History > 2007 > USA > Terrorism (I)

Kevin Siers

cartoon

North Carolina, The Charlotte Observer

Cagle        4.1.2007

http://cagle.msnbc.com/politicalcartoons/PCcartoons/siers.asp

Jailers Testify

About Padilla’s Confinement

February 28, 2007
The New York Times
By DEBORAH SONTAG

MIAMI, Feb. 27 — As Jose Padilla dropped his head and grew still, a senior official from the naval brig in Charleston, S.C., testified on Tuesday in federal court here that he had twice observed Mr. Padilla weeping in the electronically monitored cell where the military detained him for three years and eight months.

The brig’s technical director, Sanford E. Seymour, also said that Mr. Padilla, an American citizen who was designated an enemy combatant in 2002, sometimes slept on a steel bunk without a mattress, that the windows in his 80-square-foot cell were blackened and that brig employees covered up their nametags around him.

Mr. Seymour said that Mr. Padilla, a Muslim, occasionally visited with an imam and that his Koran was taken from him periodically; that he sometimes went outside to shoot baskets or sunbathe; and that when Mr. Padilla believed he had been administered LSD, it was really a flu shot.

These scattershot revelations, elicited by Mr. Padilla’s lawyers in a hearing of sharply limited scope, did not add up to a comprehensive portrait of Mr. Padilla’s time in the brig. But they were nonetheless significant, marking the first time Mr. Padilla’s military jailers were forced to speak publicly about the conditions of his secretive confinement without charges.

That confinement ended a year ago when Mr. Padilla, 36, was transferred into the civilian law enforcement system to stand trial on terrorism conspiracy charges. But his lawyers argue that the conditions of his military detention and interrogations traumatized him so severely that he is incapable of assisting them in his own defense. In essence, they say, the government rendered him incompetent to stand trial, a position the prosecution vehemently denies.

Three days of testimony in a competency hearing concluded Tuesday with the brief appearance of two brig officials. After both sides make concluding arguments on Wednesday, Judge Marcia G. Cooke of Federal District Court will choose between two starkly contrasting images of Mr. Padilla: the lucid, occasionally jolly defendant with antisocial tendencies portrayed by the government, and the twitching, fearful, damaged man presented by the defense.

In a 16-page report made public Tuesday, Rodolfo A. Buigas, a Bureau of Prisons psychologist who examined Mr. Padilla for the judge, recommended that he be found competent to stand trial. Mr. Padilla refused to submit to psychological testing, so Dr. Buigas evaluated him by talking to him for about five hours, by examining his records and the reports of experts hired by the defense, and by questioning lawyers and brig officials.

It is because Dr. Buigas interviewed brig officials that Judge Cooke allowed them to testify Tuesday despite strong objections from the government. But she allowed defense lawyers to ask the officials only about their conversations with Dr. Buigas, saying that a more general airing about conditions in the brig might be held if she conducted a hearing on a defense motion to dismiss the indictment because of “outrageous government conduct.”

Craig S. Noble, a psychologist at the brig, testified that he had screened Mr. Padilla twice. He did an initial “brief evaluation” when Mr. Padilla arrived in June 2002, finding that he was “responsive, made good eye contact and, in fact, smiled periodically.” About two years later, Dr. Noble said, he conducted a “cell front visit,” in which he spoke to Mr. Padilla through a rectangular slot on his door, and discovered no new signs of “distress or lethality.”

During the hearing, two mental health experts who spent over 25 hours evaluating Mr. Padilla for the defense testified that he was disabled by post-traumatic stress disorder caused by his experiences in the brig.

“I’m not sure that any of us know what happened at the brig, but I know that something there put the fear into Mr. Padilla,” said Patricia Zapf, a forensic psychologist who examined him. “Mr. Padilla is an anxiety-ridden, broken individual who is incapacitated by that anxiety.”

But the Bureau of Prisons psychologist, Dr. Buigas, disagreed with the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder. He said Dr. Zapf’s testing was invalidated by the fact that Mr. Padilla was handcuffed during the tests, a condition imposed on Dr. Zapf by prison officials.

Testifying on Monday, Dr. Buigas, whom defense lawyers do not view as a neutral examiner, said that Mr. Padilla possessed the capacity to work with his lawyers, and that any failure to do so was “volitional.”

Dr. Buigas added that during his first encounter with Mr. Padilla, “he was actually pretty happy.” Dr. Buigas testified that he had even commented to his boss that Mr. Padilla seemed “happier than our department,” referring to his colleagues in the mental health unit of the Miami federal detention center.

Mr. Padilla, who sat placidly through much of the testimony, chatted animatedly with his lawyers as Dr. Buigas talked. One of the lawyers, Anthony Natale, rose to his feet for a cross-examination, and what turned into an odd exchange.

”You used the word ‘happy,’ ” Mr. Natale said to Dr. Buigas. “Do you know if that’s when he was allowed for the first time to get a radio? Do you know if that’s when he was allowed to have a shower with a curtain? ... So you don’t know why he was happy?”

Dr. Buigas said he could not recall the conversation clearly, but he said, “In general, he was talking about being Puerto Rican.”

Prosecution lawyers scoffed at the idea the Mr. Padilla was mentally incompetent, saying that his jailers had never reported any psychiatric problems and that he had comported himself well during court hearings.

“Jose Padilla sits quietly,” said Brian K. Frazier, a prosecutor. “He follows the instructions of the marshals. He turns around and waves to Mama.”

Mr. Frazier said that in court Mr. Padilla manifested none of the tics, grimaces and sweating that the defense describes, “despite the fact that we talk about some pretty uncomfortable stuff.”

Prosecutors tried to introduce into evidence what they said was an internal document from Al Qaeda that coached operatives to be obstructionist if captured, to avoid revealing information and to make a claim of torture even if no mistreatment had occurred. This document, which they referred to as the “Manchester manual” because it was found several years ago in Manchester, England, was what guided Mr. Padilla, they said.

“Don’t I have to have some evidence that Mr. Padilla was aware of this document and studied it?” Judge Cooke asked prosecutors.

In declining to admit the manual into evidence, she added that the manual would have converted the competency hearing into a debate over whether the defendant had been tortured in the brig.

Jailers Testify About Padilla’s Confinement, NYT, 28.2.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/28/us/28padilla.html

Editorial

Al Qaeda Resurgent

February 25, 2007
The New York Times

Almost five and a half years ago, America — united by the shock of 9/11 — understood exactly what it needed to do. It had to find, thwart and take down the command structure of Al Qaeda, which was responsible for the deaths of 3,000 innocent people on American soil. Despite years of costly warfare in Afghanistan and Iraq, America today is not significantly closer to that essential goal.

At a crucial moment, the Bush administration diverted America’s military strength, political attention and foreign aid dollars from a necessary, winnable war in Afghanistan to an unnecessary, and by now unwinnable, war in Iraq. Al Qaeda took full advantage of these blunders to survive and rebuild. Now it seems to be back in business.

As our colleagues Mark Mazzetti and David Rohde reported last week, American intelligence and counterterrorism officials believe that Al Qaeda has rebuilt its notorious training camps, this time in Pakistan’s loosely governed tribal regions near the Afghan border. Camp graduates are fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq — and may well be plotting new terrorist strikes in the West.

The same officials point to more frequent and more current videos as evidence that Al Qaeda’s top leaders, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri — once on the run for their lives and unable to maintain timely communications with their followers — now feel more secure. Al Qaeda is not as strong as it was when its Taliban allies ruled Afghanistan. But, the officials warn, it is getting there.

Al Qaeda’s comeback didn’t have to happen. And it must not be allowed to continue. The new Qaeda sanctuaries in Pakistan do not operate with the blessing of the Pakistani government. But Pakistan’s military dictator, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, has not tried very hard to drive them out. In recent months he has virtually conceded the tribal areas to local leaders sympathetic to Al Qaeda. President Bush needs to warn him that continued American backing depends on his doing more to rid his country of people being trained to kill Americans.

Washington also has to enlist more support on the Afghan side of the border. NATO allies need to drop restrictions that hobble their troops’ ability to fight a resurgent Taliban. Afghan leaders need to wage a more aggressive campaign against corruption and drug trafficking. And Washington needs to pour significantly more money into rural development, to give Afghan farmers alternatives to drug cultivation. One reason General Musharraf has been hedging his bets with the Taliban and Al Qaeda is his growing doubt that Washington is determined to succeed in Afghanistan.

Having failed to finish off Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, Washington now finds itself fighting Qaeda-affiliated groups on multiple fronts, most recently in Somalia. Al Qaeda’s comeback in Pakistan is a devastating indictment of Mr. Bush’s grievously flawed strategies and misplaced Iraq obsession. Unless the president changes course, the dangers to America and its friends will continue to multiply.

    Al Qaeda Resurgent, NYT, 25.2.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/25/opinion/25sun1.html

New Airport X-Rays Scan Bodies,

Not Just Bags

February 24, 2007
The New York Times
By PAUL GIBLIN and ERIC LIPTON

PHOENIX, Feb. 23 — X-ray vision has come to the airport checkpoint here, courtesy of federal aviation security officials who have installed a new device that peeks underneath passengers’ clothing to search for guns, bombs or liquid explosives.

The new body scanning machine, which went into use on Friday at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport and will be tested later at airports in Los Angeles and New York, will screen only volunteers, at least initially. Transportation Security Administration officials want to make sure the machine is reliable and fast enough to replace the traditional pat-down — and that it does not provoke too many protests.

Security officials examining the head-to-toe images work in a closed booth, hidden from public view, agency officials said. Special “privacy” software intentionally blurs the image, creating an outline of a body that is clear enough to see a collarbone, bellybutton or weapon, but flattens details of revealing contours.

Kenneth Johnson, 64, of Mesa, was the first passenger screened on Friday in Phoenix. He said he had titanium implants in both shoulders and one knee that set off alarms at checkpoint metal detectors.

“I’ve been all over the world; I’ve been strip-searched,” Mr. Johnson, who was traveling to Florida, told an Associated Press reporter. “This was very easy.”

Others found the scans objectionable.

“I think that is a violation of people’s personal rights,” said Kara Neal, 36, a mental health counselor on her way to Philadelphia. She was not asked to undergo the screening, but said she would have refused. “I would rather take a pat-down than go through this,” she said.

Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union have raised similar objections, calling the X-ray scan a “virtual strip-search,” and have urged Congress to prohibit its use for routine screening.

The vending-machine-size device, which costs about $110,000, will be used only when passengers are pulled aside for a more thorough check, known as secondary screening, after passing through a metal detector. Other scanning machines will be installed this year at Los Angeles International Airport and at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York.

While security agency officials say the machines, known as SmartCheck, pose no health hazards, some experts disagree. The machine, manufactured by American Science and Engineering Inc. of Billerica, Mass., generates about as much radiation as a passenger would get flying for about two minutes at about 30,000 feet, or in technical terms, fewer than 10 microRem per scan, according to security agency and company officials. The machine is already being used in some prisons, by United States customs and at Heathrow Airport in London.

Dr. Albert J. Fornace Jr., an expert in molecular oncology at Georgetown University Medical Center, said such a low dose was inconsequential, even for pregnant women.

“Obviously, no radiation is even better than even a very low level,” Dr. Fornace said. “But this is trivial.”

But David J. Brenner, a professor of radiation oncology at Columbia University, said that even though the risk for any individual was extremely low, he would still avoid it.

“The question is, Do you want to add to your already existing risk?” Professor Brenner said, recommending that pregnant women and young children, in particular, avoid the device. “There are other technologies around that can probably do the job just as well without the extra radiation.”

The machine beams a low-energy X-ray at the passenger, which after it bounces off the surface of the skin is processed by computer software that highlights metals or elements like nitrogen that are found in explosives or weapons.

The X-ray is not strong enough to penetrate much beyond the skin, so it cannot find weapons that may be hidden in body cavities.

“A lot of people aren’t really comfortable with a pat-down,” said Ellen Howe, a security agency spokeswoman, “so they may find this to be an alternative they may appreciate.” She added that the X-ray images would be destroyed immediately.

Aviation security officials are rushing to bring new screening devices to airports because of the London-based plot last summer to use liquid explosives to blow up airliners headed to the United States.

The devices now used at the nation’s airports, the X-ray machine for carry-on bags and the metal detector for passengers, rely on 1950s-era technology that cannot reliably detect liquid or plastic explosives.

Earlier efforts by the federal security agency to introduce more advanced checkpoint technologies have stumbled, including the so-called puffer machines, which blow air on passengers to search for minute traces of explosives.

After installing 94 of the machines at 37 airports, officials suspended the program last year, saying the devices broke down too often. More puffer machines may be bought if the problems can be resolved.

Officials intend to try other alternatives, like a so-called millimeter wave machine that uses harmless radio waves, instead of X-rays, to do a full body scan.

Ms. Howe said that until the tests on the SmartCheck were complete, it was unclear how widely used the machines would be. “We are committed to testing it,” she said. “But we are not committed to deploying it widely until we learn more.”

    New Airport X-Rays Scan Bodies, Not Just Bags, NYT, 24.2.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/24/us/24scan.html?hp

U.S. Used Base in Ethiopia to Hunt Al Qaeda in Africa

February 23, 2007
The New York Times
By MICHAEL R. GORDON and MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON, Feb. 22 — The American military quietly waged a campaign from Ethiopia last month to capture or kill top leaders of Al Qaeda in the Horn of Africa, including the use of an airstrip in eastern Ethiopia to mount airstrikes against Islamic militants in neighboring Somalia, according to American officials.

The close and largely clandestine relationship with Ethiopia also included significant sharing of intelligence on the Islamic militants’ positions and information from American spy satellites with the Ethiopian military. Members of a secret American Special Operations unit, Task Force 88, were deployed in Ethiopia and Kenya, and ventured into Somalia, the officials said.

The counterterrorism effort was described by American officials as a qualified success that disrupted terrorist networks in Somalia, led to the death or capture of several Islamic militants and involved a collaborative relationship with Ethiopia that had been developing for years.

But the tally of the dead and captured does not as yet include some Qaeda leaders — including Fazul Abdullah Mohammed and Fahid Mohammed Ally Msalam — whom the United States has hunted for their suspected roles in the attacks on American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. With Somalia still in a chaotic state, and American and African officials struggling to cobble together a peacekeeping force for the war-ravaged country, the long-term effects of recent American operations remain unclear.

It has been known for several weeks that American Special Operations troops have operated inside Somalia and that the United States carried out two strikes on Qaeda suspects using AC-130 gunships. But the extent of American cooperation with the recent Ethiopian invasion into Somalia and the fact that the Pentagon secretly used an airstrip in Ethiopia to carry out attacks have not been previously reported. The secret campaign in the Horn of Africa is an example of a more aggressive approach the Pentagon has taken in recent years to dispatch Special Operations troops globally to hunt high-level terrorism suspects. President Bush gave the Pentagon powers after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to carry out these missions, which historically had been reserved for intelligence operatives.

When Ethiopian troops first began a large-scale military offensive in Somalia late last year, officials in Washington denied that the Bush administration had given its tacit approval to the Ethiopian government. In interviews over the past several weeks, however, officials from several American agencies with a hand in Somalia policy have described a close alliance between Washington and the Ethiopian government that was developed with a common purpose: rooting out Islamic radicalism inside Somalia.

Indeed, the Pentagon for several years has been training Ethiopian troops for counterterrorism operations in camps near the Somalia border, including Ethiopian special forces called the Agazi Commandos, which were part of the Ethiopian offensive in Somalia.

Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, declined to discuss details of the American operation, but some officials agreed to provide specifics because they saw it as a relative success story. They said that the close relationship had included the sharing of battlefield intelligence on the Islamists’ positions — a result of an Ethiopian request to Gen. John P. Abizaid, then the commander of the United States Central Command. John D. Negroponte, the director of national intelligence at the time, then authorized spy satellites to be diverted to provide information for Ethiopian troops, the officials said.

The deepening American alliance with Ethiopia is the latest twist in the United States’ on-and-off intervention in Somalia, beginning with an effort in 1992 to distribute food to starving Somalis and evolving into deadly confrontation in 1993 between American troops and fighters loyal to a Somali warlord, Mohammed Farah Aidid. The latest chapter began last June when the Council of Islamic Courts, an armed fundamentalist movement, defeated a coalition of warlords backed by the Central Intelligence Agency and took power in Mogadishu, the capital. The Islamists were believed to be sheltering Qaeda militants involved in the embassy bombings, as well as in a 2002 hotel bombing in Kenya.

After a failed C.I.A. effort to arm and finance Somali warlords, the Bush administration decided on a policy to bolster Somalia’s weak transitional government. This decision brought the American policy in line with Ethiopia’s.

As the Islamists’ grip on power grew stronger, their militias began to encircle Baidoa, where the transitional government was operating in virtual exile. Ethiopian officials pledged that if the Islamists attacked Baidoa, they would respond with a full-scale assault.

While Washington resisted officially endorsing an Ethiopian invasion, American officials from several government agencies said that the Bush administration decided last year that an incursion was the best option to dislodge the Islamists from power.

When the Ethiopian offensive began on Dec. 24, it soon turned into a rout, somewhat to the Americans’ surprise. Armed with American intelligence, the Ethiopians’ tank columns, artillery batteries and military jets made quick work of the poorly trained and ill-equipped Islamist militia.

“The Ethiopians just wiped out entire grid squares; it was a blitzkrieg,” said one official in Washington who had helped develop the strategy toward Somalia.

As the Islamists retreated, the Qaeda operatives and their close aides fled south toward a swampy region. Using information provided by Ethiopian forces in Somalia as well as American intelligence, a task force from the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command began planning direct strikes.

On Dec. 31, the largely impotent transitional government of Somalia submitted a formal request to the American ambassador in Kenya asking for the United States to take action against the militants.

General Abizaid called Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and informed him that the Central Command was sending additional Special Operations forces to the region. The deployment was carried out under the terms of an earlier, classified directive that gave the military the authority to kill or capture senior Qaeda operatives if it was determined that the failure to act expeditiously meant the United States would lose a “fleeting opportunity” to neutralize the enemy, American officials said.

On Jan. 6, two Air Force AC-130 gunships, aircraft with devastating firepower, arrived at a small airport in eastern Ethiopia. American Special Operations troops operating in Kenya, working with the Kenyan military, also set up positions along the southern border to capture militants trying to flee the country.

A Navy flotilla began to search for ships that might be carrying fleeing Qaeda operatives. Support planes were deployed in Djibouti. F-15Es from Al Udeid air base in Qatar also flew missions. Intelligence was shared with Ethiopia and Kenya through C.I.A. operatives in each country. American military planners also worked directly with Ethiopian and Kenyan military officials.

On Jan. 7, one day after the AC-130s arrived in Ethiopia, the airstrike was carried our near Ras Kamboni, an isolated fishing village on the Kenyan border.

According to American officials, the primary target of the strike was Aden Hashi Ayro, a young military commander trained in Afghanistan who was one of the senior leaders of the Council of Islamic Courts.

Several hours after the strike, Ethiopian troops and one member of the American Special Operations team arrived at the site and confirmed that eight people had been killed and three wounded, all of whom were described as being armed. After sifting through the debris, they found a bloodied passport and other items that led them to believe Mr. Ayro was injured in the strike and probably died. Several members of the Special Operations team were also in Somalia at the time of the strike, one official said.

The second AC-130 strike, on Jan. 23, had another of the Islamic council’s senior leaders, Sheik Ahmed Madobe, as its target. Mr. Madobe survived and was later captured by the Ethiopians, Americans say.

American officials said that Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, the mastermind of the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania and the alleged ringleader of Al Qaeda’s East African cell, remains at large. Some officials caution that while the Ethiopians have said additional “high-priority targets,” including Abu Talha al-Sudani, a leading member of the cell, were killed in their own airstrikes, American intelligence officials have yet to confirm this.

In late January, American officials played a role in securing the safe passage of Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed, the second-highest-ranking Islamist leader, from southern Somalia to Nairobi, Kenya. The exact role of American involvement is still not clear, but some American officials consider him to be a moderate Islamist.

Jeffrey Gettleman contributed reporting from Nairobi, Kenya.

    U.S. Used Base in Ethiopia to Hunt Al Qaeda in Africa, NYT, 23.2.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/23/world/africa/23somalia.html?hp

After 9/11, Ailing Residents Find a Place to Turn

February 21, 2007
The New York Times
By ANTHONY DePALMA

They say they suffer the same rasping cough, shortness of breath and gastrointestinal pains as thousands of rescue and recovery workers who fell ill from the dust and smoke at ground zero. They worry, as the others do, that the future may bring more health problems.

Yet residents, workers and students who returned to Lower Manhattan after the Sept. 11 attack say that their medical problems have largely been overlooked as officials focus increasing attention on the responders who were more exposed to the hazards.

“Not to take anything from them, but everything has been concentrated on the fire, police and E.M.T. guys,” said Agustin Chaves, who lives and works in an apartment building two blocks from the World Trade Center site. “Nobody has been helping regular working people.”

Mr. Chaves, 53, developed asthma and severe acid reflux about a year and a half after Sept. 11, 2001. As his condition worsened, he tried to find out whether it was connected to the dust he had breathed in after the twin towers collapsed. Then last fall he heard that the city was giving millions of dollars to Bellevue Hospital Center to treat people excluded from other programs, like the one that monitors and treats recovery workers at Mount Sinai Medical Center.

Since that announcement in September, the number of people being treated at the W.T.C. Environmental Health Center at Bellevue Hospital has doubled to more than 900. Several hundred more people are on a waiting list, including many low-income residents of Chinatown and the Lower East Side, and immigrant workers without health insurance. And after Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg last week encouraged residents who might have been exposed to the dust to be checked by the clinic’s specialists, the number of patients is expected to rise substantially.

Dr. Joan Reibman, a pulmonologist who directs the center, said that most of her patients had not been exposed to the dust as intensively as firefighters and workers who toiled on the debris pile, but that they might have been affected by the contaminated air nonetheless.

Doctors and scientists have not definitively linked the dust to serious illnesses like cancer. But certain symptoms of respiratory and gastrointestinal ailments have been strongly associated with exposure to the dust. Thousands of firefighters developed gastrointestinal problems and what has become known as World Trade Center cough; the seriousness of their symptoms was found to be related to how soon they arrived at ground zero after the towers collapsed. Medical studies have also shown that they suffered substantial losses in lung capacity after working at the site.

Testing done by the Fire Department is considered especially important because all firefighters undergo thorough physical examinations every year, making it possible to track with a degree of medical certainty illnesses that developed after 9/11.

Most other studies about exposure to trade center dust — for example, the World Trade Center Health Registry of 71,000 workers, residents and volunteers — have been based on people’s own reporting of when an ailment began, and thus were less reliable indicators of a link between the dust and disease.

However, in the past year, both the federal and city governments have expanded monitoring and treatment programs for recovery workers and others, based on the premise that there is some association between the dust and those respiratory ailments.

An overwhelming majority of residents in Lower Manhattan have not developed any illnesses because of the dust, Dr. Reibman said. But whether some patients who have come in complaining of symptoms actually were reacting to the dust may be determined by looking at the extent of the dust exposure and the person’s medical history.

While ground zero recovery operations ended in June 2002, dust could have remained in interior spaces and duct work in nearby office and apartment buildings far longer. In many buildings that were never thoroughly cleaned, that dust may still be present.

Dr. Reibman said it was possible that some clinic patients believed that their symptoms were associated with the dust even though there may not be a connection. As a doctor in a public hospital, she said that did not matter to her as long as those who were sick could be cared for.

But she said many of her patients do have “asthma-like symptoms that we’re treating. And a small number have more complex diseases. Where you fall in that spectrum depends on exposure and susceptibility.”

Most patients are treated with medication, though a few who develop more serious illnesses are hospitalized at Bellevue whether or not a specific link to trade center dust can be proved.

The half-dozen examining rooms at the clinic have been serving a constant stream of patients since Mr. Bloomberg pledged $16 million over five years for the clinic to treat anyone who needs it without charge. Dr. Reibman has so far adopted a policy that accepts nearly everyone.

Many people, like Mr. Chaves, arrive at the clinic with worry in their eyes and asthma inhalers in their pockets. He is the resident superintendent of a condominium complex on Greenwich Street. When his building was engulfed by dust on Sept. 11, he was standing guard in the lobby and was covered in a layer of fine particles.

About 18 months later, Mr. Chaves started having trouble breathing and began to think that his symptoms were connected to the trade center dust. His family doctor could not pinpoint what was wrong even as his condition worsened. He was once athletic and agile, he said, a basketball-court terror his sons could not catch.

“Now I can barely run around with the grandchildren,” he said.

All the apartments in his building were professionally cleaned several years ago. But he finds the dust — a toxic mixture of chemicals and concrete that scientists say can be as caustic as drain cleaner — when he has to work in spaces above ceiling tiles.

Most alarming, he said, is finding the fluffy, gray dust when he or his men are called to remove a balky air conditioner from its slot in the building wall.

“We pull it out of the wall,” Mr. Chaves said, “and all the dust is still in there.”

The Bellevue clinic, which he visits every few weeks, has its roots in an asthma clinic that Dr. Reibman started in 1991 to investigate why the city had some of the highest rates of the disease in the country.

In 2002, she collaborated with the State Department of Health on a survey of residents who lived within a mile of ground zero. The study, one of only a few to deal with the effect on residents, found that about 60 percent of the 2,812 residents who responded complained of coughing, wheezing or shortness of breath that began after the terror attack.

The study has limitations. Those who responded to the survey were not given physical examinations, nor were their medical records checked for pre-existing health problems. Their responses were based on their own estimations of when their symptoms began.

In the same 2002 study, in a control group of residents about five miles from ground zero, 20 percent reported similar symptoms, again based solely on their own recollections.

Dr. Reibman’s asthma clinic became part of the city’s overall public health response in the months after 9/11. But it played a relatively small role until Mr. Bloomberg sharply increased funding in response to community pressure and emerging medical issues among recovery workers and others.

This month Manuel S. Bruno, 82, had his first examination at the clinic after reading news articles that said firefighters and police officers were developing serious, and sometimes fatal, illnesses.

Mr. Bruno said that shortly after he and his wife cleaned ground zero dust from their apartment on the Lower East Side, he developed an eye infection and an unusual rash. He said his regular doctors dismissed any possible link to the dust, attributing the symptoms to his age. Now he said he is willing to undergo specialized tests that the clinic’s doctors ordered because, whether they find a link to ground zero dust or not, “at least maybe they can help me.”

Another recent patient, Miguel Lopez, 40, said he had felt awful since he worked several months for a company that cleaned the dust from office buildings in Lower Manhattan. Without health insurance, he struggled for years to find someone to treat his severe rash and muscle ache before he heard about the specialists at the Bellevue clinic in October.

Mr. Lopez said he wanted to return to Ecuador, his native country, but was afraid to do so until he knew more about his medical condition.

“If something happens in 5 to 10 years,” he said, “I don’t want to be in Ecuador.”

Dr. Reibman recently added psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers to the clinic staff because so many of her patients also have stress-related symptoms, stemming in part from their concerns about medical problems that could develop.

She said she was so overwhelmed with new patients that she had not had the time or staff to conduct a follow-up to her 2002 residential survey. And she is likely to get even busier. Mr. Bloomberg, in describing the city’s comprehensive plan for dealing with 9/11 health problems last week, said that the Bellevue clinic might need to care for as many as 12,000 patients.

Dr. Reibman said she did not know the extent of the health problems among Lower Manhattan residents, or how much money would be needed for treatment. But she shares data with the Mount Sinai program and the Fire Department and hopes to reach conclusions about 9/11-related symptoms and treatment.

Meanwhile, officials from the federal Environmental Protection Agency have said that trade center dust poses little continuing danger to residents. Still, in December, the agency offered to test and clean apartments in Lower Manhattan. (To register, residents and building owners can call 1-888-747-7725.)

In 2004, residents, workers and students in Lower Manhattan filed a federal class action lawsuit against the E.P.A., its former administrator, Christie Whitman, and other federal officials, seeking a more thorough cleanup and an aggressive screening and treatment program.

The suit, which does not ask for individual monetary awards, claims that Ms. Whitman deliberately distorted information and put families at risk by encouraging them to return to apartments, schools and places of business before comprehensive tests of the air quality were available.

Last year, Judge Deborah A. Batts of Federal District Court in Manhattan said that Ms. Whitman’s statements that the air downtown was safe to breathe were misleading and “conscience-shocking.” She allowed portions of the suit against Ms. Whitman and the agency to go forward.

    After 9/11, Ailing Residents Find a Place to Turn, NYT, 21.2.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/21/nyregion/21clinic.html

Judge Limits New York Police Taping

February 16, 2007
The New York Times
By JIM DWYER

In a rebuke of a surveillance practice greatly expanded by the New York Police Department after the Sept. 11 attacks, a federal judge ruled yesterday that the police must stop the routine videotaping of people at public gatherings unless there is an indication that unlawful activity may occur.

Four years ago, at the request of the city, the same judge, Charles S. Haight Jr., gave the police greater authority to investigate political, social and religious groups.

In yesterday’s ruling, Judge Haight, of United States District Court in Manhattan, found that by videotaping people who were exercising their right to free speech and breaking no laws, the Police Department had ignored the milder limits he had imposed on it in 2003.

Citing two events in 2005 — a march in Harlem and a demonstration by homeless people in front of the home of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg — the judge said the city had offered scant justification for videotaping the people involved.

“There was no reason to suspect or anticipate that unlawful or terrorist activity might occur,” he wrote, “or that pertinent information about or evidence of such activity might be obtained by filming the earnest faces of those concerned citizens and the signs by which they hoped to convey their message to a public official.”

While he called the police conduct “egregious,” Judge Haight also offered an unusual judicial mea culpa, taking responsibility for his own words in a 2003 order that he conceded had not been “a model of clarity.”

The restrictions on videotaping do not apply to bridges, tunnels, airports, subways or street traffic, Judge Haight noted, but are meant to control police surveillance at events where people gather to exercise their rights under the First Amendment.

“No reasonable person, and surely not this court, is unaware of the perils the New York public faces and the crucial importance of the N.Y.P.D.’s efforts to detect, prevent and punish those who would cause others harm,” Judge Haight wrote.

Jethro M. Eisenstein, one of the lawyers who challenged the videotaping practices, said that Judge Haight’s ruling would make it possible to contest other surveillance tactics, including the use of undercover officers at political gatherings. In recent years, police officers have disguised themselves as protesters, shouted feigned objections when uniformed officers were making arrests, and pretended to be mourners at a memorial event for bicycle riders killed in traffic accidents.

“This was a major push by the corporation counsel to say that the guidelines are nice but they’re yesterday’s news, and that the security establishment’s view of what is important trumps civil liberties,” Mr. Eisenstein said. “Judge Haight is saying that’s just not the way we’re doing things in New York City.”

A spokesman for Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly referred questions about the ruling to the city’s lawyers, who noted that Judge Haight did not set a deadline for destroying the tapes it had already made, and that the judge did not find the city had violated the First Amendment.

Nevertheless, Judge Haight — at times invoking the mythology of the ancient Greeks and of Harold Ross, the founding editor of The New Yorker — used blunt language to characterize the Police Department’s activities.

“There is no discernible justification for the apparent disregard of the guidelines” in his 2003 court order, he said. These spell out the broad circumstances under which the police could investigate political gatherings.

Under the guidelines, the police may conduct investigations — including videotaping — at political events only if they have indications that unlawful activity may occur, and only after they have applied for permission to the deputy commissioner in charge of the Intelligence Division.

Judge Haight noted that the Police Department had not produced

evidence that any applications for permission to videotape had ever been filed.

Near the end of his 51-page order, the judge warned that the Police Department must change its practices or face penalties.

“Any future use by the N.Y.P.D. of video and photographic equipment during the course of an investigation involving political activity” that did not follow the guidelines could result in contempt proceedings, he wrote.

At monthly group bicycle rides in Lower Manhattan known as Critical Mass, some participants break traffic laws, and the police routinely videotape those events, Judge Haight noted. That would be an appropriate situation for taping, he said, but police officials did not follow the guidelines and apply for permission.

“This is a classic case of application of the guidelines: political activity on the part of individuals, but legitimate law enforcement purpose on the part of the police,” Judge Haight wrote. “It is precisely the sort of situation where the guidelines require adherence to certain protocols but ultimately give the N.Y.P.D. the flexibility to pursue its law enforcement goals.”

Gideon Oliver, a lawyer who has represented many people arrested during the monthly bicycle rides, said he was troubled by the intensive scrutiny of political activities.

“I’m looking forward to a deeper and more serious exploration of how and why this surveillance has been conducted,” Mr. Oliver said.

In the past the Police Department has said that it needed intelligence about the Critical Mass rides in order to protect the streets from unruly riders.

Patrick Markee, an official with another group that was cited in the ruling, the Coalition for the Homeless, said the judge’s decision ratified their basic rights to free speech.

“We’re gratified that Judge Haight found that the police shouldn’t engage in surveillance of homeless New Yorkers and their supporters when they’re engaged in peaceful, lawful political protest,” Mr. Markee said.

The Police Department’s approach to investigating political, social and religious groups has been a contentious subject for most of four decades, and a class action lawsuit brought by political activists, including a lawyer named Barbara Handschu, was settled in 1985. Judge Haight oversees the terms of that settlement, which are known as the Handschu guidelines, and which he modified in 2003.

At the time, Judge Haight said that the police could “attend any event open to the public, on the same terms and conditions of the public generally.”

But in yesterday’s ruling, he said that permission “cannot be stretched to authorize police officers to videotape everyone at a public gathering just because a visiting little old lady from Dubuque (to borrow from The New Yorker) could do so. There is a quantum difference between a police officer and the little old lady (or other tourist or private citizen) videotaping or photographing a public event.”

The judge said he bore some responsibility for misinterpretation of the guidelines.

“I confess with some chagrin that while the text of this opinion and its implementing order, read together, may not be as opaque as the irritatingly baffling pronouncements of the Oracle” at Delphi, “they do not constitute a model of clarity,” he wrote.

    Judge Limits New York Police Taping, NYT, 16.2.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/16/nyregion/16police.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Terror suspect's claim: Too traumatized for trial

Updated 2/13/2007 11:00 PM ET
USA Today
By Laura Parker

The prisoner lived in isolation in a cell with only a steel slab for a bed. At times chained to the floor, he was deprived of light, sleep, a clock and heat. His interrogators injected him with "truth serum" drugs to try to loosen his tongue and threatened him with execution.

That's how Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen held without charge as an "enemy combatant," was treated for three years and eight months at the Navy brig in Charleston, S.C., his attorneys allege. In court papers, they say Padilla — initially accused of plotting to detonate a radioactive "dirty bomb" — was treated so severely that it amounted to torture and rendered him mentally incompetent to now stand trial on terrorism charges that could bring him life in prison.

That provocative claim — disputed by the government, which says Padilla was not abused and is fit for trial — will be the focus of a mental competency hearing for Padilla, scheduled for Feb. 22 in a federal court in Miami.

The long-shot effort to have him declared unfit for trial is the latest turn in a case that has become a test of how far the U.S. government can go in limiting the civil liberties of an American in the name of national security.

It pits Padilla — the first American since the Civil War to be held by the military solely on the president's orders — against a government that, under persistent legal challenges, has taken the case on an unusual journey from military detention to the U.S. Supreme Court and then to a federal trial court.

"I don't think there is anything to compare to this case," says Michael Perlin, a professor at New York Law School who specializes in mental health and the law. "This is an extraordinarily singular case."

Government lawyers decline to give details about how Padilla has been treated, but they flatly dispute the defense's version. "It has no merit whatsoever," prosecutors say in papers filed in the court where Padilla is scheduled for trial April 16. He is charged with conspiring to support terrorism overseas as part of a North American terror cell.

The government has said that however it handled the Brooklyn-born Padilla, 36, its actions were necessary to try to learn more about terrorism.

Civil libertarians have waged a marathon court battle challenging Padilla's detention, beginning two days after he was locked up in Charleston in June 2002. He was not allowed to talk with a lawyer until March 2004, 21 months into his confinement.

The accusations against Padilla have evolved as his case has shifted to different courts. Then-attorney general John Ashcroft initially linked him to a "dirty bomb" plot. The Justice Department later tied him to an alleged plot to blow up high-rise apartments in the USA.

However, the charges pending against Padilla mention none of that. He faces three counts that include conspiring to murder, kidnap and maim people overseas, and conspiring to support terrorism by supplying money and materials.

Focus for now is on fitness

For now, the focus is on whether Padilla is mentally fit to stand trial.

At next week's hearing, U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke will examine competing assessments of Padilla's mental state by the defense and prosecution. In court documents filed last Friday, prosecutors Russell Killinger and Stephanie Pell cite an analysis by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons in arguing that Padilla is fit for trial. Defense attorneys say the bureau's findings are inaccurate.

Padilla's attorneys plan to call as witnesses civilian and military members of the brig staff who expressed concerns about the effects of extended isolation on Padilla's mental health.

Andrew Patel, one of Padilla's attorneys, describes his own conversations with staff members in court papers. Patel says they told him Padilla was so "docile and inactive that his behavior was like that of 'a piece of furniture.' "

Prosecutors say details about Padilla's detention should be kept out of the trial. They say in court papers that such information could "distract and inflame" jurors. It is unclear how much information Cooke will allow into next week's hearing.

Padilla's attorneys argue that the government's treatment of Padilla "injured" his brain and left him incompetent to understand the proceedings against him. The attorneys have asked Cooke to dismiss the charges, calling Padilla's treatment at the brig so "outrageous, it shocks the conscience."

According to court documents, two mental health experts who examined Padilla for the defense concluded that he suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, triggered by his time in the brig. They said he is unable to watch videos of his interrogations or read transcripts of wiretapped conversations that likely will be used against him in court.

Padilla suffers from memory gaps, is unable to place events in chronological order and has difficulty concentrating, according to Patricia Zapf, a New York psychologist, and Angela Hegarty, a New York psychiatrist. Padilla also suspects his attorneys are federal agents posing as lawyers in order to interrogate him, court papers say.

Padilla told his attorneys and the mental health experts that while he was at the brig he was placed in stress positions, assaulted and told that he would be sent to "an even worse" fate at the U.S. military's prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where hundreds of foreign terrorism suspects have been held indefinitely. "The torture took myriad forms, each designed to cause pain, anguish, depression and ultimately the loss of will to live," Padilla's attorneys say in court papers.

The defense attorneys also allege that Padilla was injected with LSD or PCP as a sort of "truth serum." Padilla was denied "the most personal shreds of human dignity," his attorneys argue, when he was not allowed to bathe for weeks at a time. "One would have to revisit the history of the Tower of London to find more oppressive pretrial incarceration," the attorneys say.

Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman, won't discuss Padilla's specific claims. But he says, "The government, in the strongest terms, denies Padilla's allegations — allegations made without support and without citing a shred of record evidence. It is and always has been our policy to treat detainees humanely."

Padilla's odyssey

Padilla was born in 1970, the second of five children. His widowed Puerto Rican mother moved the family to Chicago when he was in preschool, defense court papers say. By age 15, Padilla was in a juvenile detention facility. He later moved with his family to Florida, where he converted to Islam.

In 1998, Padilla went to Egypt. The defense papers say Padilla moved there to study Islam. The U.S. government contends in court papers that Padilla traveled to the region as a recruit to fight a holy war and made his way to a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan.

He did not return to the USA until May 8, 2002, when he was arrested at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport after stepping off a flight from Zurich. He was taken to New York and held as a material witness in connection with a grand jury investigation of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

On June 9, 2002, President Bush declared Padilla an "enemy combatant," a designation created by the administration for those it aimed to detain indefinitely during the war on terrorism. Padilla then was transferred to the Navy brig.

For the next 21 months, Padilla had little human contact except with his interrogators, court papers filed by the defense say. Guards delivered food through a slot in the door of his cell. In December 2002, a federal judge in New York ordered the government to give Padilla access to an attorney. The government complied 15 months later.

Urging the judge to reconsider, the government argued in court papers in 2003: "Providing him access to counsel … would break, probably irreparably, the sense of dependency and trust the interrogators are attempting to create."

Patel and his co-counsel, Donna Newman, visited Padilla at the brig for the first time in March 2004. There, they learned he was the only occupant in a unit with 10 cells, court papers say. He was kept, sometimes in shackles and manacles, in a 9-by-7-foot cell. The cell's windows were blackened so that no natural light came through.

The legal challenge to the government's right to hold a U.S. citizen without charges moved through federal courts in New York, South Carolina and Virginia, and twice went to the U.S. Supreme Court. Then, in November 2005 — just as the Supreme Court was about to take its second look at the case — the government abruptly shifted course.

Padilla was moved out of military control and into a federal court in Miami. On Nov. 17, he was indicted with four other men accused as operatives in a terror support cell.

The indictment accuses Adham Amin Hassoun, a Lebanese national, and Kifah Wael Jayyousi, a Jordanian and naturalized U.S. citizen, of recruiting Padilla as a mujahedin fighter. It accuses the group of giving money and supplies for undisclosed terrorist activities in Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia and Chechnya. Two other defendants, Mohamed Youssef and Kassem Daher, are held at unspecified sites overseas.

The indictment does not directly allege that Padilla went to a training camp in Afghanistan, but it cites wiretapped conversations describing him as having gone to Afghanistan "to be as Usama's," an apparent reference to al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. The indictment says Padilla filled out a "Mujahideen (sic) Data Form," a camp application, in July 2000. In court papers, prosecutors say the form was found in Afghanistan in 2001. Padilla's attorneys are challenging its authenticity.

A month after the indictment, U.S. appeals court Judge Michael Luttig blasted the Bush administration for citing an alleged "dirty bomb" plot to justify holding Padilla at the brig — and then using "less serious" allegations to try to get a grand jury in Miami to indict him. Luttig wrote that the administration has risked "credibility before the courts."

Last July, Cooke, whom Bush appointed to the federal bench in 2003, called the government's case "light on facts" and asked prosecutors to offer more evidence. In August, she threw out the most serious charge against Padilla — conspiracy to murder, kidnap and maim — calling it redundant. It is the only charge that carries a life sentence; the other two each carry a sentence of up to 15 years. Prosecutors appealed, and an appeals court reinstated the charge Jan. 30.

Low standard for competency

Legal scholars disagree about the strength of the charges against Padilla. However, they agree that Padilla's attorneys are unlikely to prevail in their efforts to have him deemed mentally unfit for trial.

"The standard for competency in the U.S. is very low, so it's a tough hurdle for anybody," says Edward MacMahon, who defended Zacarias Moussaoui, a French citizen convicted of conspiracy charges as an al-Qaeda terrorist in 2005. Moussaoui's attorneys conceded he was mentally competent even though a defense psychiatrist testified he was a paranoid schizophrenic.

To be found mentally incompetent to stand trial, a defendant must be unable to understand the legal proceeding against him and be unable to help attorneys prepare his defense. "Does Padilla understand he's on trial for criminal violations?" MacMahon asks. "That's almost the entire test."

Zapf, who examined Padilla for the defense in October, says in her report that Padilla understands the proceedings against him and their consequences. "He has a factual and rational understanding of his case," she wrote.

Zapf added in her notes: "He does believe that he is being persecuted by the government, and he does demonstrate some paranoia about the government, but this does not appear to be delusional."

Hegarty, who examined Padilla for the defense in June and September, concluded that Padilla identifies with his interrogators more than his attorneys. After his attorneys cross-examined FBI agents about their interrogation of him in Chicago, Padilla felt the "proceedings were unfair" to the agents, Hegarty reported.

She said Padilla expressed concern that telling what happened to him in the brig "would cause great harm to the government."

    Terror suspect's claim: Too traumatized for trial, UT, 13.2.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-02-13-padilla-cover_x.htm

Weeks After a Death, Twists in Some 9/11 Details

February 13, 2007
The New York Times
By SEWELL CHAN and AL BAKER

For days, a New York City police officer, Cesar A. Borja, who died of lung disease last month, was held up as a symbol of the medical crisis affecting the thousands of emergency personnel and construction workers who labored on the smoking remains of the fallen World Trade Center after the 9/11 attack.

The Daily News published an article describing how Officer Borja had rushed to the trade center site after the twin towers fell, breathing in clouds of toxic dust that seared his lungs, and how he had chosen not to wear protective gear because the federal government had declared the air safe.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton wrote to President Bush seeking more federal money to care for the workers and citing Officer Borja’s months of “16-hour shifts” at the disaster site. The priest at his funeral in Queens pointed out that Officer Borja had worked as a volunteer in the recovery and cleanup efforts.

It was a powerful story, one that brought the officer’s eloquent son to the State of the Union address in Washington on Jan. 23, the day of his father’s death. The son later met with President Bush, and afterward Mr. Bush, in discussing more aid for rescue workers, said he was eager to see money directed to “first responders,” those first on the scene in the days and weeks after the attacks. “If they were on that pile and if they were first responders, they need to get help,” he said.

It turns out, though, that very few of the most dramatic aspects of Officer Borja’s powerful story appear to be fully accurate. Government records and detailed interviews with Officer Borja’s family indicate that he did not rush to the disaster site, and that he did not work a formal shift there until late December 2001, after substantial parts of the site had been cleared and the fire in the remaining pile had been declared out.

Officer Borja worked traffic and security posts on the streets around the site, according to his own memo book, and there is no record of his working 16 hours in a shift. He worked a total of 17 days, according to his records, and did not work as a volunteer there. He signed up for the traffic duty, his wife said, at least in part as a way to increase his overtime earnings as he prepared to retire.

“It’s not true,” Eva R. Borja, the officer’s wife, said of the Daily News account of his rushing there shortly after the collapse of the trade center. In two extensive interviews, Mrs. Borja displayed her husband’s memo book, where he kept detailed notes about his work across his career. The first entry for working at ground zero is Dec. 24, 2001. Almost all the rest come in February, March and April 2002, five or more months after the attacks.

Mrs. Borja said she still believed her husband was sickened in his work around the site. Shown his father’s memo book, Ceasar Borja, who had become something of a spokesman for ailing 9/11 workers, said it was the first time he understood what his father had actually done. “They kept saying my dad’s a first responder,” he said of the newspaper accounts. “I honestly never knew if he was a first responder.” Asked why he had not corrected the seemingly erroneous or unconfirmed public accounts, he said, “The reason I never tried to correct that impression is I never knew the truth of whether my father was there or not. It was always a mystery for me. I never thought of correcting them because I honestly believed it myself.”

It is hard to determine precisely how the apparent misinformation about Mr. Borja’s work at ground zero came to be reflected in newspapers, as well as in television and radio broadcasts. The family says it was not the source of the claims about working on the smoking pile. A spokeswoman for The Daily News insisted the paper had never explicitly said Officer Borja had rushed there soon after Sept. 11, only that at some point he had rushed there. Despite a number of articles and editorials that referred to him working amid the rubble and within a cloud of glass and concrete, she said the paper never actually reported his arriving there before December.

The spokeswoman, Jennifer Mauer, continued to maintain that Officer Borja had worked “200 hours on the pile.”

Other newspaper accounts repeated the account of Officer Borja’s work on the rubble without attributing it to anyone.

Mrs. Borja and her son said that The New York Times was the first newspaper to ask them for documents showing Officer Borja’s actual duties at ground zero.

Doctors and coroners may yet draw a connection between Officer Borja’s death and his more limited duties around ground zero. A city autopsy is under way. Experts say his illness, diagnosed as pulmonary fibrosis, is a rare and little-understood disease, which, depending on a variety of factors — genetics, for instance — can conceivably be caused by modest exposure to certain toxic substances or pollutants.

Then again, doctors may find that Officer Borja, who spent much of his police career at a tow pound in Queens, had other, pre-existing problems. His family says that he smoked a pack of cigarettes a day for years before giving it up around the mid-1990s.

Officer Borja’s son said that it was possible his father had gone down to ground zero as a volunteer at some point soon after the disaster, but that his father had never mentioned it, and he had no evidence of it. He said several police officers had approached him at his father’s wake and told him they recalled seeing his father on the pile, but he did not know their names.

The Police Department said informal rosters had been kept at ground zero in the first weeks after the attacks including the names of officers who showed up to work. But the department said it could not easily retrieve the records. The department had no other comment about Officer Borja, who did not officially die in the line of duty and retired with a regular service pension.

But when Officer Borja, who was seriously ill by 2005, filed paperwork with the city seeking an enhanced pension, he made no mention of any work before December 2001.

An Emotional Fight

Officer Borja’s death came amid an unfolding and emotional fight over the health of ground zero workers and the role of city, state and federal officials in caring for those who might have been sickened by their work in and around the site. A federal lawsuit has been filed on behalf of hundreds of workers, whose lawyers say they are sick and in some cases dying because of their exposure to dangerous pollutants. That suit charges that the city and federal government failed to protect them from exposure. (The Borjas said they had no plans to sue.)

The city’s Law Department, which declined to comment for this article, has said drawing connections between 9/11 work and subsequent health problems has to be judged case by case. Congress set aside $75 million in 2005 for monitoring and treating 9/11 workers, and the White House agreed to add another $25 million last month. In a September study, Mount Sinai Medical Center found that roughly 70 percent of nearly 10,000 workers it tested from 2002 to 2004 reported that they had new or substantially worsened respiratory problems while or after working at ground zero.

It was into that charged environment that Officer Borja’s case came to light. Officer Borja, who retired in June 2003, became very sick in 2005, and was admitted to Mount Sinai in December 2006. He was determined to be suffering from pulmonary fibrosis and in need of a lung transplant to save his life, officials have said.

The family, according to Mrs. Borja, reached out to the press. A Manhattan newspaper, The Filipino Reporter, published an article on Jan. 5 saying that Officer Borja had been assigned to security duty immediately after Sept. 11, and that he had done that work for months. It cited 16-hour shifts, and it quoted one family member as saying that Officer Borja had believed the air to be safe.

Officer Borja’s son, according to his mother, e-mailed other newspapers, as well. The Daily News responded. Throughout January, The News and other papers published numerous articles on Officer Borja’s case. The News, which has mounted a campaign of stinging editorials on behalf of those believed to have been sickened at ground zero, eventually paid for Ceasar Borja, 21, to fly to Washington and back for the State of the Union address.

The son said he had been prepared to drive, but accepted the offer. “The Daily News comped me,” Ceasar said. The Daily News spokeswoman said the paper was proud to have paid for the young man’s trip.

The initial accounts are full of dramatic details: The Daily News of Jan. 16 said Officer Borja “volunteered to work months of 16-hour shifts in the rubble, breathing in clouds of toxic dust.” That same article added: “Borja was working at an NYPD auto pound in Queens when the twin towers fell. He rushed to ground zero and started working long days there.”

Some of those claims were repeated in other stories in The Daily News and other papers, in both news articles and editorials. Sometimes the articles said Officer Borja had worked 14-hour shifts. Some identified him as having worked on the pile, and one Daily News editorial said he had “labored in the pulverized concrete, glass and smoke that formed a cloud over the rubble.”

The New York Times published one full article on Officer Borja, after he died at 52 on the evening of the State of the Union address. The article said he had become sick after working at ground zero. It said federal officials had agreed to pay for the officer’s medical care as a reflection of their belief that his illness was connected to his work at ground zero.

Politicians quickly began to speak out about the case, and the larger question of 9/11 health issues. Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of Manhattan, who has made 9/11 health a focus of her efforts for years, said of Officer Borja: “If his death does not convince the president to come up with a plan to deal with this medical crisis and fund medical monitoring and treatment, I don’t know what else will.”

‘A Hero’ to Clinton

Senator Clinton sent a letter to President Bush. It cited “many months” of Officer Borja’s 16-hour shifts at ground zero, and it stated: “Cesar Borja was a hero who served his country in her hour of need and sacrificed dearly for that service. Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, as Cesar’s health deteriorated, he and his family endured a great deal of hardship but never lost sight of the needs of the other workers, volunteers, first responders, and victims who survived the attacks but did not survive unharmed.”

The praise extended to Officer Borja’s funeral on Jan. 27 at St. Josaphat’s Church in Queens. The Rev. Thomas C. Machalski, who celebrated the funeral Mass, said he never discussed the details of the officer’s work at ground zero with his family before speaking, and relied on press accounts when he referred to his having served as a volunteer. In fact, he said he thought the officer was, "already retired when he went back to work at ground zero."

The fifth of 12 children, Cesar Ante Borja was born on June 30, 1954, in Polangui, a city in the Bicol region of the Philippines. The son of a farmer, he came to the United States in 1976. He joined the Army, and Army records show he was an active-duty soldier for four years, and was eventually discharged from the Army Reserve in 1983 with the rank of specialist.

He married Eva in 1982, and he soon joined the Department of Correction. He became a police officer in 1987. He served first in the 109th Precinct in Queens before settling in to many years of work in the property clerk’s office and at the tow pound. There he earned a reputation for diligent work and exemplary attendance. Mrs. Borja said he liked the short commute to the pound from their home in Bayside, Queens, and the idea that he could retire from the city after 20 years with a sizable pension.

“He was the type who wouldn’t complain,” she said of her husband. “Or maybe he didn’t like it, and just didn’t say. He would adjust to whatever situation.”

On 9/11, Officer Borja reported for duty at the tow pound, records show. Over the next several months, there is nothing in his memo book recording any work, assigned or volunteer, at ground zero. Mrs. Borja remembers him mentioning being briefly posted in Brooklyn, near ground zero, shortly after the attacks.

Interviews with several friends, relatives and officers who worked with him at the tow pound failed to turn up anyone who worked with him at ground zero before the end of 2001.

Mrs. Borja said that her husband began to see the appeal of overtime pay for working shifts near ground zero late in 2001. He was close to retiring, and realized he might be able to improve his pension with the overtime hours. She said he even called his nephew, a fellow officer, to encourage him to put in for the overtime shifts, as well. Mrs. Borja said the nephew declined.

And so Officer Borja reported on Dec. 24, 2001. The fires at the site, which had been burning for months, had been declared extinguished on Dec. 19. Considerable progress had been made in cleaning up the site.

Officer Borja’s log book makes clear where he worked during what would be 12-hour, 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. shifts: On Jan. 21, 2002, he worked at Albany and Washington Streets, three blocks south of ground zero. He worked several shifts elsewhere in Manhattan during the World Economic Forum. Then, he was back at Fulton Street and Broadway on Feb. 4, 2002. Ten of his shifts came in March or April.

Three years later, Officer Borja became seriously ill. But in January 2006, when he filed a notice of participation — a document required to enhance his pension under a 2005 state law allowing city workers who labored at ground zero to be declared disabled — he was modest about his duty: he listed eight shifts around ground zero.

On Dec. 19, 2006, he entered Mount Sinai, and soon he was near death. Mount Sinai’s records indicate he listed his first shifts around ground zero as starting in December 2001, although there is a reference to him working 72 days there. There is no additional information about that notation, but the Borja family does not contend he ever worked 72 days at or around the site.

Mrs. Borja, asked to explain how all the differing reports appeared in the press, suggested that things had simply spiraled out of control. “When I would read it, I would say, ‘Why did they put that there?’ ” she said. She said she was too distracted caring for her husband and handling his funeral to correct the record.

An Emerging Role

Ceasar, though, played a very prominent role. He spoke with Mrs. Clinton at an event at ground zero. He went to the State of the Union address. He later met with President Bush in Manhattan. Articles variously quote him talking about how his father died as a public servant and saying that heroes should be looked after.

“That was my first, inaugural speech as a political activist, which I never expected,” he said yesterday. “I was just there expressing my emotions. I didn’t know any facts. I was just speaking from the heart, and everything took off from there.”

At one point during those hectic days, the son put on his father’s pea coat. One newspaper account said the son had suggested it was the uniform his father wore on Sept. 11. Ceasar, in an interview yesterday, denied having said that.

But he did address a gathering of family and friends in Queens after the State of the Union address.

“I made everyone in the U.S. know who Cesar Borja is, what he did for this country, and what he did for the city of New York,” he was quoted as saying in The New York Post. “He is the symbol of the World Trade Center, and 9/11 and New York.”

Aides to Mrs. Clinton issued a short statement when told of the apparent discrepancies. “She knows that sacrifices were made by so many, whether it was in the hours, days, weeks or months after the attacks of Sept. 11, and believes that they all deserve our help.”

Tony Fratto, a White House spokesman, would not talk about the details of the Borja case. He said the president respected the officer and his son and all who worked at ground zero.

“Ceasar Borja is someone who loved and cared for his father, and his father was a hero from what we know of New York law enforcement and his work at the World Trade Center,” Mr. Fratto said. “It is almost beside the point what the specific details were.”

Officials at Mount Sinai said in a statement: “The fact that Mr. Borja worked there for many days (and nights) provided ample opportunity for exposure to dusts.”

Finally, Ceasar Borja, after having absorbed the implications of his father’s records, said he was no less proud. “I’m actually happy to know he wasn’t on the pile,” he said, adding that those who were must be in even graver shape. He concluded: “I don’t believe my father to be any less heroic than I previously thought, any less valiant than the other papers previously misreported on.”

Alain Delaquérière, Sandra Jamison and Carolyn Wilder contributed research.

    Weeks After a Death, Twists in Some 9/11 Details, NYT, 13.2.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/13/nyregion/13health.html

New York City to Test Ways to Prevent Nuclear Terror

February 9, 2007
The New York Times
By ERIC LIPTON

WASHINGTON, Feb. 8 — New York City is about to become a laboratory to test ways of strengthening the nation’s defenses against a terror attack by a nuclear device or a radioactive “dirty bomb.”

Starting this spring, the Bush administration will assess new detection machines at a Staten Island port terminal that are designed to screen cargo and automatically distinguish between naturally occurring radiation and critical bomb-building ingredients.

And later this year, the federal government plans to begin setting up an elaborate network of radiation alarms at some bridges, tunnels, roadways and waterways into New York, creating a 50-mile circle around the city.

The effort, which could be expanded to other cities if proven successful, is a major shift of focus for the Department of Homeland Security. As it finishes installing the first generation of radiation scanners at the nation’s ports and land border crossings, the department is trying to find ways to stop a plot that would use a weapon built within the United States.

“How do you create deterrence against terrorism?” said Vayl S. Oxford, director of the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office, the Homeland Security agency coordinating the work. “You complicate the ability for the terrorist to do what they want.”

But even as the new campaign begins, some members of Congress and antiterrorism experts are raising concerns that the initiative, like previous Homeland Security programs, could prove extraordinarily costly and provide few security gains.

“This is just total baloney,” said Tara O’Toole, a former assistant secretary at the Department of Energy during the Clinton administration, where she oversaw nuclear weapons safety efforts. “They are forgetting that no matter what type of engineering solution they try in good faith to come up with, this is a thinking enemy and they will look for a way around it.”

While Homeland Security officials repeatedly declined to estimate the costs of a nationwide detection system, agency documents show they might spend more than a billion dollars on the cargo-screening equipment alone.

Local officials in New York are sparring with Homeland Security over a plan to immediately transfer to local and state authorities the burden of maintaining and operating the network of detection machines when it is completed within several years.

“We are concerned they will put money forward for a piece of hardware and then move to another project,” said Raymond W. Kelly, New York City’s police commissioner. He added that while the city supports the plan, he is not convinced that the proposed detection network makes sense. “Whether or not it works, whether or not it causes too many false alarms, which causes a whole other set of problems, all of these things are still to be determined,” he said.

Mr. Oxford said he is aware of the concerns about costs, which is still the subject of negotiations, and the performance of the new detection machines. But with a threat like a nuclear attack, the country cannot afford to wait until all the details are worked out, he said.

“Our philosophy is not to wait for perfection, because perfection never comes,” he said.

The Domestic Nuclear Detection Office, among the newest agencies at Homeland Security, was established in April 2005, in response to criticism that efforts to combat nuclear terrorism were too disorganized.

The office focuses on blocking two types of plots: a nuclear weapon or a dirty bomb. A nuclear attack by terrorists is considered unlikely, because of the difficulty of obtaining the required radioactive materials, such as highly enriched uranium.

The detonation of a dirty bomb is considered much more feasible. It only requires dynamite or another conventional explosive to detonate a widely available radioactive source — like the cesium or cobalt in certain medical devices. The blast might cause injuries or deaths, but the radioactive residue would cover a two- to three-block area and not pose an immediate health threat. Possible panic and economic disruption could be among the most serious consequences, experts say.

The Securing the Cities detection network, as the New York experiment is called, is intended to stop a nuclear or radiological threat as far away from a city as possible. “Detecting it in the core of Manhattan is too late,” Mr. Oxford said.

The network would most likely include truck inspection stations along highways approaching New York, which would be equipped with radiation detection devices, agency budget documents say. Devices might also be installed at highway tollbooths and at spots where rail, boat and subway traffic could be monitored.

The detection equipment, some of which would be mobile, would be electronically connected and monitored so if a suspicious vehicle passed one spot without being stopped, it might be intercepted after passing another detector.

Some New York agencies already have a limited supply of radiation detection equipment, but the new system would be much more extensive and go much further outside the city.

Mr. Kelly said that the city would, at least initially, use any new detection equipment to screen vehicles heading into Lower Manhattan. The project would complement a city program to install cameras, license plate readers and devices that can block vehicle traffic, creating a “ring of steel” around the financial district.

The actual design of the Homeland Security system and the protocols for how responses to alarms will be handled, are still being negotiated by federal officials and authorities in New York City, New Jersey, Connecticut and New York state.

Benn H. Tannenbaum, a physicist and nuclear terrorism expert at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, said the system would never create anything close to an impenetrable barrier, particularly for a nuclear bomb, since the required ingredients have low levels of radioactivity and can easily be shielded. But the project still might be worthwhile, he said. “If nothing else, it makes the terrorist think twice before they do something like this,” he said.

Ms. O’Toole, the former Department of Energy official, pointed to Homeland Security’s BioWatch program, set up in about 30 cities in 2003 to monitor the air for a possible biological attack.

The equipment was installed quickly, but there was no detailed plan in place for how to respond to positive alarms, which meant three weeks of confusion among Houston authorities in October 2003, after tularemia, a naturally occurring pathogen, was discovered. “There is this disconnect between these grand schemes for technology and reality,” Ms. O’Toole said.

Laura S. H. Holgate, vice president at the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a Washington-based research group, said the government should put far more energy into a global effort to prevent nuclear materials from getting into the hands of terrorists.

The testing planned on Staten Island at the New York Container Terminal is intended to police concerns about false alarms.

Three sets of new types of detection machines have been installed there. For the first time, such machines sound an alarm when something radioactive passes through, and simultaneously identify the radioactive isotope. That allows officials to distinguish between innocuous items that can emit low levels of radiation, such as granite or kitty litter, and real threats.

Officials at the Government Accountability Office and some members of Congress are concerned that Homeland Security is moving too quickly to buy the new machines. Initial tests have shown them to be not much more effective than existing machines that are a fraction of the cost.

“We know this system is going to be expensive,” said Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, an independent from Connecticut and chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee. “We need to be sure it will perform as promised.”

    New York City to Test Ways to Prevent Nuclear Terror, NYT, 9.2.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/09/nyregion/09nuke.html?hp&ex=1171083600&en=bf1c7664805cbb4b&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Changes made to bioterror warning program

Posted 2/7/2007 10:11 PM ET
USA Today
By Mimi Hall

WASHINGTON — An early-warning program in more than 30 cities aimed at detecting biological weapons was bungled by the Homeland Security Department and has since undergone a revamping, according to a federal watchdog.

Homeland Security Inspector General Richard Skinner released a report Wednesday citing a series of problems in the BioWatch program, which costs $1 million a year per city. Among the issues was sloppy handling and storage of sensors designed to give early warnings of a bioterrorism attack.

Such problems "could jeopardize (the department's) ability to detect biological agents and protect the populace of the United States," the report says.

Jeff Steifel, BioWatch's program manager, says the problems cropped up because the program was created quickly in 2003 in response to concerns that terrorists could spread deadly biological agents in densely populated areas.

Homeland Security officials say they have "taken action to resolve the issues," the report says. Steifel says that "without question, those issues (raised by the report) are resolved."

BioWatch allows government scientists to test the air daily in high-risk cities to see whether anthrax, smallpox or other biological agents have been released. In many cases, existing air pollution monitoring machines were fitted with filters that are removed several times a day and taken to state health labs for testing.

Locations of sensors and the list of cities in the monitoring program are classified for security reasons, but Steifel confirmed that the list includes New York City and Washington.

The number of sensors per city also is secret. But in some cities, Steifel says, 40 sensors were added over the past year, indicating there are at least dozens — and maybe hundreds — in place in each city. Most are outdoors, Steifel says, but some are being added in airport terminals and other places indoors where crowds gather.

The program is run by and paid for by the Homeland Security Department. The Environmental Protection Agency and the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also play a role in placing and maintaining the machines and overseeing the lab tests.

Last March, the EPA's own inspector general criticized the agency for improperly placing and monitoring some of the machines.

Wednesday's report cited a host of problems but said all had been resolved to the inspector general's satisfaction. Among the problems:

•At 84% of the labs, exposed filters were not transferred properly from the field.

•At 74% of the labs, bags holding the filters weren't properly decontaminated.

•In 65% of the cities checked, procedural errors were made during handoffs from field workers to lab technicians.

"You won't find those issues prevalent today," Steifel says.

He says the program has successfully run 3 million tests without any false positives. In three years, there have been 15 positive hits for one of the six agents — but all were attributed to naturally occurring bacteria.

    Changes made to bioterror warning program, UT, 7.2.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2007-02-07-bioterror_x.htm

U.S. asks to arm pilots abroad

Posted 2/7/2007 10:33 PM ET
USA Today
By Thomas Frank

For the first time, the U.S. government is asking foreign countries to allow pilots to carry guns in the cockpit when they fly overseas.

The Homeland Security Department, working with the State Department, is trying to expand a 4-year-old program that allows thousands of pilots to carry guns on domestic flights.

"It's obvious that there's a threat internationally," said Conan Bruce, spokesman for the Federal Air Marshals Service, which runs the armed-pilots program. "We want to work toward having (armed pilots) be able to perform their duties on international flights."

Some countries may block U.S. efforts because they don't want guns on airplanes, even if they're carried by trained pilots who have been sworn as law officers.

"Sweden would rather not see any weapons aboard airplanes," said Michael Mohr, homeland security liaison at the Swedish Embassy in Washington. "There's a concern about arms and very sensitive equipment inside airplanes."

Nations can prohibit armed air marshals on U.S. flights to their countries. Some, including Sweden, have resisted U.S. efforts to have them put their own armed officers on U.S.-bound flights. Thousands of U.S. air marshals fly as passengers on domestic and international flights.

Armed pilots, known as flight deck officers, carry guns only in the cockpit. No pilot has fired a gun in a plane, Bruce said. The Transportation Security Administration allows handguns of varied calibers, including .357, .40 and .45, and 9mm.

The effort to expand the armed-pilots program comes amid criticism that it is falling short of its potential. A Homeland Security report released last month said the program needs improvement, and some policies "may have dissuaded pilots from participating."

"More needs to be accomplished to maximize the use of" armed pilots, the report concludes.

Congress cut $11.5 million from the last two budget requests for armed pilots because the program didn't spend all its money. Bruce said costs have fluctuated depending on pilot availability for one week of training.

Federal Flight Deck Officers Association Chairman Jim Krauss said the U.S. push for guns on international flights will help enlist more pilots in the program. "We certainly would see a lot more participation," he said.

About 8% of flights originating in the USA are to international destinations.

Members of Congress have proposed numerous bills since 2004 that would require the administration to work with countries to allow armed pilots, and to take other steps to improve the program.

David Mackett, president of the Airline Pilots Security Alliance, which advocates for armed pilots, said his group wants to see lifted a policy requiring them to keep guns in a lockbox except when they're in a cockpit. "We have thousands of pilots who are routinely riding in the cabin (as passengers) and could serve as the last line of defense," Mackett said. He said other law enforcement officers carry guns on board planes.

Bruce said improvements are planned in response to pilot concerns. Armed pilots will get badges this year to replace ID cards. Regional training sites will open to make pilot recertification more convenient.

Aviation security consultant Rich Roth said some pilots "feel better" carrying guns, but he doubts they could thwart a hijacker. "If you're sitting in the flight deck and they get through, you have no time to do anything with a weapon," Roth said.

    U.S. asks to arm pilots abroad, UT, 7.2.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/travel/news/2007-02-07-us-pilots-guns_x.htm

High-profile Guantanamo detainees face new charges

Updated 2/3/2007 12:40 AM ET
AP
USA Today

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — The U.S. military prepared new charges Friday against three of the best-known detainees at Guantanamo Bay — a key step toward resuming the military tribunals for terrorism suspects that were halted by the U.S. Supreme Court last year.

Authorities drafted new charges — including murder, conspiracy and providing material support for terrorism — against Canadian Omar Khadr, Australian David Hicks and Salim Ahmed Hamdan of Yemen, said Air Force Col. Morris Davis, chief prosecutor in the Guantanamo war crimes trials.

Under military rules, the charges are not considered formally filed against the detainees until they are approved by a U.S. Department of Defense legal adviser and another official who oversees the tribunals.

That process is expected to take two weeks, Davis said. Court hearings are not expected to begin at Guantanamo until at least the spring.

Also Friday, a military defense lawyer whose paralegal reported overhearing guards at the U.S. Navy base in southeastern Cuba brag about beating detainees said she was accused by a military investigator of filing a false statement.

Army Col. Richard Basset, who was ordered by the U.S. Southern Command to investigate the allegations into guards' actions, told the paralegal, Marine Sgt. Heather Cerveny, that the guards denied her account of their September conversations in a Guantanamo bar, according to Marine Lt. Col. Colby Vokey.

The investigator accused Cerveny of having made a false statement, Vokey told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. He said Basset met with the Cerveny late last year at Camp Pendleton, Calif., where she is based.

The probe began after Vokey filed a complaint with the Pentagon's Inspector General's office in October and attached a sworn statement from Cerveny. Jose Ruiz, a spokesman for Southern Command the where Basset is based, declined to comment on contents of the investigation.

In an earlier attempt to try detainees, the military had charged 10 of them and begun pretrial hearings at Guantanamo. The tribunals were halted by a Supreme Court ruling that their rules violated U.S. and international law.

Congress passed a new law authorizing the military commissions and President Bush signed it into law in October. The military then drafted a new set of rules for military commissions that have drawn criticism because they permit coerced or hearsay evidence.

The military has said it plans to charge 60 to 80 of the detainees at Guantanamo, where nearly 400 men are held on suspicion of links to al-Qaeda or the Taliban.

Davis said it made sense to start with Hicks, Khadr and Hamdan, a former driver for Osama bin Laden, because all were among those previously charged.

"Those three have been around for a while, and they were prepared and ready to go," he said.

Hicks, a former kangaroo skinner who converted to Islam in his native Australia, allegedly fought for the Taliban before he was captured in Afghanistan. Toronto-born Khadr, who is accused of killing an American soldier in Afghanistan, has allegedly acknowledged being trained by al-Qaeda. Hamdan has said he worked for bin Laden but denied any links to terrorism.

Australian Prime Minister John Howard on Saturday welcomed the U.S. announcement that fresh charges have been prepared against Hicks.

"I'm glad that the charges are being laid and that the deadline I set has been met," Howard told reporters, referring to his demand that Hicks be charged by mid-February. Howard has come under mounting political pressure to have Hicks tried or set free.

    High-profile Guantanamo detainees face new charges, UT, 3.2.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2007-02-02-guantanamo-charges_x.htm

Officer Who Epitomized Ills of Ground Zero Workers Dies

January 24, 2007
The New York Times
By SEWELL CHAN

A former New York City police officer died of a lung disease last night, hours before his son attended the State of the Union address to draw attention to the plight of 9/11 rescue workers like him who became ill after they were exposed to toxic dust at ground zero.

The police officer, Cesar A. Borja, 52, died around 6:15 p.m. at Mount Sinai Medical Center, where he was enrolled in a monitoring and treatment program for ground zero workers, said Lauren Woods, a hospital spokeswoman.

Officer Borja died of pulmonary fibrosis, a type of chronic lung disorder that involves scarring of the tissue between the air sacs.

Officer Borja had been in intensive care and had been accepted as a potential candidate for a lung transplant, but his critical condition, complicated by infection, precluded him being listed to receive a lung, said his physician, Dr. Maria L. Padilla.

A Congressional official briefed on the officer’s case, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of federal health privacy rules, said that federal officials had approved government financing for virtually all of Officer Borja’s care — an acknowledgment that his condition was linked to work at ground zero.

Officer Borja’s 21-year-old son, Ceasar, had been invited to attend President Bush’s address as a guest of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. On Monday at ground zero and again yesterday in Washington, the young man stood next to Mrs. Clinton and discussed the need for federal financing for treatment of 9/11 workers.

“It is really painful for me to be here, so close to where my father contracted this disease,” Ceasar Borja said in New York on Monday, wearing a dark blue coat and speaking slowly and softly. He said he was trying to stay strong for his mother and two younger siblings and added, “9/11 did not end that day.”

Last night, the son was at a dinner at Bullfeathers, a Capitol Hill restaurant, when he received a phone call notifying him of his father’s death, according to an official briefed on the situation.

Four Congressional aides were at the dinner, along with several other guests invited to attend the presidential address in order to draw attention to 9/11 responders. Those at the dinner tried to comfort Ceasar Borja, the official said, and he decided to go through with his plan to attend the address.

Officials warned last month that money for two major monitoring and treatment programs — one run by Mount Sinai and the other by the city’s Fire Department — would run out in a matter of months.

Representative Vito J. Fossella, the only Republican House member from New York City, has urged White House officials to support the workers, but so far he has evidently not met with success. President Bush did not mention the 9/11 workers in his address last night.

    Officer Who Epitomized Ills of Ground Zero Workers Dies, NYT, 24.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/24/nyregion/24officer.html

Editorial

Chemical Insecurity

January 23, 2007
The New York Times
 

The new Democratic leadership in Congress has a chance to finally do what the Republican Congress and the Bush administration failed to do after Sept. 11: to protect the nation’s chemical plants from an attack. Lawmakers should stop the Homeland Security Department from adopting new regulations that would block state and local governments from doing more to protect their residents and should finally pass a federal law with teeth.

An attack on a single plant could release deadly chemicals that could put hundreds of thousands of people at risk of death or serious injury. But since Sept. 11, the chemical industry — a major campaign contributor — has managed to ward off any significant new federal rules that might require it to spend money to increase security.

Now it is going a step further by trying to get the federal government to “pre-empt,” or invalidate, state and local efforts to impose safety standards. Supporters of pre-emption always claim that they just want a uniform standard. But in situations like this one — where the federal law is absurdly weak — it is obvious that the real agenda is to block serious safety measures at every level of government.

Congress wisely refused to include a pre-emption provision in legislation it adopted last year. Now, however, the Homeland Security Department has proposed regulations that would give itself the authority to pre-empt state and local laws. If the proposed regulations were adopted, they could wipe away the serious chemical plant security law that New Jersey has passed, and prevent other states and cities from requiring the chemical industry to do more to protect their residents.

It is up to Congress to act. It should block these deeply flawed regulations and move quickly to pass a comprehensive law that imposes tough requirements on chemical plants to harden their facilities.

Last year Congress passed a bad rider, backed by the industry, that gives the chemical industry far too much leeway to decide on its own how its plants are vulnerable and how to protect them. The new law should contain specific requirements for plant safety. It should also require companies to switch to safer chemicals when the cost is not prohibitive, a key safety measure that the industry has resisted. And it should clearly state that federal chemical-plant laws do not pre-empt state and local laws. Congress should finally put the public’s safety ahead of the chemical industry’s bottom line.

    Chemical Insecurity, NYT, 23.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/23/opinion/23tue1.html

Terrorism hoaxes still plaguing law agencies

Posted 1/18/2007 11:13 PM ET
USA Today
By Mimi Hall

The cruise ship Carnival Destiny, packed with passengers on the last leg of a trip to the Bahamas, was chugging Sunday toward the harbor in San Juan, Puerto Rico, when the U.S. Coast Guard got an ominous call.
Someone claimed a bomb was on board.

The Coast Guard ordered the craft to anchor away from the harbor piers so it could be searched. No bomb was found during repeated security sweeps that involved Customs and Border Protection officers, the Puerto Rico Ports Authority, the FBI and teams of bomb-sniffing dogs.

The case — among the most recent of the constant terrorism-related hoaxes and false threats that plague the nation's law enforcement and homeland security agencies — remains under investigation by the FBI.

Five years after 9/11 and the 2001 anthrax attacks caused a spike in false threats, senior federal officials say they still are forced to run down hoaxes nearly every day, creating a huge drain on agents' ability to pursue real threats to the nation's security.

Some hoaxes make national news, such as last October's radioactive "dirty bomb" threat against seven football stadiums. But FBI agents and officials from the Justice and Homeland Security departments say those represent just a fraction of those received by phone, mail and e-mail each year.

At police stations and FBI offices across the country hoaxes are "a serious drain," says Ken Wainstein, head of the Justice Department's National Security Division. "These terror hoaxes distract law enforcement."

They also scare people.

On Thursday, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said the government doesn't publicize most threats because "people would be in a constant state of hyper-anxiety."

The department posts Internet hoaxes on its website to reassure citizens and encourage them not to pass on bogus e-mailed chain letters. Among those that have been circulating for several years, the website says, is a fake government warning that someone bought $32,000 worth of United Parcel Service (UPS) uniforms off eBay. The fraudulent message urges people to be wary if a UPS employee comes to their door.

In an effort to help prosecutors and deter hoaxes, Congress in 2004 set stiffer penalties, allowing judges to send people to prison for up to five years for making false threats.

Among the cases that have grabbed headlines:

•A phony "dirty bomb" threat against seven football stadiums last October. Grocery store clerk Jake Brahm of Wauwatosa, Wis., was arrested after posting the threat on several Internet sites. The threats "caused a massive mobilization of every resource you can think of," said Michael Drewniak, spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's office in Newark, N.J.

"You cannot possibly quantify the amount of dollars this cost in manpower and resources all because (someone) decided to scream fire — scream terrorism — in essentially seven football stadiums."

•A false tip called in to San Diego's 911 center days before President Bush's second inauguration in January 2005. Jose Quinonez, a Mexican drug addict and smuggler, said he had smuggled two Iraqis and four Chinese chemists across the border and they were headed for Boston with nuclear material.

The tip prompted a huge response from more than 30 government agencies. Agents conducted a nationwide manhunt, the public was alerted and Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney skipped the inauguration and flew home to reassure state residents. In September, Quinonez was sentenced to three years in prison.

"We're on the front lines of keeping this country safe, and when you're distracted by these false threats, it goes right to the heart of our ability to protect the country," says Dan Dzwilewski, head of the San Diego FBI office. He oversees an entire unit within his region's Joint Terrorism Task Force that does nothing but chase down hoaxes and false threats.

•A false tip in October 2005 that six Egyptian men were planning to blow up one of the tunnels that carries traffic under Baltimore's harbor. Officials closed the tunnel, part of a major East Coast interstate, for three hours and raided at least three city businesses run by Arabs.

Police arrested several people on immigration charges during area raids, but the tip turned out to be a hoax called in by an Egyptian man who had been deported from the United States.

Charlie Allen, Homeland Security's top intelligence officer, says hoaxes and bogus tips come in "almost on a daily basis." Allen says he knew right away that the football stadium threat was "absurd." But he says every threat requires a thorough investigation because "you just can't take chances."

Officials say they want stiff penalties imposed on those who make false threats. Allen said the incidents frighten the public, force emergency responders to go on alert, and tie up federal agents and investigators at a time when the nation faces serious threats. "It's a malicious, malevolent act," Allen says, "and a felonious act."

    Terrorism hoaxes still plaguing law agencies, UT, 18.1.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-01-18-hoaxes_x.htm

Detainee letters show window into Guantanamo life

Thu Jan 18, 2007 2:32 AM ET
Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - One of the 14 "high value" detainees transferred last year from secret CIA prisons to the U.S. military camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, says in a letter to his wife she should not dwell on the thought of his return, The Washington Post reported on Thursday.

"If I come back, it will be a miracle of God," terrorism suspect Majid Khan, 26, says in the handwritten letter to his Pakistani wife, published on an Urdu language Web site operated by the BBC, the newspaper reported.

The letter and three others to relatives in Maryland were the first substantial communication from any of the 14 prisoners who spent time in CIA prisons before being transferred to Guantanamo in September, the Post said.

Khan, a Pakistani national, wrote that he is held in solitary confinement, is allowed to leave his cell "to get sunburn" for one hour each day and he sometimes talks with other inmates through cell walls, the newspaper reported.

Other than those particulars, the letters contained few details of his confinement, the Post said.

The letters, redacted by military censors, were delivered to Khan's relatives through the International Committee of the Red Cross, the newspaper said.

The U.S. government has denied Khan and other high-value detainees access to lawyers, arguing in court filings that CIA interrogation methods to which they were subjected are among the most sensitive national security secrets, the Post reported.

As a result, little is known about the arrests, detentions or interrogations of the 14 captives, the Post said.

The newspaper reported that U.S. officials say Khan, a Pakistani national, took orders from Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the accused mastermind of the September 11 attacks on the United States and also a high-value prisoner at Guantanamo.

Khan's brother in suburban Baltimore, Mahmood Khan, told The Washington Post the family was releasing the letters it received last month in order to draw attention to the case.

    Detainee letters show window into Guantanamo life, R, 18.1.2007, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=newsOne&storyID=2007-01-18T073148Z_01_N18357829_RTRUKOC_0_US-GUANTANAMO-DETAINEE-LETTERS.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C2-TopNews-newsOne-4

Court to Oversee U.S. Wiretapping in Terror Cases

January 18, 2007
The New York Times
By ERIC LICHTBLAU and DAVID JOHNSTON

WASHINGTON, Jan. 17 — The Bush administration, in a surprise reversal, said on Wednesday that it had agreed to give a secret court jurisdiction over the National Security Agency’s wiretapping program and would end its practice of eavesdropping without warrants on Americans suspected of ties to terrorists.

The Justice Department said it had worked out an “innovative” arrangement with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that provided the “necessary speed and agility” to provide court approval to monitor international communications of people inside the United States without jeopardizing national security.

The decision capped 13 months of bruising national debate over the reach of the president’s wartime authorities and his claims of executive power, and it came as the administration faced legal and political hurdles in its effort to continue the surveillance program.

The new Democratic-led Congress has pledged several investigations. More immediately, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales is expected to face hostile questioning on Thursday from the Senate Judiciary Committee on the program. And an appellate court in Cincinnati is scheduled to hear arguments in two weeks on the government’s appeal of an earlier ruling declaring the program illegal and unconstitutional.

Some legal analysts said the administration’s pre-emptive move could effectively make the court review moot, but Democrats and civil rights advocates said they would press for the courts and Congress to continue their scrutiny of the program of wiretapping without warrants, which began shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Democrats praised the administration’s decision, but said it should have come much sooner.

"The announcement today is welcome news,” said Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, the West Virginia Democrat who leads the Intelligence Committee. “But it is also confirmation that the administration’s go-it-alone approach, effectively excluding Congress and the courts and operating outside the law, was unnecessary.”

Mr. Rockefeller added, “I intend to move forward with the committee’s review of all aspects of this program’s legality and effectiveness.”

Since the surveillance program was publicly disclosed in December 2005 by The New York Times, the White House has maintained, in scores of court filings, policy papers and press statements, that the president has the inherent power to conduct wiretaps without a court warrant even though a 1978 law put intelligence surveillance under judicial review. The administration failed to win Congressional approval for the program last year after months of lobbying, and some Democrats are still trying to ban it outright.

The administration continued to assert on Wednesday that the N.S.A. program had operated legally, but it also said the time had come to allow the intelligence surveillance court, known as the FISA court, to review all warrants on all wiretaps in terrorism investigations.

“There’s obviously an advantage to having all three branches involved,” said a senior Justice Department official, who briefed reporters on the decision on condition of anonymity. “This issue of the terrorist surveillance program is one that has been under intense public debate and scrutiny on the Hill, and just considering all these circumstances, the president determined that this is the appropriate course.”

President Bush has authorized the continuation of the N.S.A. program every 45 days by executive order to allow the N.S.A. to conduct wiretaps on international communications without a court warrant. When the current order expires, however, President Bush has decided not to reauthorize the program, officials said.

The Justice Department said Wednesday that it had obtained multiple orders, or warrants, a week ago from the FISA court allowing it to monitor international communications in cases where there was probable cause to believe one of the participants was linked to Al Qaeda or an affiliated terrorist group.

“As a result of these orders,” Mr. Gonzales told leaders of Congressional Intelligence and Judiciary Committees in a letter dated Wednesday, “any electronic surveillance that was occurring as part of the Terrorist Surveillance Program will now be conducted subject to the approval of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.”

Justice Department officials said that the FISA court orders, which were not made public, were not a broad approval of the surveillance program as a whole, an idea that was proposed last year in Congressional debate over the program. They strongly suggested that the orders secured from the court were for individual targets, but they refused to provide details of the process used to identify targets — or how court approval had been expedited — because they said it remained classified. The senior Justice Department official said that discussing “the mechanics of the orders” could compromise intelligence activities.

Justice Department officials would not describe whether the court had agreed to new procedures to streamline the process of issuing orders or accepted new standards to make it easier for the government to get approval to monitor suspect e-mail and phone communications.

But the officials suggested that the effort to obtain the court’s approval for orders on Jan. 10 was not easy. “These aren’t some sort of advisory rulings,” one official said. “These are orders issued by the FISA court, not some cookie-cutter order. These orders are complex. It took a long time to work on this.”

The officials said the new approach was based on evolving legal interpretations of the foreign surveillance law by the Justice Department, changes in the foreign surveillance statute in recent years and precedents set by the FISA court in approving specific requests to conduct electronic monitoring.

The N.S.A., which has run the program of surveillance without warrants since Mr. Bush secretly approved it in October 2001, is known to have used broad pattern analysis in tracking terrorist communications and identifying possible terrorists.

But senior lawmakers said they were still uncertain Wednesday, even after the administration’s announcement, about how the court would go about approving warrants, how targets would be identified, and whether that process would differ from the court’s practices since 1978.

The administration said it had briefed the full House and Senate Intelligence Committees in closed sessions on its decision.

But Representative Heather A. Wilson, Republican of New Mexico, who serves on the Intelligence committee, disputed that, and some Congressional aides said staff members were briefed Friday without lawmakers present.

Ms. Wilson, who has scrutinized the program for the last year, said she believed the new approach relied on a blanket, “programmatic” approval of the president’s surveillance program, rather than approval of individual warrants.

Administration officials “have convinced a single judge in a secret session, in a nonadversarial session, to issue a court order to cover the president’s terrorism surveillance program,” Ms. Wilson said in a telephone interview. She said Congress needed to investigate further to determine how the program is run.

Democrats have pledged to investigate the N.S.A. program and other counterterrorism programs they say may rely on excessive presidential authority. Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York said the announcement appeared to be intended in part to head off criticism Mr. Gonzales was likely to face at Thursday’s judiciary committee hearing.

“I don’t think the timing is coincidental,” Mr. Schumer said in a telephone interview. “They knew they had a very real problem, and they’re trying to deflect it.”

But Justice Department officials said the timing of the announcement was driven solely by the FISA court’s notification in recent days that it had approved the new orders. The officials said the orders were the result of two years of discussing with the court how to bring the eavesdropping program under court review, a process they said began long before the program become public.

A Justice Department official said the department would file a motion with the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in Cincinnati, arguing that the court’s review of the issue in a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union “is now moot” in light of this week’s developments.

But several legal analysts said the issue might not be resolved that simply.

Bruce Fein, a Justice Department official in the Reagan administration who has been critical of the program, said the appellate court was likely to send the issue back to the trial court to re-examine the issue.

Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the A.C.L.U., said the appellate court should still examine the legality of the program and whether the it had violated intelligence law for the last five years.

“It’s not academic when the president violates the law,” Mr. Romero said.

    Court to Oversee U.S. Wiretapping in Terror Cases, NYT, 18.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/18/washington/18intel.html?hp&ex=1169182800&en=31f17ca266626030&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Cheney Defends Efforts to Obtain Financial Records

January 15, 2007
The New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI

Vice President Dick Cheney yesterday defended efforts by the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency to obtain financial records of Americans suspected of terrorism or espionage, calling the practice a “perfectly legitimate activity” used partly to protect troops stationed on military bases in the United States.

But the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee expressed concern over the expansion of the military’s domestic intelligence collection efforts and said his committee would investigate how the Pentagon was using its authority.

Appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” Mr. Cheney said “national security letters” issued to banks and credit agencies were an essential tool for investigating terrorism cases in the United States.

He said the Pentagon had crossed no legal boundaries in issuing the letters independent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

“There’s nothing wrong with it or illegal,” Mr. Cheney said. “It doesn’t violate people’s civil rights. And if an institution that receives one of these national security letters disagrees with it, they’re free to go to court to try to stop its execution.”

Representative Silvestre Reyes, a Texas Democrat who is the new chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said his panel would examine the matter. Mr. Reyes also indicated that he might renew efforts to pass a law requiring various agencies to get court approval before issuing national security letters.

“Any expansion by the department into intelligence collection, particularly on U.S. soil, is something our committee will thoroughly review,” he said in a statement issued to the news media.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the Pentagon has issued hundreds of letters to American banks and other financial institutions seeking information about suspects in counterterrorism or counterespionage investigations.

Banks are not required to hand over the information, but Pentagon officials said that financial institutions usually complied.

The C.I.A. also uses the letters as an investigative tool, but issues them far less frequently than does the Pentagon, intelligence officials said.

The use of the national security letters by the Pentagon and the C.I.A. was first reported in The New York Times yesterday.

By law, the Pentagon and the C.I.A. are barred from any domestic law enforcement activities. But government officials said that their authority to issue the letters dated back several decades and was strengthened by the USA Patriot Act, an antiterrorism law passed in 2001.

Mr. Cheney said yesterday that the letters were valuable for protecting American forces stationed at hundreds of bases in the United States.

Since Sept. 11, the Pentagon has increased its domestic intelligence collection efforts to help ensure that American bases are protected from potential terrorist attacks.

The efforts have been criticized by civil liberties organizations, who say the Pentagon is using “force protection” to spy on Americans and collect information on groups like war protesters.

The American Civil Liberties Union said yesterday that it had “serious concerns” about the use of the letters by the Pentagon and the C.I.A., and it called for a Congressional investigation to examine the frequency and legal basis for the records demands, along with civil liberties safeguards in place.

“This country has a long tradition of rejecting the use of the C.I.A. and the Pentagon to spy on Americans, and rightfully so,” said Caroline Fredrickson, director of the A.C.L.U.’s Washington office. “Today’s published report that the Pentagon and C.I.A. have been relying on ‘national security letters’ to collect the financial records of Americans without judicial supervision or Congressional oversight raises a host of questions that need to be answered.”

Pentagon officials said the financial documents obtained through the national security letters usually did not establish an individual’s links to terrorism or espionage and had rarely led to criminal charges.

But officials said the records still had intelligence value, and the Pentagon plans within the next year to incorporate the records into a database at its Counterintelligence Field Activity office.

With the Democrats now in charge of both houses of Congress, the House and the Senate Intelligence Committees are planning hearings on various intelligence programs conducted by the Bush administration since Sept. 11, 2001.

At the top of the agenda are hearings on the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program and the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation of terrorism suspects.

Mr. Reyes indicated yesterday that the military’s domestic collection efforts could also be a priority for his committee.

“We want our intelligence professionals to have strong tools that will enable them to interrupt the planning process of our enemies and to stop attacks against our country,” his statement said.

“But in doing so, we also want those tools to comply fully with the law and the Constitution.”

    Cheney Defends Efforts to Obtain Financial Records, NYT, 15.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/15/washington/15spy.html?hp&ex=1168923600&en=c8bf9a18c6c6e5c4&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Judge Delays Padilla's Fla. Terror Trial

January 12, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:06 p.m. ET
The New York Times

MIAMI (AP) -- A federal judge Friday ordered a three-month delay for the trial of alleged al-Qaida operative Jose Padilla and two others, in part to allow time for a full evaluation of Padilla's mental competency.

U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke set a new trial date of April 16. It was the third time the case had been postponed.

Padilla, a 36-year-old U.S. citizen and former Chicago gang member, is charged with being part of a North American cell that provided cash, supplies and recruits to Islamic extremists.

He was arrested in 2002 at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport and originally accused of plotting to detonate a radioactive ''dirty bomb'' in a U.S. city.

President Bush designated him an enemy combatant, and Padilla was held without criminal charges at a Navy brig for more than 3 years before he was added to a Miami terrorism-support case in late 2005 during a legal clash over the president's wartime detention powers. The dirty bomb allegations are not mentioned in the Miami indictment.

Trial for Padilla, alleged recruiter Adham Amin Hassoun and Kifah Wael Jayyousi had been scheduled to start on Jan. 22.

Padilla claims he was tortured while in the Navy brig, a contention the Justice Department and Pentagon have repeatedly denied. Mental experts hired by Padilla's lawyers filed court papers saying that Padilla suffers from post traumatic stress disorder and cannot adequately assist his legal defense team.

''This is a case that has to be done right. If additional time is needed, then it is time well spent,'' said his attorney Anthony Natale.

    Judge Delays Padilla's Fla. Terror Trial, NYT, 12.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Padilla-Terror-Charges.html

Judge Delays Padilla's Fla. Terror Trial

January 12, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:06 p.m. ET
The New York Times

MIAMI (AP) -- A federal judge Friday ordered a three-month delay for the trial of alleged al-Qaida operative Jose Padilla and two others, in part to allow time for a full evaluation of Padilla's mental competency.

U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke set a new trial date of April 16. It was the third time the case had been postponed.

Padilla, a 36-year-old U.S. citizen and former Chicago gang member, is charged with being part of a North American cell that provided cash, supplies and recruits to Islamic extremists.

He was arrested in 2002 at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport and originally accused of plotting to detonate a radioactive ''dirty bomb'' in a U.S. city.

President Bush designated him an enemy combatant, and Padilla was held without criminal charges at a Navy brig for more than 3 years before he was added to a Miami terrorism-support case in late 2005 during a legal clash over the president's wartime detention powers. The dirty bomb allegations are not mentioned in the Miami indictment.

Trial for Padilla, alleged recruiter Adham Amin Hassoun and Kifah Wael Jayyousi had been scheduled to start on Jan. 22.

Padilla claims he was tortured while in the Navy brig, a contention the Justice Department and Pentagon have repeatedly denied. Mental experts hired by Padilla's lawyers filed court papers saying that Padilla suffers from post traumatic stress disorder and cannot adequately assist his legal defense team.

''This is a case that has to be done right. If additional time is needed, then it is time well spent,'' said his attorney Anthony Natale.

    Judge Delays Padilla's Fla. Terror Trial, NYT, 12.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Padilla-Terror-Charges.html

U.S. Preparing for Trials of Top Qaeda Detainees

January 12, 2007
The New York Times
By DAVID JOHNSTON and NEIL A. LEWIS

WASHINGTON, Jan. 11 — The Bush administration has set up a secret war room in a Virginia suburb where it is assembling evidence to prosecute high-ranking detainees from Al Qaeda including the man accused of being the mastermind of the September 2001 attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, government officials said this week.

The effort to sift the classified files of the Pentagon, F.B.I., C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies amounts to the first concrete steps that the government has taken to press ahead with war crimes trials of high-level terror suspects under a plan announced by President Bush in a speech last September.

At the time, Mr. Bush said that Mr. Mohammed and 13 other high-level terror suspects had been transferred from secret prisons around the world to the military detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where they would be held pending trial.

The preparation of cases against the high-value operatives appears to rebut many who doubted that Qaeda suspects like Mr. Mohammed would ever be brought to trial. Critics in Congress and human rights groups had asserted that such trials would not be feasible because they would expose harsh interrogation techniques used by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The officials who discussed the preparations have been briefed on the effort in detail and represented several agencies. They declined to speak on the record about deliberations in advance of criminal prosecutions involving national security.

The prosecution team for the Qaeda defendants will be a mix of military and civilian prosecutors. Some officials said no decision had been made about who would lead each prosecution, but others said the trial of Mr. Mohammed would probably be undertaken principally by Justice Department lawyers, who would run the prosecution in a military courtroom in Guantánamo.

Mr. Mohammed, whose alleged role in the Sept. 11 attacks would make him the centerpiece of the government’s effort to bring terrorists to justice in a court of law, could be held responsible for about 3,000 deaths in the attacks, officials have said.

The prosecution of high-value detainees is separate from the long planned trials of lower-level Qaeda figures, some of whom have been at Guantánamo since 2002 and who are expected to be tried before the more important terrorist suspects.

However, both high- and low-level suspects will be tried under the same rules, which are contained in legislation approved in October.

Officials said that they were hoping to bring the first charges against leaders of Al Qaeda this summer or fall and that trials could get under way in early 2008. The current plans are to use the new trial procedures first against some of the lesser Guantánamo defendants as kind of a test run beginning this summer.

Those trials would involve some of the detainees who had already been charged under the previous system of military commissions that was struck down by the Supreme Court.

The initial trials of detainees held at Guantánamo will not carry the possibility of a death penalty. But officials said that they expected to seek to have some of the senior Qaeda officials executed if convicted.

A team of lawyers from the Justice and Defense Departments, along with civilian and military investigators, has begun poring over intelligence files and interrogation reports, about Mr. Mohammed’s role in the Sept. 11 attacks and other potentially prosecutable crimes, like the killing of a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, Daniel Pearl, and other terror plots, including an aborted plan in 2003 to use smuggled explosives to blow up gas stations, railroad tracks and a bridge in New York.

According to the final report of the independent commission that investigated the 2001 attacks, Mr. Mohammed acknowledged under interrogation that he was a major planner of the 9/11 plot. The report said that Mr. Mohammed first proposed the airliner attacks to Osama bin Laden and supervised the core group responsible for the hijackings.

Other prosecutions, like the cases related to the attack in 2000 on the Navy destroyer Cole in Yemen which killed 17 sailors, are likely to be led by military lawyers.

The Qaeda detainees at Guantánamo who the authorities have said were involved in planning the Cole attack include Abd al-Rahim al Nashiri, the accused mastermind, and Walid bin Attash, known as Khallad, who worked with Mr. Nashiri.

In preparation for the trials, the Justice Department has been quietly recruiting lawyers from the ranks of experienced terrorism prosecutors, mainly in New York and Virginia.

The new war crimes trials will operate according to rules modeled after the military justice system which were approved in legislation known at the Military Commission Act, which was signed into law last fall. The law has been criticized by some Democrats in Congress and human rights groups who say the procedures are flawed because they tilt in the government’s favor.

Prosecutors could use hearsay evidence or second-hand testimony, but could not use information obtained under torture. Even so, that would mean virtually any information obtained by the C.I.A would appear to be admissible because, under Justice Department legal opinions, none of the harsh techniques amounted to torture.

At their trials, the accused would have the right not to testify and would have the opportunity to present evidence and cross-examine witnesses against them. The trials would be open unless a military judge determined that they should be closed to protect classified information. Defendants would have the right to review the evidence to be used against them.

The C.I.A. indicated in court filings last November how it hopes to deal with efforts by defendants to bring up the issue of their interrogations. In a case involving one of the 14 high-level Qaeda detainees, the intelligence agency asked a federal judge to rule that the prisoner could not describe details of his confinement because of national security concerns. No ruling has yet been issued.

The case involves Majid Khan, a Pakistani who authorities have said was selected by Mr. Mohammed in 2002 to take part in a possible attack in the United States.

When civil liberties lawyers filed a petition on Mr. Khan’s behalf in federal court in Washington, the C.I.A. submitted an affidavit saying that if specific interrogation techniques were disclosed, “It would permit terrorist organizations to adapt their training to counter the tactics that C.I.A. can employ in interrogations.”

    U.S. Preparing for Trials of Top Qaeda Detainees, NYT, 12.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/12/washington/12terror.html?hp&ex=1168664400&en=aa392e40aa130985&ei=5094&partner=homepage

U.S. Embassy in Athens Is Attacked

January 12, 2007
The New York Times
By ANTHEE CARASSAVA

ATHENS, Jan. 12 — Shortly before sunrise today, a missile ripped through the United States embassy here, causing minor damage to the building but no injuries. The missile was fired from the street over a 10-foot high security wall, smashing the glass in front of the embassy and spraying debris inside.

“We have yet to locate the staging area of this rocket attack,” said Assimakis Golfas, the head police chief of the greater Athens area. “We are scouring the region, mainly buildings across from the embassy.”

Vyron Polydoras, the public order minister, said an anonymous caller, claiming to be a member of the Revolutionary Struggle terror group, had telephoned a local security company to claim responsibility for the attack, which occurred just before 6:00 a.m.

“We’re investigating whether in fact this claim is true,” Mr. Polydoras said after visiting the site.

Charles Ries, the American ambassador, said this morning that the embassy had not been warned of an attack.

“We can’t speculate who’s behind this,” Mr. Ries told reporters. “Still, treat it as a very serious attack. There can be no justification for such a senseless act of violence.”

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in Washington, was awakened to the news that the embassy in Greece “was under attack,” an embassy official said.

The embassy said in a statement that it was hit by a missile. Mr. Ries said that the site was not occupied at the time of the attack and that it was now a crime scene under investigation by Greek authorities.Revolutionary Struggle, a Marxist group with strong anti-American sentiments, emerged in 2003, bombing an Athens courthouse complex.

The group remains the most active Greek terror organization since the downfall of the country’s most deadly urban guerrilla group, November 17, blamed for killing 23 people — including American, British and Turkish officials — and for dozens of bomb attacks.

Today’s hit against the United States mission was not unprecedented.

On Feb. 15, 1996, an anti-tank rocket hit an outside wall of the embassy, damaging three diplomatic vehicles. While no group claimed responsibility, American officials believe the attack was committed by November 17.

The November 17 guerrilla group was dismantled in 2002. Since then, however, a string of copycat terror cells have emerged, striking government buildings and foreign business interests.

This morning’s attack forced the embassy to re-evaluate its security, already among the tightest at American diplomatic missions.

The mission is surrounded by a high steel fence. Guards are posted at every entrance and at street corners around it.

Authorities this morning were searching apartment buildings near the embassy, a hospital and a nearby construction site for evidence that could explain how terrorists managed to penetrate the capital’s most guarded district and attack the mission.

Local residents called in to state television saying they had felt the powerful explosion, which shattered windows in the front of the building.

This morning’s explosion snarled traffic for more than three hours, as scores of policemen cordoned off streets around the embassy. Police helicopters monitored the sky, circling over the building.

A strong anti-American sentiment runs through a segment of the Greek population. Still, senior Greek government officials condemned the attack.

“Such actions in the past have had a very heavy cost for the country — moral, financial and for the international standing of the country,” said Foreign Minister Dora Bakoyannis, who visited the embassy after the blast. “The Greek government is determined to undertake every effort to not allow such phenomena to be repeated in the future.”

    U.S. Embassy in Athens Is Attacked, NYT, 12.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/12/world/europe/12cnd-greece.html?hp&ex=1168664400&en=0f360d7d830036e4&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Attackers fire rocket at U.S. embassy in Athens

Fri Jan 12, 2007 1:19 AM ET
Reuters
By Karolos Grohmann

ATHENS (Reuters) - Attackers fired a rocket at the U.S. embassy in Athens on Friday but no one was hurt, police and the U.S. embassy said.

Greek anti-terrorist officers were on the scene.

"This was a rocket attack launched from a building across the street. It landed inside a toilet on the third floor of the embassy," a senior police official told Reuters.

"There are no injuries from the blast," a U.S. embassy spokesman said.

The senior police official said Greece's deputy police chief and Athens police chief had gone into the building together with officers of the national security and anti-terrorist squads.

Dozens of police cars surrounded the embassy and police cordoned off all roads in the area, including a major boulevard in front of the mission.

The tightly guarded U.S. mission is surrounded by a 3-meter (9-feet)-high steel fence. Guards are posted at every entrance and at street corners around it.

Local residents called in to state television saying they had felt the explosion, which shattered some windows.

Greece's biggest domestic security threat, the leftist November 17 guerrilla group, which had in the past killed U.S. and other foreign diplomats in Greece, was dismantled in 2002.

In November last year, Greek riot police fired tear gas to disperse demonstrators marching to the U.S. embassy in Athens who chanted slogans including "Bush the butcher, out of Iraq" and "The USA is the real terrorist".

In February 1996, unidentified assailants fired a rocket at the U.S. embassy compound in Athens, causing minor damage to three diplomatic vehicles and some surrounding buildings.

    Attackers fire rocket at U.S. embassy in Athens, R, 12.1.2007, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=newsOne&storyID=2007-01-12T061747Z_01_L12389479_RTRUKOC_0_US-GREECE-EXPLOSION.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C1-TopStories-newsOne-2

Blast at U.S. Embassy in Athens Called 'Act of Terrorism'

January 12, 2007
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

ATHENS, Greece (AP) -- An explosion at the U-S Embassy in Athens, Greece, is now being called an "act of terrorism."


A senior police official says they don't know where the rocket was fired from other than street level. He says a shell exploded in a bathroom.


The blast smashed glass in the front of the building near the U-S emblem of the embassy. But no injuries have been reported.


As a frequent site of protests, the U-S Embassy in Athens is heavily guarded but American officials have not been targeted in more than a decade.

    Blast at U.S. Embassy in Athens Called 'Act of Terrorism', NYT, 12.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Greece-US-Embassy.html?hp&ex=1168664400&en=4d4a497590acdc50&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Ex-prisoners recount Guantanamo ordeals

Posted 1/10/2007 9:26 PM ET
The Associated Press
USA Today

A black hood covered his eyes, shackles secured his wrists and legs. He felt lightheaded from two days without food and medication that made him sleep during the long flight. Startled by barking guard dogs, he was shouted at by troops in a language he didn't understand.

"We didn't know where we were or what was going to happen to us," said Adil al-Zamil, a former Kuwaiti government clerk who was one of the first to arrive at Guantanamo Bay after the base began receiving terrorism suspects Jan. 11, 2002. "We were very, very afraid."

In the early days, dogs were used to intimidate prisoners. Detainees were subjected to sleep deprivation and earsplitting rock and rap music. Some, including al-Zamil, said they were shackled in uncomfortable positions for hours.

Today, five years after the first prisoners arrived at the U.S. Navy base in southeast Cuba, the detention camp commander says those aggressive interrogation tactics are gone.

"We don't do anything today that's coercive in nature," said Navy Rear Adm. Harry Harris, commander of the detention center. "I believe we are doing things correctly here."

World outrage over the detention center has grown. Protests around the world will mark the fifth anniversary Thursday of the arrival of the first 20 prisoners at Guantanamo, including a demonstration on the Cuban side of Guantanamo's gate.

Critics say the camp has damaged U.S. credibility and should close.

"It has become iconic in the Muslim world and the wider world … for everything that the United States has done wrong in the war on terror," said Michael Ratner, president of the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights.

The military says the detention center is vital as ever. Nearly 400 detainees suspected of links to al-Qaeda and the Taliban are still held there.

"What we are doing is an important and integral part of the global war on terror," Harris told the Associated Press by telephone. "We're keeping enemies of our nation — enemy combatants, terrorists if you will — off the battlefield."

Al-Zamil, 44, insisted Tuesday that he had no links to al-Qaeda or the Taliban. He says he had traveled to Afghanistan to work for a charity before being taken into custody in Pakistan and turned over to U.S. forces. He was held in Afghanistan before being transferred to Guantanamo in what he believes was February or March of 2002.

He and another Kuwaiti, Saad al-Azmi, were forced onto the tarmac in Guantanamo together. "We were totally cut off from the world. We didn't know what was going on," al-Zamil said by telephone from Kuwait.

Al-Zamil and al-Azmi later appeared before a military panel that designated them enemy combatants. The panels considered the cases of 558 detainees and found that all but 38 were enemy combatants and should be held.

The detention camp has changed since the early days when prisoners were kept in metal open-air cages and used buckets for toilets.

Harris said conditions for prisoners are better because of the construction of steel-and-concrete buildings modeled after U.S. prisons.

The military plans to charge 60 to 80 of the detainees and expects military trials to start next summer, said Air Force Col. Morris Davis, the chief prosecutor.

The two Kuwaitis were sent home in November 2005 and cleared by a court in their home country of all terrorism charges. "I'm still trying to regain my life, trying to become a normal citizen," al-Azmi said.

    Ex-prisoners recount Guantanamo ordeals, UT, 10.1.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2007-01-10-guantanamo-prisoners_x.htm

9/11 Associate Is Sentenced in Germany to 15 Years

January 9, 2007
The New York Times
By MARK LANDLER

FRANKFURT, Jan. 8 — A German court on Monday sentenced a friend of the Sept. 11 hijackers to 15 years in prison for being an accessory in the murders of 246 people aboard the commercial planes used in the terrorist attacks.

The sentencing of the man, a Moroccan named Mounir el-Motassadeq, is a potentially decisive milestone in a complex and politically delicate case that has wended its way through the German courts for five years.

In 2005, the court, in Hamburg, found Mr. Motassadeq, 32, guilty of belonging to a terrorist organization — a lesser crime — and sentenced him to seven years in jail. But last November, an appeals court overturned that ruling, saying he had played a direct role in plotting the hijackings.

“It was a violent crime that was carried out,” the presiding judge of the Hamburg court, Carsten Beckmann, said Monday, explaining the sentence, which was the stiffest possible under the criminal guidelines.

In one way, the 15-year prison term brings the case full circle: after his first trial, in 2003, Mr. Motassadeq was found guilty of 3,066 counts of accessory to murder and sentenced to the same jail term by the Hamburg court. But that verdict was overturned on appeal and he was put on trial a second time.

Mr. Motassadeq, who came to Germany in 1993 to study engineering and fell in with a radical Islamic group in Hamburg that included two of the hijackers, Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi, is one of only two people to be convicted in the 9/11 attacks. The other — Zacarias Moussaoui, a French citizen of Moroccan descent — is serving a life sentence in Colorado.

German prosecutors struggled to build a case against Mr. Motassadeq, in part because of what they said was a lack of cooperation from the United States in sharing evidence obtained from other terrorism suspects. On Monday, however, the court handed them a clear victory.

Mr. Motassadeq’s lawyer, Udo Jacob, said he planned to appeal, either to the European Court of Human Rights or by demanding a third trial in Hamburg based on new evidence. He has already filed an appeal with the Federal Constitutional Court, the highest German court.

“This ruling was not a surprise,” he said in an interview. “The court had no choice but to give him a tough punishment.”

Witnesses in the courtroom said Mr. Motassadeq reacted impassively as the judge read the sentence. But earlier, when given a chance to address the court, Mr. Motassadeq turned to the son of one of the victims, Dominic J. Puopolo, and delivered an emotional statement.

“I understand your suffering,” Mr. Motassadeq said, according to The Associated Press. “The same thing is being done to me, my kids, my parents, my family; my future is ruined.”

Mr. Puopolo, a 40-year-old computer consultant from Miami Beach, Fla., whose mother was on one of the planes flown into the World Trade Center, replied that Mr. Motassadeq would be free one day.

“You have a chance to rebuild your life and be back with your family,” said Mr. Puopolo, who represented the victims as co-plaintiffs. “Your life is not over, but my mom’s is.”

In a telephone interview later, Mr. Puopolo said the confrontation caught him off guard. More than that, though, he said the outburst showed Mr. Motassadeq’s desperation in the waning moments of his trial. During most of his court appearances, Mr. Motassadeq, a slight man with a long beard, had projected a tranquil, even occasionally cheerful, demeanor.

“This is the end of the road for him,” Mr. Puopolo said. “It’s real justice for the 9/11 families, and for my family.”

Mr. Motassadeq’s links to the hijackers were never in dispute. He was a friend of Mr. Atta and Mr. Shehhi while they lived in Hamburg, and had wired money to Mr. Shehhi. He also admitted to attending a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan sponsored by Osama bin Laden.

But Mr. Motassadeq denied knowing about the impending attacks and said he had helped the hijackers unwittingly. In 2005, the Hamburg court accepted his contention that he played no direct role.

The appeals court, however, ruled that the evidence showed that Mr. Motassadeq was aware of the plot to hijack and crash commercial airlines, even if he did not know the targets of the attacks.

Because there was no proof that he knew about the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, he was charged in his second trial with accessory to murder in the deaths of those on the planes, rather than in the deaths of everyone killed.

Mr. Jacob says he can present new evidence from another Moroccan, Abdelghani Mzoudi, who was acquitted of complicity in the 9/11 attacks by a Hamburg court in 2004. Mr. Mzoudi, who was deported from Germany, has offered to testify on behalf of Mr. Motassadeq.

For that to happen, however, the court would have to rule that the evidence is vital enough to warrant yet another trial.

    9/11 Associate Is Sentenced in Germany to 15 Years, NYT, 9.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/09/world/europe/09germany.html?hp&ex=1168405200&en=efae7c2b5fef8d37&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Sheehan arrives in Cuba to protest Gitmo

Posted 1/7/2007 12:43 AM ET
USA Today
By Anita Snow, Associated Press

HAVANA — American "peace mom" Cindy Sheehan called for the closure of the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as she and other activists arrived here Saturday to draw attention to the nearly 400 terror suspects held at the remote site.

Sheehan is among 12 human rights and anti-war activists who will travel across this Caribbean island next week, arriving at the main gate of the Guantanamo base in eastern Cuba on Thursday — five years after the first prisoners were flown in.

"Anyone who knows me, knows that I am not afraid of anything," Sheehan said when asked about the possibility of U.S. sanctions for traveling to communist-run Cuba, which remains under an American trade embargo.

"What is more important is the inhumanity that my government is perpetrating at Guantanamo," she told reporters.

Sheehan, 49, of Vacaville, Calif., became an anti-war activist known as the "peace mom" after losing her 24-year-old son Casey in Iraq in April 2004.

She drew international attention after camping outside President Bush's Texas ranch to protest the war in Iraq, and has been arrested numerous times for trespassing.

Sheehan arrived in Havana early Saturday evening with trip organizer Medea Benjamin of the California non-profit groups Global Exchange and CODEPINK: Women for Peace.

Benjamin said group members believed they were exempt from U.S. travel restrictions on Cuba because they were traveling as professional human rights activists who will attend a day-long international conference in the Cuban city of Guantanamo on Wednesday, the eve of their protest.

The U.S. military still holds about 395 men on suspicion of links to al-Qaeda or the Taliban, including about 85 who have been cleared to be released or transferred to other countries.

    Sheehan arrives in Cuba to protest Gitmo, UT, 7.1.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2007-01-06-sheehan-cuba_x.htm

New Guantanamo charges seen by February

Fri Jan 5, 2007 5:29 PM ET
The New York Times
By Jane Sutton

MIAMI (Reuters) - The U.S. military expects to file revised charges against a group of Guantanamo prisoners by February and present the first evidence against them at trials in the summer, the tribunals chief prosecutor said on Friday.

Hundreds of foreign captives have been held as suspected terrorists without trial and mostly without charges since the prison at a U.S. Naval base on Cuba opened nearly five years ago in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks.

Air Force Col. Moe Davis, the chief prosecutor, said in a telephone interview that pretrial hearings could resume in March, but he added: "I don't see us getting to trial on the merits until some time this summer."

He cautioned that such a timetable was open to change: "All that is subject to federal court intervention and a hundred other things could bring that to a grinding halt."

Pending court challenges could again derail the trials and long-standing calls to try the prisoners in the regular U.S. court system and close the Guantanamo detention camp have grown louder as the fifth anniversary approaches on January 11.

A group of U.S. and other activists plan a protest march to the gates of the base on that day. The prison has been condemned by human rights groups and other countries who allege mistreatment of detainees and say they should be given trials.

Since the first shackled prisoners arrived on the dry and dusty base in southeast Cuba, more than 770 captives have been held there and about 395 remain. Only 10 were ever charged with crimes.

Those charges were nullified in June when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the military tribunal system created by President George W. Bush to try the suspects.

Congress approved legislation in September creating a new military tribunal system. Pentagon officials expect to finish drafting rules for those by January 15 or 16 and the Guantanamo prosecutors expect to start filing fresh charges by February, Davis said.

"I would expect in the initial batch of cases we're probably going to have 10 to 20," Davis said.

Those will include the original 10 defendants, among them Salim Ahmed Hamdan, the prisoner who won the Supreme Court case striking down the old system and who once served as a driver for al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan.

Those 10 had pretrial hearings at Guantanamo but none of the cases reached the phase where evidence was presented. None was accused of direct involvement in the September 11 attacks and none will face execution if convicted.

Davis said he would almost certainly recommend the death penalty when the military charges some of the 14 "high-value" captives sent to Guantanamo in September from secret CIA prisons.

Asked if he referred specifically to Khalid Sheik Mohammed, suspected of masterminding the September 11 attacks, Davis said, "That would be the one that kind of jumps out at you." He could not speculate when any of that group might be charged.

    New Guantanamo charges seen by February, R, 5.1.2007, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=newsOne&storyID=2007-01-05T222910Z_01_N15272346_RTRUKOC_0_US-GUANTANAMO.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C2-TopNews-newsOne-10

Moroccan Proclaims 9 / 11 Innocence

January 5, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:00 p.m. ET
The New York Times

HAMBURG, Germany (AP) -- A Moroccan convicted as an accessory to murder in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks vehemently declared his innocence as a court opened his sentencing hearing Friday.

Mounir el Motassadeq, a friend of three of the suicide pilots, could receive up to 15 years in prison in the latest chapter of the tangled, five-year legal saga.

In November, a federal appeals court ruled that judges in Hamburg had wrongly acquitted el Motassadeq in 2005 of direct involvement in the attacks, even as they sentenced him to seven years in prison for belonging to a terrorist group.

The appeals court convicted el Motassadeq as an accessory to the murder of 246 passengers and crew members aboard all four jetliners used in the attacks, and ordered the Hamburg state court to set a new sentence.

El Motassadeq, 32, a slight man with a long beard who has always maintained he knew nothing of the hijackers' plans, appeared relaxed for much of Friday's session, but became agitated when presiding Judge Carsten Beckmann asked if he wanted to make a statement.

''Can anyone in this room swear by God that what is in this verdict is the truth about me?'' he asked.

''I swear by God that I did know the attackers were in America,'' he shouted in accented German. ''I swear by God that I did not know what they wanted to do.''

Defense attorney Ladislav Anisic called for the proceedings to be stopped and his client released on procedural grounds, citing constitutional concerns over the way the panel hearing the case was selected.

His colleague, Udo Jacob, argued that the hearings should at least be halted pending a decision by the Federal Constitutional Court on an appeal filed last month against el Motassadeq's stiffened conviction. It is unclear when that court, Germany's highest, might consider the case.

Judge Carsten Beckmann adjourned the hearing until Monday without ruling on either request.

The court has scheduled sessions through Feb. 5, but Beckmann said that, depending how his three-judge panel rules on the defense requests, both sides could make their sentencing arguments Monday -- and the court could deliver a verdict then.

Prosecutor Walter Hemberger said before Friday's hearing that his sentence ''will certainly be toward the upper end'' of what is possible.

Andreas Schulz, an attorney for families of Sept. 11 victims, said he places ''a great deal of value on el Motassadeq getting the maximum sentence.''

El Motassadeq was a close friend of pilots Mohamed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah when they lived and studied in Hamburg. He has acknowledged training at an al-Qaida camp in Afghanistan and that he was close to the three hijackers, but insists he knew nothing of their plans.

However, the federal appeals court said evidence showed el Motassadeq knew that the hijackers planned to hijack and crash planes. It found that his actions -- for example, transferring money, and helping the hijackers keep up the appearance of being regular university students by paying tuition and rent fees -- facilitated the attacks.

The federal court also said it was irrelevant to el Motassadeq's guilt whether he knew of the plot's timing, dimension or targets.

The sentencing hearings mark the third time that the Hamburg court has considered el Motassadeq's case. But it may not be the end of the saga that started with his arrest in November 2001 and has featured two full trials.

El Motassadeq was convicted and sentenced to the maximum 15 years in prison in 2003, but that verdict was overturned by a federal court the following year -- largely because of lack of evidence from al-Qaida suspects in U.S. custody.

At a retrial that resulted in the 2005 conviction, the U.S. provided limited summaries from the interrogation of, among others, Ramzi Binalshibh, a suspected liaison between the Hamburg hijackers and al-Qaida.

Jacob on Friday insisted that judges had been wrong to dismiss a statement from Binalshibh supporting el Motassadeq's insistence that he knew nothing of the terror cell's plans. The judges had questioned both its credibility and its value as evidence.

    Moroccan Proclaims 9 / 11 Innocence, NYT, 5.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Germany-Sept-11-Trial.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

A Terror Detainee Longs for Court

January 5, 2007
The New York Times
By ADAM LIPTAK

Ali al-Marri, whom the government calls a sleeper agent for Al Qaeda and who is the only person on the American mainland still held as an enemy combatant, spends his days in a small cell in solitary confinement at the Navy brig in Charleston, S.C. When he is in an ironic mood, his lawyers say, he calls the cell his villa.

Mr. Marri waits there for word from his wife, two sons and three daughters, whom he last saw in 2001, just before his arrest in Peoria, Ill., where he was studying computer science at Bradley University.

Letters arrive, but they are late and have words and sentences blacked out. A note his wife sent to him 10 months ago landed recently. It began with a standard Muslim invocation, but a word was missing. Mr. Marri is pretty sure it was “Allah.”

But mostly Mr. Marri waits for word from a federal appeals court, which will soon rule on one of the most urgent questions in American law, one his case presents in stark form: May the government indefinitely detain a foreigner living legally in the United States, without charges and without access to the courts?

Mr. Marri, who is 41 and a citizen of Qatar, wants the right to challenge President Bush’s assertion that he is a terrorist and “a grave danger to the national security of the United States.”

The Bush administration says the courts cannot second-guess the president when he decides that someone is an enemy combatant, at least when noncitizens are involved. Detaining combatants is a military rather than a criminal matter, the administration says, adding that its purpose is not to punish the prisoner but to stop him from returning to the battlefield.

The implications of that position are startling, according to a brief filed last month in Mr. Marri’s case by some 30 constitutional scholars. “The government’s interpretation would be vastly threatening to the liberty of more than 20 million noncitizens residing in the United States,” the brief said, “exposing them to the risk of irremediable indefinite detention on the basis of unfounded rumors, mistaken identity, the desperation of other detainees subject to coercive interrogation, and the deliberate lies of actual terrorists.”

Kathleen M. Blomquist, a spokeswoman for the Justice Department, disputed that contention.

“Of all the terrorists currently in the custody of the United States military, al-Marri is the only one who was captured in the United States,” Ms. Blomquist said, adding that the notion that millions of people are at risk is “unfounded and absurd.”

Mr. Bush’s determination that Mr. Marri is an enemy combatant, she said, was based on substantial evidence, including “his association with Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, and files found on his computer concerning chemical weapons of mass destruction.”

Mr. Marri maintains his innocence, his lawyers say. But they have refused to offer point-by-point rebuttals of the government’s detailed assertions, calling instead for prosecutors to offer evidence to back them up in court.

“In a civilized society and under American law and tradition,” said Jonathan Hafetz, a lawyer for Mr. Marri with the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, “the government has the obligation to prove its case.”

One of Mr. Marri’s brothers, Mohammed Marri, in a telephone interview from Qatar, rejected the charge that Mr. Marri is a terrorist. “For sure it’s not true,” he said.

A third brother, Jarallah, is at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, held as an enemy combatant based on accusations that he had visited a Qaeda camp. “This is not a proper way to treat other people from other countries,” Mohammed Marri said of his brothers and other detainees. “If they are guilty, let them prove it in court.”

An Exclusive Club

The Charleston brig can hold 288 military prisoners and 6 enemy combatants, but there have never been more than 3 in the exclusive enemy combatant club. Two of them are now gone.

One of them, Yaser Hamdi, was freed and sent to Saudi Arabia after the United States Supreme Court allowed him to challenge his detention in 2004. Jose Padilla was transferred to the criminal justice system last year just as the Supreme Court was considering whether to review his case. That leaves only Mr. Marri.

Mr. Hamdi and Mr. Padilla are American citizens, but Mr. Marri is not. They were seized abroad or on their way back to the United States, while Mr. Marri was living what seemed to be an ordinary life, in Peoria, a city often caricatured as the nation’s most ordinary, with a family and a minivan.

The government contends in a partly declassified declaration from a senior defense intelligence official, Jeffrey N. Rapp, and in a recent book by former Attorney General John Ashcroft, that Mr. Marri was a Qaeda sleeper agent sent to the United States to commit mass murder and disrupt the banking system.

The assertions have not been tested in court, and human rights groups say they are based on unreliable evidence “There is substantial reason to believe,” lawyers for two of the groups wrote in a brief in November, “that the allegations of the Rapp declaration are derived from the torture of two men interrogated at Guantánamo Bay and other detention sites: Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi.”

The government says that Mr. Hawsawi was one of the financiers of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Mr. Rapp’s declaration cites the personal views of Mr. Mohammed, who is often referred to as K.S.M. “K.S.M. considered al-Marri an ideal sleeper agent,” Mr. Rapp wrote.

Kept in Isolation

Mr. Marri was kept in isolation at the brig and, according to his court filings, subjected to tough interrogation. Interrogators threatened to send him to Egypt or Saudi Arabia, according to a lawsuit filed on his behalf in 2005, “where, they told him, he would be tortured and sodomized and where his wife would be raped in front on him.”

“By winter ’05,” Andrew J. Savage, who also represents Mr. Marri, said in a recent interview, “I genuinely thought he was losing his mind. He told me in this sort of indirect way that he might not be able to hold on, that his mind was playing tricks on him.”

Mr. Padilla’s lawyers have said that their client’s time in the brig was so grueling that he is not fit to stand trial. But while Mr. Padilla was passive, Mr. Marri pushed back. He put wet toilet paper on the video camera, for instance. The brig responded by taking away his mattress, Koran and hygienic products, including his toilet paper.

“There is almost nothing to distract him from his torment,” his lawyers wrote in the lawsuit, “and he therefore becomes preoccupied with his pain and the degradation he suffers.”

Perhaps as a consequence of the lawsuit, conditions have improved.

When Mr. Marri’s lawyers were first allowed to see him in October 2004, after the decision in Mr. Hamdi’s case, Mr. Marri was behind a transparent barrier and bound in leg-irons and handcuffs that were linked to a belly-chain and fastened to the floor. Officials from the Defense Intelligence Agency and the brig were present, and the conversation was videotaped.

On a recent visit, Mr. Savage said, he met his client in a visiting lounge. Mr. Marri, who was not restrained, was wearing stylish bifocals rather than institutional prison glasses. He was also wearing a watch, which makes it easier for him to know when to pray.

Mr. Savage brought hummus and pita bread. “We sat down, we broke bread, and we had a three-and-a-half hour conversation, unmonitored,” Mr. Savage said.

Mr. Marri is now allowed to watch television in the evening, but not the news. He reads newspapers and magazines, but they are edited. “Brig staff remove all materials associated with the war on terror from them,” Cmdr. Stephanie L. Wright, the brig’s commanding officer, said in court filing in July.

Sometimes that makes for a thin newspaper. “All I get is sports and obits,” Mr. Marri has complained, Mr. Savage said. He is critical of the former, saying there is not enough soccer coverage.

The Defense Department has allowed journalists and others to tour the Guantánamo facility, where Mr. Marri’s brother Jarallah and 400 other men are being held. All of the Guantánamo prisoners are foreigners who were seized abroad. The government has not asserted that the brothers were working together.

The Defense Department refused a recent request to inspect the Charleston brig. A spokesman, Cmdr. J. D. Gordon, cited “operational security concerns surrounding the detention of an alleged al Qaeda-linked operative in the U.S. mainland,” a reference to Mr. Marri. Commander Gordon added that “it has always been our policy to treat all detainees humanely.”

Return to the United States

Mr. Marri spent eight years in the United States as a young man, graduating from Bradley with an undergraduate degree in business administration in 1991. When he returned to the United States 10 years later, he brought his family.

In his declaration, Mr. Rapp noted that Mr. Marri’s profile “differed significantly from that of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers.” Those differences, Mr. Rapp said, made Mr. Marri all the more attractive to Al Qaeda.

The years between Mr. Marri’s two stints at Bradley are a mystery. The government says he trained at a Qaeda camp in Afghanistan for about a year and a half between 1996 and 1998, specializing in poisons. The government also says that Mr. Marri visited the United States briefly in 2000, which Mr. Marri has denied.

In the summer of 2001, Mr. Rapp wrote, Mr. Mohammed introduced Mr. Marri to Osama bin Laden. Mr. Marri “offered to be an Al Qaeda martyr,” Mr. Rapp wrote.

“Al Qaeda instructed al-Marri that it was imperative that he arrive in the United States prior to Sept. 11, 2001, and that if al-Marri could not do so, that he should cancel all his plans and go to Pakistan,” Mr. Rapp wrote.

The Marris arrived in Peoria on Sept. 10, 2001.

Mr. Marri soon came to the attention of the F.B.I., which first interviewed him less than a month later. In December, agents searched his laptop, finding “research consistent with the tradecraft and teachings associated with Al Qaeda,” Mr. Rapp wrote. Mr. Marri was arrested on Dec. 12, 2001, and held as a material witness at the request of prosecutors in New York. He was indicted two months later on charges of credit card fraud. In January 2003, the government added charges of lying to federal agents and financial institutions, and identity theft. Mr. Marri pleaded not guilty. His family has since returned to the Middle East.

For a year and a half, the government pursued a conventional criminal case. Mr. Ashcroft, in his book “Never Again,” which was published in October, wrote that Mr. Marri “rejected numerous offers to improve his lot” by cooperating with investigators. “He insisted,” Mr. Ashcroft wrote, “on becoming a ‘hard case.’ ”

In June 2003, as the case was nearing trial, the government abruptly changed course, taking Mr. Marri out of the criminal system and moving him into indefinite military detention. That means, Mr. Ashcroft later wrote, that Mr. Marri can be held “at least until the war against Al Qaeda was over.”

In its rush to move Mr. Marri, the government short-circuited its criminal case. On hearing that a federal judge in Peoria would allow Mr. Marri’s lawyers to file papers opposing the transfer as long as the criminal case was alive, the government agreed to dismiss the criminal charges with prejudice, meaning they cannot be refiled.

The decision, however, would not prevent the government from charging Mr. Marri with other crimes outlined in Mr. Rapp’s declaration.

The declaration has served the purpose for which it was designed. In August, it persuaded Henry F. Floyd, a federal judge in Spartanburg, S.C., to deny a habeas corpus petition challenging Mr. Marri’s detention. Saying that Mr. Marri had “offered nothing more than a general denial” of the assertions in the declaration, Judge Floyd dismissed the petition.

Neither side was happy with the ruling. Mr. Marri has appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, saying that the president does not have the power to detain him as an enemy combatant.

A foreigner living legally in the United States, his lawyers say, is not the same as a soldier captured on a battlefield. Even if the president does have the power, they say, he should be required to support his assertions with evidence.

The government argues that Judge Floyd gave Mr. Marri too full a hearing. It cited the recent Military Commissions Act, which says that the courts have no jurisdiction to hear challenges from any alien “who has been determined by the United States to have been properly detained as an enemy combatant.”

The case will be heard Feb. 1

The government offered Mr. Marri a sort of consolation prize should the appeals court dismiss his case. It said he could try to persuade a combatant status review tribunal, convened by the Defense Department, that he was not an enemy combatant. That would apparently be the first such proceeding on the mainland; all of the others known to have been conducted were at Guantánamo Bay.

A Different View

In a brief filed in November, eight former Justice Department officials, including Janet Reno, the attorney general in the Clinton administration, said that taking Mr. Marri out of the criminal system as his case approached trial “has given to the appearance of manipulation of the judicial process.” The brief listed several criminal statutes available to prosecute people accused of terrorism along with many successful prosecutions under them.

“The criminal justice system has proven that it can make the cases,” Ms. Reno said in an interview. “For the president to be able to designate someone as an enemy combatant, without process and without regulation, just doesn’t make any sense and isn’t necessary.”

Ms. Blomquist, the Justice Department spokeswoman, said, “While we respect the views of former law enforcement officials, the United States cannot afford to retreat to a pre-September 11 mind-set that treats terrorism solely as a domestic law enforcement problem.”

Mr. Marri shared a fantasy with one of his lawyers not long ago. “I’d love to be taken back to Saudi Arabia and they would beat the” — here, he swore — “out of me for six months,” Mr. Marri said, according to Mr. Savage. “It would be brutal, but it would be finite.”

    A Terror Detainee Longs for Court, NYT, 5.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/05/washington/05terror.html?hp&ex=1168059600&en=f6a2aa9a3c03ea77&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Bush administration defends emergency mail inspection

Posted 1/4/2007 10:39 PM ET
USA Today
By Mimi Hall and David Jackson

WASHINGTON — The White House on Thursday defended a policy allowing the government to open mail without a warrant, despite criticism that the crime-fighting tactic might lead to privacy breaches.

Bush administration and Postal Service officials said citizens' mail remains constitutionally protected from unreasonable search and seizure. But White House spokesman Tony Snow said the United States needs to have the power to inspect mail in emergencies.

The mail controversy erupted Wednesday after a report in the New York Daily News that President Bush on Dec. 20 attached a so-called signing statement to a new postal law. The statement grants the government the authority during emergencies to bypass a law forbidding mail to be opened without a warrant.

Snow said Bush was simply reiterating authority the government already has under the law.

U.S. Postal Service spokesman Thomas Day concurred. "The president is not exerting any new authority," he said.

Snow did not say what emergency circumstances might warrant inspections of the mail.

Brian Walsh, a lawyer at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said the authority likely would only be used in extreme cases, such as if police learned a bomb or an envelope containing anthrax or another biohazard was in the mail.

If the government didn't have the authority for prompt inspections, the mail — particularly overnight delivery — could become "a courier service for drug dealers or terrorists," Walsh said.

Privacy rights advocates expressed concern that the administration could loosely define emergency situations to include looking at mail sent by or delivered to people who might wrongly be included on the government's terrorist watch lists.

The American Civil Liberties Union said such "deliberate ambiguity" was troublesome.

It "raises a red flag because of President Bush's history of asserting broad powers to spy on Americans," ACLU Director Anthony Romero said.

Others accused Bush of making an end-run around the Constitution and Congress.

"This opens the door into the government prying into private communications," said Jonathan Hafetz, a lawyer with the Brennan Center for Justice. "It's something we associate with a totalitarian or police state."

In Congress, where Democrats took control of both houses Thursday for the first time in 12 years, some lawmakers expressed unease about the practice.

"Every American wants foolproof protection against terrorism," Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said. "But history has shown it can and should be done within the confines of the Constitution. This last-minute, irregular and unauthorized reinterpretation of a duly passed law is the exact type of maneuver that voters so resoundingly rejected in November."

    Bush administration defends emergency mail inspection, UT, 4.1.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2007-01-04-mail-inspection_x.htm

In Padilla Wiretaps, Murky View of ‘Jihad’ Case

January 4, 2007
The New York Times
By DEBORAH SONTAG

In 1997, as the government listened in on their phone call, Adham Hassoun, a computer programmer in Broward County, Fla., proposed a road trip to Jose Padilla, a low-wage worker there. The excursion to Tampa would be his treat, Mr. Hassoun said, and a chance to meet “some nice, uh, brothers.”

Mr. Padilla, 36, a Brooklyn-born Puerto Rican who had converted to Islam a few years earlier, knew Mr. Hassoun, an outspoken Palestinian, from his mosque. Still, according to a transcript of the conversation obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Padilla equivocated as Mr. Hassoun exhorted.

“We take the whole family and have a blast,” Mr. Hassoun said. “We go to, uh, our Busch Gardens, you know ... You won’t regret it. Money-back guarantee.”

Mr. Padilla, laughing, suggested that they not discuss the matter over the phone.

“Why?” Mr. Hassoun said. “We’re going to Busch Gardens. What’s the big deal!”

That conversation took place five years before Mr. Padilla, a United States citizen accused of plotting a “dirty bomb” attack against this country, was declared an enemy combatant. Given that Mr. Padilla and Mr. Hassoun are now criminal defendants in a terrorism conspiracy case in Miami, it sounds suspicious, as if Mr. Hassoun were proposing something more sinister than a weekend at the amusement park. He well may have been — but maybe, too, he was sincere or joking about a Muslim retreat.

Deciphering such chatter in order to construct a convincing narrative of conspiracy is a challenge. Yet, prosecutors say, the government will rely largely on wiretapped conversations when it puts Mr. Padilla, Mr. Hassoun, and a third defendant, Kifah Jayyousi, on trial as a “North American support cell” that sent money, goods and recruits abroad to assist “global jihad.”

Tens of thousands of conversations were recorded. Some 230 phone calls form the core of the government’s case, including 21 that make reference to Mr. Padilla, prosecutors said. But Mr. Padilla’s voice is heard on only seven calls. And on those seven, which The Times obtained from a participant in the case, Mr. Padilla does not discuss violent plots.

But this is not the version of Mr. Padilla — Al Qaeda associate and would-be bomber — that John Ashcroft, then the attorney general, unveiled in 2002 when he interrupted a trip to Moscow to trumpet Mr. Padilla’s capture. In the four and a half years since then, as the government tested the limits of its power to deal with terrorism outside the traditional law enforcement system, Mr. Padilla is the only accused terrorist to have gone from enemy combatant to criminal defendant.

His criminal trial, scheduled to begin late this month, will feature none of the initial claims about violent plotting with Al Qaeda that the government cited as justification for detaining Mr. Padilla without formal charges for three and a half years. Those claims came from the government’s overseas interrogations of terrorism suspects, like Abu Zubaydah, which, the government said, Mr. Padilla corroborated, in part, during his own questioning in a military brig in South Carolina.

But, constrained by strict federal rules of evidence that would prohibit or limit the use of information obtained during such interrogations, the government will make a far more circumscribed case against Mr. Padilla in court, effectively demoting him from Al Qaeda’s dirty bomber to foot soldier in a somewhat nebulous conspiracy.

The initial dirty bomb accusation did not disappear. It quietly resurfaced in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The government filed the dirty bomb charges against Mr. Padilla’s supposed accomplice, an Ethiopian-born detainee, at about the same time it indicted Mr. Padilla on relatively lesser offenses in criminal court.

A Change in Strategy

The change in Mr. Padilla’s status, from enemy combatant to criminal defendant, was abrupt. It came late in 2005 as the Supreme Court was weighing whether to take up the legality of his military detention and the Bush administration, by filing criminal charges, pre-empted its review. In a way, Mr. Padilla’s prosecution was a legal maneuver that kept the issue of his detention without charges out of the Supreme Court. After apprehending him at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago in May 2002, the Bush administration made a choice: to detain Mr. Padilla militarily, in order to thwart further plotting, rather than to follow him in order to gather evidence that might serve a criminal prosecution.

Now that Mr. Padilla has ended up a criminal defendant after all, the prosecution’s case does not fully reflect the Bush administration’s view of who he is or what he did.

Senior government officials have said publicly that Mr. Padilla provided self-incriminating information during interrogations, admitting, they said, to undergoing basic terrorist training, to accepting an assignment to blow up apartment buildings in the United States, and to attending a farewell dinner with Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, the suspected master planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, before he flew to Chicago in 2002.

But any confessions by Mr. Padilla while he was detained without charges and denied access to counsel — whether or not he was mistreated, as his lawyers claim — would not be admissible in court.

And it is unlikely that information obtained during the harsh questioning of Al Qaeda detainees would be admissible, either — and, further, the government is disinclined to expose sensitive intelligence or invite further scrutiny of secret jails overseas.

Probably as a consequence, the current criminal case zeroes in on what the government sees as an earlier stage of Mr. Padilla’s involvement with terrorism. It focuses primarily on the other defendants’ support during the 1990s for Muslim struggles overseas, especially in Bosnia, Kosovo and Chechnya. Mr. Padilla, who was appended to their pre-existing case, in which he had been an unnamed co-conspirator, is depicted as their recruit.

Although prosecutors have declined to discuss the government’s strategy, their filings and statements in court provide a picture of the case they are expected to present at trial.

The most tangible allegation against Mr. Padilla is that in 2000 he filled out, under an alias, an Arab-language application to attend a terrorist training camp. That application is expected to be offered into evidence alongside the wiretapped conversations, but Mr. Padilla’s lawyers say they will contest its admissibility, challenging the government’s assertion that the “mujahideen data form” belonged to their client.

Robert Chesney, a specialist in national security law at Wake Forest University, called the prosecution a pragmatic one, analogous to “going after Al Capone on tax evasion.”

But Deborah Pearlstein, a lawyer with Human Rights First who has consulted with Mr. Padilla’s defense, said that his will never be an ordinary, pragmatic prosecution. “If Jose Padilla were from Day 1 just charged and tried, then maybe,” she said. “But this is a case that comes after three and a half years of the most gross deprivation of human rights that we’ve seen in this country for a long time.”

Further, Ms. Pearlstein noted, the government has reserved the option, should the prosecution fail, of returning Mr. Padilla to the military brig. This, she said, “casts a shadow” over the current prosecution.

The Bush administration’s military case against Binyam Mohamed, 28, the Ethiopian detainee at Guantánamo, put the current proceedings in a different light, too.

In December 2005, Mr. Mohamed was referred to the military commission in Guantánamo on accusations that he conspired with Mr. Padilla on the dirty bomb plot. It was little noticed at the time.

But accusations against Mr. Padilla that are nowhere to be found in the indictment against him filled the pages of Mr. Mohamed’s charging sheet, with Mr. Padilla repeatedly identified by name. The sheet referred to the two men meeting in Pakistan after Sept. 11, 2001, studying how to build an improvised dirty bomb, discussing the feasibility of a dirty bomb attack with Al Qaeda officials and agreeing to undertake the mission to blow up buildings.

Mr. Mohamed’s lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, said that these charges were based on a forced confession by Mr. Mohamed, who, he said, was tortured overseas into admitting to a story that was fed to him. “Binyam was told all along that his job was to be a witness against Padilla, Abu Zubaydah and Khaled Sheikh Mohammed,” Mr. Stafford Smith said, adding that his client “has no conscience knowledge that he ever met” Mr. Padilla.

The charges against Mr. Mohamed and other Guantánamo detainees who were headed for prosecution there have been suspended temporarily as a result of the Military Commissions Act passed by Congress in October. Those charges are likely to be reinstated, a Pentagon official said yesterday.

That Mr. Mohamed faced dirty bomb charges and Mr. Padilla does not speaks to the central difference between being a terrorism suspect in Guantánamo and a criminal defendant charged with terrorism offenses in the United States.

In Guantánamo, the military commission system that deals with foreign-born terrorism suspects is expected to allow, with some exceptions, the use of information obtained through coercion.

“Federal court rules are restrictive,” Professor Chesney of Wake Forest University School of Law said. “The very essence of why they’re trying to have that separate military system was to create rules to use information that is deemed by the intelligence community to be trustworthy but wouldn’t make it under the federal rules of evidence.”

David Cole, a professor of law at Georgetown University and author of books on terrorism and civil liberties, sees the difference between the two systems more critically: “What this says clearly is that they feel that they can get away with using tainted evidence in the military commission system that they can’t use in the criminal court system.”

The Wiretapping Case

The criminal case against Mr. Padilla has its roots in the prosecution of Sheikh Omer Abdel Rahman, the blind Egyptian cleric who was convicted in 1995 of conspiring to blow up the United Nations and other New York landmarks.

In the early 1990s, Sheikh Rahman’s telephone was tapped, and Mr. Hassoun and Dr. Jayyousi, a Jordanian-born American citizen who holds a doctorate in civil engineering, came to the government’s attention through phone calls to or from his line. Then the government, under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, began to eavesdrop on them, which eventually pulled Mr. Padilla into their net, too.

The government presents the three defendants as “joined at the hip,” as one prosecutor put it in a hearing last summer. But Judge Marcia G. Cooke of Federal District Court, noting that Mr. Padilla was appended to a case well under way, asked the government, “If they are so joined at the hip, why is Mr. Padilla so late to the dance?”

Dr. Jayyousi, a former school system administrator in both Detroit and Washington, D.C., never met Mr. Padilla, his lawyer, William Swor, said.

It is Mr. Hassoun, the government said, who recruited Mr. Padilla. But both Mr. Hassoun’s and Mr. Padilla’s lawyers deny that Mr. Padilla was recruited.

Seven Taped Phone Calls

Mr. Padilla’s lawyers and relatives say that he left South Florida for Egypt in September 1998 on a spiritual journey. A former juvenile offender, he converted to Islam as part of an effort to straighten out his life, they say. His mosque in Fort Lauderdale sponsored his travel, he told friends, relatives and F.B.I. agents who interviewed him in 2002. Mr. Hassoun belonged to that mosque, and the telephone transcripts seem to indicate that Mr. Hassoun helped, at the least, with Mr. Padilla’s travel plans.

The seven taped phone calls that bear Mr. Padilla’s voice involve conversations with Mr. Hassoun from 1997 to 2000.

On those calls, Mr. Padilla, unlike some of the other defendants, does not employ what the government says is coded language. According to the government, other defendants refer to their jihad-related plans as “getting some fresh air,” “participating in tourism,” “opening up a market,” “playing football,” and so on. This leads to silly-sounding exchanges where “the brothers” discuss going on “picnics” in order “to smell fresh air and to eat cheese” or using $3,500 to buy “zucchini.”

In contrast, Mr. Padilla’s seven conversations with Mr. Hassoun range from straightforward — Mr. Hassoun tells Mr. Padilla that his grandmother has died; Mr. Padilla tells Mr. Hassoun that he has found himself an 18-year-old Egyptian bride who is willing to wear a veil — to vaguely suggestive or just odd.

In one phone call, the two men talked about a dream. It appeared to be the dream that Mr. Padilla, according to his relatives, cites as having played a crucial role in inspiring him to convert to Islam: the vision of a man in a turban, surrounded by the swirling dust of a desert.

Mr. Hassoun brought it up and told Mr. Padilla that he himself had experienced the same vision. “What do you mean you saw the same dream?” Mr. Padilla asked.

“I saw the dream of the uh ... person with the turban,” Mr. Hassoun said.

Mr. Hassoun explained how, in his dream, the turban was wrongly wrapped and so he thought the man might be a spy, in which case, he was prepared “to split his body apart.” But then, he said, he understood that “the brother ... was a good one.”

“Yeah?” Mr. Padilla said.

In three of the seven conversations, Mr. Padilla made statements that the government has identified as “overt acts” in furtherance of the accused conspiracy.

In the first, Mr. Hassoun asked, “You’re ready, right?” and Mr. Padilla said, “God willing, brother, it’s going to happen soon.” That was the summer of 1997, a year before Mr. Padilla left South Florida for Egypt.

In the second, Mr. Padilla told Mr. Hassoun, during a 1999 conversation from Egypt, that he had asked his ex-wife in the United States to arrange for him to receive an army jacket, a book bag and a sleeping bag, supplies that he had requested because “there was a rumor here that the door was open somewhere.” In the third, Mr. Padilla told Mr. Hassoun in April 2000, that he would need a recommendation to “connect me with the good brothers, with the right faith” if he were to travel to Yemen.

Prosecutors say Mr. Padilla is mentioned, although by his Muslim name Ibrahim or by another alias, on 21 additional tapes. One of them refers to Ibrahim as being “in the area of Usama,” which the government takes to mean that he was near Osama bin Laden. But Mr. Padilla’s lawyers contest that interpretation.

“That is just nonsensical, Your Honor, that these men who for years, according to the government, have been talking in code all of a sudden are going to throw Osama bin Laden’s name around,” Michael Caruso, a federal public defender, said in court.

Mr. Padilla has pleaded not guilty. But before his case goes before a jury, his fitness to stand trial will be evaluated. On the basis of Mr. Padilla’s lawyers’ assertion that he is mentally damaged as a result of his prolonged isolation and his interrogation in the brig, Judge Cooke has ordered a psychiatric evaluation by a Bureau of Prisons doctor to be completed this week.

Friday in The Times: The only person on the American mainland still held as an enemy combatant.

    In Padilla Wiretaps, Murky View of ‘Jihad’ Case, NYT, 4.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/04/washington/04padilla.html?hp&ex=1167973200&en=83e101b101915721&ei=5094&partner=homepage

FBI: Guantanamo interrogator squatted over Koran

Wed Jan 3, 2007 11:25 AM ET
Reuters
by James Vicini

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - FBI agents at Guantanamo saw a military interrogator squat over the Koran in order to anger a prisoner and observed a detainee whose head was wrapped in duct tape, according to recently released FBI documents from a 2004 internal inquiry.

The documents stemmed from a survey of nearly 500 FBI employees who were asked if they saw any aggressive interview techniques, interrogations or mistreatment of prisoners at the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. More than 25 incidents were reported.

The 244 pages of documents were released on the FBI's Web site on Tuesday and were turned over to the American Civil Liberties Union as part of its lawsuit.

"The FBI believes this or substantially similar information has already been released in this litigation," the agency said.

In one incident in October of 2002, a detainee was put in a plywood hut, where interrogators yelled and screamed at him, according to the documents. One military interrogator squatted over the Koran which "incensed" the prisoner, the document said.

The Pentagon has said the population of the prison now stands at approximately 395 inmates. Most were captured during the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan after the September 11 attacks.

Another day, an FBI employee was taken to an interrogation room and saw a detainee with a full beard whose head was wrapped in duct tape.

In another incident, a civilian contractor asked an FBI special agent to see a detainee who was gagged with duct tape that covered much of his head. The contractor said the prisoner had been chanting the Koran nonstop, according to the documents.

The FBI said the survey found no evidence that its employees mistreated detainees. An FBI spokesman said the information from the survey has been turned over the Defense Department's inspector general.

    FBI: Guantanamo interrogator squatted over Koran, R, 3.1.2007, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2007-01-03T162507Z_01_N03391841_RTRUKOC_0_US-GUANTANAMO-FBI.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C5-domesticNews-3

Only four big U.S. cities ready for crisis:

report

Wed Jan 3, 2007 4:45 AM ET
Reuters



WASHINGTON (Reuters) - More than five years after the September 11 attacks, only four big U.S. cities have emergency communications allowing police, fire and medical officials to coordinate fully during a crisis, a federal report said.

The Department of Homeland Security report, due to be released officially on Wednesday, listed Washington, D.C.; San Diego, California; the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area of Minnesota; and Columbus, Ohio, as the major urban areas that achieved "most advanced" status.

The study awarded the same status to the smaller metropolitan areas of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and Laramie, Wyoming.

Portions of the report obtained by Reuters said federal officials surveyed the emergency communications systems of 75 urban and metropolitan areas.

New York City, which was hardest hit by the 2001 attacks that killed 3,000 people, did not appear among those with the most advanced systems. Neither did Chicago, another city seen as a potential target.

The report ranked Chicago in the early stages of communications development and cited political divisions between the city and surrounding Cook County as the reason.

The inability of police and fire officials to communicate during the September 11 attacks was blamed for the deaths of New York City firefighters despite a police warning when the World Trade Center towers began to collapse.

The September 11 commission, which investigated the attacks, recommended "interoperability" of the communications systems of urban emergency services.

The new Homeland Security report said 75 urban and metropolitan areas have policies governing interoperability. But it said leadership and planning have lagged and emergency services in some areas were still in need of regular training.

Homeland Security awarded most-advanced status to areas that have standard procedures for interoperable communications, proven familiarity with the equipment during emergencies and a strategic plan for meeting further communications goals.

Only four big U.S. cities ready for crisis: report, R, 2.1.2007, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2007-01-03T094455Z_01_N02357519_RTRUKOC_0_US-SECURITY-USA-CITIES.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C5-domesticNews-2