Holder was to meet with Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, Justice Minister Francisco Caamano and Interior chief Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba later Thursday.

On Friday, he will meet with the EU officials along with U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and U.S. Treasury Department officials. Vice President and EU Commissioner for Justice Vivian Reding and EU Commissioner for Home Affairs Cecilia Malmstrom also will be there.

The data-sharing deal stems from a secret program launched after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks that gave U.S. authorities access to European financial data but skirted Europe’s strict privacy rules.

News of the program broke in 2006, angering EU legislators.

The European Commission, the EU’s executive body, has now drawn up fresh proposals after the European Parliament rejected earlier ones as having insufficient safeguards.

The Obama administration argues that the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program has helped protect lives on both sides of the Atlantic and should continue with European cooperation.

European governments are seeking wide changes and safeguards to protect civil liberties as they renegotiate a deal stopped in its tracks by a vote of the European Parliament in February.

The gap between the two sides has shown the complicated contours of the Obama administration’s efforts to set a centrist course on national security.

Even as the administration struggles at home to remain vigilant against terrorism while separating its policies from the Bush White House’s hard line, U.S. officials are committed to maintaining the data-sharing program abroad.

“Each day we go without it, we run the very real risk that information crucial to preventing an attack … is not available to U.S. and EU authorities,” said David Cohen, assistant treasury secretary for terrorist financing.

Speaking Wednesday at a forum at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Cohen voiced frustration about the impasse.

“I don’t know what else we can or, frankly, that we need to do to ensure the protection of personal financial data,” he said.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, the Belgium-based SWIFT European bank transfer consortium has given U.S. authorities access to European financial data. The agreement was kept secret until 2006, when legal worries that the deal could violate EU privacy standards forced it to be redrawn.

SWIFT routes about 11 million financial transactions daily between 7,800 banks and other financial institutions in 200 countries, recording customer names, account numbers and other identifying information.

American officials say SWIFT has provided new leads, corroborated identities and uncovered relationships between suspects in an al-Qaida-directed plot to blow up trans-Atlantic flights in 2006.

The EU now plans to add new data protection guarantees to the deal, including a ban on transferring bulk data — but not leads — to other countries. It also wants data to be held no longer than five years — and says it wants to terminate data-sharing if the U.S. doesn’t keep to the new privacy restrictions.

Such a deal would formalize a secret program that skirted Europe’s strict privacy rules by transferring millions of pieces of personal information from the U.S. offices of SWIFT to American authorities.

Since the existence of the U.S. anti-terror program was disclosed in 2006 — angering European legislators — American authorities have promised that the information it collects from the databases is properly protected and used only in anti-terror probes.

Reding, the EU commissioner for justice, has promised to take far more account of civil liberties. “During the past decade, Europe’s policies have too often focused only on security,” she said recently. “And neglected justice.”

She will soon decide changes to another counterterrorism cooperation deal that swaps details on airplane passengers between Europe and the U.S. — and has threatened to investigate the wider use of body scanners at airports.

Hugo Brady, an analyst at the Centre for European Reform, a political think tank, said European governments are now eager to analyze financial data before it is handed over to the U.S.

American officials are unlikely to accept this because they prefer to scan bulk data with their superior technology, and “they don’t trust the European security services to do as good a job as they would do themselves,” he said.

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Barrett reported from Washington and Giles from Madrid. Associated Press writers Lolita C. Baldor in Washington and Aoife White in Brussels contributed to this report.

Hints of those issues emerged in anti-government Internet postings linked to Bedell. One blog linked to Bedell’s page on the social networking site LinkedIn contained a two-part treatise on big government, including its vulnerability to being controlled by a criminal organization.

“This organization, like so many murderous governments throughout history, would see the sacrifice of thousands of its citizens, in an event such as the September 11 attacks, as a small cost in order to perpetuate its barbaric control,” the blog post read.

Keevill described Bedell as “very well-educated” and well-dressed, wearing a suit that blended with commuters when he showed up at the Pentagon’s subway entrance about 6:40 p.m. But he was concealing two 9 millimeter semiautomatic weapons and “many magazines” of ammunition, Keevill said.

When Bedell seemed to reach into his pocket for worker identification, he was instead reaching for a gun, Keevill said.

“He just reached in his pocket, pulled out a gun and started shooting” at point-blank range, Keevill said. “He walked up very cool. He had no real emotion on his face.”

Bedell died Thursday night from head wounds received when the two injured officers and another officer returned fire, Keevill said.

Although the gunfire near the subway exit in Arlington, Va., lasted less than a minute, Keevill said, numerous shots were fired. Bedell was not wearing body armor, he added.

One officer suffered a thigh wound and the other was hit in the shoulder. Keevill said they were superficial injuries, and both have been released from the hospital.

There was more ammunition in Bedell’s car, which authorities found in a local parking garage.

“He came here from California,” Keevill said. “We were able to identify certain locations that he spent that last several weeks making his way from the West coast to the East coast.”

Keevill said he did not know what motivated the shooting: “I have no idea what his intentions were.”

On a Wikipedia page linked to Bedell, a user by the name JPatrickBedell revealed ill feelings toward the government and the armed forces.

JPatrickBedell wrote that he was “determined to see that justice is served” in the death of Marine Col. James Sabow, who was found dead in the backyard of his California home in 1991. The death was ruled a suicide but the case has long been the source of theories of a cover up. Sabow’s family has maintained that he was murdered because he was about to expose covert military operations in Central America involving drug smuggling.

That posting can be linked to Bedell through court documents matching the shooter’s birth date but Keevill said Friday that authorities had not made “a final determination” that the shooter was the same Bedell.

The user named JPatrickBedell wrote the Sabow case was “a step toward establishing the truth of events such as the September 11 demolitions.”

That same posting railed against the government’s enforcement of marijuana laws and included links to the author’s 2006 court case in Orange County, Calif., involving allegations of cultivating marijuana and resisting a police officer. Court records available online show the date of birth on the case mentioned by the user JPatrickBedell matches that of the John Patrick Bedell suspected in the shooting.

The assault at the very threshold of the Pentagon — the U.S. capital’s ground zero on Sept. 11, 2001 — came four months after a deadly attack on the Army’s Fort Hood, Texas, post allegedly by a U.S. Army psychiatrist with radical Islamic leanings.

Hatred of the government motivated a man in Texas last month to fly a small plane into a building housing Internal Revenue Service offices, killing an IRS employee and himself.

The shooting resembled one in January in which a gunman walked up to the security entrance of a Las Vegas courthouse and opened fire with a shotgun, killing one officer and wounding another before being gunned down in a barrage of return fire.

The subway station is immediately adjacent to the Pentagon building, a five-sided northern Virginia colossus across the Potomac River from Washington. Since a redesign following the 2001 terrorist attack on the Pentagon, riders can no longer disembark directly into the building. Riders take a long escalator ride to the surface from the underground station, then pass through a security check outside the doors of the building, where further security awaits.

Transit officials said the subway station would remain closed at least part of the day Friday while the FBI continued its investigation.

Keevill said the gunman gave no clue to the officers at the checkpoint about what he was going to do.

“There was no distress,” he said. “When he reached into his pocket, they assumed he was going to get a pass and he came up with a gun.”

Keevill added: “We have layers of security and it worked. He never got inside the building to hurt anyone.”

Ronald Domingues, 74, who lives next door to Bedell’s parents in a gated golf course community in Hollister, said he doesn’t know the family well. But he said Bedell sometimes lived with his parents and struck him “like a normal young man.”

“I wouldn’t suspect he would be involved in anything like this,” Domingues said.

Domingues described the neighborhood as middle-class. He said the Bedells live in a one story Southwestern-style stucco home, which was dark Thursday night.

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Associated Press writers Eileen Sullivan, Christine Simmons, Pauline Jelinek, Anne Gearan, Mike Gracia, Nafeesa Syeed, Philip Elliott and Kasey Jones contributed to this report.

“This raised concerns so an alert was raised,” FBI spokeswoman Sandra Berchtold said. “The investigation shows that this was a non-serious incident and all is clear at this point.”

After the flight crew became concerned, the pilot of the Sunday flight had requested emergency assistance upon arrival, sending federal authorities scrambling to respond to a potential danger.

The Transportation Security Administration said the airline alerted authorities to a “disruptive passenger” on board fligth 253, who was taken into custody when the plane landed.

Two law enforcement officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the incident, said the crew apparently acted out of an abundance of caution in alerting authorities.

Post-flight interviews by investigators determined the passenger was a legitimate businessman who posed no security threat to the plane, the two law enforcement officials said.

White House officials briefed President Barack Obama on the incident, which generated multiple law enforcement reports of a disruptive passenger aboard a Detroit-bound plane.

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Associated Press writer Ed White in Detroit contributed to this report.

The law enforcement officials cautioned that such claims could not be verified immediately, and said the man may have been acting independently — inspired but not specifically trained or ordered by terror groups.

One law enforcement official, also speaking on condition of anonymity in order to discuss the case, said Mutallab’s name had surfaced earlier on at least one U.S. intelligence database, but not to the extent that he was placed on a watch list or a no-fly list.

As investigators try to determine the veracity of his claims, they also want to figure out exactly how the explosive device was made — and how much of a broader threat it may pose to air security.

In 2006, investigators in London uncovered a plot to use liquid-based explosives disguised in drink bottles to blow up airliners. The case prompted new restrictions on passengers carrying beverages or other liquids.

Now investigators are trying to determine whether the rules need to be tightened again, concerned that the components of the explosive device were smuggled onto the plane despite technological advances in screening and detection.

“It raises some serious questions, such as how was this person able to bring an explosive substance aboard a commercial airliner?” said Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, the senior Republican on the Senate Homeland Security Committee.

Law enforcement officials said the man appeared badly burned on his legs, indicating the explosive was strapped there. The components apparently were mixed in flight and included a powdery substance, multiple law enforcement and counterterrorism officials said.

The explosive material burned but apparently did not produce enough of an explosion or fire to bring down the Airbus 330 carrying 278 passengers and a crew of 11.

The incident marks the first time someone onboard a U.S. plane had sought to detonate a bomb since Richard Reid hid explosives in his shoes on a trans-Atlantic flight on Dec. 22, 2001 — almost exactly eight years before the newest incident. Reid is currently serving a life sentence.

In Friday’s case in Detroit, no charges were filed immediately against the suspect, who was taken to a hospital.

Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., ranking GOP member of the House Homeland Security Committee, said the flight began in Nigeria and went through Amsterdam en route to Detroit.

In a bare-bones statement about the incident, Delta, which is acquiring Northwest, said the passenger caused a disturbance, was subdued, and the crew requested law enforcement meet the flight.

Law enforcement officials said they had no preholiday intelligence indicating this type of attack was in the works.

The FBI and the Homeland Security Department issued an intelligence note on Nov. 20 about the threat picture for the 2009 holiday season from Thanksgiving through Jan. 1. At the time, intelligence officials said they had no specific information about attack plans by al-Qaida or other terrorist groups. The intelligence note was obtained by The Associated Press.

President Barack Obama was notified of the incident and discussed it with security officials, the White House said. Officials said he was monitoring the situation and receiving regular updates from his vacation spot in Hawaii.

The White House was coordinating briefings for the president through the Homeland Security Department, the Transportation Security Administration and the FBI.

Federal officials said there would be heightened security for both domestic and international flights at airports across the country, but the intensified levels likely would be “layered,” differing from location to location depending on alerts, security concerns and other factors.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano also was closely monitoring the situation.

The department encouraged travelers to be observant and aware of their surroundings and report any suspicious behavior to law enforcement officials.

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Associated Press writers Lara Jakes in Baghdad and Eileen Sullivan in Washington contributed to this report.