1. Karzai Told To Dump U.S.
(Wall Street Journal)

• • ...Matthew Rosenberg

 

• • Pakistan is lobbying Afghanistan's president against building a long-term strategic partnership with the U.S., urging him instead to look to Pakistan—and its Chinese ally—for help in striking a peace deal with the Taliban and rebuilding the economy, Afghan officials say.

 

2. Taliban Not Only Danger To Troops
(USA Today)

• • ...Tom Vanden Brook

 

• • About half of recent attacks by Afghan security forces against their U.S. comrades were due to combat stress or personal disagreements and the rest were Taliban infiltration plots, a military review shows.

 

3. Afghan Officer Fires On Foreign Troops After Argument, Killing Several, Says Defense Ministry
(Washingtonpost.com)

• • ...Associated Press

 

• • An Afghan military officer opened fire on foreign troops Wednesday after an argument at the airport in the capital--the latest in a spate of deadly incidents that have occurred inside government or military installations, the Defense Ministry said. NATO confirmed that foreign troops were among the casualties, but could not say how many.

 

4. Afghan Officials Try To Limit Damage From Prison Break
(New York Times)

• • ...Alissa J. Rubin

 

• • Government officials struggled on Tuesday, but with limited effect, to contain the damage from a spectacular jailbreak that freed 475 inmates, most presumed to be Taliban fighters, from southern Afghanistan's largest prison.

 

5. Afghan Tunnel Went Unnoticed
(Los Angeles Times)

• • ...Molly Hennessy-Fiske

 

• • ...But Ghaleb also blamed foreign troops, noting that Canadian forces had been stationed at the prison in the past, and that U.S. troops had been building living quarters and judicial offices at the prison for four months as the tunnel took shape beneath them.

 

6. Senior Al Qaeda Leader Killed In Afghanistan
(Wall Street Journal)

• • ...Maria Abi-Habib

 

• • The U.S.-led coalition said Tuesday it had killed the second-most-wanted insurgent in Afghanistan, a senior al Qaeda leader from Saudi Arabia who was responsible for setting up terrorist training camps and launching attacks on U.S. and Afghan forces.

 

LIBYA

7. NATO Says It Is Stepping Up Attacks On Libya Targets
(New York Times)

• • ...Thom Shanker and David E. Sanger

 

• • NATO plans to step up attacks on the palaces, headquarters and communications centers that Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi uses to maintain his grip on power in Libya, according to Obama administration and allied officials.

 

8. Gates, British Counterpart: Gadhafi's HQ A Valid Target
(Washington Times)

• • ...Ashish Kumar Sen

 

• • ...The Western alliance is "not targeting [Col. Gadhafi] specifically," said Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, after a meeting in Washington with British Defense Secretary Liam Fox. "But we do consider command-and-control targets legitimate targets, wherever we find them," he added.

 

9. Gaddafi's Forces Hit Rebel-Held City With Renewed Might
(Washington Post)

• • ...Simon Denyer and Leila Fadel

 

• • The Libyan government renewed its artillery and rocket attack on the port of Misurata on Tuesday in its latest apparent attempt to cut the lifeline of the besieged rebel-held western city.

 

10. British Defense Secretary: Gadhafi Must Go
(PBS)

• • ...Margaret Warner

 

• • ...So how can you step up the military pressure? Did anything new come out of this lengthy meeting you had with Secretary Gates and Adm. Mullen today?

 

11. Berlusconi Joins In Airstrikes On Qaddafi To Help Break Impasse Over Libya
(Bloomberg.com)

• • ...Patrick Donahue and Lorenzo Totaro, Bloomberg News

 

• • Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said Italian air-force jets will carry out strikes over Libya as NATO seeks to break an impasse in the nine-week struggle to oust Muammar Qaddafi's regime.

 

12. From A Qaddafi Daughter, A Glimpse Inside The Bunker
(New York Times)

• • ...David D. Kirkpatrick

 

• • ...In a rare interview at her charitable foundation here, Ms. Qaddafi, 36, a Libyan-trained lawyer who once worked on Saddam Hussein's legal defense team, offered a glimpse into the fatalistic mind-set of the increasingly isolated family at the core of the battle for Libya, the bloodiest arena in the democratic uprising that is sweeping the region.

 

WHITE HOUSE

13. National Security Shakeup Expected
(Washington Post)

• • ...Karen DeYoung

 

• • President Obama is expected to announce long-anticipated changes in his national security team this week, including a new ambassador to Afghanistan, according to administration officials familiar with internal deliberations. The officials, who provided information on the condition of anonymity, said as many as four high-level appointments could be announced as soon as Thursday, a changing of the guard that would probably involve the naming of a replacement for Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates.

 

14. Government To Pull Plug On 137 Data Centers
(Wall Street Journal)

• • ...Damian Paletta

 

• • The Obama administration will unveil plans Wednesday to shut 137 of the 2,094 federal data centers by the end of the year, a move that officials see as a breakthrough in their effort to make the government's information-technology infrastructure more efficient and less costly.

 

MIDEAST

15. Government In Yemen Agrees To Talk Transition
(New York Times)

• • ...Laura Kasinof

 

• • Yemen's government on Tuesday formally agreed to a plan that would pave the way for a peaceful transition of power, saying that a delegation from the governing party planned to travel to Saudi Arabia early next week to seal the deal.

 

16. Crackdown In Syria Draws Global Condemnation
(Washington Post)

• • ...Liz Sly and Edward Cody

 

• • Syrian troops sustained their bloody crackdown against anti-government protesters in the southern town of Daraa for a second day Tuesday, drawing harsh condemnations but no specific plans for action against Damascus from U.S. and European leaders.

 

17. Syria's Upheaval Reaches Far Past Its Borders
(Los Angeles Times)

• • ...Borzou Daragahi

 

• • Unrest roiling Syria, a linchpin state in the Middle East, is shaking the region in ways that even the revolution in Egypt did not, threatening to upend some long-standing alliances and encouraging neighbors to scramble for sudden advantage. Already, the chaos in Syria is showing the potential to affect issues as broad as Iran's conflict with the U.S. and its allies, and as narrow as regional water rights.

 

DETAINEES

18. Detainees' Lawyers Can't Click On Leaked Documents
(New York Times)

• • ...Scott Shane

 

• • Anyone surfing the Internet this week is free to read leaked documents about the prisoners held by the American military at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to print them out or e-mail them to friends. Except, that is, for the lawyers who represent the prisoners.

 

19. Many Afghans Held Without Terror Link
(Miami Herald)

• • ...Tom Lasseter, McClatchy Newspapers

 

• • ...The records contain no single explanation for why so many Afghans with few links to terrorism came to be held at the prison camps in Cuba, a facility that the George W. Bush administration said was intended to house only the most serious of terrorist suspects.

 

20. Secret Case Against Detainee Crumbles
(New York Times)

• • ...William Glaberson and Charlie Savage

 

• • ...But now, a comparison of the assessment's conclusions with other information provides a case study in the ambiguities that surround many of the men who have passed through the prison at Guantanamo Bay.

 

DEFENSE DEPARTMENT

21. Military Meets Recruiting, Retention Goals
(Yahoo.com)

• • ...United Press International

 

• • The branches of the U.S. armed forces maintained high levels of recruiting and retention during the first half of fiscal year 2011, the Pentagon said Monday.

 

22. Atheists Seek Chaplain Role In The Military
(New York Times)

• • ...James Dao

 

• • ...Strange as it sounds, groups representing atheists and secular humanists are pushing for the appointment of one of their own to the chaplaincy, hoping to give voice to what they say is a large — and largely underground — population of nonbelievers in the military. Joining the chaplain corps is part of a broader campaign by atheists to win official acceptance in the military.

 

NAVY

23. San Diego Navy Commander Removed
(San Diego Union-Tribune)

• • ...Jeanette Steele

 

• • The commander of a San Diego-based destroyer group has been removed from his job while the Navy investigates an alleged inappropriate relationship.

 

NATIONAL GUARD/RESERVE

24. US Weighs Option Of Extending Guard's Deployment To Border
(Arizona Daily Star (Tucson))

• • ...Howard Fischer, Capitol Media Services

 

• • The Obama administration is having second thoughts about withdrawing all National Guard troops from the border by the end of June.

 

IRAQ

25. Leader Says Iraq Still Needs Some Help
(Boston Globe)

• • ...Rebecca Santana, Associated Press

 

• • Iraq's prime minister said yesterday that his country does not need US forces to protect its internal security but acknowledged that the country still does not have the money or training to protect its borders.

 

26. Text Messages Proliferate As Threats In Iraq
(New York Times)

• • ...Tim Arango

 

• • ...Death threats delivered by text message have become such a common experience across the spectrum of Iraq's public-minded professions — lawyers, journalists, activists and government officials — that the two mobile phone companies, Zain and Asia Cell, have arrangements with the police and courts to investigate them.

 

ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMETERY

27. Making The Honor Roll
(Los Angeles Times)

• • ...Faye Fiore

 

• • ...Richard "Ricky" Gilleland III -- 11th-grader and Junior Future Business Leaders of America computer ace -- has succeeded where the Army failed: He has created the only digitized record of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans laid to rest at Arlington.

 

BASE REALIGNMENT AND CLOSURE

28. County Won't Sue To Stop BRAC Relocation
(Washington Times)

• • ...Paige Winfield Cunningham

 

• • ...Gov. Robert F. McDonnell weighed in on the controversy, telling WTOP Radio's "Ask the Governor" program Tuesday that he will be sending a letter to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates that spells out his concerns about the move and suggests a few solutions. The state is paying $80 million for a ramp near the Alexandria site, but the project won't even be started by the transition's September deadline.

 

ROTC

29. Stanford Committee Recommends ROTC Reinstatement; Now Faculty Votes
(San Jose Mercury News)

• • ...Lisa M. Krieger

 

• • More than four decades after Stanford University banished ROTC from campus, a committee has recommended that the military programs be invited back.

 

ENVIRONMENT

30. Storms Take A Deadly Toll
(Wall Street Journal)

• • ...Ilan Brat and Joe Barrett

 

• • Violent seasonal storms in the middle of the U.S. have unleashed a string of floods and deadly tornadoes, killing at least nine people and prompting the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to consider flooding more than 130,000 acres of Missouri farmland to save towns near the intersection of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers.

 

BUSINESS

31. Cuts Stall Defense Earnings
(Wall Street Journal)

• • ...Nathan Hodge

 

• • Top defense contractors are expected to report relatively flat first-quarter earnings this week amid general uncertainty about the outlook for U.S. defense spending.

 

OPINION

32. Afghan Crossroads
(Los Angeles Times)

• • ...John R. Bolton

 

• • Will conditions on the ground or U.S. politics govern troop withdrawals?

 

33. The Milk Of Resistance
(New York Times)

• • ...Khaled Mattawa

 

• • THOUGH Libyan government forces have killed and wounded hundreds of civilians in their siege of the western city of Misurata, one of the most telling examples of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi's wrath has been the bombing and destruction of a dairy plant there.

 

34. The Tehran-Damascus Axis
(Wall Street Journal)

• • ...Amir Taheri

 

• • When the Arab uprisings started in Tunisia this winter, there were no more enthusiastic cheerleaders than the Khomeinists in Tehran. Their cheering got louder when revolution spread to Egypt, and louder still when Libyans rose in revolt. But Tehran's cheering has begun to fade. The reason is that the revolt has spread to Syria, the mullahs' sole Arab ally.

 

35. America Must Regain The Initiative Abroad
(Financial Times)

• • ...Philip Zelikow

 

• • ...Taking stock of the so-called "three wars" in which America is now embroiled, Libya is not even at the level of effort expended in the less important Kosovo conflict of 1999. Another – Iraq – is on an apparently inexorable path to being wound up this year. The main impediment to US strategic initiative is therefore Afghanistan.

 

36. The Pol And The Policy
(Washington Post)

• • ...David Ignatius

 

• • ...My instinct is that the White House is right to be pragmatic, and for that reason should avoid making so many public pronouncements: This is an evolving crisis, and each country presents a different set of issues; a one-size-fits-all policy approach would be a mistake.

 

37. The Syria Lobby
(Wall Street Journal)

• • ...Editorial

 

• • How does a small, energy-poor and serially misbehaving Middle Eastern regime always seem to get a Beltway pass? Conspiracy nuts and other tenured faculty would have us believe that country is Israel, though the Jewish state shares America's enemies and our democratic values. But the question really applies to Syria, where the Assad regime is now showing its true nature.

 

38. NATO, Europe Must Take Lead In Helping Rebels
(Arizona Republic (Phoenix))

• • ...Editorial

 

• • NATO is getting more military muscle for its air raids in Libya. The good news is the source of that muscle: It's not the United States, but Italy.

 

CORRECTIONS

39. Corrections
(New York Times)

• • ...The New York Times

 

• • An article on Friday about military setbacks suffered a day earlier by Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya misidentified the United Nations official who had described a flood of Libyan refugees into Tunisia. He is Firas Kayal, not Faras Kaya. The article also misstated the United Nations organization for which Mr. Kayal is the spokesman. It is the High Commissioner for Refugees, not the Human Rights Commission, an organization that no longer exists. (The Human Rights Council replaced the Human Rights Commission in 2006.)

 

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Wall Street Journal
April 27, 2011
Pg. 1

Karzai Told To Dump U.S.

Pakistan Urges Afghanistan to Ally With Islamabad, Beijing

By Matthew Rosenberg

Pakistan is lobbying Afghanistan's president against building a long-term strategic partnership with the U.S., urging him instead to look to Pakistan—and its Chinese ally—for help in striking a peace deal with the Taliban and rebuilding the economy, Afghan officials say.

The pitch was made at an April 16 meeting in Kabul by Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani, who bluntly told Afghan President Hamid Karzai that the Americans had failed them both, according to Afghans familiar with the meeting. Mr. Karzai should forget about allowing a long-term U.S. military presence in his country, Mr. Gilani said, according to the Afghans. Pakistan's bid to cut the U.S. out of Afghanistan's future is the clearest sign to date that, as the nearly 10-year war's endgame begins, tensions between Washington and Islamabad threaten to scuttle America's prospects of ending the conflict on its own terms.

With the bulk of U.S.-led coalition troops slated to withdraw from Afghanistan by the end of 2014, the country's neighbors, including Pakistan, Iran, India and Russia, are beginning to jockey for influence, positioning themselves for Afghanistan's post-American era.

Pakistan enjoys particular leverage in Afghanistan because of its historic role in fostering the Taliban movement and its continuing support for the Afghan Taliban insurgency. Washington's relations with Pakistan, ostensibly an ally, have reached their lowest point in years following a series of missteps on both sides.

Pakistani officials say they no longer have an incentive to follow the American lead in their own backyard. "Pakistan is sole guarantor of its own interest," said a senior Pakistani official. "We're not looking for anyone else to protect us, especially the U.S. If they're leaving, they're leaving and they should go."

Mr. Karzai is wavering on Pakistan's overtures, according to Afghans familiar with his thinking, with pro- and anti-American factions at the presidential palace trying to sway him to their sides.

The leaks about what went on at the April 16 meeting officials appear to be part of that effort. Afghans in the pro-U.S. camp who shared details of the meeting with The Wall Street Journal said they did so to prompt the U.S. to move faster toward securing the strategic partnership agreement, which is intended to spell out the relationship between the two countries after 2014. "The longer they wait…the more time Pakistan has to secure its interests," said one of the pro-U.S. Afghan officials.

A spokesman for Mr. Karzai, Waheed Omar, said: "Pakistan would not make such demands. But even if they did, the Afghan government would never accept it."

Some U.S. officials said they had heard details of the Kabul meeting, and presumed they were informed about Mr. Gilani's entreaties in part, as one official put it, to "raise Afghanistan's asking price" in the partnership talks. That asking price could include high levels of U.S. aid after 2014. The U.S. officials sought to play down the significance of the Pakistani proposal. Such overtures were to be expected at the start of any negotiations, they said; the idea of China taking a leading role in Afghanistan was fanciful at best, they noted.

Yet in a reflection of U.S. concerns about Pakistan's overtures, the commander of the U.S.-led coalition, Gen. David Petraeus, has met Mr. Karzai three times since April 16, in part to reassure the Afghan leader that he has America's support, and to nudge forward progress on the partnership deal, said Afghan and U.S. officials.

The Afghan president, meanwhile, has expressed distrust of American intentions in his country, and has increasingly lashed out against the behavior of the U.S. military. Afghanistan's relations with Pakistani are similarly fraught, though Mr. Karzai has grown closer to Pakistan's leaders over the past year. Still, many Afghans see their neighbor as meddlesome and controlling and fear Pakistani domination once America departs.

Formal negotiations on the so-called Strategic Partnership Declaration began in March. Details of talks between U.S. and Afghan negotiators so far remain sketchy. The most hotly contested issue is the possibility of long-term U.S. military bases remaining in Afghanistan beyond 2014 to buttress and continue training Afghan forces and carry on the fight against al Qaeda.

U.S. officials fear that without a stabilizing U.S. hand in Afghanistan after 2014, the country would be at risk for again becoming a haven for Islamist militants seeking to strike the West.

The opening of talks in March was enough to raise alarms among Afghanistan's neighbors. Senior Iranian and Russian officials quickly made treks to Kabul to express their displeasure at the possibility of a U.S. military presence after 2014, Afghan officials said. The Taliban have always said they wouldn't sign on to any peace process as long as foreign forces remain.

Yet no other party has been as direct, and as actively hostile to the planned U.S.-Afghan pact, as the Pakistanis. Along with Prime Minister Gilani, the Pakistani delegation at the April 16 meeting included Lt. Gen. Ahmad Shuja Pasha, chief of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence spy agency. U.S. officials accuse the ISI of aiding the Taliban, despite it being the Central Intelligence Agency's partner in the fight against Islamist militants in Pakistan. Pakistani officials deny the accusations.

After routine pleasantries about improving bilateral ties and trade, Mr. Gilani told Mr. Karzai that the U.S. had failed both their countries, and that its policy of trying to open peace talks while at the same time fighting the Taliban made no sense, according to Afghans familiar with the meeting.

Mr. Gilani repeatedly referred to America's "imperial designs," playing to a theme that Mr. Karzai has himself often embraced in speeches. He also said that, to end the war, Afghanistan and Pakistan needed to take "ownership" of the peace process, according to Afghans familiar with what was said at the meeting. Mr. Gilani added that America's economic problems meant it couldn't be expected to support long-term regional development. A better partner would be China, which Pakistanis call their "all-weather" friend, he said, according to participants in the meeting. He said the strategic partnership deal was ultimately an Afghan decision. But, he added, neither Pakistan nor other neighbors were likely to accept such a pact.

Mr. Gilani's office didn't return calls seeking comment. A senior ISI official, speaking about the meeting, said: "It is us who should be cheesed because we are totally out of the loop on what the Americans are doing in Afghanistan.…We have been telling President Karzai that we will support any and all decisions that you take for Afghanistan as long as the process is Afghan-led and not dictated by outside interests."

Although a U.S. ally, Pakistan has its own interests in Afghanistan, believing it needs a pliant government in Kabul to protect its rear flank from India. Pakistani officials regularly complain of how India's influence over Afghanistan has grown in the past decade. Some Pakistani officials say the presence of U.S. and allied forces is the true problem in the region, not the Taliban.

--Siobhan Gorman contributed to this article.

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USA Today
April 27, 2011
Pg. 1

Taliban Not Only Danger To Troops

Stress turns Afghans on U.S. comrades

By Tom Vanden Brook, USA Today

About half of recent attacks by Afghan security forces against their U.S. comrades were due to combat stress or personal disagreements and the rest were Taliban infiltration plots, a military review shows.

On April 16, a member of the Afghan army killed five American and four Afghan soldiers at a training base in eastern Afghanistan. In January, an Afghan soldier killed one U.S. servicemember and wounded another. In 2010, eight U.S. troops were killed by Afghan security forces.

Of 16 recent attacks by Afghan forces on U.S. and allied troops, about half were committed by Afghan soldiers or police officers motivated by a grudge against a particular person or because of combat stress, said Army Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, who heads up training of Afghan forces.

Caldwell said five other attackers may have become disgruntled and been convinced by insurgents to mount attacks. The motives of the others are not clear.

To prevent infiltration by the Taliban, the U.S. and Afghan militaries are moving forward with a comprehensive program that vets each of the 284,000 Afghan troops and police officers. The eight-step screening process includes a criminal background check, drug and medical testing.

"There's no question that there's going to be a continued effort on the part of the Taliban to continue these kind of attacks," Caldwell said. "They'll do whatever it takes in order to show a lack of stability or security or impinge upon the trust that is being built between the Afghan and coalition security force."

He said the attacks have not created ill will between U.S. and Afghan troops. "We're finding the Taliban is really drawing us all much closer together," Caldwell said from Kabul.

Several attacks in recent weeks were committed by insurgents wearing Afghan army uniforms. The Afghan government responded Thursday by enforcing a ban on the sale of military uniforms at markets, Caldwell said.

Attempts to infiltrate security forces can be expected in a counterinsurgency effort and can be expected to continue, said James Dubik at the Institute for the Study of War. Dubik, a retired Army three-star general, led the training of Iraqi security forces in 2007.

"It has the potential for being disruptive of the trust and confidence security forces need in one another," Dubik said. "But everyone there understands the bad guy is going to try to do bad things."

Attackers with Taliban sympathies seem to share two common traits, Caldwell said. They deserted their force for some time before returning, and the attackers had no family members living in Afghanistan.

"The Afghans have now put out an edict that if somebody's family is not living in Afghanistan, then it's going to be far more difficult for them to get into the police or army," Caldwell said.

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Washingtonpost.com
April 27, 2011

Afghan Officer Fires On Foreign Troops After Argument, Killing Several, Says Defense Ministry

By Associated Press

KABUL, Afghanistan — An Afghan military officer opened fire on foreign troops Wednesday after an argument at the airport in the capital--the latest in a spate of deadly incidents that have occurred inside government or military installations, the Defense Ministry said.

NATO confirmed that foreign troops were among the casualties, but could not say how many.

The ministry only said a number of people were killed and wounded in the 11 a.m. incident at the airport in Kabul, but gave no specifics.

Defense Ministry spokesman Gen. Mohammad Zahir Azimi said the gunman, an Afghan military pilot, was killed in the shooting, which occurred inside a facility used by the Afghan Air Force.

“An Afghan officer opened fire on foreigners after an argument,” Azimi said. “For the past 20 years, he has been a military pilot. An argument happened between him and the foreigners and we have to investigate that.”

An Afghan pilot who spoke on condition of anonymity, asid the gunman was Ahmad Gul, a 50-year-old pilot from Tarakhail district of Kabul province.

The Taliban, in a text message to The Associated Press, claimed responsibility. But authorities have not confirmed any connection to insurgents. In a statement, the Taliban said the gunman, who was impersonating an army officer, killed nine foreigners and five Afghans soldiers. Others at the facility helped the gunman gain access, the Taliban said.

Since March 2009, the coalition has recorded 20 incidents where a member of the Afghan security forces or someone wearing a uniform used by them attacked coalition forces, killing a total of 36.

It is not known how many of the 282,000 members of the Afghan security forces were killed.

According to information compiled by NATO, half of the 20 incidents involved the impersonation of an Afghan policeman or soldier. The cause of the other 10 incidents were attributed to combat stress or unknown reasons. The officers insisted that so far, there is no solid information that an insurgent was directed to join the army for the purpose of conducting attacks.

NATO officials said that in recent incidents:

*An Afghan man wearing a border police uniform who shot and killed two American military personnel April 4 in northwest Faryab province was upset over the burning of the Quran at a Florida church.

*An Afghan soldier who shot and killed three German soldiers and wounded six others Feb. 18 in northern Baghlan province felt he had been personally offended by his German partners.

*An Afghan border policeman who gunned down six American soldiers Nov. 29, 2010 in eastern Nangarhar province was suffering from personal stress because his father was forcing him into an arranged marriage.

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New York Times
April 27, 2011
Pg. 13

Afghan Officials Try To Limit Damage From Prison Break

By Alissa J. Rubin

KABUL, Afghanistan — Government officials struggled on Tuesday, but with limited effect, to contain the damage from a spectacular jailbreak that freed 475 inmates, most presumed to be Taliban fighters, from southern Afghanistan's largest prison.

Tooryalai Wesa, the governor of Kandahar Province, where the prison break occurred, announced that security forces had detained steadily mounting numbers of escaped detainees throughout the day. By day’s end, however, he conceded that while 71 people had been detained, the descriptions of only 41 men matched those of escapees.

The effort to reassure people with news of the captures failed to instill much confidence, and the most immediate effect of the jailbreak was a mounting sense among Afghans that government corruption, incompetence and complacency were as much to blame as the Taliban.

In comments on a Facebook page linked to an interview program on Tolo, a major television network here, viewers expressed anger and a complete lack of faith in the government.

“The escape of 500 Taliban from prison?” Jahanbakhash Ahmadi wrote. “This is impossible that it can happen without the help of the government.”

Another, Mard Arya, said: “Is it possible for prisoners to dig tunnels more than 100 meters long over five months and none of the prison officials knew about it? Don’t be ridiculous.”

It did not help that the prison escapes came after a month of security lapses, which have left people feeling insecure and distrustful of the government, even though assassinations and attacks in Kandahar have fallen sharply this year.

In early April, Kandahar security forces fired on crowds, killing nine people, during protests over the burning of the Koran by a pastor in the United States. On April 15, the security forces were unable to protect the Kandahar police chief (or were bribed not to), allowing a suicide bomber to enter the police headquarters and reach an area near his office where the bomber killed him and two other police officers.

Then, early Monday, despite the presence of dozens of prison guards and police officers, nearly 500 prisoners escaped, leaving many Kandahar civilians fearful that the escaped prisoners will soon launch attacks in Kandahar.

“We don’t know what the security forces are doing,” said Hajji Khairullah, a shopkeeper in central Kandahar. “If you look at the prison, it is fortified with berms and T-walls all around — you can’t imagine that an ant could get in there — but now we heard the huge and shocking news that hundreds of inmates have managed to escape through an underground tunnel.”

“This escape will affect the civilians,” he added. “I blame these security forces for not taking action. This is not the first time.”

The provincial governor, who has been critical of the security forces after each of the recent breaches, has seemed powerless to improve the situation, leaving people unsure whom to turn to.

“How do prisoners break locks in jail?” asked a Kandahari who has watched the security forces closely over the years, but asked not to be identified for fear of retribution. He was referring to prisoners’ ability to leave their cells in order to go to the cell with the tunnel entry.

“How can it be that no one noticed? What was the National Directorate of Security doing?” he said, referring to Afghanistan’s intelligence service. “Why weren’t they watching?”

A memorandum from the Justice Ministry to President Hamid Karzai’s senior aides appeared to confirm people’s fears that there was no one who could be trusted — a point the Taliban have been eager to make in carrying out their attacks.

“This is an information campaign by the Taliban; that’s the main point of these operations,” said a Western official, adding that the insurgents want to send the message that the Afghan government is weak.

The Justice Ministry’s memo raised questions about complicity by people working in the prison and the surrounding neighborhood where the tunnel emerged. The memorandum noted that digging such a long tunnel and emptying the soil could not have gone unnoticed by neighbors and security forces because “it takes a lot of time and a means of transportation to carry the soil away.”

Also noted in the memo was that the police supposedly searched the house where the tunnel began two and a half months ago, yet noted nothing suspicious.

Finally, the memo said: “Escape of all inmates through a tunnel in one room indicates cooperation and planning from inside the prison.”

The head of the team investigating the escape, Mohammed Tahir, further cemented the likelihood that there was complicity from a number of people. He described the tunnel as so carefully planned and sophisticated that it appeared that engineers must have been involved, not merely men with shovels.

“The tunnel was dug in a very professional way,” he said. “They have used an electrical system and a ventilation system and small shovels and pickaxes for digging and wheelbarrows for removing the soil.”

The conclusion reached by some Kandaharis was almost melancholy: the Taliban care more about their fighters than the government of Afghanistan does about its own people.

“The prison break indicates how much the Taliban are loyal to each other,” said Abdul Naji, a businessman in Kandahar.

“It shows how much they are trying to free their men, even digging a several-hundred-meter-long tunnel despite heavy security forces in the area,” Mr. Naji said. “It is beyond imagination.”

Taimoor Shah contributed reporting from Kandahar, Afghanistan.

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Los Angeles Times
April 27, 2011
Pg. 4

Afghan Tunnel Went Unnoticed

By Molly Hennessy-Fiske

KABUL, AFGHANISTAN -- The mud house where insurgents began digging a long tunnel that at least 488 inmates used to flee an Afghan prison had been searched about 2 1/2 months before by security forces, who failed to notice anything amiss, authorities said Tuesday.

Afghan Justice Minister Habibullah Ghaleb faulted security forces for overlooking the more than 1,000-foot-long tunnel and failing to prevent the escape Sunday night and Monday morning from Kandahar's Sarposa prison. Authorities estimate that militants spent five months digging the tunnel.

"Earth or soil dug out of the tunnel must have been moved and should not have been missed by the eyes of the security forces," Ghaleb said in a report to President Hamid Karzai.

But Ghaleb also blamed foreign troops, noting that Canadian forces had been stationed at the prison in the past, and that U.S. troops had been building living quarters and judicial offices at the prison for four months as the tunnel took shape beneath them.

Ghaleb said he suspected that escapees had help from someone inside the prison, because they managed to unlock multiple cells to reach the tunnel, which ended in a single cell. The escape went on for more than four hours.

Afghan authorities and foreign troops launched a search for the escapees but had captured only 65 as of late Tuesday, said Tooryalai Wesa, governor of Kandahar province.

The Taliban, which considers the escape a major victory, said 541 inmates fled through the tunnel and were later driven to safe houses.

Afghanistan's government has launched a full investigation of the escape, the second in three years at Sarposa. In 2008, nearly 900 prisoners, including Taliban fighters, escaped from Sarposa after a truck bomb explosion at the prison gates.

Meanwhile, NATO officials attempted to focus attention on recent offensives against insurgent leaders, announcing that an airstrike April 13 in Kunar province had killed a senior Al Qaeda operative they described as the second-most-wanted insurgent in Afghanistan.

Abu Hafs Najdi, also known as Abdul Ghani, was Al Qaeda's operations chief for Kunar, responsible for establishing training camps throughout the area, the officials said. Authorities believe he funneled weapons to insurgents, organized Al Qaeda finances and planned attacks on Afghan and coalition forces.

His name had appeared on a 2009 list of the 85 most-wanted terrorists in Saudi Arabia, his homeland, though he was based in Kunar and did most of his work in Afghanistan and Pakistan, North Atlantic Treaty Organization officials said.

Shortly before his death, Abdul Ghani allegedly organized a suicide attack that killed a tribal elder and nine other civilians, NATO officials said. They said his death in the Dangam district marked "a significant milestone in the disruption of the Al Qaeda network."

Special correspondents Aimal Yaqubi and Hashmat Baktash contributed to this report.

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Wall Street Journal
April 27, 2011
Pg. 10

Senior Al Qaeda Leader Killed In Afghanistan

By Maria Abi-Habib

KABUL—The U.S.-led coalition said Tuesday it had killed the second-most-wanted insurgent in Afghanistan, a senior al Qaeda leader from Saudi Arabia who was responsible for setting up terrorist training camps and launching attacks on U.S. and Afghan forces.

The Saudi, identified by the coalition as Abu Hafs Al Najdi, also known as Abdul Ghani, operated mostly from the mountainous Kunar province in northeast Afghanistan. A list of the 85 most wanted terrorists released by the Saudi government in 2009 placed him 21st; that list gave his real name as Salef Nayef Eid al Mahlafi, and put his current age at 27.

In addition to Mr. Najdi, the April 13 airstrike in Kunar's Dangam district bordering Pakistan killed another al Qaeda leader, known as Waqas, the coalition said. It said a total of 25 al Qaeda militants have been eliminated in Afghanistan over the past month. Just a few weeks ago, senior coalition officials had estimated the entire al Qaeda presence in Afghanistan at as low as 50 to 100 fighters.

However, earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal reported that al Qaeda, which by and large had moved out of Afghanistan after the Taliban's downfall in 2001, has returned to set up terrorist training camps in Kunar, Nangarhar and Nuristan provinces along the border with Pakistan's tribal areas. U.S. forces have largely abandoned Nuristan and have withdrawn from many parts of Kunar over the past two years, as the coalition focused its efforts on the southern part of the country.

Although the commander of coalition forces, U.S. Gen. David Petraeus, told reporters earlier this month he doesn't believe al Qaeda is resurging in Afghanistan, some senior U.S. military officers disagree, saying the withdrawals from Nuristan and Kunar have created a vacuum for al Qaeda to come back.

The coalition's Afghanistan target list is classified and the military hasn't released the name of the most-wanted militant. Al Qaeda leaders Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahri are believed to be hiding across the border in Pakistan.

Mr. Najdi "was the second-highest priority in our operations to capture or kill insurgents," said U.K. Army Maj. Tim James, a coalition spokesman in Kabul. "Losing such an important member of al Qaeda in Afghanistan will have a significant impact on their ability to operate in Afghanistan and is a blow to the insurgency."

Mr. Najdi, who had been targeted by the U.S.-led forces since at least 2007, operated a network of insurgents throughout Kunar, organizing attacks on Afghan and U.S. bases, plotting kidnappings of foreigners, running militant training camps and providing financing from Pakistan, the military said.

He was an instrumental link between al Qaeda's leadership in Pakistan and its operations in Afghanistan, and his ability to "provide considerably more funding to insurgent fighters" had allowed the insurgency to obtain more weapons and recruits, the coalition said Tuesday.

Separately, the Afghan Ministry of Justice released the results of its initial inquiry into Monday's escape of hundreds of Taliban prisoners from the Sarpoza prison in the southern city of Kandahar. The report faulted coalition and Afghan forces for failing to notice the removal of large amounts of earth during the digging of the tunnel into the prison, and for failing to spot the movement of a large number of vehicles that ferried out the prisoners early Monday morning.

According to the report, a failure to implement regulations allowed the inmates to move freely through the prison block at night, a circumstance that permitted them to escape through a tunnel that opened into an unlocked cell. This showed that some prison officials were implicated in the plot, the report said.

According to a U.S. military official, 61 of the at least 475 Taliban escapees had been rearrested by Tuesday.

The intelligence gathering and airstrike that led to Mr. Najdi's death were conducted by the U.S. military's secretive Joint Special Operations Command, known as JSOC, which has taken the lead in targeting al Qaeda in Afghanistan, a U.S. official said. In contrast, the Central Intelligence Agency leads the campaign of drone strikes that has killed numerous al Qaeda operatives sheltering across the border in Pakistan.

Many American officials say JSOC, which oversees elite units such as the Army's Delta Force and Navy SEAL Team Six, is their most effective tool to combat al Qaeda in Afghanistan, where the U.S. has far more freedom to strike than in Pakistan. But they also fear that JSOC, with a global mission and commitments in Somalia, Yemen, Iraq and other places, is already stretched thin.

Still, JSOC has counted a series of recent successes against al Qaeda in northeastern Afghanistan. An airstrike in September killed two senior leaders and other al Qaeda operatives who had gathered at a training camp in Kunar. Special Operations forces in December captured another senior al Qaeda operative, Abu Ikhlas al-Masri, who had long operated in and around Kunar. Mr. al-Masri has since provided intelligence about al Qaeda's attempts to reestablish Afghan bases, U.S. officials say.

--Habib Khan Totakhil and Matthew Rosenberg contributed to this article.

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New York Times
April 27, 2011
Pg. 10

NATO Says It Is Stepping Up Attacks On Libya Targets

By Thom Shanker and David E. Sanger

WASHINGTON — NATO plans to step up attacks on the palaces, headquarters and communications centers that Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi uses to maintain his grip on power in Libya, according to Obama administration and allied officials.

White House officials said President Obama had been briefed on the more energetic bombing campaign, which included a strike early on Monday on Colonel Qaddafi’s residential compound in the heart of Tripoli, the capital.

United States officials said the effort was not intended to kill the Libyan leader, but to take the war to his doorstep, raising the price of his efforts to continue to hold on to power. “We want to make sure he knows there is a war going on, and it’s not just in Misurata,” said a senior administration official, who requested anonymity in discussing military planning.

The NATO campaign, some officials said, arose in part from an analysis of Colonel Qaddafi’s reaction to the bombing of Tripoli that was ordered by President Ronald Reagan a quarter-century ago. Alliance officials concluded that the best hope of dislodging the Libyan leader and forcing him to flee was to cut off his ability to command his most loyal troops.

“We don’t want to kill him or make a martyr out of him in the Arab world,” said a senior NATO diplomat familiar with the evolving strategy. “But if he sees the bombing happening all around him, we think it could change his calculus.”

American warplanes were not involved in the most recent strike on the Qaddafi residential complex, which also includes administrative offices and a military communications center, or in a separate raid on Monday that temporarily knocked Libyan state television off the air. The decision to let warplanes from other nations carry out the bulk of the attacks is in keeping with the Obama administration’s decision to withdraw to what Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has called “a support role” in the Libya air campaign.

But the attacks depend on intelligence reports and other military support from the United States, NATO officials said.

NATO officials acknowledged that the alliance’s intelligence was based on intercepted cellphone calls and radio dispatches that might indicate which barracks, buildings or compounds were serving as the government’s hidden command posts.

“If you know your main headquarters is going to be hit, you get out and set up an alternative in some nondescript barracks,” one NATO official said. Attacks on those hidden military posts are wholly legitimate, officials said — but there is always a chance that Colonel Qaddafi might be inside one of them.

Officials in Europe and Washington said the strikes were meant to reduce the Libyan government’s ability to harm civilians by eliminating, link by link, the command-and-communications and supply chains that are required for military operations.

But the attacks also reflect a broadening of alliance targets at a time when the rebels and the government have been consolidating their positions along more static front lines, raising concerns of a prolonged stalemate. Although it is too soon to see results from the recent shift, a NATO official said Tuesday that the alliance was closely watching early signs, like the recent reports of desertions from the Libyan Army.

NATO planes pounded targets east of the port city of Misurata on Tuesday, lifting mushroom-shaped clouds of dust hundreds of feet into the air. On the ground, Colonel Qaddafi’s forces fired missiles and mortars in heavy, though intermittent, barrages on the rebels defending the port area, news agencies reported. Explosions echoed for miles across the water, and rescue ships bound for the port and its stranded migrant workers found themselves without a safe window to dock amid attacks by Colonel Qaddafi’s troops.

By sunset, a NATO warship could be seen patrolling the waters several miles off the coast. A Human Rights Watch representative with contacts in Misurata said one migrant worker was killed and 11 others wounded in shelling by Colonel Qaddafi’s forces.

The strike on Colonel Qaddafi’s palace and command center was denounced by Libyan officials as an assassination attempt, but alliance officers rejected that suggestion. Pentagon officials said the mission was against a legitimate military target and noted that it was carried out by F-16s from Norway.

But the view from the Kremlin was skeptical. Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Tuesday delivered his most passionate critique of the Western intervention in Libya, underlining a rare open disagreement with his protégé, President Dmitri A. Medvedev.

At a news conference in Copenhagen, Mr. Putin was asked to elaborate on his comment that the United Nations resolution allowing airstrikes resembled “a medieval call for a crusade.” He responded by launching into an extended caustic attack on the NATO campaign, saying it violated the principle of sovereignty and the wishes of the Libyan people.

Military officials privately acknowledge that removing Colonel Qaddafi from power is the desired secondary effect of striking at state television and other symbols of his authoritarian rule. “His people may see the futility of continued resistance,” one Pentagon official said.

Lt. Gen. Charles Bouchard, the NATO mission’s operational commander, told reporters on Tuesday at his headquarters in Italy that alliance intelligence officers were picking up reports of Libyan government soldiers who had abandoned their positions. “We are well aware of troops not reporting for duty,” he said.

Senior officers who served in NATO’s previous air war, fought in 1999 to protect the population of Kosovo from Serbian forces, said the campaign over Libya drew on lessons learned then.

Gen. John P. Jumper, who commanded United States Air Force units in Europe during the Kosovo campaign, recalled that allied “air power was getting its paper graded on the number of tanks killed” — even though taking out armored vehicles one by one was never going to halt “ethnic cleansing.”

So NATO began to hit high-profile institutional targets in Belgrade, the Serbian capital, instead of forces in the field. Although they were legitimate military targets, General Jumper said, destroying them also had the effect of undermining popular support for the Serbian leader, Slobodan Milosevic.

“It was when we went in and began to disturb important and symbolic sites in Belgrade, and began to bring to a halt the middle-class life in Belgrade, that Milosevic’s own people began to turn on him,” General Jumper said.

C. J. Chivers contributed reporting from the Mediterranean Sea.

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Washington Times
April 27, 2011
Pg. 10

Gates, British Counterpart: Gadhafi's HQ A Valid Target

Alliance 'not targeting' Libyan leader, they say

By Ashish Kumar Sen, The Washington Times

U.S. and British defense officials Tuesday declared Col. Moammar Gadhafi's headquarters in Tripoli a "legitimate" target, but denied that NATO is trying to kill the Libyan dictator.

The Western alliance is "not targeting [Col. Gadhafi] specifically," said Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, after a meeting in Washington with British Defense Secretary Liam Fox.

"But we do consider command-and-control targets legitimate targets, wherever we find them," he added.

NATO jets hit Col. Gadhafi's command center on Monday, leaving about 45 people injured.

Mr. Fox said the coalition understands its commitment to protect the civilian population in Libya, as outlined in a U.N. resolution that authorized air raids against pro-Gadhafi forces.

"We understand our duty. And our resolve will not waiver, as long as that civilian population remains at risk from an aggressive and wicked regime, which has waged war on its own people," he added.

Earlier Tuesday, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said the coalition had no mandate to kill Col. Gadhafi.

"They said they didn't want to kill Gadhafi. Now some officials say, 'Yes, we are trying to kill Gaddafi,' " Mr. Putin said on a visit to Denmark. "Who permitted this? Was there any trial? Who took on the right to execute this man, no matter who he is."

Libyans interviewed Tuesday told The Washington Times that they would support plans to assassinate Col. Gadhafi, who has ruled the North African nation for more than 41 years and is now locked in a bloody civil war against anti-government rebels.

A resident of Tripoli who declined to give his name citing security concerns said many people in the Libyan capital "are wishing and hoping that [NATO is] targeting Gadhafi."

A similar sentiment prevails in Libya's Western Mountains region, which has been the scene of heavy fighting in recent days.

"If NATO chooses to attack him, why not? He is after all targeting civilians with Grad rockets," said Mazigh, a resident of a Western Mountains town who only gave his first name.

Col. Gadhafi and his family are thought to be staying at Bab al-Aziziya, a heavily fortified military barracks in Tripoli.

The regime's forces on Tuesday shelled the port city of Misrata, a key lifeline in the rebel-held city in western Libya.

Rebels said pro-Gadhafi forces fired at least nine rockets and caused extensive damage.

Saddoun el-Misrati, a rebel spokesman who was at the port at the time of the shelling, described it as "the closest thing I have seen to Pearl Harbor."

Rebels say they control Misrata, including the main road Tripoli Street, and that pro-Gadhafi snipers have been cleared from rooftops.

The Libyan government denies it has been indiscriminately shelling civilian areas.

In the Western Mountains area, more than 30,000 Libyan civilians have fled into Tunisia over the past three weeks, according to the U.N. refugee agency.

Nearly 560,000 Libyans have escaped into neighboring countries, according to the U.S. Agency for International Development.

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Washington Post
April 27, 2011
Pg. 8

Gaddafi's Forces Hit Rebel-Held City With Renewed Might

'Murderous' shelling rains on Misurata, disrupting flow of humanitarian aid

By Simon Denyer and Leila Fadel

TRIPOLI, Libya — The Libyan government renewed its artillery and rocket attack on the port of Misurata on Tuesday in its latest apparent attempt to cut the lifeline of the besieged rebel-held western city.

The fresh assault on the Mediterranean port killed a migrant worker from Niger and wounded 11 people, said Khaled Abu Falgha, a doctor at the Hikma hospital there. It also disrupted humanitarian aid work and forced a Red Cross boat that had docked in the city to turn around, according to Human Rights Watch.

A rebel spokesman called the afternoon shelling by Gaddafi’s forces “murderous.”

“He’ll keep hitting the port,” Mohamed Ali said via Skype on Tuesday. “He wants to disrupt the flow of humanitarian aid and make Misurata’s port as unsafe as possible.”

Ali, who said he was at the port as the shells rained down, said the worker from Niger was killed while lining up to board an International Organization for Migration boat that had been expected to dock. By nightfall, the boat still had not docked, he said. The organization was making its fifth trip to evacuate stranded migrants from Misurata.

Another rebel spokesman, Bashir, told the Reuters news service that Gaddafi’s forces were using Grad missiles — Russian-made munitions fired in multiple rounds from launchers on the back of trucks — to attack the port. Three Libyans were also killed by government shelling in an eastern suburb, Falgha said, making it a quieter day in the city than many of late. At least 57 people died in shelling and fighting over the weekend.

More than 2,000 migrant workers are camped out in tents near the docks waiting for an escape from the war-torn city, 131 miles east of Tripoli. Many have been sleeping there for weeks, sometimes under fire.

Gaddafi’s renewed attempt to strangle Misurata comes after his military was forced out of the city center in fierce fighting over the past few days. Loyalist troops have responded to the setback by intensifying their rocket and mortar attacks on the city, including on residential areas, from their bases to the south and east.

In an irony, Gaddafi’s government complained this week that NATO was trying to strangle it by blockading the port of Tripoli and preventing humanitarian supplies from entering, in violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions.

A NATO spokesman said Tuesday that deliveries of food, medicine and humanitarian relief were not being turned away. The bloc also denied that a rocket attack on Gaddafi’s compound Monday was an attempt on his life.

“This is about command-and-control nodes, and not about individuals,” Lt. Gen. Charles Bouchard, the Canadian who commands allied operations for NATO, said in an Internet briefing in which he summed up the air campaign that began March 19.

The destroyed buildings included offices, a library Gaddafi was known to use and a meeting hall where he often receives visitors, including a recent mediation mission from the African Union. Libyan government spokesman Moussa Ibrahim said the strike was “worthy of the mafia, of gangs, but not of governments” and would not help protect civilians.

But Bouchard said the compound was essentially military and contained communications gear used to transmit orders to loyalist forces to attack civilians. The Obama administration also said Tuesday that NATO’s objective in Libya was not to kill Gaddafi but to protect civilians.

“The military mission in Libya is not regime change,” Jake Sullivan, a senior State Department official, told reporters, confirming that military officials had targeted command-and-control facilities.

“The degradation of those command-and-control sites is a part of the operation and part of the reason the opposition has had some success,” he said. The White House, meanwhile, has approved an authorization to send $25 million in nonlethal aid to Libyan opposition groups.

Also in Washington, British Defense Minister Liam Fox and Gen. David Richards, the British chief of defense staff, met with their U.S. counterparts to discuss ways to break the stalemate between Gaddafi’s forces and the rebels.

In a brief statement afterward, Fox said that NATO has “seen significant progress made in the last 72 hours” in Libya, citing the withdrawal by government forces from Misurata, as well as reports of the capture of “underage soldiers and foreign mercenaries.”

“This underlines the regime’s inability to rely on its own security forces,” Fox said.

Fox said that U.S. and British defense officials had “good discussions on how to better exploit emerging opportunities on the ground” but did not elaborate.

The airstrike on Gaddafi’s compound Monday and a separate strike on a Libyan TV broadcasting center underscored the partial shift in NATO’s focus to government installations in Tripoli instead of purely military targets in the field.

Overall, however, the number of NATO airstrikes in Libya has remained stable over the past two weeks. NATO reported flying 56 strike sorties Monday — an average number. Since April 17, the daily number of strike sorties has fluctuated between 50 and 62, according to figures released by NATO.

Libyan Foreign Minister Abdul Ati al-Obeidi called on the African Union to hold an emergency summit meeting to discuss how to deal with the NATO airstrikes, accusing the West of aiming “to punish Africa through Libya” and to “steal its wealth and colonize it again.”

His position drew some support from Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, whose government abstained from voting on U.N. resolutions against Libya but who sharply criticized Monday’s attack in Tripoli and said it had gone beyond the mandate granted by the United Nations.

“They said they didn’t want to kill Gaddafi. Now some officials say, ‘Yes, we are trying to kill Gaddafi,’ ” Putin said during a visit to Denmark, Reuters reported. “Who permitted this? Was there any trial? Who took on the right to execute this man?”

Unlike U.N. peacekeeping missions, whose mandate has to be extended every 12 months, the resolution imposing a no-fly zone is open-ended, so Russia’s ability to block military action is limited. But Moscow could prevent further action by the Security Council against Libya or veto attempts to get tough resolutions passed against countries such as Yemen or Syria.

The alliance against Gaddafi was buoyed this week by Italy’s decision to allow its warplanes to conduct strikes against Libyan government forces, while the Arab League showed no sign of wavering Tuesday, condemning the use of force against pro-democracy demonstrators in several Arab countries and saying the protesters “deserve support, not bullets.”

In a rare statement on the unrest in the Middle East, the 22-member league did not single out any Arab country but said the uprisings that toppled autocratic rulers in Tunisia and Egypt and the protests in Syria, Libya and Yemen “point to a new Arab era . . . led by youths seeking a better present and a brighter future.”

The league said foreign ministers from its member nations would meet in Cairo next month to discuss the “serious situation.” Egypt’s official Middle East News Agency said the meeting would be held May 8.

Fadel reported from Benghazi, Libya. Correspondent Edward Cody in Paris and staff writers Craig Whitlock and Mary Beth Sheridan in Washington contributed to this report.

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PBS
April 26, 2011

British Defense Secretary: Gadhafi Must Go

 

PBS Newshour, 7:00 PM

MARGARET WARNER: I spoke today with Secretary Fox at the NewsHour late this afternoon after his Pentagon meetings.

Secretary Fox, welcome. Thanks for coming in.

LIAM FOX [British Defense Secretary]: Thank you.

WARNER: You said today that Gadhafi is on the back foot. What is your evidence of that? What are you looking at?

FOX: Well, we've seen in recent days opposition forces making ground in Misurata, where the regime had been shelling the civilian population for some time. It's now clear that the opposition control a large part of -- if not all of -- the city. Clearly, that's a setback. We've also been able to hit a number of his ammunition dumps, fuel supplies. So the logistics are getting more difficult. We've been able to interdict petroleum products coming in by sea. That is also having an effect. So bit by bit, we're tightening the noose around the regime's neck.

WARNER: But the Gadhafi's forces are attacking the port of Misurata, trying to go after its supply lines. How concerned are you about that?

FOX: Well, we've been able to push them back in recent days. Obviously, that's been made easier by the fact that the United States has made the Predator unmanned aerial vehicles available to us. That's given us a shorter gap between the identification of targets and striking the targets, rather than the traditional airpower that we've been using. So that's been an advance for us, and obviously the opposition forces themselves have gained a greater capability in recent days.

WARNER: So you aren't -- the talk in Washington in the last week or so has been about potential stalemate. Adm. Mullen, the Joint Chiefs chairman, said that last week. You don't see that?

FOX: I don't see that in the last few days. You know, there's been a bit of momentum there. We've seen money coming in from Kuwait -- $150 million or so for the opposition forces. We've seen greater involvement by the Qataris, by the United Arab Emirates. So there is some political momentum there that wasn't there before. But, you know, in all of these campaigns, we get periods of greater and lesser momentum.

WARNER: So how can you step up the military pressure? Did anything new come out of this lengthy meeting you had with Secretary Gates and Adm. Mullen today?

FOX: Well, this morning was a discussion about a wide range of issues, not just Libya: obviously, Afghanistan, which remains our main effort, and the situation in Egypt; what is happening in Syria; what's happening in Bahrain; what's happening in the rest of the Gulf; what is happening in Yemen. Secretary Gates said to me a few weeks ago, it's like watching the seven plagues of Egypt unfolding. (Laughter.)

And as you said, we haven't got to the locusts yet, but we've been seeing an unusually large number of unstable situations in the region, all of which we're having to respond to.

WARNER: But is there anything new that you came up with in - on Libya to increase the pressure still further?

FOX: Well, it's not so much new as a continuation of the pressure we've been bringing on Gadhafi. Up until relatively recently - really, until the last few days - this, if you look at it from Gadhafi's point of view, has been something happening at arm's length: something happening in Misurata, something happening in Ajdabiya or out towards Benghazi.

What we've seen in recent days -- attacks on Tripoli to increase the psychological pressure, apart from anything else, on Gadhafi, to make him realize that this is something that he is involved in. And I think that's very important in terms of the pressure we can bring on the regime itself.

WARNER: So that's what the attack on his compound Sunday night and on state TV were about.

FOX: Well, what the primary aim was was to deal with the command-and-control mechanisms. Under the U.N. resolution, we've made it very clear that part of protecting the civilians is to degrade command-and-control mechanisms, wherever they are in Libya. And of course, when people talk about compounds, I think they have an idea that this is some little homely patch that he has. In fact, these are often dual-use areas that are used for accommodation but also used for command-and-control for the armed forces that are killing and terrorizing the population.

WARNER: Now the British are also sending in special forces as trainers. Are they there yet? And what are they actually going to be doing with the rebel forces?

FOX: Well, they're not trainers. They're advisers. And they're there to advise in very limited circumstances on organizational capability, on communications and on logistics -- basically, how the opposition forces can get better use out of what they've already got, rather than training them. And the reason for that is that we feel that that keeps us safely within the confines of U.N. Resolution 1973.

WARNER: So the NATO advisers aren't doing anything to assist them in training themselves on basic discipline, basic fighting tactics and strategy - the things that at least journalists who've been in on the ground with them say they really lack?

FOX: We're not there to take a side of one group in the population against the regime. Our job is to take the side of the civilians and to ensure that they are protected. And that is what the U.N. resolutions have given the international community a mandate to do. And it's very important that we stay within that because in doing so, we maintain the wider coalition, not just NATO but the Arab countries who are such an important part, militarily and politically.

WARNER: You said earlier in our conversation that the U.S. drones that have been added have helped a lot. Do you need the U.S. to do more militarily, to get back in on the basic operation in terms of bombing strikes?

FOX: Well, we need them to do more of the same. For example, with the drones that have been made available in recent days, that has been a big help to the NATO operation. Also, the U.S. air-to-air refuelers has been a big help. I think there's been unfair criticism of the administration in this whole operation. The U.S. made it very clear to us that in the early part, they would be doing a lot of the heavy lifting, a lot of the bombardment. But the U.S. had still its involvement in Iraq; clearly, it's own problems and concerns in the Gulf, Afghanistan. So we entirely understood the position of the U.S. The fact that we're getting this additional help on the drones is extremely welcome.

WARNER: The foreign secretary, William Hague, told your Cabinet yesterday to prepare for the long haul. Now, you are the defense secretary. What kind of time frame are you planning for? I mean, six weeks? Six months? A year or more?

FOX: Well, before I answer that question, I have to take into account that any message we sent on time scale is a message we're also sending to the Libyan regime. And what we need to understand is that we have a mandate to protect the civilian population, and as long as the regime is killing its own population, the international community will protect them.

The answer to the question really lies in the hands of one man, and that's Col. Gadhafi. He can end all this tomorrow by recognizing he is isolated in his country, he is unloved by his people, he's a liability to them, he has no friends in the international community, he is ostracized by the United Nations. The best thing is to call it a day and go.

WARNER: All right, Secretary Fox, thank you very much.

FOX: Thank you.

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Bloomberg.com
April 26, 2011

Berlusconi Joins In Airstrikes On Qaddafi To Help Break Impasse Over Libya

By Patrick Donahue and Lorenzo Totaro, Bloomberg News

Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said Italian air-force jets will carry out strikes over Libya as NATO seeks to break an impasse in the nine-week struggle to oust Muammar Qaddafi's regime.

Italian planes will target Libyan military installations, Berlusconi told reporters in Rome today after meeting with French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Italy, once Libya’s colonial ruler, announced yesterday it will change course and join in action against pro-regime forces that threaten civilians.

“The decision by our government hasn’t been an easy one,” Berlusconi said, describing pressure from President Barack Obama, U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron and Sarkozy to join the mission to “speed up a resolution of the Libyan problem.” Italy, which already hosts the mission’s command, will fly sorties “against precise military targets in order to exclude in any way the possibility of civilian victims.”

Qaddafi’s regime has weathered an uprising for more than two months, holding onto the capital Tripoli as rebels control much of the oil-rich east. The government denounced a strike on a Qaddafi compound in Tripoli as an assassination attempt.

“We are not targeting him specifically,” U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said today at the Pentagon, following talks with U.K. Defense Secretary Liam Fox. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is hitting Libyan government command and control centers that are “legitimate targets” in efforts to stop attacks on civilians in Misrata and elsewhere, he said.

‘Not About Individuals’

“This is not about individuals. This is not about regime change. This is about bringing an end to the violence,” Charles Bouchard, the Canadian air-force general commanding the Libya operation, told reporters via videolink from his command center in the southern Italian city of Naples.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin repeated his criticism of the NATO effort in Libya, saying the air campaign is destroying the nation’s infrastructure and going beyond the United Nations mandate to protect civilians.

“Libya’s oil reserves, by the way, are the biggest in Africa and its gas reserves are ranked fourth-biggest in Africa,” Putin told reporters in Copenhagen. “This begs the question of whether they are the main object of interest for those operating there today.”

Oil Fluctuates

The conflict in Libya has pushed crude prices to the highest since September 2008, and they’ve gained more than 30 percent since mid-February. Futures fluctuated today, with oil for June delivery falling 7 cents to settle at $112.21 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

British Foreign Secretary William Hague rejected assertions by lawmakers that a stalemate had emerged, citing signs of gains in the besieged port city of Misrata, even as the standoff between Qaddafi loyalists and rebels between Brega and Ajdabiya in western Libya has become a “fairly static situation.”

“It has not settled into what one would call a long-term stalemate,” Hague told the House of Commons in London today. He said the overall situation remained “very fluid.”

Libyan state television said NATO jets hit civilian and military sites in three districts in the Libyan capital as well as a fiber-optic cable connecting the Qaddafi stronghold of Sirte with the oil ports of Ras Lanuf and Brega to the east, the BBC reported.

Coalition jets flew 56 “strike” missions to identify and engage possible targets yesterday, NATO said. Targets included tanks, rocket launchers and ammunition depots near Tripoli, Misrata and Sirte.

Moussa Ibrahim, a spokesman for the Libyan government, said that Qaddafi remains “healthy and well” after the strike on his compound. Libyan television later showed Qaddafi receiving local leaders while sitting in a tent, with a television displaying the date.

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New York Times
April 27, 2011
Pg. 1

From A Qaddafi Daughter, A Glimpse Inside The Bunker

By David D. Kirkpatrick

TRIPOLI, Libya — Aisha el-Qaddafi, the daughter of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya, likes to tell her three young children bedtime stories about the afterlife. Now, she says, they are especially appropriate.

“To make them ready,” she said, “because in a time of war you never know when a rocket or a bomb might hit you, and that will be the end.”

In a rare interview at her charitable foundation here, Ms. Qaddafi, 36, a Libyan-trained lawyer who once worked on Saddam Hussein's legal defense team, offered a glimpse into the fatalistic mind-set of the increasingly isolated family at the core of the battle for Libya, the bloodiest arena in the democratic uprising that is sweeping the region.

She dismissed the rebels as “terrorists” but suggested that some former Qaddafi officials who are now in the opposition’s governing council still “keep in touch with us.” She pleaded for dialogue and talked about democratic reforms. But she dismissed the rebels as unfit for such talks because of their use of violence, hurled personal barbs at President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and, at one point, appeared to disparage the basic idea of electoral democracy.

After arranging the interview last week, Ms. Qaddafi spoke for more than an hour late Sunday afternoon, just hours before NATO escalated its airstrikes with an attack that disrupted state television and another on the Libyan leader’s compound in Tripoli. Ms. Qaddafi, one of the many unofficial and sometimes rivalrous Qaddafi family power brokers who dominate Libya’s economic and political life, said the crisis had pulled the family together “like one hand.”

Ms. Qaddafi said that she and her seven brothers “have a dialogue between us and exchange points of view” before anyone takes a major step in their common defense. She acknowledged that she had seen news reports that her siblings had proposed easing their father from power in a transition under the direction of her brother Seif al-Islam, but she declined to comment on the details.

She also pointedly declined to answer when asked if Abdel Fattah Younes, a top rebel military official who was a longtime interior minister, was among the leaders who had kept in touch with the Qaddafi family.

“They say to us that they have their own families, daughters, sons, spouses, and they fear for them, and that is why they have taken those positions,” she said of those rebel leaders. “There are many members of the council who have worked with my father for 42 years and been loyal to him. Do you think they would just go like that?”

Instead of the angry defiance and vows of retribution issued by her father and her brother Seif, Ms. Qaddafi focused on how the West would rue the chaos she predicted would engulf a post-Qaddafi Libya. When pressed repeatedly on how her family could stay in power, she said more than once, “We have a great hope in God.”

Ms. Qaddafi has appeared in public twice since the bombings began, before cheering crowds at the colonel’s compound, but she seldom speaks in public. During the interview, she wore close-fitting jeans, Gucci shoes and a pale scarf that did not cover her long blond hair. At times, she laughed at her fate, recalling how the United Nations, after “begging” her to be an envoy for peace in the past, has now referred her to the International Criminal Court. Her staff presented an illustrated biography entitled “Princess of Peace.”

She said her experience as a volunteer on Saddam Hussein’s defense team offered relevant parallels.

“The opposition in Iraq told the West that when you come to Iraq they will greet you with roses,” she said. “Almost 10 years later they are receiving the Americans with bullets, and, believe me, the situation in Libya will be much worse.”

She taunted both President Obama and Mrs. Clinton, saying that Mr. Obama had “achieved nothing so far” and laughing as she posed a question to Mrs. Clinton: “Why didn’t you leave the White House when you found out about the cheating of your husband?”

Even as she deprecated the American leaders, she repeatedly called for talks. “The world should come together at a round table,” she said, “under the auspices of international organizations.”

At the same time, she ruled out any dialogue with the Libyan rebels who now control the eastern half of the country; its commercial center, Misurata; and the western mountain towns of Zintan and Nalut, dismissing them as “terrorists” who “are just fighting for the sake of fighting.”

Under her brother Seif’s unofficial leadership, she said, the Libyan government had been on the verge of unveiling a constitution as a step toward democratic reform when “this tragedy happened and spoiled things.”

At the same time, she also derided, and possibly misunderstood, the basic ideas of checks and balances and public accountability in an electoral democracy. “Let me say something about the Western elections that they say are a democratic system of ruling,” she volunteered, referring to handwritten notes she had prepared for the interview. In an election where one candidate won with 50 percent of the vote and another lost with 48 percent, she asked, “Do you call this democracy? Just this one vote? What happened to the 48 percent who said ‘no’?”

She complained of the “betrayal” of Arabs whose causes her father had supported and the Western allies to whom he had turned over his weapons of mass destruction. “Is this the reward that we get?” she asked. “This would lead every country that has weapons of mass destruction to keep them or make more so they will not meet the same fate as Libya.”

Without Colonel Qaddafi, she predicted, illegal immigrants from Africa would pour into Europe, Islamic radicals would establish a base on the Mediterranean’s shores, and Libyan tribes would turn their guns on one another.

Citing unconfirmed Libyan intelligence reports, she asserted that the weapons-starved rebels had actually sold arms to the Islamist groups Hamas and Hezbollah. “When my father was there, see how safe Europe was and how safe Libya was?” she asked.

Ms. Qaddafi initially dismissed reports of the handful of nights two months ago when protesters took over the streets of Tripoli and almost every other big city, pulling down Qaddafi posters and burning police stations. Then, told that journalists had seen the evidence, she argued the destruction proved they were not civilian protesters but “saboteurs.”

She also appeared to dismiss witnesses’ accounts of Colonel Qaddafi’s forces shooting unarmed demonstrators. “I am not sure that happened,” she said. “But let’s say it did: it was limited in scope.”

As for her father’s state of mind, she said with a laugh that he was not worried at all. “He is as strong as the world knows him,” she said. “He is quite sure that the Libyan people are loyal to him.”

Her family still hoped, she said, to go back to its previous position, what she called “a return to normal.” But, she added, “of course we can expedite that if NATO will stop bombing us.”

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Washington Post
April 27, 2011
Pg. 1

National Security Shakeup Expected

Officials say Obama will announce changes in his team this week

By Karen DeYoung

President Obama is expected to announce long-anticipated changes in his national security team this week, including a new ambassador to Afghanistan, according to administration officials familiar with internal deliberations.

The officials, who provided information on the condition of anonymity, said as many as four high-level appointments could be announced as soon as Thursday, a changing of the guard that would probably involve the naming of a replacement for Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates.

A White House spokesman declined to comment on what he said were “personnel” matters. Senior congressional aides said the administration has not informed national-security-related committees of any firm decisions.

But the officials said that Ryan C. Crocker, a five-time ambassador who retired in 2009 after wartime service in Iraq, is likely to be named to take over the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, reuniting him with Gen. David H. Petraeus, who headed U.S. forces in Iraq during Crocker’s tenure there and now commands the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan. Crocker, who has resisted several administration attempts to persuade him to return to service, met privately with Obama early this month, the officials said.

A Petraeus-Crocker reunion would be brief, however, with Petraeus due to end his Afghan tour within the next several months.

Gates’s departure this year has been widely discussed, including by the defense secretary himself. The question facing the White House has been whether to announce a series of related changes all at once or space them out over a period of months.

According to Pentagon sources and others, the leading candidate to replace Gates is still CIA Director Leon Panetta. As head of the Office of Management and Budget in the Clinton administration, Panetta helped negotiate the 1993 budget bill, and he is seen as likely to continue the defense procurement and budget reforms Gates has begun.

Petraeus, who in Afghanistan has continued the close collaboration with the CIA that he began in Iraq, emerged last month as a contender for the CIA director’s job and indicated that he was interested. Marine Lt. Gen. John R. Allen, deputy of the U.S. Central Command, is likely to succeed Petraeus as commander of U.S., NATO and coalition forces in Afghanistan, officials said.

This year’s turnover will also include Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, whose second two-year term ends in September. But officials said that position is unlikely to be included in this week’s announcements.

The changes come at a crucial moment for Obama’s foreign policy: amid turmoil in North Africa and the Middle East, a U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq by the end of the year and what the administration has described as a make-or-break summer in Afghanistan.

Crocker and Petraeus were widely hailed as a “dream team” that turned around the Iraq war beginning in 2007, when President George W. Bush ordered a “surge” in U.S. forces as that country spiraled into sectarian civil strife. Both men have many supporters in Washington.

But the Obama administration — which kept Gates, a Bush appointee, at the Pentagon even as it criticized Bush’s handling of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — has been reluctant to appear to be further duplicating the Bush team.

While long lists have circulated with possible replacements for Gates and Mullen, finding a new ambassador for Afghanistan has been one of the administration’s most difficult tasks. Retired Lt. Gen. Karl W. Eikenberry, the current ambassador, is unpopular with the State Department and has frequently been at odds with the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

Crocker’s name has been floated for virtually every senior diplomatic position dealing with the Arab world and South Asia. His likely appointment as ambassador to Afghanistan was reported Tuesday by the Associated Press.

Before serving in Iraq, he was U.S. ambassador to Pakistan from 2004 to 2007 and was a senior State Department official on Middle East issues during Bush’s first term. In 2002, he was sent to Afghanistan to reopen the American Embassy in Kabul after the Taliban was ousted.

Crocker also served as ambassador to Syria from 1998 to 2001, to Kuwait from 1994 to 1997 and to Lebanon from 1990 to 1993. Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award, in 2009 when he retired to become dean of the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University — a position once held by Gates.

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Wall Street Journal
April 27, 2011
Pg. 4

Government To Pull Plug On 137 Data Centers

By Damian Paletta

The Obama administration will unveil plans Wednesday to shut 137 of the 2,094 federal data centers by the end of the year, a move that officials see as a breakthrough in their effort to make the government's information-technology infrastructure more efficient and less costly.

The closures would affect 16 federal agencies, including the Pentagon and the State Department, in nearly every corner of the U.S., from Boston to Anchorage, Alaska, according to the White House plan.

Administration officials said that they didn't have an estimate of how many government and contractor jobs might be cut as a result.

The number of federal data centers has grown rapidly in recent decades, up from just 432 in 1998. But White House officials said many of the centers ran over budget and were underutilized.

The Obama administration began planning to pare back data centers in February 2009, soon after President Barack Obama took office. The process proved complicated because it took months for officials to determine how many even existed.

The plan aims to close a total of 800 centers by 2015, which officials project would save $3 billion annually. The proliferation of facilities was the target of a Government Accountability Office report in March, which described them as a prime example of duplication and overlap in federal bureaucracy.

"Projects run over budget, they fall behind schedule, and they fail to deliver their promised functionality," said Jeffrey Zients, the White House's chief performance officer. "That's clearly unacceptable."

Data centers facilitate computer processing; they can be used for data storage, networking or housing servers. White House officials believe the number of facilities, spread out across many different agencies, is inefficient.

The government spends roughly $450 million on electricity for the centers, and White House officials estimate that 27% of a typical data center is utilized, far lower than averages for private-sector counterparts.

Consolidating data centers is part of the White House's broader effort to reduce the growth of government and spending, something critics have said the administration hasn't moved quickly enough to address. The government spends roughly $80 billion a year on information technology, just a fraction of overall federal spending, but officials believe roughly $24 billion of that amount is spent on data centers and their operations.

Many White House proposals to reduce the deficit, such as an overhaul of the tax code or eliminating certain Pentagon projects, require congressional approval. But the executive branch has more direct influence in the operations of federal agencies, making it easier to carry out the data-center consolidation. Still, such a move could face political resistance from lawmakers seeking to protect jobs at data centers in their districts.

"We do expect, obviously, in the coming months and years to make some of those really tough decisions where we would have to work really close with Congress to shut down data centers that frankly don't make sense," said Vivek Kundra, the government's chief information officer.

The administration has already shut 39 of them, with 98 more to be closed by year's end.

Before the reductions began, the Pentagon had 772 data centers, far more than any other agency, according to the government. Of the total closures, 57 will be within the Defense Department, 18 in the Department of the Interior and 14 in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

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New York Times
April 27, 2011
Pg. 11

Government In Yemen Agrees To Talk Transition

By Laura Kasinof

Yemen's government on Tuesday formally agreed to a plan that would pave the way for a peaceful transition of power, saying that a delegation from the governing party planned to travel to Saudi Arabia early next week to seal the deal.

The governing party, the General People’s Congress, known as the G.P.C., gave its official consent even though a coalition of opposition political leaders balked on Monday over one of the proposal’s conditions, that protests end immediately.

“The G.P.C. approved,” said Mohamed Al-Tayeb, a prominent member of the governing party. “Both sides will go on Monday to Riyadh.”

Mr. Tayeb said the parties had received an invitation from the six-nation Persian Gulf bloc that had formulated and promoted the proposal for the transition of power from President Ali Abdullah Saleh.

“So far, so good,” Mr. Tayeb said, adding that the governing party and the opposition had each sent letters to the regional bloc, called the Gulf Cooperation Council, agreeing to the initiative.

But a leading member of Yemen’s opposition coalition said that the opposition had given only oral approval to the proposal and that it would not send a delegation to Riyadh, the Saudi capital, until Mr. Saleh formally signed the plan for the transition. Mr. Saleh will not go to Riyadh.

“First, the president, he should officially sign the agreement,” the opposition leader, Mohammed Abdulmalik al-Mutawakil, said. “Because he is not going to Saudi Arabia, therefore he has to sign it before we leave.”

The back and forth between the two sides has been a trademark of the political impasse over the past few months in Yemen, as tens of thousands of protesters in cities throughout the country have called for Mr. Saleh’s ouster.

Under the proposal, once both sides sign the agreement, a national unity government will be formed and the opposition will select a prime minister, who will govern with Mr. Saleh for 30 days, at which point the president will step down.

In another development on Tuesday, a protester was shot to death in the central city of Taiz, according to a local doctor. Taiz has endured significant violence between security forces and protesters over the past month. A YouTube video posted online Tuesday from Taiz showed a protester being hit in the head by live gunfire from what appeared to be a military vehicle.

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Washington Post
April 27, 2011
Pg. 8

Crackdown In Syria Draws Global Condemnation

By Liz Sly and Edward Cody

BEIRUT — Syrian troops sustained their bloody crackdown against anti-government protesters in the southern town of Daraa for a second day Tuesday, drawing harsh condemnations but no specific plans for action against Damascus from U.S. and European leaders.

Reports from Daraa were sketchy because telephone lines were cut, the town was surrounded and the nearby border with Jordan was closed, but residents contacted by human rights groups indicated that government opponents were holding out in a mosque in the center of the town against an onslaught by government soldiers using tanks and armored personnel carriers.

According to Damascus-based human rights researcher Wissam Tarif, protesters were gathered in the al-Omari mosque in the heart of the old city and had turned it into a makeshift hospital for those wounded as government soldiers fired on them with automatic weapons and artillery.

Elsewhere in town, the streets were said to be deserted as tanks fired shells and snipers took up positions on rooftops, shooting at anyone who moved. The Associated Press quoted a resident as saying that the bodies of those killed were left unattended in the streets because the gunfire was so intense, citizens were unable to go outside to retrieve them. Human rights groups said in statements posted on the Internet that at least 35 people had died in two days of violence.

The deployment of the army Monday in the town that had become the epicenter of the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad’s government seemed to leave little doubt that Syrian authorities have resolved to confront the escalating protest movement with full-scale repression. Reports from the town said the unit involved was a crack brigade of the army’s special forces led by the president’s younger brother Maher.

With video footage showing tanks moving through the streets and plumes of smoke caused by artillery fire, the crackdown in the rural town is rapidly approaching Libyan proportions, with one crucial difference: The opposition movement in Syria is not armed.

At least 401 people have been killed in the six-week-old uprising, with an additional two dozen or so deaths awaiting confirmation from families, said Tarif, whose human rights group, Insan, has been monitoring the violence. Independent confirmation of the events was impossible because the Syrian government refuses to admit foreign journalists.

Thousands of people have been arrested since the protests began, Tarif said, and there were reports Tuesday of widespread detentions and a heavy troop presence in the Damascus suburbs of Douma and Moadamiya, and in the coastal town of Jableh.

‘Unacceptable’ situation

The escalating violence stirred the fiercest criticism of Damascus yet from world leaders, though there was no indication that the international community was ready to take formal action to condemn or sanction a regime whose collapse many fear could trigger widespread regional instability.

“The situation has become unacceptable,” French President Nicolas Sarkozy told a joint news conference in Rome with the Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi. “You don’t send tanks, the army, against demonstrators. You don’t fire on them.”

Berlusconi added: “Together we send a strong call to Damascus authorities to stop the violent repression of what are peaceful demonstrations, and we ask all sides to act with moderation.”

In Washington, the State Department’s head of policy planning, Jake Sullivan, also condemned the crackdown, telling reporters that Assad’s actions were “completely inconsistent with those of a responsible leader.”

But he stopped short of saying that Assad had lost the legitimacy to lead, a comment used to describe Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi after he cracked down on protesters, and Sullivan said U.S. sanctions were an option only “under consideration.” The U.S. Embassy in Damascus is preparing to evacuate nonessential personnel, but the ambassador, Robert Ford, will remain, he said.

British Defense Secretary Liam Fox, in Washington to meet with his U.S. counterpart, Robert M. Gates, bluntly told reporters that there are limits to what the world can do to influence the outcome of domestic rebellions.

“We can’t do everything all the time, and we have to recognize that there are practical limitations to what our countries can do,” he said after meeting with Gates.

Gates also indicated that the United States has no immediate plans to toughen its stance. “Our response to each country will have to be tailored to that country and to the circumstances peculiar to that country,” he said.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon issued a short statement after a closed-door meeting of the Security Council, calling on Syrian authorities “to protect civilians.” But with China and Russia already expressing misgivings about the U.N.-mandated air campaign in Libya and unwilling to take further action against Middle Eastern leaders facing domestic opposition, imminent action by the United Nations also seemed unlikely.

Syria’s U.N. ambassador, Bashar Ja’afari, defended his government’s conduct, saying that Assad has instructed Syrian forces not to fire on civilians and that the government is committed to allowing peaceful demonstrations. He accused armed groups, including al-Qaeda, of infiltrating the demonstrations and opening fire on Syrian security forces, killing dozens of them.

Ja’afari rejected U.N. calls for an outside inquiry into the killings, saying the government has established its own investigation committee. “We don’t need help from anybody,” he said.

‘People are not afraid’

Syrian democracy activists said they were anxiously hoping for a more robust international response, by way of encouraging ordinary Syrians to sustain their opposition in the face of the spiraling violence.

Activists said the bloodshed would not deter further demonstrations and predicted that the crackdown would energize the protest movement.

“People are not afraid anymore of anything,” said Razan Zeitouneh, a human rights lawyer in Damascus. “They are just preparing for Friday,” the day on which protesters typically rally after noon prayers, “and we know we must pay a price for our freedom.”

But there have still been no major demonstrations in the capital, Damascus, or in Syria’s second-largest city, Aleppo, and some activists fretted that the intensity of the crackdown may halt the momentum that had seemed to be building, by discouraging ordinary citizens from joining the protest movement.

The discrepancy between the international response to the violence in Syria and that in Libya, where NATO warplanes are waging daily bombing raids, is increasingly drawing criticism in Europe and may intensify pressure on governments to take action.

“We are very tough vis-a-vis Gaddafi, and we say nothing vis-a-vis Syria,” said Jean-Christophe Cambadelis, a member of the French Parliament from the opposition Socialist Party. “It is incomprehensible.”

Sullivan, the State Department official, denied that there is any inconsistency in the U.S. positions on Libya and Syria. “We have to take each of the countries on its own terms,” he said.

Staff writers Mary Beth Sheridan and Craig Whitlock in Washington and Colum Lynch at the United Nations contributed to this report.

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Los Angeles Times
April 27, 2011
Pg. 1

Syria's Upheaval Reaches Far Past Its Borders

By Borzou Daragahi

BEIRUT -- Unrest roiling Syria, a linchpin state in the Middle East, is shaking the region in ways that even the revolution in Egypt did not, threatening to upend some long-standing alliances and encouraging neighbors to scramble for sudden advantage.

Already, the chaos in Syria is showing the potential to affect issues as broad as Iran's conflict with the U.S. and its allies, and as narrow as regional water rights.

Whether or not President Bashar Assad weathers the storm, the uprising is forcing countries in the region to formulate a response and may ultimately change the balance of power.

While few expected the revolt against Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak early this year to dramatically shift his country's generally pro-Western policies, Syria maintains a wider range of contacts with countries that include Iran and Russia. For decades, it has been a key player in volatile Lebanon.

It has its own unresolved dispute with Israel over the Golan Heights, but is also important to Israel and the United States because of its alliance with Iran and Hezbollah, a relationship that American and Israeli officials have encouraged Assad to break.

Iran has been chalking up diplomatic victories as pro-U.S. Arab regimes such as Mubarak's have either fallen or been challenged by democratic movements this year. But now that trouble has come to Syria, Tehran has suddenly cooled to the so-called Arab Spring.

Syria serves as a political and military conduit for Iranian-backed militant groups in the eastern Mediterranean, including Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories. A leadership change in Syria could deliver a cataclysmic blow to Iran's ability to project power in the region and threaten Israel.

"We are worried about the resistance against Israel," said Asad Zarei, a pro-government political analyst in Tehran. "If the changes in Syria happen in a way that the resistance is undermined, we are very worried."

Syrian authorities, facing their greatest security challenge in 30 years, continued an assault Tuesday on the southern city of Dara, where they had dispatched tanks and thousands of troops the day before. Troops who had cut off electricity and phone networks in an attempt to smother the protest movement reportedly opened fire on civilians.

Despite the intensity of the crackdown, protests were reported in several cities. Witnesses said about 50 doctors held a demonstration in Aleppo demanding the release of all medical personnel and students arrested in recent weeks.

Over the weekend, as Syrian security forces mowed down scores of peaceful protesters in cities around the country, Iranian state media and prayer leaders cried out against oppression and injustice in a different Arab nation, Bahrain, which like Iran has a Shiite Muslim majority.

"Iran cannot remain silent in the face of the atrocities in Bahrain," supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Saturday. Khamenei said nothing about the carnage in Syria. Iranian state television reported that the protests had left 280 injured, all of them Syrian police officers.

Commentators in Arab countries suspicious of Iran's regional ambitions gloated over Tehran's obvious discomfort in supporting uprisings against secular regimes across the Arab world except for the rebellion in Syria, which it insists is the result of a Zionist plot.

"Iran and Hezbollah destroyed whatever credibility Iran has left, when Iran let down the people of Syria by considering the movement of the people there a conspiracy," Hilmi Asmar wrote in the April 20 edition of Al Dustour, a Jordanian daily.

Some Iranians appear to be realizing that the government's official position is untenable, and are calling on Damascus to reform. "The Syrian regime should heed the demands of people in Syria and manage the current crisis in the country," former Iranian Foreign Minister Manoucher Mottaki was quoted as telling students Tuesday.

Countries close to Syria, such as Turkey, have responded by distancing themselves from the Assad clan. Syria has encouraged Turkey's increasingly assertive regional leadership in recent years because of its importance as a trade partner, its potential as a counterweight to the West and as an alternative to the relationship with Iran.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who was harshly critical of Mubarak, has long been a friend of Assad. He said at a news conference Tuesday that Turkey was displeased by events in Syria. "During my conversation with Assad, I have conveyed our concern to him," he said, according to the semiofficial Anatolia news agency. "We do not desire an antidemocratic approach in Syria."

Syrian opposition figures and Turkish democracy activists appeared together Tuesday on Al Jazeera television live from Istanbul, Turkey's largest city, condemning Assad's regime.

"Why is Bashar killing his brothers?" a Turkish activist said during the program. "Is it because they want to live a free and dignified life?"

Lebanon's political factions are carefully watching events unfold in their influential neighbor, which occupied Lebanon for decades. Syria strongly backs some Lebanese factions, including Hezbollah, while others consider themselves blood enemies of Damascus. Any change of political orientation in Syria could dramatically change Lebanon's balance of power.

"Everyone is trying to game out the Syrian crisis and try to take advantage of it," said Elias Muhanna, a researcher at Harvard University and the writer of a blog on Middle East politics.

Countries may also see an opportunity in Damascus' weakness. Neighboring Jordan recently decided to demand renegotiation of a water-sharing agreement from a river that traverses both nations.

"The amount of water in the Yarmuk River is constantly dropping; therefore, the agreement needs to be reconsidered," water authority official Saad Abu-Hammur told the Jordan Times on April 16, a day after widespread protests rocked Syria.

Analysts say Saudi Arabia may be considering using its diplomatic and political influence to offer Assad a way out of his predicament, but for a price: breaking his alliance with Iran, which is accused of stirring up trouble among Shiite Muslims in countries such as Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.

"Watch to see if Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Moallem suddenly takes a trip to Riyadh," said one analyst in Beirut, who spoke on condition of anonymity, referring to the Saudi capital.

The foreign minister of the pro-Saudi United Arab Emirates, Abdullah bin Zayed al Nahyan, met Sunday with Syrian officials in what one analyst described as a possible prelude to a rapprochement with Saudi Arabia.

On offer might be help slowing the flow of information feeding the revolt on the streets of Syria. The UAE hosts Saudi-owned Al Arabiya, one of two Arabic-language channels whose reporting has been inflaming passions across Syria, and owns the Thuraya satellite phone network used by pro-democracy activists to circumvent the secret police.

Other than possibly toning down news coverage, it remained unclear how much influence Saudi Arabia and its Arabian Peninsula allies, or anyone else, may have on events in Syria, which appear to have taken on a life of their own.

Muhanna said he didn't think the Saudis wanted to see a revolution in Syria, which could usher in a more radical regime.

"If they want to appear to be giving support to the Assad regime, it could help," he said. "It could quell more radical Islamic activists."

Special correspondents Ramin Mostaghim in Tehran and Meris Lutz and Roula Hajjar in Beirut contributed to this report.

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New York Times
April 27, 2011
Pg. 1

The Guantanamo Files

Detainees' Lawyers Can't Click On Leaked Documents

By Scott Shane

WASHINGTON — Anyone surfing the Internet this week is free to read leaked documents about the prisoners held by the American military at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to print them out or e-mail them to friends.

Except, that is, for the lawyers who represent the prisoners.

On Monday, hours after WikiLeaks, The New York Times and other news organizations began publishing the documents online, the Justice Department informed Guantánamo defense lawyers that the documents remained legally classified even after they were made public.

Because the lawyers have security clearances, they are obligated to treat the readily available files “in accordance with all relevant security precautions and safeguards” — handling them, for example, only in secure government facilities, said the notice from the department’s Court Security Office.

It is only the latest absurdist challenge posed by the flood of classified material obtained by WikiLeaks over the past year: field reports from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; State Department cables; and now the military’s risk assessments of 700 past or present Guantánamo prisoners.

Joseph Margulies, a Northwestern law professor who represents Abu Zubaydah, the detainee accused of being a terrorist facilitator who was waterboarded by the Central Intelligence Agency, said he could not comment on the newly disclosed assessment of his client, which is posted on The Times Web site.

“Everyone else can talk about it,” Mr. Margulies said. “I can’t talk about it.”

The ballooning category of public-but-classified documents has befuddled officials and led to a series of unusual pronouncements from government agencies and those who work with them.

In December, Columbia University warned international relations students that commenting on the documents disclosed by WikiLeaks online or linking to them might endanger their chances of getting a government job. The same month, the United States Agency for International Development told workers that viewing the documents on an unclassified computer at work or home could violate security rules that govern their employment. In February, an Air Force unit cautioned that employees and even their family members could be prosecuted under the Espionage Act for looking at the WikiLeaks documents at home.

Some of those warnings were quickly modified or withdrawn after attracting public ridicule. But the general principle that the leaked files remain classified remains in effect, with varying consequences.

Some foreigners applying for asylum in the United States have attached diplomatic cables printed from the Internet that describe repression in their native countries — requiring the Department of Homeland Security to store their applications in special safes and to apply cumbersome security rules.

State Department employees have confided that they read leaked cables on newspaper Web sites at home rather than risk trouble by viewing them at work. A Times reporter who appeared with a State Department official on a recent panel was advised not to show leaked cables as slides — the official was prohibited from looking at them.

But the prohibition for Guantánamo lawyers has serious implications, said Mr. Margulies, who wrote a book on Guantánamo and has represented five prisoners there. Decisions about who gets released have been influenced by politics and public pressure as much as by legal standards, he said.

“It’s important to be able to use these documents to shape and inform the discussion in the public square,” he said. If a leaked risk assessment contains clearly disproved accusations about a prisoner, a lawyer should be able to publicly refute it, he said.

On Tuesday, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. told reporters that he considered the dissemination of the classified Guantánamo documents, prepared under the Bush administration, to be “deplorable.” And he said the Obama administration would not make public, even with redactions, its own assessments of the 240 prisoners who were still at Guantánamo when it took office in 2009.

The new files, Mr. Holder said, “involve a whole variety of information gleaned from a wide assortment of sources, some of which are classified.”

“That being the case,” he continued, “I would be concerned about putting out information that was incomplete.”

Meanwhile, Dean Boyd, a Justice Department spokesman, said the department was trying to answer questions posed by lawyers for Guantánamo prisoners about the restrictions on using the leaked documents.

“We’re working through these issues right now,” Mr. Boyd said. “We simply want to ensure that any information released by WikiLeaks is handled properly.”

At the Congressional Research Service, the branch of the Library of Congress that advises senators and representatives, employees were advised in December that they could not quote the classified documents obtained by WikiLeaks in their reports. Some analysts with the service grumbled privately that members of Congress were asking about diplomatic cables, but they were not permitted to quote the cables in reply.

Janine D’Addario, a spokeswoman for the research service, said she could not say whether the restrictions had hampered its work because its research was supposed to be confidential. But Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, said there was no question that the researchers were handicapped as they reported on the wars, foreign relations or Guantánamo.

“It’s the definition of self-defeating,” Mr. Aftergood said. “It doesn’t serve the interest of Congress or the public.”

Mr. Aftergood said the problems had resulted from the unprecedented scale of the WikiLeaks disclosures, which the rules did not anticipate. Tens of thousands of military documents have been disclosed, and about 8,000, so far, of a cache of 250,000 diplomatic cables.

“The surge of classified documents into the public domain has tied the system up in knots,” he said. The rush to impose patently pointless restrictions “does demonstrate a disappointing lack of agility in the security system,” Mr. Aftergood said.

But Peter J. Spiro, who teaches international law at Temple University, said the government’s dilemma was real. The law is clear: only a document that is properly declassified loses its protections. And if the government ruled that classified documents disclosed to the public were automatically declassified, that would simply create a more powerful incentive for disgruntled government employees to leak.

“The trouble is, it makes the government look totally ham-handed,” Mr. Spiro said. “There are documents on the front page that everyone’s talking about, and it looks ridiculous to pretend they’re not there.”

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Miami Herald
April 27, 2011
Pg. 1

Many Afghans Held Without Terror Link

By Tom Lasseter, McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — Naqibullah was about 14 years old when U.S. troops detained him in December of 2002 at a suspected militant's compound in eastern Afghanistan.

The weapon he held in his hands hadn't been fired, the troops concluded, and he appeared to have been left behind with a group of cooks and errand boys when a local warlord, tipped to the raid, had fled.

A secret U.S. intelligence assessment written in 2003 concluded that Naqibullah had been kidnapped and forcibly conscripted by a warring tribe affiliated with the Taliban. The boy told interrogators that during his abduction he'd been held at gunpoint by 11 men and raped.

Nonetheless, Naqibullah was held at Guantanamo for a full year.

Afghans were the largest group by nationality held at the Guantánamo Bay detention center, an estimated 221 men and boys in all. Yet they were frequently found to have had nothing to do with international terrorism, according to more than 750 secret intelligence assessments that were written at Guantánamo between 2002 and 2009. The assessments were obtained by WikiLeaks and passed to McClatchy.

In at least 44 cases, U.S. military intelligence officials concluded that detainees had no connection to militant activity at all, a McClatchy examination of the assessments, which cover both former and current detainees, found. The number might be even higher, but couldn't be determined from the information in some assessments, which often were just one or two pages long for Afghans who were released in 2002 and 2003.

Still, it's clear from the U.S. military's own assessments that beyond a core of senior Taliban and extremist commanders, the Afghans were in large part a jumble of conscripts, insurgents, criminals and, at times, innocent bystanders. Just 45 were classified as presenting a high threat level, and only 28 were judged to be of high intelligence value. At least 203 have now been released.

U.S. Department of Defense officials have declined to comment on the contents of the WikiLeaks documents, saying they are stolen property and remain classified.

The records contain no single explanation for why so many Afghans with few links to terrorism came to be held at the prison camps in Cuba, a facility that the George W. Bush administration said was intended to house only the most serious of terrorist suspects.

Anecdotes from the documents suggest that many of the Afghan captives were picked up by mistake. Others were passed along to U.S. troops by Afghan warlords and local militias who gave false information about them in return for bounty payments or to set up a local rival.

There was also a desire by U.S. intelligence analysts, particularly in the scramble after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, to cast as wide a net as possible. They were looking to piece together everything from which dirt paths were used to cross between Afghanistan to Pakistan, to the relationship between the Taliban and al Qaeda.

Afghans became crucial for understanding the lay of the land — and for many it cost them years of their lives in confinement.

For at least three Afghan men, the reason listed for being at Guantánamo was a variation of "knowledge of routes between Afghanistan and Pakistan."

The assessments for at least four others listed as the reason for holding them at Guantánamo their knowledge of the Taliban conscription process — meaning they'd been forced to join the organization.

"I think many of them were used to get what I call associated intelligence — if they knew somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody," said Emile Nakhleh, the former director of the CIA's Political Islam Strategic Analysis Program who visited the prison to assess detainees there in 2002. "They were the living dots of Google Earth in Afghanistan; we were trying to connect the dots."

The documents, however, undermine Guantánamo's carefully cultivated image as a place where each detainee had been vetted before being sent halfway around the world on a journey for which they were blindfolded, deafened with soundproof headphones and kept in diapers.

Among those held, according to the assessments:

Haji Faiz Mohammed, a 70-year-old man with senile dementia from Afghanistan's Helmand Province who was detained by U.S. forces during a raid near a mosque where he'd been sleeping. A 2002 memorandum for the commander of U.S. Southern Command, barely more than a page long, said that "There is no reason on the record for detainee being transferred to Guantánamo Bay." Mohammed was shipped home later that year.

Sharbat, the only name by which he is identified in the records, was arrested by Afghan soldiers after a roadside bomb exploded. His Guantánamo interrogators determined he was an illiterate shepherd who probably was not connected to the explosion. Three interrogation teams at the U.S. detention center at Bagram Airfield also had recommended that he be released. Instead, Sharbat was sent to Guantánamo in November 2003 and held there until February 2006.

Abdul Salaam's file summarized his case by saying that while he'd initially been accused of being a money launderer for militant groups, "after reviewing all of the available documentation, nothing has been found to support this claim. It is highly probable detainee's statements that he and his family are honest business people ... and have never transferred any money for or on behalf of the Taliban or Al Qaeda are truthful." He was held at Guantánamo from October 2002 to February 2006.

Khudai Dad may have been a farmer or he may have had a leadership position in the Taliban. It was hard to assess which was true because the schizophrenic was hospitalized at Guantánamo for "acute symptoms of psychosis" after reporting anxiety problems in November 2002 and then referred to the interrogation team for a final session in January 2003.

Eight months later, Guantánamo personnel judged him ready for a polygraph examination. It didn't last long. Dad began having hallucinations in the middle of questioning and the polygrapher "determined he was mentally unfit." His March 2004 report didn't note how long he'd been at Guantánamo at that point, but Dad wasn't released until February 2006.

There are lingering questions, too, about whether those identified in the assessments as a serious threat really belonged at Guantánamo.

As the post-invasion period began in Afghanistan, militia commanders — some of them with connections to the Taliban and other insurgent groups — began to jockey for power and to place their men in Afghan security units. By all accounts, those men funneled false information about their enemies to U.S. forces.

While the assessments about Afghan detainees did not often record those details, Guantánamo in one instance appears to have housed both a man handed over by a local security commander in eastern Afghanistan, Hafizullah Shabaz Khaul, and then the commander himself, Abdullah Mujahid. They were sent home on the same day in December 2007.

Carol Rosenberg of The Miami Herald contributed to this report.

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New York Times
April 27, 2011
Pg. 12

The Guantanamo Files

Secret Case Against Detainee Crumbles

By William Glaberson and Charlie Savage

The secret document described Prisoner 269, Mohammed el-Gharani, as the very incarnation of a terrorist threat: “an al Qaeda suicide operative” with links to a London cell and ties to senior plotters of international havoc.

But there was more to the story, as there so often is at the Guantánamo Bay prison in Cuba. Eight months after that newly disclosed assessment of Mr. Gharani was written by military intelligence officials, a federal judge examined the secret evidence. Saying that it was “plagued with internal inconsistencies” and largely based on the word of two other Guantánamo detainees whose reliability was in question, he ruled in January 2009 that Mr. Gharani should be released. The Obama administration sent him to Chad about five months later.

The secret assessment of Mr. Gharani, like many of the detainee dossiers made available to The New York Times and other news organizations, reflected few doubts about the peril he might have posed. He was rated “high risk,” and military officials recommended that he not be freed. But now, a comparison of the assessment's conclusions with other information provides a case study in the ambiguities that surround many of the men who have passed through the prison at Guantanamo Bay.

The murkiness of the secret intelligence — and the fact that interrogators gathered much of their information from the Guantánamo equivalent of jailhouse informers — has been highlighted in news reports and has drawn criticism from human rights groups in recent days. But some commentators who say the government faced difficulties sorting intelligence in a time of war have noted that such reports were often uncertain, based on bits of information, educated guesses and accounts of witnesses with their own agendas.

“Why is anybody shocked here?” asked James Jay Carafano, a national security expert at the Heritage Foundation in Washington. “The nature of intelligence is it is ambiguous sometimes. It is sometimes based on sources you wouldn’t take to Sunday school.”

Mr. Gharani’s was not the only case to crumble when the Guantánamo intelligence was tested in court. Judges have been unpersuaded by the government’s evidence in several habeas corpus cases, including another federal judge who in 2009 threw out “90 percent” of the case against a young detainee from Afghanistan, Mohammed Jawad, because it was based on a confession he gave that she ruled was “the function of torture.” Mr. Jawad was released soon after.

Mr. Gharani, who was one of Guantánamo’s youngest prisoners, has said he was subjected to abusive treatment at the prison, including solitary confinement and sleep deprivation.

His May 2008 prisoner assessment unambiguously states the most elementary of facts: born in Medina, Saudi Arabia, in 1981.

The document, though, contains few clues that even such statements may be uncertain. In an interview, Mr. Gharani’s lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, called the quality of the information in the dossier “drivel.” He said Mr. Gharani was six years younger than the military believed. That means he would have been 11, not 17, when he was said to have been linked to a London terrorist cell.

“After seven years of having him in custody,” Mr. Stafford Smith said, “they didn’t even know how old he was.”

The dossier noted that at Guantánamo, Mr. Gharani had confessed to being a member of Al Qaeda and then retracted his admission. “His original admission is assessed to be truthful,” the file said with little explanation.

The strongest statements in the assessment, which was a pattern in many of the files, were attributed to other detainees. In Mr. Gharani’s case, two of those were a Yemeni and a Saudi detainee who provided incriminating information that was quoted in many of the dossiers.

For Mr. Gharani’s file, the two serial informers provided telling details. One, Yasim Muhammed Basardah, said he recalled traveling with Mr. Gharani and other members of Al Qaeda. The other, Abdul Hakim Bukhary, said he had heard that Mr. Gharani was a member of the London terrorist cell and claimed that he “would sing about what he was going to do to the Americans” if he were released.

The assertions from the two men, both since released from Guantánamo, did not note information that might have put their damaging claims in context.

Mr. Basardah, according to other documents reviewed by federal judges in court cases, was an unreliable informer with serious psychiatric problems. The references to Mr. Bukhary did not provide an important caveat: his own dossier said he had acknowledged deliberately misleading interrogators and “has no recollection of a lot of things.”

While Mr. Gharani’s dossier leaves doubts about some of the evidence against him, it also leaves some important questions unanswered. He claimed that he happened to be praying in a mosque in Karachi, Pakistan, when he was arrested amid the tumult after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The dossier dismissed that as a familiar terrorist “cover story.” It noted that he was arrested by Pakistani forces in the company of a group of Qaeda fighters escaping the battle of Tora Bora, Afghanistan, in December 2001.

Like many of the files, his paints a picture of suspicion: a young man in the wrong place at the wrong time. His name supposedly was on a terrorist’s computer; he was said to be a Qaeda courier with ties to leaders, including Osama bin Laden; he reportedly received militant training; and he was described as “hostile” to prison guards.

Even after his release, the ambiguity about Mr. Gharani remains. The Obama administration sent him to Chad, where he is a citizen, and another set of secret government documents obtained by WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy organization, and provided to The Times, suggests that the American government is quietly watching the Chadian government watch Mr. Gharani with suspicion.

Secret diplomatic cables show that the American Embassy had been told by law enforcement officials in Chad that months after he arrived there, Mr. Gharani “obtained a fraudulent birth certificate” and “used it to obtain a Chadian national identity card under a false name.” Mr. Gharani, the embassy cable went on, had used the card to apply for a Chadian passport under the false name. It said he also produced supporting documents indicating that, under his new identity, he attended law school in London.

“Our contacts tell us that the passport application was denied, apparently because the Chadian side became aware” of who he was, the cable said.

Moreover, Mr. Gharani recently told the British legal charity that represented him, Reprieve, that a Chadian official had bluntly told him he would never be issued a passport because the Ministry of the Interior viewed him as “a terrorist.”

But there is once again another side to the story. Mr. Gharani is desperate to get out of Chad — not for any nefarious reason, his lawyers insist, but because his family lives in Saudi Arabia, where he grew up. He is struggling to earn an income and is suffering from an undiagnosed illness and wants to seek medical treatment outside of Chad.

“He’s having a really terrible time,” said Katherine O’Shea, a spokeswoman for Reprieve, the British legal nonprofit founded by Mr. Stafford Smith. “He doesn’t know anyone in Chad.”

Mr. Gharani’s lawyers also said that they had never heard about any effort on their client’s part to obtain a false passport and did not believe that the account was true. They said Mr. Gharani had limited phone service in Chad and could not be reached for comment.

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Yahoo.com
April 25, 2011

Military Meets Recruiting, Retention Goals

 

WASHINGTON, April 25 (UPI) -- The branches of the U.S. armed forces maintained high levels of recruiting and retention during the first half of fiscal year 2011, the Pentagon said Monday.

Through March, the active duty Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force met or exceeded their accession goals for fiscal 2011, which began Oct. 1, the Defense Department said in a release.

The Army and the Marine Corps exceeded their goals, the Pentagon said. The Army had 34,264 accessions, 102 percent of its 33,600 goal, while the Marines reported 11,497 accessions, slightly more than its goal of 11,468.

The Navy, with 16,011 accessions, and the Air Force, with 14,279 accessions, both met their goals, the Pentagon said.

In the reserve components, only the Air National Guard fell slightly short of its goal, the Defense Department said.

All of the service branches are on target with retention goals, Pentagon officials said.

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New York Times
April 27, 2011
Pg. 1

Atheists Seek Chaplain Role In The Military

By James Dao

FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. — In the military, there are more than 3,000 chaplains who minister to the spiritual and emotional needs of active duty troops, regardless of their faiths. The vast majority are Christians, a few are Jews or Muslims, one is a Buddhist. A Hindu, possibly even a Wiccan may join their ranks soon.

But an atheist?

Strange as it sounds, groups representing atheists and secular humanists are pushing for the appointment of one of their own to the chaplaincy, hoping to give voice to what they say is a large — and largely underground — population of nonbelievers in the military.

Joining the chaplain corps is part of a broader campaign by atheists to win official acceptance in the military. Such recognition would make it easier for them to raise money and meet on military bases. It would help ensure that chaplains, religious or atheist, would distribute their literature, advertise their events and advocate for them with commanders.

But winning the appointment of an atheist chaplain will require support from senior chaplains, a tall order. Many chaplains are skeptical: Do atheists belong to a “faith group,” a requirement for a chaplain candidate? Can they provide support to religious troops of all faiths, a fundamental responsibility for chaplains?

Jason Torpy, a former Army captain who is president of the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers, said humanist chaplains would do everything religious chaplains do, including counsel troops and help them follow their faiths. But just as a Protestant chaplain would not preside over a Catholic service, a humanist might not lead a religious ceremony, though he might help organize it.

“Humanism fills the same role for atheists that Christianity does for Christians and Judaism does for Jews,” Mr. Torpy said in an interview. “It answers questions of ultimate concern; it directs our values.”

Mr. Torpy has asked to meet the chiefs of chaplains for each of the armed forces, which have their own corps, to discuss his proposal. The chiefs have yet to comment.

At the same time, an atheist group at Fort Bragg called Military Atheists and Secular Humanists, or MASH, has asked the Army to appoint an atheist lay leader at the base. A new MASH chapter at Fort Campbell, Ky., is planning to do the same as are atheists at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida.

Such lay leaders can lead “services” in lieu of chaplains and have access to meeting rooms, including chapels.

Chaplains at Fort Bragg near here have seemed open to the idea, if somewhat perplexed by it.

“You’re not a faith group; you’re a lack-of-faith group,” First Lt. Samantha Nicoll, an active atheist at Fort Bragg, recalled a chaplain friend’s saying about the idea. “But I said, ‘What else is there for us?’ ”

Atheist leaders acknowledge the seeming contradiction of nonbelievers seeking to become chaplains or receive recognition from the chaplain corps. But they say they believe the imprimatur of the chaplaincy will embolden atheists who worry about being ostracized for their worldviews.

Defense Department statistics show that about 9,400 of the nation’s 1.4 million active-duty military personnel identify themselves as atheists or agnostics, making them a larger subpopulation than Jews, Muslims, Hindus or Buddhists in the military.

But atheist leaders say those numbers are an undercount because, they believe, there are many nonbelievers among the 285,000 service members who claim no religious preference on military surveys. Many chaplains dispute that interpretation, and say that most people in that group are religious, just not strongly so.

Those same statistics show that Christians represent about one million, or 70 percent, of all active-duty troops. They are even more dominant among the chaplain corps: about 90 percent of the 3,045 active duty chaplains are Christians, most of them Protestants.

Military atheist leaders say that although proselytizing by chaplains is forbidden, Christian beliefs pervade military culture, creating subtle pressures on non-Christians to convert.

As an example, they cite the Army’s Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program, created to help soldiers handle stress and prevent suicide. The program requires soldiers to complete surveys assessing emotional, social, family and spiritual well-being. Based on their answers, some soldiers are asked to take “resiliency” training.

Atheists say the survey and training are rife with religious code words that suggest a deity or afterlife. The Army counters that the program is intended to determine whether a soldier has “a strong set of beliefs, principles or values” that can sustain him through adversity — and not to gauge religiosity.

Atheist and secular humanist groups in the military are hardly new. But at some bases, they have become better organized and more vocal in recent years.

Last fall, atheists at Fort Bragg objected to an event by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association called Rock the Fort. The base command, at the urging of its chaplains, provided some money and manpower for the event as well as a choice location on the post’s parade grounds.

A communication sergeant, Justin Griffith, argued that the event was an Army-sponsored platform for the Graham organization to recruit converts. The post commander, Col. Stephen J. Sicinski, denied that, saying soldiers were not pressured to attend. In a recent interview, the colonel said Rock the Fort was intended to boost morale as well as “bolster the faith.”

In response, Sergeant Griffith has recruited a star lineup of atheist musicians and speakers, including the writer Richard Dawkins, to headline a secular event, possibly for the fall. He calls it Rock Beyond Belief and has asked Colonel Sicinski to provide resources similar to what he gave Rock the Fort.

Colonel Sicinski has refused, saying the event will not draw enough people to justify using the parade grounds and that money from religious tithes, which helped finance Rock the Fort, cannot be spent on it. Sergeant Griffith has appealed.

A high school dropout raised near Dallas, Sergeant Griffith, 28, was a passionate Christian and creationist until his teens. Now his dog tags list his religious preference as atheist, and he is pushing to create MASH chapters on as many bases as possible.

He is also giving thought to becoming a chaplain himself, though it would take years: He would have to earn a graduate degree in theology and then be commissioned an officer. He would also need the endorsement of “a qualified religious organization,” a role Mr. Torpy’s organization is seeking to play.

Sergeant Griffith said he believed there were already atheist chaplains in the military — just not open ones.

“I support the idea that religious soldiers need support from religious chaplains,” he said. “But there has to be a line between supporting religious soldiers and promoting religion.”

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San Diego Union-Tribune
April 27, 2011

San Diego Navy Commander Removed

By Jeanette Steele

The commander of a San Diego-based destroyer group has been removed from his job while the Navy investigates an alleged inappropriate relationship.

Capt. Donald Hornbeck was commanding Destroyer Squadron 1 in the Arabian Sea when he was removed on Saturday, according to a Navy Third Fleet statement.

A Third Fleet spokeswoman said she didn't have any further information about the allegation.

The group is deployed with the Carl Vinson as part of the aircraft carrier’s strike group. The ships include the cruiser Bunker Hill and two destroyers, the Stockdale and the Gridley.

Hornbeck has been temporarily assigned to Third Fleet headquarters in Point Loma, and his deputy commander has taken over the ship group.

The language used by the Navy is somewhat unusual in this case. Typically, the Navy relieves an officer of command after an investigation into wrongdoing. This time, the action is being called a removal from command while an investigation is performed.

The Navy has experienced a run of commander firings, starting last year. At least 17 commanding officers were relieved of their positions in 2010. Prior to Hornbeck, the count for 2011 was eight, the Navy Times reported.

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Arizona Daily Star (Tucson)
April 27, 2011

US Weighs Option Of Extending Guard's Deployment To Border

By Howard Fischer, Capitol Media Services

PHOENIX - The Obama administration is having second thoughts about withdrawing all National Guard troops from the border by the end of June.

The National Guard Bureau in Virginia is asking Arizona officials for input on "different courses of action" for what to do about the 560 soldiers now assigned to border-security duty in Arizona, part of 1,200 troops placed along the entire Mexican border. Lt. Valentine Castillo of the Arizona National Guard said Tuesday that one of those options is to extend the mission.

And Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, in an interview with Reuters, said the administration is weighing whether to keep troops there to tamp down border violence.

"They have proven to be very, very useful at the border," the former Arizona governor said. "They have helped in a number of drug seizures, among other things."

But Napolitano said there has been no "final decision about whether and at what strength to leave the Guard at the border."

A decision is needed soon.

Federal funding runs out in June. But Castillo said it is necessary to start the "ramp-down" process by the middle of next month to ensure that everything is wrapped up by that date.

Sensing a possible opportunity, Gov. Jan Brewer on Tuesday sent a letter to the president outlining some accomplishments of Arizona Guard troops, including assisting in apprehensions of border crossers and helping to seize 18 tons of marijuana.

"I am concerned that when the current mission ends in June, the gains we have made will be immediately lost," Brewer wrote. "Arizona can ill afford that kind of loss in the effort to secure the border."

The White House would not comment, referring all inquiries to Napolitano's agency.

Matt Chandler, Napolitano's press aide, had no specific comment about the continued need for troops.

But he said Border Patrol staffing now is better than it ever has been. There are currently about 20,700 agents - including 3,700 in the Tucson Sector alone - compared with 10,000 just seven years ago.

And Chandler said the situation has changed since last year when the troops were first authorized. That includes funding for another 1,000 Border Patrol officers, with 859 for the Tucson sector.

That legislation also authorized 250 new Customs and Border Protection officers at ports of entry, 250 new investigators for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and two new forward operating bases "to improve coordination of border security activities."

Brewer, in Tuesday's letter to Obama, also asked for "a serious commitment to a substantial border fence, one that is difficult to overcome and well maintained."

Homeland Security officials say the agency has completed 649 miles of fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border, including 299 miles of vehicle barriers and 350 miles of pedestrian fence.

And the governor repeated a call she made two years ago to put another 250 soldiers along the border as part of a separate, ongoing Joint Counter Narco-Terrorism Task Force. There are currently 150 soldiers in that program.

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Boston Globe
April 27, 2011

Leader Says Iraq Still Needs Some Help

Country cannot protect borders, Maliki concedes

By Rebecca Santana, Associated Press

BAGHDAD — Iraq's prime minister said yesterday that his country does not need US forces to protect its internal security but acknowledged that the country still does not have the money or training to protect its borders.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s comments came as the country is struggling to decide whether to ask American troops to stay past their expected Dec. 31 departure date. It’s a politically toxic question for the Iraqi leader in a country where many people are nervous about a future without US troops yet it is politically unpalatable to ask the Americans to stay longer.

“The internal security situation does not need this,’’ he said. “As for the external defense of Iraq’s sovereignty, then Iraq still suffers from shortages.’’

However the Iraqi leader emphasized that he does not see any regional threats to Iraq’s security. Many American proponents of keeping US forces in Iraq point to the threat posed by neighboring Iran.

“There is no one from Iraq’s neighbors who is thinking of sending his troops to Iraq. So, Iraq’s sovereignty is protected by the fact that there is nobody in the current circumstances who would violate Iraq’s sovereignty,’’ he said at a press conference.

According to an agreement signed in 2008, all of the roughly 47,000 US forces must be out of Iraq by Dec. 31.

Many Iraqi leaders privately acknowledge the country’s security shortcomings, including its lack of intelligence gathering capabilities and its inability to protect its own airspace. But as repeated anti-American protests in recent weeks have shown, a further US military presence in Iraq would not be welcomed by many.

A stream of American visitors, including Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has visited Iraq in recent weeks carrying the message that time is running out for Iraq to ask the US to stay longer.

Mullen warned last week that Iraq had only weeks to ask for an extension as the US military carries out the massive task of removing all its equipment and personnel from the country.

Maliki rejected the suggestion his government is secretly negotiating a deal and said any new agreement would have to be passed by Parliament.

The prime minister, who traveled to South Korea later yesterday, said he would convene a meeting with all political blocs when he returns in order to discuss the future of the American troops.

The prime minister appeared to be warning political opponents that responsibility for any decision to have US troops stay longer would be shared by all political groups and not just blamed on him.

“The agreement will stay as it is, and if some people want military cooperation with any country, there should be a national agreement,’’ he said.

In western Iraq, a bus carrying pilgrims overturned on the way to a Shi’ite shrine, killing seven people in what police say may have been an insurgent ambush. Nine other people were injured.

The deputy governor of Anbar Province, Hikmat Jasim Zaidan, said the bus was traveling to the holy city of Samarra when it overturned west of the provincial capital of Ramadi.

As police arrived at the scene, insurgents attacked their vehicles, wounding one police officer, Zaidan said. The police are investigating whether the accident was an ambush to lure the police.

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New York Times
April 27, 2011
Pg. 4

Text Messages Proliferate As Threats In Iraq

By Tim Arango

BAGHDAD — When he returned to his native Kurdistan in February to join the flickering of a protest movement, Dr. Pishtewan Abdellah, a hematologist who lives in Australia but also carries an Iraqi passport, suspected that the demonstrators might face harsh treatment from the Kurdish authorities. At several protests during the last two months security forces have opened fire, and an estimated 10 people have been killed and dozens wounded, according to human rights activists.

What Dr. Abdellah did not anticipate, though, was a barrage of one of this country's more peculiar menaces: death threats by text message.

“I’ve been getting heaps of them,” he said recently in an interview in Baghdad, where he had fled to from the north after several kidnapping attempts. “Every single day.”

He estimated that he had received nearly 300 such threats since late February. They usually read, he said, “We are going to kill that, or we are going to burn that. Very rude language.”

One of the few that can be printed read, “If you come back to Erbil you will not see the blue sky again.”

Digital media have amplified the young voices of democracy ringing around the Middle East, but the flip side here is that the authorities and insurgents alike are also adept at using technology, particularly cellphones, largely unavailable here before the 2003 American invasion, as part of their arsenals of intimidation.

Actual violence may have declined substantially since the worst days of the war, but a culture of fear and intimidation still prevails. It has been on display during the intermittent protests that have rippled across Iraq in the wake of the regional uprisings. Death threats delivered by text message have become such a common experience across the spectrum of Iraq's public-minded professions — lawyers, journalists, activists and government officials — that the two mobile phone companies, Zain and Asia Cell, have arrangements with the police and courts to investigate them.

“There is a great deal of cooperation between the security forces, the Iraqi judiciary and Zain with exchanging information,” said Mazin al-Asadi, a representative for Zain.

Yet most of the threats are untraceable, having been sent from throw-away phones and SIM cards bought on the black market.

“It’s impossible to count them,” said Abed al-Sattar al-Bairaqdar, the spokesman for Iraq’s Supreme Court.

Interviews with Iraqis suggest that the phenomenon cuts across all strata of society, but journalists in particular have been subject to such tactics, especially during the protests. And recent reports from Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International about abuses by security forces have mentioned text-messaged death threats.

“It’s something we’ve noticed for a while now, and it’s pervasive throughout Iraq,” said Samer Muscati, a Middle East researcher for Human Rights Watch who has recently visited Iraq. “But it seems it’s getting worse. Just about every protest organizer we’ve spoken with, and journalists, too, are getting these threats by phone and text.”

Mr. Muscati said it was common for journalists in Iraq to appear on television speaking about a controversial subject like corruption, and then, after the show, “they are barraged by these messages.”

Amnesty International, for example, reported that numerous journalists in the Kurdish region had received such messages, which the organization believes came from security officials who have taken part in attacks on news organizations. One, a correspondent for the satellite television channel KNN, affiliated with the Kurdish opposition party Goran, received a text message after reporting on work that Amnesty International has been doing in Iraq. The message told the reporter to stop his work. “Otherwise, the outcome will be disastrous,” the message read.

In the case of Dr. Abdellah, Kair al-Dain, the deputy police chief in Erbil, said he was aware of the doctor’s claims, but he would not comment more beyond saying that he had “no idea” whether Dr. Abdellah had indeed received intimidating messages.

The messages come in three basic varieties. Some are meant to intimidate, as in the case of Dr. Abdellah, who suspects that they came from the security officials who confiscated his cellphone when he was briefly imprisoned.

“They are very advanced in technology,” Dr. Abdellah said. “When you try to call the numbers, they are just disconnected.”

Yassir al-Jubori, 28, a journalist in Diyala, received a text message in February that read, “Your tongue has become too big, and it is time to cut it off.” He was told to quit his job.

“I remained for a few days in my house to be away from the insurgents,” Mr. Jubori said. “Day by day I got used to it and resumed my job, because I believe in fate.”

Other messages are mechanisms of blackmail and part of the kidnapping-for-ransom business that thrives here. Several of those interviewed said they received messages demanding payments to stay alive. One businessman in Kirkuk, who said he was kidnapped two years ago by the Sunni insurgent group Ansar al-Sunna because he had worked with the American military, recently received a text threat by the same group demanding $50,000.

“I didn’t pay them because the security situation has gotten better,” said the businessman, Faisal Hassan Khalaf. But he said he did not disregard the threat entirely. “I had to move away and change my vehicles because they can kill me whenever they want to. But at the same time, I can’t keep paying ransoms.”

At other times, the messages are tools of sectarian aggression.

Muhammed Abdul Naser, a 25-year-old student in Adhamiya, a Sunni neighborhood of Baghdad, once received a text that read: “We are the killers from the Mahdi Army. We know that you live close to the fish market. We will get you. We will get you.”

In one of the few instances in which the interviewees said the message was successfully traced, Mr. Naser said the cellphone company was able to locate the sender, who he said was indeed a member of the Mahdi Army, the now-disbanded Shiite militia loyal to the radical cleric Moktada al-Sadr.

“I knew some people that were with the Mahdi Army,” Mr. Naser said, “and they went to him and asked him to leave me alone.”

In recent days, Dr. Abdellah said the Kurdish authorities demanded three things of him: that he stay off Facebook, refrain from news media interviews and leave Erbil.

He agreed only to the final demand — to protect his family members who live in Erbil — and spoke recently at a cafe in Baghdad on the evening before he left the country. He had just gotten a new cellphone, and was enjoying a respite from the steady flow of menacing words.

Dr. Abdellah said he was leaving the country for only a few weeks. “I’m not going to give up,” he said.

Omar al-Jawoshy contributed reporting from Baghdad, and employees of The New York Times from Baghdad, Kirkuk and Diyala, Iraq.

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Los Angeles Times
April 27, 2011
Pg. 1

Column One

Making The Honor Roll

An 11th-grader compiles a digital record of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans laid to rest at Arlington.

By Faye Fiore

ARLINGTON, VA -- Rosemary Brown is standing over the grave of her son at Arlington National Cemetery when someone catches her eye. It's a boy in khaki shorts and muddy shoes, juggling a clunky camera and the Motorola Xoom he got for his 17th birthday five days earlier.

"May I ask what you're doing?" Brown inquires. The boy begins to peck at the Xoom tablet, and in seconds the image that Brown has come all the way from Cartwright, Okla., to see fills the screen. It's the white marble headstone of Army Special Forces Staff Sgt. Jason L. Brown, killed by small-arms fire in Afghanistan three years ago this day. Her face brightens.

"Most of Jason's family and friends are in Oklahoma and Texas. For them to be able to see his grave...," she says, her voice breaking.

Richard "Ricky" Gilleland III -- 11th-grader and Junior Future Business Leaders of America computer ace -- has succeeded where the Army failed: He has created the only digitized record of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans laid to rest at Arlington.

His website, preserveandhonor.com, is a reverent catalog of the fallen, and one young man's response to a scandal of Army mismanagement, mismarked graves and unmarked remains that has rocked this hallowed place for two years.

"It's a tool to help remember people. They can go on and think, 'Wow, look at all these people who gave their lives just so I can walk around,' " Ricky says.

His "project," as he calls it, won't fix Arlington's considerable problems. A commission led by former Sens. Bob Dole and Max Cleland was formed to attempt that.

But his simple website has brought a measure of order and relief to military families unnerved by reports first disclosed by Salon.com in 2009: unidentified remains in graves thought to be empty, one service member buried on top of another, an unmarked urn that turned up in a dirt landfill.

The father of one Marine was so disturbed that he had the remains of his son -- a 19-year-old private killed in Iraq by a roadside blast in 2006 -- disinterred last year. He searched the coffin that held his son's ravaged body himself. A left-arm tattoo confirmed no mistake had been made, reassurance that came at a terrible price.

An investigation by the Army inspector general concluded in June that at least 211 graves were mislabeled. Top brass were fired. And the management of the 147-year-old American landmark, where about 300,000 fallen troops rest, suddenly seemed as chaotic as its uniform lines of unadorned white markers are orderly.

Cemetery operations were declared antiquated. Arlington still relies on paper records and index cards to maintain 200 acres where presidents, astronauts, freed slaves and heroes of every American war lie.

"One fire, flood or coffee spill away" from irreplaceable loss, Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) warned.

While discussing Arlington's outdated record-keeping over dinner one night last summer, Ricky -- who had just gotten an A in his Programming 1 class at school -- announced, "I can fix that."

His mother didn't doubt it. She still remembered her older sons complaining they were locked out of the computer again because Ricky, age 4, had changed all the passwords.

"He was the kid who figured things out," Elisabeth Van Dyk, 46, said of her youngest. "He took apart remote controls and his brothers' toys and put them back together again. You could trust he knew what he was talking about."

Ricky didn't have his driver's license yet, so he hitched a ride with his mom on her 45-minute commute from their home in Stafford, Va., to her workplace in Washington. He hopped the Metro the rest of the way to the cemetery. This was July and he wanted an early start before the heat set in.

His focus was Section 60, where about 700 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan are buried, more than anywhere else in the country. He combed all 18 acres of it, row by row, and found more than just names. At one grave was a baby's sonogram; he thought about the child who would never know his dad. He saw parents who looked a lot like his own, standing, staring.

Ricky took it all in. This is a side of service he had never fully appreciated, even for a military brat -- his great-great-great-grandfather fought at Gettysburg, his father is a retired Army sergeant first class, his stepfather is a retired Navy lieutenant commander and both of his brothers are Air Force senior airmen. (He intends to apply to the Naval Academy at Annapolis and wants to be an officer.)

"Sometimes I look at the birth date and they are about the same age as my brothers, or a year older than me. It puts a whole new perspective on life to think there are 18- or 19-year-old kids who give their lives," he said.

One afternoon while he was out here taking pictures, a woman asked, "What number is my son?" She wanted to know where he fell in a casualty count that is nearing 6,000 for both wars. Ricky couldn't answer her, but later he told his mom that he didn't want them to be numbers; he wanted them to be remembered as people.

"From that point forward," his mom recalled, "it seemed to turn into more than a project."

He spent afternoons in a bookstore poring over Web development manuals for the right program language to create the site. At night, in his family's study, his computer hooked up to a 40-inch flat screen and his keyboard on a snack table in front of the couch, he input hundreds of names, photos, links to obituaries and newspaper accounts; he created a space to blog tributes.

By mid-October, the site was launched.

Army Times wrote him up. The local TV station did a piece. At North Stafford High, he was a minor celebrity. Friends and families around the country could view a loved one's grave thousands of miles away with the click of a mouse. So far, the site has received nearly 116,000 hits and about 300 emails, like the one from Jean Lockey, widow of Army Col. Jon M. Lockey, killed in Iraq on July 6, 2007: "I now have a site to go to when life overwhelms me, a place where I can pretend for a moment I am right there."

And Sarah Hall, mother of 1st Lt. Benjamin John Hall, killed in Afghanistan on July 31, 2007: "Ben was ... the light of my life and I miss him every second of every day. To know that his loss is felt by others and acknowledged with such love and honor as you have shown here lifts my heart....Thank you."

About 10% of the service members killed in Iraq and Afghanistan are at Arlington; the rest are in cemeteries around the country. Ricky's next goal is to enlist the help of the American Legion and record them all on the website. He figures it could be done in a few months.

But the work at Arlington is never really finished. Sadly, there are always graves to add, and he comes out every few weeks to update the list. That's what brings him here today, with his mom and stepdad, in the back seat of the silver Honda she said he could have if he stayed on the honor roll, which he did. (If his grades drop, she has threatened to sell the car for a dollar.)

He's eager to try out the Xoom. It's a gorgeous April Sunday after a hard rain. The red tulips stand straight as soldiers at the cemetery gates, but the grounds are soaked. Ricky starts patrolling the far end of Section 60 where the new arrivals are. It's muddy and his sneakers sink three inches into what he realizes is a grave so fresh the sod hasn't gone in yet. He winces and carries on. No way can he wear those shoes to school Monday.

That's what he's doing when Rosemary Brown spots him. She comes here twice a year -- with her husband on the anniversary of Jason's death and by herself on his birthday in September. ("It's a Mom thing. That's my time.") In between, Ricky's website might be the next best thing.

"Continue this, please," she tells the boy she's only just met. He's shy and a little awkward, not so different from the one she raised. "It's so important that they never, ever be forgotten. Ever."

"I will," Ricky promises. "You can bet on it."

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Washington Times
April 27, 2011
Pg. 13

County Won't Sue To Stop BRAC Relocation

By Paige Winfield Cunningham, The Washington Times

Fairfax County officials say they won't sue the Defense Department over the relocation of thousands of workers from Arlington to Alexandria, despite a report that showed the Army misled lawmakers about potential traffic gridlock around the new offices.

Fairfax County Supervisor Jeffrey C. McKay said the board doesn't think it has enough reason to seek an injunction to delay the relocation, even though such an action has been strongly suggested by Rep. James P. Moran.

"While we remain concerned about the significant traffic impact expected from that new facility, we have determined that federal law does not give the county an opportunity to challenge that environmental assessment at this time," said Mr. McKay, a Democrat, after the board met in closed session on Tuesday.

The Department of Defense (DOD) inspector general last week criticized an environmental analysis performed by the Army that claims the relocation won't cause significant traffic problems. The inspector general's report said two traffic studies provided in the analysis offer insufficient evidence and the analysis needs to be redone.

After the report was released, Mr. Moran asked officials in Alexandria and Arlington, Fairfax and Prince William counties to consider seeking an injunction to delay the part of the Army's Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) plan mandating that 6,400 DOD employees be moved to the Mark Center in Alexandria by September. Located at the intersection of I-395 and Seminary Road, the area is likely to become heavily congested as a result of the relocation.

Prince William Board of County Supervisors Chairman Corey A. Stewart has said he had no interest in joining a lawsuit, blaming Mr. Moran and Rep. Gerald E. Connolly, both Democrats, for failing to prevent construction at the Mark Center in the first place.

But Alexandria Mayor William D. Euille, a Democrat, has said the city council would consider taking legal action only if it was certain to be effective. The council had initially supported the Mark Center relocation in August 2008.

Gov. Robert F. McDonnell weighed in on the controversy, telling WTOP Radio's "Ask the Governor" program Tuesday that he will be sending a letter to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates that spells out his concerns about the move and suggests a few solutions. The state is paying $80 million for a ramp near the Alexandria site, but the project won't even be started by the transition's September deadline.

"The problem is, we've been advised by the federal government that we have to do an environmental impact statement, which means there are 18 months before we can even start," said Mr. McDonnell, a Republican. "Perhaps they would delay moving people there before the infrastructure improvements are done."

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San Jose Mercury News
April 26, 2011

Stanford Committee Recommends ROTC Reinstatement; Now Faculty Votes

By Lisa M. Krieger

More than four decades after Stanford University banished ROTC from campus, a committee has recommended that the military programs be invited back.

The university's faculty must still vote on the divisive issue, which will be debated at Thursday's meeting of the Faculty Senate. And then the Pentagon must decide whether to proceed - that is, whether enough Stanford students would be interested to make it worth their investment.

A year-long effort by the Ad Hoc Committee on ROTC concluded with a report that asserts that Stanford undergraduates, both military and civilian, would benefit by sharing their educational experience.

"The opportunity to talk about patriotism, just and unjust war, human rights, imperialism and anti-colonialism, etc., in a classroom or dormitory that includes prospective officers in America's military is something from which all our students can benefit," the report said.

The military would not have carte blanche on campus, according to the recommendations. The committee insisted that ROTC courses be open to all Stanford students. It also urged that Stanford have authority over the professors and quality of instruction - and even recommended jointly-taught courses.

Since the Reserve Officers Training Corps was banned from campus during the Vietnam War, Stanford students who seek military training entered into "cross enrollment agreements" with three nearby universities. Students enrolled in Navy ROTC take military classes at UC-Berkeley; Air Force ROTC classes are held at San Jose State University, and Army ROTC classes are held at Santa Clara University

But these off-campus courses do not quality to be used toward the academic requirements for Stanford undergraduates - and meant extensive traveling.

Stanford senior Jimmy Abraham Ruck, who will join the Army's 82nd Airborne, stationed in Ft. Bragg, N.C., as an Intelligence Officer, called the findings "a positive step in right direction. I am cautiously optimistic."

Although the ROTC units have slowly rebounded around the country since the 1960s, many programs were absent from some of the nation's most selective universities - in addition to Stanford, also Harvard, Yale and Columbia.

These universities maintained that the military's stance on gays conflicted with their own antidiscrimination policies.

But since President Obama's signing of the ''don't ask, don't tell'' repeal law, which forced gays and lesbians to hide their sexual orientation or face dismissal, universities have expressed interest in bringing back the armed forces officers' group, which has units at more than 300 campuses nationwide.

In March, Harvard announced that it would formally recognize ROTC. Earlier this month, Columbia University, once the heart of the anti-war movement, voted to support its return, as well.

At Stanford, the debate began when history professor Donald Kennedy and former Secretary of Defense William Perry, who teaches at Stanford, proposed bring ROTC back into the academic fold.

The committee, created by the Faculty Senate, "went to great lengths to involve students, faculty, and alumni into the process," said Akhil R. Iyer, a U.S. Marine studying International Relations and Arabic, who served with the group.

"We read dozens of letters submitted by the Stanford community that discussed the varying issues of ROTC's return, arranged a town hall so that students could engage in the dialogue as well, and researched Stanford's own history of ROTC as well as those from other universities.

Some Stanford students and faculty have argued that the military has the ability to buy a facility near Stanford, if it wanted to make its coursework more convenient, rather than involving the campus.

They also worried that the military does not promote free exchange of intellectual ideas, and may rush students into committing to a major before exploring a broad liberal arts curriculum.

Others note that the military is still discriminatory, because it continues to exclude transgender and medically disabled individuals from serving. Approving an ROTC program, they say, makes Stanford complicit in civil rights violations - and breaches the university's own antidiscrimination policy.

"Transgender individuals still can't join the military, and as a result, would not be able to participate in ROTC. We deserve the same opportunities as everyone else," said Stanford senior Cristopher Bautista, 22, a transgender student from Union City. "The return of ROTC would create a group of second-class students. This is an opportunity for Stanford to break that pattern."

Ruck, soon to leave for Army training, concedes he'll probably never meet the future students who could benefit from a change.

"But I want to give other students the opportunity to participate in ROTC, if they choose," he said. "The logistical issues have precluded students from being able to try it out."

"And it is an important gesture, symbolically, that an elite institution welcomes back the military."

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Wall Street Journal
April 27, 2011
Pg. 3

Storms Take A Deadly Toll

Floods, Tornadoes Claim Lives, Destroy Homes; Corps Weighs Blowing Up a Levee

By Ilan Brat and Joe Barrett

Violent seasonal storms in the middle of the U.S. have unleashed a string of floods and deadly tornadoes, killing at least nine people and prompting the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to consider flooding more than 130,000 acres of Missouri farmland to save towns near the intersection of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers.

The unusually strong storms, triggered by a La Niña weather pattern, delivered punishing rainfall to the upper Midwest and tornadoes to Arkansas and drought-stricken portions of Texas.

Midwestern farmers expecting a windfall this year from rising food prices have delayed planting crops in many areas because of the turbulent weather. Farmers in the 18 biggest corn-producing states had planted just 9% of their acreage by Sunday, compared with 46% on the same date last year, according to U.S. Agriculture Department.

In Kentucky, the Ohio River swelled well out of its banks. "It's like an ocean," said Kevin Trunnell, a farmer near Utica, Ky., surveying the flood waters about 12 miles south of the river.

Mr. Trunnell's land is mostly on high ground, but the heavy rains have kept him from planting corn and other crops.

Governors in Missouri, Arkansas and Kentucky declared states of emergency after the damage and in anticipation of more flooding.

With rains continuing, the National Weather Service is predicting the Mississippi River will crest at 60 feet next month in Natchez, Miss., surpassing the record of 56.6 feet set in 1927—a monster flood that left 26,000 square miles inundated, according to the Army Corps. More than 200 people died and some 600,000 people were displaced.

Out of that disaster came the Flood Control Act of 1928, which led to the nation's first comprehensive flood-control program.

The Army Corps said Tuesday it would decide later whether to blow up a levee at Birds Point, Mo., to reduce the pressure on levees across the Mississippi River at Cairo, Ill. The plan, approved in the 1920s but used only once since, would send a stream of water over some 130,000 acres of prime Missouri farmland, eventually flowing 35 miles before returning to the Mississippi at New Madrid, Mo.

Missouri officials moved in federal court in Cape Girardeau, Mo., Tuesday to block the plan, just as the Corps was seeking approval to move forward from the multistate Mississippi River Commission. The Corps said it would continue to discuss the plan Wednesday, while moving equipment into place in case the plan goes through.

Clay Shelby, who farms corn and soybeans on 800 acres that would be flooded if the levee is blown up, said the water wouldn't just sit on his land. "The current is what we're afraid of," he said. "It will scour the ground, our roads and all the improvements that we've made to those farms."

In Arkansas, where nine people were killed, four of the victims died when a tornado swept through the small town of Vilonia in the central part of the state, just north of Little Rock. The storm cell ripped trees out of the ground by their roots and smashed homes into scattered heaps of debris.

"It's pretty bad," said Capt. Matt Rice of the Faulkner County Sheriff's Department. "We've got a lot of houses that were totally destroyed. Some were blown completely apart."

In southeastern Missouri, Poplar Bluff residents began evacuating after the levee protecting the town of 17,000 breached Monday. About 250 people have checked into a shelter in the Black River Coliseum, said Cheryl Klueppel, executive director with a regional chapter of the American Red Cross.

The town is dealing with the second breach of the levee since 2008. "What I'm hearing from a lot of folks is it's deju vu. We're doing this all over again," she said.

Tony Hill of the Corps said the federal government was willing to share the cost of repairing the levee to federal standards after the 2008 disaster, but the local levee district couldn't come up with its share of the funds.

As a result, the levee received an "unacceptable" rating in 2008 and therefore won't qualify for federal help to repair the breach this time.

The flood waters have left many people's lives in Poplar Bluff in disarray yet again. Marsha Bostick, 63 years old, who helps sell the local newspaper, said her house was inundated in 2008. She eventually moved into another house that had survived the 2008 flood.

"I'm tired of moving. I'm going to just rebuild," she said at the shelter. "I'm not worried about the furniture, stuff like that, you know. It's the memories. You can't get that back."

--Stephanie Simon, Scott Kilman and Cameron McWhirter contributed to this article.

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Wall Street Journal
April 27, 2011
Pg. B7

Cuts Stall Defense Earnings

By Nathan Hodge

Top defense contractors are expected to report relatively flat first-quarter earnings this week amid general uncertainty about the outlook for U.S. defense spending.

But major U.S. weapons manufacturers may have some cause for optimism despite an expected downturn in Pentagon spending: Defense cuts may not go as deep as some feared, and the world is still a dangerous place.

Companies scheduled to release earnings this week include Northrop Grumman Corp., which builds pilotless aircraft including the Global Hawk; Raytheon Co., a major supplier of missiles; and General Dynamics Corp., which builds ships and armored vehicles.

On April 13, President Barack Obama proposed cutting $400 billion in projected U.S. security spending by 2023, part of a plan to rein in ballooning federal deficits. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, a strong advocate for preserving the defense budget, is planning to leave office this year.

Adding to the gloom, Ashton Carter, the Pentagon's chief weapons buyer, predicted last week that "undoubtedly there will be more cancellations" to major weapons systems.

Against that background, defense companies have been bracing for a leaner environment. Over the last 10 years, the defense industry has seen a "rising tide" of defense budgets, said Bruce Tanner, chief financial officer for jet fighter manufacturer Lockheed Martin Corp. "Now growth is going to depend on the portfolio of the company," he said, referring to efforts to focus on core businesses.

On Tuesday, Lockheed reported flat first-quarter profit of $530 million, or $1.50 a share, compared with $533 million, or $1.41 a share, a year earlier. Sales for the quarter increased to $10.63 billion from $10.34 billion, driven in part by increased sales of the C-130J transport aircraft.

Lockheed also makes the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the Pentagon's costliest weapons project. Mr. Tanner said the company was set to begin price negotiations with the government for a batch of 35 aircraft. Navy Vice Adm. David Venlet—who oversees the F-35 program for the Pentagon—recently told reporters that no weapons program is "above being looked at" in the current budget environment.

Andrew Koch, a defense industry consultant, said defense spending had reached a "plateau" in recent years. Many companies he added, "have continued to grow profitability by finding greater efficiency, but they can only do that for so long."

The president unveiled his deficit-reduction plan following a protracted political standoff over the fiscal 2011 budget. While Washington avoided a government shutdown, the budget fight forced the government to operate under a continuing budget resolution that froze spending at 2010 budget levels, preventing new defense programs from starting and causing major uncertainty for the industry.

Meanwhile, the U.S. military has remained heavily engaged in Afghanistan and Iraq—and more recently became involved in responding to crises in both Libya and Japan.

Still, additional defense-spending cuts are likely be reflected in the fiscal 2013 budget request, which will not be released until early next year.

Loren Thompson, a defense analyst at the nonprofit Lexington Institute and a consultant to industry, said the administration's deficit-reduction proposal "looks like more of a rhetorical flourish than a major cut."

The proposed $400 billion reduction in security spending, he said, will be taken out of projected spending of $10 trillion through 2023.

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Los Angeles Times
April 27, 2011
Pg. 17

Afghan Crossroads

Will conditions on the ground or U.S. politics govern troop withdrawals?

By John R. Bolton

President Obama must soon make a critical decision: how many and what type of U.S. forces to begin withdrawing from Afghanistan this summer. The July withdrawal date is an artificial deadline, one the president created not because it would help us reach our goals in this strategically critical country but for his own domestic political purposes. When Obama made the promise in 2009, at the same time he announced the surge in U.S. troops in Afghanistan, it was imprudent. The way he keeps it now could be downright dangerous.

However artificial the deadline, the way Obama treats it will signal whether he remains committed to defeating the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, or whether he is simply looking for a way out of a conflict he neither fully understands nor supports. His decision will send a telling message to U.S. adversaries and friends alike around the world.

The plain fact is that the military situation in Afghanistan is uncertain. Although there is an official U.S. mood of optimism, and no doubts about the military efficacy and valor of our troops, there are also disturbing and far more pessimistic reports. In February, for example, we withdrew units from northeastern Afghanistan's long-contested Pech Valley, transitioning to Afghan government forces, but we may have been too hasty. Ironically, one justification for the withdrawal was that our presence enhanced Taliban recruiting, but by April, after our withdrawal, Al Qaeda units were back, establishing training and operating bases in the nearby Korengal Valley.

Repeated U.S. efforts to find members of the Taliban willing to negotiate have been largely unsuccessful and at times downright humiliating. Last year, a supposed Taliban leader and key negotiator was revealed as an imposter, but only after he had met with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, received bags of NATO money and disappeared, with depressing new sagas of U.S. incompetence.

Iran's influence in Afghanistan remains strong, through its financing and arming of the Taliban, its control over critical oil supplies and its threats to expel more than 1 million Afghan refugees living in Iran, a humanitarian problem that could destabilize Afghanistan's fragile economy. Make no mistake, a large U.S. withdrawal this summer will be in effect pro-Iran.

An equally significant strategic issue is the impact of Obama's decision on Pakistan. Our relations with Pakistan have recently deteriorated. Pakistan's substantial arsenal of nuclear weapons remains the real prize, and the risk of the country falling into the hands of Islamic radicals remains grave. Military operations and cross-border strikes against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Pakistan are increasingly important to the task but could be jeopardized if Pakistan believes America is scuttling out of Afghanistan.

And yet the extent of the July withdrawal will likely depend on domestic American political factors, just as Obama's 2009 withdrawal announcement was a sop to his political base, to ease their pain with the surge. To Obama, the "conditions on the ground" that matter most have seemingly been the political conditions in America, not military conditions in Afghanistan.

Now that we are in a third war -- in Libya, which even U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Michael G. Mullen concedes is stalemated -- Obama may believe he must prove his antiwar credentials by ordering a very substantial Afghanistan withdrawal. The president does not want a primary challenge for the 2012 nomination; satisfying the Democratic left could considerably reduce that risk. By "declaring victory," Obama could explain a large drawdown, but he would be making a serious error of military judgment.

Alternatively, the president may feel protected politically by NATO's agreement to hand over its mission to the Afghans in 2014, thus minimizing the need for substantial troop reductions this summer. But relying on that scripted time frame, rather than strategic considerations, merely creates another artificial deadline.

For the nation, the president's best course would be to protect and capitalize on the progress we have made by maintaining troop levels and offensive operations in Afghanistan until the job is done, whenever that is. Whether Obama will follow this course, or at least order only a token withdrawal to minimize the damage of his imprudent 2009 pledge, we will soon see.

There should be no mistake that a politically driven withdrawal of substantial U.S. forces will squander the victories won in Afghanistan since the 2009 surge. It will signal to the Taliban and Al Qaeda that their long travail is nearing an end. And it will signal to radicals in Pakistan and elsewhere that they too can act against the U.S. ultimately with impunity. All of these results will endanger not just the United States but peace and security worldwide.

John R. Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of "Surrender Is Not an Option."

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New York Times
April 27, 2011
Pg. 27

The Milk Of Resistance

By Khaled Mattawa

Ann Arbor, Mich.--THOUGH Libyan government forces have killed and wounded hundreds of civilians in their siege of the western city of Misurata, one of the most telling examples of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi's wrath has been the bombing and destruction of a dairy plant there.

In just a few years the Naseem dairy plant, owned by a local family, had achieved what Colonel Qaddafi’s regime could never do: provide Libyans with a decent glass of milk.

I was 5 when Colonel Qaddafi came to power, in 1969. One of my earliest pre-Qaddafi memories is of a small Peugeot maneuvering through a crowd of children playing on our street in Benghazi. A tall man would step out, quickly open the trunk and dash up to each house before getting back in the car. If I blinked, I could imagine that the sweating jug of fresh cold milk on our doorstep had appeared there all by itself.

Soon after Colonel Qaddafi’s coup, though, milk ceased to come magically to our door. The dairy farm apparently belonged to “an enemy of the revolution,” and was nationalized. I remember driving around with my father, looking for a place to buy milk. We found one at last, but its door was closed, and empty five-liter plastic jugs were lined up outside, placed there by milk-starved residents. This was in the early 1970s, when Libya was producing about two million barrels of oil per day, one for every Libyan.

In 1977 I went on a school field trip to visit the Qaddafi regime’s solution to the milk problem. The new government-run Amal dairy plant had huge gleaming steel tanks placed in a large hall, and a sour smell in the air.

We soon learned that the milk was of terrible quality, watery and slightly bitter. Libyans made do with evaporated and condensed milk until the markets opened in the late 1990s, and high-quality shelf-stable milk could be imported from Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

I left Libya in 1979 to go to school in the United States, and returned for the first time in 2000. Grocery shopping after my long exile and wishing to support a local product, I reached for a six-pack of yogurt from Amal. The containers all had bananas on them. Holding the pack, I asked the storeowner if he had Amal plain yogurt instead of banana.

“What banana?” he said.

“This says it’s got banana flavor. I want plain.”

“No banana flavor!”

“But it says so right here on the pack.”

“How many times do I have to tell you? No bananas. It’s plain. Plain.”

I did not believe him and left without any yogurt. At home I told my family about the incident. At first they too were confused. Then they burst out laughing.

Amal had never produced anything as fancy as flavored yogurt, they told me. The fruit on the label was such a bad old joke, they’d ceased to even notice it. They didn’t laugh for long; I’d reminded them, without meaning to, of how awful things had become.

In the early 2000s, the Naseem plant in Misurata tried to change that. At the time, Colonel Qaddafi had begun to move Libya toward a market economy, but most businesses were handed over to his sons and acolytes, who weren’t under much pressure to succeed. As a family business, Naseem was different, and its milk was good. In Benghazi and all across Libya we started to buy Naseem milk, then plain and flavored yogurt, eventually even ice cream.

No one in Libya was surprised that such commercial success took place in Misurata. It is a hard-working town; people there rise with the dawn. More recently, to block Colonel Qaddafi’s tanks, Misurata’s fighters have filled shipping containers with sand and parked them across the city’s main boulevard. It is also no surprise that Colonel Qaddafi went after that city, and its factory, as a symbol of resistance, and a sign of how he has failed as a leader.

Benghazi is Libya’s heart, the seat of its initiative and spirit. Tripoli, more pragmatic, is its brain. But Misurata, which happens to be my family’s ancestral town, is the country’s hands.

A torturer par excellence, Colonel Qaddafi has brought many a good soul to submission by breaking their fingers. But this time, he didn’t succeed. We Libyans have no doubt that the Naseem plant, burned to cinders, will soon be rebuilt. And when this war is over, the people of Misurata will be busy doing what nation building is all about — with a glass of milk in the morning to get the citizenry on its way.

Khaled Mattawa, an associate professor of creative writing at the University of Michigan, is the author, most recently, of the poetry collection “Tocqueville.”

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Wall Street Journal
April 27, 2011
Pg. 17

The Tehran-Damascus Axis

Reports that Iranian snipers are gunning down Syrian democracy activists are credible given the deep military and intelligence ties between the regimes.

By Amir Taheri

When the Arab uprisings started in Tunisia this winter, there were no more enthusiastic cheerleaders than the Khomeinists in Tehran. Their cheering got louder when revolution spread to Egypt, and louder still when Libyans rose in revolt.

But Tehran's cheering has begun to fade. The reason is that the revolt has spread to Syria, the mullahs' sole Arab ally.

A sign that Tehran may be getting nervous came last week when the Islamic Majlis, Iran's ersatz parliament, published a report on "The Arab Revolution." The authors ask for "urgent action to protect our strategic interests" in case the regime of President Bashar Assad is toppled.

What kind of action? Syrian opposition sources claim that Tehran has sent snipers to help Mr. Assad kill demonstrators. The regime used this tactic during the protests following the disputed presidential election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009. (Neda Agha-Soltan, the young woman who became the symbol of the pro-democracy uprising in Iran, was killed by one such sniper.) President Barack Obama has also spoken of Iran's possible involvement in Syria.

Whether or not Tehran has sent snipers to prop up Mr. Assad, the Islamic Republic is bound by treaty to help him fight "any threats against Syria's security and stability." Tehran and Damascus first signed a military cooperation treaty in 1998. At the time, Iran's minister of defense, Adm. Ali Shamkhani, stated publicly that the treaty would also cover "intelligence and security issues" with regard to dissident armed groups. Since then the treaty has been refined and deepened on several occasions, most recently under Mr. Ahmadinejad in 2008.

Syria is the only country with which the Iranian armed forces and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps hold joint staff meetings at least once a year. Iran has also emerged as a major supplier of weapons and materiel to Syria, according to the official Iranian news agency IRNA.

Iran started using the Assad regime as a means of dividing the Arabs in the 1970s, when the shah wanted to squeeze the Baathist regime in Iraq. To this end, he supplied Syria with cut-price oil and aid totalling $150 million in 1977.

Under the mullahs, Syria retained its role in preventing the Arabs from ganging up against the then-fragile Islamic Republic. Throughout its eight-year war against Saddam Hussein, Iran benefited from Syrian support, including vital intelligence on Iraqi armed forces. As a gesture of goodwill, Tehran arranged for some mullahs to issue fatwas declaring the Alawite minority, to which the Assad family belongs, to be "part of Islam." Most Islamic scholars, on the other hand, have long regarded the esoteric Alawi sect as heretical.

Iran and Syria also share an interest in Lebanon. Syrian despots have always dreamt of annexing Lebanon. And under the shah, Iran regarded itself as the protector of Lebanon's Shiite community.

Under the mullahs, Lebanon has been recast as "our revolution's perimeter of defense," in the words of Gen. Hassan Firuzabadi, chief of staff of the Iranian armed forces. In a speech in Tehran last month, Gen. Firuzabadi justified Iran's support for Hezbollah in Lebanon and for Hamas in the Palestinian territories by underscoring the role that the two groups played in fighting "the Zionist enemy." And because of its geographical proximity, Syria plays a crucial role in channelling arms from Iran to both Hezbollah and Hamas.

Iranian-Syrian cooperation in Lebanon has a long history. In the words of Iran's former President Hashemi Rafsanjani, the countries worked together "to push the Americans out" with a suicide attack that killed 241 U.S. servicemen in 1983. In the decades that followed, Tehran and Damascus used Hezbollah in hostage-taking operations and assassinations of Western diplomats and Arab politicians.

Under Mr. Ahmadinejad, Iran has expanded its presence in Syria significantly. At least 14 Iranian "Islamic Cultural Centres" have opened across Syria, and hundreds of mullah missionaries have been sent to introduce Iranian-style Shiism to Syrians. Similar tactics in Lebanon have succeeded in "Iranizing" a large chunk of the Lebanese Shiite community.

The Assad regime has a larger strategic importance for the Islamic Republic. "We want to be present in the Mediterranean," Mr. Ahmadinejad said in a speech last month in Tehran, marking the arrival in the Syrian port of Latakia of a flotilla of Iranian warships. This was the first time since 1975 that Iranian warships had appeared in the Mediterranean.

Indeed, Iran could build a presence in the Mediterranean through Syria and Lebanon. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has already developed mooring facilities in the Syrian port as a prelude to what may be a full-scale air and naval base.

Mr. Ahmadinejad, who believes that the United States is in historic retreat, sees Iran as the successor to the defunct Soviet Union as the principal global challenger to what he says is "a world system, imposed by Infidel powers." The loss of Syria would puncture many of Mr. Ahmadinejad's aspirations.

Over the years, it is possible that Iran has built a network of contact and sympathy within the Syrian military and security services. It may now be using that network to encourage hardliners within the beleaguered Assad regime to fight on.

From the start, Tehran media have labelled the Syrian uprising "a Zionist plot," the term they used to describe the pro-democracy movement in Iran itself. In 2009, the mullahs claimed that those killed in the streets of Tehran and Tabriz were not peaceful demonstrators but "Zionist and Infidel" agents who deserved to die. The Assad clan is using the same vicious vocabulary against freedom lovers in Syria as snipers kill them in the streets of Damascus, Deraa and Douma.

Mr. Taheri is the author of "The Persian Night: Iran Under the Khomeinist Revolution" (Encounter, 2009).

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Financial Times
April 27, 2011

America Must Regain The Initiative Abroad

By Philip Zelikow

The revolution in Syria is well under way. The revolution in Libya struggles on. The Middle East is alight, yet most of America’s military commitment, and the political attention associated with it, remains in Afghanistan. Every day that the US worries about events such as the escape of hundreds of painstakingly detained insurgents from an Afghan jail is a day in which America loses the power of initiative elsewhere.

Two months ago Robert Gates, defence secretary, gave a speech about the future of the US army at West Point, saying that “any future defence secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as General MacArthur so delicately put it”. Mr Gates, a principal architect of the present commitment in Afghanistan, has since complained through his spokesman that this line was “hijacked” by critics. Gen MacArthur, also a principal advocate of a large-scale war in Asia, may not have uttered the words, but it is worth reflecting on what both these men were saying about the troubles of American grand strategy.

Mr Gates’ remarks came just as the new flare-up in Libya began and as pressure to develop military plans for a possible confrontation with Iran continues. It was a prepared remark, uttered with deliberation, by an experienced statesman. He had inherited an Afghan and Iraqi war. He helped to escalate the Iraq war in order to get to the place where he could pull out of it by the end of this year. He also helped to escalate the Afghan war, if with a longer-term vision that is harder to discern. Surely, whatever his prognosis, he regards the Afghan fight as a frustrating experience. Listening to his West Point address, I hear exasperation in his voice and the implied words: “Enough already.”

The quote Mr Gates used was borrowed from the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr, describing how Gen Macarthur in 1961 advised President John F. Kennedy to avoid intervention in Laos. For reasons so strange to us now that it needs a historian to explain them, many serious men then thought this little landlocked nation was a pivot of world security. Gen MacArthur was a fervent anti-communist, so his argument made a strong impression on Kennedy. In today’s terms, Gen MacArthur was making an argument about America’s strategic initiative.

Strategic initiative is a vital but neglected concept in foreign policy. It is about who sets the agenda and who reacts. It is about who plays offence politically and who plays defence. The side with the strategic initiative is the side that chooses the time, place and manner of a clash. Gen MacArthur was urging Kennedy not to get bogged down in a war in a time, place and manner chosen by China or the Soviet Union.

When he took his job in 2006 Mr Gates inherited a world in which the US had lost a great deal of strategic initiative. Its military capability, and the time and attention of its leaders were tied down, “fixed” in military parlance, in draining, inconclusive conflicts. At the highest level the task for American national defence remains to recover this initiative, by recovering the capacity to manoeuvre. The apt word President Barack Obama has used, which he also means in the sense of American domestic concerns, is “rebalance.”

Libya may be the irritable object of some experts who are fatigued with or even disgusted by American overcommitment. It is not, however, the impediment to recovering this initiative. With Libya, a little patience and perspective would help. There is no persuasive evidence that Muammer Gaddafi enjoys any broad base of public support. The revolution is broad and spontaneous. It is also, of course, unready, untrained and fractious. But Colonel Gaddafi has a particular, venomous history with the US and several European and Arab countries. They thus have an interest in the outcome and are acting accordingly.

But Col Gaddafi’s military forces are not formidable and his economy is based on the Libyan National Oil Company, an entity already under international sanctions. Tens of billions of dollars in frozen Libyan assets are ready to be released to an alternative government. It is possible that the revolutionaries and their foreign supporters will mismanage their efforts so disastrously that Col Gaddafi will eventually triumph, but the level of collective incompetence would need to be the stuff of legend. No “big American land army” should be desired or needed at any point.

Taking stock of the so-called "three wars" in which America is now embroiled, Libya is not even at the level of effort expended in the less important Kosovo conflict of 1999. Another – Iraq – is on an apparently inexorable path to being wound up this year. The main impediment to US strategic initiative is therefore Afghanistan. That conflict is the real subtext for Mr Gates’ now-famous remark, and the proper context for recalling Gen. MacArthur’s warning to another president, 50 years ago.

The writer is a professor of history at the University of Virginia. From 2005 to 2007 he was the counsellor of the US Department of State.

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Washington Post
April 27, 2011
Pg. 17

The Pol And The Policy

Donilon's Mideast challenge

By David Ignatius

Tom Donilon, President Obama’s national security adviser, has a reputation as a “process guy,” meaning that he runs an orderly decision-making system at the National Security Council, and as a “political guy” with a feel for Capitol Hill and the media.

Now, facing the rolling crisis of the Arab Spring, Donilon has had to transform into the ultimate “policy guy” — coordinating administration strategy for a revolution that will alter the foreign-policy map for decades.

U.S. strategy is still a work in progress. That’s the consensus among some leading Donilon-watchers inside and outside the government. The national security adviser has tried to shape Obama’s intuitive support for the Arab revolutionaries into a coherent line. But as the crisis has unfolded, there has been tension between American interests and values, and a communications-oriented NSC staff has sometimes seemed to oscillate between the two.

“The focus is more on how it plays than on what to do,” says one longtime friend of Donilon. He credits Donilon as “a very smart political person” who has brought order to the planning process. But he cautions: “Tom is not a strategist. He’s a pol. That’s the heart of what he is and does.”

Another member of the inner circle similarly credits Donilon as “very inclusive of all the principals in the decision-making process.” But he worries that this White House is too focused on “message management.”

The uprisings in Egypt, Bahrain, Libya, Yemen and now Syria all embody the tension between U.S. interests and values, and Obama has leaned different ways. With Egypt and Libya, the White House voted its values and supported rebellion and change; with Bahrain and Yemen, the administration, while sympathetic to reform, has embraced its interests in the stability of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain’s neighbor, and in a Yemen that is an ally against al-Qaeda.

The mix is pragmatic, which seems to suit both Obama and Donilon. Yet it sometimes frustrates ideologues on both sides who want a more systematic line. My instinct is that the White House is right to be pragmatic, and for that reason should avoid making so many public pronouncements: This is an evolving crisis, and each country presents a different set of issues; a one-size-fits-all policy approach would be a mistake.

The biggest test may come in Syria, where President Bashar al-Assad has launched a ruthless crackdown. Here, U.S. values and interests would seem to coincide in the fall of Assad, who is Iran’s key Arab ally and maintains a repressive, anti-American regime. But there are dangers: Assad’s fall could bring a sectarian bloodbath. So far, Donilon seems to be holding a middle ground to allow maximum U.S. flexibility.

In an interview in his West Wing office last week, Donilon outlined his basic strategic framework. It begins with Obama’s intuitive feel for these issues. Back in January when the Arab revolts began, Obama admonished his NSC advisers, preoccupied with other issues: “You need to get on this!”

Donilon cites four guidelines that have shaped the administration’s response ever since: First, the Arab revolt is a “historic” event, comparable to the fall of the Ottoman Empire or the post-1945 decolonization of the Middle East; second, “no country is immune” from change; third, the revolution has “deep roots” in poor governance, demographics and new communications technology; and fourth, “these are indigenous events” that can’t be dictated by America, Iran or any other outside power.

Donilon also stresses that this process of change is just beginning. “We’re in the early chapters,” he says, warning that the United States should be careful not to take actions now that it might regret down the road, as situations change and new players emerge.

A useful reality check for Donilon was his trip this month to Saudi Arabia, which had been traumatized by Obama’s abandonment of deposed Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and America’s initial support for Bahrain’s Shiite protesters. Donilon met with Saudi King Abdullah for more than two hours and gave him a personal letter from Obama. The reassuring message, he says, was about “the bond we have in a relationship of 70 years that’s rooted in shared strategic interest.”

Donilon is preoccupied now by Syria. He doesn’t want to talk details of policy but says the administration will follow its basic principles of opposing violent repression and supporting reform. He says Assad made a disastrous mistake being “constipated” about change. As for a Libya-style intervention, Donilon seems dubious that a military option in Syria is available or advisable.

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Wall Street Journal
April 27, 2011
Pg. 16

The Syria Lobby

Why Washington keeps giving a pass to the Assad regime.

 

How does a small, energy-poor and serially misbehaving Middle Eastern regime always seem to get a Beltway pass? Conspiracy nuts and other tenured faculty would have us believe that country is Israel, though the Jewish state shares America's enemies and our democratic values. But the question really applies to Syria, where the Assad regime is now showing its true nature.

Washington's Syria Lobby is a bipartisan mindset. "The road to Damascus is a road to peace," said Nancy Pelosi on a 2007 visit to Syria as House Speaker. Former Secretary of State James Baker is a longtime advocate of engagement with the House of Assad. So is Republican Chuck Hagel, who in 2008 co-wrote an op-ed with fellow Senator John Kerry in these pages titled "It's Time to Talk to Syria." The Massachusetts Democrat has visited Damascus five times in the past two years alone.

Yesterday, the New York Times quoted a senior Administration official saying the U.S. was reluctant to criticize the Syrian President because he "sees himself as a Westernized leader" and that "he'll react if he believes he is being lumped in with brutal dictators." This was meant as a defense of U.S. policy.

The argument made by the Syria Lobby runs briefly as follows: The Assad family is occasionally ruthless, especially when its survival is at stake, but it's also secular and pragmatic. Though the regime is Iran's closest ally in the Middle East, hosts terrorists in Damascus, champions Hezbollah in Lebanon and has funneled al Qaeda terrorists into Iraq, it will forgo those connections for the right price. Above all, it yearns for better treatment from Washington and the return of the Golan Heights, the strategic plateau held by Israel since 1967.

The Syria Lobby also claims that whoever succeeds Assad would probably be worse. The country is divided by sect and ethnicity, and the fall of the House of Assad could lead to bloodletting previously seen in Lebanon or Iraq. Some members of the Lobby go so far as to say that the regime remains broadly popular. "I think that President Assad is going to count on . . . majoritarian support within the country to support him in doing what he needs to do to restore order," Flynt Leverett of the New America Foundation said recently on PBS's NewsHour.

Now we are seeing what Mr. Leverett puts down merely to the business of "doing what he needs to do": Video clips on YouTube of tanks rolling into Syrian cities and unarmed demonstrators being gunned down in the streets; reports of hundreds killed and widespread "disappearances." Even the Obama Administration has belatedly criticized Assad, though so far President Obama has done no more than condemn his "outrageous human rights abuses."

Maybe this is all part of the Administration's strategic concept of "leading from behind," which is how one official sums up its foreign policy in this week's New Yorker. But the deeper problem is a flawed analysis of the Syrian regime's beliefs, intentions and capacity for change. Run by an Alawite minority, the regime was never going to break with its Shiite benefactors in Tehran and join the Arab Sunni orbit. A regime that builds its domestic legitimacy on hostility to Israel is also unlikely ever to make peace, even if it recovered the Golan.

So it shouldn't surprise that Damascus has only stepped up its anti-American rhetoric since President Obama came to office offering engagement (and lately returning a U.S. ambassador to Damascus after a six-year hiatus), or that its ties to Tehran have only grown closer (as Amir Taheri describes nearby), or that it continues to meddle in Lebanon, which it sees as a part of "Greater Syria." What is surprising is that for so long the U.S. has refused to stare these facts in the face.

Though the Administration complains of lacking leverage with the regime, it could recall our ambassador and expel Syria's emissary from Washington. As the Foundation for Defense of Democracies suggests, the U.S. and Europe could also freeze and seize the assets of the Assads, designate Syria's elite units responsible for human rights abuses as Specially Designated Global Terrorist entities, impose sanctions on companies providing the regime's tools of repression, and provide the Syrian opposition with encrypted communications technology to dodge the regime's surveillance. All this would damage the regime while signaling the opposition not to lose courage.

The Obama Administration's single biggest strategic failure during this Arab spring has been not distinguishing between enemies and friends. Syria's House of Assad is an enemy. The sooner the Administration abandons the counsels of the Syria Lobby, the likelier it will be that Syria becomes a country worth lobbying for.

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Arizona Republic (Phoenix)
April 27, 2011

NATO, Europe Must Take Lead In Helping Rebels

 

NATO is getting more military muscle for its air raids in Libya. The good news is the source of that muscle: It's not the United States, but Italy.

Europe needs to shoulder more of the cost and responsibility for protecting Libyans from the excesses of strongman Moammar Gadhafi, while also trying to push him out the door.

And NATO must continue to lead, not the United States, despite the urging of Arizona Sen. John McCain and others.

After visiting rebel leaders in Libya and seeing wounded young men, McCain is eager for America to step up its commitment. He wants us to take leadership of the NATO effort, supply more aircraft, recognize the transitional government and help arm and train the rebels.

We can't. And we shouldn't.

The American military and budget are already strained as we try to stabilize, and eventually exit, Afghanistan and Iraq.

No one doubts McCain's passion and experience. Yet his own assessment - untrained rebel forces, lack of equipment and a looming stalemate - foreshadows a long, dangerous, expensive effort.

NATO should stay in charge. Libya is strategically far more important to our European allies, which are the biggest customers for its oil and would bear the burden if refugees flooded out. They're much better-positioned to use economic leverage: Italy and France are calling for a Libyan oil boycott.

The military intervention in Libya, which President Barack Obama chose to join, was clearly a dicey move. If the initial goal of safeguarding civilians didn't also dislodge Gadhafi, it would be virtually impossible to avoid getting drawn into the conflict. The question now is how far to go and how to get out.

That challenge, as Obama recognizes, is best confronted jointly. Especially because Libya isn't the only crisis. In Syria, President Bashar al-Assad is cracking down on pro-democracy protesters with all the bloody zeal of Gadhafi.

A solution will take international cooperation, not America acting as the Lone Ranger.

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New York Times
April 27, 2011
Pg. 2

Corrections

 

An article on Friday about military setbacks suffered a day earlier by Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya misidentified the United Nations official who had described a flood of Libyan refugees into Tunisia. He is Firas Kayal, not Faras Kaya. The article also misstated the United Nations organization for which Mr. Kayal is the spokesman. It is the High Commissioner for Refugees, not the Human Rights Commission, an organization that no longer exists. (The Human Rights Council replaced the Human Rights Commission in 2006.)

Editor's Note: The article referred to by David D. Kirkpatrick and Thom Shanker appeared in the Current News Early Bird, April 22, 2011.