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Al Qaeda-Related and Other Articles,Collected 6/4/12

Table of Contents

1.1. Summary

1.2. US

1.2.1. Security

1.2.1.1. Obama1.2.1.1.1. Secret Kill List Proves a Test of Obama s Principles and Will

1.2.1.1.2. Assessing Obama s Counterterrorism Record1.2.1.1.3. Obama's Counterterrorism Self-Correction1.2.1.2. In Far Northwest, a New Border Focus on Latinos1.2.1.3. West Point Is Divided on a War Doctrine s Fate

1.2.2. Cases1.2.2.1. Militia Leader Takes the Stand in His Own Defense1.2.2.2. A Guilty Plea to Giving Aid to Al Qaeda Since 20071.2.2.3.Justices Reject Appeal Seeking Payments for Ex-Iran Hostages

1.2.3. At Museum on 9/11, Talking Through an Identity Crisis

1.3. Europe1.3.1. Four Convicted in Terror Plot Against Danish Paper1.3.2. U.S. and European Union Agree on Air Cargo Security1.3.3. 1 Student Is Killed and 5 Are Injured in Bombing at Italian School

1.4. Middle East1.4.1. Assad Condemns Houla Massacre, Blaming Terrorists

1.4.2. Western Nations, Protesting Killings, Expel Syrian Envoys1.4.3. International Pressure on Syria Grows After Killings

1.5. Asia

1.5.1. Pakistan1.5.1.1. Qaeda Deputy Targeted in Drone Strike in Pakistan1.5.1.2. Frustrations Grow as U.S. and Pakistan Fail to Mend Ties

1.5.2. Iran1.5.2.1. Obama Order Sped Up Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran1.5.2.2. Iran Confirms Attack by New Data Virus1.5.3. U.S. Says 2 Slain in Raid Were Qaeda

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1.5.4. In Timbuktu, Harsh Change Under Islamists1.5.5. China Warns West Against Using Force in Syria

1.6. Africa1.6.1. Bomber Strikes Nigerian Church, as Attacks on Christians Mount1.6.2. Nigeria: Kidnapped German Killed During Raid on Suspected

Terrorists1.7. New Zealand Signs Partnership Agreement With NATO

1.1. Summary(back)

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1.2. US (back)

1.2.1. Security (back)

1.2.1.1. Obama (back)

1.2.1.1.1. Secret Kill List Proves a Test of Obama s Principles and Will(back)

May 29, 2012

Secret Kill List Proves a Test of Obamas Principles and WillBy JO BECKER and SCOTT SHANEWASHINGTON This was the enemy, served up in the latest chartfrom the intelligence agencies: 15 Qaeda suspects in Yemen withWestern ties. The mug shots and brief biographies resembled a high


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school yearbook layout. Several were Americans. Two were teenagers,including a girl who looked even younger than her 17 years.

President Obama, overseeing the regular Tuesday counterterrorismmeeting of two dozen security officials in the White House SituationRoom, took a moment to study the faces. It was Jan. 19, 2010, theend of a first year in office punctuated by terrorist plots andculminating in a brush with catastrophe over Detroit on ChristmasDay, a reminder that a successful attack could derail his presidency.Yet he faced adversaries without uniforms, often indistinguishablefrom the civilians around them.

How old are these people? he asked, according to two officialspresent. If they are starting to use children, he said of Al Qaeda, weare moving into a whole different phase.

It was not a theoretical question: Mr. Obama has placed himself at thehelm of a top secret nominations process to designate terrorists for

kill or capture, of which the capture part has become largelytheoretical. He had vowed to align the fight against Al Qaeda withAmerican values; the chart, introducing people whose deaths he mightsoon be asked to order, underscored just what a moral and legalconundrum this could be.

Mr. Obama is the liberal law professor who campaigned against theIraq war and torture, and then insisted on approving every new nameon an expanding kill list, poring over terrorist suspects biographieson what one official calls the macabre baseball cards of anunconventional war. When a rare opportunity for a drone strike at a

top terrorist arises but his family is with him it is the presidentwho has reserved to himself the final moral calculation.

He is determined that he will make these decisions about how far andwide these operations will go, said Thomas E. Donilon, his nationalsecurity adviser. His view is that hes responsible for the position ofthe United States in the world. He added, Hes determined to keepthe tether pretty short.

Nothing else in Mr. Obamas first term has baffled liberal supporters

and confounded conservative critics alike as his aggressivecounterterrorism record. His actions have often remained inscrutable,obscured by awkward secrecy rules, polarized political commentaryand the presidents own deep reserve.

In interviews with The New York Times, three dozen of his current andformer advisers described Mr. Obamas evolution since taking on therole, without precedent in presidential history, of personally overseeingthe shadow war with Al Qaeda.

They describe a paradoxical leader who shunned the legislative

deal-making required to close the detention facility at GuantnamoBay in Cuba, but approves lethal action without hand-wringing. Whilehe was adamant about narrowing the fight and improving relationswith the Muslim world, he has followed the metastasizing enemy into


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new and dangerous lands. When he applies his lawyering skills tocounterterrorism, it is usually to enable, not constrain, his ferociouscampaign against Al Qaeda even when it comes to killing anAmerican cleric in Yemen, a decision that Mr. Obama told colleagueswas an easy one.

His first term has seen private warnings from top officials about aWhac-A-Mole approach to counterterrorism; the invention of a newcategory of aerial attack following complaints of careless targeting; andpresidential acquiescence in a formula for counting civilian deaths thatsome officials think is skewed to produce low numbers.

The administrations failure to forge a clear detention policy hascreated the impression among some members of Congress of atake-no-prisoners policy. And Mr. Obamas ambassador to Pakistan,Cameron P. Munter, has complained to colleagues that the C.I.A.sstrikes drive American policy there, saying he didnt realize his mainjob was to kill people, a colleague said.

Beside the president at every step is his counterterrorism adviser,John O. Brennan, who is variously compared by colleagues to a doggedpolice detective, tracking terrorists from his cavelike office in the WhiteHouse basement, or a priest whose blessing has become indispensableto Mr. Obama, echoing the presidents attempt to apply the just wartheories of Christian philosophers to a brutal modern conflict.

But the strikes that have eviscerated Al Qaeda just since April,there have been 14 in Yemen, and 6 in Pakistan have also testedboth mens commitment to the principles they have repeatedly said are

necessary to defeat the enemy in the long term. Drones have replacedGuantnamo as the recruiting tool of choice for militants; in his 2010guilty plea, Faisal Shahzad, who had tried to set off a car bomb inTimes Square, justified targeting civilians by telling the judge, Whenthe drones hit, they dont see children.

Dennis C. Blair, director of national intelligence until he was fired inMay 2010, said that discussions inside the White House of long-termstrategy against Al Qaeda were sidelined by the intense focus onstrikes. The steady refrain in the White House was, This is the only

game in town reminded me of body counts in Vietnam, said Mr.Blair, a retired admiral who began his Navy service during that war.

Mr. Blairs criticism, dismissed by White House officials as personalpique, nonetheless resonates inside the government.

William M. Daley, Mr. Obamas chief of staff in 2011, said thepresident and his advisers understood that they could not keep addingnew names to a kill list, from ever lower on the Qaeda totem pole.What remains unanswered is how much killing will be enough.

One guy gets knocked off, and the guys driver, whos No. 21, becomes20? Mr. Daley said, describing the internal discussion. At what pointare you just filling the bucket with numbers?


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Maintain My Options

A phalanx of retired generals and admirals stood behind Mr. Obamaon the second day of his presidency, providing martial cover as hesigned several executive orders to make good on campaign pledges.Brutal interrogation techniques were banned, he declared. And theprison at Guantnamo Bay would be closed.

What the new president did not say was that the orders contained afew subtle loopholes. They reflected a still unfamiliar Barack Obama, arealist who, unlike some of his fervent supporters, was never carriedaway by his own rhetoric. Instead, he was already putting his lawyerlymind to carving out the maximum amount of maneuvering room tofight terrorism as he saw fit.

It was a pattern that would be seen repeatedly, from his response toRepublican complaints that he wanted to read terrorists their rights, tohis acceptance of the C.I.A.s method for counting civilian casualties in

drone strikes.

The day before the executive orders were issued, the C.I.A.s toplawyer, John A. Rizzo, had called the White House in a panic. Theorder prohibited the agency from operating detention facilities, closingonce and for all the secret overseas black sites where interrogatorshad brutalized terrorist suspects.

The way this is written, you are going to take us out of the renditionbusiness, Mr. Rizzo told Gregory B. Craig, Mr. Obamas White Housecounsel, referring to the much-criticized practice of grabbing a

terrorist suspect abroad and delivering him to another country forinterrogation or trial. The problem, Mr. Rizzo explained, was that theC.I.A. sometimes held such suspects for a day or two while awaiting aflight. The order appeared to outlaw that.

Mr. Craig assured him that the new president had no intention ofending rendition only its abuse, which could lead to Americancomplicity in torture abroad. So a new definition of detention facilitywas inserted, excluding places used to hold people on a short-term,transitory basis. Problem solved and no messy public explanation

damped Mr. Obamas celebration.

Pragmatism over ideology, his campaign national security team hadadvised in a memo in March 2008. It was counsel that only reinforcedthe presidents instincts.

Even before he was sworn in, Mr. Obamas advisers had warned himagainst taking a categorical position on what would be done withGuantnamo detainees. The deft insertion of some wiggle words in thepresidents order showed that the advice was followed.

Some detainees would be transferred to prisons in other countries, orreleased, it said. Some would be prosecuted if feasible incriminal courts. Military commissions, which Mr. Obama hadcriticized, were not mentioned and thus not ruled out.


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As for those who could not be transferred or tried but were judged toodangerous for release? Their disposition would be handled by lawfulmeans, consistent with the national security and foreign policyinterests of the United States and the interests of justice.

A few sharp-eyed observers inside and outside the governmentunderstood what the public did not. Without showing his hand, Mr.Obama had preserved three major policies rendition, militarycommissions and indefinite detention that have been targets ofhuman rights groups since the 2001 terrorist attacks.

But a year later, with Congress trying to force him to try all terrorismsuspects using revamped military commissions, he deployed his legalskills differently to preserve trials in civilian courts.

It was shortly after Dec. 25, 2009, following a close call in which aQaeda-trained operative named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had

boarded a Detroit-bound airliner with a bomb sewn into hisunderwear.

Mr. Obama was taking a drubbing from Republicans over thegovernments decision to read the suspect his rights, a prerequisite forbringing criminal charges against him in civilian court.

The president seems to think that if he gives terrorists the rights ofAmericans, lets them lawyer up and reads them their Miranda rights,we wont be at war, former Vice President Dick Cheney charged.

Sensing vulnerability on both a practical and political level, thepresident summoned his attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., to theWhite House.

F.B.I. agents had questioned Mr. Abdulmutallab for 50 minutes andgained valuable intelligence before giving him the warning. They hadrelied on a 1984 case called New York v. Quarles, in which theSupreme Court ruled that statements made by a suspect in responseto urgent public safety questions the case involved the location of agun could be introduced into evidence even if the suspect had not

been advised of the right to remain silent.

Mr. Obama, who Mr. Holder said misses the legal profession, got into acolloquy with the attorney general. How far, he asked, could Quarlesbe stretched? Mr. Holder felt that in terrorism cases, the court wouldallow indefinite questioning on a fairly broad range of subjects.

Satisfied with the edgy new interpretation, Mr. Obama gave hisblessing, Mr. Holder recalled.

Barack Obama believes in options: Maintain my options, said Jeh

C. Johnson, a campaign adviser and now general counsel of theDefense Department.

They Must All Be Militants


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That same mind-set would be brought to bear as the presidentintensified what would become a withering campaign to useunmanned aircraft to kill Qaeda terrorists.

Just days after taking office, the president got word that the first strikeunder his administration had killed a number of innocent Pakistanis.The president was very sharp on the thing, and said, I want to knowhow this happened, a top White House adviser recounted.

In response to his concern, the C.I.A. downsized its munitions formore pinpoint strikes. In addition, the president tightened standards,aides say: If the agency did not have a near certainty that a strikewould result in zero civilian deaths, Mr. Obama wanted to decidepersonally whether to go ahead.

The presidents directive reinforced the need for caution,counterterrorism officials said, but did not significantly change the

program. In part, that is because the protection of innocent life wasalways a critical consideration, said Michael V. Hayden, the last C.I.A.director under President George W. Bush.

It is also because Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method forcounting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effectcounts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, accordingto several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligenceposthumously proving them innocent.

Counterterrorism officials insist this approach is one of simple logic:

people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a top Qaedaoperative, are probably up to no good. Al Qaeda is an insular,paranoid organization innocent neighbors dont hitchhike rides inthe back of trucks headed for the border with guns and bombs, saidone official, who requested anonymity to speak about what is still aclassified program.

This counting method may partly explain the official claims ofextraordinarily low collateral deaths. In a speech last year Mr.Brennan, Mr. Obamas trusted adviser, said that not a single

noncombatant had been killed in a year of strikes. And in a recentinterview, a senior administration official said that the number ofcivilians killed in drone strikes in Pakistan under Mr. Obama was inthe single digits and that independent counts of scores orhundreds of civilian deaths unwittingly draw on false propagandaclaims by militants.

But in interviews, three former senior intelligence officials expresseddisbelief that the number could be so low. The C.I.A. accounting has sotroubled some administration officials outside the agency that theyhave brought their concerns to the White House. One called it guilt by

association that has led to deceptive estimates of civilian casualties.

It bothers me when they say there were seven guys, so they must allbe militants, the official said. They count the corpses and theyre not


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really sure who they are.

A No-Brainer

About four months into his presidency, as Republicans accused him ofreckless navet on terrorism, Mr. Obama quickly pulled together aspeech defending his policies. Standing before the Constitution at theNational Archives in Washington, he mentioned Guantnamo 28 times,repeating his campaign pledge to close the prison.

But it was too late, and his defensive tone suggested that Mr. Obamaknew it. Though President George W. Bush and Senator John McCain,the 2008 Republican candidate, had supported closing theGuantnamo prison, Republicans in Congress had reversed courseand discovered they could use the issue to portray Mr. Obama as softon terrorism.

Walking out of the Archives, the president turned to his national

security adviser at the time, Gen. James L. Jones, and admitted thathe had never devised a plan to persuade Congress to shut down theprison.

Were never going to make that mistake again, Mr. Obama told theretired Marine general.

General Jones said the president and his aides had assumed thatclosing the prison was a no-brainer the United States will look goodaround the world. The trouble was, he added, nobody asked, O.K.,lets assume its a good idea, how are you going to do this?

It was not only Mr. Obamas distaste for legislative backslapping andarm-twisting, but also part of a deeper pattern, said an administrationofficial who has watched him closely: the president seemed to have asense that if he sketches a vision, it will happen without his reallyhaving thought through the mechanism by which it will happen.

In fact, both Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and theattorney general, Mr. Holder, had warned that the plan to close theGuantnamo prison was in peril, and they volunteered to fight for it on

Capitol Hill, according to officials. But with Mr. Obamas backing, hischief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, blocked them, saying health care reformhad to go first.

When the administration floated a plan to transfer from Guantnamoto Northern Virginia two Uighurs, members of a largely Muslim ethnicminority from China who are considered no threat to the UnitedStates, Virginia Republicans led by Representative Frank R. Wolfdenounced the idea. The administration backed down.

That show of weakness doomed the effort to close Guantnamo, the

same administration official said. Lyndon Johnson would havesteamrolled the guy, he said. Thats not what happened. Its like aboxing match where a cut opens over a guys eye.


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The Use of Force

It is the strangest of bureaucratic rituals: Every week or so, more than100 members of the governments sprawling national securityapparatus gather, by secure video teleconference, to pore over terroristsuspects biographies and recommend to the president who should bethe next to die.

This secret nominations process is an invention of the Obamaadministration, a grim debating society that vets the PowerPoint slidesbearing the names, aliases and life stories of suspected members of AlQaedas branch in Yemen or its allies in Somalias Shabab militia.

The video conferences are run by the Pentagon, which oversees strikesin those countries, and participants do not hesitate to call out achallenge, pressing for the evidence behind accusations of ties to AlQaeda.

Whats a Qaeda facilitator? asked one participant, illustrating thespirit of the exchanges. If I open a gate and you drive through it, am Ia facilitator? Given the contentious discussions, it can take five or sixsessions for a name to be approved, and names go off the list if asuspect no longer appears to pose an imminent threat, the officialsaid. A parallel, more cloistered selection process at the C.I.A. focuseslargely on Pakistan, where that agency conducts strikes.

The nominations go to the White House, where by his own insistenceand guided by Mr. Brennan, Mr. Obama must approve any name. Hesigns off on every strike in Yemen and Somalia and also on the more

complex and risky strikes in Pakistan about a third of the total.

Aides say Mr. Obama has several reasons for becoming so immersed inlethal counterterrorism operations. A student of writings on war byAugustine and Thomas Aquinas, he believes that he should take moralresponsibility for such actions. And he knows that bad strikes cantarnish Americas image and derail diplomacy.

He realizes this isnt science, this is judgments made off of, most ofthe time, human intelligence, said Mr. Daley, the former chief of staff.

The president accepts as a fact that a certain amount of screw-upsare going to happen, and to him, that calls for a more judiciousprocess.

But the control he exercises also appears to reflect Mr. Obamasstriking self-confidence: he believes, according to several people whohave worked closely with him, that his own judgment should bebrought to bear on strikes.

Asked what surprised him most about Mr. Obama, Mr. Donilon, thenational security adviser, answered immediately: Hes a president

who is quite comfortable with the use of force on behalf of the UnitedStates.

In fact, in a 2007 campaign speech in which he vowed to pull the


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United States out of Iraq and refocus on Al Qaeda, Mr. Obama hadtrumpeted his plan to go after terrorist bases in Pakistan even ifPakistani leaders objected. His rivals at the time, including MittRomney, Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Mrs. Clinton, had all pounced onwhat they considered a greenhorns campaign bluster. (Mr. Romneysaid Mr. Obama had become Dr. Strangelove.)

In office, however, Mr. Obama has done exactly what he hadpromised, coming quickly to rely on the judgment of Mr. Brennan.

Mr. Brennan, a son of Irish immigrants, is a grizzled 25-year veteranof the C.I.A. whose work as a top agency official during the brutalinterrogations of the Bush administration made him a target of fiercecriticism from the left. He had been forced, under fire, to withdraw hisname from consideration to lead the C.I.A. under Mr. Obama,becoming counterterrorism chief instead.

Some critics of the drone strategy still vilify Mr. Brennan, suggesting

that he is the C.I.A.s agent in the White House, steering Mr. Obama toa targeted killing strategy. But in office, Mr. Brennan has surprisedmany former detractors by speaking forcefully for closing Guantnamoand respecting civil liberties.

Harold H. Koh, for instance, as dean of Yale Law School was a leadingliberal critic of the Bush administrations counterterrorism policies.But since becoming the State Departments top lawyer, Mr. Koh said,he has found in Mr. Brennan a principled ally.

If John Brennan is the last guy in the room with the president, Im

comfortable, because Brennan is a person of genuine moral rectitude,Mr. Koh said. Its as though you had a priest with extremely strongmoral values who was suddenly charged with leading a war.

The president values Mr. Brennans experience in assessingintelligence, from his own agency or others, and for the sobriety withwhich he approaches lethal operations, other aides say.

The purpose of these actions is to mitigate threats to U.S. personslives, Mr. Brennan said in an interview. It is the option of last

recourse. So the president, and I think all of us here, dont like thefact that people have to die. And so he wants to make sure that we gothrough a rigorous checklist: The infeasibility of capture, the certaintyof the intelligence base, the imminence of the threat, all of thesethings.

Yet the administrations very success at killing terrorism suspects hasbeen shadowed by a suspicion: that Mr. Obama has avoided thecomplications of detention by deciding, in effect, to take no prisonersalive. While scores of suspects have been killed under Mr. Obama, onlyone has been taken into American custody, and the president has

balked at adding new prisoners to Guantnamo.

Their policy is to take out high-value targets, versus capturinghigh-value targets, said Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the top


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Republican on the intelligence committee. They are not going toadvertise that, but thats what they are doing.

Mr. Obamas aides deny such a policy, arguing that capture is oftenimpossible in the rugged tribal areas of Pakistan and Yemen and thatmany terrorist suspects are in foreign prisons because of Americantips. Still, senior officials at the Justice Department and the Pentagonacknowledge that they worry about the public perception.

We have to be vigilant to avoid a no-quarter, or take-no-prisonerspolicy, said Mr. Johnson, the Pentagons chief lawyer.

Trade-Offs

The care that Mr. Obama and his counterterrorism chief take inchoosing targets, and their reliance on a precision weapon, the drone,reflect his pledge at the outset of his presidency to reject what hecalled the Bush administrations false choice between our safety and

our ideals.

But he has found that war is a messy business, and his actions showthat pursuing an enemy unbound by rules has required moral, legaland practical trade-offs that his speeches did not envision.

One early test involved Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the PakistaniTaliban. The case was problematic on two fronts, according tointerviews with both administration and Pakistani sources.

The C.I.A. worried that Mr. Mehsud, whose group then mainly

targeted the Pakistan government, did not meet the Obamaadministrations criteria for targeted killing: he was not an imminentthreat to the United States. But Pakistani officials wanted him dead,and the American drone program rested on their tacit approval. Theissue was resolved after the president and his advisers found that herepresented a threat, if not to the homeland, to American personnel inPakistan.

Then, in August 2009, the C.I.A. director, Leon E. Panetta, told Mr.Brennan that the agency had Mr. Mehsud in its sights. But taking out

the Pakistani Taliban leader, Mr. Panetta warned, did not meet Mr.Obamas standard of near certainty of no innocents being killed. Infact, a strike would certainly result in such deaths: he was with hiswife at his in-laws home.

Many times, General Jones said, in similar circumstances, at the11th hour we waved off a mission simply because the target hadpeople around them and we were able to loiter on station until theydidnt.

But not this time. Mr. Obama, through Mr. Brennan, told the C.I.A. to

take the shot, and Mr. Mehsud was killed, along with his wife and, bysome reports, other family members as well, said a senior intelligenceofficial.


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The attempted bombing of an airliner a few months later, on Dec. 25,stiffened the presidents resolve, aides say. It was the culmination of aseries of plots, including the killing of 13 people at Fort Hood, Tex. byan Army psychiatrist who had embraced radical Islam.

Mr. Obama is a good poker player, but he has a tell when he is angry.His questions become rapid-fire, said his attorney general, Mr. Holder.Hell inject the phrase, I just want to make sure you understandthat. And it was clear to everyone, Mr. Holder said, that he wassimmering about how a 23-year-old bomber had penetrated billions ofdollars worth of American security measures.

When a few officials tentatively offered a defense, noting that theattack had failed because the terrorists were forced to rely on a novicebomber and an untested formula because of stepped-up airportsecurity, Mr. Obama cut them short.

Well, he could have gotten it right and wed all be sitting here with an

airplane that blew up and killed over a hundred people, he said,according to a participant. He asked them to use the close call toimagine in detail the consequences if the bomb had detonated. Incharacteristic fashion, he went around the room, asking each official toexplain what had gone wrong and what needed to be done about it.

After that, as president, it seemed like he felt in his gut the threat tothe United States, said Michael E. Leiter, then director of the NationalCounterterrorism Center. Even John Brennan, someone who wasalready a hardened veteran of counterterrorism, tightened the strapson his rucksack after that.

David Axelrod, the presidents closest political adviser, began showingup at the Terror Tuesday meetings, his unspeaking presence a visiblereminder of what everyone understood: a successful attack wouldoverwhelm the presidents other aspirations and achievements.

In the most dramatic possible way, the Fort Hood shootings inNovember and the attempted Christmas Day bombing had shown thenew danger from Yemen. Mr. Obama, who had rejected the Bush-eraconcept of a global war on terrorism and had promised to narrow the

American focus to Al Qaedas core, suddenly found himself directingstrikes in another complicated Muslim country.

The very first strike under his watch in Yemen, on Dec. 17, 2009,offered a stark example of the difficulties of operating in what GeneralJones described as an embryonic theater that we werent reallyfamiliar with.

It killed not only its intended target, but also two neighboring families,and left behind a trail of cluster bombs that subsequently killed moreinnocents. It was hardly the kind of precise operation that Mr. Obama

favored. Videos of childrens bodies and angry tribesmen holding upAmerican missile parts flooded You Tube, fueling a ferocious backlashthat Yemeni officials said bolstered Al Qaeda.


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The sloppy strike shook Mr. Obama and Mr. Brennan, officials said,and once again they tried to impose some discipline.

In Pakistan, Mr. Obama had approved not only personality strikesaimed at named, high-value terrorists, but signature strikes thattargeted training camps and suspicious compounds in areas controlledby militants.

But some State Department officials have complained to the WhiteHouse that the criteria used by the C.I.A. for identifying a terroristsignature were too lax. The joke was that when the C.I.A. sees threeguys doing jumping jacks, the agency thinks it is a terrorist trainingcamp, said one senior official. Men loading a truck with fertilizer couldbe bombmakers but they might also be farmers, skeptics argued.

Now, in the wake of the bad first strike in Yemen, Mr. Obamaoverruled military and intelligence commanders who were pushing touse signature strikes there as well.

We are not going to war with Yemen, he admonished in one meeting,according to participants.

His guidance was formalized in a memo by General Jones, who calledit a governor, if you will, on the throttle, intended to remind everyonethat one should not assume that its just O.K. to do these thingsbecause we spot a bad guy somewhere in the world.

Mr. Obama had drawn a line. But within two years, he stepped acrossit. Signature strikes in Pakistan were killing a large number of

terrorist suspects, even when C.I.A. analysts were not certainbeforehand of their presence. And in Yemen, roiled by the Arab Springunrest, the Qaeda affiliate was seizing territory.

Today, the Defense Department can target suspects in Yemen whosenames they do not know. Officials say the criteria are tighter thanthose for signature strikes, requiring evidence of a threat to the UnitedStates, and they have even given them a new name TADS, forTerrorist Attack Disruption Strikes. But the details are a closelyguarded secret part of a pattern for a president who came into office

promising transparency.

The Ultimate Test

On that front, perhaps no case would test Mr. Obamas principles asstarkly as that of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born cleric and Qaedapropagandist hiding in Yemen, who had recently risen to prominenceand had taunted the president by name in some of his online screeds.

The president was very interested in obviously trying to understandhow a guy like Awlaki developed, said General Jones. The clerics fiery

sermons had helped inspire a dozen plots, including the shootings atFort Hood. Then he had gone operational, plotting with Mr.Abdulmutallab and coaching him to ignite his explosives only after theairliner was over the United States.


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That record, and Mr. Awlakis calls for more attacks, presented Mr.Obama with an urgent question: Could he order the targeted killing ofan American citizen, in a country with which the United States wasnot at war, in secret and without the benefit of a trial?

The Justice Departments Office of Legal Counsel prepared a lengthymemo justifying that extraordinary step, asserting that while the FifthAmendments guarantee of due process applied, it could be satisfied byinternal deliberations in the executive branch.

Mr. Obama gave his approval, and Mr. Awlaki was killed in September2011, along with a fellow propagandist, Samir Khan, an Americancitizen who was not on the target list but was traveling with him.

If the president had qualms about this momentous step, aides said hedid not share them. Mr. Obama focused instead on the weight of theevidence showing that the cleric had joined the enemy and was

plotting more terrorist attacks.

This is an easy one, Mr. Daley recalled him saying, though thepresident warned that in future cases, the evidence might well not beso clear.

In the wake of Mr. Awlakis death, some administration officials,including the attorney general, argued that the Justice Departmentslegal memo should be made public. In 2009, after all, Mr. Obama hadreleased Bush administration legal opinions on interrogation over thevociferous objections of six former C.I.A. directors.

This time, contemplating his own secrets, he chose to keep the Awlakiopinion secret.

Once its your pop stand, you look at things a little differently, saidMr. Rizzo, the C.I.A.s former general counsel.

Mr. Hayden, the former C.I.A. director and now an adviser to Mr.Obamas Republican challenger, Mr. Romney, commended thepresidents aggressive counterterrorism record, which he said had a

Nixon to China quality. But, he said, secrecy has its costs and Mr.Obama should open the strike strategy up to public scrutiny.

This program rests on the personal legitimacy of the president, andthats not sustainable, Mr. Hayden said. I have lived the life ofsomeone taking action on the basis of secret O.L.C. memos, and it ainta good life. Democracies do not make war on the basis of legal memoslocked in a D.O.J. safe.

Tactics Over Strategy

In his June 2009 speech in Cairo, aimed at resetting relations with theMuslim world, Mr. Obama had spoken eloquently of his childhoodyears in Indonesia, hearing the call to prayer at the break of dawnand the fall of dusk.


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The United States is not and never will be at war with Islam, hedeclared.

But in the months that followed, some officials felt the urgency ofcounterterrorism strikes was crowding out consideration of a broaderstrategy against radicalization. Though Mrs. Clinton strongly supportedthe strikes, she complained to colleagues about the drones-onlyapproach at Situation Room meetings, in which discussion would focusexclusively on the pros, cons and timing of particular strikes.

At their weekly lunch, Mrs. Clinton told the president she thoughtthere should be more attention paid to the root causes ofradicalization, and Mr. Obama agreed. But it was September 2011before he issued an executive order setting up a sophisticated,interagency war room at the State Department to counter the jihadinarrative on an hour-by-hour basis, posting messages and video onlineand providing talking points to embassies.

Mr. Obama was heartened, aides say, by a letter discovered in the raidon Osama bin Ladens compound in Pakistan. It complained that theAmerican president had undermined Al Qaedas support by repeatedlydeclaring that the United States was at war not with Islam, but withthe terrorist network. We must be doing a good job, Mr. Obama toldhis secretary of state.

Moreover, Mr. Obamas record has not drawn anything like thesweeping criticism from allies that his predecessor faced. John B.Bellinger III, a top national security lawyer under the Bush

administration, said that was because Mr. Obamas liberal reputationand softer packaging have protected him. After the global outrageover Guantnamo, its remarkable that the rest of the world has lookedthe other way while the Obama administration has conductedhundreds of drone strikes in several different countries, includingkilling at least some civilians, said Mr. Bellinger, who supports thestrikes.

By withdrawing from Iraq and preparing to withdraw fromAfghanistan, Mr. Obama has refocused the fight on Al Qaeda and

hugely reduced the death toll both of American soldiers and Muslimcivilians. But in moments of reflection, Mr. Obama may have reason towonder about unfinished business and unintended consequences.

His focus on strikes has made it impossible to forge, for now, the newrelationship with the Muslim world that he had envisioned. BothPakistan and Yemen are arguably less stable and more hostile to theUnited States than when Mr. Obama became president.

Justly or not, drones have become a provocative symbol of Americanpower, running roughshod over national sovereignty and killing

innocents. With China and Russia watching, the United States has setan international precedent for sending drones over borders to killenemies.


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Mr. Blair, the former director of national intelligence, said the strikecampaign was dangerously seductive. It is the politically advantageousthing to do low cost, no U.S. casualties, gives the appearance oftoughness, he said. It plays well domestically, and it is unpopularonly in other countries. Any damage it does to the national interestonly shows up over the long term.

But Mr. Blairs dissent puts him in a small minority of securityexperts. Mr. Obamas record has eroded the political perception thatDemocrats are weak on national security. No one would have imaginedfour years ago that his counterterrorism policies would come under farmore fierce attack from the American Civil Liberties Union than fromMr. Romney.

Aides say that Mr. Obamas choices, though, are not surprising. Thepresidents reliance on strikes, said Mr. Leiter, the former head of theNational Counterterrorism Center, is far from a lurid fascination withcovert action and special forces. Its much more practical. Hes the

president. He faces a post-Abdulmutallab situation, where hes beingtold people might attack the United States tomorrow.

You can pass a lot of laws, Mr. Leiter said, Those laws are not goingto get Bin Laden dead.

Date Collected: 6/4/2012Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-in-war-on-al-qaeda.html?pagewanted=all&pagewanted=

print

1.2.1.1.2. Assessing Obama s Counterterrorism Record(back)May 29, 2012Assessing Obamas Counterterrorism RecordBy JO BECKER and SCOTT SHANEOfficials in Obama administration and others outside, interviewed inrecent months about President Obamas counterterrorism record, saidreal progress had been made against Al Qaeda but also acknowledgedlingering concerns about a fight that has shaped the United Statesapproach to much of the world for the last decade. Excerpted beloware remarks from some of nearly 40 current and former officials whohad direct knowledge about the United States classifiedcounterterrorism efforts.

Senator Saxby Chambliss, Republican of Georgia and the vicechairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, gives the presidenthigh marks despite what he sees as a failure to capture andinterrogate more terrorist suspects:

Weve crippled Al Qaeda. The foundation may have been laid in theBush administration, but you have to recognize that thisadministration has been very committed to carrying the fight to theenemy.


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William M. Daley, President Obamas chief of staff in 2011, said thepresident has frequently remarked that nothing comes to me thatseasy to decide, and has been frustrated by an inability sometimes toget real-time information when strikes appeared to have gone awry:

He would keep asking, and it was my job to push [National SecurityAdvisor] Tom Donilon to keep asking, when are we going to get theanswer to this the real answer? Was it a screw-up, was it somethinggone wrong, was it bad intelligence get me the answer. Generallythese things, in spite of what we all want answers immediately, theytake a lot longer.

William K. Lietzau, the deputy assistant secretary of defense fordetainee policy, responding to internal administration concerns that itsembrace of drone strikes suggests that it has adopted a take-no-prisoners policy:

I dont think there are clearer rules for lethal action than fordetention, but you do have a clearer picture of the long termconsequences... With lethal action, you are going to bury them.Figuring out what is going to happen long term with someone youdetain is more difficult.

General James. L. Jones, the national security adviser from January2009-November 2010, on how over time President Obama grew morecomfortable with the drone program:

At first when [then-C.I.A. director Leon] Panetta came to him with

certain missions there was rigorous questioning and analysis about theunintended consequences of a mission if he approved it. He certainlyadopted a principle of leadership that I absolutely agree with that ifyoure going to be blamed for something if it goes wrong, you want tounderstand what it is youre agreeing to when you say yes. And asyour comfort zone grows and your confidence grows in the people whoare giving you advice, then you can relax a little bit.

Dennis C. Blair, former director of national intelligence, on whatremains to be done:

The strategic question not addressed is whether the current programhas reached a point of diminishing returns. We might be just as saferelying on other measures to stop attacks on the U.S. goodintelligence sharing with other countries, strong border controls andvigilance within the country.

Im all for drone strikes if theres no downside. But in this case theresa huge downside we are making it more difficult for governmentsand Muslims that can cooperate with us against Al Qaeda to do so, andthis cooperation is the key to long-term victory over Al Qaeda...

There is also another, long-term question that needs to be asked: Iskilling leaders and followers of a hostile organization in large numbersoutside a combat zone because we have the technical capacity to do so


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something we should be showing the world how to do? Are we creatingsome kind of a monster that could turn against us when thetechnology is available widely, as all technologies are.

Antony J. Blinken, national security adviser to Vice President JosephR. Biden Jr., on participating in discussions about lethal action againstsuspected terrorists and the toll of overseeing such programs:

The president is making, and you are contributing to, life and deathdecisions. Life and death decisions, first and foremost both forAmericans citizens who may be at risk and those carrying out missionswhose lives may be at risk, but also the people who are targets of youroperations and the people around them, who may have nothing to dowith it. And what people need to understand is how seriously and howpowerfully the weight of those decisions bears on those who helpshape them and ultimately, the president who makes them.

Date Collected: 5/29/2012Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/assessing-obamas-counterterrorism-record.html?pagewanted=print

1.2.1.1.3. Obama's Counterterrorism Self-Correction(back)May 27, 2012Obama's Counterterrorism Self-CorrectionBy ALBERT R. HUNT and BLOOMBERG NEWS

Critics of President George W. Bushs anti-terrorism efforts, mainlyDemocrats and some Republicans, rejoiced when Barack Obama waselected. They were convinced that what they considered the tramplingof constitutional rights and civil liberties after the attacks of Sept. 11,2001, would end.

As a candidate, Mr. Obama, a former professor of constitutional law,promised to close the prison at Guantnamo Bay, Cuba, as well as toend the indefinite detention and the rendition of terrorism suspects toother countries, where they often were tortured. He also vowed greateraccountability and transparency in the conduct of war.

Things look different today. In his new book, Power and Constraint:The Accountable Presidency After 9/11, Jack L. Goldsmith, a HarvardLaw School professor who served in the Office of Legal Counsel underMr. Bush and objected to some of the Bush administrations tactics,writes: The Obama administration would continue almost all of itspredecessors policies, transforming what had seemed extraordinaryunder the Bush regime into the new normal of Americancounterterrorism policy. That seems only a slight exaggeration.

Mr. Goldsmith argues that this largely reflects a self-correction on Mr.Obamas part. The Bush administrations anti-terrorism policies wereexcessive, reined in by the courts and Congress. The successor thenoverpromised in the other direction and was reined in by politics.


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The Obama administration strongly disagrees with Mr. Goldsmith,said Tommy Vietor, a spokesman for the White House NationalSecurity Council. He points to achievements like ending the war inIraq, beginning to wind down the Afghanistan conflict, the devastatedleadership of Al Qaeda, ending torture and modifying other post-attacksecurity policies.

Others contend that the Obama administration capitulated after itreceived political flak for wanting to close Guantnamo and try incivilian courts those accused of being terrorists. There was a celebratedconfrontation between Rahm Emanuel, then the White House chief ofstaff, who argued that these controversial promises were impeding Mr.Obamas economic agenda, and Gregory B. Craig, then the WhiteHouse counsel, who made the civil liberties and campaign commitmentcase for change. Mr. Emanuel won; Mr. Craig later resigned.

More recently, some of the toughest criticism has come from theConstitution Project, a bipartisan group of experts.

Obama has fulfilled some promises, not fulfilled many others, eitherbecause Congress made it impossible or they decided on their own notto change, said Morton H. Halperin, a longtime liberal nationalsecurity expert.

Fundamentally, the policies are the same, and in some ways Obamahas extended the reach of government, said David A. Keene, a veteranconservative activist. He was critical of Mr. Bushs anti-terrorismpolicies, as were some Democrats, he notes, but they are silent now.

In his first week in office, Mr. Obama pledged to close Guantnamo,issued an executive order banning torture and suspended militarycommissions. There was tremendous political blowback to his decisionto close Guantnamo and move the terrorism suspects to the UnitedStates or try suspects like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the mastermindof the 2001 attacks, in civilian courts. Congress ultimately cut offfunding for any such actions.

Mr. Obama achieved some victories. He ended the torture practices ofthe Bush administration. The targeted killing of terrorism suspects,

including U.S. citizens, with drone attacks is not a policy reversal: Mr.Obama vowed to adopt that approach in 2008; he did not make clearthat the attacks might be directed out of the White House.

He backed off on ending rendition the policy of sending peopleaccused of being terrorists to other countries for interrogationinsisting that the United States would ensure that torture was nolonger practiced in the places they were sent and that their treatmentwas in accord with international laws. The administration also says ithas curbed the excesses of indefinite detention without trial, whichnow requires judicial review.

Other observers see little change. Judge Reggie B. Walton of the U.S.District Court for the District of Columbia said Mr. Obamasadjustments to military detention without trial represent a minimal if


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not ephemeral difference from the Bush position.

As a candidate, Mr. Obama promised transparency and openness. Yetthe administration has brought more charges six for leakinginformation than all previous presidents combined.

Openness and transparency doesnt mean were O.K. with peoplebreaking the law by leaking classified information that would harm ournational security, Mr. Vietor said.

The government is trying to force James Risen, a reporter for The NewYork Times, to testify about whether a former C.I.A. official, now ontrial, was a source and leaked information about the Iranian nuclearprogram. In court filings, it has been revealed that U.S. prosecutorsobtained Mr. Risens telephone, bank and credit-card data and travelrecords.

A district court judge ruled against the governments effort to force the

reporter to reveal his confidential sources; the Obama administrationis appealing that decision.

In the campaign, Obama said Bush overreached in using statesecrets, Mr. Halperin said. This administration has been worse.

Mr. Vietor said the administration would not comment on a pendingcase.

On accountability, Mr. Obama assailed the Bush administrationsfailure to heed the War Powers Act, requiring congressional

authorization when the United States is engaged in foreign hostilitiesfor more than 60 days. As a candidate, Mr. Obama, in a questionnairefor The Boston Globe in late 2007, vowed it would be different in hisadministration: History has shown us time and time again, heresponded, that military action is most successful when it isauthorized by the legislative branch.

The Western campaign against the regime of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafiof Libya began in mid-March 2011, about a month after the revolutionbegan. The initial air assault, portrayed by Pentagon and NATO

officials as under French and British leadership, was carried outmostly by U.S. forces. Responding to criticism from Congress, theWhite House argued that it was a NATO-led war and that U.S. groundforces were not involved. Senator James Webb, a Virginia Democrat,said this set a very disturbing precedent for the use of force in theage of drones and sophisticated air attacks.

In this political campaign, Mr. Obama probably will not pay any pricefor these flip-flops. Bagging Osama bin Laden immunizes him fromattacks on his conduct of the war on terrorism. The presumptiveRepublican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, is in no position to

criticize; he has suggested that as president he would reinstate the useof torture.


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Date Collected: 5/29/2012Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/28/us/28iht-letter28.html?pagewanted=print

1.2.1.2. In Far Northwest, a New Border Focus on Latinos(back)May 28, 2012In Far Northwest, a New Border Focus on LatinosBy WILLIAM YARDLEYFORKS, Wash. The Olympic Peninsula has always felt more like the edgeof the world than a mere national boundary.

Its ocean shoreline, the northwesternmost coast of the contiguous UnitedStates, is accessible by a single road, Highway 101, and it has long beentraveled by a distinctive fleet: loud logging trucks rumbling out of the dark

and wet woods, rusty pickups with windows pronouncing Native Pride,stray Subarus hauling surfboards and kayaks to the cold Pacific.

Then the United States Border Patrol vehicles started showing up.

Sometimes they respond unexpectedly to assist with mundane traffic stopsconducted by the local police. Sometimes they hover outside the warehousewhere Mexican immigrants sell the salal they pick in the temperate rainforest. Sometimes they confront people whose primary offense, many argue,is skin tone.

Those kinds of scenes might be common in towns that border Mexico inTexas, Arizona or California. But the border here is with Canada, which isseparated from the peninsula by the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

Whats the purpose of the Border Patrol in a place that has no borderproblems? asked Art Argyropoulos, who is from Greece and runs arestaurant on the peninsula with his wife, who is from Mexico.

Since the terrorist attacks of 2001, the federal government has kept a morecareful watch on the countrys northern border. Here on this remotepeninsula over the past six years, the number of Border Patrol agents hasrisen tenfold, from 4 in 2006 to about 40. This month, the agency iscompleting construction of a $10 million office in Port Angeles, a city of19,000. The one-story building, surrounded by a spiked security fence, canhouse as many as 50 officers.

The Border Patrol says its priority is to address potential terrorism andsmuggling threats from Canada (a ferry runs between Port Angeles andVictoria, British Columbia), but many people say the peninsula has insteadbecome an unlikely new frontier in the effort to fight illegal immigrationfrom Latin America.

Everybodys scared, said Benigno Hernandez, 38, who has lived in Forks,population 3,500, for more than a decade. Everybodys leaving.

In Forks, several hundred immigrants had long found winter work picking


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salal, a wild shrub whose branches are used in floral arrangements aroundthe world. But now, schools are losing enrollment because students parentshave been deported. Mobile home parks are half empty. At Thriftway, themain grocery store in the town, the weekend rush has slowed because thesalal pickers who used to shop after getting paid on Saturdays havedisappeared, sometimes because they were detained, sometimes becausethey were afraid.

Its happened very much in the past couple of months, said Mayor ByronMonohon of Forks. I think the Border Patrol has just put a lot of pressureon the situation.

Last month, the American Civil Liberties Union and the NorthwestImmigrant Rights Project filed a class-action suit against the Border Patrol,claiming that its officers were illegally stopping and interrogating people onthe basis of racial profiling. This month, the Rights Project filed anothersuit, alleging that Border Patrol agents sometimes asked to support otherlaw enforcement as interpreters Border Patrol agents are required to

know Spanish while intending instead to investigate for immigrationviolations.

In the class-action suit, the three named plaintiffs are all minority memberswho said they were stopped and questioned without cause: two werecorrections officers, one was the student-body president of Forks HighSchool, whose parents were born in Mexico. The student, Ismael Ramos-Contreras, who will be a freshman at Western Washington University in thefall, said the Border Patrols presence has become unnerving but also asource of dark humor, including when the school soccer team travels toaway games.

If we see Border Patrol, its like, Everybody hide! he said. The majorityof the soccer team is Hispanic.

The Border Patrol would not comment on the lawsuits and said it prohibitedprofiling based on race or religion.

What theyre focused on up there are the same things that were focusedon around the country, said Ronald D. Vitiello, the deputy chief of theBorder Patrol. Thats, you know, the threat of terrorism, the criminal

organizations that use the border for their own gain and being prepared tocombat those threats, eliminate the vulnerabilities that we know about andmitigate the risk where we can.

Officials sometimes cite the 1999 arrest of Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian whobecame known as the millennium bomber for his plan to detonateexplosives at Los Angeles International Airport. Mr. Ressam was convictedafter he tried to enter the United States at Port Angeles with bombcomponents.

In the six years since the Border Patrol began expanding its presence on

the peninsula, the number of apprehensions has declined by 27 percent from 811 in 2006 to 591 in 2011 in the agencys Blaine sector, whichincludes Western Washington, Oregon and Alaska. Border Patrol officialshave said the decline is a success that validates their presence.


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Last year, however, a Border Patrol agent based in Port Angeles testifiedbefore Congress that he and other agents there considered it a black holewith no purpose, no mission. The agent, Christian Sanchez, said hissupervisors told him to just drive around the peninsula during his shift.

Critics speculate that boredom, and a need to justify their presence, hasprompted agents to get involved with law enforcement beyond their usualduties. In some cases, their help has been welcomed. The United StatesForest Service, responsible for law enforcement on the peninsulas 600,000acres of national forest, has just three agents, and one of the positions isvacant.

Theyre a resource, and were few and far between, said Kim Kinville, thepatrol captain for the Forest Service on the peninsula. Forest Service agentswill sometimes request help from Border Patrol for interpreting, she said,and the encounters can lead to detentions of illegal immigrants.

Last May, a Forest Service officer stopped a Mexican couple picking salal onforest land without a permit. A Border Patrol agent soon arrived, promptingthe Mexican man to flee into the forest while, according to his girlfriend, theForest Service officer held her by her hair. The Mexican man, BenjaminRoldan Salinas, was found three weeks later, drowned in the Sol Duc River.

Like most pickers in the area, Mr. Salinas sold his salal to Hop Dhooghe,72, who runs Olympic Evergreens. Mr. Dhooghe, whose parents immigratedfrom Belgium and Germany, said his business was about a fourth of what itwas a few years ago because many good salal pickers have left thepeninsula. In response to the Border Patrols actions, Mr. Dhooghe has

joined the new Forks Human Rights Group.

Ive lived all my life out here and never seen anything like this, Mr.Dhooghe said.

Why dont they do it to the white people, to see if theyre from Canada orsomething? he said of the Border Patrol confrontations. They just do it byskin color. If they did that to the white people, thered really be an uproar.

Date Collected: 5/29/2012Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/us/hard-by-canada-border-fears-of-crackdown-on-latino-immigration.html?hpw&pagewanted=print

1.2.1.3. West Point Is Divided on a War Doctrine s Fate(back)May 27, 2012West Point Is Divided on a War Doctrines FateBy ELISABETH BUMILLER

WEST POINT, N.Y. For two centuries, the United States Military Academyhas produced generals for Americas wars, among them Ulysses S. Grant,Robert E. Lee, George S. Patton and David H. Petraeus. It is wherePresident George W. Bush delivered what became known as hispre-emption speech, which sought to justify the invasion of Iraq, and where


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President Obama told the nation he was sending an additional 30,000American troops to Afghanistan.

Now at another critical moment in American military history, the facultyhere on the commanding bend in the Hudson River is deep in its ownexistential debate. Narrowly, the argument is whether thecounterinsurgency strategy used in Iraq and Afghanistan the troop-heavy, time-intensive, expensive doctrine of trying to win over the locals bybuilding roads, schools and government is dead.

Broadly, the question is what the United States gained after a decade in twowars.

Not much, Col. Gian P. Gentile, the director of West Points militaryhistory program and the commander of a combat battalion in Baghdad in2006, said flatly in an interview last week. Certainly not worth the effort.In my view.

Colonel Gentile, long a critic of counterinsurgency, represents one side ofthe divide at West Point. On the other is Col. Michael J. Meese, the head ofthe academys influential social sciences department and a top adviser toGeneral Petraeus in Baghdad and Kabul when General Petraeuscommanded the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Nobody should ever underestimate the costs and the risks involved withcounterinsurgency, but neither should you take that off the table, ColonelMeese said, also in an interview last week. Counterinsurgency, he said,was broadly successful in being able to have the Iraqis govern themselves.

The debate at West Point mirrors one under way in the armed forces as awhole as the United States withdraws without clear victory fromAfghanistan and as the results in Iraq remain ambiguous at best. (On theABC News program This Week on Sunday, the defense secretary, Leon E.Panetta, called the Taliban resilient after 10 and a half years of war.)

But at West Point the debate is personal, and a decade of statistics morethan 6,000 American service members dead in Iraq and Afghanistan andmore than $1 trillion spent hit home. On Saturday, 972 cadetsgraduated as second lieutenants, sent off in a commencement speech by

Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. with the promise that they are the keyto whatever challenges the world has in store.

Many of them are apprehensive about what they will find in Afghanistan the news coming back from friends is often not good but still hope tomake it there before the war is largely over. Weve spent the past fouryears of our lives getting ready for this, said Lt. Daniel Prial, whograduated Saturday and said he was drawn to West Point after his fathersurvived as a firefighter in New York City on Sept. 11, 2001. Ultimately youwant to see that come to fruition.

At West Point the arguments are more public than those in the upperreaches of the Pentagon, in large part because the military officers on theWest Point faculty pride themselves on academic freedom and challengingorthodoxy. Colonel Gentile, who is working on a book titled Wrong Turn:


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Americas Deadly Embrace With Counterinsurgency, is chief among them.

Colonel Gentiles argument is that the United States pursued a narrowpolicy goal in Afghanistan defeating Al Qaeda there and keeping it fromusing the country as a base with what he called a maximalistoperational approach. Strategy should employ resources of a state toachieve policy aims with the least amount of blood and treasure spent, hesaid.

Counterinsurgency could ultimately work in Afghanistan, he said, if theUnited States were willing to stay there for generations. I m talking 70, 80,90 years, he said.

Colonel Gentile, who has photographs in his office of five young soldiers inhis battalion killed in the 2006 bloodshed in Baghdad, acknowledged that itwas difficult to question the wars in the face of the losses.

But war ultimately is a political act, and I take comfort and pride that we

as a military organization, myself as a commander of those soldiers whodied, the others who were wounded and I think the American Army writlarge, that we did our duty, he said. And there is honor in itself of doingyour duty. I mean you could probably push back on me and say youre stillsaying the wars not worth it. But Im a soldier, and I go where Im told togo, and I do my duty as best I can.

Colonel Meeses opposing argument is that warfare cannot be divorced fromits political, economic and psychological dimensions the view advanced inthe bible of counterinsurgents, the U.S. Army/Marine CorpsCounterinsurgency Field Manual that was revised under General Petraeus

in 2006. Hailed as a new way of warfare (although drawing oncounterinsurgencies fought by the United States in Vietnam in the 1960sand the Philippines from 1899 to 1902, among others), the manualpromoted the protection of civilian populations, reconstruction anddevelopment aid.

Warfare in a dangerous environment is ultimately a human endeavor, andengaging with the population is something that has to be done in order totry to influence their trajectory, Colonel Meese said.

In Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal so aggressively pushed thedoctrine when he was the top commander there that troops complainedthey had to hold their firepower. General Petraeus issued guidelines thatclarified that troops had the right to self-defense when he took over, but bythen counterinsurgency had attracted powerful critics, chief among themMr. Biden and veteran military officers who denigrated it as armed nationbuilding.

When Mr. Obama announced last June that he would withdraw by the endof this summer the 30,000 additional troops he sent to Afghanistan earlier than the military wanted or expected the doctrine seemed to be

on life support. General Petraeus has since become director of the CentralIntelligence Agency, where his mission is covertly killing the enemy, notwinning the people.


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Peacemakers Militia, claiming they would only act in the event of agovernment collapse. ----Use of arms, he said, was only appropriate if someone was about to harmyou. And the use of violence is only warranted against the government ifthey are breaking the law. He pointed to the situation in Syria as anexample. ----Cox will continue on the stand Tuesday. ----Cox, Coleman Barney and Lonnie Vernon are on trial in Anchorage oncharges of conspiracy to possess restricted weapons and conspiracy tomurder state officials. ------

Date Collected: 6/4/2012Source: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2012/06/04/us/ap-us-alaska-

militia.html?hp&pagewanted=print

1.2.2.2. A Guilty Plea to Giving Aid to Al Qaeda Since 2007(back)June 4, 2012A Guilty Plea to Giving Aid to Al Qaeda Since 2007By COLIN MOYNIHANA former Brooklyn resident pleaded guilty in Federal District Court inManhattan on Monday to providing material support to Al Qaeda.

The man, Sabirhan Hasanoff, a dual citizen of the United States andAustralia, was accused in court documents filed by federal prosecutors ofconspiring to provide the group with computer advice and other assistance.

Mr. Hasanoff had helped Al Qaeda since at least November 2007, when heaccepted $50,000 from an unidentified co-conspirator who was not chargedalong with Mr. Hasanoff, prosecutors said.

I agreed with other persons to provide material support to a designatedforeign terrorist organization, Mr. Hasanoff told Judge Kimba M. Wood.The organization was Al Qaeda.

The charge of providing material support to the group carries a maximumpenalty of 15 years in prison. He also pleaded guilty to conspiring to providethat support, which carries a maximum penalty of five years.

Originally, Mr. Hasanoff was indicted by a grand jury along with anotherman accused of being a co-conspirator, Wesam El-Hanafi. Mr. El-Hanafiscase is pending, prosecutors said on Monday.

As part of the conspiracy described by prosecutors, Mr. El-Hanafi went to

Yemen in 2008 and met with members of Al Qaeda who instructed him onoperational security measures and directed him to perform unspecifiedtasks for the group. In Yemen, he also declared allegiance to Al Qaeda, theindictment said.


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Mr. El-Hanafi later bought a subscription to a software program thatallowed him to securely communicate with others on the Web.

At roughly the same time, the indictment said, Mr. Hasanoff performedtasks for Al Qaeda and told the unidentified co-conspirator not to fill theconspirators passport pages with stamps to maintain the documents valueto Al Qaeda.

Also about that time, prosecutors said, both defendants met with the thirdco-conspirator and discussed joining Al Qaeda. Mr. El-Hanafi later acceptedan oath of allegiance on behalf of Al Qaeda from the unnamedco-conspirator, the indictment said.

In 2009, the indictment said, Mr. El-Hanafi bought seven digital watchesover the Web and had them delivered to his home in Brooklyn.

Prosecutors did not say what the defendants planned to do with thewatches, but such devices have been used in the past to help detonate

explosives.

Prosecutors said in 2010 that the two had not been involved in an activeplot. Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan, said thenthat the two had sought to modernize Al Qaeda with technologicalassistance.

Mr. Hasanoff has an accounting degree from Baruch College, and hadworked as a group chief financial officer for a company in Dubai. He wasarrested there and brought to New York to face charges.

In court on Monday, a crowd of Mr. Hasanoffs family members and friendsfilled rows of benches in the gallery. As the defendant entered, escorted byUnited States marshals, he flashed a quick smile to those supporters beforeturning to face the judge and acknowledging his guilt.

Date Collected: 6/4/2012Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/05/nyregion/sabirhan-

hasanoff-pleads-guilty-to-qaeda-support.html?pagewanted=print

1.2.2.3. Justices Reject Appeal Seeking Payments for Ex-Iran Hostages(back)May 29, 2012Justices Reject Appeal Seeking Payments for Ex-Iran HostagesBy MATTHEW L. WALDWASHINGTON The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected the last legalappeal for former American hostages seeking compensation for theircaptivity in Iran three decades ago, leaving legislation newly introduced in

Congress as the last chance to resolve their longstanding grievance.

A lower court, acting at the request of the State Department, previouslyblocked the hostages effort to win compensation from Iran, holding that theagreement under which they were released barred such claims. The former


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hostages had sued under a 1996 law that they argued allowed them to seekdamages, and in August 2001 they won a judgment of liability, becauseIran did not appear in court to defend itself. But the State Departmentargued that its ability to conduct foreign policy would be compromised ifdamages were awarded.

The Supreme Court, as is its custom, did not give a reason for its decisionon Tuesday.

Fifty-two Americans were held hostage for 444 days after Iranian radicalsseized the American Embassy in Tehran in 1979.

I would never have thought when I was getting kicked around in Iran thatmy own government would ever go to court to stop me, said David M.Roeder, a retired Air Force colonel who was the named plaintiff in the case.But after 12 years of legal wrangling, he said he was not surprised by theoutcome.

Its not just this administration or Clinton or even the Bush administration;there seems to be some sort of a weird hands-off-Iran policy, he said.

The approximately 100 people named in the suit, which included formerhostages and some of their survivors, were seeking $10,000 a day, or $4.4million each. According to their lawyers, money that was deposited in theUnited States by Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi of Iran before he wasforced from power and then frozen by the Carter administration after thehostages were taken is still available.

Mr. Roeder and the other plaintiffs are hopeful that Congress will act again.

On May 17, Representative Bruce Braley, an Iowa Democrat, andRepresentative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Florida Republican who ischairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, introduced legislationthat would double the fines against companies that are caught doingbusiness with Iran. Half of the money would be used to compensate theformer hostages. The bill would also let the president use frozen Iranianassets.

Mr. Braley, in a telephone interview, said that the court decisioncontradicted the Third Geneva Convention, which, he said, prohibits us

from absolving other countries of liability for engaging in the torture of U.S.citizens.

He did not say how much money he thought would be raised by doublingthe fines for violating anti-Iran sanctions, but he said, Any revenue is goingto be a lot more than these hostages have received during the long period oftime theyve been waiting for justice. Mr. Braleys district includes theresidence of one former hostage, Kathryn L. Koob. Mr. Braley said he wouldseek support from other lawmakers who represented districts where formerhostages lived.

Date Collected: 5/29/2012


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Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/30/us/politics/supreme-court-rejects-appeal-by-former-iran-hostagess.html?hpw&pagewanted=print

1.2.3. At Museum on 9/11, Talking Through an Identity Crisis(back)June 2, 2012At Museum on 9/11, Talking Through an Identity CrisisBy PATRICIA COHENIt seemed self-evident at the time: A museum devoted to documenting the eventsof Sept. 11, 2001, would have to include photographs of the hijackers whoturned four passenger jets into missiles. Then two and a half years ago, plans touse the pictures were made public.

New York Citys fire chief protested that such a display would honor theterrorists who destroyed the World Trade Center. A New York Post editorial calledthe idea appalling. Groups representing rescuers, survivors and victimsfamilies asked how anyone could even think of showing the faces of the men who

killed their relatives, colleagues and friends.

The anger took some museum officials by surprise.

You dont create a museum about the Holocaust and not say that it was theNazis who did it, said Joseph Daniels, chief executive of the memorial andmuseum foundation.

Such are the exquisite sensitivities that surround every detail in the creation ofthe National September 11 Memorial Museum, which is being built on land thatmany revere as hallowed ground. During eight years of planning, every step has

been muddied with contention. There have been bitter fights over the museumsfinancing, which have delayed its opening until at least next year, as well ascontinuing arguments over its location, seven stories below ground; which relicsshould be exhibited; and where unidentified human remains should rest.

Even the souvenir key chains to be sold in the gift shop have become a focus ofrancor.

But nothing has been more fraught than figuring out how to tell the story.

The sunken granite pools that opened last Sept. 11 and that occupy thefootprints of the fallen towers were designed as places to mourn and rememberthe dead. Yet nowhere on the plaza is there even a mention of the terroristattacks that caused the destruction. The job of documenting and interpreting thehistory has been left to the museum, and it is an undertaking pockmarked withcontradictions.

Alice Greenwald, the director of the new museum, and her team mustsimultaneously honor the dead and the survivors; preserve an archaeological siteand its artifacts; and try to offer a comprehensible explanation of a onceinconceivable occurrence. They must speak to vastly different audiences that

include witnesses at the scene and around the globe, as well as children bornlong after the wreckage had been cleared. And many of those listening havelong-simmering, deeply felt opinions about how the museum should take shape.

Whose truth is going to be in that museum? asked Sally Regenhard, whose


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son, Christian, a firefighter, died in the north tower.

Even the name Memorial Museum is something of a contradiction interms. In the context of a memorial, for example, the 17-foot, two-ton crossbeamwhere Mass was held every day during the cleanup is a sacred relic, an icon thatvibrates with emotional and ideological resonance. In a museum, this same hunkof iron is simply evidence. So it is with the photographs of the 19 hijackers: Theyare simultaneously documentation and abominations.

Museums are about understanding, about making meaning of the past, saidJames Gardner, who oversees the nations legislative archives, presidentiallibraries and museums. A memorial fulfills a different need; its aboutremembering and evoking feelings in the viewer, and that function is antitheticalto what museums do.

Reconciling the clashing obligations to recount the history with pinpointaccuracy, to memorialize heroism and to promote healing inevitably requiredcompromise.

No one anticipated how much.

Sifting Through Pain

As the former associate director and a 19-year veteran of the United StatesHolocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, Ms. Greenwald knows a lot aboutghastly things. Yet even that museum did not have to wrestle with the challengeof being built where the horrors had occurred and while the families of victimswere still grieving.

Since being appointed director of the September 11 Museum in 2006, Ms.Greenwald has inherited much of the distrust some of the families feel towardofficials involved in developing the site, particularly Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg,who at one point said that if he were a mourner, he would suck it up and getgoing.

In particular, many families are upset about a plan to place approximately14,000 unidentified or unclaimed remains of those who died typically bonefragments or dried bits of tissue in the museum below ground. The repositorywill be controlled by the citys medical examiner and sealed off from everyone but

family members. Visitors will just see an outer wall inscribed with a quotationfrom Virgil: No day shall erase you from the memory of time.

Seventeen family members have filed suit against the city as part of an effort toreopen the decision. They view it as degrading to set the remains in a museumbelow ground. Rosaleen Tallon, whose brother, Sean, a firefighter, died in thenorth tower, said the insensitivity was mirrored in the museums decision tostock its gift shop with $40 souvenir key chains engraved with the Virgil phrase.

Theyre marketing the headstones of our loved ones on key chains, she said.How disgusting is that?

But to Ms. Greenwald, the decision to keep the remains undergroundrepresented an equally earnest effort to fulfill a longstanding promise to otherfamilies who had sought, above all, to ensure that the remains stayed at


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bedrock.

Its been a very difficult, fascinating and challenging process to jugglecompeting visions of what the museum should be, she said.

Throughout, Ms. Greenwald reached out to the varied constituencies by invitingsome of the most influential and outspoken players to assist the museumsboard. It was led by Mayor Bloomberg and included the first deputy mayor,Patricia E. Harris. Among the 11 family members on the roster was DebraBurlingame, who lost her brother, an American Airlines pilot, in the attack onthe Pentagon. She had successfully led a campaign against a proposedinternational freedom center at ground zero that would have told the story ofSept. 11 in the context of a worldwide struggle for liberty. Also on the committeewas Howard W. Lutnick, the chief executive of Cantor Fitzgerald, the companythat lost 658 employees, including Mr. Lutnicks brother, in the attack.

Ms. Greenwald drew in an even wider circle by holding a series of discussionsabout topics like exhibiting disturbing material and handling human remains. It

was an exhausting process, with dozens of conversations that solicited theopinions of at least 25 survivors and family members of victims; 55 nearbyresidents and business, community and government representatives; 7preservationists; 12 uniformed rescue and recovery workers; 9 interfaith andmulticultural representatives; 78 museum and educational specialists; 8 socialservice and counseling professionals; and 60 foundation staff members.

As the conversations continued, a subtle map of divisions surfaced that ran alongclass, geographic and political lines: New Yorkers found outsiders meddlesome;families of uniformed rescue workers were resentful of Wall Streeters moneyedinfluence; critics disdained those willing to compromise.

Ms. Regenhard, for example, called some of the participants fat cats, V.I.P.sand stuffed suits, and said they represented pure and simple tokenism ratherthan genuine family input.

The New York City fire commissioner, Salvatore J. Cassano, on the other hand,judged the conversations a success. That doesnt mean that everybody got whatthey wanted, but they did get heard, he said.

Indeed, with a few notable exceptions, Ms. Greenwald, a small woman with red

hair, has been widely praised for her curatorial judgment as well as for herdiplomatic skills.

She has handled this thing with sensitivity, said Charles Wolf, whose wife,Katherine, was killed in the attack and who attended the discussions. She is theone who gave us all confidence in the whole process.

Helping Ms. Greenwald was a kitchen cabinet of nine advisers, including Kate D.Levin, the citys cultural commissioner; Jane Rosenthal, a founder of the TribecaFilm Festival; and a handful of scholars like James E. Young, Edward T.Linenthal, and the Civil War historian David Blight. They met two or three times

a year and served as both sounding board and touchstone.

Mr. Blight, who at one point considered writing a book about the museumscreation, said the overriding question for him was what message visitors would


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take away: Are they going to leave with any sense of why this happened and itsconsequences? Or will they be moved solely by the sheer power of thecatastrophe? If its only the latter, then the museum is a failure.

Difficult Decisions

Everyone agrees that it is the museums job is to tell the truth. The question,though, is how much truth.

The museum has more than 4,000 artifacts, from a wedding band to a 15-toncomposite of several tower floors that collapsed into a stack, like pancakes, andthen fused together. There are photographs of men and women jumping out ofwindows, burned and mutilated bodies, scattered and blood-soaked limbs,images so awful they tested the bounds of taste and appropriateness.

There are thousands of harrowing first-person recollections, and photographsand videos from survivors and witnesses, many of them raw. Many victims finalphone calls were preserved. Flight 93s cockpit recorder captured the hijackers

last words and a flight attendants begging for her life.

Which of it should be on display?

We have

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