U.S. analyzes glitches in Times Square car bomb manhunt

The federal government began requiring airlines Wednesday to recheck no-fly lists every two hours, an effort to patch a hole in the security net that allowed the man suspected of putting a bomb in Times Square to board a jetliner hours after being barred from air travel.

The new rules were designed to correct a glitch that marred an otherwise successful law enforcement operation that caught Faisal Shahzad 53 hours after authorities say he drove a bomb-laden SUV into one of the world’s major tourist centers.

“This is a success story, as far as I’m concerned,” said Ralph Basham, who was commissioner of Customs and Border Protection and head of the Secret Service during the George W. Bush administration. “In my opinion, this was at warp speed, the way they were able to bring this thing to a close.”

Rep. Jane Harman, the California Democrat who chairs the Homeland Security subcommittee on intelligence, said: “I understand there were glitches, but that’s why we have a layered system. They got the guy.”

Still, huge questions lingered in the wake of the failed attack, including what allegedly prompted Shahzad, a 30-year-old Pakistani American who had built a stable, suburban life with his wife and children in Connecticut, to turn to extremism.

Government officials and terrorism experts also were pondering whether anything could or should have alerted authorities to Shahzad, who was pulled aside in February for special screening by customs officials because he had spent time in Pakistan.

“We’ve got to find out a lot more about his connections in Pakistan, his travel records, who he may have been traveling with … whether or not authorities had information about those people and whether we may have missed connections that way,” said Juan Zarate, who was deputy national security advisor for combating terrorism from 2005 to 2009.

Looking forward, experts said local and federal officials had to refocus on the types of threats they are likely to encounter in the future.

“I’m unwilling to call this a failure, but at the same time, we need to understand there’s been a basic shift in strategy about how they’re going to come at us, and I think we need to learn from that,” said Frances Townsend, who was the senior counterterrorism advisor to former President George W. Bush.

American-based extremists “understand you don’t need a big, complicated attack to have an impact,” she said. “You can have a dramatic political and economic impact with a failed moron.”

Although a naturalized American citizen, Shahzad had family and friends in Pakistan and traveled there extensively. Investigators are trying to determine whether he had ties to extremist groups.

Several people who had contact with Shahzad have been arrested in Pakistan, including a member of Jaish-e-Muhammad, an Al Qaeda-allied militant group, intelligence sources in Karachi said Wednesday.

Shahzad has been charged with terrorism, attempting to use weapons of mass destruction, and explosives violations, but has not yet appeared before a federal judge for arraignment. It was not clear when a hearing would be held. A scheduled appearance was canceled Tuesday in part because of Shahzad’s continuing cooperation with investigators.

In a criminal complaint, U.S. authorities said Shahzad acknowledged that he traveled to the Waziristan region in the Pakistani tribal region for training in bomb-making. The complaint did not specify whether Shahzad went to North or South Waziristan, but both regions long have been strongholds for the Pakistani Taliban.

The saga began Saturday night, when a Times Square vendor alerted two police officers to a smoking 1993 Nissan Pathfinder on the southwest corner of 45th Street and Broadway. The officers called in the bomb squad, which defused the makeshift device.

A vehicle identification number on the engine block started investigators down a trail that led to Shahzad.

After investigators pieced together his identify, Shahzad’s name was placed on the no-fly list at 12:39 p.m. Monday, according to a law enforcement official who was not authorized to speak publicly.

But he was able to buy a one-way ticket with cash around 7:30 p.m. and later to board an Emirates airliner headed to Dubai. The plane was scheduled to take off at 11 p.m. Monday.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials, who review every airline passenger manifest 30 minutes before departure, matched his name and other details with information from the no-fly list and pulled him off the plane after calling it back to the gate.

“As we saw with Faisal Shahzad … the airline is responsible for manually checking the name against the no-fly list within 24 hours,” a Department of Homeland security official said. “In his case, the airline seemingly didn’t check the name, and the suspect was allowed to purchase a ticket and obtain a boarding pass.”

In a statement, Emirates did not address how it handled the no-fly list, but said: “Emirates fully cooperated with and responded immediately to all local and federal authorities on all matters related to” the flight.

Under the new rules, the airline would be required to recheck the list within 2 hours of being notified that a new name was being placed on the list under special circumstances.

Beginning later this year, the Transportation Security Administration plans to take over responsibility for checking passenger names against no-fly lists from airlines. The move comes after a long battle with privacy advocates, who opposed granting the government that authority.

In another mishap during the investigation, Shahzad slipped away from FBI surveillance after he left his house in Bridgeport on Monday en route to the airport, according a top FBI official familiar with the investigation.

That was not at all unusual, said the official, who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of surveillance operations. “It’s not like on TV, where you follow a guy and it’s all clean and nice,” the official said.

John Timoney, who spent 29 years with the New York Police Department and was police chief in Philadelphia and Miami, agreed.

“I’ve done surveillance, and I’ve lost suspects and found them again,” he said. “That’s typical.”

The most troubling aspect of the case to terrorism experts was what the attempted attack says about the evolving threat from violent Islamic extremism.

There have been a number of cases in recent years involving American citizens or those living in the United States who attempted small-scale attacks that are harder to defend. In the Times Square case, only the seeming incompetence of the bomb-maker’s skills averted casualties.

The device, cobbled together with M-88 firecrackers, propane tanks, gasoline and fertilizer, had “a number of opportunities to fail,” John Pistole, deputy director of the FBI, told reporters.

When ordinary people without longstanding extremist ties become radicalized, they are difficult to detect, Harman said.

“It a tough problem,” she said. “Think about this kid living in the suburbs of Connecticut. Nobody knew who he was. How do you uncover this?”

Harman and other experts theorize that Al Qaeda and other extremist groups, long believed to have been planning another spectacular attack on the level of Sept. 11, are now willing to settle for smaller-bore violence.

“Perhaps they haven’t been able to pull off the big bang, and so they’ve decided that in order to be relevant they will go conventional,” she said. “The second theory is they’re getting somewhat desperate because a lot of their leadership has been decapitated.”

The problem, said Paul Rosensweig, who was a senior Department of Homeland Security official during the Bush administration, is that small attacks such as vehicle bombs are difficult, if not impossible, to stop.

“Are we going regulate the purchase of propane gas, firecrackers and fertilizer? That means regulating every farmer in America,” he said. “That’s a hard thing to do.”

He said government resources are best reserved for the biggest threats: possible nuclear, chemical and biological attacks.

“The American public has to understand,” Rosensweig said. “We cannot protect against everything, all the time, everywhere. “

Townsend disagrees. What’s needed is a “dynamic and target-based intelligence system” she said, that would pay special attention to a person who spends five months in Pakistan while his house goes into foreclosure, as happened with Shahzad.

“In hindsight,” she said, “you say, ‘maybe that’s the trigger.’”

ken.dilanian@latimes.com

richard.serrano@latimes.com

Times staff writers Alex Rodriguez in Karachi, Pakistan, and Tina Susman in New York contributed to this report.