highly questionable decisions when it comes to national security, ” Grassley said in a recent statement. “[Americans] have a right to know who advises the Attorney General and the President on these critical matters.”

An extensive review of court documents and media reports by Fox News suggests many of the seven lawyers in question played only minor or short-lived roles in advocating for detainees. However, it’s unclear what roles, if any, they have played in detainee-related matters since joining the Justice Department.

Before joining the Justice Department, Jonathan Cedarbaum, now an official with the Office of Legal Counsel, was part of a “firm-wide effort” to represent six Bosnian-Algerian detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, according to the web site of the firm WilmerHale.

That effort brought the case Boumediene v. Bush to the Supreme Court, which reaffirmed the right of detainees to challenge their detention.

But, according to a review by Fox News, Cedarbaum’s name appears only once in court records of detainee-related cases. Specifically, he’s named as part of the WilmerHale legal team in a 2007 filing with the Supreme Court, and he was joined in that filing by Eric Columbus, a former WilmerHale attorney who is now senior counsel in the Office of the Deputy Attorney General.

Alongside Cedarbaum in the Office of Legal Counsel now is Karl Thompson, who while working for the firm O’Melveny & Myers became one of seven attorneys to represent Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen who was captured in Afghanistan in 2002 and transferred to Guantanamo Bay.

But, according to court documents, Thompson was only part of Khadr’s defense team for seven months, from October 2008 to May 2009.

More than five years before that, Joseph Guerra, now Principal Deputy Associate Attorney General at the Justice Department, was one of five lawyers from the firm Sidley Austin to help three civil liberties groups, including the self-described “conservative” Rutherford Institute, file a detainee-related brief with the Supreme Court.

The brief urged the justices to hear the case of Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen who was held as an “enemy combatant” before the Bush Administration decided in 2006 to prosecute him in a civilian court..

Similarly, in November 2006, Tali Farhadian, now an official in the Office of the Attorney General, was an attorney with the firm Debevoise & Plimpton when she helped file a brief with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, urging the federal appeals court to hear the case of Ali al-Marri, the only “enemy combatant” at the time being held on U.S. soil.

In addition, Beth Brinkmann, now Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Justice Department’s Civil Division, was a partner with the firm Morrison & Foerster when she helped compile at least two Supreme Court briefs dealing with Guantanamo Bay detainees.

In 2007, she and others co-signed a Supreme Court brief by 20 former federal judges calling for further protection of detainees’ rights, and the next year she co-signed a brief by two advocacy groups, including The Rutherford Institite, urging the Supreme Court to hear an appeal from al-Marri.

The most extensive detainee-related work by a current Justice Department official, though, may have been done by Tony West, the Assistant Attorney General for the Justice Department’s Civil Division.

For several years, while working in Morrison & Foerster’s San Francisco office, West represented “American Taliban” Johh Walker Lindh, a move that was hotly debated after West was nominated to the Justice Department in January 2009. West wasn’t confirmed until April 2009.

In a recent letter to Grassley, Assistant Attorney General Ron Weich said nine Justice Department lawyers in total previously represented terror suspects, contributed to court briefs in detainee-related cases or otherwise helped advocate for detainees.

Weich acknowledged in the letter that Principal Deputy Solicitor General Neal Katyal previously represented a Guantanamo Bay detainee and that National Security Division Attorney Jennifer Daskal previously worked for Human Rights Watch, which advocates on behalf of detainees.

Weich declined to identify the other lawyers, but he insisted that no political appointee at the Justice Department “would permit or has permitted any prior affiliation to interfere with the vital task of protecting national security, and any suggestion to the contrary is absolutely false.”

He also said that any suggestions of a “conflict of interest” are “an apparent misapprehension” of legal standards, adding that all political appointees have taken pledges to meet ethical standards.

Asked whether any of the seven previously unidentified lawyers now work on detainee-related issues, Miller declined to comment.

An article in The National Law Journal shows that, as recently as December, Brinkmann represented the government a defamation case that had reached a federal appeals court.

As for the two lawyers who were named by Weich in his recent letter to Grassley, Daskal has “generally worked on policy issues related to detainees” while at the Justice Department, said Weich, adding that her detainee-related work “has been fully consistent with advice she received from career Department officials regarding her [ethical and legal] obligations.”

Weich said Katyal “has not worked on any Guantanamo detainee matters, but has participated in litigation involving detainees who continue to be detained” elsewhere.

Still, the video released Tuesday includes the image of a recent Investors Business Daily headline wondering whether the Department of Justice could be called the “Department of Jihad.”

“Why the secrecy?” asks the video from Keep America Safe, which is run by Liz Cheney, daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, Debra Burlingame, whose brother was killed in the 9/11 attacks, and Bill Kristol, a Fox News contributor.

Miller suggested it all comes down to politics.

“Each of the nine people referenced in the letter filed legal briefs that are available by using something as simple as Google,” he said. “We will not participate in an attempt to drag people’s names through the mud for political purposes.”

The Obama Administration is not the first to hire lawyers who represented or advocated for terror suspects.

Pratik Shah, an assistant to the Solicitor General hired by the Bush Administration, was part of the WilmerHale team that put together arguments for the Boumediene v. Bush case.

Trisha Anderson, an adviser in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel who was also hired by the Bush Administration, was previously an attorney at Attorney General Eric Holder’s former firm, Covington & Burling, where she helped represent 13 Yemeni detainees.

Varda Hussain, an attorney hired in 2008 with the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, was an associate with the Washington-based firm Venable when she helped represent three Egyptians being held at Guantanamo Bay.

“Varda has spent over 500 hours in the past year fighting to bring due process to our clients,” a firm newsletter said in 2006.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has become the first Obama Administration official to publicly describe last year’s deadly shootings at Ft. Hood, Tex., as a terrorist act, according to a search of news clips and transcripts.

“Violent Islamic terrorism … was part and parcel of the Ft. Hood killings,” Napolitano told the Senate Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday morning. “There is violent Islamic terrorism, be it Al Qaeda in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen or anywhere else, [and] that is indeed a major focus of this department and its efforts.”

In the months since an Army psychiatrist — who had been in contact with a radical Muslim cleric in Yemen — opened fired inside the Army base, many on Capitol Hill have urged administration officials to publicly identify the attack as terrorism.

Those calls have been used by Republicans and others to paint administration officials as weak on terrorism and subsequently unwilling to use the word “terrorism.”

During the Senate hearing on Wednesday morning, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), the Homeland Security Committee’s chairman, called the administration’s “reluctance” to use terms such as “Islamist extremism” or “Muslim terrorist” a “pet peeve of mine.”

He said his “concern” about the issue was “aroused again” when an internal Pentagon review of the events leading up to the attack by Army Maj. Nidal Hasan on Nov. 5, 2009, never used such terms.

Lieberman asked Napolitano: “Has the administration made a decision to avoid any public reference to ‘violent Islamist extremism’ or ‘Muslim terrorists’?”

Napolitano denied any such move.

“There has been no such decision,” she said. “The [phrase] that you refer to, ‘violent Islamic terrorism,’ is something that we fight and deal with every day at the Department of Homeland Security. There is no doubt about that. It was the motivation [for the failed Christmas Day bombing], it was part and parcel of the Ft. Hood killings and other incidents we have seen this year within the United States.”

This comes a month after a senior Obama Administration official characterized the Ft. Hood attack, which killed 13 people and wounded dozens more, as “an act of terrorism.” But that official did not want to be identified publicly, speaking to reporters only on the condition of anonymity.

The same day, shortly after the internal Pentagon report was released, Defense Secretary Robert Gates declined to characterize the attack as terrorism, saying he did not want to disrupt an ongoing legal case.

“I’m not going to go there,” he told reporters.

Five days later, on Jan. 20, FBI Director Robert Mueller told the Senate Judiciary Commitee about “threats from home grown extremists,” including “the tragic shootings at Ft. Hood.”

At Wednesday’s Senate hearing, Lieberman, who has repeatedly described the Ft. Hood shootings as “terrorism,” said he “appreciated” Napolitano doing the same.

In fact, he said, hesitating to acknowledge or identify Islamic terrorism could ultimately work against the religion.

“I don’t think we do a favor to Muslim Americans or people who are followers of Islam anywhere in the world by not saying that this is an extreme expression — a violent expression — of one of the world’s great religions,” Lieberman said. “It is not Islam as most Muslims practice it, and as most of us who are not Muslim know it. … We’re not at war with Islam, we’re at war with a particular extremist violent terrorist expression, which in my opinion is a corruption, a perversion, of Islam. And we ought to be willing to say so.”

Napolitano agreed, saying simply, “Indeed.”

During his remarks, Lieberman acknowledged that the Department of Homeland Security “has to be concerned about” many types of terrorism unrelated to Islam, including extremist acts by white supremacists, animal rights activists and environmental activists.

The exchange about the use of the phrase “Islamic terrorism,” during a nearly two-hour hearing focusing on the DHS budget, lasted less than five minutes.

Napolitano has often used the word “terrorism,” including several times during her Senate confirmation hearing more than a year ago. But she, like others in the Obama Administration, has rarely referred to “Islamic terrorism.”

Hasan, paralyzed from the waist down after being injured during the attack, has been charged with 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted murder.

Federal authorities have arrested a Virginia man for allegedly helping hundreds of Somalis, possibly including ones with terrorist ties, enter the United States illegally.

Anthony Joseph Tracy, 35, was arrested earlier this month, after admitting to U.S. authorities that he helped about 272 citizens of war-torn Somalia come to the United States illegally, according to documents filed in federal court.

Tracy allegedly set up a business in Kenya, Noor Services Limited, that procured fraudulent Cuban travel visas for Somalis, who would then travel from Kenya to Cuba and, ultimately, to the United States, according to court documents.

He allegedly traveled to Kenya in April 2009 to establish the business, and in the months afterward obtained fraudulent visas for as many as ten Somalis each week, court documents say. He allegedly charged between $100 and $1,000 for the fake documents.

While in Kenya, an al Qaeda-linked group from Somalia, known as al-Shabaab, approached Tracy asking for his assistance, according to what Tracy allegedly told authorities during a polygraph test earlier this month.

But, Tracy insisted, he “refused to help them.”

Nevertheless, three weeks before the polygraph test, on Jan. 15, he sent an email to an unnamed Somali citizen saying, “I will be back in Kenya at the end of February, so contact me then and I will assist you inshallah. I helped a lot of Somalis and most are good but there are some who are bad and I leave them to Allah,” according to court documents.

Tracy returned to the United States three days after sending that email, and he was interviewed by FBI and Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials upon arrival at JFK International Airport in New York.

It’s unclear what happened in the month afterward, leading up to his arrest on Feb. 5.

A public defender appointed for Tracy noted in court documents that while his client allegedly helped obtain fraudulent documents for Somalis, the government does not allege anything more.

“The government has failed to allege that Mr. Tracy assisted the Somalis to leave Cuba or ever spoke about travel to the United States with any of the Somalis whom he allegedly helped to obtain Cuban travel documents,” Assistant Public Defender Geremy Kamens said in documents filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.

Tracy converted to Islam while in prison in the 1990s. He first traveled outside the United States in 2008, but information about where and why he traveled at the time is currently “classified,” according to court documents.
 
Through the social networking site Facebook, authorities have located at least five Somali men and women that, allegedly with Tracy’s help, entered the United States illegally. Those men and women are now living in New York, Tennessee, North Carolina, Washington and Arizona, according to court documents.

Al-Shabaab, which has been fighting to establish an Islamic state in anarchy-stricken Somalia, has been designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. government.

“Al-Shabaab has reportedly declared war on the United Nations and on Western non-governmental organizations,” documents filed in Tracy’s case note. “In early 2010, al-Shabaab declared its alliance with al-Qaeda.”

Tracy is currently being held without bond, accused by federal prosecutors of being a public threat and a flight risk.

But Kamens, Tracy’s attorney, described his client in court documents as a U.S. citizen, a husband and father, and a “businessman who established a lawful travel business in Kenya.”

For more than a year, the FBI has been investigating how more than 20 young Somali-Americans from the Minneapolis area and elsewhere were recruited to train and fight alongside al-Shabaab in Somalia.

That investigation has resulted in terrorism-related charges against at least 14 men, and many of those defendants have already pleaded guilty to the charges.

All this comes five months after FOX News reported exclusively that, despite public pronouncements saying al-Shabaab did not want to strike inside the United States, law enforcement officials were privately concerned al-Shabaab fighters could be smuggled into the United States to launch attacks.

“It’s certainly something that quite plainly is definitely on the radar,” one official with U.S. Customs and Border Protection told FOX News at the time. “We’re alert to that and doing our part to make sure that we address that threat.”

In fact, FOX News learned that in February last year, CBP sent an alert — or “issue paper” — about Somalia and al-Shabaab to offices across the country.

“It is feared that U.S. citizens and residents are being called to action in Somalia, as well as to support the illegal migration of Somalis to the United States,” said one sentence in the alert, as relayed to FOX News.

However, the CBP alert noted, the vast majority — if not all — of Somalis who have entered the country illegally have no intention of harming the United States.

“The continued deterioration of living conditions in Somalia is expected to sustain the illegal migration of Somalis to the United States,” the alert said, as relayed to FOX News. “The bleak future of Somalia has caused and will continue to cause refugees to seek a more sustainable existence, which includes risking thousands of dollars and their lives to be smuggled to the United States.”

It’s been a year in the making for one pair at the 2010 Olympic Winter Games, where one of them has made his Olympics debut. And now that both of them are in Vancouver, on some days they’ve had to perform at high levels for more than 12 hours straight.

But this duo isn’t made up of athletes. It’s comprised of U.S. counterterrorism officials.

“I will be in Canada,” reads a note taped to an office door in the main Justice Department building in Washington. “In an emergency I can be reached through the [Justice Department] Command Center.”

Of course, the Director of Preparedness and Response for the Justice Department’s National Security Division is in Vancouver in case of emergency there.

His office in Washington has been dark for the past two weeks, and he is in Vancouver with another National Security Division attorney, Francis Schmitz.

“The U.S. Government’s mission dictated that, given the security requirements surrounding Vancouver, including a variety of cross-border issues and other security matters, DOJ attorneys should be part of the overall deployment this year,” the Director of Preparedness said, noting that the Justice Department has sent similar representatives to summer and winter Olympic games for more than a decade.

The Director of Preparedness, who asked that his name not be published for “a variety of reasons,” and Schmitz serve several roles in Vancouver.

In particular, they provide “immediate, on-site legal guidance” to the FBI and others “in connection with security and legal issues that arise,” the Director of Preparedness said in an email to FOX News from Vancouver.

The team also acts as a “mechanism for receiving and sharing information” between Justice Department leadership, federal prosecutors across the United States and other law enforcement and homeland security officials in Vancouver, he said.

“I would say that it’s hard work for us and for all the law enforcement personnel here, especially because we have to continue managing our responsibilities at home, but the assistance [from Canadian authorities and the U.S. State Department] has been exceptional,” he said.

He and Schmitz work out of the “Olympic Coordination Office,” where other law enforcement and U.S. government personnel are based.

“As the only two officials from Main Justice on the ground in Vancouver, Fran and I are responsible for providing 24/7 coverage here on behalf of the National Security Division and Main Justice,” the Director of Preparedness said. “We are each working 8-10 hour shifts, seven days per week … Obviously, these day shifts can extend to 12 hours or more depending on events or crises.”

Schmitz’s shift begins each day at 7 a.m. and ends at 3 p.m., when the Director of Preparedness takes over. The later shift typically ends at 11 p.m., but both officials are on call overnight.

Asked whether there have been any incidents or “crises” in Vancouver requiring substantial involvement from himself or Schmitz, the Director of Preparedness declined to offer much.

“I’m afraid that I can’t get into your last question too much, except to say that the [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] and Vancouver Police have been doing an amazing and professional job, and we are very proud to be able to support their efforts,” he said.

The Justice Department attorneys are joined in Vancouver by a team of officials from the Department of Homeland Security and agents from the FBI, which has been working on the Olympics security operation for about a year.

“The FBI has a small team in Vancouver to support the U.S. mission and assist our Canadian partners,” said Richard Kolko, a member of the FBI team in Vancouver.

All of them will soon be joined by another top counterterrorism official.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano is slated to be in Vancouver later this week, as part of the U.S. delegation to the Closing Ceremony of the 2010 Olympic Winter Games.

 

In his first face-to-face with television reporters since the failed Christmas Day bomb attack, Attorney General Eric Holder on Monday tried to extinguish the heated debate in Washington over how terrorism suspects should be handled.

“We are at war against a very dangerous and intelligent and adaptable enemy, and we must use every weapon available to us in order to win that war,” Holder said in prepared remarks, as he announced that Najibullah Zazi, the Colorado airport shuttle driver accused of trying to launch a bomb plot in New York City last year, had pleaded guilty to terrorism charges. “The criminal justice system has proved to be an invaluable weapon for disrupting plots and incapacitating terrorists … [and it] contains powerful incentives to induce pleas that yield long sentences and that gain intelligence that can be used in the fight — in the war — against Al Qaeda.”

His remarks at a late-afternoon press conference included not-so-subtle references to a larger debate over whether the 9/11 case and that of Umar F. Abdulmutallab, the 23-year-old Nigerian who allegedly tried to blow up a jetliner over Detroit on Christmas Day, should be tried in the federal court system.

Many on Capitol Hill, particularly Republicans, are calling for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other alleged 9/11 conspirators to face a military commission, as the same critics blast the decision — made within 24 hours of his capture — to read Abdulmutallab his Miranda rights and prosecute him in federal court.

During questioning after his prepared remarks on Monday, Holder accused his critics of playing politics.

“To take this tool out of our hands — to denigrate the use of this tool — flies in the face of the facts, flies in the face of the history of the use of this tool, and is more about politics than it is about facts,” he said. “This [the Zazi guilty plea] is a demonstration of the facts. This is not some kind of partisan, political attempt to shape something for the purposes of an election.”

Nevertheless, Holder declined to say whether the recent debate over anti-terrorism practices has ruled out New York City — his original plan — as the venue for the trial of the 9/11 case.

“We are in the process of trying to determine where the case will be tried,” he said, also declining to rule out military commissions as an option. “We’re looking at all options. That conversation goes on within the administration, and also with local officials.”

He said a decision would be made “relatively soon,” but he also insisted the public should not “make more of these people than they are.”

“Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the others … are thugs,” he said. “They are people engaged in criminal and war-like activities against the United States, but they are not people who are different from those we have shown an ability to handle in the past, and I think we’ll have ability to handle safely in the future.”

Asked whether his Justice Department would do anything differently if someone like Abdulmutallab were captured in the near future, Holder insisted decisions have to be made on a case-by-case basis.

“We have to trust the people who are on the scene, who have to make split-second decisions as to how they’re going to interact with a suspect, what’s the most effective way they can interrogate that person, what’s the most effective means by which they can gather intelligence and information from that person,” he said. “I have great faith in the men and women of the FBI and other intelligence agencies who have been trained in interrogation, trained in counterterrorism techniques, steeped in knowledge of Al Qaeda and other terrorists groups that would do us harm.”

In fact, he said, authorities have been obtaining “very useful” information from Abdulmutallab in recent weeks. Holder declined to offer more details.

Back on the news of the day, Holder called the bomb plot by Afghanistan-born Zazi “one of the most serious terrorist threats to our nation since Sept. 11, 2001.”

“Were it not for the combined efforts of the law enforcement and intelligence communities, it could have been devastating,” Holder said. “This attemped attack on our homeland was real. It was in motion, and it would have been deadly. … There is no doubt that American lives were saved.”

Zazi went to Pakistan in August 2008 with plans to join the Taliban in Afghanistan, but “shortly after arriving” in Pakistan he was recruited by Al Qaeda to join their ranks and taken to an al Qaeda stronghold in the region, according to Holder.

Al Qaeda members “urged him to launch a suicide attack in the United States,” and “he agreed to do so,” learning how to build and detonate bombs, Holder said.

In January 2009, Zazi moved to Denver, where he gathered the components necessary to launch a bomb attack on the New York City subway system, Holder said. Zazi was hoping to carry out his plot sometime between Sept. 14 and Sept. 16, 2009, but federal authorities thwarted his plans, Holder said.

Earlier in the day, Zazi pleaded guilty in the Eastern District of New York to three federal charges, namely conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction, conspiracy to commit murder in a foreign country, and providing material support to al Qaeda. 

Zazi could spend the rest of his life in prison.

The Colorado airport shuttle driver accused of plotting to explode homemade bombs in New York City has been cooperating with U.S. authorities and is expected to plead guilty to terrorism-related offenses later today, according to U.S. officials.

Zazi, then 24, was indicted in September by a federal grand jury in the Eastern District of New York for allegedly conspiring to use weapons of mass destruction. U.S. authorities said he traveled to Pakistan with others to receive training from Al Qaeda.

Zazi is expected to enter a guilty plea sometime between 2pm ET and 3pm ET today. A court hearing in his case had been scheduled for Thursday.

–Fox News’ Melanie Schuman contributed to this report

Federal authorities have charged three Miami businessmen and others for their roles in raising “hundreds of millions” of dollars for Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based terrorist group, according to sources.

Agents from the bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and officers from the FBI and other federal agencies executed search warrants in Florida on Thursday and arrested Emilio Gonzalez-Neira, Khaled Safadi and Ulises Talavera, owners of three Miami-area freight forwarding companies.

ICE special agents assigned to the Joint Terrorism Task Force initiated an investigation in 2007. From March of that year through at least January 2008, the men allegedly exported Sony brand electronics, including Playstation 2 game consoles and digital cameras to Samer Mehdi, owner of an electronics shop in Paraguay.

“This international ICE led multi-jurisdictional investigation demonstrates ICE’s mission to identify, investigate, disrupt and dismantle criminal organizations that support designated terrorist entities and participate in the illicit trade of commodities that support terrorist activities and ultimately threaten the national security of the United States,” John Morton, ICE’s assistant secretary of Homeland Security, said in a statement.

The electronics shop in Paraguay is located within a mall known as Galeria Page, which the U.S. government has designated a terrorist entity for its ties to Hezbollah, according to sources.

“The tri-border region [where the mall is located] is an area of concern,” FBI Special Agent in Charge John Gillies said in a statement. “We will continue our efforts to safeguard our national security and economic interests, including investigations of violations of our export laws that harm the United States.”

To conceal the true destination of the prohibited shipments, the defendants created fake invoices with false addresses, and they forged other necessary export paperwork. Locations referenced in the false documents and elsewhere ensured that the electronics would reach the intended destination, according to sources.

In fact, the sources said, wire transfer payments from from Paraguay to the U.S.-based distributors were routed through various facilities to mask their true origin.

“Hundreds of millions” of dollars were made from the scheme, and the money “goes directly to Hezbollah,” one source said.

Mehdi, Safadi, Talavera and Gonzalez-Neira were indicted by a federal grand jury in Miami on charges of conspiracy, violating the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, and smuggling electronic goods from the United States to Paraguay.

Mehdi is still at large.

The others made their initial appearances earlier today in a federal court in Miami, and they are currently being held without bond.

If convicted on all the charges against them, they each face up to 35 years in prison.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney said over the weekend that his administration — like the current one — was fraught with internal disagreements over how to handle terror suspects, and now FOX News has learned a little more about those disagreements.

A former Bush Administration official says there was dissent within the previous administration over how to handle a number of terrorism cases, including that of: “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh, who was captured in Afghanistan in 2001 and then prosecuted in a U.S. federal court; alleged “20th Hijacker” Zacarias Moussaoui, who is now serving a life sentence in a U.S. prison; and Jose Padilla, the American citizen who was held as an “enemy combatant” for several years before being prosecuted in federal court.

Cheney, appearing on ABC’s “This Week,” said he “won some” battles, and “lost some.”

In addition, Cheney described a meeting in the Roosevelt Room “of the White House where we had a major shootout over how this was going to be handled between the Justice Department, that advocated that approach, and many of the rest of us, who wanted to treat it as an intelligence matter, as an act of war with military commissions.”

The former Bush Administration official offered some more details about that meeting.

The official said the meeting was held within a couple months of the 9/11 attacks — and just a few weeks before President Bush signed an executive order on Nov. 13, 2001, authorizing the creation of military tribunals for terror suspects.

Cheney, then-Attorney General John Aschroft, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and others gathered in the West Wing’s Roosevelt Room to discuss a draft of the pending executive order, according to the official.

The draft, as written, gave the Defense Secretary full authority to designate someone an “enemy combatant,” which would have allowed Rumself to unilaterally take someone in the criminal justice system and move them to a military commission, by designating them an “enemy combatant,” the official said.

“Ashcroft strongly objected to that,” the official said. “He wanted it to be the Attorney General’s decision.”

Cheney, in his interview with ABC over the weekend, said the problem was never “totally” resolved. However, according to the former Bush Administration official, after the meeting in the Roosevelt Room, Cheney brought the issue to President Bush, who decided that the Commander-In-Chief would determine who was an “enemy combatant.”

The former official noted that Cheney’s recent comments about the Roosevelt Room meeting are not the first time the meeting has been discussed publicly.

In fact, the official pointed out, a former Justice Department official seems to reference the same meeting in a book four years ago.

“Press reports … describe a struggle between the White House, the Defense Department, and Attorney General Ashcroft over who would decide when military commissions ought to be used,” John Yoo, a top lawyer with the Bush Justice Department, writes in his 2006 book “War by Other Means.”

“Defense wanted to decide, but Ashcroft, ever a defender of his bureaucratic turf, wanted a veto,” the book continues. “After a contentious White House meeting, President Bush broke the deadlock by deciding that only he would decide when an al Qaeda detainee would be sent before a military court.”

The “blogosphere” has been abuzz over whether Attorney General Eric Holder and others in the Obama Administration can accurately claim that more than 300 terrorists have been convicted in federal, civilian courts.

Holder employs the statistic in an effort to blunt criticism over the decision to try the five alleged 9/11 conspirators – and more recently, the alleged Christmas Day bomber – in a civilian court.

“We know that we can prosecute terrorists in our federal courts safely and securely because we have been doing it for years,” Holder told the Senate Judiciary Committee in November. “There are more than 300 convicted international and domestic terrorists currently in Bureau of Prisons custody.”

And last week, in a letter to Republican leaders in the Senate, Holder used the statistic again, insisting that the handling of Umar F. Abdulmutallab, charged with trying to blow up a plane over Detroit on Christmas Day, comports with “long-established” practices.

“The Bush Administration used the criminal justice system to convict more than 300 individuals on terrorism-related charges,” Holder wrote in a letter to Republican leaders in the Senate.

But many online – and on Capitol Hill – wonder whether the Obama Administration is inflating numbers to make a political point.

One blog said the Obama Administration “appears to be creating a bit of mythology with their little list of imprisoned criminals with ‘histories’ and ‘nexuses.’”

So where did the Obama Administration get its “300” statistic?

They insist they got it from the Bush Administration, and they say the information is readily available online.

“So those who say we just made up the number just need to go look at the old documents that were presented by the prior Administration,” a Justice Department spokesman told FOX News.

In fact, as part of a funding request submitted in 2008, the Bush Justice Department touted its “significant strides in the global war on terror,” noting that the department had already secured “319 convictions or guilty pleas in terrorism or terrorism-related cases” since the 9/11 attacks.

Two years before that, in September 2006, the Justice Department, then under the leadership of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, issued a “Terror Fact Sheet” stating that “288 defendants have been convicted or have pleaded guilty in terrorism or terrorism-related cases” since the 9/11 attacks.

And a year after that “Terror Fact Sheet” came out, Gonzales himself alluded to the statistic in a speech, telling a crowd at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy that the Bush Administration’s successes against terrorism were based on two key factors.

First, he said, was the decision to treat the 9/11 attacks as “acts of war,” which he said “enabled us to remove enemy combatants from the field of battle and collect intelligence.”

Second, he said, was “traditional law enforcement.”

“Planning a terrorist attack is a criminal offense, and the Department of Justice, along with our state and local law enforcement partners have also pursued would-be terrorists as criminals, frequently disrupting their plots before they are viable,” Gonzales said. “We have enjoyed great success utilizing the prosecutorial tools available within our criminal courts to disrupt and prevent further terrorist attacks on American soil in the past six years. In fact, since the September 11 attacks, hundreds of defendants have been convicted of or have pleaded guilty to terrorism-related offenses.”

Numbers, though, apparently have a tendency to change – or at least what qualifies as a “convicted terrorist” does.

During a major national security speech at the National Archives in May 2009, President Barack Obama said federal prisons “hold hundreds of convicted terrorists.”

But despite that previous claim and despite Holder’s recent statements regarding “300” convictions, President Obama told CBS this past weekend that the Bush Administration “prosecuted 190 folks in these [civilian] courts, got convictions, and those folks are in maximum security prisons right now.”

Likewise, in September 2003, on the eve of the second anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush told a crowd at the FBI Academy in Virginia about his administration’s “solid results” against terrorism, including “more than 260 suspected terrorists [who] have been charged in the United States courts, [and] more than 140 [who] have already been convicted.”

But five years later, on the eve of the seventh anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the Bush White House released a “Fact Sheet” saying, “Since 9/11, more than two dozen terrorists and supporters have been convicted in the United States of terrorism-related crimes.”

As for who comprises the Justice Department’s list of “convicted international and domestic terrorists” in U.S. prisons, the Justice Department spokesman wouldn’t say.

(The funding request submitted in 2008 can be found here: http://www.justice.gov/jmd/2009summary/html/004_budget_highlights.htm)

(The 2006 “Terror Fact Sheet” can be found here: http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2006/September/06_opa_590.html)

(The Bush White House’s “Fact Sheet” can be seen here: http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2008/09/20080910-5.html)

The Nigerian man who allegedly tried to blow up a plane on Christmas Day has been “cooperating” with authorities after he “started talking” to FBI interrogators last week, a law enforcement official told FOX News.

The official said 23-year-old Umar F. Abdulmutallab has been providing leads and “current, active intelligence” that the FBI has been able to use and chase down.

The official would not say exactly when Abdulmuttalab started talking or how often FBI interrogators have met with him.

“He knows what he faces, particularly life imprisonment,” the official said. “And that’s part of the incentive to talk.”

At a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing earlier today, FBI Director Robert Mueller said Abdulmutallab was helpful even after being given his Miranda rights.

A debate has broken out on Capitol Hill and elsewhere over whether Abdulmutallab should have been “Mirandized” on Christmas Day after FBI interrogators interviewed him for a total of 50 minutes.

A federal grand jury in Detroit has since charged him with trying to detonate a weapon of mass destruction, among other offenses.

Facing mounting pressure from both Democrats and Republicans over its handling of recent terrorism cases, the Justice Department is taking unprecedented steps to push back against critics.

Last night the Justice Department unveiled an entire web page — titled “The Criminal Justice System as a Counterterrorism Tool” — to address the growing debate.

One DOJ official described the new web page as an effort “to get the facts out there” and show that “the policy for handling these terrorism cases has not changed” from the way previous administrations handled such cases.

The web page includes links to six Justice Department press releases, the oldest being Attorney General Eric Holder’s announcement three months ago that the alleged 9/11 plotters would be coming to New York City for trial.

The Justice Department is now looking at whether that trial should be held elsewhere.

The new web page also includes a “fact sheet” about using civilian courts to fight terrorism, and it includes a letter that Holder and Defense Secretary Robert Gates sent Senate leaders in October, after Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) proposed an amendment barring use of federal funds to prosecute Guantanamo Bay detainees in the United States.

Graham introduced a similar bill today, but this time he has been joined by Democratic senators Blanche Lincoln (AR) and Jim Webb (VA).

A statement at the top of the Justice Department’s web page, www.justice.gov/cjs, says: “The Obama administration is committed to using every instrument of national power to fight terrorism – including intelligence and military operations as well as the criminal justice system. As a counter-terrorism tool, the criminal justice system has proven incredibly effective in both incapacitating terrorists and gathering valuable intelligence from and about terrorists. In every instance, the administration will use the tool that is most effective for fighting terrorism, and will make those decisions based on pragmatism, not ideology.”

This comes a week after the Justice Department quietly posted online a one-minute video message from Holder.

“I want to tell you about some ways the Justice Department is working to protect our national security,” Holder said at the top of the video.

But he never offered any specifics about his department’s anti-terrorism efforts.

“The safety of Americans remains our top priority,” he said. “We’re focused on combatting terrorism … and bringing criminals to justice. … Security, accountability, transparency. That’s what the American people deserve, and it’s what you can expect from your Department of Justice.”