Mark Hosenball

FBI search a house in Bridgeport, Conn. where Faisal Shahzad lived.Federal and local authorities arrested Faisal Shahzad, a 30-year-old American citizen of Pakistani origin, shortly after midnight Tuesday in connection with the attempted car bombing Saturday night in New York's Times Square.

A prominent expert on jihadist media says there is an apparent link between the new video message in which Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud, once thought to have been killed, proclaims he is still alive, and a message posted overnight Saturday in which the Pakistani Taliban appears to claim credit for the failed Times Square car-bomb attack.

While investigators and experts are saying that the bomb which authorities defused in an SUV at New York's Times Square on Saturday night was so crudely designed and constructed as to be almost idiotic, some investigators also say that one reason that the would-be bomber or bombers have not yet been arrested is that they made relatively sophisticated efforts to cover their tracks and conceal their identity (or identities).

A new video offers potentially conclusive evidence that Pakistani Taliban chief Hakimullah Mehsud survived a Predator attack in January. News reports and U.S. officials had argued that Mehsud, a notorious media hound who was silent for months afterward, had been killed by a CIA drone strike in Waziristan.

While someone tried to obliterate the unique Vehicle Identification Number (VIN) from one or more parts of the SUV used in Saturday night's unsuccessful Times Square bombing, investigators have succeeded in recovering the VIN from the engine block of the Nissan Pathfinder, a senior law-enforcement official says.

When federal and local law-enforcement authorities first learned that a car bomb had been discovered in New York's Times Square, one of their most urgent concerns was that there were bombs placed elsewhere and that the attempted attack as part of an elaborate 9/11-style series of assaults.As a result of discussions between domestic and foreign counterterrorism agencies, two federal officials told Declassified, one of the first steps the Department of Homeland Security took in the wake of the...

  A car bomb installed in an SUV and driven into a parking spot near New York's Times Square around dinner time on Saturday was of relatively primitive design and construction.

A New York-born man described by a law-enforcement official as a computer expert is at the center of the latest investigation into Americans who have tried and, in some but not all cases, succeeded in hooking up with Al Qaeda elements based overseas.

Amid the outrage about Arizona's strict new immigration law—which calls for the pursuit, arrest, and deportation of illegal aliens—a pivotal question remains: how will the Obama administration respond?

Pakistani intelligence officials are reportedly claiming that an American drone attack failed to kill Hakimullah Mehsud after all. As Declassified previously reported here and here, the Pakistani Taliban commander, who costarred in the "martyrdom video" of a Jordanian double agent who killed seven Americans and a Jordanian intelligence officer at a secret CIA base in Afghanistan in December, was thought to have been in the sights of a missile fired by a Predator drone this January.

The Pentagon's main supply agency has acknowledged awarding $1.4 billion in no-bid contracts to two foreign companies whose ownership and management seem extremely mysterious.

American broadcast TV networks appeared to have no hesitation about what to do when Sen. Carl Levin, grand inquisitor in a Senate investigation into the alleged delinquencies of Goldman Sachs, repeatedly quoted from an internal e-mail circulated within the investment bank that used a dirty word. "boy that timeberwof [misspelling of Timberwolf] was one s--tty deal," wrote one senior Goldman banker to another in June 2007.

The leaders of the Senate's most powerful oversight committee say the Obama administration has "failed to comply" with subpoenas the committee sent to the Justice and Defense departments demanding access to records and witnesses the committee says it needs to pursue an investigation into the background to the mass shootings at Fort Hood last Nov. 5 by accused killer Army psychiatrist Maj.

On the eve of his scheduled trial in Manhattan, an alleged member of a notorious British-based Islamic extremist group pleaded guilty on Tuesday to one count of conspiring to provide material support to Al Qaeda, according to a federal official who asked for anonymity when discussing the case.

A Delta Airlines transatlantic flight made an unscheduled landing in Maine on Tuesday after an unruly passenger made threatening comments involving explosives, according to three federal officials who asked for anonymity when talking about an incident still under investigation.

    ABC said it got the video from a Yemeni journalist. The network said Abdulmutallab's lawyer had no immediate comment. 

An armed man was arrested Sunday at a North Carolina airport where President Obama's plane was about to depart, but federal authorities now believe the man was only a harmless police wannabe.

The New York Police Department has stepped up security at the headquarters of the Comedy Central cable channel after an Islamic extremist Web site posted apparent threats to the creators of South Park, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, for making fun of the Prophet Muhammad.

U.S. national-security officials say they have no confirmation of Israeli claims that Syria has delivered or is in the process of delivering new, longer-range Scud missiles to the radical Lebanese Shiite group Hizbullah.

In the wake of the failed Christmas Day underpants bombing attempt, the government's National Counterterrorism Center has set up a new "pursuit team." Its main objective: to spot and pull together fragmentary and inchoate threat information like the scraps of information the government had gathered but failed to assemble before the Dec. 25 close call.

One of the federal government's most knowledgeable experts on Al Qaeda and related terror phenomena quietly left the government within the last few weeks.

The U.S. military in Iraq says the American command there is positive that raids it conducted with Iraqi security forces over the last weekend killed both Abu Ayyoub al-Masri and Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, alleged two most senior leaders of Al Qaeda's Iraqi affiliate. "We can confirm with certainty that Masri and [Hamid Dawud Mohammad Khalil] al-Zawi [the supposed real name of Baghdadi], were killed," said Maj.

U.S. and Iraqi forces may have announced the killing of Abu Omar al-Baghdadi—but U.S. military authorities once publicly questioned the existence of any such person.

Air-traffic authorities in Britain are now warning that new volcanic-ash clouds from Iceland may set back their efforts to reopen air travel in and out of the U.K.

The leaders of a key Senate oversight committee are carrying out a threat they issued last week. Sen. Joe Lieberman, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, and Sen.

U.S. intelligence and defense officials say "indications" have reached Washington appearing to substantiate claims by the Iraqi government that its security forces over the weekend killed the two most senior leaders of Al Qaeda's Iraqi affiliate.

Authorities in Britain are hopeful about an apparent break in the volcanic eruption in Iceland that has paralyzed air traffic across the Atlantic and within Europe.

Despite a recent upsurge in threats and violence by far-right groups and loners, the Homeland Security Department appears gun-shy about reporting or monitoring the trend too closely.

Declassified has learned that a member of the Republican staff of the House Intelligence Committee was the individual who introduced a senior National Security Agency official, indicted earlier this week for leaking classified information, to the journalist who allegedly received and wrote about the secret material.

Severe disruptions in air travel across the Atlantic and within Europe, caused by a volcanic eruption in Iceland, could continue for days, U.S. government aviation officials say.