Terrorism, Cia | featured news

The F.B.I. and the C.I.A. separately had Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the suspect who died last week, listed in government databases in 2011, though they cleared him of extremist links.

A would-be "underwear bomber" involved in a plot to attack a US-based jet was in fact working as an undercover informer with Saudi intelligence and the CIA, it has emerged. The revelation is the latest twist in an increasingly bizarre story about the disruption of an apparent attempt by al-Qaida to strike at a high-profile American target using a sophisticated device hidden in the clothing of an attacker.

Former CIA director David Petraeus testified on Friday that he believes the Sept. 11 attacks on a U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya was an act of terrorism that did not arise out of a spontaneous demonstration, a lawmaker who heard the testimony said.

In more than six years of spying on Muslim neighborhoods, eavesdropping on conversations and cataloguing mosques, the New York Police Department's secret Demographics Unit never generated a lead or triggered a terrorism investigation, the department acknowledged in court testimony unsealed late Monday. The Demographics Unit is at the heart of a police spying program, built with help from the CIA, which assembled databases on where Muslims lived, shopped, worked and prayed. Police infiltrated Muslim student groups, put informants in mosques, monitored sermons and catalogued every Muslim in New York who adopted new, Americanized surnames.

The US has expanded its secret intelligence forces in Africa, with Special Operations forces establishing a network of small air bases to spy on terrorist hideouts, The Washington Post reported on Thursday.

The CIA thwarted an ambitious plot by Al Qaeda's affiliate in Yemen to destroy a U.S.-bound airliner using a bomb with a sophisticated new design around the one-year anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden, U.S. officials said.

Authorities say a former CIA agent who has claimed he helped interrogate a top suspected terrorist has been charged with leaking classified secrets about fellow officers to the media....

The CIA worked closely with Moammar Gadhafi’s intelligence services in the rendition of terror suspects to Libya for interrogation, according to documents seen Saturday by the AP, cooperation that could spark tensions between Washington and Libya’s new rulers. The CIA was among a number of foreign intelligence services that worked with Libya’s agencies, according to documents found at a Libyan security agency building in Tripoli.

Leaders of the nation's largest police organizations, briefed in the aftermath of the raid on Osama bin Laden's Pakistani compound, have been told that there are no immediate threats of reprisals or active terrorist plots that have been gleaned from an initial review of intelligence seized from the compound, police officials told USA TODAY.

In one of the most devastating attacks in CIA history, officers failed to search an Al Qaeda double agent before he entered a December meeting at their base in a remote part of Afghanistan, and he detonated a huge bomb.