US also had human intelligence on German al Qaeda plot

NY Times:

The discovery of a plot to detonate powerful bombs in Germany this week was a result of close cooperation between American and German security officials, with intelligence passing back and forth between the two sides, German officials said Saturday.

American intelligence was instrumental in first bringing the foiled plot to the attention of German intelligence and law enforcement officials, according to German and American officials. Interceptions of e-mail messages and telephone calls between Germany and both Pakistan and Turkey raised the initial red flags last year, they said. But the Americans also wanted to protect their sources, a German intelligence official said, which meant that the earliest warnings were vague.

The official said that the first communiqué consisted of the aliases of two men, “Muaz” and “Zafer,” who were said to have visited a terrorist training camp in Pakistan.

The nicknames were linked to two members of what authorities call a breakaway cell of a Central Asian terrorist group, the Islamic Jihad Union, operating in Germany.

According to a confidential status report prepared by investigators after last week’s arrests and obtained by The New York Times, Atilla Selek, who the police say was involved in the scouting of American military barracks in the town of Hanau, goes by the alias Muaz. Zafer appeared to refer to Zafer Sari, a 22-year-old from the town of Neuenkirchen, the same town as Daniel Martin Schneider, one of the three men arrested last week and accused of planning to use hydrogen peroxide bombs.

“If we hadn’t here and there gotten little puzzle pieces of information, often through coincidences, we wouldn’t have found them,” said the intelligence official. He said the men were not only trained in explosives, but also in countersurveillance.

It was a mistake by a police officer the day before the arrest, the official said, that may have accelerated both the suspected plot and the arrest. The officer pulled the three suspects over for driving with their high beams on. During the traffic stop, he said that the men were on the watch list of the German Federal Police. The suspects heard him, the official said, and so did the federal officers, listening on the wiretap.

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The discussion was going on at the top levels of government as well. President Bush and Chancellor Angela Merkel were reported to have discussed the investigation at the Group of 8 conference in June, the German news magazine Spiegel said on its Web site on Saturday.

Investigators here said Saturday that they fear that terrorist plots could still be under way in Germany by unarrested members of the Islamic Jihad Union cell.

A senior investigator on the case, speaking on condition of anonymity, said there might be “parallel planning” for separate attacks by members of the group. “There are still three of them out there who have trained with explosives in the camps and these people are still free,” the investigator said.

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This plot against US personnel in German is very likely on of the on going plots that caused the sense of urgency in getting the terrorist surveillance legislation through Congress. The Democrats attempts to give 4th amendment rights to the enemy is unprecedented and was never contemplated by the constitution. Judges were never intended by the constitution to be a check on the President's war powers. You will not find one word to that effect in the war powers clause of the constitution. They are also singularly unsuited to the task since they cannot be held politically responsible for their screw ups such as the one that would bar intercepts of any enemy communication if a part of it touches someone in the US. This is a communication that should have a higher priority for interception. Getting the courts involved in intelligence operations in wartime is one of the worst ideas the Democrats have come up with in this war.