History > 2011 > USA > Terrorism (I)

Editorial cartoon:

Patrick Leger

Al Qaeda Stirs Again

NYT

17 April 2011

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/18/
opinion/18Zarate.html

The Guantánamo Papers

April 25, 2011
The New York Times
 

The internal documents from the prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, published in The Times on Monday were a chilling reminder of the legal and moral disaster that President George W. Bush created there. They describe the chaos, lawlessness and incompetence in his administration’s system for deciding detainees’ guilt or innocence and assessing whether they would be a threat if released.

Innocent men were picked up on the basis of scant or nonexistent evidence and subjected to lengthy detention and often to abuse and torture. Some people were released who later acted against the United States. Inmates who committed suicide were regarded only as a public relations problem. There are seriously dangerous prisoners at Guantánamo who cannot be released but may never get a real trial because the evidence is so tainted.

The torture has stopped. The inmates’ cases have been reviewed. But the detention camp in Cuba remains a festering sore on this country’s global reputation. Hampered by ideologues and cowards in Congress, President Obama has made scant progress in healing it.

Evidence obtained from torture and the uncorroborated whispers of fellow prisoners fill the more than 700 classified documents obtained by The Times and other news organizations. Mohammed al-Qahtani, a Saudi believed to have been an intended participant in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, was leashed like a dog, sexually humiliated and forced to urinate on himself. Yet claims Mr. Qahtani is said to have made about at least 16 prisoners are cited in their files with no mention of the coercion.

Some assessments relied on innuendo, gossip or information supplied by individuals whose motives were untrustworthy and whose information later proved false. Haji Jalil was captured in 2003 after an Afghan intelligence official said he had taken an “active part” in an ambush that killed American soldiers. He was sent home two years later, an inexcusable delay, after American officials determined that Mr. Jalil had been used to provide cover for the involvement of the intelligence official and others in the attack.

The Obama administration objected to release of the classified documents. The administration notes that the assessments were written between 2002 and early 2009 and that the task force established by Mr. Obama in January 2009 came to different conclusions about some of the remaining 172 prisoners. We accept that caution. But the administration is wrong to insist on secrecy. Inordinate resort to secrecy and resistance to testing evidence in fair and credible legal proceedings put the nation in this fix.

The administration should make its assessments of the remaining Guantánamo detainees public to the extent possible and free lawyers for detainees to fully communicate their clients’ side of the story.

The military commission trial of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and five other alleged Sept. 11 plotters should be pursued by the Defense Department using only evidence that would pass muster in federal court, and with maximum transparency.

The disaster at Guantánamo Bay is now Mr. Obama’s problem. He should not compound Mr. Bush’s mistakes in his efforts to correct them.

    The Guantánamo Papers, R, 25.4.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/26/opinion/26tue1.html

In Dossier,

Portrait of Push for Post-9/11 Attacks

April 25, 2011
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE and BENJAMIN WEISER

WASHINGTON — He peers out from the photo in the classified file through heavy-framed spectacles, an owlish face with a graying beard and a half-smile. Saifullah Paracha, a successful businessman and for years a New York travel agent, appears to be the oldest of the 172 prisoners still held at the Guantánamo Bay prison. His dossier is among the most chilling.

In the months after the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Paracha, 63, was one of a small circle of Al Qaeda operatives who explored ways to follow up on the hijackings with new attacks, according to the classified Guantánamo files made available to The New York Times.

Working with Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the 9/11 planner who in early 2002 gave him $500,000 to $600,000 “for safekeeping,” Mr. Paracha offered his long experience in the shipping business for a scheme to move plastic explosives into the United States inside containers of women’s and children’s clothing, the files assert.

“Detainee desired to help Al Qaeda ‘do something big against the U.S.,’ ” one of his co-conspirators, Ammar al-Baluchi, told Guantánamo interrogators, the files say. Mr. Paracha discussed obtaining biological or nuclear weapons as well, though he was concerned that detectors at ports “would make it difficult to smuggle radioactive materials into the country,” the file says.

Mr. Paracha’s assessment is among more than 700 classified documents that fill in new details of Al Qaeda’s efforts to make 9/11 just the first in a series of attacks to cripple the United States, intentions thwarted as the Central Intelligence Agency captured Mr. Mohammed and other leaders of the terrorist network.

The plots reportedly discussed by Mr. Mohammed and various operatives, none of them acted upon, included plans for a new wave of aircraft attacks on the West Coast, filling an apartment with leaked natural gas and detonating it, blowing up gas stations and even cutting the cables holding up the Brooklyn Bridge.

For the small circle of Qaeda operatives described in the December 2008 assessment of Mr. Paracha, terrorism appears to have been a family affair. There was Mr. Mohammed, the terrorist network’s top plotter, and his nephew, Mr. Baluchi, who was married to another militant, an American-trained neuroscientist, Aafia Siddiqui. And there was Mr. Paracha and his son, Uzair.

The newly revealed assessments, obtained last year by the group WikiLeaks and provided by another source to The Times, have revived the dispute, nearly as old as the prison, over whether mistreatment of some prisoners there and the prison’s operation outside the criminal justice system invalidate the government’s conclusions about the detainees.

Hina Shamsi, director of the national security project at the American Civil Liberties Union, said the assessments “are rife with uncorroborated evidence, information obtained through torture, speculation, errors and allegations that have been proven false.”

Likewise, David H. Remes, a lawyer who represents the elder Mr. Paracha, said in an interview on Monday that while he had not seen the assessment, its conclusion that Mr. Paracha posed a “high risk” to American interests was without foundation.

“The notion that he ever did anything that justified his detention, or ever was or is any kind of threat to the United States, is preposterous,” Mr. Remes said. “He is a 63-year-old man with a serious heart condition and severe diabetes, and he has been nothing but cooperative with the authorities.”

What Mr. Paracha wants, Mr. Remes added, is either a transfer back to his native country, Pakistan, or “a definitive adjudication of his case.”

Jay Carney, the White House spokesman, condemned on Monday the publication of what he called “documents obtained illegally” and noted the military’s findings about some detainees had been changed by a new review under President Obama. The detailed results of that review, however, remain secret.

Mr. Carney said the president remained committed to closing the Guantánamo prison someday. But Mr. Obama’s review identified about 50 detainees his advisers said could not be tried and were too dangerous to release, and Congress has imposed restrictions on bringing prisoners to the United States.

The portrait of Mr. Paracha is one of the striking ones to emerge from the files. The documents say he attended the New York Institute of Technology in the early 1970s and worked as a travel agent in New York for 13 years.

He was arrested in Bangkok in July 2003 after Uzair, who was already in F.B.I. custody in New York, “acknowledged” his father was a militant, the assessment says. Uzair Paracha was convicted in a 2005 trial on charges including material support for terrorism and is serving a 30-year sentence in federal prison.

According to his Guantánamo assessment, Saifullah Paracha had “provided useful information concerning senior Al Qaeda members” but “attempted to deceive and misinform intelligence and law enforcement personnel about his own activities.” As a result, the assessment draws heavily on statements by others, notably Mr. Mohammed, who was subjected to waterboarding and other brutal treatment during his interrogation by the C.I.A.

But Mr. Paracha’s assessment suggests that he did not deny militant connections at the highest level. “Detainee claimed he met UBL on a trip to Afghanistan in December 1999 or January 2000,” the documents say, using the government’s initials for Osama bin Laden. It says he offered to let Mr. bin Laden use his broadcasting business in Pakistan to generate propaganda films for Al Qaeda.

Later, Mr. bin Laden dispatched Mr. Mohammed to talk further about the idea, and Mr. Paracha explained “his vision of dedicating a program on his broadcasting network depicting UBL quoting Koranic verses.”

After 9/11, Mr. Paracha’s discussions focused on new plots, the files say. A Casio digital diary he was carrying when he was arrested “contained references to military chemical warfare agents, and their effects on humans,” according to the classified assessment. The document says Mr. Paracha told interrogators he had worked with Abdul Qadeer Khan, considered to be the father of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program and a major proliferator of nuclear technology.

Edward D. Wilford, a lawyer who represented the son at his 2005 trial, said his client had played no “witting” role in his father’s arrest.

“He was not a part of it in any way,” he said. “He didn’t make any calls. He didn’t make any contact. In fact, he was being held incommunicado. He didn’t have any way of knowing what was going on.” The son had been jailed in Manhattan on a material-witness warrant after his questioning by the F.B.I. in March 2003. He was charged criminally in August 2003, after his father’s arrest.

The relationship between father and son is only hinted at in the assessment report. It says that analysts concluded that Saifullah Paracha was “hiding aspects of his son’s extremist activities.” The son, though, talked about his father and his father’s relationship with Mr. bin Laden while testifying in his own defense.

A prosecutor asked whether Uzair Paracha had told F.B.I. agents that his father admired Mr. bin Laden. “I don’t remember if my father actually said that he admired bin Laden,” the son testified. “He said that bin Laden was a humble person and he had a simple way of life.”

    In Dossier, Portrait of Push for Post-9/11 Attacks, NYT, 25.4.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/26/world/guantanamo-files-portrait-of-push-for-post-september-11-attacks.html

U.S. wants death penalty in USS Cole attack

WASHINGTON | Wed Apr 20, 2011
5:41pm EDT
Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. military prosecutors want the death penalty for a detainee being held at the Guantanamo prison camp as they reaffirmed charges against him over the attack on the USS Cole in 2000, the Pentagon said on Wednesday.

Abd al-Rahim al Nashiri, a Saudi Arabian national of Yemeni descent, is charged with planning and preparing the attack on the warship off Yemen, which killed 17 sailors and wounded 40.

Suicide bombers rammed an explosives-laden boat into the Cole, blowing a massive hole in its side.

The United States accuses Nashiri, captured in Dubai in 2002 and held at the U.S. prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, of being al Qaeda's operations chief for the Arabian Peninsula.

Military prosecutors are recommending the death penalty, but that would have to be approved, the Pentagon said in a statement.

Prosecutors sent the charges to the Pentagon appointee overseeing the Guantanamo tribunals, retired Vice Admiral Bruce MacDonald, who will decide whether to refer the charges for trial and whether to prosecute it as a death penalty case.

The charges filed on Wednesday make Nashiri's the first capital case filed at Guantanamo under President Barack Obama's administration, which lifted its moratorium on new Guantanamo charges in early March.

Retired Navy Commander Kirk Lippold, who was in command of the Cole during the attack, said he supported the death penalty for Nashiri and hoped to be called as a witness at his trial.

"I am thrilled that this long overdue move for justice for the crew and families is finally happening," said Lippold, now a Republican candidate for Congress in Nevada.

Nashiri has also been charged with planning a 2002 attack on a French oil tanker off Yemen and with plotting an attack on another U.S. ship in 2000.

The charges announced against him included terrorism, murder and other crimes.

In 2008, Nashiri was charged in the Guantanamo war crimes tribunal with conspiring with al Qaeda, murder and other suspected crimes. Those charges were dropped in 2009 to give the Obama administration time to review Guantanamo cases.

Obama had pledged to shut down the Guantanamo prison camp and make the civilian federal courts the preferred venue for trying prisoners. But Congress blocked those plans, forcing the administration to change course, and prosecutors have resumed filing charges in the Guantanamo tribunals.

Some evidence against Nashiri could be compromised by the CIA's admission that it used the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding on him.

CIA agents also revved a power drill close to Nashiri's head and threatened him with a gun in efforts to scare him into giving information, according to a CIA inspector general's report that was partly made public in 2009.

It was unclear where those incidents took place, but Polish prosecutors are investigating Nashiri's claims that he was tortured by interrogators at a secret CIA prison in Poland before he was moved to Guantanamo in 2006.

(Reporting by Missy Ryan in Washington and Jane Sutton in Miami;

editing by Christopher Wilson)

    U.S. wants death penalty in USS Cole attack, R, 20.4.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/20/us-usa-guantanamo-cole-idUSTRE73J5WR20110420

A Statement by the United States Government

April 24, 2011
The New York Times

“It is unfortunate that The New York Times and other news organizations have made the decision to publish numerous documents obtained illegally by Wikileaks concerning the Guantanamo detention facility. These documents contain classified information about current and former GTMO detainees, and we strongly condemn the leaking of this sensitive information.

“The Wikileaks releases include Detainee Assessment Briefs (DABs) written by the Department of Defense between 2002 and early 2009. These DABs were written based on a range of information available then.

“The Guantanamo Review Task Force, established in January 2009, considered the DABs during its review of detainee information. In some cases, the Task Force came to the same conclusions as the DABs. In other instances the Review Task Force came to different conclusions, based on updated or other available information. The assessments of the Guantanamo Review Task Force have not been compromised to Wikileaks. Thus, any given DAB illegally obtained and released by Wikileaks may or may not represent the current view of a given detainee.

“Both the previous and the current Administrations have made every effort to act with the utmost care and diligence in transferring detainees from Guantanamo. The previous Administration transferred 537 detainees; to date, the current Administration has transferred 67. Both Administrations have made the protection of American citizens the top priority and we are concerned that the disclosure of these documents could be damaging to those efforts. That said, we will continue to work with allies and partners around the world to mitigate threats to the U.S. and other countries and to work toward the ultimate closure of the Guantanamo detention facility, consistent with good security practices and our values as a nation.”

Geoff Morrell

Pentagon Press Secretary

Ambassador Dan Fried

Special Envoy for Closure of the Guantanamo Detention Facility

    A Statement by the United States Government, NYT, 24.4.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/25/world/guantanamo-files-us-government-statement.html

Classified Files

Offer New Insights Into Detainees

April 24, 2011
The New York Times
By CHARLIE SAVAGE, WILLIAM GLABERSON and ANDREW W. LEHREN

WASHINGTON — A trove of more than 700 classified military documents provides new and detailed accounts of the men who have done time at the Guantánamo Bay prison in Cuba, and offers new insight into the evidence against the 172 men still locked up there.

Military intelligence officials, in assessments of detainees written between February 2002 and January 2009, evaluated their histories and provided glimpses of the tensions between captors and captives. What began as a jury-rigged experiment after the 2001 terrorist attacks now seems like an enduring American institution, and the leaked files show why, by laying bare the patchwork and contradictory evidence that in many cases would never have stood up in criminal court or a military tribunal.

The documents meticulously record the detainees’ “pocket litter” when they were captured: a bus ticket to Kabul, a fake passport and forged student ID, a restaurant receipt, even a poem. They list the prisoners’ illnesses — hepatitis, gout, tuberculosis, depression. They note their serial interrogations, enumerating — even after six or more years of relentless questioning — remaining “areas of potential exploitation.” They describe inmates’ infractions — punching guards, tearing apart shower shoes, shouting across cellblocks. And, as analysts try to bolster the case for continued incarceration, they record years of detainees’ comments about one another.

The secret documents, made available to The New York Times and several other news organizations, reveal that most of the 172 remaining prisoners have been rated as a “high risk” of posing a threat to the United States and its allies if released without adequate rehabilitation and supervision. But they also show that an even larger number of the prisoners who have left Cuba — about a third of the 600 already transferred to other countries — were also designated “high risk” before they were freed or passed to the custody of other governments.

The documents are largely silent about the use of the harsh interrogation tactics at Guantánamo — including sleep deprivation, shackling in stress positions and prolonged exposure to cold temperatures — that drew global condemnation. Several prisoners, though, are portrayed as making up false stories about being subjected to abuse.

The government’s basic allegations against many detainees have long been public, and have often been challenged by prisoners and their lawyers. But the dossiers, prepared under the Bush administration, provide a deeper look at the frightening, if flawed, intelligence that has persuaded the Obama administration, too, that the prison cannot readily be closed.

Prisoners who especially worried counterterrorism officials included some accused of being assassins for Al Qaeda, operatives for a canceled suicide mission and detainees who vowed to their interrogators that they would wreak revenge against America.

The military analysts’ files provide new details about the most infamous of their prisoners, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the planner of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Sometime around March 2002, he ordered a former Baltimore resident to don a suicide bomb vest and carry out a “martyrdom” attack against Pervez Musharraf, then Pakistan’s president, according to the documents. But when the man, Majid Khan, got to the Pakistani mosque that he had been told Mr. Musharraf would visit, the assignment turned out to be just a test of his “willingness to die for the cause.”

The dossiers also show the seat-of-the-pants intelligence gathering in war zones that led to the incarcerations of innocent men for years in cases of mistaken identity or simple misfortune. In May 2003, for example, Afghan forces captured Prisoner 1051, an Afghan named Sharbat, near the scene of a roadside bomb explosion, the documents show. He denied any involvement, saying he was a shepherd. Guantánamo debriefers and analysts agreed, citing his consistent story, his knowledge of herding animals and his ignorance of “simple military and political concepts,” according to his assessment. Yet a military tribunal declared him an “enemy combatant” anyway, and he was not sent home until 2006.

Obama administration officials condemned the publication of the classified documents, which were obtained by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks last year but provided to The Times by another source. The officials pointed out that an administration task force set up in January 2009 reviewed the information in the prisoner assessments, and in some cases came to different conclusions. Thus, they said, the documents published by The Times may not represent the government’s current view of detainees at Guantánamo.

Among the findings in the files:

¶The 20th hijacker: The best-documented case of an abusive interrogation at Guantánamo was the coercive questioning, in late 2002 and early 2003, of Mohammed Qahtani. A Saudi believed to have been an intended participant in the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Qahtani was leashed like a dog, sexually humiliated and forced to urinate on himself. His file says, “Although publicly released records allege detainee was subject to harsh interrogation techniques in the early stages of detention,” his confessions “appear to be true and are corroborated in reporting from other sources.” But claims that he is said to have made about at least 16 other prisoners — mostly in April and May 2003 — are cited in their files without any caveat.

¶Threats against captors: While some detainees are described in the documents as “mostly compliant and rarely hostile to guard force and staff,” others spoke of violence. One detainee said “he would like to tell his friends in Iraq to find the interrogator, slice him up, and make a shwarma (a type of sandwich) out of him, with the interrogator’s head sticking out of the end of the shwarma.” Another “threatened to kill a U.S. service member by chopping off his head and hands when he gets out,” and informed a guard that “he will murder him and drink his blood for lunch. Detainee also stated he would fly planes into houses and prayed that President Bush would die.”

¶The role of foreign officials: The leaked documents show how many foreign countries sent intelligence officers to question Guantánamo detainees — among them China, Russia, Tajikistan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait, Algeria and Tunisia. One such visit changed a detainee’s account: a Saudi prisoner initially told American interrogators he had traveled to Afghanistan to train at a Libyan-run terrorist training camp. But an analyst added: “Detainee changed his story to a less incriminating one after the Saudi Delegation came and spoke to the detainees.”

¶A Qaeda leader’s reputation: The file for Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who was charged before a military commission last week for plotting the bombing of the American destroyer Cole in 2000, says he was “more senior” in Al Qaeda than Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and describes him as “so dedicated to jihad that he reportedly received injections to promote impotence and recommended the injections to others so more time could be spent on the jihad (rather than being distracted by women).”

¶The Yemenis’ hard luck: The files for dozens of the remaining prisoners portray them as low-level foot-soldiers who traveled from Yemen to Afghanistan before the Sept. 11 attacks to receive basic military training and fight in the civil war there, not as global terrorists. Otherwise identical detainees from other countries were sent home many years ago, the files show, but the Yemenis remain at Guantánamo because of concerns over the stability of their country and its ability to monitor them.

¶Dubious information: Some assessments revealed the risk of relying on information supplied by people whose motives were murky. Hajji Jalil, then a 33-year-old Afghan, was captured in July 2003, after the Afghan chief of intelligence in Helmand Province said Mr. Jalil had taken an “active part” in an ambush that killed two American soldiers. But American officials, citing “fraudulent circumstances,” said later that the intelligence chief and others had participated in the ambush, and they had “targeted” Mr. Jalil “to provide cover for their own involvement.” He was sent home in March 2005.

¶A British agent: One report reveals that American officials discovered a detainee had been recruited by British and Canadian intelligence to work as an agent because of his “connections to members of various Al-Qaeda-linked terrorist groups.” But the report suggests that he had never shifted his militant loyalties. It says that the Central Intelligence Agency, after repeated interrogations of the detainee, concluded that he had “withheld important information” from the British and Canadians, and assessed him “to be a threat” to American and allied personnel in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He has since been sent back to his country.

¶A journalist’s interrogation: The documents show that a major reason a Sudanese cameraman for Al Jazeera, Sami al-Hajj, was held at Guantánamo for six years was for questioning about the television network’s “training program, telecommunications equipment, and newsgathering operations in Chechnya, Kosovo, and Afghanistan,” including contacts with terrorist groups. While Mr. Hajj insisted he was just a journalist, his file says he helped Islamic extremist groups courier money and obtain Stinger missiles and cites the United Arab Emirates’ claim that he was a Qaeda member. He was released in 2008 and returned to work for Al Jazeera.

¶The first to leave: The documents offer the first public look at the military’s views of 158 detainees who did not receive a formal hearing under a system instituted in 2004. Many were assessed to be “of little intelligence value” with no ties to or significant knowledge about Al Qaeda or the Taliban, as was the case of a detainee who was an Afghan used car salesman. But also among those freed early was a Pakistani who would become a suicide attacker three years later.

Many of the dossiers include official close-up photographs of the detainees, providing images of hundreds of the prisoners, many of whom have not been seen publicly in years.

The files — classified “secret” and marked “noforn,” meaning they should not be shared with foreign governments — represent the fourth major collection of secret American documents that have become public over the past year; earlier releases included military incident reports from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and portions of an archive of some 250,000 diplomatic cables. Military prosecutors have accused an Army intelligence analyst, Pfc. Bradley Manning, of leaking the materials.

The Guantánamo assessments seem unlikely to end the long-running debate about America’s most controversial prison. The documents can be mined for evidence supporting beliefs across the political spectrum about the relative perils posed by the detainees and whether the government’s system of holding most without trials is justified.

Much of the information in the documents is impossible to verify. The documents were prepared by intelligence and military officials operating at first in the haze of war, then, as the years passed, in a prison under international criticism. In some cases, judges have rejected the government’s allegations, because confessions were made during coercive interrogation or other sources were not credible.

In 2009, a task force of officials from the government’s national security agencies re-evaluated all 240 detainees then remaining at the prison. They vetted the military’s assessments against information held by other agencies, and dropped the “high/medium/low” risk ratings in favor of a more nuanced look at how each detainee might fare if released, in light of his specific family and national environment. But those newer assessments are still secret and not available for comparison.

Moreover, the leaked archive is not complete; it contains no assessments for about 75 of the detainees.

Yet for all the limitations of the files, they still offer an extraordinary look inside a prison that has long been known for its secrecy and for a struggle between the military that runs it — using constant surveillance, forced removal from cells and other tools to exert control — and detainees who often fought back with the limited tools available to them: hunger strikes, threats of retribution and hoarded contraband ranging from a metal screw to leftover food.

Scores of detainees were given disciplinary citations for “inappropriate use of bodily fluids,” as some files delicately say; other files make clear that detainees on a fairly regular basis were accused by guards of throwing urine and feces.

No new prisoners have been transferred to Guantánamo since 2007. Some Republicans are urging the Obama administration to send newly captured terrorism suspects to the prison, but so far officials have refused to increase the inmate population.

As a result, Guantánamo seems increasingly frozen in time, with detainees locked into their roles at the receding moment of their capture.

For example, an assessment of a former top Taliban official said he “appears to be resentful of being apprehended while he claimed he was working for the US and Coalition forces to find Mullah Omar,” a reference to Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban chief who is in hiding.

But whatever the truth about the detainee’s role before his capture in 2002, it is receding into the past. So, presumably, is the value of whatever information he possesses. Still, his jailers have continued to press him for answers. His assessment of January 2008 — six years after he arrived in Cuba — contended that it was worthwhile to continue to interrogate him, in part because he might know about Mullah Omar’s “possible whereabouts.”

Charlie Savage reported from Washington, and William Glaberson and Andrew W. Lehren from New York. Scott Shane contributed reporting from Washington, and Benjamin Weiser and Andrei Scheinkman from New York.

    Classified Files Offer New Insights Into Detainees, NYT, 24.4.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/25/world/guantanamo-files-lives-in-an-american-limbo.html

Judging Detainees’ Risk, Often With Flawed Evidence

April 24, 2011
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE and BENJAMIN WEISER

WASHINGTON — Said Mohammed Alam Shah, a 24-year-old Afghan who had lost a leg as a teenager, told interrogators at the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, that he had been conscripted by the Taliban as a driver before being detained in 2001. He had been caught, he said, as he tried to “rescue his younger brother from the Taliban.”

Military analysts believed him. Mr. Shah, who had been outfitted with a prosthetic leg by prison doctors, was “cooperative” and “has not expressed thoughts of violence or made threats toward the U.S. or its allies,” according to a sympathetic 2003 assessment. Its conclusion: “Detainee does not pose a future threat to the U.S. or U.S. interests.”

So in 2004 Mr. Shah was sent back to Afghanistan — where he promptly revealed himself to be Abdullah Mehsud, a Pakistan-born militant, and began plotting mayhem. He recorded jihadist videos, organized a Taliban force to fight American troops, planned an attack on Pakistan’s interior minister that killed 31 people, oversaw the kidnapping of two Chinese engineers, and finally detonated a suicide bomb in 2007 as the Pakistani Army closed in. His martyrdom was hailed in an audio message by none other than Osama bin Laden.

The Guantánamo analysts’ complete misreading of Abdullah Mehsud was included among hundreds of classified assessments of detainees at the prison in Cuba that were obtained by The New York Times. The unredacted assessments give the fullest public picture to date of the prisoners held at Guantánamo over the past nine years. They show that the United States has imprisoned hundreds of men for years without trial based on a difficult and strikingly subjective evaluation of who they were, what they had done in the past and what they might do in the future. The 704 assessment documents use the word “possibly” 387 times, “unknown” 188 times and “deceptive” 85 times.

Viewed with judges’ rulings on legal challenges by detainees, the documents reveal that the analysts sometimes ignored serious flaws in the evidence — for example, that the information came from other detainees whose mental illness made them unreliable. Some assessments quote witnesses who say they saw a detainee at a camp run by Al Qaeda but omit the witnesses’ record of falsehood or misidentification. They include detainees’ admissions without acknowledging other government documents that show the statements were later withdrawn, often attributed to abusive treatment or torture.

A Growing Wariness

Written between 2002 and 2009, the assessments reflect a growing wariness on the part of Guantánamo analysts. Early on, the reports are just a page or two and often sanguine in tone. By 2008, after scorching publicity about released detainees who joined Al Qaeda and the dwindling of the prison population to hard-core detainees, the assessments are decidedly more cautious.

For every case of an Abdullah Mehsud — someone wrongly judged a minimal threat — there are several instances in which prisoners rated “high risk” were released and have not engaged in wrongdoing. Murat Kurnaz, a German resident of Turkish ancestry, was judged in a 2006 assessment to be a member of Al Qaeda who fell into the most dangerous category: “high risk” and “likely to pose a threat to the U.S., its interests and allies.”

Nonetheless, American authorities, under pressure from both Germany and Turkey, overruled the analysts and sent Mr. Kurnaz home to Germany three months later. He did not join the global jihad but instead became a prominent critic of Guantánamo, writing a book and making countless media appearances to denounce the American prison.

Among the most revealing of the leaked documents is a 17-page guide for analysts, evidently prepared by military intelligence trainers, on how to gauge the danger posed by a detainee. It lists major clusters of detainees, including the so-called Dirty 30, who were the bodyguards of Mr. bin Laden, as well as the large group of accused Qaeda operatives captured with Abu Zubaydah, an important terrorist facilitator, at two guesthouses in Faisalabad, Pakistan, in 2002. It lists nine mosques associated with Al Qaeda, in Quebec, Milan, London, Yemen and Pakistan.

The guide shows how analysts seized upon the tiniest details as a potential litmus test for risk. If a prisoner had a Casio F91W watch, it might be an indication he had attended a Qaeda bomb-making course where such watches were handed out — though that model is sold around the world to this day. (Likewise, the assessment of a Yemeni prisoner suggests a dire use for his pocket calculator: “Calculators may be used for indirect fire calculations such as those required for artillery fire.”)

A prisoner caught without travel documents? It might mean he had been trained to discard them to make identification harder, the guide explains. A detainee who claimed to be a simple farmer or a cook, or in the honey business or searching for a wife? Those were common Taliban and Qaeda cover stories, the analysts were told.

And a classic Catch-22: “Refusal to cooperate,” the guide says, is a Qaeda resistance technique.

Yet the guide appears to be the product of years of experience at trying to turn bits of evidence of varying reliability into a conclusion. Notably, it cites as a cautionary tale the early misjudgment about Abdullah Mehsud, the Pakistani suicide bomber, who had claimed he was forced to join the Taliban. He was “an example,” the guide says, “of a detainee who successfully applied the conscription cover story as a means to secure his release from U.S. custody.”

Guantánamo emerges from the documents as a nest of informants, a closed world where detainees were the main source of allegations against one another and sudden recollections of having spotted a fellow prisoner at a Qaeda training camp could curry favor with interrogators. The assessments of many detainees amount to long lists of fellow prisoners’ claims about them.

Among the prison’s many informants, few outdid Yasim Basardah, a Yemeni whose statements are cited in the assessments of 30 detainees — even though at least three federal judges have questioned his credibility, citing his serious psychiatric problems. (In a curious twist, a judge ordered Mr. Basardah released last year, in part because she concluded that his ties to Al Qaeda had been effectively severed by his record of cooperation with American authorities. He was transferred to Spain.)

Or there is Abu Zubaydah, the Qaeda facilitator who was waterboarded while in the custody of the Central Intelligence Agency and whose interrogations are cited in the risk assessments of more than 100 prisoners. His lawyers have noted that his accusations against others have been systematically removed from government filings in court cases, an indication that officials no longer are certain of his reliability.

A few assessments acknowledge the hazards of rewarding detainees for information. “Detainee admitted that he provided information in a deliberately misleading manner in order to receive incentives from his debriefers,” said a report on Abdul Bukhary, a Saudi militant with a jihadist résumé stretching back to the Soviet-Afghan war. Mr. Bukhary told interrogators that “his memory was very bad,” to which the analysts added a skeptical note: “Feigning memory problems is a common counter-interrogation technique.”

Yet Mr. Bukhary’s observations are cited in the assessments of a dozen other prisoners without any caveat about his admitted deceptions or his claim of a poor memory. And though in July 2007 Mr. Bukhary was rated “high risk” and “likely” to pose a threat to American interests, he was sent home to Saudi Arabia and its rehabilitation program for militants just two months later.

The Release Lottery

The documents, originally obtained by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks but provided to The Times by another source, portray Guantánamo as a lottery with the highest stakes for both the prisoners and their American captors. A critical factor was a detainee’s country of origin. Most European inmates were sent home, despite grave qualms on the analysts’ part. Saudis went home, even some of the most militant, to enter the rehabilitation program; some would graduate and then join Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Yemenis have generally stayed put, even those cleared for release, because of the chaos in their country. Even in clearly mistaken arrests, release could be slow.

One Afghan, Mohammed Nasim, was sent to Guantánamo in May 2003 under the belief that he was a notorious Taliban military commander of the same last name. By March 2004, analysts had realized their error: “It is assessed that the detainee is a poor farmer and his arrest was due to mistaken identity.” Yet, a review tribunal considered his case later that year as if he were the Taliban commander, and he was not sent home until April 2005 — two years after he arrived at the prison.

In some cases, the analysts showed a willingness to reconsider their judgments in light of new facts. An Afghan prisoner, Shawali Khan, was caught with what appeared to be deeply incriminating documents: a Qaeda training manual on assassination, surveillance and counterfeiting that even contained a plan to kidnap the American president, as well as a notebook from a Qaeda camp on the maintenance and use of the AK-47 and other weapons.

The problem was that the documents were all in Arabic, and six years after his capture, Mr. Khan had finally convinced interrogators that he could not read Arabic. That conclusion, analysts wrote, “lends more credence to detainee’s claim” that he had looted the material from possessions abandoned by Arab fighters who had fled Kandahar in southern Afghanistan.

A single footnote can call into question the entire case against a detainee: Abdul Haddi bin Hadiddi, a Tunisian who had spent time in Italy and was once arrested there for counterfeiting, was rated “high risk” and was believed to have received training from Al Qaeda. His assessment describes phone calls by the detainee, intercepted by Italian intelligence, with gunfire in the background.

But if the Italian dates are right, the reported calls were made after Mr. Hadiddi’s arrest. A footnote tries to sort it out: “If this was the detainee,” it says, then the reported dates of the calls must be wrong. “If this is not the detainee, it may indicate detainee’s claimed name is not his” — an astonishing acknowledgment about a man imprisoned since August 2002.

Judges Weigh In

Such frustrating case studies seem to beg for an independent evaluation of the evidence, some way of shedding light on the quality of the Guantánamo analysts’ work. As it happens, federal judges have heard nearly 60 cases brought by detainees challenging their imprisonment, and they have ruled in many of them that the government’s evidence was too thin or contradictory to justify holding the prisoner.

The 2008 assessment of Alla Ali bin Ali Ahmed, for instance, a Yemeni who denied that he had fought in Afghanistan, concluded that he was a “committed member of Al Qaeda” who posed a “high risk” to the United States.

But a federal judge who saw all the classified evidence in the case found that all four witnesses who claimed to have seen him in Afghanistan were unreliable. (The judge, Gladys Kessler, ordered Mr. Ahmed released, and he went home to Yemen in 2009.)

One witness, Judge Kessler wrote, was said by American military doctors to be suffering from “psychosis.” The assessment of that witness, a Yemeni named Musab al-Madoonee, described him as “in overall good health” and made no mention of his mental illness.

But in another case this month, another judge offered far more support for the Guantánamo analysts. Writing about another Yemeni detainee, Yasin Ismail, Judge Laurence H. Silberman of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said he found the detainee’s account “phonier than a $4 bill” and rejected his challenge.

Judge Silberman showed sympathy for counterterrorism analysts who erred on the side of caution. In an ordinary criminal case, a judge may vote to overturn a conviction on evidentiary grounds even if he is virtually certain the defendant is guilty, Judge Silberman wrote. With a potential terrorist, he said, the stakes are different.

“When we are dealing with detainees,” Judge Silberman said, “candor obliges me to admit that one can not help but be conscious of the infinitely greater downside risk to our country, and its people, of an order releasing a detainee who is likely to return to terrorism.”

By the Pentagon’s count, as of Oct. 1, 2010, of the 598 detainees transferred from Guantánamo, 81 were “confirmed” and 69 “suspected” of engaging in terrorist or insurgent activities after their release. Accepting the highest Defense Department total, even the 25 percent rate would be lower than most estimates of recidivism rates for federal and state ex-convicts.

An Elusive Subject

But those numbers may be one reason Guantánamo officials have been loath to take a chance in the befuddling case of Detainee 257, known as Omar Hamzayavich Abdulayev, a 32-year-old Tajik. He arrived at Guantánamo when he was just 23, a month after the prison opened. Interrogators have questioned Mr. Abdulayev for nine years, intelligence officers from both Russia and Tajikistan have visited to talk to him and countless other prisoners have been asked what they know about him.

The most serious allegations came from a Kuwaiti prisoner who claimed that Mr. Abdulayev told him he was trained by Al Qaeda in poisons and explosives and had met top Qaeda operatives. But the Kuwaiti’s own assessment questioned his credibility, saying details of his account were “conflicting and vague.”

Then there is the documentary evidence: Mr. Abdulayev was caught with notebooks containing notes on explosives and lists of mujahedeen fighters. And an undated Qaeda training roster found in Afghanistan listed “Abdallah al-Uzbeki” among the trainees. An analyst, grasping for data on his elusive subject, wrote that “Abdallah” might be a variant of Abdallahyiv, a Tajik version of Abdulayev, and that al-Uzbeki “is an alias which can also be adopted by Tajiks and Afghans due to similar facial features and shared cultural beliefs and customs.”

Mr. Abdulayev appears to be an example of the most controversial category of Guantánamo detainees: the 47 whom the Obama administration has judged too dangerous for release but for whom it lacks the evidence necessary to hold a military tribunal.

Hence the haunting conclusion of his 2008 assessment: “Detainee’s identity remains uncertain.”

 

Scott Shane reported from Washington, and Benjamin Weiser from New York. Reporting was contributed by Charlie Savage from Washington, and William Glaberson, Andrew W. Lehren and Andrei Scheinkman from New York.

    Judging Detainees’ Risk, Often With Flawed Evidence, R, 24.4.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/25/world/guantanamo-files-flawed-evidence-for-assessing-risk.html

As Acts of War or Despair, Suicides Rattle a Prison

April 24, 2011
The New York Times
By CHARLIE SAVAGE

WASHINGTON — By October 2004, two years into his detention at the Guantánamo Bay prison, Ali Abdullah Ahmed had established a corrosive reputation among prison officials. Mr. Ahmed’s classified file said he was a hunger striker, “completely uncooperative with interrogators,” and “had a history of aggressive behavior in the camp, often defiantly failing to comply with instructions.”

Twenty-one months later, the military announced that Mr. Ahmed, a Yemeni, and two other prisoners had simultaneously hanged themselves.

Their deaths in June 2006 — the first at Guantánamo — fueled a debate between military officials, who deemed the suicides “an act of asymmetric warfare waged against us” by jihadists seeking martyrdom, and prison critics, who interpreted them as an act of despair by men with little hope of a fair trial or release.

Since then, two other detainees have succeeded in killing themselves — one in 2007, and another in 2009. Against that backdrop, a collection of secret detainee assessment files obtained by The New York Times reveal that the threat of suicide has created a chronic tension at the prison — a tactic frequently discussed by the captives and a constant fear for their captors.

The files for about two dozen detainees refer to suicide attempts or threats. Others mention informants who pass on rumors about which prisoner had volunteered to kill himself next and efforts to organize suicide attempts. Two prisoners were overheard weighing whether it would create enough time for someone to end his life if fellow prisoners blocked their cell windows, distracting guards who would have to remove the obstructions.

While medical officials struggled to keep hunger strikers alive, other officials were on constant alert for signs of trouble. In May 2008, a detainee ordered fellow prisoners to “stop singing that song; we will sing it on Monday when our brothers leave.” His file noted: “It was assessed he meant planning suicide attempts.”

Even stray remarks about suicide could have consequences. When assessing detainees’ risk level, analysts noted whether they were said to have expressed support for suicides — lowering their chances of release.

And both sides were focused on the public-relations implications: one prisoner told others in February 2006 that a detainee’s death would “open the eyes of the world and result in the closure of the base.”

In the early years at the prison, where many detainees experienced mental health problems, suicide attempts were typically described as a medical issue. A Saudi who incurred brain damage after trying to hang himself had been “treated here for depression,” his 2004 assessment noted. The file for another detainee with 12 “serious suicide attempts,” including cutting his throat in December 2005, said he suffered from a “major depressive disorder.”

Over time, though, officials appeared to take a more wary view, the documents suggest. In January 2005, a prisoner tried to hang himself after being placed in a cell next to another detainee he suspected of being an informant. An analyst noted that he “knows how the logistics work” and that “if he ‘attempted suicide’ that he would be moved from his cell and away from” the other detainee.

But the death of Mr. Ahmed and two others in June 2006 was a turning point. It marked the climax of a period of intense mass protests and turmoil, including a failed attempt at a multiple suicide the previous month by several detainees who swallowed prescription drugs they and others had hoarded.

The three deaths have gained particular notoriety among prison critics, with some skeptics even saying that they may have been homicides. The three men’s assessments do not address how they later died.

The records, part of a collection leaked last year to the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks, show that the men shared a history of hostile, defiant behavior toward their captors, but also that the evidence against them varied widely.

Mr. Ahmed was arrested during a raid on a guesthouse in Pakistan that officials believed had links to Al Qaeda. He said he was a religious student who had never been to Afghanistan. Analysts thought he was lying, his file shows, because several other detainees claimed they had seen him at training camps and with members of Al Qaeda.

The second detainee, a Saudi named Mani Shaman al-Utaybi, was arrested at a Pakistani checkpoint in a taxi with four other men, all hiding under burqas. He said he was a preacher for an Islamic missionary group, an organization officials believed had sometimes helped extremists.

Mr. Utaybi’s file said had been carrying someone else’s passport and made “inconsistent statements.” One of the men arrested with him had been to a terrorist training camp — but two others had already been released. Analysts said he knew little, and recommended sending him to Saudi Arabia for continued detention.

By contrast, the file for the third detainee, a Saudi named Yasser Talal al-Zahrani, said he freely admitted that he went to Afghanistan to be a jihadist fighter. It also said he had laughingly shouted “9/11 you not forget” at a prison staff member and told a guard “he would use a knife to cut his stomach open, cut his face off, and then drink his blood, smiling and laughing as he said it.”

Several later assessments of other detainees make references to the three suicides. One such file, for example, mentions in passing that a prisoner reported that another detainee had told him “he had been approached and recruited by the three detainees who had committed suicide.”

And Mr. Ahmed’s brother, Muhammaed Yasir Ahmed Taher, who was also a detainee until his repatriation in 2009, wrote to a family member depicting Mr. Ahmed “as a martyr,” according to an assessment. An analyst concluded that both brothers “viewed the suicide as a continuance of their jihad against the US.”

Andrew W. Lehren contributed reporting from New York.

    As Acts of War or Despair, Suicides Rattle a Prison, NYT, 24.4.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/25/world/guantanamo-files-suicide-as-act-of-war-or-despair.html

Al Qaeda Stirs Again

April 17, 2011
The New York Times
By JUAN C. ZARATE

Washington

MANY in the West had taken comfort in Al Qaeda’s silence in the wake of the uprisings in the Muslim world this year, as secular, nonviolent protests, led by educated youth focused on redressing longstanding local grievances, showcased democracy’s promise and seemed to leave Al Qaeda behind.

Indeed, the pristine spirit of the Arab Spring does represent an existential threat to Al Qaeda’s extremist ideology. But Al Qaeda’s leaders also know that this is a strategic moment. They are banking on the disillusionment that inevitably follows revolutions to reassert their prominence in the region. And now Al Qaeda is silent no more — and is taking the rhetorical offensive.

In recent statements, Ayman al-Zawahri, Osama bin Laden’s second-in-command, and Qaeda surrogates have aligned themselves with the protesters in Libya, Egypt and elsewhere, while painting the West as an enemy of the Arab people.

In North Africa, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb claimed that while protesters flooded the streets of Tunis and Cairo, it had been fighting in the mountains against the same enemies. Anwar al-Awlaki, a Yemeni-American cleric affiliated with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, declared that in the wake of the revolutions, “our mujahedeen brothers ... will get a chance to breathe again after three decades of suffocation” and that “the great doors of opportunity would open up for the mujahedeen all over the world.”

Mr. Zawahri has denounced democracy, arguing that toppling dictators is insufficient and that “justice, freedom, and independence” can be achieved only through “jihad and resistance until the Islamic regime rises.”

The chaos and disappointment that follow revolutions will inevitably provide many opportunities for Al Qaeda to spread its influence. Demographic pressures, economic woes and corruption will continue to bedevil even the best-run governments in the region. Divisions will beset the protest movements, and vestiges of the old regimes may re-emerge.

Al Qaeda and its allies don’t need to win the allegiance of every protester to exert their influence; they have a patient view of history.

Although Washington must avoid tainting organic movements or being perceived as a central protagonist, the United States and its Western allies should not be shy about working with reformers and democrats to shape the region’s trajectory — and ensuring Al Qaeda’s irrelevance in the Sunni Arab world, the heart of its supposed constituency.

In countries where autocrats have been toppled (as in Egypt and Tunisia), we must help shape the new political and social environment; in nondemocratic, allied states (like the region’s monarchies), we need to accelerate internal reform; and in repressive states (like Iran, Libya and Syria), we should challenge the legitimacy of autocratic regimes and openly assist dissidents and democrats.

This is not about military intervention or the imposition of American-style democracy. It is about using American power and influence to support organic reform movements.

The United States Agency for International Development and advocacy organizations can help civil society groups grow; human rights groups can organize and assist networks of dissidents; and Western women’s groups and trade unions could support their counterparts throughout the Middle East. Wealthy philanthropists and entrepreneurs who are part of the Middle Eastern diaspora could make investments and provide economic opportunities for the region’s youth, while technology companies interested in new markets could partner with anticorruption groups to aid political mobilization and increase government accountability and transparency. Hollywood and Bollywood writers and producers should lionize the democratic heroes who took to the streets to challenge the orthodoxy of fear.

A focused campaign to shape the course of reform would align our values and interests with the aspirations of the protesters. More important, it would answer the challenge from Al Qaeda to define what happens next and reframe the tired narratives of the past.

In 2005, Mr. Zawahri anticipated this battle for reform and noted that “demonstrations and speaking out in the streets” would not be sufficient to achieve freedom in the Muslim world. If we help the protesters succeed, it will not only serve long-term national security interests but also mark the beginning of the end of Al Qaeda.


Juan C. Zarate, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, was the deputy national security adviser for combating terrorism from 2005 to 2009.

    Al Qaeda Stirs Again, NYT, 17.4.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/18/opinion/18Zarate.html

Khalid Sheik Mohammed to be tried by military commission

Monday, April 4, 2011
10:40 PM
Washington Post
By Peter Finn

Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four alleged co-conspirators accused of organizing the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks will be tried before a military commission at Guantanamo Bay, the Obama administration said Monday, reversing its long-held plan to bring the men to trial in federal court.

The decision scuttled one of the administration’s signature goals and signified the enduring role of Guantanamo Bay as part of the country’s counterterrorism arsenal. It may also mark the effective end of the administration’s effort, now more than two years old, to close the detention center in Cuba.

In announcing the decision, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said he will return the case to the Defense Department “reluctantly” and blamed the move on Congress, which has erected a series of barriers to bringing detainees to the United States, even for prosecution.

“As the president has said, those unwise and unwarranted restrictions undermine our counterterrorism efforts and could harm our national security,” Holder said. “Decisions about who, where and how to prosecute have always been — and must remain — the responsibility of the executive branch.”

Holder added that the Justice Department had been “prepared to bring a powerful case” against the suspects. To underscore the point, the department unsealed a December 2009 indictment on Monday that outlined the case prosecutors had planned to pre­sent. A federal judge dismissed the indictment Monday at the request of federal prosecutors.

The White House, which has played a central role in formulating Guantanamo Bay policy, did not issue a statement on the reversal and referred all questions to the Justice Department.

The five defendants will now be tried in the courtroom at Guantanamo Bay that George W. Bush’s administration built for them. They were arraigned there in 2008 and have not left the detention facility since their arrival in September 2006. But President Obama stopped their prosecution immediately after he took office and promised to close the prison within a year.

Navy Capt. John F. Murphy, the chief military prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay, said Monday that he plans to swear charges against the five men in the near future and that he will again seek to prosecute them in a joint trial.

Advocates of military trials, including some leading Republicans on Capitol Hill, said the administration had belatedly bowed to the inevitable.

“As I have been saying since Day One, these terror trials belong in a military commission at Guantanamo. I am absolutely shocked that it took Attorney General Holder 507 days to come to this realization,” said Rep. Peter T. King, (R-N.Y.), the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee. “Today’s reversal is yet another vindication of President Bush’s detention policies by the Obama administration and is welcome news to the families of the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, who will finally see long-awaited justice.”

Human rights groups questioned not only the appropriateness of the prosecution venue but also the belief that it will bring anything approaching swift justice.

“There is a reason this system is condemned: It is rife with constitutional and procedural problems,” said Anthony D. Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. “Cases prosecuted by the Obama administration in the commissions now are sure to be subject to continuous legal challenges and delays, and their outcomes will not be seen as legitimate.”

The defendants include Mohammed, a Pakistani born in Kuwait who is the self-proclaimed mastermind of the attacks; Ramzi Binalshibh, a Yemeni; Walid Muhammad bin Attash, a Yemeni also known as Tawfiq bin Attash; Ammar al-Baluchi, also known as Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali, a Pakistani who is Mohammed’s nephew; and Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi, a Saudi.

They were held at secret prisons by the CIA and were subjected to what have been called “enhanced interrogation techniques” before they were transferred to Guantanamo Bay.

Military prosecutors, like their federal counterparts, think they can secure convictions without relying on coerced statements made to the CIA, and Holder said he has “full faith and confidence in the military-commission system to appropriately handle this case as it proceeds.”

But military defense lawyers think their clients’ treatment by the CIA will still be a critical factor mitigating against death sentences, and they plan to try to introduce as much evidence of abuse as possible.

Another unresolved key question is whether Mohammed and the others can plead guilty and receive the death penalty, something they appeared interested in doing just before Obama suspended military commissions.

In December 2008, the five sent a document to the military judge overseeing their case to “announce our confessions and plea in full.” But the judge, Army Col. Stephen R. Henley, said he wanted a briefing from the prosecution and a defense response on whether he could accept guilty pleas in a death penalty case under the language of the Military Commissions Act, which suggests that a death penalty can arise only from a decision by a military jury.

“Are you saying if we plead guilty we will not be able to be sentenced to death?” Mohammed asked at the time, before withdrawing the offer.

Rep. Howard P. “Buck” McKeon (R-
Calif.) has introduced legislation that would allow a military judge to accept a guilty plea to capital charges and then sentence the defendants to death.

Murphy, the chief military prosecutor, said: “It would be inappropriate to speculate on what specific charges may be sworn or if . . . prosecutors will seek the death penalty.”

Holder first announced in November 2009 the planned prosecution of Mohammed and his co-defendants in federal court in New York. The decision was the culmination of an almost year-long examination of the
cases of every Guantanamo Bay detainee.

But the announcement triggered almost immediate opposition from congressional Republicans, who said the attacks on New York and Washington were acts of war, not ordinary crimes, and should be prosecuted in a military tribunal.

New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg (I) initially supported the prosecution, but that backing faltered when fears were raised of major disruption in the life of the city and when the New York Police Department said it would cost hundreds of millions of dollars to secure Lower Manhattan.

The administration quietly shelved its plans while insisting that it was still committed to federal trials for some Guantanamo Bay detainees. Through much of the past year, the 9/11 case and other potential prosecutions of Guantanamo Bay detainees have been in limbo.

Federal law enforcement officials said the decision not to hold civilian trials was considered inevitable within the Justice Department once Congress barred the transfer of Guantanamo Bay detainees to the United States for any reason, including prosecution, which previously was possible.

“It’s fair to say that was the final nail in the coffin,’’ said one source familiar with the case, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. “It was just never, never going to happen.’’

Other sources said the decision had been in the works for some time before Monday but was closely held. Asked why it took four months after Congress passed the legislation, one official said: “The government is a big battleship, and it takes a while to turn it around. I wouldn’t read anything more into it than that.’’


Staff writers Jerry Markon and William Branigin and staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

    Khalid Sheik Mohammed to be tried by military commission, WP, 4.4.2011,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/khalid-sheik-mohammed-to-be-tried-by-military-commission-officials-say/2011/04/04/AFhlS8cC_story.html

Sept. 11 suspects to be tried at Guantanamo Bay

WASHINGTON | Mon Apr 4, 2011
6:14pm EDT
Reuters
By David Alexander and James Vicini

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama yielded to political opposition Monday, agreeing to try the self-professed mastermind of the September 11 attacks in a military tribunal at Guantanamo and not in a civilian court as he had promised.

Attorney General Eric Holder blamed lawmakers for the policy reversal, saying their December decision to block funding for prosecuting the 9/11 suspects in a New York court "tied our hands" and forced the administration to resume military trials.

His announcement was an embarrassing reversal of the administration's decision in November 2009 to try September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four co-conspirators in a court near the site of the World Trade Center attack that killed nearly 3,000 people.

That decision had been welcomed by civil rights groups but strongly opposed by many lawmakers -- especially Republicans -- and New Yorkers, who cheered Holder's announcement that the Obama administration had reversed course.

In moving the case back to the military system, the Justice Department unsealed a nine-count criminal indictment that detailed how Mohammed trained the 9/11 hijackers to use short-bladed knives by killing sheep and camels.

Another of the five -- Walid bin Attash -- tested air security by carrying a pocket knife and wandering close to the doors of aircraft cockpits to check for reactions, said the indictment, which prosecutors asked the court to drop so the case can be handled by a military commission.

 

PRISON STILL HOLDS 172 PEOPLE

The decision to abandon civilian prosecution was an admission that Obama has not been able to overcome political opposition to his effort to close the prison for terrorism suspects and enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, a key 2008 campaign promise. It came on the day he kicked off his campaign for re-election in 2012.

James Carafano, a foreign policy expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, said a military trial for the five men was "the only rational course of action" and Obama was unlikely to be hurt politically by the decision.

"The (U.S.) public basically just ignores the issue these days. Even overseas, Europeans who were so critical before of Guantanamo have really gone to sleep on the issue," he said.

Obama has called the Guantanamo Bay facility, set up by his predecessor President George W. Bush, a recruiting symbol for anti-American groups and said allegations of prisoner mistreatment there had tarnished America's reputation.

He promised to close the prison by the end of his first year in office, but that deadline passed with no action as the administration confronted the hard reality of finding countries willing to accept custody of the inmates.

The prison still holds 172 people, down from 245 when Obama took office in January 2009.

 

DECISION WELCOMED

The decision to try the five men before military commissions was praised in New York and Washington. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the cost of holding and securing the trials in Manhattan would have been near "a billion dollars" at a time of tight budgets.

Chuck Schumer, a Democratic senator for New York, called it "the final nail in the coffin of that wrong-headed idea."

Julie Menin, who spearheaded opposition to the trials in New York, said the decision was a "victory for lower Manhattan and my community."

But others, like Valerie Lucznikowska, said the use of military commissions was "just not satisfying to people who want real justice." The 72-year-old New Yorker, whose nephew died in the World Trade Center attack, said the military commissions could be viewed by the world as "kangaroo courts."

Holder said he still believed the 9/11 suspects would best be prosecuted in U.S. civilian courts, despite strong congressional opposition.

Captain John Murphy, the chief prosecutor of the office of military commissions, said his office would swear charges in the near future against the five suspects for their alleged roles in the 2001 attacks.

In addition to Mohammed, an al Qaeda leader captured in Pakistan in 2003, and bin Attash, the accused co-conspirators are Ramzi Binalshibh, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali and Mustafa Ahmed al Hawsawi.

 

(Reporting by Phil Stewart, James Vicini, Jeremy Pelofsky, Matt Spetalnick and Susan Cornwell in Washington and Basil Katz in New York; writing by David Alexander; Editing by Sandra Maler and Todd Eastham)

    Sept. 11 suspects to be tried at Guantanamo Bay, R, 4.4.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/04/us-usa-guatanamo-mohammed-idUSTRE7333RI20110404

Saudi Man Accused in Bomb Plot to Be Arraigned

March 28, 2011
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

LUBBOCK, Texas (AP) — A Texas college student from Saudi Arabia who is accused of buying chemicals and equipment to build a weapon of mass destruction is set to be arraigned.

The arraignment for Khalid Ali-M Aldawsari (al-daw-SAW'-ree) is scheduled for Monday morning at the federal courthouse in Lubbock. He faces up to life in prison if he's convicted of attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction.

Court documents allege he had hatched plans to attack various U.S. targets, including New York City and former President George W. Bush's Dallas home.

Aldawsari was arrested Feb. 23. Court records indicate that federal agents traced his online purchases, discovered extremist online posts he made and secretly searched his apartment, computer and e-mail accounts and read his diary.

    Saudi Man Accused in Bomb Plot to Be Arraigned, NYT, 28.3.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/03/28/us/AP-US-Terror-Bomb-Plot.html

A Right Without a Remedy

February 28, 2011
The New York Times

In a landmark case three years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, who are not American citizens have “the constitutional privilege of habeas corpus.” It gives them the right to have a federal judge decide promptly whether their detention is illegal and, if so, order their release because the United States controls the place they are held. The 5-to-4 decision in what is known as the Boumediene case was a repudiation of the Bush strategy of imprisoning the detainees outside American territory so the Constitution would not apply. Or so many thought.

The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, the only circuit where detainees can challenge their detention, has dramatically restricted the Boumediene ruling. In its hands, habeas is no longer a remedy for the problem the Boumediene majority called “arbitrary and unlawful restraint.”

The sole recourse is for the Supreme Court, once again, to say what the Constitution requires judges to do in habeas cases. Fortunately, a case is at hand for the justices to do so in an appeal from the District of Columbia Circuit. In the Kiyemba case recently, five Uighur, or Chinese Muslim, detainees filed a brief with the Supreme Court in support of their petition for it to restore the power of federal trial judges to free them.

This appeal in no way threatens national security. The government has admitted that the Uighurs are not enemies, let alone enemy combatants. Refugees from China, they were mistakenly imprisoned during the Afghanistan war and sent to Guantánamo Bay in 2002. Other Uighurs accepted release to the island of Palau, 500 miles from the Philippines, but these five declined the offer because they have no connection to the island.

The appeal is about judicial power and the duty to use it. In 2008, a District of Columbia trial judge ordered the government to bring the Uighurs to his court to resolve how they should be released. The appeals court ruled that the judge lacked authority to free them in the United States because the “political branches” have “exclusive power” to decide which non-Americans can enter this country.

Judge Raymond Randolph of the District of Columbia Circuit wrote the key Kiyemba opinion. The Uighurs’ brief says, “The constant in this case is the court of appeals’ refusal to apply, or even acknowledge,” the Boumediene ruling.

Judge Randolph also wrote the opinion for the District of Columbia Circuit that the Supreme Court overturned in Boumediene. In a speech called “The Guantanamo Mess” last fall, he said that the justices were wrong to do so and all but expressed contempt for the holding. As the basis for the speech’s title, he compared the justices who reached it to characters in “The Great Gatsby.” “They were careless people,” he read. “They smashed things up ... and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

In Kiyemba and related cases, however, it is Judge Randolph and others on the District of Columbia Circuit who are making the mess. Respected lawyers say they are subverting the Supreme Court and American justice. Of 140 challenging their detentionsin the face of this hostility, dozens who should have been freed will likely remain in prison.

Alexander Hamilton called “arbitrary imprisonments” by the executive “the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny.” In Boumediene, Justice Anthony Kennedy stressed that habeas is less about detainees’ rights, important as they are, than about the vital judicial power to check undue use of executive power.

The appellate court has all but nullified that view of judicial power and responsibility backed by Justice Kennedy and the court majority. The Supreme Court should remind the appellate court which one leads the federal judicial system and which has a solemn duty to follow.

    A Right Without a Remedy, NYT, 28.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/01/opinion/01tue1.html

Saudi Student to Be Arraigned in Bomb Plot

February 25, 2011
The New York Times
By CHARLIE SAVAGE and SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON — A 20-year-old Saudi college student was scheduled to be arraigned in Texas on Friday morning for what federal officials said was a plot to carry out terrorist attacks inside the United States.

The student, Khalid Aldawsari, who wrote in his journal that he sought a student visa three years ago so he could carry out terrorist attacks, will be charged with the attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction, officials said.

By the time Mr. Aldawsari, a community college student in Lubbock, Tex., came to the attention of the authorities this month, he had obtained two of the three chemicals needed for a bomb and was researching potential targets — including the Dallas residence of former President George W. Bush, the homes of three former military guards at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and dams in Colorado and California, an F.B.I. affidavit said.

Mr. Aldawsari’s journal, which says “it is time for jihad,” and his e-mail account also contained at least two semicryptic references to New York — a plan to spend a week there as part of a to-do list that culminated in leaving car bombs in unidentified places during rush hour and a link to a Web site of feeds from the city’s traffic cameras, the F.B.I. complaint said.

The New York City police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, said the department had been following the case from the beginning, adding that the plan “sure gives us cause for concern, but we are not surprised — New York is at the top of the terrorist target list.” A law enforcement official said Mr. Aldawsari had visited the city, but gave no details.

A North Carolina chemical supply company reported Mr. Aldawsari to the Federal Bureau of Investigation on Feb. 1, citing a suspicious order, the complaint said. Officials said that set off a fast-moving investigation involving hundreds of agents, prosecutors and analysts. “Yesterday’s arrest demonstrates the need for and the importance of vigilance and the willingness of private individuals and companies to ask questions and contact the authorities when confronted with suspicious activities,” said James T. Jacks, United States attorney for the Northern District of Texas, said Thursday.

Federal officials declined to discuss whether Mr. Aldawsari’s student visa application raised any red flags. But Representative Lamar Smith, the Texas Republican who leads the Judiciary Committee, condemned the immigration system for allowing him to enter the country — comparing him to the hijackers in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, most of whom were Saudis with valid visas. “Until we crack down on our immigration laws that allow terrorists to enter the U.S., history will continue to repeat itself,” Mr. Smith said.

The complaint says that Mr. Aldawsari complied with immigration rules by notifying the authorities each time he transferred to a different school.

Nail al-Jubeir, a Saudi Embassy spokesman, said more than 30,000 Saudi students were in the United States and he knew of no other Saudi student arrested here on terrorism charges since 2001. “We were informed about the arrest, and we’re working closely with U.S. authorities,” he said.

The complaint suggests that investigators have so far found no conspirators and no links to terrorist organizations, though his Facebook page listed several groups opposed to the Saudi monarchy. The F.B.I. document says he wrote in his journal that he wanted to found a terrorist group under the Qaeda umbrella to carry out attacks in the United States.

“I excelled in my studies in high school in order to take advantage of an opportunity for a scholarship to America,” investigators said he wrote in Arabic. “And now, after mastering the English language, learning how to build explosives, and continuous planning to target the infidel Americans, it is time for Jihad.”

Mr. Aldawsari came to the United States in September 2008. He studied English at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, and transferred in August 2009 to Texas Tech University in Lubbock, and then to a nearby campus of South Plains College last month.

Mr. Aldawsari led a solitary life at Texas Tech, rarely speaking to other students, said three former roommates who requested anonymity because they feared association with him would hurt their careers. They said Mr. Aldawsari lived with them for a year while he studied chemistry.

He kept his food separate in a small refrigerator in his room and kept his room locked when he was out. He would often bang on the walls of his room in anger or frustration.

“He was just in his own bubble,” said one 20-year-old roommate from Dallas.

He could often be heard talking loudly on the telephone in Arabic in the mornings, and in the afternoon he streamed Arabic television stations at a high volume.

He was not outwardly religious, the roommates said.

A Facebook page for Mr. Aldawsari says he is from Al Kharj, in central Saudi Arabia, and lists interests ranging from “STOP Israel’s War Crimes in Gaza” and several Saudi dissident groups to Agatha Christie and zombies.

Mr. Aldawsari wrote in his journal that he was inspired by Osama bin Laden’s speeches and that the 9/11 attacks had produced a “big change” in his thinking, the authorities said. The F.B.I. also said he wrote a blog, FromFarAway90, where posts in Arabic refer to war and distress in Palestine, infidels in the Islamic world and martyrdom.

The handwritten journal was also said to list “important steps,” including obtaining a forged United States birth certificate; applying for a passport and driver’s license; traveling to New York for a week; and renting cars in disguise, putting bombs with remote detonators in them and taking them to various places during rush hour.

Mr. Aldawsari was reported to the authorities twice this month. On Feb. 1, Carolina Biological Supply in Burlington, N.C., told the F.B.I. that he had tried to place a $435 order for phenol on its Web site the day before.

Phenol is explosive when mixed with sulfuric and nitric acids. Mr. Aldawsari had already managed to buy three gallons of sulfuric acid and about eight gallons of nitric acid at other places in December, the affidavit said.

Because Carolina Biological Supply would not ship phenol to a residential address, Mr. Aldawsari had to have his order sent to a freight firm in Lubbock. But the firm returned the shipment to North Carolina, and then reported it to the Lubbock police.

Later, after the supply firm, at the F.B.I.’s request, pressed Mr. Aldawsari to explain why he wanted the chemical, he angrily canceled the order. On Feb. 12, the affidavit says, he e-mailed himself procedures for extracting phenol from aspirin.

The authorities said he sent additional e-mails to himself listing “nice targets” and instructions for converting a cellphone into a detonator. One e-mail, titled “Tyrant’s House,” contained Mr. Bush’s address in Dallas.

Mr. Aldawsari also searched on the Internet for rules on backpacks in Dallas nightclubs and looked at pictures of dolls, the F.B.I. said, suggesting that he may have considered nightclub attacks or concealing explosives.

The search of his apartment, the affidavit said, also found chemical lab equipment, a gas mask, a hazardous materials suit and Christmas lighting it said was suitable for bomb making.


Al Baker contributed reporting from New York, and James C. McKinley Jr. from Lubbock, Tex.

    Saudi Student to Be Arraigned in Bomb Plot, NYT, 25.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/26/us/26texas.html

U.S. Arrests Saudi Student in Bomb Plot

February 24, 2011
The New York Times
By CHARLIE SAVAGE

WASHINGTON — A 20-year-old Saudi Arabian student living in Texas has been arrested by federal agents, who charged him with planning to build bombs for terror attacks in the United States, the Justice Department announced Thursday.

According to an affidavit filed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the student, Khalid Ali-M Aldawsari, indicated in online research and in a journal that he was considering attacking the Dallas residence of former President George W. Bush as well as hydroelectric dams, nuclear power plants, nightclubs and the homes of soldiers who were formerly stationed at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Mr. Aldawsari, a business major at South Plains College in Lubbock, Tex., is in the United States legally on a student visa, the bureau said. He came to the government’s attention on Feb. 1, when a North Carolina supply company reported that he had tried to order five liters of a chemical that can be used to make an explosive.

A subsequent investigation found that he had already obtained large supplies of the other two chemicals needed for the explosive compound — trinitrophenol or TNP — in December, court documents said.

“Aldawsari purchased ingredients to construct an explosive device and was actively researching potential targets in the United States,” said David Kris, the assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s national security division. “Thanks to the efforts of many agents, analysts and prosecutors, this plot was thwarted before it could advance further.”

There was no indication on Thursday that investigators had found links between Mr. Aldawsari and Al Qaeda or some other foreign militant group. According to the affidavit, he wrote in his journal that he wanted to found a new terrorist group modeled after Al Qaeda, which he would lead, and he indicated that he had been methodically planning for years to commit a terrorist attack.

“I excelled in my studies in high school in order to take advantage of an opportunity for a scholarship to America” that was offered by the Saudi Arabian government, investigators said he wrote. “And now, after mastering the English language, learning how to build explosives, and continuous planning to target the infidel Americans, it is time for Jihad.”

The journal was also said to list “important steps” toward his goal, including obtaining a forged United States birth certificate, applying for a passport and driver’s license, renting cars online, putting bombs in them and taking them to various sites during rush hours, and then leaving the city for a “safe place.”

The affidavit says that in his journal, Mr. Aldawsari said he was inspired by the speeches of Osama Bin Laden and wrote that the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, had produced a “big change” in his thinking. It also contends that he was the writer of a blog called FromFarAway90, published in a mix of English and Arabic.

The Arabic posts on that blog speak at times about war and distress in Palestine and other Muslim lands and about driving infidels out of the Islamic world, and they ask that Allah make the writer a martyr. It is not clear whether Mr. Aldawsari wrote the posts or copied material from elsewhere.

The affidavit also said Mr. Aldawsari, using several e-mail accounts, often sent research to himself about potential targets and explosives. The authorities retrieved several e-mails about manufacturing TNP and other explosives and about how to convert a cellphone into a remote detonator.

Other e-mails — with subject lines like “Nice targets” — contained the names and addresses of three Americans who had been stationed at Abu Ghraib during their military service in Iraq and the locations of 12 reservoirs and dams in Colorado and California. An e-mail entitled “Tyrant’s House” listed the address for Mr. Bush’s house in Dallas.

Mr. Aldawsari also made “numerous Internet searches” related to realistic-looking baby dolls and strollers and viewed photographs of altered dolls, which the F.B.I. said “could indicate” that he was considering concealing explosives in such a doll.

The search of his apartment, the affidavit said, also found flasks and chemical lab equipment, a gas mask, a protective suit and Christmas light wiring that it said was suitable for producing a bomb.

    U.S. Arrests Saudi Student in Bomb Plot, NYT, 24.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/25/us/25terror.html

A Patriot Act Surprise

February 12, 2011
The New York Times

Republicans have a long history of favoring small government except when it comes to surveillance and security, at which point civil liberties take a back seat. Last week, however, 26 Republicans in the House demonstrated a remarkable consistency by joining 122 Democrats to prevent the extension of three questionable provisions of the Patriot Act, the post-9/11 law created during the Bush administration.

The vote splashed some cold water on the House Republican leadership, which had been so confident that it raised the extension under fast-track rules that require a two-thirds majority. The leadership is planning to bring it back this week under the normal rules. It is almost certain to pass and be sent to the Senate.

Nonetheless, the concerns that briefly brought together liberals, Tea Party members and longtime centrists from both parties should send a message to the White House and the Senate. The provisions of the Patriot Act should be carefully re-examined before being hastily reauthorized year after year. The Tea Party-backed congressman Justin Amash of Michigan was right to say that some raise serious concerns about violating the ban on unreasonable searches and seizures.

Three provisions in the act are set to expire on Feb. 28, and would be renewed under the House bill, supported by the Obama administration, through December.

One would allow a roving wiretap on a terror suspect to monitor his conversations as he moves from phone to phone. That can be a useful tool, but the authorization is so broad that the government does not even have to specify the suspect’s name to get a warrant. The failure to provide a more narrow identification of the suspect is too lax and could lead to abuse.

Another expiring provision has long raised serious civil liberties concerns, allowing the government to examine library and bookstore records of suspects, along with hard drives, tax documents and gun records. Investigators are not required to show probable cause that the material is related to a terrorist investigation.

The third provision, allowing surveillance of “lone wolf” suspects who may not be tied to recognized terror organizations, is also overly broad but has never been used. Rather than renew it without debate, the government should explain whether it is really necessary.

The extensions will probably pass the House this week — though leaders do not plan to give anyone a chance to amend them — and go to the Senate, which should provide another opportunity for reconsideration. Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the Judiciary Committee chairman, has introduced a bill that would add several safeguards to the act, most notably the phasing out of “national security letters,” which the F.B.I. has used to obtain evidence without a court order. These letters have been subject to widespread misuse and have never received proper oversight.

Unfortunately, the same bill that would bring the letters under control would extend the three expiring provisions in the Patriot Act through 2013. It is a much better measure, however, than a bill by Senator Dianne Feinstein that would extend the provisions for three more years without the new safeguards, or one by Senator Mitch McConnell that would make the three provisions permanent. Congress should not miss an opportunity to wield some oversight on this issue and determine whether the government could achieve its goals with less sweeping surveillance powers.

    A Patriot Act Surprise, NYT, 12.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/opinion/13sun1.html

Muslims to Be Congressional Hearings’ Main Focus

February 7, 2011
The New York Times
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

WASHINGTON — The new chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee said Monday that he planned to call mostly Muslim and Arab witnesses to testify in hearings next month on the threat of homegrown Islamic terrorism.

Representative Peter T. King, Republican of New York, said he would rely on Muslims to make his case that American Muslim leaders have failed to cooperate with law enforcement officials in the effort to disrupt terrorist plots — a claim that was rebutted in recent reports by counterterrorism experts and in a forum on Capitol Hill on Monday.

“I believe it will have more of an impact on the American people if they see people who are of the Muslim faith and Arab descent testifying,” Mr. King said.

The hearings, which Mr. King said would start the week of March 7, have provoked an uproar from both the left and the right. The left has accused Mr. King of embarking on a witch hunt. The right has accused him of capitulation for calling Muslims like Representative Keith Ellison, Democrat of Minnesota, to testify while denying a platform to popular critics of Islamic extremism like Steven Emerson, Frank Gaffney, Daniel Pipes and Robert Spencer.

As the hearings approach, the reaction from Muslim groups — initially outraged — has evolved into efforts to get Mr. King to enlarge the scope of the hearings beyond Muslims. They want to use the forum to reinforce the notion that the potential for terrorist violence among American Muslims is very marginal and very isolated.

“Our heads aren’t in the sand,” Alejandro J. Beutel, the government and policy analyst for the Muslim Public Affairs Council, a national advocacy group, said at a forum his group sponsored on Monday on Capitol Hill. “The threat clearly exists, but I also want to put it in perspective. The threat exists, but it is not a pandemic.”

Fifty-one Muslim, civil rights and interfaith groups sent a letter last week to Speaker John A. Boehner, Republican of Ohio, and the House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, protesting Mr. King’s hearings as modern-day McCarthyism. They said that if Congress was going to investigate violent extremism, it should investigate extremists of all kinds and not just Muslims.

“Singling out a group of Americans for government scrutiny based on their faith is divisive and wrong,” said the letter, which was led by Muslim Advocates, a legal and policy organization in San Francisco, and was signed by non-Muslim groups including Amnesty International USA, the Interfaith Alliance and the Japanese American Citizens League.

Mr. Ellison said that while he would participate, “I’m going to make it clear that I challenge the premise of the hearings.

“If you put every single Muslim in the U.S. in jail, it wouldn’t have stopped Jared Loughner,” Mr. Ellison said, referring to the man accused of opening fire on an Arizona congresswoman and her constituents. “It wouldn’t have stopped the young man who killed his classmates at Virginia Tech. It wouldn’t have stopped the bombing in Oklahoma City or the man who killed a guard at the Holocaust Museum in Washington.”

But Mr. King dismissed this line of criticism, saying: “I totally reject that. That, to me, is political correctness at its worst. If we included these other violent events in the hearings, we’d be sending the false signal that we think there’s a security threat equivalency between Al Qaeda and the neo-Nazi movement, or Al Qaeda and gun groups. There is none.”

Mr. King added, “I’m not going to dilute the hearings by including other extremists.”

In fact, he said he planned to hold three or four more hearings this year on topics like the radicalization of Muslims in prisons and Saudi financing for American mosques.

He said the only witness he had settled on for certain of the three he would call in the first hearing was Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, a doctor from Arizona and an American military veteran who has little following among Muslims but has become a favorite of conservatives for his portrayal of American Muslim leaders as radical Islamists.

Mr. King said he had changed his mind about summoning as a witness Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born feminist critic of Islam who became a member of Parliament in the Netherlands and then fled because of threats on her life.

The hearings, Mr. King said, would be organized into panels of witnesses, one of them to include members of Congress. He said Mr. Ellison would serve as a witness on that panel. He said he did not expect to call any of the local law enforcement or counterintelligence experts who he said had told him repeatedly that noncooperation by American Muslims is a “significant issue.” He says they will say these things privately, but not in public.

Some law enforcement experts have challenged Mr. King’s portrayal of widespread noncooperation. At the forum Monday, Sheriff Leroy Baca of Los Angeles County said he had cultivated extensive relationships with Muslim leaders throughout his county. He said that as a member of the Major City Chiefs Association, the Major County Sheriffs Association and the National Sheriffs Association, he had not heard complaints about noncooperation from Muslims.

Two other experts at the forum, Peter Bergen, director of the National Security Studies Program at the New America Foundation, and Roger Cressey, former director for transnational threats at the National Security Council, said the really sophisticated terrorists stop traveling and stop communicating in order to avoid detection. When that happens, they said, law enforcement must rely almost entirely on tips from the Muslim community to catch them.

A report issued last week by an independent research group on national security found that 48 of the 120 Muslims suspected of plotting domestic terrorist attacks since Sept. 11, 2001, were turned in by fellow Muslims, including parents, mosque members and even a Facebook friend. The report was issued by the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security, which is affiliated with Duke and the University of North Carolina.

The report said, “In some communities, Muslim-Americans have been so concerned about extremists in their midst that they have turned in people who turned out to be undercover informants.”

    Muslims to Be Congressional Hearings’ Main Focus, NYT, 7.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/08/us/politics/08muslim.html

U.S. Prepares to Lift Ban on Guantánamo Cases

January 19, 2011
The New York Times
By CHARLIE SAVAGE

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is preparing to increase the use of military commissions to prosecute Guantánamo detainees, an acknowledgment that the prison in Cuba remains open for business after Congress imposed steep new impediments to closing the facility.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates is expected to soon lift an order blocking the initiation of new cases against detainees, which he imposed on the day of President Obama’s inauguration. That would clear the way for tribunal officials, for the first time under the Obama administration, to initiate new charges against detainees.

Charges would probably then come within weeks against one or more detainees who have already been designated by the Justice Department for prosecution before a military commission, including Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Saudi accused of planning the 2000 bombing of the American destroyer Cole in Yemen; Ahmed al-Darbi, a Saudi accused of plotting, in an operation that never came to fruition, to attack oil tankers in the Straits of Hormuz; and Obaydullah, an Afghan accused of concealing bombs.

Preparations for the tribunal trials — including the circulation of new draft regulations for conducting them — were described by several administration officials familiar with the discussions. A spokeswoman for the military commissions system declined to comment.

With the political winds now against more civilian prosecutions of Guantánamo detainees, the plans to press forward with additional commission trials may foreshadow the fates of many of the more than 30 remaining detainees who have been designated for eventual prosecution: trials in Cuba for war crimes before a panel of military officers.

The administration is also preparing an executive order to create a parole board-like system for periodically reviewing the cases of the nearly 50 detainees who would be held without trial.

Any charging of Mr. Nashiri would be particularly significant because the official who oversees the commissions, retired Vice Adm. Bruce MacDonald of the Navy, may allow prosecutors to seek the death penalty against him — which would set up the first capital trial in the tribunal system. The Cole bombing killed 17 sailors.

Mr. Nashiri’s case would also raise unresolved legal questions about jurisdiction and rules of evidence in tribunals. And it would attract global attention because he was previously held in secret Central Intelligence Agency prisons and is one of three detainees known to have been subjected to the drowning technique known as waterboarding.

Lt. Cmdr. Stephen Reyes of the Navy, a military lawyer assigned to defend Mr. Nashiri, declined to comment on any movement in the case. But he noted that two of Mr. Nashiri’s alleged co-conspirators were indicted in federal civilian court in 2003, and he made clear that the defense would highlight Mr. Nashiri’s treatment in C.I.A. custody.

“Nashiri is being prosecuted at the commissions because of the torture issue,” Mr. Reyes said. “Otherwise he would be indicted in New York along with his alleged co-conspirators.”

As a candidate, President Obama criticized the Bush administration’s tribunals. But after taking office, he backed a system in which some cases would tried by revamped military tribunals while others would go before civilian juries. He also pressed to close the Guantánamo prison.

But last month, Congress made it much harder to move Guantánamo detainees into the United States, even for trials in federal civilian courthouses. That essentially shut the door for now on the administration’s proposal to transfer inmates to a prison in Illinois and its desire to prosecute some of them in regular court.

More than a year ago, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. designated Mr. Nashiri, Mr. Darbi and Mr. Obaydullah for trial in a military commission. But they have lingered in limbo amid administration indecision about broader terrorism prosecution policies. The paralysis followed a backlash against Mr. Holder’s proposal to prosecute suspected conspirators in the Sept. 11 attacks in a Manhattan federal courthouse.

Three other detainees were also approved for tribunals by Mr. Holder in 2009. Those cases have progressed — two pleaded guilty last year, and the third is scheduled for trial at Guantánamo next month. But the charges in those cases were left over from the Bush administration.

While Mr. Nashiri and Mr. Darbi had also been charged in tribunals in the Bush administration, their cases were later dropped and must be started over.

The process of charging Mr. Obaydullah had started under the Bush administration, but it was frozen before completion.

Mr. Nashiri would be the first so-called high-value detainee — a senior terrorism suspect who was held for a time in secret C.I.A. prisons and subjected to what the Bush administration called “enhanced interrogation techniques” — to undergo trial before a tribunal.

Another former such detainee, Ahmed Ghailani, was convicted in federal civilian court for playing a role in the 1998 Africa embassy bombings.

While Mr. Ghailani faces between 20 years and life in prison, many Republicans have pointed to his acquittal on 284 related charges — and a judge’s decision to exclude an important witness because investigators learned about the man during Mr. Ghailani’s C.I.A. interrogation — to argue that prosecuting terrorism cases in federal court is too risky.

Mr. Nashiri’s treatment was apparently more extreme than Mr. Ghailani’s. The C.I.A. later destroyed videotapes of some waterboarding sessions.

Moreover, the C.I.A. inspector general called Mr. Nashiri the “most significant” case of a detainee who was brutalized in ways that went beyond the Bush administration’s approved tactics — including being threatened with a power drill. Last year, Polish prosecutors investigating a now-closed C.I.A. prison granted Mr. Nashiri “victim status.”

An effort to prosecute Mr. Nashiri could also put a sharp focus on one of the crucial differences between federal civilian court and military commissions: the admissibility of hearsay evidence — statements and documents collected outside of court.

Much of the evidence against Mr. Nashiri consists of witness interviews and documents gathered by the F.B.I. in Yemen after the bombing. Prosecutors may call the F.B.I. agents as witnesses to describe what they learned during their investigation — hearsay that would be admissible under tribunal rules, but not in federal court.

It remains unclear whether the Supreme Court would uphold a tribunal conviction that relied on such evidence.

Mr. Nashiri’s case would also test another legal proposition: whether a state of war existed between the United States and Al Qaeda at the time of the Cole bombing — before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the authorization by Congress to use military force against their perpetrators.

The United States initially handled the Cole attack as a peacetime terrorism crime, but the government now contends that a state of armed conflict had legally existed since 1996, when Osama bin Laden declared war against the United States.

The question is important because military commissions for war crimes are generally understood to have jurisdiction only over acts that took place during hostilities.

    U.S. Prepares to Lift Ban on Guantánamo Cases, NYT, 19.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/20/us/20trials.html

Bomb Is Found in Backpack Before March Honoring King

January 18, 2011
The New York Times
By WILLIAM YARDLEY

SEATTLE — A suspicious backpack found Monday along the route of a march honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in Spokane, Wash., contained a live bomb that was “likely capable of inflicting multiple casualties,” federal investigators said Tuesday.

The package, found before the morning march, prompted law enforcement to ask march officials to change their route and several businesses to evacuate as investigators sent in bomb-smelling dogs, a robot and specially trained officers.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation said the bomb was neutralized at the scene. It was found on a bench at North Washington Street and West Main Avenue.

“We’re certainly approaching it as a potential domestic terrorism event at this point,” said Frank Harrill, the F.B.I.’s supervisory senior resident agent in Spokane.

“Whether the motive was racial or an individual was being targeted, it’s too soon to say,” he said.

The device, partially concealed by clothing in a Swiss Army-brand backpack, was reported to police about 9:25 a.m. by a contract worker whose duties included helping to maintain a nearby parking lot, Mr. Harrill said. The worker apparently handled the bag and took photographs of it and sent the photographs to the police, Mr. Harrill said.

The F.B.I. is offering a $20,000 reward for information about the identity of anyone seen with the backpack. The agency is also seeking photographs or video taken in the area that morning.

The Rev. Percy Watkins, known as Happy, who read Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech at a gathering before the march that included city officials, American Indian leaders and others, said most people in the march did not know about the bomb threat, or that the march had been rerouted, until after the march.

    Bomb Is Found in Backpack Before March Honoring King, NYT, 18.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/19/us/19bomb.html

Mourning a Woman

Who Shared a 9/11 Miracle

January 16, 2011
The New York Times
By AL BAKER

The story of her improbable rescue by New York City firefighters was among the most enduring to emanate from the horror of Sept. 11, 2001. It was told and retold: how a weary woman, Josephine Harris, was coaxed and carried to safety by six men from Ladder Company 6 in Chinatown who had rushed to the World Trade Center that morning.

It was a feat of timing, engineering and plain luck that when the rush of wind and noise came and the north tower fell away, the firefighters and Ms. Harris were not crushed in a sea of concrete, dust and steel as they were spread along the stairwell between the fourth and first floors. Rather, the building fell around them.

As Deputy Chief John A. Jonas explained, unlike the south tower, which leaned and toppled over, “ours peeled away like a banana.”

“And we were the banana,” he added. “We were at the bottom.”

It was so happy a story that the only disagreement seemed to arise over who had saved whom. Had the firefighters, led by Chief Jonas — he was then a captain — survived because they paused to help Ms. Harris, a bookkeeper for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, as they rushed to leave the north tower? Or had Ms. Harris, whose legs were weakened by fatigue, been lucky enough to live because of them?

Chief Jonas spoke on Saturday. On Wednesday, members of the Fire Department — this time, the Emergency Medical Service — again rushed to help Ms. Harris, after being summoned to her apartment on Bushwick Avenue in Brooklyn by a 911 call at 2:20 a.m.

Ms. Harris, 69, was unconscious when they arrived, and they had to force open the door. “They did CPR, and worked on her for some time,” a Fire Department official said. But she was pronounced dead, apparently after a heart attack.

News of Ms. Harris’s death arrived at Ladder 6 by a telephone call from her sister, Thelma Johnson.

“I kind of had the same feeling as if a relative had died,” Chief Jonas said. “Right away you start thinking about all the things you’d gone through. It was a cloak of sadness, and it is still there. With the 10-year anniversary coming up, it’s going to be a little different without her.”

“You cannot say that something that happened to you is a miracle,” Chief Jonas said. “But we had the courage to do what we did, and you can say that if she was not there for us to save her, we probably would not have made it.”

“We had a very unique, shared experience that not many people on this earth can say they’ve had,” he added. “We survived that terrible day together, and we felt close to her and tried to include her in as many things as we could.”

That shared experience unfolded when Ladder 6 arrived at the trade center. The firefighters ran into the lobby of 1 World Trade Center minutes before a plane hit the south tower. They passed two bodies, entered Stairway B and began climbing — each man carrying 100 pounds of gear.

At one point they reversed course and headed down. At the 14th or 15th floor they encountered Ms. Harris. She had been walking down from the 73rd floor but was exhausted.

“We looked at her, and Tommy Falco looked at me and said, ‘Hey, Cap, what do you want to do with her?’ ” Chief Jonas said. “And I said, ‘We cannot leave her behind.’ So, we took her with us, though it really did put us in harm’s way. It really was the right thing to do, to take her, and I am so glad we did it.”

Firefighter Bill Butler had her arm around his shoulders. They moved as fast as possible, but Ms. Harris collapsed around the fourth floor “and was yelling at us to leave her,” Chief Jonas said.

“We weren’t going to leave her,” he said.

Ms. Harris first went to the firehouse, on Canal Street, about two weeks after Sept. 11, to meet the firefighters. They gave her a jacket with the words “Guardian Angel” embroidered on it. In the days that followed, there were many requests for interviews, to retell the story of what they had endured.

The account was chronicled in the book “102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers,” by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn, reporters for The New York Times. Its narrative of trauma, fate and redemption was replayed on the fifth anniversary of the attack, in a History Channel documentary, “The Miracle of Stairway B.”

So unique was the story of Ms. Harris and the six men — Firefighters Matt Komorowski, Mike Meldrum and Sal D’Agostino as well as Firefighters Butler and Falco and Captain Jonas — that Fire Commissioner Salvatore J. Cassano said last week: “On a day that will always be recalled for its inconceivable devastation and unimaginable loss, the story of Josephine and the firefighters of Ladder 6 was nothing short of miraculous. One hundred floors of a high-rise building came down on them, and, huddled together, they managed to survive.”

“She was happy when she was around us,” Chief Jonas said. “She would talk to the wives. She was very interested in what the kids were doing. She was a very reserved — really a study in dignity — type of woman.”

She last appeared with the firefighters in a show on the Oprah Winfrey Network last week.

Ms. Johnson said that her sister had briefly returned to work for the Port Authority but found it difficult because of an injury sustained on Sept. 11. She stopped working after her job was moved to Newark, Ms. Johnson added.

Without a job, Ms. Harris, a widow, eked out a living on disability assistance and became withdrawn, from neighbors and even relatives. Some neighbors in her building, where she had lived for decades, did not even know her apartment was occupied. Another neighbor, however, said Ms. Harris had attended a tenant meeting last week and complained of a fever and loss of appetite. “She never let you know what was going on in her world,” Ms. Johnson said.

Like that day when she asked the firefighters to go on without her, Ms. Harris seemed to prefer to shoulder her own burdens. “Do the most you can for yourself, by yourself — that’s how she was,” her sister said.

“I only found out about her health problems when I went into her apartment after she passed away and looked through her papers,” Ms. Johnson said. “I come to find out that she was in and out of the hospital.”

Along with medical documents, Ms. Johnson found unpaid utility bills and paperwork that showed Ms. Harris had filed for bankruptcy. Arrangements for her funeral were incomplete on Sunday, and, according to the city medical examiner, her body remained unclaimed at the morgue.

Mosi Secret and Mitchell Trinka contributed reporting.

    Mourning a Woman Who Shared a 9/11 Miracle, NYT, 16.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/17/nyregion/17harris.html

Obama May Bypass Guantánamo Rules,

Aides Say

January 3, 2011
The New York Times
By CHARLIE SAVAGE

WASHINGTON — President Obama’s legal advisers, confronting the prospect of new restrictions on the transfer of Guantánamo detainees, are debating whether to recommend that he issue a signing statement asserting that his executive powers would allow him to bypass the restrictions, according to several officials.

If Mr. Obama were to issue such a statement, it could represent a more aggressive use of unilateral executive powers than what he exerted in his first two years in office. The issue has arisen as the Republican Party takes control of the House.

Last month, while still under Democratic control, Congress included the detainee transfer restrictions — which would make it harder for the administration to achieve its goal of closing the prison at the military base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba — in a major defense bill it sent to Mr. Obama. He could act on the measure by the end of the week.

One provision bars the military from using its funds to transfer detainees to the United States, making it harder to prosecute them in federal court. Another prohibits the transfer of detainees to any other country unless the defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, certifies that the country has met a strict set of security conditions.

The deliberations over whether Mr. Obama should challenge those provisions were reported Monday by ProPublica, an investigative journalism site, and were confirmed by several officials familiar with the discussions.

Before the vote on the bill last month, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. told Congress that the restrictions would be “an extreme and risky encroachment on the authority of the executive branch.” But lawmakers included them in the final legislation anyway, and Mr. Obama is considered unlikely to veto the measure because it authorizes billions of dollars for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

One option on the table, according to officials familiar with the deliberations, is for Mr. Obama to sign the bill into law but declare his opposition to the detainee transfer restrictions — which expire Sept. 30, at the end of the current fiscal year — by simply arguing that they are bad policy.

But the administration is also considering whether he should go further by issuing a signing statement — a formal document recording a president’s interpretation of a new law for the rest of the executive branch to follow — asserting that he has the constitutional power to disregard the restrictions.

Under the latter approach, the president would assert that as the head of the executive branch and commander in chief, his prosecutorial discretion and wartime powers would allow him to lawfully bring detainees into the United States for trial or to transfer them to other countries as he sees fit.

It remained unclear whether the administration would actually carry out a detainee transfer despite the restrictions, or whether it would merely assert, as an abstract matter, that Mr. Obama had the authority to do so.

In 2002, under President George W. Bush, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel wrote that Congress has no power to limit the transfer of detainees because “the president has plenary constitutional authority, as the commander in chief, to transfer such individuals who are captured and held outside the United States to the control of another country.” The Bush administration rescinded that memorandum five days before leaving office.

During that era, Mr. Obama and many future members of his legal team criticized the Bush administration as taking too sweeping a view of executive power. They also criticized Mr. Bush for his frequent use of signing statements to claim a constitutional right to override laws.

Mr. Bush attached such statements to about 150 bills during his eight years in office, challenging about 1,200 provisions — around twice the number challenged by all previous presidents combined. Among the most contentious was an assertion that he had the power to lawfully override a statute banning torture.

In 2006, the American Bar Association declared that presidents should veto legislation they view as flawed rather than issue signing statements, which the group portrayed as “contrary to the rule of law and our constitutional separation of powers.” One member of the Obama legal team, Harold Koh, the State Department legal adviser, was a member of a task force that developed that declaration.

But several other future members of the Obama legal team argued at the time that signing statements were lawful and appropriate so long as the president invoked only mainstream legal theories. Mr. Obama adopted the latter approach, pledging greater restraint.

Early in his presidency, he issued several signing statements that made relatively uncontroversial challenges. But he has not issued any since June 2009, when lawmakers of both parties expressed outrage over a statement he attached to a bill saying that he could disregard requirements imposed on certain negotiations with international financial institutions.

Obama May Bypass Guantánamo Rules, Aides Say, NYT, 3.1.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/04/us/politics/04gitmo.html