Guardian report.

There were 41 people killed and 80 wounded in an attack on a political rally in Timergarah in the Lower Dir district, next to the Swat valley, target of a big Pakistani military offensive against militants last year.

In a separate attack, Islamist militants attacked the US consulate in Peshawar, the region's main city, with car bombs and grenades in an apparent attempt to storm the heavily fortified compound.

New York Post report.

Call it a surge, Big Apple-style.

Hundreds of cops flooded Penn Station, Grand Central and Herald Square yesterday in a post-Moscow terror drill to see how prepared law enforcement is for an attack on the city's subways and commuter trains.

Officers from the NYPD transit bureau, National Guard and the police forces of the MTA, Long Island Rail Road, Amtrak and New Jersey Transit all took part in the drill dubbed Operation MASS -- or Multi-Agency Super Surge, officials said.

Guardian report.

The justice secretary, Jack Straw, was ordered by a court yesterday to announce whether the government accepts responsibility for one of the UK's longest-standing miscarriages of justice.

The court of appeal gave Straw 28 days to decide whether Lotfi Raissi, a pilot wrongly accused of involvement in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, is entitled to compensation from the government.

Independent report.

Personal information concerning the private lives of almost 1,000 British Muslim university students is to be shared with US intelligence agencies in the wake of the Detroit bomb scare.

The disclosure has outraged Muslim groups and students who are not involved in extremism but have been targeted by police and now fear that their names will appear on international terrorist watch lists. So far, the homes of more than 50 of the students have been visited by police officers, but nobody has been arrested. The case has raised concerns about how the police use the data of innocent people and calls into question the heavy-handed treatment of Muslim students by UK security agencies.

Guardian report.

Two female suicide bombers blew themselves up on the Moscow subway during the morning rush hour today, killing at least 35 people and injuring 51, Russian officials said.

Telegraph report.

A report questions claims that the country has faced a "public emergency" every year since 2001 and calls for a complete review of counter-terrorism measures and whether they are all still justified.

The parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights also warns the Government's "narrow" definition of what it considers being complicit in torture could be unlawful.

Times article.

Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, has been given 28 days to decide whether a pilot wrongly accused of training the 9/11 hijackers should be exonerated and compensated.

[...]

Mr Raissi was eventually freed in February 2002 but has been unable to resume his career as a pilot because neither the British nor US authorities have been prepared to apologise for falsely accusing him.

Independent leading article.

No one disputes that the threat from terrorism in Britain is real. But hysterical official assertions about the scale of that threat do nothing to make us safer. And the trading of ancient liberties for a thin blanket of security is the very worst way for Britain, as a nation, to respond.

Asia Times article.

News that the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had reached a plea bargain with David Coleman Headley, who played a key role in the planning of the terrorist strike in Mumbai in November 2008 in which 166 people were killed, has caused an uproar in India.

The deal enables the US government to hold back from formally producing any evidence against Headley in a court of law that might have included details of his links with US intelligence or oblige any cross-examination of Headley by the prosecution.

[...] A senior Indian editor wrote on Sunday, "Headley ... was convicted on drug charges and sent to jail in the US. We know also that he was subsequently released from jail and handed over to the Drug Enforcement Administration, which said that it wanted to send him to Pakistan as an undercover agent. All this is a matter of public record. What happened between the time the US sent Headley into Pakistan and his arrest at Chicago airport a few months ago? How did an American agent turn into a terrorist? The US will not say."

Craig Murray comments.

Miliband did his level best today, in his parliamentary statement on the expulsion of the Israeli "diplomat" over forged British passports, to avoid mentioning the murder in Dubai at all. For those who criticised my decision to rejoin the Lib-Dems as "Zionist", I point out that it was Lib Dem spokesman Ed Davey who first introduced the oppression of the Palestinians of Gaza into the debate.

Washington Post article.

By early 2008, top U.S. military officials had become convinced that extremists planning attacks on American forces in Iraq were making use of a Web site set up by the Saudi government and the CIA to uncover terrorist plots in the kingdom.

[...]

Elite U.S. military computer specialists, over the objections of the CIA, mounted a cyberattack that dismantled the online forum. Although some Saudi officials had been informed in advance about the Pentagon's plan, several key princes were "absolutely furious" at the loss of an intelligence-gathering tool, according to another former U.S. official.

Daily Pioneer article.

The doubts over the Obama Administration's bona fides are strongest in India's 'strategic community', the charmed circle of diplomats, spooks, security experts and interested politicians. The Headley case has suggested a grey zone of complicity between US Intelligence and its asset who may have turned into a double agent. It is, after all, scarcely conceivable that Headley could have undergone five spells of training in a Lashkar-e-Tayyeba camp, from late-2005 to October 2009, without being on the radar of US counter-terrorism. Circumstantial evidence points to Headley undertaking his jihadi activities with the knowledge, and possibly consent, of US authorities. Till much after the Mumbai attacks, Headley wasn't regarded as a rogue agent.

From the Raw Story.

The White House is threatening to veto a key intelligence funding bill over what it considers to be a dangerous amount of oversight on covert agencies, according to published reports.

The 2010 Intelligence Budget has gone through a number of key changes over the past few months, with House Democrats and the Obama administration butting heads over a number of provisions. Key among them for the latest White House veto threat is a provision that would allow the Government Accountability Office to investigate intelligence agencies.

[...] In a letter to the House and Senate intelligence committees, Office of Management and Budget chief Peter Orszag highlighted several areas of the bill that have intelligence officials worried, including the GAO oversight provision.

{...] Strangely, Orszag additionally called out an effort to re-investigate the 2001 anthrax attacks, which have since been blamed on the deceased government scientist Bruce Ivins. An unnamed Obama administration official told Bloomberg News that if the 2010 Intelligence Budget demands another look at the FBI's conclusions, the bill would be vetoed.

Reuters report.

A Chicago man pleaded guilty in court on Thursday to scouting targets for the 2008 assault on Mumbai that killed more than 160 people, including six Americans.

David Headley, 49, has been cooperating with U.S. investigators since his arrest in October and faces up to life in prison, said U.S. District Court Judge Harry Leinenweber.

Evening Standard article.

Already, it is routinely described as a "failed state". From day one he opposed the War on Terror and "the American puppet politicians in Pakistan". The decision to send the army into the tribal areas of the North West Frontier, to flush out al Qaeda terrorists, simply fuelled extremism. "It's civil war in the making," he says shaking his head. "They were like a bull in a china shop, fighting one or two guerrillas with aerial bombing of villages. That turned people against the army and a new phenomenon was created: the Pakistan Taliban." It's made him believe even more passionately in socio-economic justice. "You will have no problem with extremists in Pakistan if you have democracy with a welfare state," he tells the audience.

Cynthia McKinney in the Independent.

[...] sadly, the entire global community that expects national leaders to respect the rule of law and tell them the truth are now victims of 9/11.