History > 2014 > USA > Terrorism (I)

Drone Strike in Somalia

Is Said to Kill Shabab Leader

 

DEC. 30, 2014

The New York Times

By ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON — An American drone strike in Somalia has killed the chief of intelligence for the Shabab, the Qaeda affiliate in that country, Somali officials said Tuesday.

Rear Adm. John Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, said Monday that the United States had carried out an airstrike against a senior Shabab leader in the vicinity of Saakow, but American officials declined to identify the leader.

Somalia’s National Intelligence and Security Agency on Tuesday identified the Shabab operative as Abdishakur, also known as Tahliil, and said he was the chief of intelligence and the leader of a unit of the Shabab responsible for suicide attacks.

“With the help of the Somali national security and intelligence agency and its U.S. counterpart, an Al Shabab leader was killed last night,” the security agency said in a statement.

American officials stopped short of publicly seconding that assertion, waiting for other indicators to avoid the possible embarrassment of past airstrikes in which militants who were declared dead popped up very much alive some time later.

After his predecessor was killed in a strike this year, Abdishakur took over as intelligence chief. American officials said a drone fired several Hellfire missiles at a convoy in which the Shabab leader was traveling.

Last week, the Shabab’s former chief of intelligence, Zakariya Ismail Ahmed Hersi, a leader with a $3 million bounty on his head, turned himself in to the Somali authorities, according to The Associated Press. Shabab officials said he left the group over a year ago after a falling out with insurgents loyal to the group’s top leader, Ahmed Abdi Godane, who was killed in an American airstrike in September.

At that time, President Obama drew a direct link between the killing of Mr. Godane, who turned an obscure local militant group into one of the most fearsome Qaeda affiliates in the world, and Mr. Obama’s plans for the leaders of the Islamic State.

The president vowed to hunt down those leaders “the same way” the United States had found Mr. Godane.

Despite setbacks in the past few years that have driven the Shabab from strongholds in Somali cities like Mogadishu into rural areas, the group has continued a string of lethal attacks.

The Shabab — who once ruled large expanses of Somalia — have been in retreat for months, pushed back by African Union peacekeepers and an increasingly hostile populace and weakened by defections. The airstrike that killed Mr. Godane left the group in further disarray.

But the Shabab remain dangerous, unpredictable and bold, and are known for audacious and chilling attacks. Their fighters routinely target the Somali government and international peacekeepers in Mogadishu.

A Christmas meal at the African Union peacekeeping base in Mogadishu was ambushed Thursday by Islamist gunmen and suicide bombers, including some dressed as Somali soldiers. At least three soldiers, one civilian and five attackers were killed, and three attackers were captured after the gunfight at the Halane base camp near the airport in Mogadishu.

This month, Shabab attackers also seized dozens of Kenyan miners, separated the Christians from the Muslims and executed the Christians, the Kenyan authorities said.

And last year, the Shabab massacred dozens of shoppers at a mall in Nairobi, Kenya.
 

A version of this article appears in print on December 31, 2014, on page A10 of the New York edition with the headline: Drone Strike Is Said to Kill a Shabab Chief.

    Drone Strike in Somalia Is Said to Kill Shabab Leader,
    NYT, 30.12.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/31/world/africa/
    drone-strike-is-said-to-kill-shabab-leader.html

Five Guantánamo Prisoners

Are Released to Kazakhstan

DEC. 30, 2014

The New York Times

By HELENE COOPER

WASHINGTON — The United States transferred five detainees from the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to Kazakhstan, the Defense Department announced late Tuesday. It was the last in a flurry of year-end moves as President Obama sought to fulfill his promise to close the American-run prison.

The five former detainees — three Yemenis and two Tunisians — are “free men” for all intents and purposes after the transfer, a senior official in the Obama administration said. Officials declined to disclose the security assurances reached between the United States and Kazakhstan or detail how the men would be prevented from returning to battlefields in Afghanistan or Pakistan.

With the move, 28 detainees have been transferred this year from Guantánamo to other countries, including Uruguay and Afghanistan, administration officials said.

It is the biggest number since 2009, when Mr. Obama assumed office and began trying to make good on his campaign promise to close the prison, which top administration officials have characterized as a blight on the country’s international standing. There are 127 prisoners at Guantánamo.

Some Defense Department officials have expressed concern that prisoners released from the prison may return to take on the American troops who remain in Afghanistan.

Administration officials identified the three Yemenis released as Asim Thabit Abdullah al-Khalaqi, Muhammad Ali Husayn Khanayna and Sabri Mohammad Ibrahim Al Qurashi. They were captured by Pakistani troops in 2001 and handed over to the American authorities. The three have been at Guantánamo for more than 12 years and were recommended for release almost five years ago by Mr. Obama’s national security team.

The Tunisians were identified as Adel al-Hakeemy, who had been held for 12 years 10 months, and Abdullah bin Ali al-Lufti, held for 11 years and 10 months.

The transfer comes a week after Cliff Sloan, Mr. Obama’s envoy for detainee transfers, announced his resignation. His departure is a blow to White House efforts to close the military prison. Mr. Sloan, a Washington lawyer and confidant of Secretary of State John Kerry, had grown frustrated with the slow pace of transfers, administration officials said, a pace that has picked up only in recent weeks.

There has been friction between the White House and the Defense Department over the transfers, with Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, who resigned under pressure in November, insisting that he would not be hurried in moving the prisoners to other countries.

In May, Susan E. Rice, Mr. Obama’s national security adviser, sent Mr. Hagel a memo pressuring him to pick up the pace, but Mr. Hagel told reporters during a flight to Alaska at the time that he was in no rush to approve deals.

“My name is going on that document; that’s a big responsibility,” Mr. Hagel had said, adding: “What I’m doing is, I’m taking my time. I owe that to the American people, to ensure that any decision I make is, in my mind, responsible.”

An administration official said Tuesday that the White House had not decided on a replacement for Mr. Sloan.

    Five Guantánamo Prisoners Are Released to Kazakhstan, NYT, 30.12.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/31/world/middleeast/
    five-guantnamo-prisoners-are-released-to-kazakhstan.html

In Battle to Defang ISIS,

U.S. Targets Its Psychology

 

DEC. 28, 2014

The New York Times

By ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON — Maj. Gen. Michael K. Nagata, commander of American Special Operations forces in the Middle East, sought help this summer in solving an urgent problem for the American military: What makes the Islamic State so dangerous?

Trying to decipher this complex enemy — a hybrid terrorist organization and a conventional army — is such a conundrum that General Nagata assembled an unofficial brain trust outside the traditional realms of expertise within the Pentagon, State Department and intelligence agencies, in search of fresh ideas and inspiration. Business professors, for example, are examining the Islamic State’s marketing and branding strategies.

“We do not understand the movement, and until we do, we are not going to defeat it,” he said, according to the confidential minutes of a conference call he held with the experts. “We have not defeated the idea. We do not even understand the idea.”

General Nagata’s frustration is shared by other American officials. Even as President Obama and his top civilian and military aides express growing confidence that Iraqi troops backed by allied airstrikes have blunted the Islamic State’s momentum on the ground in Iraq and undermined its base of support in Syria, other officials acknowledge they have barely made a dent in the larger, longer-term campaign to kill the ideology that animates the terrorist movement.

Four months after his initial session with the outside advisers, General Nagata, one of the military’s rising stars and the man Mr. Obama has tapped to train a Pentagon-backed army of Syrian rebels to fight the Islamic State, is still searching for answers.

“Those questions and observations are my way of probing and questioning,” General Nagata said in a brief email this month, declining on orders from his superiors to say any more.

The minutes of internal conference calls between General Nagata and more than three dozen experts he convened through Pentagon channels in August and October offer an unusual insight into the struggle to understand the Islamic State as a movement, and where the American military’s top leaders are most focused.

One of the panel’s initial observations that has intrigued General Nagata is the Islamic State’s “capacity to control” a population, according to the minutes.

It is not so much the number of troops or types of weapons the militants use, the experts said. Rather, it is the intangible means by which the Islamic State, also called ISIS or ISIL, wrests and maintains control over territory and its people.

This ability, they discussed, centers on “psychological tactics such as terrorizing populations, religious and sectarian narratives, economic controls.”

The minutes, which are confidential but not classified, reveal disagreements among the experts over whether ISIS’ main objective is ideological or territorial — General Nagata encourages competing views, urging the group to have “one hell of a debate” over his questions.

But the panel raised doubts whether ISIS “has the bureaucratic sophistication necessary to govern.”

“The fact that someone as experienced in counterterrorism as Mike Nagata is asking these kind of questions shows what a really tough problem this is,” said Michael T. Flynn, a retired three-star Army general and former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency who has publicly raised similar concerns.

A final report by the group, which draws from industry, academia and policy research organizations, is due next month.

How to defang the Islamic State’s enticing narrative weighs heavily on many other senior administration officials, as well as top leaders in the Middle East and Europe.

This month, Lisa Monaco, Mr. Obama’s counterterrorism and homeland security adviser, said the increasing effort by the Islamic State to branch out to countries like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon and Libya “is a huge area of concern.” About 1,000 foreign fighters flock to Iraq and Syria every month, American intelligence officials say, most to join arms with ISIS.

“We have to, I think, as an international community, come to terms with how we’re going to deal with these ideologies and movements that are exploiting the weaknesses of various countries,” John O. Brennan, the C.I.A. director, said this fall. “We have to find a way to address some of these factors and conditions that are abetting and allowing these movements to grow.”

Enter General Nagata. He has fought in the shadows most of his 32-year Army career, serving in Special Operations forces and classified military units in hot zones such as Somalia, the Balkans and Iraq. Colleagues say he has displayed bureaucratic acumen in counterterrorism jobs at the C.I.A. and the Pentagon, and diplomatic savvy as a senior American military liaison officer in Pakistan during the turbulent period there from 2009 to 2011.

“He’s the rare warrior who is most comfortable in complexity,” said Stanley A. McChrystal, a retired four-star general and former commander of allied forces in Afghanistan.

Complexity is precisely what General Nagata, by then head of American commandos in the Middle East, wanted in July when he asked a tiny think tank within the military’s Joint Staff, known as Strategic Multilayer Assessment, for help in defeating the Islamic State.

In the past year, the group has produced studies on the security implications of megacities around the world and how to apply neuroscience to the concept of deterrence.

When General Nagata first convened the specialists on a conference call on Aug. 20, he described his priorities and the challenges that ISIS posed.

“What makes I.S. so magnetic, inspirational?” he said. He expressed specific concern that the militant organization is “deeply resonant with a specific but large portion of the Islamic population, particularly young men looking for a banner to flock to.”

“There is a magnetic attraction to I.S. that is bringing in resources, talent, weapons, etc., to thicken, harden, embolden I.S. in ways that are very alarming,” General Nagata said.

During the call, General Nagata alluded to the Islamic State’s sophisticated use of social media to project and amplify its propaganda, and insisted the United States needed “people born and raised in the region” to help combat the problem.

“I want to engage in a long-term conversation to understand a commonly held view of the psychological, emotional and cultural power of I.S. in terms of a diversity of audiences,” the general said. “They are drawing people to them in droves. There are I.S. T-shirts and mugs.”

“When I watch Americans use words like cowardly, barbaric, murder, outrageous, shocking, etc., to describe a violent extremist organization’s actions, we are playing right into the enemy’s hands,” General Nagata added. “They want us to become emotional. They revel in being called murderers when the words are coming from an apostate.”

He continued: “We have to remember that most of their messaging is not for us. We are not the target. They are happy to see us outraged, but they are really communicating to people we are being drawn to their banner.”

Six weeks later, in a second conference call on Oct. 3, General Nagata praised the group’s initial efforts, but again noted, “I do not understand the intangible power of ISIL.”

General Nagata scoffed at those who he said had questioned his decision to focus so much on understanding the intangibles of ISIS.

“What we have been asked to do will take every ounce of creativity that we have,” he said. “This may sound like a bizarre excursion into the surreal, but for me it is about avoiding failure.”
 

A version of this article appears in print on December 29, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: In Battle to Defang ISIS, U.S. Targets Its Psychology.

    In Battle to Defang ISIS, U.S. Targets Its Psychology, NYT, 28.12.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/29/us/politics/
    in-battle-to-defang-isis-us-targets-its-psychology-.html

Prosecute Torturers and Their Bosses

 

DEC. 21, 2014

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

The Opinion Pages | Editorial

Since the day President Obama took office, he has failed to bring to justice anyone responsible for the torture of terrorism suspects — an official government program conceived and carried out in the years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

He did allow his Justice Department to investigate the C.I.A.’s destruction of videotapes of torture sessions and those who may have gone beyond the torture techniques authorized by President George W. Bush. But the investigation did not lead to any charges being filed, or even any accounting of why they were not filed.

Mr. Obama has said multiple times that “we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards,” as though the two were incompatible. They are not. The nation cannot move forward in any meaningful way without coming to terms, legally and morally, with the abhorrent acts that were authorized, given a false patina of legality, and committed by American men and women from the highest levels of government on down.

Americans have known about many of these acts for years, but the 524-page executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report erases any lingering doubt about their depravity and illegality: In addition to new revelations of sadistic tactics like “rectal feeding,” scores of detainees were waterboarded, hung by their wrists, confined in coffins, sleep-deprived, threatened with death or brutally beaten. In November 2002, one detainee who was chained to a concrete floor died of “suspected hypothermia.”

These are, simply, crimes. They are prohibited by federal law, which defines torture as the intentional infliction of “severe physical or mental pain or suffering.” They are also banned by the Convention Against Torture, the international treaty that the United States ratified in 1994 and that requires prosecution of any acts of torture.

So it is no wonder that today’s blinkered apologists are desperate to call these acts anything but torture, which they clearly were. As the report reveals, these claims fail for a simple reason: C.I.A. officials admitted at the time that what they intended to do was illegal.

In July 2002, C.I.A. lawyers told the Justice Department that the agency needed to use “more aggressive methods” of interrogation that would “otherwise be prohibited by the torture statute.” They asked the department to promise not to prosecute those who used these methods. When the department refused, they shopped around for the answer they wanted. They got it from the ideologically driven lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel, who wrote memos fabricating a legal foundation for the methods. Government officials now rely on the memos as proof that they sought and received legal clearance for their actions. But the report changes the game: We now know that this reliance was not made in good faith.

No amount of legal pretzel logic can justify the behavior detailed in the report. Indeed, it is impossible to read it and conclude that no one can be held accountable. At the very least, Mr. Obama needs to authorize a full and independent criminal investigation.

The American Civil Liberties Union is to give Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. a letter Monday calling for appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate what appears increasingly to be “a vast criminal conspiracy, under color of law, to commit torture and other serious crimes.”

The question everyone will want answered, of course, is: Who should be held accountable? That will depend on what an investigation finds, and as hard as it is to imagine Mr. Obama having the political courage to order a new investigation, it is harder to imagine a criminal probe of the actions of a former president.

But any credible investigation should include former Vice President Dick Cheney; Mr. Cheney’s chief of staff, David Addington; the former C.I.A. director George Tenet; and John Yoo and Jay Bybee, the Office of Legal Counsel lawyers who drafted what became known as the torture memos. There are many more names that could be considered, including Jose Rodriguez Jr., the C.I.A. official who ordered the destruction of the videotapes; the psychologists who devised the torture regimen; and the C.I.A. employees who carried out that regimen.

One would expect Republicans who have gone hoarse braying about Mr. Obama’s executive overreach to be the first to demand accountability, but with one notable exception, Senator John McCain, they have either fallen silent or actively defended the indefensible. They cannot even point to any results: Contrary to repeated claims by the C.I.A., the report concluded that “at no time” did any of these techniques yield intelligence that averted a terror attack. And at least 26 detainees were later determined to have been “wrongfully held.”

Starting a criminal investigation is not about payback; it is about ensuring that this never happens again and regaining the moral credibility to rebuke torture by other governments. Because of the Senate’s report, we now know the distance officials in the executive branch went to rationalize, and conceal, the crimes they wanted to commit. The question is whether the nation will stand by and allow the perpetrators of torture to have perpetual immunity for their actions.

A version of this editorial appears in print on December 22, 2014, on page A26 of the New York edition with the headline: Prosecute Torturers and Their Bosses.

    Prosecute Torturers and Their Bosses, NYT, 21.12.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/22/opinion/
    prosecute-torturers-and-their-bosses.html

In 2008 Mumbai Killings,

Piles of Spy Data,

but an Uncompleted Puzzle

 

DEC. 21, 2014

The New York Times

By JAMES GLANZ,

SEBASTIAN ROTELLA

and DAVID E. SANGER

In the fall of 2008, a 30-year-old computer expert named Zarrar Shah roamed from outposts in the northern mountains of Pakistan to safe houses near the Arabian Sea, plotting mayhem in Mumbai, India’s commercial gem.

Mr. Shah, the technology chief of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistani terror group, and fellow conspirators used Google Earth to show militants the routes to their targets in the city. He set up an Internet phone system to disguise his location by routing his calls through New Jersey. Shortly before an assault that would kill 166 people, including six Americans, Mr. Shah searched online for a Jewish hostel and two luxury hotels, all sites of the eventual carnage.

But he did not know that by September, the British were spying on many of his online activities, tracking his Internet searches and messages, according to former American and Indian officials and classified documents disclosed by Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor.

They were not the only spies watching. Mr. Shah drew similar scrutiny from an Indian intelligence agency, according to a former official briefed on the operation. The United States was unaware of the two agencies’ efforts, American officials say, but had picked up signs of a plot through other electronic and human sources, and warned Indian security officials several times in the months before the attack.

What happened next may rank among the most devastating near-misses in the history of spycraft. The intelligence agencies of the three nations did not pull together all the strands gathered by their high-tech surveillance and other tools, which might have allowed them to disrupt a terror strike so scarring that it is often called India’s 9/11.

“No one put together the whole picture,” said Shivshankar Menon, who was India’s foreign minister at the time of the attacks and later became the national security adviser. “Not the Americans, not the Brits, not the Indians.” Mr. Menon, now retired, recalled that “only once the shooting started did everyone share” what they had, largely in meetings between British and Indian officials, and then “the picture instantly came into focus.”

The British had access to a trove of data from Mr. Shah’s communications, but contend that the information was not specific enough to detect the threat. The Indians did not home in on the plot even with the alerts from the United States.

Clues slipped by the Americans as well. David Coleman Headley, a Pakistani-American who scouted targets in Mumbai, exchanged incriminating emails with plotters that went unnoticed until shortly before his arrest in Chicago in late 2009. United States counterterrorism agencies did not pursue reports from his unhappy wife, who told American officials long before the killings began that he was a Pakistani terrorist conducting mysterious missions in Mumbai.

That hidden history of the Mumbai attacks reveals the vulnerability as well as the strengths of computer surveillance and intercepts as a counterterrorism weapon, an investigation by The New York Times, ProPublica and the PBS series “Frontline” has found.

Although electronic eavesdropping often yields valuable data, even tantalizing clues can be missed if the technology is not closely monitored, the intelligence gleaned from it is not linked with other information, or analysis does not sift incriminating activity from the ocean of digital data.

This account has been pieced together from classified documents, court files and dozens of interviews with current and former Indian, British and American officials. While telephone intercepts of the assault team’s phone calls and other intelligence work during the three-day siege have been reported, the extensive espionage that took place before the attacks has not previously been disclosed. Some details of the operations were withheld at the request of the intelligence agencies, citing national security concerns. “We didn’t see it coming,” a former senior United States intelligence official said. “We were focused on many other things — Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, the Iranians. It’s not that things were missed — they were never put together.”

After the assault began, the countries quickly disclosed their intelligence to one another. They monitored a Lashkar control room in Pakistan where the terror chiefs directed their men, hunkered down in the Taj and Oberoi hotels and the Jewish hostel, according to current and former American, British and Indian officials.

That cooperation among the spy agencies helped analysts retrospectively piece together “a complete operations plan for the attacks,” a top-secret N.S.A. document said.

The Indian government did not respond to several requests for official comment, but a former Indian intelligence official acknowledged that Indian spies had tracked Mr. Shah’s laptop communications. It is unclear what data the Indians gleaned from their monitoring.

Asked if Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, Britain’s eavesdropping agency, should have had strong suspicions of a looming attack, a government official responded in a statement: “We do not comment on intelligence matters. But if we had had critical information about an imminent act of terrorism in a situation like this we would have shared it with the Indian government. So the central allegation of this story is completely untrue.”

The attacks still resonate in India, and are a continuing source of tension with Pakistan. Last week, a Pakistani court granted bail to a militant commander, Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, accused of being an orchestrator of the attacks. He has not been freed, pending an appeal. India protested his release, arguing it was part of a Pakistani effort to avoid prosecution of terror suspects.

The story of the Mumbai killings has urgent implications for the West’s duel with the Islamic State and other groups. Like Lashkar, the Islamic State’s stealthy communications and slick propaganda make it one of the world’s most technologically sophisticated terror organizations. Al Qaeda, which recently announced the creation of an affiliate in India, uses similar tools.

Although the United States computer arsenal plays a vital role against targets ranging from North Korea’s suspected assault on Sony to Russian cyberthieves and Chinese military hacking units, counterterrorism requires a complex mix of human and technical resources. Some former counterterrorism officials warn against promoting billion-dollar surveillance programs with the narrow argument that they stop attacks.

That monitoring collects valuable information, but large amounts of it are “never meaningfully reviewed or analyzed,” said Charles (Sam) Faddis, a retired C.I.A. counterterrorism chief. “I cannot remember a single instance in my career when we ever stopped a plot based purely on signals intelligence.”

The targeting of Mr. Shah’s communications also failed to detect Mr. Headley’s role in the Mumbai attacks, and National Security Agency officials did not see for months that he was pursuing a new attack in Denmark.

“There are small successes in all of this that don’t make up for all the deaths,” said Tricia Bacon, a former State Department intelligence analyst, referring to intelligence and broader efforts to counter Lashkar. “It’s a massive failure and some small successes.”

Lashkar’s Computer Chief

Zarrar Shah was a digitally savvy operative, a man with a bushy beard, a pronounced limp, strong ties to Pakistani intelligence and an intense hatred for India, according to Western and Indian officials and court files. The spy agencies of Britain, the United States and India considered him the technology and communications chief for Lashkar, a group dedicated to attacking India. His fascination with jihad established him as something of a pioneer for a generation of Islamic extremists who use the Internet as a weapon.

According to Indian court records and interviews with intelligence officials, Mr. Shah was in his late 20s when he became the “emir,” or chief, of the Lashkar media unit. Because of his role, Mr. Shah, together with another young Lashkar chief named Sajid Mir, became an intelligence target for the British, Indians and Americans.

Lashkar-e-Taiba, which translates as “the Army of the Pure,” grew rapidly in the 1990s thanks to a powerful patron: the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate (ISI), the Pakistani spy agency that the C.I.A. has worked with uneasily for years. Lashkar conducted a proxy war for Pakistan in return for arms, funds, intelligence, and training in combat tactics and communications technology. Initially, Lashkar’s focus was India and Kashmir, the mountainous region claimed by both India and Pakistan.

But Lashkar became increasingly interested in the West. A Qaeda figure involved in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center was arrested in a Lashkar safe house in 2002. Investigators dismantled a Lashkar network as it plotted a bombing in Australia in 2003 while recruiting, buying equipment and raising funds in North America and Europe. In 2007, a French court convicted in absentia the ringleader, Mr. Mir. He remained at large in Pakistan under ISI protection, investigators say.

Lashkar’s alliance with the ISI came under strain as some of the militants pushed for a Qaeda-style war on the West.

As a result, some ISI officers and terror chiefs decided that a spectacular strike was needed to restore Lashkar’s cohesion and burnish its image, according to interviews and court files. The plan called for a commando-style assault in India that could also hit Americans, Britons and Jews there.

The target was the centerpiece of Indian prosperity: Mumbai.

Hatching a Plot

Lashkar’s chiefs developed a plot that would dwarf previous operations.

The lead conspirators were alleged to be Mr. Mir and Mr. Lakhvi, according to interviews and Indian court files, with Mr. Shah acting as a technical wingman, running the communications and setting up the hardware.

In early 2008, Indian and Western counterterrorism agencies began to pick up chatter about a potential attack on Mumbai. Indian spy agencies and police forces gathered periodic leads from their own sources about a Lashkar threat to the city.

Starting in the spring, C.I.A. warnings singled out the iconic Taj Mahal Palace Hotel and other sites frequented by Westerners, according to American and Indian officials. Those warnings came from electronic and human sources, not from tracking Mr. Shah, other officials said.

“The U.S. intelligence community — on multiple occasions between June and November 2008 — warned the Indian government about Lashkar threats in Mumbai,” said Brian Hale, a spokesman for the director of the Office of National Intelligence. “The information identified several potential targets in the city, but we did not have specific information about the timing or the method of attack.”

United States spy agencies also alerted their British counterparts, according to a senior American intelligence official. It is unclear if the warnings led to the targeting of Mr. Shah’s communications, but by the fall of 2008, the British had found a way to monitor Lashkar’s digital networks.

So had the Indians. But until the attacks, one Indian official said, there was no communication between the two countries on the matter.

Western spy agencies routinely share significant or “actionable” intelligence involving threats with allies, but sometimes do not pass on less important information. Even friendly agencies are typically reluctant to disclose their sources of intelligence.

Britain and India, while cooperative, were not nearly as close as the United States and Britain. And India is not included in the tightest intelligence-sharing circles of international, eavesdropping agencies that the two countries anchor.

Intelligence officials say that terror plots are often discernible only in hindsight, when a pattern suddenly emerges from what had been just bits of information. Whatever the reason, no one fully grasped the developing Mumbai conspiracy.

“They either weren’t looking or didn’t understand what it all meant,” said one former American official who had access to the intelligence and would speak only on the condition of anonymity. “There was a lot more noise than signal. There usually is.”

Leaving a Trail

Not long after the British gained access to his communications, Mr. Shah contacted a New Jersey company, posing online as an Indian reseller of telephone services named Kharak Singh, purporting to be based in Mumbai. His Indian persona started haggling over the price of a voice-over-Internet phone service — also known as VoIP — that had been chosen because it would make calls between Pakistan and the terrorists in Mumbai appear as if they were originating in Austria and New Jersey.

“its not first time in my life i am perchasing in this VOIP business,” Mr. Shah wrote in shaky English, to an official with the New Jersey-based company when he thought the asking price was too high, the GCHQ documents show. “i am using these services from 2 years.”

Mr. Shah had begun researching the VoIP systems, online security, and ways to hide his communications as early as mid-September, according to the documents. As he made his plan, he searched on his laptop for weak communication security in Europe, spent time on a site designed to conceal browsing history, and searched Google News for “indian american naval exercises” — presumably so the seagoing attackers would not blunder into an overwhelming force.

Ajmal Kasab, the only terrorist who would survive the Mumbai attacks, watched Mr. Shah display some of his technical prowess. In mid-September, Mr. Shah and fellow plotters used Google Earth and other material to show Mr. Kasab and nine other young Pakistani terrorists their targets in Mumbai, according to court testimony.

The session, which took place in a huge “media room” in a remote camp on the border with Kashmir, was part of an effort to chart the terrorists’ route across the Arabian Sea, to a water landing on the edge of Mumbai, then through the chaotic streets. Videos, maps and reconnaissance reports had been supplied to Mr. Mir by Mr. Headley, the Pakistani-American who scouted targets. “The gunmen were shown all this data from the reconnaissance,” said Deven Bharti, a top Mumbai police official who investigated the attacks, adding that the terrorists were trained to use Google Earth and global positioning equipment on their own. “Kasab was trained to locate everything in Mumbai before he went.”

If Mr. Shah made any attempt to hide his malevolent intentions, he did not have much success at it. Although his frenetic computer activity was often sprawling, he repeatedly displayed some key interests: small-scale warfare, secret communications, tourist and military locations in India, extremist ideology and Mumbai.

He searched for Sun Tzu’s “Art of War,” previous terror strikes in India and weather forecasts in the Arabian Sea, typed “4 star hotel in delhi” and “taj hotel,” and visited mapsofindia.com to pore over sites in and around Mumbai, the documents show.

Still, the sheer scale of his ambition might have served as a smokescreen for his focus on the city. For example, he also showed interest in Kashmir, the Indian Punjab, New Delhi, Afghanistan and the United States Army in Germany and Canada. He constantly flipped back and forth among Internet porn and entertainment sites while he was carrying out his work. He appeared to be fascinated with the actor Robert De Niro, called up at least one article on the singer Taylor Swift, and looked at funny cat videos. He visited unexplainable.net, a conspiracy theory website, and conducted a search on “barak obama family + muslim.”

In late September and again in October, Lashkar botched attempts to send the attackers to Mumbai by sea. During that period, at least two of the C.I.A. warnings were delivered, according to American and Indian officials. An alert in mid-September mentioned the Taj hotel among a half-dozen potential targets, causing the facility to temporarily beef up security. Another on Nov. 18 reported the location of a Pakistani vessel linked to a Lashkar threat against the southern coastal area of Mumbai, where the attack would occur.

Eventually Mr. Shah did set up the VoIP service through the New Jersey company, ensuring that many of his calls to the terrorists would bear the area code 201, concealing their actual origin. But in November, the company’s owner wrote to the fictitious Indian reseller, Mr. Singh, complaining that no traffic was running on the digital phone network. Mr. Shah’s reply was ominous, according to Indian law enforcement officials, who obtained evidence from the company’s communications records with F.B.I. assistance after the attack."Dear Sir,” Mr. Shah replied, “i will send trafic by the end of this month.”

By Nov. 24, Mr. Shah had moved to the Karachi suburbs, where he set up an electronic “control room” with the help of an Indian militant named Abu Jundal, according to his later confession to the Indian authorities. It was from this room that Mr. Mir, Mr. Shah and others would issue minute-by-minute instructions to the assault team once the attacks began. On Nov. 25, Abu Jundal tested the VoIP software on four laptops spread out on four small tables facing a pair of televisions as the plotters, including Mr. Mir, Mr. Shah and Mr. Lakhvi, waited for the killings to begin.

In a plan to pin the blame on Indians, Mr. Shah typed a statement of responsibility for the attack from the Hyderabad Deccan Mujahadeen — a fake Indian organization. Early on Nov. 26, Mr. Shah showed more of his hand: he emailed a draft of the phony claim to an underling with orders to send it to the news media later, according to American and Indian counterterrorism officials.

Before the attacks started that evening, the documents show, Mr. Shah pulled up Google images of the Oberoi Hotel and conducted Wikimapia searches for the Taj and the Chabad House, the Jewish hostel run by an American rabbi from Brooklyn who would die in the strike along with his pregnant wife. Mr. Shah opened the hostel’s website. He began Googling news coverage of Mumbai just before the attacks began.

An intercept shows what Mr. Shah was reading, on the news website NDTV, as the killings proceeded.

“Mumbai, the city which never sleeps, was brought to its knees on Wednesday night as it came under an unprecedented multiple terror attack,” the article said. “Even as heavily armed police stormed into Taj Hotel, just opposite the Gateway of India where suspected terrorists were still holed up, blood-soaked guests could be seen carried out into the waiting ambulances.”

A Trove of Data

In the United States, Nov. 26 was the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. A long presidential election fight was over, and many officials in Washington had already drifted away for their long weekend. Anish Goel, director for South Asia at the National Security Council in the White House, left around 6 a.m. for the eight-hour drive to his parents’ house in Ohio. By the time he arrived, his BlackBerry was filled with emails about the attacks.

The Pakistani terrorists had come ashore in an inflatable speedboat in a fishermen’s slum in south Mumbai about 9 p.m. local time. They fanned out in pairs and struck five targets with bombs and AK-47s: the Taj, the Oberoi Hotel, the Leopold Cafe, Chabad House, and the city’s largest train station.

The killing was indiscriminate, merciless, and seemingly unstoppable over three horrific days. In raw, contemporaneous notes by analysts, the eavesdroppers seem to be making a hasty effort to understand the clues from the days and weeks before.

“Analysis of Zarrar Shah’s viewing habits” and other data “yielded several locations in Mumbai well before the attacks occurred and showed operations planning for initial entry points into the Taj Hotel,” the N.S.A. document said.

That viewing history also revealed a longer list of what might have been future targets. M.K. Narayanan, India’s national security adviser at the time, appeared to be concerned about that data from Mr. Shah in discussions with American officials shortly after the attacks, according to the WikiLeaks archive of American diplomatic cables.

A top secret GCHQ document described the capture of information on targets that Mr. Shah had identified using Google Earth. The analysts seemed impressed by the intelligence haul — “unprecedented real-time active access in place!” — one GCHQ document noted. Another agency document said the work to piece the data together was “briefed at highest levels nationally and internationally, including the US National Security Adviser.”

As early reports of many casualties came in, Mr. Goel said the focus in Washington shifted to a question already preoccupying the White House: “Is this going to lead to a war between Pakistan and India?” American officials who conducted periodic simulations of how a nuclear conflict could be triggered often began with a terror attack like this one.

On Nov. 30, Mr. Goel was back at his office, reading a stack of intelligence reports that had accumulated on his desk and reviewing classified electronic messages on a secure terminal.

Amid the crisis, Mr. Goel, now a senior South Asia Fellow at the New America Foundation, paid little attention to the sources of the intelligence and said that he still knew little about specific operations. But two things stood out, he said: The main conspirators in Pakistan had already been identified. And the quality and rapid pacing of the intelligence reports made it clear that electronic espionage was primarily responsible for the information. “During the attacks, it was extraordinarily helpful,” Mr. Goel said of the surveillance.

But until then, the United States did not know of the British and Indian spying on Mr. Shah’s communications. “While I cannot comment on the authenticity of any alleged classified documents, N.S.A. had no knowledge of any access to a lead plotter’s computer before the attacks in Mumbai in November 2008,” said Mr. Hale, the spokesman for the Office of the director of National Intelligence. As N.S.A. and GCHQ analysts worked around the clock after the attacks, the flow of intelligence enabled Washington, London and New Delhi to exert pressure on Pakistan to round up suspects and crack down on Lashkar, despite its alliance with the ISI, according to officials involved. In the stacks of intelligence reports, one name did not appear, Mr. Goel clearly recalls: David Coleman Headley. None of the intelligence streams from the United States, Britain or India had yet identified him as a conspirator.

The Missing American

Mr. Headley’s many-sided life — three wives, drug-smuggling convictions and a past as an informant for the United States Drug Enforcement Administration — would eventually collapse. But for now, he was a free man, watching the slaughter on television in Lahore, Pakistan, according to his later court testimony. At the time, he was with Faiza Outalha, his Moroccan wife, having reconciled with her after moving his Pakistani wife and four children to Chicago.

Mr. Headley’s unguarded emails reflected euphoria about Lashkar’s success. An exchange with his wife in Chicago continued a long string of incriminating electronic communications by Mr. Headley written in a transparent code, according to investigators and case files. “I watched the movie the whole day,” she wrote, congratulating him on his “graduation.”

About a week later, Mr. Headley hinted at his inside information in an email to fellow alumni of a Pakistani military school. Writing about the young terrorists who carried out the mayhem in Mumbai, he said: “Yes they were only 10 kids, guaranteed. I hear 2 were married with a daughter each under 3 years old.” His subsequent emails contained several dozen news media photos of the Mumbai siege.

Almost immediately, Mr. Headley began pursuing a new plot with Lashkar against a Danish newspaper that had published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. He went to Denmark in January and cased the newspaper, meeting and exchanging emails with its advertising staff, according to his later testimony and court records. He sent messages to his fellow conspirators and emailed himself a reconnaissance checklist of sorts, with terms like “Counter-Surveillance,” “Security (Armed?)” and “King’s Square” — the site of the newspaper.

Those emails capped a series of missed signals involving Mr. Headley. The F.B.I. conducted at least four inquiries into allegations about his extremist activity between 2001 and 2008. Ms. Outalha had visited the United States Embassy in Islamabad three times between December 2007 and April 2008, according to interviews and court documents, claiming that he was a terrorist carrying out missions in India.

Mr. Headley also exchanged highly suspicious emails with his Lashkar and ISI handlers before and after the Mumbai attacks, according to court records and American counterterrorism officials. The N.S.A. collected some of his emails, but did not realize he was involved in terrorist plotting until he became the target of an F.B.I. investigation, officials said.

That inquiry began in July 2009 when a British tip landed on the desk of a rookie F.B.I. counterterrorism agent in Chicago. Someone named “David” at a Chicago pay phone had called two suspects under surveillance in Britain, planning to visit. He had contacted the Britons for help with the plot, according to testimony. Customs and Border Protection used his flight itinerary to identify him while en route, and after further investigation, the F.B.I. arrested him at Chicago O’Hare Airport that October, as he was preparing to fly to Pakistan. For his role in the Mumbai attacks, he pleaded guilty to 12 counts and was sentenced to 35 years in prison.

After disclosures last year of widespread N.S.A. surveillance, American officials claimed that bulk collection of electronic communications led to Mr. Headley’s eventual arrest. But a government oversight panel rejected claims giving credit to the N.S.A.'s program to collect Americans’ domestic phone call records. Case files and interviews with law enforcement officials show that the N.S.A. played only a support role in the F.B.I. investigation that finally identified Mr. Headley as a terrorist and disrupted the Danish plot.

The sole surviving attacker of the Mumbai attack, Mr. Kasab, was executed in India after a trial. Although Pakistan denies any role in the attacks, it has failed to charge an ISI officer and Mr. Mir, who were indicted by American prosecutors. Though Mr. Shah and other Lashkar chiefs had been arrested, their trial remains stalled six years after the attack. Mr. Menon, the former Indian foreign minister, said that a lesson that emerged from the tragedy in Mumbai was that “computer traffic only tells you so much. It’s only a thin slice.” The key is the analysis, he said, and “we didn’t have it.”
 

James Glanz reported from India, New York and Washington; Sebastian Rotella of ProPublica reported from Chicago, India, New York and Washington; and David E. Sanger reported from Washington. Reporting was contributed by Andrew W. Lehren from New York, Declan Walsh from London, and Jeff Larson of ProPublica and Tom Jennings and Anna Belle Peevey of Frontline from New York.

A version of this article appears in print on December 22, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Spy Data Failed to Stop ‘08 Mubai Terror.

    In 2008 Mumbai Killings, Piles of Spy Data, but an Uncompleted Puzzle,
    NYT, 21.12.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/22/world/asia/
    in-2008-mumbai-attacks-piles-of-spy-data-but-an-uncompleted-puzzle.html

U.S. Transfers

6 Guantánamo Detainees

to Uruguay

DEC. 7, 2014

The New York Times

By CHARLIE SAVAGE

WASHINGTON– The United States transferred six detainees from the Guantánamo Bay prison to Uruguay this weekend, the Defense Department announced early Sunday. It was the largest single group of inmates to depart the wartime prison in Cuba since 2009, and the first of the detainees to be resettled in South America.

The transfer included a Syrian man who has been on a prolonged hunger strike to protest his indefinite detention without trial, and who has brought a high-profile lawsuit to challenge the military’s procedures for force-feeding him. His release may moot most of that case, although a dispute over whether videotapes of the procedure must be disclosed to the public is expected to continue.

The transfer was also notable because the deal has been publicly known since it was finalized last spring. Significantly, however, bureaucratic delays by Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel in signing off on the arrangement placed it in jeopardy. Mr. Hagel’s slow pace this year in approving proposed transfers of low-level detainees contributed to larger tensions with the White House before his resignation under pressure last month.

Although President Obama had vowed in 2013 to revive his effort to close the prison, the military had transferred just one low-level detainee – in March – through the first ten months of 2014. But the bureaucratic logjam appears to be clearing: since November, it has now transferred 12 more. Still, even if the military were to transfer all of the other detainees recommended for transfer, some 69 detainees would remain who are either facing charges before a military commission or are deemed too dangerous to release but untriable.

The Obama administration hopes that if it can shrink the inmate population to two digits, then Congress will revoke a law that bars the transfer of detainees into the United States. It would be far cheaper for taxpayers to house the inmates on domestic soil, and the White House argues that closing Guantánamo would eliminate a propaganda symbol for terrorists to use against the country. But Republican lawmakers, who argue that housing wartime prisoners on domestic soil so would raise risks of terrorist attacks inside the United States, remain hostile to that plan.

The Uruguay deal was ready to go in March. But in August, when the United States was finally ready to move forward with it and sent a plane to Guantánamo to bring the men out, Uruguay’s president balked.

Each of the detainees has long been recommended for release if the receiving country could meet security conditions, but remained at Guantánamo because they come from home countries with troubled security conditions. Earlier this year, Uruguay’s president, Jose Mujica, had offered to take them in.

Then, Uruguay’s presidential election went into a run-off, which was held on Nov. 30. During the delay, administration officials had insisted that the transfers would take place, eventually.

Cliff Sloan, the State Department envoy who negotiates detainee transfers, expressed gratitude to Mr. Mujica in a statement. Several other South American countries, including Brazil, Chile and Colombia, motivated by news of the Uruguay deal, had opened talks about potentially taking in some low-level detainees, as well, but were watching would what happen.

“We are very grateful to Uruguay for this important humanitarian action, and to President Mujica for his strong leadership in providing a home for individuals who cannot return to their own countries,” Mr. Sloan said. “The support we are receiving from our friends and allies is critical to achieving our shared goal of closing Guantánamo.”

He noted that“this transfer is a major milestone in our efforts to close the facility.”

The transferred men included four Syrians, one Tunisian and one Palestinian. Each had been recommended for release by an interagency task force in 2009. Their departure reduces the inmate population at Guantánamo to 137 detainees, of whom 68 are on the list of those approved for transfer if security conditions can be met; most on that list are Yemenis.

One of the Syrians is Jihad Ahmed Mujstafa Diyab, who had been held for 12 years without a trial. He is the plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging the military’s procedures for dealing with hunger strikes, which include strapping detainees into a restraint chair and inserting tubes into their noses, through which liquid nutritional supplement is poured.

In October, a Federal District Court judge ruled that the military must make public videotapes of Mr. Diyab undergoing that procedure, in response to a petition by the New York Times and 15 other new organizations. The Obama administration has appealed that order, saying the release of the videos could inflame attacks against American troops abroad.

Under statutory transfer restrictions enacted by Congress, the secretary of defense must tell lawmakers at least 30 days before any transfer that he has determined that it would be safe enough to release a detainee. Mr. Hagel had approved a flurry of transfers in late 2013, but in 2014 the process ground to a halt as he did not move on the Uruguay deal, nor on aproposal to repatriate four low-level Afghans and other arrangements in the pipeline.

His reluctance to sign off on these agreements contributed to a deterioration in his relations with the White House. In May, President Obama’s national security adviser, Susan Rice, sent Mr. Hagel a memo pressuring him to pick up the pace, and Mr. Hagel, in an interview, explained that he was in no hurry to approve deals.

“My name is going on that document. That’s a big responsibility,” Mr. Hagel said at the time, adding: “What I’m doing is, I am taking my time. I owe that to the American people, to ensure that any decision I make is, in my mind, responsible.”

Later that month, Mr. Hagel did transfer five high-level Taliban detainees to Qatar in a prisoner exchange for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, America’s only living prisoner of war from the conflict in Afghanistan. The deal angered lawmakers because Mr. Hagel did not follow the 30-day advance notice law in that instance; the administration said that waiting 30 days after the deal for Sergeant Bergdahl’s release was struck would have endangered his life.

Mr. Hagel finally did notify Congress that he was approving the Uruguay deal in July, but by the time the 30 days ran, Mr. Mujica preferred to avoid the media spectacle of their arrival in the middle of the election campaign to select his successor.

In recent months, Mr. Hagel has also signed approved other detainee transfers. In early November, the military carried out the repatriation of a low-level Kuwaiti, followed by the resettlement of four Yemenis and a Tunisian in Eastern Europe later last month.

“The Defense Department is working diligently to transfer eligible detainees from Guantánamo,” Paul Lewis, the Pentagon envoy on transfers, said in a statement, adding: “Security is always top-of-mind prior to any decision to transfer a detainee, and each detainee is closely reviewed by six departments before he is eligible for transfer.”

But Mr. Hagel also backed off an interagency decision to repatriate four Afghans, shortly before he announced his resignation underpressure, pending the confirmation of a successor; Mr. Obama has nominated Ashton B. Carter for the job. It is not clear what Mr. Hagel’s transitional status means for any other proposedtransfers awaiting approval.

    U.S. Transfers 6 Guantánamo Detainees to Uruguay, NYT, 7.12.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/08/world/americas/
    us-transfers-6-guantanamo-detainees-to-uruguay.html

2 Hostages Killed in Yemen

as U.S. Rescue Effort Fails

 

DEC. 6, 2014

The New York Times

By KAREEM FAHIM and ERIC SCHMITT

SANA, Yemen — United States commandos stormed a village in southern Yemen early Saturday in an effort to free an American photojournalist held hostage by Al Qaeda, but the raid ended in tragedy, with the kidnappers killing the American and a South African held with him, United States officials said.

The hostages — Luke Somers, an American photojournalist, and Pierre Korkie, a South African teacher — were killed by their captors, militants from Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, when they realized the rescue effort was underway. President Obama said he had authorized the operation, led by about three dozen Navy SEAL Team 6 commandos, after concluding that Mr. Somers’s life was in “imminent danger.”

It was the second attempt by United States forces to rescue Mr. Somers from Yemen in less than two weeks. Despite the deaths of the hostages, as well as several Yemeni civilians, President Obama said his administration would not back down from using military power to free its captured citizens.

“As this and previous hostage rescue operations demonstrate, the United States will spare no effort to use all of its military, intelligence and diplomatic capabilities to bring Americans home safely, wherever they are located,” he said in a statement.

The raid Saturday, however, may have doomed an effort by a South African aid group to free Mr. Korkie. Gift of the Givers, a South African relief organization that has projects in Yemen, said it had successfully negotiated Mr. Korkie’s release, and he had been expected to be freed by the militants on Sunday. American officials said they were not aware of those arrangements.

Mr. Somers had been part of a group of freelance journalists who covered the aftermath of Yemen’s 2011 uprising and had stayed on, working as a freelance editor at English-language publications and as a photojournalist. He was kidnapped in September 2013 while walking on a street in Sana, Yemen’s capital. Shortly before his death, Mr. Somers’s family released a video in which they pleaded with his captors to release him, while insisting that they had no prior knowledge of the first rescue attempt.

On Saturday, Mr. Somers’s sister, Lucy Somers, told The Associated Press that F.B.I. agents had notified the family of her brother’s death.

“We ask that all of Luke’s family members be allowed to mourn in peace,” she said.

In the village where the rescue attempt took place, in the southern province of Shabwah, a tribal leader, Tarek al-Daghari al-Awlaki, said the American commandos had raided four houses, killing at least two militants but also eight civilians. He said that one of the civilians killed was a 70-year-old man.

“The shooting caused panic,” Mr. Daghari said. “Nine of the dead are from my tribe.” He added that villagers had spent the rest of Saturday burying the dead and collecting spent bullet casings.

American officials said they acted while facing a perilous deadline and a tiny window of opportunity. Mr. Somers’s captors said in a video statement released Wednesday that they would kill him by Saturday unless unspecified demands were met. The ultimatum for Mr. Somers appeared to be largely a response to the first raid, on Nov. 25, an operation led by United States Special Operations commandos on a cave near Yemen’s border with Saudi Arabia. The commandos freed eight other hostages and killed seven militants, but found no sign of Mr. Somers, who apparently had been moved in the days before the operation.

By Saturday, though, the United States had tracked him to a walled compound in the village in southern Yemen. American intelligence, including spy satellites, surveillance drones and eavesdropping technology, had pinpointed the location of Mr. Somers and one other Western hostage inside the compound, according to a senior military official who provided an account of the operation. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified operations.

America’s Special Operations forces have played a central role in global combat missions since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the most notable being the raid into Pakistan in 2011 that killed Osama bin Laden. But the challenges of distance, weather, equipment failure, pinpoint intelligence — and unpredictable actions by the adversary — are ever-present.

A raid in July by Special Operations forces against an Islamic State safe house in Syria also failed to free American hostages, who apparently had been relocated in advance of the mission.

In the case of the raid Saturday, the intelligence on Mr. Somers’s location was accurate. It seems likely that the deadline set by the militant captors to kill him on Saturday set the clock on carrying out the mission.

It remained to be seen whether the killings represented a larger shift in the tactics of Al Qaeda, which has largely turned away from executing hostages in recent years in favor of negotiating ransoms — a contrast to the frequent executions carried out by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. When they have faced military raids, Al Qaeda militants have executed hostages.

The operation on Saturday began at about 1 a.m. The SEAL Team 6 commandos, joined by a small number of Yemeni counterterrorism troops, swept toward the village aboard V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft under cover of darkness early Saturday local time. They landed several hundred yards from the compound in an effort to remain undetected.

Their effort faced steep odds. The compound, which was located in a remote, hilly area, surrounded by scrub, was guarded by about half a dozen gunmen, already jittery about a possible repeat of the previous rescue attempt. And the approach to the compound was sufficiently difficult that the commandos had virtually no element of surprise, which they typically plan for and rely on. The commandos were detected when they were less than 100 yards from the compound. It was not clear what alerted the militants.

“It was very difficult to catch them by enough surprise to prevent them from having time to execute the hostages,” said the senior military official, who monitored the operation overnight Friday into Saturday.

Heavily armed and wearing night-vision goggles, the commandos breached the compound and knew in which building the hostages were being held. But their advantage was already lost: The commandos saw one of the militants go into a small building long enough to shoot the hostages and leave. By the time the Americans reached the building, the militants had already fled. The commandos recovered Mr. Somers and Mr. Korkie, who were both gravely wounded. One of the hostages — officials did not say which one — died on the Osprey ride to the amphibious assault ship Makin Island, from which the rescue mission was launched off the Yemeni coast.

The other hostage died on the operating table after reaching the ship.

Mr. Korkie was kidnapped with his wife, Yolande Korkie, in May 2013. Ms. Korkie was released without a ransom in January after Gift of the Givers used its connections with tribal leaders in the area to contact the kidnappers, according to the charity’s director, Imtiaz Sooliman.

Negotiations for the release of Mr. Korkie proved more difficult, the aid group said, with Al Qaeda insisting on the payment of a ransom — even though the family said that they did not have the money. The South African government refused to intercede, Mr. Sooliman said in an interview in June.

In the statement posted on the Gift of the Givers website, the aid group said that “Pierre was to be released by Al Qaeda tomorrow.” Yemeni leaders were preparing “the final security and logistical arrangements,” the statement continued.

“It is even more tragic that the words we used in a conversation with Yolande at 5:59 this morning was, ‘The wait is almost over.’ ”

Correction: December 6, 2014

An earlier version of this article misspelled part of the name of the ship from which the rescue mission was launched. It is the Makin Island, not the Malkin Island.

Kareem Fahim reported from Sana, Yemen, and Eric Schmitt from Manama, Bahrain. Rukmini Callimachi contributed reporting from Istanbul, Saeed Al-Batati from Al Mukalla, Yemen, and Michael R. Gordon from Washington.

A version of this article appears in print on December 7, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: 2 Hostages Killed in Yemen as U.S. Rescue Effort Fails.

    2 Hostages Killed in Yemen as U.S. Rescue Effort Fails, NYT, 6.12.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/07/world/middleeast/
    hostage-luke-somers-is-killed-in-yemen-
    during-rescue-attempt-american-official-says.html

Obama Condemns

Islamic State’s Killing of Peter Kassig

 

NOV. 16, 2014

The New York Times

By RUKMINI CALLIMACHI

GAZIANTEP, Turkey — Islamic State militants released a chilling videotape on Sunday showing they had beheaded a fifth Western hostage, an American aid worker the group had threatened to kill in retaliation for airstrikes carried out by the United States in Iraq and Syria.

President Obama on Sunday confirmed the death of the aid worker, Peter Kassig, a former Army Ranger who disappeared more than a year ago at a checkpoint in northeastern Syria while delivering medical supplies.

Mr. Kassig “was taken from us in an act of pure evil by a terrorist group,” Mr. Obama said in a statement from aboard Air Force One that was read to the news media in Washington.

In recent days, American intelligence agencies received strong indications that the Islamic State had killed Mr. Kassig, the group’s third American victim. The president’s announcement was the first official confirmation of his death.

“Today we offer our prayers and condolences to the parents and family of Abdul-Rahman Kassig, also known to us as Peter,” Mr. Obama’s statement said. The president used the Muslim name that Mr. Kassig adopted after his capture, making the point that the Islamic State had killed a fellow Muslim. He acknowledged the “anguish at this painful time” felt by Mr. Kassig’s family.

The footage in the video released Sunday was of poorer quality than some of the group’s previous, slickly produced execution videos.

The video shows a black-robed executioner standing over the severed head of Mr. Kassig. Though the end result of the footage was grimly familiar, it was strikingly different from the executions of four other Western hostages, whose recorded deaths were carefully choreographed.

In the clip released early Sunday, the Islamic State displays the head of Mr. Kassig, 26, at the feet of a man with a British accent who appeared in the previous beheading videos and has been nicknamed Jihadi John by the British news media. Unlike the earlier videos, which were staged with multiple cameras from different vantage points, and which show the hostages kneeling, then uttering their last words, the footage of Mr. Kassig’s death is curtailed — showing only the final scene.

“This is Peter Edward Kassig, a U.S. citizen of your country. Peter, who fought against the Muslims in Iraq while serving as a soldier under the American Army, doesn’t have much to say. His previous cellmates have already spoken on his behalf,” the fighter with a British accent says in the video. “You claim to have withdrawn from Iraq four years ago. We said to you then that you are liars.”

Analysts said that the change in the videos suggested that something may have gone wrong as the militants, who have been under sustained attack from a United States-led military coalition and have faced a series of setbacks in recent weeks, carried out the killing.

“The most obvious difference is in the beheading itself — the previous videos all showed the beheading on camera,” said Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, in Washington, and a former director of the Center for the Study of Terrorist Radicalization. “This one just shows the severed head itself. I don’t think this was the Islamic State’s choice.” He added, “The likeliest possibility is that something went wrong when they were beheading him.”

Among the things that could have gone wrong, analysts surmise, is that the extremists did not have as much time outdoors as they did when they killed the others. The United States announced soon after the first beheading in August that they would send surveillance aircraft over Syria and residents contacted on social media have reported seeing objects in the sky that they believe are drones.

The first four beheadings were carried out in the open air, with a cinematic precision that suggests multiple takes, filmed over an extended period of time. Carrying out a similar level of production as surveillance planes crisscrossed the skies above would result in extended exposure — heightening risk.

Another possibility, Mr. Gartenstein-Ross said, is that Mr. Kassig resisted, depriving the militants of the ability to stage the killing as they wanted.

“We know that this is a very media-savvy organization, and they know that you only have one take to get the beheading right,” he said.

An Indianapolis native, Mr. Kassig turned to humanitarian work after a tour as an Army Ranger in Iraq in 2007. He was certified as an emergency technician, and by 2012 he returned to the battlefield, this time helping bandage the victims of Syria’s civil war who were flooding into Lebanon. He moved to Lebanon’s capital, Beirut, where he founded a small aid group and initially used his savings to buy supplies, like diapers, which he distributed to the Syrian refugees in Lebanon.

In the summer of 2013, he relocated to Gaziantep in southern Turkey, roughly an hour from the border, and began making regular trips into Syria to offer medical care to the wounded.

He disappeared on Oct. 1, 2013, when the ambulance he and a colleague were driving was stopped at a checkpoint on the road to Deir al-Zour, Syria. He was transferred late last year to a prison beneath the basement of the Children’s Hospital in Aleppo, and then to a network of jails in Raqqa, the capital of the extremist group’s self-declared caliphate, where he became one of at least 23 Western hostages held by the group.

His cellmates included two American journalists, James Foley and Steven J. Sotloff, as well as two British aid workers, David Haines and Alan Henning, who were beheaded in roughly two-week intervals starting in August. Mr. Kassig was shown in the video released in October that showed the decapitation of Mr. Henning.

The previous videos of beheadings produced by the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, appeared to be filmed in the same location, identified by analysts using geo-mapping as a bald hill outside Raqqa. Each video was relatively short — under five minutes on average — and included a speech by the hostage, in which he is forced to accuse his government of crimes against Muslims, while the masked killer stands by holding the knife.

By contrast, Mr. Kassig’s death appears in the final segment of a nearly 16-minute video, which traces the history of the Islamic State, from its origins as a unit under the control of Osama bin Laden to its modern incarnation in the region straddling Iraq and Syria. In one extended sequence, a mass beheading of captured Syrian soldiers is shown, filmed with long close-ups of details, like the shining blade of the executioner’s knife, mirroring the high production quality of the first four beheading videos.

The part showing Mr. Kassig’s body is amateurish compared with both the footage of the soldiers being killed and previous executions of Westerners.

“The final Kassig execution section is definitely different from previous videos,” said Jarret Brachman, a counterterrorism expert who advises the United States intelligence community. The “message to President Obama from Jihadi John is sloppy, jumbled and redundant. His joke about Kassig having nothing to say seems like a defensive way of covering up the fact that they don’t have a video of his actual beheading or weren’t able to make one.”

In the months leading up to his death, Mr. Kassig seemed to know the end was near.

In a letter to his parents smuggled out this summer, he described his fear: “I am obviously pretty scared to die but the hardest part is not knowing, wondering, hoping, and wondering if I should even hope at all,” he wrote. “Just know I’m with you. Every stream, every lake, every field and river. In the woods and in the hills, in all the places you showed me. I love you.”
Correction: November 16, 2014

An earlier version of this article misidentified the country where Peter Kassig went in 2012 to help care for those wounded in and those living as refugees from Syria’s civil war. It is Lebanon, not Libya.

Karam Shoumali contributed reporting from Gaziantep, Turkey, and Michael S. Schmidt from Washington.

A version of this article appears in print on November 17, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Obama Confirms That ISIS Killed Third American.

    Obama Condemns Islamic State’s Killing of Peter Kassig,
    NYT, 16.11.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/17/world/middleeast/
    peter-kassig-isis-video-execution.html

Islamic State Claims

It Has Beheaded

U.S. Hostage Kassig

 

NOV. 16, 2014

4:38 A.M. E.S.T.

By REUTERS

CAIRO — Islamic State militants fighting in Iraq and Syria claimed in a video posted online on Sunday that they had beheaded American hostage Peter Kassig.

The video did not show the beheading but showed a masked man standing with a decapitated head covered in blood lying at his feet.

Speaking in English in a British accent, the man says: "This is Peter Edward Kassig, a U.S. citizen."

Reuters could not immediately verify the authenticity of the footage, which appeared on a jihadist website and on Twitter feeds used by Islamic State.

The video also shows a number of other people being beheaded.

(Reporting by Omar Fahmy and Lin Noueihed, Editing by William Maclean and Janet Lawrence)

    Islamic State Claims It Has Beheaded U.S. Hostage Kassig,
    NYT, 16.11.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2014/11/16/world/
    middleeast/16reuters-mideast-crisis-beheading.html

Don’t Execute Those We Tortured

SEPT. 24, 2014

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Contributors

By JONATHAN HAFETZ

AFTER years of legal battles, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, will finally be put on trial before a military commission at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, though a trial date hasn’t yet been set. If he is convicted, as expected, he will almost certainly face the death penalty. And, assuming one believes in the death penalty, it would be hard to think of a stronger candidate for its use.

But there are reasons Mr. Mohammed should not be executed, irrespective of how one feels about capital punishment. He was the victim of blatantly illegal treatment — the C.I.A. waterboarded him 183 times in March 2003, and threatened to kill his children while imprisoning him in a secret jail — at the hands of the government.

What happens in his case particularly matters, because President Obama has declined to pursue criminal charges against officials of George W. Bush’s administration for torture and other illegal conduct as part of the war on terror, declaring that the United States must “look forward, as opposed to looking backwards.” His administration declined not only to bring criminal prosecutions, but also to undertake a comprehensive investigation into torture. In contrast, a Senate committee is about to release a long-awaited summary of a 6,200-page “torture report,” after years of legal review and redactions.

The absence of accountability for those who encouraged and conducted torture leaves the criminal sentencing of convicted terrorists as one of the few tools, however imperfect, that remain for addressing past abuses of law, and restoring America’s reputation for dedication to the norms of international law. If convicted, Mr. Mohammed should be spared, because his execution — after years of mistreatment in a series of secret C.I.A.-run prisons before he was moved to Guantánamo — would send a disastrous message about impunity for torture and about the rule of law.

The recent case of another prisoner charged in the war on terror, Jose Padilla, shows how sentencing can provide a modicum of accountability.

This month, a federal judge in Miami, Marcia G. Cooke, sentenced Mr. Padilla to 21 years in prison, after a jury convicted him of terrorism conspiracy. In 2002, Mr. Bush declared Mr. Padilla, a Brooklyn-born former gang member who turned to radical Islam, an enemy combatant. He was then imprisoned in a navy brig in South Carolina for more than three years before he was charged.

When Judge Cooke first sentenced Mr. Padilla in 2008, to 17 years in prison, she concluded that his living conditions at the brig “were so harsh” that they “warranted consideration in sentencing.” She credited his claims that he had been cut off completely from the outside world, and subjected to sleep deprivation, painful stress positions and extreme sensory deprivation, including alternating periods of bright light and total darkness.

The United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit found the original sentence too lenient, given the severity of Mr. Padilla’s offense, and returned the case for resentencing. But it also acknowledged that judges had the authority to take a defendant’s mistreatment into account, under exceptional circumstances. Judge Cooke’s new sentence again fell beneath the range provided in the federal sentencing guidelines.

Criminal sentencing, to be sure, would not normally be the vehicle for holding the government accountable for torture. The primary goals in sentencing are retribution and deterrence.

Under normal circumstances, we would focus on those who abetted or committed torture. The European Court of Human Rights, for example, has ordered Poland and Macedonia to pay damages to detainees for their complicity in the C.I.A.’s secret torture program. The court, moreover, provided this remedy even though two of those detainees are still at Guantánamo.

But the United States has bucked prevailing trends in international justice. Although Mr. Obama recently acknowledged that “we tortured some folks,” he continues to resist the consequences of that admission. His administration has even pressed federal judges to close the door on civil suits by former detainees, citing state secrets.

This accountability void is what makes Mr. Mohammed’s sentencing so important. Unlike in a criminal trial, which determines guilt or innocence, the sentencing phase allows courts to consider mitigating or extenuating circumstances. That assessment is rightly applied even more broadly in death penalty cases.

To execute Mr. Mohammed after his brutal torture would make a mockery of the rule of law, and effectively condone torture by depriving it of all legal consequence. Worse, it would reinforce the perception that the United States applies a double standard in fighting terrorism — extolling liberal values in the abstract, but ignoring them in practice. A life sentence, in contrast, would acknowledge the egregious conduct. It would not redress the wholesale human rights abuses committed after 9/11. But it would offer one last chance to demonstrate that the government, too, must pay a price when it breaks the law.
 

Jonathan Hafetz is an associate professor of law at Seton Hall University.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on September 25, 2014, on page A31 of the New York edition with the headline: Don’t Execute Those We Tortured.

    Don’t Execute Those We Tortured, NYT, 24.9.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/25/opinion/dont-execute-those-we-tortured.html

Airstrikes by U.S. and Allies

Hit ISIS Targets in Syria

 

SEPT. 22, 2014

The New York Times

By HELENE COOPER

and ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON — The United States and allies launched airstrikes against Sunni militants in Syria early Tuesday, unleashing a torrent of cruise missiles and precision-guided bombs from the air and sea on the militants’ de facto capital of Raqqa and along the porous Iraq border.

American fighter jets and armed Predator and Reaper drones, flying alongside warplanes from several Arab allies, struck a broad array of targets in territory controlled by the militants, known as the Islamic State. American defense officials said the targets included weapons supplies, depots, barracks and buildings the militants use for command and control. Tomahawk cruise missiles were fired from United States Navy ships in the region.

The strikes are a major turning point in President Obama’s war against the Islamic State and open up a risky new stage of the American military campaign. Until now, the administration had bombed Islamic State targets only in Iraq, and had suggested it would be weeks if not months before the start of a bombing campaign against Islamic State targets in Syria.

Bahrain, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates took part in the strikes, American officials said, although the Arab governments were not expected to announce their participation until later Tuesday. The new coalition’s makeup is significant because the United States was able to recruit Sunni governments to take action against the Sunni militants of the Islamic State. The operation also unites the squabbling states of the Persian Gulf.

The strikes came less than two weeks after Mr. Obama announced in an address to the nation that he was authorizing an expansion of the military campaign against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS.

Unlike American strikes in Iraq over the past month, which have been small-bore bombings of mostly individual Islamic State targets — patrol boats and trucks — the salvo on Tuesday in Syria was the beginning of what was expected to be a sustained, hourslong bombardment at targets in the militant headquarters in Raqqa and on the border.

The strikes began after years of debate within the Obama administration about whether the United States should intervene militarily or should avoid another entanglement in a complex war in the Middle East. But the Islamic State controls a broad swath of land across both Iraq and Syria.

Defense officials said the goal of the air campaign was to deprive the Islamic State of the safe havens it enjoys in Syria. The administration’s ultimate goal, as set forth in the address Mr. Obama delivered on Sept. 10, is to recruit a global coalition to “degrade and ultimately destroy” the militants, even as Mr. Obama warned that “eradicating a cancer” like the Islamic State was a long-term challenge that would put some American troops at risk.

American warplanes had been conducting surveillance flights over Syria for more than a month in anticipation of airstrikes, but it had been unclear just how much intelligence the Pentagon had managed to gather about the movements of the Sunni militant group in Syria. Unlike Iraq, whose airspace is controlled by the United States, Syria has its own aerial defense system, so American planes have had to rely on sometimes jamming the country’s defenses when crossing into Syria.

The strikes in Syria occurred without the approval of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, whose government, unlike Iraq, did not ask the United States for help against the Sunni militant group. Mr. Obama has repeatedly called on Mr. Assad to step down because of chemical weapons attacks and violence against his own people, and defense officials said Mr. Assad had not been told in advance of the strikes.

But administration officials acknowledge that American efforts to roll back the Sunni militant group in Syria cannot help but aid Mr. Assad, whose government is also a target of the Islamic State.

The United Arab Emirates announced three weeks ago that it was willing to participate in the campaign against the Islamic State, and administration officials have also said they expect the Iraqi military to take part in strikes both in Iraq and Syria. If both nations are in fact participants, the strikes on Tuesday could mark a rare instance when the Shiite-dominated Iraqi military has cooperated in a military operation with its Sunni Arab neighbors.

Combined with a French airstrike last week on a logistics depot held by Islamic State militants in northeastern Iraq, the allied participation in the strikes allows Mr. Obama to make the case that his plan to target the Islamic State has international cooperation.

In addition, Saudi Arabia recently agreed to a training facility for moderate members of the Syrian opposition, whom the United States hopes to train, equip and send back to Syria to fight both Mr. Assad and Islamic State militants.

On Wednesday, Mr. Obama is expected to speak of the international coalition in an address to the United Nations General Assembly.

In his Sept. 10 speech to the nation, Mr. Obama drew a distinction between the military action he was ordering and the two wars begun by his immediate predecessor, George W. Bush. He likened this campaign to the selective airstrikes that the United States has carried out for years against suspected terrorists in Yemen and Somalia, few of which have been made public.

The airstrikes in Syria, so far, come without the benefit of a large ground force to capitalize on gains they make. While some Syrian opposition groups fighting the Islamic State militants may be able to move into a few cleared areas, administration officials acknowledged on Monday that it was doubtful that the Free Syrian Army, the opposition group most preferred by the United States, would be able to take control of major sections of Islamic State territory, at least not until it has been better trained — which will take place over the next year.

That could leave the forces of Mr. Assad in perhaps the best position to take advantage of any American bombardment. An administration official on Monday acknowledged that that was a worry, but said, “We don’t plan to make it easy for Assad to reclaim territory.” He declined to say what methods the United States would use to prevent the Syrian leader from capitalizing on the American aerial bombardment.

Although the full scope of the airstrikes was not immediately clear, they followed an urgent appeal from Hadi al-Bahra, the president of the Syrian Opposition Coalition, for American military action. He said the United States needed to act quickly to stop militants from the Islamic State from pressing their attack against the Kurdish communities near the Syrian border town of Ayn-al-Arab, as it is known by Arabs, or Kobani, as it is called by the Kurds.

And Representative Eliot L. Engel, a New York Democrat who serves on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, issued a statement urging “targeted American airstrikes” to protect the Syrian Kurds and prevent a “potential massacre.”

Obama administration officials asserted that they were having success building an international coalition to confront the Islamic State, but Laurent Fabius, the French foreign minister, said on Monday that France would limit its military operations to Iraq.

“The French president has said we do not have intention to do the same in Syria, I mean by air,” Mr. Fabius said in an appearance before the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, adding that France would support the moderate Syrian opposition.

“I can confirm that U.S. military and partner nation forces are undertaking military action against ISIL terrorists in Syria using a mix of fighter, bomber and Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles,” said Rear Adm. John Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, using an alternate name for the Islamic State.

“Given that these operations are ongoing, we are not in a position to provide additional details at this time,” Admiral Kirby said in a statement Monday night in Washington. “The decision to conduct these strikes was made earlier today by the U.S. Central Command commander under authorization granted him by the commander in chief. We will provide more details later as operationally appropriate.”
 

Michael R. Gordon contributed reporting from New York.

A version of this article appears in print on September 23, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: U.S. and Allies Hit ISIS Targets in Syria.

    Airstrikes by U.S. and Allies Hit ISIS Targets in Syria, NYT, 22.9.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/23/world/middleeast/
    us-and-allies-hit-isis-targets-in-syria.html

U.S. Airstrikes Hit Targets

Near Baghdad Held by ISIS

 

SEPT. 15, 2014

The New York Times

By STEVE KENNY

WASHINGTON — The United States, as promised by President Obama, has stepped up its airstrike campaign in Iraq, hitting targets near Baghdad in the effort to help the Iraqi government win back territory seized by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, Pentagon officials said Monday.

The offensive is the first expansion of the United States’ campaign against the Islamist militant group that Mr. Obama outlined last week in a speech to the nation.

The new campaign included a strike on Monday southwest of Baghdad and one the day before near Sinjar, Iraq, the Defense Department said in a statement. The strikes, the Pentagon said, go beyond the United States’ initial mission announced last month of “protecting our own people and humanitarian missions.”

The strikes on Sunday and Monday involved both attack and fighter aircraft, which the Pentagon said destroyed six vehicles near Sinjar and an ISIS combat post that was firing on Iraqi troops. The United States has now carried out 162 airstrikes across Iraq to counter an ISIS offensive that quickly gained ground in northern Iraq and Syria and set up what the group said was an Islamic caliphate.

It was a small first step in what the president said last week would be a major and longstanding expansion of the military campaign against ISIS. That ambitious proposal includes American airstrikes in Syria and the deployment of 475 more military advisers to Iraq, bringing the total to 1,600.

Mr. Obama vowed that the United States did not intend to go it alone, and the administration said Sunday it had lined up support from Arab nations to help in the airstrike campaign, although officials would not say when that assistance would come or who would provide it.

Saudi Arabia has already agreed to provide a base to train Syrian fighters who oppose both ISIS and President Bashar al-Assad.

Mr. Obama announced the first airstrikes against ISIS in early August, when it appeared that the Kurdish capital, Erbil, would fall to the Islamists.

A version of this article appears in print on September 16, 2014, on page A11 of the New York edition with the headline: U.S. Airstrikes Hit Targets Near Baghdad Held by ISIS.

    U.S. Airstrikes Hit Targets Near Baghdad Held by ISIS, NYT, 15.9.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/16/world/middleeast/
    us-airstrikes-hit-targets-near-baghdad-held-by-isis.html

ISIS Draws a Steady Stream

of Recruits From Turkey

 

SEPT. 15, 2014

The New York Times

By CEYLAN YEGINSU

ANKARA, Turkey — Having spent most of his youth as a drug addict in one of the poorest neighborhoods of Turkey’s capital, Can did not think he had much to lose when he was smuggled into Syria with 10 of his childhood friends to join the world’s most extreme jihadist group.

After 15 days at a training camp in the Syrian city of Raqqa, the de facto headquarters of the group, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the 27-year-old Can was assigned to a fighting unit. He said he shot two men and participated in a public execution. It was only after he buried a man alive that he was told he had become a full ISIS fighter.

“When you fight over there, it’s like being in a trance,” said Can, who asked to be referred to only by his middle name for fear of reprisal. “Everyone shouts, ‘God is the greatest,’ which gives you divine strength to kill the enemy without being fazed by blood or splattered guts,” he said.

Hundreds of foreign fighters, including some from Europe and the United States, have joined the ranks of ISIS in its self-proclaimed caliphate that sweeps over vast territories of Iraq and Syria. But one of the biggest source of recruits is neighboring Turkey, a NATO member with an undercurrent of Islamist discontent.

As many as 1,000 Turks have joined ISIS, according to Turkish news media reports and government officials here. Recruits cite the group’s ideological appeal to disaffected youths as well as the money it pays fighters from its flush coffers. The C.I.A. estimated last week that the group had from 20,000 to 31,500 fighters in Iraq and Syria.

The United States has put heavy pressure on Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to better police Turkey’s 560-mile-long border with Syria. Washington wants Turkey to stanch the flow of foreign fighters and to stop ISIS from exporting the oil it produces on territory it holds in Syria and Iraq.

So far, Mr. Erdogan has resisted pleas to take aggressive steps against the group, citing the fate of 49 Turkish hostages ISIS has held since militants took over Iraq’s second-largest city, Mosul, in June. Turkey declined to sign a communiqué last Thursday that committed a number of regional states to take “appropriate” new measures to counter ISIS, frustrating American officials.

For years, Turkey has striven to set an example of Islamic democracy in the Middle East through its “zero problems with neighbors” prescription, the guiding principle of Ahmet Davutoglu, who recently became Turkey’s prime minister after serving for years as foreign minister. But miscalculations have left the country isolated and vulnerable in a region now plagued by war.

Turkey has been criticized at home and abroad for an open border policy in the early days of the Syrian uprising. Critics say that policy was crucial to the rise of ISIS. Turkey had bet that rebel forces would quickly topple the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, but as the war evolved, the extremists have benefited from the chaos.

Turkish fighters recruited by ISIS say they identify more with the extreme form of Islamic governance practiced by ISIS than with the rule of the Turkish governing party, which has its roots in a more moderate form of Islam.
Continue reading the main story

Hacibayram, a ramshackle neighborhood in the heart of Ankara’s tourist district, has morphed into an ISIS recruitment hub over the past year. Locals say up to 100 residents have gone to fight for the group in Syria.

“It began when a stranger with a long, coarse beard started showing up in the neighborhood,” recalled Arif Akbas, the neighborhood’s elected headman of 30 years, who oversees local affairs. “The next thing we knew, all the drug addicts started going to the mosque.”

One of the first men to join ISIS from the neighborhood was Ozguzhan Gozlemcioglu, known to his ISIS counterparts as Muhammad Salef. In three years, he has risen to the status of a regional commander in Raqqa, and locals say he frequently travels in and out of Ankara, each time making sure to take back new recruits with him.

Mehmet Arabaci, a Hacibayram resident who assists with distributing government aid to the poor, said younger members of the local community found online pictures of Mr. Gozlemcioglu with weapons on the field and immediately took interest. Children have started to spend more time online since the municipality knocked down the only school in the area last year as part of an aggressive urban renewal project.

“There are now seven mosques in the vicinity, but not one school,” Mr. Arabaci said. “The lives of children here are so vacant that they find any excuse to be sucked into action.”

Playing in the rubble of a demolished building on a recent hot day here, two young boys staged a fight with toy guns.

When a young Syrian girl walked past them, they pounced on her, knocking her to the floor and pushing their toy rifles against her head. “I’m going to kill you, whore,” one of the boys shouted before launching into sound effects that imitated a machine gun.

The other boy quickly lost interest and walked away. “Toys are so boring,” he said. “I have real guns upstairs.”

The boy’s father, who owns a nearby market, said he fully supported ISIS’s vision for Islamic governance and hoped to send the boy and his other sons to Raqqa when they are older.

“The diluted form of Islam practiced in Turkey is an insult to the religion,” he said giving only his initials, T.C., to protect his identity. “In the Islamic State you lead a life of discipline as dictated by God, and then you are rewarded. Children there have parks and swimming pools. Here, my children play in the dirt.”

But when Can returned from Raqqa after three months with two of the original 10 friends he had left with, he was full of regret.

“ISIS is brutal,” he said. “They interpret the Quran for their own gains. God never ordered Muslims to kill Muslims.”

Still, he said many were drawn to the group for financial reasons, as it appealed to disadvantaged youth in less prosperous parts of Turkey. “When you fight, they offer $150 a day. Then everything else is free,” he said. “Even the shopkeepers give you free products out of fear.”

ISIS recruitment in Hacibayram caught the news media’s attention in June when a local 14-year-old recruit came back to the neighborhood after he was wounded in a shelling attack in Raqqa. The boy’s father, Yusuf, said that the government had made no formal inquiry into the episode and that members of the local community had started to condemn what they saw as inaction by the authorities.

“There are clearly recruitment centers being set up in Ankara and elsewhere in Turkey, but the government doesn’t seem to care,” said Aaron Stein, a fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based think tank. “It seems their hatred for Bashar al-Assad and their overly nuanced view of what radical Islam is has led to a very short- and narrow-sighted policy that has serious implications.”

The Interior Ministry and National Police Department did not respond to requests for comment.

On a recent afternoon in Ankara, Mr. Erdogan and Mr. Davutoglu came to pray at the historic Haci Bayram Veli Mosque, just over 100 yards away from an underground mosque used by a radical Salafi sect known to oversee ISIS recruits.

When news of their visit reached the neighborhood, several residents scurried down the steep hill hoping to catch an opportunity to raise the issue.

At the same time, a 10-year-old boy lingered in his family’s shop, laughing at the crowd rushing to get a glimpse of the two leaders. He had just listened to a long lecture from his father celebrating ISIS’ recent beheading of James Foley, an American journalist. “He was an agent and deserved to die,” the man told his son, half-smirking through his thick beard.

To which the boy replied, “Journalists, infidels of this country; we’ll kill them all.”

A version of this article appears in print on September 16, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: From Turkey, ISIS Draws Steady Stream of Recruits.

    ISIS Draws a Steady Stream of Recruits From Turkey, NYT, 15.9.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/16/world/middleeast/
    turkey-is-a-steady-source-of-isis-recruits.html

Arabs Give Tepid Support

to U.S. Fight Against ISIS

SEPT. 11, 2014

The New York Times

By ANNE BARNARD

and DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Many Arab governments grumbled quietly in 2011 as the United States left Iraq, fearful it might fall deeper into chaos or Iranian influence. Now, the United States is back and getting a less than enthusiastic welcome, with leading allies like Egypt, Jordan and Turkey all finding ways on Thursday to avoid specific commitments to President Obama’s expanded military campaign against Sunni extremists.

As the prospect of the first American strikes inside Syria crackled through the region, the mixed reactions underscored the challenges of a new military intervention in the Middle East, where 13 years of chaos, from Sept. 11 through the Arab Spring revolts, have deepened political and sectarian divisions and increased mistrust of the United States on all sides.

“As a student of terrorism for the last 30 years, I am afraid of that formula of ‘supporting the American effort,’ ” said Diaa Rashwan, a scholar at the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, a government-funded policy organization in Cairo. “It is very dangerous.”

The tepid support could further complicate the already complex task Mr. Obama has laid out for himself in fighting the extremist Islamic State in Iraq and Syria: He must try to confront the group without aiding Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, or appearing to side with Mr. Assad’s Shiite allies, Iran and the militant group Hezbollah, against discontented Sunnis across the Arab world.

While Arab nations allied with the United States vowed on Thursday to “do their share” to fight ISIS and issued a joint communiqué supporting a broad strategy, the underlying tone was one of reluctance. The government perhaps most eager to join a coalition against ISIS was that of Syria, which Mr. Obama had already ruled out as a partner for what he described as terrorizing its citizens.

Syria’s deputy foreign minister, Fayssal Mekdad, told NBC News that Syria and the United States were “fighting the same enemy,” terrorism, and that his government had “no reservations” about airstrikes as long as the United States coordinated with it. He added, “We are ready to talk.”

Others were less than forthcoming. The foreign minister of Egypt — already at odds with Mr. Obama over the American decision to withhold some aid after the Egyptian military’s ouster last year of the elected president — complained that Egypt’s hands were full with its own fight against “terrorism,” referring to the Islamist opposition.

In Jordan, the state news agency reported that in a meeting about the extremists on Wednesday, King Abdullah II had told Secretary of State John Kerry “that the Palestinian cause remains the core of the conflict in the region” and that Jordan was focusing on the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip.

Turkey, which Mr. Kerry will visit on Friday, is concerned about attacks across its long border with ISIS-controlled Syria, and also about 49 Turkish government employees captured by the group in Iraq. Speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, an official advised not to expect public support for the American effort.

At a meeting in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, to build a coalition for the American mission, at least 10 Arab states signed a communiqué pledging to join “in the many aspects of a coordinated military campaign,” but with the qualification “as appropriate” and without any specifics. Turkey attended the meeting but declined to sign.

Even in Baghdad and across Syria, where the threat from ISIS is immediate, reactions were mixed. Members of Iraq’s Shiite majority cheered the prospect of American help. But many Sunni Muslims were cynical about battling an organization that evolved from jihadist groups fighting American occupation.

“This is all a play,” said Abu Amer, 38, a government employee, who withheld his family name for his safety. “It is applying American political plans.”

The difficulties are all the more striking because ISIS has avowed enemies on both sides of the region’s Sunni-Shiite divide.

Sunni-led governments view it as a threat at home and believe it has aided Mr. Assad by attacking his more moderate Sunni opponents. For Shiites, whom ISIS views as apostates deserving death, the group poses an existential threat, yet Shiite-led Iran, a longtime foe of the United States, is excluded from the coalition.

Some Arab leaders appeared to fear a domestic backlash, perhaps like the attacks against Saudi Arabia by Osama bin Laden and others after the kingdom allowed American troops to use its territory as a staging ground during the Persian Gulf war in 1991. Also looming was a broader worry that airstrikes could increase soft support for, or reluctant tolerance of, the group.

Some background on goals, tactics and the potential long-term threat to the United States from the militant group known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

Most Sunnis are terrified of ISIS and its aim to impose a caliphate ruled by its brutal interpretation of Islamic law; they have borne the brunt of its beheadings and other atrocities. In an arc of Sunni discontent spanning the region, some say they feel abandoned enough to accept help “from Satan, not because we like Satan,” as one Sunni tribesman in the ISIS stronghold of Raqqa, Syria, put it on Thursday.

Sunnis have endured a decade of what are, from their perspective, catastrophic setbacks. In Iraq, the American ouster of Saddam Hussein ended centuries of Sunni dominance, ushered in years of sectarian conflict and increased the influence of Shiite Iran.

In Lebanon, the Shiite militant group Hezbollah has come to dominate since the Sunni patron Rafik Hariri was assassinated in 2005. More recently, in Egypt and Syria, revolts that Sunni Islamists saw as their chance at power have been rolled back or brutally thwarted.

“The Sunnis need to feel that they have a voice in their capitals,” said Ibrahim Hamidi, a Syrian correspondent for the pan-Arab newspaper Al-Hayat and a critic of Syria’s government. “Otherwise, you push more Sunnis toward ISIS.”

Without a simultaneous effort to address the political environment that has disenfranchised many Sunnis, “I think that’s a real risk,” a Western diplomat working on Syria said in Beirut. “There are consequences to every action.”

A growing number of diplomats argue that fighting ISIS effectively requires a political settlement to Syria’s three-year civil war, perhaps allowing Mr. Assad to stay but insisting he cede some powers to a Sunni-inclusive national unity government. But Mr. Assad’s inner circle has given no sign of interest in any compromise.

Ryan C. Crocker, a former United States ambassador to Syria and Iraq, said that with “no good options,” hitting ISIS in Syria was essential to American security. Attacks, along with aid to relatively moderate insurgents who would be pressured to embrace an inclusive Syria, could open the door to a political solution there, he said.

But that, he said, would require fancy footwork from Mr. Obama to “make it clear this is about American security, not about favoring any side in the Syrian civil conflict.”

President Obama said that military strategy against ISIS will resemble U.S. efforts in Somalia and Yemen, where airstrikes and other operations have been reported since 2002. The scale of U.S. airstrike operations in Pakistan was much larger, though it has tapered in recent years.

Mr. Crocker said American attacks would “get people’s attention in Raqqa and elsewhere,” adding: “Where do you want to stand on this, with ISIS? If you think barrel bombs are bad, how about drones and F-16s?”

But such talk does not often play well in a region weary of disappointments from American policy, from the invasion of Iraq to the failure to curb the killing in Syria.

A longtime opponent of ISIS in Raqqa, Ibrahim al-Raqawi, said he had refused to give a caller from Washington information on ISIS positions because he feared civilian casualties. He said he opposed airstrikes if they did not also hit Mr. Assad’s forces and stop him from killing civilians.

Members of a range of Syrian insurgent groups that consider ISIS an enemy said they, too, opposed American strikes unless they also targeted the government.

And even those most supportive of the strikes — members of the American-vetted groups that stand to gain new aid to fight ISIS — complained that the United States had abetted the extremists’ rise by failing to help other insurgents earlier. They said the United States was attacking ISIS now only because the group threatened it as well as the broader world.

They said that they welcomed new American aid, but that it remained to be seen whether it would improve on smaller efforts in recent years that have failed to produce a unified, effective or consistently moderate opposition force.

A member of Hezbollah familiar with its thinking said that while coordination with Syria would be best, any attacks against ISIS would curb the group and help Syria’s government.

Um Taha, a 35-year-old Sunni in Baghdad who withheld her full name, captured the mixture of cynicism and tenuous hope that may pass for the prevailing mood in the Arab world now.

She said she hoped the coalition succeeded, “despite the fact that America was one of the reasons why this radical organization originally existed.”

Anne Barnard reported from Beirut, and David D. Kirkpatrick from Baghdad. Reporting was contributed by an employee of The New York Times from Raqqa, Syria; Hwaida Saad and Mohammad Ghannam from Beirut; Ali Hamza from Baghdad; Merna Thomas from Cairo; and Sebnem Arsu from Istanbul.
 

A version of this article appears in print on September 12, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Arabs Give Tepid Support to U.S. Fight Against ISIS.

    Arabs Give Tepid Support to U.S. Fight Against ISIS, NYT, 11.9.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/12/world/middleeast/
    arabs-give-tepid-support-to-us-fight-against-isis.html

On a Day Devoted to Past Events,

Focus on New Terror Link

 

SEPT. 11, 2014

The New York Times

By MARK LANDLER

WASHINGTON — The morning after committing the nation to an expanded military campaign against Islamist terrorism, President Obama honored the victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks as the White House argued that he had the right to wage his new fight under the same legal authority he used to hunt down Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda.

On a day suffused with memories of four hijacked planes and the war they ignited, the president’s new mission seemed less a break from the past than the continuation of a long national struggle.

The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the administration said, was formerly the Iraqi affiliate of Al Qaeda, and has maintained ties with Al Qaeda even after its very public falling-out with Qaeda leaders. It uses brutal tactics that are out of the Qaeda playbook, and is viewed, even by some members of Al Qaeda, as the legitimate heir to Bin Laden’s legacy.

The argument, laid out Thursday by Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, could spare the president’s lawyers from having to negotiate a new legal authorization from Congress, should Mr. Obama decide to ask lawmakers to approve a prolonged military campaign.

But it ties his efforts against ISIS more firmly to the war on terrorism waged by him and his predecessor George W. Bush in the decade after the 2001 attacks, even though Mr. Obama insists they are different. In his prime-time speech to the nation on Wednesday, Mr. Obama drew a distinction between the ISIS campaign and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, saying it was a new kind of counterterrorism operation that would rely on bolstering local troops rather than deploying American ones.

On Thursday, Mr. Obama paid tribute to the service members and civilians killed at the Pentagon. Speaking before a giant American flag draped over the part of the Pentagon wall where one of the hijacked planes crashed, Mr. Obama said, “Thirteen years after small and hateful minds conspired to break us, America stands tall and America stands proud.”

The president hailed the “9/11 generation” of soldiers who have served in the years since the 2001 attacks, noting that “three months from now, our combat mission in Afghanistan will come to an end.”

Mr. Obama made no mention of ISIS, speaking only of challenges facing the country. But his description of a nation coping with the threat of terrorism seemed entirely relevant today. “We carry on because as Americans, we don’t give in to fear — ever,” he said.

On Wednesday, the president said he had the authority as commander in chief to expand military action against ISIS, though he added, “I welcome congressional support for this effort to show the world that Americans are united in confronting this danger.”

Mr. Earnest said the White House believed that the new military campaign fell under a 2001 statute that authorized the use of force against the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks. The language has been interpreted to apply to Al Qaeda and its affiliates, and has been used to justify drone strikes against terrorism suspects in Yemen and Somalia.

But the connections between ISIS and Al Qaeda are a matter of dispute among counterterrorism experts. While ISIS was formed as Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Iraq after the American-led invasion of the country in 2003, it broke with Al Qaeda in the past year and was formally banished in February by the leader of Al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahri.

“That long, decade-long or more, relationship is not something that can be disregarded as the result of one internal disagreement that was aired in public,” Mr. Earnest told reporters.

He offered a list of other links to Al Qaeda, including similarly brutal tactics, like the beheading of two American journalists, and similar aspirations, like the establishment of an Islamic caliphate, which ISIS has declared in a stretch of territory in Syria and Iraq.

Counterterrorism experts, however, said that would-be recruits, including from the United States, make a clear distinction between ISIS and Al Qaeda. They cite the case of a California man, Nicholas Teausant, who was arrested in March on his way to Syria. Mr. Teausant told investigators that he was determined to join ISIS, not Al Qaeda.

“While it is understandable that we don’t make a distinction between them in this country, that should not, for a second, cloud the distinction that jihadis make,” said Brian Fishman, a counterterrorism research fellow at the New America Foundation.

Last year, Mr. Obama called for the repeal of the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force, saying it had outlived its usefulness. “Unless we discipline our thinking, our definitions, our actions,” he said, “we may be drawn into more wars we don’t need to fight.” Mr. Earnest suggested that if Congress wanted to show support for this mission, it could pass a “refined” version of the 2001 measure.

In some ways, this anniversary was no different from its 12 predecessors. It was filled with familiar rituals: a moment of silence; taps played by an Army bugler; the assembled families of the victims, many now with children who have grown into adulthood.

But this year, Mr. Obama is immersed in planning a new military campaign. His warning on Wednesday about challenges to come still hung in the air as he observed the anniversary of battles past and expressed hope that the United States would remain resilient in the face of terrorist threats.

“Generations from now, Americans will fill our parks, our stadiums, our cities,” Mr. Obama said. “Generations from now, Americans will still build towers that reach toward the heavens, still serve in embassies that stand for freedom around the world, still wear the uniform.”
 

A version of this article appears in print on September 12, 2014, on page A11 of the New York edition with the headline: A Day Spent Remembering the Past, and Linking It to the Present.

    On a Day Devoted to Past Events, Focus on New Terror Link,
    NYT, 11.9.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/12/us/
    obama-honors-9-11-victims-a-day-
    after-announcing-new-mission-against-terror.html

Obama, in Speech on ISIS,

Promises Sustained Effort

to Rout Militants

 

SEPT. 10, 2014

The New York Times

By MARK LANDLER

WASHINGTON — President Obama on Wednesday authorized a major expansion of the military campaign against rampaging Sunni militants in the Middle East, including American airstrikes in Syria and the deployment of 475 more military advisers to Iraq. But he sought to dispel fears that the United States was embarking on a repeat of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In a speech to the nation from the State Floor of the White House, Mr. Obama said the United States was recruiting a global coalition to “degrade and ultimately destroy” the militants, known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. He warned that “eradicating a cancer” like ISIS was a long-term challenge that would put some American troops at risk.

“We will hunt down terrorists who threaten our country, wherever they are,” Mr. Obama declared in a 14-minute address. “That means I will not hesitate to take action against ISIL in Syria, as well as Iraq,” he added, using an alternative name for ISIS. “This is a core principle of my presidency: If you threaten America, you will find no safe haven.”

The president drew a distinction between the military action he was ordering and the two wars begun by his predecessor, George W. Bush. He likened this campaign to the selective airstrikes that the United States has carried out for years against suspected terrorists in Yemen and Somalia, few of which have been made public.

After enduring harsh criticism for saying two weeks ago that he did not have a strategy for dealing with ISIS in Syria, Mr. Obama outlined a plan that will bolster American training and arming of moderate Syrian rebels to fight the militants. Saudi Arabia has agreed to provide a base for the training of those forces.

Mr. Obama called on Congress to authorize the plan to train and equip the rebels — something the Central Intelligence Agency has been doing covertly and on a much smaller scale — but he asserted his authority as commander in chief to expand the overall campaign, which will bring the number of American troops in Iraq to 1,600.

“These American forces will not have a combat mission; we will not get dragged into another ground war in Iraq,” Mr. Obama pledged, adding that the mission “will be different from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; it will not involve American combat troops fighting on foreign soil.”

President Obama said that military strategy against ISIS will resemble U.S. efforts in Somalia and Yemen, where airstrikes and other operations have been reported since 2002. The scale of U.S. airstrike operations in Pakistan was much larger, though it has tapered in recent years.

For all of Mr. Obama’s efforts to reassure the public, his remarks were a stark acknowledgment of the threat posed by the militants, whose lightning advance through Iraq and Syria and videotaped beheading of two American journalists have reignited fears of radical Islamic terrorism.

There is no evidence that ISIS is plotting an attack on the United States, Mr. Obama said. But he added, “If left unchecked, these terrorists could pose a growing threat” to Americans because of foreign fighters, including some from the United States, who have traveled to Syria and Iraq and who could return home to carry out attacks.

Standing just outside the Blue Room, steps from where he announced the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in May 2011, Mr. Obama delivered a message that seemed worlds away from his confident assertions that the United States had decimated Al Qaeda. The United States, he said, was locked in a long battle with a successor to Al Qaeda, “unique in their brutality.”

The president’s remarks, on the eve of the 13th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, will thrust the United States into a civil war in Syria that he had long sought to avoid, and will return a significant American military presence to Iraq, not quite three years after the last American troops withdrew.

Unlike Mr. Bush in the Iraq war, Mr. Obama has sought to surround the United States with partners. Earlier on Wednesday, he called King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia to enlist his support for the plan to step up training of the Syrian rebels.

Mr. Obama is acting as polls show rapidly shifting public opinion, with a large majority of Americans now favoring military action against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, even as they express deep misgivings about the president’s leadership,

Mr. Obama is also facing difficult crosscurrents on Capitol Hill, where Republican lawmakers, initially reluctant to demand congressional authorization of military action, have begun agitating for a vote, even as some Democrats warn of a stampede to war.

On Wednesday, Senate Democratic leaders prepared legislation on the narrow issue of authorizing the American military to train the Syrian rebels. House Republicans appeared ready to follow their lead.

The surge of activity means Congress is likely to weigh in on the military action before the midterm elections in eight weeks. Former Vice President Dick Cheney further roiled the political atmosphere on Capitol Hill when he gave a speech on Wednesday blaming Mr. Obama’s “arbitrary and hasty” withdrawal of troops in 2011 for the chaos in Iraq.

Senator Richard J. Durbin, an Illinois Democrat and a political ally of Mr. Obama, rejected Mr. Cheney’s critique, saying, “We want to be careful that we don’t engage ourselves for a long period of time in a long-term war involving the vulnerability of our troops.”

Mr. Obama’s speech amounted to a strategy for a problem he has long said would defy an American remedy: sectarian strife between Sunni and Shiite Muslims in countries with deeply disaffected minorities and no history of democratic government.

Among the questions that Mr. Obama did not answer: How will the United States and its allies reinvigorate a moderate Syrian opposition that has been marginalized by more extremist forces? And how can the United States act against ISIS in Syria without benefiting President Bashar al-Assad?

While Mr. Obama said that Mr. Assad had lost his legitimacy to govern Syria, he did not call again for his ouster. Instead, he spoke of strengthening the moderate rebels to give them a seat at the table in a political settlement with the Assad government.

Administration officials indicated that airstrikes in Syria could still be weeks away, while American surveillance planes continue to gather intelligence on the location of ISIS targets.

They also tried to manage expectations about whether the United States could truly destroy ISIS. Wiping out a group whose roots go back to the start of the Iraq war is a formidable challenge, a senior official said in a briefing for reporters, speaking on the condition of anonymity under White House ground rules.

“What we can do is systematically roll back the organization, shrink the territory where they’re operating, decimate its ranks, cut off its sources of support in terms of funding and equipment, and have the threat methodically and relentlessly reduced,” he said.
 

Reporting was contributed by Jonathan Weisman, Eric Schmitt, Michael D. Shear and Helene Cooper.

A version of this article appears in print on September 11, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: OBAMA PROMISES SUSTAINED EFFORT TO ROUT MILITANTS.

    Obama, in Speech on ISIS, Promises Sustained Effort to Rout Militants,       
    NYT,10.9.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/11/world/middleeast/obama-speech-isis.html

Transcript of Obama’s Remarks

on the Fight Against ISIS

SEPT. 10, 2014

The New York Times

My fellow Americans, tonight I want to speak to you about what the United States will do with our friends and allies to degrade and ultimately destroy the terrorist group known as ISIL.

As commander in chief, my highest priority is the security of the American people. Over the last several years, we have consistently taken the fight to terrorists who threaten our country. We took out Osama bin Laden and much of Al Qaeda’s leadership in Afghanistan and Pakistan. We’ve targeted Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen and recently eliminated the top commander of its affiliate in Somalia. We’ve done so while bringing more than 140,000 American troops home from Iraq and drawing down our forces in Afghanistan, where our combat mission will end later this year. Thanks to our military and counterterrorism professionals, America is safer.

Still, we continue to face a terrorist threat. We can’t erase every trace of evil from the world and small groups of killers have the capacity to do great harm. That was the case before 9/11, and that remains true today. And that’s why we must remain vigilant as threats emerge. At this moment the greatest threats come from the Middle East and North Africa, where radical groups exploit grievances for their own gain. And one of those groups is ISIL — which calls itself the Islamic State.

Now let’s make two things clear: ISIL is not Islamic. No religion condones the killing of innocents, and the vast majority of ISIL’s victims have been Muslim. And ISIL is certainly not a state. It was formerly Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Iraq and has taken advantage of sectarian strife and Syria’s civil war to gain territory on both sides of the Iraq-Syrian border. It is recognized by no government nor by the people it subjugates. ISIL is a terrorist organization, pure and simple. And it has no vision other than the slaughter of all who stand in its way.

In a region that has known so much bloodshed, these terrorists are unique in their brutality. They execute captured prisoners. They kill children. They enslave, rape and force women into marriage. They threatened a religious minority with genocide. And in acts of barbarism, they took the lives of two American journalists — Jim Foley and Steven Sotloff.

So ISIL poses a threat to the people of Iraq and Syria and the broader Middle East, including American citizens, personnel and facilities. If left unchecked, these terrorists could pose a growing threat beyond that region, including to the United States. While we have not yet detected specific plotting against our homeland, ISIL leaders have threatened America and our allies. Our intelligence community believes that thousands of foreigners, including Europeans and some Americans, have joined them in Syria and Iraq. Trained and battle-hardened, these fighters could try to return to their home countries and carry out deadly attacks.

I know many Americans are concerned about these threats. Tonight I want you to know that the United States of America is meeting them with strength and resolve. Last month I ordered our military to take targeted action against ISIL to stop its advances. Since then we’ve conducted more than 150 successful airstrikes in Iraq. These strikes have protected American personnel and facilities, killed ISIL fighters, destroyed weapons and given space for Iraqi and Kurdish forces to reclaim key territory. These strikes have also helped save the lives of thousands of innocent men, women and children.

But this is not our fight alone. American power can make a decisive difference, but we cannot do for Iraqis what they must do for themselves. Nor can we take the place of Arab partners in securing their region. That’s why I’ve insisted that additional U.S. action depended upon Iraqis forming an inclusive government, which they have now done in recent days.

So tonight, with a new Iraqi government in place, and following consultations with allies abroad and Congress at home, I can announce that America will lead a broad coalition to roll back this terrorist threat. Our objective is clear: We will degrade and ultimately destroy ISIL through a comprehensive and sustained counterterrorism strategy.

First, we will conduct a systematic campaign of airstrikes against these terrorists. Working with the Iraqi government, we will expand our efforts beyond protecting our own people and humanitarian missions so that we’re hitting ISIL targets as Iraqi forces go on offense. Moreover, I have made it clear that we will hunt down terrorists who threaten our country, wherever they are. That means I will not hesitate to take action against ISIL in Syria as well as Iraq. This is a core principle of my presidency: If you threaten America, you will find no safe haven.

Second, we will increase our support to forces fighting these terrorists on the ground. In June, I deployed several hundred American service members to Iraq to assess how we can best support Iraqi security forces. Now that those teams have completed their work and Iraq has formed a government, we will send an additional 475 service members to Iraq. As I have said before, these American forces will not have a combat mission. We will not get dragged into another ground war in Iraq. But they are needed to support Iraqi and Kurdish forces with training, intelligence and equipment. We’ll also support Iraq’s efforts to stand up national guard units to help Sunni communities secure their own freedom from ISIL control.

Across the border in Syria, we have ramped up our military assistance to the Syrian opposition. Tonight, I again call on Congress, again, to give us additional authorities and resources to train and equip these fighters. In the fight against ISIL, we cannot rely on an Assad regime that terrorizes its own people — a regime that will never regain the legitimacy it has lost. Instead, we must strengthen the opposition as the best counterweight to extremists like ISIL, while pursuing the political solution necessary to solve Syria’s crisis once and for all.

Third, we will continue to draw on our substantial counterterrorism capabilities to prevent ISIL attacks. Working with our partners, we will redouble our efforts to cut off its funding, improve our intelligence, strengthen our defenses, counter its warped ideology, and stem the flow of foreign fighters into and out of the Middle East. And in two weeks, I will chair a meeting of the U.N. Security Council to further mobilize the international community around this effort.

Fourth, we will continue to provide humanitarian assistance to innocent civilians who’ve been displaced by this terrorist organization. This includes Sunni and Shia Muslims who are at grave risk, as well as tens of thousands of Christians and other religious minorities. We cannot allow these communities to be driven from their ancient homelands.

So this is our strategy. And in each of these four parts of our strategy, America will be joined by a broad coalition of partners. Already, allies are flying planes with us over Iraq, sending arms and assistance to Iraqi security forces and the Syrian opposition, sharing intelligence and providing billions of dollars in humanitarian aid. Secretary Kerry was in Iraq today meeting with the new government and supporting their efforts to promote unity, and in the coming days he will travel across the Middle East and Europe to enlist more partners in this fight, especially Arab nations who can help mobilize Sunni communities in Iraq and Syria to drive these terrorists from their lands. This is American leadership at its best: We stand with people who fight for their own freedom, and we rally other nations on behalf of our common security and common humanity.

My administration has also secured bipartisan support for this approach here at home. I have the authority to address the threat from ISIL. But I believe we are strongest as a nation when the president and Congress work together. So I welcome congressional support for this effort in order to show the world that Americans are united in confronting this danger.

Now, it will take time to eradicate a cancer like ISIL. And any time we take military action, there are risks involved, especially to the servicemen and women who carry out these missions. But I want the American people to understand how this effort will be different from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It will not involve American combat troops fighting on foreign soil. This counterterrorism campaign will be waged through a steady, relentless effort to take out ISIL wherever they exist, using our air power and our support for partners’ forces on the ground. This strategy of taking out terrorists who threaten us while supporting partners on the front lines is one that we have successfully pursued in Yemen and Somalia for years, and it is consistent with the approach I outlined earlier this year: to use force against anyone who threatens America’s core interests, but to mobilize partners wherever possible to address broader challenges to international order.

My fellow Americans, we live in a time of great change. Tomorrow marks 13 years since our country was attacked. Next week marks six years since our economy suffered its worst setback since the Great Depression. Yet despite these shocks, through the pain we felt and the grueling work required to bounce back, America is better positioned today to seize the future than any other nation on Earth.

Our technology companies and universities are unmatched. Our manufacturing and auto industries are thriving. Energy independence is closer than it’s been in decades. For all the work that remains, our businesses are in the longest uninterrupted stretch of job creation in our history. Despite all the divisions and discord within our democracy, I see the grit and determination and common goodness of the American people every single day, and that makes me more confident than ever about our country’s future.

Abroad, American leadership is the one constant in an uncertain world. It is America that has the capacity and the will to mobilize the world against terrorists. It is America that has rallied the world against Russian aggression and in support of the Ukrainian people’s right to determine their own destiny. It is America — our scientists, our doctors, our know-how — that can help contain and cure the outbreak of Ebola. It is America that helped remove and destroy Syria’s declared chemical weapons so that they can’t pose a threat to the Syrian people or the world again. And it is America that is helping Muslim communities around the world not just in the fight against terrorism, but in the fight for opportunity and tolerance and a more hopeful future.

America, our endless blessings bestow an enduring burden. But as Americans, we welcome our responsibility to lead. From Europe to Asia, from the far reaches of Africa to war-torn capitals of the Middle East, we stand for freedom, for justice, for dignity. These are values that have guided our nation since its founding. Tonight, I ask for your support in carrying that leadership forward. I do so as a commander in chief who could not be prouder of our men and women in uniform — pilots who bravely fly in the face of danger above the Middle East and service members who support our partners on the ground.

When we helped prevent the massacre of civilians trapped on a distant mountain, here’s what one of them said: “We owe our American friends our lives. Our children will always remember that there was someone who felt our struggle and made a long journey to protect innocent people.”

That is the difference we make in the world. And our own safety, our own security depends upon our willingness to do what it takes to defend this nation and uphold the values that we stand for — timeless ideals that will endure long after those who offer only hate and destruction have been vanquished from the Earth.

May God bless our troops and may God bless the United States of America.

    Transcript of Obama’s Remarks on the Fight Against ISIS,
    NYT, 10.9.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/11/world/middleeast/
    obamas-remarks-on-the-fight-against-isis.html

To Defeat Terror,

We Need the World’s Help

John Kerry:

The Threat of ISIS Demands a Global Coalition

 

AUG. 29, 2014

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Contributor

By JOHN KERRY

IN a polarized region and a complicated world, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria presents a unifying threat to a broad array of countries, including the United States. What’s needed to confront its nihilistic vision and genocidal agenda is a global coalition using political, humanitarian, economic, law enforcement and intelligence tools to support military force.

In addition to its beheadings, crucifixions and other acts of sheer evil, which have killed thousands of innocents in Syria, Iraq and Lebanon, including Sunni Muslims whose faith it purports to represent, ISIS (which the United States government calls ISIL, or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) poses a threat well beyond the region.

ISIS has its origins in what was once known as Al Qaeda in Iraq, which has over a decade of experience in extremist violence. The group has amassed a hardened fighting force of committed jihadists with global ambitions, exploiting the conflict in Syria and sectarian tensions in Iraq. Its leaders have repeatedly threatened the United States, and in May an ISIS-associated terrorist shot and killed three people at the Jewish Museum in Brussels. (A fourth victim died 13 days later.) ISIS’ cadre of foreign fighters are a rising threat not just in the region, but anywhere they could manage to travel undetected — including to America.

There is evidence that these extremists, if left unchecked, will not be satisfied at stopping with Syria and Iraq. They are larger and better funded in this new incarnation, using pirated oil, kidnapping and extortion to finance operations in Syria and Iraq. They are equipped with sophisticated heavy weapons looted from the battlefield. They have already demonstrated the ability to seize and hold more territory than any other terrorist organization, in a strategic region that borders Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey and is perilously close to Israel.

ISIS fighters have exhibited repulsive savagery and cruelty. Even as they butcher Shiite Muslims and Christians in their effort to touch off a broader ethnic and sectarian conflict, they pursue a calculated strategy of killing fellow Sunni Muslims to gain and hold territory. The beheading of an American journalist, James Foley, has shocked the conscience of the world.

With a united response led by the United States and the broadest possible coalition of nations, the cancer of ISIS will not be allowed to spread to other countries. The world can confront this scourge, and ultimately defeat it. ISIS is odious, but not omnipotent. We have proof already in northern Iraq, where United States airstrikes have shifted the momentum of the fight, providing space for Iraqi and Kurdish forces to go on the offensive. With our support, Iraqi leaders are coming together to form a new, inclusive government that is essential to isolating ISIS and securing the support of all of Iraq’s communities.

Airstrikes alone won’t defeat this enemy. A much fuller response is demanded from the world. We need to support Iraqi forces and the moderate Syrian opposition, who are facing ISIS on the front lines. We need to disrupt and degrade ISIS’ capabilities and counter its extremist message in the media. And we need to strengthen our own defenses and cooperation in protecting our people.

Next week, on the sidelines of the NATO summit meeting in Wales, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and I will meet with our counterparts from our European allies. The goal is to enlist the broadest possible assistance. Following the meeting, Mr. Hagel and I plan to travel to the Middle East to develop more support for the coalition among the countries that are most directly threatened.

The United States will hold the presidency of the United Nations Security Council in September, and we will use that opportunity to continue to build a broad coalition and highlight the danger posed by foreign terrorist fighters, including those who have joined ISIS. During the General Assembly session, President Obama will lead a summit meeting of the Security Council to put forward a plan to deal with this collective threat.

In this battle, there is a role for almost every country. Some will provide military assistance, direct and indirect. Some will provide desperately needed humanitarian assistance for the millions who have been displaced and victimized across the region. Others will help restore not just shattered economies but broken trust among neighbors. This effort is underway in Iraq, where other countries have joined us in providing humanitarian aid, military assistance and support for an inclusive government.

Already our efforts have brought dozens of nations to this cause. Certainly there are different interests at play. But no decent country can support the horrors perpetrated by ISIS, and no civilized country should shirk its responsibility to help stamp out this disease.

ISIS’ abhorrent tactics are uniting and rallying neighbors with traditionally conflicting interests to support Iraq’s new government. And over time, this coalition can begin to address the underlying factors that fuel ISIS and other terrorist organizations with like-minded agendas.

Coalition building is hard work, but it is the best way to tackle a common enemy. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, the first President George Bush and Secretary of State James A. Baker III did not act alone or in haste. They methodically assembled a coalition of countries whose concerted action brought a quick victory.

Extremists are defeated only when responsible nations and their peoples unite to oppose them.
 

John Kerry is the secretary of state of the United States.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on August 30, 2014,
on page A21 of the New York edition with the headline:
To Defeat Terror, We Need the World’s Help.

    To Defeat Terror, We Need the World’s Help, NYT, 29.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/30/opinion/
    john-kerry-the-threat-of-isis-demands-a-global-coalition.html

A Thin Rationale for Drone Killings

 

JUNE 23, 2014
The New York Times
The Opinion Pages | Today's Editorials
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

The Obama administration on Monday reluctantly released its justification for killing an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, whom it considered a terrorist, in a 2011 drone strike in Yemen. But the rationale provides little confidence that the lethal action was taken with real care.

Under orders from a federal appeals court, the Justice Department made public a 2010 memo explaining why the drone strike was legal. Considering how long the administration fought the release, which was sought by The New York Times and the American Civil Liberties Union, one might have expected a thoughtful memo that carefully weighed the pros and cons and discussed how such a strike accords with international and Constitutional law.

Instead, the memo turns out to be a slapdash pastiche of legal theories — some based on obscure interpretations of British and Israeli law — that was clearly tailored to the desired result. Perhaps the administration held out so long to avoid exposing the thin foundation on which it based such a momentous decision.

The main theory that the government says allows it to kill American citizens, if they pose a threat, is the “public authorities justification,” a legal concept that permits governments to take actions in emergency situations that would otherwise break the law. It’s why fire trucks can break the speed limit and police officers can fire at a threatening gunman. But it’s a dangerous concept if expanded because it could be used to justify all kinds of government misdeeds, especially since Congress has never explicitly authorized an exception for official killing in this kind of circumstance, as the memo acknowledges.

The sheer power of drone strikes, several of which have killed many innocent bystanders, is in no way comparable to the kind of police shootings that the memo cites as precedent. (And, in most cities, police shootings are carefully investigated afterward, and officers face punishment if they exceed their authority. Has that ever happened with an errant drone strike?)

There’s no explanation given in the memo for how the United States knew Mr. Awlaki was planning “imminent” mayhem, as the memo claims. It’s possible that this information was contained in the dozen or so pages that were redacted from the 41-page memo, which was written by David Barron, then an assistant attorney general who was recently appointed to a federal appellate court. The memo says only that Mr. Awlaki had joined Al Qaeda and was planning attacks on Americans, but that the government did not know when these attacks would occur.

Mr. Awlaki’s due-process rights are dealt with summarily. The “realities of combat” meant that no serious due process was possible, the memo said, citing the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force that allows antiterror measures anywhere. And the memo never questioned whether the Defense Department and the Central Intelligence Agency, which operate the drone programs, would properly follow international law. “We understand,” Mr. Barron wrote, that the two agencies “would conduct this operation in a manner that accords with the rules of international humanitarian law governing this armed conflict.”

Blithely accepting such assurances at face value is why these kinds of killings are so troubling, and why we have repeatedly urged that an outside party — such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court — provide an independent review when a citizen is targeted. How did the Justice Department know that capturing Mr. Awlaki was not feasible, or that the full force of a drone strike was necessary? This memo should never have taken so long to be released, and more documents must be made public. The public is still in the dark on too many vital questions.

A version of this editorial appears in print on June 24, 2014,

on page A26 of the New York edition with the headline:

A Thin Rationale for Drone Killings.

    A Thin Rationale for Drone Killings, NYT, 23.6.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/24/opinion/a-thin-rationale-for-drone-killings.html

No to Guantánamo for Ahmed Abu Khattala

JUNE 19, 2014
The New York Times
The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Contributor
By MORRIS DAVIS

NEARLY eight years ago, 14 men arrived at Guantánamo after years in Central Intelligence Agency custody. Since then, only one has been tried and convicted with the case upheld on appeal. That was Ahmed Ghailani, a Tanzanian national who received a life sentence for his role in the 1998 bombings of the American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 223 people. Mr. Ghailani was tried in federal court in New York, and he is serving his sentence in a federal prison in the United States. His 13 comrades from the C.I.A. detention and interrogation program are still in limbo at Guantánamo, where justice for them and the families of their victims remains elusive.

When word got out that Ahmed Abu Khattala, suspected of being the ringleader of the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the United States diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, that killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans, had been captured, it was inevitable that some would demand sending him to Guantánamo. Among the Guantánamo advocates who argue that Mr. Abu Khattala should be interrogated there as an enemy combatant are Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, two individuals I worked with in 2006 when I was the chief prosecutor for the Guantánamo military commissions.

Back then, Senators McCain and Graham stood up against those in the administration of President George W. Bush who wanted harsh tactics and rigged justice, and I have great respect for the way they swam against the political current. But they are wrong now to oppose the Obama administration’s plan to bring Mr. Abu Khattala to the United States to stand trial in a federal court.

Too often, the public falls prey to the superficial argument that we are in a war against terrorism and that foreign terrorism suspects do not deserve the rights afforded American citizens. That seems sensible on its face, but what is it exactly that needs to be compromised in terrorism cases to ensure that the guilty face justice while also protecting our national security? What would we gain, in other words, by sending Mr. Abu Khattala to Guantánamo?

The United States has been roundly condemned by allies and adversaries alike for the legal black hole we created at Guantánamo. In the 2008 presidential race, both Mr. McCain and his opponent, Barack Obama, said they wanted to close the detention camp. Senator McCain issued a joint statement with Senator Dianne Feinstein a year ago that said, “It is in our national interest to end detention at Guantánamo.” Adding to the prison’s population now would not contribute to that effort and would undermine the small gains that have been made toward unraveling this Gordian knot.

Collecting intelligence from Mr. Abu Khattala is a top priority, true, but there is nothing special about Guantánamo that makes it the best place to question him. Guantánamo was chosen originally because some in the Bush administration thought it was beyond the reach of the law — the perfect place, they thought, to exploit people for intelligence, free and clear of judicial oversight.

Over time, however, it has become clear that Guantánamo is not the legal no man’s land it was thought to be. The Supreme Court has held that detainees have the right to an attorney and to challenge in federal court the basis for their detention. Senator McCain led the way in passing the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 that banned “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” of those in military custody. The notion that, by sending Mr. Abu Khattala to Guantánamo, we could hide him from outside scrutiny while applying some extraordinary measures to make him talk is simply false.

President Bush authorized military commissions — tribunals that operate without key elements of civilian courts’ due process — in November 2001. In the more than 12 years since, only eight individuals have been convicted, and each process has been surrounded by controversy. For example, the only military commission completed during my two-year tenure as chief prosecutor was the trial of David Hicks, who was convicted of providing material support for terrorism. Later, in another case, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit held that material support was not a legitimate law of war offense that could be tried by a military commission.

In contrast, hundreds of terrorism-related cases have been prosecuted successfully and without adverse incident in federal courts during the same period, including the trials of the radical cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri, Osama bin Laden’s son-in-law Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, and Mr. Ghailani. Meanwhile, at Guantánamo, the military commission proceedings against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and those accused with him in the 9/11 attacks are into their third year — with no firm date yet set for a trial.

Given the controversy surrounding what happened at Benghazi, it is especially important for the Abu Khattala case to be presented in the sunlight of a federal court, where the public can see and hear the evidence and draw its own conclusions. Rather than languishing for years and being obscured by the opaque standards that plague the military commissions at Guantánamo, this case deserves the certainty, the efficiency and the clarity that our federal courts provide.

When it comes to Mr. Abu Khattala and Guantánamo, the question is not could we, but should we? And the answer is no.

Morris Davis, a retired Air Force colonel

and an assistant professor

at the Howard University School of Law,

was the chief prosecutor for the military commissions

at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, from 2005 to 2007.

    No to Guantánamo for Ahmed Abu Khattala, NYT, 19.6.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/20/opinion/
    no-to-guantanamo-for-ahmed-abu-khattala.html

Brazen Figure May Hold Key to Mysteries

Apprehension of Ahmed Abu Khattala

May Begin to Answer Questions on Assault

JUNE 17, 2014
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

CAIRO — Ahmed Abu Khattala was always open about his animosity toward the United States, and even about his conviction that Muslims and Christians were locked in an intractable religious war. “There is always hostility between the religions,” he said in an interview. “That is the nature of religions.”

During the assault on the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, on the night of Sept. 11, 2012, Mr. Abu Khattala was a vivid presence. Witnesses saw him directing the swarming attackers who ultimately killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.

Afterward, he offered contradictory denials of his role, sometimes trying to say that he did not do it but strongly approved. He appeared to enjoy his notoriety.

Even after President Obama vowed to hunt down the attackers, Mr. Abu Khattala sat for repeated interviews with Western journalists and even invited a correspondent for tea in the modest home where he lived openly, with his mother, in the el-Leithi neighborhood of Benghazi.

But for all his brazenness, Mr. Abu Khattala also holds many tantalizing secrets for the Americans still investigating and debating the attack.

Captured by military commandos and law enforcement agents early on Monday, Mr. Abu Khattala may now help address some of the persistent questions about the identity and motives of the attackers. The thriving industry of conspiracy theories, political scandals, talk show chatter and congressional hearings may now confront the man federal investigators say played the central role in the attack.

Despite extensive speculation about the possible role of Al Qaeda in directing the attack, Mr. Abu Khattala is a local, small-time Islamist militant. He has no known connections to international terrorist groups, say American officials briefed on the criminal investigation and intelligence reporting, and other Benghazi Islamists and militia leaders who have known him for many years.

In several hours of interviews since the attack, Mr. Abu Khattala was happy to profess his admiration for Osama bin Laden and other leaders of Al Qaeda. He insisted that American foreign policy alone was to blame for the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But he remained a distant admirer of Mr. Bin Laden’s organization, having spent most of his adult life in and out of jail for his extremism under Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.

Even by the standards of Benghazi jihadists — and even among many of his friends — Mr. Abu Khattala stands out as both erratic and extremist. “Even in prison, he was always alone,” said Sheikh Mohamed Abu Sidra, an Islamist member of Parliament from Benghazi who spent several years in prison with Mr. Abu Khattala.

“He is sincere, but he is very ignorant, and I don’t think he is 100 percent mentally fit,” Mr. Abu Sidra said. “I always ask myself, how did he become a leader?”

When the revolt against Colonel Qaddafi broke out in February 2011, however, Mr. Abu Khattala’s years in prison were an attractive credential to the young men looking for tough-talking “sheikhs” to follow into battle.
Continue reading the main story

He formed a militia of perhaps two dozen fighters, naming it Obeida Ibn Al Jarra for an early Islamic general. But by the summer, Mr. Abu Khattala and his band had become notorious across Benghazi.

A group of Islamist militia leaders decided to “arrest” and investigate the main rebel commander, Gen. Abdul Fattah Younes, who had also become NATO’s preferred partner among the rebel leaders. His captors held him overnight in the headquarters of Mr. Abu Khattala’s brigade, and General Younes’s body was found the next day on a roadside, riddled with bullets.

Mr. Abu Khattala “became a boogeyman” across Benghazi, said Mohamed al-Gharabi, the Islamist leader of the Rafallah al-Sehati Brigade. “People started to fear him,” he said.

Mr. Abu Khattala appeared to enjoy his new infamy. When the Islamist-dominated militias reorganized into a centralized coalition, he rejected it as insufficiently Islamist. Complaining that the coalition supported the Western-backed provisional government instead of demanding a theocracy, he pulled back from the front.

“He thinks he owns God and everyone else is an infidel,” said Fawzi Bukatef, the coalition’s former leader.

In the period before the attack, Mr. Abu Khattala was living in el-Leithi, known for its high concentration of militant extremists. He made his living as a building contractor in blue Dickies coveralls. But he was still active with a small, part-time militia, which at certain times over the last two years controlled at least one checkpoint on a highway near Benghazi.

On the day of the attack, Islamists in Cairo had staged a demonstration outside the United States Embassy there to protest an American-made online video mocking Islam, and the protest culminated in a breach of the embassy’s walls — images that flashed through news coverage around the Arab world.

As the attack in Benghazi was unfolding a few hours later, Mr. Abu Khattala told fellow Islamist fighters and others that the assault was retaliation for the same insulting video, according to people who heard him.

In an interview a few days later, he pointedly declined to say whether an offensive online video might indeed warrant the destruction of the diplomatic mission or the killing of the ambassador. “From a religious point of view, it is hard to say whether it is good or bad,” he said.

Several witnesses to the attack later said that Mr. Abu Khattala’s presence and leadership were conspicuous from the start. He initially hung back, standing near the crowd at Venezia Road, several witnesses said. But a procession of fighters hurried to him out of the smoke and gunfire, addressed him as “sheikh,” and then gave him reports or took his orders before plunging back into the compound.

Spotting him as the central figure in the attack, a local official, Anwar el-Dos, approached Mr. Abu Khattala for help in entering the compound. The two men drove into the mission together in Mr. Abu Khattala’s pickup truck, witnesses said. As the men moved forward, the fighters parted to let them pass.

When the truck doors opened inside the walls, witnesses said, Mr. Dos dived to the ground to avoid gunfire ringing all around. But Mr. Abu Khattala strolled coolly through the chaos.

“He was just calm as could be,” a young Islamist who had joined the pillaging said, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. Mr. Abu Khattala showed up on internal security cameras at about 11:30 p.m., according to American officials who have viewed the footage.

A short time later, Mr. Abu Khattala drove to the headquarters of Ansar al-Shariah, a local Benghazi militia whose members, witnesses said, also played a prominent role in the attack.

Although widely seen at the attack, Mr. Abu Khattala made no attempt to flee. The safest place for him may have been Benghazi, where Libya’s weak central government feared exerting its authority because of the superior power of the local Islamist militias.

Mr. Abu Khattala’s neighbors and other residents of Benghazi were apparently unaware of his capture, perhaps because they assumed he was caught up in other fighting in the city. A renegade general has been waging a local campaign against Islamist militants such as those in Ansar al-Shariah and Mr. Abu Khattala.

In interviews after the news emerged, two Benghazi residents said they had last seen Mr. Abu Khattala on Sunday. A neighbor in the el-Leithi district said he had seen Mr. Abu Khattala leaving his house alone in an Afghan-style jallabiya, with a Kalashnikov rifle slung over one shoulder and a Belgian FN rifle over the other.

“Then he walked deep into el-Leithi,” the neighbor said. “We haven’t seen him since.”

Suliman Ali Zway contributed reporting from Tripoli, Libya.

A version of this article appears in print on June 18, 2014,

on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:

Brazen Figure May Hold Key To Mysteries.

    Brazen Figure May Hold Key to Mysteries, NYT, 17.6.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/18/world/middleeast/
    apprehension-of-ahmed-abu-khattala-
    may-begin-to-answer-questions-on-assault.html

Syria Suicide Bombing

Puts U.S. Face on Jihad Video

Officials Fear Moner Mohammad Abusalha’s
Jihad Video Will Inspire Others

 

JUNE 14, 2014
The New York Times
By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT

WASHINGTON — Like a trailer for a summer blockbuster, the video begins with loud music and the words “Coming Soon.”

But instead of superheroes or comedians on screen, there are images of a burning American flag and a jetliner hitting the World Trade Center, and the words: “Join the Caravan of Jihad and Martyrdom.”

As the music fades away, the blurred face of a man appears. He makes a direct appeal to Americans to join the fight.

The video ends with footage of a United States passport being burned. Men are heard laughing and shouting an Arabic phrase about God’s greatness.

Although the recruitment video has circulated among extremist groups for some days, intelligence analysts now believe the man with the blurred face is a 22-year-old from Florida who blew himself up last month in a suicide attack on Syrian government forces that killed 37, according to senior American government officials.

The man, Moner Mohammad Abusalha, who took his own life in a truck bombing mission, is one of roughly 100 Americans who have tried to travel to Syria to fight alongside Islamic extremists, or who have actually done so. American officials express deep concerns that the video may inspire others to follow his path.

The American authorities had tracked his indirect travels to Syria, but they knew very little about him at the time. It is not illegal to travel there, and many others have done so for humanitarian reasons. It was only after he arrived in Syria that the authorities here learned through intelligence sources that he was planning a suicide attack, senior American officials said.

Once Mr. Abusalha’s intentions were clear, there was little the United States could do to stop him because there are no American or allied forces in Syria, and certainly none who could have taken action inside the militant organization that Mr. Abusalha had joined, according to government officials. Had the authorities known before he arrived in Syria that he intended to fight alongside extremists, they most likely would have had enough evidence to charge him with providing material support to terrorists, as they have done with several other Americans.

The officials declined to say how the United States obtained intelligence that he was fighting alongside militants and was planning to blow himself up in a suicide truck-bomb attack. But in the past year, the authorities have obtained similar information in Syria from contacts on the ground, electronic intercepts like cellphones and foreign intelligence agencies.

As the unrest in Syria has spread into Iraq recently, and the group Islamic State in Iraq and Syria has gained ground, American and European authorities have grown increasingly concerned that some of their citizens may be traveling to Syria to take up the militants’ cause.

One area of concern in the United States is Minnesota, where the F.B.I. has received reports that several young men of Somali descent there have traveled to Syria to fight, officials said. Starting in 2007, a number of men 0f Somali descent in Minnesota and elsewhere in the United States have traveled to Somalia to fight alongside Islamist extremists. At least three carried out suicide attacks there.

“There’s an active investigation ongoing to discern how many have traveled there,” said Kyle Loven, a spokesman for the F.B.I.’s Minneapolis field office.

There have been countless videos, Twitter posts and other pieces of propaganda released by extremists since the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. A number of them have highlighted American citizens. But this video is believed to be the first that features an American in the expanding attempts to recruit other Americans to go fight in Syria. It comes amid growing fears among American and European officials about young men flocking to fight in Syria and Iraq, who may return as battle-hardened fighters to commit violence at home.

“We’ve had Saudis, Algerians, Russians but never an American featured in a propaganda video, and Americans are the best poster boys for propaganda,” said Laith Alkhouri, a senior analyst at Flashpoint Global Partners, a security consulting firm that tracks militant websites, referring to the conflict in Syria. “It is the United States who is leading the war on terror. And what they’re saying is, ‘We have Americans, we are here to welcome Americans. Don’t hesitate to travel to come join the fight.’ ”

Although the suicide bomber was not identified by nationality or name, a video was circulated last month that appears to have documented Mr. Abusalha’s mission. That previous video shows rebels loading what appear to be tank shells into a large vehicle that had been armored with metal plates. Later, there is a large explosion after the vehicle drives down a road.

Mr. Abusalha was born in Florida, played basketball as a teenager and was known as “Mo.” In high school, he would often sneak out to pray instead of study. His mother is American and his father Palestinian. They owned grocery stores in the Vero Beach, Fla., area.

After graduating from high school, he enrolled in three colleges but dropped out of each, and in 2012, he told friends he was moving to Orlando. Shortly thereafter he told friends he was moving to Jordan to take courses as a nursing assistant.

In the past year, he lost touch with his parents. His friends believe that he was recruited by extremists while he was living in Jordan. In Syria, he adopted a nom de guerre, Abu Huraira al-Amriki. He spent two months in a training camp of Nusra Front, the militant group, in Aleppo before going to the northern province of Idlib, where he carried out the suicide attack.

In the video clip of the man with the blurred face, he points at the camera and pats his chest as he describes why Americans should travel to Syria to fight. He uses the Arabic word “haq,” which means divine obligation.

“Jihad is protecting Islam,” he said. “It is now haq on you to protect your brothers and oppressed, and it’s haq on you to fight,” he said.

The video that appeared to feature the suicide bomber was released last month by the Global Islamic Media Front. That group has put out similar ones from Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. The video did not say which group the suicide bomber had joined. But it has been billed as a preview for a larger clip that will soon be released about an American martyr who died fighting a holy war in Syria, according to analysts who monitor extremists’ websites and online chatter.

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on June 15, 2014,

on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:

Suicide in Syria Puts U.S. Face on Jihad Video.

    Syria Suicide Bombing Puts U.S. Face on Jihad Video,
    NYT, 14.6.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/15/world/middleeast/
    fear-of-trend-after-bombing-by-a-us-man.html

Resurgent Violence

Underscores Morphing

of Al Qaeda Threat

JUNE 13, 2014
1:09 A.M. E.D.T.
The New York Times
By REUTERS

WASHINGTON/ISLAMABAD — - In Iraq, an al Qaeda splinter group is threatening Baghdad after seizing control of two cities. In Pakistan, the Taliban attacked a major airport twice in one week. And in Nigeria, the Islamist militant group Boko Haram was blamed for another mass kidnapping.

A cluster of militant attacks over the past week is a reminder of how the once-singular threat of al Qaeda has changed since the killing of Osama bin Laden, morphing or splintering into smaller, largely autonomous Islamist factions that in some cases are now overshadowing the parent group.

Each movement is different, fueled by local political and sectarian dynamics. But this week’s violence is a measure of their ambition and the long-term potential danger they pose to the West.

Between 2010 and 2013, the number of al Qaeda and al Qaeda-related groups rose 58 percent and the number of "Salafi jihadists" - violent proponents of an extreme form of Islam - more than doubled, according to a report by the RAND Corp think tank.

Daniel Benjamin, former U.S. State Department counterterrorism coordinator under President Barack Obama, said he was "considerably more optimistic 18 months ago than ... now" about the threat posed by al Qaeda-related groups.

Few examples are more vivid than the fall of northern Iraq, which has raised the prospect of the country's disintegration as a unified state.

Sunni insurgents known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL, seized the northern city of Mosul on Tuesday, and then overran an area further south on Wednesday, capturing the city of Tikrit and threatening Iraq's capital, Baghdad.

The militants are exploiting deep resentment among Iraq's Sunni minority, which lost power when the 2003 U.S.-led invasion toppled Saddam Hussein. Since the U.S. withdrawal in 2011, the Sunni population has become increasingly alienated from Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's Shii'ite-dominated government and his U.S.-trained military.

This has helped fuel the stunning resurgence of ISIL. The group seeks to create a caliphate based on medieval Sunni Islamic principles across Iraq and neighboring Syria, where it has become one of the fiercest rebel forces in the civil war to oust President Bashar al-Assad.

ISIL underscores the complexity of the new galaxy of militant groups. Earlier this year, it split from the core al Qaeda organization completely, after a dispute between ISIL's leader and bin Laden's successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

 

"WE ARE TALKING ABOUT YEARS"

Even if Iraq can survive the onslaught, there is no saying how long it might take to restore order. "This is a very protracted war against terror," said an adviser to Maliki. "We are not talking about months. We are talking about years."

It has taken years for the situation to reach its current low point. After the 2003 Iraq invasion, the disgruntled Sunni population initially served as the base for a bloody insurgency against the U.S. military and emerging Shi'ite majority rule.
Continue reading the main story

That revolt appeared to have been quelled by the time U.S. troops left in December 2011. But Iraqi Sunni grievances simmered, fanned by what they saw as Maliki's sectarian rule and failure to build an inclusive government and army.

The future members of ISIL, then calling themselves the Islamic State of Iraq, were ready when the uprising in Syria started in 2011 and moved in to take advantage of the chaos. Bolstered by their success on the battlefield, they renamed themselves the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

With ISIL's lightning advance in Iraq in recent days, the army has seen thousands of soldiers desert their posts in the north. And in Baghdad, fears of a sectarian bloodbath have grown.

Benjamin, now at Dartmouth University, said that groups like ISIL and rival Jabhat al-Nusrah in Syria, while serious regional problems, do not pose the same direct threat to the United States and its allies that bin Laden's al Qaeda did.

"We shouldn't lose sight of that," he said. "I don't think it's an existential threat by any means."

 

TENSIONS HIGH IN PAKISTAN

Tensions are also running high in Pakistan, where a brazen attack by the Pakistani Taliban on the country’s biggest airport in Karachi underscored the resurgence of an Islamist group with longtime ties to al Qaeda. Ten militants were killed in a gun battle that claimed at least 34 other lives.

The Pakistani Taliban has vowed a large-scale campaign against government and security installations after months of failed peace negotiations. In response, the Pakistani army is expected to ramp up air strikes in restive tribal areas.

So far, cities like Islamabad and Lahore have not seen the kind of violence that has plagued other parts of the country. But observers expect that to change.

The Pakistani Taliban operate closely with al Qaeda, which has senior commanders deployed in the tribal areas, as well as the Afghan Taliban, who provide their Pakistani comrades with funding and logistical support.

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has long advocated peace talks with the Taliban but the picture changed radically after the airport attack, with public opinion swinging back again in favor of an all-out military operation against the militants.

Signaling possible escalation, U.S. drones struck Taliban hideouts in Pakistan, killing at least 10 militants in response to the Karachi airport attack, officials said on Thursday, in the first such raids by unmanned CIA aircraft in six months.

Pakistani government officials said Islamabad had given the Americans "express approval" for the strikes - the first time Pakistan has admitted to such cooperation.

 

BOKO HARAM

In Nigeria, Islamist group Boko Haram, another al Qaeda-linked group, has stepped up attacks in recent months after the kidnapping of more than 200 schoolgirls in April sparked international outrage.

The group is suspected in the abduction last week of up to 30 women form nomadic settlements in Nigeria's northeast, close to where it grabbed the schoolgirls, residents and Nigerian media said. The militants were reported to be demanding cattle in exchange for the women.

Along with a desire for international attention, analysts believe the increasingly ferocious attacks are designed to embarrass the Nigerian government and ultimately give Boko Haram more negotiating power in its demand for the introduction of sharia law in northern Nigeria.

Bomb attacks in the capital of Abuja in the run-up to the World Economic Forum in May killed scores of people and illustrated the powerlessness of security forces to stop them.

Ahead of an election next year, President Goodluck Jonathan appears at pains to show his government can tackle Boko Haram, ordering a "full-scale operation" against the group and authorizing security forces to use "any means necessary under the law."

But that's easier said than done, given the difficulties faced by security forces in Africa's most populous nation.

Some analysts say that while Boko Haram's tactics are similar to al Qaeda's, any links are tenuous at best.

"They've got no particular interest in attacking Western targets. It's all focused on their aims: introducing sharia law and a level of autonomy, self-determination for the north," said Martin Roberts, a senior Africa analyst at research firm IHS.

One group that has repeatedly set its sights on American targets is the Yemen-based al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), which was believed to have been behind the failed attempt in 2009 to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner by the so-called "underwear bomber."

In a message to the U.S. Congress on Thursday, Obama repeated his administration's warnings that AQAP is "the most active and dangerous affiliate of al Qaeda today."

But the militant splinter groups are evolving so rapidly that - thanks to ISIL's rapid expansion and to operations against AQAP in Yemen - that may no longer be true.

(Additional reporting by David Dolan in Abuja

and Warren Strobel in Washington.;

Writing by Jason Szep and Matt Spetalnick;

Editing by David Storey and Lisa Shumaker)

    Resurgent Violence Underscores Morphing of Al Qaeda Threat,
    NYT, 13.6.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2014/06/13/world/middleeast/
    13reuters-iraq-security-alqaeda.html

A View From Gitmo

JUNE 7, 2014
The New York Times
By RAMZI KASSEM

GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — THE week’s national debate around the exchange of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl for five Afghans imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay found me at the American base in Cuba for meetings with my clients. Here, too, the swap is the talk of the town — among prisoners, among guards and between the two groups.

Some Guantánamo prison guards voiced anger at the news of how their fellow soldier, Sergeant Bergdahl, had been liberated. In their view, he was a deserter, unworthy of the sustained media interest his release had garnered, especially compared to the dearth of attention paid to the sacrifice of those killed and wounded in the Afghan conflict.

But to the emaciated man sitting across a rickety table from me in an orange jumpsuit, chained to the floor inside a dilapidated shack, that furious reaction was baffling. My client, Moath al-Alwi, wondered aloud “why those people are not simply happy that this American soldier will soon be reunited with his family.” He reflected that the critics have probably “never tasted this sort of ordeal themselves.”

In contrast to the guards, Mr. Alwi and many of his fellow prisoners empathized with Sergeant Bergdahl and his family. After all, they only wanted the same for themselves: to see their loved ones after long years in captivity.

My students and I have been representing Guantánamo inmates for most of the last decade. Mr. Alwi was on one of the first planes to shuttle so-called enemy combatants to the prison in early 2002.

A Yemeni citizen raised in Saudi Arabia, Mr. Alwi traveled to Afghanistan in early 2001 to teach the Quran and live in a society that appeared from afar to honor Islamic ideals. He was 24 when he fled the conflict there, was seized by the authorities in Pakistan and likely sold into American captivity for a bounty.

At a 2008 hearing, having given Mr. Alwi only three weeks to review a lengthy dossier compiled by the United States government over seven years and consisting largely of uncorroborated and self-incriminating statements that we argued were extracted under coercive circumstances, a federal judge ruled his detention justified. A court of appeals found that the judge’s “haste” was “hard to understand,” but upheld the decision.

To protest the injustice of his open-ended imprisonment without fair process, Mr. Alwi has been on hunger strike since February 2013. Every day, Guantánamo personnel strap him in a chair with restraints and force-feed him, in an effort to break his will.

Mr. Alwi never fought against the United States and has not been found guilty of any crime.

The political controversy over whether the prisoner exchange was conducted legally is even less comprehensible to the inmates at Guantánamo than the guards’ anger. To their mind, before debating the finer point of whether the transfer of the five Afghans adhered to the law, the American public should ask if the detention and abuse at Guantánamo Bay of hundreds — without charge, fair process or the protections of the Geneva Conventions — were lawful in the first place.

From where Mr. Alwi sits, the talking point of legality is almost amusingly quaint. Guantánamo remains at its core a lawless place, and this release in seeming contravention of a solitary statute appears par for the course. In the absurd history of the detention camp, it is not uncommon for inmates among the handful who have been convicted by the military commissions to be the ones who are released. Questionable though their legitimacy and fairness may be, the military commissions can at least determine a finite term for internment at Guantánamo, one that the American government has chosen to honor so far.

So the release of the five Afghans, including, by some accounts, known figures in the Taliban, fits a larger pattern in which the many dozens of inmates not accused of any crime and, in fact, cleared for release by successive American administrations languish for years on end. For many, the difference between liberation and limbo has nothing to do with justice or legality, but just the luck of what nationality a prisoner happens to hold. Because no Guantánamo inmate has been repatriated to Yemen in years, Mr. Alwi said that some inmates are considering relinquishing their Yemeni citizenship in the hope that it might facilitate their resettlement elsewhere.

The furor over the Sergeant Bergdahl affair has simply reinforced a commonly held view among the inmates that the prospects for release from Guantánamo are tied far less to court decisions, threat assessments and the determinations of the military review board, and far more to the politics of the moment. “It is all political,” Mr. Alwi said. “It is all theater, it is all a game.”

Guantánamo has indeed become a sideshow of the American political spectacle, a drama in which the vast majority of the camp’s inmates are held hostage to our partisan politics. If the current upheaval around Sergeant Bergdahl’s release proves anything, it is that President Obama is capable of pushing past the congressional histrionics that, until recently, he has pointed to as cover for his failure to shutter the infamous prison.

Ending indefinite detention at Guantánamo Bay, in the face of opposition from his political adversaries and reluctance from some officials within his administration, requires fortitude of Mr. Obama. What is needed now is decisive action to resettle and repatriate as many inmates as possible and give fair trials to any that remain. Only by doing so can America end this grim farce.

Ramzi Kassem is an associate professor of law

at the City University of New York

who directs the Immigrant and Non-Citizen Rights Clinic,

which represents prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba,

and elsewhere.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on June 8, 2014,

on page SR7 of the New York edition with the headline:

A View From Gitmo.

    A View From Gitmo, NYT, 7.6.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/08/opinion/sunday/a-view-from-gitmo.html

Bowe Bergdahl, American Soldier,

Freed by Taliban in Prisoner Trade

MAY 31, 2014
The New York Times
By ERIC SCHMITT
and CHARLIE SAVAGE

WASHINGTON — The lone American prisoner of war from the Afghan conflict, captured by insurgents nearly five years ago, has been released to American forces in exchange for five Taliban detainees held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, Obama administration officials said Saturday.

The soldier, Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, 28, was handed over to American Special Operations troops inside Afghanistan near the Pakistan border about 10:30 a.m. Saturday in a tense but uneventful exchange with 18 Taliban officials, American officials said. Moments later, Sergeant Bergdahl was whisked away by the helicopter-borne commandos, American officials said. He was described in good physical condition.
 

The five Taliban detainees at Guantánamo, including two senior militant commanders said to be linked to operations that killed American and allied troops as well as implicated in murdering thousands of Shiites in Afghanistan, were flown from Cuba in the custody of officials from Qatar, who will accompany them back to that Persian Gulf state. They will be subject to security restrictions there, including a one-year travel ban.

Senior administration officials cautioned that the discussions over the prisoner swap, which were secretly restarted last fall after collapsing several months earlier, did not necessarily presage the resumption of the broader, on-again-off-again peace talks to end the 13-year war.

“This is the only issue we’ve discussed with the Taliban in recent months,” said one senior Obama administration official involved in the talks. “We do hope that having succeeded in this narrow but important step, it will create the possibility of expanding the dialogue to other issues. But we don’t have any promises to that effect.”

But word of renewed, secret negotiations with the Taliban brought immediate criticism from some lawmakers, including Representative Mike Rogers of Michigan, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. “I have little confidence in the security assurances regarding the movement and activities of the now-released Taliban leaders, and I have even less confidence in this administration’s willingness to ensure they are enforced,” he said. “I believe this decision will threaten the lives of American soldiers for years to come.”

A Western official in Kabul said the Afghan government was not told ahead of time that the Taliban were going to hand over Sergeant Bergdahl or that the release of prisoners from Guantánamo Bay was proceeding, though the Afghans were broadly aware that the talks had been rekindled. American officials feared leaks could scuttle the deal.

President Obama personally called the soldier’s parents on Saturday, shortly after Sergeant Bergdahl was transferred to the American military; the Bergdahl family was in Washington after a visit here for Memorial Day, officials said.

Later on Saturday in the White House Rose Garden, Mr. Obama, flanked by Robert and Jani Bergdahl, the sergeant’s parents, said, “Right now, our top priority is making sure that Bowe gets the care and support that he needs, and that he can be reunited with his family as soon as possible.”
Continue reading the main story

The Bergdahls, who have waged a tireless campaign for their son’s release, have sometimes criticized the Obama administration for lack of action. But at the impromptu Rose Garden appearance and in a statement released earlier in the day, they praised the American and Qatari governments for their help. “We cannot wait to wrap our arms around our only son,” they said in the statement. “Today, we are ecstatic!”

Family and friends in the Bergdahl family’s hometown, Hailey, Idaho, said they were planning a celebration on Sunday. A Pentagon official said Saturday evening that Sergeant Bergdahl was en route to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany. He would then be transferred to Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio when doctors felt he was fit to travel.

Negotiations and internal deliberations over the potential for a swap have waxed and waned for years, but they intensified in the past several weeks as an agreement appeared within reach, according to an official familiar with the matter.

Among other complications, there was a potential legal obstacle: Congress has imposed statutory restrictions on the transfer of detainees from Guantánamo Bay. The statutes say the secretary of defense must determine that a transfer is in the interest of national security, that steps have been taken to substantially mitigate a future threat by a released detainee, and that the secretary notify Congress 30 days before any transfer of his determination.

In this case, the secretary, Chuck Hagel, acknowledged in a statement that he did not notify Congress ahead of time. When Mr. Obama signed a bill containing the latest version of the transfer restrictions into law, he issued a signing statement claiming that he could lawfully override them under his executive powers.

“The executive branch must have the flexibility, among other things, to act swiftly in conducting negotiations with foreign countries regarding the circumstances of detainee transfers,” he wrote in the signing statement, adding that if the restrictions “operate in a manner that violates constitutional separation of powers principles, my administration will implement them in a manner that avoids the constitutional conflict.”

An administration official said the circumstances of a fast-moving exchange deal made it appropriate to act outside the statutory framework for transfers.

The top Republicans on the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, Representative Howard McKeon of California and Senator James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, said the release of the Taliban prisoners “clearly violated laws” governing the transfer of detainees from Guantánamo Bay. One senior administration official defended the decision, saying that “due to a near-term opportunity to save Sergeant Bergdahl’s life, we moved as quickly as possible,” requiring action outside the notice requirement of the statute.

In his comments Saturday afternoon, Mr. Obama said, “The Qatari government has given us assurances that it will put in place measures to protect our national security.”

Prisoner swaps have been more common in conventional wars between two nation-state armies than in the sort of insurgency conflict that characterized Afghanistan and Iraq, and American officials could not cite another instance in which an American soldier had been freed in these conflicts in a swap.

The transfer reduces the detainee population at Guantánamo to 149. They include 12 Afghan citizens — each of whom was deemed far less important and dangerous than the five who were included in the swap.

Sergeant Bergdahl was believed to have been held by the militant Haqqani network in the tribal area of Pakistan’s northwest frontier, on the Afghan border. He was captured in Paktika Province in Afghanistan on June 30, 2009. The circumstances of how he was separated from his unit and captured have remained a mystery.

Hopes for Sergeant Bergdahl’s release were lifted last November when the Taliban signaled it was prepared to engage the United States on the limited issue of a prisoner swap, but not on wider issues including reconciliation with the government of Afghanistan, a senior administration official said Saturday.

The discussions resumed with the Qatari government acting as an intermediary for messages between the two sides, the official said. Previous talks faltered over issues including restrictions on any released detainees; it was unclear whether the one-year travel prohibition was a breakthrough compromise. While it was described by American officials, it was not mentioned in a Taliban statement on the swap.

The latest evidence indicating that Sergeant Bergdahl, who was promoted twice while being held as a prisoner, was still alive came in January, when the American military obtained a video showing him alert but also apparently in declining health.

In the past week, detailed negotiations culminated in an agreement for a Taliban delegation to bring Sergeant Bergdahl to Afghanistan, where he would be retrieved by American Special Operations troops.

Mr. Obama called the emir of Qatar on Tuesday, and they gave each other assurances about the proposed transfers, an administration official said Saturday.

Sergeant Bergdahl was handed over about 7 p.m. local time without incident with the several dozen Special Operations troops spending only a few minutes on the ground, said American officials, who did not disclose the swap’s location in Afghanistan. Taliban officials, though, said the exchange was carried out in Khost Province.
Photo
In Sergeant Bergdahl’s hometown, Hailey, Idaho, a poster at Zaney’s River Street Coffee House contains messages for the prisoner of war. He was exchanged for five Taliban detainees at Guantánamo Bay. Credit Bill Schaefer for The New York Times

The Taliban statement said that the swap was “a result of nonstraightforward negotiations” with the United States, with mediation by Qatar, and that the released detainees “will reside in Qatar with their families.”

The details of what the government believes it knows about the five former Taliban leaders were made public in classified military files given to WikiLeaks by Pfc. Bradley Manning, now Chelsea Manning.

Mohammad Nabi Omari is described in the files as “one of the most significant former Taliban leaders detained” at Guantánamo. He is said to have strong operational ties to anticoalition militia groups, including Al Qaeda, the Taliban and the Haqqani network.

A former Taliban provincial governor, Mullah Norullah Noori, is also “considered one of the most significant former Taliban officials” at the prison, according to the documents.

Both Mr. Noori and a third detainee being exchanged, Mullah Mohammad Fazl, a former Taliban deputy defense minister, are accused of having commanded forces that killed thousands of Shiite Muslims, a minority in Afghanistan, before the Taliban were toppled in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

The fourth detainee is Abdul Haq Wasiq, a former top Taliban intelligence official. The fifth, Khirullah Said Wali Khairkhwa, is a former minister of the interior and provincial governor.

The Western official in Kabul said the Afghan government was not told about the deal beforehand because there had been a number of false starts since the exchange negotiations had picked up in the past few weeks.

One of the Americans’ chief concerns was that word of the plan would leak, and the Taliban would get cold feet or face pressure from harder line elements not to release Sergeant Bergdahl.

The Americans also feared the possibility of the exchange being upended by an outburst from the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, who might see the prisoner swap as an attempt to open peace talks with the Taliban behind his back.

He has previously claimed that the United States aimed to weaken the Afghan government by cutting a separate peace agreement with the Taliban and its backers in Pakistan, and “no one wanted to deal with that kind of stuff right now,” the Western official said.

Helene Cooper contributed reporting from Singapore,

and Matthew Rosenberg from Kabul, Afghanistan.

A version of this article appears in print on June 1, 2014,

on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:

American Soldier Freed by Taliban in Prisoner Trade.

    Bowe Bergdahl, American Soldier, Freed by Taliban in Prisoner Trade,
    NYT, 31.5.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/01/us/
    only-american-pow-from-afghan-war-is-freed.html

N.S.A. Collecting Millions of Faces

From Web Images

MAY 31, 2014
The New York Times
By JAMES RISEN
and LAURA POITRAS

The National Security Agency is harvesting huge numbers of images of people from communications that it intercepts through its global surveillance operations for use in sophisticated facial recognition programs, according to top-secret documents.

The spy agency’s reliance on facial recognition technology has grown significantly over the last four years as the agency has turned to new software to exploit the flood of images included in emails, text messages, social media, videoconferences and other communications, the N.S.A. documents reveal. Agency officials believe that technological advances could revolutionize the way that the N.S.A. finds intelligence targets around the world, the documents show. The agency’s ambitions for this highly sensitive ability and the scale of its effort have not previously been disclosed.

The agency intercepts “millions of images per day” — including about 55,000 “facial recognition quality images” — which translate into “tremendous untapped potential,” according to 2011 documents obtained from the former agency contractor Edward J. Snowden. While once focused on written and oral communications, the N.S.A. now considers facial images, fingerprints and other identifiers just as important to its mission of tracking suspected terrorists and other intelligence targets, the documents show.

“It’s not just the traditional communications we’re after: It’s taking a full-arsenal approach that digitally exploits the clues a target leaves behind in their regular activities on the net to compile biographic and biometric information” that can help “implement precision targeting,” noted a 2010 document.

One N.S.A. PowerPoint presentation from 2011, for example, displays several photographs of an unidentified man — sometimes bearded, other times clean-shaven — in different settings, along with more than two dozen data points about him. These include whether he was on the Transportation Security Administration no-fly list, his passport and visa status, known associates or suspected terrorist ties, and comments made about him by informants to American intelligence agencies.

It is not clear how many people around the world, and how many Americans, might have been caught up in the effort. Neither federal privacy laws nor the nation’s surveillance laws provide specific protections for facial images. Given the N.S.A.’s foreign intelligence mission, much of the imagery would involve people overseas whose data was scooped up through cable taps, Internet hubs and satellite transmissions.

Because the agency considers images a form of communications content, the N.S.A. would be required to get court approval for imagery of Americans collected through its surveillance programs, just as it must to read their emails or eavesdrop on their phone conversations, according to an N.S.A. spokeswoman. Cross-border communications in which an American might be emailing or texting an image to someone targeted by the agency overseas could be excepted.

Civil-liberties advocates and other critics are concerned that the power of the improving technology, used by government and industry, could erode privacy. “Facial recognition can be very invasive,” said Alessandro Acquisti, a researcher on facial recognition technology at Carnegie Mellon University. “There are still technical limitations on it, but the computational power keeps growing, and the databases keep growing, and the algorithms keep improving.”
Continue reading the main story

State and local law enforcement agencies are relying on a wide range of databases of facial imagery, including driver’s licenses and Facebook, to identify suspects. The F.B.I. is developing what it calls its “next generation identification” project to combine its automated fingerprint identification system with facial imagery and other biometric data.

The State Department has what several outside experts say could be the largest facial imagery database in the federal government, storing hundreds of millions of photographs of American passport holders and foreign visa applicants. And the Department of Homeland Security is funding pilot projects at police departments around the country to match suspects against faces in a crowd.

The N.S.A., though, is unique in its ability to match images with huge troves of private communications.

“We would not be doing our job if we didn’t seek ways to continuously improve the precision of signals intelligence activities — aiming to counteract the efforts of valid foreign intelligence targets to disguise themselves or conceal plans to harm the United States and its allies,” said Vanee M. Vines, the agency spokeswoman.

She added that the N.S.A. did not have access to photographs in state databases of driver’s licenses or to passport photos of Americans, while declining to say whether the agency had access to the State Department database of photos of foreign visa applicants. She also declined to say whether the N.S.A. collected facial imagery of Americans from Facebook and other social media through means other than communications intercepts.

“The government and the private sector are both investing billions of dollars into face recognition” research and development, said Jennifer Lynch, a lawyer and expert on facial recognition and privacy at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. “The government leads the way in developing huge face recognition databases, while the private sector leads in accurately identifying people under challenging conditions.”

Ms. Lynch said a handful of recent court decisions could lead to new constitutional protections for the privacy of sensitive face recognition data. But she added that the law was still unclear and that Washington was operating largely in a legal vacuum.

Laura Donohue, the director of the Center on National Security and the Law at Georgetown Law School, agreed. “There are very few limits on this,” she said.

Congress has largely ignored the issue. “Unfortunately, our privacy laws provide no express protections for facial recognition data,” said Senator Al Franken, Democrat of Minnesota, in a letter in December to the head of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, which is now studying possible standards for commercial, but not governmental, use.

Facial recognition technology can still be a clumsy tool. It has difficulty matching low-resolution images, and photographs of people’s faces taken from the side or angles can be impossible to match against mug shots or other head-on photographs.

Dalila B. Megherbi, an expert on facial recognition technology at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, explained that “when pictures come in different angles, different resolutions, that all affects the facial recognition algorithms in the software.”

That can lead to errors, the documents show. A 2011 PowerPoint showed one example when Tundra Freeze, the N.S.A.’s main in-house facial recognition program, was asked to identify photos matching the image of a bearded young man with dark hair. The document says the program returned 42 results, and displays several that were obviously false hits, including one of a middle-age man.

Similarly, another 2011 N.S.A. document reported that a facial recognition system was queried with a photograph of Osama bin Laden. Among the search results were photos of four other bearded men with only slight resemblances to Bin Laden.

But the technology is powerful. One 2011 PowerPoint showed how the software matched a bald young man, shown posing with another man in front of a water park, with another photo where he has a full head of hair, wears different clothes and is at a different location.

It is not clear how many images the agency has acquired. The N.S.A. does not collect facial imagery through its bulk metadata collection programs, including that involving Americans’ domestic phone records, authorized under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, according to Ms. Vines.

The N.S.A. has accelerated its use of facial recognition technology under the Obama administration, the documents show, intensifying its efforts after two intended attacks on Americans that jarred the White House. The first was the case of the so-called underwear bomber, in which Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian, tried to trigger a bomb hidden in his underwear while flying to Detroit on Christmas in 2009. Just a few months later, in May 2010, Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani-American, attempted a car bombing in Times Square.

The agency’s use of facial recognition technology goes far beyond one program previously reported by The Guardian, which disclosed that the N.S.A. and its British counterpart, General Communications Headquarters, have jointly intercepted webcam images, including sexually explicit material, from Yahoo users.

The N.S.A. achieved a technical breakthrough in 2010 when analysts first matched images collected separately in two databases — one in a huge N.S.A. database code-named Pinwale, and another in the government’s main terrorist watch list database, known as Tide — according to N.S.A. documents. That ability to cross-reference images has led to an explosion of analytical uses inside the agency. The agency has created teams of “identity intelligence” analysts who work to combine the facial images with other records about individuals to develop comprehensive portraits of intelligence targets.

The agency has developed sophisticated ways to integrate facial recognition programs with a wide range of other databases. It intercepts video teleconferences to obtain facial imagery, gathers airline passenger data and collects photographs from national identity card databases created by foreign countries, the documents show. They also note that the N.S.A. was attempting to gain access to such databases in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Iran.

The documents suggest that the agency has considered getting access to iris scans through its phone and email surveillance programs. But asked whether the agency is now doing so, officials declined to comment. The documents also indicate that the N.S.A. collects iris scans of foreigners through other means.

In addition, the agency was working with the C.I.A. and the State Department on a program called Pisces, collecting biometric data on border crossings from a wide range of countries.

One of the N.S.A.’s broadest efforts to obtain facial images is a program called Wellspring, which strips out images from emails and other communications, and displays those that might contain passport images. In addition to in-house programs, the N.S.A. relies in part on commercially available facial recognition technology, including from PittPatt, a small company owned by Google, the documents show.

The N.S.A. can now compare spy satellite photographs with intercepted personal photographs taken outdoors to determine the location. One document shows what appear to be vacation photographs of several men standing near a small waterfront dock in 2011. It matches their surroundings to a spy satellite image of the same dock taken about the same time, located at what the document describes as a militant training facility in Pakistan.

A version of this article appears in print on June 1, 2014,

on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:

N.S.A. Collecting Millions of Faces From Web Images.

    N.S.A. Collecting Millions of Faces From Web Images,
    NYT, 31.5.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/01/us/
    nsa-collecting-millions-of-faces-from-web-images.html

Under Pressure,

Hagel Promises to Act

on Guantánamo Transfers

MAY 29, 2014
The New York Times
By CHARLIE SAVAGE
and HELENE COOPER

WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, who is under pressure from within the Obama administration to step up his pace in approving the transfer of low-level Guantánamo Bay detainees, has told reporters that he would decide soon whether to accept a months-old offer to resettle six prisoners in Uruguay.

But Mr. Hagel, in his most expansive public comments about detainee transfers, acknowledged that he has been in no rush to sign off on them. He cited the burden and responsibility of being the one official who, under a legal obligation imposed by Congress, must personally determine that releasing a detainee makes sense.

“My name is going on that document. That’s a big responsibility,” Mr. Hagel said, adding: “What I’m doing is, I am taking my time. I owe that to the American people, to ensure that any decision I make is, in my mind, responsible.”

Mr. Hagel made his remarks in response to questions by a reporter accompanying him on a flight to Alaska late on Wednesday.

They came less than a week after Susan E. Rice, President Obama’s national security adviser, sent a three-page memo to Mr. Hagel requiring him to “provide an update on progress on detainee transfers every two weeks until further notice,” according to an official who read passages of the memo to a reporter.

Mr. Obama has sought to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, since taking office in 2009. Congress gave the secretary of defense the final say over approving transfers. He must determine that a transfer is in the national-security interest and that steps have been taken to “substantially mitigate” the risk that a detainee could pose a future threat to the United States or its allies.

Ms. Rice’s May 24 memo includes a record of Mr. Obama’s guidance on how much risk to accept when transferring detainees, including saying that it is “not a zero-risk standard,” and that the risk must be balanced against the harm to the United States caused by the continued operation of the facility.

The memo is said to define “substantially mitigate” as meaning that “steps have been or will be taken that would materially lessen the risk that detainee, post transfer, will engage or re-engage in any terrorist or other hostile activity that specifically threatens the United States or U.S. persons or interests.”

There were no transfers of low-level detainees under Mr. Hagel’s predecessor, Leon E. Panetta, who ran the Pentagon from July 2011 to February 2013. But Mr. Hagel has approved 11 transfers of low-level detainees, plus another who served out a sentence. Just one of those — an Algerian repatriated in March — came this year. Several officials said that more than a dozen detainees are the subject of proposed deals, and that there are serious talks with specific countries about taking in several dozen more.

In an interview with NPR on Thursday, Mr. Obama reiterated his desire to close Guantánamo. “We cannot in good conscience maintain a system of indefinite detention in which individuals who have not been tried and convicted are held permanently in this legal limbo outside of this country,” he said. He made a similar comment in his speech at West Point the day before.

In one respect, Mr. Obama’s negative portrayal of indefinite detention clashed with a key aspect of the approach to closing Guantánamo that he has advocated: He wants to bring several dozen detainees — who are deemed too difficult to prosecute but too dangerous to release — to a prison inside the United States for continued detention without trial.

Mr. Obama also said he keeps “chipping away” at the problem. Lisa O. Monaco, Mr. Obama’s counterterrorism adviser, said in an interview that the president raises the issue of transferring the low-level Guantánamo detainees “every week” with Mr. Hagel.

“Hagel has put in place a system where he is now meeting regularly with his team, and he has a list that he’s going through,” she said. “This is in large measure a response to the fact that he meets weekly with the president, and it is always on the president’s agenda.”

Several officials said Mr. Hagel and his top military adviser, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have closely scrutinized the potential consequences of proposed transfer deals — including whether a receiving country has sufficient capabilities to live up to its promises to keep tabs on former detainees.

“I have a system that I have developed, put in place, to look at every element, first of all complying with the law, risks, mitigation of risk. Does it hit the thresholds of the legalities required?” Mr. Hagel said. “Can I ensure compliance with all those requirements? There is a risk in everything.”

Of the 154 remaining detainees, 78 are recommended for transfer if security conditions can be met; most have had that status since a January 2010 task force report. Their ranks grew this month when a military board added Ghaleb Nassar al-Bihani, 35, a Yemeni who had been designated for indefinite detention, a document posted on Thursday said.

The bulk of the 78 come from countries with problematic security, including 58 Yemenis. Officials are deliberating over a report Congress mandated them to write about how risky it would be to repatriate some, including if Yemen builds a rehabilitation center. They are also exploring resettling Yemenis elsewhere, officials said.

Another four are Syrians. In January, officials said the State Department envoy for detainee issues, Cliff Sloan, went to Uruguay and met with its president, José Mujica, who offered to resettle the four Syrians and two others. Among them is Jihad Ahmed Mujstafa Diyab, who is challenging the military’s policy of force-feeding hunger strikers. He ended his strike in February when it appeared his transfer was imminent, but later resumed his protest.

A federal judge had barred the military from force-feeding him, but lifted the order last week.

Charlie Savage reported from Washington,

and Helene Cooper from Anchorage.

A version of this article appears in print on May 30, 2014,

on page A13 of the New York edition with the headline:

Under Pressure, Hagel Promises to Act

on Guantánamo Transfers.

    Under Pressure, Hagel Promises to Act on Guantánamo Transfers,
    NYT, 29.5.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/30/us/
    hagel-sets-his-own-timetable-on-deciding-guantanamo-transfers.html

U.S. Strategy to Fight Terrorism

Increasingly Uses Proxies

 

MAY 29, 2014
The New York Times
By ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON — During the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States military often carried out dozens of daily operations against Al Qaeda and other extremist targets with heavily armed commandos and helicopter gunships.

But even before President Obama’s speech on Wednesday sought to underscore a shift in counterterrorism strategy — away from the Qaeda strongholds in and near those countries — American forces had changed their tactics in combating Al Qaeda and its affiliates, relying more on allied or indigenous troops with a limited American combat role.

Navy SEAL or Army Delta Force commandos will still carry out raids against the most prized targets, such as the seizure last fall of a Libyan militant wanted in the 1998 bombings of two United States Embassies in East Africa. But more often than not, the Pentagon is providing intelligence and logistics assistance to proxies, including African troops and French commandos fighting Islamist extremists in Somalia and Mali. And it is increasingly training foreign troops — from Niger to Yemen to Afghanistan — to battle insurgents on their own territory so that American armies will not have to.

A decade of military and intelligence operations have battered Al Qaeda’s headquarters in Pakistan and reduced the likelihood of a large-scale attack against the United States, counterterrorism officials say. But a more decentralized terrorist threat has heightened the danger to Americans abroad, putting at greater risk diplomatic outposts such as the mission in Benghazi, Libya, or commercial sites like the shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya, that the Islamist extremist group the Shabab attacked last year, killing at least 67 people.

“We have to develop a strategy that matches this diffuse threat — one that expands our reach without sending forces that stretch our military too thin, or stir up local resentments,” Mr. Obama said in his speech at the United States Military Academy at West Point, N.Y.

To confront several crises in Africa, the United States has turned to helping proxies. In Somalia, for instance, the Pentagon and the State Department support a 22,000-member African force that has driven the Shabab from their former strongholds in Mogadishu, the capital, and other urban centers, and continues to battle the extremists in their mountain and desert redoubts.

“Our basic premise is that it’s Africans who are best able to address African challenges,” Gen. David M. Rodriguez, who leads the military’s Africa Command, said this year.

In the Central African Republic, American transport planes ferried 1,700 peacekeepers from Burundi and Rwanda to the strife-torn nation earlier this year, but refrained from putting American boots on the ground.

The United States flies unarmed reconnaissance drones from a base in Niger to support French and African troops in Mali, but it has conspicuously stayed out of that war, even after the conflict helped spur a terrorist attack in Algeria in which Americans were taken hostage.

In addition to proxies, the Pentagon is training and equipping foreign armies to tackle their own security challenges. In the past two years, the Defense Department has gradually increased its presence in Yemen, sending about 50 Special Operations troops to train Yemeni counterterrorism and security forces, and a like number of commandos to help identify and target Qaeda suspects for drone strikes, according to American officials.

Across Africa this year, soldiers from a 3,500-member brigade in the Army’s First Infantry Division are conducting more than 100 missions, ranging from a two-man sniper team in Burundi to humanitarian exercises in South Africa.

Since 2006, the Defense Department has spent about $2.2 billion in more than 40 countries to train and equip foreign troops in counterterrorism and stability operations, according to the Congressional Research Service. This year alone, the Pentagon is spending $290 million on programs that include border security assistance to Lebanon and a counterterrorism battalion in Niger, in West Africa.

Mr. Obama on Wednesday proposed a Counterterrorism Partnerships Fund of up to $5 billion to “facilitate partner countries on the front lines.”

In explaining the rationale for the fund, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, said: “We’re dealing with networks, and not just regional networks, but global networks of terrorists. So this fund would be used to deal with all of our efforts on counterterrorism.”

A senior administration official suggested that the drawdown in the Afghan war, which cost $10 billion to $15 billion a month, could save money that could be reallocated to these types of funds.

In his speech, Mr. Obama reserved the right to use unilateral military action to protect Americans and core American interests.

Last October, for instance, American troops assisted by F.B.I. and C.I.A. agents seized a suspected Qaeda leader on the streets of Tripoli, Libya, while on the same day a Navy SEAL team raided the seaside villa of a militant leader in a firefight on the coast of Somalia. The Navy commandos exchanged gunfire with militants at the home of a senior leader of the Shabab but were ultimately forced to withdraw.

The Libyan militant captured in Tripoli was indicted in 2000 for his role in the 1998 bombings of the United States Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The militant, born Nazih Abdul-Hamed al-Ruqai and known by his nom de guerre, Abu Anas al-Libi, had a $5 million bounty on his head; his capture at dawn ended a 15-year manhunt.

Mr. Ruqai was taken to Manhattan for trial after being held for a week in military custody aboard a Navy vessel in the Mediterranean, where he was reportedly interrogated for intelligence purposes. He has pleaded not guilty and is scheduled to go to trial in November.

A version of this article appears in print on May 30, 2014,

on page A8 of the New York edition with the headline:

U.S. Terrorism Strategy Increasingly Involves Proxies

to Fight Battles.

    U.S. Strategy to Fight Terrorism Increasingly Uses Proxies,
    NYT, 29.5.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/30/world/africa/
    us-strategy-to-fight-terrorism-increasingly-uses-proxies.html

Guantánamo Inmate’s Case

Reignites Fight Over Detentions

MAY 23, 2014
The New York Times
By CHARLIE SAVAGE

WASHINGTON — The seemingly unending struggle over Guantánamo Bay — the prison President Obama vowed to close shortly after he was sworn in — is again reverberating over an “anguishing” case of force-feeding a Syrian detainee.

The case involves Jihad Ahmed Mujstafa Diyab, a Syrian who has been held for 12 years without a trial, and who has gone on prolonged hunger strikes. Late Thursday, a Federal District Court judge lifted an order barring his force-feeding, even as she rebuked the military for using procedures that she said caused “agony.”

The decision underscored the stubborn problems entangling Guantánamo — a dispute over its future between Mr. Obama, who still wants to close it, and many Republicans in Congress, who want its use expanded, has resulted in a frozen-in-place policy that no one supports. There have been recurring vows to resolve the situation, but the years pass and the government keeps dozens of men imprisoned without trial, despite the recommendations of a task force in January 2010 that they be released.

Last week, Judge Gladys Kessler temporarily barred the military from force-feeding Mr. Diyab. On Wednesday, she also ordered the Obama administration to turn over videotapes showing the procedure, which he is challenging. But in Thursday’s decision she cited, “an anguishing Hobson’s choice”: to risk that the detainee dies by keeping the order in place as a legal fight unfolds, or to allow the military to take steps to keep him alive using procedures that inflict “unnecessary” suffering.

“The court simply cannot let Mr. Dhiab die,” she wrote, using an alternate spelling for the detainee’s name.

The force-feeding procedure involves strapping a detainee into a restraint chair and inserting a tube through his nose and down his throat. Liquid nutritional supplement is then poured into his stomach.

A leaked military file for Mr. Diyab said he was arrested by the Pakistani police in April 2002 and later turned over to the United States.

The file describes Mr. Diyab, who is now 42, as a member of a group of Syrians who fled to Afghanistan in 2000 after escaping a government crackdown on terrorist cells. He was sentenced to death in absentia in Syria, it said, for “unspecified political crimes,” which it speculates was “probably for his terrorist activities in Syria,” which it does not detail.

The assessment also alleges that he was a document forger for jihadist groups, saying he had 30 passport-size photos in his possession when he was arrested. It says he insisted instead that he was a honey salesman.

Mr. Diyab was recommended for transfer more than four years ago, but officials fear repatriating him because of the chaos in Syria and the apparent death sentence.

In February, the president of Uruguay offered to allow him to be released there, but Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, who has the final say under restrictions imposed by Congress, has not signed off on the transfer.

Lt. Col. J. Todd Breasseale, a Pentagon spokesman, said: “We remain fully committed to implementing the president’s direction that we transfer detainees to the greatest extent possible, in a way that is consistent with the tenets of both our national security and our humane treatment policies, as we work toward shutting down the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay. ”

At one point this year, Mr. Diyab suspended his hunger strike for a brief period when it appeared to him that release might be imminent. But he said he found the continuing limbo “too difficult to bear” and resumed the protest “because of the delay in releasing him,” a defense lawyer who spoke with him recounted in a new court filing.

Judge Kessler wrote that he had indicated a “continued desire to refuse to eat and/or drink” since she forbid the military to force-feed him a week ago, and that his condition was “swiftly deteriorating.”

Mr. Diyab’s challenge to the military’s procedures for force-feeding hunger-striking detainees is the first since a federal appeals court ruled in February that the judiciary may review conditions of confinement at Guantánamo, reversing an earlier ruling by Judge Kessler that she lacked the authority to intervene.

She had asked the military to compromise over its procedures while the litigation unfolded. She wrote that Mr. Diyab had asked to be fed at the base hospital without being restrained and without having the feeding tube reinserted and removed for each cycle, sparing him the “agony” of that procedure.

If he could have been fed in that manner to prevent him from committing suicide by starvation, “it would have then been possible to litigate his plea to enjoin certain practices used in his force-feeding in a civilized and legally appropriate manner,” she wrote.

“The Department of Defense refused to make these compromises,” the judge said.

Mr. Diyab’s defense team recently learned that some videotapes of forcible cell extractions and force-feeding of Mr. Diyab and other detainees exist, and on Wednesday, Judge Kessler ordered the military to turn 34 such tapes over to his lawyers.

But in his statements, Mr. Diyab said the tapes might not show everything. The medical staff and guards, he said, turn the cameras off when they are forcing the tube into him, and turn them on only when he has stopped resisting.

In 2009, Mr. Obama promised to close the prison within a year. But the plans slowed amid a congressional blockade to any transfers to a prison in the United States, and steep restrictions on transfers elsewhere.

Transfers dried up after 2011, leading to a major hunger strike in early 2013. Mr. Obama defended the force-feeding, saying, “I don’t want these individuals to die.” But he also vowed to revive efforts to close the prison, and since then, a dozen detainees have been transferred. There are 154 inmates left in the prison.

After Mr. Obama revived his efforts, participation in the hunger strike fell off sharply. But the military also stopped making public how many detainees were refusing to eat, and lawyers for detainees contend that the guards are using rough force-feeding to break the wills of those who continue.

“I am stunned that the Department of Defense refused to agree to the reasonable compromise Mr. Diyab proposed,” said Jon Eisenberg, another lawyer for Mr. Diyab. “But the real responsibility lies at the door of President Obama, who utters lofty words but fails to stop the terrible things that are happening at Guantánamo Bay on his watch.”

A version of this article appears in print on May 24, 2014,

on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:

U.S. Judge Decides ‘Anguishing’ Case on Force-Feeding.

    Guantánamo Inmate’s Case Reignites Fight Over Detentions,
    NYT, 23.5.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/24/us/
    judge-allows-military-to-force-feed-guantanamo-detainee.html

The 9/11 Story Told

at Bedrock, Powerful

as a Punch to the Gut

Sept. 11 Memorial Museum at Ground Zero
Prepares for Opening

MAY 14, 2014
The New York Times
By HOLLAND COTTER

After a decade marked by deep grief, partisan rancor, war, financial boondoggles and inundation from Hurricane Sandy, the National September 11 Memorial Museum at ground zero is finally opening ceremonially on Thursday, with President Obama present, and officially to the public next Wednesday. It delivers a gut-punch experience — though if ever a new museum had looked, right along, like a disaster in the making, this one did, beginning with its trifurcated identity.

Was it going to be primarily a historical document, a monument to the dead or a theme-park-style tourist attraction? How many historical museums are built around an active repository of human remains, still being added to? How many cemeteries have a $24 entrance fee and sell souvenir T-shirts? How many theme parks bring you, repeatedly, to tears?

Because that’s what the museum does. The first thing to say about it, and maybe the last, is that it’s emotionally overwhelming, particularly, I expect, for New Yorkers who were in the city on that apocalyptic September day and the paranoia-fraught weeks that followed, but almost as certainly for the estimated two billion people around the globe who followed the horror unfolding on television, radio and the Internet.

Anguished, angry questions about the museum, raised by families of some of the 2,983 people who died on Sept. 11, 2001, and in the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, have been widely reported. Debates over purpose, propriety and protocol are still in the air. At times, they have threatened to derail the project, or delay it indefinitely. But the work inched forward, and the museum that emerged is true to its initial and literally fundamental goal: to tell the Sept. 11 story at ground zero bedrock.
 

While the accompanying National September 11 Memorial — two granite basins of cascading water that fill the twin tower footprints — is viewable from a street-level plaza, the museum is almost entirely subterranean. The bulk of it, some 10,000 square feet of gallery space, is 70 feet below ground, where the foundations of the towers met raw Manhattan schist.

Invisibility can make for strong drama. A descent into darkness is the stuff of suspense. It’s also the classic route of religious ritual and regeneration, bringing images of the tomb and the seedbed to mind. The museum makes full use of these associations and reveals itself slowly.

The drama starts, low key, on the plaza level with an aboveground entry pavilion midway between the memorial fountains. Designed by the Norwegian architectural firm Snohetta, it’s a glass box set at a sharp, dizzy tilt, like a tipping building or a listing ship. The blond-wood atrium, with its coat checks, a small cafe and a closed-off room for the use of Sept. 11 families, is atmospherically neutral, even bland, but offers an unmistakable sight: two of the immense steel trident columns that were the signature features of the twin tower facades.

Once aluminum-covered, now rusted, this pair survived the collapse of the north tower. And although they dwarf the atrium, you’re only seeing a small section of them. Peer over a balcony, and you can follow their lines plunging several stories down, the direction you will now take to a second lobby area below plaza level, out of the range of natural light, and not so neutral in feeling.

Among other things, the fraught global politics of Sept. 11 and the World Trade Center are hinted at here in an astonishing quotation, emblazoned on a wall, by Minoru Yamasaki, the architect of the towers, in which he declares the buildings “a monument to world peace.” Suffice it to say, not everyone bought this utopian gloss. To many people, these quarter-mile-high structures were at best two cold, giant vertical bars of silver bullion, at worst obscene gestures of capitalist might.

And even as you read the architect’s words, you hear the Sept. 11 narrative being introduced nearby in a dark hallway leading farther into the museum. Projections of global maps and stricken faces line the path. Voices of people giving clipped, urgent accounts of catastrophe crowd the air.

Recorded sound, once inadmissible in conventional museums, plays a major role in this one. So does scale. You emerge from the corridor’s close, oppressive aural cloud onto a platform overlooking a yawning space and an archaeological monolith: a 60-foot-high exposed section of the World Trade Center’s slurry wall. This thick, foundational barrier of poured concrete, laid before construction began in 1966, was, and is, the bulwark between the trade center and the Hudson River.

When the twin towers collapsed, there was fear that the wall would give, flooding the site. It didn’t give. It cracked, but held, and was quickly claimed as an emblem of indomitability and resilience. Daniel Libeskind, when he was hired as master planner for a new trade center complex in 2003, spoke of the slurry wall as the soul of his design, and by then it had already served as a multipurpose symbol of urban recovery, democracy, communal strength, the human spirit, not to mention the virtues of sound engineering.

Metaphorical thinking was rife in the days and months after Sept. 11. Everything was framed in terms of darkness and light, wounding and healing, death and rebirth. The interior design of the museum, by the New York firm Davis Brody Bond, preserves this kind of thinking in several of its features, notably in a long, descending ramp that leads visitors down seven stories, between the gigantic sunken cubes of the memorial pool basins, to true ground zero.

The ramp was inspired by an access road that was created during the early recovery phase and eventually took on a sacral aura. But in the museum context, the ramp becomes a processional path, lined with anticipatory vistas and projected versions of the “Missing” posters that papered the post-Sept. 11 city for weeks.

And when the path finally ends at bedrock, it leaves a choice of ways to go, toward a subdued exhibition commemorating those killed by the terrorist attacks or toward a disturbingly vivid evocation of the events themselves. It’s at this point that the conflicted character of the museum starts to become clear.

The commemorative display is, basically, the equivalent of a communal, life-honoring memorial service perpetually in progress. Photographs of nearly 3,000 people cover the walls of a gallery. The same faces, along with biographical portraits and spoken reminiscences, can be pulled up on touch screens and projected large in another room. Some 14,000 still unidentified or unclaimed Sept. 11 remains reside, unseen, in an adjacent repository, at the request of a vast majority of families.
 

A smaller group has protested the presence of the remains here. Families of some victims have balked at the idea of a museum — especially one that will inevitably swarm with casual tourists — doubling as a mortuary. Others fear that a building that took on 11 feet of water during Hurricane Sandy could flood again. Finally, the fact that the remains are not technically entombed but in storage, and subject to removal for testing, under the auspices of the city’s chief medical examiner, inevitably compromises any sense of repose.

Repose is the last word you’d associate with the museum’s other, larger exhibition, addressing that September day itself. Winding through several galleries, it calls on videos, audio recordings, photographs and hundreds of objects to document, minute by minute, the events of that Tuesday, from 8:46 a.m., when American Airlines Flight 11 slammed into the north tower, and on past 10:28 a.m., when that tower fell, by which time three other planes were pulverized, the Pentagon was in flames, and thousands of people were gone.

The installation is the work of a team of designers led by the museum’s director, Alice M. Greenwald, formerly an official at the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington. It is culled from over 10,000 artifacts in the museum’s collection, and some of them are devastating: recordings of last phone calls; photographs of doomed firefighters heading into action; surveillance videos of hijackers passing — no problem — undetected through airport security. Certain material, like video stills of people leaping from the towers, are set in alcoves with advisory notices, but even things not usually considered shocking can leave you dumbstruck. For some reason, the largest objects — an intact fire truck with carefully folded hoses but a burned-out cab; a steel column plastered with prayer cards; a storefront jeans display still covered with World Trade Center ashes — are the easiest to take, maybe because of their public identity, or even their resemblance to contemporary sculpture. The hundreds of small, battered personal items, many donated by families of the victims, are another story. Their natural realm is the purse, the pocket, the bedside drawer at home; they feel too ordinary and intimate to have ended up under plexiglass. Infused with lost life, they make the experience of moving through this museum at once theatrical, voyeuristic and devotional.

Its nearest equivalent I can think of is the dynamic of religious pilgrimage sites, whether Christian churches, Buddhist temples or Sufi shrines. There, the mortal remains of saints, and objects sanctified by their touch, are the focus of attention. Here, you also walk a long, sanctified route, stopping at the equivalent of side chapels and altars, contemplating icons, talismans and embodied miracles: a pair of crossed steel ground zero girders that to some eyes formed a crucifix, a Bible found fused to a hunk of steel and opened to a passage that warns against repaying violence with violence.

The prevailing story in the museum, as in a church, is framed in moral terms, as a story of angels and devils. In this telling, the angels are many and heroic, the devils few and vile, a band of Islamist radicals, as they are identified in a cut-and-dried, contextless and unnuanced film called “The Rise of Al Qaeda,” seen at the end of the exhibition.

The narrative is not so much wrong as drastically incomplete. It is useful history, not deep history; news, not analysis. This approach is probably inevitable in a museum that is, to an unusual degree, still living the history it is documenting; still working through the bereavement it is memorializing; still attached to the idea that, for better and worse, Sept. 11 “changed everything,” though there is plenty of evidence that, for better and worse, this is not so. The amped-up patriotism set off by the attacks has largely subsided. So has the tender, in-this-together generosity that Americans extended to one another at the time.

Still, within its narrow perspective, maybe because of it, the museum has done something powerful. And, fortunately, it seems to regard itself as a work in progress, involved in investigation, not summation. I hope so. If it stops growing and freezes its narrative, it will become, however affecting, just another Sept. 11 artifact. If it tackles the reality that its story is as much about global politics as about architecture, about a bellicose epoch as much as about a violent event, it could deepen all our thinking about politics, morality and devotion.

The National September 11 Memorial Museum

opens next Wednesday at 1 Albany Street,

at Greenwich Street, Lower Manhattan;

212-266-5211; 911memorial.org.

A version of this review appears in print on May 14, 2014,

on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:

The 9/11 Story Told at Bedrock,

Powerful as a Punch to the Gut.

    The 9/11 Story Told at Bedrock, Powerful as a Punch to the Gut,
    NYT, 14.5.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/14/arts/design/
    sept-11-memorial-museum-at-ground-zero-prepares-for-opening.html

In ‘Ceremonial Transfer,’

Remains of 9/11 Victims

Are Moved to Memorial

MAY 10, 2014
The New York Times
By STEPHEN FARRELL

On the granite plaza of the World Trade Center memorial, families of Sept. 11 victims gathered on Saturday morning beneath mist-shrouded skyscrapers to watch as the unidentified remains of people killed there more than 12 years ago were moved to what may be their final resting place.

A slow-moving procession transferred the remains on their short journey across from a Manhattan medical examiner’s office on 26th Street, near the East River, to a specially built repository at ground zero, between the footprints of the old Twin Towers.

In what Mayor Bill de Blasio’s office called “a ceremonial transfer,” the convoy arrived at the site at 7 a.m. carrying three coffin-size metal military transfer cases, one borne by a New York Police Department vehicle, another on a Fire Department truck and the third by a Port Authority Police Emergency Service Unit.

The convoy, bearing 7,930 remains, stopped after it passed by a line of saluting firefighters. Uniformed bearers stepped up to each flag-draped case and carried it through the swamp white oak trees on the memorial plaza, past watching family members who had gathered to pay their respects, and into the medical examiner’s repository, which is in the same building as the soon-to-open National September 11 Memorial Museum, but is separated from it by a wall.

A few dozen families attended.

Some relatives of victims wore black gags over their mouths to protest what they said was a lack of consultation about the decision to move the remains to what is likely to be a major tourist attraction.

City officials have said that victims’ families would be able to visit a private “reflection room” in the repository, and that the entire repository area would be closed to the public.

Alexander Santora, 77, a retired deputy chief in the Fire Department, was among those who wore gags. “We had no say in what was going on here,” said Mr. Santora, whose son Christopher, 23, a probationary firefighter, was killed in the attacks. “You can’t tell me that tour guides aren’t going to be going inside that building and saying, ‘Behind that wall are the victims of 9/11.’ That’s a dog and pony show.”

But other families supported the decision and were critical of the protesters.

“I thought it was just ridiculous; everyone is too political over this,” said Lisa Vukaj, 34, as she left the plaza wearing a badge bearing a photo of her brother Simon Marash Dedvukaj, who was killed. Describing the ceremonial transfer as “appropriate and fitting,” she said, “I just wanted to come and pay my respects, to be in the moment.”

The remains are to stay under the medical examiner office’s jurisdiction, and identification work will be done off-site at its DNA laboratory, with some families holding out hope that future advances may enable more of the remains to be identified.

That identification work continues. Of the 2,753 people reported missing at the World Trade Center after the 2001 attacks, remains have not been identified for 1,115 people.

Julie Bolcer, director of public affairs for the city medical examiner’s office, said Saturday’s transfer also included some remains that had been identified, but that families had chosen to keep at the repository. The transfer, she said, represented the “vast majority” of the remains still in the medical examiner’s custody.

“Families were given the option of claiming identified remains before the transfer, and they will continue to be able to claim remains after the move. It appears that many families want their loved ones’ identified remains to be moved to the repository,” Ms. Bolcer said.

Museum officials have said that the repository is separate from the museum.

“There was never a plan, and there still isn’t a plan, for the human remains to ever be part, in any way, of our exhibition,” Joseph C. Daniels, the chief executive of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, said at a news conference in January.

“The expectation in what this plan will deliver is that those remains will be brought back to the site, they are in no way accessible to anyone from the public. There will only be an area for 9/11 family members to access to be near the remains, but it will not be a part of the museum.”

After the transfer was over on Saturday, critics and supporters of the proceedings stood nearly shoulder to shoulder on nearby sidewalks, delivering their contrasting opinions. Some have never received remains and do not know if those of their loved ones are among those that were transferred.

Charles G. Wolf, 60, whose wife, Katherine, was killed in the north tower of the Trade Center, said he had never received any of her remains, and believed that the transfer had been “done right.”

“Am I waiting for anything? No,” he said. “If I do, I will praise God and I will put whatever it is in a niche at the columbarium of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine. My wife and I had our wedding ceremony there, and her memorial service was there.”

Occasionally the proximity of the two groups led to short outbursts. “Oh stop it, stop lying,” shouted Sally Regenhard, who has long been a vocal opponent of the repository site. Her son Christian, a probationary firefighter and former Marine, died in the attacks. Upon hearing the exchange, a policeman, who identified himself only as Officer Tjornhom, asked her to restrain herself.

“I feel your pain,” he said. “As a favor to another Marine, please, this is not the time or the place.”

A version of this article appears in print on May 11, 2014,

on page A20 of the New York edition with the headline:

In ‘Ceremonial Transfer,’ Remains of 9/11 Victims

Are Moved to Memorial.

    In ‘Ceremonial Transfer,’ Remains of 9/11 Victims Are Moved to Memorial,
    NYT, 10.5.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/11/nyregion/
    remains-of-9-11-victims-are-transferred-to-trade-center-site.html

Jurors Convict Abu Ghaith,

Bin Laden Son-in-Law,

in Terror Case

MARCH 26, 2014
The New York Times
By BENJAMIN WEISER

More than a dozen years after the Sept. 11 attacks, a man who came to speak for Osama bin Laden in a series of impassioned videotaped messages that praised the attacks and promised more, was convicted by a federal jury on Wednesday of conspiring to kill Americans and of other terrorism charges.

The defendant, Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, was the most senior Bin Laden confederate to be tried in a civilian court in the United States since Sept. 11, and his swift conviction on all counts would seem to serve as a rejoinder to critics of the Obama administration’s efforts to try suspected terrorists in civilian courts, rather than before a military tribunal.

“It was appropriate that this defendant, who publicly rejoiced over the attacks on the World Trade Center, faced trial in the shadow of where those buildings once stood,” the United States attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., said in a statement.

Citing the success of the civilian courts in “hundreds of other cases involving terrorism defendants,” he added, “it would be a good thing for the country if this case has the result of putting that political debate to rest.”

The verdict, returned after six hours of deliberations, comes a little more than a year after Mr. Abu Ghaith, a son-in-law of Bin Laden, was turned over to United States authorities in Jordan and flown to New York to face charges. The trial lasted three weeks.

The decision to prosecute Mr. Abu Ghaith in federal court reignited the debate over whether international terrorists should be placed in military custody and sent to the United States naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina who sharply criticized that decision, said that while he was pleased with the verdict, he still believed Mr. Abu Ghaith should have been held by the military “as an enemy combatant for intelligence gathering purposes.”

Nonetheless, the successful prosecution of Mr. Abu Ghaith could further smooth the way for the Justice Department to pursue the cases of other suspected terrorists in federal court if they are captured; for example, Ayman al-Zawahri, the current leader of Al Qaeda, remains under indictment in Manhattan.

Mr. Abu Ghaith, a 48-year-old Kuwaiti-born cleric known for his fiery oratory, was so trusted by Bin Laden that on the night of Sept. 11, the Qaeda leader invited him to his remote Afghan cave.

“He said, ‘Come in, sit down.’ He said, ‘Did you learn about what happened?’ ” Mr. Abu Ghaith testified at the trial. “He said, ‘We are the ones who did it.’ ”

The next day, at Bin Laden’s request, Mr. Abu Ghaith issued the first of a series of videotaped statements that helped Bin Laden spread his global message of terror, energize Qaeda fighters and recruit new ones, prosecutors told the jury.

Mr. Abu Ghaith has not been accused of having a role in the plot to attack the World Trade Center or of knowing about it. But when asked by a prosecutor if he “knew something big was coming from Al Qaeda,” he responded, “Yes.”

He was convicted on three counts: conspiracy to kill Americans, for which he could face life in prison; and providing material support to terrorists and conspiring to do so; each of those counts carries a maximum term of 15 years. The judge, Lewis A. Kaplan, said the defendant would be sentenced on Sept. 8.

Mr. Abu Ghaith, who used an Arabic interpreter in Federal District Court in Manhattan, appeared impassive as the judge’s deputy clerk, Andrew Mohan, read the verdict aloud, repeating “guilty” three times.

Mr. Abu Ghaith’s lead lawyer, Stanley L. Cohen, said later that his client was stoic and “at ease.”

“He has confidence that this is not the end but the beginning,” Mr. Cohen said, adding that there were “a number of compelling issues” for appeal.

Crucial among them, Mr. Cohen said, was the judge’s refusal to allow the defense to introduce testimony from Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-described architect of the Sept. 11 attacks who is detained at Guantánamo Bay. Mr. Cohen had argued that Mr. Mohammed, with his unsurpassed knowledge of Qaeda operations, could help exculpate his client.

Mr. Cohen also said the prosecution had “gone out of its way to exploit the anguish and pain of 9/11 to fill an enormous evidentiary vacuum,” making it “literally impossible for a jury of New Yorkers to look objectively” at the case.

The prosecution team of John P. Cronan, Michael Ferrara and Nicholas J. Lewin told the jury there was overwhelming evidence that Mr. Abu Ghaith had participated in a conspiracy to kill Americans and had provided support to terrorists.

They cited the videos he had made for Bin Laden, in which he praised the Sept. 11 attacks and warned repeatedly that the “storm of airplanes” would not abate, a clear reference, they said, to future attacks.

In one video, Mr. Abu Ghaith warned Muslims in the United States and Britain “not to board aircraft” and “not to live in high rises.”

In another, he attributed the Sept. 11 attacks to the United States’ policies toward Muslims. “The American people must know that they bear full responsibility,” he declared.

The prosecution roundly rejected Mr. Cohen’s argument that Mr. Abu Ghaith had not always been speaking for Al Qaeda on the videos, and his suggestion that his client was an Islamic theologian, speaking for Muslims more broadly.

“This man twisted and manipulated that religion beyond all recognition,” Mr. Ferrara said in the government’s rebuttal, “and he did so in the service of motivating young men to kill Americans.”

The prosecutors also cited Mr. Abu Ghaith’s interrogation by an agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation and a deputy United States marshal as he was flown to New York in early 2013, and his admissions in court when he unexpectedly testified.

It was in that testimony that he described being summoned by Bin Laden on the night of Sept. 11 for his opinion on how the United States would respond.

They met again the next day, Mr. Abu Ghaith testified, and he agreed to Bin Laden’s request that he help spread the Qaeda leader’s message to the world.

That day, Mr. Abu Ghaith appeared in a widely disseminated video, which was shown to the jury, with Bin Laden; Mr. al-Zawahri, then his deputy; and a military commander.

“In the days and months after Sept. 11, Sulaiman Abu Ghaith literally sat at Osama bin Laden’s right hand,” Mr. Cronan told the jury.

Before being brought to the United States, Mr. Abu Ghaith said, he was imprisoned for about a decade in Iran, where, around 2008, he married Bin Laden’s daughter, Fatima — a fact that was not disclosed to the anonymous jury of nine women and three men.

Preet Bharara, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, said, “Like the others who have faced terrorism charges in Manhattan’s federal courthouse before him, Abu Ghaith received a fair trial, after which a unanimous jury rendered its verdict, justly holding him accountable for his crimes.”

“We hope this verdict brings some small measure of comfort to the families of the victims of Al Qaeda’s murderous designs,” Mr. Bharara added.

Colin Moynihan contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on March 27, 2014,

on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:

Jurors Convict Bin Laden Aide in Terror Case.

    Jurors Convict Abu Ghaith, Bin Laden Son-in-Law, in Terror Case,
    NYT, 26.3.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/27/nyregion/
    bin-ladens-son-in-law-is-convicted-in-terror-trial.html

At Trial, Son-in-Law

Recalls a Cave Meeting

With Bin Laden on 9/11

MARCH 19, 2014
The New York Times
By BENJAMIN WEISER

It was some hours after the World Trade Center towers had been toppled when Sulaiman Abu Ghaith was summoned to a meeting with Osama bin Laden. He recalled a three-hour-or-so drive into the night, finding the leader of Al Qaeda in a cave amid the mountains in Afghanistan.

Bin Laden wanted his opinion on what would happen next, Mr. Abu Ghaith testified on Wednesday. He said he told Bin Laden that he was not a military analyst, but Bin Laden pressed him.

Mr. Abu Ghaith said he told him that “America, if it was proven that you were the one who did this, will not settle until it accomplishes two things: to kill you and topple the state of Taliban.

“He said, ‘You are being too pessimistic.’

“I said, ‘You asked my opinion, and this is my opinion.’ ”

In the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Abu Ghaith, who later became Bin Laden’s son-in-law, served as a spokesman for him, amplifying some of his pronouncements, and giving voice, prosecutors say, to a broad recruitment drive for fighters committed to wage war on the United States.

On Wednesday, Mr. Abu Ghaith gave voice to his own cause, unexpectedly taking the stand in a federal courtroom in Manhattan to defend himself against charges that include conspiring to kill Americans and providing material support to terrorists. He is the most senior Bin Laden adviser to be tried — let alone testify — in a civilian trial in the United States since the attacks, and he offered an extraordinarily intimate look at Bin Laden at the time, taking jurors inside his cave in Afghanistan.

After the drive from Kandahar, Mr. Abu Ghaith said, he found Bin Laden “in a cave, inside a mountain, in a rough terrain.”

“He said, ‘Come in, sit down.’ He said, ‘Did you learn about what happened?’ ”

Bin Laden told him that “we are the ones who did it,” the defendant recalled in response to questions posed by his lawyer, Stanley L. Cohen.

The decision by Mr. Abu Ghaith, a 48-year-old Kuwaiti-born cleric, to testify came two weeks into his trial in Federal District Court. Late on Wednesday, the defense rested its case. The jury is expected to begin deliberations early next week.

Mr. Abu Ghaith had been in Afghanistan for several months in 2001, where he was delivering religious lectures in Qaeda training camps, he said. On the morning of Sept. 12, he testified, Bin Laden told him he wanted “to deliver a message to the world.”

Mr. Abu Ghaith recalled saying that he was “new in this field.” He said Bin Laden replied, “I am going to give you some points and you build around them that speech.”

In those videotaped speeches, the first delivered on Sept. 12, 2001, as he sat beside Bin Laden, Mr. Abu Ghaith praised the Sept. 11 attacks and warned of others to come.

Mr. Abu Ghaith’s decision to testify gave federal prosecutors a rare chance to cross-examine someone who was so close to Bin Laden, and the government took full advantage of the opportunity.

Mr. Abu Ghaith had said under direct examination, for example, that Bin Laden wanted him to lecture in the Qaeda camps because the trainees had a “hard life.”

“I need you to change that,” Bin Laden told him, Mr. Abu Ghaith recalled. He said Bin Laden wanted him to make them be merciful.

Seizing on that moment, a prosecutor, Michael Ferrara, later asked Mr. Abu Ghaith, “You’re telling this jury that Bin Laden asked you to speak at those training camps where men were armed and learning how to use guns because he wanted you to talk about mercy?”

“Yes,” Mr. Abu Ghaith replied.

Mr. Abu Ghaith had also testified on direct examination that he had no idea “specifically” that the Sept. 11 attacks would occur, saying he only learned of them from news reports.

But on cross-examination, he admitted that in the training camps, he had heard that “something” might happen.

“You knew something big was coming from Al Qaeda?” Mr. Ferrara asked.

“Yes,” Mr. Abu Ghaith replied.

Until Mr. Abu Ghaith took the stand, his lawyers had given no indication that they were going to have their client testify. The defense’s strategy had been to obtain the testimony of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-described architect of the Sept. 11 attacks; the defense had argued that testimony from Mr. Mohammed, given his vast knowledge of Al Qaeda’s operations, would help clear their client.

But the judge, Lewis A. Kaplan, would not allow Mr. Mohammed’s testimony, ruling on Tuesday that there had been no showing by the defense, with rare exceptions, that Mr. Mohammed “has personal knowledge of anything important to this matter.”

Asked by Mr. Cohen whether he had ever taken part in any plan to kill Americans or anyone else, Mr. Abu Ghaith said no. He also said he had met Mr. Mohammed but only engaged in “casual talk” with him. He denied that he and Mr. Mohammed had ever discussed terrorist plots.

Prosecutors have not accused Mr. Abu Ghaith of helping to plan or carry out the Sept. 11 attacks. But prosecutors have said that Mr. Abu Ghaith knew of the Qaeda plot in which Richard C. Reid tried to blow up a trans-Atlantic airplane with explosives in his shoes — an assertion he denied on Wednesday.

The government has said in court papers that as part of his role in the conspiracy and the support he provided to Al Qaeda, Mr. Abu Ghaith spoke on behalf of the terrorist group, “embraced its war against America,” and sought to recruit others to join in that conspiracy.

Mr. Abu Ghaith responded calmly as he was questioned; at one point, as the government played a video of one of his fiery speeches, he rested his head on his hand and appeared to be impassively watching a monitor on the witness stand.

During the questioning by Mr. Cohen, Mr. Abu Ghaith said that he had hoped that his speeches and videos would have led the United States to say, “Let’s go and sit down and talk and solve this problem.”

Mr. Ferrara, though, pressed the defendant about the message he delivered in his speeches.

“It was your intention to deliver a message you believed in, right?” the prosecutor asked.

Mr. Abu Ghaith said yes.

“Your words carried weight, didn’t they?” Mr. Ferrara added a few questions later.

“The listener will have to be the judge of that,” Mr. Abu Ghaith said. “I cannot judge my own words.”

A version of this article appears in print on March 20, 2014,

on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:

At Trial, Relative Recalls a Cave Meeting With Bin Laden

on 9/11.

    At Trial, Son-in-Law Recalls a Cave Meeting With Bin Laden on 9/11,
    NYT, 19.3.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/20/nyregion/abu-ghaith-terror-trial.html