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US: Shiite 'special group' behind Iraq bombing

By BUSHRA JUHI

Associated Press Writer

6:07 AM CDT, June 18, 2008

BAGHDAD

The U.S. military blamed a renegade Shiite group Wednesday for a deadly car bombing in a Baghdad Shiite neighborhood and said it was seeking to re-ignite the sort of sectarian violence that swept the area 18 months ago. Iraqi officials said the death toll from the bombing rose to 63, including women and children.

The Iraqi government said the horrific attack on Tuesday, the deadliest in Baghdad in three months, would stiffen its resolve "to defeat the terrorists and to maintain the security achievements."

No group claimed responsibility for the blast, which occurred on a bustling commercial street in Hurriyah, scene of some of the bloodiest sectarian slaughter in 2006. That led to speculation Sunni extremists may have been behind the attack.

But U.S. spokesman Lt. Col. Steven Stover said the command did not believe al-Qaida in Iraq was behind the attack based on the type of vehicle and explosives used.

Instead, he said the command believed the attack was carried out by a Shiite special group led by Haydar Mehdi Khadum al-Fawadi, whom Stover described as a "murderous thug" seeking to incite violence "for his individual profit and gain."

U.S. and Iraqi forces have been searching for al-Fawadi for months, and his photo is displayed on checkpoints in the area.

"We believe he ordered the attack to incite (Shiite) violence against Sunnis; that his intent was to disrupt Sunni resettlement in Hurriyah in order to maintain extortion of real estate rental income to support his nefarious activities," Stover said in an e-mail.

Several Iraqi police officials said the casualty toll stood at 63, with another 78 wounded. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not supposed to release the information. Stover gave a figure of 27 dead and 40 wounded.

The blast was the deadliest attack in Baghdad since March 6, when a pair of bombs detonated in the mostly Shiite district of Karradah, killing 68 people and wounding about 120.

The U.S. uses the term "special groups" to identify breakaway factions of the Mahdi Army, the biggest Shiite militia led by anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. The U.S. says special groups are backed by Iran, although Stover did not mention Iran in his statement.

He said the bomb was believed to have contained 200 to 300 pounds of an undetermined explosive. He also said a U.S. military team was attending a meeting about 150 yards away at the time of the blast.

The blast shattered the relative calm in the capital since a May 11 cease-fire ended seven weeks of fighting between U.S. and Iraqi forces and Shiite militants in the Sadr City district. Ironically, it came the same day the Iraqi parliament announced plans to move outside the U.S.-protected Green Zone -- a show of confidence that the worst of Baghdad's violence was over.

In a statement, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's Cabinet said the blast was aimed at raising the morale of extremist groups that have suffered setbacks in Baghdad, Basra and Mosul.

"This crime will not influence our determination and resolve to defeat the terrorists and to maintain the security achievements," the statement said. "Moreover, it will increase our resolve to save the capital and the provinces from terrorists, killers, and outlaws."

The U.S. Embassy and the U.S. military command issued a joint statement condemning the assault as barbaric and pledging to work with Iraqi security "to find those who perpetrated this horrific attack and help bring them to justice."

Iraqi officials have been eager to promote a sense of confidence among the war-weary Iraqi people after months of declining bloodshed in the capital.

Deputy parliamentary speaker Khalid al-Attiyah told lawmakers Tuesday that they will move from the convention center in the Green Zone to the Saddam Hussein-era National Assembly building for their next legislative term, which begins Sept. 1.

But residents of Hurriyah said security around their neighborhood on the west side of the Tigris River had increased in recent days, with new blast walls erected at the entrance to the area and more police and military checkpoints.

On buses Wednesday, Hurriyah commuters heading for work talked about the bombing and speculated what group may have been responsible. Some people said they thought Sunni militants from nearby Adil may have been to blame. Thousands of Sunnis fled Hurriyah for Adil during the height of the sectarian slaughter.

"I think that car bomb came from the Adil area," said Jaafar Ali, 33, a government employee. Ali predicted a mortar attack would be launched on Adil in retaliation, and said the explosion was "meant to raise tension between these two neighborhoods."

U.S. commanders have warned repeatedly that the relative peace in Baghdad is fragile because extremists, including al-Qaida in Iraq and Shiite militant groups, remain capable of high-profile attacks.

The U.S. hopes security measures which have tamped down violence since last summer will be enough to prevent extremists from mounting a sustained campaign of bombings against civilians that could provoke a return to sectarian reprisal attacks.

Survivors complained that the army and police had failed to protect them.

"The blast occurred because there wasn't any security presence by the Iraqi army or police at the scene, not even any checkpoint," said Khalid Hassan, 40, who suffered shrapnel wounds and burns. "People were confused, upset and running in all directions. We are all victims of terrorism and carelessness."

NYTimes.com

June 16, 2008 

Officials Fear Bomb Design Went to Others

By DAVID E. SANGER and WILLIAM J. BROAD

WASHINGTON — Four years after Abdul Qadeer Khan, the leader of the world’s largest black market in nuclear technology, was put under house arrest and his operation declared shattered, international inspectors and Western officials are confronting a new mystery, this time over who may have received blueprints for a sophisticated and compact nuclear weapon found on his network’s computers.

Working in secret for two years, investigators have tracked the digitized blueprints to Khan computers in Switzerland, Dubai, Malaysia and Thailand. The blueprints are rapidly reproducible for creating a weapon that is relatively small and easy to hide, making it potentially attractive to terrorists.

The revelation this weekend that the Khan operation even had such a bomb blueprint underscores the questions that remain about what Dr. Khan, a Pakistani metallurgist and the father of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program, was selling and to whom. It also raises the possibility that he may still have sensitive material.

Yet even as inspectors and intelligence officials press their investigation of Dr. Khan, officials in Pakistan have declared the scandal over and have discussed the possibility of setting him free. In recent weeks, American officials have privately warned the new government in Pakistan about the dangers of doing so.

“We’ve been very direct with them that releasing Khan could cause a world of trouble,” a senior administration official who has been involved in the effort said last week. “The problem with Pakistan these days is that you never know who is making the decision — the army, the intelligence agencies, the president or the new government.”

The illicit nuclear network run by Dr. Khan was broken up in early 2004. President Bush, eager for an intelligence victory after the failure to find unconventional weapons in Iraq, declared that ending Dr. Khan’s operation was a major coup for the United States. Since then, evidence has emerged that the network sold uranium enrichment technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya. Investigators are still pursuing leads that he may have done business with other countries.

Dr. Khan is an expert in centrifuges used to produce enriched uranium for bomb fuel, and much of the technology he sold involved enrichment. But it was only in recent months that officials have begun to confirm that they had found the electronic design for a bomb itself among material seized from some of Dr. Khan’s top lieutenants, a Swiss family, the Tinners.

The same design documents were found in computers in three other locations connected to Khan operatives, according to a senior foreign diplomat involved in the investigation.

American officials and inspectors at the International Atomic Energy Agency say they have been unable to determine if the weapon blueprints were sold to Iran or other customers of the smuggling ring.

The blueprints bear a strong resemblance to weapons tested by Pakistan a decade ago, said two senior diplomats involved in the investigation. Pakistani officials have balked at providing much information about the newly revealed warhead design, just as they have refused to allow the C.I.A. or international atomic inspectors to directly interrogate Dr. Khan, who is still considered a national hero in Pakistan for helping it become a nuclear weapons state.

Pakistani officials insist that Dr. Khan, as the leader of a uranium enrichment program, had no weapons access. But this is the second weapons design found in his smuggling network. The first was for an unwieldy but effective Chinese design from the mid-1960s that Libya acknowledged obtaining from the Khan network before it surrendered its bomb-making equipment in 2003.

Both the new and the old designs exploit the principle of implosion, in which a blast wave from a sphere of conventional explosives squeezes inward with tremendous force to compress a ball of bomb fuel, starting the chain reaction and the atomic explosion. A nuclear official in Europe familiar with the Khan investigation said the new design was powerful but miniaturized — using about half the uranium fuel of the older design to produce a greater explosive force.

“Pakistan cannot put the big China design on any of its rockets,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the information is classified. “It’s too big.” A smaller warhead created from the new design, he added, is “more efficient and easier to hide,” meaning that one day it might become a “terrorist issue.”

China first exploded the old design in 1966, nuclear experts say, and Pakistan fired the miniaturized version in 1998.

Nuclear experts said a warhead built from the new design was small enough to fit atop a family of medium-range missiles that derive from North Korea’s Nodong class of missiles. Those missiles include Pakistan’s Ghauri and Iran’s Shahab. All are about four feet wide, and any warhead atop them must, by definition, be smaller.

In interviews in Vienna, Islamabad and Washington, officials have said that the weapons design was far more sophisticated than the blueprints discovered in Libya in 2003, when Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi gave up his country’s nuclear weapons program. The design is electronic, they said, making it easy to copy — and they have no idea how many copies, if any, are circulating.

On Sunday, Mr. Bush’s national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, said that the administration remained concerned about the possibility that additional plans had been disseminated, but he did not address any of the latest revelations, which were reported Sunday by The Washington Post and The New York Times. “We’re very concerned about the A. Q. Khan network,” he told reporters traveling with Mr. Bush from Paris to London.

The existence of the compact bomb design began to become public in recent weeks after Switzerland announced that it had destroyed a huge stockpile of documents, including weapons designs, that were found in computers belonging to Friedrich Tinner and his two sons, Marco and Urs, all arrested as part of the Khan investigation.

Switzerland’s president, Pascal Couchepin, said in late May that the government had destroyed the documents to keep atomic materials from “getting into the hands of a terrorist organization or an unauthorized state.”

Two former Bush administration officials said they believed that the Tinners had provided information to the C.I.A. while the father and two sons were still working for Dr. Khan and that some of their information helped American and British officials intercept shipments of centrifuges en route to Libya in 2003.

When news of that interception became public and Libya turned its $100 million program over to American and atomic energy agency officials, President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan forced Dr. Khan to issue a vague confession and then placed him under house arrest. Dr. Khan has since renounced that confession in Pakistani and Western news media, saying he made it only to save Pakistan greater embarrassment.

It was not until 2005 that officials of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is based in Vienna, finally cracked the hard drives on the Khan computers recovered around the world. And as they sifted through files and images on the hard drives, investigators found tons of material — orders for equipment, names and places where the Khan network operated, even old love letters.

“There was stuff about dealing with Iranians in 2003, about how to avoid intelligence agents,” said one official who had reviewed it. But the most important document was a digitized design for a nuclear bomb, one that investigators quickly recognized as Pakistani.

“It was plain where this came from,” a senior official of the atomic energy agency said. “But the Pakistanis want to argue that the Khan case is closed, and so they have said very little.”

In public statements, Pakistani officials have insisted that the Khan “incident,” as they call it, is now history, and they publicly declared nearly two years ago that their investigations were over.

A senior Pakistani official said that in April that the information provided by the atomic energy agency was “vague and incomplete,” and he insisted that because Dr. Khan’s laboratories specialized in manufacturing equipment needed to enrich uranium, “he was not involved in weapons designs.”

But atomic energy agency investigators and American intelligence officials say they have little doubt that he was the source of the digitized bomb design. “Clearly, someone had tried to modernize it, to improve the electronics,” one said. “There were handwritten references to the electronics, and the question is, who was working on this?”

The officials said that parts of the design were coded so that they could be transferred quickly to an automated manufacturing system.

David E. Sanger reported from Washington, and William J. Broad from New York. Steven Lee Myers contributed reporting from London.

NYTimes.com

June 6, 2008 

Bush Overstated Evidence on Iraq, Senators Report

By MARK MAZZETTI and SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON — A long-delayed Senate committee report endorsed by Democrats and some Republicans concluded that President Bush and his aides built the public case for war against Iraq by exaggerating available intelligence and by ignoring disagreements among spy agencies about Iraq’s weapons programs and Saddam Hussein’s links to Al Qaeda.

The report was released Thursday after years of partisan squabbling, and it represented the close of five years of investigations by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence into the use, abuse and faulty assessments of intelligence leading to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

That some Bush administration claims about the Iraqi threat turned out to be false is hardly new. But the report, based on a detailed review of public statements by Mr. Bush and other officials, was the most comprehensive effort to date to assess whether policy makers systematically painted a more dire picture about Iraq than was justified by the available intelligence.

The 170-page report accuses Mr. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other top officials of repeatedly overstating the Iraqi threat in the emotional aftermath of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Its findings were endorsed by all eight committee Democrats and two Republicans, Senators Olympia J. Snowe of Maine and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska.

In a statement accompanying the report, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, the West Virginia Democrat who is chairman of the intelligence panel, said, “The president and his advisers undertook a relentless public campaign in the aftermath of the attacks to use the war against Al Qaeda as a justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein.”

Dana Perino, the White House spokeswoman, on Thursday called the report a “selective view” and said that the Bush administration’s public statements were based on the same faulty intelligence given to Congress and endorsed by foreign intelligence services. Senator Christopher S. Bond of Missouri, the committee’s top Republican, called the report a “waste of committee time and resources.”

The presidential campaigns of Senators John McCain and Barack Obama had not responded by Thursday night to requests for comment on the Senate report.

The report on the prewar statements found that on some important issues, most notably on what was believed to be Iraq’s nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs, the public statements from Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and other senior officials were generally “substantiated” by the best estimates at the time from American intelligence agencies. But it found that the administration officials’ statements usually did not reflect the intelligence agencies’ uncertainties about the evidence or the disputes among them.

In a separate report released Wednesday, the intelligence committee provided new details about a series of clandestine meetings in Rome and Paris between Pentagon officials and Iranian dissidents in 2001 and 2003. The meetings included discussions about possible covert actions to destabilize the government in Tehran, and were used by the Pentagon officials to glean information about rivalries in Iran and what was thought to be an Iranian “hit” team intending to attack American troops in Afghanistan, the report said.

The report concluded that Stephen J. Hadley, now the national security adviser, and Paul D. Wolfowitz, who was then the deputy defense secretary, “acted within their authorities” to send the Pentagon officials to Rome. But the report criticized the meetings as ill advised, and accused Mr. Hadley and Mr. Wolfowitz of keeping the State Department and intelligence agencies in the dark about the meetings, which the report portrayed as part of a rogue intelligence operation.

The two reports were the final parts of the committee’s so-called Phase 2 investigation of prewar intelligence on Iraq and related issues. The first phase of the inquiry, begun in the summer of 2003 and completed in July 2004, identified grave faults in the C.I.A.’s analysis of the threat posed by Mr. Hussein.

The report on Iraq on Thursday was especially critical of statements by the president and vice president linking Iraq to Al Qaeda and raising the possibility that Mr. Hussein might supply the terrorist group with unconventional weapons. “Representing to the American people that the two had an operational partnership and posed a single, indistinguishable threat was fundamentally misleading and led the nation to war on false premises,” Mr. Rockefeller wrote.

Mr. Bond and four other Republicans on the committee sharply dissented from the report’s findings and suggested that the investigation was a partisan smoke screen to obscure the real story: that the C.I.A. failed the Bush administration by delivering intelligence assessments to policy makers that have since been discredited.

In a detailed minority report, four of those Republicans accused Democrats of hypocrisy and of cherry picking, namely by refusing to include misleading public statements by top Democrats like Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and Mr. Rockefeller.

As an example, they pointed to an October 2002 speech by Mr. Rockefeller, who declared to his Senate colleagues that he had arrived at the “inescapable conclusion that the threat posed to America by Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction is so serious that despite the risks, and we should not minimize the risks, we must authorize the president to take the necessary steps to deal with the threat.”

The report about the Bush administration’s public statements offers some new details about the intelligence information that was available to policy makers as they built a case for war. For instance, in September 2002 Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that “the Iraq problem cannot be solved by airstrikes alone,” because Iraqi chemical and biological weapons were so deeply buried that they could not be penetrated by American bombs.

Two months later, however, the National Intelligence Council wrote an assessment for Mr. Rumsfeld concluding that the Iraqi underground weapons facilities identified by the intelligence agencies “are vulnerable to conventional, precision-guided, penetrating munitions because they are not deeply buried.”

On Thursday, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, a Democratic member of the intelligence committee, said that Congress had never been told about the National Intelligence Council’s assessment.

Australian PM attacks decision to join war in Iraq

By ROD McGUIRK

Associated Press Writer

8:08 PM CDT, June 2, 2008

CANBERRA, Australia

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd accused his predecessor of abusing intelligence information to justify entering the Iraq war, saying Monday that the Australian people were misled.

In remarks to parliament on the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, which began Sunday, Rudd said the nation must learn from the errors of former Prime Minister John Howard, who sent 2,000 troops to support U.S. and British forces in the 2003 invasion.

"We must learn from Australia's experience in the lead-up to going to war with Iraq and not repeat the same mistakes in the future," Rudd said.

He criticized Howard's government for going to war without accurate information or a full assessment of the consequences.

"Of most concern to this government was the manner in which the decision to go to war was made: the abuse of intelligence information, a failure to disclose to the Australian people the qualified nature of that intelligence," Rudd said.

Before the invasion, Howard argued that Saddam Hussein had to be toppled to prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction and terrorism. The weapons were not discovered and no definite links were established between Saddam and al-Qaida or other terror networks.

Rudd said Howard wrongly believed that Australia's close alliance with the United States left him with no choice but to join the campaign in Iraq.

"This government does not believe that our alliance with the United States mandates automatic compliance with every element of the United States' foreign policy," Rudd told Parliament.

White House press secretary Dana Perino said she had not reviewed Rudd's comments, but said the U.S. invasion was based on intelligence that the entire world had.

"We acted based on a threat that was presented to us," Perino said at the White House. "Since then, we have learned that there was not WMD (weapons of mass destruction) in Iraq."

She said the U.S. has since taken steps to strengthen the accuracy of intelligence.

Howard could not be immediately reached for comment after Rudd's address. However, in an interview published Monday in The Sydney Morning Herald, Howard said he was "baffled" by the decision to withdraw troops, adding he would have shifted them into a training roles.

The former prime minister has long denied deliberately misleading the Australian public over the threat posed by Iraq.

A government-commissioned inquiry in 2004 into Australian spy agencies' pre-Iraq war intelligence cleared Howard's government of overstating the case for joining the U.S.-led invasion.

But in his 185-page report, retired diplomat and spy master Philip Flood lamented "the thinness of the intelligence on which analysts were expected to make difficult calls" about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction. Details about the intelligence and how it was provided were not available.

Rudd campaigned for November's general election vowing to withdraw combat troops by mid-2008.

On Sunday troops lowered the Australian flag that had flown over Camp Terendak in the southern Iraqi city of Talil, marking an end to the service of the 550 soldiers there.

Twenty-seven Australian troops have been wounded in Iraq. None were killed in combat.

Australia has been urging NATO forces to boost their presence in Afghanistan, but Defense Minister Joel Fitzgibbon said Tuesday that Australia's withdrawal from Iraq did not mean more troops would be available for service in Afghanistan.

"We are doing substantial work there and we have no intention of doing more while so many NATO countries, I think, could be doing much more themselves," Fitzgibbon told the Australian Broadcasting Corp., of Australia's about 1,000 forces in Afghanistan.

Intelligence Official Sees Little Progress before Bush Exits

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, May 31, 2008; A10

Previewing the world for the next U.S. president, a top U.S. intelligence official this week predicted that the Bush administration would make little progress before leaving office on top national security priorities including an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement, political reconciliation in Iraq and keeping Iran from being able to produce a nuclear weapon.

A regenerated al-Qaeda will remain the leading terrorism threat, Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence Donald M. Kerr said. Pakistan's "inward" political focus and failure to control the tribal territories where al-Qaeda maintains a haven, he said, is "the number one thing we worry about."

Kerr's analysis, in a speech Thursday evening that he posited as a presidential intelligence briefing delivered on Jan. 21, 2009, contrasted with more optimistic administration forecasts of rapprochement among Iraq's political forces and a possible Middle East peace agreement in the next eight months. It also seemed at odds with CIA Director Michael V. Hayden's judgment that al-Qaeda is now on the defensive throughout the world, including along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

Senate intelligence committee Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.) yesterday said Hayden's assessment, in an interview this week with The Washington Post, was inconsistent with recent intelligence reports to Capitol Hill. In a letter to Hayden, Rockefeller said that he was "surprised and troubled by your comments" and asked for "a full explanation of both the rationale for, and the substance of" the interview.

The CIA defended Hayden's comments. "The director simply said in his interview that progress has been made against al-Qaeda, which remains a very dangerous foe. That judgment should be no surprise to anyone familiar with the intelligence," CIA spokesman George Little said.

Kerr is one of two officials -- the other is National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell -- who deliver the President's Daily Briefing at the White House. Speaking to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Kerr offered "a notional view of some of the issues that will be raised in the Oval Office PDB" for the next president. "Let's imagine for tonight that you have just been sworn in -- you're the 44th president of the United States."

Issues in "your first post-inaugural briefing . . . will, for the foreseeable future, remain the threats and challenges emanating from the Middle East," Kerr said.

None of the three presidential candidates has received a full intelligence briefing. In past election years, the CIA director or his deputy have met with the nominees after the party conventions. This year, following the establishment of the umbrella intelligence directorate in 2005, the briefings will probably be conducted by McConnell and Kerr.

Sens. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) exchanged barbs this week challenging each other's knowledge of events in Iraq. Obama charged that McCain, who supports Bush's Iraq policy, had failed to learn from the administration's mistakes, while McCain attacked Obama for not visiting the war zone for the past two years.

Both have said they would make significant changes in the intelligence community. McCain has said he would set up a new agency, patterned after the World War II Office of Strategic Services, with "a cadre of . . . undercover operatives" to conduct unconventional and psychological warfare and covert action.

Obama has said he would establish a fixed term for the national intelligence director, a presidential appointee, and would institute a national declassification center to reverse the rise in official secrecy under the Bush administration.

In his speech, Kerr cautioned against making intelligence a partisan issue. "The Middle East threats and challenges I've laid out . . . are nonpartisan in nature and will confront our nation regardless of who is in the Oval Office to receive this briefing," he said.

Kerr began the Jan. 21, 2009, "briefing" with Iraq, where he said al-Qaeda is weakened and violence has diminished. But Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government "has had limited success in delivering government services and improving the quality of life for Iraqis," and "political accommodation will continue to be incremental."

In the Middle East peace process, Kerr said, discussions between Israel and the Palestinian Authority have continued and have yielded improved security cooperation. But Hamas has remained popular, and "the Palestinian public has not seen tangible positive changes in key areas . . . such as improving freedom of movement and freezing Israeli settlement expansion," he said.

He said that Pakistan remains a valuable partner determined to strengthen its fight against terrorists, even in the midst of domestic political turmoil. But in response to a question, he said that "we don't know enough" about what is happening in Pakistan.

"One of the concerns we have is that as Pakistan looks inward," the western tribal areas "will be more hospitable to those who would strike us and less hospitable to us in trying to root out that problem," Kerr said.

He said that the intelligence community has no reason to change its mid-2007 judgment that Iran had ceased work on designing a nuclear weapon in 2003. "But since the halted activities were part of an unannounced secret program that Iran attempted to hide," he said, "we do not know if it has been restarted."

Designing weapons was easy, he said, compared with producing fissile material with which to arm them, and Iran's uranium enrichment efforts, suspended in 2003 and restarted in 2006, still face "significant technical problems." While it is possible that Iran could produce enough weapons-grade enriched uranium by 2009, "that is very unlikely," Kerr said, although it "probably" could do so "sometime during the 2010-2015 time frame."

"We assess with moderate to high confidence," he said, "that Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons."

Staff writers Michael D. Shear and Joby Warrick and researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this report.

May 26, 2008 

States Chafing at U.S. Focus on Terrorism

By ERIC SCHMITT and DAVID JOHNSTON

Juliette N. Kayyem, the Massachusetts homeland security adviser, was in her office in early February when an aide brought her startling news. To qualify for its full allotment of federal money, Massachusetts had to come up with a plan to protect the state from an almost unheard-of threat: improvised explosive devices, known as I.E.D.’s.

“I.E.D.’s? As in Iraq I.E.D.’s?” Ms. Kayyem said in an interview, recalling her response. No one had ever suggested homemade roadside bombs might begin exploding on the highways of Massachusetts. “There was no new intelligence about this,” she said. “It just came out of nowhere.”

More openly than at any time since the Sept. 11 attacks, state and local authorities have begun to complain that the federal financing for domestic security is being too closely tied to combating potential terrorist threats, at a time when they say they have more urgent priorities.

“I have a healthy respect for the federal government and the importance of keeping this nation safe,” said Col. Dean Esserman, the police chief in Providence, R.I. “But I also live every day as a police chief in an American city where violence every day is not foreign and is not anonymous but is right out there in the neighborhoods.”

The demand for plans to guard against improvised explosives is being cited by state and local officials as the latest example that their concerns are not being heard, and that federal officials continue to push them to spend money on a terrorism threat that is often vague. Some $23 billion in domestic security financing has flowed to the states from the federal government since the Sept. 11 attacks, but authorities in many states and cities say they have seen little or no intelligence that Al Qaeda, or any of its potential homegrown offshoots, has concrete plans for an attack.

Local officials do not dismiss the terrorist threat, but many are trying to retool counterterrorism programs so that they focus more directly on combating gun violence, narcotics trafficking and gangs — while arguing that these programs, too, should qualify for federal financing, on the theory that terrorists may engage in criminal activity as a precursor to an attack.

Michael Chertoff, the Homeland Security secretary, said in an interview that his department had tried to be flexible to accommodate local needs.

“We have not been highly restrictive,” Mr. Chertoff said. But he said the department’s programs were never meant to assist local law enforcement agencies in their day-to-day policing. The requirements of the Homeland Security programs had helped strengthen the country against an attack, Mr. Chertoff said, expressing concern about shifting money to other law enforcement problems from counterterrorism. “If we drop the barrier and start to lose focus,” he said, “we will make it easier to have successful attacks here.”

Local officials have long groused that Homeland Security grants seemed mismatched with local needs and that the agency’s requirements failed to recognize regional differences. After Hurricane Katrina struck Gulf Coast states in 2005, federal authorities demanded that cities come up with evacuation plans, even on the West Coast where earthquakes, not hurricanes, are a threat.

Most of the $23 billion in federal grants has been spent shoring up local efforts to prevent, prepare for and ferret out a possible attack. Because official post-9/11 critiques found huge gaps in communication and coordination, billions of dollars have been spent linking federal law enforcement and intelligence authorities to the country’s more than 750,000 police officers, sheriffs and highway patrol officers. Many Homeland Security-financed “fusion centers,” designed to collect and analyze data to deter terrorist attacks, have evolved into what are known as “all-crimes” or “all-hazards” operations, branching out from terrorism to focus on violent crime and natural disasters.

Intelligence officials assert that Al Qaeda remains intent on striking inside the United States. The Seattle chief of police, R. Gil Kerlikowske, said, “If the law enforcement focus at the local level is only on counterterrorism, you will be unable as a local entity to sustain it unless you are an all-crimes operation, and you may be missing some very significant issues that could be related to terrorism.”

Chief Kerlikowske is president of a group of police chiefs from major cities who said in a report last week that local governments were being forced to spend increasingly scarce resources because, they say, Homeland Security did not pay for all the costs. “Most local governments move law enforcement, counterterrorism and intelligence programs down on the priority list because their municipality has not yet been directly affected by an attack,” the report said.

Seattle has experienced its own terrorism scares since 9/11, after photographs of the Space Needle were recovered in 2002 from suspected Qaeda safe houses in Afghanistan. The city had another jolt last year when the Federal Bureau of Investigation sought the public’s help in locating two men “exhibiting unusual behavior” on a ferry. Neither episode proved an actual threat.

In the case of this year’s focus on improvised explosives, the main killer of American troops in Iraq, Homeland Security officials say the attention to the domestic threat stems from a classified strategy that President Bush approved last year that is designed to help the country to deter and defeat I.E.D.’s before terrorists can detonate them here.

The administration is completing a plan to assign specific training, prevention and response duties to several federal agencies, including the F.B.I. and Homeland Security, the officials said. But they also said that state advisers misunderstood the financing guidelines, and that states could also meet the requirement by improving their overall preparedness against a range of undefined terrorist threats.

State officials say the federal government issued the grant requirement without providing any new information pointing to the danger of bomb threats in the United States — an approach they said underscored the glaring disconnect between how states and the federal government view the terrorist threat.

“I.E.D. detection, protection, and prevention is an important issue, and we all need to be looking at that,” Matthew Bettenhausen, California’s homeland security director, said in a telephone interview. But, he said of the grant requirement: “It’s another thing to be so prescriptive; that came as a surprise to many of us states.”

Maj. Gen. Tod M. Bunting, the homeland security director for Kansas, said Washington ran the risk of raising undue public alarm by prescribing such a large part of the grant to bomb prevention.

“A federal cookie-cutter mandate doesn’t work on every state,” said General Bunting, who is also the state’s adjutant general.

Leesa Berens Morrison, Arizona’s homeland security director, said the new federal guidance “absolutely surprised us,” and said state officials were scrambling to comply.

In Massachusetts, Ms. Kayyem regarded a potential grant this year of $20 million in federal homeland security money as too important to pass up, even though she said that technically one-quarter of it had to be spent on I.E.D.’s to qualify for the money. So, Massachusetts officials wrote a creative proposal, pledging to upgrade bomb squads in many of the state’s 351 cities and towns. It also proposed buying new hazardous-material suits, radios to communicate between law enforcement agencies and explosive-detection devices.

But Ms. Kayyem acknowledged that much of the equipment was chosen to serve double duty. Hazmat suits could be useful in the event of a bombing, but would be even more help with accidents that state officials regarded as much more probable, like chemical spills on the Massachusetts Turnpike.

The grant was approved by federal authorities, but Mr. Chertoff warned: “There are times when you get so far away from the core purpose that it’s hard to justify the grant money.”

In one effort to crack down on what Mr. Chertoff referred to as “mission creep,” Homeland Security officials last year imposed restrictions on use of a heavy truck by the police in Providence, R.I.

The truck had been bought with federal counterterrorism money, based on a plan that it be used to haul a patrol boat used for port security. But when the Police Department began to use the truck instead to pull a horse trailer, federal authorities sought to draw the line, relenting only after local officials protested in a phone call with Washington, said local and federal officials.

Eric Schmitt reported from Boston, Phoenix and Topeka, Kan.; and David Johnston from Washington.

Interpol says computer files came from Colombian rebels

Documents suggest Venezuela backed guerrillas

By Frank Bajak and John Leicester, Associated Press  |  May 16, 2008

BOGOTA - Interpol said yesterday that computer files suggesting Venezuela was arming and financing Colombian guerrillas came from a rebel camp and were not tampered with, discrediting Venezuela's assertions that Colombia faked them.

President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela denounced the report as "ridiculous," saying a "show of clowns" surrounded the announcement. But the findings are expected to increase pressure on Chávez to explain his relationship with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.

More revelations are likely to emerge, since Interpol also turned over to Colombia 983 files it decrypted.

"We are absolutely certain that the computer exhibits that our experts examined came from a FARC terrorist camp," said Interpol's secretary general, Ronald Noble, adding: "No one can ever question whether or not the Colombian government tampered with the seized FARC computers."

Chávez called Noble "a tremendous actor" and an "immoral police officer who applauds killers."

"Do you think we should waste time here on something so ridiculous?" Chávez asked a journalist.

He denies arming or funding the FARC, though he openly sympathizes with Latin America's most powerful rebel army.

Colombian commandos recovered the three Toshiba Satellite laptop computers, two external hard drives and three USB memory sticks after destroying the rebel camp just across the border in Ecuador. FARC foreign minister Raul Reyes and 24 others were killed in the March 1 raid.

Interpol addressed Chávez's charges that no computer could have survived the bombardment by showing photographs of metal cases that protected them during the raid.

"Mr. Reyes is now dead. But they were definitely his computers, his disks, his hardware," Noble said.

The Interpol study was done at Colombia's request, and Colombia got a major bonus when Interpol ran 10 computers nonstop for two weeks to crack the encrypted files. Noble said it was up to Colombia to decide whether to make their contents public. Interpol also gave Colombia a separate confidential report for use in criminal investigations.

The 39-page public forensic report by the France-based international police agency concluded Colombian authorities did not always follow internationally accepted methods for handling computer evidence, but said that did not taint the data.

Interpol said it reviewed 610 gigabytes of data including 210,888 images, 37,872 written documents, 22,481 Web pages, 10,537 sound and video files, 7,989 e-mail addresses and 452 spreadsheets.

Interpol limited itself to verifying whether Colombia altered the files and correctly handled the evidence, but did not address the contents of the documents, even making a point to use two forensic experts who do not read Spanish.

A Colombian antiterrorism officer accessed the computers before they were handed over to Interpol, leaving multiple traces in operating system files, which Noble said runs against internationally accepted protocol. But Colombian authorities properly told Interpol's specialists about the episode and Noble praised their professionalism. 

NYTimes.com

May 5, 2008 

Police and Army Officers Tied to Attempt on Karzai’s Life

By CARLOTTA GALL

KABUL, Afghanistan — Afghanistan’s defense minister confirmed Sunday that a police captain was connected with the group behind the assassination attempt on President Hamid Karzai a week earlier and that an army officer supplied the weapons and ammunition used in the attack.

Both men have been arrested and are under investigation for their suspected role in the attack on the military parade, which killed three people, including a member of Parliament, and wounded 11. One of the suspects may have been a sympathizer, and the other was probably motivated by money, Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak said.

Afghanistan’s intelligence chief, Amrullah Saleh, blamed Al Qaeda for the attack. He said three of the men involved were in contact with people outside Afghanistan, including people in Miram Shah, a town in Pakistan’s tribal region of North Waziristan, the main base for Taliban and Al Qaeda in the region.

The three, who were killed in a house raid Wednesday, include an Afghan named Homayoun, suspected of directing an attack on the Serena Hotel in Kabul in January, and two foreigners who were planning suicide bombings in the city.

“That was the angle of Al Qaeda involvement,” the intelligence chief said. “It is very clear to us.”

Western military officials here have said the assassination attempt, coming after the coordinated attack on the Serena Hotel, indicates a growing ambition and sophistication on the part of those planning and carrying out such attacks.

Afghan forces caught a mortar team on the morning of the parade and uncovered a number of suicide vests in the days before the attack, all signs that the plan was for multiple coordinated attacks that could have been far more deadly.

Mr. Saleh called for more pressure on the terrorist bases in the lawless tribal areas of Pakistan, where, he said, the suspects were receiving training and finance.

“They are equipped financially and they are equipped logistically; they are receiving training, sophisticated training,” he said of the attackers. “And we have always spoken out for pressure to be put on their bases. If at the same time as the intelligence work we are doing pressure is put on their bases, then with these together, we can eliminate them.”

He added: “This is not a war to be ended next week. These are not the problems to be ended this year.”

Mr. Wardak, the defense minister, said that security officials needed to keep investigating how and when the group of three gunmen who fired on the military parade managed to bring weapons into their hotel room and that they still needed to question members of the presidential guard who were responsible for the security of the area for the 24 hours before the parade.

The arrested police captain, named Zalmai, is a trained nurse and was in touch with Mr. Homayoun, the mastermind of the attack, Mr. Wardak said.

He said the arrested army officer, named Jawed, was known by his nickname, Taleb Shah, and worked in the military’s weapons maintenance department, repairing weapons and refurbishing ones surrendered under the national disarmament program.

Two assault rifles used in the attack appeared to be from army stocks, while the machine gun was not, Mr. Wardak said. The arrested army officer admitted that he had provided the machine gun from his personal collection, Mr. Wardak said.

Senate panel makes second try at preventing waterboarding

By PAMELA HESS

Associated Press Writer

7:27 PM CDT, April 29, 2008

WASHINGTON

The Senate Intelligence Committee voted Tuesday to limit CIA interrogators to techniques approved by the military, which would effectively bar them from waterboarding prisoners, congressional officials said.

The vote on an amendment by Sen. Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., taken behind closed doors as the committee debated legislation to authorize money for intelligence operations in 2009, marks at least the second attempt by intelligence overseers in Congress to regulate CIA questioning of detainees. Congressional officials discussed the vote on condition of anonymity because the vote was secret.

President Bush vetoed the 2008 intelligence authorization bill in March because it included the same curbs on questioning techniques. This interrogation provision, if passed by the full Senate and House, would likely face the same fate.

Committee officials refused to comment because deliberations over the bill were ongoing. The bill was expected to be completed later this week.

In a statement announcing her intention to offer the amendment, Feinstein said, "With this legislation, the United States will never again engage in waterboarding or other harsh interrogation techniques."

The military rewrote its field manual on interrogation in 2006 in the wake of the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal in Iraq. It outlines 19 legal interrogation techniques, including "good cop/bad cop," "false flag" -- making prisoners think they are in the custody of another country -- and the separation of a prisoner from other prisoners for up to 30 days at a time.

It prohibits waterboarding, which simulates drowning. The technique has been traced back hundreds of years, to the Spanish Inquisition, and is condemned by nations around the world. Critics call it a form of torture.

According to the field manual, prisoners may not be hooded or have duct tape put across their eyes. They may not be stripped naked or forced to perform or mimic sexual acts. They may not be beaten, electrocuted, burned or otherwise physically hurt. They may not be subjected to hypothermia or mock executions. The manual also does not allow food, water and medical treatment to be withheld, and dogs may not be used in any aspect of interrogation.

CIA Director Michael Hayden has objected to limiting the CIA to military methods, saying the CIA was not consulted on the 19 approved techniques and they do not encompass all lawful, non-abusive methods of interrogation. For example, sleep deprivation is not mentioned in the manual.

The CIA says it has held and interrogated fewer than 100 detainees. It has used "enhanced" interrogation techniques on a third of them, according to Hayden.

Hayden told Congress this spring that the CIA waterboarded three prisoners in 2002 and 2003. In 2006 he ordered a halt to the practice in the wake of a Supreme Court decision and new laws on the treatment of U.S. detainees.

Absent a law against it, waterboarding remains a possibility in future interrogations of terrorism suspects, as long as the president authorizes it after consulting with the attorney general and intelligence officials.

Feinstein's amendment was co-sponsored by seven other lawmakers: Democrats John D. Rockefeller of West Virginia, the committee chairman; Russell Feingold of Wisconsin; Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island; Ron Wyden of Oregon; and Barbara Mikulski of Maryland; and Republicans Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Olympia Snowe of Maine.

April 26, 2008

Questions Linger on Scope of Iran’s Threat in Iraq

By MARK MAZZETTI, STEVEN LEE MYERS and THOM SHANKER

NYTimes.com

This article is by Mark Mazzetti, Steven Lee Myers and Thom Shanker.

WASHINGTON — The United States has gathered its most detailed evidence so far of Iranian involvement in training and arming fighters in Iraq, officials say, but significant uncertainties remain about the extent of that involvement and the threat it poses to American and Iraqi forces.

Some intelligence and administration officials said Iran seemed to have carefully calibrated its involvement in Iraq over the last year, in contrast to what President Bush and other American officials have publicly portrayed as an intensified Iranian role.

It remains difficult to draw firm conclusions about the ebb and flow of Iranian arms into Iraq, and the Bush administration has not produced its most recent evidence.

But interviews with more than two dozen military, intelligence and administration officials showed that while shipments of arms had continued in recent months despite an official Iranian pledge to stop the weapons flow, they had not necessarily increased.

Iran, the officials said, has shifted tactics to distance itself from a direct role in Iraq since the American military captured 20 Iranian operatives inside Iraq in December 2006 and January 2007. Ten of those Iranians remain in American custody.

Since then, Iran seems to have focused instead on training Iraqi Shiite fighters inside Iran, though the exact number remains unclear. Some officials said only handfuls of fighters at a time had recently trained in Iran. At the same time, Iran has sought to retain political and economic influence over a variety of Shiite factions, not just the most extremist militias, known as “special groups.”

“They don’t want to be identified with activities that might be seen by the international community as illegitimate,” a senior official familiar with the intelligence about Iran said in an interview.

Iran has sought to spread its influence inside Iraq not only by its support to militias, officials said, but also through legitimate economic assistance, in particular across the oil-rich Shiite south.

The Iranians also support a number of Shiite parties and militias — including providing weapons to militias fighting the Shiite-led government in Baghdad as well as to militias supporting that government.

For weeks, Mr. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and the top American officials in Iraq have portrayed Iran as a significant and growing threat to the American war effort in Iraq.

In particular, they have cited an intensified barrage of Iranian-made rockets hitting the Green Zone in Baghdad — including attacks during a visit by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice — that have killed Americans and Iraqis.

None of the officials interviewed disputed the notion that Iran sought to undermine American interests in Iraq, but in recent weeks the administration has sought to emphasize the threat by citing new evidence. The interrogations of four Iraqi Shiite militia commanders, for example, have provided new details about the extent of training conducted by the Quds Force of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, officials said.

Still, the officials offered an assessment of Iranian involvement that was more complicated and nuanced than public statements by Mr. Bush and other officials, including Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, who said at a news conference this week that “what Iranians are doing is killing American servicemen inside Iraq” by providing training and weapons to Shiite fighters.

Two weeks ago, Mr. Bush cited Iran as a primary justification in his announcement that he would halt further withdrawals of American troops in Iraq after the level reaches 140,000 this summer. He said an American withdrawal “would embolden its radical leaders and fuel their ambitions to dominate the region.”

At the White House, the Pentagon, the intelligence agencies and the military headquarters in Baghdad, officials declined to detail publicly the extent of Iran’s support for fighters in Iraq, referring instead only in broad terms to training, equipping and financing Shiite militias.

But in the wake of his briefings to Congress on April 8 and 9, Gen. David H. Petraeus, the senior commander, ordered his subordinates to prepare a public dossier on Iranian involvement as part of the administration’s efforts to expose Iran’s covert activities and sustain support for the war, which is increasingly unpopular at home.

On Capitol Hill, General Petraeus said Iranian-backed militias could “pose the greatest long-term threat to the viability of a democratic Iraq.”

Publication of the dossier — which includes pages of charts and photographs of seized Iranian-made weapons — has been widely expected but has now been delayed while the government of Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, confronts Iran diplomatically with new evidence of Iranian assistance to Shiite militias, one of the officials said.

The administration’s focus on Iran has raised alarms among the war’s staunchest critics, who accuse the White House of overstating the threat and laying the groundwork for military action against Iran.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat from California who has called for opening talks with Iran, said that while she believed that there was evidence that Iran was aiding Shiite militias, she worried about the tenor of the administration’s latest warnings.

“This is not a new thing,” she said of Iran’s involvement. “Why all of a sudden do the sabers start to rattle?”

The administration has, in fact, discussed whether to attack training camps, safe houses and weapons storehouses inside Iran that intelligence reports say are being used by the Quds Force to train fighters, according to two senior administration officials. Like most of those interviewed for this article, they spoke only on condition of anonymity because they were discussing intelligence assessments and potential military operations.

For now, however, the United States has decided that military strikes in Iran would be untenable and has concentrated on trying to disrupt the routes used to smuggle weapons and fighters across the border, and on diplomatic and financial pressure, those and other officials said.

“The focus right now clearly is on dealing with the problem inside Iraq,” Mr. Gates said in an interview.

Much of the new evidence of Iranian activity in Iraq emerged during the Iraqi-led operation last month to seize control of Iraq’s second largest city, Basra. A senior administration official described the fighting in Basra as “a clarifying moment” for the Iraqis, as well as the Americans, about the extent of Iran’s involvement.

The operation in Basra and fighting against Shiite militias that has spread to the Sadr City neighborhood in Baghdad have resulted in the capture of significant caches of weapons, including hundreds of rockets and materials to build the bombs designed to puncture armored vehicles, which kill most American troops, the officials said.

The caches, the officials said, have given American commanders a clearer picture of how Iranian weapons have entered Iraq and filtered to various militias and criminal groups throughout the country.

“Much of the Iranian-sponsored arms flow through southern Iraq and are used elsewhere in the country — certainly here in the ongoing Sadr City fight,” a senior military officer in Baghdad said.

Many of the weapons included serial numbers or packaging materials indicating that they had been made in Iran and in 2008, the officials said. That would contradict Iranian pledges last year to Mr. Maliki that it would stanch the flow of weapons and fighters crossing the border.

Even so, the amount of weaponry does not appear to have increased.

“I would argue that in fact, that it has been consistent with where it was some time ago — I couldn’t tell you whether it was 12 months ago — but essentially, that that support continues,” Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at the Pentagon Friday of Iranian involvement. “And it’s not just weapons. They continue to train Iraqis in Iran to come back and fight Americans and the coalition.”

The dossier being prepared by General Petraeus’s staff also details the interrogations of four captured Iraqi Shiite militia commanders who had received training in Iran, a senior official said. Those commanders, among 16 Shiite commanders captured from last fall to the beginning of the fighting in Basra, have provided the American military its most extensive understanding of Iran’s training of Iraqi fighters, the officials said.

The official said Iran’s Quds Force had developed a formal and sophisticated training program that included five courses on tactics, leadership, training, commando operations and weapons and explosives. Graduates of the training program are expected to return to Iraq and train other Iraqis, the officials said.

“We have very little intelligence collection on actual numbers crossing the border,” a senior official familiar with the intelligence reports on Iran said in an interview.

The United States has identified an unspecified number of Quds camps, warehouses and safe houses near the border with Iraq, according to other officials. Those sites are dispersed in Iranian cities, making them difficult to strike without risking killing civilians, the officials said.

In January, the Treasury Department imposed financial sanctions against Iranian officials suspected of aiding Shiite militias in Iran. They included Brig. Gen. Ahmed Foruzandeh, commander of the Quds Force Ramazan Corps, who was identified as the organizer of the training in Iran, and Abu Mustafa al-Sheibani, an Iraqi based in Iran who moved fighters across the border for training, as well as weapons.

A report by the Congressional Research Service this month said that the fighting in Basra — which ended after Iran took credit for brokering a cease-fire — “cast significant doubt on the effectiveness of the U.S. counter-measures” against the Iranian efforts.

There is evidence, officials said, that Iran may not have control over the various Shiite groups it had armed. According to a senior American official, Iran has at times been angered when Iranian weapons were used for intra-Shiite fighting, rather than for killing Americans.

“Iran has hedged its bets,” said Ted Galen Carpenter of the Cato Institute, who has written extensively about Iran’s role in Iraq. “It doesn’t know which Shiite faction is going to come out on top.”

NYTimes.com