USA > History > 2010 > Terrorism (III)

Dave Granlund

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Massachusetts

Cagle

9 September 2010

Osama bin Laden

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Coverage of Koran Case Stirs Questions on Media Role

NYT        9.9.2010

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/10/us/10media.html

Jews in Chicago Feel Safe,

but Are Cautious

October 30, 2010
The New York Times
By RACHEL CROMIDAS

CHICAGO — Even to a block that is arguably one of the safest and most secure in the country, the news that two parcels containing explosives were shipped from Yemen and addressed to synagogues or Jewish community centers in the city gave some residents pause on Saturday.

“I’m not terribly worried — I heard on the 5 o’clock news that we weren’t one of the synagogues targeted,” said Alan Berger, a Hyde Park resident, as he arrived for services at KAM Isaiah Israel, a Reform congregation where he serves as secretary.

“But the president does live across the street,” said Mr. Berger’s wife, Paula. “You never know if some crazy will attempt to blow up the people in the synagogue.”

Reports that Chicago-area synagogues or Jewish community centers were likely targets of a terrorist attack and the return of President Obama to his hometown this weekend brought attention to the city’s security. But except for having to negotiate an extra layer of the already tight security in the neighborhood, the mood was calm among the dozen members of KAM Isaiah Israel, directly across the street from Mr. Obama’s home in Hyde Park/Kenwood, as prayer services wrapped up Saturday afternoon.

Mr. Berger, 70, said he has planned taking extra time to reach the synagogue since Mr. Obama’s election, when the route came under regular surveillance by Chicago police officers and Secret Service agents, who usually stop cars and pedestrians entering the area.

On Saturday afternoon, more than nine Chicago police cars joined half a dozen Secret Service vehicles stationed between Ellis and Greenwood Avenues. The streets around Mr. Obama’s house have been blocked off to pedestrian and car traffic other than residents since his election, and security is routinely stepped up when he is in town for an overnight stay. The president returned for a rally in Hyde Park Saturday evening, his first here since his Election Night celebration in 2008.

“This is probably the safest place in the country to be today,” said Michael Rothschild, who was touring the neighborhood with his wife, Judith, on Saturday morning. “Having Obama’s house right by the synagogue, the odds of this one being bombed are much less because it is so fortified already.”

Though federal investigators have not publicly identified the two synagogues that were targets, religious leaders and the local media have speculated that they were in Lakeview and Rogers Park, both neighborhoods on the city’s far North Side. The Federal Bureau of Investigation confirmed that KAM Isaiah Israel was not a target.

Mr. Rothschild, a professor of business at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who has researched the likelihood of terrorist attacks on the United States, said the probability of an attack was still too low to deter him from visiting the president’s neighborhood. “People tend to overweight unusual events and underweight the things that are ordinary,” he said.

The Chicago Police Department said in a news release on Friday that it was working with the Department of Homeland Security, the F.B.I. and the Joint Terrorism Task Force to protect the city and its residents. The police declined repeated requests for further comment by e-mail and phone Saturday afternoon.

“The Secret Service is paying close attention to information we receive from the intelligence community at the local, state and national level,” said Ed Donovan, an agency spokesman. He would not comment on how the agency planned to maintain security in Chicago during the president’s visit.

Andrea Maremont, 68, a North Side resident and member of Temple Sholom in Lakeview, said the threat did not worry her, despite her synagogue’s prominence and location near a lakefront highway. She said it was assumed that her synagogue was a target, “and we know we have to be on the alert. We just have to go about our business.”

Rabbi Batsheva Appel of KAM Isaiah Israel echoed the cautious optimism of other members of the city’s Jewish community as she mingled with worshipers after services Saturday.

“We do have a level of anxiety,” she said. “The news of packages destined for Chicago synagogues is very sad, but there is not much we can do except be careful.”

Jews in Chicago Feel Safe, but Are Cautious, NYT, 30.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/31/us/31chicago.html

Saudi Help in Package Plot

Is Part of Security Shift

October 30, 2010
The New York Times
By ROBERT F. WORTH

BEIRUT, Lebanon — As new facts emerge about the terrorist plot to send explosives from Yemen to the United States by courier, one remarkable strand has stood out: the plot would likely not have been discovered if not for a tip by Saudi intelligence officials.

For many in the West, Saudi Arabia remains better known as a source of terrorism than as a partner in defeating it. It is the birthplace of Osama bin Laden and 15 of the 19 hijackers in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Yet Western intelligence officials say the Saudis’ own experience with jihadists has helped them develop powerful surveillance tools and a broad network of informers that has become increasingly important in the global battle against terrorism.

This month, Saudi intelligence warned of a possible terrorist attack in France by Al Qaeda’s branch in the Arabian Peninsula. The Saudis have brought similar intelligence reports about imminent threats to at least two other European countries in the past few years, and have played an important role in identifying terrorists in Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia and Kuwait, according to Saudi and Western intelligence officials.

“This latest role is one in a series of Saudi intelligence contributions,” said Thomas Hegghammer, a research fellow at the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment. “They can be helpful because so much is going on in their backyard, and because they have a limitless budget to develop their abilities.”

The Saudis have stepped up their intelligence-gathering efforts in Yemen since last year, when Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula came close to assassinating Prince Muhammad bin Nayef, who runs the Saudi counterterrorism program. A suicide bomber posing as a reformed jihadist detonated a bomb hidden inside his body, cutting himself to shreds but only lightly injuring the prince.

The Qaeda group’s main goal is to topple the Saudi monarchy, which they consider illegitimate and a slave to the West.

Prince bin Nayef, whose tip to the United States led to the discovery of the two bombs on Thursday, is held in high esteem by Western intelligence agencies, and works closely with them. He appears to be building a network of informers across Yemen, and some terrorism analysts say they believe the tip may well have come from one of his spies, possibly even from inside Al Qaeda.

“The Saudis have really stepped up their efforts in Yemen, and I’m under the impression that they’ve infiltrated Al Qaeda, so that they can warn the Americans, the French, the British and others about plots before they happen,” said Theodore Karasik, an analyst at the Institute for Near East and Gulf Military Analysis in Dubai.

Saudi officials do not comment on delicate intelligence matters. But the Saudi role in a shadowy intelligence war in Yemen’s hinterlands has emerged in accounts from observers in Yemen and from Al Qaeda itself, which has often publicized its struggles to outwit Prince bin Nayef’s informers.

Last year, Al Qaeda’s regional branch killed a Yemeni security official named Bassam Sulayman Tarbush and issued a video of Mr. Tarbush describing the Saudi informer network in Marib Province, a haven for Qaeda members east of Sana, the Yemeni capital. More recently, Al Qaeda released a video detailing its success in misleading Saudi informers during the assassination attempt against Prince bin Nayef.

Saudi Arabia’s counterterrorism program differs from its Western counterparts in striking ways. It includes a familiar “hard” element of commando teams that kill terrorists, along with vastly expanded surveillance. The streets of major Saudi cities are continuously watched by cameras, and most Internet traffic goes through a central point that facilitates monitoring.

But the program also has a softer side aimed at re-educating jihadists and weaving them back into Saudi society. The government runs a rehabilitation program for terrorists, including art therapy and efforts to find jobs and wives for the former convicts. The program suffered an embarrassment last year when two of its graduates, who had also been in Guantánamo, fled the country and became leading figures in Al Qaeda’s Arabian branch.

But Saudi officials defend their overall record, noting that the program now has 349 graduates, of whom fewer than 20 have returned to terrorism.

The Saudis’ growing expertise in counterterrorism has been the fruit of painful experience. Between 2003 and 2005, home-grown jihadists waged a brutal campaign of bombings in the kingdom, leaving scores of Saudis and foreigners dead and forcing the nation to wake up to a reality it had long refused to acknowledge. The puritanical strain of Islam fostered by the state, sometimes called Wahhabism, was breeding extremists who were willing to kill even Muslims for their cause.

Saudi officials acknowledge that they still have a long way to go; the powerful religious establishment remains deeply conservative, and public schools continue to teach xenophobic and anti-Semitic material. But public opinion, once relatively supportive of figures like Mr. bin Laden, has shifted decisively since Al Qaeda began killing Muslims on Saudi soil.

And when the Saudi Interior Ministry released its list of the top 85 wanted militants last year, all of them were said to be outside the kingdom, including some in Yemen. Saudi Arabia’s problem, in other words, has become the world’s problem.

    Saudi Help in Package Plot Is Part of Security Shift, NYT, 30.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/31/world/middleeast/31saudi.html

U.S. Sees Complexity of Bombs as Link to Qaeda Group

October 30, 2010
The New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI and ROBERT F. WORTH

WASHINGTON — The powerful bombs concealed inside cargo packages and destined for the United States were expertly constructed and unusually sophisticated, American officials said Saturday, further evidence that Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen is steadily improving its abilities to strike on American soil.

As investigators on three continents conducted forensic analyses of two bombs shipped from Yemen and intercepted Friday in Britain and Dubai, American officials said evidence was mounting that the top leadership of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, including the radical American-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, was behind the attempted attacks.

Yemeni officials on Saturday announced the arrest of a young woman and her mother in connection with the plot, which also may have involved two language schools in Yemen. The two women were not identified, but a defense lawyer who has been in contact with the family, Abdul Rahman Barham, said the daughter was a 22 year-old engineering student at Sana University.

Yemen’s president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, said Saturday night during a news conference that Yemeni security forces had identified her based on a tip from American officials, but he did not indicate her suspected role.

Investigators said that the bomb discovered at the Dubai airport in the United Arab Emirates was concealed in a Hewlett-Packard desktop printer, with high explosives packed into a printer cartridge to avoid detection by scanners.

“The wiring of the device indicates that this was done by professionals,” said one official involved in the investigation, who like several officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the inquiry was continuing. “It was set up so that if you scan it, all the printer components would look right.”

The bomb discovered in Britain was also hidden in a printer cartridge.

The terror plot broke publicly in dramatic fashion on Friday morning, when the two packages containing explosives and addressed to synagogues or Jewish community centers in Chicago were found, setting off an international dragnet and fears about packages yet to be discovered. It also led to a tense scene in which American military jets escorted a plane to Kennedy International Airport amid concerns — which turned out to be unfounded — that there might be explosives on board.

On Saturday, in news conferences in London and Yemen, and from interviews with investigators here and abroad, the contours of the investigation began to emerge, along with new details of the frantic hours leading to the discovery of the packages.

American officials said their operating assumption was that the two bombs were the work of Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri, Al Qaeda in Yemen’s top bomb-maker, whose previous devices have been more rudimentary, and also unsuccessful. Mr. Asiri is believed to have built both the bomb sewn into the underwear of the young Nigerian who tried to blow up a trans-Atlantic flight last Dec. 25, and the suicide bomb that nearly killed Saudi Arabia’s intelligence chief, Mohammed bin Nayef, months earlier. (In the second episode, American officials say, Mr. Asiri hid the explosives in a body cavity of his brother, the suicide bomber.)

Just as in the two previous attacks, the bomb discovered in Dubai contained the explosive PETN, according to the Dubai police and Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security. This new plot, Ms. Napolitano said, had the “hallmarks of Al Qaeda.”

The targets of the bombs remained in question.

Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain said on Saturday that the parcel bomb intercepted in England was designed to explode while the plane was flying. The country’s home secretary, Theresa May, said that British investigators had also concluded the device was “viable and could have exploded.”

“The target may have been an aircraft, and had it detonated, the aircraft could have been brought down,” she said.

But earlier in the day, Representative Michael McCaul of Texas, the ranking Republican on the House homeland security intelligence subcommittee, said that federal authorities indicated to him that the packages were probably intended to blow up the Jewish sites in Chicago rather than the cargo planes, since they do not carry passengers.

Based on a conversation with Ms. Napolitano, he said that authorities were also leaving open the possibility that other packages with explosives had not yet been found. On Saturday, Deputy Commissioner Paul J. Browne, the New York Police Department’s chief spokesman, said that no specific threats had been made against synagogues or Jewish neighborhoods in the city, but that officers were watching them more closely as a precaution.

It was a call from Mr. bin Nayef, the Saudi intelligence chief, on Thursday evening to John O. Brennan, the White House senior counterterrorism official and former C.I.A. station chief in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, that set off the search, according to American officials. They said Mr. bin Nayef also notified C.I.A. officials in Riyadh.

Saudi Arabia has sometimes been a reluctant ally in America’s global campaign against radical militants. But it sees Yemen, its impoverished next door neighbor, as a different matter. The Saudis consider the Qaeda branch in Yemen its biggest security threat and Saudi intelligence has set up both a web of electronic surveillance and spies to penetrate the organization.

Reviewing the evidence, American intelligence officials say they believe that the plot may have been blessed by the highest levels of Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen, including Mr. Awlaki.

“We know that Awlaki has taken a very specific interest in plotting against the United States, and we’ve found that he’s usually behind any attempted attack on American targets,” said one official.

Still they cautioned that it was still early to draw any firm conclusions and they did not present proof of Mr. Awlaki’s involvement.

This year, the C.I.A. designated Mr. Awlaki — an American citizen — as a high priority for the agency’s campaign of targeted killing.

According to one official involved in the investigation, the package that was discovered in Dubai had a woman’s name and location in Sana on the return address. The package left Yemen on Thursday, the official said, where it was flown to Doha, Qatar, and on to Dubai.

Also on Saturday, the Department of Homeland Security dispatched a cable warning that the bombs may have been associated with two schools in Yemen — the Yemen American Institute for Languages-Computer Management, and the American Center for Training and Development.

That connection would echo the attempted bombing last Dec. 25; the Nigerian who was implicated had studied at a different Sana language school before training with Al Qaeda. If language schools are again involved, it opens the possibility that a foreign student or students may have participated in the plot.

Security forces in Yemen were in a state of heightened alert on Saturday, as investigators questioned cargo employees and shut down the FedEx and U.P.S. offices in Sana, the Yemeni capital.

Obama administration officials said they were discussing a range of responses to the thwarted attack. The failed attack on Dec. 25 created an opportunity for the White House to press Yemen’s government to take more aggressive action against Qaeda operatives there, and some American officials believe the conditions are similar now.

A thinly veiled campaign of American missile strikes in Yemen this year has achieved mixed results. American officials said that several Qaeda operatives had been killed in the attacks, but there have also been major setbacks, including a strike in May that accidentally killed a deputy governor in a remote province of Yemen. That strike infuriated Yemen’s president, Mr. Saleh, and forced a months-long halt in the American military campaign.

In recent months, the Obama administration has been debating whether to escalate its secret offensive against the Qaeda affiliate in Yemen. The C.I.A. has a fraction of the staff in Yemen that it currently has in Pakistan, where the spy agency is running a covert war in the country’s tribal areas, but over the course of the year the C.I.A. has sent more case officers and analysts to Sana as part of a task force with the military’s Joint Special Operations Command.

American officials have been considering sending armed drone aircraft to Yemen to replicate the Pakistan campaign, but such a move would almost certainly require the approval of the mercurial Mr. Saleh.

Yemeni officials have declined to comment on details of the plot, saying only that they are investigating. But new checkpoints appeared in the capital on Saturday, with officers checking the identity cards of drivers and pedestrians.

Mark Mazzetti reported from Washington, and Robert F. Worth from Beirut, Lebanon. Reporting was contributed by John F. Burns from London; Eric Schmitt from Washington; and Liz Robbins, Al Baker and Angela Macropoulos from New York.

    U.S. Sees Complexity of Bombs as Link to Qaeda Group, NYT, 30.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/31/world/31terror.html

Yemen Emerges as Base for Qaeda Attacks on U.S.

October 29, 2010
The New York Times
By ROBERT F. WORTH

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Not long ago, most Americans had scarcely heard of Yemen, the arid, Texas-size country in the southern corner of the Arabian peninsula.

But on Friday, as news emerged of a plot to send explosives in courier packages from Yemen to synagogues in Chicago, the world’s attention was focused once again on the threats brewing in Yemen’s lawless, strife-torn hinterlands, where American citizens appear to be helping the local branch of Al Qaeda take aim at the United States.

It was the second time in less than a year: on Dec. 25, a Nigerian trained in Yemen tried to detonate a bomb on a commercial flight as it approached Detroit, and Al Qaeda took credit for the attempt. The American-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki had been in contact with the would-be bomber, and some analysts believe the latest effort may also be linked to Mr. Awlaki, a charismatic preacher who remains in hiding in Yemen and has issued threats by Internet.

In recent months, American intelligence officials have grown increasingly concerned about Yemen, despite a renewed cooperation on counterterrorism with the Yemeni authorities in the past year. Al Qaeda’s regional arm, which went quiet for several months after a series of American airstrikes in Yemen that began last December, has become more active since the spring, and has killed several dozen Yemeni soldiers and police officers.

The group has also stepped up its recruitment drive on the Internet, issuing an English-language magazine that includes articles with titles like “Make a Bomb in Your Mother’s Kitchen.” The most recent issue of the magazine, “Inspire,” was published last month and includes an article by an American citizen named Samir Khan titled “I am Proud to be a Traitor to America.” Mr. Khan, who grew up in North Carolina and New York City, is believed to have joined Al Qaeda’s Yemeni branch last year.

One important reason for the rising concern about Yemen is the presence of Americans like Mr. Awlaki and Mr. Khan.

It is not clear how many Americans are working with Al Qaeda in Yemen, a group that is believed to comprise several hundred members, including some from Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries. The group is mostly based in the lawless provinces to the east of Yemen’s capital, Sana, but has carried out attacks in the capital as well.

“These are people with both access to explosives and knowledge of how the United States works,” said Bernard Haykel, a professor of Near Eastern studies at Princeton University who has written on Yemen. “And in Yemen, you can walk into a local branch of FedEx and mail something to the U.S. You can’t do that in Somalia or in rural Afghanistan.”

Al Qaeda’s Yemen-based branch, which calls itself Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, does not consider the United States a key target, intelligence officials and analysts say. The group has tried repeatedly to strike at Saudi Arabia, and says it aims to topple the Yemeni and Saudi governments.

But attacking the United States draws broader publicity, and may be helpful with recruiting. Al Qaeda’s regional arm took credit for a suicide attack on the American Embassy in Sana in September 2008 that left 16 people dead, including the six attackers. There have been other, less deadly attacks on other foreign embassies in Yemen’s capital.

The United States government’s relationship with Yemen has been troubled by mutual suspicion. The country has long been a haven for jihadists, who were welcomed there after returning from fighting the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s. After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Yemeni government cracked down on many jihadists, but also maintained relationships with them, paroling some convicted terrorists and cultivating radical clerics. American officials complained; Yemeni officials defended their approach as necessary pragmatism in a country where hard-line Islamist views are common.

Last year American officials showed Yemen’s longtime president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, intelligence reports indicating that Al Qaeda was singling out him and his family members, many of whom hold senior government positions. After that, Mr. Saleh redoubled his commitment to fighting Al Qaeda, and allowed the United States to launch airstrikes on Yemeni terrain.

But Al Qaeda’s presence has also led the United States to vastly increase its military and economic assistance to Yemen, and many Yemeni and American analysts say they fear that Mr. Saleh has a financial interest in maintaining some level of threat in his country.

Another source of concern is the rising chaos of Yemen, which has a fast-growing, desperately poor population of 23 million and is running out of water.

The country’s meager oil reserves, a key source of revenue for the government, are also running dry. The government has limited control outside of major cities, where powerful tribes hold sway and are sometimes willing to shelter Qaeda members. An intermittent rebellion in Yemen’s northwest has created a humanitarian crisis; in the south, a secessionist movement has fostered an increasingly lawless environment where Al Qaeda appears to be flourishing.

Although Al Qaeda has not claimed credit for the packages that were bound for Chicago, this latest episode “is a reminder that we have a serious problem brewing in Yemen, and the current counterterrorism measures have not been able to stop it,” said Gregory Johnsen, an expert on Yemen at Princeton University.

    Yemen Emerges as Base for Qaeda Attacks on U.S., NYT, 29.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/30/world/middleeast/30yemen.html

Explosives in Cargo Renew Debate on Screening

October 29, 2010
The New York Times
By CHRISTINE HAUSER

The discovery of two explosive devices shipped by cargo planes has reignited a long-running debate about how thoroughly cargo needs to be screened on its way into the United States.

Despite the increased scrutiny of people and luggage on passenger planes since 9/11, there are far fewer safeguards for packages and bundles, particularly when loaded on cargo-only planes. The issue has come up in Congress repeatedly and was the subject of a recent report by the research arm of Congress that warned new mandates were not being met.

Industry experts said the latest case suggested that terrorists may have singled out cargo aircraft precisely because they are not subject to the same scrutiny as passenger planes.

Only a small percentage of all cargo from abroad is physically checked on freight planes bound for the United States. A law that took effect in August requiring full screening does not apply.

“The 100 percent screening requirements only pertains to passenger flights that carry air cargo,” said Steve Lord, a director of homeland security and justice issues at the Government Accountability Office.

The size of a package can determine whether it is physically checked. A legislative aide who has studied the issue said large packages were subject to a higher level of scrutiny, usually meaning they are opened, in an effort partly meant to detect stowaways. If a package makes an official suspicious, for instance if it is leaking or has protruding wires, it will be inspected, industry sources said. Sometimes, cargo on freight planes is tracked by only packing lists or manifests.

All cargo on passenger planes, on the other hand, which carry about 16 percent of all cargo that comes into, leaves and travels within the United States, are bound by the August law to have physical inspections using technology and other means. Those screening measures are conducted by private contractors, officials of a foreign government or by American customs officials in some countries.

In addition, planes carrying only freight that are scheduled to transfer to a passenger flight are subject to the full screening law. But as the G.A.O. noted in a June 2010 report, the federal government has yet to meet these requirements for inbound air cargo on passenger flights.

“Even though it is subject to the law, it is not yet being screened 100 percent,” Mr. Lord said. “T.S.A. is still devising a system to screen this cargo. That is a potential vulnerability.”

In a statement, the transportation administration said that it screens 100 percent of all cargo on domestic flights as well as 100 percent of what it described as "high-risk" international inbound air cargo packages on passenger planes. However, a T.S.A. official declined to say what percentage of cargo on international cargo flights is screened.

Representative Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat who was an author of the August law, said, “Given the terrorist threats that we face, the need for continued vigilance is clear when it comes to cargo on aircraft.”

Over all, 20 million pounds of cargo is transported on domestic and inbound passenger aircraft daily.

Officials of both FedEx and United Parcel Service declined to provide details about their screening practices but said their procedures exceeded federal regulations. Both carriers said that they rely on contract carriers in Yemen and do not fly their own planes there. On Friday, the companies said that they had embargoed shipments from Yemen or suspended service from that country.

The suspcious package intercepted in England was shipped through United Parcel Service. Karen Cole, a spokeswoman for the company, declined to say whether a company plane carried that package at any point in its route.

Maury S. Lane, a spokesman for FedEx, said the carrier learned that a suspect package might be at its Dubai facility when it was contacted by the F.B.I. and local authorities in Dubai. “We were contacted, and the package was intercepted shortly afterwards,” Mr. Lane said.

Michael D. Whatley, a partner at HBW Resources, which is a consulting firm for the Air Cargo Security Alliance, an organization that represents the cargo airlines, said that there is no way to force American standards on other countries loading cargo bound for the United States.

“That is a huge hole,” said Mr. Whatley. “So we have to rely on international treaties and bilateral negotiations and all the different tools that we have as a country to get the other countries to do it on their territory.”

Aviation officials have been under Congressional pressure for nearly a decade to ensure that air cargo loaded onto passenger planes is checked for possible explosives. Critics have argued it made no sense for the United States to have spent billions of dollars to examine all carry-on bags and checked baggage but allow cargo to be loaded onto passenger planes without scrutiny.

Congress, frustrated with the progress, mandated in 2007 that the Transportation Security Administration take steps to ensure that all air cargo on passenger planes be inspected — on domestic flights and international flights headed to the United States — by August 2010. Homeland Security recently acknowledged it would not meet the deadline for international cargo.

Earlier this year, Gale D. Rossides, then acting director of the Transportation Security Administration, , told a House committee that about 80 to 85 percent of international cargo headed for passenger planes would be inspected as of the August deadline, and cited the difficulty of getting certain international airports to comply.

“We’re visiting these countries,” Ms. Rossides told a House Homeland Security subcommittee in June. “We’re giving them our standards. We’re assisting them with teams of T.S.A. experts.”

The G.A.O. audit said that part of the problem is that the Transportation Security Administration as of earlier this year had not approved the use of devices to screen large pallets or containers of cargo. A significant amount of air cargo headed to the United States is also given an exemption from screening if it is in shrink-wrapped bundles, based on an assumption that the shipper knows the contents are secure, the audit said.

Perhaps more troubling, the audit found that the agency could not say for sure that air carriers are complying with the mandates to screen cargo even at airports where the system is supposedly in place. The inspections are done by private companies, not government security officers, and the federal government does not have a reliable way to monitor the process.

Barry Meier and Eric Lipton contributed reporting.

    Explosives in Cargo Renew Debate on Screening, NYT, 29.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/30/us/30cargo.html

U.S. Hunts for More Suspicious Packages

October 29, 2010
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON — Officials searched for suspicious packages in the United States and other countries after two shipments containing explosives, sent from Yemen and addressed to synagogues in Chicago, were intercepted in Britain and Dubai.

The discovery of the explosives packed in toner cartridges for computer printers, based on a tip from Saudi intelligence officials, set off a broad terrorism scare on Friday that included the scrambling of fighter jets to accompany a passenger flight as it landed safely in New York.

Cargo planes were moved to secure areas of airports in Philadelphia and Newark for searches, and a United Parcel Service truck in Brooklyn was stopped and inspected. No additional explosives had been discovered by early Saturday morning.

Representative Jane Harman, a California Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee, said Friday that the packages seized in Britain and Dubai contained PETN, the same chemical explosive contained in the bomb sewn into the underwear of the Nigerian man who tried to blow up an airliner over Detroit last Dec. 25. That plot, too, was hatched in Yemen, a country that is regarded as one of the most significant fronts in the battle with extremists.

Ms. Harman, who was briefed by John S. Pistole, administrator of the Transportation Security Administration, said that both packages contained computer printer cartridges filled with the explosive, but that one used a cellphone as a detonator and the other had a timer.

In a brief statement to reporters at the White House on Friday afternoon, President Obama, who had been briefed on developments starting at 10:35 p.m. on Thursday, said the explosives represented a “credible terrorist threat” to the United States.

“The events of the past 24 hours underscores the necessity of remaining vigilant against terrorism,” Mr. Obama said. He praised the work of intelligence and counterterrorism officials in foiling the plot.

“The American people should be confident that we will not waver in our resolve to defeat Al Qaeda and its affiliates and to root out violent extremism in all its forms,” the president said.

News of the terrorist plot came as Mr. Obama was barreling into the last four days of campaigning before midterm elections on Tuesday, and White House officials appeared determined to project the appearance of a commander in chief who was on top of the developments.

Intelligence officials in Saudi Arabia tipped off the United States to the plot to ship explosives from Sana, the Yemeni capital, American officials said. Saudi Arabia, which borders Yemen, closely monitors militants there, who have plotted against the Saudi monarchy and sent a suicide bomber last year in an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate the Saudi counterterrorism chief.

Representative Peter T. King, Republican of New York and the top Republican on the Homeland Security Committee, whose office was briefed on the episode, said the tip about the explosives was precise. “We knew what we were looking for, and we knew where to look,” he said.

Mr. King, who has often been a critic of the administration and intelligence agencies that have at times missed warning signs of attacks, said, “So far everything has worked the right way.”

John O. Brennan, the president’s top counterterrorism adviser, said that the packages containing explosives, which he compared in size to a “breadbox,” were undergoing forensic analysis and that the inquiry was at an early stage. He said investigators did not yet know how the explosives were intended to be activated.

He said the search for additional explosives was continuing. “We don’t want to presume we know the bounds of this plot, so we are looking at all packages,” Mr. Brennan said.

The latest plot underscored once again the threat from Yemen and Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the branch of the terrorism network based there. Mr. Brennan called it “the most active operational franchise of Al Qaeda.”

Indeed, Yemen, once little known to most Americans, has been the source of some of the most dramatic terrorism attempts of recent years. American intelligence officials have said that Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born radical cleric now hiding in Yemen, played a direct role in the Christmas Day airliner plot, and he has publicly called for more attacks on the United States.

In addition, an Army psychiatrist charged with killing 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas, a year ago had exchanged e-mails with Mr. Awlaki beforehand. Mr. Awlaki’s lectures and sermons have been linked to more than a dozen terrorist investigations in the United States, Britain and Canada, and Faisal Shahzad, who tried to set off a car bomb in Times Square in May, cited Mr. Awlaki as an inspiration.

Yemeni raids and American missile strikes have repeatedly targeted Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula since December, and early this year Mr. Awlaki became the first American citizen to be placed on the Central Intelligence Agency’s list of suspected terrorists to be captured or killed. So far no evidence has been made public linking Mr. Awlaki to the latest plot.

A spokesman for the Yemeni Embassy in Washington, Mohammed Albasha, said Yemen’s government “launched a full-scale investigation” and was working closely with the United States and other countries to assess the episode.

Mr. Brennan, who spoke early Friday with the Yemeni president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, said Yemen’s cooperation in the fight against terrorism had steadily improved. “We’re working very closely with them, and we have found that they are courageous partners,” he said.

Mr. Brennan also praised the Saudis, saying, “Their quick action was responsible for preventing what might have been major terrorist attacks with significant loss of life.”

The plot unfolded in dramatic fashion on international television, with scenes of security teams surrounding cargo planes in several countries, military fighters accompanying a passenger plane into New York and a grim-faced president and his aides, many of whom had spent a sleepless night.

One of the packages was found aboard a U.P.S. cargo plane at East Midlands Airport near Nottingham, England, officials said. A second, similar package was removed from a FedEx flight in Dubai, they said.

Neither company has flights into or out of Yemen, but they offer shipping from Yemen and contract with other companies to move freight from there to hubs in Europe and elsewhere in the Middle East.

The episode is likely to reignite a long-running debate over the screening of freight aboard cargo planes. Only a small percentage of such freight is currently screened, though in 2007 Congress directed the Transportation Security Administration to screen all cargo carried on passenger flights starting this year.

Administration officials said they had no reason to believe the Chicago addresses were connected to Mr. Obama’s plans to be in Chicago on Saturday night. They said the decision to have the president speak publicly about the plot was made partly because of confusing and contradictory reports on television on Friday.

After a suspicious package was reported to be aboard a flight from the United Arab Emirates to New York, Canadian and American fighters were scrambled to accompany it. The flight landed in New York City on Friday afternoon without incident, and no explosives were found.

David Packles, 23, a financial analyst from New York who was aboard the plane, Emirates Flight 201 from Dubai, said he did not spot any military aircraft or notice any unusual security precautions, except for a 20-minute delay before passengers were permitted to leave the plane.

“To think there were fighter jets escorting the plane really, really blows my mind right now,” he said.

Two U.P.S. cargo planes at the Philadelphia airport and another in Newark were moved to safe areas away from terminals and searched before being cleared. A U.P.S. truck in New York City was stopped and searched as well, and two items from Yemen were inspected, the police said.

Counterterrorism officials declined to identify the synagogues to which the suspicious packages found in Dubai and Britain were addressed; they did say they did not include KAM Isaiah Israel, which is across the street from Mr. Obama’s Hyde Park home.

Synagogues in Chicago planned to hold regular services on Saturday, said Rabbi Michael Balinsky, executive vice president of the Chicago Board of Rabbis. “It’s obviously disturbing,” he said of the news that Chicago might have been the focus of a plot, “but certainly the Jewish community will proceed as it proceeds. We’ll just exercise caution.”

Reporting was contributed by Helene Cooper, Eric Lipton, Charlie Savage, Eric Schmitt, Mark Mazzetti, Matthew L. Wald, Thom Shanker and Michael D. Shear from Washington; Al Baker, Mick Meenan and Liz Robbins from New York; and Emma Graves Fitzsimmons from Chicago.

    U.S. Hunts for More Suspicious Packages, NYT, 29.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/30/us/30plane.html

Obama’s Remarks on U.S.-Bound Explosives

October 29, 2010
The New York Times

The following is a transcript, provided by the White House, of President Obama’s remarks on Friday about the suspicious packages originating in Yemen and bound for the United States:

Good afternoon, everybody. I want to briefly update the American people on a credible terrorist threat against our country, and the actions that we’re taking with our friends and our partners to respond to it.

Last night and earlier today, our intelligence and law enforcement professionals, working with our friends and allies, identified two suspicious packages bound for the United States — specifically, two places of Jewish worship in Chicago. Those packages had been located in Dubai and East Midlands Airport in the United Kingdom. An initial examination of those packages has determined that they do apparently contain explosive material.

I was alerted to this threat last night by my top counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan. I directed the Department of Homeland Security and all our law enforcement and intelligence agencies to take whatever steps are necessary to protect our citizens from this type of attack. Those measures led to additional screening of some planes in Newark and Philadelphia.

The Department of Homeland Security is also taking steps to enhance the safety of air travel, including additional cargo screening. We will continue to pursue additional protective measures for as long as it takes to ensure the safety and security of our citizens.

I’ve also directed that we spare no effort in investigating the origins of these suspicious packages and their connection to any additional terrorist plotting. Although we are still pursuing all the facts, we do know that the packages originated in Yemen. We also know that Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, a terrorist group based in Yemen, continues to plan attacks against our homeland, our citizens, and our friends and allies.

John Brennan, who you will be hearing from, spoke with President Saleh of Yemen today about the seriousness of this threat, and President Saleh pledged the full cooperation of the Yemeni government in this investigation.

Going forward, we will continue to strengthen our cooperation with the Yemeni government to disrupt plotting by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and to destroy this Al Qaeda affiliate. We’ll also continue our efforts to strengthen a more stable, secure and prosperous Yemen so that terrorist groups do not have the time and space they need to plan attacks from within its borders.

The events of the past 24 hours underscores the necessity of remaining vigilant against terrorism. As usual, our intelligence, law enforcement and Homeland Security professionals have served with extraordinary skill and resolve and with the commitment that their enormous responsibilities demand. We’re also coordinating closely and effectively with our friends and our allies, who are essential to this fight.

As we obtain more information we will keep the public fully informed. But at this stage, the American people should know that the counterterrorism professionals are taking this threat very seriously and are taking all necessary and prudent steps to ensure our security. And the American people should be confident that we will not waver in our resolve to defeat Al Qaeda and its affiliates and to root out violent extremism in all its forms.

Thank you very much.

    Obama’s Remarks on U.S.-Bound Explosives, NYT, 29.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/30/us/30obama-text.html

Deal Averts Trial in Disputed Guantánamo Case

October 25, 2010
The New York Times
By CHARLIE SAVAGE

WASHINGTON — A former child soldier being held at the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, pleaded guilty on Monday to terrorism-related charges, averting the awkward prospect that he would be the first person to stand trial before a military commission under the Obama administration.

The defendant, Omar Khadr, 24, a Canadian, admitted to a military judge that he threw a grenade that killed an American soldier during a 2002 firefight and that he had planted 10 roadside bombs for Al Qaeda. Mr. Khadr, born in Toronto, was 15 when he was captured in Afghanistan.

By avoiding the need for a trial of Mr. Khadr, the deal represents a breakthrough for the Obama administration’s legal team, which had been dismayed that his case was to become the inaugural run of a new-look commissions system — undermining their efforts to rebrand the tribunals as a fair and just venue for prosecuting terrorism suspects.

Mr. Khadr’s decision to plead guilty was a turnabout from his vow to never accept such an arrangement lest it allow the United States to save face. He contended that he was coerced by older relatives into working with Al Qaeda and was not at fault.

In exchange for pleading guilty to five charges — including murder in violation of the law of war, supporting terrorism and spying — Mr. Khadr was spared the risk of a life sentence. A panel of seven military officers will decide the length of his prison sentence.

But his plea agreement is believed to cap the potential time at eight years, on top of the eight he has been in custody.

The deal followed a complex flurry of negotiations, including a side deal reached on Saturday between the United States and Canada allowing Mr. Khadr, after a year, to apply for transfer to Canadian custody to serve out the remainder of his sentence.

The commission system, set up by President George W. Bush in November 2001, has been contentious. The Supreme Court struck down one version in 2006, and it has produced only a handful of convictions.

President Obama campaigned for the White House as a critic of the Bush administration’s version of military commissions. One of his first acts after taking office was halting all tribunal prosecutions then in process — including the case against Mr. Khadr.

But Mr. Obama and his advisers later decided that it was necessary to keep a form of the tribunals if some detainees were to receive any trial. The commission rules provided greater flexibility than civilian court about the admission of evidence like hearsay and material gathered from the battlefield.

The administration spent months working with Congress to set up new rules providing greater defendant protections. It restarted the tribunals in November 2009, hoping that the overhaul would change their global image as a second-class justice system. Some allies have refused to provide evidence or witnesses for use in the tribunals.

No one intended Mr. Khadr’s case to become the first trial under the revamped system, complicating efforts to showcase the reforms. But in August, a 50-year-old Sudanese detainee pleaded guilty, and Mr. Khadr’s case was already well developed and next in line.

In July 2002, Mr. Khadr, who comes from a Qaeda-linked family, was found wounded at a Qaeda compound in Afghanistan that had been attacked by United States troops.

A grenade blast in that firefight killed an Army sergeant, Christopher Speer. Investigators concluded that Mr. Khadr probably threw the grenade. A videotape found at the compound was said to show Mr. Khadr making and planting roadside bombs.

Several factors made prosecuting Mr. Khadr for war crimes unusual.

The centerpiece of the charges was not a conventional terrorism offense — targeting civilians — but killing an enemy soldier in combat. Usually in war, battlefield killing is not prosecuted. But the United States contended that Mr. Khadr lacked battlefield immunity because he wore no uniform, among other requirements of the laws of war.

The uniform issue also led to a scramble by the Obama legal team to rewrite commission rules on the eve of a hearing for Mr. Khadr. Because Central Intelligence Agency drone operators also kill while not wearing uniforms, the team rewrote the rules to downgrade “murder in violation of the laws of war” to a domestic law offense from a war crime to avoid seeming to implicitly concede that the C.I.A. is committing war crimes.

Moreover, child soldiers are almost never prosecuted for war crimes. That meant that the world coverage of Mr. Khadr’s case was dominated by questions about whether the case was appropriate. On Monday, for example, Human Rights Watch said the United States “should never have pursued the case” because convicting someone of war crimes for actions taken as a juvenile for the first time since World War II “sets a terrible precedent.”

In an e-mail to The New York Times, Mr. Khadr’s military lawyer, Lt. Col. Jon Jackson, said he planned to tell the sentencing panel that his client is a “decent young man” who “deserves a first chance at a meaningful life.”

In a phone interview, Capt. John F. Murphy of the Navy, the tribunals’ chief prosecutor, said Mr. Khadr was a convicted murderer and terrorist, not an innocent victim. “He was convicted with the strongest evidence that exists under the law, which is his own admission under oath and in open court,” Mr. Murphy said.

Captain Murphy said he told prosecutors to “re-engage” Mr. Khadr’s defense about a plea deal in August. He did not say whether he had discussed the matter with administration officials, but stressed that his handling of the case was “my own independent decision alone” and “not the result of any political interference with the case.”

The plea deal leaves only one remaining case currently on the tribunal docket: Noor Uthman Muhammed, a Sudanese detainee accused of running a terrorist training camp and of planning to participate in a terrorist operation against Israel. His trial is scheduled for February.

    Deal Averts Trial in Disputed Guantánamo Case, NYT, 25.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/26/us/26gitmo.html

U.S. Had Warnings on Plotter of Mumbai Attack

October 16, 2010
The New York Times
By JANE PERLEZ, ERIC SCHMITT and GINGER THOMPSON

This article is by Jane Perlez, Eric Schmitt and Ginger Thompson.

Less than a year before terrorists killed at least 163 people in Mumbai, India, a young Moroccan woman went to American authorities in Pakistan to warn them that she believed her husband, David Headley, was plotting just such an attack.

It was not the first time American law enforcement authorities were warned about Mr. Headley, a longtime informer in Pakistan for the United States Drug Enforcement Administration whose roots in Pakistan and the United States allowed him to move easily in both worlds.

Two years earlier, in 2005, an American woman who was also married to the 50-year-old Mr. Headley told federal investigators in New York that she believed that he was a member of the militant group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, created and sponsored by Pakistan’s powerful intelligence agency.

Despite those warnings by two of his three wives Mr. Headley roamed far and wide on Lashkar’s behalf between 2002 and 2009, receiving small arms and countersurveillance training, scouting targets for attack, and building a network of connections that extended from Chicago to Pakistan’s lawless frontier.

Then in 2008, it was his handiwork as chief reconnaissance scout that set the stage for Lashkar’s strike against Mumbai, an assault intended to provoke a conflict between nuclear-armed adversaries, Pakistan and India.

It is unclear what United States officials did with the warnings they had gotten about Mr. Headley — who has pleaded guilty to the crimes and is cooperating with authorities — or whether they saw them as complaints from wives whose motives might be colored by their strained relations with their husband.

A senior administration official said Saturday, “We took the information, passed it around to the relevant agencies, and what came back was that the F.B.I. had a file on Headley, but it didn’t link him to terrorism.”

Mr. Headley’s ability to hide for years in plain sight has rekindled concerns that the Mumbai bombings are another instance of a communications breakdown among the agencies involved in combating terrorism, much like the enormous intelligence failures before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

It also raises the question of whether United States officials were reluctant to dig deeper into Mr. Headley’s movements because he had been an informant for the D.E.A. More significantly, it may provide another instance of American reluctance to pursue evidence that some officials in Pakistan, its major ally in the war against Al Qaeda, were involved in planning an attack that killed six Americans.

The Pakistani government has insisted that its spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, a close partner of the C.I.A., did not know of the attack. The United States says it has no evidence to counter this, though officials acknowledge that some current or retired ISI officers probably played some role.

State Department officials and the F.B.I. said that they investigated the warnings they received about Mr. Headley, but that they could not confirm any connections between him and Lashkar-e-Taiba. And D.E.A. officials said they ended their association with him at the end of 2001, at least two months before Mr. Headley reportedly attended his first terrorist training.

The investigative news organization ProPublica reported the 2005 warning from Mr. Headley’s American ex-wife on its Web site and in the Saturday issue of The Washington Post. By ProPublica’s account, she told authorities that Mr. Headley boasted about working as an American informant while he trained with Lashkar. According to that report, she gave authorities audio cassettes and ideological material, and described e-mails she believed he exchanged with extremists.

But she was not the only one to come forward. An examination of Mr. Headley’s movements shows that United States authorities also heard from his Moroccan wife that he was involved in a terrorist group that was actively plotting against targets in India. Beyond these warnings, interviews illustrate his longstanding connections to American law enforcement and the ISI.

Among the findings:

¶ An officer of the Pakistani spy agency handed Mr. Headley $25,000 in early 2006 to open an office and set up a house in Mumbai to be used as a front during his scouting trips, according to Mr. Headley’s testimony to Indian investigators in Chicago in June.

¶ The ISI officer who gave Mr. Headley the cash, known as Maj. Iqbal, served as the supervisor of Lashkar’s planning, helping to arrange a communications system for the attack, and overseeing a model of the Taj Mahal Hotel, so that gunmen could find their way around, according to Mr. Headley’s testimony to the Indians.

¶ While working for Lashkar, which has close ties to the ISI, Mr. Headley was also enlisted by the Pakistani spy agency to recruit Indian agents to monitor Indian troop levels and movements, an American official said.

Mr. Headley was well known both to Pakistani and American security officials long before his arrest as a terrorist. He went to an elite military high school in Pakistan, whose graduates went on to become high-ranking military officers and intelligence operatives. After arrests in 1988 and 1997 on drug-trafficking charges, Mr. Headley became such a valued D.E.A. informant that the drug agency sent him back and forth between Pakistan and the United States.

In several long interviews in her home, Mr. Headley’s Moroccan wife, Faiza Outalha, described the warnings she gave to American officials less than a year before gunmen attacked several popular tourist attractions in Mumbai. She claims she even showed the embassy officials a photo of Mr. Headley and herself in the Taj Mahal Hotel where they stayed twice in April and May 2007. Hotel records confirm their stay.

Ms. Outalha said that in two meetings with American officials at the United States Embassy in Islamabad, she told the authorities that her husband had many friends who were known members of Lashkar-e-Taiba. She said she told them that he was passionately anti-Indian, that he but traveled to India all the time for business deals that never seemed to amount to much.

And she said she told them Mr. Headley assumed different identities: as a devout Muslim who went by the name Daood when he was in Pakistan, and an American playboy named David, when he was in India.

“I told them, he’s either a terrorist, or he’s working for you,” she recalled saying to American officials at the United States Embassy in Islamabad. “Indirectly, they told me, to get lost.”

Though there are lots of gaping holes left in Mr. Headley’s public profile, the one thing that is clear is he assumed multiple personas.

He was born in the United States, the son of a Pakistani diplomat and a socialite from Philadelphia’s Main Line. When he was about a year old, his parents took him to Pakistan, where he attended the Hasan Abdal Cadet College, the country’s oldest military boarding school, just outside of Islamabad.

Mr. Headley’s parents divorced. And before he finished high school, he moved to Philadelphia to help his American mother run a bar, called the Khyber Pass. Later he opened a couple of video rental stores.

But at the same time he was involved in a life of crime. In 1988, and later in 1997, he was arrested on charges of drug trafficking. Each time, he used his roots in the United States and Pakistan to make himself as valuable an asset to law enforcement as he was to the traffickers; one with the looks and passports to move easily across borders, and the charisma to penetrate secretive organizations.

He was married at least three times. For one period he was married to all three wives — a Moroccan medical student half his age, a New York makeup artist, and a conservative Pakistani Muslim — at the same time.

Those relationships, however, could have been his undoing. In 2005, his American wife filed domestic abuse charges against Mr. Headley, according to federal investigators in New York, and reported his ties to Lashkar-e-Taiba. The investigators said the tip was passed on to the F.B.I.’s Joint Terrorism Task Force.

Then in December 2007, Ms. Outalha talked her way into the heavily guarded American Embassy in Islamabad. A senior administration official acknowledged that Ms. Outalha met twice with an assistant regional security officer and an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer at the embassy. However, the administration official said Ms. Outalha offered almost no details to give credibility to her warnings.

“The texture of the meeting was that her husband involved with bad people, and they were planning jihad,” the official said. “But she gave no details about who was involved, or what they planned to target.”

Given that she had been jilted, Ms. Outalha acknowledged she may not have been composed. “I wanted him in Guantánamo,” she said.

More than that, however, Ms. Outalha says, she went to American authorities looking for answers to questions about Mr. Headley’s real identity. In public he criticized the United States for the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. But at night he loved watching “Seinfeld” and Jay Leno.

The imam who officiated her wedding to Mr. Headley warned her that her husband was an associate of the Lashkar leader Hafiz Saeed. Other friends, however, told her he worked with the D.E.A. And she thought by telling the Americans authorities what she knew, they could tell her which was true.

Sipping tea in a cafe overlooking the main plaza in her hometown of Meknes, Morocco, Ms. Outalha said that in hindsight, she is convinced that both were.

“I told them anything I could to get their attention,” she said of the American authorities at the embassy in Islamabad. “It was as if I was shouting, ‘This guy was a terrorist! You have to do something.’ ”

    U.S. Had Warnings on Plotter of Mumbai Attack, NYT, 16.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/world/asia/17headley.html

Shahzad Gets Life Term for Times Square Bombing Attempt

October 5, 2010
The New York Times
By MICHAEL WILSON

The defendant came to Federal District Court in Manhattan on Tuesday ready to ladle out several minutes of anti-American justification for his act of terrorism in Times Square. But the judge, Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum, best known of late for presiding over Martha Stewart’s trial, came ready, too.

She repeatedly interrupted the defendant, Faisal Shahzad, to spar with him over his interpretation of the Koran, his invocation of a Muslim warrior in the Crusades and, above all, the relevance of any of it to the life sentence that hung over him like the dozen United States deputy marshals who guarded the prisoner in court.

And after the judge formally sentenced Mr. Shahzad to life in prison, she left him a parting shot: “I do hope that you will spend some of the time in prison thinking carefully about whether the Koran wants you to kill lots of people.”

The six or eight minutes or so of back and forth brought a bit of drama to the endgame of a case that, as nerve-rattling as it was at its inception, with the discovery of a potentially lethal bomb in Times Square on May 1, had drawn to a close with the sentencing on Tuesday.

The hearing was a part-sentencing and part-scolding, and the latter started before the former. Judge Cedarbaum looked at Mr. Shahzad, seated between lawyers, his beard thick and his hair long under his white skullcap, and said, “I think you should get up.”

Mr. Shahzad, 31, rose. He seemed to have aged in the last five months from the boyish man who was arrested aboard a jet that had been cleared for takeoff at Kennedy Airport.

He asked the judge for 5 or 10 minutes, then launched into a soliloquy that was at times rambling, at times threatening and delivered with the crinkly-eyed grin of a man who acted as if he could not be happier than where he was at that moment.

“This is but one life,” he said. “If I am given a thousand lives, I will sacrifice them all for the sake of Allah, fighting this cause, defending our lands, making the word of Allah supreme over any religion or system.”

He made his one and only reference to his arrest by claiming, for the first time, that his rights had been denied. Law enforcement officials have said that immediately following his arrest, on May 3, Mr. Shahzad cooperated, but he said otherwise on Tuesday.

“On the second day of my arrest, I asked for the Miranda,” he said, referring to the required notification of his right to counsel. “And the F.B.I. denied it to me for two weeks” and threatened his wife and children, he said. The judge, prosecutors and defense lawyers stayed silent as Mr. Shahzad, who has mounted no substantive defense in his case and who pleaded guilty to all charges against him on June 21, continued to speak. His lawyer, Philip L. Weinstein, had no comment on the statements after the hearing.

Mr. Shahzad attacked the American military forces “who have occupied the Muslim lands,” and said that attacks like his attempted bombing would continue.

“Brace yourselves, because the war with Muslims has just begun,” he said. “Consider me only a first droplet of the flood that will follow me.”

He went on about the war and about the “fragile economy” that he said would soon prove unable to sustain the troops, when Judge Cedarbaum interrupted and asked, “Do you want to comment in any way in connection with sentence?” He said he was getting to that, his motivations, when the judge asked, “Didn’t you swear allegiance to this country when you became an American citizen?”

He smiled like a boy caught in a fib, and said as much: “I did swear, but I did not mean it.”

“You took a false oath?”

“Yes.”

“Very well. Is there anything else you want to tell me?”

“Sure,” he began, and went on to say, “Blessed be” Osama bin Laden, “who will be known as no less than Saladin of the 21st-century crusade, and blessed be those who give him asylum.”

The judge stopped him again. “How much do you know about Saladin, as you called him?”

He is known in the Middle East as Salahuddin al-Ayubi, but commonly known in the West as Saladin, the Muslim leader who took Jerusalem from the Crusaders in 1187. He is remembered in biographies as being a lover of peace who waged war reluctantly.

“He didn’t want to kill people,” the judge told the defendant.

“He liberated — ” Mr. Shahzad continued.

“He was a very moderate man,” Judge Cedarbaum said. Mr. Shahzad spoke more about the war in Iraq and said, “If you call us terrorists, then we are proud terrorists, and we will keep on terrorizing until you leave our land and people at peace.”

He finished, and it was time for the sentencing by Judge Cedarbaum. “Although happily, the training you sought in making bombs was unsuccessful and you were unsuccessful in your effort to kill many Americans,” she said, the facts of the case “require that you be incarcerated for life.”

She began going through the 10 separate sentences he faced: “I sentence you to life in prison,” she said.

“Allahu akbar,” he replied. (“God is great.”)

“I understand that you welcome that,” the judge said.

Mr. Shahzad was handcuffed and led away.

    Shahzad Gets Life Term for Times Square Bombing Attempt, NYT, 5.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/06/nyregion/06shahzad.html

Message to Muslims: I’m Sorry

September 18, 2010
The New York Times
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Many Americans have suggested that more moderate Muslims should stand up to extremists, speak out for tolerance, and apologize for sins committed by their brethren.

That’s reasonable advice, and as a moderate myself, I’m going to take it. (Throat clearing.) I hereby apologize to Muslims for the wave of bigotry and simple nuttiness that has lately been directed at you. The venom on the airwaves, equating Muslims with terrorists, should embarrass us more than you. Muslims are one of the last minorities in the United States that it is still possible to demean openly, and I apologize for the slurs.

I’m inspired by another journalistic apology. The Portland Press Herald in Maine published an innocuous front-page article and photo a week ago about 3,000 local Muslims praying together to mark the end of Ramadan. Readers were upset, because publication coincided with the ninth anniversary of 9/11, and they deluged the paper with protests.

So the newspaper published a groveling front-page apology for being too respectful of Muslims. “We sincerely apologize,” wrote the editor and publisher, Richard Connor, and he added: “we erred by at least not offering balance to the story and its prominent position on the front page.” As a blog by James Poniewozik of Time paraphrased it: “Sorry for Portraying Muslims as Human.”

I called Mr. Connor, and he seems like a nice guy. Surely his front page isn’t reserved for stories about Bad Muslims, with articles about Good Muslims going inside. Must coverage of law-abiding Muslims be “balanced” by a discussion of Muslim terrorists?

Ah, balance — who can be against that? But should reporting of Pope Benedict’s trip to Britain be “balanced” by a discussion of Catholic terrorists in Ireland? And what about journalism itself?

I interrupt this discussion of peaceful journalism in Maine to provide some “balance.” Journalists can also be terrorists, murderers and rapists. For example, radio journalists in Rwanda promoted genocide.

I apologize to Muslims for another reason. This isn’t about them, but about us. I want to defend Muslims from intolerance, but I also want to defend America against extremists engineering a spasm of religious hatred.

Granted, the reason for the nastiness isn’t hard to understand. Extremist Muslims have led to fear and repugnance toward Islam as a whole. Threats by Muslim crazies just in the last few days forced a Seattle cartoonist, Molly Norris, to go into hiding after she drew a cartoon about Muhammad that went viral.

And then there’s 9/11. When I recently compared today’s prejudice toward Muslims to the historical bigotry toward Catholics, Mormons, Jews and Asian-Americans, many readers protested that it was a false parallel. As one, Carla, put it on my blog: “Catholics and Jews did not come here and kill thousands of people.”

That’s true, but Japanese did attack Pearl Harbor and in the end killed far more Americans than Al Qaeda ever did. Consumed by our fears, we lumped together anyone of Japanese ancestry and rounded them up in internment camps. The threat was real, but so were the hysteria and the overreaction.

Radicals tend to empower radicals, creating a gulf of mutual misunderstanding and anger. Many Americans believe that Osama bin Laden is representative of Muslims, and many Afghans believe that the Rev. Terry Jones (who talked about burning Korans) is representative of Christians.

Many Americans honestly believe that Muslims are prone to violence, but humans are too complicated and diverse to lump into groups that we form invidious conclusions about. We’ve mostly learned that about blacks, Jews and other groups that suffered historic discrimination, but it’s still O.K. to make sweeping statements about “Muslims” as an undifferentiated mass.

In my travels, I’ve seen some of the worst of Islam: theocratic mullahs oppressing people in Iran; girls kept out of school in Afghanistan in the name of religion; girls subjected to genital mutilation in Africa in the name of Islam; warlords in Yemen and Sudan who wield AK-47s and claim to be doing God’s bidding.

But I’ve also seen the exact opposite: Muslim aid workers in Afghanistan who risk their lives to educate girls; a Pakistani imam who shelters rape victims; Muslim leaders who campaign against female genital mutilation and note that it is not really an Islamic practice; Pakistani Muslims who stand up for oppressed Christians and Hindus; and above all, the innumerable Muslim aid workers in Congo, Darfur, Bangladesh and so many other parts of the world who are inspired by the Koran to risk their lives to help others. Those Muslims have helped keep me alive, and they set a standard of compassion, peacefulness and altruism that we should all emulate.

I’m sickened when I hear such gentle souls lumped in with Qaeda terrorists, and when I hear the faith they hold sacred excoriated and mocked. To them and to others smeared, I apologize.


I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos videos and follow me on Twitter.

    Message to Muslims: I’m Sorry, NYT, 18.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/opinion/19kristof.html

The Terror Translators

September 17, 2010
The New York Times
By ALAN FEUER

INSPIRE magazine, an English-language journal published by Al Qaeda, included in its summer edition what amounted to a “Friends and Foes” list. There, on Page 4, following the letter from the editor (“We survive through jihad and perish without it”), were pictures of, and quotations from, kindred spirits like Faisal Shahzad, who pleaded guilty in a plot to detonate a car bomb in Times Square, and, perhaps surprisingly, David Letterman, who was praised for recent criticism of former President George W. Bush.

Among the magazine’s “foes” were Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates; Nicolas Sarkozy, the president of France; and King Abdullah II of Jordan. Then there was Mitchell D. Silber, a studious and mild-mannered former financier who grew up in Atlantic Beach, N.Y.

Mr. Silber (“I guess I was flattered in a strange way”) may seem an unlikely choice to occupy that space with a terrorist, a television star, a cabinet secretary, a European head of state and an Arab potentate. He is not, after all, a boldface name. Rather, he is a 40-year-old father with a master’s degree in international affairs from Columbia University who says his main hobby is reading deeply on the Middle East.

What landed Mr. Silber on that list was his leadership of a little-known counterterrorism team deep within the crime-fighting structure of the New York Police Department.

Formally known as the Analytic Unit of the department’s Intelligence Division, the team was created in 2002 as part of the city’s response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. It stands as a unique experiment in breaking traditional law-enforcement boundaries, comprising two dozen civilian experts — lawyers, academics, corporate consultants, investment bankers, alumni of the World Bank and the Council on Foreign Relations and even a former employee of the Foreign Ministry of Azerbaijan.

The team serves as the Police Department’s terrorism reference arm: available on demand to explain Islamic law or Pakistani politics to detectives in the field.

“We have found that conducting terrorism investigations is more art than science and requires a breadth of complementary skill sets,” Mr. Silber said during one of several interviews this summer. “Our detectives tend to have a very narrow focus. But the analysts have 360-degree visibility. They focus on the bigger picture, and they sometimes see things detectives don’t see.”

To bolster counterterrorism operations after 9/11, the Police Department expanded its Intelligence Division — run by David Cohen, a 30-year veteran of the C.I.A. — with detectives who had mainly spent their careers chasing street gangs, drug lords and violent Mafiosi. Such trained investigators brought with them specific skills the department thought would translate into the fight against terror: the ability to read a suspect’s manner and the talent for managing secret informants.

What they needed, in turn, were people to help them translate their skills to new terrain, people with a firm cultural grasp of the suspects they were meant to be pursuing. Over the years, a gang detective in the Bronx will probably have developed a radar able to determine at a glance the meaning of a hand gesture or a prison tattoo. But, as one former intelligence detective said of potential Islamic extremists, “when we first started, we didn’t even know they prayed on Fridays.”

Enter the Analytic Unit, which Samuel J. Rascoff, who ran it from 2006 to 2008 and is now a law professor at New York University, described as an attempt to bring “the culturally exotic world of the ivory tower to bear on the gritty problems of counterterrorism as experienced by beat cops and seasoned detectives.”

Consider the time a detective was investigating an Afghan immigrant suspected of involvement in terror activities. The detective found it helpful when an analyst informed him that the United States military had attacked the man’s hometown three months earlier with a drone strike. Sometimes, analysts walk detectives through Google Earth images of Pakistani villages — the mosque is here, the bazaar is there — so the detectives sound more informed and enhance their credibility when dealing with potential covert sources.

“Say a detective is doing surveillance on a cabdriver and he pulls over and goes into a mosque,” Mr. Silber said. “Is this a secret meeting or is it Ramadan and the driver is simply going to pray? The detective is just unlikely to be familiar with that kind of thing, but the analyst can put it in context.”

Mr. Silber’s analysts earn $55,000 to $95,000 a year working daily shifts at their offices in Manhattan and at the Brooklyn Army Terminal, but are available to put things into context around the clock, at the ring of a cellphone. Their assistance can be as complicated as explaining the interlocking network of Afghan tribes or the nuances of the Koran, or as simple as keeping current with New York’s foreign-language newspapers.

As one detective from the Intelligence Division’s Priority Targeting Unit, which focuses on the highest-profile cases, said: “I’m not reading that stuff. I’m reading Sports Illustrated.”

LESS than an hour after a Nissan Pathfinder was found spewing smoke and rigged with a car bomb on West 45th Street on May 1, several members of the Analytic Unit had gathered at their secret office on the West Side of Manhattan trying to assess what, by all accounts, was the most severe terror threat to face the city in years.

For the next 24 hours, as detectives in the field scoured the car for clues, pulled apart the bomb and began tracking down witnesses, their civilian counterparts helped them, by brainstorming leads to be pursued. In which stores, they asked themselves, could the fireworks and propane tanks that had made up the bomb be obtained? And what did that Arab-language sticker on its timing device — a cheap alarm clock — say?

The unit’s linguists monitored jihadist Web sites for useful hints or boastful chatter. Others searched the Internet — sometimes using methods as basic as typing “Times Square car bomb” into Google, but filtering the results through eyes trained to see obscure tidbits. Eventually, they came across a YouTube video posted by the Pakistani Taliban, claiming responsibility for the plot.

Cyber specialists were able to determine that the YouTube account had been set up less than 24 hours before the attack occurred. The video was analyzed by the unit’s Pakistan expert, who knew, for instance, that a leader of the group, the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, or T.T.P., had posted videos during the previous month, announcing that commandoes had “penetrated” the United States and were poised to strike.

By 9 p.m. on May 2, a Sunday, the Analytic Unit had prepared an eight-page report for Mr. Cohen, the Police Department’s deputy commissioner for intelligence, suggesting that an “evolving, highly dynamic” terrorist group, T.T.P., was probably behind the failed attack. Officials in Washington announced the same conclusion days later. (Mr. Shahzad eventually acknowledged that the group had trained him for the operation.)

No other municipal police force in the country has a team similar in scope and sophistication to the Analytic Unit. Its specialists speak Urdu, Farsi, Russian, Arabic and Hebrew, and “cover” subjects including South Asia, Somalia, Yemen, Turkey, Lebanon, Israel, Iran and homegrown terrorist groups.

The unit began with five analysts working for a police captain. When Mr. Rascoff, its first civilian leader, was tapped four years ago to enhance the team — quadrupling its size to 20 — he described his mission as finding people who “combined very solid analytic and cultural skills with the ability to make it in a world of cops where the coin of the realm is not whether your degree came from Harvard or Columbia.”

As an Ivy Leaguer himself who once clerked for a Supreme Court justice, Mr. Rascoff understood it would be difficult having “pointy-headed youngsters” interacting with veteran cops and wanted analysts with what he called “a low jerk quotient.”

Mr. Silber, who was hired to run the team in 2008 and has further expanded it to 24 analysts, spent nine years in the financial world with the Carson Group and Evolution Capital, but left because, as he put it, 9/11 made him want “to get into the fight.” At Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, he specialized in Saudi Arabia’s laws regulating the flow of terrorist money. “I went from corporate finance to terrorist finance,” he said.

The analysts he has brought in are mostly in their 20s and 30s and have worked at the United Nations, the State Department, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the New America Foundation, a research group in Washington.

“We come into this with a couple of years’ experience in a region, or with a law degree or master’s degree,” said one analyst, Jennifer, who, like most, spoke on the condition that her last name not be used, for security reasons. “We’re not like the street cops. But it’s the blending of those worlds that’s the best part of the job.”

Mr. Rascoff said this “blending” was his goal. Analysts sometimes accompany detectives into the field, where they offer what Sgt. Steven Hines called “another set of eyes.” Those eyes are often attuned to what police eyes may not see: a poster in Pashto for a local demonstration against drone strikes; or a collection box on a deli counter seeking spare change for a charity suspected of having terrorist ties.

Mr. Rascoff said the working relationship between the civilian and sworn counterterrorism officials in New York was better than the parallel relationships in the Federal Bureau of Investigation because federal agents, unlike the local detectives, were often as highly educated as the analysts they work with.

“F.B.I. agents sometimes look at their analysts and say, ‘So, basically, we do the same job, but I carry a gun and kick down doors while you sit at your desk all day,’ ” said Mr. Rascoff, who has been working in intelligence since 2003, when he was a consultant to L. Paul Bremer, the special envoy to Iraq.

In the C.I.A., Mr. Rascoff added, the relationship between operatives and analysts is often the chilly one between “an author of cables and a reader of cables.”

In the Police Department, he said, there is an “educational, experiential but not intellectual” gulf that can, paradoxically, bring the sides together.

“While it’s sometimes hard to harness those conflicting energies,” Mr. Rascoff said, “when it succeeds, it succeeds wildly.”

The police officers agree, noting that academics versed in the culture of the region are able to seize upon investigative subtleties that they themselves might miss.

“An analyst once pointed out an individual on the street I thought was Afghan, but was actually Pakistani,” said the detective from the Priority Targeting Unit. “She knew because of the henna in his beard, the lack of a mustache and the pants length.

“They’re from a different world,” he added. “They’re educated; I’m not. My education is locking up bad guys.”

Another detective, sounding a bit like a Woody Allen character, put it this way: “Whenever I have problems, I call my analyst.”

THE history of domestic intelligence in the United States has, to say the least, a checkered record. From Cointelpro, a series of F.B.I. counterintelligence programs, to the New York Police Department’s own spying at the Republican National Convention in 2004, there are enough instances of the authorities’ inappropriately surveilling their own citizens to make even the firmest law-and-order advocate wince.

Christopher Dunn, a lawyer for the New York Civil Liberties Union who has criticized the Police Department’s surveillance of political groups, expressed some concern about the arrangement.

“This is yet another step toward the N.Y.P.D. being able to operate entirely outside of the larger law-enforcement community,” he said. “This type of lone-wolf approach, which we saw during the convention, is a recipe for abuse, or worse.”

But if civilian analysts help bring intellectual rigor to terrorism investigations, if the police “are more sophisticated and less stereotypical in their work,” Mr. Dunn added, “that’s all to the good.”

Investigations undertaken by the Analytic Unit, like those of the Intelligence Division over all, are governed by legal controls put in place in 1985 as a result of a 1971 class-action lawsuit, Handschu v. Special Services Division, that concerned harassment of political groups by the department’s so-called Red Squad.

Mr. Silber argued that, by nature, a team of academics trained in Islamic law and mores mitigated abuse. “The unit helps detectives dealing with sources and suspects to be more sophisticated,” he said, “and to develop a nuanced understanding of doctrines, ideology and historical and cultural references.”

NEW YORK seems an ideal place to practice this theory of intellectual investigation, and the unit has managed over the years to attract people who have worked in the Washington bureaucracy and seem to prefer the city.

“We had people leaving jobs with the C.I.A. and military intelligence to come work for us,” Mr. Rascoff said. “Why were they doing that? Part of it was the noir quality of being within the confines of an institution like the N.Y.P.D. There is an emotional, even an aesthetic, immediacy in being in New York rather than sitting in a cubicle in some fluorescent-lit office in Langley.”

To Mr. Silber, the attraction is the opportunity to work at street level on terrorism cases.

This year, analysts used their knowledge of cultural and political trends in Somalia to help prepare an undercover officer in his dealings with two New Jersey men, Mohamed Mahmood Alessa and Carlos Eduardo Almonte, arrested in June just before they traveled to Somalia to join Al Shabab, a group that claims kinship with Al Qaeda. Last year, an analyst provided unique advice to detectives investigating Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan immigrant who has pleaded guilty in a plot to detonate a bomb on the subway. The analyst, who served in Afghanistan with the elite Army Rangers, drew upon his knowledge of local tribes in Waziristan to create a flow chart of the numerous suspects in the Zazi case, highlighting those that shared hometowns and family affiliations.

The Zazi case, Mr. Silber said, was the largest surveillance effort the Police Department ever mounted in a terrorism investigation, and the unit’s analysts worked around the clock at covert locations, debriefing detectives as they came in off the street, then analyzing and sharing the information with the next shift before it went into the field.

“We’re very much in the weeds of investigations,” Mr. Silber said. “We’re looking at the threat to New York, in New York, so there’s a feeling of grittiness in a sense.”

He said that working in Washington, where the focus is often on events and people thousands of miles away, can feel “a little antiseptic.”

“Here we’re all in the same domain — the suspects and the analysts,” he said. “You might hear that yesterday, at 3 o’clock, people gathered at this street corner or in this cafe. We’re all in the same fishbowl together. It makes for an odd, exciting dynamic.”

    The Terror Translators, NYT, 17.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/nyregion/19intel.html

Aid to Counter Al Qaeda in Yemen Divides U.S. Officials

September 15, 2010
The New York Times
By ERIC SCHMITT and SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON — Senior State Department and American military officials are deeply divided over the pace and scale of military aid to Yemen, which is emerging as a crucial testing ground for the Obama administration’s approach to countering the threat from Al Qaeda.

As the terrorism network’s Yemen branch threatens new attacks on the United States, the United States Central Command has proposed supplying Yemen with $1.2 billion in military equipment and training over the next six years, a significant escalation on a front in the campaign against terrorism, which has largely been hidden from public view.

The aid would include automatic weapons, coastal patrol boats, transport planes and helicopters, as well as tools and spare parts. Training could expand to allow American logistical advisers to accompany Yemeni troops in some noncombat roles.

Opponents, though, fear American weapons could be used against political enemies of President Ali Abdullah Saleh and provoke a backlash that could further destabilize the volatile, impoverished country.

The debate is unfolding as the administration reassesses how and when to use American missiles against suspected terrorists in Yemen following a botched strike in May. That attack, the fourth since December by the American military, killed a provincial deputy governor and set off tribal unrest.

The Yemen quandary reflects the uncertainty the administration faces as it tries to prevent a repeat of the Dec. 25 attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound airliner by a Nigerian man trained in Yemen. American officials say a central role in preparing the attack was played by Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born radical cleric now hiding with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the network’s branch in Yemen.

“Yemen is the most dangerous place,” said Representative Jane Harman, a senior California Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee who visited Yemen in March. “We’re much more likely to be attacked in the U.S. by someone inspired by, or trained by, people in Yemen than anything that comes out of Afghanistan.”

Administration officials acknowledge that they are still trying to find the right balance between American strikes, military aid and development assistance — not only in Yemen, but in Pakistan, Somalia and other countries where Islamic extremist groups are operating.

Daniel Benjamin, the State Department’s counterterrorism coordinator, said in a policy talk last week that American-backed assaults by Yemeni forces on Al Qaeda may “deny it the time and space it needs to organize, plan and train for operations.” But in the long term, he added, countering extremism in Yemen “must involve the development of credible institutions that can deliver real economic and social progress.”

American military aid to Yemen has soared already, to $155 million in fiscal 2010 from less than $5 million in fiscal 2006, but American commanders say the assistance has been piecemeal.

The proposal by the Central Command, which runs military operations in the Middle East and Central Asia, would represent a shift to a more comprehensive approach to strengthening Yemeni troops, proponents say.

“If we’re going to do this, we need to do it right, not dribble aid in and wonder why, if things worsen,” said one senior defense official involved in the debate, who agreed to speak candidly if he was not identified. “It’s like a forest fire. You fight to put it out, not watch it.”

As many as 75 American Special Forces troops now train Yemeni forces, and some proponents of the plan envision these advisers also accompanying Yemeni troops on helicopter missions as logistical advisers.

Military officials say that the aid would be phased in to avoid overwhelming Yemen’s tiny military, and that safeguards would ensure that equipment and troops trained by American counterterrorism experts were not diverted to domestic conflicts. In addition to Al Qaeda, Yemeni forces face so-called Houthi rebels in the north and a secessionist movement in the south.

But senior State Department officials in Washington, as well as Stephen A. Seche, who just completed a three-year tour as the American ambassador to Yemen, oppose the plan, saying the threat — about 500 to 600 hard-core members of the Qaeda branch — does not justify building a 21st-century military force in the poorest country in the Arab world, which has no hostile neighbors, according to two senior administration officials.

The critics say that security aid should be parceled out year by year to retain American leverage, and that it must be part of a far broader plan to promote development and stability. State Department officials offer a scaled-back alternative that focuses on providing Yemeni special forces with transport helicopters to allow them to operate from remote bases and deploy quickly against Qaeda cells, guided by American surveillance photographs and communications intercepts.

Under this plan, American advisers would train Yemeni troops at upgraded operating bases in four or five remote locations. The goal would be to have Yemeni forces develop better informant networks to make ground strikes more precise, avoiding civilian casualties and the provocative American label on missile strikes.

A senior military official said that Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, supported the aid package, which was first reported by The Wall Street Journal earlier this month. Its most enthusiastic proponent was Gen. David H. Petraeus, before he left his position as head of the Central Command in July to oversee allied forces in Afghanistan, two senior military officials said. His successor, Gen. James N. Mattis, initially viewed the proposal with skepticism, but now embraces the plan “lock, stock and barrel,” a senior defense official said.

The Pentagon and State Department are reconciling differences as part of the budget process for next year, officials said.

State Department officials said the May 25 strike that killed the deputy governor of Marib Province underscored the need for less reliance on American airstrikes and greater emphasis on improving the ability of Yemeni forces. For their part, American commanders say they have tightened the procedures for airstrikes against Qaeda suspects.

If the Saleh government was once seen in Washington as too cozy with Islamic militants, that has changed, in part because Al Qaeda has stepped up its attacks. In recent weeks, Yemeni security forces have rousted Qaeda fighters from the southern city of Lawdar. In retaliation, Al Qaeda on Friday published the names of 55 regional security, police and intelligence officers, calling them “legitimate targets.”

“That response shows Al Qaeda sees a real threat from security forces,” said Gregory Johnsen, a Yemen scholar at Princeton. But Mr. Johnsen said the priorities of President Saleh, an autocrat whose family has ruled for three decades, do not coincide with those of the United States.

“If we’re just pouring money and equipment into the Yemeni military in the hopes that it will be used against Al Qaeda,” Mr. Johnsen said, “that hope doesn’t match either with history or current reality.”

    Aid to Counter Al Qaeda in Yemen Divides U.S. Officials, NYT, 15.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/16/world/middleeast/16yemen.html

Zawahiri Urges Jihad in Speech Marking 9/11 Anniversary

September 15, 2010
The New York Times
By ROBERT F. WORTH

DAMASCUS, Syria — Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda’s second in command, released an audio message on Wednesday to mark the ninth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, urging Muslims to embrace jihad.

The speech, released in Arabic on a video with English, Urdu, and Pashto subtitles, offers condolences on Pakistan’s recent floods and accuses Pakistan’s government of doing too little for its people, according to a transcript provided by the SITE Institute, an American group that monitors jihadist Internet postings.

In the 44-minute speech Mr. Zawahiri also says that the past nine years have made clear that there are two “orientations” for Muslims: the path of jihad, and the path of surrender and defeat. The latter, he said, is exemplified by Mohamed ElBaradei, the former director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, who has been campaigning for reform in Egypt.

    Zawahiri Urges Jihad in Speech Marking 9/11 Anniversary, NYT, 15.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/16/world/middleeast/16qaeda.html

On Sept. 11 Anniversary, Rifts Amid Mourning

September 11, 2010
The New York Times
By ANNE BARNARD and MANNY FERNANDEZ

The ninth anniversary of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was marked on Saturday by the memorials and prayer services of the past, but also by events hard to envision just a year ago — heated demonstrations blocks from ground zero, political and religious tensions and an unmistakable sense that a once-unifying day was now replete with division.

The names of nearly 3,000 victims were read under crisp blue skies in Lower Manhattan after the bells of the city’s houses of worship tolled at the exact moment — 8:46 a.m. — that the first plane struck the north tower of the World Trade Center. At the Pentagon, President Obama called for tolerance and said, “As Americans we are not — and never will be — at war with Islam.”

The familiar rituals at ground zero — the reciting of names, the occasionally cracking voice of a reader, the silences — had a new element. The posters and photographs that victims’ relatives held aloft bluntly injected politics into New York City’s annual ceremony, addressing the debate over plans to build a Muslim community center and mosque near ground zero.

Two posters commemorated the victims James V. DeBlase and Joon Koo Kang. One read, “Where are OUR rights?” The other: “We love you!! Islam mosque right next to ground zero??? We should stop this!!”

Differences were evident at the outset. About 7:25 a.m., as a choir finished up “The Star-Spangled Banner” at Zuccotti Park, just southeast of ground zero, Alyson Low, 39, a children’s librarian from Fayetteville, Ark., faced the media bleachers and held up a photo of her sister, Sara Low.

“Today is ONLY about my sister and the other innocents killed nine years ago,” read the text beside the photograph.

Nick Chiarchiaro, 67, a fire-alarm designer, gave her a hug. Ms. Low’s sister was a flight attendant on the plane that crashed into the north tower, where Mr. Chiarchiaro’s wife and niece were working and were killed.

“I’m tired of talking about everything else, tired of the politics,” she said. “Today is only about loss.”

But for Mr. Chiarchiaro, it was not. “A mosque is built on the site of a winning battle,” he said. “They are symbols of conquest. Hence we have a symbol of conquest here? I don’t think so.”

Thousands filled the makeshift plaza beside a construction site sprouting cranes and American flags on a crystal-clear morning a few degrees cooler than the one nine years ago. They carried cups of coffee and wore T-shirts emblazoned with the symbols of the response agencies that had paid so dearly. Until midday, they placed flowers at ground zero.

During the ceremony, knots of protesters wandered the area, sometimes arguing. In the afternoon, a few blocks away, police officers and barricades separated demonstrations, both for and against the Muslim center, that each drew about 2,000 people.

Around the country, people debated the meaning of 9/11 and the appropriateness of political rallies and protests on its anniversary. The day drew an array of national and international figures. John R. Bolton, the former United States ambassador to the United Nations, addressed the New York rally against the proposed Muslim center via video, and Geert Wilders, a Dutch politician who tried to ban the Koran in his country, described Islam as an intolerant “power of darkness,” saying, “We must draw the line, so that New York, rooted in Dutch tolerance, will never become New Mecca.”

Thousands were expected to gather later in Anchorage, paying $74 to $225 to hear speeches by Glenn Beck, the conservative broadcaster, and Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska.

At the Pentagon, in a memorial honoring the nearly 200 victims of the attack there, Mr. Obama said that those responsible had sought to divide the country.

“They may seek to spark conflict between different faiths, but as Americans we are not — and never will be — at war with Islam,” Mr. Obama said. “It was not a religion that attacked us that September day; it was Al Qaeda, a sorry band of men which perverts religion. And just as we condemn intolerance and extremism abroad, so will we stay true to our traditions here at home as a diverse and tolerant nation.”

In Shanksville, Pa., where United Airlines Flight 93 crashed after passengers rebelled against the plane’s hijackers, the focus remained on the victims, with speeches by the first lady, Michelle Obama, and her predecessor, Laura Bush.

Mrs. Obama celebrated the bravery of the passengers. “They called the people they loved — many of them giving comfort instead of seeking it, explaining they were taking action, and that everything would be O.K.,” she said. “And then they rose as one, they acted as one, and together they changed history’s course.”

Terry Jones, the Florida pastor who had announced, and then suspended, plans to burn copies of the Koran, arrived in New York on Friday seeking a meeting with Feisal Abdul Rauf, the imam behind the proposed Muslim center. The pastor’s presence in the city, under police protection, only added to the day’s drama.

On NBC’s “Today” show, Mr. Jones said that neither he nor his congregants would burn the Koran, whether or not he met with the imam. “We feel that God is telling us to stop,” he said.

Yet scattered imitators adopted his idea. Near the White House, 10 members of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue tore pages from the Koran that they said showed Islam’s intolerance. Near ground zero, a man burned what appeared to be a page of the Koran. Behind him, someone held a sign: “Real Americans don’t burn Korans.”

In Afghanistan, five people were wounded when demonstrators protesting the proposed Koran-burning tried to storm a provincial governor’s house.

At the New York demonstrations, there were no arrests, the police said, and the few clashes were verbal. Priscilla Lynch, 58, a Massachusetts social worker who supported the center and was wearing a T-shirt with Arabic writing, crossed a street near the opposing protesters. Some yelled: “Go back to Mecca!”

Supporters of the center rallied at City Hall Park, two blocks from the proposed center. The group was organized by left-wing and pro-Palestinian groups, following a separate vigil Friday by Christian, Jewish, Muslim, interfaith and neighborhood organizations.

Stephen Northmore, 24, an emergency medical worker who attended both, wore an American flag as a cape. Three friends from his native Staten Island served in Iraq and Afghanistan, he said. One lost a leg; another was the sole survivor when a Humvee hit a roadside bomb.

“I think it’s offensive that my friends are ordered to go to Muslim countries and defend Muslims there against the same radicals that attacked us,” he said, “but peaceful Muslims can’t build a community center in New York City in their own country."

Sharif Chowdhury did not attend the rally after honoring his daughter and her husband, both Muslims who died in the World Trade Center, at the ceremony. But he said that objecting to the Islamic center implied that all Muslims were terrorists and violated religious freedom. “If you want to stop this,” he said, “you have to change the Constitution.”

Opponents of the Muslim center gathered on West Broadway for a protest organized by the Freedom Defense Initiative and Stop Islamization of America, both led by the conservative blogger Pamela Geller.

Jan Loght, 58, a pharmacist from Arizona, said she was “insulted” by the planned center and troubled by Islam. “If we allow them to build this, then that’s saying we gave in, and Americans don’t give in.”

Most of the crowd chanted “No Mosque” or “U.S.A.” When Ilario Pantano, an Iraq war veteran running for Congress in North Carolina, mentioned Muslims, some shouted, “Kill them all!”

It was a Sept. 11 starkly different in tone and emotion from those past. For the first time, the anniversary of the worst attack on American soil and New York’s deadliest disaster served almost as a backdrop to politics. The rancor of a ground zero riven by clashing views on Islam and the United States contrasted with the heartbreak of the place.

For many, the politics were cause for a new kind of mourning — for the setting aside of differences that many Americans felt on previous anniversaries.

“We need to get back to that commonality and spirit that we had after 9/11,” said Julie Menin, the chairwoman of the local community board, who supports the Muslim center.

Many 9/11 rituals went on unchanged. In the East Village, former workers from Windows on the World — the restaurant atop the trade center that lost 73 workers — shared a brunch at Colors, a restaurant some surviving workers opened after the attacks.

People of many faiths, born in places from Egypt and Yugoslavia to Brooklyn, passed around babies and pictures. Zlatko Mundjer, 38, who had tended bar at Windows on the World, said no one was talking politics. “We are all family here — we are neutral.”

Steve Harewood, 45, who had worked as a bartender, received a marriage proposal from Paula Sternitzky, 46. They set their wedding date on the spot: Sept. 11, 2011.


Reporting was contributed by Damien Cave, Helene Cooper, Adam B. Ellick, Angela Macropoulos, Colin Moynihan, Andy Newman, Sharon Otterman, Ashley Parker and Rebecca White.

    On Sept. 11 Anniversary, Rifts Amid Mourning, NYT, 11.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/nyregion/12sept11.html

Religious Tension Marks Sept 11 Anniversary

September 11, 2010
The New York Times
By REUTERS
Filed at 2:50 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Religious tensions are overshadowing the anniversary of the September 11 attacks on the United States where President Barack Obama urged a Christian preacher to abandon a plan to burn copies of the Koran.

A day ahead of Saturday's ninth anniversary, a report warned that the United States faced a growing threat from home-grown insurgents and an "Americanization" of the al Qaeda leadership.

On Friday, Obama appealed to Americans to respect the "inalienable" right of religious freedom and said he hoped the preacher would abandon his plan to burn the Muslim holy book, saying it could deeply hurt the United States abroad.

News of the plan has outraged Muslims around the world and triggered violent protests in Afghanistan in which one protester was shot dead.

"This is a way of endangering our troops, our sons and daughters ... you don't play games with that," Obama told a Washington news conference in which he included an appeal for religious tolerance.

Pastor Terry Jones, of the obscure Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Florida, has backed off a threat to burn the Koran on the anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks in which nearly 3,000 people died.

Jones arrived late on Friday in New York, where he was scheduled to appear on NBC's "Today" show on Saturday morning.

He had said he would call off the Koran burning if he could meet with Muslim leaders seeking to build an Islamic center and mosque near the Manhattan site of the September 11 attacks with the aim of getting it relocated.

While the bewhiskered fundamentalist preacher kept people guessing about his precise intentions, an evangelist acting as a spokesman, K.A. Paul, said he could "guarantee" Jones would not go ahead with the event.

Referring to "the individual down in Florida," Obama noted the pastor's Koran-burning plan had already caused anti-American riots in Afghanistan, where U.S. troops are in a grueling war against Muslim Taliban militants.

Thousands of people took to the streets across Afghanistan on Friday, some threatening to attack U.S. bases. One protester was shot dead and several were wounded outside a German-run NATO base in northeast Afghanistan. Demonstrations later spread to the capital, Kabul, and at least four other provinces.

OPPOSITION TO Center

Opponents of the New York center building plan say it is insensitive to the families of the victims of the 2001 events.

The New York imam involved in the project, Feisal Abdul Rauf, said on Friday he had no meeting planned with the Florida pastor.

Sharif el-Gamal, project developer for the center, denied it would be moved.

Obama said at the news conference that he recognized "the extraordinary sensitivities" surrounding the September 11 attacks.

But he said it should be possible to erect a mosque near the so-called Ground Zero site, or a building representing any other kind of religion.

"This country stands for the proposition that all men and women are created equal, that they have certain inalienable rights. One of those inalienable rights is to practice their religion freely," Obama said.

"We are not at war against Islam, we are at war against terrorist organizations that have distorted Islam and have falsely used the banner of Islam," he added.

Former heads of the 9/11 Commission that studied the 2001 attacks presented a 43-page report they called a wake-up call about the radicalization of Muslims in the United States and the changing strategy of al Qaeda and its allies.

"The threat that the U.S. is facing is different than it was nine years ago," said the report, released by the Washington-based Bipartisan Policy Center.

"The U.S. is arguably now little different from Europe in terms of having a domestic terrorist problem involving immigrant and indigenous Muslims as well as converts to Islam."

U.S. officials have warned that cases such as the threat to burn the Korean could lead to a recruiting bonanza for al Qaeda.

(Additional reporting by Washington Newsroom, Daniel Trotta in New York; Sayed Salahuddin in Kabul; Paul Carrel in Cologne; Writing by Pascal Fletcher; Writing by Eric Walsh, editing by Jonathan Thatcher)

    Religious Tension Marks Sept 11 Anniversary,11.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2010/09/11/world/international-us-usa-muslims.html

Sept. 11, 2010: The Continuing Human Damage

September 10, 2010
The New York Times

The 9/11 atrocity continues to scar tens of thousands of citizens who pitched in as cleanup volunteers and emergency responders in the toxin-laden clouds at ground zero, the Pentagon and rural Pennsylvania. Ordinary citizens, neighborhood residents and responders heedless of overtime worked side by side for weeks in New York City, many eventually developing grave illnesses that are disrupting lives and careers.

In July, Congress fumbled vital legislation to provide compensation for medical care and economic loss to exemplary citizens from the three sites. A second chance to enact it is expected as early as next week, and Congress must not waste it.

Election-year politics and an ill-advised House strategy requiring two-thirds approval got in the way of the July vote, which nevertheless registered bipartisan majority support. The second vote will wisely require a simple majority to approve the measure. Surely this time lawmakers will suspend narrow politicking and recognize their obligation to these 9/11 victims.

The legislation provides $3.2 billion in medical aid over the next eight years and $4.2 billion in economic compensation. It’s important that the latter will cap attorneys’ fees at 10 percent and bar victims who accept separate compensation through an earlier city lawsuit by cleanup workers.

The medical program of monitoring and treatment would be run through the Department of Health and Human Services. The cost would be adequately offset by closing some tax loopholes enjoyed by foreign-based companies.

An estimated 50,000 responders are currently being monitored in New York as the devastation of 9/11 continues to threaten the living. While the nation’s hope is that most will not be gravely stricken, its obligation is to see that help is firmly at hand.

    Sept. 11, 2010: The Continuing Human Damage, NYT, 10.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/11/opinion/11sat2.html

Among 9/11 Families, the Last Holdout on a Settlement Wants Its Day in Court

September 10, 2010
The New York Times
By BENJAMIN WEISER

In the nine years since Sept. 11, 2001, the legal claims for people who were injured or killed in the attacks have almost entirely been resolved. Thousands of victims and families entered a special compensation fund created by Congress and were paid more than $7 billion; a much smaller group chose to file lawsuits, which have been settled over time for about $500 million.

All, that is, but one.

The holdout is the family of Mark Bavis, a passenger on United Airlines Flight 175, the second plane to strike the World Trade Center. Ever since the family filed suit in 2002, it has spurned efforts to negotiate, despite settlement attempts and a court mediation session.

They recognize that they could have obtained a quicker resolution by settling; they say the case is not about money. They say they want to prove in a public courtroom what they and their lawyers believe was a case of gross negligence by United and other defendants that allowed the hijackers to board Flight 175 and the attacks to occur.

The victim’s brother, Michael, who was his identical twin, said in an interview that the family had never considered settling out of court. “Settlement has not been in our vocabulary,” he said.

The family’s lawyers said they filed papers on Friday proposing that a federal judge in Manhattan schedule a trial date.

Donald A. Migliori, a lawyer with Motley Rice, the firm that represents the Bavises and was involved in more than 50 other cases, said the firm’s investigation had focused on failures at airport security checkpoints, flawed cockpit doors, inadequate training and how the industry ignored confidential government warnings about terrorist threats.

“The security breaches that day,” he said, “were absolutely known to these defendants before 9/11, and should have been addressed before this could happen.”

United and other defendants, including Boeing and a firm that ran the checkpoint at Logan International Airport in Boston, where Flight 175 took off, all denied liability. At one point, United offered not to contest liability in the case and proposed a trial only on the issue of damages. But the family objected, and the judge rejected the airline’s motion.

This week, a United spokeswoman said, “This was a tragic event, and we are actively working to resolve this case.” Boeing declined to comment.

The family’s push for a trial has ignited a debate among legal experts about the value of litigation as a forum for disclosure.

Michael Bavis, 40, said the family believed that only through a trial could the defendants be held accountable. “The public should know,” he said. “We’ve got a responsibility to hold them to the fire.”

Other victims’ families praised the Bavises’ stance. Julie Sweeney Roth, who sued over the death of her husband, Brian D. Sweeney, 38, also on Flight 175, said she had wanted to pursue a trial but ultimately remarried and settled her suit a few years ago.

“I always hoped,” she said, “that there would be at least one — it only takes one family — to hold out and bring them to trial and get the answers that everyone deserves.”

Mark Bavis was 31 when he died. He grew up in the Roslindale section of Boston, the son of a city police officer. He played ice hockey with his brother, Michael, first in high school and later at Boston University. The brothers were strong defensive players. “Mark was a gritty and competitive leader,” recalled Michael, now an assistant coach at Boston University.

Mark Bavis eventually became an assistant coach at Brown and Harvard and was working as a scout for the Los Angeles Kings in the National Hockey League when he flew on Flight 175 to Los Angeles.

His brother, Michael, who said he flew 50,000 miles last year for his job, grew disenchanted with the aviation industry’s approach to security, which he said was based on what is “fastest and cheapest.”

He pointed to information turned up in the investigation by the Motley Rice law firm, as well as well-known episodes like the Nigerian man who was allowed to board a flight to Detroit last Christmas with explosives sewn into his underwear.

“The airlines,” he said of the events on 9/11, “had the most narrowly focused task, to make sure that illegal weapons cannot pass through that security checkpoint — box cutters, pepper spray, knives.” He also cited the failures in cockpit security.

“Really in our hearts, it’s been about how my brother was wronged,” Mr. Bavis said, citing what he called the aviation industry’s knowledge of the imminence of a terrorist threat and the vulnerability of the system.

“We feel like they made a conscious choice not to do anything about it,” he said. “And that’s not acceptable.”

Mr. Bavis said that while some might feel a settlement could bring closure, “For our family, receiving a settlement is not putting it behind us.”

Mr. Bavis’s mother, Mary, 79, said the family never wavered in its approach. “We discussed that really from the beginning — that we wanted answers,” she said.

Mrs. Bavis and her six surviving children, among them a schoolteacher, a retired Army officer and a housewife, would meet or hold conference calls to discuss the case. “They didn’t make off-the-cuff decisions,” said their lawyer, Mary F. Schiavo, a partner at Motley Rice. “Everything was very well thought out.”

At one point, the family met with the judge, Alvin K. Hellerstein of Federal District Court in Manhattan, as part of mediation efforts. The family was polite but firm about not wanting to settle, Ms. Schiavo said, and the talk turned to hockey (the judge was also a fan).

In addition to the wrongful death suits, the judge has been trying to resolve property damage suits and health claims by more than 10,000 rescue and recovery workers at ground zero.

“It’s rather extraordinary,” Judge Hellerstein told lawyers in court last January, noting that they were still involved in the litigation so long after the attacks.

“But we know from reading the newspapers that the dust hasn’t settled. Society still feels its wounds,” he said, and the lawsuits “continue to move along.” Some years ago, Judge Hellerstein told litigants that he believed lawsuits were “not good tools for investigation.” But last year he made clear that the plaintiffs had a choice. “I’ve run my course as a judge not twisting arms to settle,” he said. “If they want to have a trial, I’m going to give it to them.”

The issue now permeates the debate over the Bavis case.

Kenneth R. Feinberg, the special master who administered the government’s Victim Compensation Fund, said “the idea that a lawsuit will compel disclosure I think is unrealistic.”

Mr. Feinberg said that when he talked years ago with families who chose to sue rather than seek compensation through the fund, they offered two major reasons for doing so. Some said a suit would make the airlines safer; others said a suit was the only way to find out what really happened and who was to blame, he recalled.

He said he told the families that suits were unlikely to achieve either goal. “If you want to know what really happened,” he recalled saying, “go to the Senate and House intelligence committees; go to the special commission that President Bush set up. That’s where critical information is going to be analyzed and disclosed.”

Mark Dombroff, an aviation industry lawyer who was not involved in the Bavis case, concurred, saying that the litigation process was intended to resolve disputes, and in the case of wrongful death, “the only resolution the courts can give is money.”

But Michael Sandel, the Harvard political theorist and author of “Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?” said: “The primary purpose of civil courts is to settle claims and to provide damages and compensation. But courts are public institutions, and in this case it sounds as though the family cares more about having a voice than winning a settlement.

“That’s a perfectly understandable human impulse: to express a public grievance, in hopes of holding an industry accountable,” he said.

Alice Hoagland of Los Gatos, Calif., who received compensation through the victims’ fund, said she understood that impulse. Ms. Hoagland’s son, Mark Bingham, 31, was a passenger on United Flight 93 who fought back against the hijackers before that plane crashed in Shanksville, Pa. She called the Bavises “a brave group,” and said she would attend if there were a trial. “I wouldn’t miss it,” she said.

The Bavis family planned to gather Saturday at the 9/11 memorial in the Boston Public Garden and also to attend other events. This week, in discussing their lawsuit, the victim’s mother, Mary, said: “I don’t know if we expected it would take this long. If justice is done, and if we get some answers, it’ll all be worth waiting for.”

    Among 9/11 Families, the Last Holdout on a Settlement Wants Its Day in Court, NYT, 10.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/11/nyregion/11family.html

Muslims and Islam Were Part of Twin Towers’ Life

September 10, 2010
The New York Times
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN

Sometime in 1999, a construction electrician received a new work assignment from his union. The man, Sinclair Hejazi Abdus-Salaam, was told to report to 2 World Trade Center, the southern of the twin towers.

In the union locker room on the 51st floor, Mr. Abdus-Salaam went through a construction worker’s version of due diligence. In the case of an emergency in the building, he asked his foreman and crew, where was he supposed to reassemble? The answer was the corner of Broadway and Vesey.

Over the next few days, noticing some fellow Muslims on the job, Mr. Abdus-Salaam voiced an equally essential question: “So where do you pray at?” And so he learned about the Muslim prayer room on the 17th floor of the south tower.

He went there regularly in the months to come, first doing the ablution known as wudu in a washroom fitted for cleansing hands, face and feet, and then facing toward Mecca to intone the salat prayer.

On any given day, Mr. Abdus-Salaam’s companions in the prayer room might include financial analysts, carpenters, receptionists, secretaries and ironworkers. There were American natives, immigrants who had earned citizenship, visitors conducting international business — the whole Muslim spectrum of nationality and race.

Leaping down the stairs on Sept. 11, 2001, when he had been installing ceiling speakers for a reinsurance company on the 49th floor, Mr. Abdus-Salaam had a brief, panicked thought. He didn’t see any of the Muslims he recognized from the prayer room. Where were they? Had they managed to evacuate?

He staggered out to the gathering place at Broadway and Vesey. From that corner, he watched the south tower collapse, to be followed soon by the north one. Somewhere in the smoking, burning mountain of rubble lay whatever remained of the prayer room, and also of some of the Muslims who had used it.

Given the vitriolic opposition now to the proposal to build a Muslim community center two blocks from ground zero, one might say something else has been destroyed: the realization that Muslim people and the Muslim religion were part of the life of the World Trade Center.

Opponents of the Park51 project say the presence of a Muslim center dishonors the victims of the Islamic extremists who flew two jets into the towers. Yet not only were Muslims peacefully worshiping in the twin towers long before the attacks, but even after the 1993 bombing of one tower by a Muslim radical, Ramzi Yousef, their religious observance generated no opposition

“We weren’t aliens,” Mr. Abdus-Salaam, 60, said in a telephone interview from Florida, where he moved in retirement. “We had a foothold there. You’d walk into the elevator in the morning and say, ‘Salaam aleikum,’ to one construction worker and five more guys in suits would answer, ‘Aleikum salaam.’ ”

One of those men in suits could have been Zafar Sareshwala, a financial executive for the Parsoli Corporation, who went to the prayer room while on business trips from his London office. He was introduced to it, he recently recalled, by a Manhattan investment banker who happened to be Jewish.

“It was so freeing and so calm,” Mr. Sareshwala, 47, said in a phone conversation from Mumbai, where he is now based. “It had the feel of a real mosque. And the best part is that you are in the epicenter of capitalism — New York City, the World Trade Center — and you had this island of spiritualism. I don’t think you could have that combination anywhere in the world.”

How, when and by whom the prayer room was begun remains unclear. Interviews this week with historians and building executives of the trade center came up empty. Many of the Port Authority’s leasing records were destroyed in the towers’ collapse. The imams of several Manhattan mosques whose members sometimes went to the prayer room knew nothing of its origins.

Yet the room’s existence is etched in the memories of participants like Mr. Abdus-Salaam and Mr. Sareshwala. Prof. John L. Esposito of Georgetown University, an expert in Islamic studies, briefly mentions the prayer room in his recent book “The Future of Islam.”

Moreover, the prayer room was not the only example of Muslim religious practice in or near the trade center. About three dozen Muslim staff members of Windows on the World, the restaurant atop the north tower, used a stairwell between the 106th and 107th floors for their daily prayers.

Without enough time to walk to the closest mosque — Masjid Manhattan on Warren Street, about four blocks away — the waiters, chefs, banquet managers and others would lay a tablecloth atop the concrete landing in the stairwell and flatten cardboard boxes from food deliveries to serve as prayer mats.

During Ramadan, the Muslim employees brought their favorite foods from home, and at the end of the daylight fast shared their iftar meal in the restaurant’s employee cafeteria.

“Iftar was my best memory,” said Sekou Siby, 45, a chef originally from the Ivory Coast. “It was really special.”

Such memories have been overtaken, though, by others. Mr. Siby’s cousin and roommate, a chef named Abdoul-Karim Traoré, died at Windows on the World on Sept. 11, as did at least one other Muslim staff member, a banquet server named Shabir Ahmed from Bangladesh.

Fekkak Mamdouh, an immigrant from Morocco who was head waiter, attended a worship service just weeks after the attacks that honored the estimated 60 Muslims who died. Far from being viewed as objectionable, the service was conducted with formal support from city, state and federal authorities, who arranged for buses to transport imams and mourners to Warren Street.

There, within sight of the ruins, they chanted salat al-Ghaib, the funeral prayer when there is not an intact corpse.

“It is a shame, shame, shame,” Mr. Mamdouh, 49, said of the Park51 dispute. “Sometimes I wake up and think, this is not what I came to America for. I came here to build this country together. People are using this issue for their own agenda. It’s designed to keep the hate going.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: September 10, 2010


An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of the proposed Islamic center and mosque near ground zero. It is Park51, not Parc51. It also misstated the name of a chef at the Windows on the World restaurant who died on Sept. 11. He was Abdoul-Karim Traoré, not Abdul Karim. And the article misstated the order in which the World Trade Center towers fell. The south tower fell first, not the north tower.

    Muslims and Islam Were Part of Twin Towers’ Life, NYT, 10.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/11/nyregion/11religion.html

9/11/10: Reflection and Contention

September 10, 2010
The New York Times

To the Editor:

Nine years ago, on 9/11, none of us in New York City had a harsh look or word for one another. Our hearts were too heavy to waste time on pettiness. Our gigantic city felt strangely gentle as it burned and we mourned the death of loved ones.

We were stunned into kindness. We seemed suddenly to understand what was important in our lives.

The news media need to respect that and not overdo coverage of the trivial, like Terry Jones, on this 9/11.

Mary Dixon
Jersey City, Sept. 10, 2010

•

To the Editor:

Re “A Fringe Pastor, a Fiery Stunt and the Media Spotlight’s Glare” (front page, Sept. 10):

The concept of free speech has always worked in this country because the vast majority of Americans have known how to tolerate the ravings of various types of extremists and kooks without heeding their message of hate — and because the rest of the world has long understood that those voices of anger and prejudice were the aberration in a land where decency and mutual respect are the rule.

It seems to me that the news media bear a huge responsibility for maintaining the delicate balance between free speech and the many other freedoms our Constitution promises. If we allow those lone voices to dominate the national conversation for the sake of attracting readers or viewers to a juicy controversy, the true picture of American tolerance and decency will be distorted, and we will all be the losers.

We are taught as schoolchildren that one person’s freedoms end where another’s begin. It’s a pity not all of us can manage to carry that lesson into adulthood.

Louise T. Guinther
Forest Hills, Queens, Sept. 10, 2010

•

To the Editor:

Re “The Healers of 9/11” (column, Sept. 9):

In a national climate weathered by ill will, Nicholas D. Kristof’s sensitive portrayal of 9/11 widows reacting by reaching out to Afghan widows is a bracing breeze of goodness. That these women expressed compassion, not retaliation, of a practical economically empowering sort is as remarkable as its success.

This column should be tweaked into a “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus” for cynical adults, who deserve the chance to dwell on its message.

Bill Puka
Lexington, Mass., Sept. 10, 2010

•

To the Editor:

As I read Nicholas D. Kristof’s tribute to the efforts of Susan Retik, Patti Quigley and so many others who have transformed horror into hope for the last nine years, I contrasted their actions with those of Terry Jones and his followers who had designated Sept. 11, 2010, as International Burn a Koran Day.

As schools open throughout the metropolitan area, we teachers and school leaders have a marvelous opportunity to invite our students to examine the potential effects of these two responses to the same terrible historical moment.

Whose actions will enable our fractured world to envision a more peaceful future? Whose motives move beyond the spotlight of international media coverage toward a clearer understanding of the complexities of the world we all inhabit?

Peter Schmidt
Gladstone, N.J., Sept. 10, 2010

The writer is director of studies at Gill St. Bernard’s School.

•

To the Editor:

The campaign by a 9/11 widow, Susan Retik, to recruit members of a mosque in Boston to join her battle against poverty and illiteracy in Afghanistan is commendable and inspiring.

But her attempt to reach out to Muslims should not be used in an attempt to criticize or embarrass those who oppose the Islamic mosque/cultural center planned near ground zero. While the owners of the building at this site have the legal right to build the Islamic center there, anyone has a perfect right to oppose a Muslim center so close to the place where almost 3,000 lost their lives from the jihadists’ attack.

People who oppose the mosque/cultural center should not be “scolded” by others, including Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, for expressing their honest and legal opposition. “I’m compassionate and right, and you’re a biased Islamophobe” is not a fair and reasonable position to take on this issue.

Michael J. Gorman
Whitestone, Queens, Sept. 9, 2010

The writer is a retired New York Police Department lieutenant who lost friends and co-workers on 9/11.


•

To the Editor:

Re “Building on Faith” (Op-Ed, Sept. 8):

How cool that the downtown community center will be named Cordoba House, after the city in Spain where, as Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf writes, “Muslims, Christians and Jews co-existed in the Middle Ages during a period of great cultural enrichment created by Muslims.”

One can only hope that the vitriol surrounding this issue hasn’t ruined any chance, centuries down the road, of a similarly inspired New York House.

Jeremy D. Nathaniel
Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y., Sept. 9, 2010

•

To the Editor:

Re “9 Years After 9/11, a Nationwide Safety Communications Network Is Unrealized” (news article, Sept. 6):

We commend your article about the lack of interoperable communications devices for first responders, especially shocking as we near the ninth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. According to the 9/11 Commission, such a system could have saved the lives of many in the World Trade Center towers.

The situation must be remedied. That’s why we introduced the Next Generation Public Safety Device Act of 2010. The bill will create a $70 million competitive grant program to build within five years a new, affordable and interoperable class of communications devices for our police, firefighters and paramedics.

The first responders’ market is just too small to attract the attention of technology innovators. The free market needs a nudge. Our device bill does just that.

We owe our first responders equipment that not only helps them protect and serve, but can also save their lives as well.

Jane Harman
Mark Warner
Washington, Sept. 8, 2010

The writers are, respectively, a California Democrat in the House and a Virginia Democrat in the Senate.

•

To the Editor:

Re “Up From Zero” (news article, Sept. 5):

Lower Manhattan is a global model of a robust, round-the-clock, 21st-century business district of 300,000 workers, 55,000 residents and six million yearly visitors who live, work and play in one sustainable square mile with the region’s best transportation connections.

Lower Manhattan is alive not only after work but also on nights and weekends. The residential population has more than doubled since 2001. The number of hotels has tripled. Nearly 300 businesses have relocated downtown just since 2008. And while Wall Street remains one of the world’s premier financial services addresses, Lower Manhattan is now a hub for creative services.

As the World Trade Center starts to reach its full potential, we look forward to a future that is even more exciting.

Elizabeth H. Berger
Robert R. Douglass
New York, Sept. 6, 2010

The writers are, respectively, president and chairman, Alliance for Downtown New York.

    9/11/10: Reflection and Contention, NYT, 11.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/11/opinion/l11wtc.html

Sept. 11, 2010: The Right Way to Remember

September 10, 2010
The New York Times

Nine years after terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center, a memorial and a transportation hub are taking recognizable shape and skyscrapers are finally starting to rise from the ashes of ground zero.

That physical rebirth is cause for celebration on this anniversary. It is a far more fitting way to defy the hate-filled extremists who attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, and to honor their victims, than to wallow in the intolerance and fear that have mushroomed across the nation. They are fed by the kind of bigotry exhibited by the would-be book burner in Florida, and, sadly, nurtured by people in positions of real power, including prominent members of the Republican Party.

The most important sight at ground zero now is Michael Arad’s emerging memorial. The shells of two giant pools are 30 feet deep and are set almost exactly in the places where the towers once were.

The huge waterfalls around the sides, the inscribed names of victims and the plaza are promised by the 10th anniversary next year. But two 70-foot tridents that were once at the base of the twin towers were installed last week. The museum will be built around them by 2012. And the first 16 of 416 white swamp oaks were planted on the eight-acre surface.

Surrounding that memorial will be a ring of commercial towers — eventually to be filled with workers, commuters, shoppers, tourists, the full cacophony of New York City. The tallest skyscraper is now a third of the way up. The developer Larry Silverstein has one of his skyscrapers taking shape — this one by the Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki. The bases of two more are finally beyond the planning stage.

The first outlines of Santiago Calatrava’s elegant PATH station are visible. Giant white ribs and other structures that will support the birdlike hall are moving into place. The temporary PATH station shuttles 70,000 commuters a day through the construction site.

After years of political lassitude and financial squabbling, rebuilding at the site began in earnest two years ago. That was when Mayor Michael Bloomberg exerted his considerable muscle to make sure the memorial is finished by 2011. At about the same time, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey established more control of the site. The authority and the mayor turned out to be a good team.

That cooperation and the visible progress are such a contrast with the way some political figures have been trying to use the Sept. 11 attacks to generate antipathy toward all Muslims. For weeks, politicians — mostly but definitely not all on the right — have been fanning the public controversy over plans to build an Islamic community center two blocks away from ground zero.

Then, Terry Jones, a minor preacher in Florida, managed to create a major furor by scheduling a ritual burning of the Koran for Sept. 11. Alarmed by hyperbolic news coverage, the top general in Afghanistan, the secretary of defense, the State Department and the president warned that such a bonfire would endanger Americans and American troops around the world.

It was bad enough to see a fringe figure acting out for cable news and Web sites, but it was deeply disturbing to hear John Boehner, the Republican leader in the House, equate Mr. Jones’s antics with the Muslim center.

In both cases, he told ABC News, “Just because you have a right to do something in America does not mean it is the right thing to do.” The Constitution does, indeed, protect both, but they are not morally equivalent. In New York City, a group of Muslims is trying to build something. Mr. Jones and his supporters are trying to tear down more than two centuries of religious tolerance.

It is a good time to remember what President Obama said on Friday, echoing the words of President George W. Bush after the attacks: “We’re not at war with Islam. We’re at war with terrorist organizations.”

    Sept. 11, 2010: The Right Way to Remember, NYT, 10.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/11/opinion/11sat1.html

In Your Palm, Memories of Horror and Valor

September 10, 2010
The New York Times
By ARIEL KAMINER

New York is not meant for memorials. In a city where everything lurches relentlessly into the future, who has time to mourn the past?

The problem of how — or whether — to enshrine memory is especially clear at ground zero, where after almost a decade the official memorial is nowhere near completed and the feelings of many New Yorkers are nowhere near resolved.

But what to do with those unresolved feelings? Go to the World Trade Center site and take pictures? Watch the somber annual remembrance on TV? Just in time for the ninth anniversary, the design firm Local Projects, working under the aegis of the 9/11 museum-to-be, has come up with a much more satisfying option. And it comes, of all things, in the form of a free iPhone app.

The Explore 9/11 app, which has already been downloaded 100,000 times, is a guided tour around the perimeter of the World Trade Center site, narrated by the people who lived through it all.

Small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, the app is as different as could be from the grandiosity of most memorial projects. But that same reduced scale makes it feel much more personal, and therefore much more powerful. Instead of reading quotations inscribed in granite, you are listening as someone whispers them in your ear while you cradle the phone and strain to hear more.

(Actually, straining to hear is a serious problem: imagine having a phone conversation at the edge of the biggest construction site in the city and you’ll get a sense of the challenge. Ear buds or good headphones might help in this regard, and would in any case let you actually look at the accompanying photographs while listening.)

After a brief introduction, the tour begins at the corner of Vesey Street and West Broadway, where someone named Bruno Dellinger recalls the moment of impact. Having heard many such narratives, and perhaps having 9/11 stories of your own to tell, you might think these accounts had lost their power. But Mr. Dellinger’s — delivered in plain language, without any rhetorical flourishes — is pure shock and awe.

Next, Mary Hagen, who walked down 81 flights of stairs while eight months pregnant, talks about the police officer who escorted her out of harm’s way. “He just drove down by City Hall, and that’s where he let us out,” she says. With a tone of just-dawning wonder, as though comprehending his sacrifice for the very first time, she adds, “And then I think he went back.”

I listened while standing among a bunch of construction workers taking a coffee break. Behind them, members of New York’s Congressional delegation were demanding health care for 9/11 first responders. And one block beyond that stood the site of the proposed Islamic cultural center, the unnoticed eye of a national storm.

At the pedestrian overpass on the corner of Vesey and West Streets, Lt. Joseph Torrillo of the Fire Department talks about realizing that the towers were about to collapse and ordering all the emergency vehicles to evacuate. Seconds later, his prediction came sickeningly true. “I figured,” he recalls, “if I made it underneath that bridge that goes over West Street, I said, well, maybe they’ll find my body.” They did find it — somehow alive despite having been hurled against a wall and battered by steel and concrete.

Not all the testimonials are quite that vivid. Over all, however, the presentation is admirably accessible and straightforward, easy to navigate and easy to adjust to your own pace. If it’s suddenly too much, step into a newsstand and read some magazines, or disappear into the eerily pleasant Winter Garden of the World Financial Center.

When you’re ready to go again, just hit Play. (There are other 9/11-related apps — a four-minute tour of historic Lower Manhattan, a panoramic view from atop the World Trade Center and a slide show made by a designer whose other apps include “How to Fart” — but there is nothing of comparable depth.) Explore 9/11 also offers an interactive timeline and a map of photographs submitted by ordinary citizens and displayed, thanks to the GPS reading on your cellphone, according to their proximity to the spot where you’re standing.

These features are less successful than the tour. For one thing, they rely on the never-all-that-satisfying Google Maps interface, with its dense cluster of bulbous pins. For another, the information used to classify the photographs is only as accurate as the people who took them. Finally, of course, the whole thing happens on a cellphone. Standing on Vesey Street, I was all but unable to get the photos to load; they crept in at a snail’s pace until I gave up in frustration.

When it works, though, the effect is beautiful and haunting. Load a photo taken nine years ago on the exact spot where you are standing. Position yourself or your phone so you have the exact same perspective as the person who took the photograph did. Now, shift your eyes from despair to regrowth and back again, and think about how much can change in a decade, or a day.

It’s this effect — layering past over present, present over past — that makes Explore 9/11 such a good fit with the city it memorializes. In New York, nothing stays still but nothing entirely disappears. Anyone who’s lived here long enough to regard someone else as a newcomer knows the apartment that was torn down to make room for that ridiculous hotel, or the electronics repair shop that preceded the organic-babywear boutique. Allowing the city of grieving memory to coexist with the city of current growth, and placing them both within the palm of your hand, is a powerful way to focus a New Yorker’s attention — for a moment, until it’s gone again, lost in a rush of delirious amnesia.

    In Your Palm, Memories of Horror and Valor, NYT, 10.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/nyregion/12critic.html

Still on Duty at Ground Zero, the Indomitable Nurse Reggi

September 10, 2010
The New York Times
By MICHAEL WILSON

ALL attempts to keep Mary Regina Shane from working exactly where she wants to have failed, thank you very little.

Terrorists did not manage to kill Ms. Shane in 1993, and they failed to kill her again in 2001. When she wanted to go back, her mother tried an appeal to common sense: Regina, have you lost your mind? That did not work, either. And so Ms. Shane, a cheerful daughter of Staten Island better known as Nurse Reggi, reports to work every morning at what can honestly be called her favorite place in town: the World Trade Center site.

“I have a guardian angel, for sure,” she said in the small trailer marked “First Aid” below what will someday be a 1,776-foot-tall tower.

Having twice survived attacks on the World Trade Center, Ms. Shane returns to the site every morning as part of a medical team to mend the cuts and bruises and burns of construction workers rebuilding it.

“I love this place; I really do,” said Ms. Shane, 63, a plug of an Irish-Italian mother of two and grandmother of four, who was wearing a hard hat as she stood in the middle of the site recently.

In 1993, Ms. Shane was working as a nurse in the employee health unit of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, on the 63rd floor of the South Tower. “I was very lucky,” she said, as if talking about landing such a job instead of surviving it on Feb. 26 that year. She was in the lobby when the bomb went off. It was lunchtime. A picture of her pushing a woman out of the building on a coffee cart ran later in USA Today.

“I felt like a rescuer,” she said. “I didn’t feel like my life was in danger. We never, ever thought the buildings could ever come down.”

Ms. Shane changed jobs after that, working in New Jersey and eventually landing at Verizon in its human resources department, employed in the workers’ compensation office. When Verizon moved her to its office on the ninth floor of the South Tower in the late 1990s, she was happy to be back.

On Sept. 11, 2001, Ms. Shane heard an explosion and saw flaming debris streaming down from the North Tower. “The floor shook; the lights flickered,” she said. “Someone ran in and said this was a commercial airliner that hit the building.”

“We ran out,” she recalled. “We were very lucky.”

In the lobby, someone told her group that it would be safe inside. Ignoring that, she and a co-worker ran toward Century 21. She did not look back when the buildings fell.

“I had terrible guilt about not trying to stay and rescue more people, but I honestly was in fear of my life,” she said. “Honest to God, I was going to jump in the river if one more thing blew up.”

Her mother, in Midland Beach, on the eastern edge of Staten Island, feared the worst until Ms. Shane finally called after landing safely home in Stuyvesant Town, where she still lives.

Her mother, Santa Maria Shane, born in 1927, was the Italian half of the family and a woman of many opinions. Among other things, she frowned at the nickname Nurse Reggi.

“My mother would never call me that — ‘I didn’t name you that,’ ” Ms. Shane said. “She was a corker.”

All joking ceased after the attacks. “September 12th, I said, ‘I’m coming back,’ ” Ms. Shane recalled. “My mother said, ‘I’m not speaking to you anymore.’ ”

Afraid she was serious, the daughter stood down, reporting to work at a Verizon office on 38th Street to outfit workers with air masks before they repaired telephone lines near ground zero. No more talk of a move downtown. “It wasn’t even discussed,” she said.

Ms. Shane’s father died in 2005. Her mother, who had scleroderma for years, died in 2006, at age 79.

A week or two later, Ms. Shane was reading a newspaper and came across a small classified ad at the bottom of a page. “This big,” she said, holding a pinky sideways. The ad was seeking someone in occupational health to work in Lower Manhattan. She called, and a man with Concentra Health Solutions asked, “Have you heard of the Freedom Tower?”

“It was like kismet,” she said. “I’m sure it was my mom saying, ‘O.K., have it your way. You can go back to work there.’ ”

The clinic, staffed by three full-time and two part-time emergency medical technicians, two consulting physicians as well as Ms. Shane, is open around the clock six days a week and most of Sunday. In between treating injuries, she provides safety programs for the construction workers.

Ms. Shane has been back on the site for three years, and on any given day she must be the happiest-looking person anywhere in the area, which is filled with toiling workers and populated, of late, by angry opponents of a planned Islamic cultural center. Ms. Shane’s take: Other people’s religion is not her business.

The other day, she gave a short tour, color-commentating to the visitor about a faraway worker’s safety precautions — “Tie off, brother. Let me see you tie off ... good job” — and exchanging greetings with guys who have visited her trailer.

She speaks with uncommon expertise about the stages of the various projects, including the subway lines below, the memorial plaza and the lifts that take workers to the top of the growing tower. “People are so friendly, and they tell me things,” she said.

Ms. Shane treats about five workers on a busy day, for welding burns or turned ankles where the footing is unsure, or dust and dirt in the eye. She also takes every opportunity to check blood pressure and give little lectures about tetanus shots and how to prevent infection and eat better. “People liken it to working in a school,” she said, “but having big kids.”

Ms. Shane takes her meals from a food truck like everybody else, and her biggest complaint seems to be the discomfort of having put down her cigarettes almost three weeks ago. She is proud of the workers and the way they look out for one another.

“Enough people have died here,” she said.

    Still on Duty at Ground Zero, the Indomitable Nurse Reggi, NYT, 10.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/nyregion/12NURSE.html

Visiting Ground Zero, Asking Allah for Comfort

September 9, 2010
The New York Times
By SAM DOLNICK

Nearly every Sept. 11 since Sept. 11, Hadidjatou Karamoko Traoré has made sure that her three children were dressed in their best clothes, and taken them from their tidy brick home in the Bronx to the pit where the World Trade Center stood, and where her husband, their father, worked and died.

After the attacks, all that was found of Abdoul-Karim Traoré, a cook at the Windows on the World restaurant, were his leather wallet, his identification cards and a few coins.

“I like to go down there and pray and see the place and remember,” said Mrs. Traoré, a native of Ivory Coast who came to the United States in 1997. “When I go there, I feel closer to him. And him to me. I pray for him, too.”

When she prays, she calls God Allah. Mrs. Traoré, 40, says praying in the pit feels entirely natural, even if some of those standing with her — widows and widowers, parents and children — blame her religion for the destruction of that day.

“That’s not fair,” she said. “It’s not because of Allah that these buildings fell.”

Mrs. Traoré is the widow of one of roughly 60 Muslim victims — cooks, businessmen, emergency responders and airline passengers — believed to have died on 9/11. It is a group that has been little examined, and no precisely reliable count of their ranks exists. But their stories, when told, have frequently been offered as counterweights in the latest public argument over terrorism and Islam.

Mrs. Traoré works the overnight shift as a nurse’s assistant at Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx. She loves to cook: peanut sauce and doughy fritters are her specialties. She has a wide smile and a raspy laugh. Her life, a juggling act of homework, bills and prayer, is one Sept. 11 story — the kind of personal account Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and others have sought to highlight amid the debate over a planned Islamic community center near the pit where Ms. Traoré prays every September.

Over the past nine years, Mrs. Traoré has lived a kind of dual life. She is a 9/11 widow struggling to raise her children, cope with her loss and tame her anger. The trials of her days would ring familiar to single mothers and fathers from Staten Island to Washington. But she is also a Muslim woman, both devoted to her faith and conscious of the discomfort it can evoke in her adopted homeland.

She wears Western clothes when she shops at Costco. But she wears a robe and head scarf when she visits her mosque in the Bronx. When she is in her religious attire, she can sense a shift as people on the street appear to regard her with suspicion.

“When people run away from me, I feel sad,” she said. “But I understand why they’re doing that. What happened was terrible.”

Her two sons, Souleymane, 11, and Siaka, 9, attend a Roman Catholic school near their home. During prayer, they sit in the back of the classroom with the few other non-Catholic students. They feel comfortable there, but they, too, have hidden their religion from schoolyard bullies. Mrs. Traoré received government money from the Sept. 11 compensation fund, and she said she was both unsurprised by and grateful for the American generosity.

Mrs. Traoré is also frustrated and troubled, she said, that so many Americans find it impossible to separate the pious of her faith from its fanatics. But it has not buckled her beliefs.

“I’m proud to be Muslim,” she said. “I’m going to be Muslim until God takes my spirit.”

Africa and New York

Mrs. Traoré met her husband in 1990 in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. He was a handsome mechanic, she worked at a health clinic, and they quickly fell in love. They married in 1992, and she was pregnant the next year. Before their daughter was born, however, Mr. Traoré moved to New York in search of a better life. Mrs. Traoré followed four years later.

They lived, at first, in the Parkchester section of the Bronx. She braided women’s hair and spent most of her time with other West Africans. She felt comfortable in the city and never felt the need to hide her religion.

Mr. Traoré first worked delivering groceries; later he got a job as a cook at the restaurant inside the American Museum of Natural History, and then came the opportunity at Windows on the World. He worked the 7 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. shift, which allowed him to make extra money delivering USA Today in the early morning.

Mr. Traoré never met his daughter, Djenebou, a quiet 17-year-old who now looks after her brothers as something of a surrogate parent. Unable to move to the United States with her mother, she grew up with relatives in Ivory Coast, and came to New York in 2002 after receiving “humanitarian parole.”

Their home, a jumble of New York and Africa, is filled with the laugh track of Disney Channel sitcoms and the smell of peanut stew. A pile of shoes lies by the door — leopard-print Timberland boots, shiny high-top sneakers, slippers, sandals and high heels.

Mrs. Traoré keeps hand-drawn Mother’s Day cards taped to her bedroom door and posters of Mecca taped to the living room walls. Those walls could use a fresh coat of paint, and the ragged carpet has seen better days. But the family is busy, and the house is well loved, a refuge from the rough streets of Hunts Point outside.

Mrs. Traoré is strict — she keeps her children indoors or in their small backyard — and she tries to limit television to an hour a day. Djenebou spends much of her time checking Facebook and juggling instant messages, but her sessions are routinely interrupted by the call to prayer, which Mrs. Traoré has set to issue from the family laptop’s speakers.

Mrs. Traoré wants her children to pray, but that can take some nudging. They pray together in her bedroom, and they have long, quiet conversations about their religion. And on Fridays, they visit a ground-floor mosque nearby on Southern Boulevard that sits opposite a graffiti-covered junkyard, down the street from El Mundo Department Store.

“I tell them we have to believe in God, you have to pray,” she said.

While she finishes her overnight shift at the hospital, the children get themselves up and prepare their bowls of cereal. She calls when she is five minutes away so they can jump in the car and race to school. “We’re always late,” she said. “Always, always.”

She sleeps until 3 p.m., and then picks them up from after-school programs, prepares dinner, reviews homework and checks backpacks before leaving for another night shift.

“I’m the father and mother now,” she said.

‘He Went to Work’

Mrs. Traoré can barely discuss Sept. 11, 2001, without tears pooling in her eyes. “He went to work,” she said. “That’s it.”

She remembers her husband praying and getting dressed for his first job of the day, delivering newspapers, but it was too early for them to speak. She woke up at 8 a.m. for what was to be her second day of formal English classes. Though she had spent four years in New York, she knew only rudimentary phrases.

As she was hurrying to leave, her brother-in-law called to ask if Abdoul had gone to the World Trade Center. Yes, of course. Like always. He told her to turn on the television.

She saw the towers burning, but she could not understand what the newscasters were saying. She began crying, dialing her husband’s cellphone “again, again, again.” Relatives rushed to the apartment to translate the TV for her.

For two weeks, Mrs. Traoré barely slept. She called her husband’s phone repeatedly and visited a string of hospitals in search of him. She did not tell her children what she most feared.

“I just said he went away,” she remembered. “I said he’s coming, he’s coming.”

Souleymane, then 3, struggled. He insisted, for whatever reason, on sleeping on sheets that were perfectly white. A social worker advised her to tell the children what happened, and nine years later they still have not made peace with their father’s death.

“I want to ask why they did that,” Souleymane said on a recent afternoon. “If they were mad at somebody, they could have sorted it out instead of starting a war.”

Mr. Traoré’s remains were never found, but his wallet was recovered intact, as if he had only forgotten it on the nightside table. For years, Souleymane kept it as a totem.

Soon after the attacks, the family moved from Parkchester to a three-story home in Hunts Point that Mr. Traoré had found before he died. His brother, a taxi driver, lives on the top floor. A family friend from Ivory Coast lives on the second floor. Mrs. Traoré has support. She is not one to live in the past, even if her busy life allowed for more reflection.

“Life has never been normal, but it’s better,” she said. “I still miss him. But it’s not horrible like before.”

‘Everything Has Changed’

If the attacks forever upended her family, they also altered her understanding of America, and her place in this country.

“After 9/11, everything has changed,” she said. “At the beginning after 9/11, they were saying terrorists are all Islamic people. But terrorists and the religious people are different. God doesn’t say kill people.”

At home, the river of mail and bills never stops, a deluge her husband managed so smoothly. She still struggles with English. Perhaps the one part of her world that has remained fixed is her faith.

“My children are Muslim and my parents are Muslim,” she said. “I read the Koran and I am proud.”

Islam, indeed, acts as the ballast of her life. “It puts me in the right direction, and it protects me from doing bad things,” she said.

She does not blame God for her husband’s death. “That was my husband’s destiny,” she said.

If they had stayed in Ivory Coast, she reasons, perhaps he would have fallen fatally ill. “I’m praying to God to make me strong to protect them and raise them,” she said of her children. “I believe God is helping me because my children here are growing and they’re healthy and I’m doing my work.”

“I move closer to prayer, closer to God, and I thank him,” she said. “I keep praying to God to make me strong.”

On Friday, she will have a birthday party for Siaka. He has asked for ice cream cake. On Saturday, Sept. 11, the family will return to ground zero. And she will pray to Allah.

    Visiting Ground Zero, Asking Allah for Comfort, NYT, 9.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/10/nyregion/10muslim.html

Harvest of Anger

September 9, 2010
The New York Times
By ROGER COHEN

LONDON — A cover of The Economist right after 9/11 declared: “The Day the World Changed.” It has, and not just at airports where several billion shoes have been removed. Nine years later a harvest of anger is in.

Burning books is a lousy idea. Heinrich Heine, the German poet, foresaw the worst early in the 19th century: “Where they burn books, in the end they will also burn people.” Less than a decade separated the Nazi book burning of 1933 from the crematoria of the Final Solution.

Terry Jones, the pastor of a small church in Florida, did well to heed history’s warnings — as well as the warnings of America’s top military commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David Petraeus — and cancel his planned Koran burning to mark the ninth anniversary Saturday of Al Qaeda’s attack.

Images of Islam’s Holy Book in flames in northwest Gainesville would have enraged Muslims and become a powerful recruitment tool for the very jihadists who attempt to sanctify indiscriminate violence through selective references to the Koran.

Why, almost a decade from Mohammad Atta, with his parting call to “read the Holy Koran” and “remember all of the things God has promised for the martyrs,” has there been scant healing? Why is America now bitterly divided over plans to build a mosque and Islamic center in the immediate vicinity of ground zero, and Europeans almost equally split over the growing Muslim presence in their societies?

This is a sullen time. Only a spark, it seems, separates resentment from uprising.

Since returning to Europe recently, I’ve been struck by the venom in the air: a German Bundesbank board member lamenting the Muslim dilution of his nation in a best-selling book called “Germany Does Away with Itself;” the growing political clout of the Dutch rightist Geert Wilders who is expected in Manhattan Saturday to address an anti-mosque rally; a political climate that sees Turkey’s entry into the European Union receding, a Swiss ban on minarets and French and Belgian acrimony over the veil.

All this is happening as the American right seizes on the lower-Manhattan mosque plan to galvanize anti-Islamic sentiment — lurking despite the better social integration of U.S. Muslims — and cast the Democrats as soft on Shariah.

The Sept. 11 attacks, seen now with a little perspective, shattered America’s self-image. A continent-sized sanctuary, flanked by the shining waters of two oceans, was no longer. A hideous neologism, the “homeland,” was coined to describe a country that now needed vigilant protection from within and without. Two wars, one longer than any in the nation’s history, deepened the trauma.

While one America fought, another shopped until the debt-driven spree ended in mayhem; and, to their horror, Americans discovered they could no longer cushion their declining incomes by borrowing against the once rising — now crashing — assets of their homes. Their last coping mechanism had collapsed.

What was left, and now feeds national anger, was a hard quest to keep house, habits and hope intact while the now bailed-out fat cats who’d invented securitized mortgages sloped off into the sunset, and veterans, scarred from faraway wars, limped back to the “homeland,” once just home. Inequality sharpened. American promise, for many, soured.

None of this fosters forgiveness. Rather, it feeds a quest for scapegoats — Wall Street or Wahhabis.

Europe, in Madrid and London, has also been attacked by jihadists, but its unease goes deeper — to chronic unemployment and aging and resentments spurred by the access of immigrants to elaborate, now cash-strapped social welfare programs. The self-image of a Christian continent persists, drawing lines between insider and outsider.

Against these backdrops, Islam is easily manipulated by those who would cast it as enemy. Its very effervescence — that of the youngest of the great monotheistic religions — and its conservative values, especially on women’s rights, are fodder. So are its political expression as an ordering framework for society and the contentious concept of jihad.

We should tread carefully. I don’t doubt the sincerity of Feisal Abdul Rauf, the man behind a mosque project expressing what he calls the “common impulse of our great faith traditions.”

But nor do I see the project as a test of American religious freedoms. They are abundantly established, not least by the nondenominational chapel — often used as a mosque — at the Pentagon. Nor, above all, do I doubt the pain of many families of the dead who recall Atta’s words and are troubled by a major Islamic center so close to the hallowed ground and hallowed air into which their beloved were vaporized.

I went to Auschwitz 12 years ago to cover the story of a burgeoning field of crosses outside the death camp put there by Catholic protesters. Their tone was ugly but it was hard to argue with them: Close to 100,000 non-Jewish Poles had died in the camp, a number dwarfed by the Jewish dead, but not insignificant.

Still, the crosses were a bad idea. They were offensive to Jewish memory. All but one was eventually removed.

The mosque project near ground zero upholds a great American principle, but it’s not a sensible idea. Good sense is needed when a harvest of anger is in.


This column has been updated to reflect the news.

    Harvest of Anger, NYT, 9.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/10/opinion/10iht-edcohen.html

The Healers of 9/11

September 8, 2010
The New York Times
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

This weekend, a Jewish woman who lost her husband in the 9/11 attacks is planning to speak at a mosque in Boston. She will be trying to recruit members of the mosque to join her battle against poverty and illiteracy in Afghanistan.

The woman, Susan Retik, has pursued perhaps the most unexpected and inspiring American response to the 9/11 attacks. This anniversary of Sept. 11 feels a little ugly to me, with some planning to remember the day with hatred and a Koran-burning — and that makes her work all the more exhilarating.

In the shattering aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, Ms. Retik bonded with another woman, Patti Quigley, whose husband had also died in the attack. They lived near each other, and both were pregnant with babies who would never see their fathers.

Devastated themselves, they realized that there were more than half a million widows in Afghanistan — and then, with war, there would be even more. Ms. Retik and Ms. Quigley also saw that Afghan widows could be a stabilizing force in that country.

So at a time when the American government reacted to the horror of 9/11 mostly with missiles and bombs, detentions and waterboardings, Ms. Retik and Ms. Quigley turned to education and poverty-alleviation projects — in the very country that had incubated a plot that had pulverized their lives.

The organization they started, Beyond the 11th, has now assisted more than 1,000 Afghan widows in starting tiny businesses. It’s an effort both to help some of the world’s neediest people and to fight back at the distrust, hatred and unemployment that sustain the Taliban.

“More jobs mean less violence,” Ms. Retik noted. “It would be naïve to think that we can change the country, but change has to start somewhere. If we can provide a skill for a woman so that she can provide for her family going forward, then that’s one person or five people who will have a roof over their head, food in their bellies and a chance for education.”

In times of fear and darkness, we tend to suppress the better angels of our nature. Instead, these women unleashed theirs.

Paul Barker, who for many years ran CARE’s operations in Afghanistan, believes America would have accomplished more there if our government had shared the two women’s passion for education and development. “I can only wonder at what a different world it could be today if in those fateful months after 9/11 our nation’s leadership had been guided more by a people-to-people vision of building both metaphorical and physical bridges,” Mr. Barker said.

A terrific documentary, “Beyond Belief,” follows Ms. Retik and Ms. Quigley as they raise funds for Afghan widows and finally travel to Afghanistan to visit the women they had been helping. Ms. Quigley has since stepped down from Beyond the 11th because she felt in danger of becoming a perpetual 9/11 poster widow, but she still is working on a series of Afghan initiatives. Ms. Retik, who has since remarried, remains focused on the charity.

Beyond the 11th began by buying small chicken flocks for widows so that they could sell eggs. Another major project was to build a women’s center in the city of Bamian, where the women weave carpets for export. The center, overseen by an aid group called Arzu, also offers literacy classes and operates a bakery as a business.

Another initiative has been to train Afghan women, through a group called Business Council for Peace, to run a soccer ball manufacturing company. The bosses have been coached in quality control, inventory management and other skills, and they have recruited unemployed widows to stitch the balls — which are beginning to be exported under the brand Dosti.

Ms. Retik’s next step will be to sponsor a microfinance program through CARE. There are also plans to train attendants to help reduce deaths in childbirth.

Will all of this turn Afghanistan into a peaceful country? Of course not. Education and employment are not panaceas. But the record suggests that schools and economic initiatives do tend over time to chip away at fundamentalism — and they’re also cheap.

All the work that Beyond the 11th has done in Afghanistan over nine years has cost less than keeping a single American soldier in Afghanistan for eight months.

I admire Ms. Retik’s work partly because she offers an antidote to the pusillanimous anti-Islamic hysteria that clouds this anniversary of 9/11. Ms. Retik offers an alternative vision by reaching out to a mosque and working with Muslims so that in the future there will be fewer widows either here or there.

Her work is an invigorating struggle to unite all faiths against those common enemies of humanity, ignorance and poverty — reflecting the moral and mental toughness that truly can chip away at terrorism.


•

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    The Healers of 9/11, NYT, 8.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/09/opinion/09kristof.html

Torture Is a Crime, Not a Secret

September 8, 2010
The New York Times

Five men who say the Bush administration sent them to other countries to be tortured had a chance to be the first ones to have torture claims heard in court. But because the Obama administration decided to adopt the Bush administration’s claim that hearing the case would divulge state secrets, the men’s lawsuit was tossed out on Wednesday by the full United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The decision diminishes any hope that this odious practice will finally receive the legal label it deserves: a violation of international law.

The lawsuit was brought in 2007 against a Boeing subsidiary, Jeppesen Dataplan, that the plaintiffs said had arranged the rendition flights that took them to Morocco, Egypt and Afghanistan to be tortured. One of the men, Binyam Mohamed, had his bones broken in Morocco, where security agents also cut his skin with a scalpel and poured a stinging liquid into his wounds.

But the merits of the case were never considered because the Bush administration argued that even discussing the matter in court would violate the state secrets privilege. Barack Obama told voters in 2008 that he opposed the government cult of secrecy, but once he became president, his Justice Department also argued that the case should be dismissed on secrecy grounds.

The Ninth Circuit was sharply divided, voting 6 to 5 to dismiss the case and overturn a decision to let it proceed that was made by a panel of three circuit judges last year. The majority said it reached its decision reluctantly and was not trying to send a signal that secrecy could be used regularly to dismiss lawsuits. But even though it is public knowledge that Jeppesen arranged the torture flights, the majority said any effort by the company to defend itself would pose “an unacceptable risk of disclosure of state secrets.”

That notion was demolished by the five-judge minority that dissented from the ruling, pointing out that the plaintiffs were never even given a chance to make their case in court using nonsecret evidence, including a sworn statement by a former Jeppesen employee about the company’s role in what he called “the torture flights.” The case should have been sent back to the district court to examine which evidence was truly secret; now it will have to be appealed to a Supreme Court that is unlikely to be sympathetic to the plaintiffs.

The state secrets doctrine is so blinding and powerful that it should be invoked only when the most grave national security matters are at stake — nuclear weapons details, for example, or the identity of covert agents. It should not be used to defend against allegations that if true, as the dissenting judges wrote, would be “gross violations of the norms of international law.”

All too often in the past, the judges pointed out, secrecy privileges have been used to avoid embarrassing the government, not to protect real secrets. In this case, the embarrassment and the shame to America’s reputation are already too well known.

    Torture Is a Crime, Not a Secret, NYT, 8.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/09/opinion/09thurs2.html

9 Years After 9/11, Public Safety Radio Not Ready

September 6, 2010
The New York Times
By EDWARD WYATT

WASHINGTON — The inability of most firefighters and police officers to talk to each other on their radios on Sept. 11, 2001, at the World Trade Center — one of the most vexing problems on that day nine years ago — still has not been completely resolved.

The problem, highlighted in the 9/11 Commission Report, was seen again in 2005 after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Public safety officers from different jurisdictions arrived at the scene of those disasters only to find that, unable to communicate with each other by radio, they had to resort to running handwritten notes between command centers.

Despite $7 billion in federal grants and other spending over the last seven years to improve the ability of public safety departments to talk to one another, most experts in such communications say that it will be years, if ever, before a single nationwide public safety radio system becomes a reality.

In the meantime, public safety and homeland security officials have patched together voice networks in some regions, including New York, that link commanders at various agencies. But the focus in Washington has turned to the development of the next generation of emergency communications, wireless broadband, which seeks to succeed where radio has failed.

Many of the issues that helped shape the current dysfunctional public safety radio networks threaten the creation of a uniform standard for wireless broadband communications.

“For a brief moment in time, a solution is readily within reach,” James A. Barnett Jr., chief of the Federal Communications Commission’s public safety and homeland security bureau, told a Congressional hearing this summer. “Unless we embark on a comprehensive plan now, including public funding, America will not be able to afford a nationwide, interoperable public safety network.”

Public safety groups, with the backing of some members of Congress, are arguing that they need to be given control of a larger chunk of broadband spectrum — the airwaves on which wireless devices communicate with each other — to ensure that they have adequate network capacity during emergencies.

Officials from the F.C.C. and other legislators disagree, saying that the best way to pay for and build a robust, affordable communications system is to auction some of the airwaves to commercial companies that can build a network and make it available to public safety agencies during an emergency.

That disagreement, and the associated Congressional inquiries and lobbying, have stalled development just as wireless phone companies are beginning to construct and deploy their fourth-generation, or 4G, networks.

Building public safety networks at the same time as the commercial wireless networks, and sharing towers and fiber optic cables would save $9 billion in construction costs and billions more over the lifetime of the network, the F.C.C. says.

Some public safety systems are already under way. Last month, the Commerce Department awarded $220 million to five regional efforts to build some of the first wireless broadband public safety systems. Among the awards was $50 million to Motorola to build a network in the San Francisco Bay area that would allow public safety officials from San Francisco, Oakland and surrounding counties to talk, transfer files and share video.

But those initial broadband systems are being built before the various parties have settled on the appropriate standards for equipment and networks — meaning that there is no guarantee that other jurisdictions that build their systems at some point in the future will be working on the same wavelength.

Because of the specialized nature of much of the equipment, the nation’s 50,000 public safety agencies pay $2,500 to $5,000 a unit for the current generation of rugged, hand-held radios that allow different departments to talk to each other. Only mass production of uniform broadband equipment is likely to bring down the costs, officials say.

And while the Obama administration, Congress, the F.C.C. and public safety groups are seeking agreements on standards, turf battles and political posturing have crept into the debate.

“The history of public safety is one where the vendors have driven the requirements,” Deputy Chief Charles F. Dowd, who oversees the New York Police Department’s communications division, said in an interview. “We don’t want that situation anymore. We want public safety to do the decision making. And since we’re starting with a clean slate, we can develop rules that everybody has to play by.”

The Obama administration has been conducting meetings of a task force that includes representatives of the Homeland Security Department, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, public safety agencies and telecommunications companies. At the end of September, the administration is to convene a public forum to share ideas.

Administration officials acknowledge it will take years to build a nationwide public safety system. “We’re talking about an endeavor that will take 10 or so years to get completed,” said one official. “We’re starting with a new generation of technology, and that gives us a much better chance to succeed than we had with the legacy systems.”

Complicating the debate is the demand by public safety officials that they control their own networks. At issue is a section of the airwaves created when television stations converted from analog to digital signals, freeing up additional space for other applications. A 10 megahertz band was set aside for public safety to build a wireless broadband network, as part of a 24 megahertz allocation. Congress also instructed the F.C.C. to auction off an additional 10 megahertz band that would include a network built to public safety specifications.

That auction, in 2008, failed to attract the minimum bid. The F.C.C. has proposed another auction with less onerous specifications, but it would still produce a commercial system on which public safety would have priority in case of an emergency.

Public safety officials — associations of police departments, fire chiefs, and other law enforcement and rescue agencies — oppose that plan, saying they need all 34 megahertz of the spectrum at issue to build a wireless broadband system that is theirs alone.

F.C.C. officials liken that scenario to building a separate highway for the use of police cars and firetrucks, rather than having the public pull over to the side of the road when a firetruck or ambulance needs to pass.

Police and fire officials are difficult constituents to oppose when they combine forces on Capitol Hill, and with the approach of the midterm elections, public safety trade groups have gained considerable support in Congress for their effort to secure the extra spectrum. Competing bipartisan bills have been introduced and will receive hearings starting this month.

Some Homeland Security officials fear that the debate over broadband is obscuring strides that have been made in linking voice systems, which will continue long into the future to be the dominant method of communication for public safety departments during emergencies. Meanwhile, the window to plan a next-generation broadband system is starting to close.

“There is nothing that is inevitable about having a nationwide, interoperable system,” Mr. Barnett told Congress this summer. “Indeed, the last 75 years of public safety communications teaches us that there are no natural or market forces” that will make it happen.

    9 Years After 9/11, Public Safety Radio Not Ready, NYT, 6.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/07/business/07rescue.html