History > 2006 > USA > Terrorism (IV)

Protesters against torture Tuesday outside the White House.

Photograph: Doug Mills/The New York Times

Bush Signs New Rules to Prosecute Terror Suspects

NYT        18.10.2006

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/18/washington/18detain.html

Alleged al Qaeda agent Padilla

claims torture

Tue Oct 31, 2006 2:10 PM ET
Reuters
By Tom Brown

MIAMI (Reuters) - Lawyers for alleged al Qaeda operative Jose Padilla have asked a Florida judge to dismiss the terrorism case against him, saying he was tortured and force-fed psychedelic drugs while held at a U.S. military brig for more than 3-1/2 years.

"The torture took myriad forms, each designed to cause pain, anguish, depression and ultimately, the loss of will to live," Padilla's attorney's said in the motion for dismissal filed in Miami federal court earlier this month.

"Often he had to endure multiple interrogators who would scream, shake and otherwise assault Mr. Padilla," his lawyers said. "Additionally, Mr. Padilla was given drugs against his will, believed to be some form of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) or phencyclidine (PCP), to act as a sort of truth serum during his interrogations."

Presiding U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke on Monday gave the U.S. attorney's office until November 14 by to respond to Padilla's allegations, according to an order released by the court.

Padilla, a U.S. citizen arrested in Chicago in May 2002, was initially accused of plotting to set off a radioactive "dirty bomb."

He was held in a brig at the Naval Weapons Station in Charleston, South Carolina for three years and seven months, without charge, before being abruptly transferred to a federal lock-up in Miami and brought into the official legal system.

While in the brig, Padilla was "tortured by the United States government without cause or justification," his lawyers said, adding that his treatment was "shocking to even the most hardened conscience."

The forms of torture included isolation, prolonged sleep deprivation, exposure to extremely cold temperatures and shackling in "stress positions" for hours at a time, they said.

Human rights advocates have made similar allegations on behalf of suspects held by U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Vice President Dick Cheney last week fended off allegations he had endorsed an interrogation technique called "waterboarding" when he told a radio station that a "dunk in water" might be useful in interviewing terrorists.

But the allegation that Padilla was forced to consume mind altering drugs -- reminiscent of CIA-financed mind-control experiments in the late 1950s -- appeared to be one of the first such accusations in connection with Washington's war on terrorism.

Padilla and two codefendants are scheduled to go on trial in January on charges of conspiracy and aiding terrorists abroad.

The Bush administration dropped an "enemy combatant" designation against Padilla last year, charging him instead with being part of a North American support cell for global Islamic extremism.

The charges against Padilla, a convert to Islam whom prosecutors said attended an al Qaeda training camp, were added to an existing case against four other men charged in Florida.

Two of them, Adham Amin Hassoun and Kifah Wael Jayyousi, are in custody and are scheduled to be tried with Padilla, although their attorneys have asked for separate trials.

If convicted on all the charges, they could face life in prison.

    Alleged al Qaeda agent Padilla claims torture, R, 31.10.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2006-10-31T190956Z_01_N31202725_RTRUKOC_0_US-SECURITY-PADILLA.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C5-domesticNews-3

U.S. Seen Balking at Challenge

by Islamist Web

October 28, 2006
By REUTERS
Filed at 11:21 a.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Bush administration is failing to counter Islamist online propaganda that could propel militancy into the next generation, experts say.

From the Middle East, Asia and Europe, Islamists have built an expansive Internet library of sophisticated texts on the ideology that underpins violence against the West and other enemies, analysts and intelligence officials said.

``It's a steady, stealthy indoctrination aimed at creating a whole new generation of jihadists. And scandalously, it is unopposed,'' said Stephen Ulph, who studies the Islamist Web for the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington think tank.

E-books and online pamphlets, with titles such as ``39 Ways to Serve and Participate in Jihad,'' encourage the growth of home-grown militant cells across the world, including in such Western countries as Canada and Britain, the experts believe.

U.S. intelligence is reluctant to mount an effective counteroffensive by recruiting Islamic experts from overseas to rebut and even ridicule Islamist authors, according to experts and U.S. officials.

``Anything exposing the West as a supporter would destroy Islamic opposition to the jihadis,'' one intelligence official on condition of anonymity. ``We are completely out of luck with the Muslim world, across the board.''

Several agencies including the CIA, FBI and the office of U.S. National Intelligence Director John Negroponte are part of a closely guarded effort to monitor the content of Islamist Web sites.

But the program is hampered by stringent security standards that make it hard for intelligence agencies to employ Islamist experts from the Arab world.

``Even if we think we understand elements of the religion, we certainly don't understand elements of their cultural communications,'' the intelligence official said.

POP JIHAD PROPAGANDA

Others warned that U.S. policy-makers could be making a fatal error by ignoring doctrinal online texts that lay bare the substance of a violent Islamist mind-set.

``In order to be able to fight something, you have first of all to understand what is going on. And I don't think that at this stage they understand it well enough to fight it,'' said Rita Katz, director of the SITE Institute, which tracks and analyzes international terrorism.

In a presentation this week, Ulph said doctrinal material accounts for 60 percent of Islamist Web content and most texts are in Arabic. But many have begun to reappear in English and other European languages in an apparent appeal to Muslims living in the West.

One of the most popular is the 1,600-page treatise, ``Call to Global Islamic Resistance,'' a comprehensive guide to militant life by al Qaeda ideologue Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, also known as Abu Musab al-Suri, who was captured in Pakistan a year ago.

The Islamist Web became a center for al Qaeda operational planning, training and fund-raising after the fall of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

Thousands of Islamist Web sites have since sprouted, many appealing to disenfranchised Muslim youth with so-called Pop Jihad propaganda that can include films of beheadings and spectacular attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq.

But Ulph and others, including former intelligence officials, say the future of Islamist militancy depends on the more sophisticated doctrinal material, capable of guiding the life of the committed militant from childhood to martyrdom.

``The focus has been on how these guys use the Internet for fund-raising and operations,'' said Jarret Brachman of the Combating Terrorism Center at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York. ``Only recently have we realized there are strategic implications.''

    U.S. Seen Balking at Challenge by Islamist Web, NYT, 28.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/washington/politics-security-internet-islamists.html

White House denies

Cheney endorsed 'water boarding'

Updated 10/28/2006 12:58 AM ET
AP
USA Today

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Bush said Friday the United States does not torture prisoners, trying to calm a controversy created when Vice President Dick Cheney embraced the suggestion that a "dunk in water" might be useful to get terrorist suspects to talk.

Human rights groups complained that Cheney's words amounted to an endorsement of a torture technique known as water boarding, in which the victim believes he is about to drown. The White House insisted Cheney was not talking about water boarding but would not explain what he meant.

Less than two weeks before midterm congressional elections, the White House was put on the defensive as news of Cheney's remark spread. Bush was asked about it at a White House photo opportunity with NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer. Presidential spokesman Tony Snow was pelted with questions at two briefings with reporters.

Democrats also pointed to Cheney's statement.

"Is the White House that was for torture before it was against it, now for torture again?" tweaked Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass. Kerry, in his unsuccessful campaign for the presidency, had been skewered by Bush for saying he had voted for war funds before he voted against them.

Cheney triggered the flap in an interview Tuesday by radio broadcaster Scott Hennen of WDAY in Fargo, N.D. Hennen said callers had told him, "Please, let the vice president know that if it takes dunking a terrorist in water, we're all for it, if it saves lives."

"Would you agree a dunk in water is a no-brainer if it can save lives?" Hennen asked.

"Well, it's a no-brainer for me, but for a while there I was criticized as being the vice president for torture," Cheney said. "We don't torture. That's not what we're involved in."

On Friday, Cheney called reporters to his cabin on Air Force Two as he returned from a trip to Missouri and South Carolina.

"I did not talk about specific techniques and won't," the vice president said. "I didn't say anything about water boarding. ... He (Hennen) didn't even use that phrase."

"I have said that the interrogation program for a selected number of detainees is very important," Cheney said. "(It) has been I think one of the most valuable intelligence programs we have. I believe it has allowed us to prevent terrorist attacks against the United States."

At his photo op, Bush said, "This country doesn't torture, we're not going to torture. We will interrogate people we pick up off the battlefield to determine whether or not they've got information that will be helpful to protect the country."

Snow, at a morning meeting with reporters, tried to brush off the controversy.

"You know as a matter of common sense that the vice president of the United States is not going to be talking about water boarding. Never would, never does, never will," Snow said. "You think Dick Cheney's going to slip up on something like this? No, come on."

Snow said Cheney did not interpret the question as referring to water boarding and the vice president did not make any comments about water boarding. He said the question put to Cheney was loosely worded.

In water boarding, a prisoner is tied to a board with his head slanted down and a towel covering his face. Water is then poured on his face to create the sensation of drowning.

The administration has repeatedly refused to say which techniques it believes are permitted under a new law. Asked to define a dunk in water, Snow said, "It's a dunk in the water."

At a televised briefing later, the questions turned tougher and more pointed.

"The vice president says he was talking in general terms about a questioning program that is legal to save American lives, and he was not referring to water boarding," Snow said.

Yet, the spokesman conceded, "I can understand that people will look at this and draw the conclusions that you're trying to draw."

Larry Cox, executive director of Amnesty International USA, said in a statement, "What's really a no-brainer is that no U.S. official, much less a vice president, should champion torture. Vice President Cheney's advocacy of water boarding sets a new human rights low at a time when human rights is already scraping the bottom of the Bush administration barrel."

Human Rights Watch said Cheney's remarks were "the Bush administration's first clear endorsement" of water boarding.

A new Army manual, released last month, bans torture and degrading treatment of prisoners, explicitly barring water boarding and other procedures.

    White House denies Cheney endorsed 'water boarding', UT, 28.10.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-10-27-cheney_x.htm

Some 200 human remains found

at NY Ground Zero

Thu Oct 26, 2006 6:40 PM ET
Reuters

NEW YORK (Reuters) - More than 200 pieces of human remains have been found at the World Trade Center site since the discovery of bones by workers clearing rubble from manholes sparked a new search a week ago, an official said on Thursday.

The Twin Towers in New York City were hit by hijacked passenger jets and collapsed on September 11, 2001, killing 2,749 people. Some 1,150 of the victims have either not been identified or not recovered.

A spokeswoman for New York's Chief Medical Examiner's Office said that on Thursday an additional nine pieces of bone were found, bringing the total for the week to 202 pieces, ranging from 1 inch to 12 inches in length.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has defended the clean-up of the site, although he said he was at a loss to explain why the bones had not been discovered sooner.

The manholes where the bones were first discovered last Thursday had been covered by a temporary road built after the attacks to allow in cranes to start removing debris.

"Who is going to be held responsible for the emotional, mental and physical damage this has done to the families?" said Adele Milanowycz on putitaboveground.org, a Web site posting updates for families on the searches.

"Why is this not front-page news? We read about bodies being found in Iraq in mass graves and we are horrified. How is this not horrifying the world?" wrote Milanowycz, who lost her son Greg in the attacks.

Bloomberg has said the city would not shut down construction while searches continued on the western edge of the site where commemoration ceremonies for the families of victims are held on each anniversary of the attacks.

The discovery is the latest setback for the rebuilding effort at the World Trade Center site. Construction of a new Freedom Tower began in April after bickering over financing, security and design delayed plans.

    Some 200 human remains found at NY Ground Zero, R, 26.10.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=newsOne&storyID=2006-10-26T223939Z_01_N26191887_RTRUKOC_0_US-SEPT11-REMAINS.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C2-TopNews-newsOne-4

Young Muslim Woman

Awaits Decision That She Says

Carries Prospect of Mutilation

October 26, 2006
The New York Times
By NINA BERNSTEIN

Adama Bah’s schoolmates were jubilant when she returned to 10th grade at Heritage High School in Manhattan in May 2005 after six weeks in a distant juvenile detention center. Her release put to rest the federal government’s unexplained assertion that Adama, a popular 16-year-old who wore jeans under her Islamic garb, was a potential suicide bomber.

But a year and a half later, with many of her friends planning proms and applying to college, Ms. Bah, now 18, was still wearing an electronic ankle bracelet and tethered to a 10 p.m. government curfew, restrictions that were conditions of her release. And she was still facing deportation to Guinea, where she has not lived since she was 2.

Today, at a closed hearing in Manhattan’s federal building, she will plead for political asylum from Guinea’s entrenched practice of female genital mutilation, which has marked all the women in her extended family, including her mother. An immigration judge could decide her fate on the spot.

“I’m worried about being sent back,” Ms. Bah said on Tuesday in her first extended interview about the lasting consequences of a case that briefly became a cause célèbre in the debate over government vigilance and the protection of individual liberties. “I’m worried about being separated from my family. This is all I have left now — what hasn’t been taken.”

Officially, she and a 16-year-old Bangladeshi girl arrested in Queens the same day were detained solely because their childhood visas were no longer valid. That remains the only reason Ms. Bah is in deportation proceedings, and the sole legal basis for an order last year that released the other girl, Tashnuba Hayder, on the condition that she leave the country immediately.

Even now, Ms. Bah says she has no idea whether her slight acquaintance with Ms. Hayder was what caused agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation to hold her for questioning. Though a document provided by a federal agent at the time said the F.B.I. considered the girls “an imminent threat” to national security, it provided no evidence, and officials refused to discuss the matter.

“Why me?” she asked, before her volunteer lawyers warned that a judicial order limits what she can say about the experience. “Nobody answers, why me?”

She has had little time to dwell on the question, however, because she has been struggling to replace her father as the family’s primary breadwinner. Her father, a cabdriver who was arrested along with her and held on immigration violations, stayed in detention until his deportation last month. Her mother, illiterate and speaking little English, soon lost the family business, a trinket stand.

But under the strictures of the government’s curfew, Ms. Bah found she could not continue her education and at the same time earn enough to feed her four younger siblings, all American citizens. Last year, she dropped out of Heritage High, where teachers had praised her intellectual curiosity and generous spirit, and took up office work at Bellevue Hospital Center for $6.75 an hour.

Her income fell far short of needs. And though a few community agencies tried to help with diapers for the youngest and trips to a food pantry, she said, the financial crisis deepened. In the end, it was an Islamic political activist in Maryland who came through, taking three of Ms. Bah’s siblings into his home for the summer, and paying $500 a month toward household expenses so she could attend summer school and re-enroll in Heritage this fall.

“We were looking for other options, but nothing was working out,” Ms. Bah said. She added that she knew little about the politics of the activist, Mauri Saalakhan, 53, whom she met for the first time last fall when she and her mother stopped to pray at a downtown mosque after a session with lawyers at Hughes, Hubbard & Reed, which is handling her asylum case without fee.

Her family’s association with Mr. Saalakhan raised eyebrows this spring when he invited her to join spectators at the trial of a Pakistani immigrant accused — and eventually convicted — of plotting to blow up the Herald Square subway station in 2004. Ms. Bah, who was recognized by some reporters in the courtroom, said later that she went out of curiosity because people told her that the young man’s case was like hers. It was not, she said, and when she realized that, she did not go back.

Mainstream Islamic groups have looked askance at her family’s link to Mr. Saalakhan, an African-American who often accuses such groups of timidity, and whose criticism of government policies dates to a youthful stint with the Black Panthers. But, she said, “He’s somebody who stepped up and helped” when others seemed afraid or only offered services like counseling instead of money to pay the rent.

For his part, Mr. Saalakhan says he is “a provocateur for truth and justice,” who loves America and has police officers in his family. He was happy to have Ms. Bah’s siblings Mohamed, 14, Mariama, 12, and Abdoul, 8, join him, his wife and teenage daughter for the summer near Washington, where he directs the Peace and Justice Foundation, “a grass-roots human rights organization.”

“What our government has put this family through is unconscionable,” he said.

But the volunteer lawyers who took over Ms. Bah’s asylum case last fall are leery of any effort to make her emblematic of larger issues, when government lawyers are raising no national security questions.

“Right now all we have is a straightforward asylum claim,” said Bryan Lonegan, a lawyer with the Legal Aid Society’s immigration unit who is advising Hughes, Hubbard lawyers on the case. “This is a life and death situation for her.”

The petition draws a grim picture of what she would face in Guinea as a young woman with intact genitalia who opposes the painful and dangerous practice of genital mutilation.

In Guinea, “If a girl’s genitals are not mutilated, she is considered dirty, repulsive, unfit for marriage and motherhood, and devoid of morals and monetary value,” an expert, Hanny Lightfoot-Klein, wrote in an affidavit. Male relatives consider themselves dishonored, and will beat her until she submits, the affidavit added. “Elder women perform the procedure on dimly lit floors, with dull kitchen knives, glass shards, scissors or razor blades,” the affidavit said.

Ms. Bah’s mother, Aissatou Dalanda Bah, who has separately applied for asylum, had her clitoris excised by her grandmother with a kitchen knife when she was about 10, the court papers said. Later, she watched helplessly as one of Adama’s cousins bled to death from the procedure.

For Ms. Bah, who grew up absorbing American values and believing she was a legal immigrant, the prospect is terrifying and unreal. Genital mutilation “has nothing to do with my religion,” she said. “You can’t just circumcise a woman against her will, to take away her pleasure. That’s my right as a woman.” Her fear has become part of a day-to-day struggle to hold the family together, she said, as she repeatedly interrupted the interview to respond to her youngest brother, Saeed, 2.

“In front of people,” she said, “you have to be this happy person, even though inside, it hurts.” At night, alone, she said, she allows herself to cry when she thinks about her family’s collapse, and about her judge: “Somebody who’s meeting me once, and making a decision for my lifetime.”

    Young Muslim Woman Awaits Decision That She Says Carries Prospect of Mutilation, NYT, 26.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/26/nyregion/26suicide.html

Medical Views of 9/11’s Dust

Show Big Gaps

October 24, 2006
The New York Times
By ANTHONY DePALMA

In 2004, Kenneth R. Feinberg, special master of the federal Sept. 11 Victim Compensation Fund, awarded $2.6 million to the family of a downtown office worker who died from a rare lung disease five months after fleeing from the dust cloud released when the twin towers fell. That decision made the worker, Felicia Dunn-Jones, a 42-year-old lawyer, the first official fatality of the dust, and one of only two deaths to be formally linked to the toxic air at ground zero.

The New York City medical examiner’s office, however, has refused to put her on its official list of 9/11 victims, saying that by its standards there was insufficient medical evidence to link her death to the dust.

Mrs. Dunn-Jones’s case shows how difficult it can be to prove a causal connection with any scientific certainty — and how even government agencies can disagree. With thousands of people now seeking compensation and treatment for dust exposure, the debate about the relationship between the toxic particles and disease will be a central issue in the flood of Sept. 11-related lawsuits. Health experts are starting to document the connections, but any firm conclusion is still years away.

Most of the suits involve workers who spent weeks and months on the pile at ground zero and say the city and other agencies failed to protect them from the toxic dust. Others involve residents who say they were made sick by dust that settled in their homes. Mrs. Dunn-Jones was among those downtown office workers caught in the initial fallout.

The question that arises in all these cases is straightforward: Can a link between the dust and disease be proved with scientific certainty? The answer is anything but simple.

“Certainty is a word we always dance around,” said Joseph Graziano, associate dean for research at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. For him, searching for the cause of disease is like developing film. “At first you see a faint image of what the real picture is,” Dr. Graziano said, “and then, over time, you see it with much more clarity. In these relatively early times, the image is still faint.”

It can take decades to approach any degree of certainty. For instance, only after years of observation did doctors agree that there was a strong link between asbestos and diseases like asbestosis and mesothelioma.

In legal cases, “a reasonable degree of medical certainty” is considered the gold standard in making a causal connection. Last week, a federal judge cleared the way for thousands of workers’ lawsuits to go to trial. When the cases are heard, any proof that does not meet that legal standard is likely to be challenged.

But outside the courtroom, scientists say, even a less rigorous link could be sufficient to warrant expanding the range of illnesses covered by treatment programs, and to serve as the basis for issuing cautions to people in high-risk groups. When the health effects are too new or the evidence is too vague for a strong link, lesser indicators like the concurrence of different studies have to be relied on.

For example, nearly every ground zero study shows that workers and residents exposed to the dust in the hours after the collapse have suffered the worst health problems. The consistency in that data has helped doctors monitor and treat people since Sept. 11.

And it may also help explain why Mrs. Dunn-Jones, a dynamic civil rights lawyer with the United States Department of Education, became so sick so quickly. As she was swallowed by a whirling dust plume filled with asbestos, benzene, dioxin and other hazards when the first tower fell, all she could do was cover her nose and mouth as she fled from her office one block north of the World Trade Center.

It was night by the time she got home to Staten Island. “She was in a state of shock,” her husband, Joseph Jones, recalled. Her clothes were still dusty, but he didn’t pay much attention. “I was just so happy to see her,” he said.

For the next few months, life returned to normal, until Mrs. Dunn-Jones developed a cough. In January 2002, the cough grew worse. On Feb. 10, she suddenly stopped breathing and died.

Mr. Jones, 54, an assistant manager at a Brooklyn pharmacy, was stunned. Then, when he received the official death certificate months later, he was shocked to see an unfamiliar word — sarcoidosis.

“Even though I was in the medical field, I had never heard of it,” he said.

After reading several medical reports on sarcoidosis — including one by Dr. David J. Prezant, deputy chief medical officer of the New York Fire Department — Mr. Jones and his lawyer, Richard H. Bennett, wondered if Mrs. Dunn-Jones’s mysterious death could be linked to 9/11 dust because sarcoidosis, which produces microscopic lumps called granulomas, on vital organs, is often associated with exposure to environmental hazards.

They took the case to Mr. Feinberg and the victim compensation fund, which gave $7 billion to the families of those killed or injured on 9/11.

Mr. Feinberg initially expressed doubts about the claim and demanded to see definitive medical evidence linking Mrs. Dunn-Jones’s sarcoidosis to the dust.

Dr. Prezant, who declined to be interviewed for this article, was one of two experts who testified at a hearing conducted by Mr. Feinberg. In the first four years after 9/11, he found 20 cases of sarcoidosis in the Fire Department, a rate of 80 per 100,000 in the first year (with treatment, all are now stable), compared with a national rate of fewer than 6 per 100,000, according to the American Thoracic Society.

The other expert was Dr. Alan M. Fein, a clinical professor of medicine at the New York University School of Medicine. He, too, was skeptical at first, but he said he changed his mind after reviewing Mrs. Dunn-Jones’s medical record, including the autopsy report. “I’m comfortable saying her death was caused by exposure to the dust,” Dr. Fein said in an interview.

In March 2004, Mr. Feinberg agreed, making Mrs. Dunn-Jones’s death the only dust-related fatality recognized by the fund. Only one other death has been formally linked to the dust: In April, a New Jersey coroner determined that James Zadroga, 34, a New York City police detective, had died of a disease similar to sarcoidosis, also caused by his exposure to ground zero dust.

Mr. Jones welcomed the settlement from the victim compensation fund, and believes that his wife was a 9/11 victim as surely as if she had died in the towers. He sent Mr. Feinberg’s decision to the city’s chief medical examiner, Dr. Charles S. Hirsch, and asked that his wife be put on the official list so that her name could be read on Sept. 11. Dr. Hirsch refused, a spokeswoman said, because the available evidence did not prove the connection “with a reasonable degree of medical certainty”— the highest medical standard generally used in legal cases.

Mr. Feinberg’s decision had been based on a different standard: a preponderance of medical evidence.

That was proof enough for the Staten Island Memorial Commission, which has engraved Mrs. Dunn-Jones’s name on the bone-white memorial on the island’s north shore.

Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, who has fought to get medical care for 9/11 victims, said the contradictory conclusions about Mrs. Dunn-Jones’s death underscored the importance of deciding who has the final say on causal links. “They should be medical decisions, not political ones,” she said, suggesting that city officials may have a conflict of interest in making such determinations since the city is a defendant in the ground zero workers’ lawsuits.

She has introduced a bill to reopen the federal compensation fund to people whose illnesses became known after the original eligibility period ended in 2003.

In the effort to collect definitive data, Dr. John Howard, the federal government’s 9/11 health coordinator, recently circulated a draft set of autopsy protocols that directs pathologists to use a standard of proof that establishes both biological plausibility and unequivocal evidence of a causal connection to the dust. But doctors and elected officials have said those standards are so restrictive that almost no death could be linked to the dust for years to come. A spokesman for Dr. Howard said the guidelines were being refined.

In another effort, the Mount Sinai Medical Center, which has screened thousands of ground zero workers, has begun a long-term study of the incidence of diseases to identify any rates that exceed national averages.

“Right now we’re in the process of confirming every case of interstitial lung disease, every cancer, every sarcoidosis that has been reported to us by responders in their visits,” said Dr. Jeanne M. Stellman, director of the public health program at Columbia University, is leading the data collection project.

“We are actively trying to determine whether Detective Zadroga and Mrs. Dunn-Jones are alone,” she said. “And we are trying to find a way to do this that is scientifically correct while also being responsive to the needs and fears of the communities involved.”

    Medical Views of 9/11’s Dust Show Big Gaps, NYT, 24.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/24/nyregion/24toxic.html?hp&ex=1161748800&en=d7e60713715acbc4&ei=5094&partner=homepage

More human remains

uncovered at WTC site

Updated 10/21/2006 9:14 PM ET
AP
USA Today

NEW YORK (AP) — Workers recovered more human remains Saturday from several manholes as the city began a new search for Sept. 11 victims.

The search was ordered after the surprise discovery of dozens of bones in an abandoned manhole this week.

Utility and city officials on Saturday hand-removed material from other manholes after tearing into the pavement on a service road along the site's western edge. It was then sifted onsite by forensic officials for fragments of human remains, said deputy mayor Edward Skyler.

City officials said that about 15 more pieces of remains had been recovered, bringing the total to nearly 100 this week.

Upset relatives of some Sept. 11 victims called for a new federally-led search for remains in and around ground zero after construction workers discovered bones in one manhole excavated as part of work on a transit hub, officials said.

The 80 bones and fragments found earlier this week ranged from a little less than an inch to 12 inches long, said Ellen Borakove, spokeswoman for the city medical examiner's office. The bones possibly include ribs, arms, legs and vertebra, she said.

The active search for the dead ended at the site in 2002 after a massive cleanup of 1.5 million tons of debris. About 20,000 pieces of human remains were found, but the DNA in thousands of those pieces was too damaged by heat, humidity and time to yield matches in the many tests forensic scientists have tried over the years.

More than 40% of the 2,749 Sept. 11 victims in New York have never been identified.

    More human remains uncovered at WTC site, UT, 21.10.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-10-21-wtc-bones_x.htm

Bush, the Prisoners and Our Rights

(7 Letters)

October 20, 2006
The New York Times

To the Editor:

“A Dangerous New Order” (editorial, Oct. 19) is a much-needed reminder of how much the Bush administration has eroded the Constitution. It has replaced habeas corpus for all with a system that operates at the whim of the executive branch.

The actual “war on terror” declared by this administration has been waged ineptly at best. The invasion of Iraq, repeatedly stated to be part of that war, has created more dangers for America both overseas and at home.

This, the pandering of fear, and the craven passage of the military tribunals law, provide proof that the “war on terror” is actually the war against the Constitution.

This is a “war” we can stop by voting.

Carl Ian Schwartz
Paterson, N.J., Oct. 19, 2006

To the Editor:

Re “President Signs New Rules to Prosecute Terror Suspects” (news article, Oct. 18):

It is astounding that the president of the United States could state that “it is a rare occasion when a president can sign a bill he knows will save American lives.” This referred to the bill he signed allowing coercive interrogation.

The implication, of course, is that since the detainees must be guilty, we can treat them any way we want to. It assumes that we will get all their information regarding illegal terrorist activities and will save American lives.

Of course, we can hold them, interrogate them, cause suffering and harm to them and their families even if they are innocent, even if they know nothing about terrorist activities and even if they are taken by mistake.

It is an abomination that President Bush has been allowed to frame this discussion in terms of how we treat the guilty.

Without due process, we don’t know if they are guilty. The president has signed a bill that fundamentally allows the United States government to torture possibly innocent people.

The question was never about how we treat the guilty (although that is a valid question in a country that has a Constitution). The question should always have been about how we determine guilt and are we harming the innocent.

Elaine M. Edelman
Staten Island, Oct. 18, 2006

To the Editor:

Re “A Dangerous New Order” (editorial, Oct. 19):

Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, speaking for the Bush administration, states cynically that those who oppose the new Military Commissions Act “would gingerly pamper the terrorists who plan to destroy innocent Americans’ lives.”

This demagogy is insulting to our intelligence.

The issue is not about coddling evil; it is about preserving fundamental checks and balances.

While many of those held at Guantánamo are bad men intent on bad deeds, hundreds of other detainees have been quietly released without charges or apology or compensation after years of captivity and harassment.

If these individuals had been granted basic habeas corpus rights, this shameful injustice would have never occurred.

To those who say it’s better to be safe than sorry, I’d ask:

If it were your father or son who was spirited away, jailed without charges and repeatedly intimidated, degraded and, yes, tortured despite his innocence, would you still think that our government was acting in your best interests?

Robert J. Inlow
Charlottesville, Va., Oct. 19, 2006

To the Editor:

It is really sad to see that the president and the Republican Congress are unwittingly doing exactly what the terrorists aspire to do themselves: chipping away at the pillars of liberty and freedom of the Western world, one law at a time.

In this particular instance, the American judicial system has been torpedoed.

The president and the Republicans may have won a battle with the Democrats, but they should take a step back to see that we are slowly losing the war on terror by compromising on the principles and ideals laid down in the United States Constitution.

Kiran Achyutuni
Bangalore, India, Oct. 19, 2006

To the Editor:

As an Australian citizen concerned about the welfare of my fellow citizen David Hicks, who is one of the hundreds of inmates at Guantánamo Bay, I am horrified at the new American law on military tribunals.

Your editorial quite correctly points out that these new laws do nothing for the reputation of the United States as a democratic society and should be of great concern to all Americans.

The idea that if you don’t like the decision of the umpire (the Supreme Court, in this case), you just change the rules to suit your purpose may work on some sporting fields, but it should not be used by a national government to undermine the justice system.

Lorie Werner
Melbourne, Australia
Oct. 19, 2006

To the Editor:

What a sad day for the United States, and for the rest of the world witnessing this event, that a bill has been signed into law that allows torture.

Yes, the United States has been a shining light of freedom and democracy; now it is quickly becoming a rogue state, characterized by a lust for war, hoping to achieve the quelling of dissent by indoctrination inside the United States and by violence outside of it.

A very sad day.

Kees Schepers
Antwerp, Belgium, Oct. 19, 2006

To the Editor:

“It can’t happen here.”

It did.

Geoff Carver
Bensberg, Germany, Oct. 19, 2006

    Bush, the Prisoners and Our Rights (7 Letters), NYT, 20.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/20/opinion/l20detain.html

Editorial

A Dangerous New Order

October 19, 2006
The New York Times

Once President Bush signed the new law on military tribunals, administration officials and Republican leaders in Congress wasted no time giving Americans a taste of the new order created by this unconstitutional act.

Within hours, Justice Department lawyers notified the federal courts that they no longer had the authority to hear pending lawsuits filed by attorneys on behalf of inmates of the penal camp at Guantánamo Bay. They cited passages in the bill that suspend the fundamental principle of habeas corpus, making Mr. Bush the first president since the Civil War to take that undemocratic step.

Not satisfied with having won the vote, Dennis Hastert, the speaker of the House, quickly issued a statement accusing Democrats who opposed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 of putting “their liberal agenda ahead of the security of America.” He said the Democrats “would gingerly pamper the terrorists who plan to destroy innocent Americans’ lives” and create “new rights for terrorists.”

This nonsense is part of the Republicans’ scare-America-first strategy for the elections. No Democrat advocated pampering terrorists — gingerly or otherwise — or giving them new rights. Democratic amendments to the bill sought to protect everyone’s right to a fair trial while providing a legal way to convict terrorists.

Americans will hear more of this ahead of the election. They also will hear Mr. Bush say that he finally has the power to bring to justice a handful of men behind the 9/11 attacks. The truth is that Mr. Bush could have done that long ago, but chose to detain them illegally at hidden C.I.A. camps to extract information. He sent them to Guantánamo only to stampede Congress into passing the new law.

The 60 or so men at Guantánamo who are now facing tribunals — out of about 450 inmates — also could have been tried years ago if Mr. Bush had not rebuffed efforts by Congress to create suitable courts. He imposed a system of kangaroo courts that was more about expanding his power than about combating terrorism.

While the Republicans pretend that this bill will make America safer, let’s be clear about its real dangers. It sets up a separate system of justice for any foreigner whom Mr. Bush chooses to designate as an “illegal enemy combatant.” It raises insurmountable obstacles for prisoners to challenge their detentions. It does not require the government to release prisoners who are not being charged, or a prisoner who is exonerated by the tribunals.

The law does not apply to American citizens, but it does apply to other legal United States residents. And it chips away at the foundations of the judicial system in ways that all Americans should find threatening. It further damages the nation’s reputation and, by repudiating key protections of the Geneva Conventions, it needlessly increases the danger to any American soldier captured in battle.

In the short run, voters should see through the fog created by the Republican campaign machine. It will be up to the courts to repair the harm this law has done to the Constitution.

    A Dangerous New Order, NYT, 19.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/19/opinion/19thu1.html

Utility workers find remains at WTC site

Updated 10/19/2006 9:39 PM ET
AP
USA Today

NEW YORK (AP) — Human remains that appear to be from World Trade Center victims were found by utility workers in a manhole at the northern edge of the site, a Port Authority official said Thursday.

A Consolidated Edison crew doing excavation of the manhole at street level found the remains, some as big as arm or leg bones, said Steve Coleman, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the site.

Con Ed said it entered the site Wednesday to remove material from two manholes that had been damaged and abandoned after the 2001 collapse of the twin towers.

Crews hauled the excavated materials Wednesday to a work center more than a mile away, as is customary, Con Edison said. On Thursday morning, a contractor working for the Port Authority realized the materials contained remains, Con Edison spokesman Chris Olert said, and the medical examiner's office was contacted.

Five years after 2,749 people died in the Sept. 11 World Trade Center attacks, families of about 1,150 victims still do not know whether their loved ones' remains were recovered.

During the excavation of the 110-story twin towers, which began the evening of the attacks and lasted for nine months, about 20,000 pieces of human remains were found. The DNA in thousands of those pieces, many small enough to slip into a test tube, was too damaged by heat, humidity and time to yield matches in the many tests forensic scientists have tried over the years.

The city told victims' families last year that it was putting the project of making identifications on hold, possibly for years, until new DNA technology was developed. Last month, the company contracted to work on the bone fragments said advances had been made and new identifications would be forthcoming.

Besides the new remains found by the utility workers, the lab also has recently received hundreds of bone fragments discovered on the roof of a building just south of where the trade center had stood. The building had been condemned since the attacks and was about to be torn down when workers found the bone pieces.

Charles Wolf, whose wife Katherine's remains were never recovered, said he wants an independent party to take over the remains search. He showed up at the Con Edison site after being contacted by television stations Thursday.

"We've got a problem right now," Wolf said. "Where else are we going to find them next?"

Contributing: Associated Press writers Sara Kugler and Amy Westfeldt contributed to this report.

    Utility workers find remains at WTC site, UT, 19.10.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/sept11/2006-10-19-wtc-remains_x.htm

Bush Signs New Rules to Prosecute Terror Suspects

October 18, 2006
The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON, Oct. 17 — President Bush signed legislation Tuesday that creates new rules for prosecuting and interrogating terrorism suspects, a move Mr. Bush said would enable the Central Intelligence Agency to resume a once-secret program to question the most dangerous enemy operatives in the war on terror.

“It is a rare occasion when a president can sign a bill he knows will save American lives,” Mr. Bush said at a ceremony in the East Room of the White House.

He called the bill “a way to deliver justice to the terrorists we have captured.”

But the C.I.A. program is unlikely to resume immediately, because the law authorizes Mr. Bush to issue an executive order clarifying the rules for questioning high-level detainees and the order has not been written. Many experts believe that the harsh techniques the C.I.A. has used, including extended sleep deprivation and water-boarding, which induces a feeling of drowning, will not be allowed.

With the midterm elections three weeks away, Mr. Bush hoped to use the bill signing to turn the political debate back to the war on terrorism, a winning issue for Republicans, and away from scandals like the Mark Foley case, which have dominated the news in recent weeks. The president said he was signing the measure “in memory of the victims of September the 11th.”

The law sets up a system of military commissions for trying terrorism suspects that would allow evidence to be withheld from defendants in certain instances. It also strips the federal courts of jurisdiction to hear petitions from noncitizens for writs of habeas corpus, effectively preventing detainees from going to court to challenge their confinement.

More than 500 habeas suits are pending in federal court, and Justice Department officials said Tuesday that they would move swiftly to dismiss them under the new law. That will inevitably spark a challenge by civil liberties lawyers, who regard the habeas-stripping provision as unconstitutional, a view shared by many Democrats on Capitol Hill.

“Congress had no justification for suspending the writ of habeas corpus, a core value in American law, in order to avoid judicial review that prevents government abuse,” said Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the senior Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The bill signing drew protests outside the White House from human rights advocates, some dressed in orange jumpsuits of the sort worn by detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. They gathered around a black coffin painted with the words “the corpse of habeas corpus”; some were arrested after refusing to move away from the White House gates.

Joining the president at the bill signing were senior members of his war cabinet, including Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Gen. Michael V. Hayden, director of the C.I.A.. In an e-mail message to C.I.A. employees, General Hayden called the measure a “very public vote of confidence by Congress and the president in the skill and discipline of C.I.A.’s officers.”

Leading Republican lawmakers, among them Senators John W. Warner of Virginia and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who balked at the initial White House version of the bill and forced a much-publicized compromise, were also on hand. But the third leader of that Republican rebellion, Senator John McCain of Arizona, was noticeably absent.

Mr. McCain, a likely presidential contender in 2008, skipped the ceremony to go to Wisconsin to campaign for a Republican House candidate, John Gard, and was later headed to Sioux Falls, S.D., to address the Chamber of Commerce. A spokeswoman said the senator’s absence was “purely an issue of scheduling.”

The bill was prompted by a Supreme Court ruling, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, that invalidated the system of military commissions Mr. Bush had set up for trying terrorism suspects, saying they required Congressional authorization. The court also required suspects to be treated in accordance with a provision of the Geneva Conventions, Common Article 3, which prohibits cruel and inhumane treatment, including “outrages upon personal dignity.”

The ruling prompted Mr. Bush to acknowledge the existence of the secret C.I.A. program. Last month, he announced he was moving 14 high-level terrorism detainees out of C.I.A. custody and to the detention center at Guantánamo Bay. He called on Congress to pass a bill setting up military commissions and establishing new standards for interrogation so the C.I.A. program could go forward.

Neil A. Lewis contributed reporting.

    Bush Signs New Rules to Prosecute Terror Suspects, NYT, 18.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/18/washington/18detain.html

Iraqis Ask Why U.S. Forces Didn’t Intervene in Balad

October 17, 2006
The New York Times
By MICHAEL LUO

BAGHDAD, Oct. 16 — American military units joined with Iraqi forces on Monday in maintaining a fragile peace between Sunni and Shiite communities in Balad, a rural town north of the capital where an explosion of sectarian violence over the weekend left dozens dead.

In the aftermath of the reprisals, some residents of Balad asked why American troops had not intervened when the killings began in earnest on Saturday. One of the largest American military bases in Iraq, Camp Anaconda, which includes a sprawling air base that serves as the logistical hub of the war, is nearby.

“People are bewildered because of the weak response by the Americans,” said one Balad resident who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals. “They used to patrol the city every day, but when the violence started, we didn’t see any sign of them.”

The situation in Balad, about 50 miles north of Baghdad, appears, in stark form, to show the dilemma for American military commanders at a time when they are hastening the transfer of wide areas of the country to Iraqi forces. They are also insisting that those troops take the lead in quelling violence, leaving American forces to step in only when asked.

It also highlighted yet again the powerlessness of the Iraqi forces to stand in the way of such sectarian violence.

Killings also continued to besiege the capital on Monday with the discovery of at least 64 bodies across the city, and two car bomb attacks that appeared to kill 22 people. The American military, meanwhile, said Monday that five American service members were killed Sunday, bringing the toll this month to 58. One soldier was killed by a roadside bomb in Baghdad; two died in Kirkuk Province and two in Salahuddin Province.

Sectarian violence and retribution killings of the kind that unfolded in Balad over the weekend are the purview of the Interior Ministry, in charge of Iraq’s police forces, and the Iraqi government in general, said Lt. Col. Michael Donnelly, a spokesman for the Army’s Fourth Infantry Division, adding that responsibility for the Balad area was transferred from American military units to the Fourth Iraqi Army about a month ago.

The job of the United States military, he said, is to work “by, through and with” its Iraqi counterparts “to build further capacity to reduce the violence, and bring about stability.”

American military commanders reviewing what happened over the weekend concluded that the situation in Balad was best dealt with by the Iraqi armed forces, a senior American military official said.

The senior officer, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly on the subject, said that American commanders viewed the upheaval in Balad as a new test for the Shiite-dominated government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, who has come under American pressure to crack down on militias that have been responsible for much of the killing in the country.

The American military eventually provided what Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, a military spokesman, described as “quick reaction force assistance” to the Iraqi Army and the police in the area.

“We were waiting for a request from the Iraqi government,” he said.

It was unclear, however, when that request came. The sectarian killings began on Friday in the neighboring town of Dhuluiya, where the decapitated bodies of 14 Shiite workers from Balad were found. While the center of Balad is mostly Shiite, its outskirts and the neighboring area, including Dhuluiya, are overwhelmingly Sunni.

By the following day, groups of Shiite gunmen from Balad were setting up checkpoints and hunting down and killing dozens of Sunni Arab residents, the authorities said.

Overall, the bodies of some 31 Sunni Arab residents of the area were found during the weekend, said Qasim al-Qaisi, the director of Balad Hospital. Most of the killings took place on Saturday, the authorities said.

American troops did not arrive until late Sunday afternoon, taking up positions in the town center and on its outskirts, said Hamad al-Qaisi, governor of Salahuddin Province. By then, a curfew had been imposed on the town and the situation had mostly stabilized.

On Monday mortar rounds landed on Balad, injuring five civilians, a police official said. Otherwise, the town was mostly quiet. Shiite clerics broadcast appeals over loudspeakers for calm on Monday, urging residents not to attack their Sunni neighbors, residents said. The leader of one mosque even urged any Sunnis harmed in any attacks to visit the mosque and register a complaint, said a resident who asked not to be identified.

A meeting between the provincial governor, security officials, American commanders and tribal sheiks in Balad and Dhuluiya will be held Wednesday to discuss ways to defuse tensions in the area, a provincial government official said.

At least 60 Sunni families have fled Balad for neighboring Dhuluiya, said Adel al-Smaidaei, a representative of the Iraqi Islamic Party, the country’s leading Sunni political party.

The burst of violence in Balad, which had previously only dealt with relatively low levels of sectarian tension, came as American troops were continuing the largest series of sweeps in the nation’s capital since the invasion, in an attempt to stop sectarian bloodshed. Over the past year, American forces had gradually withdrawn from large areas of the capital, leaving security in the hands of the Iraqi Army and the police.

That policy, however, was followed by unhindered sectarian bloodletting, particularly after a bombing of a sacred Shiite shrine in Samarra in February, which prompted the American military command to move troops back to the capital.

The police in Baghdad reported the discovery of the 64 bodies, all of which appeared to have been shot at close range and showed signs of torture. In the largely Shiite neighborhood of Ur, two car bombs, one of which was aimed at a large Shiite funeral gathering, exploded almost simultaneously Monday evening, an Interior Ministry official said. The other bomb went off nearby, about 200 meters from a busy market.

At least 22 people were killed and 31 people wounded in the blasts, said Qasim al-Sweidi, an official at Imam Ali Hospital in nearby Sadr City, where the victims were taken.

Earlier in the day, a car bomb exploded in Suwayra, a neighborhood located southeast of Baghdad, killing 10 people and wounding 15 others, the official said.

The day’s toll in Baghdad included another killing, at least the 12th of its kind, of a victim linked to the court trying Saddam Hussein and his associates. Court officials said that the older brother of Munkith al-Faroun, chief prosecutor in the so-called Anfal trial that began in Baghdad in August, was shot dead by unknown assailants at his home in the western Baghdad suburb of Jamaa.

The officials said the brother, Emad al-Faroun, who is a legal adviser to Ahmad Chalabi, one of the most prominent Iraqi politicians in the period since the overthrow of Mr. Hussein, was killed by men who attacked him in the carport of his home. His wife and son, also shot in the attack, survived, the officials said.

On Monday, Mr. Hussein’s lawyers made public a letter they said they had been given by Mr. Hussein during a weekend consultation at Camp Cropper, the American-run detention center near the Baghdad airport, where he has been held during the trials.

Mr. Hussein used the letter to call on Iraqis to end the current wave of sectarian bloodletting and to focus attacks instead on “occupiers from far away who crossed the Atlantic Ocean under the inspiration of Zionism.” He added, “You should remember that your goal is to liberate your country from the invader’s forces and their followers, and that there should be no other issues to distract you from this goal.”

Reporting was contributed by Omar al-Neami, Hosham Hussein, Ali Adeeb, John F. Burns and Sabrina Tavernise.

    Iraqis Ask Why U.S. Forces Didn’t Intervene in Balad, NYT, 17.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/17/world/middleeast/17iraq.html

Editorial

Guilty Until Confirmed Guilty

October 15, 2006
The New York Times

When President Bush rammed the bill on military commissions through Congress, the Republicans crowed about creating a process that would be tough on terrorists but preserve essential principles of justice. “America can be proud,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, one of the bill’s architects.

Unfortunately, Mr. Graham was wrong. One of the many problems with the new law is that it will only make it harder than it already is to separate the real terrorists from the far larger group of inmates at Guantánamo Bay who were bit players in the Taliban or innocent bystanders. Mr. Graham and other supporters of this dreadful legislation seem to have forgotten that American justice does not merely deliver swift punishment to the guilty. It also protects the innocent.

Mr. Bush ignored that fact after 9/11, when he tried to put the prisoners of the war on terror beyond the reach of American law and the Geneva Conventions. For starters, he dispensed with one of the vital provisions of the conventions: that prisoners must be screened by a “competent tribunal” if there is any doubt about who they are and what role they played in hostilities. As a result, hundreds of men captured in Afghanistan and other countries were sent to Guantánamo Bay and other prisons, including the network of illegal C.I.A. detention camps, without any attempt to determine whether they were any sort of combatant, legal or illegal.

The Bush administration showed not the slightest interest in fixing this problem until the Supreme Court said in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld that the president cannot simply lock up anyone — even a foreign citizen — without giving him a real chance to challenge his detention before a “neutral decision maker.”

In response, Mr. Bush created Combatant Status Review Tribunals, which gave the most cursory possible reviews of the Gitmo detainees. These reviews took place years after the prisoners were captured. They permitted the use of hearsay evidence, evidence obtained through coercion and even torture, and evidence that was kept secret from the prisoner. The normal burden of proof was reversed: the tribunals presumed prisoners were justifiably detained and the prisoners had the burden of disproving government evidence — presuming they knew what it was in the first place.

The new law leaves this mockery of justice stronger. The Military Commissions Act of 2006 makes it virtually impossible to contest a status tribunal’s decision. It prohibits claims of habeas corpus — the ancient right of prisoners in just societies to have their detentions reviewed — or any case based directly or indirectly on the Geneva Conventions. Even if an appeal got to the single appeals court now authorized to hear it, the administration would very likely argue that it cannot be heard without jeopardizing secrets, as it has done repeatedly.

The new law dangerously expands the definition of illegal enemy combatant and allows Mr. Bush — and the secretary of defense — to give to anyone they choose the authority to designate a prisoner as an illegal combatant. It also allows Mr. Bush to go on squirreling prisoners away at secret C.I.A. camps where none of the rules apply.

Mr. Bush wants Americans to trust him to apply these powers only to truly dangerous men. Even if our system were based on that sort of personal power and not the rule of law, it would be hard to trust the judgment of a president and an administration whose records are so bad. The United States has yet to acknowledge that it kidnapped an innocent Canadian citizen and sent him to be abused in a Syrian prison. In another case, a German citizen has accused the United States of grabbing him off the streets of Macedonia, drugging him and sending him to Afghanistan, where he was brutally treated. Then there is the Ethiopian living in London who said he was grabbed by American agents and brutalized by Moroccan torturers until he confessed to plotting with Jose Padilla to set off a “dirty bomb.” Mr. Padilla was never charged with the crime. The Ethiopian remains at Guantánamo Bay.

Republicans who support the new law like to point out that it only covers foreigners. But Americans have never believed that human rights are just for Americans. Our nation is outraged when an authoritarian government jails an American, or one of its own citizens, on trumped-up charges and brings him or her before a phony court. Surely that is not the model we want to follow in our nation’s prisons.

    Guilty Until Confirmed Guilty, NYT, 15.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/15/opinion/15sun1.html

U.S. brings first treason case in over 50 years

Wed Oct 11, 2006 6:22 PM ET
Reuters
By James Vicini

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A California-born convert to Islam, accused of making a series of al Qaeda propaganda videos, became on Wednesday the first American charged with treason since the World War Two era, U.S. Justice Department officials said.

Fugitive Adam Gadahn, 28, who is believed to be in Pakistan, was accused of treason, which carries a maximum punishment of death, and providing material support to al Qaeda, they said.

According to the charges, Gadahn appeared in five videos broadcast between October 2004 and September 11, 2006, giving al Qaeda "aid and comfort ... with the intent to betray the United States."

"Gadahn gave himself to our enemies in al Qaeda for the purpose of being a central part of their propaganda machine," Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty told a news conference.

"By making this choice, we believe Gadahn committed treason -- perhaps the most serious offense for which any person can be tried under our Constitution," he said.

McNulty acknowledged that Gadahn appeared to be involved only in propaganda for the Islamic militant group, not in planning any attacks.

Gadahn converted to Islam from a Jewish-Christian family when he was 17 and a few years later moved to Pakistan. He was previously known as Adam Pearlman and grew up on a goat ranch outside Los Angeles.

The charges were contained in an indictment handed up in a federal court in California by a grand jury. The evidence against him in the indictment consisted entirely of the videos.

The FBI has been seeking to question Gadahn since May 2004. The FBI added him on Wednesday to its list of the most wanted terrorists and a U.S. State Department program offered up to a $1 million reward for information leading to his arrest.

In Los Angeles, Gadahn's aunt, Nancy Pearlman, declined to comment, saying, "We are not giving any interviews."

There were a number of treason cases after World War Two, including a trial in 1952, legal experts said. In one of the cases, an American woman, known as "Tokyo Rose," was convicted of treason and later pardoned. She died in Chicago last month.

Justice Department officials denied the case was timed to deflect attention from the fallout over lewd computer messages sent by a former Republican congressman to young male aides, a scandal that may help Democrats seize control of Congress in the November 7 elections.

BLOOD RUNNING IN THE STREETS

In the first video in October 2004, right before the presidential election, Gadahn announced he had joined al Qaeda and said that "the streets of America shall run red with blood," according to the indictment.

In another video in September 2005, around the anniversary of the September 11 attacks, Gadahn referred to "the blessed raids on New York and Washington," the indictment said.

He referred to more recent attacks in London and Madrid and stated, "Tomorrow, Los Angeles and Melbourne, Allah willing," according to the indictment.

It said he appeared earlier this past summer in a video that also contained statements from the top al Qaeda leaders, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri.

In a video broadcast on September 2, Gadahn encouraged American soldiers to "escape from the unbelieving Army and join the winning side."

In a video released on or about the fifth anniversary of the attacks, he praised the pilots who took control of the planes on September 11 and referred to the United States as "enemy soil," according to the indictment.

(Additional reporting by Rick Cowan)

    U.S. brings first treason case in over 50 years, R, 11.10.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2006-10-11T222116Z_01_N11240953_RTRUKOC_0_US-SECURITY-USA-QAEDA.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C5-domesticNews-2

U.S. weighs first treason charges in over 50 years

Wed Oct 11, 2006 1:36 PM ET
Reuters
By James Vicini

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A California-born convert to Islam could become the first American accused of treason since World War Two after he appeared in al Qaeda videos, sources familiar with the man's case said on Wednesday.

They said U.S. prosecutors were strongly considering bringing the charges, which carry a maximum punishment of death, against Adam Gadahn, 28, who is believed to be overseas and is not in U.S. custody.

The charges could come as early as Wednesday.

The U.S. Justice Department last brought treason charges, during the World War Two era, the sources said.

Gadahn, who is also known on the videos as Azzam the American, has been involved in a propaganda campaign of the Islamic militant group, the sources said. Some of the videos have threatened attacks against the United States.

He converted to Islam from a Judeo-Christian family when he was 17 and a few years later moved to Pakistan. He previously was known as Adam Pearlman and grew up on a goat ranch outside Los Angeles.

The FBI has sought to question him since May 2004.

Besides treason, prosecutors have prepared other criminal charges against Gadahn, the sources said. They declined to give specific details.

AL QAEDA

The sources denied the case was timed to deflect attention from the fallout over lewd computer messages sent by a former Republican congressman to young male aides, a scandal that may help Democrats seize control of Congress in November 7 election.

The FBI has said that Gadahn attended al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan, that he has been associated with al Qaeda's leaders and that he has done translations for al Qaeda.

His last video was posted on a Web site on September 2.

"If the Zionist crusader missionaries of hate and counter-Islam consultants like ... the crusader and chief George W. Bush were to abandon their unbelief and repent and enter into the light of Islam and turn their swords against the enemies of God, it would be accepted of them and they would be our brothers in Islam," Gadahn said in English.

Al Qaeda's second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahri, made a brief statement at the start of the tape urging viewers to listen carefully to the message.

U.S. officials believe Gadahn appeared in another video last year, right before the anniversary of the September 11 attacks, threatening al Qaeda attacks on Los Angeles and Melbourne, Australia.

They also believe Gadahn threatened attacks in a video released in October 2004, just before the U.S. presidential election.

    U.S. weighs first treason charges in over 50 years, R, 11.10.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2006-10-11T173524Z_01_N11240953_RTRUKOC_0_US-SECURITY-USA-QAEDA.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C5-domesticNews-2

N.Y. mosque leaders convicted of money laundering charges

Posted 10/11/2006 2:26 AM ET
AP
USA Today

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — Two mosque leaders arrested in a terrorism-related sting were convicted Tuesday of federal money laundering charges.

Yassin Aref, imam at the Masjid as-Salam mosque in Albany, and Mohammed Hossain, a pizzeria owner and a founder of the mosque, were never accused of being terrorists, but prosecutors said they laundered money in 2003-04 for an FBI informant.

They were accused of attempting to provide support to Jaish-e-Mohammed, a Pakistan-based group listed by the federal government as a terrorist organization.

Hossain was convicted on all 27 charges against him, including three counts of conspiracy. The jury, which deliberated over four days, found Aref guilty of 10 of the 30 charges against him.

Prosecutors said the informant, a Pakistani businessman posing as an arms dealer, asked Hossain to launder $50,000 from the sale of a shoulder-fired missile that they were told would be used to kill a Pakistani diplomat in New York City. Aref acted as a witness to the series of transactions.

"Obviously we had a couple of individuals that were prone to supporting terrorism," U.S. Attorney Glenn Suddaby said after the verdict. "The FBI did what they had to do."

Aref, a 36-year-old Kurdish refugee from northern Iraq, was also found guilty of lying to FBI agents about having known a terrorist leader, Mullah Krekar.

Assistant U.S. Attorney William Pericek said through the sting, the men were simply offered an opportunity to choose whether to participate with the informant in a terrorist plot.

Defense lawyers said the two men had an incomplete understanding of what the informant was proposing. Hossain's lawyer, Kevin Luibrand, said his client was entrapped. Aref merely thought he was acting as a witness to financial transactions according to Muslim custom, said his lawyer, Terence Kindlon.

Hossain, a 51-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen from Bangladesh with severe diabetes, faces about 20 years in prison. Luibrand said that is tantamount to a life sentence and that the verdict likely will be appealed.

Kindlon did not comment on what kind of sentence Aref could face, saying he didn't want to speculate. Pericek said Aref likely would be deported after serving his prison sentence.

Luibrand added that his client had not committed any crimes, nor did he intend to, before he was targeted by the government. The FBI acknowledged Aref was its ultimate target, using Hossain to get close to him.

The men are scheduled to be sentenced Feb. 12.

    N.Y. mosque leaders convicted of money laundering charges, UT, 11.10.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-10-11-mosque-raid_x.htm

Guards describe Guantanamo prisoner abuse

Sat Oct 7, 2006 8:27 AM ET
Reuters
By Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Guantanamo guards described physically and mentally abusing detainees, including slamming one's head into a cell door and denying them privileges merely to anger them, a U.S. Marine said in a document made public on Friday.

"Examples of this abuse included hitting detainees, denying them water, and removal of privileges for no reason," the Marine Corps sergeant stated in a sworn affidavit sent to the Pentagon's inspector general's office for investigation.

The affidavit, signed on Wednesday, was provided by lawyers representing some of the approximately 455 foreign terrorism suspects held at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. It represents the latest in a series of allegations of abuse of Guantanamo detainees by U.S. personnel.

The name of the sergeant, a female paralegal in a detainee criminal case, was blacked out. The sergeant described an hourlong conversation with guards at a bar at the base on September 23, but the affidavit mentioned only the first names of those accused of taking part in the abuse.

U.S. Navy Cmdr. Robert Durand, a spokesman for the military task force running the Guantanamo facility, said: "The mission of the Joint Task Force is the safe and humane care and custody of detained enemy combatants. Abuse or harassment of detainees in any form is not condoned or tolerated."

"The Joint Task Force will cooperate fully with the inspector general to learn the facts of the matter and will take action where misconduct is discovered," Durand added by e-mail.

A Navy sailor named Bo told of beating detainees. "One such story Bo told involved him taking a detainee by the head and hitting the detainee's head into the cell door," the sergeant wrote, adding that Bo stated that others at Guantanamo knew of his actions and did not punish him.

A guard named Steven said that even when the conduct of detainees was good, guards would take away personal items. "He said they do this to anger the detainees so they can punish them when they object or complain," she stated.

'A COMMON PRACTICE'

The affidavit said about five other guards talking at the bar admitted to hitting detainees, including punching them in the face. "From the whole conversation, I understood that striking detainees was a common practice. Everyone in the group laughed at the others' stories of beating detainees," she wrote.

Lt. Col. Colby Vokey, a Marine lawyer assigned to defend a Canadian detainee, Omar Ahmed Khadr, charged with murder, said in a memo to the inspector general's office that the abuse described violated U.S. and international law.

The United States has faced international criticism over its indefinite detention of Guantanamo detainees, many held more than four years without charges. The Pentagon contends the facility is vital to detain and interrogate terrorism suspects who might otherwise return to the battlefield.

Wells Dixon, a lawyer representing four current Guantanamo detainees, said the latest account of abuse reflected a complete breakdown in the chain of command at Guantanamo and a lack of accountability by senior military officials there.

"The fact that members of the U.S. Navy can sit around at a bar and laugh about beating detainees for no reason is outrageous. We're one step away from Abu Ghraib (Iraq prison abuse scandal) or possibly worse," Dixon said.

    Guards describe Guantanamo prisoner abuse, R, 7.10.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=newsOne&storyID=2006-10-07T122701Z_01_N06202683_RTRUKOC_0_US-SECURITY-GUANTANAMO.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C2-TopNews-newsOne-10

Editorial

The Mayor’s New Job

October 7, 2006
The New York Times

After too much confusion and emotional conflict, the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation finally has a leader who can get the job done — Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

The mayor has already made the largest single donation to the memorial from his personal fortune and should be invaluable in getting other philanthropists to contribute to the struggling building fund. Much more important, in recent years he has provided a sensible voice on the restoration of Lower Manhattan and has a long track record in finding solutions to difficult and contentious public matters.

While some of his earlier ideas for ground zero went too far — like a recommendation to put a school on the site — Mr. Bloomberg has apparently now recognized the public’s need for the memorial to provide a striking centerpiece to the rebuilding effort and a way for thousands of visitors to come and remember Sept. 11.

From this position, he can be the one to make certain that the powerful memorial design by Michael Arad is preserved while assuring contributors and taxpayers that the costs for the memorial do not spiral out of control. We have confidence that he will also show respect for the families who lost loved ones at ground zero while making certain that deference does not stand in the way of creating a memorial that belongs to the entire country.

Our only regret is that it has taken this long to get Mr. Bloomberg in control. The city has played some part in all the negotiations involving the site — which is technically owned by the states of New York and New Jersey. But while he was lacking a direct say in the rebuilding, the mayor never gave the problems of Lower Manhattan the kind of attention he gave to projects like the aborted West Side stadium.

Since its creation last year, the memorial foundation has been crying out for the kind of leadership and stability that the mayor is capable of providing. Gov. George Pataki, formerly the point man on Lower Manhattan development issues, has been granted the title of honorary lifetime chairman of the foundation. It was hard for any one person to control events at the World Trade Center site, given all the overlapping layers of authority and influence. But whatever the reason, Mr. Pataki has turned out to be more of an overseer than a steady leader in the rebuilding effort downtown.

Mayor Bloomberg may have some battles ahead with the likely next governor, Eliot Spitzer, but we would prefer thoughtful disagreements and practical solutions to the sense of drift over the past few years.

    The Mayor’s New Job, NYT, 7.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/07/opinion/07sat1.html

Security Barriers of New York Are Removed

October 7, 2006
The New York Times
By CARA BUCKLEY

They started appearing on Manhattan streets immediately after September 11: concrete and metal barriers in front of skyscrapers, offices and museums. Some were clunky planters; others were shaped artfully into globes. They were meant to be security barriers against possible car or truck bombers in a jittery city intent on safeguarding itself.

But now, five years later, their numbers have begun to dwindle. After evaluations by the New York Police Department, the city’s Department of Transportation has demanded that many of the planters and concrete traffic medians known as jersey barriers be taken away. So far, barriers have been removed at 30 buildings out of an estimated 50 to 70 in the city.

Officials found that the barriers obstructed pedestrian flow — and, in the case of planters, often ended up being used as giant ashtrays. Counterterrorism experts also concluded that in terms of safety, some of the barriers, which building owners put in of their own accord, might do more harm than good.

Across the nation, security barriers were hastily erected as a fast reaction to the terrorist attacks. Vehicle barriers were installed at the Library Tower in Los Angeles and the Sears Tower in Chicago. Capitol buildings from coast to coast were barricaded with fresh rows of concrete posts. Through it all, officials have tried to balance safety with other concerns.

“In an emergency, anything will do,” said John F. Timoney, former first deputy police commissioner in New York and now the chief of police in Miami. “However, five years out, these cities are beautiful, and you want to take that into consideration. There comes a time and place that hopefully, with security in mind, you can come up with a better scheme that at least, if not aesthetically pleasing, is not offensive.”

In recent years, counterterrorism experts have concluded that a poorly anchored planter, struck hard enough by explosive force or a speeding vehicle could become, to use police jargon, “weaponized”: it could shatter into deadly shards or go flying.

Moreoever, city officials concluded that some of the buildings that erected jersey barriers or planters posthaste after September 11 were not necessarily at risk. And, security experts say, Manhattan’s buildings are so close to its narrow streets anyway, car bombers could get close enough whether barriers were in place or not.

“Physical barriers in New York City really aren’t very practical,” said James Jay Carafano, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation specializing in homeland security. “Trying to childproof America is a really dumb idea. The most cost-effective thing to do is to keep terrorists out.”

In recent weeks, planters have been removed from sidewalks in front the Reuters Building at 3 Times Square and Morgan Stanley’s headquarters at 1585 Broadway. Sixty-three pre-cast concrete globes that encircled the Times Square Tower were taken out on September 27, each leaving behind a ghostly oval imprint. The planters outside the Ernst & Young building at 5 Times Square are also set to go.

“Wherever possible, we want to avoid the appearance that the city is under siege or unwelcoming,” Iris Weinshall, the city’s transportation commissioner said in an e-mail message.

The Department of Transportation has ordered the 30 buildings around the city to remove the planters or other barriers at their own expense. Others are expected to remain, for a variety of reasons.

The removal orders have often elicited chilly reactions from the affected building owners, some of whom paid $50,000 to $100,000 to install the planters. Removing planters could cost up to $10,000 per site, one owner said.

The Department of Homeland Security does not have an official stance on such barriers, said Joanna Gonzalez, a spokeswoman, and instead urges state and local officials to determine how best to guard themselves. “But we encourage cities to have a sensible way to protect their communities using a risk-based approach,” Ms. Gonzalez said.

None of Manhattan’s building owners were ordered to install planters or barriers in the first place. After September 11, barriers and planters sprang up at 50 to 70 sites, some with the approval of the Department of Transportation, many without. The planters and barriers came in all shapes and sizes: plastic, metal and concrete, tubby and skinny, round, rectangular and square.

The Transportation Department issued permits for many of the planters, but only on a temporary basis, viewing them as a stopgap measure. They stopped approving the renewals for planters about two years ago. Newly issued permits for other barriers could be revoked at any time.

At least one building owner, Boston Properties, which counts Times Square Tower and 5 Times Square among its holdings, took great pains to pass official muster.

The company commissioned an architect, Christopher J. Finger of Fogarty Finger, to design fanciful heavy concrete globes and ellipses for Times Square Tower, at 42nd Street and Broadway. The globes and columns were installed in the summer of 2005, after they were approved by city planners, the Transportation Department and the Arts Commission. Still, they were ordered removed because, in the end, they were not deemed necessary or wholly effective by experts within the Police Department’s counterterrorism bureau. Late last month, they were taken out.

City planners, transportation officials and members of the Arts Commission began working on creating an accepted, uniform barrier before September 11. In the last few years, they decided on a metal or concrete pillar, about 30 inches high and anchored soundly in the ground, known as a bollard. (The word historically refers to the posts used to moor boats to piers.)

The Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle, for example, is ringed by more than 200 approved shiny steel bollards — often used as stools by passers-by and ersatz fire hydrants by dogs. The Transportation Department said the bollards at the center would not be ordered out.

Still, merely having an acceptable bollard does not give buildings owners carte blanche to have them installed. The areas are surveyed by a task force that includes Transportation Department officials and members of the Police Department’s counterterrorism task force, who visit the sites and determine whether there is a threat against the building and whether protective measures installed there are adequate.

“We respond on a case by case basis,” said Paul J. Browne, the chief spokesman for the Police Department.

The city’s decision to order the planters removed has been warmly met by urban planners, who viewed the barriers as the height of poor design, especially since their efficacy was questionable in the first place. Michael Sorkin, director of the graduate urban design program at the City College of New York, suggested that barriers had risen to the level of a sort of personal statement, an emblem of self-importance.

“It was so ubiquitous, it was a bit of a status thing,” Mr. Sorkin said. “Surely every branch bank in Manhattan is not something that Al Qaeda is thinking of blowing up.”

Still, the removal of the planters does not signal the end of the security question in places like Times Square. Tim Tompkins, president of the Times Square Alliance, said that while planters were viewed as interim — and eventually ineffective — solutions, longer term strategies were needed to make the area less vulnerable to vehicular bombs.

“Is any building in Times Square, by definition of its being in Times Square, a place that warrants greater attention?” Mr. Tompkins asked. “We would argue that the answer is yes.”

Now that so many of the city’s planters and other barriers are being removed, businesses have to figure out what to do with them. Robert E. Selsam, a senior vice president and manager for the New York region at Boston Properties, was determined to find a home for Mr. Fogarty’s globes and columns — and did. They have been adopted by the New York Hall of Science in Corona, Queens, and are currently wrapped up and piled in a corner of the hall’s parking lot until workers there figure out where to put them.

And what will become of the planters in front of 5 Times Square, another Boston Properties site? Alas, they were bound for the Dumpster. Or, as Mr. Selsam said, planter heaven.

Al Baker contributed reporting.

    Security Barriers of New York Are Removed, NYT, 7.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/07/nyregion/nyregionspecial3/07bollard.html

Brief Journey for an Icon of the Attack on New York

October 6, 2006
The New York Times
By ERIC KONIGSBERG

First, they hoisted it above the ground with a 40-ton cherry picker. After that, four or five men set about removing the residue from the previous welding job at the base, each of them taking a turn with a blowtorch, so that it could be securely mounted to a pedestal at its future home.

That was, at just after 8 in the morning, the initial preparation work for a three-block journey along Church Street that would come in the afternoon. Not such a great distance, even for something as difficult to move as a chunk of steel that weighs 6,000 pounds, give or take, but this particular piece of steel and this particular transition had taken on a good deal of significance to a good number of people.

That steel is the cross-shaped beams discovered on Sept. 13, 2001, amid the ruins of 6 World Trade Center. About 18 feet tall, one of the construction workers estimated, and perhaps half as wide, the cross was, to nobody’s objection, being moved from ground zero to a location outside St. Peter’s Roman Catholic Church, on Barclay Street.

That step was necessary to make way for construction on the east side of the trade center site. The World Trade Center Memorial Foundation has promised to eventually provide a permanent home for the cross, most likely at the World Trade Center Memorial Museum, which is to open in 2009.

But if not for some arm-twisting and noisemaking on the part of the Rev. Brian Jordan, an enterprising Franciscan friar, and Frank Silecchia, the Local 731 laborer who first unearthed the cross, it would be on its way, like many of the other artifacts from the site, to cold storage in Hangar 17 at Kennedy International Airport, courtesy of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

Instead, at 2 p.m., the cross, covered in rust and chained to an 18-wheel flatbed, was hauled up a sloping driveway out of the trade center site and onto Church Street, at the corner of Liberty Street.

Tourists and office workers, drawn to the site in full force by clear skies and the midday sun, their curiosity piqued by the presence of television cameras, began to gather behind the truck. The mood was solemn but the noise level was anything but funereal.

Father Jordan, in his brown friar’s robes and Birkenstock sandals, led a procession of about 150 people, among them ground zero workers, relatives of some of those killed in the attack, “uniformed personnel,” as he called them, and some of the onlookers. There were executives in suits and brush-cut union workers with windbreakers over their neckties.

During the journey, brief as it was, Mr. Silecchia and Father Jordan described their battle to keep the cross outside, where it could be seen.

“No hangar, no hangar, no hangar,” Mr. Silecchia said, characterizing his initial reaction to the Port Authority’s plan, which he had learned of last April.

Mr. Silecchia was part of the debris-removal team. He said that he found working in the presence of the cross “uplifting and spiritual.” Throughout the 10-month cleanup process, he and other workers said, the cross, which stood near the edge of the site, was a destination to which they repaired during coffee breaks and on Sundays, when Father Jordan began celebrating Mass.

“It gave a lot of people a place to go when they were trying to make sense of the work all of us were doing,” said Charlie Vitchers, a general superintendent who oversaw both the cleanup operation and yesterday’s relocation.

The Port Authority’s plan to store the cross in a hangar had upset many ground zero workers, as well as relatives of some victims.

“I think what it was, in fairness to Port Authority, was a kind of miscommunication among themselves,” Father Jordan said. “There are a lot of memorial and rebuilding projects on everybody’s minds. Politics was involved and also big business was involved, and the cross wasn’t that important to them.”

Father Jordan, whose own parish, Saint Francis of Assisi Roman Catholic Church, is on West 32nd Street, persuaded the authority to agree not to send “the artifact,” as he often calls it, to Kennedy.

More difficult, according to Mr. Silecchia, was finding a church willing to hold onto it until 2009. Then Father Jordan spoke with the Rev. Kevin V. Madigan, the pastor of St. Peter’s, who was happy to provide a temporary home.

When the cross reached Barclay Street yesterday afternoon, it was lifted into position by the crane. Two members of the original ground zero team, Gene Flood and Warren Allen, both ironworkers from Local 40, moved swiftly to bolt it into place.

Father Madigan blessed the cross and shook holy water on it. Officials spoke.

Finally, Andrew Macchio, a retired sanitation worker with a rich baritone, came to the front of the crowd and led everybody in a rendition of “God Bless America.”

    Brief Journey for an Icon of the Attack on New York, NYT, 6.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/06/nyregion/nyregionspecial3/06cross.html

Ground Zero cross moves to temporary home at church

Updated 10/5/2006 9:38 PM ET
By Verena Dobnik, The Associated Press
USA Today

NEW YORK — A cross-shaped steel beam that survived the 2001 World Trade Center terrorist attack to become a symbol of hope amid the ruins was moved Thursday from Ground Zero to a nearby church, accompanied by a procession of victims' families, clergy and construction workers.
The 2-ton, 20-foot-high cross was placed on a flatbed truck for the 3-block trip to its new home, St. Peter's Church, which had served as a sanctuary for rescue workers searching for human remains from the Sept. 11 attack.

"This piece of steel meant more to many people than any piece of steel ever," said Richard Sheirer, head of the city Office of Emergency Management five years ago. "It goes beyond any religion."

Ironworkers sang God Bless America as hundreds of people walked behind the cross to its temporary home facing Ground Zero outside the 18th-century church, New York City's oldest Roman Catholic parish.

"This cross is a sign of consolation and inspiration to workers who served at Ground Zero for the 10 months of recovery," said the Rev. Brian Jordan, a Franciscan priest who had blessed the beam days after it was pulled from the wreckage. "Some interpret it as a cross. Others see it as an artifact that has historical and architectural importance, a reminder that is also a sign of closure."

Five years ago, the church, rattled but intact after the attack, also became a temporary morgue. The Rev. Mychal Judge, the New York Fire Department chaplain who became the first official trade center fatality, was among those brought inside.

Jordan, in a brown robe cinched around the waist with a white cord, led the procession. He also led the effort to preserve the beam, discovered in the ruins of 6 World Trade Center by construction worker Frank Silecchia on Sept. 13, 2001.

The worker showed it to Jordan, asking what the priest saw. "I said, 'Frank, I believe that is a cross,' " said Jordan, Judge's friend and fellow Franciscan. "We are all anxious for some type of God's presence."

Jane Pollicino, who lost her husband, Steve, in the attack, was among those walking in the procession. "This cross is a sign," said the mother of two, whose spouse worked as a bond broker for Cantor Fitzgerald, a brokerage firm that lost 658 employees in the attack.

Workers excavated the beam and installed it at the site. Each night, illuminated, it shone over the smoking debris as they kept digging. On Feb. 14, 2002, the cross was moved to Church and Cortland streets, its location until Thursday.

Some people, including a group of atheists, "wanted to get rid of it," Jordan said. "Others argued it was a conflict of church and state, since the site is owned by a government agency. But we fought and prevailed."

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the site's owner, had planned months ago to store the cross in a hangar at John F. Kennedy International Airport in Queens, N.Y., but family members and ministers objected.

At the spot where it stood for four years, just south of a transit hub, land is being excavated to make way for three office towers. The cross is to stay at the church during the reconstruction.

The World Trade Center Memorial Foundation has said it plans to include the cross as part of its memorial or inside the Sept. 11 museum.

    Ground Zero cross moves to temporary home at church, UT, 5.10.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-10-05-cross-moved_x.htm

Judges Zero In on Treatment of a Detainee

October 5, 2006
The New York Times
By NINA BERNSTEIN

In sharp questioning, a three-judge panel yesterday challenged arguments by federal officials seeking dismissal of a Pakistani man’s suit charging that because of his religion, race or national origin, he, like others, was held for months after 9/11 in abusive solitary confinement before being cleared of links to terrorism and deported.

In the mahogany and marble splendor of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in Lower Manhattan, lawyers for former Attorney General John Ashcroft and other government officials argued that the officials were entitled to immunity from the lawsuit filed by the man, Javaid Iqbal, who had been known as “the cable guy” to his Long Island customers before he was swept into a federal detention center in Brooklyn as were hundreds of other Muslim immigrants in the New York area.

From the start of yesterday’s two-hour hearing, one of the judges, Jon O. Newman, showed particular impatience with the narrow legal defenses offered by the defendants in the case, which lawyers for Mr. Iqbal say seeks accountability for what they call serious constitutional violations by the nation’s highest law enforcement officials. It is the first case of its kind to reach the appellate level.

Judge Newman was especially scathing in questioning the lawyer for Dennis Hasty, formerly the warden of the Metropolitan Detention Center, where Mr. Iqbal and 184 others designated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation as “of high interest” were confined in a special unit where a 2003 Justice Department Inspector General’s report found widespread abuse.

Mr. Hasty’s lawyer, Michael L. Martinez, had argued in his brief that even if everything alleged in the lawsuit were true — as the appellate judges must assume at this stage of the litigation — Mr. Iqbal’s treatment “never approached the level of a due process violation.”

“Beatings?” Judge Newman asked. “Exposure to air-conditioning after standing in the rain? Needless strip-searches? Never approached a due process violation? If I thought your client really believed that, I’ve got to tell you, I’d be really troubled.”

Judge Robert D. Sack was equally acerbic in commenting on a defense assertion that the complaint failed to link Mr. Hasty personally to what was going on at the detention center.

“He is the warden,” Judge Sack said. “If he didn’t know what was going on — I’m boggled twice in one argument.”

Mr. Martinez replied that five years after 9/11 it was easy to criticize decisions made at the time. He cited legal precedents holding that “the courts are ill-equipped to second-guess what goes on in prisons.”

Earlier, Judge Newman interrupted Lauren Resnick, the lawyer representing two former officials of the F.B.I., Michael Rolince, the agency’s former chief of counterterrorism, and Kenneth Maxwell, a former special agent in charge of the F.B.I. office in New York, as she argued that the complaint was not specific enough in linking the F.B.I. supervisors to what another federal bureaucracy was doing in the detention center.

“You don’t think your clients had a major role in the decision not to release these plaintiffs?” Judge Newman asked. He was referring to findings by the Inspector General that detainees picked up on called-in tips were often designated “high-interest” and held in highly restrictive conditions until the F.B.I. cleared them, a process that took months because it was not a high priority.

“Are you telling me that they were unaware that they were being held in highly restrictive conditions?”

Instead of answering, Ms. Resnick kept repeating the legal position that the complaint itself was deficient in the way it made its accusations.

Earlier this year, the federal government agreed to pay $300,000 to another plaintiff in the same suit, settling his claim without admitting to wrongdoing. The government, which in a lower federal court lost its effort to dismiss Mr. Iqbal’s lawsuit without testimony, is seeking to overturn that ruling. It also lost a similar motion in a companion lawsuit brought as a class action by other former detainees.

Mr. Iqbal eventually pleaded guilty to credit-card fraud and was deported to Pakistan.

Many legal arguments yesterday concerned Supreme Court rulings on governmental immunity. Judge Sack and Judge Jose A. Cabranes suggested that a case now pending before the Supreme Court might affect the question, and asked for memos by Oct. 9 on whether a delay would be appropriate.

Gregory G. Garre, a Justice Department lawyer representing Mr. Ashcroft and Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the F.B.I., said that context was everything in judging whether Mr. Iqbal’s treatment, as alleged, violated any known constitutional rights.

“If there’s anything that the court can take judicial notice of,” he said, “ it’s that 9/11 was the most deadly foreign attack on domestic soil.”

In his rebuttal on behalf of Mr. Iqbal, whose lawsuit was brought by the Urban Justice Center, Alexander A. Reinert argued that questioning officials was necessary to determine how 9/11 actually affected Mr. Iqbal’s treatment.

Mr. Iqbal’s lawsuit charges that Mr. Ashcroft and others created a discriminatory policy that was “applied to Mr. Iqbal in some of the most horrific conditions of confinement,” he said, and that they knew or should have known it.

“They may believe the facts will disprove it,” added Mr. Reinert, of Koob & Magoolaghan, “but that’s exactly what discovery is for.”

At the close of the hearing, Judge Newman questioned Mr. Garre, as the sole Justice Department lawyer, about another assertion in Mr. Hasty’s brief. It contends that Mr. Iqbal’s lawsuit itself shows there were “only minimal restrictions” on his ability to practice his religion, since he complained that his Koran had been routinely confiscated and that guards had banged on his cell door when he tried to pray, which demonstrated that he had been allowed to pray and to have a Koran.

In a tone of outraged incredulity, Judge Newman repeated the phrase “only minimal restrictions,” first pressing Mr. Hasty’s lawyer to say whether that was really his client’s position or “just hyperbole by his lawyer,” and finally asking Mr. Garre whether that was the government’s position.

Mr. Garre replied, “Specific abuse like that is not something that’s condoned by the United States.”

    Judges Zero In on Treatment of a Detainee, NYT, 5.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/05/nyregion/05immigrant.html

Surveillance Program to Continue for Now

October 4, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:55 p.m. ET
The New York Times

CINCINNATI (AP) -- The Bush administration is allowed to continue its warrantless surveillance program while it appeals a judge's ruling that the program is unconstitutional, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday.

The president says the program is needed in the war on terrorism; opponents say it oversteps constitutional boundaries on free speech, privacy and executive powers.

    Surveillance Program to Continue for Now, NYT, 4.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Domestic-Spying.html

Pennsylvania man charged al Qaeda plot attempt

Wed Oct 4, 2006 1:42 PM ET
Reuters

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A Pennsylvania man, arrested in an FBI sting operation, was accused by a federal grand jury of trying to conspire with al Qaeda to destroy major U.S. oil and gas pipelines and disrupt the economy.

Michael Curtis Reynolds, 47, could face up to 80 years in prison and fines totaling $1.5 million if found guilty, according to the indictment filed on Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania.

Defense lawyer Joseph O'Brien, who is defending Reynolds, had no comment.

The FBI arrested Reynolds in a sting in December 2005 when he was traveling to Idaho in an attempt to collect $40,000 he believed was payment for helping to blow up sections of the Transcontinental Pipeline, the indictment alleges.

The pipeline carries natural gas from the U.S. Gulf Coast to New York City via Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

The prosecution said Reynolds began communicating with what he believed were al Qaeda operatives through a Web-based chat group in October 2005. His contact in the forum however was not a member of al Qaeda, and he then began cooperating with the authorities in their investigation of Reynolds.

The alleged plot included a plan to detonate propane trucks along the Alaska Pipeline and to blow up oil refineries in New Jersey and Wyoming.

    Pennsylvania man charged al Qaeda plot attempt, R, 4.10.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2006-10-04T174247Z_01_N04384712_RTRUKOC_0_US-SECURITY-USA-QAEDA.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C5-domesticNews-3

C.I.A. Chief Warned Rice on Al Qaeda

October 3, 2006
By PHILIP SHENON and MARK MAZZETTI
The New York Times

JIDDA, Saudi Arabia, Oct. 2 — A review of White House records has determined that George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, did brief Condoleezza Rice and other top officials on July 10, 2001, about the looming threat from Al Qaeda, a State Department spokesman said Monday.

The account by the spokesman, Sean McCormack, came hours after Ms. Rice, the secretary of state, told reporters aboard her airplane that she did not recall the specific meeting on July 10, noting that she had met repeatedly with Mr. Tenet that summer about terrorist threats. Ms. Rice, the national security adviser at the time, said it was “incomprehensible” to suggest she had ignored dire terrorist threats two months before the Sept. 11 attacks.

Mr. McCormack also said records showed that the Sept. 11 commission had been informed about the meeting, a fact that former intelligence officials and members of the commission confirmed on Monday.

When details of the meeting emerged last week in a new book by Bob Woodward of The Washington Post, Bush administration officials questioned Mr. Woodward’s reporting.

Now, after several days, both current and former Bush administration officials have confirmed parts of Mr. Woodward’s account.

Officials now agree that on July 10, 2001, Mr. Tenet and his counterterrorism deputy, J. Cofer Black, were so alarmed about intelligence pointing to an impending attack by Al Qaeda that they demanded an emergency meeting at the White House with Ms. Rice and her National Security Council staff.

According to two former intelligence officials, Mr. Tenet told those assembled at the White House about the growing body of intelligence the C.I.A. had collected suggesting an attack was in the works. But both current and former officials, including allies of Mr. Tenet, took issue with Mr. Woodward’s account that he and his aides had left the meeting feeling that Ms. Rice had ignored them.

Earlier this week, some members of the Sept. 11 commission said they could not recall being told about a meeting like the one described by Mr. Woodward.

On Monday, officials said Mr. Tenet had told members of the commission about the July 10 meeting when they interviewed him in early 2004, but committee members said he never indicated he had left the White House with the impression that he had been ignored.

“Tenet never told us that he was brushed off,” said Richard Ben-Veniste, a Democratic member of the commission. “We certainly would have followed that up.”

Mr. McCormack said the records showed that far from ignoring Mr. Tenet’s warnings, Ms. Rice acted on the intelligence and requested that Mr. Tenet make the same presentation to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and John Ashcroft, then the attorney general.

But Mr. Ashcroft said by telephone on Monday evening that he never received a briefing that summer from Mr. Tenet.

“Frankly, I’m disappointed that I didn’t get that kind of briefing,” he said. “I’m surprised he didn’t think it was important enough to come by and tell me.”

Government investigations have shown that Mr. Ashcroft was briefed by other C.I.A. officials in the weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks.

The dispute that has played out in recent days gives further evidence of an escalating battle between the White House and Mr. Tenet over who should take the blame for the failure to stop the Sept. 11 attacks and assertions by Bush administration officials that Saddam Hussein was stockpiling chemical and biological weapons and cultivating ties to Al Qaeda.

Mr. Tenet resigned as director of central intelligence in the summer of 2004 and was honored that December with a Presidential Medal of Freedom at a White House ceremony. Since leaving the C.I.A., Mr. Tenet has stayed out of the public eye, largely declining to defend his record even after several government investigations assailed the faulty intelligence that helped build the case for the Iraq war.

Mr. Tenet is now completing work on a memoir that is scheduled to be published early next year. It is unclear how much he will use the book to settle old scores, although recent books have portrayed him both as dubious about the need to invade Iraq and angry that the White House has made the C.I.A. the primary scapegoat for the war.

In his book “The One Percent Doctrine,” the journalist and author Ron Suskind quotes Mr. Tenet’s former deputy at the C.I.A., John McLaughlin, as saying Mr. Tenet “wishes he could give that damn medal back.”

In his own book, Mr. Woodward wrote that over time Mr. Tenet developed a particular dislike for Ms. Rice, and that the former C.I.A. director was furious when she publicly blamed the agency for allowing President Bush to make the false claim in the 2003 State of the Union address that Mr. Hussein was pursuing nuclear materials in Niger.

“If the C.I.A., the director of central intelligence, had said, ‘Take this out of the speech,’ it would have been gone, without question,” Ms. Rice told reporters in July 2003.

In fact, the C.I.A. had told the White House months before that the intelligence about Niger was dubious, and had managed to keep the claim out of an October 2002 speech that Mr. Bush gave in Cincinnati.

More recently, Mr. Tenet has told friends he was particularly angry when, appearing recently on Sunday talk shows, both Ms. Rice and Vice President Dick Cheney cited Mr. Tenet as the reason that Bush administration officials asserted that Mr. Hussein had stockpiles of banned weapons and ties to Al Qaeda.

Mr. Cheney recalled in an appearance on “Meet the Press” on Sept. 10: “George Tenet sat in the Oval Office and the president of the United States asked him directly, he said, ‘George, how good is the case against Saddam on weapons of mass destruction?’ The director of the C.I.A. said, ‘It’s a slam dunk, Mr. President, it’s a slam dunk,’ ”

Philip Shenon reported from Jidda, and Mark Mazzetti from Washington.

    C.I.A. Chief Warned Rice on Al Qaeda, NYT, 3.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/03/washington/03rivals.html?hp&ex=1159934400&en=a8d116e7a90c4c5f&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Wait Ends for Father and Son Exiled by F.B.I. Terror Inquiry

October 2, 2006
The New York Times
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD

LOS ANGELES, Oct. 1 — Two American citizens of Pakistani descent returned to the United States on Sunday, five months after they were denied permission to fly home to California unless they submitted to an interrogation by F.B.I. terrorism investigators.

The men, Muhammad Ismail, 45, and his son, Jaber, 19, of the Northern California farming town of Lodi, returned from Pakistan on a flight that landed at Kennedy Airport in New York around 3:30 p.m. Eastern time. They were scheduled to arrive in California on Sunday night or early Monday on a connecting flight, their lawyer said Sunday.

The Ismails are an uncle and cousin of Hamid Hayat, a Lodi man who was convicted in April in federal court of providing material support to terrorists. Mr. Hayat told investigators he had attended a terrorism training camp during a long stay in Pakistan and intended to carry out unspecified attacks in the United States. Mr. Hayat’s father, Umer, was convicted on a lesser charge of lying to investigators about the amount of cash he carried to Pakistan on a 2003 trip, but a jury deadlocked on terrorism charges.

The Ismails were not charged in the case. They attributed their predicament to being related to the Hayats, the only people to have been charged in what federal prosecutors have described as an investigation into possible terrorism links in Lodi.

Julia Harumi Mass of the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, who is representing the Ismails, said the pair had no terrorism connections. In a complaint in August to the Department of Homeland Security, she urged the authorities to explain any accusations against them and why they had been denied permission to fly home.

Legal experts said the matter raised questions about balancing terrorism investigations against American citizens’ right to travel freely without having been charged with a crime or detained as a suspect.

On Sept. 6, nearly a month after Ms. Mass’s complaint, the Homeland Security Department notified her in a letter and telephone call that unspecified records had been modified “to address any delay or denial boarding” the pair had encountered. Ms. Mass said she took that to mean they were cleared to fly, and the Ismails arranged financing and bought tickets home.

“I never imagined that the country I was born in would stop me from coming home for five months and separate me from my family, especially when I was not charged with a crime,” Jaber Ismail said in a statement released through the A.C.L.U.

Hamid Hayat had told investigators he believed that Jaber, who was born in Lodi, attended a terrorism camp, but he lacked details. Mr. Hayat’s lawyers attacked the investigators’ questioning of Mr. Hayat as vague and coerced. Muhammad Ismail, a naturalized citizen who was born in Pakistan, said in the statement that they had traveled to Pakistan so Jaber Ismail could pursue religious study there.

On April 21, as juries were weighing the Hayats’ cases, the Ismails were not permitted to board a connecting flight to San Francisco from Hong Kong and returned to Pakistan, where Jaber Ismail was questioned by F.B.I. agents at the American embassy in Islamabad. The agents, Ms. Mass said, requested further interviews with him and his father and a polygraph, which the Ismails refused.

The United States attorney’s office in Sacramento, which prosecuted the Hayats, has declined to comment on the investigation other than to acknowledge that agents wished to speak with the Ismails. A Homeland Security spokesman said he had no information about the case.

    Wait Ends for Father and Son Exiled by F.B.I. Terror Inquiry, NYT, 2.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/02/us/02terror.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Rice Dismisses Charge That She Ignored Qaeda Warning

October 2, 2006
The New York Times
By PHILIP SHENON

SHANNON, Ireland, Oct. 2 — Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said it was “incomprehensible” that she could have ignored dire terrorist threats two months before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Her remarks were meant to rebut an account in a new book by Bob Woodward saying that she failed to act on warnings from George J. Tenet, who was then the director of central intelligence.

In her first direct comments about the book, Secretary Rice told reporters traveling with her to the Middle East on Sunday night that she did not believe there had ever been such an exchange with Mr. Tenet.

Nor, she said, did she remember if she even met with Mr. Tenet in the White House on July 10, 2001, the date identified in Mr. Woodward’s book, “State of Denial,” which went on sale last weekend. Ms. Rice was President Bush’s national security adviser at that time.

Mr. Woodward’s book reports that Mr. Tenet hurriedly arranged a White House meeting on to try to “shake Rice” into taking action on ominous intelligence reports warning of a potentially catastrophic attack by Al Qaeda, possibly within American borders.

The book says that Mr. Tenet and J. Cofer Black, who was then his counterterrorism chief, left the meeting in frustration, believing they had been given a “brush-off.”

Secretary Rice said Sunday night that there would have been no need for a “a kind of emergency meeting in which there was a need to shock me, given that every day we were meeting in the Oval Office going over the threat reporting” during the summer of 2001, when spy agencies were flooded with warnings of an imminent Al Qaeda attack.

“I don’t recall a so-called emergency meeting,” she continued, adding that “it was not unusual that George and I would meet, in a sense, unscheduled” in the White House, especially during such a tense period.

Ms. Rice said she had no specific recollection of meeting with Mr. Tenet and Mr. Black on July 10, 2001. Members of the commission that investigated the attacks of Sept. 11 and the events leading up to them have said they were never told of a special White House meeting held on that date, and have questioned in recent days whether information about such a meeting may have been intentionally withheld from the panel.

“We’ll have to go back to the records to see if there was a meeting” that day, Secretary Rice said.

“What I can be quite certain of is that I would remember if I was told, as this account apparently says, that there was about to be an attack in the United States,” she said. “The idea that I would have somehow ignored that, I find incomprehensible — especially given that in July, we’re getting a steady stream of quite alarmist reports of potential attacks.”

Mr. Woodward’s account says that Mr. Tenet and Mr. Black, who have refused to comment on the book but appear to have been important sources for Mr. Woodward, told Ms. Rice that “Al Qaeda was going to attack American interests, possibility within the United States itself.”

The book says that after the meeting, both men “felt they were not getting through to Rice — she was polite, but they felt the brush-off.”

Ms. Rice also disputed other material in Mr. Woodward’s book, including his report that the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, was so disdainful of Ms. Rice during President Bush’s first term that he refused to return her telephone calls from the White House.

“Secretary Rumsfeld has never refused to return my phone calls,” she said. “The idea that he wasn’t returning my phone calls was simply ludicrous.”

She also disputed Mr. Woodward’s suggestion that she had urged that Mr. Rumsfeld be replaced in President Bush’s second term. “I did not try to get the president to change his Secretary of Defense,” she said.

Secretary Rice said that one of her top aides — Philip D. Zelikow, who was the executive director of the Sept. 11 commission before joining the State Department last year — had remained behind in Washington this week, in part to deal with the swirling controversy over Mr .Woodward’s book.

“He does want to be able to help reconstruct, from the commission’s side, what happened,” Ms. Rice said.

In the wake of book’s publicaton, members of the Sept. 11 commission said that they were told nothing of any special July 10, 2001, meeting at the White House, although the panel questioned Ms. Rice, Mr. Tenet and Mr. Black in detail, sometimes under oath.

The dispute over Mr. Woodward’s book — and Ms. Rice’s depiction in it — threatened to overwhelm her scheduled week-long trip to the Middle East, where she is trying to encourage Arab leaders to bolster the beleaguered Palestinian leader, President Mahmoud Abbas, and is seeking their help in dealing with the turmoil in Iraq.

On her first stop, in Saudi Arabia today, Secretary Rice is scheduled to meet with King Abdullah and ask him to “do more” to assist Mr. Abbas, who has attempted to press the radical Islamic group Hamas to work towards a peace settlement with Israel.

    Rice Dismisses Charge That She Ignored Qaeda Warning, NYT, 2.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/02/washington/03ricecnd.html?hp&ex=1159848000&en=5de194832d554019&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Sept. 11 Panel Wasn’t Told of Meeting, Members Say

October 2, 2006
The New York Times
By PHILIP SHENON

WASHINGTON, Oct. 1 — Members of the Sept. 11 commission said Sunday they were alarmed that they were told nothing about a July 2001 White House meeting at which George J. Tenet, then director of central intelligence, is reported to have warned Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser, about an imminent attack by Al Qaeda and failed to persuade her to take action.

Details of the meeting on July 10, 2001, two months before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, were first reported last week in a new book by Bob Woodward. The White House disputes his account.

The final report from the Sept. 11 commission made no mention of the meeting, nor did it suggest that there had been such an encounter between Mr. Tenet and Ms. Rice, now secretary of state.

Since the release of the book, “State of Denial,” the White House and Ms. Rice have disputed major elements of Mr. Woodward’s account. Ms. Rice has said through spokesmen that there had been no such exchange in a private meeting with Mr. Tenet and that he had expressed none of the frustration attributed to him in Mr. Woodward’s book.

“It really didn’t match Secretary Rice’s recollection of the meeting at all,” said Dan Bartlett, counselor to President Bush, in an interview on “Face the Nation” on CBS. “It kind of left us scratching our heads because we don’t believe that’s an accurate account.”

Passages of the book suggest that Mr. Tenet was a major source for Mr. Woodward. The former intelligence director has refused to comment on the book since its release.

There has also been no comment on the book from J. Cofer Black, who was Mr. Tenet’s counterterrorism chief, and who, the book says, attended the July 10 meeting and left it frustrated by Ms. Rice’s “brush-off” of the warnings.

Mr. Black is quoted as saying, “The only thing we didn’t do was pull the trigger to the gun we were holding to her head.” He did not return calls left at Blackwater, the security firm he joined last year.

The book says Mr. Tenet hurriedly organized the meeting, calling ahead from his car as it traveled to the White House, because he wanted to “shake Rice” into persuading the president to respond to dire intelligence warnings about a possible terrorist strike.

Mr. Woodward writes that Mr. Tenet left the meeting frustrated because “they were not getting through to Rice.”

The disclosures took members of the bipartisan Sept. 11 commission by surprise last week. Some questioned whether information about the July 10 meeting was intentionally withheld from the panel, the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States.

In interviews Saturday and Sunday, commission members said they were never told about the meeting despite hours of public and private questioning with Ms. Rice, Mr. Tenet and Mr. Black, much of it focused specifically on how the White House dealt with terrorist threats in the summer of 2001.

“None of this was shared with us in hours of private interviews, including interviews under oath, nor do we have any paper on this,” said Timothy J. Roemer, a Democratic member of the commission and a former congressman from Indiana. “I’m deeply disturbed by this. I’m furious.”

Another Democratic commissioner, the former Watergate prosecutor Richard Ben-Veniste, said the staff of the Sept. 11 commission was polled in recent days on the disclosures in Mr. Woodward’s book and agreed that the meeting “was never mentioned to us.”

“This is certainly something we would have wanted to know about,” he said, referring to the meeting. “We asked broad questions which should have elicited this information.”

He said he had attended the commission’s private interviews with both Mr. Tenet and Ms. Rice and had pressed “very hard for them to provide us with everything they had regarding conversations with the executive branch” about terrorist threats before Sept. 11.

Philip D. Zelikow, the executive director of the Sept. 11 commission and now counselor to the State Department, agreed that no witness before the commission had drawn attention to a July 10 meeting at the White House or described the sort of encounter portrayed in Mr. Woodward’s book.

Mr. Zelikow said it was “entirely plausible” that a meeting occurred on July 10, during a period that summer in which intelligence agencies were being flooded with warnings of a terrorist attack against the United States or its allies.

But he said the commissioners and their staff had heard nothing in their private interviews with Mr. Tenet and Mr. Black to suggest that they made such a dire presentation to Ms. Rice or that she had rebuffed them.

“If we had heard something that drew our attention to this meeting, it would have been a huge thing,” Mr. Zelikow said. “Repeatedly, Tenet and Black said they could not remember what had transpired in some of those meetings.”

Democratic lawmakers have seized on Mr. Woodward’s book in arguing that the Bush administration bungled the war in Iraq and paid too little attention to terrorism threats in the months before Sept. 11.

Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, the senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said on CBS that there had been “rumors” of such an encounter between Mr. Tenet and Ms. Rice in the summer of 2001.

Mr. Woodward’s book, he said, raised the question of “why didn’t Condi Rice and George Tenet tell the 9/11 commission about that? They were obliged to do that, and they didn’t.”

    Sept. 11 Panel Wasn’t Told of Meeting, Members Say, NYT, 2.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/02/washington/02woodward.html

9/11 Panel Members Upset They Weren’t Told of Meeting

October 1, 2006
The New York Times
By PHILIP SHENON

WASHINGTON, Oct. 2 — Members of the Sept. 11 commission said today that they were alarmed that they were told nothing about a White House meeting in July 2001 at which George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, is reported to have warned Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, about an imminent Al Qaeda attack and failed to persuade her to take action.

Details of the previously undisclosed meeting on July 10, 2001, two months before the Sept. 11 terror attacks, were first reported last week in a new book by the journalist Bob Woodward.

The final report from the Sept. 11 commission made no mention of the meeting nor did it suggest there had been such an encounter between Mr. Tenet and Ms. Rice, now secretary of state.

Since release of the book, “State of Denial,” the White House and Ms. Rice have disputed major elements of Mr. Woodward’s account, with Ms. Rice insisting through spokesmen that there had been no such exchange in a private meeting with Mr. Tenet and that he had expressed none of the frustration attributed to him in Mr. Woodward’s book.

“It really didn’t match Secretary Rice’s recollection of the meeting at all,” said Dan Bartlett, counselor to President Bush, in an interview on the CBS News program “Face the Nation.”

“It kind of left us scratching our heads because we don’t believe that’s an accurate account,” he said.

Although passages of the book suggest that Mr. Tenet was a major source for Mr. Woodward, the former intelligence director has refused to comment on the book.

Nor has there been any comment from J. Cofer Black, Mr. Tenet’s counterterrorism chief, who is reported in the book to have attended the July 10 meeting and left it frustrated by Ms. Rice’s “brush-off” of the warnings.

He is quoted as saying, “The only thing we didn’t do was pull the trigger to the gun we were holding to her head.” Mr. Black did not return calls left at the security firm Blackwater, which he joined last year.

The book says that Mr. Tenet hurriedly organized the meeting — calling ahead from his car as it traveled to the White House — because he wanted to “shake Rice” into persuading the president to respond to dire intelligence warnings that summer about a terrorist strike. Mr. Woodward writes that Mr. Tenet left the meeting frustrated because “they were not getting through to Rice.”

The disclosures took members of the bipartisan Sept. 11 commission by surprise last week. Some questioned whether information about the July 10 meeting was intentionally withheld from the panel.

In interviews Saturday and today, commission members said they were never told about the meeting despite hours of public and private questioning with Ms. Rice, Mr. Tenet and Mr. Black, much of it focused specifically on how the White House had dealt with terrorist threats in the summer of 2001.

“None of this was shared with us in hours of private interviews, including interviews under oath, nor don’t we have any paper on this,” said Timothy J. Roemer, a Democratic member of the commission and a former House member from Indiana. “I’m deeply disturbed by this. I’m furious.”

Another Democratic commissioner, former Watergate prosecutor Richard Ben-Veniste, said that the staff of the Sept. 11 commission was polled in recent days on the disclosures in Mr. Woodward’s book and agreed that the meeting “was never mentioned to us.”

“This is certainly something we would have wanted to know about,” he said, referring to the July 10, 2001, meeting.

He said he had attended the commission’s private interviews with both Mr. Tenet and Ms. Rice and had pressed “very hard for them to provide us with everything they had regarding conversations with the executive branch” about terrorist threats before the Sept. 11 attacks.

Philip D. Zelikow, the executive director of the Sept. 11 commission and now a top aide to Ms. Rice at the State Department, agreed that no witness before the commission had drawn attention to a July 10 meeting at the White House, nor described the sort of encounter portrayed in Mr. Woodward’s book.

Mr. Zelikow said that it was “entirely plausible” that a meeting occurred on July 10, during a period that summer in which intelligence agencies were being flooded with warnings of a terrorist attack against the United States or its allies.

But he said the commissioners and their staff had heard nothing in their private interviews with Mr. Tenet and Mr. Black to suggest that they had made such a dire presentation to Ms. Rice or that she had rebuffed them.

“If we had heard something that drew our attention to this meeting, it would have been a huge thing,” he said. “Repeatedly Tenet and Black said they could not remember what had transpired in some of those meetings.”

Democratic lawmakers have seized on Mr. Woodward’s book in arguing that the Bush administration bungled the war in Iraq and paid too little attention to terrorist threats in the months before Sept. 11.

Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, the senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said on “Face the Nation” on CBS that there had been “rumors” of such an encounter between Mr. Tenet and Ms. Rice in the summer of 2001.

Mr. Woodward’s book, he said, raised the question of “why didn’t Condi Rice and George Tenet tell the 9/11 commission about that? They were obliged to do that and they didn’t.”

    9/11 Panel Members Upset They Weren’t Told of Meeting, NYT, 1.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/01/washington/01cnd-book.html?hp&ex=1159761600&en=797d904aeadd4206&ei=5094&partner=homepage

The laughing 9/11 bombers

Exclusive film of suicide pilots at Bin Laden’s HQ

October 01, 2006
The Sunday Times 
Yosri Fouda

FILM of the ringleader of the September 11 hijackers reading his “martyrdom” will inside Afghanistan at Osama Bin Laden’s headquarters has emerged five years after the Al-Qaeda outrage.

It is the first time that a videotape has appeared of Mohammed Atta — who flew an American Airlines plane into the north tower of the World Trade Center — at a training camp in Afghanistan. It fills in a significant gap in the timing of the build-up to the attacks on the United States.

Dates on the tape show Atta was filmed on January 18, 2000, together with Ziad Jarrah, the pilot of United Airlines flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania after the passengers apparently stormed the flight deck.

The Sunday Times has obtained a copy of the video through a previously tested channel. The tape has no soundtrack and a US source said lip readers had tried without success to decipher what was being said.

Despite the deadly tasks the men had been assigned, they appear in high spirits, laughing and smiling in front of the camera. Only when Atta, with an AK-47 propped on a wall beside him, reads a document marked in Arabic “the will”, does he become solemn. Both are well groomed, without the haggard appearance of the identity mugshots issued after September 11.

The high quality, unedited film shows Bin Laden addressing his followers at the mud-walled complex near Kandahar. One of the main figures in the September 11 plot, Ramzi Binalshibh, is identifiable in the crowd, as is a bodyguard whose task was to kill Bin Laden with two bullets to the head if he faced capture.

Dating on the tape indicates that the Al-Qaeda leader was filmed on January 8, 2000, 10 days before Atta and Jarrah recorded their wills.

American and German investigators have struggled to find evidence of Atta’s whereabouts in January 2000 after he disappeared from Hamburg. The hour-long tape places him in Afghanistan at a decisive moment in the development of the conspiracy when he was given operational command. Months later both he and Jarrah enrolled at flying schools in America.

Investigators have also puzzled over the fact that unlike the rest of the hijackers — most of whom were young Saudi fundamentalists — Atta and Jarrah were well educated and appeared to fit into western society while studying in Germany. The video indicates how easily they slipped from a western identity to a fundamentalist one. It also shows up the subterfuge they maintained in Germany and America that they did not know each other, all part of evading detection.

    The laughing 9/11 bombers, STs, 1.10.2006, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-2383229,00.html

Detainee Memo Created Divide in White House

October 1, 2006
The New York Times
By TIM GOLDEN

In June 2005, two senior national security officials in the Bush administration came together to propose a sweeping new approach to the growing problems the United States was facing with the detention, interrogation and prosecution of terrorism suspects.

In a nine-page memorandum, the two officials, Gordon R. England, the acting deputy secretary of defense, and Philip D. Zelikow, the counselor of the State Department, urged the administration to seek Congressional approval for its detention policies.

They called for a return to the minimum standards of treatment in the Geneva Conventions and for eventually closing the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The time had come, they said, for suspects in the 9/11 plot to be taken out of their secret prison cells and tried before military tribunals.

The recommendations of the paper, which has not previously been disclosed, included several of the major policy shifts that President Bush laid out in a White House address on Sept. 6, five officials who read the document said. But the memorandum’s fate underscores the deep, long-running conflicts over detention policy that continued to divide the administration even as it pushed new legislation through Congress last week on the handling of terrorism suspects.

When the paper first circulated in the upper reaches of the administration, two of those officials said, it so angered Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that his aides gathered up copies of the document and had at least some of them shredded.

“It was not in step with the secretary of defense or the president,” said one Defense Department official who, like many others, would discuss the internal deliberations only on condition of anonymity. “It was clear that Rumsfeld was very unhappy.”

The internal debate over detention issues that began within weeks after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has come to light before. But interviews show that the struggle, pitting top officials against one another, intensified behind the scenes over the last year as criticism of the administration’s approach grew in the United States and abroad. Crucial elements of that approach were struck down by the Supreme Court on June 29, forcing a resolution of disputes that had gone on for months.

On one side of the fight were officials, often led by Vice President Dick Cheney, who said the terrorism threat required that the president have wide power to decide who could be held and how they should be treated. On the other side were officials, primarily in the State Department and the Pentagon, who portrayed their disagreement as pragmatic. They said the administration had claimed more authority than it needed, drawing widespread criticism and challenges in the courts.

Those officials initially hailed the president’s Sept. 6 announcement. Mr. Bush publicly discussed the Central Intelligence Agency’s secret detention program for the first time, saying he had ordered its remaining 14 prisoners sent to Guantánamo and tried before military tribunals. The same day, Pentagon officials presented new directives that effectively renounced military use of highly coercive interrogation methods.

But even as the White House negotiated with Congress in recent weeks, administration forces led by the vice president’s office reasserted themselves. Officials said Mr. Cheney’s staff and its bureaucratic allies — having agreed reluctantly to the disclosure of the C.I.A. operation and other changes — were closely involved in guiding the talks with Republican senators. Their adversaries in the administration, meanwhile, had to scramble just to keep up with details of the bargaining.

“Basically, they were left to get back whatever they could from Congress,” one senior administration official said of the Cheney group. “And they did.”

In the end, the White House pressed Republican senators to accept a broad definition of “unlawful enemy combatants” whom the government can hold indefinitely, to maintain some of the president’s control over C.I.A. interrogation methods and to allow the government to present some evidence in military tribunals that is based on hearsay or has been coerced from witnesses.

The administration did concede to the senators on some rules for military commissions, as the tribunals are called. It also backed off its effort to limit its obligations under the Geneva Conventions, but fought to ensure that government personnel would be immunized from prosecution for any treatment of detainees before the end of 2005 that was cruel, inhuman or degrading.

Still, several officials said privately that the detainee legislation might fail to meet a primary goal of those inside the administration who had advocated change: quelling domestic and international criticism and moving past the federal lawsuits that have tied up parts of the detention apparatus since 2002.

“There have been so many times when we thought we had broken through and turned things around, and then the forces on the other side kept charging back,” said one administration lawyer who has supported such changes. Now, the official added, “even after what was supposed to be this major legislation to resolve these issues, we are going to be back at it.”

At the time the England-Zelikow memorandum was written, in mid-June 2005, several officials said they saw little enthusiasm for reconsidering the detention system that had been set up after 9/11, primarily by a small group of lawyers in the White House, the Justice Department and the Defense Department.

That system had begun to come under increasing attack. An erroneous item in Newsweek magazine, about a Koran being flushed down a toilet at Guantánamo, led to violent demonstrations overseas. Criticism of the detention camp grew sharper in Europe. Some influential Republicans in Congress began to voice complaints as well.

Mr. Zelikow, who served as staff director for the national commission that investigated the 9/11 attacks, joined the State Department in early 2005 with strong views on the detention issue, other officials said. Early on, he began to push the idea that high-level C.I.A. captives held in connection with the 9/11 attacks should be brought to justice, these officials said.

Mr. England took over as Mr. Rumsfeld’s acting deputy in April 2005 while continuing to serve as secretary of the Navy. (He was confirmed as deputy secretary in April 2006.) He, too, had experience with the detainee issue, having spent months working to overhaul what many military officers saw as a flawed screening process for prisoners at Guantánamo.

Two other officials who had worked extensively on detention issues during Mr. Bush’s first term also participated in the drafting of the memorandum, officials said. One of them, Matthew C. Waxman, was Mr. Rumsfeld’s chief aide for detainee issues. The other, John B. Bellinger III, was the State Department’s legal counsel.

The proposals in the paper were not entirely new. But what was different, one administration official said, was an effort at “a big-bang solution,” to persuade senior officials or the president himself to adopt a comprehensive new approach to the detention problems of the policy. Failing that, officials said, the authors hoped to foster new debate about how to shape a strategy that would be more sustainable diplomatically, politically and in the federal courts.

Three years after Mr. Bush had determined he would not apply the Geneva Conventions in fighting terrorists, the memorandum urged a return to the conventions’ minimum standards, including the ban on “humiliating and degrading treatment” contained in the provision known as Common Article 3. The authors advocated that move not because they believed it was required by international law, officials said, but to win broader support from American allies and make court intervention less likely.

The paper did not advocate abandoning the covert interrogation program, but restricting it to the shorter-term questioning of more important suspects, officials said. After repatriating many of the Guantánamo detainees, the authors argued, the detention center could be shut down and the remaining prisoners transferred to a long-term detention facility in the United States. They did not specify what kind of facility it should be, two of the officials who read the paper said.

In a passage that underscored the views of Mr. Zelikow, one official said, the paper argued that efforts to bring to justice the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks must produce more than the chaotic trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the French-born militant who remains the only person to have been charged in an American court with involvement in the attacks.

The paper specifically called for taking Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and others held by the C.I.A. before military commissions, officials said, arguing that much of the information that would be disclosed by their trials was already widely known.

Officials said the memorandum was well received by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who forwarded it to senior officials at the National Security Council. But the hope that it would lead to a broader discussion of options within the administration was quashed by Mr. Rumsfeld, they said.

Some of the defense secretary’s ire over the paper appeared to be substantive, several Pentagon officials said. At various times, Mr. Rumsfeld raised objections to taking over responsibility for the C.I.A. detainees, and he was reluctant to consider closing Guantánamo without a viable alternative in sight, the officials said.

Most important, they said, Mr. Rumsfeld was angered that his new deputy, Mr. England, had worked on the memorandum with officials outside the Pentagon without his authorization. “England’s wings got clipped after that,” one Defense Department aide said.

A spokesman for the department, Col. Gary L. Keck, said it would not discuss its deliberations on detainee policy or any “predecisional documents.” But he denied that Mr. Rumsfeld was ever angered by those deliberations or instructed anyone to destroy documents.

“This is a difficult and complex issue that has profound operational, diplomatic, legal and political implications not only for the Department of Defense, but for many other executive agencies,” Colonel Keck said in a statement. “In any discussion on such an important topic there will be differences of opinion — this is to be expected.”

In early August 2005, after a long internal debate, new rules for the Guantánamo military tribunals were published which did not include changes that many military lawyers had advocated. Officials said David S. Addington, who was then Mr. Cheney’s counsel and is now his chief of staff, was prominent among those who opposed modifications like an explicit ban on evidence obtained by torture, contending that it would wrongly hint that the government had sanctioned torture at all.

At the Pentagon, Mr. England continued to pursue the idea of adopting Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions in a directive that would set guidelines for prisoner treatment and interrogations. In late August, he called a meeting with some of the vice chiefs of staff of the armed forces and senior uniformed and civilian lawyers to consider the matter.

According to officials who attended the meeting, several of those present spoke in favor of the Geneva provision, including the senior Army lawyer, Maj. Gen. Thomas J. Romig. In an unusual move, Mr. England called for a show of hands. All but two of those present endorsed the provision. But those two officials were among the most influential in the room: the department’s under secretary for intelligence, Stephen A. Cambone, and its general counsel, William J. Haynes II.

Their concerns, which were later echoed by aides to Mr. Cheney, started with the fact that the president had explicitly rejected the Geneva standard in February 2002. They also disputed the idea that Article 3 would necessarily give clear guidance to soldiers, citing what they called its vague prohibition on “outrages upon personal dignity.”

Debate over both the proposed prisoner-treatment directive and an Army field manual for interrogations would go on for another year. For the time being, though, the idea of adopting Common Article 3 directly as the standard of treatment went no further.

There was little high-level discussion of alternatives to Guantánamo, several officials said. But the C.I.A.’s secret prisons had been a subject of rising concern since at least 2004, when unease over the open-ended detentions became evident within the agency and the Supreme Court ruled that detainees held by the United States at Guantánamo — and, by implication, elsewhere around the world — could challenge their detention in American courts.

By late 2005, as reports in The Washington Post and other news media about the secret prisons raised a storm of complaints among foreign governments, the C.I.A. began to move more quickly to transfer some captives to the custody of their own and other foreign governments, officials familiar with the program said.

By the end of 2005, military lawyers also began to review the C.I.A.’s evidentiary files on the high-value detainees to consider their possible prosecution by the military commissions at Guantánamo. Ultimately, military officials concluded that they could make solid cases against the C.I.A. prisoners without unduly exposing the agency’s covert program or even having to depend heavily on statements that had been obtained during highly coercive interrogations, several officials said.

There was also new pressure for action from within the C.I.A. Intelligence officers involved in detention and interrogations were increasingly worried about the legal implications of the program, officials said. Some foreign governments had declined to house covert detention centers, and the furor over those sites created friction with other intelligence agencies, the officials said.

Still, some senior figures in the administration, including Mr. Cheney and his chief of staff, Mr. Addington, remained unconvinced that the C.I.A. program could be made public and its prisoners taken before military commissions while continuing to protect what they saw as a vital intelligence asset, several officials said.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Cheney, Lea Anne McBride, said his office would have no comment on its role in policy deliberations, as did spokesmen for the State Department and the National Security Council.

“The problem fell for some period of time into the too-hard category,” one senior administration official said. “It fell so far into the too-hard category that it was lost from view.”

Interagency meetings on the detention issue with officials just below the cabinet level went around and around for months, officials said. In the late spring, they added, the president’s national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, began pushing senior officials to agree on options they could present to the president.

Many officials said the most important factor in forcing a new approach was the Supreme Court’s ruling in June that the military commissions set up by the administration could not proceed. That decision, which also upheld the minimum Geneva standards of prisoner treatment as binding law, led the administration to seek Congressional authorization for new tribunals and, some officials said, left the C.I.A.’s interrogation program on even more tenuous ground.

In late July, two officials said, Mr. Rumsfeld and his aides dropped their longstanding concerns about taking custody of the C.I.A. detainees, and Mr. Hadley moved to approve the arrangements for their transfer to Guantánamo.

The two officials said that Mr. Cheney was never entirely persuaded of the wisdom of emptying the C.I.A.’s detention sites and making its interrogation program public, but supported the move when Mr. Bush decided in late August to go ahead.

“The vice president knows the president has made the right decisions to make Americans safer and support the men and women on the front lines in the war on terror who are fighting this brutal enemy,” Mr. Cheney’s spokeswoman, Ms. McBride, said.

The element of the new legislation that raised the sharpest criticism among legal scholars and human rights advocates last week was the scaling back of the habeas corpus right of terrorism suspects to challenge their detention in the federal courts. But in dozens of high-level meetings on detention policy, officials said, that provision was scarcely even discussed.

    Detainee Memo Created Divide in White House, NYT, 1.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/01/washington/01detain.html?hp&ex=1159761600&en=b6308a474a8f0599&ei=5094&partner=homepage