USA > History > 2010 > Terrorism (I)

Obama Team Is Divided

on Tactics Against Terrorism

March 28, 2010
The New York Times
By CHARLIE SAVAGE

WASHINGTON — Senior lawyers in the Obama administration are deeply divided over some of the counterterrorism powers they inherited from former President George W. Bush, according to interviews and a review of legal briefs.

The rift has been most pronounced between top lawyers in the State Department and the Pentagon, though it has also involved conflicts among career Justice Department lawyers and political appointees throughout the national security agencies.

The discussions, which shaped classified court briefs filed this month, have centered on how broadly to define the types of terrorism suspects who may be detained without trials as wartime prisoners. The outcome of the yearlong debate could reverberate through national security policies, ranging from the number of people the United States ultimately detains to decisions about who may be lawfully selected for killing using drones.

“Beyond the technical legal issues, this debate is about the fundamental question of whom we are at war with,” said Noah Feldman, a Harvard law professor who specializes in war-power issues. “The two problems most plaguing Obama in the war on terrorism are trials for terrorists and taking the fight beyond Afghanistan to places like Pakistan and Yemen. This issue of whom we are at war with defines both of them.”

In the years after the 9/11 attacks, Mr. Bush claimed virtually unlimited power as commander in chief to detain those he deemed a threat — a view so boundless that his Justice Department once told a court that it was within the president’s lawful discretion to imprison as an enemy combatant even a “little old lady in Switzerland” who had unwittingly donated to Al Qaeda.

But President Obama and his team, which criticized such claims as an overreach, have sought to demonstrate that the executive branch can wage war while also respecting limits imposed on presidential power by what they see as the rule of law.

In March 2009, the Obama legal team adopted a new position about who was detainable in the war on terrorism — one that showed greater deference to the international laws of war, including the Geneva Conventions, than Mr. Bush had. But what has not been known is that while the administration has stuck to that broad principle, it has been arguing over how to apply the body of law, which was developed for conventional armies, to a war against a terrorist organization.

An examination of that conflict offers rich insight into how the team of former law professors and campaign lawyers, nearly all veterans of the Clinton administration, is shaping important policies under Mr. Obama.

In February 2009, just weeks after the inauguration, John D. Bates, a federal judge overseeing several cases involving detainees in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, asked a provocative question: Did the new administration want to modify Mr. Bush’s position that the president could wield sweeping powers to imprison people without trial as wartime detainees?

Career Justice Department lawyers handling Guantánamo lawsuits feared that rolling back the Bush position might make it harder to win. And the new acting head of the department’s Office of Legal Counsel — David Barron, a Harvard law professor and co-author of a lengthy law review critique of Bush administration claims that the commander in chief can override statutes — worried that Judge Bates had given them too little time to devise the answer.

But the White House counsel, Greg Craig, a campaign adviser to Mr. Obama who had been a foreign policy official in the Clinton administration, saw this as an important opportunity to demonstrate a break with Mr. Bush. And at a White House meeting, Mr. Obama weighed in, declaring that he did not want to invoke unrestrained commander-in-chief powers in detention matters.

With the president’s directions in hand, Mr. Obama’s Justice Department came back on March 13, 2009, with a more modest position than Mr. Bush had advanced. It told Judge Bates that the president could detain without trial only people who were part of Al Qaeda or its affiliates, or their “substantial” supporters. The department rooted that power in the authorization granted by Congress to use military force against the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks. And it acknowledged that the scope and limits of that power were defined by the laws of war, as translated to a conflict against terrorists.

But behind closed doors, the debate flared again that summer, when the Obama administration confronted the case of Belkacem Bensayah, an Algerian man who had been arrested in Bosnia — far from the active combat zone — and was being held without trial by the United States at Guantánamo. Mr. Bensayah was accused of facilitating the travel of people who wanted to go to Afghanistan to join Al Qaeda. A judge found that such “direct support” was enough to hold him as a wartime prisoner, and the Justice Department asked an appeals court to uphold that ruling.

The arguments over the case forced onto the table discussion of lingering discontent at the State Department over one aspect of the Obama position on detention. There was broad agreement that the law of armed conflict allowed the United States to detain as wartime prisoners anyone who was actually a part of Al Qaeda, as well as nonmembers who took positions alongside the enemy force and helped it. But some criticized the notion that the United States could also consider mere supporters, arrested far away, to be just as detainable without trial as enemy fighters.

That view was amplified after Harold Koh, a former human-rights official and Yale Law School dean who had been a leading critic of the Bush administration’s detainee policies, became the State Department’s top lawyer in late June. Mr. Koh produced a lengthy, secret memo contending that there was no support in the laws of war for the United States’ position in the Bensayah case.

Mr. Koh found himself in immediate conflict with the Pentagon’s top lawyer, Jeh C. Johnson, a former Air Force general counsel and trial lawyer who had been an adviser to Mr. Obama during the presidential campaign. Mr. Johnson produced his own secret memorandum arguing for a more flexible interpretation of who could be detained under the laws of war — now or in the future.

In September 2009, national-security officials from across the government packed into the Office of Legal Counsel’s conference room on the fifth floor of the Justice Department, lining the walls, to watch Mr. Koh and Mr. Johnson debate around a long table. It was up to Mr. Barron, who sat at the head of the table, to decide who was right.

But he did not. Instead, days later, he circulated a preliminary draft memorandum stating that while the Office of Legal Counsel had found no precedents justifying the detention of mere supporters of Al Qaeda who were picked up far away from enemy forces, it was not prepared to state any definitive conclusion.

So with no consensus, the legal team decided on a tactical approach. For as long as possible they would try to avoid that hard question. They changed the subject by instead asking courts to agree that people like Mr. Bensayah, looked at from another angle, had performed functions that made them effectively part of the terrorist organization — and so were clearly detainable.

The appeals court has not yet ruled on Mr. Bensayah’s case. But the hours and effort that high-level officials expended on wrestling over adjustments to the reasoning in his case — only to reach the same outcome, that he was detainable without trial — dovetailed with a pattern identified by critics as varied as civil libertarians and former Bush lawyers.

“I think the change in tone has been important and has helped internationally,” said John B. Bellinger III, a top Bush era National Security Council and State Department lawyer. “But the change in law has been largely cosmetic. And of course there has been no change in outcome.”

But at a recent American Bar Association event, Mr. Koh argued that the administration’s changes — including requiring strict adherence to anti-torture rules and ensuring that all detainees are being held pursuant to recognizable legal authorities — have been meaningful. The United States, he said, can now defend its national-security policies as fully compliant with domestic and international law under “common and universal standards, not double standards.”

“We are not saying that we don’t have to fight battles,” he said. “We’re just saying that we should fight those battles within the framework of law.”

Last week, in another speech, Mr. Koh also for the first time outlined portions of the administration’s legal rationale for targeted killings using drone strikes, which some scholars have criticized. His remarks, however, focused on issues like whether it was lawful to single out specific enemy figures for killing — not defining the limits of who may be deemed an enemy.

But Mr. Feldman, the Harvard professor, said the detention debate also had “serious consequences” for the targeted killings policy because, “If we’re at war with you, then we can detain you — but we can also try to kill you.”

That said, he cautioned, additional factors complicate the analysis of selecting lawful targets. Among them, it is not clear whether Mr. Obama is more willing in classified settings to assert that, as commander in chief, he can use drone strikes to defend the country against perceived threats that cannot be linked to the Congressionally authorized war against Al Qaeda.

And even in detention matters, Bush-era theories have remained attractive to some. This January, two appeals court judges appointed by Mr. Bush — Janice Rogers Brown and Brett M. Kavanaugh, both of whom had been singled out by Democrats after their nominations as too ideological — reopened the debate by unexpectedly declaring, in another Guantánamo case, that the laws of armed conflict did not limit the president’s war powers.

In the Justice Department, career litigators who defend against Guantánamo lawsuits wanted to embrace that reasoning, arguing it would help them win. Judges have sided with detainees seeking release in some 34 of 46 cases to date — though the decisions largely turned on skepticism about specific evidence, not the general legal theory about who was detainable.

But political appointees — including Mr. Barron, Mr. Koh and even Mr. Johnson — criticized the reasoning of the appeals court ruling as vulnerable to reversal and argued that the administration should not abandon its respect for the laws of war.

In classified briefs filed in several detainee cases this month, officials said, the Justice Department adopted an ambivalent stance. It cited the ruling as a precedent while also reasserting its own contradictory argument that the laws of war matter. The debate would go on.

“We’ll see how the cases develop,” Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said in an interview in February, in the midst of that latest round. But, he added, “I don’t think we are going to deviate from our argument.”

    Obama Team Is Divided on Tactics Against Terrorism, NYT, 29.3.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/29/us/politics/29force.html

Report Faults

2 Authors of Bush Terror Memos

February 20, 2010
The New York Times
By ERIC LICHTBLAU and SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON — After five years of often bitter internal debate, the Justice Department concluded in a report released Friday that the lawyers who gave legal justification to the Bush administration’s brutal interrogation tactics for terrorism suspects used flawed legal reasoning but were not guilty of professional misconduct.

The report, rejecting harsher sanctions recommended by Justice Department ethics lawyers, brings to a close a pivotal chapter in the debate over the legal limits of the Bush administration’s fight against terrorism and whether its treatment of Qaeda prisoners amounted to torture.

The ethics lawyers, in the Office of Professional Responsibility, concluded that two department lawyers involved in analyzing and justifying waterboarding and other interrogation tactics — Jay S. Bybee, now a federal judge, and John C. Yoo, now a professor at the University of California, Berkeley — had demonstrated “professional misconduct.” It said the lawyers had ignored legal precedents and provided slipshod legal advice to the White House in possible violation of international and federal laws on torture. That report was among the documents made public Friday.

But David Margolis, a career lawyer at the Justice Department, rejected that conclusion in a report of his own released Friday. He said the ethics lawyers, in condemning the lawyers’ actions, had given short shrift to the national climate of urgency in which Mr. Bybee and Mr. Yoo acted after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. “Among the difficulties in assessing these memos now over seven years after their issuance is that the context is lost,” Mr. Margolis said.

Indeed, the documents released Friday provide new details about the atmosphere in which Mr. Yoo and the Justice Department prepared their initial findings in August 2002, shortly after the capture of Abu Zubaydah, suspected of being an operative for Al Qaeda.

The report quotes Patrick Philbin, a senior Justice Department lawyer involved in the review, as saying that because of the urgency of the situation, he had advised Mr. Bybee to sign the memorandum, despite what he saw as Mr. Yoo’s aggressive and problematic interpretation of the president’s broad commander-in-chief powers in trumping international and domestic law.

Mr. Philbin said that “given the situation and the time pressures, and they are telling us this has to be signed tonight — this was like 9 o’clock, 10 o’clock at night on the day it was signed — my conclusion” was that it was permissible for Mr. Bybee to sign the memorandum. “They” apparently referred to White House officials.

In a separate portion of the report, Mr. Yoo denied that the White House or the Central Intelligence Agency, which had requested the legal opinion, had exerted any pressure on him in his legal findings. “I don’t think of them as being particularly aggressive,” Mr. Yoo said, adding, “I had never felt that anybody was pushing us in one direction or another.”

The Office of Professional Responsibility, however, suggested in its report that the legal conclusions were in effect pre-ordained. It said that John Rizzo, the C.I.A. lawyer who requested the opinion, had “candidly admitted the agency was seeking maximum legal protection for its officers” against possible criminal prosecution. Mr. Rizzo objected to the way his remarks were characterized by the office.

Mr. Margolis said that in rejecting harsher sanctions, “this decision should not be viewed as an endorsement of the legal work that underlies those memoranda.” But he said the legal advice of Mr. Yoo and the other lawyers, while “flawed” and insufficient in some areas, did not rise to the level of “professional misconduct,” which could have resulted in bar reviews or other disciplinary action.

Indeed, Mr. Margolis’s 69-page report was often more critical of the ethics office than of the Bush administration lawyers themselves. Mr. Margolis, who has served at the Justice Department for more than three decades and handles many high-level disciplinary issues, saved some stinging criticism for Mr. Yoo.

“While I have declined to adopt O.P.R.’s findings of misconduct, I fear that John Yoo’s loyalty to his own ideology and convictions clouded his view of his obligation to his client and led him to author opinions that reflected his own extreme, albeit sincerely held, view of executive power while speaking for an institutional client,” Mr. Margolis said.

In their responses to the ethics office’s report, Mr. Yoo and Mr. Bybee adamantly denied that they had done anything but gave their honest and reasoned legal judgments on pressing matters of national security.

O.P.R. officials, however, were not persuaded.

The report said “situations of great stress, danger and fear do not relieve department attorneys of their duty to provide thorough, objective, and candid legal advice, even if that advice is not what the clients want to hear.”

Representative John Conyers Jr., the Michigan Democrat who leads the House Judiciary Committee, said the ethics office report released Friday made clear that the authors of the interrogation memorandums “dishonored their office and the entire Department of Justice.”

Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, said, “Mr. Bybee and Mr. Yoo may keep their law licenses, but they will not escape the verdict of history.”

The ethics’ office findings also criticized Steven Bradbury, who wrote four memorandums in 2005 and 2007 also justifying the harsh interrogation tactics. It said “we had serious concerns about some of his analysis” but said the problems did not amount to misconduct.

The ethics report also criticized former Attorney General John Ashcroft and two of his senior aides, Michael Chertoff and Adam G. Ciongoli, saying they “should have looked beyond the surface complexity” of the legal memorandums and pressed harder to determine whether the legal foundations were solid or not. But it did not accuse them of wrongdoing, and other officials defended their work.

The ethics report is not the last word on the emotional national dispute about torture. In August, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. opened a criminal investigation to determine whether the C.I.A. interrogation program broke the law, and that inquiry is expected to continue for months.

But the Justice Department’s findings about its own lawyers are a milestone in the long debate over the treatment of Qaeda prisoners. Interrogators were directed to use coercive methods in an effort to find out whether new terrorist attacks were planned. The interrogators’ bosses, from top C.I.A. officials to former President George W. Bush, have justified their policies by saying the Justice Department’s opinion was that the methods were legal.

So the political debate over interrogation often returned to the legal opinions Mr. Yoo, Mr. Bybee and other officials of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel had written declaring that none of the C.I.A.’s methods were illegal torture.

Some of the brutal interrogation methods that Mr. Yoo and Mr. Bybee approved for use on Qaeda prisoners, including wall-slamming and the near-drowning of waterboarding, had never before been authorized in American history, and the United States had condemned such treatment as torture and abuse when used by other countries.

Over less than a year starting in August 2002, according to intelligence officials, waterboarding was used on three Qaeda prisoners, including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks. The coercive methods set off a heated dispute inside the C.I.A., and their use was suspended after a damning inspector general’s report in 2004.

A scaled-back set of harsh methods was approved by the Justice Department and White House in 2007, but they were rarely if ever used before President Obama banned such methods shortly after taking office.

    Report Faults 2 Authors of Bush Terror Memos, NYT, 20.2.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/20/us/politics/20justice.html

Right to Free Speech Collides With Fight Against Terror

February 11, 2010
The New York Times
By ADAM LIPTAK

WASHINGTON — Ralph D. Fertig, a 79-year-old civil rights lawyer, says he would like to help a militant Kurdish group in Turkey find peaceful ways to achieve its goals. But he fears prosecution under a law banning even benign assistance to groups said to engage in terrorism.

The Supreme Court will soon hear Mr. Fertig’s challenge to the law, in a case that pits First Amendment freedoms against the government’s efforts to combat terrorism. The case represents the court’s first encounter with the free speech and association rights of American citizens in the context of terrorism since the Sept. 11 attacks — and its first chance to test the constitutionality of a provision of the USA Patriot Act.

Opponents of the law, which bans providing “material support” to terrorist organizations, say it violates American values in ways that would have made Senator Joseph R. McCarthy blush during the witch hunts of the cold war.

The government defends the law, under which it has secured many of its terrorism convictions in the last decade, as an important tool that takes account of the slippery nature of the nation’s modern enemies.

The law takes a comprehensive approach to its ban on aid to terrorist groups, prohibiting not only providing cash, weapons and the like but also four more ambiguous sorts of help — “training,” “personnel,” “expert advice or assistance” and “service.”

“Congress wants these organizations to be radioactive,” Douglas N. Letter, a Justice Department lawyer, said in a 2007 appeals court argument in the case, referring to the dozens of groups that have been designated as foreign terrorist organizations by the State Department.

Mr. Letter said it would be a crime for a lawyer to file a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of a designated organization in Mr. Fertig’s case or “to be assisting terrorist organizations in making presentations to the U.N., to television, to a newspaper.”

It would be no excuse, Mr. Letter went on, “to be saying, ‘I want to help them in a good way.’ ”

Mr. Fertig said he was saddened and mystified by the government’s approach.

“Violence? Terrorism?” he asked in an interview in his Los Angeles home. “Totally repudiate it. My mission would be to work with them on peaceful resolutions of their conflicts, to try to convince them to use nonviolent means of protest on the model of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King.”

Mr. Fertig said his commitment to nonviolence was not abstract. “I had most of my ribs broken,” he said, after his 1961 arrest in Selma, Ala., for trying to integrate the interstate bus system as a freedom rider.

He paused, correcting himself. “I believe all my ribs were broken,” he said.

Mr. Fertig is president of the Humanitarian Law Project, a nonprofit group that has a long history of mediating international conflicts and promoting human rights. He and the project, along with a doctor and several other groups, sued to strike down the material-support law in 1998.

Two years earlier, passage of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act had made it a crime to provide “material support” to groups the State Department had designated as “foreign terrorist organizations.” The definition of material support included “training” and “personnel.” Later versions of the law, including amendments in the USA Patriot Act, added “expert advice or assistance” and “service.”

In 1997, Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright designated some 30 groups under the law, including Hamas, Hezbollah, the Khmer Rouge and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party. The United States says the Kurdish group, sometimes called the P.K.K., has engaged in widespread terrorist activities, including bombings and kidnappings, and “has waged a violent insurgency that has claimed over 22,000 lives.”

The litigation has bounced around in the lower courts for more than a decade as the law was amended and as it took on a central role in terrorism cases. Since 2001, the government says, it has prosecuted about 150 defendants for violating the material-support law, obtaining roughly 75 convictions.

The latest appeals court decision in Mr. Fertig’s case, in 2007, ruled that the bans on training, service and some kinds of expert advice were unconstitutionally vague. But it upheld the bans on personnel and expert advice derived from scientific or technical knowledge.

Both sides appealed to the Supreme Court, which agreed to hear the consolidated cases in October. The cases are Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, No. 08-1498, and Humanitarian Law Project v. Holder, No. 09-89. The court will hear arguments on Feb. 23.

David D. Cole, a lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents Mr. Fertig and other challengers to the law, told the court that the case concerned speech protected by the First Amendment “promoting lawful, nonviolent activities,” including “human rights advocacy and peacemaking.”

Solicitor General Elena Kagan countered that the law allowed Mr. Fertig and the other challengers to say anything they liked so long as they did not direct their efforts toward or coordinate them with the designated groups.

A number of victims of McCarthy-era persecution filed a friend-of-the-court brief urging the Supreme Court to remember the lessons of history.

“I signed the brief,” said Chandler Davis, an emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of Toronto, “because I can testify to the way in which the dubious repression of dissent disrupted lives and disrupted political discourse.”

Professor Davis refused to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1954 and was dismissed from his position at the University of Michigan. Unable to find work in the United States, he moved to Canada. In 1991, the University of Michigan established an annual lecture series on academic freedom in honor of Professor Davis and others it had mistreated in the McCarthy era.

Mr. Fertig said the current climate was in some ways worse.

“I think it’s more dangerous than McCarthyism,” he said. “It was not illegal to help the communists or to be a communist. You might lose your job, you might lose your friends, you might be ostracized. But you’d be free. Today, the same person would be thrown in jail.”

A friend-of-the-court brief — prepared by Edwin Meese III, the former United States attorney general; John C. Yoo, a former Bush administration lawyer; and others — called the civil liberties critique of the material-support law naïve.

The law represents “a considered wartime judgment by the political branches of the optimal means to confront the unique challenges posed by terrorism,” their brief said. Allowing any sort of contributions to terrorist organizations “simply because the donor intends that they be used for ‘peaceful’ purposes directly conflicts with Congress’s determination that no quarantine can effectively isolate ‘good’ activities from the evil of terrorism.”

Mr. Fertig said he could understand an argument against donating money, given the difficulty of controlling its use. But the sweep of the material-support law goes too far, he said.

“Fear is manipulated,” Mr. Fertig said, “and the tools of the penal system are applied to inhibit people from speaking out.”

    Right to Free Speech Collides With Fight Against Terror, NYT, 11.2.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/11/us/11law.html

Editorial

The Politics of Fear

February 10, 2010
The New York Times

An election is coming, so the Republicans are trying to scare Americans by making it appear as if the Democrats don’t care about catching or punishing terrorists.

It’s nonsense, of course, but effective. The be-very-afraid approach helped former President George W. Bush ram laws through Congress that chipped away at Americans’ rights. He used it to get re-elected in 2004. Now the Republicans are playing the fear card for the fall elections.

The most recent target is the Obama administration’s handling of the failed Christmas Day bomber, particularly its decision (an absolutely correct one) to have the F.B.I. arrest and interrogate the suspect and file federal terrorism charges rather than throw him into a military prison where the Republicans seem to expect that he would be given no rights, questioned and held without charges.

Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, suggested — without any evidence — that vital intelligence was lost by that approach. Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, told Politico that he wants to block financing for civilian trials of terrorism suspects so Republicans can brag about it this fall. He said “the core question is whether the attorney general of the United States ought to be in charge of the war on terror.”

As Mr. McConnell should know perfectly well, that is not the question at all, core or otherwise. The Obama administration has embraced the idea of using military tribunals for some terrorism suspects. The Christmas bombing suspect, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was arrested in the United States. The American justice system does not allow people arrested in the United States for serious offenses to be detained and held without access to an attorney.

It is good that the administration is pushing back.

In a five-page letter to Mr. McConnell, Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. said that the handling of Mr. Abdulmutallab followed the sensible practices of presidents of both parties. Although Mr. Abdulmutallab stopped talking at one point, he has since begun cooperating, according to administration officials. Law enforcement agents know that many defendants talk after being told of their right to remain silent, Mr. Holder noted.

Republicans like to say that Mr. Obama is giving new rights to terrorists. But Mr. Holder’s letter noted that the Bush administration prosecuted more than 300 people on terrorism-related charges in federal courts without a whiff of complaint from those same Republicans. He said those included Richard Reid, the so-called shoe bomber; Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person convicted of involvement in the Sept. 11 attacks; the man charged with plotting to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge; and another who schemed to bomb the Los Angeles airport.

The Republican propaganda is a distraction from the real issue: that the counterterrorism system is malfunctioning more than eight years after the Sept. 11 attacks. Like many of the nation’s other problems, Mr. Obama inherited this one. For eight years, Congress failed in its legal duty to oversee the intelligence community and the basic operational tasks of the Department of Homeland Security and correct the abusive system of detention at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and elsewhere that made our country more vulnerable, not less.

Congress should be helping the president fix those problems, not piling up sound bites for November and trying to bring that shameful detention system home.

    The Politics of Fear, NYT, 10.2.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/10/opinion/10wed1.html

Letters

Moving the 9/11 Trial Out of New York

February 2, 2010
The New York Times
 

To the Editor:

Re “U.S. Drops Plan for a 9/11 Trial in New York City” (front page, Jan. 30):

While the decision to move the trial of the 9/11 plotters from New York to an as yet undisclosed place is welcome, one must still ask: How could such an absurd decision have been made in the first place?

Why the Obama administration disregarded the economic damage that would be inflicted upon a city already reeling from the current financial meltdown is beyond belief — particularly a city still coping with residual psychic wounds resulting from the attacks of that fateful day.

Yes, the administration has reversed a poor decision, but, incredibly, as of only a few days ago the plan was still “a go.” One hopes that this is a sign that President Obama is beginning to listen to people with some common sense instead of only his inner circle.

Steven Morris
East Hampton, N.Y., Jan. 30, 2010

•

To the Editor:

This is a case of Nimby gone amok. It’s O.K. to have civilian trials, but not here. Real estate brokers are worried about the negative effect on the market value of apartments; community leaders are worried about shutting down Chinatown and the financial district. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who can always be counted on for a mercantile perspective, does an about-face.

The bottom line is that the terrorism trials in New York City would have affected the bottom line. Can New Yorkers think of nothing else?

Alexander Goldstein
Brooklyn, Jan. 30, 2010

•

To the Editor:

Re “It Happened in Our Backyard” (editorial, Jan. 31):

Regardless of whether one believes that the Khalid Shaikh Mohammed terrorism trial should be held in New York City or elsewhere, the basic premise is solid: this trial must be conducted publicly and in a democratic, civilian court. To follow former President George W. Bush’s plan for military tribunals would be an insult to our foundational democratic beliefs, and a statement of distrust in our country’s ability to function as a democracy.

Given that, the costs and resources must certainly be shared by all, through federal government coverage for security and costs. The 9/11 attacks were against the United States, not individual targets; we must respond as a united country in conducting these trials.

Aaron Taylor
Houston, Jan. 31, 2010

•

To the Editor:

In response to your editorial, our civilian judiciary has a long history of moving high-profile trials away from crime sites — usually because of defendant motions to avoid prejudice. Certainly, holding an open civilian trial at one of the alternative secured sites within the Southern District would undermine neither the quality of justice nor the political statement.

My objection to the downtown location focused not on the money but on the unconscionable, unprecedented, multiyear disruption to lives and businesses and vital services. Clearly, the federal government overlooked the facts that the only neighborhood playground sits right around the corner, and that people who have been through so much since 9/11 live right across the street from the courthouse.

A nation that genuinely extols humanitarian values would not so totally upset the lives of children or anyone for the sake of even the most important of political statements when the statement could effectively be delivered from elsewhere.

Alan J. Gerson
New York, Jan. 31, 2010

The writer is a former New York City Council member representing Lower Manhattan.

•

To the Editor:

Holed up in his hideaway, Osama bin Laden must be congratulating himself upon hearing the news that now, more than eight years after 9/11, Americans are still so terrified of his power that they are afraid to try Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-described 9/11 mastermind, at the scene of his crime in New York City.

Opponents of a trial venue in New York are successfully demonstrating that fear and minor commercial disruption are sufficient reasons to derail the democratic process and in so doing confirm to the world that our repeated representations of freedom and liberty are unconvincing rhetoric.

Comfortably assured that at every opportunity spineless demagogues will spread fear and doubt, Osama bin Laden can sleep comfortably with confidence that he need do little more to terrorize America.

Arthur L. Yeager
Edison, N.J., Jan. 31, 2010

•

To the Editor:

Re “Another Inconvenient Truth,” by Gail Collins (column, Jan. 30):

Ms. Collins calls those opposed to holding terrorism trials in Lower Manhattan selfish. Recently, Lower Manhattan residents packed Community Board 1 meetings pleading that the trials be held elsewhere. They were worried, even terrified. Many still have health problems and post-traumatic stress syndrome from the destruction of the World Trade Center. Some lost friends, family, homes and businesses because of 9/11.

If the trials were going to last a few weeks or even a few months, I think that these residents would have put up with them, but they were told that the trials would probably go on for years.

Most of the people who spoke at the community board meetings favored civilian trials in a federal court — not military trials — but the prospect of not having free access to their homes, of snipers on the rooftops, of having to send their children to school past a security cordon and other “inconveniences” was too much for them to accept.

It would be incorrect to dismiss these fears as selfish.

Terese Loeb Kreuzer
New York, Jan. 30, 2010

    Moving the 9/11 Trial Out of New York, NYT, 2.2.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/02/opinion/l02terror.html

U.S. Drops Plan for a 9/11 Trial in New York City

January 30, 2010
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE and BENJAMIN WEISER

The Obama administration on Friday gave up on its plan to try the Sept. 11 plotters in Lower Manhattan, bowing to almost unanimous pressure from New York officials and business leaders to move the terrorism trial elsewhere.

“I think I can acknowledge the obvious,” an administration official said. “We’re considering other options.”

The reversal on whether to try the alleged 9/11 terrorists blocks from the former World Trade Center site seemed to come suddenly this week, after Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg abandoned his strong support for the plan and said the cost and disruption would be too great.

But behind the brave face that many New Yorkers had put on for weeks, resistance had been gathering steam.

After a dinner in New York on Dec. 14, Steven Spinola, president of the Real Estate Board of New York, pulled aside David Axelrod, President Obama’s closest adviser, to convey an urgent plea: move the 9/11 trial out of Manhattan.

More recently, in a series of presentations to business leaders, local elected officials and community representatives of Chinatown, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly laid out his plan for securing the trial: blanketing a swath of Lower Manhattan with police checkpoints, vehicle searches, rooftop snipers and canine patrols.

“They were not received well,” said one city official.

And on Tuesday, in a meeting Mr. Bloomberg had with at least two dozen federal judges on the eighth floor of their Manhattan courthouse, one judge raised the question of security. The mayor, according to several people present, said he was sure the courthouse could be made safe, but that it would be costly and difficult.

The next day, the mayor, who back in November had hailed the idea of trying Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four other accused Sept. 11 plotters in the heart of downtown Manhattan, made clear he’d changed his mind.

The Obama administration official said the decision to back out of plans for a New York trial had broad support but had not yet been made public.

Jason Post, a spokesman for Mr. Bloomberg, said Friday night that the mayor would have no comment until the Obama administration had made an official announcement of its intentions.

Told of the administration’s decision, a spokesman for Mr. Kelly said, “We were not aware of that.”

But the spokesman, Paul J. Browne, said of Mr. Kelly: “He is of the mind that such a decision would give us some breathing room, but that New York has to remain vigilant because it remains at the top of the terrorist target list.”

“It is obvious that they can't have the trials in New York,” said Senator Charles E. Schumer, New York's Democratic senior senator.

Mr. Bloomberg’s remarks on Wednesday set off a stampede of New York City officials, most of them Democrats well-disposed toward President Obama, who suddenly declared that a civilian trial for the 9/11 suspects was a great idea — as long as it didn’t happen in their city.

By Friday, Justice Department officials were studying other locations, focusing especially on military bases and prison complexes, and no obvious new choice had emerged.

The story of how prominent New York officials seemed to have so quickly moved from a kind of “bring it on” bravado to an “anywhere but here” involves many factors, including a new anxiety about terrorism after the attempted airliner bombing on Christmas Day.

Ultimately, it appears, New York officials could not tolerate ceding much of the city to a set of trials that could last for years.

“The administration is in a tricky political and legal position,” Julie Menin, a lawyer who is chairwoman of the 50-member Community Board 1 that represents Lower Manhattan, including the federal courthouse and ground zero, said of President Obama and his Justice Department. “But it means shutting down our financial district. It could cost $1 billion. It’s absolutely crazy.”

Ms. Menin said the turning point for her came when she heard Mr. Kelly’s security plan and cost estimates: hundreds of millions of dollars a year. “It was an absolute game-changer,” she said. She wrote a Jan. 17 op-ed article for The New York Times proposing moving the trial to Governors Island off Manhattan; that idea did not catch hold, but the article escalated the outcry against a Manhattan trial.

When the Justice Department announced in November its plans to try Mr. Mohammed and four alleged accomplices blocks from where the World Trade Center stood, Mr. Bloomberg hailed the location as not only workable but as a powerful symbol.

“It is fitting that 9/11 suspects face justice near the World Trade Center site where so many New Yorkers were murdered,” the mayor said at the time. The federal courthouse had hosted major terror trials previously, he noted, and the police were more than up to the security challenge.

And so it is possible that the reversal will call into question the calibrated effort of Mr. Obama and his attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., to bring the handling of suspected terrorists out of the realm of military emergency and into the halls of civilian justice.

If the message to Al Qaeda and its supporters in November was that New York City was able, even eager, to bring justice to those who plotted mass murder, the message of January is far less confident.

“This will be one more stroke for Al Qaeda’s propaganda,” said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University.

The breakdown of support for the trials in New York might have actually been assisted by the way New York officials were first notified by the Obama administration.

Mr. Holder called Mr. Bloomberg and Gov. David A. Paterson only a few hours before his public announcement on Nov. 13; and Mr. Kelly got a similar call that morning from Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan, whose office had been picked to prosecute the cases.

But by the time those calls were made, the decision had already been reported in the news media, which was how Mr. Bloomberg learned about it, according to mayoral aides.

One senior Bloomberg official, speaking on condition of anonymity so as not to antagonize the White House, said: “When Holder was making the decision he didn’t call Ray Kelly and say, ‘What do you think?’ He didn’t call the mayor and say, ‘What would your position be?’ They didn’t reach out until it got out there.”

Soon, though, New York real estate executives were raising concerns with the Obama administration, according to Mr. Spinola, president of the Real Estate Board of New York.

Mr. Spinola said he had received calls and e-mail messages from the board’s members. Residential real estate brokers were “going berserk,” as he put it, worried that they would no longer be able to sell apartments downtown.

Commercial brokers feared they would not be able to lease office space.

On Nov. 20, the Friday before Thanksgiving, the real estate executive William C. Rudin held a meeting at his office to talk about issues with Jim Messina, a deputy White House chief of staff, according to Mr. Spinola.

The meeting was not on the topic of the trials, but the executives pressed their case anyway.

Mr. Spinola said that he told Mr. Messina, “I hope that the White House was going to put a ton of money into it.”

A turning point came when Mr. Kelly spoke before a large business crowd at a New York Police Foundation breakfast on Jan. 13.

After addressing the year’s highlights in crime reduction, he turned to the 9/11 trials, offering a presentation that was direct and graphic.

“Whatever the merits of holding the trial in Lower Manhattan,” he said, “it will certainly raise the level of threat.” He said that “securing this area and the entire city for the duration of this event promises to be an extremely demanding undertaking.”

He offered a detailed account of his department’s security plan, with inner and outer perimeters, unannounced vehicle checkpoints, countersniper teams on rooftops, and hazardous-materials and bomb squad personnel ready to respond. And he cited the hundreds of millions it would cost to protect the city.

“The entire audience issued a collective gasp when it became clear that this was an event that could go on for years,” said one guest, Kathryn S. Wylde, president and chief executive of the Partnership for New York City.

The unhappiness grew. During the Real Estate Board of New York’s annual gala, held on Jan. 21, Mr. Bloomberg dropped by, and Bloomberg officials said they got “an earful on that” from real estate executives, all of whom were angry about the plan.

A week later, his public opinion had changed, and so, it seems, had the ultimate destination of the trials.

Jet Diverted in Scare

WASHINGTON (AP) — A Continental Airlines jet flying from Newark, N.J., to Bogota was diverted to Jacksonville, Fla., on Friday over concerns that a passenger was on the government’s watch list of suspected terrorists banned from commercial flights. It turned out to be a case of mistaken identity.

The passenger — one of 75 — was cleared by the F.B.I. and permitted to continue on the flight to Colombia, the Transportation Security Administration said.

Reporting was contributed by Al Baker, David W. Chen, Christine Haughney and William K. Rashbaum.

    U.S. Drops Plan for a 9/11 Trial in New York City, NYT, 30.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/30/nyregion/30trial.html

Bin Laden Blasts US for Climate Change

January 29, 2010
Filed at 6:52 a.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

CAIRO (AP) -- Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden has called in a new audiotape for the world to boycott American goods and the U.S. dollar, blaming the United States and other industrialized countries for global warming.

In the tape, aired in part on Al-Jazeera television Friday, bin Laden warns of the dangers of climate change and says that the way to stop it is to bring ''the wheels of the American economy'' to a halt.

He says the world should ''stop consuming American products'' and ''refrain from using the dollar,'' according to a transcript on Al-Jazeera's Web site.

The new message, whose authenticity could not immediately be confirmed, comes after a bin Laden tape released last week in which he endorsed a failed attempt to blow up an American airliner on Christmas Day.

    Bin Laden Blasts US for Climate Change, NYT, 29.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/01/29/world/AP-ML-Bin-Laden-Tape.html

Man Claims Terror Ties in Little Rock Shooting

January 22, 2010
The New York Times
By JAMES DAO

MEMPHIS — A Tennessee man accused of killing a soldier outside a Little Rock, Ark., military recruiting station last year has asked a judge to change his plea to guilty, claiming for the first time that he is affiliated with a Yemen-based affiliate of Al Qaeda.

In a letter to the judge presiding over his case, the accused killer, Abdulhakim Muhammad, calls himself a soldier in Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and calls the shooting “a Jihadi Attack” in retribution for the killing of Muslims by American troops.

“I wasn’t insane or post traumatic nor was I forced to do this Act,” Mr. Muhammad said in a two-page, hand-printed note in pencil. The attack, which he said did not go as planned, was “justified according to Islamic Laws and the Islamic Religion. Jihad — to fight those who wage war on Islam and Muslims.”

It remains unclear whether Mr. Muhammad really has ties to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which President Obama has said is behind the attempted Christmas Day bombing of an American plane by a Nigerian man.

But if evidence emerges that his claim is true, it will give the June 1, 2009, shooting in Little Rock new significance at a time when Yemen is being more closely scrutinized as a source of terrorist plots against the United States.

Mr. Muhammad, 24, a Muslim convert from Memphis, spent about 16 months in Yemen starting in the fall of 2007, ostensibly teaching English and learning Arabic. During that time, he married a woman from south Yemen. But he was also imprisoned for several months because he overstayed his visa and was holding a fraudulent Somali passport, the Yemen government said.

Under pressure from the United States government, Yemen deported Mr. Muhammad in late January 2009. But just four months after his return, Mr. Muhammad used a semiautomatic rifle to gun down two soldiers — Pvt. William A. Long and Pvt. Quinton Ezeagwula — while they were standing outside a military recruiting station in Little Rock, killing Private Long and wounding Private Ezeagwula.

After the shooting, Mr. Muhammad pleaded not guilty, but also took responsibility for the shootings in interviews with The Associated Press. But he did not acknowledge being part of an extremist group and some terrorism experts came to view him as a self-radicalized, lone actor.

In his letter to Herb Wright Jr., a Pulaski County circuit judge, Mr. Muhammad calls himself a member of “Abu Basir’s Army,” an apparent reference to Naser Abdel-Karim al-Wahishi, the Yemen group’s leader, who also goes by the name Abu Basir.

Mr. Muhammad’s father, Melvin Bledsoe, a Memphis businessman, said that while he believes his son may have been radicalized in Yemen, he doubts whether he has serious ties to the Qaeda affiliate.

He suggested that Mr. Muhammad might be trying to link himself to Al Qaeda because he believes it will lead to his execution and make him a martyr. Mr. Bledsoe added that he considers his son “unable to process” reality, describing him as “brainwashed.”

“I think a lot of this is make-believe,” Mr. Bledsoe said in an interview.

A spokesman for the F.B.I. declined to comment about Mr. Muhammad, citing an order against public statements in the case by Judge Wright.

Mr. Muhammad’s lawyer, Claiborne Ferguson, said his client had not discussed changing his plea to guilty before he wrote the letter, which is dated Jan. 12. He said the prosecutor would have to agree before the judge would consider the request.

Mr. Muhammad is charged with capital murder, attempted capital murder and 10 counts of unlawful discharge of a firearm. Prosecutors have said they will seek the death penalty on the capital murder charge.

John M. DiPippa, dean of the Bowen School of Law at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock, said a judge could only accept a guilty plea in a capital case if he determines that the defendant is mentally competent and not under duress. Mr. Muhammad is in the process of being evaluated by a psychologist, his father said.

Mr. DiPippa said the prosecutor would also have to waive the death penalty, something he may be unwilling to do. Mr. DiPippa added that “the only way it would make sense” for a defendant to plead guilty in a capital case “is to avoid the death penalty.”

In an interview, the prosecutor, Larry Jegley, said it was highly unlikely that he would waive the death penalty, adding, “We’re on” for a trial.

Even before the Christmas Day bombing attempt, Yemen had come under closer scrutiny by American officials, because the soldier charged in the Fort Hood shootings, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, exchanged e-mail messages with a radical cleric in Yemen, Anwar al-Awlaki.

This week, a report by the Democratic staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee asserted that as many as 36 American Muslims who were prisoners have moved to Yemen in recent months, ostensibly to study Arabic, and that several of them may have linked up with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

Steve Barnes contributed reporting from Little Rock, Ark.

    Man Claims Terror Ties in Little Rock Shooting, NYT, 22.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/22/us/22littlerock.html

Review of Jet Bomb Plot Shows More Missed Clues

January 18, 2010
The New York Times
By ERIC LIPTON, ERIC SCHMITT and MARK MAZZETTI
 

This article is by Eric Lipton, Eric Schmitt and Mark Mazzetti.

WASHINGTON — Worried about possible terrorist attacks over the Christmas holiday, President Obama met on Dec. 22 with top officials of the C.I.A., F.B.I. and Department of Homeland Security, who ticked off a list of possible plots against the United States and how their agencies were working to disrupt them.

In a separate White House meeting that day, Mr. Obama’s homeland security adviser, John O. Brennan, led talks on Yemen, where a stream of disturbing intelligence had suggested that Qaeda operatives were preparing for some action, perhaps a strike on an American target, on Christmas Day.

Yet in those sessions, government officials never considered or connected links that, with the benefit of hindsight, now seem so evident and indicated that the gathering threat in Yemen would reach into the United States.

Just as lower-level counterterrorism analysts failed to stitch together the pieces of information that would have alerted them to the possibility of a suicide bomber aboard a Detroit-bound jetliner on Christmas, top national security officials failed to fully appreciate mounting evidence of the dangers beyond the Arabian Peninsula posed by extremists linked to Yemen.

Mr. Obama this month presented his government’s findings on how the plot went undetected. But a detailed review of the episode by The New York Times, including more than two dozen interviews with White House and American intelligence officials and with counterterrorism officials in Europe and Yemen, shows that there were far more warning signs than the administration has acknowledged.

The officials also cited lapses and misjudgments that were not disclosed in the declassified government report released Jan. 7 about what went wrong inside the nation’s counterterrorism network.

In September, for example, a United Nations expert on Al Qaeda warned policy makers in Washington that the type of explosive device used by a Yemeni militant in an assassination attempt in Saudi Arabia could be carried aboard an airliner.

In early November, American intelligence authorities say they learned from a communications intercept of Qaeda followers in Yemen that a man named “Umar Farouk” — the first two names of the jetliner suspect, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab — had volunteered for a coming operation.

In late December, more intercepts of Qaeda operatives in Yemen, who had previously focused their attacks in the region, mentioned the date of Dec. 25, and suggested that they were “looking for ways to get somebody out” or “for ways to move people to the West,” one senior administration official said.

And the same day those White House meetings on terrorist activities took place, a Qaeda figure made ominous — and seemingly prescient — threats against the United States.

“We carry prayer beads, and with them we carry a bomb for the enemies of God,” a man describing himself as a Qaeda fighter from Yemen announced in a video released on Al Jazeera satellite television. “The issue is between us and America and its allies, and beware, those who stand in the ranks of America.”

The American intelligence network was clearly listening in Yemen and sharing that information, a sign of progress since the 2001 terrorist attacks. Yet the inability to pull the data together or correctly interpret it produced the “systemic failure” that Mr. Obama has vowed to fix and that Congress will examine in hearings this week.

The criticism of the government’s performance has provoked infighting, with rival agencies privately pointing at one another and some intelligence officials complaining about what they see as a White House attempt to deflect responsibility.

Top White House officials, already warning Americans about the possibility of more Qaeda terrorist plots, say they have little patience for squabbling.

“We had a system in place to capture these nuggets because of the investment we put into the collection system,” Mr. Brennan said in an interview. “We had the ability to map it against a database that was designed specifically to capture that bio data information. We had those pieces in place.

“And we could have brought it together, and we should have brought it together. And that is what upset the president.”

A Growing Threat

The blast that ricocheted last August through the office of Prince Mohammed bin Nayef of Saudi Arabia took only one life — that of the young suicide bomber sent by Al Qaeda in Yemen. But the assassination attempt set off alarms both in the Middle East and in Washington.

From the start of the Obama administration, American officials had been focused on the growing threat in Yemen, where Qaeda operatives from Saudi Arabia and Yemen had recently merged and created a dangerous alliance dubbed Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

The attack against Prince Nayef, who is the country’s chief counterterrorism official, showed that the new group’s ambitions were growing and spurred warnings about the explosive’s usefulness as an aviation threat. Mr. Brennan flew to Saudi Arabia within a week to see him, and the United States swiftly increased its electronic eavesdropping and other spying in Yemen. It also intensified a diplomatic effort to prod Yemen’s leaders to strike back at the militants.

A second alarm came in early November, when Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan killed 12 soldiers at Fort Hood in Texas. Over the previous year, American investigators said, Major Hasan had sent more than a dozen e-mail messages to Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical, American-born cleric living in Yemen. After ordering a review of any contacts between other possible extremists and Mr. Awlaki, American authorities began collecting more intelligence, officials said.

And some of the tips were increasingly alarming. Qaeda operatives in Yemen were caught discussing an “Umar Farouk” who had recently been in contact with Mr. Awlaki about volunteering for terrorist operations, one official said. American intelligence officials learned of the conversation in November, although it had been intercepted by a foreign intelligence service in August, an administration official said.

The National Security Agency intercepted a second phone conversation in November involving Qaeda members in Yemen, in which they discussed an unnamed Nigerian man who was being groomed for an operation. (Mr. Abdulmutallab is Nigerian.) The next month, intelligence officials eavesdropped on Qaeda operatives who talked of sending a militant toward the West to carry out a strike.

Other intercepted conversations mentioned a significant event on Christmas Day, although it was unclear if the event concerned a strike against an American target or a movement of Qaeda backers, perhaps motivated by the deadly raids that Yemeni forces began in mid-December, officials said.

In the final weeks of the year, American intelligence officials, using spy satellites and communication intercepts, were intently focused on pinpointing the location of Qaeda fighters so the Yemeni military could strike them. By doing so, the American officials hoped to prevent attacks on the United States Embassy in Yemen, personnel or other targets in the region with American ties.

Yet they had unwittingly left themselves vulnerable, American officials now concede. Counterterrorism officials assumed that the militants were not sophisticated or ambitious enough to send operatives into the United States. And no one shifted more intelligence analysts to the task, so that they could have supported the military assaults by Yemen while also scrutinizing all incoming tips for hints about future attacks against Americans, one administration official said.

So, though intelligence analysts had enough information in those days before Christmas to block the suicide bomber on the Northwest flight, they did not act.

“We didn’t know they had progressed to the point of actually launching individuals here,” Mr. Brennan said on Jan. 7 at a White House briefing.

An administration official added, “The puzzle pieces were not being fitted to any type of homeland plot.”

Flaws Laid Bare

The overhaul of America’s intelligence apparatus in the years after the Sept. 11 attacks was intended to break information logjams and ensure that spy agencies traded secrets with one another. It established redundant layers of terrorism analysts to ensure that disparate clues to the next attack would not be ignored or overlooked.

But in the weeks before Christmas, the flaws in the structure were laid bare. No single person or unit was in charge of running down every high-priority tip.

At the National Counterterrorism Center just outside Washington, where specialists can draw on streams of information from more than 80 databases across the government, two teams of intelligence analysts worked on different parts of the same problem. Yet they never collaborated to piece together clues about the Christmas Day attack that were coming in.

A group of “watch list analysts” had been told by the United States Embassy in Nigeria that Mr. Abdulmutallab had been reported missing by his father and was likely to be under “the influence of religious extremists based in Yemen.”

But American officials in Nigeria did not flag Mr. Abdulmutallab for closer scrutiny, and alarms were not raised with the American Embassy in Yemen, either. Inside their electronic files, which contain tips on tens of thousands of cases, the analysts at the counterterrorism center also had a draft C.I.A. memorandum with biographical information about the man.

These tips were enough for the team, made up of about two dozen specialists, to add Mr. Abdulmutallab into the so-called Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, a tally of 550,000 people worldwide who might be a threat to the United States. The analysts, though, had missed the other threads of information sitting in their computer systems, so they did not put him in a more restrictive database that could have resulted in his inclusion on a “no fly” list.

The second team, a cadre of about 300 “all-source analysts,” failed to make the link as well. They are supposed to be the deep thinkers charged with preparing long-term assessments of terrorist groups, their financing and recruiting methods and their leadership. But officials said that while dozens of such analysts were examining the Yemen threat, they failed to repeatedly scrutinize the raw intelligence for hints of a possible attack on the United States originating in Yemen.

Obama administration officials now say the counterterrorism center needs personnel assigned solely to follow up on all tips, acting like detectives who keep working cases until they are solved.

The analysts are stymied, however, by computer systems that cannot easily search automatically — and repeatedly — for possible links, officials said. Even simple keyword searches are a challenge, according to a 2008 report by investigators for the House Committee on Science and Technology.

“The program not only can’t connect the dots, it can’t find the dots,” Representative Brad Miller, Democrat of North Carolina and chairman of a House panel that oversees the program, said at the time.

At the C.I.A, some of the information that had been collected was not widely distributed. A draft memorandum on Mr. Abdulmutallab circulated through the agency, with information added by officers inside its Africa division and its counterterrorism center.

But on Christmas Day, the final draft of the memorandum was still sitting in the computer of a junior C.I.A. analyst, waiting until a photo of the young Nigerian was located. Unbeknownst to the analyst, officials said, Mr. Abdulmutallab’s photo had already been delivered to other counterterrorism agencies.

“There were so many things that could have altered the course of events,” one senior administration official said.

The fallout from the terrorist plot has already exposed some simmering tensions, complicating the government’s ability fix the problems.

One senior Obama official faulted Dennis C. Blair, the director of national intelligence, for failing to assign extra intelligence analysts to focus on Yemen while also hunting for possible emerging threats to the United States.

For their part, some senior intelligence officials bristled at what they saw as a White House effort to place blame for the breakdowns solely on American spy agencies.

Mr. Blair fought back after early drafts of the White House report on the bombing attempt did not, in his view, adequately acknowledge the difficulties of placing a name on travel watch lists, according to two government officials. The report’s release was delayed several hours, and Mr. Blair managed to get changes made to the final version.

The tensions have also added to the concern expressed by influential lawmakers, who said they were told by administration officials last week in a briefing that the United States believes that Al Qaeda in Yemen could use other young men like Mr. Abdulmutallab as suicide bombers aboard aircraft.

“We don’t know how many more individuals are still out there that were trained by this radical cleric in Yemen,” said Representative Michael McCaul of Texas, the ranking Republican on the House Homeland Security intelligence subcommittee, “and may be still trying to pull off the same stunt.”

Steven Erlanger and Mike McIntire contributed reporting.

    Review of Jet Bomb Plot Shows More Missed Clues, NYT, 18.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/18/us/18intel.html

Lonely Trek to Radicalism for Terror Suspect

January 17, 2010
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER

KADUNA, Nigeria — Well before Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab disappeared into the rugged mountains of Yemen with an ominous goodbye to his father — warning him that “this is the last time you are going to hear from me,” according to top Nigerian officials — the tensions between the two pious men had already begun to show.

Though his father’s career in banking had brought great wealth, enough to finance a neighborhood mosque in the family name and hire a private imam at home, his cousins said the young Mr. Abdulmutallab openly condemned the profession as immoral for charging interest and lectured his father to quit.

“Anytime he came back on vacation” from studying abroad, a cousin said on the condition of anonymity because the family has forbidden contact with the press, “he would tell his father he needed to quit banking because it was un-Islamic.”

Behind Mr. Abdulmutallab’s journey from gifted student to terrorism suspect, accused of trying to bring down a plane headed to Detroit on Dec. 25 with explosives sewn into his underwear, is the struggle between father and son, between piety and radicalism, between an investment in this life and a disconnected young man’s apparent longing for the next.

It is a struggle within Islam itself, not just in the Middle East or in centers of jihadist ideology like London, but also here in Kaduna, the northern Nigerian city where Mr. Abdulmutallab grew up and returned to on vacation.

This is a place where the dividing line between devotion and extremism is often blurred, where Islamic police ensure that moral codes are obeyed, where scores were killed in religious violence incited by the Miss World contest in 2002, and where even a family as Westernized as Mr. Abdulmutallab’s has had contact with clerics espousing anti-Western and anti-Israeli ideals.

“Kaduna city has a long history of religious extremism and intolerance,” said a neighbor, Shehu Sani. “For 30 years, there has been violence here. People like Farouk grew up in this atmosphere. I don’t think all his radical ideas came from Yemen.”

While it may be rare for a child of privilege like Mr. Abdulmutallab to embrace extremism, it is far from unprecedented, analysts say, bringing to mind some infamous cases.

John Walker Lindh, the American captured as a fighter for the Taliban in northern Afghanistan, was the son of a lawyer and grew up in the gentle, moneyed suburbs of Marin County, Calif. Osama bin Laden’s father was a staggeringly wealthy contractor in Saudi Arabia, while his second in command in Al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahri, is a doctor who comes from a highly prestigious family in Egypt.

And like Mr. Zawahri, some analysts say, Mr. Abdulmutallab shared another trait of some notable jihadists.

“He is alone and isolated,” said Hani Nesira, a director at Al Mesbar Studies and Research Center who specializes in Islamic movements. “These kind of individuals are usually different from their social surrounding and are unable to find themselves.”

Moreover, they often come from families that may monitor educational performance but are removed from “their moods and their psychological and intellectual inclinations,” Mr. Nesira added, enabling the lonely or depressed to seek belonging in “a religious utopia,” sometimes a very radical one.

‘The Real Islam’

That kind of detachment from others and singular focus on Islam was a common thread in Mr. Abdulmutallab’s life, according to family members, friends and classmates. It was evident long before he sent the kind of strident text messages to his father — saying that he had found “the real Islam” and that his family “should just forget about him,” the cousin said — which alarmed his father enough to warn American officials this November that Mr. Abdulmutallab was a security threat.

“He is a total teetotaler,” said Mr. Abdulmutallab’s uncle by marriage, Mahmoon Baba-Ahmed, who runs a television station in Kaduna. “He doesn’t do what his peers used to do. He is always indoors reading his Koran.”

While other rich children were going to parties, Mr. Abdulmutallab spent his visits home across the street, at the mosque financed by his father, Alhaji Umaru Mutallab, and bearing his grandfather’s name, always in the front row. His piety was so pronounced that the young people around here mocked him for it, his neighbor said.

It also set the stage for conflict within his own family, devout though it was. Along Ahman Pategi Road, an oasis of palms and mango trees in this dusty city, the security guards of the affluent Unguwan Sarki neighborhood know the story well. One evening the young Mr. Abdulmutallab brought out a plate with leftovers from the family dinner table — his father’s plate — to give to one of the guards. His mother’s rebuke over this breach of etiquette was voluble enough to reach the domestic workers; the young man’s calm response was to cite a verse from the Koran on duties toward the less fortunate.

“He wasn’t close to his father,” said Aminu Baba-Ahmed, a cousin by marriage. Ill will had simmered after the lonely young man, at 21, had expressed a desire to marry, the cousin said, but his parents blocked it, saying he did not yet have a master’s degree.

Increasingly, Mr. Abdulmutallab was close to nobody, according to those who know him here in Kaduna. The young man who as a teenager who had happily played basketball and PlayStation with his cousin had retreated into his faith.

In Internet postings in 2005, when he was a student at a British boarding school in neighboring Togo, he pondered his sense of isolation. “I feel depressed and lonely,” he wrote. “I do not know what to do. and then I think this loneliness leads me to other problems.”

By 2007, as he studied mechanical engineering at University College London, the transformation was deep.

“He had changed; he was saying ‘Islam, Islam, Islam;’ he was saying we should all try to change, and be more Islamic,” Aminu Baba-Ahmed recalled. Even in recent months, he said, the fun-loving boy he had known was chiding him about going to parties. “I was really surprised,” Mr. Baba-Ahmed said.

Radicalism Takes Root

Radical politics had also firmly taken root. While in London, Mr. Abdulmutallab lived alone, according to a friend there, in a family property at 2 Mansfield Street, an imposing white-pillared building in an upscale neighborhood near Regent’s Park where Mercedes-Benzes and Bentleys abound. Newspapers, neighbors and even some family members in Nigeria now blame this lack of supervision, a symptom of what they call the neglect among the Nigerian elite, for facilitating Mr. Abdulmutallab’s slide toward extremism.

His family may have assumed that Mr. Abdulmutallab’s piety would stave off any profligacy, and it did, at least in the conventional sense. Instead, he took quite a different turn, attending prayers at London mosques under watch by British security services because of their radical links. Still, while he was seen to be “reaching out” to known extremists and appearing on “the periphery of other investigations” into radical suspects there, he was not considered a terrorist threat himself, according to a British counterintelligence official.

For the inaugural lecture of the “War on Terror Week” that Mr. Abdulmutallab helped organize as president of the college’s Islamic society from 2006 to 2007, the group booked a large lecture hall. It was a full house, said Fabian De Fabiani, a student at the time who attended, with about 150 other people. Some members of the society dressed in the orange jumpsuits of the Guantánamo Bay detainees; they stood at the doors and handed out leaflets.

Mr. Abdulmutallab was seated “where the lecturer would usually sit,” Mr. De Fabiani said, “very close” to Moazzam Begg, a former Guantánamo detainee then in contact with Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical preacher whom officials say Mr. Abdulmutallab probably met in Yemen before setting off on his failed bombing attempt. In an interview, Mr. Begg acknowledged attending the event but said he did not recall meeting Mr. Abdulmutallab.

“When we sat down they played a video that opened with shots of the twin towers after they’d been hit, then moved on to images of mujahedeen fighting, firing rockets in Afghanistan,” Mr. De Fabiani said. “It was quite tense in the theater, because I think lots of people were shocked by how extreme it was. It seemed to me like it was brainwashing, like they were trying to indoctrinate people.”

There is a very big difference, of course, between religious devotion or radical politics and violence, and while “many, many people start the journey” toward extremist Islam, only a “small number” of people are committed to bloodshed, the British counterintelligence official said. Since the bombing attempt, newspaper editorials, psychologists and officials in Nigeria have suggested that Mr. Abdulmutallab was hardly Nigerian at all, that his ideas came from his time studying overseas.

No Shield From Islamic Fervor

But as rich and shielded as Mr. Abdulmutallab’s family was, it was not quarantined from the Islamic fervor that has led to outbreaks of violence in Kaduna.

In 2002, Muslim youths rioted and clashed with Christians after a newspaper article suggested that the Prophet Muhammad might have been happy to choose his wife from among the Miss World contestants, who were set to compete in the capital, Abuja. About 220 people were killed, and mobs burned 16 churches, 9 mosques, 11 hotels and 189 houses, according to a local civil rights groups led by Mr. Sani, Mr. Abdulmutallab’s neighbor.

Though the violence did not touch the serene family compound, the radical views permeating society might well have. Mr. Abdulmutallab’s family attends one of Kaduna’s largest mosques, the Sultan Bello mosque, for Friday Prayer and sermons, said the imam there. Anti-Western and anti-Israeli sermons are staples within its walls, said Nasir Abbas, a local human rights advocate who attends the mosque. “You would hear about what Israel has been doing to Palestine, you would hear that, and also America’s contributions to the Israelis,” Mr. Abbas said. In fact, at “all of the mosques” in Kaduna it is possible to hear anti-Western preaching, he said.

Mr. Abdulmutallab’s father evidently did not share those views, since he was the first to blow the whistle on his son. Yet even Mr. Mutallab encounters people here like Imam Ibrahim Adam, who said he had been in the family home and had met with the father at “religious gatherings” and meetings for a proposed Islamic bank, of which Mr. Mutallab is chairman of the board, according to the bank’s Web site. “Yemeni Muslims should have been the ones to attack America, not a Nigerian,” said the imam, carefully adding that he did not personally support the attack.

Exactly what drove Mr. Abdulmutallab’s father to report his son is still a source of debate within the family. In telling the Americans, he “acted on the dictates of his religion,” said the uncle, Mr. Baba-Ahmed. The father later viewed his son’s arrest in much the same way. “He summed it up with a verse from the Koran,” Mr. Baba-Ahmed recounted. “ ‘This is a trial: your offspring can be a source of happiness and sadness.’ ”

But the cousin who asked to remain anonymous had a more nuanced explanation for Mr. Mutallab’s whistle-blowing. “This is somebody who has investments in the Western world since before the boy was born,” he. “He’s got a £4 million house in London. Now the boy is jeopardizing everything.”

While studying last year in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, Mr. Abdulmutallab did not appear overly restless, doing better than average in his classes and quietly reading the Koran on the shuttle bus from student housing to campus each day, according to a classmate and the school director. But inwardly, he was apparently chafing against the secularism around him, and he argued with his father over the graduate business program in which he was enrolled before abruptly dropping out. “His father wanted him to continue his studies,” said an Arab official with ties to Persian Gulf intelligence services. “He didn’t want to. It wasn’t the Arab world for him. It wasn’t the Muslim world.” That, the official said, is when Mr. Abdulmutallab became angry “and went to Yemen without his dad’s permission.”

He entered Yemen on Aug. 4, with a visa to resume his studies at the Sana Institute for the Arabic Language, where he had studied the language in 2004 and 2005. But this time his mind was elsewhere, and he offered excuses about why he was seldom in class. He said he had a throat infection and “and was thinking of going to Dubai to check it out, and we said that there are hospitals here,” said an American classmate of his, adding, “He’d even leave class in the middle to go to pray at the mosque.”

Investigators are now trying to piece together his movements, examining how he managed to slip out of sight after being driven to the airport on Sept. 21 with an exit visa. Yemeni officials have said he went to the remote, rugged mountains of Shabwa Province, where he met with “Al Qaeda elements” before leaving Dec. 4, a few weeks before his fateful journey to Detroit.

After the disappearance, Mr. Abdulmutallab’s father tried desperately to get him back. He enlisted one of his powerful friends, a retired national security adviser, to track his son down using the National Intelligence Agency, Nigeria’s version of the C.I.A. But the new director of the agency did not go along with it, officials here said.

“The impression he had was, they were using the service to locate the prodigal son of a rich man, who was off enjoying himself somewhere,” said a top Nigerian security official. “I don’t think he did anything. He didn’t have any idea about terrorism.”

Since his son’s arrest, Mr. Mutallab has remained out of public view. The father “is extremely worried,” Mr. Baba-Ahmed said. “Everybody is worried.”

Reporting was contributed by Ravi Somaiya, Alan Cowell and John F. Burns from London; Steven Erlanger from Sana, Yemen; Michael Slackman from Dubai, United Arab Emirates; and Senan Murray from Abuja, Nigeria.

    Lonely Trek to Radicalism for Terror Suspect, NYT, 17.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/world/africa/17abdulmutallab.html

News Analysis

A Year of Terror Plots, Through a 2nd Prism

January 13, 2010
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON — As terrorist plots against the United States have piled up in recent months, politicians and the news media have sounded the alarm with a riveting message for Americans: Be afraid. Al Qaeda is on the march again, targeting the country from within and without, and your hapless government cannot protect you.

But the politically charged clamor has lumped together disparate cases and obscured the fact that the enemies on American soil in 2009, rather than a single powerful and sophisticated juggernaut, were a scattered, uncoordinated group of amateurs who displayed more fervor than skill. The weapons were old-fashioned guns and explosives — in several cases, duds supplied by F.B.I. informants — with no trace of the biological or radiological poisons, let alone the nuclear bombs, that have long been the ultimate fear.

And though 2009 brought more domestic plots, and more serious plots, than any recent year, their lethality was relatively modest. Exactly 14 of the approximately 14,000 murders in the United States last year resulted from allegedly jihadist attacks: 13 people shot at Fort Hood in Texas in November and one at a military recruiting station in Little Rock, Ark., in June.

Such statistics would be no comfort, of course, if an attack with mass casualties succeeded some day.

Nor do they excuse the acknowledged missteps at the United States’ bulked-up security agencies that helped allow a makeshift bomb to be carried onto a Detroit-bound Northwest Airlines plane on Christmas Day — the attempted attack that set off the flood of news coverage.

But even that near miss, said Mark M. Lowenthal, assistant director of the Central Intelligence Agency for analysis from 2002 to 2005, may offer indirect evidence of the enemy’s diminished strength, compared with the coordinated attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

“Sending one guy on one plane is a huge step down,” Mr. Lowenthal said. “They’re less capable, even if they’re still lethal. They’re not able to carry out the intense planning they once did.”

Counterterrorism experts inside and outside the government are intensely debating the meaning of the flurry of plots last year, and there is no settled consensus. Somalia and Yemen have emerged decisively as jihadist hot spots that may pose a direct threat to the United States. C.I.A. drone strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas have by no means ended the threat from there, as the Dec. 30 suicide bombing that killed seven C.I.A. employees in nearby Afghanistan grimly underscored. The Internet continues to prove a powerful tool for radicalization, as long-distance propagandists stir the ire of young Muslims about American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

But Mr. Lowenthal and others who urge a calmer, more strategic assessment of the recent rash of violent schemes insist that the country is far safer than it was in 2001. They also argue that since the goal of terrorism is to spread terror, hyperbole about threats only does the extremists’ work for them.

“We give comfort to our enemies,” said Charles E. Allen, a 40-year C.I.A. veteran who served as the top intelligence official at the Department of Homeland Security from 2007 to early last year. Exaggerated news coverage and commentary, he said, “creates an atmosphere of tension and fear, and to me that’s exactly the wrong way to go.”

Mr. Allen said the United States needed “resilience” in the face of the terrorist threat. He noted with admiration that public transportation barely paused in London in 2005 when 52 people were killed by four suicide bombers attacking the subway and a bus.

“I believe in heightened attention to security; I just don’t believe hysteria is useful,” Mr. Allen said.

The 10 jihadist plots or attacks inside the United States in 2009 — a count by Bruce Hoffman, who studies terrorism at Georgetown University — had no evident links to one another and little in common beyond their apparent ideological motive.

The deadliest was allegedly carried out by Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychiatrist accused of the Fort Hood shootings, who does not appear to have been directed by any group, though he exchanged e-mail messages with a radical cleric in Yemen. Schemes broken up in Newburgh, N.Y.; Springfield, Ill.; Raleigh, N.C.; Boston; and Dallas seem to have developed independently and largely under surveillance from the F.B.I.

More disturbing to counterterrorism officials were two cases with ties to Pakistan’s tribal region, where Osama bin Laden and the remaining core of Al Qaeda are thought to be hiding. They involved Najibullah Zazi, the former Manhattan coffee vendor accused of traveling to Pakistan for explosives training, and David C. Headley of Chicago, who is charged with aiding the 2008 assault on Mumbai and plotting attacks in Denmark.

The term “Al Qaeda,” used as a catchall in many of the plots, blurs important distinctions. By most accounts, apart from possibly the Zazi case, none of the 2009 cases appears to be directly tied to “Al Qaeda central,” as experts refer to the Pakistan-based group led by Mr. bin Laden.

Others involved ersatz “Qaeda” agents who actually worked for the F.B.I. Still others, including the Christmas Day attempt, had links to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, a loosely linked affiliate of Mr. bin Laden’s group in Yemen and Saudi Arabia.

Audrey Kurth Cronin of the National War College said Qaeda affiliates borrow the name to enhance their appeal but are usually more interested in local goals than in the global jihad proclaimed by Mr. bin Laden.

“The proper response is to stop calling all these plots ‘Al Qaeda,’ ” Ms. Cronin said. “We’re inadvertently building up the brand.”

In 2008, in his book “Leaderless Jihad,” Marc Sageman, a psychiatrist and former C.I.A. officer who has long studied terrorism networks, wrote that Al Qaeda was in decline, to be replaced by dispersed terrorists for whom it provided mostly inspiration. The new generation of extremists, he believed, would be less skilled and would likely pose less of a threat than the network responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks.

Dr. Sageman said he saw no reason to revise that judgment today. The plots of the last year should be carefully analyzed and the findings used to improve counterterrorism, not turned into fuel for thoughtless anti-Muslim panic and discrimination, he said.

“If we overreact and upset 1.5 billion Muslims,” Dr. Sageman said, referring to the global total, “then we’ll have a lot bigger problem on our hands.”

    A Year of Terror Plots, Through a 2nd Prism, NYT, 13.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/13/us/13intel.html

Queens Man Is Accused of Getting Qaeda Training

January 10, 2010
The New York Times
By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM

A 25-year-old Queens College graduate who traveled to Pakistan in 2008 with the Denver airport shuttle bus driver indicted last year in a Qaeda bomb plot was charged on Saturday with conspiring to commit murder in a foreign country and receiving training from the group.

The accusations marked the third case brought by federal prosecutors in Brooklyn stemming from what Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has called “one of the most serious terrorist threats to our country” since the Sept. 11 attacks.

The charges against the man, Adis Medunjanin, 25, in an indictment unsealed Saturday in Federal District Court in Brooklyn, did not relate directly to the bomb plot in which the shuttle bus driver, Najibullah Zazi, 24, was charged in September.

A Bosnian-born naturalized American citizen, the black-bearded Mr. Medunjanin pleaded not guilty on Saturday at his arraignment, a four-minute proceeding before Magistrate Judge Viktor V. Pohorelsky.

“We have declared very loudly that he is not guilty,” Mr. Medunjanin’s lawyer, Robert C. Gottlieb, said outside the courthouse after the arraignment.

Mr. Gottlieb has accused federal authorities of holding his client and improperly questioning him for more than 36 hours without letting him see or speak to his family or his lawyer. A person briefed on the matter said that Mr. Medunjanin made significant admissions while he was being questioned.

One of the prosecutors, James P. Loonam, told Magistrate Judge Pohorelsky that the government intended to seek a permanent order of detention at a bail hearing scheduled for Thursday. In the meantime, the judge ordered Mr. Medunjanin detained.

The spare, two-count indictment was almost devoid of details about the accusations against Mr. Medunjanin, who traveled to Pakistan in 2008 with Mr. Zazi and a third man, who has also been charged, people briefed on the matter have said.

Mr. Medunjanin faces a maximum of life in prison if convicted of the most serious charge, conspiring to commit murder in a foreign country.

Mr. Zazi told F.B.I. agents who questioned him in September, days before he was charged with plotting to detonate bombs in the United States, that he had received training from Al Qaeda in weapons and explosives during the trip, according to court papers filed in his case.

Mr. Medunjanin and the other man, Zarein Ahmedzay, 24, have been under intense scrutiny by F.B.I. agents and police detectives since the investigation of a plot burst into public view in mid-September, in part because of their trip with Mr. Zazi and their association with him. It is not clear how the three men met, but they attended Flushing High School together.

The events that led up to the arrests of Mr. Medunjanin and Mr. Ahmedzay apparently began on Thursday afternoon, when members of the F.B.I.-N.Y.P.D. Joint Terrorism Task Force executed a search warrant to seize Mr. Medunjanin’s passport at the Queens apartment where he lives with his parents.

Shortly after the investigators left, Mr. Medunjanin rammed his car at a high speed into another vehicle near the Whitestone Bridge — while he was under surveillance, law enforcement officials said.

According to the officials, he had just used his cellphone to dial 911, and, invoking Allah, exclaimed, “We love death more than you love life!”

The police and federal authorities believe he might have been trying to kill himself, several officials said. His statement was first reported by Reuters.

Mr. Medunjanin ran from the scene and was apprehended by task force investigators who had been following him.

Mr. Medunjanin was taken into custody and arrested early Friday. Mr. Ahmedzay was also picked up on Thursday — around midnight in Manhattan, where he was driving a yellow cab — and charged with lying to investigators. He pleaded not guilty at his arraignment on Friday.

The indictment charges that Mr. Medunjanin conspired to commit murder in a foreign country between August and October 2008, and as part of that plot flew to Doha, Qatar, and on to Peshawar, Pakistan, from Newark Liberty International Airport on Aug. 28, 2008.

It also charges that Mr. Medunjanin, “together with others,” received “military-style” training from Al Qaeda.

    Queens Man Is Accused of Getting Qaeda Training, NYT, 10.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/nyregion/10plot.html

Letters

Stopping Terrorists Before They Act

January 9, 2010
The New York Times

To the Editor:

“Obama Orders Steps to Stem Terror Threat” (front page, Jan. 8) states that the Obama administration’s report “concluded that the government’s counterterrorism operations had been caught off guard by the sophistication and strength of a Qaeda cell in Yemen.” You quote the president’s chief counterterrorism adviser, John O. Brennan, as saying, “We didn’t know they had progressed to the point of actually launching individuals here.”

Sophisticated? Really?

The terror suspect’s ticket was paid for with cash, and he had no luggage. Moreover, his rinky-dink bomb didn’t work — thankfully. This operation was so unsophisticated and amateurish that a group of kindergarten sleuths should have been able to spot it and stop it.

But the Obama administration’s terrorism apparatus not only didn’t see it coming, it didn’t even realize that it had a systemic problem assessing information until after the attempted attack. We can’t afford to discover deficiencies after the fact; we have to be up to speed to prevent attempts in the first place.

The president’s slow response afterward and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano’s “the system worked” remark hardly inspire confidence that they’re on top of things. Mr. President, Mr. Brennan and Ms. Napolitano, you’re all doing a heck of a job.

Mark R. Godburn
North Canaan, Conn., Jan. 8, 2010

•

To the Editor:

Now that the president has concluded that “we are at war,” shouldn’t Congress do its constitutional duty and follow up with a declaration of war? This would eliminate the disputes about the president’s authority to prosecute the war against terrorism that complicated prior administrations’ war-fighting efforts.

For example, it would eliminate any doubt that the United States can hold enemy prisoners of war until the end of the war. A Congressional declaration of war would help to unite the country against a clear and present danger.

Robert C. Atkinson
New York, Jan. 8, 2010

•

To the Editor:

Thomas H. Kean and John Farmer Jr. (“How 12/25 Was Like 9/11,” Op-Ed, Jan. 6) tell us what we all know: We still haven’t fixed the systemic flaws in United States intelligence.

What we need in our intelligence network are nerds, computer hackers, puzzle masters and maybe a few chess masters for good measure — people who thrive on complex intellectual challenges and who love connecting the dots.

Irwin M. Weisbrot
Norwalk, Conn., Jan. 6, 2010

•

To the Editor:

Re “What’s Our Line?” by Michael Kinsley (Op-Ed, Jan. 5):

There is another option for trying foreign terrorists besides civilian courts: military commissions. Indeed, this was the approach sought by the Bush administration and has been used successfully in the past. For example, in 1942 eight Nazi saboteurs who landed on Long Island and in Florida were tried before a specially constituted military commission appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

American citizens, even terrorism suspects like Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, should be afforded all of their constitutional rights in civilian courts (or in Major Hasan’s case, in a court-martial). But trying foreign terrorists before military commissions recognizes that their actions are not just mere crimes, but acts of war.

Daniel Tepper
Forest Hills, Queens, Jan. 5, 2010

•

To the Editor:

Michael Kinsley does not mention another obvious “bright line” for determining who should be entitled to constitutional protections — American citizenship. Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, Timothy McVeigh and the Columbine killers were all American citizens. They deserve constitutional protections. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and any other noncitizen accused of attacking us from beyond our borders do not.

The Constitution is not an ideal blueprint that we are trying to impose on the rest of the planet. It is a pact among American citizens. Those who have sworn allegiance to its protections deserve its protections. Those who have not, do not.

William Tucker
Piermont, N.Y., Jan. 6, 2010

•

To the Editor:

Michael Kinsley did not address the most relevant consideration in designating a terrorist captured within the United States as an enemy combatant — the need for real-time actionable intelligence. In the case of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, what he may know about other terrorists on their way to the United States or how they were trained is more than of academic interest.

“Well, first, recognize that this has become a judgment call so the answer is no longer obvious or mandated by logic,” Mr. Kinsley says of the question of whom to designate an enemy combatant. But it is both obvious and logical that our national security services need as much real-time intelligence as possible to protect us.

Mr. Abdulmutallab might have provided it had he been treated as an enemy combatant, but certainly not now after he has been “lawyered up.”

Perhaps months or a year from now his lawyers will allow Mr. Abdulmutallab to reveal some information in exchange for a lighter sentence.

By then his information will be largely dated and of little value to the C.I.A.

George Smith
Pacific Palisades, Calif., Jan. 5, 2010

    Stopping Terrorists Before They Act, NYT, 9.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/09/opinion/l09terror.html

2 Men Arrested in Connection With Zazi Terror Inquiry

January 9, 2010
The New York Times
By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM

Two men from Queens who had traveled to Pakistan in 2008 with a Denver airport shuttle bus driver who later was charged in a Qaeda bomb plot were arrested early Friday morning in connection with the case, according to the F.B.I.

The two men, Adis Medunjanin, 25, and Zarein Ahmedzay, 24, came under intense scrutiny during the investigation that led to a federal bombing conspiracy indictment against the shuttle bus driver, Najibullah Zazi, 24, in September, and have remained under investigation, officials have said.

The charges against Mr. Medunjanin and Mr. Ahmedzay — who both attended Flushing High School, as did Mr. Zazi — were not immediately made available on Friday morning. But the two men were expected to be arraigned later in the day in federal court in Brooklyn, where the charges were lodged against Mr. Zazi.

“Early this morning, Adis Medunjanin and Zarein Ahmedzay were arrested by the F.B.I.- N.Y.P.D. Joint Terrorism Task Force,” said James M. Margolin, a spokesman for the bureau’s New York office. He referred additional questions to the office of the Brooklyn United States Attorney, Benton J. Campbell, which is prosecuting the case and overseeing the investigation. A spokesman for Mr. Campbell declined comment.

A lawyer for Mr. Medunjanin, a United States citizen who is originally from Bosnia, has consistently denied that his client had any role in any terrorist plot or was involved in any wrongdoing. On Friday morning, the lawyer, Robert C. Gottlieb, accused the authorities of keeping his client away from him and from relatives, and said any statements Mr. Medunjanin may have made if he was questioned on Thursday night or Friday morning would therefore be inadmissible.

Mr. Ahmedzay’s father said on Thursday night that he has no lawyer. Another family member has denied that the young man, who like Mr. Zazi is originally from Afghanistan, was involved in any wrongdoing.

The arrests of the two young men sometime after midnight came hours after two agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation seized Mr. Medunjanin’s passport at his family’s Flushing apartment, pursuant to a search warrant, about 3 p.m. on Thursday. That led to a strange series of events that ended with Mr. Medunjanin in the custody of F.B.I. agents and police detectives and undergoing questioning, according to law enforcement officials.

Roughly an hour after his passport was seized, Mr. Medunjanin, who was being trailed by agents and detectives from the joint task force, was involved in a car accident near the Whitestone Bridge, according to law enforcement officials.

Mr. Medunjanin, who graduated from Queens College in June, got out of the car and apparently tried to flee the scene on foot. He was pursued and apprehended by the investigators, a law enforcement official said. He was taken to New York Hospital Queens, where he was treated for minor injuries, and then questioned by agents and detectives, a law enforcement official said.

Mr. Zazi, according to court papers filed in his case, admitted to F.B.I. agents during questioning in September that he had received training in weapons and explosives from Al Qaeda during his 2008 trip to Pakistan, although he has denied taking part in a bomb plot, and has pleaded not guilty to the charges against him.

Mr. Medunjanin’s lawyer, Mr. Gottlieb, said that two agents had gone to his client’s apartment with a search warrant for the passport.

The warrant, he said, indicated that the passport was being sought as part of an investigation into a conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction — the formal charge leveled against Mr. Zazi in September — and receiving military-type training from a foreign terrorist organization.

On Friday morning, Mr. Gottlieb said that he had been trying to contact federal authorities for nearly 12 hours, and that they had not notified him of his client’s arrest. He said that he had gone to the hospital on Thursday night after learning of the accident, and then to the nearby police precinct station house where, an emergency room nurse told him, Mr. Medunjanin had been taken. But, he said, he was unable to locate his client.

He said a desk sergeant at the station house told him Mr. Medunjanin had been taken to the Task Force’s offices in Manhattan, but he was unable to reach anyone there or at the prosecutor’s office.

The Task Force investigators and prosecutors, he said, knew that Mr. Medunjanin was represented by a defense lawyer and therefore could not legally question him without his lawyer present.

“And, therefore, if they did question him, it was an illegal interrogation and has to be thrown out,” Mr. Gottlieb said.

In September, Mr. Medunjaninand and Mr. Ahmedzay became the focus of intense investigation, partly because they had traveled to Pakistan in 2008 with Mr. Zazi, people with knowledge of the case have said.

Agents and detectives assigned to the task force searched their homes, questioned them at length in voluntary interviews and took fingerprints from them, people briefed on the case have said. During the searches, investigators took cellphones and laptop computers, which family members said were later returned, and other items.

Both men were also kept under surveillance.

Another measure of investigators’ interest in the two men could be found in an incident that some investigators have said forced them to begin executing search warrants and take the investigation into Mr. Zazi public before they were ready.

Police detectives assigned to the Intelligence Division showed photographs of the two men, along with a picture of Mr. Zazi and an unidentified man, to a Queens imam who had helped the police in the past, according to the cleric’s lawyer, Ronald L. Kuby. The imam, Ahmad Wais Afzali, was later arrested on charges of making false statements and accused of warning Mr. Zazi that he was being sought by the authorities. Mr. Zazi’s father, Mohammed Wali Zazi, was also charged with making false statements in the case.

Mr. Zazi, who was born in Afghanistan, was raised in Pakistan and lived in Queens for 10 years before moving to Denver in January, was ordered held without bail in September after he pleaded not guilty to a bombing conspiracy indictment of a single count. A detention memorandum filed in federal court detailed what prosecutors said was his effort to make homemade explosives and his drive from Colorado to New York.

“Zazi and others flew from Newark Liberty International Airport to Peshawar, Pakistan,” the memo said, referring to the 2008 trip, without identifying the others.

Mr. Medunjanin, Mr. Zazi and Mr. Ahmedzay, 24, a taxi driver, had all lived in the same Flushing neighborhood. After they returned from Pakistan, Mr. Zazi moved to Denver, where he worked as a shuttle bus driver at Denver International Airport, according to court papers and people briefed on the matter.

Mr. Medunjanin’s and Mr. Ahmedzay’s apartments were among four that were searched in September as part of the investigation that led to bombing conspiracy charges against Mr. Zazi a week later.

“After all these months, when I was hoping they had closed the book on him, it indicates that things are still percolating, and the family is very upset,” Mr. Gottlieb said of the search warrant on Thursday, before learning of the car accident and subsequent arrest. “He did not do anything wrong, and if the book isn’t already closed, it should have been.”

 

Karen Zraick contributed reporting.

    2 Men Arrested in Connection With Zazi Terror Inquiry, NYT, 8.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/09/nyregion/09zazi.html

Obama Details New Policies in Response to Terror Threat

January 8, 2010
The New York Times
By JEFF ZELENY and HELENE COOPER

WASHINGTON — President Obama on Thursday ordered intelligence agencies to take a series of steps to streamline how terrorism threats are pursued and analyzed, saying the government had to respond aggressively to the failures that allowed a Nigerian man to ignite an explosive mixture on a commercial jetliner on Christmas Day.

The president also directed the Homeland Security Department to speed the installation of $1 billion in advanced-technology equipment for the screening of passengers, including body scanners at American airports and to work with international airports to see that they upgrade their own equipment to protect passengers on flights headed to the United States.

He said intelligence reports involving threats would be distributed more widely among agencies. He instructed the State Department to review its visa policy to make it more difficult for people with connections to terrorism to receive visas, while making it simpler to revoke visas to the United States when questions arise.

“We are at war,” Mr. Obama said, releasing an unclassified version of a report on the attempted attack.

He pledged not to “succumb to a siege mentality” sacrificing the country’s civil liberties for security, but he called for expanding the criteria for adding people to terrorism watch lists.

The report concluded that the government’s counterterrorism operations had been caught off guard by the sophistication and strength of a Qaeda cell in Yemen, where officials say the plot against the United States originated.

“We didn’t know they had progressed to the point of actually launching individuals here,” said John O. Brennan, the president’s chief counterterrorism adviser, in a briefing to reporters.

The report sharply criticized the National Counter Terrorism Center and the Central Intelligence Agency. The president ordered the agencies to speed the dissemination of information about potential plots and to develop ways of more quickly pursuing connective threads on potential terrorists.

“In the never-ending race to protect our country, we have to stay one step ahead of a nimble adversary,” Mr. Obama said. “That’s what these steps are designed to do.”

Mr. Obama ordered the review of the incident in which a Nigerian man traveling to Detroit from Amsterdam tried to bring down a Northwest Airlines flight and its 278 passengers. The man, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, is to be arraigned Friday on charges of attempted murder on a plane, attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction and other offenses.

It was the second time this week that the president delivered public remarks on the attempted bombing and the intelligence lapses. Administration officials said human error led to perhaps the biggest lapse of all: the failure to put Mr. Abdulmutallab on the no-fly list despite the government’s having information that showed him to be not only a threat, but also a threat with a visa to visit the United States.

The internal report, conducted by Mr. Brennan, blamed a host of errors for the intelligence lapse, including a misspelling of Mr. Abdulmutallab’s name. The mistake led officials at the State Department to the erroneous conclusion that Mr. Abdulmutallab did not have a visa.

“The intentional redundancy in the system should have added an additional layer of protection in uncovering a plot like the failed attack on Dec. 25,” the review found. “However, in both cases, the mission to ‘connect the dots’ did not produce the result that, in hindsight, it could have.”

But the systemic breakdown went much further. The cable from the State Department outlining Mr. Abdulmutallab’s father’s warnings about his son was available to the N.C.T.C. officials who maintained the no-fly list, the report said. But the cable alone did not meet the minimum standard for Mr. Abdulmutallab to get on the list.

At that point, a senior administration official said, the logical thing to do would have been to cross check to see if there were other red flags out on Mr. Abdulmutallab. That apparently did not happen.

“Watch-list personnel had access to additional derogatory information in databases that could have been connected to Mr. Abdulmutallab,” the report said, “but that access did not result in them uncovering the biographic information that would have been necessary for placement on the watch list.”

Mr. Brennan said that the intelligence failures that took place before Christmas were not similar to the lapses that led to the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Back then, some agencies were denied access to critical information, he said, but those problems have been resolved with the changes in the structure of intelligence agencies.

Mr. Brennan said the most significant finding of his report was the strength of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. He called it “one of the most lethal” cells of the terrorist organization. Before the attempted attack on Christmas, he said, intelligence officials were not aware that the cell was organized enough to mount a plot on the United States.

The C.I.A. promised to speed the time it took to disseminate information on terrorism suspects, and to increase the number of analysts focused on Yemen.

A spokesman for the agency, George Little, said information would be shared within 48 hours of receiving it. He also said the agency would look at information it had on “individuals from countries of concern” to determine if their status on watch lists should be changed.

The White House defended Michael Leiter, the director of the counterterrorism center, who went on vacation in the immediate aftermath of the Christmas incident. Mr. Brennan said he had approved Mr. Leiter’s leave.

The president said the missteps were not the fault of one individual or agency. He took responsibility for the failures, saying, “The buck stops with me.”

The White House released the declassified report in an effort to show that the administration is conducting its business with transparency and willing to admit mistakes in order to correct them. The classified version offered a far starker view, officials said, of how close the United States came to averting the near tragedy.

The president has been criticized by some Republicans, including former Vice President Dick Cheney, who has suggested he does not appreciate the gravity of the threats facing the United States. Mr. Obama struck a defiant tone on Thursday.

“Great and proud nations don’t hunker down and hide behind walls of suspicion and mistrust,” Mr. Obama said. “That is exactly what our adversaries want, and so long as I am president, we will never hand them that victory.”

The findings of the report drew criticism from some in the intelligence community.

“You can’t ask analysts to think faster,” said Mark M. Lowenthal, who was the C.I.A.’s assistant director for analysis from 2002 to 2005. “And the president’s solution to have analysts share more information sooner is only going to exacerbate the problem that got us into this flap in the first place.”

    Obama Details New Policies in Response to Terror Threat, NYT, 8.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/08/us/politics/08terror.html

Editorial

Eight Years Later

January 8, 2010
The New York Times

President Obama was right to take responsibility for the near-catastrophic Christmas Day terrorist plot. The buck, as always, must stop with the president. And it was a relief to hear him candidly acknowledge widespread failures in the vast and vastly expensive intelligence and homeland security system and insist that his administration do better. It must.

Of course, we have heard about these problems before in the months and years after 9/11. And while Mr. Obama did not create the current system, he has now gotten a bitter lesson in its weaknesses and its stubborn resistance to change, despite the mea culpas and pledges of reform.

Many of the most glaring failings — specifically the failure to correlate and act on available intelligence about a brewing terrorist plot — were supposed to have been corrected long ago. They clearly were not.

The review the White House released on Thursday acknowledges that the government was awash in clues — about a plot by an Al Qaeda affiliate in Yemen to attack the United States and about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian man trained in Yemen who is accused of trying to blow a hole in the side of Detroit-bound Northwest Flight 253. The report is filled with shocking details on how the government failed to act.

To recap what happened, quickly:

In May, Britain refused to renew Mr. Abdulmutallab’s visa, and it put him on a watch list. In August, the National Security Agency overheard leaders of the Al Qaeda branch in Yemen discussing a plot involving a Nigerian man. In November, Mr. Abdulmutallab’s father, a respected banker in Nigeria, warned the American Embassy in Abuja that his son was being radicalized and had disappeared in Yemen. The father even met with an official of the Central Intelligence Agency.

The son was put on the least-restrictive American watch list — one that still allowed him to board a plane to Detroit without luggage and with a ticket that was paid for with cash.

The report implicitly acknowledges all of this, saying that the system failed “to identify, correlate, and fuse into a coherent story all of the discrete pieces of intelligence held by the U.S. government” about both the Al Qaeda group and Mr. Abdulmutallab. It also makes clear that this was not a single failure by one agency but was a cascade of failures across agencies and departments and the bureaucracies that are supposed to coordinate them.

It says that once the government learned of a possible plot in Yemen, the intelligence community failed to devote more analytic resources, and it failed to put one agency or official in charge. John Brennan, the senior official responsible for figuring out what went wrong, said on Thursday that only after the failed plot did the intelligence community recognize that the group, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, actually posed a direct threat to the United States.

The report also describes serious problems with the system of watch lists, which, even with fair and frightening warning, put Mr. Abdulmutallab on one that only flagged him for future investigation rather than on the no-fly list. Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, said that while Mr. Abdulmutallab was in the air, customs officials had decided to question him after he landed.

The government’s report chillingly acknowledges that, eight years after 9/11, it still does not have a single database that contains all terrorism-related information. And, incredibly, the report suggests that the intelligence community does not know the current “visa status of all ‘known and suspected terrorists,’ beginning with the No Fly list.”

President Obama has now ordered a raft of immediate improvements in the handling of intelligence and in border security.

We would feel more reassured if these steps weren’t so basic and self-evident: improve intelligence analysis; clarify the responsibilities of different agencies; upgrade computer technology; ensure faster distribution of intelligence reports; train National Security Agency personnel in watch list procedures; add more people to watch lists; enhance airport screening.

More than eight years after 9/11, the United States has another chance to learn from its mistakes. So does Al Qaeda. President Obama has his work cut out for him.

    Eight Years Later, NYT, 8.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/08/opinion/08fri1.html

Obama Says Plot Could Have Been Disrupted

January 6, 2010
The New York Times
By JEFF ZELENY and HELENE COOPER

WASHINGTON — President Obama said Tuesday that the government had sufficient information to uncover the terror plot to bring down a commercial jetliner on Christmas Day, but that intelligence officials had “failed to connect those dots.”

“This was not a failure to collect intelligence,” Mr. Obama said after meeting with his national security team for nearly two hours. “It was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already had.”

He added: “We have to do better, we will do better, and we have to do it quickly. American lives are on the line.”

The tone of the president’s remarks on Tuesday — the sharpest of any of his statements since the incident nearly two weeks ago — underscored his anger over the lapses in intelligence as well as his efforts to minimize any political risks from his administration’s response.

The president said he was suspending the transfer of detainees from the Guantánamo Bay military prison to Yemen, where a Qaeda cell has been connected to the Dec. 25 attack. While Mr. Obama also renewed his commitment to close the prison, halting the transfer underscores the difficulty he faces in closing the center and reflects the criticism Republicans have directed at the administration.

Mr. Obama also said that intelligence and law enforcement reviews of the terror plot would be completed this week and that he would announce additional security measures for air travelers in the coming days.

The statement was Mr. Obama’s fullest and most forceful to date on the incident, in which a Nigerian man traveling to Detroit from Amsterdam tried to ignite an explosive mixture that could have brought down the Northwest Airlines flight and its 278 passengers.

“I want specific recommendations for corrective actions to fix what went wrong,” said Mr. Obama, who was speaking in the Grand Foyer of the White House. “I want those reforms implemented immediately, so that this doesn’t happen again and so we can prevent future attacks.”

Mr. Obama’s stark assessment that the government failed to properly analyze and integrate intelligence served as a sharp rebuke of the country’s intelligence agencies, including the National Counterterrorism Center, the organization set up after the Sept. 11 attacks to ensure that the government had a central clearinghouse for spotting, assessing and thwarting terrorist threats.

But Mr. Obama insisted that he was not interested in getting into a blame game. White House officials said the president was standing by his top national security advisers, including those whose agencies failed to communicate with one another.

In a meeting with those officials on Tuesday, the president called the events leading up to the attempted Christmas Day attack a “screwup,” one White House official said, and told the assembled officials, “We dodged a bullet, but just barely.” Mr. Obama, the official said, also told the group that he would not “tolerate” finger-pointing.

In his remarks to reporters after the meeting, the president called the threat against the United States “a challenge of the utmost urgency.” He suggested that the passengers aboard the Northwest Airlines flight were lucky to skirt disaster and warned that future attacks might not be thwarted unless communication improved among intelligence officials.

“I will accept that intelligence by its nature is imperfect, but it is increasingly clear that intelligence was not fully analyzed or fully leveraged,” Mr. Obama said. “That’s not acceptable, and I will not tolerate it.”

Dennis C. Blair, the director of national intelligence, said in a statement on Tuesday evening that the “intelligence community received the president’s message today — we got it.” He acknowledged the failures, but added, “We can and we must outthink, outwork and defeat the enemy’s new ideas.”

In the meeting, officials did not blame the organization of the intelligence or homeland security agencies, which were set up under the Bush administration, but rather how the information was analyzed.

“I don’t think it’s a structure problem,” said Denis McDonough, the chief of staff of the National Security Council. “This isn’t a problem of intelligence sharing, but rather a problem related to ensuring that all the wealth of information we had was appropriately correlated, analyzed and highlighted.”

The decision to suspend the transfer of detainees from Guantánamo Bay to Yemen because of the rising terror threats emanating from the country was another tacit acknowledgment of how difficult it will be to close the prison. Nearly half of the remaining detainees are from Yemen, senior administration officials said.

Mr. Obama was already poised to miss his self-imposed one-year deadline for shuttering the prison by Jan. 22, but evidence that a Qaeda branch in Yemen was behind the failed Christmas Day attack means the administration will fall even further behind schedule.

Mr. Obama inherited 242 detainees at Guantánamo when he took office, and so far he has released or transferred 44. Of the 198 remaining, about 92 are from Yemen. Of those, just under 40 have been cleared for release, a senior administration official said.

But the official said the administration had already decided before the attempted attack that it would slow down the release of the remaining Yemeni detainees. The administration sent six detainees back to Yemen just before Christmas, in a move that drew criticism from Republicans, including Senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and John McCain of Arizona, as well as Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, an independent. That criticism did not come until after the administration had already sent the men back.

Mr. Obama did not disclose what changes might be in store at airport security checkpoints, but transportation security officials have already been in contact with equipment manufacturers to find out what capacity they have to increase production of whole-body scanners, which can help detect hidden weapons or explosives.

So far, there are only 40 of these devices in place at 19 airports nationwide in a domestic aviation system that has more than 2,200 checkpoint security lanes. An additional 150 machines were recently ordered and are in the process of being delivered.

Industry officials said they expected a request for 300 more machines, which would result in a total of nearly 500 devices, still covering just a small fraction of the checkpoint lanes, but perhaps enough to have them at most of the major airports in the United States. The machines cost about $190,000 a piece.

Eric Lipton contributed reporting.

    Obama Says Plot Could Have Been Disrupted, NYT, 6.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/06/us/politics/06obama.html

Court Backs War Powers Over Rights of Detainees

January 6, 2010
The New York Times
By JOHN SCHWARTZ

A federal appeals court panel on Tuesday strongly backed the powers of the government to hold Guantánamo detainees and other noncitizens suspected of committing terrorist acts.

In a sweeping opinion, a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit found that the presidential war power to detain those suspected of terrorism is not limited even by international law of war.

The decision, if it is not reversed by the Supreme Court, could apply to all cases involving detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, since all of those cases are heard by the District of Columbia Circuit. As a result, the Obama administration will have a stronger position when opposing a court order to release a terrorism suspect.

In its ruling, the court denied a request by Ghaleb Nassar al-Bihani, a former cook for a Taliban paramilitary brigade, to be released from the detention center at Guantánamo. It is the first case to directly apply a landmark 2008 Supreme Court decision that allowed prisoners to challenge their detention.

Mr. Bihani, who is from Yemen, was captured in 2002 when his brigade surrendered. He challenged his detention with a petition for habeas corpus, which the courts did not act on before the decision of the 2008 Supreme Court case, Boumediene v. Bush, which said federal judges had jurisdiction to hear such claims.

Last year, a federal district court denied Mr. Bihani’s petition for release; Tuesday’s decision upheld the lower court.

Mr. Bihani argued that his continued detention violated international law because he was not part of the military of a nation at war, and had not committed “a direct hostile act” like firing his weapon. His petition for release, he said, should have been reviewed under standards like those for criminal defendants in the United States.

But the court found that granting such a high level of protection to the rights of detainees like Mr. Bihani would affect the military’s entire approach to war.

“From the moment a shot is fired, to battlefield capture, up to a detainee’s day in court, military operations would be compromised as the government strove to satisfy evidentiary standards in anticipation of habeas litigation,” the opinion said.

A lawyer for Mr. Bihani did not return calls seeking comment. A Department of Justice spokesman also declined to comment.

Eric M. Freedman, a law professor at Hofstra University and an expert in habeas cases, said the appeals court had “gone out of its way to poke a stick in the eye of the Supreme Court” by taking a view that expands government power beyond the limits laid out in decisions like Boumediene.

The 25-page opinion was written by Judge Janice Rogers Brown and joined by Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, both appointees of President George W. Bush. Both are considered among the most conservative judges on the circuit.

The third member of the panel, who joined in denying Mr. Bihani’s petition but not in the complete reasoning of the decision, was Judge Stephen F. Williams., a senior judge who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan. In a concurring opinion, Judge Williams, wrote that the majority’s argument that the president’s war powers are not bound by the international laws of war actually “goes well beyond even what the government has argued in this case.”

In a separate concurrence, Judge Brown wrote that the war placed the nation “past the leading edge of a new and frightening paradigm, one that demands new rules be written.”

She wrote, “War is a challenge to law, and the law must adjust.”

    Court Backs War Powers Over Rights of Detainees, NYT, 6.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/06/us/06detain.html

U.S. Saw a Path to Qaeda Chiefs Before Bombing

January 6, 2010
The New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON — Before detonating a suicide bomb in Afghanistan last week, a Jordanian militant was considered by American spy agencies to be the most promising informant in years about the whereabouts of Al Qaeda’s top leaders, including Ayman al-Zawahri, the terrorist group’s second-ranking operative.

American intelligence officials said Tuesday they had been so hopeful about what the Jordanian might deliver during a meeting with C.I.A. officials last Wednesday at a remote base in Khost that top officials at the agency and the White House had been informed that the gathering would take place.

Instead, the discovery that the man, Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, also known as Humam Khalil Mohammed, was a double agent and the killing of seven C.I.A. operatives in the blast were major setbacks to a spy agency that has struggled to gather even the most ephemeral intelligence about the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden and Mr. Zawahri.

New details about the Khost attack emerged Tuesday as the Obama administration took steps to strengthen security measures after failing to detect a Christmas Day airline bombing plot. The two episodes illuminate the problems the United States still faces in understanding the intentions of Al Qaeda and its affiliates.

With the Jordanian double agent, American intelligence officials proved to be overly optimistic about someone they had hoped could help them penetrate Al Qaeda’s inner circle. In the other case, spy agencies were too lax in piecing together information about a young Nigerian man who officials say tried to blow up an American jetliner as it descended into Detroit.

The Jordanian militant for months had been feeding a stream of information about lower-ranking Qaeda operatives to his Jordanian supervisor, Capt. Sharif Ali bin Zeid, to establish his credibility and apparently to help broker a meeting with C.I.A. operatives in Afghanistan.

“He had provided information that checked out, about people in Al Qaeda whom he had access to,” said a senior intelligence official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the C.I.A.’s contacts with the Jordanian are classified. “This was one of the agency’s most promising efforts.”

American officials said that Mr. Balawi had strengthened his bona fides in recent months by posting strident, anti-American essays in jihadi Web forums under the name Abu Dujana al-Khorasani. Officials now concede that those essays represented his true beliefs.

Mr. Balawi proved to be one of the oddest double agents in the history of espionage, choosing to kill his American contacts at their first meeting, rather than establish regular communication to glean what the C.I.A. did — and did not — know about Al Qaeda and then report back to the network’s leaders.

In the deadly aftermath, American intelligence officials pledged retribution. The C.I.A. has already carried out three missile strikes in Pakistan’s tribal belt since the Khost bombing, an unusually high weekly number. Captain Zeid, an officer in Jordan’s General Intelligence Directorate, also died in the Khost attack.

Mr. Balawi had spent time in a Jordanian prison for radical, anti-Western views he had expressed on the Internet, but Jordanian intelligence operatives believed that they had persuaded Mr. Balawi, a 32-year-old physician, to turn on his militant brethren.

In the past, former C.I.A. officials said, the Jordanian spy service had pressed potential recruits by suggesting that their families’ safety depended on their cooperation. American officials did not say Tuesday whether Mr. Balawi had been coerced into spying for the Jordanians.

The C.I.A. had been so optimistic about Mr. Balawi’s potential as an informant that it sent the spy agency’s second-ranking officer in Afghanistan to Khost to meet with him.

The agency is facing criticism for security lapses that allowed the Jordanian to detonate an explosives belt in the middle of Forward Operating Base Chapman. He apparently was not checked at the entrance of the base, American intelligence officials have acknowledged.

At the same time, few criticized the agency’s impulse to chase any credible lead about the locations of Al Qaeda’s top leaders.

“This is the C.I.A’s top priority, and when I was in Afghanistan, if any intelligence came about the possible whereabouts of Zawahri or bin Laden, you dropped everything to run it to ground,” said a former senior C.I.A. officer. “Everyone would have wanted to be on the team that caught Zawahri. That’s the kind of thing that makes careers.”

The White House and the C.I.A. declined to comment for this article.

The failed operation with the Jordanian agent comes amid new criticism about the quality of American intelligence collection in Afghanistan.

On Monday, the top American military intelligence officer in Afghanistan published a report calling the information gathered in the country “only marginally relevant” to counterinsurgency efforts and concluding that little of the information gathered in the field is useful for analysts working in Washington and Kabul.

“The problem is that these analysts — the core of them bright, enthusiastic and hungry — are starved for information from the field, so starved, in fact, that many say their jobs feel more like fortune-telling than serious detective work,” concludes the report, written partly by Maj. Gen. Michael T. Flynn.

General Flynn reserved the bulk of his criticism for military intelligence officers. However, the report raises overall questions about the quality of the intelligence collection and analysis in Afghanistan by America’s military and civilian spy agencies.

The general has ordered an overhaul to the American military’s intelligence apparatus in the country. For its part, the C.I.A. is expanding its network of remote firebases in the southern and eastern parts of the country and expects to bolster its ranks in Afghanistan by 25 percent over the next 18 months.

    U.S. Saw a Path to Qaeda Chiefs Before Bombing, NYT, 6.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/06/world/06intel.html

Op-Ed Columnist

Father Knows Best

January 6, 2010
The New York Times
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Surely, the most important, interesting — and, yes, heroic — figure in the whole Christmas Day Northwest airliner affair was the would-be bomber’s father, the Nigerian banker Alhaji Umaru Mutallab.

Mutallab did something that, as far as we know, no other parent of a suicide bomber has done: He went to the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria and warned us that text messages from his son revealed that he was in Yemen and had become a fervent, and possibly dangerous, radical.

We are turning ourselves inside out over how our system broke down — and surely it did — in allowing Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the would-be suicide bomber, to board that airliner. But his father, in effect, told us something else: “My family system, our village system, broke down. My own son fell under the influence of a jihadist version of Islam that I do not recognize and have reason to fear.”

The Times, quoting a cousin, said the son had sent the father a text message from Yemen in which he declared that “he had found a new religion, the real Islam” and that he was never coming home again. A Feb. 20, 2005, Internet posting attributed to the son and quoted by The Associated Press said: “I imagine how the great jihad will take place, how the Muslims will win ... and rule the whole world, and establish the greatest empire once again!!!”

Finding people with the courage to confront that breakdown — the one identified by the father, the one that lures young Muslims away from the mainstream into a willingness to commit suicide against innocent civilians as part of some jihadist power fantasy — is what matters most right now.

Yes, we need to fix our intelligence. Yes, we absolutely must live up to our own ideals, as President Obama is trying to do in banning torture and closing Guantánamo Bay. We can’t let this “war on terrorism” consume us. We can’t let our country become just The United States of Fighting Terrorism and nothing more. We are the people of July 4th — not Sept. 11th.

But even if we do all that, no laws or walls we put up will ever be sufficient to protect us unless the Arab and Muslim societies from whence these suicide bombers emerge erect political, religious and moral restraints as well — starting by shaming suicide bombers and naming their actions “murder,” not “martyrdom.”

I keep saying: It takes a village. The father, Alhaji Umaru Mutallab, saw himself as part of a global community, based on shared values, and that is why he rang the alarm bell. Bless him for that. Unless more Muslim parents, spiritual leaders, political leaders — the village — are ready to publicly denounce suicide bombing against innocent civilians — theirs and ours — this behavior will not stop.

Just last Friday, for example, a suicide bomber set off an explosives-laden vehicle in the midst of a volleyball tournament in the Pakistani village of Shah Hassan Khel, killing more than 100 people. Most were youngsters. No surprise. When suicide bombing becomes legitimate to use against non-Muslim “infidels” abroad it becomes legitimate to use against Muslim opponents at home. And what becomes “legitimate” and “illegitimate” in a community is so much more important than any government regulation.

All too often, though, Arab and Muslim governments arrest their jihadis at home, denounce them privately to us, but say nothing in public. The global leadership of Islam — like the king of Saudi Arabia or the Organization of the Islamic Conference — rarely take on jihadist actions and ideology openly with the kind of passion, consistency and mass protests that we have seen them do, for example, against Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.

President Obama should not hesitate to call for it — respectfully but publicly. If he only presses for more effective airport security, which he must, it’s a cop-out.

“When you want to foster more responsible behavior in people, you can’t just legislate more rules and regulations,” said Dov Seidman, the C.E.O. of LRN, which helps companies build ethical cultures, and the author of the book “How.” “You have to enlist and inspire people in a set of values. People need to be governed both from the outside, through compliance with rules, and from the inside, inspired by shared values. That is why shame is so important. When we call a banker ‘a fat cat’ for taking too big a bonus, we’re actually being inspirational leaders because we are telling them, ‘You are behaving beneath how a responsible human being should behave.’ We need to inspire the village to shame those who betray our common values.”

Every faith has its violent extreme. The West is not immune. It’s all about how the center deals with it. Does it tolerate it, isolate it or shame it? The jihadists are a security problem for our system. But they are a political and moral problem for the Arab-Muslim system. If they won’t address this problem for us, I truly hope they will do it for themselves. Eventually, we’ll find a way to keep most jihadists off our planes and out of our volleyball games — but they will have to live with them.

 

Maureen Dowd is off today.

    Father Knows Best, NYT, 6.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/06/opinion/06friedman.html

Letters

To Stop a Terrorist: No Lack of Ideas

January 5, 2010
The New York Times

To the Editor:

Re “Obama Says Al Qaeda in Yemen Planned Bombing Plot, and He Vows Retribution” (news article, Jan. 3):

President Obama, in his intelligence meeting on Tuesday, should recognize that our system of multiple intelligence agencies is a bureaucratic mess. Interagency rivalry is inevitable. In turn, the natural consequence is a lack of effective intercommunication.

The web of quasi-autonomous agencies should be radically simplified. There should be a single intelligence agency whose head reports directly to the president. This agency head should maintain a unified file of suspect names, and all intelligence related to a name should be attached to the name. This would automatically “connect the dots.”

If such a structure had been in place, the knowledge in one agency about the Nigerian’s stay in Yemen would have been in the common file. It would have been available to those who compile the watch list and those who control visas.

Herbert Fingarette
Berkeley, Calif., Jan. 3, 2010

•

To the Editor:

Re “Why Didn’t They See It?” (editorial, Jan. 2):

You correctly demand a “clearheaded, nonpoliticized assessment of what went wrong” in the Christmas Day terrorism plot and “nonhysterical remedies” to prevent another attack. You should have added that the C.I.A.’s Office of the Inspector General prepared such an authoritative report after 9/11 that has never been fully released to the public, and that President Obama’s failure to appoint a statutory inspector general virtually ensures that such a report will not be prepared this time.

The inspector general responsible for the 9/11 accountability report announced his retirement nearly 11 months ago; Senator Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has been derelict in not demanding that the Obama administration name a successor.

Melvin A. Goodman
Bethesda, Md., Jan. 2, 2010

The writer was a C.I.A. analyst from 1966 to 1990.

•

To the Editor:

Re “Now Yemen” (editorial, Dec. 31):

You argue that the United States and its allies must address the “desperate” political and social problems of Yemen in order to have hope of defeating Al Qaeda’s Yemen-based terror plots. Have we learned nothing from the terrible war and loss of life in Afghanistan?

It should be clear by now that a foreign power has no chance of imposing change on a society whose customs and values are so different from those of the West, and that poverty has little to do with murderous jihadist movements in the Islamic world.

Our defense against Al Qaeda must be based on aggressive action using all the military and related resources at our disposal, regardless of the objections of corrupt regimes harboring those who want to kill us.

Matthew W. Sagal
Longboat Key, Fla., Jan. 1, 2010

•

To the Editor:

Americans need to wake up to the fact that our government has failed us in protecting the flying public. Nothing short of body scans and conducting all security outside of the airport is the only way to ensure protection.

The Christmas flight to Detroit should be a game changer in improving airport security. Let’s hope that Homeland Security and the T.S.A. get their act together and provide the flying public with security that works.

David Lewenz
St. Petersburg Beach, Fla., Jan. 1, 2010

•

To the Editor:

Re “How to Prevent Terror in the Skies” (letters, Dec. 31):

As a Transportation Security Administration officer and traveler, I agree that change is needed in our nation’s security agencies, from the top down.

In defense of the T.S.A., it is on the right track in at least one area: a behavior detection program. Of course, Israel is the paragon of effective airline security, and the adoption of some of its techniques is one of the smartest things that the T.S.A. has done. But a far greater emphasis should be placed on behavior detection and screener discretion, accompanied by a de-emphasis of reactive, blanket screening policies that by nature divert time, energy and attention from probable security threats. The appointment of a long-overdue administration chief will, one hopes, help lead the T.S.A. in this direction.

To all those who shout, “Profiling now!” I ask: Given our legal landscape, how many civil rights lawsuits would the T.S.A. see as soon as an unmitigated profiling policy was carried out? It’s a complex balancing act.

Jason Harrington
Chicago, Jan. 1, 2010

    To Stop a Terrorist: No Lack of Ideas, NYT, 5.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/05/opinion/l05terror.html

Op-Ed Contributor

What’s Our Line?

January 5, 2010
The New York Times
By MICHAEL KINSLEY

Washington

WHY are we reading Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab his Miranda rights instead of taking him somewhere and forcibly finding out where he got the explosive underwear and whatever else he might know about Al Qaeda? Isn’t this, as well as the forthcoming federal court trial of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, proof that the Obama administration doesn’t really regard the war on terrorism as a war?

Even worse, isn’t President Obama, despite his statements on terrorism over the weekend, confused and amateurish on this deadly serious issue? At his direction, thousands of American soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq are doing their best to kill terrorists, would-be terrorists and terrorists in training with no thought whatsoever to the legal niceties. Why do these two scoundrels deserve lawyers and a trial?

Republican critics like Dick Cheney and Newt Gingrich have raised these questions in the past few days. There’s a gruesome anomaly here, to be sure: the United States government will blow you to smithereens and consider it a good day’s work if you’re a Qaeda member dreaming of jihadist glory while residing somewhere outside the United States, but will pay for your lawyer if you get caught in the act within our borders. But this anomaly didn’t arise with the Obama administration. It is built into our dual role as a liberal democracy and as a legitimately aggrieved superpower.

The charms of liberal democracy sometimes need to be defended by war, and Mr. Obama’s critics are right that war can’t be conducted with a high level of concern for individual justice. A liberal democracy aspires to punish only the guilty. But war is inherently unfair — it distributes suffering arbitrarily among enemy combatants, civilians and one’s own soldiers. A line has to be drawn somewhere to determine which of these utterly different standards of government behavior is applied where — and the nation’s border is as good a line as any.

Members of Al Qaeda are not the only ones affected by this double standard. The most repulsive and obviously guilty child molester — or drug kingpin who may also have information that the government could use — gets American justice, while an innocent child killed accidentally in our pursuit of terrorists gets no justice at all. (This second part of the equation doesn’t seem to bother the Cheneys and the Gingriches.) Any place you draw the line, it will be possible to come up with what lawyers call “a parade of horribles.” Any line you draw can be made to seem absurd, because it is absurd. But the line must be drawn somewhere.

So why not draw the line to put an Abdulmutallab or a Shaikh Mohammed on the “war” side and treat him as an enemy combatant? Well, first, recognize that this has become a judgment call so the answer is no longer obvious or mandated by logic. Second, recognize that the national border is a “bright line,” and if people captured within the United States are going to be treated as if they were somewhere else — provided that they are certified terrorists — things are going to get complicated quickly.

What about Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychiatrist charged with killing 13 people at Fort Hood, Tex., in November? He was influenced by an Islamic cleric, but seems to have been fighting his own demons rather than participating in a larger plot. And he’s a citizen. What about Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber? What about the Columbine high school killers? Are they terrorists? Is American justice too good for them?

American justice is not a “get out of jail free” card. Obviously guilty murderers rarely escape punishment here. We have nothing to be ashamed of, little to fear and much to be proud of in choosing to err on the side of treating captured foreign terrorists as we would treat any upstanding American who tried to blow up an airplane full of people.

Michael Kinsley is the editor in chief of a forthcoming Web site for business executives.

    What’s Our Line?, NYT, 5.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/05/opinion/05kinsley.html

Editorial

Yes, It Was Torture, and Illegal

January 4, 2010
The New York Times

Bush administration officials came up with all kinds of ridiculously offensive rationalizations for torturing prisoners. It’s not torture if you don’t mean it to be. It’s not torture if you don’t nearly kill the victim. It’s not torture if the president says it’s not torture.

It was deeply distressing to watch the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit sink to that standard in April when it dismissed a civil case brought by four former Guantánamo detainees never charged with any offense. The court said former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the senior military officers charged in the complaint could not be held responsible for violating the plaintiffs’ rights because at the time of their detention, between 2002 and 2004, it was not “clearly established” that torture was illegal.

The Supreme Court could have corrected that outlandish reading of the Constitution, legal precedent, and domestic and international statutes and treaties. Instead, last month, the justices abdicated their legal and moral duty and declined to review the case.

A denial of certiorari is not a ruling on the merits. But the justices surely understood that their failure to accept the case would further undermine the rule of law.

In effect, the Supreme Court has granted the government immunity for subjecting people in its custody to terrible mistreatment. It has deprived victims of a remedy and Americans of government accountability, while further damaging the country’s standing in the world.

Contrary to the view of the lower appellate court, it was crystal clear that torture inflicted anywhere is illegal long before the Supreme Court’s 2008 ruling that prisoners at Guantánamo, de facto United States territory, have a constitutional right to habeas corpus. Moreover, the shield of qualified immunity was not raised in good faith. Officials decided to hold detainees offshore at Guantánamo precisely to try to avoid claims from victims for conduct the officials knew was illegal.

Reversing the Circuit Court would not have ended the matter. The plaintiffs would still have had to prove their case at trial. They deserved that chance. There are those who oppose trying to punish Bush-era lawlessness — some who argue that America should not look backward and some who excuse that lawlessness. But the rule of law rests on scrutinizing evidence of past behavior to establish accountability, confer justice and deter bad behavior in the future.

President Obama, much to his credit, has forsworn the use of torture, but politics and policy makers change and democracy cannot rely merely on the good will of one president and his aides. Such good will did not exist in the last administration. And the inhumane and illegal treatment of detainees could make a return in a future administration unless the Supreme Court sends a firm message that ordering torture is a grievous violation of fundamental rights.

Anyone who doubts the degree of executive branch pliability in this realm needs to consider this: The party that urged the Supreme Court not to grant the victims’ appeal because the illegality of torture was not “clearly established” was the Obama Justice Department.

    Yes, It Was Torture, and Illegal, NYT, 4.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/04/opinion/04mon1.html

U.S. Intensifies Screening for Travelers From 14 Nations

January 4, 2010
The New York Times
By ERIC LIPTON

WASHINGTON — Citizens of 14 nations, including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Nigeria, who are flying to the United States will be subjected indefinitely to the intense screening at airports worldwide that was imposed after the Christmas Day bombing plot, Obama administration officials announced Sunday.

But American citizens, and most others who are not flying through those 14 nations on their way to the United States, will no longer automatically face the full range of intensified security that was imposed after the attempted bombing of a Northwest Airlines flight, officials said.

The change represents an easing of the immediate response to the attempted bombing of a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit that had been in place the past week. But the restrictions remain tougher than the rules that were in effect before the Dec. 25 incident. And the action on Sunday further establishes a global security system that treats people differently based on what country they are from, evoking protests from civil rights groups.

Citizens of Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria, countries that are considered “state sponsors of terrorism,” as well as those of “countries of interest” — including Afghanistan, Algeria, Lebanon, Libya, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Yemen — will face the special scrutiny, officials said.

Passengers holding passports from those nations, or taking flights that originated or passed through any of them, will be required to undergo full-body pat downs and will face extra scrutiny of their carry-on bags before they can board planes to the United States.

In some countries that have more advanced screening equipment, travelers will also be required to pass through so-called whole-body scanners that can look beneath clothing for hidden explosives or weapons, or may be checked with a device that can find tiny traces of explosives.

On Sunday, Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain announced that whole-body scanners would be introduced in that country’s airports. Officials in Amsterdam announced last week that they would begin using the scanners on passengers bound for the United States.

Many, though not all, other passengers coming to the United States will face similar measures, but that screening will be done randomly or if there is some reason to believe that a particular passenger might present a threat, officials said.

The changes should speed up boarding of international flights bound for the United States while still increasing security beyond the standard X-rays of carry-on bags and metal-detector checks of all passengers.

The changes will mean that any citizen of Pakistan or Saudi Arabia will for the first time be patted down automatically before boarding any flight to the United States. Even if that person has lived in a country like Britain for decades, he now will be subject to these extra security checks.

Nawar Shora, the legal director at the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, says the rule wrongly implies that all citizens of certain nations are suspect.

“I understand there needs to be additional security in light of what was attempted on Christmas Day,” Mr. Shora said, adding that he intended to file a formal protest on Monday. “But this is extreme and very dangerous. All of a sudden people are labeled as being related to terrorism just because of the nation they are from.”

In the United States, an order for a “second screening” has already been in effect for a dozen countries.

But the requirement often does not have much of an impact because most passengers traveling domestically in the United States use driver’s licenses — not passports — when passing through checkpoints, so officials do not know their nationality and there is less of a chance that they would receive extra attention.

The addition of Nigeria, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to the “country of interest” list marks the first time that citizens of those countries will be subject to automatic additional screening for flights to the United States.

Charles Oy, 28, of Chicago is an American who was born in Nigeria. He said that he detected heightened security over the weekend — not in Nigeria but upon his arrival Sunday at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago. He was one of a few passengers taken aside for individual interviews, and his bags and passport were examined.

The suspect arrested in the Northwest Airlines episode, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, was Nigerian, but Mr. Oy said that the added scrutiny did not leave him discouraged. “I feel it is very isolated, and is something not characteristic of Nigeria,” he said. “I had no particular feelings of unpleasantness. I understand it is part of the world we live in. I factor all that into my traveling. If it happens, I roll with it.”

A homeland security official said that the Obama administration did not consider this move a step in the direction of racial profiling, which the Transportation Security Administration has said it has long tried to avoid.

“Out of abundance of caution and based on the latest intelligence in this evolving threat environment, additional screening measures are necessary to keep transportation safe,” the official said, asking that she not be identified by name as she was not authorized to address the question on the record.

Domestically, passengers traveling in the United States may notice more canine bomb-detection teams or face occasional extra checks of carry-on bags. Additional behavioral detection officials are also in airports to observe passengers for any signs that might offer a hint of a plot. But there have been no comprehensive changes in screening at domestic airports.

David Castelveter, a spokesman for the Air Transport Association, the airlines’ trade organization, said the group had been “closely coordinating” the enhanced security measures with customers’ convenience in mind. “I believe we accomplished that,” he said Sunday.

Meanwhile, flights out of one terminal at Newark Liberty International Airport were temporarily halted Sunday evening as officials investigated a possible security breach.

After a man was seen walking the wrong way down the exit lane between the secured, or “sterile,” area and the public area around 5:20 p.m., the Transportation Security Administration stopped screening. More than two hours later, the T.S.A. ordered all passengers on the sterile side to move back to the public side for rescreening.

The concourse was reopened shortly before midnight. The man who was being sought was not found, the authorities said.

While it was unclear who first alerted the authorities to the potential breach, the person was not an employee of the T.S.A., an official of the agency said.

 

Micheline Maynard contributed reporting from Detroit, Mark Guarino from Chicago, and Sarah Wheaton from New York.

    U.S. Intensifies Screening for Travelers From 14 Nations, NYT, 4.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/04/us/04webtsa.html

Flights Out of Newark Airport Halted for Possible Security Breach

January 4, 2010
The New York Timers
By SARAH WHEATON

Flights out of one terminal at Newark Liberty International Airport were temporarily halted Sunday night as officials investigated a possible security breach.

Officials took the action after a man was observed walking the wrong way down the exit lane between the secured, or “sterile,” area and the public area at around 5:20 p.m.

The Transportation Security Administration initially responded by stopping screening. But about two and a half hours later, the T.S.A. ordered all passengers on the sterile side to move back to the public side for rescreening.

While it was unclear who first alerted authorities to the potential breach, the individual was not an employee of the T.S.A., which is in charge of airport security, said an administration official.

People were allowed to begin boarding planes again just under seven hours after screening was first shut down, and the T.S.A. expected all passengers to be rescreened by 12:30 a.m. on Monday. Officials did not locate the man who caused the alert.

The situation caused significant disruption at the airport. With flights having been grounded after several hours, and planes bound for Newark severely delayed because there were no gates available at the terminal, Continental announced that passengers scheduled to fly into or out of the airport on Sunday and Monday could reschedule trips without penalty. Officials estimated that thousands of people were affected.

Airline safety officials have been on heightened alert since the attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound flight on Christmas Day, an incident that President Obama on Saturday linked to an Al Qaeda branch based in Yemen.

    Flights Out of Newark Airport Halted for Possible Security Breach, NYT, 4.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/04/nyregion/04newark.html

Obama Ties Failed Plane Attack to Qaeda in Yemen

January 3, 2010
The New York Times
By PETER BAKER

HONOLULU — President Obama declared for the first time on Saturday that a branch of Al Qaeda based in Yemen sponsored the attempted Christmas Day bombing of an American passenger jet, and he vowed that those behind the failed attack “will be held to account.”

In his first weekly Saturday address of the new year, Mr. Obama also rebutted attacks by former Vice President Dick Cheney and other Republicans who since the incident have accused him of not recognizing that the struggle against terrorists is a war. Mr. Obama said he was well aware that “our nation is at war against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred.”

The president’s speech, taped from Hawaii, where he is nearing the end of a 10-day vacation, was the third time he had publicly addressed the failed attack on Northwest Flight 253 bound for Detroit on Dec. 25. Mr. Obama noted that he had received preliminary reports about the incident but gave no more details about how a Nigerian man with known radical views was allowed to board a flight to the United States with explosives in his underwear.

Mr. Obama’s comments about the involvement of Al Qaeda, however, were the most direct to date. Administration officials and intelligence analysts previously had said they were increasingly confident that Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, as the Yemeni branch calls itself, was involved, as it claimed.

But the president until now had shied away from referencing that until analysts were further along in their assessment of the group’s activities and its ties to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the 23-year-old Nigerian charged with trying to blow up the airliner.

“We’re learning more about the suspect,” Mr. Obama said. “We know that he traveled to Yemen, a country grappling with crushing poverty and deadly insurgencies. It appears that he joined an affiliate of Al Qaeda and that this group, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, trained him, equipped him with those explosives and directed him to attack that plane headed for America.”

Mr. Obama’s comments indicated that he and the government largely accepted the accounts offered by Mr. Abdulmutallab since he was taken into custody and by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in a statement on the Web. The National Security Agency had intercepted communications among Qaeda leaders months ago talking about an unnamed Nigerian preparing to attack, but the government never correlated that with information about Mr. Abdulmutallab’s radicalization collected by embassy officials in Nigeria from the suspect’s father.

Mr. Obama noted that this was not the first time the group had tried to attack the United States and its allies. “In recent years, they have bombed Yemeni government facilities and Western hotels,” he said, adding, “So as president, I’ve made it a priority to strengthen our partnership with the Yemeni government.”

He said those efforts had already led to strikes against the group’s leaders and training camps. “And all those involved in the attempted act of terrorism on Christmas must know, you, too, will be held to account,” he said.

The president also used the address to implicitly deflect Republicans who have blamed some of his policy changes for weakening the struggle against terrorism. Although he did not name Mr. Cheney, Mr. Obama was clearly responding to the former vice president’s assertion that the president was “trying to pretend we are not at war.”

Mr. Obama defended his policies as tough but reasonable, and called for an end to the sniping that both parties had engaged in since the Christmas episode. “Instead of succumbing to partisanship and division, let’s summon the unity that this moment demands,” he said. “Let’s work together, with a seriousness of purpose, to do what must be done to keep our country safe.”

    Obama Ties Failed Plane Attack to Qaeda in Yemen, NYT, 3.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/us/politics/03address.html

Editorial

Why Didn’t They See It?

January 2, 2010
The New York Times

It will take some time before all the facts about the Christmas Day terrorism plot are known and analyzed. One thing is already clear: The government has to urgently improve its ability to use the reams of intelligence it receives every day on suspected terrorists and plots. That was supposed to have been addressed after the infamous “failure to connect the dots” before the 9/11 attacks. The echoes of the earlier disaster in this near-disaster are chilling.

There were plenty of clues about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian man accused of trying to blow a hole in the side of Northwest Flight 253. But no one in the vast (and vastly expensive) intelligence and homeland security bureaucracy put them together.

In May, Britain refused to renew Mr. Abdulmutallab’s visa and put him on a watch list. In August, the National Security Agency overheard leaders of an Al Qaeda branch in Yemen discussing a plot involving a Nigerian man. In November, Mr. Abdulmutallab’s father, a respected banker, warned the American Embassy in Abuja (he even met with an official of the Central Intelligence Agency) that his son was being radicalized and had disappeared in Yemen.

The son was put on the least-restrictive American watch list — one that flagged him for future investigation. His plane ticket to Detroit was bought with cash. He boarded the trans-Atlantic flight with no luggage. Homeland security officials routinely receive lists of passengers before planes take off and the Transportation Security Administration can request that a plane return to its departure airport if a suspicious passenger is on board. Still no one raised an alarm.

Following the recommendations of the 9/11 commission, Congress created the National Counterterrorism Center to unify the government’s data collection and ordered the welter of intelligence agencies to put aside their rivalries and share what they know and suspect. Everyone insists that is happening; but still something went terribly wrong.

According to The Times, a preliminary review ordered by President Obama has found that because of human error, the agencies were still looking at discrete pieces of the puzzle without adequately checking other available databases — and, in some cases, were not sharing what they knew. The State Department says that it relayed the father’s warnings to the National Counterterrorism Center. C.I.A. officials in Nigeria prepared a separate report on Mr. Abdulmutallab that was sent to the C.I.A. headquarters but not to other agencies. At this point, we don’t know who was told of the N.S.A. intercepts.

Either the National Counterterrorism Center didn’t get all of the information it was supposed to get — or it utterly failed to do its job, which is to correlate data so any pattern emerges. No doubt sorting through heaps of information and determining what is urgent or even worthy of follow-up is daunting. Still, it is incredible, and frightening, that the government cannot do at least as good a job at swiftly updating and correlating information as Google.

Long before Mr. Abdulmutallab was allowed to board that flight to Detroit, some analyst should have punched “Nigerian, Abdulmutallab, Yemen, visa, plot” into the system. We are still waiting to find out whether Britain told Washington that it had revoked the suspect’s visa. Shouldn’t that have been on file?

We will reserve judgment about whether anyone should be fired for what President Obama has rightly called a “systemic failure.”

Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, didn’t help matters when she briefly asserted that the system worked. Her system clearly has serious flaws. So does the intelligence system. We are sure that the turf war between Leon Panetta, the C.I.A. director, and the director of national intelligence, Dennis Blair (his job was created after 9/11 to oversee all 16 spy agencies), is not helping. Neither are the Republicans, who predictably seized on the plot for political advantage by absurdly accusing Mr. Obama of being weak on national security.

What is needed now is what was needed after 9/11: a clearheaded, nonpoliticized assessment of what went wrong and nonhysterical remedies that work this time. The United States cannot be enclosed in an impermeable bubble. But Mr. Abdulmutallab never should have been allowed to board that plane.

    Why Didn’t They See It?, NYT, 2.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/02/opinion/02sat1.html

Terror Attempt May Hinder Plans to Close Guantánamo

January 1, 2010
The New York Times
By PETER BAKER and CHARLIE SAVAGE

KANEOHE, Hawaii — The attempted bombing of an American passenger plane on Christmas Day could greatly complicate President Obama’s efforts to close the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as lawmakers in both parties call on the administration to rethink its approach.

The task of determining what to do with the detainees held at Guantánamo has already proved so daunting that Mr. Obama is poised to miss his self-imposed one-year deadline for shuttering the prison by Jan. 22. But evidence that Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen was behind last week’s failed plane attack will make closing the center even harder since nearly half the remaining detainees are from Yemen.

“The current threats emanating from Yemen dramatically increase the political costs of closing Guantánamo,” said Matthew Waxman, a former top Pentagon official who handled detainee issues and supports trying to close the detention center. “To close it anytime soon, the Obama administration either has to send many detainees back to Yemen — widely viewed as a major terrorist haven — or it brings many of them into the U.S. for continued detention without trial.”

The possible impact on Guantánamo represents just one ramification of the Christmas Day plot. The administration is already reviewing changes in intelligence analysis and aviation screening to address what the president on Tuesday called “human and systemic failures” that allowed a 23-year-old Nigerian with known radical views to board a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit with explosives in his underwear.

Mr. Obama, who is spending the holidays with his family in his home state, Hawaii, was briefed Thursday on the preliminary results of twin reviews into the breakdown leading up to the failed attack, and he ordered his senior advisers and agency heads to meet with him in Washington next week.

Mr. Obama spoke by telephone separately with John O. Brennan, his counterterrorism adviser, and with Janet Napolitano, his secretary of homeland security, but he offered no fresh assessment on Thursday as he waited for more reports later in the day. The president said in a written statement that he would meet with agency directors on Tuesday “to discuss our ongoing reviews as well as security enhancements and intelligence-sharing improvements in our homeland security and counterterrorism operations.”

The reviews were expected to tell the president that the government had intercepted conversations about a possible attack by the Yemen group, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, but did not correlate it with information about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian man arrested in the airline plot, that might have pointed to his plans.

They also were looking at how explosives were taken onto the plane despite security procedures and what changes might be required to detect such materials in the future.

Ms. Napolitano announced that she was sending top deputies to meet with leaders from major international airports in Africa, Europe, the Middle East and South America to review security procedures and technology used to screen passengers bound for the United States.

“We are looking not only at our own processes, but also beyond our borders to ensure effective aviation security measures are in place,” Ms. Napolitano said in a statement.

The Guantánamo issue is not part of this review, but leading members of Congress are pressing Mr. Obama to either abandon plans to close the prison or to suspend any transfers of prisoners to Yemen.

Mr. Obama inherited 242 detainees at Guantánamo when he came into office, and his team has released or transferred 44. Of the 198 remaining, about 92 are from Yemen, and of those, about 40 have been cleared for release.

But a senior administration official said Thursday that Mr. Obama’s interagency team had already decided quietly several weeks ago that the security situation in Yemen was too volatile to transfer any more detainees beyond six who were sent home in December. The government concluded it had to release those six because it was about to lose habeas corpus hearings in court that would order them freed.

As for the rest, “we all agreed we couldn’t send people back because of the security situation,” said the official, who like others requested anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

The administration has been trying to help develop a rehabilitation program for Yemen like one in neighboring Saudi Arabia that has been judged largely successful in transitioning former detainees back into society. But the senior official said that such a program appeared unlikely to be set up, and that without it, sending dozens of Yemenis back home would not be feasible.

The administration will re-examine the question in late 2010, when an Illinois prison is ready to take remaining Guantánamo detainees, the official said.

Ben LaBolt, a White House spokesman, said Mr. Obama remained “as committed to closing the detention facility at Guantánamo” as he was a year ago, in part because it is a magnet for anti-American propaganda.

“That facility has been used as a rallying cry and recruiting tool by Al Qaeda and its affiliates, including Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula,” Mr. LaBolt said.

But criticism has grown with reports that one former Guantánamo detainee released to the Saudi program under President George W. Bush in 2007 is now involved in Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which has claimed responsibility for the Christmas attack.

Senators John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, both Republicans, and Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, sent a letter to Mr. Obama asking him to stop the transfer of the six detainees sent to Yemen in December, even though that transfer had already been completed. Other Republicans joined the call to reverse Mr. Obama’s Guantánamo policy.

“Turning these terrorists over to other countries is not working, and we shouldn’t import them into the United States,” Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the House Republican leader, said in a statement. “It’s time for the president to halt terrorist transfers to other countries, including Yemen, and to re-evaluate his decision to close the prison at Guantánamo.”

Some Democrats have expressed concern, too, including Representative Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, and Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Ms. Feinstein still supports closing Guantánamo but said that “Guantánamo detainees should not be released to Yemen at this time” because “it is too instable.”

But David Remes, a lawyer representing Yemeni prisoners who are challenging their detention without trial, said the administration was transferring only detainees deemed not to be a threat.

“I don’t see what the chaos in Yemen has to do with whether to return Yemenis to their home because these men have been determined not to be dangerous to the U.S.,” he said. “It’s a non sequitur.”

Peter Baker reported from Kaneohe, and Charlie Savage from Washington. Eric Lipton contributed reporting from Washington.

    Terror Attempt May Hinder Plans to Close Guantánamo, NYT, 1.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/01/us/politics/01terror.html

Focus on Internet Imams as Al Qaeda Recruiters

January 1, 2010
The New York Times
By ERIC SCHMITT and ERIC LIPTON

WASHINGTON — The apparent ties between the Nigerian man charged with plotting to blow up an airliner on Christmas Day and a radical American-born Yemeni imam have cast a spotlight on a world of charismatic clerics who wield their Internet celebrity to indoctrinate young Muslims with extremist ideology and recruit them for Al Qaeda, American officials and counterterrorism specialists said.

American military and law enforcement authorities said Thursday that the man accused in the bombing attempt, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, most likely had contacts with the cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, whom investigators have also named as having exchanged e-mail messages with Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, an American Army psychiatrist charged with killing 13 people in a shooting rampage in November at Fort Hood, Tex.

Speaking in eloquent, often colloquial, English, Mr. Awlaki and other Internet imams from the Middle East to Britain offer a televangelist’s persuasive message of faith, purpose and a way forward, for both the young and as yet uncommitted, as well as for the most devout worshipers ready to take the next step, to jihad, officials say.

“People across the spectrum of radicalism can gravitate to them, if they’re just dipping their toe in or they’re hard core,” said Jarret Brachman, author of “Global Jihadism: Theory and Practice” (Routledge, 2008) and a consultant to the United States government about terrorism. “The most important thing they do is take very complex ideological thoughts and make them simple, with clear guidelines on how to follow Islamic law.”

In an online posting in 2005 under the name “farouk1986,” Mr. Abdulmutallab referred to another radical Muslim cleric he listened to, a Jamaican-born preacher named Abdullah el-Faisal.

Mr. Faisal, who was deported from Britain in 2007, was convicted four years earlier for soliciting murder and inciting racial hatred in English- and Arabic-language tapes of speeches urging his followers to kill Hindus, Christians, Jews and Americans. He was later accused of influencing one of the attackers in the London bombings of July 2005.

These celebrity imams — in addition to their knowledge of the Koran and Islamic theology — offer in some cases an almost heroic flair because of their occasional brushes with the law. Among the examples are Abu Yahya al-Libi, a Libyan cleric, who escaped from prison in Afghanistan in 2005, and Mr. Faisal, who continued to preach online even after his arrest and deportation.

In his May 2005 online posting, Mr. Abdulmutallab wrote: “i thought once they are arrested, no one hears about them for life and the keys to their prison wards are thrown away. That’s what I heard sheikh faisal of UK say (he has also been arrested i heard).”

Mr. Abdulmutallab has now become somewhat of a hero, with his photograph posted on Web sites that feature announcements by these prominent clerics.

American and European authorities say some of these clerics, like Mr. Awlaki, offer something much more sinister than just guideposts to radical Islam: a pipeline to Al Qaeda operatives in places like Yemen and the lawless Pakistan tribal areas.

“Awlaki is, among other things, a talent spotter,” an American counterterrorism official said. “That’s part of his value to Al Qaeda. If people are drawn to him, he can pass them along to trainers and operational planners. Abdulmutallab was cannon fodder, a piece snapped into an operation.”

Sheikh Khalid bin Abdul Rahman al-Husainan of Kuwait, who is fast attracting a large following, mixes contemporary politics with talk of martyrdom.

“Obama, in the same way that you raised the slogan, ‘Yes We Can,’ I too have a slogan,” Mr. Husainan wrote in August 2009. “My slogan in this life — and memorize this slogan — is ‘Happiness is the day of my martyrdom.’ ”

Intelligence officials and Congressional aides briefed this week on the inquiry say investigators are still trying to determine the precise nature of any contacts between Mr. Abdulmutallab and Mr. Awlaki.

It is not clear what role, if any, Mr. Awlaki played in the airliner plot.

Marc Sageman, a former Central Intelligence Agency operations officer and Qaeda scholar, said the relationship between these celebrity imams and younger men like Major Hasan and perhaps Mr. Abdulmutallab was a two-way street.

“It is really young people seeking them out — the movement is from the bottom up,” Mr. Sageman said. “Just like you saw Major Hasan send 21 e-mails to al-Awlaki, who sends him two back. You have people seeking these guys and asking them for advice. What they provide is a justification for what these young kids want to do in the first place. There is an influence, but the direction is from the young people seeking folks out, as opposed to older guys recruiting them.”

Mr. Sageman cautioned about placing too much singular responsibility on leaders like Mr. Awlaki. He also said he had no independent evidence that Mr. Awlaki and Mr. Abdulmutallab were linked.

But Mr. Sageman is anxious to find out if that is the case.

“Young people have a mind of their own,” he said. “They are not robots, brainwashed. They are already radicalized. What they want in a sense is a validation of what they already believe. The religious leaders are lightning rods, because of the extreme statements. They form a community around them.”

Mr. Sageman also said that leaders like Mr. Awlaki were effectively reaching into the Western world for an obvious reason: they can speak and write well in English, resulting in a following in Britain particularly.

“English speakers hang out with English speakers,” he said.

Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee who participated in a classified briefing on Wednesday about the investigation, said his suspicions that there was some link between Mr. Abdulmutallab and Mr. Awlaki were strengthened by what he had been told.

Mr. Hoekstra questioned why these apparent links were not figured out before the attempted airliner attack took place.

“You would think if you did a Google search on these different threads, it would bring these things together quickly,” he said. “There are organizations that deal with massive amounts of data in real time every day. Talk to MasterCard.”

Souad Mekhennet contributed reporting from Islamabad, Pakistan.

    Focus on Internet Imams as Al Qaeda Recruiters, NYT, 1.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/01/us/politics/01terror.html