Rep. Peter King Says Alleged Boston Bombers are Fifth Terrorists to Survive Prior US Scrutiny

One additional case shares some aspects of the pattern King laid out — that of Umar Farook Abdulmutallab, the “underwear bomber.” But since his plot was foiled and he did not go on to “carry out terrorist murders,” his case doesn’t make King’s list. (In Abdulmutallab’s case, the National Security Agency had intercepted a discussion in Yemen that referenced the plot, but analysts did not link these intercepts with a separate piece of information, that Adbulmutallab’s father “visited the United States Embassy in Nigeria to express concerns about his son’s radicalization,” according to the New York Times.)

We asked Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a terrorism expert who is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, for his thoughts on King’s list. He agreed that Hasan’s case qualified as a good example of government officials determining (misguidedly, as it turned out) that an individual was “no threat.” He added that he thought Al-Awlaki and Muhammed fit the pattern to a significant degree, but not entirely. In their cases, while the U.S. government did not immediately step in to arrest either man, it’s not clear that the U.S. government went so far as to determine that they were “no threat,” Gartenstein-Ross said.

The weakest example, Gartenstein-Ross said, is Headley, whose case is murky for several reasons, including his role as a U.S. government informant. Seven years elapsed between his interview in 2001 and the Mumbai attack in 2008 — a long enough time to raise questions about whether he was sufficiently radicalized to have given government officials reason to believe he was on a path to terrorism.

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