Al Qaeda-Related and Other Articles Collected 6412

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Al Qaeda-Related and Other Articles, Collected 6/4/12

Table of Contents
1.1. Summary 1.2. US 1.2.1. Security 1.2.1.1. Obama 1.2.1.1.1. Secret Kill List Proves a Test of Obama s Principles and Will 1.2.1.1.2. Assessing Obama s Counterterrorism Record 1.2.1.1.3. Obama's Counterterrorism Self-Correction 1.2.1.2. In Far Northwest, a New Border Focus on Latinos 1.2.1.3. West Point Is Divided on a War Doctrine s Fate 1.2.2. Cases 1.2.2.1. Militia Leader Takes the Stand in His Own Defense 1.2.2.2. A Guilty Plea to Giving Aid to Al Qaeda Since 2007 1.2.2.3. Justices Reject Appeal Seeking Payments for Ex-Iran Hostages 1.2.3. At Museum on 9/11, Talking Through an Identity Crisis 1.3. Europe 1.3.1. Four Convicted in Terror Plot Against Danish Paper 1.3.2. U.S. and European Union Agree on Air Cargo Security 1.3.3. 1 Student Is Killed and 5 Are Injured in Bombing at Italian School 1.4. Middle East 1.4.1. Assad Condemns Houla Massacre, Blaming Terrorists 1.4.2. Western Nations, Protesting Killings, Expel Syrian Envoys 1.4.3. International Pressure on Syria Grows After Killings 1.5. Asia 1.5.1. Pakistan 1.5.1.1. Qaeda Deputy Targeted in Drone Strike in Pakistan 1.5.1.2. Frustrations Grow as U.S. and Pakistan Fail to Mend Ties 1.5.2. Iran 1.5.2.1. Obama Order Sped Up Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran 1.5.2.2. Iran Confirms Attack by New Data Virus 1.5.3. U.S. Says 2 Slain in Raid Were Qaeda
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1.5.4. In Timbuktu, Harsh Change Under Islamists 1.5.5. China Warns West Against Using Force in Syria 1.6. Africa 1.6.1. Bomber Strikes Nigerian Church, as Attacks on Christians Mount 1.6.2. Nigeria: Kidnapped German Killed During Raid on Suspected Terrorists 1.7. New Zealand Signs Partnership Agreement With NATO
1.1. Summary
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1.2. US
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1.2.1. Security
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1.2.1.1. Obama
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1.2.1.1.1. Secret Kill List Proves a Test of Obama s Principles and Will May 29, 2012 Secret Kill List Proves a Test of Obamas Principles and Will By JO BECKER and SCOTT SHANE WASHINGTON This was the enemy, served up in the latest chart from the intelligence agencies: 15 Qaeda suspects in Yemen with Western ties. The mug shots and brief biographies resembled a high
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school yearbook layout. Several were Americans. Two were teenagers, including a girl who looked even younger than her 17 years. President Obama, overseeing the regular Tuesday counterterrorism meeting of two dozen security officials in the White House Situation Room, took a moment to study the faces. It was Jan. 19, 2010, the end of a first year in office punctuated by terrorist plots and culminating in a brush with catastrophe over Detroit on Christmas Day, a reminder that a successful attack could derail his presidency. Yet he faced adversaries without uniforms, often indistinguishable from the civilians around them. How old are these people? he asked, according to two officials present. If they are starting to use children, he said of Al Qaeda, we are moving into a whole different phase. It was not a theoretical question: Mr. Obama has placed himself at the helm of a top secret nominations process to designate terrorists for kill or capture, of which the capture part has become largely theoretical. He had vowed to align the fight against Al Qaeda with American values; the chart, introducing people whose deaths he might soon be asked to order, underscored just what a moral and legal conundrum this could be. Mr. Obama is the liberal law professor who campaigned against the Iraq war and torture, and then insisted on approving every new name on an expanding kill list, poring over terrorist suspects biographies on what one official calls the macabre baseball cards of an unconventional war. When a rare opportunity for a drone strike at a top terrorist arises but his family is with him it is the president who has reserved to himself the final moral calculation. He is determined that he will make these decisions about how far and wide these operations will go, said Thomas E. Donilon, his national security adviser. His view is that hes responsible for the position of the United States in the world. He added, Hes determined to keep the tether pretty short. Nothing else in Mr. Obamas first term has baffled liberal supporters and confounded conservative critics alike as his aggressive counterterrorism record. His actions have often remained inscrutable, obscured by awkward secrecy rules, polarized political commentary and the presidents own deep reserve. In interviews with The New York Times, three dozen of his current and former advisers described Mr. Obamas evolution since taking on the role, without precedent in presidential history, of personally overseeing the shadow war with Al Qaeda. They describe a paradoxical leader who shunned the legislative deal-making required to close the detention facility at Guantnamo Bay in Cuba, but approves lethal action without hand-wringing. While he was adamant about narrowing the fight and improving relations with the Muslim world, he has followed the metastasizing enemy into
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new and dangerous lands. When he applies his lawyering skills to counterterrorism, it is usually to enable, not constrain, his ferocious campaign against Al Qaeda even when it comes to killing an American cleric in Yemen, a decision that Mr. Obama told colleagues was an easy one. His first term has seen private warnings from top officials about a Whac-A-Mole approach to counterterrorism; the invention of a new category of aerial attack following complaints of careless targeting; and presidential acquiescence in a formula for counting civilian deaths that some officials think is skewed to produce low numbers. The administrations failure to forge a clear detention policy has created the impression among some members of Congress of a take-no-prisoners policy. And Mr. Obamas ambassador to Pakistan, Cameron P. Munter, has complained to colleagues that the C.I.A.s strikes drive American policy there, saying he didnt realize his main job was to kill people, a colleague said. Beside the president at every step is his counterterrorism adviser, John O. Brennan, who is variously compared by colleagues to a dogged police detective, tracking terrorists from his cavelike office in the White House basement, or a priest whose blessing has become indispensable to Mr. Obama, echoing the presidents attempt to apply the just war theories of Christian philosophers to a brutal modern conflict. But the strikes that have eviscerated Al Qaeda just since April, there have been 14 in Yemen, and 6 in Pakistan have also tested both mens commitment to the principles they have repeatedly said are necessary to defeat the enemy in the long term. Drones have replaced Guantnamo as the recruiting tool of choice for militants; in his 2010 guilty plea, Faisal Shahzad, who had tried to set off a car bomb in Times Square, justified targeting civilians by telling the judge, When the drones hit, they dont see children. Dennis C. Blair, director of national intelligence until he was fired in May 2010, said that discussions inside the White House of long-term strategy against Al Qaeda were sidelined by the intense focus on strikes. The steady refrain in the White House was, This is the only game in town reminded me of body counts in Vietnam, said Mr. Blair, a retired admiral who began his Navy service during that war. Mr. Blairs criticism, dismissed by White House officials as personal pique, nonetheless resonates inside the government. William M. Daley, Mr. Obamas chief of staff in 2011, said the president and his advisers understood that they could not keep adding new names to a kill list, from ever lower on the Qaeda totem pole. What remains unanswered is how much killing will be enough. One guy gets knocked off, and the guys driver, whos No. 21, becomes 20? Mr. Daley said, describing the internal discussion. At what point are you just filling the bucket with numbers?
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Maintain My Options A phalanx of retired generals and admirals stood behind Mr. Obama on the second day of his presidency, providing martial cover as he signed several executive orders to make good on campaign pledges. Brutal interrogation techniques were banned, he declared. And the prison at Guantnamo Bay would be closed. What the new president did not say was that the orders contained a few subtle loopholes. They reflected a still unfamiliar Barack Obama, a realist who, unlike some of his fervent supporters, was never carried away by his own rhetoric. Instead, he was already putting his lawyerly mind to carving out the maximum amount of maneuvering room to fight terrorism as he saw fit. It was a pattern that would be seen repeatedly, from his response to Republican complaints that he wanted to read terrorists their rights, to his acceptance of the C.I.A.s method for counting civilian casualties in drone strikes. The day before the executive orders were issued, the C.I.A.s top lawyer, John A. Rizzo, had called the White House in a panic. The order prohibited the agency from operating detention facilities, closing once and for all the secret overseas black sites where interrogators had brutalized terrorist suspects. The way this is written, you are going to take us out of the rendition business, Mr. Rizzo told Gregory B. Craig, Mr. Obamas White House counsel, referring to the much-criticized practice of grabbing a terrorist suspect abroad and delivering him to another country for interrogation or trial. The problem, Mr. Rizzo explained, was that the C.I.A. sometimes held such suspects for a day or two while awaiting a flight. The order appeared to outlaw that. Mr. Craig assured him that the new president had no intention of ending rendition only its abuse, which could lead to American complicity in torture abroad. So a new definition of detention facility was inserted, excluding places used to hold people on a short-term, transitory basis. Problem solved and no messy public explanation damped Mr. Obamas celebration. Pragmatism over ideology, his campaign national security team had advised in a memo in March 2008. It was counsel that only reinforced the presidents instincts. Even before he was sworn in, Mr. Obamas advisers had warned him against taking a categorical position on what would be done with Guantnamo detainees. The deft insertion of some wiggle words in the presidents order showed that the advice was followed. Some detainees would be transferred to prisons in other countries, or released, it said. Some would be prosecuted if feasible in criminal courts. Military commissions, which Mr. Obama had criticized, were not mentioned and thus not ruled out.
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As for those who could not be transferred or tried but were judged too dangerous for release? Their disposition would be handled by lawful means, consistent with the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States and the interests of justice. A few sharp-eyed observers inside and outside the government understood what the public did not. Without showing his hand, Mr. Obama had preserved three major policies rendition, military commissions and indefinite detention that have been targets of human rights groups since the 2001 terrorist attacks. But a year later, with Congress trying to force him to try all terrorism suspects using revamped military commissions, he deployed his legal skills differently to preserve trials in civilian courts. It was shortly after Dec. 25, 2009, following a close call in which a Qaeda-trained operative named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had boarded a Detroit-bound airliner with a bomb sewn into his underwear. Mr. Obama was taking a drubbing from Republicans over the governments decision to read the suspect his rights, a prerequisite for bringing criminal charges against him in civilian court. The president seems to think that if he gives terrorists the rights of Americans, lets them lawyer up and reads them their Miranda rights, we wont be at war, former Vice President Dick Cheney charged. Sensing vulnerability on both a practical and political level, the president summoned his attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., to the White House. F.B.I. agents had questioned Mr. Abdulmutallab for 50 minutes and gained valuable intelligence before giving him the warning. They had relied on a 1984 case called New York v. Quarles, in which the Supreme Court ruled that statements made by a suspect in response to urgent public safety questions the case involved the location of a gun could be introduced into evidence even if the suspect had not been advised of the right to remain silent. Mr. Obama, who Mr. Holder said misses the legal profession, got into a colloquy with the attorney general. How far, he asked, could Quarles be stretched? Mr. Holder felt that in terrorism cases, the court would allow indefinite questioning on a fairly broad range of subjects. Satisfied with the edgy new interpretation, Mr. Obama gave his blessing, Mr. Holder recalled. Barack Obama believes in options: Maintain my options, said Jeh C. Johnson, a campaign adviser and now general counsel of the Defense Department. They Must All Be Militants
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That same mind-set would be brought to bear as the president intensified what would become a withering campaign to use unmanned aircraft to kill Qaeda terrorists. Just days after taking office, the president got word that the first strike under his administration had killed a number of innocent Pakistanis. The president was very sharp on the thing, and said, I want to know how this happened, a top White House adviser recounted. In response to his concern, the C.I.A. downsized its munitions for more pinpoint strikes. In addition, the president tightened standards, aides say: If the agency did not have a near certainty that a strike would result in zero civilian deaths, Mr. Obama wanted to decide personally whether to go ahead. The presidents directive reinforced the need for caution, counterterrorism officials said, but did not significantly change the program. In part, that is because the protection of innocent life was always a critical consideration, said Michael V. Hayden, the last C.I.A. director under President George W. Bush. It is also because Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent. Counterterrorism officials insist this approach is one of simple logic: people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a top Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good. Al Qaeda is an insular, paranoid organization innocent neighbors dont hitchhike rides in the back of trucks headed for the border with guns and bombs, said one official, who requested anonymity to speak about what is still a classified program. This counting method may partly explain the official claims of extraordinarily low collateral deaths. In a speech last year Mr. Brennan, Mr. Obamas trusted adviser, said that not a single noncombatant had been killed in a year of strikes. And in a recent interview, a senior administration official said that the number of civilians killed in drone strikes in Pakistan under Mr. Obama was in the single digits and that independent counts of scores or hundreds of civilian deaths unwittingly draw on false propaganda claims by militants. But in interviews, three former senior intelligence officials expressed disbelief that the number could be so low. The C.I.A. accounting has so troubled some administration officials outside the agency that they have brought their concerns to the White House. One called it guilt by association that has led to deceptive estimates of civilian casualties. It bothers me when they say there were seven guys, so they must all be militants, the official said. They count the corpses and theyre not
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really sure who they are. A No-Brainer About four months into his presidency, as Republicans accused him of reckless navet on terrorism, Mr. Obama quickly pulled together a speech defending his policies. Standing before the Constitution at the National Archives in Washington, he mentioned Guantnamo 28 times, repeating his campaign pledge to close the prison. But it was too late, and his defensive tone suggested that Mr. Obama knew it. Though President George W. Bush and Senator John McCain, the 2008 Republican candidate, had supported closing the Guantnamo prison, Republicans in Congress had reversed course and discovered they could use the issue to portray Mr. Obama as soft on terrorism. Walking out of the Archives, the president turned to his national security adviser at the time, Gen. James L. Jones, and admitted that he had never devised a plan to persuade Congress to shut down the prison. Were never going to make that mistake again, Mr. Obama told the retired Marine general. General Jones said the president and his aides had assumed that closing the prison was a no-brainer the United States will look good around the world. The trouble was, he added, nobody asked, O.K., lets assume its a good idea, how are you going to do this? It was not only Mr. Obamas distaste for legislative backslapping and arm-twisting, but also part of a deeper pattern, said an administration official who has watched him closely: the president seemed to have a sense that if he sketches a vision, it will happen without his really having thought through the mechanism by which it will happen. In fact, both Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and the attorney general, Mr. Holder, had warned that the plan to close the Guantnamo prison was in peril, and they volunteered to fight for it on Capitol Hill, according to officials. But with Mr. Obamas backing, his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, blocked them, saying health care reform had to go first. When the administration floated a plan to transfer from Guantnamo to Northern Virginia two Uighurs, members of a largely Muslim ethnic minority from China who are considered no threat to the United States, Virginia Republicans led by Representative Frank R. Wolf denounced the idea. The administration backed down. That show of weakness doomed the effort to close Guantnamo, the same administration official said. Lyndon Johnson would have steamrolled the guy, he said. Thats not what happened. Its like a boxing match where a cut opens over a guys eye.
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The Use of Force It is the strangest of bureaucratic rituals: Every week or so, more than 100 members of the governments sprawling national security apparatus gather, by secure video teleconference, to pore over terrorist suspects biographies and recommend to the president who should be the next to die. This secret nominations process is an invention of the Obama administration, a grim debating society that vets the PowerPoint slides bearing the names, aliases and life stories of suspected members of Al Qaedas branch in Yemen or its allies in Somalias Shabab militia. The video conferences are run by the Pentagon, which oversees strikes in those countries, and participants do not hesitate to call out a challenge, pressing for the evidence behind accusations of ties to Al Qaeda. Whats a Qaeda facilitator? asked one participant, illustrating the spirit of the exchanges. If I open a gate and you drive through it, am I a facilitator? Given the contentious discussions, it can take five or six sessions for a name to be approved, and names go off the list if a suspect no longer appears to pose an imminent threat, the official said. A parallel, more cloistered selection process at the C.I.A. focuses largely on Pakistan, where that agency conducts strikes. The nominations go to the White House, where by his own insistence and guided by Mr. Brennan, Mr. Obama must approve any name. He signs off on every strike in Yemen and Somalia and also on the more complex and risky strikes in Pakistan about a third of the total. Aides say Mr. Obama has several reasons for becoming so immersed in lethal counterterrorism operations. A student of writings on war by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, he believes that he should take moral responsibility for such actions. And he knows that bad strikes can tarnish Americas image and derail diplomacy. He realizes this isnt science, this is judgments made off of, most of the time, human intelligence, said Mr. Daley, the former chief of staff. The president accepts as a fact that a certain amount of screw-ups are going to happen, and to him, that calls for a more judicious process. But the control he exercises also appears to reflect Mr. Obamas striking self-confidence: he believes, according to several people who have worked closely with him, that his own judgment should be brought to bear on strikes. Asked what surprised him most about Mr. Obama, Mr. Donilon, the national security adviser, answered immediately: Hes a president who is quite comfortable with the use of force on behalf of the United States. In fact, in a 2007 campaign speech in which he vowed to pull the
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United States out of Iraq and refocus on Al Qaeda, Mr. Obama had trumpeted his plan to go after terrorist bases in Pakistan even if Pakistani leaders objected. His rivals at the time, including Mitt Romney, Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Mrs. Clinton, had all pounced on what they considered a greenhorns campaign bluster. (Mr. Romney said Mr. Obama had become Dr. Strangelove.) In office, however, Mr. Obama has done exactly what he had promised, coming quickly to rely on the judgment of Mr. Brennan. Mr. Brennan, a son of Irish immigrants, is a grizzled 25-year veteran of the C.I.A. whose work as a top agency official during the brutal interrogations of the Bush administration made him a target of fierce criticism from the left. He had been forced, under fire, to withdraw his name from consideration to lead the C.I.A. under Mr. Obama, becoming counterterrorism chief instead. Some critics of the drone strategy still vilify Mr. Brennan, suggesting that he is the C.I.A.s agent in the White House, steering Mr. Obama to a targeted killing strategy. But in office, Mr. Brennan has surprised many former detractors by speaking forcefully for closing Guantnamo and respecting civil liberties. Harold H. Koh, for instance, as dean of Yale Law School was a leading liberal critic of the Bush administrations counterterrorism policies. But since becoming the State Departments top lawyer, Mr. Koh said, he has found in Mr. Brennan a principled ally. If John Brennan is the last guy in the room with the president, Im comfortable, because Brennan is a person of genuine moral rectitude, Mr. Koh said. Its as though you had a priest with extremely strong moral values who was suddenly charged with leading a war. The president values Mr. Brennans experience in assessing intelligence, from his own agency or others, and for the sobriety with which he approaches lethal operations, other aides say. The purpose of these actions is to mitigate threats to U.S. persons lives, Mr. Brennan said in an interview. It is the option of last recourse. So the president, and I think all of us here, dont like the fact that people have to die. And so he wants to make sure that we go through a rigorous checklist: The infeasibility of capture, the certainty of the intelligence base, the imminence of the threat, all of these things. Yet the administrations very success at killing terrorism suspects has been shadowed by a suspicion: that Mr. Obama has avoided the complications of detention by deciding, in effect, to take no prisoners alive. While scores of suspects have been killed under Mr. Obama, only one has been taken into American custody, and the president has balked at adding new prisoners to Guantnamo. Their policy is to take out high-value targets, versus capturing high-value targets, said Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the top
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Republican on the intelligence committee. They are not going to advertise that, but thats what they are doing. Mr. Obamas aides deny such a policy, arguing that capture is often impossible in the rugged tribal areas of Pakistan and Yemen and that many terrorist suspects are in foreign prisons because of American tips. Still, senior officials at the Justice Department and the Pentagon acknowledge that they worry about the public perception. We have to be vigilant to avoid a no-quarter, or take-no-prisoners policy, said Mr. Johnson, the Pentagons chief lawyer. Trade-Offs The care that Mr. Obama and his counterterrorism chief take in choosing targets, and their reliance on a precision weapon, the drone, reflect his pledge at the outset of his presidency to reject what he called the Bush administrations false choice between our safety and our ideals. But he has found that war is a messy business, and his actions show that pursuing an enemy unbound by rules has required moral, legal and practical trade-offs that his speeches did not envision. One early test involved Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban. The case was problematic on two fronts, according to interviews with both administration and Pakistani sources. The C.I.A. worried that Mr. Mehsud, whose group then mainly targeted the Pakistan government, did not meet the Obama administrations criteria for targeted killing: he was not an imminent threat to the United States. But Pakistani officials wanted him dead, and the American drone program rested on their tacit approval. The issue was resolved after the president and his advisers found that he represented a threat, if not to the homeland, to American personnel in Pakistan. Then, in August 2009, the C.I.A. director, Leon E. Panetta, told Mr. Brennan that the agency had Mr. Mehsud in its sights. But taking out the Pakistani Taliban leader, Mr. Panetta warned, did not meet Mr. Obamas standard of near certainty of no innocents being killed. In fact, a strike would certainly result in such deaths: he was with his wife at his in-laws home. Many times, General Jones said, in similar circumstances, at the 11th hour we waved off a mission simply because the target had people around them and we were able to loiter on station until they didnt. But not this time. Mr. Obama, through Mr. Brennan, told the C.I.A. to take the shot, and Mr. Mehsud was killed, along with his wife and, by some reports, other family members as well, said a senior intelligence official.
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The attempted bombing of an airliner a few months later, on Dec. 25, stiffened the presidents resolve, aides say. It was the culmination of a series of plots, including the killing of 13 people at Fort Hood, Tex. by an Army psychiatrist who had embraced radical Islam. Mr. Obama is a good poker player, but he has a tell when he is angry. His questions become rapid-fire, said his attorney general, Mr. Holder. Hell inject the phrase, I just want to make sure you understand that. And it was clear to everyone, Mr. Holder said, that he was simmering about how a 23-year-old bomber had penetrated billions of dollars worth of American security measures. When a few officials tentatively offered a defense, noting that the attack had failed because the terrorists were forced to rely on a novice bomber and an untested formula because of stepped-up airport security, Mr. Obama cut them short. Well, he could have gotten it right and wed all be sitting here with an airplane that blew up and killed over a hundred people, he said, according to a participant. He asked them to use the close call to imagine in detail the consequences if the bomb had detonated. In characteristic fashion, he went around the room, asking each official to explain what had gone wrong and what needed to be done about it. After that, as president, it seemed like he felt in his gut the threat to the United States, said Michael E. Leiter, then director of the National Counterterrorism Center. Even John Brennan, someone who was already a hardened veteran of counterterrorism, tightened the straps on his rucksack after that. David Axelrod, the presidents closest political adviser, began showing up at the Terror Tuesday meetings, his unspeaking presence a visible reminder of what everyone understood: a successful attack would overwhelm the presidents other aspirations and achievements. In the most dramatic possible way, the Fort Hood shootings in November and the attempted Christmas Day bombing had shown the new danger from Yemen. Mr. Obama, who had rejected the Bush-era concept of a global war on terrorism and had promised to narrow the American focus to Al Qaedas core, suddenly found himself directing strikes in another complicated Muslim country. The very first strike under his watch in Yemen, on Dec. 17, 2009, offered a stark example of the difficulties of operating in what General Jones described as an embryonic theater that we werent really familiar with. It killed not only its intended target, but also two neighboring families, and left behind a trail of cluster bombs that subsequently killed more innocents. It was hardly the kind of precise operation that Mr. Obama favored. Videos of childrens bodies and angry tribesmen holding up American missile parts flooded You Tube, fueling a ferocious backlash that Yemeni officials said bolstered Al Qaeda.
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The sloppy strike shook Mr. Obama and Mr. Brennan, officials said, and once again they tried to impose some discipline. In Pakistan, Mr. Obama had approved not only personality strikes aimed at named, high-value terrorists, but signature strikes that targeted training camps and suspicious compounds in areas controlled by militants. But some State Department officials have complained to the White House that the criteria used by the C.I.A. for identifying a terrorist signature were too lax. The joke was that when the C.I.A. sees three guys doing jumping jacks, the agency thinks it is a terrorist training camp, said one senior official. Men loading a truck with fertilizer could be bombmakers but they might also be farmers, skeptics argued. Now, in the wake of the bad first strike in Yemen, Mr. Obama overruled military and intelligence commanders who were pushing to use signature strikes there as well. We are not going to war with Yemen, he admonished in one meeting, according to participants. His guidance was formalized in a memo by General Jones, who called it a governor, if you will, on the throttle, intended to remind everyone that one should not assume that its just O.K. to do these things because we spot a bad guy somewhere in the world. Mr. Obama had drawn a line. But within two years, he stepped across it. Signature strikes in Pakistan were killing a large number of terrorist suspects, even when C.I.A. analysts were not certain beforehand of their presence. And in Yemen, roiled by the Arab Spring unrest, the Qaeda affiliate was seizing territory. Today, the Defense Department can target suspects in Yemen whose names they do not know. Officials say the criteria are tighter than those for signature strikes, requiring evidence of a threat to the United States, and they have even given them a new name TADS, for Terrorist Attack Disruption Strikes. But the details are a closely guarded secret part of a pattern for a president who came into office promising transparency. The Ultimate Test On that front, perhaps no case would test Mr. Obamas principles as starkly as that of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born cleric and Qaeda propagandist hiding in Yemen, who had recently risen to prominence and had taunted the president by name in some of his online screeds. The president was very interested in obviously trying to understand how a guy like Awlaki developed, said General Jones. The clerics fiery sermons had helped inspire a dozen plots, including the shootings at Fort Hood. Then he had gone operational, plotting with Mr. Abdulmutallab and coaching him to ignite his explosives only after the airliner was over the United States.
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That record, and Mr. Awlakis calls for more attacks, presented Mr. Obama with an urgent question: Could he order the targeted killing of an American citizen, in a country with which the United States was not at war, in secret and without the benefit of a trial? The Justice Departments Office of Legal Counsel prepared a lengthy memo justifying that extraordinary step, asserting that while the Fifth Amendments guarantee of due process applied, it could be satisfied by internal deliberations in the executive branch. Mr. Obama gave his approval, and Mr. Awlaki was killed in September 2011, along with a fellow propagandist, Samir Khan, an American citizen who was not on the target list but was traveling with him. If the president had qualms about this momentous step, aides said he did not share them. Mr. Obama focused instead on the weight of the evidence showing that the cleric had joined the enemy and was plotting more terrorist attacks. This is an easy one, Mr. Daley recalled him saying, though the president warned that in future cases, the evidence might well not be so clear. In the wake of Mr. Awlakis death, some administration officials, including the attorney general, argued that the Justice Departments legal memo should be made public. In 2009, after all, Mr. Obama had released Bush administration legal opinions on interrogation over the vociferous objections of six former C.I.A. directors. This time, contemplating his own secrets, he chose to keep the Awlaki opinion secret. Once its your pop stand, you look at things a little differently, said Mr. Rizzo, the C.I.A.s former general counsel. Mr. Hayden, the former C.I.A. director and now an adviser to Mr. Obamas Republican challenger, Mr. Romney, commended the presidents aggressive counterterrorism record, which he said had a Nixon to China quality. But, he said, secrecy has its costs and Mr. Obama should open the strike strategy up to public scrutiny. This program rests on the personal legitimacy of the president, and thats not sustainable, Mr. Hayden said. I have lived the life of someone taking action on the basis of secret O.L.C. memos, and it aint a good life. Democracies do not make war on the basis of legal memos locked in a D.O.J. safe. Tactics Over Strategy In his June 2009 speech in Cairo, aimed at resetting relations with the Muslim world, Mr. Obama had spoken eloquently of his childhood years in Indonesia, hearing the call to prayer at the break of dawn and the fall of dusk.
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The United States is not and never will be at war with Islam, he declared. But in the months that followed, some officials felt the urgency of counterterrorism strikes was crowding out consideration of a broader strategy against radicalization. Though Mrs. Clinton strongly supported the strikes, she complained to colleagues about the drones-only approach at Situation Room meetings, in which discussion would focus exclusively on the pros, cons and timing of particular strikes. At their weekly lunch, Mrs. Clinton told the president she thought there should be more attention paid to the root causes of radicalization, and Mr. Obama agreed. But it was September 2011 before he issued an executive order setting up a sophisticated, interagency war room at the State Department to counter the jihadi narrative on an hour-by-hour basis, posting messages and video online and providing talking points to embassies. Mr. Obama was heartened, aides say, by a letter discovered in the raid on Osama bin Ladens compound in Pakistan. It complained that the American president had undermined Al Qaedas support by repeatedly declaring that the United States was at war not with Islam, but with the terrorist network. We must be doing a good job, Mr. Obama told his secretary of state. Moreover, Mr. Obamas record has not drawn anything like the sweeping criticism from allies that his predecessor faced. John B. Bellinger III, a top national security lawyer under the Bush administration, said that was because Mr. Obamas liberal reputation and softer packaging have protected him. After the global outrage over Guantnamo, its remarkable that the rest of the world has looked the other way while the Obama administration has conducted hundreds of drone strikes in several different countries, including killing at least some civilians, said Mr. Bellinger, who supports the strikes. By withdrawing from Iraq and preparing to withdraw from Afghanistan, Mr. Obama has refocused the fight on Al Qaeda and hugely reduced the death toll both of American soldiers and Muslim civilians. But in moments of reflection, Mr. Obama may have reason to wonder about unfinished business and unintended consequences. His focus on strikes has made it impossible to forge, for now, the new relationship with the Muslim world that he had envisioned. Both Pakistan and Yemen are arguably less stable and more hostile to the United States than when Mr. Obama became president. Justly or not, drones have become a provocative symbol of American power, running roughshod over national sovereignty and killing innocents. With China and Russia watching, the United States has set an international precedent for sending drones over borders to kill enemies.
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Mr. Blair, the former director of national intelligence, said the strike campaign was dangerously seductive. It is the politically advantageous thing to do low cost, no U.S. casualties, gives the appearance of toughness, he said. It plays well domestically, and it is unpopular only in other countries. Any damage it does to the national interest only shows up over the long term. But Mr. Blairs dissent puts him in a small minority of security experts. Mr. Obamas record has eroded the political perception that Democrats are weak on national security. No one would have imagined four years ago that his counterterrorism policies would come under far more fierce attack from the American Civil Liberties Union than from Mr. Romney. Aides say that Mr. Obamas choices, though, are not surprising. The presidents reliance on strikes, said Mr. Leiter, the former head of the National Counterterrorism Center, is far from a lurid fascination with covert action and special forces. Its much more practical. Hes the president. He faces a post-Abdulmutallab situation, where hes being told people might attack the United States tomorrow. You can pass a lot of laws, Mr. Leiter said, Those laws are not going to get Bin Laden dead.
Date Collected: 6/4/2012 Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamasleadership-in-war-on-al-qaeda.html?pagewanted=all&pagewanted= print
1.2.1.1.2. Assessing Obama s Counterterrorism Record (back) May 29, 2012 Assessing Obamas Counterterrorism Record By JO BECKER and SCOTT SHANE Officials in Obama administration and others outside, interviewed in recent months about President Obamas counterterrorism record, said real progress had been made against Al Qaeda but also acknowledged lingering concerns about a fight that has shaped the United States approach to much of the world for the last decade. Excerpted below are remarks from some of nearly 40 current and former officials who had direct knowledge about the United States classified counterterrorism efforts. Senator Saxby Chambliss, Republican of Georgia and the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, gives the president high marks despite what he sees as a failure to capture and interrogate more terrorist suspects: Weve crippled Al Qaeda. The foundation may have been laid in the Bush administration, but you have to recognize that this administration has been very committed to carrying the fight to the enemy.
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William M. Daley, President Obamas chief of staff in 2011, said the president has frequently remarked that nothing comes to me thats easy to decide, and has been frustrated by an inability sometimes to get real-time information when strikes appeared to have gone awry: He would keep asking, and it was my job to push [National Security Advisor] Tom Donilon to keep asking, when are we going to get the answer to this the real answer? Was it a screw-up, was it something gone wrong, was it bad intelligence get me the answer. Generally these things, in spite of what we all want answers immediately, they take a lot longer. William K. Lietzau, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee policy, responding to internal administration concerns that its embrace of drone strikes suggests that it has adopted a take-noprisoners policy: I dont think there are clearer rules for lethal action than for detention, but you do have a clearer picture of the long term consequences... With lethal action, you are going to bury them. Figuring out what is going to happen long term with someone you detain is more difficult. General James. L. Jones, the national security adviser from January 2009-November 2010, on how over time President Obama grew more comfortable with the drone program: At first when [then-C.I.A. director Leon] Panetta came to him with certain missions there was rigorous questioning and analysis about the unintended consequences of a mission if he approved it. He certainly adopted a principle of leadership that I absolutely agree with that if youre going to be blamed for something if it goes wrong, you want to understand what it is youre agreeing to when you say yes. And as your comfort zone grows and your confidence grows in the people who are giving you advice, then you can relax a little bit. Dennis C. Blair, former director of national intelligence, on what remains to be done: The strategic question not addressed is whether the current program has reached a point of diminishing returns. We might be just as safe relying on other measures to stop attacks on the U.S. good intelligence sharing with other countries, strong border controls and vigilance within the country. Im all for drone strikes if theres no downside. But in this case theres a huge downside we are making it more difficult for governments and Muslims that can cooperate with us against Al Qaeda to do so, and this cooperation is the key to long-term victory over Al Qaeda... There is also another, long-term question that needs to be asked: Is killing leaders and followers of a hostile organization in large numbers outside a combat zone because we have the technical capacity to do so
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something we should be showing the world how to do? Are we creating some kind of a monster that could turn against us when the technology is available widely, as all technologies are. Antony J. Blinken, national security adviser to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., on participating in discussions about lethal action against suspected terrorists and the toll of overseeing such programs: The president is making, and you are contributing to, life and death decisions. Life and death decisions, first and foremost both for Americans citizens who may be at risk and those carrying out missions whose lives may be at risk, but also the people who are targets of your operations and the people around them, who may have nothing to do with it. And what people need to understand is how seriously and how powerfully the weight of those decisions bears on those who help shape them and ultimately, the president who makes them.
Date Collected: 5/29/2012 Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/assessingobamas-counterterrorism-record.html?pagewanted=print
1.2.1.1.3. Obama's Counterterrorism Self-Correction (back) May 27, 2012 Obama's Counterterrorism Self-Correction By ALBERT R. HUNT and BLOOMBERG NEWS Critics of President George W. Bushs anti-terrorism efforts, mainly Democrats and some Republicans, rejoiced when Barack Obama was elected. They were convinced that what they considered the trampling of constitutional rights and civil liberties after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, would end. As a candidate, Mr. Obama, a former professor of constitutional law, promised to close the prison at Guantnamo Bay, Cuba, as well as to end the indefinite detention and the rendition of terrorism suspects to other countries, where they often were tortured. He also vowed greater accountability and transparency in the conduct of war. Things look different today. In his new book, Power and Constraint: The Accountable Presidency After 9/11, Jack L. Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor who served in the Office of Legal Counsel under Mr. Bush and objected to some of the Bush administrations tactics, writes: The Obama administration would continue almost all of its predecessors policies, transforming what had seemed extraordinary under the Bush regime into the new normal of American counterterrorism policy. That seems only a slight exaggeration. Mr. Goldsmith argues that this largely reflects a self-correction on Mr. Obamas part. The Bush administrations anti-terrorism policies were excessive, reined in by the courts and Congress. The successor then overpromised in the other direction and was reined in by politics.
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The Obama administration strongly disagrees with Mr. Goldsmith, said Tommy Vietor, a spokesman for the White House National Security Council. He points to achievements like ending the war in Iraq, beginning to wind down the Afghanistan conflict, the devastated leadership of Al Qaeda, ending torture and modifying other post-attack security policies. Others contend that the Obama administration capitulated after it received political flak for wanting to close Guantnamo and try in civilian courts those accused of being terrorists. There was a celebrated confrontation between Rahm Emanuel, then the White House chief of staff, who argued that these controversial promises were impeding Mr. Obamas economic agenda, and Gregory B. Craig, then the White House counsel, who made the civil liberties and campaign commitment case for change. Mr. Emanuel won; Mr. Craig later resigned. More recently, some of the toughest criticism has come from the Constitution Project, a bipartisan group of experts. Obama has fulfilled some promises, not fulfilled many others, either because Congress made it impossible or they decided on their own not to change, said Morton H. Halperin, a longtime liberal national security expert. Fundamentally, the policies are the same, and in some ways Obama has extended the reach of government, said David A. Keene, a veteran conservative activist. He was critical of Mr. Bushs anti-terrorism policies, as were some Democrats, he notes, but they are silent now. In his first week in office, Mr. Obama pledged to close Guantnamo, issued an executive order banning torture and suspended military commissions. There was tremendous political blowback to his decision to close Guantnamo and move the terrorism suspects to the United States or try suspects like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the 2001 attacks, in civilian courts. Congress ultimately cut off funding for any such actions. Mr. Obama achieved some victories. He ended the torture practices of the Bush administration. The targeted killing of terrorism suspects, including U.S. citizens, with drone attacks is not a policy reversal: Mr. Obama vowed to adopt that approach in 2008; he did not make clear that the attacks might be directed out of the White House. He backed off on ending rendition the policy of sending people accused of being terrorists to other countries for interrogation insisting that the United States would ensure that torture was no longer practiced in the places they were sent and that their treatment was in accord with international laws. The administration also says it has curbed the excesses of indefinite detention without trial, which now requires judicial review. Other observers see little change. Judge Reggie B. Walton of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia said Mr. Obamas adjustments to military detention without trial represent a minimal if
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not ephemeral difference from the Bush position. As a candidate, Mr. Obama promised transparency and openness. Yet the administration has brought more charges six for leaking information than all previous presidents combined. Openness and transparency doesnt mean were O.K. with people breaking the law by leaking classified information that would harm our national security, Mr. Vietor said. The government is trying to force James Risen, a reporter for The New York Times, to testify about whether a former C.I.A. official, now on trial, was a source and leaked information about the Iranian nuclear program. In court filings, it has been revealed that U.S. prosecutors obtained Mr. Risens telephone, bank and credit-card data and travel records. A district court judge ruled against the governments effort to force the reporter to reveal his confidential sources; the Obama administration is appealing that decision. In the campaign, Obama said Bush overreached in using state secrets, Mr. Halperin said. This administration has been worse. Mr. Vietor said the administration would not comment on a pending case. On accountability, Mr. Obama assailed the Bush administrations failure to heed the War Powers Act, requiring congressional authorization when the United States is engaged in foreign hostilities for more than 60 days. As a candidate, Mr. Obama, in a questionnaire for The Boston Globe in late 2007, vowed it would be different in his administration: History has shown us time and time again, he responded, that military action is most successful when it is authorized by the legislative branch. The Western campaign against the regime of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya began in mid-March 2011, about a month after the revolution began. The initial air assault, portrayed by Pentagon and NATO officials as under French and British leadership, was carried out mostly by U.S. forces. Responding to criticism from Congress, the White House argued that it was a NATO-led war and that U.S. ground forces were not involved. Senator James Webb, a Virginia Democrat, said this set a very disturbing precedent for the use of force in the age of drones and sophisticated air attacks. In this political campaign, Mr. Obama probably will not pay any price for these flip-flops. Bagging Osama bin Laden immunizes him from attacks on his conduct of the war on terrorism. The presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, is in no position to criticize; he has suggested that as president he would reinstate the use of torture.
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Date Collected: 5/29/2012 Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/28/us/28ihtletter28.html?pagewanted=print
1.2.1.2. In Far Northwest, a New Border Focus on Latinos (back) May 28, 2012 In Far Northwest, a New Border Focus on Latinos By WILLIAM YARDLEY FORKS, Wash. The Olympic Peninsula has always felt more like the edge of the world than a mere national boundary. Its ocean shoreline, the northwesternmost coast of the contiguous United States, is accessible by a single road, Highway 101, and it has long been traveled by a distinctive fleet: loud logging trucks rumbling out of the dark and wet woods, rusty pickups with windows pronouncing Native Pride, stray Subarus hauling surfboards and kayaks to the cold Pacific. Then the United States Border Patrol vehicles started showing up. Sometimes they respond unexpectedly to assist with mundane traffic stops conducted by the local police. Sometimes they hover outside the warehouse where Mexican immigrants sell the salal they pick in the temperate rain forest. Sometimes they confront people whose primary offense, many argue, is skin tone. Those kinds of scenes might be common in towns that border Mexico in Texas, Arizona or California. But the border here is with Canada, which is separated from the peninsula by the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Whats the purpose of the Border Patrol in a place that has no border problems? asked Art Argyropoulos, who is from Greece and runs a restaurant on the peninsula with his wife, who is from Mexico. Since the terrorist attacks of 2001, the federal government has kept a more careful watch on the countrys northern border. Here on this remote peninsula over the past six years, the number of Border Patrol agents has risen tenfold, from 4 in 2006 to about 40. This month, the agency is completing construction of a $10 million office in Port Angeles, a city of 19,000. The one-story building, surrounded by a spiked security fence, can house as many as 50 officers. The Border Patrol says its priority is to address potential terrorism and smuggling threats from Canada (a ferry runs between Port Angeles and Victoria, British Columbia), but many people say the peninsula has instead become an unlikely new frontier in the effort to fight illegal immigration from Latin America. Everybodys scared, said Benigno Hernandez, 38, who has lived in Forks, population 3,500, for more than a decade. Everybodys leaving. In Forks, several hundred immigrants had long found winter work picking
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salal, a wild shrub whose branches are used in floral arrangements around the world. But now, schools are losing enrollment because students parents have been deported. Mobile home parks are half empty. At Thriftway, the main grocery store in the town, the weekend rush has slowed because the salal pickers who used to shop after getting paid on Saturdays have disappeared, sometimes because they were detained, sometimes because they were afraid. Its happened very much in the past couple of months, said Mayor Byron Monohon of Forks. I think the Border Patrol has just put a lot of pressure on the situation. Last month, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project filed a class-action suit against the Border Patrol, claiming that its officers were illegally stopping and interrogating people on the basis of racial profiling. This month, the Rights Project filed another suit, alleging that Border Patrol agents sometimes asked to support other law enforcement as interpreters Border Patrol agents are required to know Spanish while intending instead to investigate for immigration violations. In the class-action suit, the three named plaintiffs are all minority members who said they were stopped and questioned without cause: two were corrections officers, one was the student-body president of Forks High School, whose parents were born in Mexico. The student, Ismael RamosContreras, who will be a freshman at Western Washington University in the fall, said the Border Patrols presence has become unnerving but also a source of dark humor, including when the school soccer team travels to away games. If we see Border Patrol, its like, Everybody hide! he said. The majority of the soccer team is Hispanic. The Border Patrol would not comment on the lawsuits and said it prohibited profiling based on race or religion. What theyre focused on up there are the same things that were focused on around the country, said Ronald D. Vitiello, the deputy chief of the Border Patrol. Thats, you know, the threat of terrorism, the criminal organizations that use the border for their own gain and being prepared to combat those threats, eliminate the vulnerabilities that we know about and mitigate the risk where we can. Officials sometimes cite the 1999 arrest of Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian who became known as the millennium bomber for his plan to detonate explosives at Los Angeles International Airport. Mr. Ressam was convicted after he tried to enter the United States at Port Angeles with bomb components. In the six years since the Border Patrol began expanding its presence on the peninsula, the number of apprehensions has declined by 27 percent from 811 in 2006 to 591 in 2011 in the agencys Blaine sector, which includes Western Washington, Oregon and Alaska. Border Patrol officials have said the decline is a success that validates their presence.
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Last year, however, a Border Patrol agent based in Port Angeles testified before Congress that he and other agents there considered it a black hole with no purpose, no mission. The agent, Christian Sanchez, said his supervisors told him to just drive around the peninsula during his shift. Critics speculate that boredom, and a need to justify their presence, has prompted agents to get involved with law enforcement beyond their usual duties. In some cases, their help has been welcomed. The United States Forest Service, responsible for law enforcement on the peninsulas 600,000 acres of national forest, has just three agents, and one of the positions is vacant. Theyre a resource, and were few and far between, said Kim Kinville, the patrol captain for the Forest Service on the peninsula. Forest Service agents will sometimes request help from Border Patrol for interpreting, she said, and the encounters can lead to detentions of illegal immigrants. Last May, a Forest Service officer stopped a Mexican couple picking salal on forest land without a permit. A Border Patrol agent soon arrived, prompting the Mexican man to flee into the forest while, according to his girlfriend, the Forest Service officer held her by her hair. The Mexican man, Benjamin Roldan Salinas, was found three weeks later, drowned in the Sol Duc River. Like most pickers in the area, Mr. Salinas sold his salal to Hop Dhooghe, 72, who runs Olympic Evergreens. Mr. Dhooghe, whose parents immigrated from Belgium and Germany, said his business was about a fourth of what it was a few years ago because many good salal pickers have left the peninsula. In response to the Border Patrols actions, Mr. Dhooghe has joined the new Forks Human Rights Group. Ive lived all my life out here and never seen anything like this, Mr. Dhooghe said. Why dont they do it to the white people, to see if theyre from Canada or something? he said of the Border Patrol confrontations. They just do it by skin color. If they did that to the white people, thered really be an uproar.
Date Collected: 5/29/2012 Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/us/hard-by-canada-borderfears-of-crackdown-on-latino-immigration.html?hpw&pagewanted=print
1.2.1.3. West Point Is Divided on a War Doctrine s Fate (back) May 27, 2012 West Point Is Divided on a War Doctrines Fate By ELISABETH BUMILLER WEST POINT, N.Y. For two centuries, the United States Military Academy has produced generals for Americas wars, among them Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, George S. Patton and David H. Petraeus. It is where President George W. Bush delivered what became known as his pre-emption speech, which sought to justify the invasion of Iraq, and where
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President Obama told the nation he was sending an additional 30,000 American troops to Afghanistan. Now at another critical moment in American military history, the faculty here on the commanding bend in the Hudson River is deep in its own existential debate. Narrowly, the argument is whether the counterinsurgency strategy used in Iraq and Afghanistan the troopheavy, time-intensive, expensive doctrine of trying to win over the locals by building roads, schools and government is dead. Broadly, the question is what the United States gained after a decade in two wars. Not much, Col. Gian P. Gentile, the director of West Points military history program and the commander of a combat battalion in Baghdad in 2006, said flatly in an interview last week. Certainly not worth the effort. In my view. Colonel Gentile, long a critic of counterinsurgency, represents one side of the divide at West Point. On the other is Col. Michael J. Meese, the head of the academys influential social sciences department and a top adviser to General Petraeus in Baghdad and Kabul when General Petraeus commanded the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nobody should ever underestimate the costs and the risks involved with counterinsurgency, but neither should you take that off the table, Colonel Meese said, also in an interview last week. Counterinsurgency, he said, was broadly successful in being able to have the Iraqis govern themselves. The debate at West Point mirrors one under way in the armed forces as a whole as the United States withdraws without clear victory from Afghanistan and as the results in Iraq remain ambiguous at best. (On the ABC News program This Week on Sunday, the defense secretary, Leon E. Panetta, called the Taliban resilient after 10 and a half years of war.) But at West Point the debate is personal, and a decade of statistics more than 6,000 American service members dead in Iraq and Afghanistan and more than $1 trillion spent hit home. On Saturday, 972 cadets graduated as second lieutenants, sent off in a commencement speech by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. with the promise that they are the key to whatever challenges the world has in store. Many of them are apprehensive about what they will find in Afghanistan the news coming back from friends is often not good but still hope to make it there before the war is largely over. Weve spent the past four years of our lives getting ready for this, said Lt. Daniel Prial, who graduated Saturday and said he was drawn to West Point after his father survived as a firefighter in New York City on Sept. 11, 2001. Ultimately you want to see that come to fruition. At West Point the arguments are more public than those in the upper reaches of the Pentagon, in large part because the military officers on the West Point faculty pride themselves on academic freedom and challenging orthodoxy. Colonel Gentile, who is working on a book titled Wrong Turn:
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Americas Deadly Embrace With Counterinsurgency, is chief among them. Colonel Gentiles argument is that the United States pursued a narrow policy goal in Afghanistan defeating Al Qaeda there and keeping it from using the country as a base with what he called a maximalist operational approach. Strategy should employ resources of a state to achieve policy aims with the least amount of blood and treasure spent, he said. Counterinsurgency could ultimately work in Afghanistan, he said, if the United States were willing to stay there for generations. Im talking 70, 80, 90 years, he said. Colonel Gentile, who has photographs in his office of five young soldiers in his battalion killed in the 2006 bloodshed in Baghdad, acknowledged that it was difficult to question the wars in the face of the losses. But war ultimately is a political act, and I take comfort and pride that we as a military organization, myself as a commander of those soldiers who died, the others who were wounded and I think the American Army writ large, that we did our duty, he said. And there is honor in itself of doing your duty. I mean you could probably push back on me and say youre still saying the wars not worth it. But Im a soldier, and I go where Im told to go, and I do my duty as best I can. Colonel Meeses opposing argument is that warfare cannot be divorced from its political, economic and psychological dimensions the view advanced in the bible of counterinsurgents, the U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual that was revised under General Petraeus in 2006. Hailed as a new way of warfare (although drawing on counterinsurgencies fought by the United States in Vietnam in the 1960s and the Philippines from 1899 to 1902, among others), the manual promoted the protection of civilian populations, reconstruction and development aid. Warfare in a dangerous environment is ultimately a human endeavor, and engaging with the population is something that has to be done in order to try to influence their trajectory, Colonel Meese said. In Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal so aggressively pushed the doctrine when he was the top commander there that troops complained they had to hold their firepower. General Petraeus issued guidelines that clarified that troops had the right to self-defense when he took over, but by then counterinsurgency had attracted powerful critics, chief among them Mr. Biden and veteran military officers who denigrated it as armed nation building. When Mr. Obama announced last June that he would withdraw by the end of this summer the 30,000 additional troops he sent to Afghanistan earlier than the military wanted or expected the doctrine seemed to be on life support. General Petraeus has since become director of the Central Intelligence Agency, where his mission is covertly killing the enemy, not winning the people.
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Now, as American troops head home from Afghanistan, where the new strategy will be a narrow one of hunting insurgents, the arguments at West Point are playing out in war colleges, academic journals and books, and will be for decades. (The argument has barely begun over whether violence came down in Iraq in 2007 because of the American troop increase or the Anbar Awakening, when Sunni tribes turned against the insurgency.) To Col. Gregory A. Daddis, a West Point history professor, the debate is also about the role of the military as the war winds down. Were not really sure right now what the Army is for, he said. To officers like Brig. Gen. H.R. McMaster, much of the debate presents a false either-or dilemma. General McMaster, who used counterinsurgency to secure the Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005 and returned recently from Kabul as head of a task force fighting corruption, said that without counterinsurgency, Theres a tendency to use the application of military force as an end in itself. To John Nagl, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who fought in Iraq, wrote a book about counterinsurgency and now teaches at the United States Naval Academy, American foreign policy should ensure that we never have to do this again. Does counterinsurgency work? Yes, he said. Is it worth what you paid for it? Thats an entirely different question. This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: Correction: May 28, 2012 An earlier version of this article misstated how many cadets graduated West Point on Saturday as second lieutenants; it is 972.
Date Collected: 5/29/2012 Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/28/world/at-west-pointasking-if-a-war-doctrine-was-worth-it.html?pagewanted=print
1.2.2. Cases
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1.2.2.1. Militia Leader Takes the Stand in His Own Defense (back) June 4, 2012-Militia Leader Takes the Stand in His Own Defense-By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS--ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) The leader of an Alaska militia accused of conspiring to kill government officials and possess illegal weapons presented a gentler side when he took the stand Monday in his own defense. --Schaeffer Cox of Fairbanks downplayed any notions of an aggressive Alaska
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Peacemakers Militia, claiming they would only act in the event of a government collapse. --Use of arms, he said, was only appropriate if someone was about to harm you. And the use of violence is only warranted against the government if they are breaking the law. He pointed to the situation in Syria as an example. --Cox will continue on the stand Tuesday. --Cox, Coleman Barney and Lonnie Vernon are on trial in Anchorage on charges of conspiracy to possess restricted weapons and conspiracy to murder state officials. ---Date Collected: 6/4/2012 Source: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2012/06/04/us/ap-us-alaskamilitia.html?hp&pagewanted=print
1.2.2.2. A Guilty Plea to Giving Aid to Al Qaeda Since 2007 (back) June 4, 2012 A Guilty Plea to Giving Aid to Al Qaeda Since 2007 By COLIN MOYNIHAN A former Brooklyn resident pleaded guilty in Federal District Court in Manhattan on Monday to providing material support to Al Qaeda. The man, Sabirhan Hasanoff, a dual citizen of the United States and Australia, was accused in court documents filed by federal prosecutors of conspiring to provide the group with computer advice and other assistance. Mr. Hasanoff had helped Al Qaeda since at least November 2007, when he accepted $50,000 from an unidentified co-conspirator who was not charged along with Mr. Hasanoff, prosecutors said. I agreed with other persons to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization, Mr. Hasanoff told Judge Kimba M. Wood. The organization was Al Qaeda. The charge of providing material support to the group carries a maximum penalty of 15 years in prison. He also pleaded guilty to conspiring to provide that support, which carries a maximum penalty of five years. Originally, Mr. Hasanoff was indicted by a grand jury along with another man accused of being a co-conspirator, Wesam El-Hanafi. Mr. El-Hanafis case is pending, prosecutors said on Monday. As part of the conspiracy described by prosecutors, Mr. El-Hanafi went to Yemen in 2008 and met with members of Al Qaeda who instructed him on operational security measures and directed him to perform unspecified tasks for the group. In Yemen, he also declared allegiance to Al Qaeda, the indictment said.
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Mr. El-Hanafi later bought a subscription to a software program that allowed him to securely communicate with others on the Web. At roughly the same time, the indictment said, Mr. Hasanoff performed tasks for Al Qaeda and told the unidentified co-conspirator not to fill the conspirators passport pages with stamps to maintain the documents value to Al Qaeda. Also about that time, prosecutors said, both defendants met with the third co-conspirator and discussed joining Al Qaeda. Mr. El-Hanafi later accepted an oath of allegiance on behalf of Al Qaeda from the unnamed co-conspirator, the indictment said. In 2009, the indictment said, Mr. El-Hanafi bought seven digital watches over the Web and had them delivered to his home in Brooklyn. Prosecutors did not say what the defendants planned to do with the watches, but such devices have been used in the past to help detonate explosives. Prosecutors said in 2010 that the two had not been involved in an active plot. Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan, said then that the two had sought to modernize Al Qaeda with technological assistance. Mr. Hasanoff has an accounting degree from Baruch College, and had worked as a group chief financial officer for a company in Dubai. He was arrested there and brought to New York to face charges. In court on Monday, a crowd of Mr. Hasanoffs family members and friends filled rows of benches in the gallery. As the defendant entered, escorted by United States marshals, he flashed a quick smile to those supporters before turning to face the judge and acknowledging his guilt.
Date Collected: 6/4/2012 Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/05/nyregion/sabirhanhasanoff-pleads-guilty-to-qaeda-support.html?pagewanted=print
1.2.2.3. Justices Reject Appeal Seeking Payments for Ex-Iran Hostages (back) May 29, 2012 Justices Reject Appeal Seeking Payments for Ex-Iran Hostages By MATTHEW L. WALD WASHINGTON The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected the last legal appeal for former American hostages seeking compensation for their captivity in Iran three decades ago, leaving legislation newly introduced in Congress as the last chance to resolve their longstanding grievance. A lower court, acting at the request of the State Department, previously blocked the hostages effort to win compensation from Iran, holding that the agreement under which they were released barred such claims. The former
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hostages had sued under a 1996 law that they argued allowed them to seek damages, and in August 2001 they won a judgment of liability, because Iran did not appear in court to defend itself. But the State Department argued that its ability to conduct foreign policy would be compromised if damages were awarded. The Supreme Court, as is its custom, did not give a reason for its decision on Tuesday. Fifty-two Americans were held hostage for 444 days after Iranian radicals seized the American Embassy in Tehran in 1979. I would never have thought when I was getting kicked around in Iran that my own government would ever go to court to stop me, said David M. Roeder, a retired Air Force colonel who was the named plaintiff in the case. But after 12 years of legal wrangling, he said he was not surprised by the outcome. Its not just this administration or Clinton or even the Bush administration; there seems to be some sort of a weird hands-off-Iran policy, he said. The approximately 100 people named in the suit, which included former hostages and some of their survivors, were seeking $10,000 a day, or $4.4 million each. According to their lawyers, money that was deposited in the United States by Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi of Iran before he was forced from power and then frozen by the Carter administration after the hostages were taken is still available. Mr. Roeder and the other plaintiffs are hopeful that Congress will act again. On May 17, Representative Bruce Braley, an Iowa Democrat, and Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Florida Republican who is chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, introduced legislation that would double the fines against companies that are caught doing business with Iran. Half of the money would be used to compensate the former hostages. The bill would also let the president use frozen Iranian assets. Mr. Braley, in a telephone interview, said that the court decision contradicted the Third Geneva Convention, which, he said, prohibits us from absolving other countries of liability for engaging in the torture of U.S. citizens. He did not say how much money he thought would be raised by doubling the fines for violating anti-Iran sanctions, but he said, Any revenue is going to be a lot more than these hostages have received during the long period of time theyve been waiting for justice. Mr. Braleys district includes the residence of one former hostage, Kathryn L. Koob. Mr. Braley said he would seek support from other lawmakers who represented districts where former hostages lived.
Date Collected: 5/29/2012
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Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/30/us/politics/supreme-courtrejects-appeal-by-former-iran-hostagess.html?hpw&pagewanted=print
1.2.3. At Museum on 9/11, Talking Through an Identity Crisis (back) June 2, 2012 At Museum on 9/11, Talking Through an Identity Crisis By PATRICIA COHEN It seemed self-evident at the time: A museum devoted to documenting the events of Sept. 11, 2001, would have to include photographs of the hijackers who turned four passenger jets into missiles. Then two and a half years ago, plans to use the pictures were made public. New York Citys fire chief protested that such a display would honor the terrorists who destroyed the World Trade Center. A New York Post editorial called the idea appalling. Groups representing rescuers, survivors and victims families asked how anyone could even think of showing the faces of the men who killed their relatives, colleagues and friends. The anger took some museum officials by surprise. You dont create a museum about the Holocaust and not say that it was the Nazis who did it, said Joseph Daniels, chief executive of the memorial and museum foundation. Such are the exquisite sensitivities that surround every detail in the creation of the National September 11 Memorial Museum, which is being built on land that many revere as hallowed ground. During eight years of planning, every step has been muddied with contention. There have been bitter fights over the museums financing, which have delayed its opening until at least next year, as well as continuing arguments over its location, seven stories below ground; which relics should be exhibited; and where unidentified human remains should rest. Even the souvenir key chains to be sold in the gift shop have become a focus of rancor. But nothing has been more fraught than figuring out how to tell the story. The sunken granite pools that opened last Sept. 11 and that occupy the footprints of the fallen towers were designed as places to mourn and remember the dead. Yet nowhere on the plaza is there even a mention of the terrorist attacks that caused the destruction. The job of documenting and interpreting the history has been left to the museum, and it is an undertaking pockmarked with contradictions. Alice Greenwald, the director of the new museum, and her team must simultaneously honor the dead and the survivors; preserve an archaeological site and its artifacts; and try to offer a comprehensible explanation of a once inconceivable occurrence. They must speak to vastly different audiences that include witnesses at the scene and around the globe, as well as children born long after the wreckage had been cleared. And many of those listening have long-simmering, deeply felt opinions about how the museum should take shape. Whose truth is going to be in that museum? asked Sally Regenhard, whose
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son, Christian, a firefighter, died in the north tower. Even the name Memorial Museum is something of a contradiction in terms. In the context of a memorial, for example, the 17-foot, two-ton crossbeam where Mass was held every day during the cleanup is a sacred relic, an icon that vibrates with emotional and ideological resonance. In a museum, this same hunk of iron is simply evidence. So it is with the photographs of the 19 hijackers: They are simultaneously documentation and abominations. Museums are about understanding, about making meaning of the past, said James Gardner, who oversees the nations legislative archives, presidential libraries and museums. A memorial fulfills a different need; its about remembering and evoking feelings in the viewer, and that function is antithetical to what museums do. Reconciling the clashing obligations to recount the history with pinpoint accuracy, to memorialize heroism and to promote healing inevitably required compromise. No one anticipated how much. Sifting Through Pain As the former associate director and a 19-year veteran of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, Ms. Greenwald knows a lot about ghastly things. Yet even that museum did not have to wrestle with the challenge of being built where the horrors had occurred and while the families of victims were still grieving. Since being appointed director of the September 11 Museum in 2006, Ms. Greenwald has inherited much of the distrust some of the families feel toward officials involved in developing the site, particularly Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who at one point said that if he were a mourner, he would suck it up and get going. In particular, many families are upset about a plan to place approximately 14,000 unidentified or unclaimed remains of those who died typically bone fragments or dried bits of tissue in the museum below ground. The repository will be controlled by the citys medical examiner and sealed off from everyone but family members. Visitors will just see an outer wall inscribed with a quotation from Virgil: No day shall erase you from the memory of time. Seventeen family members have filed suit against the city as part of an effort to reopen the decision. They view it as degrading to set the remains in a museum below ground. Rosaleen Tallon, whose brother, Sean, a firefighter, died in the north tower, said the insensitivity was mirrored in the museums decision to stock its gift shop with $40 souvenir key chains engraved with the Virgil phrase. Theyre marketing the headstones of our loved ones on key chains, she said. How disgusting is that? But to Ms. Greenwald, the decision to keep the remains underground represented an equally earnest effort to fulfill a longstanding promise to other families who had sought, above all, to ensure that the remains stayed at
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bedrock. Its been a very difficult, fascinating and challenging process to juggle competing visions of what the museum should be, she said. Throughout, Ms. Greenwald reached out to the varied constituencies by inviting some of the most influential and outspoken players to assist the museums board. It was led by Mayor Bloomberg and included the first deputy mayor, Patricia E. Harris. Among the 11 family members on the roster was Debra Burlingame, who lost her brother, an American Airlines pilot, in the attack on the Pentagon. She had successfully led a campaign against a proposed international freedom center at ground zero that would have told the story of Sept. 11 in the context of a worldwide struggle for liberty. Also on the committee was Howard W. Lutnick, the chief executive of Cantor Fitzgerald, the company that lost 658 employees, including Mr. Lutnicks brother, in the attack. Ms. Greenwald drew in an even wider circle by holding a series of discussions about topics like exhibiting disturbing material and handling human remains. It was an exhausting process, with dozens of conversations that solicited the opinions of at least 25 survivors and family members of victims; 55 nearby residents and business, community and government representatives; 7 preservationists; 12 uniformed rescue and recovery workers; 9 interfaith and multicultural representatives; 78 museum and educational specialists; 8 social service and counseling professionals; and 60 foundation staff members. As the conversations continued, a subtle map of divisions surfaced that ran along class, geographic and political lines: New Yorkers found outsiders meddlesome; families of uniformed rescue workers were resentful of Wall Streeters moneyed influence; critics disdained those willing to compromise. Ms. Regenhard, for example, called some of the participants fat cats, V.I.P.s and stuffed suits, and said they represented pure and simple tokenism rather than genuine family input. The New York City fire commissioner, Salvatore J. Cassano, on the other hand, judged the conversations a success. That doesnt mean that everybody got what they wanted, but they did get heard, he said. Indeed, with a few notable exceptions, Ms. Greenwald, a small woman with red hair, has been widely praised for her curatorial judgment as well as for her diplomatic skills. She has handled this thing with sensitivity, said Charles Wolf, whose wife, Katherine, was killed in the attack and who attended the discussions. She is the one who gave us all confidence in the whole process. Helping Ms. Greenwald was a kitchen cabinet of nine advisers, including Kate D. Levin, the citys cultural commissioner; Jane Rosenthal, a founder of the Tribeca Film Festival; and a handful of scholars like James E. Young, Edward T. Linenthal, and the Civil War historian David Blight. They met two or three times a year and served as both sounding board and touchstone. Mr. Blight, who at one point considered writing a book about the museums creation, said the overriding question for him was what message visitors would
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take away: Are they going to leave with any sense of why this happened and its consequences? Or will they be moved solely by the sheer power of the catastrophe? If its only the latter, then the museum is a failure. Difficult Decisions Everyone agrees that it is the museums job is to tell the truth. The question, though, is how much truth. The museum has more than 4,000 artifacts, from a wedding band to a 15-ton composite of several tower floors that collapsed into a stack, like pancakes, and then fused together. There are photographs of men and women jumping out of windows, burned and mutilated bodies, scattered and blood-soaked limbs, images so awful they tested the bounds of taste and appropriateness. There are thousands of harrowing first-person recollections, and photographs and videos from survivors and witnesses, many of them raw. Many victims final phone calls were preserved. Flight 93s cockpit recorder captured the hijackers last words and a flight attendants begging for her life. Which of it should be on display? We have to transmit the truth without being absolutely crushed by it, Mr. Daniels, the chief executive, said. We dont want to retraumatize people. Within months of settling into her office at 1 Liberty Plaza in Lower Manhattan, Ms. Greenwald invited Grady P. Bray, a disaster psychologist who consulted with the Fire Department after Sept. 11, to speak with the staff and advisers. He explained that hearing a recording could be more disturbing than seeing an image because it requires more imagination. The mind is left to create the illusion of what was taking place, Mr. Bray said. We personalize things that we dont see so well. With those concerns in mind, curators reviewed hundreds of recordings. The family of Betty Ong, the flight attendant on American Airlines Flight 11, which hit the north tower, for example, gave the museum a tape of her calmly informing ground control of the terror transpiring around her. Its the most remarkable demonstration of professionalism under duress that I think anyone will ever hear, and they wanted us to include it because they felt it said so much about who she was, Ms. Greenwald said. The family of Mary Fetchet, a member of the foundations advisory board, donated the recording of her 24-year-old son Brads last phone call from the south tower, telling her not to worry. A third recording was of a 911 operator tenderly trying to comfort a woman during her terrifying final moments. As she listened, Ms. Greenwald kept thinking of a comment made by the museum consultant Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. Ill never forget it because it just ripped me apart when she said it, that we need to look at this kind of material as another form of human remains, Ms. Greenwald said. We need to
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use it judiciously. In the end, they decided to make Brad Fetchets and Betty Ongs voices available, and to archive the other. This was not meant to be a public moment, Ms. Greenwald said of the 911 call. We have to be careful not to be exploitative, to be sensitive to whats appropriate in the setting of a public museum. Over time the team also pulled back further from exhibiting graphic carnage. Curators followed a guideline used by the Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum, which commemorates the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building by Timothy McVeigh that killed 168 people. We dont show body parts, but we show blood, Kari F. Watkins, that museums executive director, said in an interview. Ms. Greenwald explained that there were other ways to convey horror, as when it is reflected in the faces of witnesses. The historical reality is that there were body parts littering Lower Manhattan, she said. We do not feel the need to display that. Particularly upsetting items drew additional review by the program committee, as well as by advisers and staff. Opinions about whether to include images of trapped victims leaping from the flaming towers were mixed. Mr. Cassano, the fire chief, was opposed. I didnt think it was respectful to show people jumping out of windows, he said, adding that the Fire Departments memorial book excluded such pictures. I thought it was too graphic. After repeated discussions, Ms. Greenwald and Mr. Daniels decided to use photographs, but not video, and only if the person jumping could not be identified. Still, the material can be devastating. Even all of us who work here, when I see bits of the exhibition, Mr. Daniels said, pausing for a breath, its very powerful. When Mr. Bray talked to staff members, he discovered that some were already showing symptoms of severe stress from listening to audiotapes and oral histories and reviewing photographs hour after hour, day after day. There was literally this Aha moment, Mr. Bray recalled. Workers were oblivious to the fact that new problems at home and in their relationships were influenced significantly by the work they were doing. The lesson that Ms. Greenwald took away was to offer visitors choices rather than sending them on a forced march. So the architectural design includes early exits along the museum route, enabling distressed visitors to duck out without having to pass through the entire exhibition. Disturbing material will be sectioned off with partitions or put in alcoves. Those who want more information can stop at one of several kiosks to gain access to the museums archives.
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The emotional journey that each visitor will travel has been painstakingly orchestrated by Ms. Greenwalds team, from the moment someone enters the museums glass pavilion on the plaza and descends to the schist bedrock seven stories down. Gradually, the story is rolled out. It begins on Sept. 11, 2001, with an 8 foot by 10-foot-7-inch photograph, taken at 8:30 a.m., of New Yorks sublime skyline, with the World Trade Center towers stretching to the Crayola-blue heavens. Its the world before, Ms. Greenwald said. Innocence. About 4,000 of the museums 110,000 square feet of public space are devoted to honoring the victims, with artifacts and photos of each of the 2,977 people who died on Sept. 11 and the 6 who died in 1993, when terrorists planted a bomb in the Trade Center garage. The tumultuous events of Sept. 11 in the air and on the ground in New York; Washington; and Shanksville, Pa., unfold through oral histories, timelines and photographs. We decided to start with what people saw that day, Ms. Greenwald said, explaining that familiar images like those flashed hundreds of times on television and in print would be easier to process. To give visitors time to recover, Ms. Greenwald said the designers built in some breathing room. A more cerebral subject the history of Al Qaeda follows the intensely emotional recounting of the day. There are also exhibits about the construction of the towers, the wrenching posters of the missing, the outpouring of tribute art. The account of the recovery and response starts with Sept. 12, 2001, and includes the start of the war in Afghanistan. It ends on May 30, 2002, when the final object was cleared from ground zero, Ms. Greenwald said. Other events and issues, like the Patriot Act and the 9/11 Commission, are treated thematically, as a series of questions dealing with, say, the tension between civil liberties and national security, or investigations into what happened. The job of selecting which moments to highlight, potentially a political brawl, has been given to a computer that will project an ever-changing variety of news articles on a wall, as chosen by a statistical algorithm. At the end, visitors will confront what is essentially an archaeological excavation, a section of the soaring 60-foot-high slurry wall that was built to hold back the Hudson River when the World Trade Center site was designed. You become a witness yourself, Ms. Greenwald said. Nearby, the monumental artifacts have already been installed: bent beams from the spot where the nose of a 767 jet, Flight 11, first rammed the north tower at 8:46 a.m. and reconfigured the reigning global order; the smashed fire truck of Ladder Company 3; the crossbeam where recovery workers gathered for daily Mass; and the last item to be removed from ground zero, the 60-ton, 36-foot steel column from the south tower that had served as a makeshift shrine. Choices remain. Absent from the space so far are any composites, the chunks of compressed floors. Many officials and family members say they are the objects
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that perhaps best capture the destructive force unleashed that day. This is something that people 50 years from now should see, Mr. Cassano, the fire chief, said. Some families are concerned, though, that despite assurances and tests, composites could contain body matter. Museum officials thought this was a very interesting exhibit, said Diane Horning, who lost her 26-year-old son, Matthew. To us, it was human remains. The Faces of Terror Like a line in a sacred text, a single sentence in the museums guidelines generated volumes of conflicting commentary: Exhibits should explore a factual presentation of what is known of the terrorists, including their methods and means of preparation. That sentence was one of the recommendations offered by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation before it handed off responsibility for the memorial and museum to the foundation in 2006. The two pages of guidelines composed by the corporations 27-member museum advisory committee, after consulting with seven advisers and reviewing 1,070 public comments were adopted by what is now known as the National September 11 Memorial & Museum at the World Trade Center Foundation as a formal planning document. The Talmudic-like analysis began immediately. How, for instance, should the museum handle the flood of information about the terrorists private lives and plotting that the governments mammoth investigation was uncovering? The museum was in a unique position to draw perhaps the most detailed and nuanced portrait of the men, but that was precisely the problem. Officials were wary of being seen as trying to do too much to humanize murderers. By 2008, Jan Ramirez, the museums chief curator, said, We retreated from that kind of in-depth presentation. Only evidence that proved the hijackers guilt would be displayed. There is not a shred of psychoanalysis about what their issues might have been, Ms. Ramirez explained. You would never want to create a type of interest in their lives that would potentially promote some other zealot. Explaining the terrorists motivations aroused similar concerns. To some families of victims, asking what caused Sept. 11 is literally a profane question, said Rabbi Irwin Kula, president of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership and a participant in the conversation series. It is like blaming the victim. Other families, Ms. Greenwald said, literally took me by the lapel and said, Dont whitewash this, youve got to tell the story. Yet making sense of the attacks is hard to do without delving into the grievances of the attackers. In the end, Mr. Daniels said, they reasoned: Al Qaeda was responsible. Therefore we looked at the rise of Al Qaeda, and that was in the
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80s. Thus the museum will begin the tale in 1979 with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, where radical Islamic fighters, who gained power with the support of the United States, later gave Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda safe haven. Ultimately this is not a museum that is created or designed by committee, Mr. Daniels said. Well listen to everybody, but in the end we have to make the decision. After a pause, he added, Theres almost a comfort level that were going to get criticized, no matter what. The tug of war between memorializing and documenting is encapsulated in the angry debates over the question of displaying the hijackers photographs. To Mr. Daniels the museums primary obligation is to preserve the history of what happened, and so he took it for granted that the photos would be there. But portraying perpetrators and enemies is rarely simple, as Mr. Blight pointed out. Most of the narratives displayed at Civil War battlefields started to mention slavery as a cause of the conflict only about 10 to 15 years ago. Mr. Daniels learned that lesson on Sept. 10, 2009, when, during a presentation, he mentioned the photos and the possibility that some of the hijackers words would be posted in the museum. When he opened The New York Post the next day, he discovered that its editorial board had denounced the idea. Mr. Cassano said he too was opposed. The story has to be told, he said, but added that he did not think the hijackers should be given the honor of having their pictures in the museum that showed everybody else who was killed. The issue was then put on the consultative conveyor belt. Ms. Greenwald devoted a planning conversation to it. She, Mr. Daniels and a handful of staff members visited the Oklahoma City Memorial Museum, which had confronted similar concerns. Gov. Frank Keating of Oklahoma initially opposed showing a picture of Mr. McVeigh, who was convicted in 1997 and executed in 2001, the director, Ms. Watkins, said. But to her it was important to show how unbelievably normal Timothy McVeigh looked, like the guy living next door. In the end, his picture was displayed. Historians had additional reasons for wanting to use the hijackers photographs. There are all these conspiracy theories, that it was Jews who did this or the C.I.A., said Bernard Haykel, a professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, but we know exactly who they were. The conspiracy fantasies persist. Im still receiving crank phone calls suggesting our son is still alive, said David Beamer, whose son, Todd, was one of a handful of men who tried to overpower the hijackers on Flight 93 before it crashed in Shanksville. I do believe that its important and appropriate that names, faces and voices are part of the reality of that day. When the program committee voted on whether to play the cockpit recording of the hijackers voices, Mr. Daniels reported, everyone there said yes.
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The decision on the photographs was more labored. They decided to shrink the images, from 6 by 4 inches to 2 by 1 inches, the faces a little bigger than a thumbnail. And they will have evidence stickers from the F.B.I. attached. During a visit to Washington, Ms. Ramirez discovered that the F.B.I. had been struggling with similar questions about its own in-house Sept. 11 exhibition. One option organizers considered was to display the hijackers photographs on a ledge so that visitors could avoid a head-on confrontation. Though the agency ended up posting them on the wall, museum officials borrowed the idea to place the photos on a slanted board, in a narrow partitioned alcove. People would have to turn physically and look down to see them, Ms. Greenwald said. In that space will be documentation of their activities, including quotations from their final statements, acknowledging their participation. Were allowing them to indict themselves as mass murderers, not giving them a platform for propaganda, she said. Ms. Greenwald said her staff calculated that the history of Al Qaeda and the hijackers made up only a tiny fraction of the exhibition space. Ms. Burlingame captured the whirl of sentiments. Despite doubts, she ultimately agreed that the hijackers photographs should be shown because we need to tell the story of 9/11 truthfully and fully. But, she added, One of my own brothers called me to say, I dont want to see their faces. Evolving History Many of the decisions Ms. Greenwald and her colleagues are making today may be unmade in the future. Sensibilities are sure to be different 10 or 20 years from now. Future curators will choose differently as time passes, anguish eases, and Americas position in the world shifts. As Ms. Greenwald said, This is a museum without an ending. For the present, though, the National September 11 Memorial Museum is emphasizing a story of hope over despair, and the resiliency and selflessness of the rescue effort, not its mishaps. That is by design. The Lower Manhattan Development Corporations original guidelines specifically directed the museum to chronicle the outpouring of heroism, sacrifice and human ingenuity during, and in the aftermath of, the attacks. How, then, to handle less-than-heroic moments? For example, the communications breakdowns between rescuers that contributed to the days cascading catastrophes and a death toll that included 343 firefighters. Or the looting that followed, which outraged downtown residents. The Sept. 11 museum will include the communications failures, Ms. Ramirez said, but they will not dominate the story of how police and firefighters responded. The same goes for the thefts. Oral histories complaining about them
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are part of the museum archives, Ms. Ramirez said, but not in the permanent exhibition. The more they listened, she said, the more they realized that those incidents were irrelevant to the story were telling. A similar approach guided the museums treatment of angry reactions the attacks generated. Ms. Ramirez said it was not appropriate for a museum to support anger or militarism as a response. So photos of protesters advocating violence, for example, will probably be included only in video projections that capture a range of reactions, enabling viewers to see that this sentiment then yields to another sentiment and another sentiment, she said. The staff acknowledges that at points it has ceded authority and taken a step back from creating the definitive master narrative, functioning instead as an aggregator. Its not always an authoritative museum, Ms. Greenwald said. Its about collective memory. This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: Correction: June 5, 2012 An article on Sunday about sensitivities and disputes surrounding the creation of the National September 11 Memorial Museum in Manhattan misstated the name of a disaster psychologist who spoke with museum staff members and advisers. He is Grady P. Bray, not Brady P. Gray.
Date Collected: 6/4/2012 Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/03/arts/design/sept-11-memorialmuseums-fraught-task-to-tell-the-truth.html?pagewanted=print
1.3. Europe
(back)
1.3.1. Four Convicted in Terror Plot Against Danish Paper (back) June 4, 2012 Four Convicted in Terror Plot Against Danish Paper By CHRISTINA ANDERSON GLOSTRUP, Denmark A court here convicted four men on Monday of planning a terrorist attack in December 2010 against the offices of a Danish newspaper. The four men, who denied the charges, were sentenced to 12 years in prison. The planned attack was intended as revenge for the publication of 12 cartoons, many of them depicting the Prophet Muhammad, in 2005, prosecutors said; Jyllands-Posten, the paper that published the cartoons, was the target. After months of surveillance, the Danish police arrested three of the four men Mounir Dhahri, Munir Awad and Omar Aboelazm at an apartment in a Copenhagen suburb on Dec. 29, 2010, and the Swedish police arrested the
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fourth, Sahbi Zalouti, at his apartment in Stockholm later the same day. The lead prosecutor in the case, Gyrithe Ulrich, told the court during the sentencing hearing that there was no doubt the four men were planning to kill a large number of people in the building housing the offices of Jyllands-Posten and another leading Danish newspaper, Politiken, in central Copenhagen that day. We have a completely concrete target, Ms. Ulrich said. They had enough ammunition to at least shoot 122 people. During the trial, which began April 13, prosecutors presented recordings of wiretapped phone conversations from Mr. Zaloutis apartment. We could hear them planning the attack, Ms. Ulrich said in an interview. Prosecutors said they believed the four men received orders to mount the attack from militants in Pakistan, where Mr. Dhahri, a Tunisian citizen, spent considerable time in the two years before his arrest. In one of the recordings presented in court, Mr. Dahahri is heard calling a phone booth in Waziristan, a tribal area of Pakistan known for militant activity. The other three men are Swedish citizens. The four men left Stockholm in a rental car on the day before their arrest, and were followed by Swedish Security Service officers, prosecutors said. Mr. Zalouti separated from the group in Sweden, and the others drove on toward Copenhagen; when they crossed into Denmark, Danish security agents took over the surveillance, following the men to the apartment in Herlev, a Copenhagen suburb, where the men were arrested the next morning. The police found a semiautomatic gun, 122 bullets and 200 plastic strips commonly used as makeshift handcuffs in the rented car, and a pistol in the apartment, Ms. Ulrich said. Denmark and its embassies overseas have been the target of several attempted terrorist attacks since the cartoons were published, but Ms. Ulrich said this plot was the most serious so far. This time, we knew exactly when and where it was going to happen, she said. The earlier thwarted plots included the capture of two men with Scandinavian links in Sarajevo, Bosnia, in 2005 with about 10 pounds of explosives; three men from Odense, Denmark, who were convicted of plotting terrorist attacks in 2007; another terrorist cell broken up in Copenhagen the same year, with two men convicted and imprisoned; a letter bomb meant for the newspaper that was inadvertently detonated in a hotel in 2010; and an intruder who broke into the cartoonists home with an ax in 2010. As recently as last week, Danish authorities arrested two Danish-Somali brothers on suspicion of planning a terrorist act. For Islamic militants, Jyllands-Posten is a prestige target, said Magnus Ranstorp, an intelligence and counterterrorism expert with the Swedish National Defense College, in an interview the day before the ruling. It has been blinking red continuously in Denmark since 2005-2006, and they are coming from all quarters from local homegrown youngsters, to Al Shabab, to individuals from the Caucasus, to remnants of Al Qaeda in Pakistan all focusing in on one tiny country.
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Date Collected: 6/4/2012 Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/05/world/europe/four-convictedin-terror-plot-against-danish-paper.html?pagewanted=print
1.3.2. U.S. and European Union Agree on Air Cargo Security (back) June 1, 2012 U.S. and European Union Agree on Air Cargo Security By NICOLA CLARK The United States and the European Union were expected Friday to announce an agreement to recognize each others air cargo security procedures, putting an end to a costly duplication of security controls on the more than $130 billion in airfreight that crosses the Atlantic from Europe each year. Under the terms of the accord, which was to take effect immediately, the Transportation Security Administration will accept a set of European rules on the screening of cargo and the maintenance of a secure supply chain for all airlines and freight shippers flying cargo and mail into or through the European Union. Previously, only five of the 27 members of the bloc Britain, Finland, France, the Netherlands and Ireland signed bilateral air cargo security agreements with the United States. Airfreight is by definition naturally urgent, Siim Kallas, the European transport commissioner, said in a statement. Cutting out the duplication of security procedures will mean huge savings for cargo operators in terms of time and money. The debate over how best to screen air cargo for the presence of explosives or other threats dates to the terrorist attacks against the United States on Sept. 11, 2001. While many American politicians have pushed for physical inspection of every parcel and pallet that enters an aircraft cargo hold just as security screenings are required for all passengers the global airfreight industry has argued that such an approach risks paralyzing a business that represents some 40 percent of the value of global trade. Both the United States and the European Union sharply stepped up their cargo security measures after the Sept. 11 attacks, but the two sides adopted different approaches. The Transportation Security Administration imposed strict protocols at the last point of departure to the United States regardless of whether the cargo had been previously screened in another country and required air carriers to guarantee that the cargo had been screened according to T.S.A. standards. The European approach has focused on ensuring that cargo, once it has been screened at its point of origin, cannot be tampered with at any point along its route. In practice, this required air carriers and shipping agents to physically separate cargo bound for the United States in airport warehouses for special processing involving not only duplicate sets of paperwork but also often a requirement that
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parcels be scanned by two sets of similar X-ray equipment to comply with the technical standards of both systems. In most cases, the additional compliance costs were passed on to customers in the form of higher shipping rates. The additional handling procedures also slowed shipping times. The divergence in approach also created expensive headaches after October 2010, when terrorists in Yemen used United Parcel Service and FedEx to try to ship hidden explosives to the United States. The parcels were intercepted at airport cargo terminals in Britain and Germany. After that incident, the European Union added enhanced screening requirements for all cargo originating in third countries but continued to apply a one-stop screening policy to those goods. The T.S.A., however, did not accept this approach as equivalent to its own, and airlines were faced with a barrage of emergency amendments to United States procedures. No fewer than 25 such amendments have been issued over the last 18 months, airline industry executives said. Carriers were forced to either comply sometimes on very short notice or to come up with an alternative procedure, said Margreet Lommerts, manager for cargo and security at the Association of European Airlines in Brussels. It was extremely complicated. And if one airlines procedure was accepted, it was difficult for others to say that they couldnt apply it as well. Mutual recognition is expected to reduce costs and improve the speed and efficiency of trans-Atlantic shipments of goods ranging from electronic components to perishable foods and medicines. The agreement comes after the announcement in mid-May that the T.S.A. had set a firm deadline of Dec. 3 for airlines to conduct 100 percent screening for explosives of all cargo carried on passenger flights bound for the United States. The mandate part of a 2007 federal law that already applies to cargo loaded onto domestic flights and to planes leaving the United States requires all passenger airlines to break down consolidated shipments and pallets to screen individual parcels before they are loaded onto flights headed for the United States. According to the T.S.A., more than 80 percent of cargo on international passenger flights into the United States is screened, up from around 65 percent two years ago. Helen Kearns, a spokeswoman for Mr. Kallas, the European transport commissioner, confirmed that the mutual recognition agreement means that compliance with E.U. security rules also meets the U.S. requirement of 100 percent screening of air cargo. In a statement, John S. Pistole, the T.S.A. administrator, hailed the agreement, saying it would ease the burden on industry as well as strengthen security by ensuring that we share information and work together toward our common interests.
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Date Collected: 6/4/2012 Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/01/business/us-and-europe-agreeon-air-cargo-rules.html?pagewanted=print
1.3.3. 1 Student Is Killed and 5 Are Injured in Bombing at Italian School (back) May 20, 2012-1 Student Is Killed and 5 Are Injured in Bombing at Italian School-By GAIA PIANIGIANI and ELISABETTA POVOLEDO; Gaia Pianigiani reported from Brindisi, and Elisabetta Povoledo from Rome.-CORRECTION APPENDED -BRINDISI, Italy -- A bomb exploded Saturday in front of a school in this southern city, killing a student and wounding at least five others, local officials said, raising fears of a return to the kind of violence that shook Italy decades ago. --The explosion occurred near a vocational school named after Francesca Morvillo, a magistrate who was killed with her husband, Giovanni Falcone, an anti-Mafia prosecutor, by a Cosa Nostra bomb on May 23, 1992, an event Italy planned to commemorate on its 20th anniversary. --The bomb went off as students were preparing to enter the school on Saturday morning before classes. It consisted of three gas canisters tied together, set off by a rudimentary timer, and had been placed next to a wall not far from the school's main gate, said an Italian official who asked not be identified because he was not authorized to speak to the news media. --Witnesses described the panic that followed the explosion as ''an inferno,'' while television stations broadcast the eerily silent aftermath, with knapsacks, textbooks and notebooks strewed across the asphalt in front of the school, pages flapping in the wind. --There was no immediate claim of responsibility, and the authorities said Saturday that investigators would examine all possibilities, including links to the Sacra Corona Unita, the organized crime syndicate rooted in the southern region of Puglia, and domestic or foreign terrorism. --''It's difficult to form an idea because killing students is without precedent, and doesn't correspond to any of the models of Italian terrorism,'' said Salvatore Lupo, a professor of contemporary history at the University of Palermo. ''There's no logic, but with terrorist attacks there is no logic.'' --Piero Grasso, the prosecutor who leads the anti-Mafia judicial agency, described the bombing as an act of ''pure terrorism,'' because, he said, ''Every parent will think when they send their child to school: could they be in danger?'' --In recent months, Italy has experienced a level of political economic turmoil that has unsettled people, with some linking the government's austerity measures to a rash of suicides. There has also been a rise in violence against tax collection offices -- mostly carried out by indebted and frustrated taxpayers -- as well as other institutions, like the military and the aerospace group Finmeccanica, which has been singled out by radical groups that pattern themselves after the terrorists that kept Italy under siege in the 1970s and 1980s. -43 of 74
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-A senior executive for a Finmeccanica-owned company was shot in the leg on May 7, and the group's chief executive was the target of a death threat recently. --On Thursday, the government announced that it would redeploy the nearly 25,000 police officers and soldiers that currently protect more than 14,000 potential targets and 550 people, after analyzing the recent spate of attacks throughout the country. --Since November, Italy has been governed by a caretaker government of technocrats, led by Prime Minister Mario Monti, a respected economist called in to stave off financial disaster caused by the fallout from the euro zone crisis. Although Mr. Monti has broad bipartisan support in Parliament, that is more a function of the need to assure financial markets that Italy is getting its economy in order, rather than any real political conviction. --Several lawmakers on Saturday spoke of the bombing as an attack on the state. ''We must all be united in the face of this massacre, this attack on institutions,'' Antonio Di Pietro, a politician with the Italy of Values Party, told the ANSA news agency. ''Either we immediately stem this terrorist phase, or our country is destined for a civil war.'' --Interior Minister Annamaria Cancellieri said Saturday that she had been struck by the fact that the school, which specializes in fashion and tourism courses, was named for the prosecutor and his wife killed by the Sicilian Mafia 20 years ago, but she said in an interview with Italian Sky News that this form of attack ''was not usual for the Mafia.'' --In 1993, Cosa Nostra planted bombs in Rome, Milan and Florence, killing some civilians, but more typically the Mafia kills people that get in the way of its business, as Mr. Falcone did. --Condemnation of the attacks was immediate and widespread. President Giorgio Napolitano spoke of a ''barbarous attack'' and called on the government to be vigilant and firm to root out ''subversive violence.'' --The explosives went off just before 8 a.m., next to a group of girls. One, Melissa Bassi, 16, was killed by the blast, and another was seriously wounded. Four others also suffered injuries. --Remembering the violence of the so-called Years of Lead, a period of social and political turmoil marked by dozens of acts of terrorism carried out by left-wing and right-wing radicals, Italians took to the streets on Saturday in impromptu demonstrations and held sit-ins in many cities. Sporting events stopped for a minute of silence, and an all-night museum jamboree in Rome, which usually draws tens of thousands of visitors, was canceled. --At a rally in Brindisi on Saturday, Miriam Maggio, 23, a volleyball coach, said: ''This is a quiet place where there are criminals, but such things have never happened, at least not since we were born. I fear it's the beginning of something monstrous.'' --Martina Carpani, a representative of the Union of Students, said that despite
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their fear, students must not be afraid of going to school. ''They want to use fear as a form of control,'' she said, ''but we can't let that happen.'' --Bishop Rocco Talucci of Brindisi said he was both anguished and angry. ''This is not just an offense to life, but especially to young innocent lives'' in a city struggling to distance itself from local organized crime, he said on the state RAI Radio. Speaking to those who carried out the attack, the bishop called for an end to the violence. ''Because we have to build, not destroy,'' he said. --PHOTO: Onlookers outside the school in Brindisi, Italy, where a bomb on Saturday killed a student. (PHOTOGRAPH BY BIAGIO CLAUDIO LONGO/EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY) ---Copyright 2012 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Back to Top Date Collected: 6/4/2012 Source: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res= 9906EED6163FF933A15756C0A9649D8B63&pagewanted=print
1.4. Middle East
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1.4.1. Assad Condemns Houla Massacre, Blaming Terrorists (back) June 3, 2012 Assad Condemns Houla Massacre, Blaming Terrorists By NEIL MacFARQUHAR BEIRUT, Lebanon President Bashar al-Assad denied Sunday that the Syrian government played a role in the massacre in the village of Houla, using his first speech in five months to reiterate his line that foreigners were fomenting the violence in Syria. Addressing a Parliament just selected under a new Constitution, Mr. Assad said that the election was a slap against those questioning the reforms in Syria, that the countrys problems were rooted in terrorism rather than lack of political change, and that dialogue with the opposition remained possible. Mr. Assad, speaking for about an hour at an ornately carved wooden podium, described himself as horrified by the Houla massacre, saying that even monsters couldnt perpetrate what we have seen. Our hearts bled and our anger was indescribable when we saw the painful scenes on television, he said. The Arabic language and human language cannot describe the scenes we witnessed at Houla. He noted that government forces had initially been accused of causing the deaths by artillery shelling, but that the claim was later revised. The president lumped together the Houla case with what he called the general assault that Syria had faced for 15 months. The May 25 attack at the village left 108 people dead, 49 of them children. Most were shot at close range or stabbed. Villagers said their assailants were shabiha, or armed militiamen controlled by the government, who came from nearby
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villages and are from the same minority Alawite sect as the president. While stopping short of blaming Syria directly, the United Nations found indications that the shabiha had carried out the attack, and the Security Council criticized the Syrian government for using heavy artillery against civilian areas. Activists were dismissive of Mr. Assads speech, both for his denying any military role in the deaths at Houla and his comments that the Syrian military was defending the country against foreign powers. We have eyewitnesses from the massacre, and they know who did it, said Salim Qabbani, an activist in the Homs area. It was the shabiha who are supported and encouraged by the Syrian Army. The one waging war on the Syrian people is the regime, which is using its heavy weapons to attack civilians and to destroy entire cities. Mr. Assad said Syria was under assault from outside because of its long history of backing the resistance, a term used to describe standing up to Israel in particular and the West in general. It is about the role of Syria, the militant role of Syria, Syrias support for resistance, he said Sunday. They want to harm this role, they want to crush it, they want to divide this nation. Kofi Annan, the envoy to Syria for the United Nations and the Arab League, said last week in a visit to Syria that the government should begin enacting the six-point United Nations peace plan that Syria accepted in March. It includes a cease-fire and a political dialogue with the opposition. He said the onus was on the government as the stronger power to get the plan moving. Mr. Assad did not directly address Mr. Annans suggestions, saying he wanted to speak about the domestic aspects of the crisisrather than the international ones. The crisis is not internal, Mr. Assad said. Rather it is a foreign war with internal tools, and everybody is responsible for defending the homeland. He repeated that his government was ready to talk to its opponents as long as they were not beholden to foreign governments. The Houla massacre raised international concerns that diplomatic efforts were failing and that regional sectarian war might be nearing, reviving some debates on intervention. Russia and China whose votes would be crucial to any United Nations action have reiterated their opposition to Western military action since the Houla massacre. On Monday, the Chinese Communist Partys official newspaper laid out its case again. The Syrian question should be resolved by the Syrian people, said the commentary in Peoples Daily. Outside powers do not have the right to stick their hands in. That position echoed remarks by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who said on Friday that while he saw worrying signs of an emerging civil war in Syria, he was opposed to Western intervention. You cannot do anything by force, Mr. Putin said.
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At least 10,000 civilians have died by United Nations count, and the Syrian government says more than 2,600 members of the security services have been killed. There has been some evidence of foreign jihadists fighting in Syria, but most of the violence involves clashes between the military and the Free Syrian Army, a patchwork of local militias formed by the opposition. We should fight terrorism so that it will not dissuade us from our path, Mr. Assad said. Terrorism has nothing to do with the political process. Using language reminiscent of the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Mr. Assad said his critics hated that idea that reform was moving ahead in Syria. Holding the elections for the peoples assembly as scheduled slapped those who wanted Syria to close in on itself, to drown in the blood of its people, he said. Mr. Assad has the reputation for speaking like a stilted university professor, and this address was no exception. It drew somewhat limited applause from a Parliament with a history of rigorous clapping for presidential speeches. Mr. Assad, 46, inherited the presidency from his father in 2000 and has been promising to open up the political system ever since. He repeated that promise on Sunday. Keith Bradsher contributed reporting from Hong Kong.
Date Collected: 6/4/2012 Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/04/world/middleeast/assadcondemns-houla-massacre-blaming-outside-terrorists.html?pagewanted=print
1.4.2. Western Nations, Protesting Killings, Expel Syrian Envoys (back) May 29, 2012 Western Nations, Protesting Killings, Expel Syrian Envoys By NEIL MacFARQUHAR BEIRUT, Lebanon Western nations expelled senior Syrian diplomats on Tuesday in a hardened and coordinated condemnation of the weekend massacre of more than 100 villagers in Syria, nearly half of them children. The response by the United States and others came as the top United Nations peacekeeping official gave new credence to suspicions that pro-government Syrian thugs, known as shabiha, were at least partly responsible for the killings, despite official Syrian denials of complicity. Outrage over the killings, which constituted one of the gravest atrocities in the 15-month-old uprising against President Bashar al-Assad, coincided with a visit to Syria by the United Nations special envoy, Kofi Annan, who met with Mr. Assad in Damascus to salvage a failing cease-fire. Mr. Annan, speaking to reporters later, said he had warned Mr. Assad time is running out.
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'We are at a tipping point,' he said at a news conference in Damascus. 'The Syrian people do not want the future to be one of bloodshed and division. Yet the killings continue and the abuses are still with us today. As I reminded the President, the international community will soon be reviewing the situation. I appealed to him for bold steps now not tomorrow, now to create momentum for the implementation of the plan.' As Mr. Annan was speaking, the United Nations undersecretary for peacekeeping operations, Herv Ladsous, told reporters at U.N. headquarters in New York that victims of the massacre who had died from small weapons and knife wounds 'probably points the way to the shabiha.' While he did not rule out other perpetrators, Mr. Ladsous said, 'the suspicion is definitely there.' The effort by countries including the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Bulgaria, Australia, Spain, Italy and Canada to expel the senior Syrian diplomatic officials appeared timed to underscore the extreme isolation of the Syrian government and pressure Mr. Assad into honoring the terms of a nearly two-month-old peace plan negotiated by Mr. Annan. It followed comments by the chairman of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff warning that continued atrocities could make military intervention more likely. The State Department said the United States had expelled the Syrian charg d'affaires, Zuheir Jabbour, and had given him 72 hours to leave the country. Mr. Annan, in his meeting on Tuesday, urged the Syrian government to hold to its commitment in March to abide by the terms of the peace plan, which included not only a cease-fire, but also political dialogue with the opposition and freedom for Syrians to demonstrate. 'He conveyed in frank terms his view to President Assad that the six-point plan cannot succeed without bold steps to stop the violence and release detainees, and stressed the importance of full implementation of the plan,' a spokesman for Mr. Annan, Ahmad Fawzi, said in a statement. Questions about the viability of the plan were thrown into sharp relief by the massacre on Friday in the villages that constitute Houla, near Homs. Victims included 49 children and 34 women, according to a United Nations count. The Security Council on Sunday unanimously condemned the massacre and, while not assigning blame, censured the Syrian government for using heavy artillery against civilians. But on Tuesday a spokesman for the United Nations High Commissioner for human rights said that fewer than 20 of the victims in Houla were killed by artillery fire. 'Most of the rest of the victims were summarily executed in two separate incidents' in Taldaou, one of the villages in the Houla area, the spokesman, Rupert Colville, told reporters in Geneva. 'At this point it looks like entire families were shot in their houses.' The statement appeared likely to add to the uncertainty surrounding a massacre that opposition activists have blamed on the government and Syrian officials have portrayed as the work of terrorists. Deaths from heavy artillery can be pinned on government forces with relative certainty because such weapons are
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not held by opposition fighters. But responsibility for deaths at close quarters is harder to determine in a country where reporters have been prevented from moving about freely. Witnesses to the massacre, including a survivor who was wounded and left for dead, said most of the killing was conducted by pro-government militiamen, Mr. Colville said, adding that they sometimes appeared to operate in concert with government security forces. Witness accounts described how some militiamen went through houses chanting, 'Shabiha for you, Assad,' Mr. Colville said in an interview, using a term for pro-government thugs. The aftermath of the killings continued to reverberate inside Syria. Shops, including the famous Hamadiyah bazaar of Damascus, stayed shut as part of an opposition-led call to observe three days of mourning, according to opposition activists and residents. Damascus has been a bastion of government support. The activists and residents said government agents forced some stores to reopen, particularly in the nut and candy bazaar, by prying open their metal shutters. Mr. Annan, the envoy of both the United Nations and the Arab League and a former United Nations secretary general, arrived with a new mandate from the Security Council including Russia, which had usually blocked action against its ally in Damascus to carry out his plan. He was to hold a news conference later Tuesday after his meeting with Mr. Assad and will also meet with a variety of other people, including opposition figures, on the trip, which was scheduled before the massacre. From the beginning, the peace plan has been given slim chances of success. But it was seen as an acceptable means to try to bridge the differences over Syria between the West and the Arab nations on one side and Russia, China and Iran on the other. Some analysts have called it an international stalling measure, because the Western appetite for military intervention in the conflict is low, even in the absence of Russian opposition. In Washington, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called the massacre horrific and atrocious and said that he was prepared with military options in Syria should they be requested by the White House. But he otherwise spoke cautiously about American intervention by force. There is always a military option, but that military option should always be wielded carefully, General Dempsey said on Fox News. Because one thing weve learned about war, I have learned personally about war, is that it has a dynamic all its own it takes on a life of its own. Nonetheless, he said, it may come to a point with Syria because of the atrocities. White House officials said on Monday that General Dempseys television appearances were not a coordinated administration response to Syria, but had been previously planned as part of the commemoration of Memorial Day. In recent days, the Obama administration has come under intensified criticism by some in Congress and by the Republican presidential front-runner Mitt Romney, who accused President Obama of not doing enough to help the Syrian opposition.
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In Moscow, the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, was slightly more expansive in holding the Syrian government responsible for the violence during comments after a meeting about Syria with his British counterpart William Hague. And both he and Mr. Hague agreed that the main priority was to fully carry out the peace plan. Mr. Lavrov repeated Russias position that it was tied not to Mr. Assad staying in power, but to the Syrians piloting their own political transition. For us, the main thing is to put an end to the violence among civilians and to provide for political dialogue under which the Syrians themselves decide on the sovereignty of their country, he said. Navi Pillay, the United Nations High Commissioner for human rights, called for an immediate and unfettered international investigation of atrocities, which she said may amount to crimes against humanity or other forms of international crime or violations of international law. Syria has suffered a number of major bomb attacks that could only be described as terrorist acts, Ms. Pillay acknowledged. But a defense against terrorism does not in any way justify indiscriminate violence and killing of the sort that government forces and their allies have just carried out in Houla, she said. Despite the increased Russian public pressure on the Syrian government, Mr. Lavrov did echo Syrian government claims that the violence was being fomented by imported terrorists working at the behest of foreign governments a clear hand of Al Qaeda, and the threat of terrorism is growing. Later, the Foreign Ministry issued a statement saying that Russias special representative to the Middle East, Mikhail Bogdanov, had told Riyad Haddad, the Syrian ambassador, that violence against civilians was unacceptable and that the six-point plan had to be implemented. President Franois Hollande announced on Tuesday that France would expel Lamia Chakkour, the Syrian ambassador, either Tuesday or Wednesday. Mr. Hollande also said France would hold a Friends of Syria meeting of anti-Assad governments in early July. In an interview published in Le Monde on Tuesday, the French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, called Mr. Assad the murderer of his people and said he had to relinquish power, the sooner the better. Mr. Fabius ruled out any ground intervention in Syria, which he said would carry the risk of a regional extension of the conflict. The Syrian Army is powerful,' Mr. Fabius said. 'No state is ready to consider ground intervention at the current time.' The concise, simultaneous diplomatic expulsions evolved out of discussions that took place over the weekend among advisers responsible for the region in each of the participating nations, according to a European diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity about confidential negotiations. As the details about the massacre in Houla emerged, the diplomat said, a consensus quickly began to form that a decisive, concerted action was required to send a strong signal of outrage among the Western partners.
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The advisers regularly work together, and know one another so well that it did not take long for the idea to take shape through various channels of communication, including telephone calls, e-mails and teleconferences that routinely take place following an event of this nature, the diplomat said. Given the Monday holiday in the United States and much of Europe, including France and Germany, the only question that remained open by early Tuesday was one of the exact timing. Once that was decided on and approved at a higher level, the European diplomat said, the Syrian diplomats in the various countries were informed at the agreed-upon time and the action was carried out. In Houla, where survivors buried their remaining dead in a mass grave on Monday, new accounts of the killings emerged, adding to earlier statements that some the attacks were by pro-government thugs who went house to house to find victims. Human Rights Watch quoted one elderly woman from the Abdul Razzak clan as saying she survived by hiding in a back room while gunmen dressed in fatigues killed most of her family. I heard several gunshots, she was quoted as saying, describing how she collapsed in terror until the soldiers left. I looked outside the room and saw all of my family members shot. They were shot in their bodies and their head. I was terrified to approach to see if they were alive. I kept crawling until I reached the back door. I went outside, and I ran away. Reporting was contributed by Hwaida Saad from Beirut, Elisabeth Bumiller from Washington, Ellen Barry from Moscow, Nick Cummings-Bruce from Geneva, Alan Cowell and Maa de la Baume from Paris, Melissa Eddy from Berlin and J. David Goodman and Rick Gladstone from New York.
Date Collected: 5/29/2012 Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/30/world/middleeast/kofi-annanmeets-with-bashar-al-assad.html?hp&pagewanted=print
1.4.3. International Pressure on Syria Grows After Killings (back) May 28, 2012 International Pressure on Syria Grows After Killings By NEIL MacFARQUHAR BEIRUT, Lebanon International efforts to pressure Syria intensified on Monday, as the United Nations special envoy Kofi Annan began negotiations in the capital, Damascus, and the chairman of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff warned that continued atrocities could make military intervention more likely. Mr. Annan traveled to Syria seeking to salvage his peace plan, which appeared more precarious than ever after the massacre of at least 108 villagers in the Houla area of central Syria. He urged the government to hold to its commitment in March to honor the six-point plan, which included not only a cease-fire, but also political dialogue with the opposition and freedom for Syrians to demonstrate.
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I urge the government to take bold steps to signal that it is serious in its intention to resolve this crisis peacefully, and for everyone involved to help create the right context for a credible political process, Mr. Annan said. Creating the right climate for progress was the responsibility of not only the government but everyone with a gun, he added. Questions about the viability of the plan were thrown into sharp relief by the massacre in the villages that constitute Houla, near Homs, on Friday, whose victims included 49 children and 34 women by United Nations count. The Security Council on Sunday unanimously condemned the massacre and, while not assigning blame, censured the Syrian government for using heavy artillery against civilians. The aftermath of the killings continued to reverberate inside Syria. Shops, including the famous Hamadiyah bazaar of Damascus, stayed shut as part of an opposition-led call to observe three days of mourning, according to opposition activists and residents. Damascus has been a bastion of government support. The activists and residents said government agents forced some stores to reopen, particularly in the nut and candy bazaar, by prying open their metal shutters. Mr. Annan, the envoy of both the United Nations and the Arab League and a former United Nations secretary general, arrived with a new mandate from the Security Council including Russia, which had usually blocked action against its ally in Damascus to carry out his plan. He was scheduled to hold talks on Monday with Walid al-Moallem, the Syrian foreign minister, and with President Bashar al-Assad on Tuesday. He will also meet with a variety of other people, including opposition figures, on the trip, which was scheduled before the massacre. From the beginning, the peace plan has been given slim chances of success. But it was seen as an acceptable means to try to bridge the differences over Syria between the West and the Arab nations on one side and Russia, China and Iran on the other. Some analysts have called it an international stalling measure, because the Western appetite for military intervention in the conflict is low, even in the absence of Russian opposition. In Washington, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called the massacre horrific and atrocious and said that he was prepared with military options in Syria should they be requested by the White House. But he otherwise spoke cautiously about American intervention by force. There is always a military option, but that military option should always be wielded carefully, General Dempsey said on Fox News. Because one thing weve learned about war, I have learned personally about war, is that it has a dynamic all its own it takes on a life of its own. Nonetheless, he said, it may come to a point with Syria because of the atrocities. White House officials said on Monday that General Dempseys television appearances were not a coordinated administration response to Syria, but had been previously planned as part of the commemoration of Memorial Day. In recent days, the Obama administration has come under intensified criticism by
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some in Congress and by the Republican presidential front-runner, Mitt Romney, who accused President Obama of not doing enough to help the Syrian opposition. In Moscow, the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, was slightly more expansive in holding the Syrian government responsible for the violence during comments after a meeting about Syria with his British counterpart, William Hague. And both he and Mr. Hague agreed that the main priority was to fully carry out the peace plan. Mr. Lavrov repeated Russias position that it was tied not to Mr. Assad staying in power, but to the Syrians piloting their own political transition. For us, the main thing is to put an end to the violence among civilians and to provide for political dialogue under which the Syrians themselves decide on the sovereignty of their country, he said. Despite the increased Russian public pressure on the Syrian government, Mr. Lavrov did echo Syrian government claims that the violence was being fomented by imported terrorists working at the behest of foreign governments a clear hand of Al Qaeda, and the threat of terrorism is growing. Later, the Foreign Ministry issued a statement saying that Russias special representative to the Middle East, Mikhail Bogdanov, had told Riyad Haddad, the Syrian ambassador, that violence against civilians was unacceptable and that the six-point plan had to be implemented. In Houla, where survivors buried their remaining dead in a mass grave on Monday, new accounts of the killings emerged, adding to earlier statements that some the attacks were by pro-government thugs who went house to house to find victims. Human Rights Watch quoted one elderly woman from the Abdul Razzak clan as saying she survived by hiding in a back room while gunmen dressed in fatigues killed most of her family. I heard several gunshots, she was quoted as saying, describing how she collapsed in terror until the soldiers left. I looked outside the room and saw all of my family members shot. They were shot in their bodies and their head. I was terrified to approach to see if they were alive. I kept crawling until I reached the back door. I went outside, and I ran away. Hwaida Saad contributed reporting from Beirut, Elisabeth Bumiller from Washington, and Ellen Barry from Moscow.
Date Collected: 5/29/2012 Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/middleeast/syria-pressedon-peace-plan-after-un-condemnation.html?pagewanted=print
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1.5. Asia
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1.5.1. Pakistan
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1.5.1.1. Qaeda Deputy Targeted in Drone Strike in Pakistan (back) June 4, 2012 Qaeda Deputy Targeted in Drone Strike in Pakistan By DECLAN WALSH and ERIC SCHMITT ISLAMABAD, Pakistan The fate of one of the United States most dedicated enemies was the subject of mounting speculation on Monday after a drone strike in Pakistans tribal belt was said to have targeted Abu Yahya al-Libi, the Qaeda commander who escaped American custody in 2005 and became the groups deputy leader after Osama bin Ladens death last year. Tribal sources in Mir Ali, where the drone attack occurred, said Mr. Libi was either killed or seriously wounded in the strike, which Pakistani officials said killed at least 15 people. It was the third strike in three days in the tribal belt. In Washington, American officials familiar with the strikes confirmed that Mr. Libi, believed to be in his late 40s, was the target of the attack. But they said they did not know whether he had survived. Officials appeared to be wary because, as with some other top militants sheltering in the region, Mr. Libi has been falsely reported dead before in December 2009 after a drone strike in South Waziristan. By Monday night in Pakistan, no concrete evidence had emerged to prove the latest accounts of his death were accurate. But from Peshawar, the main city in northwestern Pakistan, to Islamabad and Washington, officials confirmed they were taking such reports very seriously. If true, it would be the United States governments greatest gain against Al Qaeda since Navy SEALs killed Bin Laden in Abbottabad last year. People are looking very closely to see whether hes still alive, said one American official who was monitoring intelligence reports, speaking on the condition of anonymity. Itll take some time for people to gain a high level of confidence that hes dead. But hes No. 2 in Al Qaeda, and this would be a major blow. The strike occurred early Monday in Hassu Khel, a small village in North Waziristan, just south of Mir Ali, when a drone fired several missiles at a compound and a nearby pickup truck, local Pakistani officials said. As many as 16 people were killed in the attack, making it the deadliest in the tribal belt since November 2011. The attack was the latest signal of the Obama administrations determination to press ahead with its drone campaign. The attacks have outraged Pakistani officials even while negotiations continue to try to reopen NATO supply lines that run into Afghanistan. A resident of the Mir Ali area, citing militant sources and speaking on the
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condition of anonymity, said he believed that Mr. Libi was in the compound in Hassu Khel when the attack occurred. He said Mr. Libi had been moved there to recuperate from light injuries sustained in a drone strike on May 28. The resident said he could not be sure if Mr. Libi had been killed or injured. A senior Pakistani security source in Peshawar said it looks like he has been killed. Mr. Libi and three other Qaeda militants escaped from the American detention center at Bagram Air Base, north of Kabul, in July 2005 after picking a lock and dodging guards. His notoriety swelled after he appeared in a 54-minute video a year later, describing his capture by Pakistani forces in 2002 and his escape from one of the worlds largest military prisons. He went on to make many more videos, appearing more frequently than even Ayman al-Zawahri, then Al Qaedas deputy leader. Mr. Zawahri succeeded Bin Laden as Qaeda leader, and Mr. Libi became the organizations deputy in its Pakistan operations, which are anchored in the tribal belt. Last year he appeared in a new video urging his fellow Libyans to overthrow Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi as Mr. Libi had tried to do in the 1990s, when he was part of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group that aimed to turn Libya into an Islamic state. But Qaeda operations in Pakistan have been disrupted by the drone campaign, and the groups operatives in Yemen have had greater success in plotting violence against the West, particularly the United States. Reports of Mondays airstrike came during a continued scramble to reach a deal over the NATO supply lines, which have been closed since November, after American airstrikes killed 24 Pakistani soldiers. Weeks of negotiations have become bogged down in arguments over transit fees; with a Congressional deadline looming, officials from both countries agree that time is running short. A senior Defense Department official, Peter Lavoy, is due in Islamabad this week as part of urgent efforts to break the deadlock. The drones strike could complicate the talks because Pakistani officials perceive them as being part of the American bargaining strategy. This is nothing but pressure tactics and preparing for the second term, said a senior Pakistani security official, referring to both the NATO negotiations and President Obamas re-election campaign. They want to prove something. A senior American official said the increase in drone strikes was driven by recent good weather over Waziristan, not any desire to pressure the Pakistanis. Until now the area was socked in by a long stationary front with cloud cover, the official said. Another factor in the increased strikes may be the pickup in the fighting season in Afghanistan, as more Pakistan-based Taliban cells have been crossing the border as the weather has improved.
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The pace of the campaign is partly dictated by Mr. Obama, who personally approves every name added to the kill list of drone targets and can veto strikes that might hit civilians. Declan Walsh reported from Islamabad, and Eric Schmitt from Washington. Ihsanullah Tipu Mehsud contributed reporting from Islamabad, and Ismail Khan from Peshawar, Pakistan.
Date Collected: 6/4/2012 Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/05/world/asia/drone-strikekills-14-in-pakistan.html?hp&pagewanted=print
1.5.1.2. Frustrations Grow as U.S. and Pakistan Fail to Mend Ties (back) May 27, 2012 Frustrations Grow as U.S. and Pakistan Fail to Mend Ties By STEVEN LEE MYERS and ERIC SCHMITT WASHINGTON When Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton met Pakistans president at the NATO summit meeting in Chicago last week, the two spent most of the meeting talking politics, and Mrs. Clinton was nothing if not blunt. President Asif Ali Zardari complained about the difficulties of unifying Pakistans fractious political parties to support a more aggressive campaign against extremists and noted it was an election year in both countries. We dont have the resources or control over these groups, he said, referring to militants based in Pakistans borderlands. He added, Were backed into a corner because you havent apologized for a NATO attack in November that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers at an outpost on the border with Afghanistan. Reflecting the Obama administrations mounting frustration, Mrs. Clinton told him that the only way countries have defeated insurgencies like the ones threatening Pakistan and its neighbor was by forging national unity and exercising political will. Its going to take leadership, she told a subdued Mr. Zardari, according to officials from both countries familiar with the hourlong meeting at McCormick Place last Sunday. Its going to take leadership from you and others. Mr. Zardaris visit to the summit meeting after an 11th-hour invitation intended as a conciliatory gesture went well for neither the United States nor Pakistan. It not only failed to resolve a six-month deadlock over the transportation of supplies to Afghanistan, but it also underscored the poisonous distrust and political chasms in an uneasy alliance that is central to the Obama administrations plan to end the war in Afghanistan. You have to look at the meeting in context of whether its worth the investment having Pakistan as a partner, one Obama administration
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official said bitingly. The best that that official could say of Mrs. Clintons meeting with Mr. Zardari was that it was not a total waste since she was able to deliver such a pointed message. Far from moving toward some kind of easing of tension, relations have only worsened since then. On three days last week, American drones fired missiles at what were thought to be insurgent hide-outs in northwestern Pakistan, ending a brief lull heading into the NATO summit meeting and ignoring demands by Pakistans Parliament to end the strikes altogether. And on Wednesday, a court in Pakistan convicted a doctor who helped the C.I.A. in the search for Osama bin Laden, sentencing him to 33 years in prison for treason. The next day the Senate approved a new cut of $33 million in American military assistance to Pakistan, $1 million for each year of his sentence. The failed diplomacy of the last week highlighted the inability of both countries to repair a relationship that was badly frayed by the secret raid that killed Bin Laden in May of last year and then was nearly ruptured by the NATO attack in November. It has raised questions over whether even a more limited security relationship between the two countries is even possible. Its an up-and-down relationship, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said Sunday on ABCs This Week. Officials from both countries expressed a desire to resolve their differences, but it appeared that both were drifting ever farther apart. We need to scale back expectations for each other, Sherry Rehman, Pakistans ambassador to the United States, said in an interview. For Mr. Zardari, the visit to Chicago was a political disaster at home, exposing the increasingly embattled president to blistering criticism. In a clear diplomatic slight, President Obama refused to hold a meeting with him, speaking to him for only a few minutes on the way to a group photograph of the world leaders who came to Chicago to map out an end to the war in Afghanistan. While Mr. Obama later expressed support for a successful, stable Pakistan, he added, I dont want to paper over the differences there. In Pakistan, Imran Khan, a former cricket star who has become one of the most popular opposition leaders, declared the visit a disgrace to the country, and accused the United States and NATO of ignoring the demands of its Parliament and its own sacrifices in the fight against terrorists. This is not our war, Mr. Khan said of Afghanistan, so lets get out of it. The tensions over Afghanistan, over Pakistans perceived unwillingness to strike against insurgents within its borders and over the continued American drone strikes have resisted a year of efforts to ease them. Mrs. Clinton has now met Mr. Zardari three times since the Bin Laden raid; after the first two she had expressed hope that the relationship was back on track, as she put it in Islamabad in October.
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After Pakistans Parliament completed a review of relations with the United States in April, Mrs. Clinton and others in the State Department expected that they could reach a new understanding on security cooperation, which has been more or less delayed since November. A series of American delegations visited officials in Pakistan led by Deputy Secretary of State Thomas R. Nides and Marc Grossman, the administrations special envoy only to find Pakistan changing its demands in response to domestic politics and, some said, Mr. Zardaris weakened position. The Pakistani Parliament demanded an unconditional apology for the November attack and an immediate end to the C.I.A. drone strikes, but it also paved the way for a reopening of NATO supply lines through Pakistan, though at a cost that the administration and members of Congress viewed as extortion. A brazen attack on Kabul and other Afghan cities in April by the Haqqani network, Islamic militants operating from a base in Pakistan, simply hardened the administrations stance, especially on the apology, something that also would be politically risky for Mr. Obamas re-election campaign. Even so, a team of American specialists remained in Islamabad to try to hammer out an agreement to reopen the supply routes. Pakistan, stung by the suspension of American military assistance last year, demanded a fee of $5,000 for each truck that crossed its territory from the port in Karachi to Afghanistan. Before the November attack, NATO had paid $250. The Pakistanis also asked for an indemnity waiver in case American cargo is damaged, for some repairs to the port of Karachi, and for road improvements near the border crossings, the senior American official said. Before the summit meeting in Chicago, the two sides appeared to narrow the difference, with Pakistan asking for $3,000 and the United States offering to pay up to $1,000. In hopes of finishing the deal, NATO extended a late invitation to Mr. Zardari to attend, but even the narrow issue of supply routes proved too divisive to resolve. By the time Mrs. Clinton sat down with Mr. Zardari last Sunday, the administration had lowered its expectations. Tactically, the officials said, she pressed him to tell the NATO leaders that he was committed to resolving the dispute over the transit of supplies, which he did in a closed meeting the next day. Most of Mr. Zardaris meeting with Mrs. Clinton was spent on his difficulties unifying the countrys political blocs. He responded defensively. Zardari made it clear its an election season where he is, and he knows it is here, too, one administration official said. Mrs. Clinton suggested specific ways to overcome the differences over counterterrorism operations and to sell them to politicians in Pakistan. The officials declined to discuss those ideas, even on the condition of anonymity. The meeting ended without any clear commitments. The secretary, the official said, sought to make this very clear: Are you guys ready to move and get your whole leadership on the same page?
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Because sometimes it looks to us like youre not.
Date Collected: 5/29/2012 Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/28/world/asia/frustrationsas-us-and-pakistan-fail-to-mend-ties.html?pagewanted=print
1.5.2. Iran
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1.5.2.1. Obama Order Sped Up Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran (back) June 1, 2012 Obama Order Sped Up Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran By DAVID E. SANGER WASHINGTON From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Irans main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding Americas first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program. Mr. Obama decided to accelerate the attacks begun in the Bush administration and code-named Olympic Games even after an element of the program accidentally became public in the summer of 2010 because of a programming error that allowed it to escape Irans Natanz plant and sent it around the world on the Internet. Computer security experts who began studying the worm, which had been developed by the United States and Israel, gave it a name: Stuxnet. At a tense meeting in the White House Situation Room within days of the worms escape, Mr. Obama, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency at the time, Leon E. Panetta, considered whether Americas most ambitious attempt to slow the progress of Irans nuclear efforts had been fatally compromised. Should we shut this thing down? Mr. Obama asked, according to members of the presidents national security team who were in the room. Told it was unclear how much the Iranians knew about the code, and offered evidence that it was still causing havoc, Mr. Obama decided that the cyberattacks should proceed. In the following weeks, the Natanz plant was hit by a newer version of the computer worm, and then another after that. The last of that series of attacks, a few weeks after Stuxnet was detected around the world, temporarily took out nearly 1,000 of the 5,000 centrifuges Iran had spinning at the time to purify uranium. This account of the American and Israeli effort to undermine the Iranian nuclear program is based on interviews over the past 18 months with current and former American, European and Israeli officials involved in the program, as well as a range of outside experts. None would allow their names to be used because the effort remains highly classified, and parts of it continue to this day.
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These officials gave differing assessments of how successful the sabotage program was in slowing Irans progress toward developing the ability to build nuclear weapons. Internal Obama administration estimates say the effort was set back by 18 months to two years, but some experts inside and outside the government are more skeptical, noting that Irans enrichment levels have steadily recovered, giving the country enough fuel today for five or more weapons, with additional enrichment. Whether Iran is still trying to design and build a weapon is in dispute. The most recent United States intelligence estimate concludes that Iran suspended major parts of its weaponization effort after 2003, though there is evidence that some remnants of it continue. Iran initially denied that its enrichment facilities had been hit by Stuxnet, then said it had found the worm and contained it. Last year, the nation announced that it had begun its own military cyberunit, and Brig. Gen. Gholamreza Jalali, the head of Irans Passive Defense Organization, said that the Iranian military was prepared to fight our enemies in cyberspace and Internet warfare. But there has been scant evidence that it has begun to strike back. The United States government only recently acknowledged developing cyberweapons, and it has never admitted using them. There have been reports of one-time attacks against personal computers used by members of Al Qaeda, and of contemplated attacks against the computers that run air defense systems, including during the NATO-led air attack on Libya last year. But Olympic Games was of an entirely different type and sophistication. It appears to be the first time the United States has repeatedly used cyberweapons to cripple another countrys infrastructure, achieving, with computer code, what until then could be accomplished only by bombing a country or sending in agents to plant explosives. The code itself is 50 times as big as the typical computer worm, Carey Nachenberg, a vice president of Symantec, one of the many groups that have dissected the code, said at a symposium at Stanford University in April. Those forensic investigations into the inner workings of the code, while picking apart how it worked, came to no conclusions about who was responsible. A similar process is now under way to figure out the origins of another cyberweapon called Flame that was recently discovered to have attacked the computers of Iranian officials, sweeping up information from those machines. But the computer code appears to be at least five years old, and American officials say that it was not part of Olympic Games. They have declined to say whether the United States was responsible for the Flame attack. Mr. Obama, according to participants in the many Situation Room meetings on Olympic Games, was acutely aware that with every attack he was pushing the United States into new territory, much as his predecessors had with the first use of atomic weapons in the 1940s, of intercontinental missiles in the 1950s and of drones in the past decade. He repeatedly expressed concerns that any American acknowledgment that it was using cyberweapons even under the most careful and limited circumstances
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could enable other countries, terrorists or hackers to justify their own attacks. We discussed the irony, more than once, one of his aides said. Another said that the administration was resistant to developing a grand theory for a weapon whose possibilities they were still discovering. Yet Mr. Obama concluded that when it came to stopping Iran, the United States had no other choice. If Olympic Games failed, he told aides, there would be no time for sanctions and diplomacy with Iran to work. Israel could carry out a conventional military attack, prompting a conflict that could spread throughout the region. A Bush Initiative The impetus for Olympic Games dates from 2006, when President George W. Bush saw few good options in dealing with Iran. At the time, Americas European allies were divided about the cost that imposing sanctions on Iran would have on their own economies. Having falsely accused Saddam Hussein of reconstituting his nuclear program in Iraq, Mr. Bush had little credibility in publicly discussing another nations nuclear ambitions. The Iranians seemed to sense his vulnerability, and, frustrated by negotiations, they resumed enriching uranium at an underground site at Natanz, one whose existence had been exposed just three years before. Irans president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, took reporters on a tour of the plant and described grand ambitions to install upward of 50,000 centrifuges. For a country with only one nuclear power reactor whose fuel comes from Russia to say that it needed fuel for its civilian nuclear program seemed dubious to Bush administration officials. They feared that the fuel could be used in another way besides providing power: to create a stockpile that could later be enriched to bomb-grade material if the Iranians made a political decision to do so. Hawks in the Bush administration like Vice President Dick Cheney urged Mr. Bush to consider a military strike against the Iranian nuclear facilities before they could produce fuel suitable for a weapon. Several times, the administration reviewed military options and concluded that they would only further inflame a region already at war, and would have uncertain results. For years the C.I.A. had introduced faulty parts and designs into Irans systems even tinkering with imported power supplies so that they would blow up but the sabotage had had relatively little effect. General James E. Cartwright, who had established a small cyberoperation inside the United States Strategic Command, which is responsible for many of Americas nuclear forces, joined intelligence officials in presenting a radical new idea to Mr. Bush and his national security team. It involved a far more sophisticated cyberweapon than the United States had designed before. The goal was to gain access to the Natanz plants industrial computer controls. That required leaping the electronic moat that cut the Natanz plant off from the Internet called the air gap, because it physically
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separates the facility from the outside world. The computer code would invade the specialized computers that command the centrifuges. The first stage in the effort was to develop a bit of computer code called a beacon that could be inserted into the computers, which were made by the German company Siemens and an Iranian manufacturer, to map their operations. The idea was to draw the equivalent of an electrical blueprint of the Natanz plant, to understand how the computers control the giant silvery centrifuges that spin at tremendous speeds. The connections were complex, and unless every circuit was understood, efforts to seize control of the centrifuges could fail. Eventually the beacon would have to phone home literally send a message back to the headquarters of the National Security Agency that would describe the structure and daily rhythms of the enrichment plant. Expectations for the plan were low; one participant said the goal was simply to throw a little sand in the gears and buy some time. Mr. Bush was skeptical, but lacking other options, he authorized the effort. Breakthrough, Aided by Israel It took months for the beacons to do their work and report home, complete with maps of the electronic directories of the controllers and what amounted to blueprints of how they were connected to the centrifuges deep underground. Then the N.S.A. and a secret Israeli unit respected by American intelligence officials for its cyberskills set to work developing the enormously complex computer worm that would become the attacker from within. The unusually tight collaboration with Israel was driven by two imperatives. Israels Unit 8200, a part of its military, had technical expertise that rivaled the N.S.A.s, and the Israelis had deep intelligence about operations at Natanz that would be vital to making the cyberattack a success. But American officials had another interest, to dissuade the Israelis from carrying out their own pre-emptive strike against the Iranian nuclear facilities. To do that, the Israelis would have to be convinced that the new line of attack was working. The only way to convince them, several officials said in interviews, was to have them deeply involved in every aspect of the program. Soon the two countries had developed a complex worm that the Americans called the bug. But the bug needed to be tested. So, under enormous secrecy, the United States began building replicas of Irans P-1 centrifuges, an aging, unreliable design that Iran purchased from Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani nuclear chief who had begun selling fuel-making technology on the black market. Fortunately for the United States, it already owned some P-1s, thanks to the Libyan dictator, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. When Colonel Qaddafi gave up his nuclear weapons program in 2003, he turned over the centrifuges he had bought from the Pakistani nuclear ring, and they were placed in storage at a weapons laboratory in Tennessee. The military and intelligence officials overseeing Olympic Games borrowed some for what they termed destructive testing, essentially building a virtual
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replica of Natanz, but spreading the test over several of the Energy Departments national laboratories to keep even the most trusted nuclear workers from figuring out what was afoot. Those first small-scale tests were surprisingly successful: the bug invaded the computers, lurking for days or weeks, before sending instructions to speed them up or slow them down so suddenly that their delicate parts, spinning at supersonic speeds, self-destructed. After several false starts, it worked. One day, toward the end of Mr. Bushs term, the rubble of a centrifuge was spread out on the conference table in the Situation Room, proof of the potential power of a cyberweapon. The worm was declared ready to test against the real target: Irans underground enrichment plant. Previous cyberattacks had effects limited to other computers, Michael V. Hayden, the former chief of the C.I.A., said, declining to describe what he knew of these attacks when he was in office. This is the first attack of a major nature in which a cyberattack was used to effect physical destruction, rather than just slow another computer, or hack into it to steal data. Somebody crossed the Rubicon, he said. Getting the worm into Natanz, however, was no easy trick. The United States and Israel would have to rely on engineers, maintenance workers and others both spies and unwitting accomplices with physical access to the plant. That was our holy grail, one of the architects of the plan said. It turns out there is always an idiot around who doesnt think much about the thumb drive in their hand. In fact, thumb drives turned out to be critical in spreading the first variants of the computer worm; later, more sophisticated methods were developed to deliver the malicious code. The first attacks were small, and when the centrifuges began spinning out of control in 2008, the Iranians were mystified about the cause, according to intercepts that the United States later picked up. The thinking was that the Iranians would blame bad parts, or bad engineering, or just incompetence, one of the architects of the early attack said. The Iranians were confused partly because no two attacks were exactly alike. Moreover, the code would lurk inside the plant for weeks, recording normal operations; when it attacked, it sent signals to the Natanz control room indicating that everything downstairs was operating normally. This may have been the most brilliant part of the code, one American official said. Later, word circulated through the International Atomic Energy Agency, the Vienna-based nuclear watchdog, that the Iranians had grown so distrustful of their own instruments that they had assigned people to sit in the plant and radio back what they saw. The intent was that the failures should make them feel they were stupid, which is what happened, the participant in the attacks said. When a few centrifuges failed, the Iranians would close down whole stands that linked
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164 machines, looking for signs of sabotage in all of them. They overreacted, one official said. We soon discovered they fired people. Imagery recovered by nuclear inspectors from cameras at Natanz which the nuclear agency uses to keep track of what happens between visits showed the results. There was some evidence of wreckage, but it was clear that the Iranians had also carted away centrifuges that had previously appeared to be working well. But by the time Mr. Bush left office, no wholesale destruction had been accomplished. Meeting with Mr. Obama in the White House days before his inauguration, Mr. Bush urged him to preserve two classified programs, Olympic Games and the drone program in Pakistan. Mr. Obama took Mr. Bushs advice. The Stuxnet Surprise Mr. Obama came to office with an interest in cyberissues, but he had discussed them during the campaign mostly in terms of threats to personal privacy and the risks to infrastructure like the electrical grid and the air traffic control system. He commissioned a major study on how to improve Americas defenses and announced it with great fanfare in the East Room. What he did not say then was that he was also learning the arts of cyberwar. The architects of Olympic Games would meet him in the Situation Room, often with what they called the horse blanket, a giant foldout schematic diagram of Irans nuclear production facilities. Mr. Obama authorized the attacks to continue, and every few weeks certainly after a major attack he would get updates and authorize the next step. Sometimes it was a strike riskier and bolder than what had been tried previously. From his first days in office, he was deep into every step in slowing the Iranian program the diplomacy, the sanctions, every major decision, a senior administration official said. And its safe to say that whatever other activity might have been under way was no exception to that rule. But the good luck did not last. In the summer of 2010, shortly after a new variant of the worm had been sent into Natanz, it became clear that the worm, which was never supposed to leave the Natanz machines, had broken free, like a zoo animal that found the keys to the cage. It fell to Mr. Panetta and two other crucial players in Olympic Games General Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Michael J. Morell, the deputy director of the C.I.A. to break the news to Mr. Obama and Mr. Biden. An error in the code, they said, had led it to spread to an engineers computer when it was hooked up to the centrifuges. When the engineer left Natanz and connected the computer to the Internet, the American- and Israeli-made bug failed to recognize that its environment had changed. It began replicating itself all around the world. Suddenly, the code was exposed, though its intent would not be clear, at least to ordinary computer users.
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We think there was a modification done by the Israelis, one of the briefers told the president, and we dont know if we were part of that activity. Mr. Obama, according to officials in the room, asked a series of questions, fearful that the code could do damage outside the plant. The answers came back in hedged terms. Mr. Biden fumed. Its got to be the Israelis, he said. They went too far. In fact, both the Israelis and the Americans had been aiming for a particular part of the centrifuge plant, a critical area whose loss, they had concluded, would set the Iranians back considerably. It is unclear who introduced the programming error. The question facing Mr. Obama was whether the rest of Olympic Games was in jeopardy, now that a variant of the bug was replicating itself in the wild, where computer security experts can dissect it and figure out its purpose. I dont think we have enough information, Mr. Obama told the group that day, according to the officials. But in the meantime, he ordered that the cyberattacks continue. They were his best hope of disrupting the Iranian nuclear program unless economic sanctions began to bite harder and reduced Irans oil revenues. Within a week, another version of the bug brought down just under 1,000 centrifuges. Olympic Games was still on. A Weapons Uncertain Future American cyberattacks are not limited to Iran, but the focus of attention, as one administration official put it, has been overwhelmingly on one country. There is no reason to believe that will remain the case for long. Some officials question why the same techniques have not been used more aggressively against North Korea. Others see chances to disrupt Chinese military plans, forces in Syria on the way to suppress the uprising there, and Qaeda operations around the world. Weve considered a lot more attacks than we have gone ahead with, one former intelligence official said. Mr. Obama has repeatedly told his aides that there are risks to using and particularly to overusing the weapon. In fact, no countrys infrastructure is more dependent on computer systems, and thus more vulnerable to attack, than that of the United States. It is only a matter of time, most experts believe, before it becomes the target of the same kind of weapon that the Americans have used, secretly, against Iran. This article is adapted from Confront and Conceal: Obamas Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power, to be published by Crown on Tuesday.
Date Collected: 6/4/2012 Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/01/world/middleeast/obamaordered-wave-of-cyberattacks-against-iran.html?pagewanted=
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1.5.2.2. Iran Confirms Attack by New Data Virus (back) May 29, 2012 Iran Confirms Attack by New Data Virus By THOMAS ERDBRINK TEHRAN The computers of high-ranking Iranian officials appear to have been penetrated by a data-mining virus called Flame, in what may be the most destructive cyberattack on Iran since the notorious Stuxnet virus, an Iranian cyberdefense organization confirmed on Tuesday. In a message posted on its Web site, Irans Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center warned that the virus was dangerous. An expert at the organization said in a telephone interview that it was potentially more harmful than the 2010 Stuxnet virus, which destroyed several centrifuges used for Irans nuclear enrichment program. In contrast to Stuxnet, the newly identified virus is designed not to do damage but to collect information secretly from a wide variety of sources. Flame, which experts say could be as much as five years old, was discovered by Iranian computer experts. In a statement about Flame on its Web site, Kaspersky Lab, a Russian producer of antivirus software, said that the complexity and functionality of the newly discovered malicious program exceed those of all other cyber menaces known to date. The virus bears special encryption hallmarks that an Iranian cyberdefense official said have strong similarities to previous Israeli malware. Its encryption has a special pattern which you only see coming from Israel, said Kamran Napelian, an official with Irans Computer Emergency Response Team. Unfortunately, they are very powerful in the field of I.T. While Israel never comments officially on such matters, its involvement was hinted at by top officials there. Anyone who sees the Iranian threat as a significant threat its reasonable that he will take various steps, including these, to harm it, said the vice prime minister and strategic affairs minister, Moshe Yaalon, in a widely quoted interview with Israels Army Radio on Tuesday. In a speech Tuesday night, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not mention Flame specifically, but he did include computer viruses as one of five critical types of threats Israel faces, saying: We are investing a great deal of money in that, human capital and financial capital. I expect these investments to yield a great deal in the coming years. Mr. Napelian said that Flame seemed designed to mine data from personal computers and that it was distributed through USB sticks rather than the Internet, meaning that a USB has to be inserted manually into at least one computer in a network. This virus copies what you enter on your keyboard; it monitors what you see on your computer screen, Mr. Napelian said. That includes collecting passwords, recording sounds if the computer is connected to a microphone, scanning disks for specific files and monitoring Skype.
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Those controlling the virus can direct it from a distance, Mr. Napelian said. Flame is no ordinary product. This was designed to monitor selected computers. Mr. Napelian said he was not authorized to disclose how much damage Flame had caused, but guessed the virus had been active for the past six months and was responsible for a massive data loss. Iran says it has developed antivirus software to combat Flame, something that international antivirus companies have yet to do, since they have just become aware of its existence. One of the most alarming facts is that the Flame cyberattack campaign is currently in its active phase, and its operator is consistently surveilling infected systems, collecting information and targeting new systems to accomplish its unknown goals, Alexander Gostev, chief security expert at Kaspersky Lab, said on the companys Web site. Those close to Irans leaders said that the virus was tantamount to an attack. I am no virus expert, and my computer seems to be working said Sadollah Zarei, a columnist for the state newspaper, Kayhan, but I know this is covert warfare, aimed at weakening us. Jodi Rudoren contributed reporting from Tel Aviv.
Date Collected: 5/29/2012 Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/30/world/middleeast/iranconfirms-cyber-attack-by-new-virus-called-flame.html?hp& pagewanted=print
1.5.3. U.S. Says 2 Slain in Raid Were Qaeda (back) May 29, 2012 U.S. Says 2 Slain in Raid Were Qaeda By ROD NORDLAND KABUL, Afghanistan American military officials said on Tuesday that two militants killed in eastern Kunar Province on Sunday were members of Al Qaeda. One of the militants was Sakhr al-Taifi, according to a statement from the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force that described him as Al Qaedas second-ranking leader in Afghanistan. However, there are no known published references to Mr. Taifi, and nobody by that name (or by two pseudonyms given by the military, Mushtaq and Nasim) appears on the official United Nations blacklist of Qaeda terrorists, which has several hundred names. Most of the groups significant figures are believed to be based in Pakistan or Yemen. NATOs statement said the two were killed in a precision airstrike after they had
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been identified. A spokesman for ISAFs Joint Command, Capt. Justin Brockhoff, said that Mr. Taifi had connections with Taliban leaders and exercised influence on them, as well as controlling multiple Al Qaeda terrorists. He said the militarys information came from information gathered through combined intelligence gathering. The second man killed was not identified by the military. Elsewhere in Afghanistan, a suicide bomber in eastern Nangarhar Province detonated his explosives prematurely while apparently en route to the district governors office in Momand District on Tuesday, according to the governor, Shakrullah Durani. Mr. Durani said two people were killed and three severely wounded, all of them passengers in the bombers car. He said the bomber had apparently offered them rides in an effort to disguise his attack.
Date Collected: 5/29/2012 Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/30/world/asia/us-says-qaedamilitants-killed-in-afghanistan.html?hp&pagewanted=print
1.5.4. In Timbuktu, Harsh Change Under Islamists (back) June 2, 2012 In Timbuktu, Harsh Change Under Islamists By ADAM NOSSITER BAMAKO, Mali Isolated for centuries by the harsh desert that surrounds it, Timbuktu now finds itself even more cut off from the rest of the world. Rebels who captured the city in northern Mali in April have imposed a form of hard-edged Islamic rule, prompting many residents to flee in fear and changing the face of what had been a tolerant and easygoing destination that drew tourists from around the world. Women are now forced to wear full, face-covering veils. Music is banned from the radio. Cigarettes are snatched from the mouths of pedestrians. And the look of the ancient mud-brick town is changing. A centuries-old monument, the shrine of a 15th-century saint, has been defaced; bars have been demolished; and black flags have been hung around town to honor Ansar Dine, or Defenders of the Faith, the radical Islamist movement that emerged from the desert and turned life upside down. There is no liberty, said Abdoulaye Ahmed, a tailor who fled Timbuktu and came to Malis capital last week. He added that the Islamist rebels are constantly circulating with their guns. This is scaring people. The town is sinister. The situation is said to be especially troubling for women in Timbuktu. Women are living in terrible fear, said Baba Aicha Kalil, a well-known civic activist who
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is still living in the town, which once had a population of more than 50,000 but has experienced a significant exodus since the rebels moved in. They want to put a veil on everything, Mrs. Kalil said, reached over a crackly telephone line from Timbuktu, which is about 440 miles northeast of Bamako, at the edge of the Sahara. They are everywhere, everywhere with their guns. All of northern Mali, an area the size of France, has been in the hands of a loose coalition of Islamists and nomadic Tuareg rebels since late March, when resistance by the Malian Army collapsed after a coup dtat by junior military officers in the capital. Since the takeover, however, the Islamists of Ansar Dine, supported by Al Qaeda, have gained the upper hand over the Tuaregs, and they are aggressively promoting their brand of Islamic law, or Shariah. Black billboards with Koranic inscriptions have replaced advertisements, residents said. Leading figures in the regional Qaeda affiliate, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, have also been spotted there. A Swiss missionary who was among the last Westerners in Timbuktu was kidnapped in April by gunmen said to have been acting under the orders of the Qaeda faction. She was later released, after negotiations. The area is not considered safe for Westerners, and Western journalists have not been there since the Islamist takeover. The Qaeda offshoot has taken in tens of millions of dollars in ransom payments from Western governments over the last decade, and it was still holding over a dozen hostages in the desert, those with knowledge of the region said. Mrs. Kalil said that when the Islamists encountered young people of the opposite sex together, they forced them to marry on the spot. We dont want the Shariah here, she said. Truly we are living in misery. Personally, I am deeply concerned. Alpha Sane Hadara, a farmer with deep ties to the region, said: They have brought the population to heel through terror. Ive seen them beat up youth watching television in the street. Restrictions range from the petty to the serious. In the northern town of Gao, Ansar Dine followers defaced the ear of a woman for wearing a short skirt and flogged men who drank alcohol and were accused of petty theft, Human Rights Watch reported. Mahaman Alidji Tour, a history teacher at a leading school in Timbuktu, said in a telephone interview, Theyve told us our trousers cant descend to our ankles. He added, If they find you with a cigarette, they will take you directly to the Islamic police. A spokesman for Ansar Dine in Timbuktu angrily rejected the picture drawn by residents and said that if people were fleeing the town, it was because they feared the United States might bomb the Islamists who now controlled it.
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We have bad memories of you because of Falluja and Afghanistan, the spokesman, Sanda Ould Boumana, said by telephone. You are not well placed to talk about liberty, when we see what is happening in Guantnamo, Iraq and Palestine. Mr. Boumana added that when you accept that there is Islam, you have to accept that there is Shariah. He said that if Shariah obliges us to cover women, we are obliged to apply it, adding, We have not chosen you as judge. Al Qaeda are our Islamic brothers, Mr. Boumana said. Ever since the coup, Mali, a nation of 14 million that until recently was considered a democratic model in Africa, has been in administrative chaos, with a power vacuum in the south and a would-be breakaway state in the north. Two weeks ago, the juntas leader, Capt. Amadou Sanogo, promised to step down, lured by a lucrative deal brokered by Ecowas, a regional alliance of West African states. But the disarray here in the capital was underscored two weeks ago when the interim president, Dioncounda Traor, was severely beaten by pro-junta activists. He was sent to Paris for treatment, and had not returned. In a recent report, Human Rights Watch documented a large number of rapes and other abuses immediately after the Tuareg takeover, by armed men speaking the Tuareg language and driving cars with the flag of the Tuareg rebel movement, which is known as the M.N.L.A. Among the disturbing accounts, a 14-year-old girl in Gao described being abducted from her home and repeatedly gang-raped by M.N.L.A. rebels. Although the M.N.L.A. is still present in the principal northern towns, Timbuktu, Gao and Kidal and has thoroughly looted the former offices of the Mali government in Timbuktu, down to the air-conditioners, according to residents it is Ansar Dine, led by a former Tuareg military commander named Iyad Ag Ghaly, that is aggressively promoting its brand of Shariah and exercising most authority. Mr. Boumana, the Ansar Dine spokesman, said that the Islamists were now negotiating with the M.N.L.A. over power sharing, and that Ansar Dine did not reject the rebel groups notion of an independent state in northern Mali, which it calls Azawad, as long as there is total application of Shariah. But he quickly dismissed the idea that Ansar Dine might retreat or give up control of Timbuktu. It is not our preoccupation that other states accept us, Mr. Boumana said. And in any event, there is no military threat to the northern rebels supremacy. The Malian Army, weak and fragmented after the coup, is in no position to take on the rebels and Ansar Dine, diplomats in the capital said. The United Nations said that more than 160,000 Malians have fled to the neighboring countries of Mauritania, Burkina Faso and Niger, with many living in refugee camps, and that more than 140,000 were displaced in Mali itself. In the meantime, residents say that Timbuktu has taken on the air of a ghost town.
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Most stores have closed, and streets are deserted. With banks also shuttered, money is running out. The traditional evening gatherings of young men who drink tea and chat on doorsteps have dispersed. Mr. Hadara, the farmer, encountered at a cafe in Bamako, was nonetheless preparing to head back to Timbuktu. Its my city, he said, and its my land.
Date Collected: 6/4/2012 Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/03/world/africa/in-timbuktumali-rebels-and-islamists-impose-harsh-rule.html?pagewanted=print
1.5.5. China Warns West Against Using Force in Syria (back) June 4, 2012 China Warns West Against Using Force in Syria By KEITH BRADSHER HONG KONG The Chinese Communist Partys official newspaper warned on Monday against Western military intervention in Syria, in a strongly worded reminder that China, like Russia, is wary of forceful international action even as the civil conflict in Syria grows much bloodier. The Syrian question should be resolved by the Syrian people, said a commentary in Peoples Daily. Outside powers do not have the right to stick their hands in. The position taken by Peoples Daily echoed remarks by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who said Friday that while he saw worrying signs of an emerging civil war in Syria, he was also opposed to Western intervention. You cannot do anything by force, Mr. Putin said. China and Russia, both members of the United Nations Security Council, have long opposed Western military intervention. The recent comments came as Arab and Western governments appeared to be considering a more muscular response to the carnage in Syria after a massacre in the village of Houla on May 25 left 108 people dead, 49 of them children. Arab and Western governments have blamed government-backed militiamen for the attack, but the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, denied in a speech on Sunday that his government was responsible. The commentary in Peoples Daily, one of the longest and clearest expositions of Chinas stance in recent weeks, called for more patience in the hope that the peace plan proposed by Kofi Annan, the envoy to Syria for the United Nations and the Arab League, would succeed. International society, instead of losing confidence and patience, should support Annans peace plan and not propagate Annans plan is dead around the world out of ulterior motives, the official commentary said. The Syrian governments opponents accuse it of continuing extensive military action against unarmed or lightly armed domestic opponents despite the peace plan.
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The similar stances of China and Russia toward Syria and its government underline a persistent and broader challenge for the West. Senior officials in Beijing and Moscow share a deep distaste for any hint of civil disorder in their own countries, and have been reluctant to countenance international action even against governments elsewhere that use military force against their own people to restore order. The Peoples Daily column appeared on the 23rd anniversary of the military assault on unarmed protesters in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. Hundreds died there, according to former officials who were in office at the time. But the newspaper column did not allude to the anniversary; the subject is still strictly banned in mainland media. A candlelight vigil has been scheduled for Monday evening in Hong Kong, while the police are on alert in mainland China against any attempt to commemorate the anniversary.
Date Collected: 6/4/2012 Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/04/world/middleeast/china-warnswest-against-using-force-in-syria.html?pagewanted=print
1.6. Africa
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1.6.1. Bomber Strikes Nigerian Church, as Attacks on Christians Mount (back) June 3, 2012 Bomber Strikes Nigerian Church, as Attacks on Christians Mount By . REUTERS YELWA, Nigeria (Reuters) A suicide bomber set off a car full of explosives at a church in northern Nigeria on Sunday, killing at least 12 people in the latest attack on Christian worshipers, witnesses said. Security officers at a roadblock nearby said the bomber forced his car through the checkpoint and drove into the church in Yelwa in the state of Kebbi. I had just left after the morning service and was out of the church when I heard a loud explosion, said Aliku Jon, a mechanic. I rushed back and there were dozens of people lying in pools of blood. Many were injured, including two police officers. It was not clear who was responsible for the attack, although churches have been singled out this year by the militant Islamist group Boko Haram, which has increasingly used suicide bombers. Boko Haram has been blamed for hundreds of killings in bombings or gun attacks over the past two years. It says it is fighting to reinstate an ancient Islamic caliphate in northern Nigeria that would impose stricter Shariah law. It has become the chief security threat in Nigeria, Africas top oil producer, and has linked up with other Islamist groups in the region like Al Qaedas North
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African wing. But its sphere of influence is far from oil-producing facilities in southern Nigeria. The sect had been less active in recent weeks, as a security crackdown in the north led to the deaths and arrests of several commanders.
Date Collected: 6/4/2012 Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/04/world/africa/bomber-strikesnigerian-church-as-attacks-on-christians-mount.html?pagewanted=print
1.6.2. Nigeria: Kidnapped German Killed During Raid on Suspected Terrorists

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May 31, 2012 Nigeria: Kidnapped German Killed During Raid on Suspected Terrorists By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Kidnappers stabbed a captive German engineer to death on Thursday as soldiers unaware of the hostages presence raided a home in northern Nigeria, officials said, five months after the mans abduction by members of a group linked to Al Qaeda. Soldiers initiated the raid on Thursday morning in Kano, the northern city where gunmen abducted the German, Edgar Fritz Raupach, on Jan. 26. A military spokesman, Lt. Iweah Ikedichi, said soldiers attacked a home where senior commanders of the terrorist element were believed to be meeting. The soldiers killed five people suspected of being terrorists in a firefight, Lieutenant Ikedichi said. Soldiers later discovered Mr. Raupachs handcuffed body while searching the house, he said. A security official said the kidnappers stabbed Mr. Raupach before trying to escape. Date Collected: 6/4/2012 Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/01/world/africa/nigeria-kidnappedgerman-killed-during-raid-on-suspected-terrorists.html?pagewanted=print
1.7. New Zealand Signs Partnership Agreement With NATO June 4, 2012 New Zealand Signs Partnership Agreement With NATO By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
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WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) New Zealand has signed a partnership agreement with NATO. The agreement states that despite its distance from member nations, New Zealand can partner with NATO on issues like terrorism, military training and intelligence. Prime Minister John Key says the agreement formalizes and builds on a relationship that goes back to 2003, when New Zealand first sent troops to Afghanistan. About 145 New Zealand troops remain in Afghanistan but they are to pull out next year.
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Key signed the agreement Monday in Brussels with NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen. The agreement comes as New Zealand seeks a non-permanent spot on the U.N. Security Council during 2015-16. New Zealand has also been strengthening military ties with the U.S.
Date Collected: 6/4/2012 Source: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2012/06/04/world/asia/ap-as-newzealand-nato-treaty.html?hp&pagewanted=print
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Al Qaeda-Related and Other Articles, Collected 6/4/12

Date Collected: 6/4/2012 Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamasleadership-in-war-on-al-qaeda.html?pagewanted=all&pagewanted= print

Date Collected: 5/29/2012 Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/assessingobamas-counterterrorism-record.html?pagewanted=print

Date Collected: 5/29/2012 Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/28/us/28ihtletter28.html?pagewanted=print

Date Collected: 5/29/2012 Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/us/hard-by-canada-borderfears-of-crackdown-on-latino-immigration.html?hpw&pagewanted=print

Date Collected: 5/29/2012 Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/28/world/at-west-pointasking-if-a-war-doctrine-was-worth-it.html?pagewanted=print

Date Collected: 6/4/2012 Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/05/nyregion/sabirhanhasanoff-pleads-guilty-to-qaeda-support.html?pagewanted=print

Date Collected: 5/29/2012

Date Collected: 6/4/2012 Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/03/arts/design/sept-11-memorialmuseums-fraught-task-to-tell-the-truth.html?pagewanted=print

Date Collected: 6/4/2012 Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/05/world/europe/four-convictedin-terror-plot-against-danish-paper.html?pagewanted=print

Date Collected: 6/4/2012 Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/01/business/us-and-europe-agreeon-air-cargo-rules.html?pagewanted=print

1.4. Middle East

Date Collected: 6/4/2012 Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/04/world/middleeast/assadcondemns-houla-massacre-blaming-outside-terrorists.html?pagewanted=print

Date Collected: 5/29/2012 Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/30/world/middleeast/kofi-annanmeets-with-bashar-al-assad.html?hp&pagewanted=print

Date Collected: 5/29/2012 Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/middleeast/syria-pressedon-peace-plan-after-un-condemnation.html?pagewanted=print

Date Collected: 6/4/2012 Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/05/world/asia/drone-strikekills-14-in-pakistan.html?hp&pagewanted=print

Because sometimes it looks to us like youre not.

Date Collected: 5/29/2012 Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/28/world/asia/frustrationsas-us-and-pakistan-fail-to-mend-ties.html?pagewanted=print

Date Collected: 6/4/2012 Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/01/world/middleeast/obamaordered-wave-of-cyberattacks-against-iran.html?pagewanted=

Date Collected: 5/29/2012 Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/30/world/middleeast/iranconfirms-cyber-attack-by-new-virus-called-flame.html?hp& pagewanted=print

Date Collected: 5/29/2012 Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/30/world/asia/us-says-qaedamilitants-killed-in-afghanistan.html?hp&pagewanted=print

Date Collected: 6/4/2012 Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/03/world/africa/in-timbuktumali-rebels-and-islamists-impose-harsh-rule.html?pagewanted=print

Date Collected: 6/4/2012 Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/04/world/middleeast/china-warnswest-against-using-force-in-syria.html?pagewanted=print

Date Collected: 6/4/2012 Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/04/world/africa/bomber-strikesnigerian-church-as-attacks-on-christians-mount.html?pagewanted=print

1.6.2. Nigeria: Kidnapped German Killed During Raid on Suspected Terrorists

Date Collected: 6/4/2012 Source: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2012/06/04/world/asia/ap-as-newzealand-nato-treaty.html?hp&pagewanted=print

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