History > 2007 > USA > Terrorism (III)

Tighter Security at US Airports

June 30, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 4:31 p.m. ET
The New York Times

KENNEBUNKPORT, Maine (AP) -- U.S. airports and mass transit systems will tighten security in response to apparent terrorist incidents in Britain, the Bush administration said Saturday.

The United States, however, is not raising its terror alert status, President Bush's spokesman and the Homeland Security secretary said. ''There is no indication of any specific or credible threat to the United States -- no change in the overall security level,'' Tony Snow told reporters in Maine.

Britain raised its security alert to the highest level possible, an indication that terrorist attacks are imminent.

Snow said after this step was announced in London that the British government had notified the White House in advance, and that it did not provoke any change in the threat assessment in the United States. ''We constantly monitor and assess the situation, and adjust our posture as necessary,'' he said.

Still, U.S. officials were wary. Acting out of ''an abundance of caution'' during the upcoming Fourth of July holidays, Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff said the government is putting in place plans to increase security at airports, on mass transit and at transportation facilities.

''Some of these measures will be visible; others will not,'' he said in a statement.

Chertoff added that ''at this point, I have seen no specific, credible information suggesting that this latest incident is connected to a threat to the homeland. We have no plans at this time to change the national threat level, although we remind everyone that the aviation threat level has been raised to orange since last fall.''

Orange is No. 2 of five levels and indicates a high risk of terrorist attacks. The current national threat level is yellow, or the third highest, indicating an elevated threat.

The Transportation Security Administration is posting more agents outside terminals at some airports, Snow said.

''There will be some inconvenience of passengers in terms of longer wait times,'' Snow said. Local police also may take separate measures, he added.

''The most you're going to see right now is some inconvenience -- some increased inconvenience of airline passengers, more likely at large airports than small,'' Snow said.

Police stepped up curbside patrols with canine units at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates Newark Liberty in New Jersey and John F. Kennedy and LaGuardia airports in New York, took ''a number of measures as we always do to respond to security situations immediately,'' spokesman Steve Coleman said.

Operations at Miami International Airport went on heightened alert through at least Independence Day. Officials were increasing patrols around the perimeter of Philadelphia International Airport.

''Certainly there is a high awareness,'' said spokeswoman Carolyn Fennell at Orlando International Airport in Florida. ''We have taken steps in due diligence and are applying measures that are already in place.''

At Washington's Reagan National and Dulles International airports, spokesman Ron Yingling said some measures are behind the scenes. ''I don't think there's anything different in what passengers have to physically do to get through security that's different from yesterday.''

Bush, who spent the day biking and fishing, was kept abreast of the developments in Britain, Snow said. U.S. officials were in contact with their counterparts in Europe, Snow said.

Chertoff said his department and the FBI have provided updated and guidance on protective measures to state and local homeland security and law enforcement agencies.

FBI spokesman Richard Kolko said the bureau stood ready to help British authorities.

Two men rammed a flaming sport utility vehicle into the main terminal of the airport in Glasgow, Scotland, crashing into the glass doors at the entrance and causing a fire, witnesses said. Police said two suspects were arrested.

The airport -- Scotland's largest -- was evacuated and all flights suspended. Hours later, Britain raised its security alert to ''critical.''

On Friday, British police thwarted a plot to bomb central London, discovering two cars abandoned with loads of gasoline, gas canisters and nails. Detectives said they were keeping an open mind about the suspects in the London case.

Bush was in Maine to host Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Bush family's summer home on the coast. Putin was to arrive Sunday for a two-day stay.

Tighter Security at US Airports, NYT, 30.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-US-Britain-Airport-Crash.html

In Shift, Justices Agree

to Review Detainees’ Case

June 30, 2007
The New York Times
By WILLIAM GLABERSON

The United States Supreme Court reversed course yesterday and agreed to hear claims of Guantánamo detainees that they had a right to challenge their detention in American courts.

The decision, announced in a brief order released yesterday morning, set the stage for a legal battle that could shape debates in the Bush administration about how to close the detention center, which has become a lightning rod for international criticism.

The order, which required votes from five of the nine justices, rescinded an April order in which the justices declined to review a federal appeals court decision that ruled against the detainees.

The court offered no explanation. But the order meant that the justices will hear the full appeal in their next term, perhaps by December.

The court rarely grants such motions for reconsideration. Some experts on Supreme Court procedure said they knew of no similar reversal by the court in decades.

After two Supreme Court decisions since 2004 that have been sweeping setbacks for the administration’s detention policies, the order yesterday signaled that the justices had determined to review the issues again.

“Finally, after nearly six years, the Supreme Court is going to rule on the ultimate question: does the Constitution protect the people detained at Guantánamo Bay?” said Neal K. Katyal, a Georgetown University law professor who argued the last Supreme Court case dealing with the Guantánamo detainees. In that case, decided last June, the justices struck down the administration’s planned system for war crimes trials of detainees.

The new case sets up a test of one of the central principles of the administration’s detention policies: that it can hold “enemy combatants” without allowing them habeas corpus proceedings, which have been used in English and American law for centuries to challenge the legality of detentions.

The Justice Department declined to comment in any detail on yesterday’s order, which it had strenuously opposed. “We are disappointed with the decision, but are confident in our legal arguments and look forward to presenting them before the court,” said Erik Ablin, a department spokesman.

The administration has argued that permitting habeas corpus suits by foreigners who are held as enemy combatants outside the United States would paralyze the military during wartime by giving courts the power to review commanders’ decisions. In response, Congress passed a law last year stripping the federal courts of the power to hear such habeas corpus cases filed by Guantánamo detainees.

One issue in the case is whether Congress had the power to enact that law, as a constitutional provision bars the government from suspending habeas corpus except in “cases of rebellion or invasion.”

Lawyers for many of the 375 men now held at the naval station in Cuba greeted the court’s unexpected action with euphoria. “The Supreme Court has taken a giant step toward ensuring the detainees a day in court,” said David H. Remes, a Washington lawyer who represents Yemeni detainees at Guantánamo.

Lawyers for detainees had filed some 300 habeas cases, which were working their way through the courts when Congress passed the law last year. Democrats in Congress have been pressing to explicitly grant the detainees habeas rights. Some supporters said yesterday’s decision would increase political pressure for such a measure, although administration officials have said the president would probably veto it.

Even so, the court’s decision yesterday could increase momentum within the administration to find a way to close the Guantánamo detention center. President Bush and other administration officials have said that they would like to close it, but the question of where else to hold detainees who are considered too dangerous to release is a complex one.

Yesterday’s reversal by the Supreme Court suggested that Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who opposed hearing the case in April, had changed his position. Although the vote tally for yesterday’s decision was not released, there have been indications that Justice Kennedy’s position on this case has been pivotal. But lawyers said it was not possible to predict how he might eventually vote in what could be a divisive issue on the court.

Lawyers on both sides of the issue also said the Supreme Court’s review was likely to focus on the fairness of the military hearings that the administration has established to determine whether detainees are enemy combatants and should be detained. In the closed hearings, conducted by what are known as combatant status review tribunals, detainees are not permitted lawyers and cannot see much of the evidence against them.

The detainees’ lawyers have said the hearings are sham proceedings that cannot substitute for reviews by federal judges. On June 22, while the Supreme Court was considering whether to reconsider its April decision, detainees’ lawyers filed an affidavit by the first military participant in the hearing process to criticize secret hearing procedures.

In the affidavit, Stephen E. Abraham, a Reserve military intelligence officer, described the process of gathering evidence as haphazard and said commanding officers exerted pressure to have the panels find that detainees were properly held as enemy combatants.

Although military officials said they disagreed with Mr. Abraham’s characterizations, lawyers involved in the case said yesterday that the affidavit might have helped convince some justices that they should more closely examine the legal procedures at Guantánamo. In the case now before the Supreme Court, the federal appeals court in Washington in February upheld the law that stripped federal judges of authority to review foreign prisoners’ challenges to their detention at Guantánamo Bay.

In the case, Boumediene v. Bush, a divided three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit found that the 2006 law did not violate the constitutional provision that bars the government from suspending habeas corpus.

Two of the three appeals court judges said the right of habeas corpus did not extend to foreign citizens detained outside the United States. In fighting the effort to get the Supreme Court to review that decision, the administration argued that habeas corpus rights “would not extend to aliens detained at Guantánamo Bay as enemy combatants.”

The Supreme Court twice before had faced similar questions, and had ruled in 2004 that federal courts did have jurisdiction to hear Guantánamo detainees’ cases.

Last June, the court said the administration’s plan to try some of the Guantánamo detainees in military commissions was invalid and struck it down.

Language in the justices’ statements accompanying the April order had suggested maneuvering among them on whether or when they should again get involved in the tangled legal questions presented by Guantánamo.

A statement “respecting the denial” of the detainees’ requests in April was signed jointly by Justices Kennedy and John Paul Stevens. It said the detainees had to contest findings of the military hearings in the federal appeals court in Washington, as provided by Congress, before going to the Supreme Court.

But the April statement also said the Supreme Court would be open to a renewed appeal if it turned out that “the government has unreasonably delayed proceedings” or subjected the detainees to “some other and ongoing injury.”

    In Shift, Justices Agree to Review Detainees’ Case, NYT, 30.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/30/washington/30scotus.html

Op-Ed Contributor

The Guantánamo I Know

June 26, 2007
The New York Times
By MORRIS D. DAVIS

Arlington, Va.

LINDSEY GRAHAM, a Republican senator from South Carolina, is right: “The image of Guantánamo Bay and the reality of Guantánamo Bay are completely different.” It is disappointing that so many embrace a contrived image. Reality for Guantánamo Bay is the daily professionalism of its staff, the humanity of its detention centers and the fair and transparent nature of the military commissions charged with trying war criminals. It is a reality that has been all but ignored or forgotten.

The makeshift detention center known as Camp X-Ray closed in early 2002 after just four months of use. Now it is overgrown with weeds and serves as home to iguanas. Yet last week ABC News published a photo online of Camp X-Ray as if it were in use, five years after its closing.

Today, most of the detainees are housed in new buildings modeled after civilian prisons in Indiana and Michigan. Detainees receive three culturally appropriate meals a day. Each has a copy of the Koran. Guards maintain respectful silence during Islam’s five daily prayer periods, and medical care is provided by the same practitioners who treat American service members. Detainees are offered at least two hours of outdoor recreation each day, double that allowed inmates, including convicted terrorists, at the “supermax” federal penitentiary in Florence, Colo.

Standards at Guantánamo rival or exceed those at similar institutions in the United States and abroad. After an inspection by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in March 2006, a Belgian police official said, “At the level of detention facilities, it is a model prison, where people are better treated than in Belgian prisons.”

Critics liken Guantánamo Bay to Soviet gulags, but reality does not match their hyperbole. The supporters of David Hicks, the detainee popularly known as the “Australian Taliban,” asserted that Mr. Hicks was mistreated and wasting away. But at his March trial, where he pleaded guilty to providing material support to a terrorist organization, he and his defense team stipulated he was treated properly. Mr. Hicks even thanked service members, and as one Australian newspaper columnist noted, he appeared in court “looking fat, healthy and tanned, and cracking jokes.”

Some imply that if a defendant does not get a trial that looks like Martha Stewart’s and ends like O. J. Simpson’s, then military commissions are flawed. They are mistaken. The Constitution does not extend to alien unlawful enemy combatants. They are entitled to protections under Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which ensures they are afforded “all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.”

Justice John Paul Stevens, in the Hamdan decision that rejected an earlier plan for military commissions, observed that Article 75 of the Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions defines the judicial guarantees recognized as indispensable. A comparison of Article 75 and the Military Commissions Act of 2006 shows military commissions provide the fundamental guarantees.

Each accused receives a copy of the charges in his native language; outside influence on witnesses and trial participants is prohibited; the accused may challenge members of the commission; an accused may represent himself or have assistance of counsel; he is presumed innocent until guilt is established beyond a reasonable doubt; he is entitled to assistance to secure evidence on his behalf; he is not required to incriminate himself at trial and his silence is not held against him; he may not be tried a second time for the same offense; and he is entitled to the assistance of counsel through four stages of post-trial appellate review ending at the United States Supreme Court.

One myth is that the accused can be excluded from his trial and convicted on secret evidence. The administrative boards that determine if a detainee is an enemy combatant and whether he is a continuing threat may consider classified information in closed hearings outside the presence of the detainee. But military commissions may not. The act states, “The accused shall be permitted ... to examine and respond to evidence admitted against him on the issue of guilt or innocence and for sentencing.” Unless the accused chooses to skip his trial or is removed for disruptive behavior, he has the right to be present and to confront all of the evidence.

Many critics disapprove of the potential admissibility of evidence obtained by coercion and hearsay. Any statement by a person whose freedom is restrained by someone in a position of authority can be viewed as the product of some degree of coercion. Deciding how far is too far is the challenge. I make the final decision on the evidence the prosecution will introduce. The defense may challenge this evidence and the military judge decides whether it is admitted. If it is admitted, both sides can argue how much weight, if any, the evidence deserves. If a conviction results, the accused has the assistance of counsel in four stages of post-trial appellate review. These are clearly robust safeguards.

The Military Commissions Act says hearsay is admissible unless it is challenged. The party raising the challenge must persuade the military judge that the probative value of the evidence is substantially outweighed by the danger of unfair prejudice, confusion of the issues, or misleading the commission, among other reasons. While this standard permits admission of some evidence that would not be admissible in federal courts, the rights afforded Americans are not the benchmark for assessing rights afforded enemy combatants in military tribunals.

There is no ban on hearsay among the indispensable rights listed in the Geneva Conventions. Nor is there a ban on hearsay for the United Nations-sanctioned war crimes tribunals, including the International Criminal Court, the International Criminal Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and the Special Court for Sierra Leone. The Nuremberg trials also did not limit hearsay evidence. Simply stated, a ban on hearsay is not an internationally recognized judicial guarantee.

Guantánamo Bay is a clean, safe and humane place for enemy combatants, and the Military Commissions Act provides a fair process to adjudicate the guilt or innocence of those alleged to have committed crimes. Even the most vocal critics say they do not want to set terrorists free, but they scorn Guantánamo Bay and military commissions and demand alternatives. The facts show the current alternative is worth keeping.

Morris D. Davis, a colonel in the Air Force, is the chief prosecutor in the Defense Department’s Office of Military Commissions.

    The Guantánamo I Know, NYT, 26.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/26/opinion/26davis.html

Judge Criticizes Warrantless Wiretaps

June 23, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:48 p.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A federal judge who used to authorize wiretaps in terrorist and espionage cases criticized President Bush's decision to order warrantless surveillance after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Royce Lamberth, a district court judge in Washington, said Saturday it was proper for executive branch agencies to conduct such surveillance. ''But what we have found in the history of our country is that you can't trust the executive,'' he said at the American Library Association's convention.

''We have to understand you can fight the war (on terrorism) and lose everything if you have no civil liberties left when you get through fighting the war,'' said Lamberth, who was appointed by President Reagan.

The judge disagreed with letting the executive branch alone decide which people to spy on in national security cases.

''The executive has to fight and win the war at all costs. But judges understand the war has to be fought, but it can't be at all costs,'' Lamberth said. ''We still have to preserve our civil liberties. Judges are the kinds of people you want to entrust that kind of judgment to more than the executive.''

Lamberth was named chief of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in 1995 by then-Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist. Lamberth held that post until 2002.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 established the court after domestic spying scandals in the 1970s.

The court meets in secret to review applications from the FBI, the National Security Agency and other agencies for warrants to wiretap or search the homes of people in the United States in terrorist or espionage cases. Each application is signed by the attorney general. The court has approved more than 99 percent of them.

Shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Bush authorized the NSA to spy on calls between people in the U.S. and suspected terrorists abroad without FISA court warrants. The administration said it needed to act more quickly than the court could and that the president had inherent authority under the Constitution to order warrantless domestic spying.

After the program became public and was challenged in court, Bush put it under FISA court supervision this year. The president still claims the power to order warrantless spying.

Lamberth took issue with Bush's approach.

''I haven't seen a proposal for a better way than presenting an application to the FISA court and having an independent judge decide if it's really the kind of thing that we ought to be doing, recognizing that how we view civil liberties is different in time of war,'' he said.

''I have seen a proposal for a worse way and that's what the president did with the NSA program.''

Lamberth said the FISA court met the challenge of acting quickly after Sept. 11. Lamberth was stuck in a car pool lane near the Pentagon when a hijacked jet slammed into it that day. With his car enveloped in smoke, he called marshals to help him get into the District of Columbia.

By the time officers reached him, ''I had approved five FISA coverages (warrants) on my cell phone,'' Lamberth said. He also approved other warrants at his home at 3 a.m. and on Saturdays.

''In a time of national emergency like that, changes have to be made in procedures. We changed a number of FISA procedures,'' Lamberth said.

Normal FISA warrant applications run 40 to 50 pages, but he said he issued orders in the days after Sept. 11 ''based on the oral briefing by the director of the FBI to the chief judge of the FISA court.''

Lamberth would not say whether he thought Bush's warrantless surveillance was constitutional. ''Judges shouldn't give advisory opinions and I was never asked to give an opinion in court,'' he said.

But he said when the NSA briefed him about the program, he advised them to keep good records so that if any applications came to the FISA court based on information obtained from warrantless surveillance, the court could rule on the legality.

He said he never got such an application before leaving the court in 2002.

Lamberth defended the court against those who say it is rubber stamp and said if the government is working properly, most applications should be approved.

''We're making sure there's not some political shenanigan going on or some improper motive for the surveillance,'' Lamberth said. ''The fact that they have to submit it to us keeps them honest.''

Lambert also criticized FBI Director Robert Mueller for allowing the agents in charge of all 56 FBI field offices to approve National Security Letters. These allow agents to demand information from phone companies, Internet service providers and corporations without court warrants in national security cases.

The Justice Department's inspector general recently estimated there were 3,000 violations of law between 2002 and 2005 in the FBI's use of the letters.

''Once they saw how the field offices had screwed this all up, I thought that would be a good time to centralize the approvals'' in one Washington office that could enforce the rules uniformly, Lamberth said. ''Unfortunately, Mueller and (Attorney General Alberto) Gonzales did not do that.''

    Judge Criticizes Warrantless Wiretaps, NYT, 23.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Domestic-Spying.html

Reserve Officer Criticizes Process of Identifying ‘Enemy Combatants’ at Guantánamo

June 23, 2007
The New York Times
By WILLIAM GLABERSON

The military hearings used to decide whether to hold Guantánamo detainees relied on incomplete and outdated information, screened by officers who were under intense pressure from their commanders to conclude that the detainees should be held, a reserve military intelligence officer and lawyer who had a role in the process said in an affidavit filed yesterday in a federal appeals court.

The sworn affidavit, the first from an insider who is critical of the Pentagon process, was portrayed by detainees’ lawyers as a crack in the military’s disciplined defense of the procedures used to declare detainees properly held as “enemy combatants.”

The fairness of the hearings is a central issue in legal challenges to the Bush administration’s detention policies, and yesterday the affidavit became the subject of intense discussion in the government and among the administration’s critics.

“What purported to be specific statements of fact lacked even the most fundamental earmarks of objectively credible evidence,” the officer, Stephen E. Abraham, a civilian business lawyer in Newport Beach, Calif., said in the affidavit filed in Washington, D.C.

Mr. Abraham, an Army Reserve lieutenant colonel, added that the evidence against the detainees often “lacked detail” and consisted of “generalized statements” of culpability, rather than specific evidence.

Military officials have said they scoured intelligence records to ensure that the detainees were terrorists and other enemies of the United States. But Mr. Abraham portrayed a haphazard and arbitrary process, and he took issue with military assertions that there were careful reviews to gather any evidence that might clear detainees.

Pentagon officials, while not addressing Mr. Abraham’s accusations specifically, questioned whether he had enough information to draw conclusions about the process.

But Mr. Abraham said he had a pivotal role in the proceedings. He said one of his responsibilities was to review the records of intelligence agencies to see if they contained evidence that was exculpatory, or favorable to a detainee. Some detainees have claimed that they landed in American custody by mistake or because American officials paid bounties for terrorism suspects.

But Mr. Abraham said that when he asked intelligence agencies if there was evidence that might clear certain detainees, he was told simply that the evidence he had been shown was all he would be shown.

“On those occasions when I asked that a representative of the organization provide a written statement that there was no exculpatory evidence, the requests were summarily denied,” the affidavit said.

In a statement issued yesterday, Pentagon officials defended the hearings, known as Combatant Status Review Tribunals, saying they were fair and neutral. Military officials also questioned whether Mr. Abraham had a basis for his affidavit. “Based on his limited experience he would not be in a position to comment” on such issues as the training of the officials involved in the gathering evidence or the claims of improper influence from military officers, one military official said.

The officials confirmed that Mr. Abraham had worked for six months in 2004 and 2005 as a liaison between the Pentagon office that runs the status tribunals and government intelligence agencies that hold information about many of the detainees. They also said he was a member of a hearing panel.

The tribunals involve unnamed military officers reviewing evidence against detainees. Detainees are not allowed to have lawyers and cannot examine much of the evidence against them.

In an interview yesterday, Mr. Abraham, 46, said the hearing process included what amounted to a presumption that detainees were guilty. He said he felt that some people involved in gathering evidence for the tribunals did not have the training to understand either the legal process they were being asked to run or the intelligence materials they were reviewing.

As a result, he said in the interview, the hearing often had the predictable result even if there was little specific evidence against the detainee. “If what you fear is the consequence of somebody being released, what better way to assuage that fear than to not release him?” he asked.

Mr. Abraham said that he was not motivated by anger at the military but that he wrote the affidavit for detainees’ lawyers after learning that a retired admiral who once ran the Pentagon’s status-review hearing program had portrayed it in a recent affidavit as a diligent effort to gather all evidence and to consider it fully.

He said he learned of that affidavit, by Rear Adm. James M. McGarrah, from his sister, who is a lawyer at a national law firm, Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman, where other lawyers are handling detainees’ lawsuits.

As a liaison officer between officers responsible for compiling the cases against the detainees and the government’s intelligence agencies, Mr. Abraham said yesterday, he had the opportunity to see the evidence against many of the detainees. The Pentagon conducted more than 550 hearings.

“In very few instances,” he said, “would you find very specific information from which you could conclude he was an enemy combatant.”

    Reserve Officer Criticizes Process of Identifying ‘Enemy Combatants’ at Guantánamo, NYT, 23.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/23/washington/23combatant.html

At White House, Renewed Debate on Guantánamo

June 23, 2007
The New York Times
By HELENE COOPER and WILLIAM GLABERSON

WASHINGTON, June 22 — The Bush administration acknowledged Friday that its top officials were once again actively debating recommendations about how and when to close the detention facilities at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, but officials said they thought it could be weeks or months before a decision was made.

A central recommendation, but not the only possibility, would be to move the terror suspects from Guantánamo to military prisons in the United States, the officials said.

The revival of a bitter, long-running debate behind closed doors in the Bush administration comes only a few months after the Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told President Bush that they believed that Guantánamo’s continued existence was undercutting American foreign policy efforts around the world, and would ultimately prove a stain on Mr. Bush’s legacy.

Meanwhile Friday, a military intelligence official who had been involved in screening detainees was sharply critical of the process.

Mr. Gates and Ms. Rice met strong resistance from Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, who argued that moving the prisoners to American prisons would open a floodgate of litigation. Vice President Dick Cheney has also been reported to be a staunch opponent of transferring prisoners to American soil.

But Mr. Gonzales has been badly weakened by the political dispute over the dismissals of United States attorneys, and Mr. Cheney’s influence has been on the wane, officials say.

“The president has declared this thing should be closed, sooner or later, and so all the old proposals about how to send prisoners back or move them to American soil are being brought back with new urgency,” said one official involved in the debate who was not authorized to speak publicly.

But it is unclear whether those who favor closing the prison can push Mr. Bush to action. While he has publicly expressed a desire to close Guantánamo — a point the deputy White House press secretary, Dana Perino, cited to reporters on Friday — he has never set a date certain to do so, or said whether it would happen during his time in office.

Senior administration officials, including Ms. Rice, Mr. Gates and Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, were scheduled to have a meeting at the White House on Friday. But that meeting was scrapped after The Associated Press reported Thursday that a consensus was building for a proposal to transfer detainees to Defense Department facilities or to high-security prisons.

Ms. Perino said that “there was a decision that a meeting wasn’t necessary,” and would not elaborate on why it was canceled. But she added, “Everybody is working towards the goal to meet what the president has asked them to do, which is to do it as soon as possible.”

On Thursday night, in response to questions about the A.P. article, Gordon D. Johndroe, a spokesman for the National Security Council, issued an opaque statement that did not reflect the deep debate.

“The president has long expressed a desire to close the Guantánamo Bay detention facility and to do so in a responsible way,” his statement said. “A number of steps need to take place before that can happen, such as setting up military commissions and the repatriation to their home countries of detainees who have been cleared for release. These and other steps have not been completed. No decisions on the future of Guantánamo Bay are imminent and there will not be a White House meeting tomorrow.”

The administration officials who want Guantánamo closed now outnumber the ones who do not. Gone are former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld; his intelligence chief, Stephen A. Cambone; and the former White House counsel Harriet E. Miers, who administration officials said all backed Mr. Gonzales’s position.

Publicly, administration officials usually cite the problem of figuring out where to send the Guantánamo prisoners as the main reason the facilities have not been closed. In written testimony before the United States Helsinki Commission on Thursday, John B. Bellinger III, the State Department’s legal adviser, said: “Although our critics abroad and at home have called for Guantánamo to be shut immediately, they have not offered any credible alternatives for dealing with the dangerous individuals that are detained there.”

But some officials noted that there are fears of lawsuits once those prisoners set foot in the United States.

“Litigation risk has been, by far, the No. 1 argument against shutting down Guantánamo,” said Philip D. Zelikow, counselor at the State Department until last December.

A decision to move the detainees from Guantánamo to the United States would change the legal landscape instantly, legal experts said, because a central assertion of the administration has been that alien enemies who are held outside of the United States could not use American courts to challenge their wartime detention. "If you move them to the United States there’s no question these people will have more legal rights,” said Scott L. Silliman, a retired Air Force colonel who is executive director of the Center on Law, Ethics and National Security at Duke University.

Some detainees’ lawyers said their efforts to get federal courts to consider the legality of the detentions and the conditions of incarceration would be so strengthened that the momentum of the legal battle would change.

David B. Rivkin, a lawyer in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and the first President George Bush who has been a consistent supporter of the administration’s detention policies, said a decision to place Guantánamo detainees in the United States would end with legal challenges that would leave the detention policies “in total disarray.”

Mr. Rivkin said that, while there are some good arguments that the detainees in Guantánamo Bay do not have constitutional rights, those arguments would very likely vanish if they were moved to American soil.

The administration says it is planning to bring war-crimes prosecution cases against about 80 of the 375 detainees at Guantánamo. It has said that about 75 others have been cleared for release but that it has been having difficulty finding countries willing to accept them.

David E. Sanger contributed reporting.

    At White House, Renewed Debate on Guantánamo, NYT, 23.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/23/washington/23gitmo.html?hp

Report Says U.S. Misled City on Dust From Ground Zero

June 21, 2007
The New York Times
By ANTHONY DePALMA

WASHINGTON, June 20 — Federal environmental officials misled Lower Manhattan residents about the extent of contamination in their condominiums and apartments after the collapse of the World Trade Center, according to a preliminary report released on Wednesday by the Government Accountability Office.

According to the report, made public during a Senate subcommittee hearing, the Environmental Protection Agency did not accurately report the results of a residential cleanup program in 2002 and 2003. More than 4,000 apartments in Lower Manhattan were professionally decontaminated in that program, and the agency reported that only a “very small” number of air samples taken in those residences showed unsafe levels of asbestos.

But the agency failed to explain that 80 percent of the air samples were taken after the apartments had already been cleaned.

“That was misleading,” said John B. Stephenson, director of the natural resources and environment division of the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress. He spoke after testifying at a hearing of the Subcommittee on Superfund and Environmental Health of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, which is reviewing the government’s response to environmental and health issues at ground zero.

The report concluded that the misleading information had left residents with an erroneous impression about risk. As a result, only 295 residents and apartment building owners asked to take part in a new residential cleanup program before enrollment ended in March. That number represented just a small portion of the 20,000 apartments eligible to participate.

“Residents are understandably reluctant to participate in what they consider to be a waste of time,” said Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who led the subcommittee hearing. Senator Clinton, who has been sharply critical of the federal response to 9/11-related health issues, said the data in the report offered “a very different picture from what the White House would like us to believe.”

Susan P. Bodine, assistant administrator of the environmental agency’s Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response, declined to comment on the report. “I would have to go back and check the numbers,” she said in an interview.

Wednesday’s hearing was the first to look into the administration’s environmental response to the trade center disaster since Democrats took control of Congress. Christie Whitman, the agency’s administrator in 2001, is expected to testify at a committee hearing in the House on Monday about her handling of the disaster and the way she communicated the level of risk to the public.

Also at Wednesday’s hearing, Senator Clinton announced that a Senate appropriations subcommittee had included $55 million in the 2008 budget proposal for screening and treatment of people exposed to ground zero dust.

The money would, for the first time, cover residents of Lower Manhattan. The measure would also require the Department of Health and Human Services to develop a long-term screening and treatment plan.

    Report Says U.S. Misled City on Dust From Ground Zero, NYT, 21.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/21/nyregion/21dust.html

Among Firefighters in New York, Mixed Views on Giuliani

June 17, 2007
The New York Times
By MICHAEL WILSON

Their images are permanently etched in photographs after the fall of the World Trade Center towers, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and firefighters cloaked in the same gray dust. For months afterward, they stood together at funerals. Mr. Giuliani, in his eulogy, always asked for a round of applause to celebrate the dead firefighter’s life.

It would be easy to assume, then, that Mr. Giuliani can count on the support of the 11,000 men and women of the New York City Fire Department as he runs for president. But that would not be entirely true.

Interviews with more than 50 firefighters and department officers show a mix of admiration and disdain for the former mayor. Many firefighters praise his years in office, citing his success in reducing crime and his leadership after the terrorist attacks. Others harbor a resentment for what they describe as his poor treatment of the department before and after Sept. 11.

Some still speak bitterly about a contract that left firefighters without a raise for two years. Some also say Mr. Giuliani has exaggerated the role he played after the terrorist attacks, casting himself as a hero for political gain. The harshest sentiments stem from Mr. Giuliani’s decision nearly two months after 9/11 to reduce the number of firefighters who were allowed to search for colleagues in the rubble — a move that he partially reversed but that still infuriates many firefighters.

As his candidacy proceeds, Mr. Giuliani’s work on and after Sept. 11, his greatest strength in the eyes of many voters, will be scrutinized. The firefighters’ interviews indicate that in New York, at least, a critical evaluation has begun.

“I think they assume that we all love him,” said Robert Keys, 48, a battalion chief and 25-year department veteran, referring to people outside New York. “He wound up with this ‘America’s Mayor’ image. Those of us who had to deal with him before and after 9/11 don’t share that same sentiment.”

Daniel McCarthy, a 54-year-old firefighter, said Mr. Giuliani should be judged on more than just his relationship with firefighters. “Maybe he wasn’t great for the Fire Department,” Mr. McCarthy said. “But he was great for the city.”

On the campaign trail, Mr. Giuliani frequently invokes the Sept. 11 heroism of “my firefighters,” as he often calls them, as emblematic of American patriotism and resolve. But some firefighters have begun organizing efforts to dispel the notion that they are in his corner.

The International Association of Fire Fighters, an umbrella union based in Washington, spoke out against Mr. Giuliani in March. The group is also preparing a short DVD outlining its grievances that it plans to send to fire departments across the country. Meanwhile, a small group of Sept. 11 family members and firefighters has been protesting outside many of Mr. Giuliani’s campaign appearances.

One of those protesters, Deputy Chief Jim Riches, who lost his firefighter son that day, said Mr. Giuliani did nothing on Sept. 11 to warrant hero status. “He’s making a million dollars a month with his speeches,” said Chief Riches, 55. “It’s blood money.”

Officials with another union, the Uniformed Fire Officers Association, said they planned to work against Mr. Giuliani’s campaign. “I don’t think the person in Nebraska has any idea yet how we feel,” said John J. McDonnell, a battalion chief and president of the association. “He probably assumes that we think he’s great.”

Historically, the New York City firefighters unions have backed presidential candidates from both parties. The International Association of Fire Fighters and the Uniformed Fire Officers Association have endorsed Democratic candidates for president in recent elections, but the union for rank-and-file firefighters, the Uniformed Firefighters Association, endorsed President Bush in 2004. And both the fire officers and the firefighters unions endorsed Mr. Giuliani for re-election in 1997.

There is one group supporting Mr. Giuliani called Firefighters 4 Rudy. But the retired fire captain and talk-radio host who runs it, Matt Bruce, 59, lives in Florida and worked in Oswego in central New York, not in New York City.

Mr. Giuliani’s supporters credit the former mayor with bringing New York back to something approaching normalcy after the attacks. They also applaud his attendance at the funerals, which continued after his term ended in January 2002.

“Even after he left, he’d go to funerals,” said Chief Michael McGrath, who added that Mr. Giuliani had a right to trumpet his role after the Sept. 11 attacks. “He never ran anything but the city, a city that was attacked,” he said. “What do you think he’s going to talk about?”

Some firefighters said that while they believed that Mr. Giuliani shortchanged the Fire Department in failing to give raises to firefighters in 1995 and ’96, what he did for the city as a whole was more important.

Lt. Thomas Farragher, 52, with Ladder 175 in East New York, said, “There’s more to this country than the Fire Department. I have kids. I’m more worried about that than getting a couple dollars more.”

Other favorable opinions of Mr. Giuliani are based on simple encounters. One firefighter recalled that the former mayor handed him a bottle of water at the scene of a fire. “I’ll never forget that,” he said.

Another firefighter, John Orlando, 36, said he regularly saw Mr. Giuliani at fires. “He was always showing up,” he said. “I turn around, and there’s the mayor.”

Among those firefighters who criticized Mr. Giuliani, almost every one of them said they were still angry about the mayor’s decision several weeks after the attacks to reduce the number of firefighters allowed to search for remains at ground zero, where 343 firefighters died.

Until Mr. Giuliani intervened, the Fire Department was in control of the site, searching first for survivors, then for bodies. Mayor Giuliani, heeding the advice of safety experts, would allow no more than 25 firefighters on the site. That was far fewer than in the weeks immediately following the attacks.

Loose girders and construction equipment that was constantly on the move posed a danger to the firefighters, the Giuliani administration said. And thousands of firefighters who had worked at the site had already been treated for chronic chest pain and coughing.

“All of us standing here have friends that continue to remain there,” Mr. Giuliani said at the time. “And we would love to recover them. But none of us standing here can possibly justify seeing a human being die in this effort if it isn’t handled with great discipline and great responsibility.”

The reduced contingent continued to search for bodies. But firefighters felt, in their words, that he had “shut down the pile.” Emotions simmered, and on Nov. 2, a group of firefighters scuffled with police officers who were blocking access to the site.

After that incident, the policy was relaxed to allow fire company members to escort the remains of their colleagues from ground zero. But the anger lingered.

“I think that was the beginning of a job-wide sense that the guy might not be the greatest guy in the world,” said Lt. Simon Ressner, 47.

“He treated firemen like they were common criminals,” Chief Keys said. “He did not get good advice. There was no one there who would dare tell him no. People forget about the details.”

Chief Riches agreed. “We were finding bodies the week before that,” he said. “The bodies didn’t disintegrate. He just wanted to scoop them up, dump them in a truck and get out of there.”

“Meanwhile,” Chief Riches added, “I’m down there on my hands and knees, looking for my son and other firemen.”

Firefighters who support Mr. Giuliani expressed discomfort discussing ground zero and the interruption in the recovery of bodies. Even though some said they disagreed with their colleagues who found Mr. Giuliani’s actions to be unforgivable, they were hesitant to say so.

“I can’t knock them for that,” said Firefighter McCarthy, who lost several friends. “God, it’s their loved ones under there.”

Another firefighter, Kenneth Haskell, 37, lost two brothers, both fellow firefighters, on Sept. 11, but he supported Mr. Giuliani’s decision to scale back the firefighters’ presence at ground zero.

“The site became a very dangerous area,” Firefighter Haskell said, recalling the day a cable snapped and dropped from a crane. “There was a point where the city needed to move forward.” He also praised the city’s decision to continue paying the salaries of the dead firefighters, at overtime rates, long after Sept. 11.

Beyond ground zero, many firefighters cited lingering frustration over the “double zeros” — the contract in which the first two years, 1995 and 1996, brought no raises.

“If he would have given us a half-percent raise with a retroactive check for $32.75, we would have loved him for it,” said Lt. Thomas McGoff, 54.

Some firefighters said that once their opinions of Mr. Giuliani had soured, they found his frequent appearances at 9/11 funerals hard to take.

John Walsh, 48, a firefighter for 21 years, said he had supported Mr. Giuliani early in his tenure. “He’s been riding our coattails since 9/11 like he did something,” Firefighter Walsh said. “He did nothing. He showed up to funerals. So what? He’s a self-promoter. I told my wife, ‘Anything that ever happens, I don’t want him at my funeral.’ ”

But Lieutenant Farragher said he believed that Mr. Giuliani was being sincere when he appeared at a firefighter’s funeral on his last day in office.

“That just struck me,” he said. “He wasn’t looking for press.”

Kate Hammer, Trymaine Lee and Matthew Sweeney contributed reporting.

    Among Firefighters in New York, Mixed Views on Giuliani, NYT, 17.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/17/us/politics/17firefighters.html?hp

U.S. Eyes Antiterror Rules for Small Jets and Boats

June 16, 2007
The New York Times
By ERIC LIPTON

WASHINGTON, June 15 — Acknowledging that the nation remains too vulnerable to terrorist attack by small planes and recreational boats, the Department of Homeland Security is considering new requirements to allow authorities to identify operators and passengers in millions of these vehicles as they ply the coasts and skies.

Department personnel have been touring the country meeting with trade groups and elected officials to gauge their reaction to the proposed changes, to be issued by the Transportation Security Administration and the Coast Guard.

“What I’m trying to do is to kind of stick my toe in the water and see if I get bit by a piranha,” the Coast Guard commandant, Vice Adm. Thad W. Allen, told a group of state legislators at a recent briefing.

The Coast Guard proposals in particular are still in the conceptual stages but are already drawing protests from boat owners, who under one measure would be required to pass a proficiency test and to carry a form of government-issued identification.

“These are ill-conceived solutions that will inconvenience everyone and not result in a substantial increase in security,” said Michael G. Sciulla, senior vice president of the Boat Owners Association of the United States, which is already organizing to fight the proposals.

The threat posed by small planes and boats has been well documented. While the United States is spending billions of dollars to screen cargo containers carried by ships, as well as passengers and baggage on commercial planes, a small private jet could be used to fly a weapon, or a team of terrorists, into the country.

The first set of new rules, to be announced by the end of this summer, will most likely be for small planes. Under those rules, boarding of small private planes would continue to be allowed without X-ray screening of passengers and baggage.

But passengers on corporate and fractionally owned jets would for the first time be required to undergo terrorist-watch-list checks, particularly if they are flying into the United States from overseas.

A similar mandate now generally applies only to small planes flying as a charter.

Under another proposal, general aviation airports, which range from a grass runway in the middle of a field to sprawling complexes with air traffic rivaling that at some major city airports, would have to conduct security assessments, identifying vulnerabilities. In addition, planes parked at those airports might be required to have ignition or propeller locks.

Kip Hawley, assistant secretary of the Transportation Security Administration, said two goals of the new initiative could provoke at least some protests: ensuring that unauthorized pilots cannot gain access to small planes and that officials have a way of knowing who is at the controls of a plane in flight.

A variety of options are under consideration to meet these goals, including requiring that small planes eventually have equipment that would allow the authorities to know automatically the plane’s owner and the pilot’s identity.

“We know which pilots own which aircraft,” Mr. Hawley said in an interview. “The next step would be to know who is on the runway in that aircraft.”

Many pilots maintain adamantly that their small planes pose only a very modest threat: a four-seat, single-engine Cessna weighs about the same as a medium-size S.U.V. And the industry is represented by a lobbying group — the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association — that is known for its campaigns to preserve liberties and that is indeed sometimes referred to as the “N.R.A. of the air.”

The right to captain a small boat, meanwhile, with little interference by the government is fiercely defended by organizations like the boat owners association.

Mr. Hawley and Admiral Allen said they were trying to work closely with these groups to avoid a conflict. A National Small Vessel Security Summit, for instance, is scheduled for later this month in the Washington area.

But Michael Chertoff, secretary of homeland security, said his department would not be shy about making new demands.

“If we just need to be a little tougher,” Mr. Chertoff said, “we’re going to be a little tougher.”

Matthew L. Wald contributed reporting.

    U.S. Eyes Antiterror Rules for Small Jets and Boats, NYT, 16.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/16/washington/16secure.html

911 Tapes: Dying Woman Was Denied Help

June 13, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 9:37 a.m. ET
The New York Times

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- A woman who lay bleeding on the emergency room floor of a troubled inner-city hospital died after 911 dispatchers refused to contact paramedics or an ambulance to take her to another facility, newly released tapes of the emergency calls reveal.

Edith Isabel Rodriguez, 43, died of a perforated bowel on May 9 at Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital. Her death was ruled accidental by the Los Angeles County coroner's office.

Relatives said Rodriguez was bleeding from the mouth and writhing in pain for 45 minutes while she was at a hospital waiting area. Experts have said she could have survived had she been treated early enough.

County and state authorities are now investigating Rodriguez's death. Relatives reported she died as police were wheeling her out of the hospital after the officers they had asked to help Rodriguez arrested her instead on a parole violation. Sheriff's Department spokesman Duane Allen said Wednesday that the investigation is ongoing.

In the recordings of two 911 calls that day, first obtained by the Los Angeles Times under a California Public Records Act request, callers pleaded for help for Rodriguez but were referred to hospital staff instead.

''I'm in the emergency room. My wife is dying and the nurses don't want to help her out,'' Rodriguez's boyfriend, Jose Prado, is heard saying in Spanish through an interpreter on the tapes.

''What's wrong with her?'' a female dispatcher asked.

''She's vomiting blood,'' Prado said.

''OK, and why aren't they helping her?'' the dispatcher asked.

''They're watching her there and they're not doing anything. They're just watching her,'' Prado said.

The dispatcher told Prado to contact a doctor and then said paramedics wouldn't pick her up because she was already in a hospital. She later told him to contact county police officers at a security desk.

A second 911 call was placed eight minutes later by a bystander who requested that an ambulance be sent to take Rodriguez to another hospital for care.

''She's definitely sick and there's a guy that's ignoring her,'' the woman told a male dispatcher.

During the call, the dispatcher argued with the woman over whether there really was an emergency.

''I cannot do anything for you for the quality of the hospital. ... It is not an emergency. It is not an emergency ma'am,'' he said.

''You're not here to see how they're treating her,'' the woman replied.

The dispatcher refused to call paramedics and told the woman that she should contact hospital supervisors ''and let them know'' if she is unhappy.

''May God strike you too for acting the way you just acted,'' the woman said finally.

''No, negative ma'am, you're the one,'' he said.

The incident was the latest high-profile lapse at King-Harbor, formerly known as King/Drew. The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors is investigating claims of recent patient care breakdowns, including Rodriguez's case.

Federal inspectors last week said emergency room patients were in ''immediate jeopardy'' of harm or death, and King-Harbor was given 23 days to shape up or risk losing federal funding.

Dr. Bruce Chernof, director of the county Department of Health Services, which oversees the facility, has called Rodriguez's death ''inexcusable'' and said it was ''important to understand that this was fundamentally a failure of caring.'' He has said conditions are improving, though.

A call Wednesday seeking comment about the 911 tapes from the department's communications office, which handles information about the hospital, was not immediately returned.

Dr. Roger Peeks, the chief medical officer at the hospital, was placed on ''ordered absence'' Monday, the Times reported. Health officials declined to elaborate, saying it was a personnel matter. Dr. Robert Splawn, chief medical officer for the health department, was named interim chief medical officer, the newspaper said.

    911 Tapes: Dying Woman Was Denied Help, NYT, 13.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Hospital-Death-Probe.html

Chinese Leave Guantánamo for Albanian Limbo

June 10, 2007
The New York Times
By TIM GOLDEN

TIRANA, Albania — Ahktar Qassim Basit says he is not angry about the four years he spent as an American prisoner at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, before his captors mumbled a brief apology and flew him to this drab Balkan capital to begin a new life as a refugee.

It is this new life in Albania, Mr. Basit and other former Guantánamo detainees say, that is driving them to desperation.

The men, Muslims from western China’s Uighur ethnic minority, were freed from their confinement in Cuba after they were found to pose no threat to the United States. They have now lived for more than a year in a squalid government refugee center on the grubby outskirts of Tirana, guarded by armed policemen.

The men have been told that they will need to get work to move out of the center, they said, but that they must learn the Albanian language to get work permits. For now, they subsist on free meals heavy with macaroni and rice, and monthly stipends of about $67, which they spend mostly on brief telephone calls to their families. But some of the men have already lost hope of ever seeing their wives and children again.

“We suffered very much at Guantánamo, but we continue to suffer here,” Mr. Basit said. “The other prisoners had their countries, but we are like orphans: we have no place to go.”

Mr. Basit and four other men here, who spent time at a hamlet in Afghanistan run by Uighur separatists, are still considered terrorist suspects by China’s Communist government. Only Albania’s pro-American government would give them asylum, but Albanian officials have since told the men they cannot afford to give them much else.

Things could be worse, the former prisoners note. At least 15 of the 17 Uighurs who remain at Guantánamo have also been cleared for release, but not even Albania will accept them — and neither will the United States. Instead, American diplomats say they have asked nearly 100 countries to provide asylum to the detainees, only to find that Chinese officials have warned some of the same countries not to accept them.

“The United States has made extensive and high-level efforts over a period of four years to try to resettle the Uighurs in countries around the world,” the State Department’s legal adviser, John B. Bellinger III, said in an interview. Its lack of success, he added, “has not been for lack of trying.”

Many American officials privately describe the Uighurs’ plight as one of the more troubling episodes of the Bush administration’s detention program. The case also provides a view of the remarkable difficulties Washington has encountered in trying to winnow the detainee population at Guantánamo in response to domestic and international criticism.

The refugees in Tirana seem to have little sense of how to influence the global chess game in which they have become involved. They spend most of their days behind the refugee center’s high, cinderblock walls, reading the Koran, studying Albanian and waiting for a turn on the center’s lone desktop computer. They avoid the gravelly soccer field because it reminds them of one they looked out on at Guantánamo.

With President Bush scheduled to visit Albania on Sunday, the Uighurs and three other former Guantánamo detainees here are also asking whether the United States, having flown them here in shackles, might do anything to help get them the housing, jobs and other support they have been told to expect.

One morning in mid-May, the five Uighurs (pronounced WEE-gurs) got permission to leave the refugee center, rode buses downtown and trooped to the offices of the Albanian prime minister, Sali Berisha. An aide said Mr. Berisha was too busy to see them, but promised to pass along their entreaties.

“We said, if you can’t deliver what you have promised, please ask George W. Bush to find another country for us,” another of the former prisoners, Abu Bakker Qassim, recalled.

Officials of the Albanian Interior Ministry, which is responsible for the refugees, declined to comment on their treatment.

The 22 Uighurs who ended up at Guantánamo were part of a group of about three dozen Uighur men who were staying at a hamlet in the White Mountains of eastern Afghanistan, not far from Tora Bora, when United States forces began bombing the area in October 2001.

Most of the five Uighurs in Tirana said they had left their homes in China’s far-western Xinjiang Province, an area the Uighurs call East Turkestan, to earn more money for their families and escape government harassment. They said they drifted into Afghanistan after travels through other Central Asian countries, and heard that the Uighur hamlet was a place where they could get free food and shelter while trying to figure out where to go next.

The youngest, Ayoub Haji Mamet, who was 18 when he was captured, had a quixotic plan to make his way across Europe and then fly to the United States to attend school.

International human rights groups have long accused the Chinese authorities of oppressing the roughly nine million Uighurs in Xinjiang, where there have been occasional acts of separatist violence. The State Department’s own 2006 human rights report for China describes ethnic discrimination, the suppression of Muslim religious freedom and the persecution of those thought to be separatists, many of whom have been executed.

Pentagon officials have described the Uighur hamlet in Afghanistan as a separatist training camp that was at least loosely aligned with the Taliban. Lawyers for the men dispute that characterization. But in interviews, the Uighurs in Albania described a tiny, primitive outpost run by secretive members of some sort of Uighur liberation group.

The men who arrived there were given chores to do and beans to eat. Most of them were assigned aliases and shown how to fire an old AK-47 assault rifle, the only weapon they saw. One American intelligence official said that some of the Uighurs still at Guantánamo received more extensive training. The leader of the hamlet, a man called Abdul Musin, told visitors that they could stay on if they wanted to “liberate” other Uighurs, the men said, but that they were also free to go.

“We do not know if he belonged to any group,” said Mr. Qassim, 38, the oldest of the five detainees. “We were not allowed to ask any questions.”

In mid-October of 2001, American planes bombed the Uighur hamlet, killing at least one man and sending the rest fleeing over the mountains into Pakistan. Villagers there sheltered and fed the Uighurs but then betrayed them to local security forces, which turned them over to the United States military.

By June 2002, nearly all the Uighurs had been sent from military detention centers in Afghanistan to Guantánamo. They described their imprisonment as bewildering and traumatic, punctuated by moments of the absurd. After they were cleared for release, they were able to watch cartoons and Harry Potter movies, until Mr. Mamet smashed the television because of what he said was the guards’ refusal to take him to a doctor. The set was replaced with one made in China, the men said dismissively; it broke after a week.

Several of the Uighurs said their most traumatic experience at Guantánamo was their interrogation by a team of Chinese security officials in September 2002. The Chinese “had all of our files from the Americans,” Mr. Qassim said, threatened them repeatedly and insisted that the prisoners return with them to China. They refused.

But American intelligence personnel at Guantánamo soon began to doubt that most of the Uighurs represented a real terrorist threat, officials who served there said. By late 2003, senior national security officials in Washington cleared most of the Uighurs for release — 14, by one official’s count.

Some officials at the Pentagon advocated sending the Uighurs back to China, and the State Department eventually sought and received assurances from the Chinese that they would treat the men humanely. But senior officials finally decided not to repatriate them, citing China’s past treatment of the Uighur minority.

The State Department began approaching both Muslim countries like Turkey and those with small Uighur communities, like Germany and Sweden. However, the search was interrupted in September 2004, when the Pentagon set up panels at Guantánamo to decide whether the prisoners there, including the 22 Uighurs, were being rightfully held. Although most of the Uighurs had already been cleared for release, the review panels found that all but six were in fact enemy combatants.

The boards were told to review the Uighur cases again, officials said. This time, they found that only five could be freed. (Subsequent annual reviews have cleared 15 of the 17 remaining detainees.)

The State Department then began casting its net more widely. One prospect was the west African republic of Gabon, which has a small Muslim minority. Gabon’s long-ruling president, Omar Bongo, said he was open to accepting the Uighurs. But according to two officials, he wanted not only compensation for resettling the refugees, but support for international loans to his government and a meeting with President Bush at the White House. He had already had one such meeting just months earlier, on May 26, 2004.

American diplomats said they had contacted governments from Angola to Switzerland to Australia. Increasingly, though, they have seen the shadows of their Chinese counterparts.

“The Chinese keep coming in behind us and scaring different countries with whom they have financial or trade relationships,” said one administration official, who insisted on anonymity in discussing diplomatic issues.

A spokeswoman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington said her government would not discuss its specific diplomatic efforts regarding the Uighurs. But in a statement, the embassy described the Uighurs at Guantánamo as “suspects of the ‘East Turkestan’ terrorist forces which constitute part of international terrorist forces,” and it said they should face justice in China.

Beijing’s ambassador to Albania has met at least three times with Mr. Berisha, the prime minister, to demand the Uighurs’ repatriation, Albanian officials said. Albania has since told Washington it cannot accept any more of the Uighur detainees.

“But we helped as much as we could,” the Albanian foreign minister, Lulzim Basha, said in an interview.

American officials said China has also been active in Germany, which has heard appeals about the Uighurs from high-level White House and State Department officials, as well as international human rights groups.

“One of the problems we’ve encountered is that they say, why doesn’t the U.S. take some of these people?” said Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, who has lobbied European governments to accept some of the Uighurs and other Guantánamo detainees.

American officials said they considered that idea. But two officials said it was shot down in 2005 by the Department of Homeland Security, which argued that the men would be barred from entering the United States under the Immigration and Nationality Act because they had been linked to a terrorist group or received “military-type training” from a group that engaged in terrorism.

Although American officials said they had compensated the Albanian government generously for taking the refugee, American diplomats in Tirana have paid little attention to the fate of the five Uighurs and the three other former Guantánamo detainees here, an Egyptian, an Algerian and an Uzbek.

“We’ve never talked to them,” said an American official who insisted on anonymity because she was not authorized to discuss the matter. “We don’t monitor them. They’re not our citizens, and there is no reason for us to.” The official attributed the shortcomings of the Albanian resettlement effort to “routine bureaucratic problems.”

The Tirana representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, which has helped to organize and finance the refugee program in Albania, sounded more frustrated with the slow pace of resettlement.

“The government of Albania agreed to provide asylum to these people,” the official, Hossein Kheradmand, said. “We are not talking about 5,000 or 6,000 people; we are talking about eight people.”

The detainees have tried to fend for themselves. Mr. Mamet, the only one of the Uighurs who is single, found a young Albanian Muslim woman to marry but the arrangement collapsed when he could not move out of the refugee center. The others seem torn between longing for their families, who may never be able to leave China, and hope that they might someday start over.

After what they said had been endless promises of help from Albanian officials, they asked late last year to be moved to another country. They were told that because they were in a “safe” country, the United Nations could not relocate them. And anyway, no other country would have them. Lately, they have considered a hunger strike, a protest method they sometimes used in Cuba.

“After four and a half years, we thought we had escaped from Guantánamo, but we are still living under that shadow,” Mr. Qassim said. “Sometimes we think it would be better to go die in our homeland than to stay here.”

Raymond Bonner contributed reporting from Washington.

    Chinese Leave Guantánamo for Albanian Limbo, NYT, 10.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/10/world/europe/10resettle.html?hp

Rights Group Offers Grim View of C.I.A. Jails

June 9, 2007
The New York Times
By DOREEN CARVAJAL

PARIS, June 8 — In a report on Friday, the lead investigator for the Council of Europe gave a bleak description of secret prisons run by the Central Intelligence Agency in Eastern Europe, with information he said was gleaned from anonymous intelligence agents.

Prisoners guarded by silent men in black masks and dark visors were held naked in cramped cells and shackled to walls, according to the report, which was prepared by Dick Marty, a Swiss senator investigating C.I.A. operations for the Council of Europe, a 46-nation rights group.

Ventilation holes in the cells released bursts of hot or freezing air, with temperature used as a form of extreme pressure to wear down prisoners, the investigators found. Prisoners were also subjected to water-boarding, a form of simulated drowning, and relentless blasts of music and sound, from rap to cackling laughter and screams, the report says.

The report, which runs more than 100 pages, says the prisons were operated exclusively by Americans in Poland and Romania from 2003 to 2006. It relies heavily on testimony from C.I.A. agents.

Critics in Poland and Romania attacked Mr. Marty’s use of anonymous sources and issued categorical denials, as they have done repeatedly. Denis MacShane, a British member of Parliament and longtime critic of Mr. Marty, complained that the investigator “makes grave allegations to two European Union member states, Poland and Romania, without any proof at all.”

Tomasz Szeratics, a spokesman for the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said: “We shall not make any comments on Dick Marty’s latest report until we receive it officially and analyze the evidence presented. The Polish position remains unchanged and it is very clear: There were no secret C.I.A. detention centers on the territory of the Republic of Poland.”

But Mr. Marty said at a news conference in Paris that anonymous testimony was backed by thousands of flight records showing prisoner transfers, including private planes linked to the C.I.A. that made 10 flights from Afghanistan and Dubai to the Szczytno-Szymany International Airport in Poland between 2002 and 2005.

That was the closest airport to a Soviet-era military compound where about a dozen high-level terror suspects were jailed, the report charges. The local authorities formed secure buffer zones around the jails, which were operated exclusively by Americans, Mr. Marty reported.

Lower-level prisoners from Afghanistan and Iraq were held at a military base near the Black Sea in Romania, the report says. The Romanians were restricted to the buffer zone.

“Our Romanian officers do not know what happened inside those areas because we sealed them off and we had control,” the report cites a senior military agent as saying.

The details of prison life were given by retired and current American intelligence agents who had been promised confidentiality, the report says.

Their motives were varied, Mr. Marty said. “For 15 years, I have interviewed people as an investigating magistrate and I have always noticed that at a certain point, people with secrets need to talk,” he said.

Others justified the grim treatment, the reports said, saying, in one instance: “Here’s my question. Was the guy a terrorist? ’Cause if he’s a terrorist, then I figure he got what was coming to him.”

According to the report, suspects were often held for months with no contact except with masked, silent guards who would push meals of cheese, potatoes and bread through hatches.

When prisoners resisted, the report says, one investigator considered it a welcome sign. “You know they are starting to crack,” he said, “So you hold out. You push them over the edge.”

    Rights Group Offers Grim View of C.I.A. Jails, NYT, 9.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/09/world/europe/09prisons.html

Pentagon to Appeal Guantanamo Decisions

June 8, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:55 p.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Defense Department said Friday that it will appeal the decisions of two judges who earlier this week stalled the military's move to put detainees at Guantanamo Bay on trial.

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said the department is filing a motion with the judges to reconsider their rulings, saying that the problem is largely semantics.

Military judges ruled Monday that the Pentagon could not prosecute Salim Ahmed Hamdan and Omar Khadr because they had not first been identified as ''unlawful'' enemy combatants, as required by a law passed last year by Congress. Khadr and Hamdan previously had been identified by military panels here only as enemy combatants, lacking the critical ''unlawful'' designation.

Whitman called the issue a slight difference in terminology, that should be settled quickly. He said the motion for reconsideration would be filed Friday.

''There is no material difference between the term enemy combatant used by the combatant status review tribunal process and the term unlawful enemy combatant as utilized in the military commissions act, as it pertains to the individuals in question,'' said Whitman.

He said the department reviewed various options and opted to go back to the original two judges with a renewed legal argument.

Hamdan, of Yemen, is believed to have been chauffeur to al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden. Khadr is a Canadian who was arrested at 15 on an Afghan battlefield, accused of killing a U.S. soldier.

The decision dealt a blow to the Bush administration in its efforts to begin prosecuting dozens of detainees regarded as the nation's most dangerous terrorist suspects.

The two detainees are the only ones currently in the roughly 380 prisoner population at Guantanamo who have been charged with crimes under a reconstituted military trial system.

One other detainee charged under the new system, Australian David Hicks, pleaded guilty in March to providing material support to al-Qaida and is serving a nine-month sentence in Australia.

Last year, Republicans and the White House pushed through legislation authorizing the war-crimes trials after the Supreme Court threw out President Bush's previous system as illegal and in violation of international treaties.

Bush established the specialized tribunal system shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks but had not been able to convict any terrorists because of legal hurdles.

------

On the Net:

Defense Department: http://www.defenselink.mil

    Pentagon to Appeal Guantanamo Decisions, NYT, 8.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Guantanamo-Detainees.html

U.S. Border Passport Rules Suspended

June 8, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 10:16 a.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Bush administration on Friday suspended some of its new, post-Sept. 11 requirements for flying abroad, hoping to placate Congress and irate summer travelers whose vacations have been thwarted by delays in processing their passports.

The proposal would temporarily lift a requirement that U.S. passports be used for citizens flying to and from Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean and Bermuda. The rule, and its suspension, does not affect Americans driving across the Canadian or Mexican borders or taking sea cruises, although those travelers are expected to need passports beginning next year.

The suspension should allow the State Department to catch up with a massive surge in applications that has overwhelmed passport processing centers since the rule took effect this year. The resulting backlog has caused up to three-month delays for passports and ruined or delayed the travel plans of thousands of Americans.

Until the end of September, travelers will be allowed to fly without a passport if they present a State Department receipt, showing they had applied for a passport, and government-issued identification, such as a driver's license. Those who have not applied for a passport will not be allowed to travel.

Those with receipts but no passports would receive additional security scrutiny, which could include extra questioning or bag checks.

''This is further evidence that the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department are simply not ready to make this program work as well as it must,'' said Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y.

Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., said his office has had to intervene in the cases of more than 1,400 Minnesotans frustrated by the backlog.

''DHS's decision to suspend is simply common sense, and frankly, should have been made months ago,'' said Coleman.

The change would help those like Judy and Darrell Green, of Rifle, Colo., who are still waiting to hear whether their son-in-law's passport will arrive in time for a a family vacation to Mexico to celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary and Darrell's 60th birthday.

Darrell Green's passport arrived Thursday, only after Rep. John Salazar, D-Colo., helped expedite it. Their son-in-law expects to get his Friday with the help of his congresswoman.

''It makes you feel kind of frantic because you've spent all that money,'' Judy Green said.

Homeland Security signed off on the proposal Thursday after consultations with the State Department, the White House and members of Congress, who have been deluged with calls from angry constituents seeking help with their passports.

Rep. Thomas Reynolds, R-N.Y., whose district lies near the Canadian border, said White House officials had been on Capitol Hill trying to work out a compromise amid what he called a ''turf war'' between State and Homeland Security.

Reynolds faulted ''arrogant'' officials for failing to get the system working properly, and said he was worried about even more headaches next year when passports will be required to drive into Canada or Mexico.

Lawmakers had been pushing for a change for weeks.

''To say people must have a passport to travel and not give people a passport is right up there in the stupid column,'' said Rep. Heather Wilson, R-N.M., who urged the State Department to lift the rule last month.

The application surge is the result of the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative that since January has required U.S. citizens to use passports when entering the United States from Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean by air. It is part of a broader package of immigration rules enacted after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Between March and May, the department issued more than 4.5 million passports. It has millions more to process, according to consular affairs officials.

Wilson's office took more than 500 calls from frustrated travelers seeking help in May alone. The problem has since spread from border states to Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kansas, Colorado and elsewhere.

This summer may not spell the end of the passport crunch. DHS has insisted it plans to go ahead with a January 2008 start for requiring passports at all land border crossing in the United States -- a security measure that could trigger a new frenzy applications. The State Department is still working on creating a cheaper, passcard alternative for such land crossings.

Associated Press Writer Matthew Lee contributed to this report.

    U.S. Border Passport Rules Suspended, NYT, 8.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-US-Passports.html?hp

Captured Terror Suspect at Guantanamo

June 6, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:07 p.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A suspected al-Qaida terrorist and leader of the Islamic group that ruled part of Somalia last year was captured and taken to the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, the Pentagon said Wednesday.

He was identified as Abdullahi Sudi Arale.

''We believe him to be an extremely dangerous member of the al-Qaida network,'' said Defense Department spokesman Bryan Whitman.

Whitman said Arale was suspected of acting as a courier between al-Qaida in East Africa and al-Qaida in Pakistan and helping the Africans get weapons and explosives.

A Defense Department statement also said that since his return from Pakistan to Somalia last September, Arale had a leadership role in the Council of Islamic Courts, which ruled part of Somalia for six months before being driven from power in January by Somali troops and their Ethiopian allies with the help of U.S. military airpower.

Officials also say Arale helped foreign fighters travel into Somalia by getting them false documents.

''The capture of Abdullahi Sudi Arale exemplifies the genuine threat that the United States and other countries face throughout the world from dangerous extremists,'' a Pentagon statement said.

Whitman said Arale was transferred to Guantanamo this week after being captured in the last couple of weeks in the Horn of Africa. He declined to provide additional details about the suspect or his capture.

The U.S. military has stepped up its activity in that region this year. A number of foreign and Somali Islamic militants were reported killed last week in fighting with Somali government forces and during a bombardment from a U.S. Navy ship in Somalia's semiautonomous northeastern region of Puntland. The U.S. also assisted with air strikes when the Council of Islamic Courts was ousted in January.

The United States has repeatedly accused Somalia's Council of Islamic Courts of harboring international terrorists linked to al-Qaida and allegedly responsible for the 1998 bombings of the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

------

On the Net:

Defense Department http://www.defenselink.mil/releases/

    Captured Terror Suspect at Guantanamo, NYT, 6.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Guantanamo-Terror-Capture.html

Is U.S. Safer Since 9/11? Clinton and Rivals Spar

June 6, 2007
The New York Times
By MICHAEL COOPER and PATRICK HEALY

The Bush administration’s efforts to thwart terrorism at home have created a fissure among the three leading Democratic presidential candidates, with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton coming under attack for saying that America is safer now than before 9/11 — contrary to a popular line of argument among some Democratic officials.

In a televised debate on Sunday night, Mrs. Clinton, who has tried to minimize her differences with her rivals on commander-in-chief issues, bluntly disagreed with a main rival, former Senator John Edwards, who had just said that the administration’s so-called war on terror was little more than a slogan.

“I believe we are safer than we were,” Mrs. Clinton said. “We are not yet safe enough, and I have proposed over the last year a number of policies that I think we should be following.”

The senator, a New York Democrat, was referring to domestic security efforts since Sept. 11, 2001, and not to the consequences of the war in Iraq or President Bush’s foreign policy, her advisers say. Yet rival Democratic campaigns, arguing that the war in Iraq has harmed security in America by breeding terrorists, are using the remark to highlight differences with her on the issue of the ability to be commander in chief, which political analysts view as a threshold issue for any woman running for president.

The campaign of her other chief rival, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, sent supporters and reporters a memorandum on Monday titled “America Is Not Safer Since 9/11,” which cited research from the State Department and other groups that described terrorism as an accelerating threat. Advisers to other candidates, meanwhile, argued yesterday that Mrs. Clinton might be misjudging Democratic primary voters, who are loath to credit the Bush administration with much of anything.

Advisers and supporters of Mrs. Clinton said yesterday that she was not endorsing the Bush administration’s strategy against terrorism, but highlighting the improved efforts of Americans on the front lines to detect and deter terrorist activity since 9/11. They said that Mrs. Clinton also thought the war in Iraq had been a distraction from the fight against terrorism, but that, day to day, people are safer than they were.

“I think the vast majority of Democratic primary voters, and Americans, would agree with Senator Clinton,” said a campaign spokesman, Howard Wolfson. “I think most Americans, for instance, would think that air travel is safer today than on Sept. 10.”

Only Mrs. Clinton’s Senate vote in 2002 to authorize military action in Iraq — and her subsequent refusal to apologize for that vote — has created so clear a division thus far in the positions of Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Edwards and Mr. Obama. Her remark on Sunday was also a partial departure from the position that many Democrats took with success last fall before the midterm elections, when they argued that the war in Iraq and mismanagement by the Bush administration had left the nation more at risk.

The question of whether the nation is safer than it was before the Sept. 11 attacks is debated passionately among policy makers and security experts. A survey of more than 100 foreign policy experts, conducted in February by Foreign Policy magazine, for instance, found that three-quarters believed that the United States was losing the war on terror.

Some cite the fact that there have been no domestic terror attacks since Sept. 11, and the foiling of several alleged terror plots, as evidence that the new antiterrorism measures are working. They credit the heightened security measures at airports and in cities across the nation, and the revamping of the nation’s intelligence agencies.

Others argue that the war in Iraq has diverted resources from the country’s efforts to contain Al Qaeda, inspired a new generation of anti-American terrorists and taken the diplomatic focus away from serious threats like Iran and North Korea.

“Hillary’s comment is a pretty centrist position, because I think the public is divided between giving the president credit for some steps toward safety, and being very critical of him,” said Rand Beers, a national security expert who was an adviser on the Democratic presidential campaign of Senator John Kerry in 2004. “How you talk about the issue is really a cup-half-full versus cup-half-empty choice.”

The memorandum from the Obama campaign did not name Mrs. Clinton, but it represented a rare — if gentle by the terms of political combat — effort to take on one of her positions. Bill Burton, a spokesman for the Obama campaign, said: “It was an important distinction that emerged at the debate. Senator Obama has often made the point that as a result of the war in Iraq, the threat of terrorism has increased.”

A spokesman for Mr. Edwards, Mark Kornblau, said yesterday: “George Bush’s disastrous foreign policy has made America less safe in the world, according to his own State Department. His long list of failures, topped by the war in Iraq, has left us with more terrorists and fewer allies.”

Still, according to a review of their past remarks, Mr. Edwards said at one point in 2003 that the nation was safer, yet not as safe as it needed to be. Mr. Obama said in 2004 that the nation was more secure in some areas, like airline security.

The Clinton campaign noted that Mrs. Clinton’s remark was in line with the conclusions of the bipartisan commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks, which found in 2004 that the nation’s actions against Al Qaeda abroad and its efforts to improve domestic security had left the nation safer, but not yet safe.

Indeed, her remark echoed one that Mr. Bush made in 2004 in a presidential debate against Mr. Kerry, when he said: “The 9/11 commission put out a report that said America is safer but not yet safe. There’s more work to be done.”

Mr. Kerry made similar statements, too. In August 2004, for instance, he said that the question of whether Americans were safer since 9/11 was “an easy one,” and that the answer was yes. But he also said the greater issue was that the president’s foreign policy had made the nation less safe over all.

Yet last year, as Democrats were fighting to reclaim Congress, many argued that the nation was less safe than it had been before the attacks. A group of Democrats including Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, then the minority leader, issued a report in September that they described as “a damning indictment of Bush Republican failure and incompetence that has left America less safe five years after September 11, 2001.”

Mrs. Clinton, too, linked the issue of the nation’s safety to Iraq last fall. After parts of a National Intelligence Estimate were released, she said “they confirm what a lot of us feared, that the policies pursued by this administration have not worked and therefore we are breeding terrorists who will not only take aim at us but at our friends and allies.”

    Is U.S. Safer Since 9/11? Clinton and Rivals Spar, NYT, 6.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/06/us/politics/06dems.html?hp

Editorial

Gitmo: A National Disgrace

June 6, 2007
The New York Times

Ever since President Bush rammed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 through Congress to lend a pretense of legality to his detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, we have urged Congress to amend the law to restore basic human rights and judicial process. Rulings by military judges this week suggest that the special detention system is so fundamentally corrupt that the only solution is to tear it down and start again.

The target of the judges’ rulings were Combatant Status Review Tribunals, panels that determine whether a prisoner is an “unlawful enemy combatant” who can be tried by one of the commissions created by the 2006 law. The tribunals are, in fact, kangaroo courts that give the inmates no chance to defend themselves, allow evidence that was obtained through torture and can be repeated until one produces the answer the Pentagon wants.

On Monday, two military judges dismissed separate war crimes charges against two Guantánamo inmates because of the status review system. They said the Pentagon managed to get them declared “enemy combatants,” but not “unlawful enemy combatants,” and moved to try them anyway under the 2006 law. That law says only unlawful combatants may be tried by military commissions. Lawful combatants (those who wear uniforms and carry weapons openly) fall under the Geneva Conventions.

If the administration loses an appeal, which it certainly should, it will no doubt try to tinker with the review tribunals so they produce the desired verdict. Congress cannot allow that. When you can’t win a bet with loaded dice, something is wrong with the game.

There is only one path likely to lead to a result that would allow Americans to once again hold their heads high when it comes to justice and human rights. First, Congress needs to restore the right of the inmates of Guantánamo Bay to challenge their detentions. By the administration’s own count, only a small minority of the inmates actually deserve a trial. The rest should be sent home or set free.

Second, Congress should repeal the Military Commissions Act and start anew on a just system for determining whether prisoners are unlawful combatants. Among other things, evidence obtained through coercion and torture should be banned.

And Congress should shut down Guantánamo Bay, as called for in bills sponsored by two California Democrats, Representative Jane Harman in the House and Senator Dianne Feinstein in the Senate. Both lawmakers are intimately familiar with the camp and have concluded it is beyond salvaging.

Their bill would close Gitmo in a year and the detainees would be screened by real courts. Those who are truly illegal combatants would be sent to military or civilian jails in the United States, to be tried under time-tested American rules of justice, or sent to an international tribunal. Some would be returned to their native lands for trial, if warranted. The rest would be set free, as they should have been long ago.

The Guantánamo camp was created on a myth — that the American judicial system could not handle prisoners of “the war against terror.” It was built on a lie — that the hundreds of detainees at Gitmo are all dangerous terrorists. And it was organized around a fiction — that Mr. Bush had the power to create this rogue system in the first place.

It is time to get rid of it.

    Gitmo: A National Disgrace, NYT, 6.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/06/opinion/06wed1.html

Democrats Hope to Expand Rights at Guantánamo

June 6, 2007
The New York Times
By JEFF ZELENY

WASHINGTON, June 5 — A day after two military judges ruled against the Bush administration’s system for trying terrorism detainees, Democrats seized on the rulings on Tuesday as evidence that Congress should restore the right of those held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to challenge their detentions.

Senator Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who is the majority leader, said he would be willing to bring such legislation to the floor. The Senate Judiciary Committee is preparing to approve such a plan on Thursday.

Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who is chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said the rulings on Monday in two cases added urgency to the push to restore detainees’ right to file habeas corpus suits. Congress eliminated that right last year while redesigning the military tribunals after the Supreme Court struck down the first plan.

Mr. Leahy criticized the administration for insisting on an approach to the tribunals “which even conservative courts say no to.”

“It just shows what happens when they want to just rush something through arbitrarily without actually listening to the people who actually knew what they are talking about,” he said Tuesday in an interview. “After 9/11, a number of Republicans and Democrats talked to the White House and said we can put together legislation that can legitimately handle questions of military tribunals.

“The White House was not the least bit interested,” Mr. Leahy continued. “They made up their mind of how they were going to do it.”

Senator Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat who is a member of the Judiciary Committee, said, “The denial of habeas corpus is a mistake.”

Republicans who helped shape the measure last year said Congress should be careful not to respond too reflexively to the rulings, in which military judges dismissed charges of war crimes against two detainees. The administration has said it is exploring options for an appeal.

“Congress cannot suddenly rewrite laws every time a federal district court judge or someone changes their view of the law,” said Senator John W. Warner, Republican of Virginia, who was closely involved in writing the military tribunal bill. “Give it some time.”

Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and a former military prosecutor, said the decisions on Monday showed that the system worked as it should.

“Let’s let the legal process go forward and not overreact,” Mr. Graham said. “I consider it a point of pride that we have a judicial system at Guantánamo Bay that is focused on process. Not who’s there, but the process. It is so important to distinguish ourselves from our enemies. In their world you don’t get a process. In our world you do.”

In the first comment from the White House on the decisions, Dana Perino, the deputy White House spokeswoman, said, “We certainly disagree with the ruling.”

Ms. Perino added that the Defense Department was studying “the opportunities for appeal and what they would say.”

The Judiciary Committee expects to approve a bipartisan bill restoring habeas corpus. That plan could be added to a Pentagon policy measure making its way through the Senate.

Ms. Feinstein said there should also be a vote as part of that bill to close the Guantánamo detention center. “After this year, I don’t think Guantánamo makes a great deal of sense, if it ever did at all,” she said.

Carl Hulse contributed reporting.

    Democrats Hope to Expand Rights at Guantánamo, NYT, 6.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/06/washington/06gitmo.html

A Legal Debate in Guantánamo on Boy Fighters

June 3, 2007
The New York Times
By WILLIAM GLABERSON

The facts of Omar Ahmed Khadr’s case are grim. The shrapnel from the grenade he is accused of throwing ripped through the skull of Sgt. First Class Christopher J. Speer, who was 28 when he died.

To American military prosecutors, Mr. Khadr is a committed Al Qaeda operative, spy and killer who must be held accountable for killing Sergeant Speer in 2002 and for other bloody acts he committed in Afghanistan.

But there is one fact that may not fit easily into the government’s portrait of Mr. Khadr: He was 15 at the time.

His age is at the center of a legal battle that is to begin tomorrow with an arraignment by a military judge at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, of Mr. Khadr, whom a range of legal experts describe as the first child fighter in decades to face war-crimes charges. It is a battle with implications as large as the growing ranks of child fighters around the world.

Defense lawyers argue that military prosecutors are violating international law by filing charges that date from events that occurred when Mr. Khadr was 15 or younger. Legal concepts that are still evolving, the lawyers say, require that countries treat child fighters as victims of warfare, rather than war criminals.

The military prosecutors say such notions may be “well-meaning and worthy,” but are irrelevant to the American military commissions at Guantánamo. Mr. Khadr is one of only three Guantánamo detainees to face charges under the law establishing the commissions, passed by Congress last year.

“International law,” the Justice Department asserted in a court filing in the case last week, “does not prohibit an individual under 18 from being prosecuted for war crimes.” Even so, prosecutors said that if they won a conviction, they would seek something less than a life term, given Mr. Khadr’s age. He is 20 now.

Whatever the outcome, his case seems destined to become a landmark, though some scholars say not enough attention has been given to its importance. “What is the precedent that we are setting with this unique step?” asked Peter W. Singer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who has written about child fighters.

Mr. Khadr’s case offers a snapshot of relatively new questions surrounding the legal treatment of child fighters globally, though advocates for children have tended to focus less on young terrorists and more on children who fight in civil wars, like Ishmael Beah, whose best-selling memoir, “A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier,” recounts his bloody days as a child soldier in Sierra Leone’s civil war.

Mr. Khadr may not be the most sympathetic figure for those pressing for the more forgiving interpretation of international law. He was born in Canada to a family with such deep Al Qaeda ties that some newspapers there have called them Canada’s first family of terrorism.

He is the youngest detainee at Guantánamo Bay, nearly blind in one eye from injuries sustained during the July 2002 firefight in which Sergeant Speer was mortally wounded and another American soldier was severely injured. Last week, Mr. Khadr said he wanted to fire all of his American lawyers, and some of them said they understood why he might distrust Americans after five years at Guantánamo.

Still, they argue that war-crimes prosecutors should focus on the adults who press children into service, not on the children themselves. The charges against Mr. Khadr, they said in a recent court filing, cross a line in the treatment of children that no other country has crossed “in modern history.”

The prosecutors, they say, included in their charges acts that occurred when Mr. Khadr was younger than 10. Mr. Khadr “was subject to undue adult influences,” said Muneer I. Ahmad, an associate professor at the American University Washington College of Law, who has represented Mr. Khadr.

“If Omar had had his free choice,” Professor Ahmad said, “what he would have chosen to do is ride horses, play soccer and read Harry Potter books.”

It is an appeal to emotion that the prosecutors are likely to meet with their own. Sergeant Speer left a wife and two small children. His widow, Tabitha, said in an e-mail exchange with a reporter last week that Mr. Khadr’s youth entitled him to no special consideration.

“Given the opportunity, he would do it all over again,” she wrote. “He was trained to do exactly what he did, regardless of his age.”

To the prosecutors, Mr. Khadr is the essence of a young man who should be held to adult standards. American officials say his father, Ahmed Said Khadr, who was killed in a shootout with Pakistani forces in 2003, was a senior deputy to Osama bin Laden.

One of Mr. Khadr’s brothers is in a wheelchair as a result of that 2003 shootout; another told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation “we are an Al Qaeda family.” Ahmed Khadr traveled internationally from Canada under the auspices of handling charity money for Muslims. In the mid-1990s, he was held for a time in Pakistan on suspicion of helping finance the bombing of the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad.

After he was released, the Khadrs and several of their six children moved from Canada to Afghanistan, where they lived at times in the same compound as Osama bin Laden, officials have said. “All of the children were indoctrinated into the Al Qaeda way of thinking,” said the chief military prosecutor at Guantánamo, Col. Morris D. Davis of the Air Force.

After Sept. 11, Mr. Khadr made deliberate choices to join Al Qaeda and eventually to kill Sergeant Speer, Colonel Davis said in a recent interview. “There is a difference,” Colonel Davis said, “between a 15-year-old who makes a spur-of-the-moment decision and someone who made a long-term choice.”

Captured bloody and bullet-riddled after the firefight that killed Sergeant Speer, Mr. Khadr has been held at Guantánamo since 2002. At least three other juveniles, perhaps as young as 12, were also held there for a time. But they were released in January 2004, the military said.

Mr. Khadr’s lawyers have said in court that he has been subject to physical and psychological torture that exploited his youth, another example of what they say is a violation of international principles that children be accorded special protections.

In legal filings, the lawyers have asserted, for example, that an interrogator at Guantánamo told Mr. Khadr when he was 17 that if he did not cooperate he would be sent to Egypt where he would be confronted by “Soldier No. 9,” a man who the interrogators said would be sent to rape him.

Asked about the accusations, a Pentagon spokesman, Cmdr. Jeffrey D. Gordon, said they “may be raised by counsel during the course of the trial” but he would not discuss the specifics of the accusations. Commander Gordon added that detainees “have frequently made allegations of abuse while in detention in order to garner public support.”

In their filings, the prosecutors concede that some treaties require special treatment of children caught in warfare. Some of those treaties, they noted, have not been ratified by the United States, and others do not specifically ban prosecution of combatants who are 15 or older.

Some legal experts acknowledge that it is difficult to define precisely what international law requires in the treatment of child fighters. It is a fluid discipline, with few enforcement mechanisms, and there are inconsistent precedents and treaty provisions.

But even those who say there is no bar to the war crimes prosecutions of youthful fighters say the growing use of child fighters around the world means that Mr. Khadr’s case could become pivotal.

“More and more child soldiers are being recruited, and they are committing heinous crimes. This is an issue the international community is going to have to confront,” said Michael A. Newton, a former military prosecutor and expert on the law of war who teaches at Vanderbilt University Law School.

The two sides in the Khadr case interpret some international legal documents differently. One subject on which they differ is a treaty to which the United States is a party, a 2002 United Nations agreement dealing with child fighters.

The defense notes that the agreement requires countries to demobilize captured child fighters and to provide assistance for their physical and psychological recovery “and their social reintegration.”

The defense lawyers say that means sending them home. That would be inconsistent with the potential life term Mr. Khadr faces on charges of murder, attempted murder, spying, conspiracy and providing material support for terrorism.

But government lawyers note that the child-soldier treaty does not expressly rule out war crimes prosecutions for juveniles. Another international child-soldier provision that has become a central issue in Mr. Khadr’s case is a law approved by the United Nations for the prosecution of war crimes after the Sierra Leone civil war in the 1990s. It specifically provides that “persons of 15 years of age” and older can be charged with war crimes.

Colonel Davis said that was a significant precedent. “If the United Nations has signed on to the principle that people who are 15 can be prosecuted for war crimes,” he said, “the notion that we’re blazing a new trail with Mr. Khadr is a false assumption.”

But the former chief war crimes prosecutor for Sierra Leone, David M. Crane, said in an interview that soon after he was appointed by Secretary General Kofi Annan of the United Nations in 2002, he announced that he would not prosecute anyone under 18.

Mr. Crane, a former senior Pentagon legal official who is now a professor at Syracuse University Law School, said the Sierra Leone civil war included a catalogue of horrific acts by teenagers and children. But he said he concluded that warriors under 18 did not have the intellectual and emotional maturity to be prosecuted for war crimes.

“I called them as much victims as the people they raped, maimed and mutilated,” he said.

One person who has reached a different conclusion about the culpability of child fighters is Layne Morris, a housing administrator in a Salt Lake City suburb. Mr. Morris is a former Army Special Forces sergeant, who, like Mr. Khadr, is half-blind because of the firefight that day outside Khost, Afghanistan.

On a recent day, Mr. Morris remembered the stream of shots from AK-47s inside a compound a coalition patrol had surrounded. He remembered the hand grenades that kept coming over the wall. And he described the feeling of the shrapnel that took half his sight.

He said the battle did not unfold quickly, as it sometimes seems in the retelling. American forces surrounded the compound. And then they waited. Some women from the compound emerged and were allowed to leave, Mr. Morris said. A boy fighter would have had the chance to walk out of the gate, too, he said.

There were shots. And more waiting, as the Americans called for air support.

Anyone who was inside had a choice of fighting or surrendering, he said, including Mr. Khadr.

“There is just no way you can say this is a poor befuddled, brainwashed kid,” Mr. Morris said. “This is a kid who made a whole lot of decisions on his own.”

    A Legal Debate in Guantánamo on Boy Fighters, NYT, 3.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/us/03gitmo.html?hp

4 Accused of Plot to Blow Up Facilities at Kennedy Airport

June 3, 2007
The New York Times
By CARA BUCKLEY and WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM

Four men, including a onetime airport cargo handler and a former member of the Parliament of Guyana, were charged yesterday with plotting to blow up fuel tanks, terminal buildings and the web of fuel lines running beneath Kennedy International Airport.

One of the suspects was taken into custody in Brooklyn and two others were detained in Trinidad, the authorities said, while the fourth man was still at large.

One defendant, the former cargo handler, Russell Defreitas, was arraigned yesterday in federal court in Brooklyn. He is a 63-year-old Guyanese native and naturalized American citizen who lives in Brooklyn.

Mark J. Mershon, the assistant director in charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation field office in New York, said all four men had “fundamentalist Islamic beliefs of a violent nature,” although they appeared to be acting on their own and had no known connection to Al Qaeda.

Law enforcement officials said that Kennedy, which handles roughly 45 million passengers a year and 1,000 flights a day, was never in imminent danger because the plot was only in a preliminary phase and the conspirators had yet to lay out detailed plans or obtain financing or explosives.

The airport is fed jet fuel, gasoline and heating oil through a capillary system of pipes that run from New Jersey through Staten Island, Brooklyn and Queens. Oil industry experts said safety shut-off valves would almost assuredly have prevented an exploding airport fuel tank from igniting all or even part of the network.

But officials said the four men determined to carry out their attack, having conducted “precise and extensive” surveillance of the airport using photographs, video, the recollections of Mr. Defreitas and satellite images downloaded from Google Earth.

They said the men had also traveled repeatedly to Guyana and Trinidad in recent months, seeking the blessing and financial backing of an extremist Muslim group based in Trinidad and Tobago called Jamaat al-Muslimeen, which was behind a bloody coup attempt in Trinidad in 1990.

“The enforcement action we are announcing today was taken to prevent a terrorist plot from maturing into a terrorist act,” Mr. Mershon said during a news conference yesterday at F.B.I. headquarters in Manhattan. The motive behind the planned attack, he said, “was a pattern of hatred toward the United States and the West in general.”

Mr. Defreitas was arrested Friday night at a restaurant in Brooklyn, the Lindenwood Diner. A federal magistrate judge ordered him detained at his arraignment yesterday, pending a bail hearing on Wednesday.

Mr. Defreitas walked slowly into the courtroom, his face drawn, wearing a greenish-brown knee-length tunic and loose pants. His court-appointed lawyer, Drew Carter, told Magistrate Judge Kiyo A. Matsumoto:

“There’s a lot more to the story. I don’t want to get into this now, because it’s not a trial.”

One law enforcement official played down Mr. Defreitas’s ability to carry out an attack, calling him “a sad sack” and “not a Grade A terrorist.” Comparing the case with the plot in which a group of men were arrested last month on charges of planning to attack soldiers at Fort Dix in New Jersey, the official said the New Jersey plotters “were a bit further along.”

But the official said that Mr. Defreitas’s efforts to enlist Jamaat al-Muslimeen’s aid could have had devastating consequences.

“They didn’t have the money and they didn’t have the bombs,” the official said of the suspects, “but if we let it go it could have gotten there; they could have gotten the J.A.M. fully involved, and we wouldn’t know where it could have gone.”

The official declined to be identified because he was not authorized to comment on the case.

Abdul Kadir, 55, a former mayor of a town in Guyana and a onetime member of Parliament in that South American country, was arrested in Trinidad on Friday. He helped Mr. Defreitas complete the plan and secure financing, according to the criminal complaint, which was unsealed yesterday.

Mr. Kadir was detained after boarding a flight on Aeropostal, a Venezuelan airline, which was to go to Caracas, an official briefed on the arrest said yesterday. The flight between Port of Spain and Caracas, which usually takes less than an hour, had taken off but the crew was told to return to Trinidad, the official said.

The third suspect, Kareem Ibrahim, 61, was arrested in Trinidad. The extradition of both Mr. Kadir and Mr. Ibrahim was being sought.

The fourth suspect, Abdel Nur, 57, remained a fugitive, the officials said, and was believed to be in Trinidad.

If convicted, all four suspects could face life in prison.

The charges were announced by Mr. Mershon; the city’s police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly; Roslynn R. Mauskopf, the United States attorney in Brooklyn; and other officials.

According to the criminal complaint, which was sworn out by Robert Addonizio, an investigator with the Brooklyn district attorney’s office assigned to the Joint Terrorism Task Force, the authorities became aware of the plot in January 2006; officials would not say how.

An informant with a criminal history including drug trafficking and racketeering agreed to work with investigators on the case, in exchange for payments and a reduced sentence.

Last July, the informant, whose name was not released, befriended Mr. Defreitas, officials said. Mr. Defreitas said he recognized the informant from attending services at a Brooklyn mosque, took him into his confidence and slowly disclosed his plan to attack Kennedy, according to the complaint.

Though Mr. Defreitas had lived in Brooklyn and Queens, he told the informant that his resentment of the United States hardened into hatred during his years as a cargo worker at the airport.

“He saw military parts being shipped to Israel, including missiles, that would be used to kill Muslims,” the complaint read. Mr. Defreitas, who was secretly recorded by the informant, complained bitterly that he “wanted to do something” and that “Muslims always incur the wrath of the world while Jews get a pass.”

Mr. Defreitas envisioned “the destruction of the whole of Kennedy” and theorized that because of underground pipes, “part of Queens would explode.” He boasted that in addition to a huge of loss of life — “even the twin towers can’t touch it,” he said — the attack would devastate the United States economy and strike a deep symbolic blow against a national icon, President John F. Kennedy, officials said.

“Any time you hit Kennedy, it is the most hurtful thing to the United States,” he said in one of dozens of conversations secretly recorded during the 18-month investigation, according to the complaint.

“They love John F. Kennedy,” he said. “If you hit that, this whole country will be in mourning. It’s like you kill the man twice.”

Mr. Defreitas worked as a contractor at the airport from 1990 to 1993, said officials with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which runs the airport. Commissioner Kelly said he stopped working at the airport in 1995. The reason for the discrepancy was not clear.

In any event, the informant accompanied Mr. Defreitas on a series of trips between New York and Guyana, where the pair met with a number of co-conspirators, the authorities said. The group created code words like the “Chicken Farm” and “Chicken Hatchery” to refer to the plot.

As described in 33-page complaint, Mr. Defreitas seemed enraptured by the plot. He believed the informant had been “sent by Allah to be the one” and fantasized about the paradise that would await them after their martyrdom.

Mr. Defreitas was intent on meeting leaders of Jamaat al-Muslimeen to finance the plot, and another co-conspirator, Mr. Nur, agreed to help arrange the meeting. The group gained notoriety for the failed coup attempt, in which 24 people died, but today, officials said, it is known more as a street gang involved in drug trafficking. Authorities in the United States and Trinidad have closely watched the group’s activities since the Sept. 11 attacks, but in the United States it is not designated as a foreign terrorist organization.

A representative of Jamaat al-Muslimeen, who declined to be identified, said in a telephone interview from Port of Spain that the group would have no immediate comment on the allegations.

In January of this year, Mr. Defreitas was back in New York, and over the period of a week he and the informant visited Kennedy Airport four times — all the while being recorded, videotaped and followed by law enforcement authorities.

Mr. Defreitas pointed out fuel tanks on airport property, nearby gas stations, possible sites of lax security as well as possible escape routes, the authorities said.

Using video he shot at Kennedy, which he hoped would secure funds for the plot, Mr. Defreitas returned to Guyana in February and began meeting again with co-conspirators, including Mr. Kadir, who, along with being a former elected official, is an imam.

Mr. Defreitas and the informant traveled to Trinidad on May 20 and stayed for two days with Mr. Ibrahim; then, all three men met with Mr. Nur in a compound owned by a leader from Jamaat al-Muslimeen, the authorities said. That group was interested in the plot but first wanted to learn more about Mr. Defreitas and the informant. Mr. Ibrahim was worried about presenting the plan to the group, and advised Mr. Defreitas to present it instead to contacts overseas.

Mr. Defreitas agreed, and he and the source returned to New York on May 26.

Less than a week later, believing they had enough evidence for a successful prosecution, the authorities picked him up.

One friend of Mr. Defreitas’s expressed shock at word that he had been arrested in a plot to attack Kennedy Airport. The friend, Trevor Watts, 65, described Mr. Defreitas as not dangerous.

“He’s not that type of person,” Mr. Watts said after learning of Mr. Defreitas’s arrest. “He’s not smart enough.”

Mr. Watts said he first met Mr. Defreitas years ago, when both men lived on Albany Avenue in Brooklyn. Mr. Defreitas was working at Kennedy Airport at the time. His brother helped him land the job there, filling out his job application for him because Mr. Defreitas had trouble reading, Mr. Watts said.

Mr. Defreitas had been divorced and lost touch with his two children, Mr. Watts said. After leaving his Albany Avenue apartment, he moved from place to place and was homeless for a time, his friend said.

He also lived alone for several years in an apartment on North Conduit Avenue, near the airport. The daughter of his landlord described him yesterday as a “polite man” who always paid his rent on time. When he finally ended up leaving, he told the landlord that the weather was rough on his health and the cold was tough on his arthritis, the daughter said.

Mr. Defreitas was always thinking of ways to make money, Mr. Watts said. He had been in a car accident, and he spoke to Mr. Watts about his hopes of getting rich by winning a lawsuit. He sold books on a street corner in Queens and would ask his friends to give him their broken air-conditioners and refrigerators. He shipped the items to his girlfriend’s sister in Guyana so she could repair and sell them, Mr. Watts said.

After coming home from a series of trips to Guyana, Mr. Defreitas started dressing in traditional Muslim clothes and referred to himself as Mohammed, said Mr. Watts, an auto mechanic.

Mr. Watts said Mr. Defreitas appeared to have adopted his fundamentalist beliefs only in recent years. He had previously embraced American culture, Mr. Watts said, and liked a particularly American brand of music, jazz, especially the saxophone.

In recent years, he lived in an apartment in a four-story building on Rockaway Avenue in Brooklyn, on a run-down block full of graffiti. Agents from the F.B.I.’s Joint Terrorism Task Force arrested Mr. Defreitas at the diner, on Linden Boulevard, about 10 p.m. on Friday.

“When he was picked up last night, he was playing the guessing game about who the informant was,” a law enforcement official said yesterday. “He was cooperative at first, but he was not providing any information that we did not know.”

When confronted by the authorities with information about the plot, however, Mr. Defreitas denied any involvement, the official said.

Though the New York area has been the subject of several terrorist plots, Commissioner Kelly said this one was different because it was largely developed in the Caribbean.

“This is an area in which we have growing concern and I think requires a lot more focus,” Mr. Kelly said, echoing a concern law enforcement officials have reiterated in recent years.

According to The Trinidad Guardian newspaper, Guyana’s president, Bharath Jagdeo, said yesterday that he was unaware of the details of the arrests but that on Friday, the United States ambassador, Roy Austin, requested a meeting with him. He said he learned from Mr. Austin that Guyanese nationals were involved “in some plot at the J.F.K.,” but he said there was no Guyanese connection to the overall plot. He noted that Mr. Kadir was not a government official but was, until about two years ago, a member of parliament from the opposition party.

Asked whether he believed that West Indians traveling to the United States would be subject to greater scrutiny, Mr. Jagdeo said, “I hope there is no paranoia.”

“It’s not as if it’s a trend,” he was quoted as saying. “We are hoping there is no adverse reaction.”

Reporting was contributed by Ann Farmer, Manny Fernandez, Kate Hammer, Daryl Khan, Marc Lacey, Angela Macropoulos, Patrick McGeehan, Ray Rivera, Simon Romero and Nate Schweber.

    4 Accused of Plot to Blow Up Facilities at Kennedy Airport, NYT, 3.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/nyregion/03plot.html?hp

Plot Was Unlikely to Work, Experts Say, Citing Safeguards and Pipeline Structure

June 3, 2007
The New York Times
By PATRICK McGEEHAN

Federal authorities said that four men were hoping to blow up Kennedy International Airport and a large swath of Queens by detonating a fuel pipeline and storage tanks, but oil industry executives and local officials said yesterday that such a plot was probably not feasible.

While it is true that the tanks at Kennedy Airport are connected to a network of underground pipes that run from New Jersey through Staten Island, Brooklyn and Queens, an exploding tank should not ignite the pipeline, they said. The pipes, which carry jet fuel, gasoline and heating oil, have valves that can be operated from headquarters in Pennsylvania to cut off the flow if sensors indicate that there might be a leak or rupture, said Roy Haase, an official of Buckeye Partners, the company that operates the pipeline.

“It’s not like the pipeline is a stick of dynamite and the whole thing would blow up,” Mr. Haase said. He said it was more likely that the damage from an exploding tank would be limited to the immediate area around the tank.

Each of the fuel tanks at Kennedy “is its own self-contained unit” 200 to 300 feet from the nearest road, said Stephen Sigmund, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which runs the airport.

Anthony E. Shorris, the executive director of the Port Authority, disputed the suspects’ notion, as stated in the criminal complaint, that the tanks had minimal security during the daytime. At a news conference yesterday, Mr. Shorris said, “There are Port Authority police patrols that are regularly in place around all of them.”

He said the tanks were also equipped with alarm systems and firefighting equipment.

Still, when the New York Police Department learned of the plot, officers began monitoring the pipeline from helicopters and boats, said Raymond W. Kelly, the police commissioner.

Mr. Haase said that Buckeye employees inspected the pipeline every day, on foot and in cars. They are not usually looking for terrorists, he said, but for contractors digging too close to the pipes.

He said there had not been a significant fire involving the pipeline in its 41 years of existence. During that time, he said, billions of gallons of fuel have moved through the pipeline, which originates in Linden, N.J.

From there, two pipes, each 12 inches in diameter, run east through the heart of Staten Island and under New York Bay to a junction in the New Lots section of Brooklyn. One pipe carries jet fuel for planes at Kennedy and La Guardia Airports and one carries diesel fuel for trucks, heating oil and gasoline.

From New Lots, one branch snakes north to a terminal at Long Island City and on to La Guardia. The other continues east to Kennedy and on to a terminal in Inwood. All told, the pipeline delivers more than eight million gallons of petroleum to the city each day, Mr. Haase said.

“We have security and safety measures in place and those features are very well known to the Fire Department, the Police Department, the F.B.I. and Homeland Security,” he said. But when asked to describe them in detail, he added, “There was a time when we would brag about the safety and security of our system, but we don’t do that anymore.”

Thomas O. Miesner, a former president of Conoco Pipe Line in Houston, said, “The reason the explosion wouldn’t travel along the pipeline is that there’s not enough oxygen present inside the pipeline to allow ignition.

“It would have caused a big fire, no question about that,” Mr. Miesner said. “And the fire would have burned until it was either put out or the jet fuel fueling the fire was all consumed or burned up.”

One Port Authority official, who declined to be identified because he was not authorized to comment publicly, said that while it would be extremely difficult to cause a catastrophic explosion by attacking the fuel system, the damage to the airline industry could have been substantial. “No airline except American could survive any sustained drop in ridership,” the official said.

    Plot Was Unlikely to Work, Experts Say, Citing Safeguards and Pipeline Structure, NYT, 3.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/nyregion/03pipe.html

Detainee Found Dead in Guantánamo Cell

May 31, 2007
The New York Times
By WILLIAM GLABERSON

A Guantánamo detainee apparently committed suicide yesterday, military officials said in a succinct announcement last night.

The announcement, which immediately brought new criticism of the administration’s detention practices, included few details. It stated only that the unidentified detainee was a Saudi Arabian and that he “was found unresponsive and not breathing in his cell by guards” early yesterday afternoon. It said lifesaving efforts were exhausted but did not make clear why the officials had concluded that the death was a suicide.

A spokesman at the naval station at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where about 380 men are held, referred calls to the United States Southern Command in Miami, which posted the announcement on its Web site.

The death comes almost a year after three suicides at Guantánamo last June, which drew international attention. Some critics of the Bush administration said the suicides were testament to desperation in the detention camps. But the commander at the time, Rear Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr., asserted that “this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.”

The death yesterday seemed to mark the end of a period of relative calm in which officials have appeared to take extraordinary steps to avoid detainee suicides, including force-feeding hunger strikers to assure they receive adequate nutrition.

Admiral Harris completed his tour of duty at Guantánamo this month and said at the time that the camp was in a much less turbulent state than last year.

Several of the detainees’ lawyers have said in recent months that the psychological condition of many of the detainees was markedly deteriorating. They said that some detainees had begun to feel that they would never emerge alive from Guantánamo, which was opened at a detention camp more than five years ago.

Some of the lawyers have publicly warned that more suicides are inevitable. Last night, one of those lawyers, Joshua Colangelo-Bryan, said that if the Saudi death was a suicide it was a public sign of the hopelessness at the camp.

“It was simply a matter of time before this suicide,” Mr. Colangelo-Bryan said, “and I imagine it is only a matter of time before the next.” He said that detainees in their sixth year of detention speak of being told that they have no legal rights and will never leave Guantánamo.

American officials have said they have decided that about 80 of the detainees can be released, but that few countries have been willing to accept them. Military officials have said they may bring war-crimes charges against about 80 others.

The remainder are being held as enemy combatants, and the Bush administration has argued that it can hold them until they cease to become a danger or until the war against terrorism is compete. The Pentagon conducts annual reviews of the detainees to asses whether they are still properly classified as enemy combatants.

Anant P. Raut, a Washington lawyer who represents 5 of about 80 Saudi detainees at Guantánamo, said he had not been told as of last night of the condition of his clients. He said that when he visited Guantánamo in February his clients had difficulty understanding why they were still there if the government was not planning to charge them with war crimes.

Mr. Raut said yesterday’s death should bring a thorough assessment of why a detainee might have committed suicide.

“The conditions that led to this have to be re-examined,” he said.

    Detainee Found Dead in Guantánamo Cell, NYT, 31.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/31/washington/31gitmo.html

Gitmo Detainee Apparently Kills Himself

May 31, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:41 a.m. ET
The New York Times

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) -- A Saudi Arabian detainee died Wednesday at Guantanamo Bay prison and the U.S. military said he apparently committed suicide. Critics of the detention center said the death showed the level of desperation among prisoners.

Also Wednesday, a Canadian detainee fired his American attorneys, leaving him without defense counsel ahead of his trial, his former U.S. military attorney told The Associated Press. The detainee, Omar Khadr, is still to be arraigned and is one of only three of the roughly 380 Guantanamo prisoners to be charged with a crime.

The military did not identify the detainee who died or describe the manner of death. There are about 80 detainees from Saudi Arabia held at Guantanamo.

Guards at the U.S. Naval Base in southeast Cuba found the detainee unresponsive and not breathing in his cell Wednesday afternoon, the U.S. military's Southern Command said in a statement.

''They tried to save his life but he was pronounced dead,'' said Mario Alvarez, a Miami-based spokesman for the command.

Lawyer Julia Tarver Mason, whose firm represents eight Saudi detainees at Guantanamo, said she has tried so far without success to learn from the government if the apparent suicide was by one of her clients.

''They are in the care of the United States government and that should mean that deaths should not occur,'' Mason said.

It would be the fourth suicide at Guantanamo since the prison camp opened in January 2002. On June 10, 2006, two Saudi detainees and one Yemeni hanged themselves with sheets.

A spokesman for detention operations, Navy Cmdr. Rick Haupt, declined to comment, referring questions to the Miami-based Southern Command, which oversees U.S. military operations in the Caribbean and Latin America.

Defense attorneys said the death was likely an act of desperation at a prison camp where detainees are denied access to U.S. civilian courts and isolated in their cells for up to 22 hours a day.

''You have five and a half years of desperation there with no legal way out,'' said Michael Ratner, president of the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights. ''Sadly, it leads to people being so desperate they take their own lives.''

Marc Falkoff, who is part of a team of attorneys representing 17 men from Yemen, said the suicide should be expected given the conditions at Guantanamo.

''We've said all along that the guys are going to try to take their lives and that appears to be what happened here,'' Falkoff said. ''It's just incredibly sad and it wouldn't happen if these guys were just given their day in court.''

A cultural adviser was helping the military handle the remains. ''The remains of the deceased detainee are being treated with the utmost respect,'' the military said.

The death came as the U.S. military prepared to try Khadr and Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemeni, in military tribunals set up by Congress after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a previous military trial system, calling it unconstitutional.

Their arraignment is scheduled to proceed Monday at Guantanamo as planned, Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman, said late Wednesday.

Khadr was 15 when he was captured in a firefight with U.S. troops in Afghanistan during which he allegedly killed a U.S. Army special forces soldier with a grenade.

''He doesn't trust American lawyers, and I don't particularly blame him,'' said U.S. Marine Lt. Col. Colby Vokey, who was taken off the case Wednesday. ''The United States is responsible for his interrogation, and his treatment under a process that is patently unfair.''

Vokey was excused as defense counsel by Col. Dwight Sullivan, chief defense counsel.

''I'm definitely disappointed,'' Vokey said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. ''I wanted to go the distance for Omar.''

Khadr is now represented by only two Canadian lawyers, who are known as foreign attorney consultants because they have not been cleared to be full-level attorneys, Vokey said. Under new rules for military tribunals adopted last year, the detainee is permitted to represent himself.

The apparent suicide Wednesday came despite the military's best efforts.

The military tightened security at the prison camp following the previous suicides and an uprising last spring, removing access to light fixtures and other possible makeshift weapons and taking away bed sheets in the daytime.

About 380 men are held at the isolated prison camp on suspicion of links to al-Qaida or the Taliban. Many have been held for five years.

The Naval Criminal Investigative Service is conducting an ongoing investigation into the three previous suicides.

The former commander of the detention facilities, Navy Rear Adm. Harry Harris, described those suicides as acts of ''asymmetric warfare'' -- an effort to increase condemnation of the prison.

Associated Press writers Andrew O. Selsky and Ben Fox contributed to this story from San Juan.

    Gitmo Detainee Apparently Kills Himself, NYT, 31.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Guantanamo-Suicide.html

Private Guards a Weak Link in Security

May 29, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:53 a.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Legions of ill-trained, low-paid private security guards are protecting tempting terrorist targets across the U.S.

Richard Bergendahl is one of them. He fights the war on terrorism in Los Angeles, protecting a high-rise office building for $19,000 a year. Down the block is an even taller skyscraper, identified by President Bush as a building chosen for a Sept. 11-style airplane attack.

Bergendahl, 55, says he often thinks: ''Well, what am I doing here? These people are paying me minimum wage.''

The security guard industry found itself involuntarily transformed after September 2001 from an army of ''rent-a-cops'' to protectors of the homeland. Yet many security officers are paid little more than restaurant cooks or janitors.

And the industry is governed by a maze of conflicting state rules, according to a nationwide survey by The Associated Press. Wide chasms exist among states in requirements for training and background checks. Tens of thousands of guard applicants were found to have criminal backgrounds.

''A security officer is ... not trained to be a G.I. Joe,'' said Paul Maniscalco, a senior research scientist at George Washington University.

More than five years after the 9/11 terror attacks, Maniscalco is helping to change the security guard culture. He recently developed an anti-terrorism computer course for shopping mall guards, who are being taught that they now have more concerns than rowdy teenagers and shoplifters.

The middle ground pay for security officers in 2006 was $23,620, according to a Labor Department survey. The low pay reflects cutthroat competition among security firms, who submit the lowest possible bids to win contracts. Lowball contracts also mean lower profit margins and less money for training and background checks for guards.

Some states require FBI fingerprint checks for every guard job applicant. Others let the industry police itself. The following states don't regulate the industry: Alabama, Colorado, Kansas, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, South Dakota, Kentucky, Wyoming and Idaho. The city of Boise and many Idaho communities do regulate guards. Some states require background checks for company owners but not guards.

In states that keep such records, the AP found that more than 96,000 out of 1.3 million applicants, about 7.3 percent, were turned down -- mostly, state officials said, for having criminal histories.

The most important number, however, can't be found: individuals convicted of serious crimes who were hired in states without background checks or in states where they slipped through the system.

Congressional investigators reported last year that 89 private guards working at two military bases had histories that included assault, larceny, possession and use of controlled substances and forgery. The Army says it has purged guards with criminal histories from its bases.

''I frankly was shocked, after 25 years in the FBI; I assumed those in the private sector had gone through criminal background checks,'' said Jeffrey Lampinski, the former FBI special-agent-in-charge of the Philadelphia office who is now an executive with AlliedBarton Security Services.

The security businesses' own trade group, representing the largest firms, acknowledges the industry as a whole isn't ready to recognize signs of terrorism and respond to an attack.

''I would have to say no,'' said Joseph Ricci, executive director of the National Association of Security Companies, when asked whether most guards are trained to protect the homeland. ''Companies that hire private guards began spending more for security after Sept. 11, 2001, but then began cutting back. We've become complacent because we haven't had attacks.''

For guards at the Energy Department's nuclear weapons facilities, failure to protect nuclear materials from terrorists could be catastrophic. That's why their training is far more exhaustive than that of most security officer recruits.

At the Nevada Test Site, the former nuclear weapons testing ground 65 miles from Las Vegas, contract guards working for the Wackenhut Corp. train in desert camouflage and military helmets, fire automatic weapons, put on gas masks and kick up the desert dust in military Humvees with gunners on top.

They crouch behind cactus plants to shoot at targets, stalk ''intruders'' with drawn sidearms and burst through doors of buildings, first dropping ''flash-bang'' devices that have an explosive sound and fill the room with smoke.

''Failure on our part is failure to protect a vital national security asset,'' said David Bradley, the Wackenhut general manager at the federal facility, where current operations include emergency response training and conventional weapons testing. ''We don't see that ever occurring.''

Other sites protected by the security industry include drinking water reservoirs; oil and gas refineries; ports; bus and rail commuter terminals; nuclear power plants; chemical plants; food supplies; hospitals, and communications networks.

Bergendahl, the Los Angeles guard who protects the high rise near the formerly named Library Tower -- now the US Bank Tower -- thinks often of Bush's disclosure last year that terrorists with shoe bombs planned to take control of a jetliner and crash it into the building.

''It scares me,'' said Bergendahl, who has spent 28 years as a security guard.

Bergendahl said his training usually consists of a real estate manager reading security measures to him every few months. His building rarely has evacuation drills. Management's advice? ''Keep your coat buttoned. Keep your shoes shiny,'' Bergendahl said.

Franklin Bullock, 51, a guard at the busy bus and rail commuter station in Kent, Wash., said he's had no drills with police and fire responders despite terrorist bombings of trains and buses overseas.

A supervisor once tested Bullock by walking him down the platform to see whether he would spot a package he could hardly miss. It had ''BOM'' written on it. That was the end of his useful hands-on training, Bullock said.

''Everybody's so afraid he's going to make a mistake,'' said the $25,000-a-year guard, who spent most of his working life as a security guard or correctional officer. ''There's no security at all.''

Maria Macay, 54, a former travel agent, has been working the midnight-to-8 shift guarding a hospital in San Francisco for about $25,000 a year. She donned a protective suit and mask in a drill for a possible chemical or biological attack, but she isn't confident she could handle a real attack.

''I don't think I learned a lot,'' she said. ''It's scary. Thank God, it hasn't happened. If I had to be put in that situation, what is going to happen to my family if something happens to me?''

The pay for security guards generally is low. In an annual survey of employers, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the median hourly pay for security guards in 2006 was $11.35, compared with restaurant cooks at $10.11, janitors at $10.45 and laboratory animal caretakers at $10.13.

Police patrol officers were at $23.27, emergency management specialists $24.26 and firefighters $20.37. The median reflects the same number of individuals above those amounts as below.

The Service Employees International Union is trying to raise guard pay by negotiating master contracts with multiple companies in urban areas. The union has contracts for guards in New York, Chicago, Minneapolis and the San Francisco Bay area. Negotiations are under way in Seattle, and the union hopes for talks in Los Angeles, Sacramento, Calif., Washington, D.C., and Boston.

Many industries pay lobbyists generously to keep government regulators away. Large security firms want tougher regulation by state governments.

They want mandatory training requirements and a required national background check for all job applicants that would be accessible to all security firms. Currently, companies can access the FBI's national fingerprint database only through state agencies. If the state doesn't require background checks, companies are barred from the system.

''Imagine an industry saying, 'Please regulate me.' It's pretty unusual,'' said William Whitmore, chief executive and president of AlliedBarton.

Company executives are worried about their industry's reputation, and they don't want to be caught hiring convicted felons to protect other Americans.

''Potentially you could have a small organization who might want to cut corners and, God forbid, you're not sure who they're hiring,'' said Robert Johnson, a vice president of Blackstone Valley Security in Cranston, R.I.

Rich Powers, owner of Guilford Security Agency Inc. of Greensboro, N.C., said, ''We've had everything from an arsonist to a burglar and a shoplifter'' applying for jobs.

Nobody knows how private security guards would perform in an actual terrorist attack, but several incidents serve as potential warnings:

--In September 2004, at the Energy Department's enriched uranium stockpile plant in Oak Ridge, Tenn., a force of armed contract guards ran through the dark to confront ''intruders'' -- a team of guards conducting a mock attack. Some guards and outside watchdog groups said there was sufficient confusion to potentially cause an accidental shooting. Bryan Wilkes, an Energy Department spokesman, disputed the account, saying, ''No accidental shooting came close to happening.''

--In fall 2005, an envelope with suspicious powder was opened by guards at the Washington headquarters of the Homeland Security Department. The guards carried the substance past the office of Secretary Michael Chertoff, took it outside and then shook it outside Chertoff's window without evacuating people nearby. The powder turned out to be harmless.

--Since September 2001, guards have been caught napping or playing computer games at nuclear power plants, and one was caught dozing at a federal courthouse. Three security workers were investigated for ''inattentiveness'' at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in 2005, said Ralph DeSantis, a spokesman for the facility near Harrisburg, Pa., the site in 1979 of the nation's worst nuclear accident.

--Guards with criminal backgrounds have committed criminal offenses on and off duty in numerous cities.

Some companies have decided to conduct anti-terrorism training, regardless of whether their clients will cover the cost.

At the AlliedBarton office in Washington's Virginia suburbs, training instructor Richard Cordivari's class consisted of 13 company guards. Their assignments included a financial institution, high-rise office buildings, Washington's water and sewer utility, a university and a shopping mall.

Get to know the people who deliver packages and bottled water, Cordivari instructed. Make sure the person repairing the air conditioner is supposed to be there. Watch for people casing the location. Take note of odd smells. Know how to conduct a thorough search.

Private guards at military bases, who feared they would be fired if identified by name, told the AP they were trained to use handguns and nightsticks to fight terrorists who might be equipped with assault rifles and grenade launchers.

When guard companies learn military inspectors are on the way, these officers said, patrols are increased. Anyone from the top supervisors to the mailman can be sent out.

One guard said he was given this direction in case of an attack: ''Call the police.''

    Private Guards a Weak Link in Security, NYT, 29.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Homeland-Insecurity.html

Ala. Terror Web Site Angers Activists

May 28, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:29 a.m. ET
The New York Times

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) -- The Alabama Department of Homeland Security has taken down a Web site it operated that included gay rights and anti-war organizations in a list of groups that could include terrorists.

The Web site identified different types of terrorists, and included a list of groups it believed could spawn terrorists. The list also included environmentalists, animal rights advocates and abortion opponents.

The director of the department, Jim Walker, said his agency received a number of calls and e-mails from people who said they felt the site unfairly targeted certain people just because of their beliefs. He said he plans to put the Web site back on the Internet, but will no longer identify specific types of groups.

Howard Bayliss, chairman of the gay and lesbian advocacy group Equality Alabama, said he doesn't understand why gay rights advocates would be on the list.

''Our group has only had peaceful demonstrations. I'm deeply concerned we've been profiled in this discriminatory matter,'' Bayliss said.

The site included the groups under a description of what it called ''single-issue'' terrorists. That group includes people who feel they are trying to create a better world, the Web site said. It said that in some communities, law enforcement officers consider certain single issue groups to be a threat.

''Single-issue extremists often focus on issues that are important to all of us. However, they have no problem crossing the line between legal protest and ... illegal acts, to include even murder, to succeed in their goals,'' it read.

Walker said the site had been up since spring 2004, and had gotten a relatively small number of hits until it recently became the subject of blogs, he said.

Birmingham attorney Eric Johnston, president of the Alabama Pro Life Coalition, said he was concerned about any list that described people doing social justice work as terrorists.

''Our group's main mission is educational. The thought that we would somehow be harboring terrorists escapes me,'' he said.

    Ala. Terror Web Site Angers Activists, NYT, 28.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Web-Site-Terror.html

Study: Terror Deportations Remain Stable

May 28, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:23 a.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- U.S. immigration agencies say anti-terrorism is their primary mission, but they tried to deport only 12 people on terrorism-related charges from 2004 through 2006, according to a private research study released Sunday.

That group of 12 represents a tiny fraction of the 814,073 people the government tried to remove from the country during those three years. The study's authors acknowledge the figure understates the anti-terrorism effort by the Homeland Security Department's immigration agencies.

In addition, because no one knows how many terrorists are in the United States or tried to get in, there is no way to say whether the figure of 12 is too low, too high or about right.

''The right number is unknowable,'' co-author David Burnham said in an interview. ''But the budget and powers of this agency are influenced by all their talk and rhetoric about terrorism and criminals and if that isn't what they are doing, it should be considered by Congress and the public.''

Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke said the study failed to appreciate record-setting enforcement totals.

''They seem not to grasp that immigration laws are a powerful authority in preventing security risks from setting foot on our soil,'' Knocke said. ''The vast majority of immigration violations are either going to be criminals or economic migrants who arrive illegally, but we're tough for that off-chance one presents a national security concern.''

Terrorists have been barred, Knocke said, and new tools to help are going into place. That includes getting data on travelers well before they arrive and improving security of travel documents.

A former New York Times reporter, Burnham is co-director of the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. The private research group at Syracuse University analyzed the work of two Homeland Security agencies -- Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection.

TRAC analyzed records of the more than 200 immigration court judges employed by the Justice Department back through 1992 and the department's records of criminal cases brought in U.S. district courts. The records were acquired under the Freedom of Information Act.

TRAC also found that a separate, broader category of national security charges were brought to try to deport an additional 114 people during the three years. Criminal charges such as human trafficking, drug dealing and other traditional crimes were used against 106,878, or 13 percent of those the government tried to deport.

The overwhelming majority of deportation cases -- 86.5 percent -- were based on traditional immigration violations such as sneaking past border inspections, not having a valid visa or overstaying a student visa, TRAC said.

TRAC found that Homeland Security agencies were credited during the period with producing or assisting on only 31 of 620 criminal prosecutions in district courts against defendants whom prosecutors labeled international terrorists, domestic terrorists or terrorism financiers.

Last month, Assistant Secretary Julie L. Myers, who heads ICE, said: ''Our mission remains clear -- to protect the United States and uphold public safety by targeting the people, money and materials that support terrorists and criminal activities.''

The customs commissioner, Ralph Basham, said in the agency's performance report for 2006: ''Our priority mission -- and our greatest challenge -- is to prevent terrorists and terrorist weapons from entering the United States.''

The TRAC report said deportations and prosecutions are not the full measure of the agencies' anti-terror efforts, which also include patrolling borders and inspecting cargo. The study said some people suspected of terrorism may be charged only with lesser infractions because those are easier to prove and the maximum penalty for either charge in immigration court is removal from the country.

Defending the performance, government officials note the absence of major terrorist attacks in this country since Sept. 11, 2001.

But TRAC unearthed evidence the total of 12 persons targeted for deportation on 14 separate terrorist charges might have been too high. Only four charges were upheld by immigration judges; six charges were withdrawn by Homeland Security; one was not sustained; two are pending; and one was otherwise dealt with.

On the other hand, the number might be too low if other terrorists have entered undetected and are waiting to attack.

------

On the net:

TRAC study: http://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/178

    Study: Terror Deportations Remain Stable, NYT, 28.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Immigration-Terrorism.html

For the First Time, New York Links a Death to 9/11 Dust

May 24, 2007
The New York Times
By ANTHONY DePALMA

New York City’s chief medical examiner, Dr. Charles S. Hirsch, has for the first time directly linked a death to exposure to dust from the destruction of the World Trade Center.

In a letter made public yesterday, Dr. Hirsch said that he was certain “beyond a reasonable doubt” that dust from the twin towers contributed to the death of Felicia Dunn-Jones, 42, a civil rights lawyer who was engulfed on Sept. 11 as she ran from her office a block away from the trade center.

She later developed a serious cough and had trouble breathing, and she died five months after the terrorist attack.

Dr. Hirsch said he had decided to amend Mrs. Dunn-Jones’s death certificate to indicate that exposure to trade center dust “was contributory to her death.” The manner of death will be changed from natural causes to homicide.

Her name will be added to the official list of World Trade Center victims, and the official number of people who died as a result of the attack on the twin towers will be increased to 2,750.

By making a formal connection between Mrs. Dunn-Jones’s death and her relatively brief exposure to the dust, the medical examiner’s decision could have a wide impact on how the city deals with the growing number of illnesses and deaths linked in some way to ground zero.

The city is already under pressure to re-examine the deaths of people like James Zadroga, 34, a New York police detective who worked at the debris pile in the months after the towers fell. Although a New Jersey pathologist who conducted an autopsy last year concluded that Detective Zadroga’s death was linked to trade center dust, city officials have not accepted that finding.

“The city medical examiner has now accepted what thousands of people with 9/11-related illnesses and their doctors have long understood: that ground zero dust was harmful and even deadly,” said Representative Carolyn B. Maloney.

She and Representative Vito J. Fossella, both of New York, had appealed to Dr. Hirsch to change his original decision on Mrs. Dunn-Jones. Ms. Maloney urged Dr. Hirsch yesterday to review other cases of people who died after being exposed to the dust. The medical examiner’s office said it had no plans to undertake such a review.

But the New York State Department of Health, with financial assistance from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, has already started to study deaths among rescue and recovery workers and volunteers who responded to the trade center disaster.

The medical examiner’s decision also could be cited as supporting evidence in the federal lawsuits filed against the city by thousands of firefighters, police officers and recovery workers who say they were injured by breathing the dust during the 10-month cleanup.

“This will bring us some closure, but hopefully it will also open doors for others to get the medical compensation they need,” Joseph Jones, Mrs. Dunn-Jones’s husband, said in a telephone interview.

Mrs. Dunn-Jones was covered in ash laced with asbestos and other hazardous material as she ran from her office and made her way home to Staten Island.

After she died on Feb. 10, 2002, an autopsy showed that Mrs. Dunn-Jones had sarcoidosis, which produces microscopic lumps called granulomas on vital organs and is often associated with exposure to environmental hazards.

Her husband later filed a claim with the federal Sept. 11 Victim Compensation Fund, which concluded the disease was linked to the dust and awarded the family $2.6 million.

Mrs. Dunn-Jones’s name was engraved on the Sept. 11 memorial in Staten Island. But when Mr. Jones tried to have her name added to the official list of Sept. 11 victims, Dr. Hirsch’s office rejected the request in 2004, saying there was insufficient proof.

Richard H. Bennett, a lawyer representing the Jones family, continued to collect evidence and press the medical examiner to reconsider. Mr. Bennett said that in March he prepared a file containing more than 400 pages of reports and medical studies showing the effects of exposure to the dust.

Among the reports was one published this month in a medical journal showing a sharp increase in the number of cases of sarcoidosis among New York City firefighters in the first two years after Sept. 11.

In a letter to Mr. Bennett on Friday, Dr. Hirsch said that “accumulating evidence indicates that in some persons exposure to W.T.C. dust has caused sarcoidosis or an inflammatory reaction indistinguishable from sarcoidosis.”

Dr. Hirsch indicated in the letter that he still doubted that Mrs. Dunn-Jones’s sarcoidosis was caused by exposure to the dust.

He cited detailed medical information from the autopsy on Mrs. Dunn-Jones that showed scars on her heart muscle — the kind that would be caused by sarcoidosis — that had probably been there since before Sept. 11.

Despite having reservations about when the disease began, Dr. Hirsch said in the letter that “whether or not she had sarcoidosis prior to 9/11/01, it is likely, with certainty beyond a reasonable doubt, that exposure to W.T.C. dust was harmful to her.”

Experts agree that even brief exposure to dust could aggravate the pre-existing sarcoidosis.

“Sarcoidosis in general is usually a disorder of years, but sometimes it goes undiagnosed,” said Dr. Ronald G. Crystal, chief of the division of pulmonary and critical care medicine at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell hospital. “Then the conditions are recognized, and people die in a few months.”

Dr. Crystal said that some people are more genetically predisposed to sarcoidosis than others, but it remains a relatively rare disease and not one that should concern people who were briefly exposed to the dust.

“If there is going to be a significant increase in sarcoidosis connected with this type of exposure, it would have appeared by now,” Dr. Crystal said.

    For the First Time, New York Links a Death to 9/11 Dust, NYT, 24.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/24/nyregion/24dust.html

Amnesty Blasts U.S. on Terrorism War

May 23, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 5:03 p.m. ET
The New York Times

LONDON (AP) -- In its fight against terrorism, the United States has eroded rights worldwide, Amnesty International said Wednesday.

In its annual report, the London-based rights group said politicians around the world -- from Australia to Sudan -- were taking advantage of shortsighted U.S. leadership in a fight against global terrorism that had sacrificed individual liberties.

''One of the biggest blows to human rights has been the attempt of Western democratic states to roll back some fundamental principles of human rights -- like the prohibition of torture,'' Amnesty's Secretary-General Irene Khan told The Associated Press before the report's launch. She also criticized the U.S. policy of extraordinary rendition.

While Amnesty International has highlighted rights issues that have erupted since the deadly Sept. 11 terror attacks in the United States, little of the 337-page report dealt with the terrorist threat itself or attacks linked to the al-Qaida terror network.

In Washington, State Department spokesman Tom Casey said Amnesty's time would have been better spent on helping the Iraqi government deal with past rights abuses.

''It's pretty clear that Amnesty International thought that we'd make a convenient ideological punching bag,'' Casey said.

Last year's Amnesty report offered similar criticism of the United States, saying the country's pursuit of security had undermined human rights.

America's unique position on the world stage justified the criticism, Khan said.

''If we focus on the U.S. it's because we believe that the U.S. is a country whose enormous influence and power has to be used constructively,'' she said. ''When countries like the U.S. are seen to undermine or ignore human rights, it sends a very powerful message to others.''

The report noted that a new Army Field Manual -- which bans the use of dogs, hooding and sexual humiliation in interrogations -- did not apply to CIA-run detention facilities.

European countries were accused of failing to challenge the U.S. military putting terror suspects on secret flights to third countries for interrogations. Britain, Australia and Japan were singled out for passing harsh new anti-terror laws.

Russia's authoritarian drift also attracted Amnesty's attention.

Journalists, human rights defenders and others had been devastated by a government crackdown on civil society, the report said, pointing to the assassination of investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya and the abduction of civilians in war-wracked Chechnya.

The report said the government was intensifying its pressure on the independent media and was turning a blind eye to the growing number of hate crimes targeting foreigners, immigrants and sexual minorities.

Khan also noted the deteriorating human rights situation in Zimbabwe and Darfur, which she called ''a bleeding wound on world conscience.''

The report also criticized China's role in shielding Sudan from U.N. action, saying the Chinese government and companies showed little regard for their ''human rights footprint'' on the African continent.

Amnesty also criticized Israel, saying its army killed more than 650 Palestinians last year -- half of them unarmed civilians, including some 120 children -- a threefold increase from 2005. It said Israel had deepened the poverty in Palestinian territories by withholding customs duties, and widening a network of blockades and other travel restrictions.

The number of Israelis killed by Palestinian armed groups diminished by half last year, to 27, including 20 civilian adults and one child, the report said. By The Associated Press' count, 580 people were killed on the Palestinian side and 34 on the Israeli side in 2006.

------

On the Net:

Amnesty International, http://amnesty.org 

    Amnesty Blasts U.S. on Terrorism War, NYT, 23.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Britain-Human-Rights.html

Bush: Iraq at Center of Terror Fight

May 23, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 4:26 p.m. ET
The New York Times

NEW LONDON, Conn. (AP) -- President Bush portrayed the Iraq war as a battle between the U.S. and al-Qaida on Wednesday and shared nuggets of intelligence to contend Osama bin Laden was setting up a terrorist cell in Iraq to strike targets in America.

Bush, who faces a public weary of war and is at odds with Democrats in Congress over funding troops, said that while the Sept. 11 attacks occurred in 2001, Americans still face a major threat from terrorists.

''In the minds of al-Qaida leaders, 9/11 was just a down payment on violence yet to come,'' Bush said during a commencement speech at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in which he defended his decision to order a troop buildup in Iraq. ''It is tempting to believe that the calm here at home after 9/11 means that the danger to our country has passed.''

''Here in America, we are living in the eye of a storm,'' he said. ''All around us, dangerous winds are swirling and these winds could reach our shores at any moment.''

Critics of the war insist that U.S. troops are in the middle of fights among Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds.

''As global terror threats remain very real, President Bush is sinking more money and sending more troops to referee Iraq's civil war, when those precious resources would be better spent in finishing the mission left unaccomplished in Afghanistan,'' said Brian Katulis, a national security expert at the Center for American Progress think tank.

The White House has repeatedly said the U.S. and its allies will be successful when the Iraqis can sustain, govern and defend themselves, yet Bush used his speech to stress the threat from al-Qaida activities in Iraq.

''Hear the words of Osama bin Laden: He calls the struggle in Iraq a `war of destiny,''' Bush said. ''He proclaimed `The war is for you or for us to win. If we win it, it means your defeat and disgrace forever.'''

Much of the intelligence information Bush cited in his speech described terrorism plots already revealed. But he declassified information to flesh out details and highlight U.S. successes in foiling planned attacks orchestrated by bin Laden, the al-Qaida boss.

''Victory in Iraq is important for Osama bin Laden, and victory in Iraq is vital for the United States of America,'' Bush told the graduating class seated in a stadium under bright sunshine along the Thames River.

Bush said intelligence showed that in January 2005, bin Laden tasked Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, his senior operative in Iraq, to organize a terrorist cell and use Iraq as a staging ground for attacking the United States.

This information expanded on a classified bulletin the Homeland Security Department issued in March 2005. The bulletin, which warned that bin Laden had enlisted al-Zarqawi to plan potential strikes in the United States, was described at the time as credible but not specific. It did not prompt the administration to raise its national terror alert level.

Bush said that in the spring of 2005, bin Laden also instructed Hamza Rabia, a senior operative, to brief al-Zarqawi on an al-Qaida plan to attack sites outside Iraq.

''Our intelligence community reports that a senior al-Qaida leader, Abu Faraj al-Libi, went further and suggested that bin Laden actually send Rabia, himself, to Iraq to help plan external operations,'' Bush said. ''Abu Faraj later speculated that if this effort proved successful, al-Qaida might one day prepare the majority of its external operations from Iraq.''

Bush said another suspected al-Qaida operative, Ali Salih al-Mari, was training in poisoning at a camp in Afghanistan and dispatched to the United States before the Sept. 11 attacks to ''serve as a sleeper agent ready for follow-on attacks.''

Bush said bin Laden attempted to send a new commander to Iraq, an Iraqi-born terrorist named Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi. Al-Iraqi, who was al-Qaida's top commander in Afghanistan, was captured last year and recently transferred to Guantanamo Bay.

Democrats and other critics have accused Bush of selectively declassifying intelligence, including portions of a sensitive National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, to justify the U.S.-led invasion on grounds that Saddam Hussein's government possessed weapons of mass destruction. That assertion proved false.

Rand Beers, national security adviser to John Kerry's 2004 Democratic presidential campaign, contended Wednesday that the Bush administration was releasing intelligence to buttress the argument that Iraq is the central front in the war on terrorism while a number of intelligence sources say the most recent attacks or planned attacks against the U.S. and its allies have originated in Pakistan instead.

''Bin Laden is using Iraq to kill and demonize the United States while remaining secure and planning further operations in Pakistan,'' Beers said.

Frances Fragos Townsend, the White House homeland security adviser, said new details about the plots were declassified because the intelligence community had tracked all leads from the information and the players were either dead or in U.S. custody.

In May 2005, al-Libi was captured. Several months later, in December 2005, al-Rabia was killed in Pakistan. In June of 2006, al-Zarqawi was killed in Iraq in a U.S. airstrike.

Actually, making the new information public earlier might have allowed Bush to use it to his political advantage, Townsend said. ''This is kind of late to be able to bring this to the game,'' she said, adding that intelligence officials needed time to exploit the information.

------

On the Net:

White House: http://www.whitehouse.gov

    Bush: Iraq at Center of Terror Fight, NYT, 23.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-US-Terrorism.html

Settlement on Ground Zero Insurance Claims

May 23, 2007
The New York Times
By CHARLES V. BAGLI

The Spitzer administration announced this afternoon the settlement of insurance claims at ground zero, ensuring that $4.55 billion will be available for rebuilding the World Trade Center site and ending an often bitter, five-year battle with insurers over payouts related to the terrorist attack.

The settlement with seven of the two dozen insurers — Allianz Global Risk, Travelers Companies, Zurich American, Swiss Re, Employers Insurance, Industrial Risk Insurers and Royal Indemnity — that provided coverage for the World Trade Center is the culmination of a two-month campaign by the state insurance superintendent, Eric R. Dinallo, involving meetings in Geneva, Paris and Delaware.

In recent weeks, Gov. Eliot Spitzer joined the negotiations, which lasted until the early morning hours today. The other insurers made good on their claims.

The agreement removes a dark cloud over the rebuilding effort, although the insurance money represents only about half of the $9 billion cost of rebuilding the office towers and retail space at ground zero.

Without the money, officials say they might not have been able to obtain private financing or the use of tax-free Liberty Bonds. The dispute, officials say, could have dragged on for some time without a resolution, while eating up millions of dollars in lawyers’ fees.

“The unsettled insurance claims were the last major barrier to rebuilding and have been bitterly and intensely contested for almost six years,” Governor Spitzer said in an interview. “This means we can now fund construction, access the financial markets and move on to what should be our primary focus: rebuilding.”

He said the agreement, which ends all the litigation, was part of a collaborative effort on the part of many officials who had lost “patience with the ongoing fighting that didn’t serve the public interest or the effort to rebuild.” Mr. Dinallo was working in tandem with the retired judge Albert Rosenblatt, who was overseeing an arbitration proceeding in the case.

Business leaders downtown, who have been frustrated by years of delays and political and legal wrangling, were elated by the news.

“The downtown business community is pleased that the efforts of the governor and the insurance superintendent in removing the remaining uncertainty over the financing of the World Trade Center site,” said Eric J. Deutsch, president of the Alliance for Downtown New York. “In conjunction with a strong office market, the settlement will ensure success.”

So far, the two dozen insurers at ground zero have collectively paid about $2.55 billion on a maximum claim of $4.68 billion.

Under the settlement, the seven insurers who disputed some of the claims will pay an additional $2 billion. All parties to the settlement have signed confidentiality agreements concerning the specific amounts paid by each company.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the land at ground zero and built the trade center, will get about $870 million from the settlement, which will go toward the cost of erecting the $3 billion Freedom Tower, the tallest and most symbolic skyscraper planned for ground zero, as well as the retail space at the complex. the developer Larry A. Silverstein will get the remaining $1.13 billion for three large office towers to be built along Church Street, between Vesey and Liberty Streets.

The Port Authority and Mr. Silverstein, who had leased the trade center complex six weeks before Sept. 11, had to relinquish their claim that the companies owed in excess of $500 million in interest relating to delays in making the payments.

This is not to say that nothing has happened at the 16-acre trade center site. The Port Authority is building a $2 billion PATH train station and work has begun on the Freedom Tower. The authority expects to turn over the eastern portion of the site to Mr. Silverstein at the end of this year.

“Look how far we’ve come in the last year,” Mr. Silverstein said.

“A year ago today, we opened 7 World Trade Center, a huge success and a validation of downtown as a world class business district,” he said. “We’ve started construction on the Freedom Tower. We reached an agreement on who would build what and when. And now we have resources to rebuild as quickly and spectacularly as possible.”

    Settlement on Ground Zero Insurance Claims, NYT, 23.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/23/nyregion/23cnd-insure.html?hp

White House Pushed Ashcroft on Wiretaps

May 15, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:34 p.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush's warrantless wiretapping program was so questionable that a top Justice Department official refused for a time to reauthorize it, sparking a battle with top White House officials at the bedside of an ailing attorney general, a Senate panel was told Tuesday.

Former Deputy Attorney General James Comey told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday that he refused to recertify the program because Attorney General John Ashcroft had reservations about its legality just before falling ill with pancreatitis in March 2004.

Comey, the acting attorney general during Ashcroft's absence, said then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and former White House Chief of Staff Andy Card responded by trying to get Ashcroft to sign the recertification from his bed at George Washington University Hospital.

During that dramatic meeting, also attended by Comey, Ashcroft lifted his head off the pillow and appeared reluctant to sign the document, pointing out that Comey held the powers of the office.

Gonzales and Card then left the hospital room, Comey said.

''I was angry,'' Comey told the panel. ''I thought I had just witnessed an effort to take advantage of a very sick man who did not have the powers of the attorney general.''

The hospital room confrontation had been previously reported, but this was the first time Comey has spoken about it publicly.

    White House Pushed Ashcroft on Wiretaps, NYT, 15.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Eavesdropping.html

Terror Suspect Claims Torture

May 15, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:23 p.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A Pakistani terrorism suspect denied any connection to al-Qaida and said he was tortured and his family was hounded by U.S. authorities, according to a transcript released Tuesday by the Pentagon.

Majid Khan, in a lengthy written statement, said the CIA and the Defense Department tortured him after his capture in Pakistan as well as when he was transferred to the Guantanamo Bay detention facility.

''I swear to God this place in some sense worst than CIA jails. I am being mentally torture here,'' said Khan in a statement read by his personal representative about his time in Guantanamo. ''There is extensive torture even for the smallest of infractions.''

Khan, who grew up in Maryland and is the only U.S. resident among 15 detainees the government considers most dangerous, also described suicide attempts where he ''chewed my artery which goes through my elbow.''

    Terror Suspect Claims Torture, R, 15.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Guantanamo-Terror-Suspect.html

After 5 Years, Padilla Goes on Trial in Terror Case

May 15, 2007
The New York Times
By ABBY GOODNOUGH

MIAMI, May 14 — The trial of Jose Padilla, the American convert to Islam charged with conspiring to support terrorism, opened Monday with federal prosecutors describing what they called a calculated plan to provide money, equipment and recruits to Al Qaeda.

Brian K. Frazier, an assistant United States attorney, spent a good part of his opening arguments defining terms like “terrorism support cell,” “jihad” and “mujahedeen” for the jury of seven men and five women.

Mr. Frazier described one of Mr. Padilla’s two co-defendants, Adham Hassoun, as a zealot who “indoctrinated people and converted them to become Al Qaeda fighters,” and the other, Kifah Jayyousi, as “the money man” who provided financing and equipment to terrorist groups overseas.

Mr. Frazier said Mr. Padilla, who was declared an enemy combatant soon after his arrest in 2002 but was eventually moved to the criminal justice system, had gone even further, traveling to a training camp in Afghanistan.

“We will prove that Jose Padilla became an Al Qaeda terrorist trainee,” Mr. Frazier said.

Mr. Padilla was described after his arrest as an operative of Al Qaeda plotting to detonate a radioactive “dirty bomb” in the United States. But that charge does not figure in the case being tried before Judge Marcia G. Cooke of the Federal District Court here, because, the government has said, it obtained the information by questioning other terrorism suspects abroad and interrogating Mr. Padilla during his initial confinement at a military brig in South Carolina. Federal rules of evidence prohibit or limit the use of information obtained during such interrogations.

Mr. Padilla’s detention without charges lasted more than three years and became a test case of President Bush’s powers in the fight against terror. The government transferred him to civilian custody in Miami in 2005, just as the Supreme Court was weighing whether to take up the legality of his military detention. With the transfer, prosecutors added his case to those of Mr. Hassoun, a Lebanese-born Palestinian computer programmer, and Dr. Jayyousi, a Jordanian-born engineer.

The trial is being conducted under heavy security. Federal marshals have been brought in from around the country to help protect the courthouse, and a bomb-sniffing dog from Rochester was outside the courtroom Monday.

Mr. Padilla and the other defendants, dressed in dark suits and blending in with their lawyers, sat quietly through the day’s proceedings, following attentively.

Mr. Frazier, the prosecutor, gave a history lesson of sorts, describing ethnic and religious conflicts in Lebanon, Somalia, Kosovo and Chechnya. He said Al Qaeda had sent recruits to those regions, using the conflicts to advance its own violent agenda.

Al Qaeda “needed people who were willing to fight and even kill” for Islamic fundamentalism, he said — people like the three defendants. Their “South Florida support cell,” he said, “fit right into this pattern of training, equipping and deploying Islamic fighters all over the world.”

As evidence, he said, the jurors will see an application that Mr. Padilla filled out — in Arabic, under an alias — to attend a terrorist training camp. He said they would also hear many of the defendants’ phone conversations, thousands of which were recorded by the F.B.I. from 1993 to 2000. “The phone calls will tell the story of this case,” Mr. Frazier said.

Defense lawyers said their clients were merely passionate and vocal Muslims with no connection to Al Qaeda and no intent to support terrorism. The government’s case is politically motivated, they said, and was fueled by the nation’s dread following 9/11.

“In this case,” said Anthony Natale, a lawyer for Mr. Padilla, “you will see how in the absence of hard evidence, a suspicion can be fueled by fear, nourished by prejudice and directed by politics into a criminal prosecution.”

Jeanne Baker, a lawyer for Mr. Hassoun, said the government had cherry-picked certain words and phrases from the recorded phone calls. “The government really is trying to put Al Qaeda on trial in this case,” Ms. Baker said, “and it doesn’t belong in this courtroom because it has nothing to do with the true facts.”

She and other defense lawyers said that in fact their clients had only been trying to help Muslims who were under attack in the 1990s in places like Kosovo and Chechnya. In that context, Ms. Baker said, words like mujahedeen and jihad have positive connotations and nothing to do with terrorism.

Mr. Padilla, now 36, made his first visit to a Muslim country, Egypt, in 1998. He did so only because he wanted to become an imam, said Mr. Natale, who, like the other defense lawyers, dismissed the government’s accusation of a conspiracy to “murder, kidnap and maim” people overseas. “As you will hear clearly and without a doubt,” he said, “there were no victims in this case, real or imagined.”

Testimony will begin on Tuesday. The trial is expected to last at least three months.

    After 5 Years, Padilla Goes on Trial in Terror Case, NYT, 15.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/15/washington/15padilla.html

Guantánamo Detainees’ Suit Challenges Fairness of Military’s Repeat Hearings

May 15, 2007
The New York Times
By WILLIAM GLABERSON

WASHINGTON, May 14 — The military system of determining whether detainees are properly held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, includes an unusual practice: If Pentagon officials disagree with the result of a hearing, they order a second one, or even a third, until they approve of the finding.

These “do-overs,” as some critics call them, are among the most controversial parts of the military’s system of determining whether detainees are enemy combatants, and the fairness of the repeat hearings is at the center of a pivotal federal appeals court case.

On Tuesday, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit begins consideration of the first of what are expected to be scores of challenges to the military panels’ decisions that detainees are enemy combatants and are properly held.

The case, involving eight detainees, is the first under a 2005 law that permits a limited review of the panels’ decisions. The repeat hearings have emerged as a major flashpoint, with lawyers for the government and the detainees offering the court sharply different interpretations of their significance, legal filings and interviews show.

For both sides, the dispute crystallizes the larger questions now facing the courts over how much leeway the appeals court judges have to review the decisions of the hearing panels.

The 2005 law said the court was largely limited to determining whether the military had followed its own procedures in determining a detainee’s status. But the lawyers for the detainees are pressing to get the court to consider the basic fairness of the procedure itself.

Detainees’ lawyers say the issue of the repeated hearings offers the starkest proof that the Pentagon set up a system of military tribunals not to find the truth about the detainees but to ratify its own conclusion that the military had seized the right people.

“When you have a proceeding that comes up with the ‘wrong answer,’ ” said P. Sabin Willett, one of the detainees’ lawyers, “in this country we don’t keep sending it back to a tribunal until they come up with the ‘right answer.’ And we don’t do it in secret, and that’s what happened here.”

Mr. Willett is to argue before the appeals court on Tuesday.

Government lawyers say critics are wrong to compare the wartime system in Guantánamo, known as combatant status review tribunals, or C.S.R.T.’s, to the civilian legal system, which gives defendants extensive rights.

“This is just one of many areas,” a government brief said, “where it is inappropriate to compare C.S.R.T. proceedings with background principles that stem from domestic criminal law.”

Another aspect to the case in the appeals court that has caused public debate involves the government’s request that the court tighten restrictions on lawyers for the detainees. One proposal would have limited the number of visits the lawyers could make to Guantánamo, a request that the Justice Department withdrew Friday.

The practice of repeating some of the hearings is shrouded in secrecy. It first came to public attention in November, when a report by Seton Hall University Law School documented that “at least three detainees were initially found not to be enemy combatants” but were then reclassified as enemy combatants after a new hearing.

Reviewing records of 102 hearings that were obtained from the government through lawsuits, the report’s authors found that “at least one detainee, after his first and second tribunals unanimously determined him not to be an enemy combatant, had yet a third tribunal” that then classified him as an enemy combatant. About 380 men are now detained at Guantánamo.

Military officials have not said in how many cases such hearings were repeated.

A Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Cmdr. Chito Peppler of the Navy, acknowledged that some decisions had reversed earlier findings that detainees were not enemy combatants.

At the same time, Commander Peppler said, after reconsideration in Washington, some detainees benefited from tribunal hearings that were repeated and that reclassified them from enemy combatant to “no longer enemy combatant,” making them eligible for release.

Commander Peppler disputed the way the detainees’ lawyers described the repeat hearings. He said multiple hearings for a single detainee were part of the process. Under Defense Department rules, he said, the hearing process is not finished until a Pentagon official “completes final review and approval of the decisions of the tribunals.”

The combatant status review process was initiated in a July 7, 2004, memorandum by Paul D. Wolfowitz, then the deputy secretary of defense. He acted after a Supreme Court decision that June suggested that detainees were entitled to a “fair opportunity to rebut the government’s factual assertions before a neutral decision maker.”

As set up by the Pentagon, the tribunals do not permit detainees to have lawyers at the hearings or to see much of the evidence against them.

When asked about the detainees’ lawyers’ assertion that the tribunal process was not fair, a Justice Department spokesman, Erik Ablin, said “more process has been afforded to the detainees than ever provided to enemy combatants in the history of armed conflict.”

Critics of the Bush administration’s detention policies argue that the unusual and indefinite detentions at Guantánamo raise new questions about the extent of the government’s war powers.

Eric M. Freedman, a law professor at Hofstra University who has consulted with lawyers for several detainees, said the repeated hearings were a symptom of the flaws in the military hearings. “The system is designed,” Mr. Freedman said, “to validate the holding of everyone they are now holding.”

Because much of the evidence in the combatant status hearings is classified and much of the process occurs behind closed doors, little is known about the repeat hearings.

One e-mail message from a Pentagon official, declassified last month in a court case, shows that the official, whose name remains classified, ordered a new hearing after a detainee had been determined not to be an enemy combatant. The e-mail message, apparently from early 2005, noted that other detainees whose circumstances were similar had been declared properly held.

The official wrote that “inconsistencies will not cast a favorable light” on the hearing process or the Pentagon office in charge of the combatant status review system, the Office for the Administrative Review of the Detention of Enemy Combatants. After a new hearing, according to a court document, the detainee was reclassified as an enemy combatant. He is still at Guantánamo.

Detainees’ lawyers say that in recent months they have learned of other cases, beyond the three identified in the Seton Hall report last year, that might have involved repeated hearings.

This month, Susan Baker Manning, a lawyer for seven detainees involved in the current appeals court case, received a package of information from the government about the combatant status hearing of one of the seven. At the bottom of a Pentagon memorandum dated Jan. 14, 2005, there was a note that said her client had first been determined not to be an enemy combatant. But later, the notation continued, it was “ultimately determined that the detainee is an enemy combatant.”

Ms. Manning’s client, Hammad Memet, now 29, has been at Guantánamo for more than five years.

    Guantánamo Detainees’ Suit Challenges Fairness of Military’s Repeat Hearings, NYT, 15.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/15/washington/15gitmo.html

Ground Zero Illnesses Clouding Giuliani’s Legacy

May 14, 2007
The New York Times
By ANTHONY DePALMA

Anyone who watched Rudolph W. Giuliani preside over ground zero in the days after 9/11 glimpsed elements of his strength: decisiveness, determination, self-confidence.

Those qualities were also on display over the months he directed the cleanup of the collapsed World Trade Center. But today, with evidence that thousands of people who worked at ground zero have become sick, many regard Mr. Giuliani’s triumph of leadership as having come with a human cost.

An examination of Mr. Giuliani’s handling of the extraordinary recovery operation during his last months in office shows that he seized control and largely limited the influence of experienced federal agencies. In doing that, according to some experts and many of those who worked in the trade center’s ruins, Mr. Giuliani might have allowed his sense of purpose to trump caution in the rush to prove that his city was not crippled by the attack.

Administration documents and thousands of pages of legal testimony filed in a lawsuit against New York City, along with more than two dozen interviews with people involved in the events of the last four months of Mr. Giuliani’s administration, show that while the city had a safety plan for workers, it never meaningfully enforced federal requirements that those at the site wear respirators.

At the same time, the administration warned companies working on the pile that they would face penalties or be fired if work slowed. And according to public hearing transcripts and unpublished administration records, officials also on some occasions gave flawed public representations of the nature of the health threat, even as they privately worried about exposure to lawsuits by sickened workers.

“The city ran a generally slipshod, haphazard, uncoordinated, unfocused response to environmental concerns,” said David Newman, an industrial hygienist with the New York Committee on Occupational Safety and Health, a labor group.

City officials and a range of medical experts are now convinced that the dust and toxic materials in the air around the site were a menace. More than 2,000 New York City firefighters have been treated for serious respiratory problems. Seventy percent of nearly 10,000 recovery workers screened at Mount Sinai Medical Center have trouble breathing. City officials estimate that health care costs related to the air at ground zero have already run into the hundreds of millions of dollars, and no one knows whether other illnesses, like cancers, will emerge.

The question of who, if anyone, is to blame for not adequately protecting the workers could finally be decided in United States District Court in Manhattan, where thousands of firefighters, police officers and other recovery workers are suing the city for negligence.

City officials have always maintained that they acted in good faith to protect everyone at the site but that many workers chose not to wear available safety equipment, for a variety of reasons.

Mr. Giuliani has said very little publicly about how his leadership might have influenced the behavior of the men and women who worked at ground zero. Mr. Giuliani, whose image as a 9/11 hero has been a focus of his run for president, declined to be interviewed for this article. His representatives did not respond to specific questions about the pace of the cleanup, the hazards at the site and Mr. Giuliani’s reticence about the workers’ illnesses.

Moreover, many of the people who ran agencies for Mr. Giuliani or who handled responsibility for the health issues after he left office would not comment, citing the pending litigation.

In the past, Mr. Giuliani has said that quickly reopening the financial district was essential for healing New York and the nation. The cost of Wall Street’s going dark was enormous, and Mr. Giuliani has said he was forced to balance competing interests as he confronted a never-imagined emergency, and he acknowledged that he and others made mistakes.

A Mayor in Control

From the beginning, there was no doubt that Mr. Giuliani and his team ruled the hellish disaster site. Officials from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Army Corps of Engineers and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, all with extensive disaster response experience, arrived almost immediately, only to be placed on the sideline. One Army Corps official said Mr. Giuliani acted like a “benevolent dictator.”

Despite the presence of those federal experts, Mr. Giuliani assigned the ground zero cleanup to a largely unknown city agency, the Department of Design and Construction. Kenneth Holden, the department’s commissioner until January 2004, said in a deposition in the federal lawsuit against the city that he initially expected FEMA or the Army Corps to try to take over the cleanup operation. Mr. Giuliani never let them.

In this environment, the mayor’s take-charge attitude produced two clear results, according to records and interviews. One, work moved quickly. Although the cleanup was expected to last 30 months, the pit was cleared by June 2002, nine months after the attack.

And second, the city ultimately became responsible for thousands of workers and volunteers while, critics say, its health and safety standards went lacking.

“I would describe it as a conspiracy of purpose,” said Suzanne Mattei, director of the New York office of the Sierra Club, which has been critical of how the cleanup was handled. “It wasn’t people running around saying, ‘Don’t do this safely.’ But there was a unified attempt to do everything as fast as possible, to get everything up and running as fast as possible. Anything in the way of that just tended to be ignored.”

Records show that the city was aware of the danger in the ground zero dust from the start. In a federal court deposition, Kelly R. McKinney, associate commissioner at the city’s health department in 2001, said the agency issued an advisory on the night of Sept. 11 stating that asbestos in the air made the site hazardous and that everyone should wear masks.

Many workers refused. No one wanted to be slowed down while there was still a chance of rescuing people. Later on, workers said that the available respirators were cumbersome and made it difficult for them to talk.

Violations of federal safety rules abounded, and no one strictly enforced them. OSHA did not play an active role during the rescue phase, which is usually the case in emergency operations. But the agency remained in a strictly advisory position long after there was any hope of finding any survivors and at the point when, in other circumstances, it would have enforced safety requirements.

Agency officials said that enforcing rules and issuing fines would have delayed the cleanup, and contractors could have passed along the cost of the fines to the city.

With the city in charge, municipal employees were given video cameras to record recovery workers who were not wearing respirators. Violations were reported at daily safety meetings.

An official who was then with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, who asked not to be quoted by name because he was not authorized to speak for the agency, said the focus in safety discussions was always on preventing accidents, not protecting workers from the toxic dust.

Remarkably, not one fatal accident occurred on the pile. But the city’s inspectors found that by late October, only 29 percent of ground zero workers were wearing the sophisticated respirators that were required by OSHA. Even Mr. Giuliani sometimes showed up without one.

The city’s handling of safety issues has been criticized by doctors, unions and occupational safety experts. Mr. Giuliani’s oversight of the operation was condemned in a 2006 book, “Grand Illusion,” by Wayne Barrett, a longtime critic of the former mayor, and Dan Collins. Mr. Barrett said in an interview that when it came to safety, Mr. Giuliani “said all the right things, but did all the wrong things.”

In their defense against the negligence lawsuit, city officials have maintained that they cooperated with federal officials to develop an effective safety plan. On Nov. 20, well into the cleanup, contractors and city agencies agreed to follow safety rules, and OSHA agreed not to fine them if violations occurred.

The agency ended up distributing more than 130,000 respirators. Workers’ unions tried to get members to wear them, but usage remained spotty without strict enforcement of the rules.

“What they were doing on paper wasn’t what they were doing in practice,” said Paul J. Napoli, one of the lawyers representing the more than 8,000 workers who have sued the city for negligence. He said that the construction companies were billing the city for their time and materials, and “safety slows things down.”

The four large construction companies that had been hired to clear debris worked around the clock. But that was not fast enough for the city, especially after the rescue operation formally ended on Sept. 29. One reason for the push may have been concern that unnecessary delays would have added to the cost of the cleanup.

Two days after the rescue efforts ended and the full-scale recovery and cleanup began, Michael Burton, executive deputy commissioner of the Design and Construction Department, warned one of the companies in a letter that the city would fire individual workers or companies “if the highest level of efficiency is not maintained.”

Danger in the Air

Much has been said and written about Christie Whitman, then the Environmental Protection Agency administrator, and her statement a week after the towers fell that the air in New York was safe. But even then, the air above the debris pile was known to be more dangerous than the air in the rest of Lower Manhattan.

In those first days after 9/11, Mr. Giuliani made it clear that workers needed to wear masks at ground zero because it was more contaminated than elsewhere. But as time went on, and workers failed to heed the warnings, the record indicates that his administration sometimes said otherwise.

Even after the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health found that workers were “unnecessarily exposed” to health hazards, officials played down the danger.

Robert Adams, director of environmental health and safety services at the Design and Construction Department, told the City Council’s environmental committee in early November that even unprotected ground zero workers would not experience long-term health risks. In an interview last week, Mr. Adams, now working for a consulting firm in Princeton, N.J., said that he still believed that based on the information available at the time, the right decisions were made.

Whatever they were saying publicly about the safety of the air, Mr. Giuliani and his staff were privately worried. A memo to Deputy Mayor Robert M. Harding from his assistant in early October said that the city faced as many as 10,000 liability claims connected to 9/11, “including toxic tort cases that might arise in the next few decades.”

The warning did not lead to a crackdown on workers without respirators. Rather, a month later, Mr. Giuliani wrote to members of the city’s Congressional delegation urging passage of a bill that capped the city’s liability at $350 million. And two years after Mr. Giuliani left office, FEMA appropriated $1 billion for a special insurance company to defend the city against 9/11 lawsuits.

Some experts and critics have suggested that the only way the respirator rules could have been enforced after rescue operations ended would have been to temporarily shut down the site and lay down the law: No respirator, no work. And they say the only person who could have done so was Mr. Giuliani.

“They should have backed off on the night shift, when a very limited amount of work could be done,” said Charles Blaich, who was in charge of safety for the Fire Department at the time of the attack.

Mr. Blaich, who is now retired, said he considers Mr. Giuliani’s unwillingness to enforce respirator rules a failure of judgment, not a mistake, because no one had ever faced such a crisis.

“ ‘Mistake’ indicates there was a known procedure that wasn’t followed,” he said. “There just was not that much logistics in place to support another course of action.”

Help for the Sick

Millions of Americans saw television news reports of Mr. Giuliani attending firefighters’ funerals. They heard him call those who died heroes.

But they have not heard him say much about the medical problems of ground zero workers. Although he pushed Congress to protect the city from lawsuits, he has generally stood on the sidelines as New York’s delegation tried to get the federal government to pay for the treatment that sick workers need.

“I don’t think I ever saw the mayor at a 9/11 hearing on health,” said Representative Jerrold Nadler, a Democrat whose district includes parts of Brooklyn and Manhattan. Mr. Nadler, who was one of the first to criticize the city’s handling of ground zero, said it never occurred to him or to other Democrats in Congress to ask for Mr. Giuliani’s help to influence the Republican White House.

John T. Odermatt, who was Mr. Giuliani’s deputy at the city’s Office of Emergency Management, said that Mr. Giuliani had to make many decisions every day during the crisis, but the priority always was “clearly more about people than getting the site open.”

Mr. Odermatt, now speaking on behalf of Mr. Giuliani’s presidential campaign, said he did not know whether the former mayor had ever lobbied Congress on behalf of sick workers, and the campaign did not provide any information about Mr. Giuliani’s working to secure federal funds for treatment of ground zero responders. Many of those people are now sick, and they are angry.

Lee Clarke, director of health and safety for District Council 37, the city’s largest public employees’ union, said Mr. Giuliani used “very, very poor judgment” in rushing to reopen the financial district without watching out for the workers who cheered him at ground zero.

Ms. Clarke said that if those workers found themselves in a meeting with Mr. Giuliani today, “a number of them would be standing up, wanting a piece of Rudy.”

    Ground Zero Illnesses Clouding Giuliani’s Legacy, NYT, 14.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/14/nyregion/14giuliani.html?hp

Face-recognition systems weighed as next weapon against terrorism

10.5.2007
USA Today
By Thomas Frank

WASHINGTON — Homeland Security leaders are exploring futuristic and possibly privacy-invading technology aimed at finding terrorists and criminals by using digital surveillance photos that analyze facial characteristics.

The government is paying for some of the most advanced research into controversial face-recognition technology, which converts photos into numerical sequences that can be instantly compared with millions of photos in a database.

Facial-recognition research was sought to enable federal air marshals to surreptitiously photograph people in airports and bus and train stations to check whether they were on terrorist databases. The air marshals disavowed the technology to focus on identifying suspects through methods that don't use cameras.

Even so, the research continues and could help police identify someone photographed by a security camera, said David Boyd, head of command, control and interoperability at Homeland Security's Science and Technology branch.

The technology has been tested at Boston's Logan International Airport, in busy city centers and at the 2001 Super Bowl in Tampa

The ability to establish quick identities will "turbocharge video surveillance," ACLU privacy expert Jay Stanley warns. "It turns 'dumb' camera lenses into 'smart' observers that not only capture images but attach an identity to the image. That could increase the attractiveness of surveillance cameras."

Melissa Ngo of the Electronic Privacy Information Center says the technology endangers privacy by enabling ordinary security cameras to find out the names of people being observed. "Why are you being tracked if you're not doing anything wrong?" she said.

Face-recognition cameras have helped casinos spot known card counters and other unwelcome gamblers, said Walter Hamilton, chairman of the International Biometric Industry Association.

More recently, 19 states have adopted the technology and compare driver's-license applicants with a photo database of license holders to see whether an applicant already has a license or is using a false identity, Hamilton said.

The Homeland Security research aims to make the technology work in one area where it has failed: surveillance. Tampa and Virginia Beach police removed face-recognition systems that did not yield a single arrest. During a test at Boston's airport in 2002, the system failed 39% of the time to identify volunteers posing as terrorists at security checkpoints.

Using face-recognition for surveillance is "enormously difficult" because systems photograph people at oblique angles or in weak light, both of which create poor images, said Takeo Kanade, head of Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute. Terrorists can defeat the systems with disguises or hats that shield their faces.

The Homeland Security research aims to counter shortcomings by creating technology that will "take a partial picture of a face and reconstruct that into a full frontal shot," Boyd said. "No one has done that before."

Kanade said the research, by L-1 Identity Solutions of Stamford, Conn., "challenges the most difficult part of face recognition. It's a challenge worth pursuing."

    Face-recognition systems weighed as next weapon against terrorism, UT, 10.5.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2007-05-10-facial-recognition-terrorism_N.htm

Jury chosen in former "enemy combatant" trial

Tue May 8, 2007
6:54PM EDT
Reuters
By Jane Sutton

MIAMI (Reuters) - Defense lawyers accused the U.S. government of trying to oust anyone with Muslim ties from the jury seated on Tuesday to try former "dirty bomber" suspect Jose Padilla and two other men on charges of supporting terrorism.

Prosecutors in turn accused the defense of trying to strike all the white and Hispanic men from the Miami jury chosen to try the case.

U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke questioned both sides about their reasons for excusing jury candidates and found that none had been excused for racial, ethnic or religious reasons.

The panel of seven men and five women was scheduled to hear opening statements on Monday in the trial, which is expected to last through August.

Padilla, a 36-year-old U.S. citizen and alleged al Qaeda recruit, was arrested at Chicago's O'Hare Airport in 2002 and held in a military brig without charge for three and a half years.

President George W. Bush declared him an "enemy combatant" in the war against terrorism and his administration said Padilla was plotting to set off a radioactive "dirty bomb" in the United States.

Padilla was transferred to civilian custody as his lawyers prepared a Supreme Court challenge to the president's authority to imprison him without charges.

He and two other men, Adham Amin Hassoun and Kifah Wael Jayyousi, face life in prison if convicted on charges of conspiring to "murder, kidnap and maim" people overseas and providing material support for terrorists.

They are accused of providing money and recruits for Islamist groups waging violent jihad in Afghanistan, Algeria, Bosnia, Chechnya, Lebanon, Libya and Somalia. None of the three are accused of committing any violent acts.

The charges do not mention the "dirty bomb" allegations, which were based in part on statements from two al Qaeda suspects who claimed they were tortured during interrogations before being sent to the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba.

Defense lawyers accused prosecutors of using their allotment of jury challenges to dismiss a Muslim woman, a woman whose father belonged to the Nation of Islam and others with ties to the faith.

"They have shown a pattern of bias," said Marshall Dore Lewis, one of Jayyousi's lawyers.

All three defendants are Muslims.

Prosecutors accused the defense team of trying to eliminate all the male jurors who were not black. They did not say why the defense might want to do that, but black men are often perceived as being more skeptical of the government than other groups, and thus less likely to convict.

The jury is made up of five blacks, four whites and three Hispanics. An Egyptian-born woman who was raised Muslim is one of the six alternates.

Cooke accepted the explanations the lawyers gave for dismissing other jury candidates. One fell asleep in court and was deemed unlikely to stay awake during the 100 hours of wiretapped phone calls the prosecution plans to use as evidence.

Prosecutors booted a Muslim woman they described as getting all her news from "renowned terrorist countries" Yemen, Syria and Iran. Defense lawyers ousted a Cuban American who referred to jihadists as "brain-washed suckers" and said Muslims were indoctrinated to hate Americans just as Cubans were.

    Jury chosen in former "enemy combatant" trial, R, 8.5.2007, http://www.reuters.com/article/politicsNews/idUSN0819345620070508

6 Men Arrested in a Terror Plot Against Fort Dix

May 9, 2007
The New York Times
By DAVID KOCIENIEWSKI

CAMDEN, N.J., May 8 — Six Muslim men from New Jersey and Philadelphia were charged Tuesday with plotting to attack Fort Dix with automatic weapons and possibly even rocket-propelled grenades, vowing in taped conversations “to kill as many soldiers as possible,” federal authorities said.

The arrests came after a 15-month investigation during which the F.B.I. and two informers who had infiltrated the group taped them training with automatic weapons in rural Pennsylvania, conducting surveillance of military bases in the Northeast, watching videos of Osama bin Laden and the 9/11 hijackers and trying to buy AK-47 assault rifles.

The authorities described the suspects as Islamic extremists and said they represented the newest breed of threat: loosely organized domestic militants unconnected to — but inspired by — Al Qaeda or other international terror groups.

But the criminal complaint that details the plot describes an effort that was alternately ambitious and clumsy, with the men at turns declaring themselves eager to sacrifice their lives in the name of Allah and worrying about getting arrested or deported for buying weapons or possessing a map of a military base.

The suspects include three ethnic Albanian brothers who entered the United States illegally, part of a family that has lived for years in Cherry Hill, N.J., where they attended public schools and relatives ran a roofing business and a pizzeria. They were joined by their brother-in-law, who was born in Jordan and is a United States citizen, and two other legal United states residents: an ethnic Albanian from the former Yugoslavia, and a Turk who lived in Philadelphia.

The men, ages 22 to 28, held jobs ranging from roofer to cabdriver to pizza deliveryman, and had no clear motivation other than their stated desire to kill United States soldiers in the name of Islam. They considered a variety of targets, including the annual Army-Navy football game and warships docked in the Port of Philadelphia, but ultimately dismissed Dover Air Force Base in Delaware as having too much security and picked Fort Dix largely because one of their fathers owned a restaurant nearby that delivered to the base.

The authorities first caught up with the men in January 2006, when personnel at a video store alerted the authorities after the suspects requested that he transfer onto a DVD a videotape of the group shouting about jihad as they fired assault weapons at a range in the Pocono Mountains.

“This is a new brand of terrorism where a small cell of people can bring enormous devastation,” Christopher J. Christie, the United States attorney for New Jersey, said at an afternoon news conference at the courthouse here.

As the suspects were charged before a United States magistrate judge, Joel Schneider, prosecutors described a complicated operation that was marked by deadly weapons but also lacking in sophistication. The authorities said one of the men had been a sniper in Kosovo, and as they sought to amass the weapons they intended to use in the attack, members of the cell were training with automatic rifles at a shooting range in Gouldsboro, Pa.

“When it comes to defending your religion, when someone is trying to attack your religion, your way of life, then you go jihad,” Eljvir Duka, 23, who also went by the nickname Elvis, is quoted as saying in the complaint. His elder brother Dritan Duka, who is 28 and known as Tony, said at another point that “as far as people, we have enough.”

“Seven people, and we are all crazy,” Dritan Duka said. “We can do a lot of damage with seven people.”

Federal agents said that it was unclear when the attack was to take place, because in the taped conversations the suspects said they were waiting for a fatwa, or authorization from an Islamic cleric. But prosecutors and officials said they had no doubt that the suspects were both capable and determined to strike.

“Today we dodged a bullet,” J. P. Weiss, special agent in charge of the F.B.I.’s Philadelphia office, said at the news conference. “In fact, when you look at the type of weapons that this group was trying to purchase, we may have dodged a lot of bullets.”

Mr. Weiss added: “We had a group that was forming a platoon to take on an army. They identified their target, they did their reconnaissance. They had maps. And they were in the process of buying weapons. Luckily, we were able to stop that.”

In Washington, senior law enforcement officials said that while the charges against those arrested were serious, there was no evidence that they were connected with any foreign terrorist organizations or broader conspiracy.

“They appear to be individuals who were actively perusing radical Web sites and began shooting weapons, doing surveillance and trying to get some advanced weaponry,” said one official who spoke on the condition of anonymity, because the matter was still under investigation.

It is the latest in a series of plots, targeting sites in the United States, that authorities said they have foiled. These included one last June in which seven arrests were made in Miami after the authorities described suspects talking about blowing up the Sears Tower in Chicago and the F.B.I.’s Miami headquarters. In June 2003, the authorities said they thwarted a plot to bring down the Brooklyn Bridge, and in 2002, six Yemeni-Americans from Lackawanna, N.Y., near Buffalo, were arrested and linked with Qaeda interests.

While the exact path of the Duka family’s immigration was unknown, thousands of ethnic Albanians and others fled to this country after the United States led NATO air attacks against Yugoslav forces in Kosovo and bombed Belgrade in 1999 to keep Slobodan Milosevic’s government from attacking ethnic Albanians and Muslims. Many were held first at Fort Dix, and settled in the area.

Five of the suspects, who were arrested in three raids on Monday night, were charged with conspiring to kill American military personnel, a crime punishable by life in prison. The sixth, Agron Abdullahu, 24, was charged with aiding and abetting the illegal weapons purchase, which carries a sentence of up to 10 years. The three Duka brothers — Dritan, Eljvir and Shain, 26 — were also charged with violating the federal law that prohibits illegal aliens from possessing weapons.

The criminal complaint describes the Dukas’ brother-in-law, Mohamad Shnewer, as the coordinator of the plot, determined to obtain the cache of weapons. He arranged the training sessions in Pennsylvania, the complaint says. “My intent is to hit a heavy concentration of soldiers,” Mr. Shnewer is quoted as saying in one taped conversation. “You hit four, five or six Humvees and light the whole place up and retreat completely without any losses.”

The men never managed to obtain rocket-propelled grenades, but they had substantial firepower, including handguns, an assault rifle and a semiautomatic assault weapon, the authorities said. They were arrested as they tried to buy, from an F.B.I. informer, four AK-47s and M-16s, which were inoperable. “They were at the point where they wanted the final piece of their plan, to obtain the final weaponry,” Mr. Christie said.

Cassie Herman, who lives in Blackwood, N.J., where the Duka family once owned a pizzeria, said she rented her 5,000-square-foot home in a gated community on Big Bass Lake to Eljvir Duka for a week in February, and to someone from the F.B.I. for a few days just before.

Kevin O’Brien, 36, who lives in the same community, said he had gone to bars twice with several of the men, who told him they were avid hunters. Mr. O’Brien said the men drank whiskey and beer and asked him about his stint in the Marines, trading stories of their own military training in the former Yugoslavia.

Tom Cornine, a bartender at the Gouldsboro Inn, recalled two of the men there on a February weekend, drinking Stoli on the rocks until they drained the bottle, then Absolut. “They drank more than the average man,” Mr. Cornine said.

For all the suspects’ talk of holy war and martyrdom, investigators said there is little indication that they were devout, or even practicing, Muslims. Leaders at nearby Muslim houses of worship said they had never seen the suspects and were troubled to learn they had tried to use faith as a justification for their plan.

“This is not what our religion teaches us,” said Zia Rahman, who helped found a mosque in nearby Voorhees. “These people claim to be Muslim, but I don’t know how they can be. Islam is a religion of peace, not of violence, and this goes against the grain of our religion.”

    6 Men Arrested in a Terror Plot Against Fort Dix, NYT, 9.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/09/us/09plot.html?hp

Six Ordinary Lives That Took a Detour to a World of Terror

May 9, 2007
The New York Times
By KAREEM FAHIM

These are the suspects arrested in connection with a plot to attack Fort Dix.

MOHAMAD IBRAHIM SHNEWER, 22, a Jordanian-born American citizen, lives in Cherry Hill, N.J., and drives a cab in Philadelphia. The most outspoken of the six defendants, court papers show, he is quoted as saying, “My intent is to hit a heavy concentration of soldiers.” Mr. Shnewer smiles broadly in his 2003 yearbook photographs from Cherry Hill High School West. Neighbors say they were irritated by the unkempt yard, towering television antenna and cluttered carport of the family’s house. Relatives said Mr. Shnewer has two sisters. He attended college for a time, but dropped out to earn money, they said.

DRITAN DUKA, 28, also known variously as Distan, Anthony and Tony Duka, is — like his two brothers who also were charged yesterday — an ethnic Albanian born in the former Yugoslavia and living in the United States illegally. According to court papers, he operates roofing businesses from a home in Cherry Hill where he lives with his brothers. As he and his colleagues fine-tuned their plans for an attack on Fort Dix, the court papers show, Mr. Duka said: “We can do a lot of damage with seven people. You can do big things with seven people.”

ELJVIR DUKA, 23, was sometimes called Sulayman. But at Cherry Hill High School West everyone called him Elvis, and that is how his name appears in several yearbooks. He, too, is in the family roofing businesses, court papers say. One classmate said he remembered that the three Duka brothers were often in trouble, fighters in a school where there were few fights. In the court papers, some of that pugnaciousness emerges as Mr. Duka says that when someone is attacking your religion or way of life, “then you go jihad.”

SHAIN DUKA, 26, also known as Shaheen, once owned a pizza shop in Turnersville, N.J., about 35 miles from Fort Dix, with his brother Dritan. In June 2005 they sold the place — now known as Tony Soprano’s — to Tony Giordano. “They always had the Koran out or somewhere on the counter,” Mr. Giordano said. He said that when he bought the pizzeria “the carpet was filthy, the ceiling had holes” and “they had no business.” As the group watched a terrorist video, court papers say, Shain Duka laughed as the arm of a United States marine was blown off.

SERDAR TATAR, 23, a legal resident of the United States who was born in Turkey, lives in Northeast Philadelphia and until several months ago worked at a 7-Eleven on the Temple University campus. It was Mr. Tatar, court records say, who took a map of Fort Dix from his father’s pizza parlor on the edge of Fort Dix as the six plotted their attack. For a time he delivered pizzas, often to the military base. At one point when Mr. Tatar thought the group had been infiltrated by the government, the papers say, he notified the police in Philadelphia and told them he had been approached by a man who “pressured him to acquire maps of Fort Dix.” He said he was fearful that “the incident was terrorist-related.” But the planning went on.

AGRON ABDULLAHU, 24, of Buena Vista Township in Atlantic County, N.J., was born in the former Yugoslavia and is living in the United States legally. According to the court papers, Mr. Abdullahu, who is the brother-in-law of Eljvir Duka, held the weapons for the Duka brothers; he took a 9-millimeter handgun and a Yugoslavian semiautomatic rifle to Dritan Duka’s house before the group went to the Poconos for a training session, and carried them in a vehicle with a shotgun and a Beretta rifle. In Buena Vista, Mary Williams, a homemaker who lives about a block away, said yesterday, “They seemed to keep to themselves, but many of us who live here live here because we can keep to ourselves.” According to court papers, Mr. Abdullahu worked at a supermarket in Williamstown, N.J. At the house in Buena Vista where Mr. Abdullahu lives, there were three cars in the driveway yesterday and a boat alongside the house.

    Six Ordinary Lives That Took a Detour to a World of Terror, NYT, 9.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/09/nyregion/09suspects.html

Practice in the Poconos: U.S. Details How Men Prepared

May 9, 2007
The New York Times
By ALAN FEUER

It was a terror plot that hinged, in no small part, upon a map snatched from a New Jersey pizzeria. The plotters honed their shooting skills on semiautomatics at the firing range, though they also spent time conducting what the authorities called “tactical training” by playing paintball in the woods.

They seemed to be prepared: with terror training tapes, with computerized ballistic simulations, even with what appeared to be a template of the last will and testament drawn up by two of the hijackers from Sept. 11. At the same time, one of the men worried aloud to a government informer: “I just want to be safe, brother. I got five kids, so I don’t want to go down.”

The narrative of a foiled terror plot spelled out in the federal complaint issued yesterday by officials in New Jersey is full of tiny moments that are clearly chilling yet undeniably strange. Certainly, the 27-page document describing a plot to kill soldiers at the Fort Dix Army base in New Jersey stands out as one of the more detailed descriptions to emerge so early in a terrorism case during the last few years.

While the document paints a picture of a bloody-minded, though occasionally unsophisticated, plot, it is worth recalling that acts of terror — even deadly ones — have often included glaring strategic flaws in the past. One of the terrorists in the 1993 scheme to destroy the World Trade Center, in fact, returned to a rental office to claim his deposit for the truck that carried explosives into the complex’s garage.

The current case came to light in early 2006 when the suspects — four ethnic Albanians, three of them brothers; a Jordanian; and a Turk — asked their local video store to transfer their own improvised jihadist videotape to DVD and a representative of the store called the authorities. Within weeks, federal agents managed to infiltrate the group with an informer who recorded them with apparent ease — at home, in their cars and on the phone for more than a year.

The recorded conversations indicate that the suspects shifted between a deadly intent to kill and a fear of losing heart. They appear at times to bolster one another — “I’m in, honestly, I’m in,” one says — or to give one another pretexts to avoid the plot. One says they need a fatwa, or religious decree, before they actually proceed. Another unwittingly suggests that the informer take the lead in the attack since he is a former soldier and is thought to be more seasoned than the rest.

Throughout, however, there are anxieties about the law, resulting in what soon sounds like a plot within the plot. Fearing the informer is betraying them, one of the men confronts him. “I don’t know whether you’re F.B.I.,” he says. But the planning goes on, according to the complaint.

The plot began in earnest in late January 2006, the government says, after a video store owner from New Jersey approached the F.B.I., saying a man had recently given him a videotape to transfer to DVD. The tape showed 10 men in their early 20s shooting assault weapons at a firing range “in a militialike style while calling for jihad,” according to the complaint. The F.B.I. identified the men and opened an investigation.

As part of that investigation, agents dispatched the informer to befriend the men, and by March he had developed a relationship with one of them, Mohamad Shnewer, the complaint says. Mr. Shnewer showed the informer DVDs with “various jihadist images” and a voice-over that sought recruits to the “jihadist movement.” Another informer, who had also penetrated the group, was shown computer videos of attacks on American soldiers and noted that Mr. Shnewer smiled while he watched them.

Nonetheless, Mr. Shnewer asks the first informer, who had served with the Egyptian Army, to “help lead the attack,” the complaint says. As for money, Mr. Shnewer says that he has plenty: “I have been saving money for this plan for some time.”

In mid-August, the complaint says, Mr. Shnewer and the first informer drive to Fort Dix to conduct surveillance — an admittedly dangerous task. Mr. Shnewer counsels taking videos on a cellphone “as if you are talking,” adding that one can always delete the images if stopped by the police.

On the drive, Mr. Shnewer is recorded laying out the ambitious details of the plot: “You hit four, five, or six Humvees and light the whole place up,” the complaint quotes him as saying, “and retreat completely without any losses.”

By this point, the plot has deepened with additional surveillance trips and attempts to acquire rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns, according to the complaint.

Yet apprehensions have already appeared: When the informer asks one suspect, Shain Duka, if he is “with them,” Mr. Duka says, “God willing, we will see.” Mr. Duka’s brother Eljvir is quoted as saying they need a fatwa before they can attack. And another suspect, Serdar Tatar, asserts he is “in” but cautions that they must take steps to ensure their families’ safety.

There are also lingering suspicions. In November, for example, trying to determine if the first informer is a plant, Mr. Tatar contacts the police in Philadelphia, according to the complaint, and tells a sergeant he has recently been approached by a man who “pressured him to acquire maps of Fort Dix.” In a remarkable turn, he tells the sergeant he is fearful that “the incident was terrorist-related.”

And yet the plot continues, the complaint says. “I’m going to do it,” Mr. Tatar tells the informer. “Know why? It doesn’t matter to me whether I get locked up.”

In the next few months, the men talk guns (somewhat oddly, they seem troubled by the thought of weapons that are fully automatic, noting they are, after all, illegal) and take shooting practice on state land in the Poconos, in Pennsylvania. Mr. Shnewer is quoted as saying the group missed an opportunity to attack the Army-Navy game in Philadelphia.

Much of the group’s attention seems focused on a map of Fort Dix taken from Mr. Tatar’s father’s pizzeria in Cookstown, N.J., near the Army base. At one point, the complaint says, Mr. Shnewer hides the map in his mother’s car.

On Feb. 2, 2007, while the suspects are in the Poconos, an uncanny coincidence takes place: two of the Duka brothers unexpectedly run into an undercover agent at a convenience store. The complaint says the agent has been secretly watching the firing range and that Eljvir Duka, believing him to be a fellow gun enthusiast, inquires rather casually where he might buy AK-47s and M-16s.

The group has rented a house in the mountains, the complaint says, and spends time watching videos, including one in which a United States marine gets his arm blown off, which prompts a burst of laughter. On the ride back to New Jersey, Mr. Shnewer is quoted as proposing a plan to attack two warships when they dock the next year in Philadelphia.

There is paintball training in February and March, with the third Duka brother, Dritan, saying, “They use this in the U.S. Army,” the complaint says.

At one point, the complaint says, the informer tells the group he knows a source who will sell them weapons but needs to remain anonymous. His list of guns includes an M-60 machine gun, a Sig Sauer pistol and a Smith & Wesson revolver.

Yet even as Dritan Duka reviews the list, his own words suggest he may not fully apprehend the gravity of what he plans to do.

“I just want to be safe, brother,” he tells the informer. “I got five kids, so I don’t want to go down. People catch me like they think I’m a terrorist.”

    Practice in the Poconos: U.S. Details How Men Prepared, NYT, 9.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/09/nyregion/09complaint.html

Many Detainees at Guantánamo Rebuff Lawyers

May 5, 2007
The New York Times
By WILLIAM GLABERSON

Many of the detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, are no longer cooperating with their lawyers, adding a largely invisible struggle between the lawyers and their own clients to the legal battle over the Bush administration’s detention policies.

Some detainees refuse to see their lawyers, while others decline mail from their lawyers or refuse to provide them information on their cases, according to court documents, writings of some of the detainees and recent interviews.

The detainees’ resistance appears to have been fueled by frustration over their long detention and suspicion about whether their lawyers are working for the government, as well as anti-American sentiment, some of the documents and interviews show. “Your role is to polish Bush’s shoes and make the picture look good,” a Yemeni detainee, Adnan Farhan Abdullatif, 31, wrote his lawyer in February.

Some of the lawyers accuse Guantánamo officials of feeding the detainees’ suspicions of the lawyers, a charge Pentagon officials deny.

Lawyers said many of the relationships appeared to have deteriorated as the detainees’ legal cause has suffered setbacks in Congress and the courts, and as Justice Department officials have begun efforts to limit lawyers’ access to detainees, raising new concerns among the detainees about their lawyers’ effectiveness.

“Every lawyer is afraid, every time they go down there, that their clients won’t see them,” said Mark P. Denbeaux, a professor at Seton Hall University School of Law who represents two Guantánamo detainees. “And it’s getting worse, because it’s pretty hard to say we’re offering them anything.”

The situation is awkward for the lawyers, who have become a considerable force not only in the courts but also in legislative, diplomatic and public debates about detention policies. Tense relationships or outright resistance from their clients could undercut their credibility and complicate their legal work.

The Justice Department, in a recent court filing, asked a federal appeals court to limit the number of times lawyers challenging detention could visit detainees and to allow officials to read lawyers’ mail to detainees. Some of the lawyers said that court fight would be likely to further weaken their ties to some detainees because it raised questions about whether their communications would be confidential and whether they would be able to continue to see their clients.

Some detainees are clearly cooperating with their lawyers and are engaged in regular dialogue with them. In interviews, some lawyers denied there were problems in their relationships with detainees or declined to discuss the difficulties, saying such information would embolden the government. But other lawyers estimated that a third or more of the detainees who have worked with lawyers in cases challenging their detention were now resisting cooperating with them.

Of 10 detainees publicly identified by military prosecutors as targets of possible war-crimes charges, many, if not most, either have refused American lawyers or are now uncooperative or uncommunicative, four of the lawyers involved in the war crimes cases said. Some of those detainees face possible life sentences.

“The relationship of the lawyers with many of the clients who still see us is very strained and tense,” said David H. Remes, a Washington lawyer at Covington & Burling, who represents 17 Yemeni detainees in efforts to challenge their detention.

At times, the lawyer-client battles provide an insight into detainees’ attitudes. Mr. Remes said one client grew furious when he learned his lawyers had interviewed his family members in Yemen to gather information for his case. The detainee assumed, Mr. Remes said, that his lawyers were acting as investigators for the American government.

Mr. Denbeaux said one client had pleaded with him to bring toothpaste. When he did on a later visit, military guards confiscated it and his client took that as proof that the lawyer was powerless. “I said, ‘They took it from me,’ ” Mr. Denbeaux recalled, “and he said: ‘What good are you? You can’t even get me toothpaste.’ ”

Neal R. Sonnett, a Miami lawyer who has been an American Bar Association observer at Guantánamo, said the deterioration of the relationships could become an issue as courts continue to sort through the thicket of legal questions presented by the administration’s detention policies. “Due process,” he said, “includes the ability of the lawyers to effectively prepare their cases.”

A Justice Department spokesman, Dean Boyd, declined to comment.

In the interviews, lawyers described differing reasons for the resistance from their clients, including what several lawyers described as depression or other mental illness, or resignation more than five years after the United States naval base at Guantánamo was opened as a detention camp.

Several said there had been cycles of wariness and peer pressure to reject American lawyers. Some of the lawyers said a new cycle might have gained intensity after a federal appeals court in February approved legislation Congress passed last year intended to strip the courts of the power to hear the habeas corpus cases, the main legal vehicle many of the lawyers had used to try to challenge their clients’ detention. Last month, the Supreme Court declined to review that ruling.

Some of the detainees’ comments, in writings given to the lawyers or recorded in their declassified notes, showed confusion about what role the lawyers were playing. Mohammed Nasser Yahia Abdullah Khussrof, a 61-year-old Yemeni, explained a common suspicion of the lawyers among the detainees.

“Some people don’t have full trust in attorneys,” Mr. Khussrof said, according to Mr. Remes’s notes. “They think you work for government.”

Several lawyers noted that in the war-crimes cases, defendants were assigned military lawyers who visit them dressed in uniforms similar to those of some of the jailers.

Clive A. Stafford Smith, a lawyer who represents 35 detainees, said one of his clients, Omar Deghayes, a Libyan, had said that in lawyer-client meetings at Guantánamo, “we all know that everything we say in these rooms is being monitored by them.” Military officials say they do not eavesdrop on those meetings.

Mr. Stafford Smith also said several of his clients had described what he said were efforts by Guantánamo officials to foster detainees’ distrust of the lawyers. He said detainees had described investigators’ telling them that their lawyers were Jewish or gay or that prisoners with lawyers were less likely to be released than those without them.

Mr. Stafford Smith and other lawyers also said clients had told them of investigators who posed as lawyers and then questioned detainees.

The military spokesman in Guantánamo, Cmdr. Richard W. Haupt, said each of those accusations was false. “It is our policy to in no way interfere with legal counsel,” he said. He said that military officials had worked to make it as easy as possible for lawyers to visit detainees and that there had been an increase in such meetings this year.

Court records show that the detainees’ concerns about whether lawyers’ mail will remain confidential may be based, in part, on experience. Officials acknowledged in court last year that during an investigation after three suicides at Guantánamo in June they seized written materials and personal items from all detainees, a total of more than 1,100 pounds, “including legal material and other correspondence.”

Although the detainees’ lawyers have had some notable successes in American courts, no detainee has been freed as a result of a court order. Some have come to rely on the lawyers as their only conduit to the outside world. But even in that capacity, the lawyers said, military rules have often made it impossible for them to satisfy simple requests.

Mr. Remes, the Washington lawyer for the 17 Yemenis, said military officials had barred lawyers from giving detainees rudimentary reading materials, including a Dr. Seuss book and “Jack and the Beanstalk.” Commander Haupt said lawyers were permitted to provide “properly cleared” reading material to the detention camp library.

Joseph Margulies, a detainee’s lawyer who teaches at Northwestern University School of Law, said the growing skepticism of some detainees was not surprising. “They don’t trust that we will be able to accomplish anything,” he said.

    Many Detainees at Guantánamo Rebuff Lawyers, NYT, 5.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/05/washington/05gitmo.html?hp

Editorial

Spying on Americans

May 2, 2007
The New York Times

For more than five years, President Bush authorized government spying on phone calls and e-mail to and from the United States without warrants. He rejected offers from Congress to update the electronic eavesdropping law, and stonewalled every attempt to investigate his spying program.

Suddenly, Mr. Bush is in a hurry. He has submitted a bill that would enact enormous, and enormously dangerous, changes to the 1978 law on eavesdropping. It would undermine the fundamental constitutional principle — over which there can be no negotiation or compromise — that the government must seek an individual warrant before spying on an American or someone living here legally.

To heighten the false urgency, the Bush administration will present this issue, as it has before, as a choice between catching terrorists before they act or blinding the intelligence agencies. But the administration has never offered evidence that the 1978 law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, hampered intelligence gathering after the 9/11 attacks. Mr. Bush simply said the law did not apply to him.

The director of national intelligence, Michael McConnell, said yesterday that the evidence of what is wrong with FISA was too secret to share with all Americans. That’s an all-too-familiar dodge. Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, who is familiar with the president’s spying program, has said that it could have been conducted legally. She even offered some sensible changes for FISA, but the administration and the Republican majority in the last Congress buried her bill.

Mr. Bush’s motivations for submitting this bill now seem obvious. The courts have rejected his claim that 9/11 gave him virtually unchecked powers, and he faces a Democratic majority in Congress that is willing to exercise its oversight responsibilities. That, presumably, is why his bill grants immunity to telecommunications companies that cooperated in five years of illegal eavesdropping. It also strips the power to hear claims against the spying program from all courts except the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which meets in secret.

According to the administration, the bill contains “long overdue” FISA modifications to account for changes in technology. The only example it offered was that an e-mail sent from one foreign country to another that happened to go through a computer in the United States might otherwise be missed. But Senator Feinstein had already included this fix in the bill Mr. Bush rejected.

Moreover, FISA has been updated dozens of times in the last 29 years. In 2000, Lt. Gen. Michael Hayden, who ran the National Security Agency then, said it “does not require amendment to accommodate new communications technologies.” And since 9/11, FISA has had six major amendments.

The measure would not update FISA; it would gut it. It would allow the government to collect vast amounts of data at will from American citizens’ e-mail and phone calls. The Center for National Security Studies said it might even be read to permit video surveillance without a warrant.

This is a dishonest measure, dishonestly presented, and Congress should reject it. Before making any new laws, Congress has to get to the truth about Mr. Bush’s spying program. (When asked at a Senate hearing yesterday if Mr. Bush still claims to have the power to ignore FISA when he thinks it is necessary, Mr. McConnell refused to answer.)

With clear answers — rather than fearmongering and stonewalling — there can finally be a real debate about amending FISA. It’s not clear whether that can happen under this president. Mr. Bush long ago lost all credibility in the area where this law lies: at the fulcrum of the balance between national security and civil liberties.

    Spying on Americans, NYT, 2.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/02/opinion/02wed1.html

U.S. Seeks Closing of Visa Loophole for Britons

May 2, 2007
The New York Times
By JANE PERLEZ

LONDON, May 1 — Omar Khyam, the ringleader of the thwarted London bomb plot who was sentenced to life imprisonment on Monday, showed the potential for disaffected young men to be lured as terrorists, a threat that British officials said they would have to contend with for a generation.

But the 25-year-old Mr. Khyam, a Briton of Pakistani descent, also personifies a larger and more immediate concern: as a British citizen, he could have entered the United States without a visa, like many of an estimated 800,000 other Britons of Pakistani origin.

American officials, citing the number of terror plots in Britain involving Britons with ties to Pakistan, expressed concern over the visa loophole. In recent months, the homeland security secretary, Michael Chertoff, has opened talks with the government here on how to curb the access of British citizens of Pakistani origin to the United States.

At the moment, the British are resistant, fearing that restrictions on the group of Britons would incur a backlash from a population that has always sided with the Labor Party. The Americans say they are hesitant to push too hard and embarrass their staunch ally in the Iraq war, Prime Minister Tony Blair, as he prepares to step down from office.

Among the options that have been put on the table, according to British officials, was the most onerous option to Britain, that of canceling the entire visa waiver program that allows all Britons entry to the United States without a visa. Another option, politically fraught as it is, would be to single out Britons of Pakistani origin, requiring them to make visa applications for the United States.

Rather than impose any visa restrictions, the British government has told Washington it would prefer if the Americans simply deported Britons who failed screening once they arrived at an airport in the United States, British officials said. The British also screen at their end, and share intelligence with the Americans.

But Washington feels strongly, Mr. Chertoff has said, that it has the right to build controls against terrorists from Britain who do not have a prior criminal record — precisely the kind of man Mr. Khyam was until he was arrested in early 2004 and put on trial for plotting to blow up targets like a major London nightclub and a popular suburban shopping mall.

For its part, the British government looks with dismay at the frequency with which Britons travel to their ancestral land of Pakistan — an estimated 400,000 trips a year — where a small minority, like Mr. Khyam, link up with extremist groups and acquire training in weapons and explosives.

Foreign office officials have said they have discussed measures with the Pakistani Embassy in London, which grants Pakistani passports to Britons of Pakistani descent, to consider tightening the rules for Pakistani travel documents.

In Washington, an expert on terrorism and Pakistan, Bruce Riedel, who served on the National Security Council under President Clinton and in the early Bush administration, and who recently retired after 30 years in the Central Intelligence Agency, said that Mr. Khyam was perfect material for Al Qaeda.

“He is the classic U.K.-Pakistani connection that Al Qaeda has focused on since 9/11,” said Mr. Riedel, who is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “His U.K. passport gives him international mobility. His training at a camp run for Kashmiris by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency gives him expertise. Al Qaeda gives him direction.”

The trial that ended Monday with the conviction of Mr. Khyam and four other Muslim men on conspiracy charges did not establish whether Mr. Khyam or his colleagues belonged to a Qaeda cell.

But the head of counterterrorism at Scotland Yard, Peter Clarke, said after the verdict the investigations into the bomb plot had given “a new understanding of the Al Qaeda threat to Britain.”

At his sentencing, the judge, Sir Michael Astill, described Mr. Khyam as “the energy behind the conspiracy,” the man who attracted other young Muslims to the plan, and inspired them, and who knew how to shuttle from Britain to Pakistan for terrorism training.

From Mr. Khyam’s own testimony, as well as a cascade of official intelligence surveillance presented during the yearlong trial, a portrait of determination and ruthlessness emerged.

As a teenager, Omar became entranced by jihadist ideology. He moved on to the cause of Kashmir, and was then piqued by 9/11 and the Iraq war, things that inspired and angered other Britons with Pakistani roots. But he in the end turned to attacking Britain, where he was born and raised.

Asked on the witness stand his reaction to 9/11, Mr. Khyam did not disguise his delight.

“I was happy,” he recalled in his south England accent. “America was, and still is, the greatest enemy of Islam. I was happy that America had been hit because of what it represented against the Muslims, but obviously 3,000 people died, so there were mixed feelings.”

Mr. Khyam testified that his parents migrated to Britain from Pakistan in the 1970s, before his birth. He came from a family, he said, with a proud heritage of service, first in the British Army in Pakistan, then in the army of the newly independent Pakistan, and also in the intelligence services.

His parents were not particularly religious, he said, a pattern typical among Pakistani immigrants to Britain where the new generation, often turned off by what they see as the loose morals of binge drinking and broken marriages, has proven to be more devout than their elders.

At the age of 10, his father, a successful businessman with a textile factory in Karachi, left his mother and moved to Belgium, leaving behind Omar, the eldest, and two small children.

His mother’s English was poor. Quickly, Omar became the man of the household, organizing the finances, and bossing his siblings. Instead of enrolling in the local school where most of the students were South Asian, he attended a mostly white, government-run school, and led a middle-class British life.

He did relatively well in his final school exams and enrolled in college but, distracted by his larger cause, never followed through on his studies or sought steady employment.

By 1998, he had taken his first steps into the realm of radical Islam, when he was introduced to Al Muhajiroun, a group led in Britain by Omar Bakri Mohammed, in his neighborhood in West Sussex. The group indoctrinates followers in the virtues of an Islamic state and indoctrinates a strict code of personal behavior. It expects members to shun friends who do not practice strict Islamic mores.

On the political side, Mr. Khyam calmly told the court about how he watched bloody videotapes of Russian soldiers blowing up mosques in Chechnya, and of atrocities by the Serbs against Muslims in Bosnia, which were shown to members of Al Muhajiroun.

But he soon tired of Al Muhajiroun, he said, and yearned for something more than the group’s desire for an Islamic state in Britain, which he deemed to be “not realistic.”

He took his first trip to Pakistan as a vacation with his mother and his brothers in 1999, when he was just a teenager. There, he experienced firsthand what he had heard about at home: the cause of Kashmir, the border area claimed by both Pakistan and India. He met with a group, Al Badr Mujahedeen, that fought, he said, to free Kashmir from Indian control.

In early 2000, Mr. Khyam was back in Pakistan. He found a training camp for fighters being sent to Kashmir that was run, he said, by Inter-Services Intelligence.

According to his testimony, the American-led war in Afghanistan, and later Iraq, dramatically colored his views. Those wars, he said, were wars against Islam, and he hoped to join the fight.

“By this time I had a lot of contact with the I.S.I. because of my family,” he said, referring to the Pakistani intelligence service. He visited the headquarters of the agency in Islamabad, and was told that what the Americans wanted “is to stop anyone who calls for the return of an Islamic state or a caliphate.”

From 2002 on, Mr. Khyam said he shuttled between Britain and Pakistan, culminating in a trip in 2003 to a training camp in Malakand in the North-West Frontier Province with five of his fellow defendants, including his younger brother, Shujah, who was acquitted.

By late 2003, according to prosecution evidence, Mr. Khyam had decided from his trips to Pakistan to concentrate on a plot in Britain that would involve a fertilizer bomb.

Mr. Khyam, using some of the organizational skills he had honed as a young man at home, can be heard on surveillance tapes divvying up responsibilities for the plan.

Along the way, he found time to marry — in what he called a “religious marriage” — Saira, a Pakistani woman.

They finally married in a civil ceremony on March 25, 2004, and a few days later, Mr. Khyam was arrested by the police in a bedroom of a Holiday Inn in England while he was on his honeymoon with his wife.

    U.S. Seeks Closing of Visa Loophole for Britons, NYT, 2.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/02/world/europe/02britain.html?hp

State Survey: Terror Attacks Up Sharply

April 30, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:03 p.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Terrorist attacks worldwide shot up by 25 percent between 2005 and last year, killing 40 percent more people as extremists used increasingly lethal means to carry out high casualty hits, the State Department says.

In its annual global survey of terrorism to be released later Monday, the department says about 14,000 attacks took place in 2006, mainly in Iraq and Afghanistan, claiming more than 20,000 lives. That is 3,000 more attacks than in 2005 and 5,800 more deaths, it says.

In addition, the number of injuries from terrorist attacks rose by 54 percent between 2005 and 2006 with a doubling in the number wounded in Iraq over the period, according to the department's Country Reports on Terrorism 2006.

''By far the largest number of reported terrorist incidents occurred in the Near East and South Asia,'' says the 335-page report, referring to the regions where Iraq and Afghanistan are located.

''These two regions also were the locations for 90 percent of all the 290 high-casualty attacks that killed 10 or more people,'' says the report, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press ahead of its official release.

The report says 6,600, or 45 percent, of the attacks took place in Iraq, killing about 13,000 people, or 65 percent of the worldwide total of terrorist-related deaths.

Afghanistan had 749 strikes in 2006, a 50-percent rise from 2005 when 491 attacks were tallied, according to the report.

    State Survey: Terror Attacks Up Sharply, NYT, 30.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-US-Terrorism.html

Archivists Work to Save Sept. 11 History

April 29, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:21 a.m. ET
The New York Times

NEW YORK (AP) -- It started with a clogged dust mask that fell onto the desk of Jan Ramirez on the afternoon of Sept. 11, 2001. A friend had used the paper mask to breathe while fleeing downtown Manhattan as the air was filled with grit and smoke from the World Trade Center towers.

''That dust mask is going to be an important artifact some day,'' Ramirez recalled the friend telling her.

Today, the mask has become a museum piece, one small part of the largest records trove ever assembled to document a single event.

Millions of pieces of paper documenting government investigations, BlackBerry messages written by survivors as they fled, children's finger-paintings and family photographs are also part of the archive, preserved in many different places including state offices, museums and on the Internet.

Saving all things Sept. 11 was a mission embraced from the time of the attacks by professional archivists and grassroots collectors.

''Pearl Harbor, there are only so many pictures of,'' said Nancy Shader, regional administrator in New York for the National Archives. ''This, as we know, was captured in so many ways.''

Archivists immediately set out to compile the most complete picture ever of one historic event, and already are planning for decades ahead. They shared data with museum officials and individual collectors at a symposium last month.

''Our goal is to make sure we all know who's got what stuff,'' said Kathleen Roe, a New York state archivist who is storing more than 1,000 boxes of government records -- such as the 9/11 Commission report -- in boxes in Albany.

Roe said she and other major archivists met in New York two weeks after the terrorist attack to ensure that no piece of paper was discarded. It was the first time archivists had met so early to begin collecting artifacts after such an event, she said.

Mary Fetchet saved a 43-second telephone message left on the morning of the attacks by her son, Brad, who later died in the south tower. Brad Fetchet, 24, called his mother after the first hijacked airliner struck, but before the second plane crashed into his building.

''We're fine, we're in World Trade Center Two. I'm obviously alive and well over here, but obviously a pretty scary experience,'' Fetchet told his mother.

Mary Fetchet, founding director of the Voices of Sept. 11 family group, says: ''I want people 100 years from now to be able to listen to that message.''

The organization, with several thousand members, is dispensing advice to family members on preserving audio recordings, videotapes and photographs of their loved ones, as well as important papers, including condolence letters from the president.

The group is developing an Internet archive she calls a ''living memorial'' that will eventually hold commemorative information about all the 2,973 victims, as well as survivors and rescuers. So far, it has Web pages that pay tribute to about 300 victims.

Tom Scheinfeldt, a history professor at George Mason University, is one of the coordinators of the 9/11 Digital Archive, which stores 150,000 items including paper, audio and photographs relating to the attacks.

Included in that archive are e-mails from survivors who typed as they fled the towers, and the heart-rate monitor readout of a jogger who was crossing the Brooklyn Bridge when he saw one plane crash into the north tower, causing his heart rate to spike.

The Associated Press has saved two full boxes of the printout of the AP's national news wire on Sept. 11-12, 2001, as well as oral histories from several reporters and photographers, said Valerie Komor of the AP Corporate Archives.

Michael Ragsdale, a Columbia University senior technician, roamed the city for more than a year collecting thousands of pages of ''ephemera'' like fliers advertising anti-terrorism rallies, blood drives and other public announcements.

He avoided the missing-persons posters that blanketed New York in the months after the attacks.

''I stayed away from the grief,'' he said. ''I stayed away from the violence on purpose.''

Ramirez -- who was at the New-York Historical Society when she received her friend's dust mask and now is the curator of the planned Sept. 11 museum -- said the collapse of the twin towers may have inspired people to save even the smallest remnants of that day.

''There's a preciousness that comes attached to anything left concrete from this event,'' she said. ''I think people seem to feel that it was sort of almost this sacred stewardship they have taken on in holding this material.''

------

On the Net:

Trade Center Memorial Foundation: www.buildthememorial.org/

Voices of Sept 11 family Web site: www.911livingmemorial.org/

Sept 11 digital archive: www.911digitalarchive.org/

New York State 9/11 archives: www.nyshrab.org/wtc/s--wtc--projects.shtml/

    Archivists Work to Save Sept. 11 History, NYT, 29.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Sept-11-Archive.html

Giuliani Broadens His Message on Terrorism

April 26, 2007
By MARC SANTORA
The New York Times

MANCHESTER, N.H., April 25 — In his two months on the campaign trail, the central animating theme of Rudolph W. Giuliani’s presidential campaign has been that his performance as New York mayor on Sept. 11, 2001, makes him the best candidate to keep the United States safe from terrorists.

But when Mr. Giuliani broadened that message here on Tuesday night, saying that Democrats “do not understand the full nature and scope of the terrorist war against us” and that if they were elected the United States would suffer “more losses,” the response from his Democratic rivals was swift and pointed.

Senator Barack Obama of Illinois accused Mr. Giuliani of “taking the politics of fear to a new low.” Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York used the remarks to link Mr. Giuliani to a failure by the Bush administration to quash Al Qaeda. John Edwards called the remarks “divisive and just plain wrong.”

The skirmishing, some of the most intense between the parties in the young 2008 campaign, suggests that a line of attack that the administration used in 2004 would again be a central Republican theme.

In his speech before Republicans here on Tuesday night, Mr. Giulani called the fight against terrorism “the defining conflict of our time.” If a Democrat were elected president, he said, they would “wave the white flag” in Iraq, cut back on surveillance of terrorists, restrict the ability of law enforcement officials to gather intelligence and limit interrogation techniques, curtailing their effectiveness.

“Make no mistake about it, the Democrats want to put us back on defense,” he said.

In the end, he added, the United States would prevail regardless of who was in office, but if it was a Democrat, there would probably be greater loss of life before that victory was achieved.

The Democrats’ rapid response reflected a desire among their candidates not to let themselves be painted as weak, as many party loyalists believe occurred in 2004. It also reflected a sensitive chord embodied by Mr. Giuliani’s candidacy, the symbolism of the Sept. 11 attacks, which Democrats often note occurred under a Republican president.

To that end, Mrs. Clinton focused on what she said were the failed policies of the Bush administration that have only put the United States more at risk.

“The plain truth is that this administration has done too little to protect our ports, make our mass transit safer and protect our cities,” she said. “They have isolated us in the world and have let Al Qaeda regroup.”

Here in New Hampshire, Mr. Giuliani’s statements about the Democrats were greeted enthusiastically, suggesting how his approach may resonate among Republican primary voters skeptical of withdrawal timetables for Iraq and wary of criticism of the administration.

Facing the critical barrage, Mr. Giuliani struck back, taking particular aim at Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Senate leader.

“Here is the thing that the Democrats do not get and all these attacks and the things Harry Reid is doing and the presidential candidates indicate,” Mr. Giuliani said on “The Sean Hannity Show,” the syndicated radio program. “They do not seem to get the fact that there are people, terrorists in this world, really dangerous people that want to come here and kill us. That in fact they did come here and kill us twice and they got away with it because we were on defense because we weren’t alert enough to the dangers and the risks.”

Mr. Giuliani’s focus on terrorism, and so closely linking it to the Iraq war, could pose political risks, particularly in a general election. Since the 2004 campaign, the situation in Iraq has worsened, and with polls showing widespread disapproval of the president’s conduct of the war, the Democrats have grown bolder.

To leave Iraq, in Mr. Giuliani’s view, would be to create an even more dangerous front in the fight against terrorism where terrorists would be able to destabilize the region and eventually direct attacks on the United States. Mr. Giuliani has studiously avoided criticizing the administration, not only on Iraq but also on some basic measures in fighting terrorism like wiretapping without warrants.

On Wednesday, that provided a clear opening for Democrats. The Democratic National Committee used the former mayor’s remarks to highlight his failure “to prepare New York City for the second attack on the World Trade Center.”

Mr. Edwards used the comments to link the Iraq failures to the fight against terrorism. “As far as the facts are concerned,” he said, “the current Republican administration led us into a war in Iraq that has made us less safe and undermined the fight against Al Qaeda.”

    Giuliani Broadens His Message on Terrorism, NYT, 26.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/26/us/politics/26giuliani.html?hp

U.S. Asks Court to Limit Lawyers at Guantánamo

April 26, 2007
By WILLIAM GLABERSON
The New York Times

The Justice Department has asked a federal appeals court to impose tighter restrictions on the hundreds of lawyers who represent detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and the request has become a central issue in a new legal battle over the administration’s detention policies.

Saying that visits by civilian lawyers and attorney-client mail have caused “intractable problems and threats to security at Guantánamo,” a Justice Department filing proposes new limits on the lawyers’ contact with their clients and access to evidence in their cases that would replace more expansive rules that have governed them since they began visiting Guantánamo detainees in large numbers in 2004.

The filing says the lawyers have caused unrest among the detainees and have improperly served as a conduit to the news media, assertions that have drawn angry responses from some of the lawyers.

The dispute is the latest and perhaps the most significant clash over the role of lawyers for the detainees. “There is no right on the part of counsel to access to detained aliens on a secure military base in a foreign country,” the Justice Department filing argued.

Under the proposal, filed this month in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, the government would limit lawyers to three visits with an existing client at Guantánamo; there is now no limit. It would permit only a single visit with a detainee to have him authorize a lawyer to handle his case. And it would permit a team of intelligence officers and military lawyers not involved in a detainee’s case to read mail sent to him by his lawyer.

The proposal would also reverse existing rules to permit government officials, on their own, to deny the lawyers access to secret evidence used by military panels to determine that their clients were enemy combatants.

Many of the lawyers say the restrictions would make it impossible to represent their clients, or even to convince wary detainees — in a single visit — that they were really lawyers, rather than interrogators.

Jonathan Hafetz of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, a lawyer who has helped to coordinate strategy for the detainees, said the government was trying to disrupt relationships between the lawyers and their clients and to stop the flow of public information about Guantánamo, which he described as a “legal black hole” before the courts permitted access for the lawyers in 2004.

“These rules,” Mr. Hafetz said, “are an effort to restore Guantánamo to its prior status as a legal black hole.”

The dispute comes in a case in which detainees are challenging decisions by military panels that they were properly held as enemy combatants. The Justice Department’s proposed rules could apply to similar cases that lawyers say are likely to eventually involve as many as 300 of the roughly 385 detainees now held at Guantánamo.

Some of the detainees’ lawyers say the Justice Department proposal is only the latest indication of a long effort to blunt their effectiveness, which they say was evident in statements of a senior Pentagon official early this year. The official, Charles D. Stimson, deputy assistant secretary for detainee affairs, resigned after he was criticized for suggesting that corporations should consider severing business ties with law firms that represented Guantánamo detainees.

Under the current rules, legal mail is inspected for contraband but is not read. The lawyers, who have security clearances, are presumed to be entitled to review classified evidence used against their clients.

There is no limit on the number of times lawyers can visit their clients. Some say that they have been to Guantánamo 10 or more times and that they have needed the time to work with clients who are often suspicious and withdrawn.

Justice Department officials would not comment on the proposal, which is scheduled to be the subject of a court hearing on May 15.

The filing used combative language, saying lawyers had been able to “cause unrest on the base” and mentioned hunger strikes, protests and disobedience. An affidavit by a Navy lawyer at Guantánamo, Cmdr. Patrick M. McCarthy, that accompanied the filing, said lawyers had gathered information from the detainees for news organizations. Commander McCarthy also said the lawyers had provided detainees with accounts of events outside Guantánamo, like a speech at an Amnesty International conference and details of terrorist attacks.

“Such information,” his affidavit said, “threatens the security of the camp, as it could incite violence among the detainees.”

Several detainees’ lawyers involved in some of the incidents denied that they had caused security problems. Neil H. Koslowe, a lawyer at Shearman & Sterling in Washington, called the assertion a “McCarthy-era charge” that was not supported by the evidence.

The dispute over the lawyers’ role is one of the first issues the appeals court in Washington will have to decide as it opens a new chapter of the legal battle over Guantánamo. In 2005, Congress designated that court as the forum for detainees to challenge directly decisions made by the Pentagon’s combatant status review tribunals designating them as enemy combatants.

But many detainees’ lawyers have resisted filing petitions to review those decisions because Congress narrowly defined the arguments the appeals court could consider. The law said the court could review whether a panel’s decision “was consistent with the standards and procedures” set forth by the Pentagon.

Instead, many detainees’ lawyers pursued habeas corpus petitions, using the centuries-old legal proceeding to ask a judge for release from imprisonment. But after a complex trip through the courts, Congress last year passed a provision intended to strip courts of the authority to hear habeas corpus cases involving Guantánamo detainees.

A divided panel of the federal appeals court in Washington upheld that provision in February. And early this month, the United States Supreme Court declined to review that decision. Two justices, John Paul Stevens and Anthony M. Kennedy, said that before the Supreme Court could again consider whether Congress was permitted to strip the courts of the ability to consider the habeas corpus cases, the detainees had to try to complete the appeals court review of their enemy combatant decisions.

As a result, much of the focus in the legal battle is now shifting to the appeals court. Scores of petitions seeking review of the combatant-status rulings are expected to be filed in the coming weeks, according to the Center for Constitutional Rights, an advocacy group that has been coordinating the detainees’ lawyers. The May 15 arguments will focus on rules that could apply to all of those cases.

Lawyers say they are pressing ahead with the more limited review process in the appeals court as part of an effort to set the stage for a return to the Supreme Court. Some lawyers said that while they may lose, that would allow them to argue to the Supreme Court that the reviews were so limited that the detainees needed the more sweeping consideration permitted in habeas corpus cases.

But government lawyers, too, are developing new strategies in the wake of the Supreme Court action this month. They say that Congress and the courts have determined that expansive habeas corpus petitions are not available to the detainees.

As a result, they say, rules like those that allowed unlimited visits with detainees are no longer necessary as the detainees pursue the more limited appeals court review.

But, while arguing that detainees have no right to lawyers, the Justice Department filing said the government was giving the Guantánamo detainees enough access to lawyers so that “the court’s review will be assisted by having informed counsel.”

    U.S. Asks Court to Limit Lawyers at Guantánamo, NYT, 26.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/26/washington/26gitmo.html?hp

4 Plead Not Guilty to Terrorism Charges

April 25, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:28 a.m. ET
The New York Times

TOLEDO, Ohio (AP) -- Four men pleaded not guilty Tuesday to charges that they plotted to recruit and train terrorists to attack U.S. and allied troops overseas.

Zubair A. Ahmed, Mohammad Zaki Amawi, Marwan Othman El-Hindi and Wassim I. Mazloum are accused of conspiring to kill or maim people outside the United States, including military personnel in Iraq.

A fifth man, Khaleel Ahmed, 26, pleaded not guilty to similar charges last month. He and Zubair Ahmed, 27, are cousins from Illinois. Amawi, El-Hindi and Mazloum live in Ohio. All are U.S. citizens except Mazloum, who came to the U.S. legally from Lebanon.

The five sought recruits and sites for training in firearms, hand-to-hand combat and the use of explosives, according to the indictment. They also are accused of agreeing to raise funds for training and downloading Internet information on improvised explosive devices.

Prosecutors said Khaleel and Zubair Ahmed attended a Muslim convention in Cleveland in 2004 with El-Hindi and a former U.S. military man who helped foil the plot.

The men talked about a five-year plan to carry out their mission, said Gregg Sofer, a Justice Department attorney, during a detention hearing.

''This conversation is nothing short of devastating,'' he said.

Zubair Ahmed's attorney, Terry Gilbert, said the men never took any action.

''Is that a crime to talk about guns?'' asked Gilbert. ''There's no talk about jihad. There's no talk about killing Americans.''

U.S. District Judge James Carr ordered that the Ahmeds be released upon posting bond, which he set at $500,000. He noted that the cousins had known for a year they and others were under investigation but did not try to flee.

The five men face a maximum penalty of life in prison if convicted of conspiring to kill Americans overseas, according to federal prosecutors.

Steve Hartman, El-Hindi's attorney, said his client has maintained his innocence from the beginning. Hartman said the government's informant overreached and instigated the investigation.

''I think he created a vast majority of this case,'' Hartman said.

The three men from the Toledo area were arraigned on new charges filed by federal prosecutors two months ago. They were first arrested in February 2006.

The three were charged with conspiring to provide material support to terrorists. Amawi also was charged with verbally threatening the president of the United States and unlawful distribution of a video about suicide bomber vests.

Amawi and El-Hindi also were charged with distributing information about explosive chemicals downloaded from the Internet.

    4 Plead Not Guilty to Terrorism Charges, NYT, 25.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Military-Plot-Charges.html

U.S. Charges Guantanamo Detainee

April 25, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:19 a.m. ET
The New York Times

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) -- The U.S. military filed a murder charge Tuesday against the Canadian son of an alleged al-Qaida financier, who was captured at age 15 in Afghanistan and has spent almost five years at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay.

Omar Khadr, now 20, allegedly joined the Taliban in Afghanistan and threw a grenade that killed a U.S. Green Beret soldier in July 2002. He was captured as he lay wounded after that firefight, at an al-Qaida compound in eastern Afghanistan.

The U.S. military charged him with murder, attempted murder, providing support to terrorism, conspiracy and spying under rules for military trials adopted last year and first used to try David Hicks, the Australian sentenced to nine months in prison after pleading guilty.

The military said the Toronto-born Khadr would be arraigned within 30 days. He faces a maximum penalty of life imprisonment.

Khadr's Pentagon-appointed defense attorney, Marine Lt. Col. Colby Vokey, said the U.S. would become the first country in modern history to try a war crimes suspect who was a child at the time of the alleged violations. The conspiracy charge is based on acts allegedly committed when Khadr was younger than 10, Vokey said.

The attorney urged Canada and the United States to negotiate a ''political resolution'' of the case to spare Khadr from a guaranteed conviction by ''one of the greatest show trials on earth.''

Opponents of the detention center at Guantanamo Bay criticized authorities for subjecting Khadr to the same military trial system as adult terror suspects. In any other conflict, he would have been treated as a child soldier, said Jumana Musa, advocacy director of Amnesty International.

''This was, in fact, a child,'' Musa said. ''From the beginning, he was never treated in accordance with his age. He was treated like any adult taken into custody.''

A Pentagon spokesman, Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, said Khadr must be held accountable.

''The Defense Department will continue to uphold the law and bring unlawful enemy combatants to justice through the military commissions process,'' he said.

The U.S. military said Khadr hurled a grenade that killed Army Sgt. 1st Class Christopher Speer, 28, of Albuquerque, N.M., and wounded Army Sgt. Layne Morris, of West Jordan, Utah. The charges say those acts were carried out ''in violation of the law of war,'' but did not elaborate.

Speer's widow and Morris filed a civil lawsuit against Khadr and his father. In February, a judge awarded them $102.6 million.

The military alleges that Khadr also conducted surveillance of U.S. troops and planted land mines targeting American convoys.

Khadr allegedly received a month of basic training from al-Qaida in June 2002 that included the use of rocket-propelled grenades, rifles, pistols and explosives, according to the charge sheet signed by Susan J. Crawford, the convening authority for the military commissions.

Several of Khadr's family members have been accused of ties to Islamic extremists. His Egyptian-born father, Ahmad Said al-Khadr, was killed in Pakistan in 2003 alongside senior al-Qaida operatives. Canada is holding Khadr's brother Abdullah on a U.S. extradition warrant accusing him of supplying weapons to al-Qaida.

Another brother, Abdul Karim, said his sibling has said in his letters home that he does not believe he can receive a fair trial at Guantanamo.

''It's not good but the Americans were going to do it eventually. They've been charging people for no reason for so long. It doesn't really matter,'' the younger Khadr told the AP in a phone interview from the family home in Toronto.

In March, the military tribunal at Guantanamo sentenced Hicks to nine months in prison after he pleaded guilty to supporting terrorism -- the first conviction at a U.S. war crimes trial since World War II. Under an agreement with the court, he will serve his sentence in an Australian prison, but must remain silent about any alleged abuse while in custody.

Prosecutors say they plan to charge as many as 80 of the 385 men being held at Guantanamo on suspicion of links to al-Qaida or the Taliban.

The U.S. Supreme Court in June struck down the previous military tribunal system at Guantanamo as unconstitutional. Congress then passed a law establishing a new military tribunal system.

Dennis Edney, a Canadian lawyer for Khadr's family, said the new tribunal system which allows coerced and hearsay evidence ''provides Mr. Khadr with almost no chance of proving his innocence.''

''The aim is to provide a showcase to justify the U.S. administration decision to arrest Mr. Khadr and other men like him in the first place,'' Edney said.

The high court is now considering a challenge to the revised tribunals. Some members of Congress have vowed to repeal the law that limits detainees' access to civilian courts.

------

On the Net:

http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Apr2007/KhadrReferral.pdf 

    U.S. Charges Guantanamo Detainee, NYT, 25.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Guantanamo.html

Survivors mark Okla. City bombing

19.4.2007
AP
USA Today

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — Oklahoma City mourners on Thursday marked the 12th anniversary of the bombing that killed 168 people here by reaching out to victims of the Virginia Tech shootings and victims of violence everywhere.

Mourners gather each April 19 at the former site of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building to observe the anniversary of the bombing, which injured hundreds.

Participants observed 168 seconds of silence, followed by family members reading the names of their lost loved ones.

Organizers said attention is also focusing on the killings of 32 people at Virginia Tech by a student who then killed himself on Monday.

"Violence obviously is happening," said Nancy Coggins, spokeswoman for the Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum. "We hope there are ways we can reach out to them and offer support. They will be in our minds and in our hearts."

Coggins said the "fairly low-key" anniversary observance will be "a little more prominent" this year because the crowd will hear from Rudy Giuliani, who was New York's mayor during the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

After the ceremony, Ron Norick, who was mayor of Oklahoma City in 1995, and Giuliani, now a Republican presidential candidate, will discuss how they led their cities through acts of terrorism during a symposium at the museum.

In the federal building attack, a cargo truck packed with two tons of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil was detonated in front of the nine-story federal building on April 19, 1995.

Timothy McVeigh was apprehended less than two hours later. He was convicted of federal murder charges and was executed June 11, 2001. Terry Nichols, who met McVeigh in the Army, was convicted of federal and state bombing charges and is serving life prison sentences.

Another Army buddy, Michael Fortier, pleaded guilty to not telling authorities in advance about the bomb plot and agreed to testify against McVeigh and Nichols. Fortier was released from a federal prison in January 2006 after serving most of a 12-year sentence.

Prosecutors said the bombing was a twisted attempt to avenge the deaths of about 80 people in the government siege at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, exactly two years earlier.

    Survivors mark Okla. City bombing, UT, 19.4.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-04-19-okla-city_N.htm

Survivors to Remember Okla. City Bombing

April 19, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:53 a.m. ET
The New York Times

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) -- Survivors and relatives of victims will gather to mark the 12th anniversary of Oklahoma City bombing on Thursday, three days after the deadliest shooting rampage in modern U.S. history shocked the nation.

Mourners gather each year April 19 at the former site of the Murrah Federal Building to observe the anniversary of the worst act of domestic terrorism in U.S. history, which killed 168 people and injured hundreds more.

Participants will observe 168 seconds of silence, followed by family members reading the names of their lost loved ones.

Organizers said attention also will focus on the deaths of 32 people at Virginia Tech on Monday during a rampage by a man who then killed himself.

''Violence obviously is happening,'' said Nancy Coggins, spokeswoman for the Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum. ''We hope there are ways we can reach out to them and offer support. They will be in our minds and in our hearts.''

Coggins said the ''fairly low-key'' anniversary observance will be ''a little more prominent'' this year because former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who was mayor during the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, will address the crowd.

After the ceremony, Ron Norick, who was the mayor of Oklahoma City in 1995, and Giuliani, a Republican presidential candidate, will discuss how they led their cities through acts of terrorism during a symposium at the museum.

Six years before the Sept. 11 attacks, a cargo truck packed with two tons of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil was detonated in front of the nine-story federal building on April 19, 1995.

Timothy McVeigh was apprehended less than two hours later. He was convicted of federal murder charges and was executed June 11, 2001. Terry Nichols, who met McVeigh in the Army, was convicted of federal and state bombing charges and is serving life prison sentences.

Another Army buddy, Michael Fortier, pleaded guilty to not telling authorities in advance about the bomb plot and agreed to testify against McVeigh and Nichols. Fortier was released from a federal prison in January 2006 after serving most of a 12-year sentence.

Prosecutors said the bombing was a twisted attempt to avenge the deaths of about 80 people in the government siege at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, exactly two years earlier.

    Survivors to Remember Okla. City Bombing, NYT, 19.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Okla-Bombing-Anniversary.html

White House Outlines Bioterrorism Plan

April 19, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:52 a.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- To deal with potential bioterrorism, the government will focus on buying new medicines for anthrax, smallpox and acute radiation syndrome, according to a Bush administration plan.

The plan's release came on the same day that Democratic lawmakers raised concerns about the government's efforts in preparing how to confront a weapon of mass destruction.

The Health and Human Services Department terminated the largest contract, $877 million for an anthrax vaccine, through a procurement program known as Project BioShield.

''BioShield is a new program. That said, new doesn't necessarily equate with a license to make mistakes,'' said Rep. Bennie G. Thompson, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee. ''Yet, mistakes have been made with regard to the development and implementation of the program,'' said Thompson, D-Miss.

In 2004, Congress set aside about $5.5 billion for Project Bioshield. The plan that the administration released Wednesday described priorities for acquiring medicine both in the short term -- this year and next -- and longer term, 2009-2013.

The plan said it will cost more than $100 million to acquire the anthrax and smallpox vaccines that the government seeks. The cost of medicine for acute radiation poisoning is anticipated to exceed $100 million.

The plan listed as a near-term priority the development of antibiotics for threats such as the plague or tularemia. Both diseases can be deadly are caused by the bacteria found in rodents in many parts of the world.

The plan will focus on buying medicines to be used after people are exposed to biological agents. The government would pursue preventive measures only for threats of ''catastrophic consequence.''

The administration emphasized that money for basic research and product development has increased by more than tenfold since 2001. Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt cited progress since the Sept. 11 attacks in securing medicine for a range of threats.

But some people say more progress should have been made. In written testimony before the House Homeland Security Committee, one witness said Leavitt's department pushed drug companies away from investing in medicines that could be used against weapons of mass destruction.

Richard Hollis, chief executive officer of Hollis-Eden Pharmaceuticals, said the department did not put the program in place according to the law and changed the criteria required by companies to get a contract.

''Realize that these same officials and their actions are the precise reason why companies and investors are running away from, not toward this BioShield program,'' Hollis said.

------

On the Net:

Project BioShield: http://www.hhs.gov/aspr/ophemc/bioshield

    White House Outlines Bioterrorism Plan, NYT, 19.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Bioterror.html

Ohio man charged with joining al-Qaeda

USA Today
By Dennis Cauchon

COLUMBUS — An Ohio man who had joined al-Qaeda planned to bomb European tourist spots popular among Americans in 1999 and 2000, federal prosecutors alleged Thursday.

Christopher Paul, 43, also researched flight-simulator computer programs in 2006 that could have provided information on how to fly large, commercial passenger planes, the government said.

Paul was arrested outside his apartment Wednesday in Columbus, where he was born. He is charged with conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction — a bomb targeted for Europe — and conspiring to provide support and resources to terrorists.

The alleged plots had not reached the point at which lives were in imminent danger, said FBI agent Timothy Murphy, who heads the bureau's Cincinnati office.

Paul could face life in prison if convicted of the most serious charge, conspiring to use weapons of mass destruction.

The indictment alleges that Paul and other unnamed co-conspirators in Germany planned in 1999 and 2000 to bomb unspecified resorts frequented by American tourists. They also planned to attack U.S. military bases and diplomatic buildings in Europe, the indictment says. The attacks were not carried out.

Paul is the third Columbus man arrested on terrorism charges. Iyman Faris, a truck driver, was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2003 for providing material support for al-Qaeda in a plot to cut the cables on the Brooklyn Bridge. After his arrest, Faris told FBI agents that Nuradin Abdi had talked about blowing up a Columbus-area shopping mall. Abdi, a Somali immigrant, was arrested in 2003 and awaits trial on charges of conspiring to support terrorism.

U.S. Attorney Gregory Lockhart said he didn't think Columbus was a particular haven for terrorists. "It could happen anywhere," he said.

A hearing is scheduled today to consider the government's request that Paul be held without bond. Don Wolery, Paul's attorney, declined to comment.

A neighbor who drove the accused's wife to the courthouse Thursday said he didn't think Paul was capable of terrorism. "He's a very kind person. You would meet him on the street and he would want to hug you with the heart that he has," Hisham Jenhawai, 32, told the Associated Press.

Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd described Paul as a "made al-Qaeda man." He said Paul had met with "heavy hitters" in Germany in the plot to attack tourist destinations and had more recently gathered information on nuclear bombs.

Paul was born Paul Kenyatta Laws. He changed his name legally to Abdulmalek Kenyatta in 1989, then to Christopher Paul in 1994, the indictment says. "It would be safe to assume that changing his name (to Christopher Paul) might allow somebody to travel more easily," Lockhart said.

The government's 14-page indictment alleges that Paul:

•Joined al-Qaeda in 1991 after traveling to Afghanistan and Pakistan. He stayed several times at an al-Qaeda guesthouse in Pakistan, received military training in Afghanistan and met Osama bin Laden's pilot, the indictment says.

•Obtained equipment that could be used to make fake documents in 1997, practiced unspecified "training operations" with others in an Ohio state park in 1998 and provided explosives training in Germany to suspected terrorists in 1999.

•Wrote a letter to his parents saying that he will be "on the front lines." The note was found in his father's house in 2006, along with books on how to make bombs. Paul's family members are not suspects, Lockhart said.

One of the books seized —Deathtrap! Improvised Booby-Trap Devices— was available Thursday on Amazon.com for $39.95.

The indictment gives no details on the research Paul allegedly conducted on airplane flight simulators. The indictment says he also had researched remote control boats and 5-foot-long helicopters.

The government alleges that Paul had phone numbers of al-Qaeda operatives programmed into a fax machine and had wired $1,760 from the USA to co-conspirators in Germany in 1999.

Contributing: Donna Leinwand in Washington

    Ohio man charged with joining al-Qaeda, UT, 12.4.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-04-12-al-qaeda-ohio_N.htm

$4.7 Million Raised to Treat

Those Who Fell Ill After 9/11

April 9, 2007
The New York Times

The 9/11 Neediest Medical Campaign to help those who developed serious illnesses after the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center has collected $300,000 since February for a total of nearly $4.7 million, fund officials announced.

Recent contributions or pledges to the campaign include $104,000 from the Star-Ledger Disaster Relief Fund of the Community Foundation of New Jersey; $100,000 from the Carnegie Corporation; and $112,000 from 205 individual donors.

The funds will be divided between Mount Sinai Medical Center and Bellevue Hospital Center for uninsured patients. A $100,000 grant will go to St. Vincent’s World Trade Center Healing Services for treatment of patients suffering major mental illnesses arising from 9/11.

In February, The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund, the New York Community Trust, the Ford Foundation, and the Open Society Institute each contributed $1 million to a charity organized by the Neediest Cases Fund. The Altman Foundation also gave $250,000, the United Way of New York City $75,000, and Trinity Church $25,000.

The board of the Community Trust voted on Friday to divide its grant of $1 million between Bellevue and Beyond Ground Zero, a community service organization that works with Bellevue to help people affected by the 9/11 disaster.

Last year, the federal government provided $26 million to treat some, but not all, who fell ill after the attack. The money from the Neediest Medical Campaign will be available to doctors whose patients are not eligible for federal aid.

The city’s World Trade Center Health Panel in February estimated that screening and treatment of ailments associated with ground zero costs the nation $393 million annually.

    $4.7 Million Raised to Treat Those Who Fell Ill After 9/11, NYT, 9.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/09/nyregion/09fund.html

Guantánamo Detainees

Stage Hunger Strike

April 9, 2007
The New York Times
By TIM GOLDEN

A long-term hunger strike has broken out at the American detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, with more than a dozen prisoners subjecting themselves to daily force-feeding to protest their treatment, military officials and lawyers for the detainees say.

Lawyers for several hunger strikers said their clients’ actions were driven by harsh conditions in a new maximum security complex. About 160 of the roughly 385 Guantánamo detainees have been moved to the complex since December.

Thirteen detainees are now on hunger strikes, the largest number to endure the force-feeding regimen on an extended basis since early 2006, when the military broke a long-running strike with a new policy of strapping prisoners into restraint chairs while they are fed by plastic tubes inserted through their nostrils.

The hunger strikers are now monitored so closely that they have virtually no chance to starve themselves. Yet their persistence underscores how the struggle between detainees and guards at Guantánamo has continued even as the military has tightened its control in the past year.

“We don’t have any rights here, even after your Supreme Court said we had rights,” one hunger striker, Majid al-Joudi, told a military doctor, according to medical records released recently under a federal court order. “If the policy does not change, you will see a big increase in fasting.”

A military spokesman at Guantánamo, Cmdr. Robert Durand of the Navy, played down the significance of the current strike, calling the prisoners’ complaints “propaganda.”

But the protests come as criticism of Guantánamo continues to rise in the United States and abroad. Last week, after the Supreme Court denied a new appeal on behalf of the detainees, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross delivered a rare public reprimand to the Bush administration, saying the prisoners’ ability to contest their detention was inadequate.

Newly released Pentagon documents show that during earlier hunger strikes, before the use of the restraint chairs, some detainees lost more than 30 pounds in a matter of weeks. By comparison, the current hunger strike — in which 12 of the 13 detainees were being force-fed as of Friday — seems almost symbolic.

For instance, the medical records for Mr. Joudi, a 36-year-old Saudi, showed that when he was hospitalized on Feb. 10, he had been fasting for 31 days and had lost more than 15 percent of his body weight.

By the time he was transferred a few days later to a “feeding block” where more serious hunger strikers are segregated from other prisoners, his condition had stabilized and his weight was nearly back to an ideal level for a man his size. (His exact weight gain was not recorded.) Mr. Joudi was subsequently flown home and turned over to the Saudi authorities, his lawyer said.

Lawyers for several detainees held in the new maximum security complex, known as Camp 6, compared it to “supermax” prisons in the United States. The major differences, they said, are that the detainees have limited reading material and no television, and only 10 of the Guantánamo prisoners have been charged.

The Camp 6 inmates are generally locked in their 8-foot-by-10-foot cells for at least 22 hours a day, emerging only to exercise in small wire cages and to shower. Besides those times, they can talk with other prisoners only by shouting through food slots in the steel doors of their cells.

“My wish is to die,” one reported hunger striker in the camp, Adnan Farhan Abdullatif, a 27-year old Yemeni, told his lawyer on Feb. 27, according to recently declassified notes of the meeting. “We are living in a dying situation.”

Commander Durand, the Guantánamo spokesman, dismissed such accounts as part of an effort by the prisoners and their lawyers to discredit the detention mission. He described the new unit as much more comfortable than the detainees’ previous quarters, and denied that they suffered any greater sense of isolation in the new cell blocks.

“This was designed to improve living conditions,” Commander Durand said, “and we think it has.”

Camp 6 was originally designed as a modern, medium-security prison complex for up to 200 inmates, with common areas where they could gather for meals and a large fenced athletic field where they could jog or play soccer outside the high concrete walls.

But after a riot last May and the suicides of three prisoners in June, the unit was retrofitted before opening to limit the detainees’ freedom and reduce the risk that they might hurt themselves or attack guards, military officials said.

As Camp 6 was opening, senior officials expressed concern about how prisoners would react to its greater isolation. Most had been held in makeshift blocks of wire-mesh cells that — while often hot, noisy and lacking privacy — allowed them to communicate easily, pray together and even pass written messages.

Guantánamo’s other maximum-security unit, Camp 5, has cells that face each other across a short hallway, allowing the roughly 100 detainees there to converse fairly easily. In Camp 6, the prisoners can see one another from their cells only when one of them is being moved. At other times, they look out on the stainless-steel picnic tables in the common areas they are not allowed to use.

Lawyers for several Camp 6 detainees said their clients were despondent about the move even though, as military officials note, the new cells are 27 square feet larger than the old ones and have air-conditioning, nicer toilets and sinks, and a small desk anchored to the wall.

“They’re just sitting on a powder keg down there,” said one lawyer, Sabin Willett, who, like others, described growing desperation among the prisoners. “You’re going to have an insane asylum.”

Lawyers who visited Guantánamo recently said the detainees reported a higher number of hunger strikers than had the military — perhaps 40 or more. Military officials said there were sometimes “stealth hunger strikers,” who pretend to eat or surreptitiously vomit after eating, but they dismissed the detainees’ estimates as exaggerations.

Because reporters are prevented from speaking with detainees or visiting most of their cell blocks, it is difficult to verify the conflicting accounts.

Hunger strikes have been part of life at Guantánamo almost since the detention center opened in January 2002.

They reached a peak in September 2005, when more than 130 detainees were classified as hunger strikers, having refused at least nine consecutive meals, military records show. As the strikes went on, some detainees being force-fed continued to lose weight by vomiting or siphoning their stomachs with the feeding tubes. But by early February 2006, shortly after the military began using restraint chairs during the forced feedings, the number of hunger strikers plunged to three.

The number rose again sharply but briefly last May, reaching 86 after three detainees attempted suicide and a riot broke out as the guards searched for contraband. Yet even then, no more than seven strikers were forced into the restraint chair regimen.

Three detainees who had been hunger strikers hung themselves on June 10. After July, no more than three detainees subjected themselves to extended forced feeding.

That number began to grow again as detainees were moved into Camp 6 in December. By mid-March, the number of hunger strikers reached 17. For the first time, as many as 15 detainees continued with the strikes despite being force-fed in the restraint chairs.

Military officials have described the restraint chair regimen as unpleasant but necessary. They originally said prisoners needed to be restrained while digesting, so they could not purge what they were fed.

Now, the rationale has changed. The restraints are generally applied “for safety of the detainee and medical staff,” records show, and they are kept on for as little as 15 minutes at a time, rather than the two hours commonly used before. Afterward, the prisoners are moved to a “dry cell” and monitored to make sure they do not vomit.

Even so, some detainees describe the experience as painful, even gruesome.

One Sudanese detainee, Sami al-Hajj, a 38-year-old former cameraman for Al Jazeera, described feeling at one point that he could not bear the tube for another instant. “I said I would begin to scream unless they took it out,” he wrote in a recent diary entry given to his lawyer. “They finally did.”

Stephen H. Oleskey, who represents Saber Lahmar, an Algerian religious scholar whom military officials accused of propagating a religious legal ruling that was linked to the suicides, said of his client: “The man has been in segregation — virtual isolation — for over nine months. Physically and emotionally, he’s collapsing. We think this punishment does exceed what the law allows, and that he won’t survive.”

Military officials said Mr. Lahmar and other detainees had received adequate medical attention.

Margot Williams and William Glaberson contributed reporting.

    Guantánamo Detainees Stage Hunger Strike, NYT, 9.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/09/us/09hunger.html?hp

Editorial

Guantánamo Follies

April 6, 2007
The New York Times

There has been much speculation about the Supreme Court’s decision not to hear an appeal from a group of Guantánamo Bay inmates until they have exhausted their legal options. Was the court signaling that the appeal had no merit? Were the court’s liberals waiting for a better chance to review President Bush’s unconstitutional detention system for “illegal enemy combatants”?

Whatever the justices’ intentions, we saw one clear message in their decision, and we hope that Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, and Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, saw it too. It is past time for Congress to undo the grievous damage done by President Bush’s abuse of the Constitution when he created his system of secret prisons and public internment camps to detain selected foreigners indefinitely without any real legal challenge.

In the months since Congress passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006, the administration has pushed ahead with the show trials permitted by the law. Each development in that courtroom brings fresh evidence of how urgent it is for the courts to strike down that law and for Congress to rewrite it.

The plea bargain: Last month, after being held at Guantánamo for five years, David Hicks, an Australian citizen, pleaded guilty to a single, relatively minor charge in exchange for his freedom. This deal should infuriate any side of the debate.

Americans who support Mr. Bush’s policy on prisoners accepted its premise: that the people in Guantánamo are so dangerous that letting any out will compromise American security. If an injustice were committed here or there, Americans would just have to grit their teeth. How does that square with allowing Mr. Hicks to go home and quickly go free? Worse, the plea bargain seemed timed to help Prime Minister John Howard, a Bush ally whose inaction on the case was becoming a re-election issue in Australia.

For Americans, like us, who are sickened by the Guantánamo prison, the Hicks bargain was emblematic of its lawless nature. If there was evidence that Mr. Hicks was a terrorist, we have yet to see it. He was declared an illegal combatant by a kangaroo court created to confirm that designation, which had been applied long before. He was denied a lawyer and censored by the court when he tried to pursue abuse charges. Under his plea bargain he gave up his right to sue, repudiated his own accounts of abuse and was even barred from talking to the news media about his experience.

To understand why Mr. Hicks still found that sort of deal attractive, remember that once a person is declared an “illegal enemy combatant,” he faces a lifetime in detention. He might be released by a “combatant status tribunal,” but his chances are very slim, and the process mocks civilized standards of justice. If the prisoner is one of the very few that the Pentagon plans to charge with a crime, he will be brought before a military tribunal. That court may use evidence obtained through hearsay, coercion or even torture. If convicted, there is little likelihood that he will be released after serving his time. If acquitted, he just goes back to being an illegal combatant who can be held for life.

The censored confession: On March 14, Abd al-Rahim al Nashiri, accused of the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole and other crimes, went before a combatant status tribunal. According to a transcript, Mr. Nashiri said he was tortured. But it is Mr. Bush’s policy that no prisoner may allege torture in public, so this is what appeared in the transcript:

PRESIDENT (of the tribunal): Please describe the methods that were used.

DETAINEE: (CENSORED) What else do I want to say? (CENSORED) There were doing so many things. What else did they did? (CENSORED) After that another method of torture began. (CENSORED) They used to ask me questions and the investigator after that used to laugh. And, I used to answer the answer that I knew. And if I didn’t replay what I heard, he used to (CENSORED).

Officials defended this censorship by arguing that interrogation methods are so secret that they cannot be discussed, even by the prisoner. But they also said that Al Qaeda members are trained to claim torture and that Mr. Nashiri lied. If so, why censor the transcript? His answers can’t help Al Qaeda. Tragically, the most likely answer is to spare United States intelligence agents and their bosses, who could face charges if the Military Commissions Act is ever repealed or rewritten. The law gives a retroactive carte blanche to American interrogators for any abuse they may have committed.

The lawsuit: The case the Supreme Court turned down this week was filed by Guantánamo inmates who contend that their detention was illegal and that the Military Commissions Act is unconstitutional. We agree. Holding people without evidence or charges or trial is barbaric, as is denying them the right to challenge their detention in a real court, a right generally referred to as habeas corpus.

Both violate the Constitution, and the court should strike down the Military Commissions Act of 2006, and the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, which limits avenues for appeal. But Congress approved the military commissions, left in place the combatant status review tribunals and suspended habeas corpus. Mr. Reid and Ms. Pelosi have a moral obligation to lead the way to righting these wrongs.

    Guantánamo Follies, NYT, 6.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/06/opinion/06fri1.html

Bronx Man Pleads Guilty in Terror Case

April 5, 2007
The New York Times
By ALAN FEUER

A jazz bassist and martial arts expert charged two years ago in an elaborate undercover terrorism investigation pleaded guilty yesterday to plotting to teach would-be Qaeda operatives how to wage jihad with hand-to-hand combat.

The man, Tarik Shah, 44, entered his guilty plea in Federal District Court in Manhattan. In exchange, he will receive a reduced maximum sentence of no more than 15 years.

The plea by Mr. Shah, who is from the Bronx, brings to a close his involvement in a wide-ranging federal sting operation that reached its height in May 2005 when an undercover F.B.I. agent posing as a recruiter for Al Qaeda met him in a ground-floor apartment near the Grand Concourse. There, the government says, Mr. Shah discussed a failed attempt to attend a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan and then, in words that were secretly recorded, pledged “bayat,” or allegiance, to Al Qaeda.

The government has acknowledged that neither Mr. Shah, nor the three others accused in the case — two of whom have already pleaded guilty — were on the verge of any violent act. But the case stood out because it stemmed, in some measure, from the work of a former jailhouse informer and evolved into a large sting operation, complete with secret meetings, coded messages and talk of travel overseas for formal training in the name of jihad.

Mr. Shah first came to the attention of authorities in 2003, court papers show, when he began a relationship with a man he did not know was a federal informer. He told the man of his martial arts training and of his ability to teach “brothers” how to fight.

The government never revealed the identity of the informer beyond saying he was convicted in 1990 of crimes related to a robbery; his cooperation in terrorism investigations began while he was behind bars.

Mr. Shah’s conversations with the informer drew the interest of investigators, which intensified in December 2003 when he was arrested in Yonkers on charges unrelated to terror. The police discovered in checking his car phone the numbers of two men whom the F.B.I. had already identified as suspects in terrorism investigations.

Shortly after that search, Mr. Shah met again with the informer, who told him of a warehouse on Long Island that Mr. Shah could use for his martial arts training. Mr. Shah, the government says, was intrigued and offered the informer details of his own secret militant ambitions, claiming that his life as a jazz musician was his “greatest cover.”

Even while imprisoned and awaiting trial, Mr. Shah, who grew up listening to Cannonball Adderley records, continued to practice his music. He and his brother, Antoine Dowdell, a jazz pianist, would sometimes sing and scat in an isolated visiting area of the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Lower Manhattan.

In early 2004, the informer, at the F.B.I.’s direction, told Mr. Shah that he had been in touch with a terrorism recruiter from the Middle East who had been looking for someone to train fighters in close-quarters combat. In March 2004, Mr. Shah and the informer took an Amtrak train from Pennsylvania Station to Plattsburgh, N.Y., court papers say, to meet with the recruiter, who was actually an F.B.I. agent.

Mr. Shah told the undercover agent of a friend, Rafiq Sabir, an emergency room doctor with a Columbia University medical degree, who had worked in New York and Florida. The agent told Mr. Shah that the doctor’s skills could be used for jihadists who are hurt in training.

Dr. Sabir is awaiting trial in the case. Abdulrahman Farhane, a Brooklyn bookseller, has pleaded guilty to plotting to buy arms for Islamic fighters in Afghanistan. And on Monday, Mahmud Faruq Brent, a paramedic from Washington, entered a guilty plea to having attended a training camp run by the Pakistani terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba in 2002.

During the many months of the investigation, Mr. Shah had conversations about Osama bin Laden, according to the government, and about Mr. Shah’s interest in learning about chemicals and explosives.

“This has always been one of my dreams,” he said at one point about his proposed role as a martial arts trainer, according to a federal complaint.

Dr. Sabir, the government says, attended the meeting with Mr. Shah and the undercover agent two years ago in the Bronx. At the outset of the meeting, the government says, Mr. Shah took care to assure everyone that the apartment was “safe.”

    Bronx Man Pleads Guilty in Terror Case, NYT, 5.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/05/nyregion/05terror.html

Ex - Sailor Plea:

Not Guilty of Terrorism

April 4, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:01 p.m. ET
The New York Times

NEW HAVEN, Conn. (AP) -- A former Navy sailor pleaded not guilty Wednesday to federal charges alleging he supported terrorism by disclosing secret information about the locations of Navy ships and ways to attack them.

Hassan Abujihaad, 31, has been held without bail since his arrest last month in Phoenix.

He is charged with providing material support to terrorists with intent to kill U.S. citizens and disclosing classified information relating to the national defense. Prosecutors say the case started with an Internet service provider in Connecticut and followed a suspected terrorist network across the country and into Europe and the Middle East.

A British computer specialist arrested in 2004, Babar Ahmad, is also charged, accused of running Web sites to raise money for terrorism.

Investigators say Abujihaad exchanged e-mails with Ahmad while on active duty on the guided missile destroyer USS Benfold in 2000 and 2001, according to an FBI affidavit. In those e-mails, the affidavit says, Abujihaad discussed naval briefings and praised Osama bin Laden and the people who attacked the USS Cole in 2000.

During a search of Ahmad's computers, investigators discovered files containing classified information about the positions of Navy ships and discussing their susceptibility to attack, officials said.

Prosecutors said Wednesday that Ahmad might be extradited to the United States in a matter of months, and the two men might be tried together.

Abujihaad, who received an honorable discharge from the Navy in 2002, could face up to 25 years in prison if convicted.

His attorney, Dan LaBelle, filed a motion Tuesday asking that Abujihaad be released from prison, saying his client has a job and two small children. A hearing is scheduled April 11 on the request.

    Ex - Sailor Plea: Not Guilty of Terrorism, NYT, 4.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Navy-Terror.html

Top court won't decide

Guantanamo prisoner appeal

Mon Apr 2, 2007 12:23PM EDT
Reuters
By James Vicini

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A closely divided Supreme Court said on Monday it would not decide whether Guantanamo prisoners have the right to challenge their confinement before U.S. federal judges, avoiding a test of President George W. Bush's powers in the war on terrorism.

Over the strongly worded dissent of three justices, the high court said it would not rule on the constitutionality of part of an anti-terrorism law that Bush pushed through Congress last year. The law takes away the right of the foreign terrorist suspects at the U.S. prison in Cuba to have a judicial review of their detention.

The justices declined to hear two appeals by prisoners seeking to overturn a lower court ruling in February. The lower court decision said lawsuits challenging the prisoners' detentions must be dismissed.

The Supreme Court in 2004 and 2006 rejected the Bush administration's position that Guantanamo prisoners cannot sue in U.S. courts.

Although the court did not give any explanation for its action, two justices said the Supreme Court could consider the issue later, if the congressionally approved proceedings involve unreasonable delays or some other injury for the prisoners.

The two, John Paul Stevens and Anthony Kennedy, issued a statement saying rejection of the appeals at this time "does not constitute any opinion on the merits" of the dispute.

There are about 385 detainees at the U.S. naval base in Cuba. The first prisoners arrived more than five years ago after the United States launched its war on terrorism in response to the September 11 attacks.

The indefinite detention and allegations of prisoner mistreatment at Guantanamo, which the U.S. military denies, have tarnished the United States' image abroad and a chorus of allies have urged Bush to shut down the camp for foreign terrorism suspects.

Justices Stephen Breyer, David Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented. The prisoners fell one vote short of the four required to grant an appeal.

"I believe these questions deserve this court's immediate attention," Breyer wrote. "Immediate review may avoid an additional year or more of imprisonment."

Attorneys for the prisoners had said the ruling by a U.S. appeals court upholding the law conflicted with decisions by the Supreme Court in 2004 and 2006 that said the detainees could get a hearing before a federal judge.

Their attorneys said the prisoners have been unlawfully detained for more than five years, without a fair hearing or any meaningful way to challenge their detention.

The attorneys said the cases involved a "watershed challenge" to Bush's authority. The Bush administration argued that the appeals should be rejected.

Prisoners receive a military proceeding, called a Combatant Status Review Tribunal, to determine if they have been rightfully deemed "an unlawful enemy combatant."

Under the law, prisoners cannot challenge their detention before a federal district court judge. But they can get a more limited review of the tribunal's decision before a U.S. appeals court.

The Bush administration told the Supreme Court that review before the appeals court should be allowed to go forward -- an argument the Supreme Court appeared to accept.

One appeal involved 39 prisoners, nearly all of whom have been at Guantanamo for more than five years without any charges. The other appeal involved six Algerians captured in Bosnia and held at Guantanamo since January 2002.

Top court won't decide Guantanamo prisoner appeal, R, 2.4.2007, http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSWBT00675620070402?src=040207_1227_TOPSTORY_gitmo_court_ruling