Morning Brief - 4/24/12

The United States
MORE ADMITTED TERRORISTS TESTIFY AT NYC TRIAL
Two confessed terrorists testified Monday at the trial of Adis Medunjanin, who is accused of plotting to bomb the NYC subway system in an al Qaeda terror plot. Medunjanin’s two alleged co-conspirators, Najibullah Zazi and Zarein Ahmedzay, have already pleaded guilty and testified against him last week. On Monday, they were joined by Saajid Badat, who served time in Britain for his role in a plot timed to coincide with that of attempted shoebomber Richard Reid and who testified via video, and Bryant Neal Vinas, a Long Island man who fought with al Qaeda against American troops in Afghanistan. “It’s rather ironic that this case has attracted so little attention,” Matthew Waxman, a law professor at Columbia University who used to work on detainee affairs for the Bush administration, told NPR. “This trial has been an occasion for a convention of terrorism suspects.” (NPR)

Badat and Vinas were called largely to “corroborate facts about the training in Qaeda-run camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” reports the NYT. Badat testified that he met Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, and that bin Laden told him that a follow-up attack after 9/11 would doom the U.S. economy. (NYT, AP, WSJ, CNN)

Wrigleyville bomb plot: Sami Samir Hassoun, a Chicago man of Lebanese descent, has pleaded guilty to placing a backpack he thought contained a powerful explosive device near Wrigley Field in Chicago in September 2010. The bomb was inert and had been given to him during an FBI sting operation. He faces up to 30 years in prison. (Chicago Tribune)

Targeted killings suit: Attorney General Eric Holder has requested more time to respond to a suit brought by the ACLU seeking the legal documents authorizing targeted killings. A letter from prosecutors filed in federal court in New York said that “given the significance of the matters presented in this case, the government’s position is being deliberated at the highest level of the executive branch.” (Reuters)

Padilla suit: Jose Padilla is asking the Supreme Court to reinstate his suit against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other government officials over his treatment in a South Carolina military prison. The suit was struck down in January by a federal appeals court. (AP, BBC News)

Conflict Zones
REUTERS: NORTH KOREA READIES NUCLEAR TEST
Reuters reports that North Korea “has almost completed preparations for a third nuclear test and has the capacity to carry it out ‘soon,’” according to a senior source with close ties to Pyongyang and Beijing. News of the possible nuclear test comes a day after North Korea sharply escalated its rhetoric against South Korea, threatening to launch “special actions” that would reduce the South’s government to ashes within minutes. (Reuters, AP, NYT)  

Afghanistan: Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), who has been a persistent critic of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, was effectively barred from entering Afghanistan over the weekend as he traveled with a congressional delegation. “He was not welcome at all,” an Afghan official said. The rest of the delegation continued with the trip, though the U.S. Embassy in Kabul issued a statement on Monday calling the lawmakers’ visit a privately arranged event that didn’t represent official administration policy. (WSJ)

Iran: Iran disconnected some of its Persian Gulf oil terminals from the Internet Monday in response to what officials there called a sustained cyberattack. The Iranian oil ministry said Tuesday that its IT systems did not suffer lasting damage. (NYT, Reuters)

Syria: Time reports that “one of Lebanon’s most wanted terrorists,” Abdel Ghani Jawhar, one of the leaders of the Sunni fundamentalist terror group Fatah al-Islam, accidentally blew himself up in the Syrian city of Qsair on Friday night while assembling a bomb. (Time)

Syria: The Wall Street Journal reports that Syrian government forces launched deadly reprisal attacks on civilians Monday, “unleashing an artillery barrage on a neighborhood of the city of Hama and execut[ing] residents who spoke with United Nations peace monitors.” (WSJ)

World News
Kenya: The U.S. Embassy warned on Monday that a terror attack on government buildings and hotels in Nairobi could be imminent, and urged Americans there to be vigilant. (AP)

UK: Five men have been arrested in Luton on suspicion of preparing for terror acts. (AFP)

Bosnia: Three people have been charged with terrorism offenses for their involvement in a shooting attack on the U.S. Embassy in Sarajevo last October. (AP)

Arguments, Editorials, and Must Reads
Larry Siems on how America embraced torture: I dug through 140,000 formerly classified documents from the Department of Defense, the Justice Department, and the CIA that detail the abuse of prisoners in U.S. custody in the war on terror, writes Siems in Slate. “Here is what I learned. Our highest government officials, up to and including President Bush, broke international and U.S. laws banning torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment. Worse, they made their subordinates in the military and civilian intelligence services break those laws for them. When the men and women they asked to break those laws protested, knowing they could be prosecuted for torture, they pretended to rewrite the law. They commissioned legal opinions they said would shield those who carried out the abuses from being hauled into court, as the torture ban requires. ‘The law has been changed,’ detainees around the world were told. ‘No rules apply.’ Then they tortured.”

Seth Jones on why the al Qaeda obituaries are premature: In a “Think Again” feature on al Qaeda, Seth Jones writes in Foreign Policy that the terror group is not on the brink of defeat, its mergers are not a sign of weakness, and it remains more popular than many analysts might think.