well, frankly their role in counter-terrorism is complicated. just to give you some highlights, i would say before 9/11, i was in saudi arabia a couple times seeking their cooperation, didn t get it. they were not particularly cooperative in the early days after 9/11. in 2003, they had some serious attacks by al qaeda on their facilities in saudi arabia. i will say that turned them around. they became quite good partners on counter-terrorism over the years. recently i think the most noteworthy thing they contributed was advance noise of a plot in 2010, that had it been carried out, would have placed some cartridge bombs on fedex planes and other aircraft coming to the united states. they alerted us in advance to this.
designs. this affects overseas flights coming into the u.s. of course, it is already tsa policy for passengers to take off their shoes going through security checkpoints to be x-rayed. a law enforcement official says that passengers as a result of this new warning may notice additional searches including explosive detection swabs. to be clear, there s no specific threat or plot known. an intelligence official told me this, quote, this threat is not specific or credible enough to require a specific response. they often issue an alert out of an abundance of caution. i spoke with cnn terrorism analyst peter bergen to get an understanding of what kind of groups would be capable of this. here s what he said. the dhs warning is nonspecific, but the universe of people who have known capably is not large. al qaeda in yemen continues to put underwear bombs on planes, continues to try to put cartridge bombs on planes.
bomber, every time the president makes a move on this, something from yemen comes up and trips him up. in terms of the objections to sending whether or not it is safe to send former guantanamo prisoners who have been cleared for release in terms of their raw assessment of dangerousness, however they do that, in terms of whether it s safe to send them to a place like yemen, can this government or the previous government make any meaningful assurances about this? does any of it strike you as substantive or is all of this politics? a lot of it is politics. the bush administration sent people back to saudi arabia because it trusted the saudi government. send them back to afghanistan because it trusted, in sort of a way, what the afghan government was. there hasn t been that same amount of trust in yemen, and the real irony is that the group in yemen, al qaeda, the group responsible for these underwear bombs, these cartridge bombs, that group has former guantanamo bay detainees in it,
qaeda in the arabian peninsula is not trying to launch another attack. these methods of how we re collecting intelligence are really the crown jewels in terms of disrupting these plots. what can we learn from the bomb itself? we re told that the bomber, the master bomber, this may have been someone he trained. it may have been he himself, but he was upgrading the underwear bomb, working on something more advanced than the cartridge bombs that were put on those cargo planes going to philadelphia back in 2010. so what can we learn from looking at this plastic and figuring out how to guard against it? is the tsa going to have to redesign it s whole procedure? this bomb maker has been a target for several years because he s been so innovative. the underwear bomber, the cartridge bomb plot, which was really well-disguised on cargo jets. they re going to be looking at the components of this bomb, the
chris, that the president was first informed of this in april by john brennan, his top counterterrorism official. he directed homeland security and law enforcement and intelligence agencies to take whatever steps were necessary. i am told separately that we were working very closely with saudi intelligence on this, because this man al asiri who was the master designer of bombs and still is at loose we believe in yemen had also designed the bomb that did successfully explode. it was an attempted assassination in 2009 against a top saudi official, the son of prince nayyaf, the interior minister, who is himself a top counterterrorism official. he was injured in that attempted assassination in jeddah, saudi arabia. so you had three known instances where al asiri did design bombs. one was the cartridge bombs that pete williams pointed out. the other, of course, was the underwear bomber in 2009. and then the successful attempt