2 U.S. Architects of Harsh Tactics in 9/11's Wake

NY Times reports:
Jim Mitchell and Bruce Jessen were military retirees and psychologists, on the lookout for business opportunities. They found an excellent customer in the Central Intelligence Agency, where in 2002 they became the architects of the most important interrogation program in the history of American counterterrorism.

Dr. Bruce Jessen joined his Air Force colleague to build a thriving business that made millions of dollars selling interrogation and training services to the C.I.A.

A former Air Force explosives expert and a natural salesman, Dr. Jim Mitchell and his colleague had no expertise on Al Qaeda and had never conducted an actual interrogation. But they had psychological credentials and an intimate knowledge of a brutal treatment regimen used decades ago by Chinese Communists.

They had never carried out a real interrogation, only mock sessions in the military training they had overseen. They had no relevant scholarship; their Ph.D. dissertations were on high blood pressure and family therapy. They had no language skills and no expertise on Al Qaeda.

But they had psychology credentials and an intimate knowledge of a brutal treatment regimen used decades ago by Chinese Communists. For an administration eager to get tough on those who had killed 3,000 Americans, that was enough.

So “Doc Mitchell” and “Doc Jessen,” as they had been known in the Air Force, helped lead the United States into a wrenching conflict over torture, terror and values that seven years later has not run its course.

Dr. Mitchell, with a sonorous Southern accent and the sometimes overbearing confidence of a self-made man, was a former Air Force explosives expert and a natural salesman. Dr. Jessen, raised on an Idaho potato farm, joined his Air Force colleague to build a thriving business that made millions of dollars selling interrogation and training services to the C.I.A.

Seven months after President Obama ordered the C.I.A. interrogation program closed, its fallout still commands attention. In the next few weeks, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is expected to decide whether to begin a criminal torture investigation, in which the psychologists’ role is likely to come under scrutiny. The Justice Department ethics office is expected to complete a report on the lawyers who pronounced the methods legal. And the C.I.A. will soon release a highly critical 2004 report on the program by the agency’s inspector general.

Col. Steven M. Kleinman, an Air Force interrogator and intelligence officer who knows Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen, said he thought loyalty to their country in the panicky wake of the Sept. 11 attacks prompted their excursion into interrogation. He said the result was a tragedy for the country, and for them.

“I feel their primary motivation was they thought they had skills and insights that would make the nation safer,” Colonel Kleinman said. “But good persons in extreme circumstances can do horrific things.”

For the C.I.A., as well as for the gray-goateed Dr. Mitchell, 58, and the trim, dark-haired Dr. Jessen, 60, the change in administrations has been neck-snapping. For years, President George W. Bush declared the interrogation program lawful and praised it for stopping attacks. Mr. Obama, by contrast, asserted that its brutality rallied recruits for Al Qaeda; called one of the methods, waterboarding, torture; and, in his first visit to the C.I.A., suggested that the interrogation program was among the agency’s “mistakes.”

The psychologists’ subsequent fall from official grace has been as swift as their rise in 2002. Today the offices of Mitchell Jessen and Associates, the lucrative business they operated from a handsome century-old building in downtown Spokane, Wash., sit empty, its C.I.A. contracts abruptly terminated last spring.

With a possible criminal inquiry looming, Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen have retained a well-known defense lawyer, Henry F. Schuelke III. Mr. Schuelke said they would not comment for this article, which is based on dozens of interviews with the doctors’ colleagues and present and former government officials.

In a brief e-mail exchange in June, Dr. Mitchell said his nondisclosure agreement with the C.I.A. prevented him from commenting. He suggested that his work had been mischaracterized.

“Ask around,” Dr. Mitchell wrote, “and I’m sure you will find all manner of ‘experts’ who will be willing to make up what you’d like to hear on the spot and unrestrained by reality.”

A Career Shift

At the time of the Sept. 11 attacks, Dr. Mitchell had just retired from his last military job, as psychologist to an elite special operations unit in North Carolina. Showing his entrepreneurial streak, he had started a training company called Knowledge Works, which he operated from his new home in Florida, to supplement retirement pay.

But for someone with Dr. Mitchell’s background, it was evident that the campaign against Al Qaeda would produce opportunities. He began networking in military and intelligence circles where he had a career’s worth of connections.

He had grown up poor in Florida, Dr. Mitchell told friends, and joined the Air Force in 1974, seeking adventure. Stationed in Alaska, he learned the art of disarming bombs and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in psychology.

Robert J. Madigan, a psychology professor at the University of Alaska who had worked closely with him, remembered Dr. Mitchell stopping by years later. He had completed his doctorate at the University of South Florida in 1986, comparing diet and exercise in controlling hypertension, and was working for the Air Force in Spokane.

“I remember him saying they were preparing people for intense interrogations,” Dr. Madigan said.

Military survival training was expanded after the Korean War, when false confessions by American prisoners led to sensational charges of communist “brainwashing.” Military officials decided that giving service members a taste of Chinese-style interrogation would prepare them to withstand its agony.

Air Force survival training was consolidated in 1966 at Fairchild Air Force Base in the parched hills outside Spokane. The name of the training, Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, or SERE, suggests its breadth: airmen and women learn to live off the land and avoid capture, as well as how to behave if taken prisoner.

In the 1980s, Dr. Jessen became the SERE psychologist at the Air Force Survival School, screening instructors who posed as enemy interrogators at the mock prison camp and making sure rough treatment did not go too far. He had grown up in a Mormon community with a view of Grand Teton, earning a doctorate at Utah State studying “family sculpting,” in which patients make physical models of their family to portray emotional relationships.

Dr. Jessen moved in 1988 to the top psychologist’s job at a parallel “graduate school” of survival training, a short drive from the Air Force school. Dr. Mitchell took his place.

The two men became part of what some Defense Department officials called the “resistance mafia,” experts on how to resist enemy interrogations. Both lieutenant colonels and both married with children, they took weekend ice-climbing trips together.

While many subordinates considered them brainy and capable leaders, some fellow psychologists were more skeptical. At the annual conference of SERE psychologists, two colleagues recalled, Dr. Mitchell offered lengthy put-downs of presentations that did not suit him.

At the Air Force school, Dr. Mitchell was known for enforcing the safety of interrogations; it might surprise his later critics to learn that he eliminated a tactic called “manhandling” after it produced a spate of neck injuries, a colleague said.

At the SERE graduate school, Dr. Jessen is remembered for an unusual job switch, from supervising psychologist to mock enemy interrogator.

Dr. Jessen became so aggressive in that role that colleagues intervened to rein him in, showing him videotape of his “pretty scary” performance, another official recalled.

Always, former and current SERE officials say, it is understood that the training mimics the methods of unscrupulous foes.

Mark Mays, the first psychologist at the Air Force school, said that to make the fake prison camp realistic, officials consulted American P.O.W.’s who had just returned from harrowing camps in North Vietnam.

“It was clear that this is what we’d expect from our enemies,” said Dr. Mays, now a clinical psychologist and lawyer in Spokane. “It was not something I could ever imagine Americans would do.”

Start of the Program

In December 2001, a small group of professors and law enforcement and intelligence officers gathered outside Philadelphia at the home of a prominent psychologist, Martin E. P. Seligman, to brainstorm about Muslim extremism. Among them was Dr. Mitchell, who attended with a C.I.A. psychologist, Kirk M. Hubbard.

During a break, Dr. Mitchell introduced himself to Dr. Seligman and said how much he admired the older man’s writing on “learned helplessness.” Dr. Seligman was so struck by Dr. Mitchell’s unreserved praise, he recalled in an interview, that he mentioned it to his wife that night. Later, he said, he was “grieved and horrified” to learn that his work had been cited to justify brutal interrogations.

Dr. Seligman had discovered in the 1960s that dogs that learned they could do nothing to avoid small electric shocks would become listless and simply whine and endure the shocks even after being given a chance to escape.

Helplessness, which later became an influential concept in the treatment of human depression, was also much discussed in military survival training. Instructors tried to stop short of producing helplessness in trainees, since their goal was to strengthen the spirit of service members in enemy hands.

Dr. Mitchell, colleagues said, believed that producing learned helplessness in a Qaeda interrogation subject might ensure that he would comply with his captor’s demands. Many experienced interrogators disagreed, asserting that a prisoner so demoralized would say whatever he thought the interrogator expected.

At the C.I.A. in December 2001, Dr. Mitchell’s theories were attracting high-level attention. Agency officials asked him to review a Qaeda manual, seized in England, that coached terrorist operatives to resist interrogations. He contacted Dr. Jessen, and the two men wrote the first proposal to turn the enemy’s brutal techniques — slaps, stress positions, sleep deprivation, wall-slamming and waterboarding — into an American interrogation program.

By the start of 2002, Dr. Mitchell was consulting with the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorist Center, whose director, Cofer Black, and chief operating officer, Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., were impressed by his combination of visceral toughness and psychological jargon. One person who heard some discussions said Dr. Mitchell gave the C.I.A. officials what they wanted to hear. In this person’s words, Dr. Mitchell suggested that interrogations required “a comparable level of fear and brutality to flying planes into buildings.”

By the end of March, when agency operatives captured Abu Zubaydah, initially described as Al Qaeda’s No. 3, the Mitchell-Jessen interrogation plan was ready. At a secret C.I.A. jail in Thailand, as reported in prior news accounts, two F.B.I agents used conventional rapport-building methods to draw vital information from Mr. Zubaydah. Then the C.I.A. team, including Dr. Mitchell, arrived.

With the backing of agency headquarters, Dr. Mitchell ordered Mr. Zubaydah stripped, exposed to cold and blasted with rock music to prevent sleep. Not only the F.B.I. agents but also C.I.A. officers at the scene were uneasy about the harsh treatment. Among those questioning the use of physical pressure, according to one official present, were the Thailand station chief, the officer overseeing the jail, a top interrogator and a top agency psychologist.

Whether they protested to C.I.A. bosses is uncertain, because the voluminous message traffic between headquarters and the Thailand site remains classified. One witness said he believed that “revisionism” in light of the torture controversy had prompted some participants to exaggerate their objections.

As the weeks passed, the senior agency psychologist departed, followed by one F.B.I. agent and then the other. Dr. Mitchell began directing the questioning and occasionally speaking directly to Mr. Zubaydah, one official said.

In late July 2002, Dr. Jessen joined his partner in Thailand. On Aug. 1, the Justice Department completed a formal legal opinion authorizing the SERE methods, and the psychologists turned up the pressure. Over about two weeks, Mr. Zubaydah was confined in a box, slammed into the wall and waterboarded 83 times.

The brutal treatment stopped only after Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen themselves decided that Mr. Zubaydah had no more information to give up. Higher-ups from headquarters arrived and watched one more waterboarding before agreeing that the treatment could stop, according to a Justice Department legal opinion.

Lucrative Work

The Zubaydah case gave reason to question the Mitchell-Jessen plan: the prisoner had given up his most valuable information without coercion.

But top C.I.A. officials made no changes, and the methods would be used on at least 27 more prisoners, including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times.

The business plans of Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen, meanwhile, were working out beautifully. They were paid $1,000 to $2,000 a day apiece, one official said. They had permanent desks in the Counterterrorist Center, and could now claim genuine experience in interrogating high-level Qaeda operatives.

Dr. Mitchell could keep working outside the C.I.A. as well. At the Ritz-Carlton in Maui in October 2003, he was featured at a high-priced seminar for corporations on how to behave if kidnapped. He created new companies, called Wizard Shop, later renamed Mind Science, and What If. His first company, Knowledge Works, was certified by the American Psychological Association in 2004 as a sponsor of continuing professional education. (A.P.A. dropped the certification last year.)

In 2005, the psychologists formed Mitchell Jessen and Associates, with offices in Spokane and Virginia and five additional shareholders, four of them from the military’s SERE program. By 2007, the company employed about 60 people, some with impressive résumés, including Deuce Martinez, a lead C.I.A. interrogator of Mr. Mohammed; Roger L. Aldrich, a legendary military survival trainer; and Karen Gardner, a senior training official at the F.B.I. Academy.

The company’s C.I.A. contracts are classified, but their total was well into the millions of dollars. In 2007 in a suburb of Tampa, Fla., Dr. Mitchell built a house with a swimming pool, now valued at $800,000.

The psychologists’ influence remained strong under four C.I.A. directors. In 2006, in fact, when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her legal adviser, John B. Bellinger III, pushed back against the C.I.A.’s secret detention program and its methods, the director at the time, Michael V. Hayden, asked Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen to brief State Department officials and persuade them to drop their objections. They were unsuccessful.

By then, the national debate over torture had begun, and it would undo the psychologists’ business.

In a statement to employees on April 9, Leon E. Panetta, President Obama’s C.I.A. director, announced the “decommissioning” of the agency’s secret jails and repeated a pledge not to use coercion. And there was another item: “No C.I.A. contractors will conduct interrogations.”

Agency officials terminated the contracts for Mitchell Jessen and Associates, and the psychologists’ lucrative seven-year ride was over. Within days, the company had vacated its Spokane offices. The phones were disconnected, and at neighboring businesses, no one knew of a forwarding address.


This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 15, 2009
An article on Wednesday about two former military psychologists who designed the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogation program in 2002 misstated the credentials of an Air Force officer who criticized the interrogation methods but suggested that the two psychologists had acted out of patriotic motives. The officer, Steven M. Kleinman, is a career intelligence officer and former interrogator; he is not a psychologist and is not “Dr. Kleinman.” (He has master’s degrees in strategic intelligence and forensic sciences, but does not have a doctorate.)

CIA Coverups and American Injustice

How the Bush administration's policies in the war on terror are coming back to haunt us.

At Salon.com, Hina Shamsi writes:

The news last week that the CIA had destroyed interrogation videotapes of two prisoners in its secret detention program had particular resonance at Guantánamo Bay, where I was attending a U.S. military tribunal hearing as a human rights observer. The destroyed tapes reportedly were evidence of the CIA's brutal treatment, in secret prisons abroad, of two alleged high-level al-Qaida operatives, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nahsiri. Both men are now in U.S. military custody in Guantánamo, together with 13 other former CIA prisoners the government refers to as "high-value detainees."

Evidence from three of the other "high-value detainees" was a key issue in the hearing I attended, and showed how the Bush administration's authorization of illegal detention and brutal prisoner treatment has tainted all aspects of its existing framework for handling key terrorist suspects. With the administration's stubborn refusal to return to the rule of law, how can it be surprising that, in Washington, D.C., the CIA's likely crimes have led to a coverup?

More light may be shed on the CIA's destruction of evidence in the coming weeks, with congressional committees pursuing investigations. A test of new Attorney General Michael Mukasey's leadership will be whether he appoints an investigator into the CIA's wrongdoing who is independent of the Department of Justice. Not only has the DOJ been demoralized by scandal and accusations of partisanship, it was also responsible for writing legal memos that justified the CIA's unlawful interrogation and detention program.

Just last month, the government told the American Civil Liberties Union that the DOJ had three memos, written in May 2005, that relate to CIA interrogation tactics. We know from news reports that at least two of these memos authorized the CIA to use harsh treatment, including waterboarding, freezing temperatures and head slaps, with the promise of impunity for interrogators. The disclosure was part of a court filing in ACLU v. Department of Defense, a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, seeking the government's release of the memos. A federal judge is expected to decide the issue early in 2008, but in the meantime, the CIA's destruction of the interrogation tapes falls afoul of two existing court orders in the same case.

In Guantánamo, the destruction of CIA evidence loomed large as proceedings continued in the case of Salim Ahmed Hamdan, allegedly a driver and bodyguard for Osama bin Laden. At issue in Hamdan's hearing was whether under the Military Commissions Act the government had the authority to try Hamdan as an "unlawful enemy combatant." Congress passed the law in October 2006, under pressure from the Bush administration, on the eve of the midterm elections. The law circumvents due process safeguards that are a hallmark of American justice, in both the military's own court-martial system and in the federal courts. For the more than 300 men held in Guantánamo for over six years, the Military Commissions Act stripped their right to challenge detention without charge through the ancient writ mechanism of habeas corpus. (The prisoners' challenge to this provision was before the Supreme Court last Wednesday.)

The first thing that happened when I and the other three human rights observers went through security for Hamdan's hearing was an apt metaphor for the rest of the two-day proceeding: We were forbidden from bringing the law into the courtroom. We could not bring in our copies of the Military Commissions Act, the rules of procedure, or even the military's own charges against Hamdan. Apparently the military feared that such basic but essential documents posed some sort of security risk. We were each permitted to bring in only a notepad and a pen.

Hamdan's hearing was the first time the government publicly presented evidence to support its "unlawful enemy combatant" charge, and the defense had the chance to refute the government's case. The playing field was not level, however. For example, the defense wanted to call five Guantánamo prisoners, including three "high-value detainees," Khalid Sheik Mohammed, Ramzi Bin al-Shib and Abu Faraj al-Libi, as witnesses. According to defense lawyers, these potential witnesses, and especially the "high-value detainees," could refute the government's charge that Hamdan had engaged in a conspiracy with senior members of al-Qaida to attack and murder civilians.

The judge permitted testimony from one of the detainees (and the defense and prosecution are negotiating the possible testimony of another), but refused to let the three "high-value detainees" testify, on the basis that the defense request was not timely in the proceedings. Government lawyers argued that the three were part of a highly classified special access program -- a situation of the government's own making, of course -- and that only those with top secret clearance had access to them, which took time.

On the flight back from Guantánamo on Friday night, I asked Hamdan's lead military defense lawyer, Lt. Brian Mizer, what it would take to get access. Lt. Mizer told me that, in fact, he had that top secret clearance and had been "read into" other special access programs on national security cases. It took about 20 minutes to get access, he said, but only if the government was willing. It has been widely reported that Muhammad, al-Shib, and al Libi have each been subjected to extreme cruelty, if not torture, in CIA custody. But the government takes the position that their treatment is classified and cannot be disclosed as a matter of the highest national security. But the credibility of that position has been destroyed along with the deliberate destruction of the CIA tapes.

Torture will also be an issue in any trial of any other "high-value detainees." The government has said that it intends to try at least some of these men in military commission proceedings. But this is where Bush administration policies will come back to haunt us with a vengeance: Unlike the majority of Guantánamo detainees who appear to be low-level players or even innocent, Khalid Sheik Mohammed and others did likely engage in serious and heinous crimes. If so, they should be prosecuted and sentenced -- but based on lawfully obtained evidence in full and fair proceedings that comport with the best traditions of American justice.

Instead, there's no doubt that government torture and cruelty -- and the question of what other evidence might exist or have been destroyed -- will be an issue in their trials. Given the CIA's destruction of the interrogations tapes, it will now be even harder to take government assurances of fair play and transparency at face value. There's also the danger that information obtained through torture will be introduced in the military commissions, in violation of more than 200 years of American law and values. For the first time in U.S. history, and under pressure from the Bush administration, in the Military Commissions Act, Congress explicitly authorized an American tribunal to permit evidence obtained through "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment" as long as it was obtained before Dec. 31, 2005. Even though the Military Commissions Act prohibits evidence obtained through torture, it could still come in because of this cruel treatment loophole, combined with the other provisions that permit secret evidence and evidence from second- and third-hand sources.

After 9/11, the Bush administration created a legal black hole in the name of national security -- and six years later, we're still trying to crawl out of it. The question now is, which direction will we take? At stake is nothing less than a return to the rule of law, the heart of American justice from which we have strayed so far.

The government could still choose to pull itself out of the morass it created by using two proven systems for detention and trial: either military courts-martials or the civilian criminal justice system.

Instead, it looks as if we're on the verge of creating a different, but equally dubious approach. Over the summer, academics, policymakers and others have begun calling for another entirely new system: a national security court, with fewer procedural and substantive safeguards, to oversee the detention (possibly indefinitely, without criminal charge) and trial of terrorism suspects. Attorney General Mukasey indicated his willingness to consider such a system in a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed in August. And in June, Secretary of Defense Gates asked Congress to provide "a statutory basis for holding prisoners who should never be released and who may or may not be able to be put on trial." We face the risk that, instead of repealing the Military Commissions Act, Congress could compound its mistake and enact a new, second-tier system of secondary justice.

Among other justifications, proponents argue that our existing military or civilian criminal justice systems are too protective of individual rights. They add that regular courts could give defendants access to sensitive national security information for their own defense, and that the threshold for evidence obtained from battlefields is too high. But none of these arguments addresses specifically why, if existing laws are inadequate, the better approach is not to identify flaws and amend them, rather than create a new system designed to circumvent core protections of constitutional due process.

The United States' strength lies in its values, enshrined in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and in military and civilian criminal justice systems that reflect those values. It is because the Bush administration ignored and continues to ignore this that we are so far from having an effective and lawful arrangement for detaining and trying terrorism suspects.

Bin Laden: "Europeans Should End U.S. Help"

The Associated Press reports:

Al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden called on Europeans to stop helping the United States in the war in Afghanistan, according to excerpts of a new audiotape broadcast Thursday on Al-Jazeera television.

Bin Laden said it was unjust for the United States to have invaded Afghanistan for sheltering him after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, saying he was the "only one responsible" for the deadly assaults on New York and Washington.

"The events of Manhattan were retaliation against the American-Israeli alliance's aggression against our people in Palestine and Lebanon, and I am the only one responsible for it. The Afghan people and government knew nothing about it. America knows that," the al-Qaida leader said in the five-minute tape.

The message appeared to be another attempt by bin Laden to influence public opinion in the West. In 2004, he offered Europeans a truce if they stopped attacking Muslims, then later spoke of a truce with the U.S. In both cases, al-Qaida then denounced those areas for not accepting its offer.

The terror leader said Afghans have been caught up in decades of struggle, first "at the hands of the Russians ... and before their wounds had healed and their grief had ended, they were invaded without right by your unjust governments."

He said that two separate injustices were visited upon Afghanistan as the Taliban was toppled in 2001: First, the war was "waged against the Afghans without right", and second coalition troops have not followed the "protocol of warfare," with the result that most bomb victims have been women and children.

"I have personally witnessed incidents like these, and the matter continues on an almost daily basis," he said.

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack dismissed the new tape as typical of bin Laden's tactics and expressed faith in the European allies.

"I think our NATO allies understand quite clearly what is at stake in Afghanistan as well as elsewhere around the world in fighting the war on terror," he told reporters. "It's going to require a sustained commitment over a period of time and we have seen that kind of commitment from our European allies."

FBI analysts were reviewing the tape but were not immediately able to say how long it was or when it might have been recorded nor could they provide other details. Spokesman Richard Kolko said it was being examined "to determine if it is authentic and for any intelligence value."

"As the FBI has said since 9/11, bin Laden was responsible for the attack," Kolko said in a statement. "In this latest tape, he again acknowledged his responsibility. This should help to clarify for all the conspiracy theorists, again _ the 9/11 attack was done by bin Laden and al-Qaida."

This has been the deadliest year in Afghanistan since the U.S.-led invasion in late 2001, with more than 6,100 people killed _ including more than 800 civilians _ in militant attacks and military operations, according to an Associated Press tally of figures from Afghan and Western officials.

In the new tape, bin Laden said European nations joined the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan "because they had no other alternative, only to be a follower."

"The American tide is ebbing, with God's help, and they will go back to their countries," he said, speaking of Europeans.

Bin Laden urged Europeans to pull away from the fight.

"It is better for you to stand against your leaders who are dropping in on the White House, and to work seriously to lift the injustice against the believers," he said, accusing U.S. forces and their allies of intentionally killing women and children in Afghanistan.

Al-Jazeera aired two brief excerpts of the audiotape, titled "Message to the European Peoples," which al-Qaida had announced Mondday that it would release soon.

Bin Laden issued four public statements earlier this year _ on Sept. 7, Sept. 11, Sept. 20 and Oct. 22. The Sept. 7 video was his first in three years and was issued to mark the sixth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Al-Qaida has dramatically stepped up its messages _ a pace seen as a sign of its increasing technical sophistication and the relative security felt by its leadership. Bin Laden is believed to be hiding along the Afghan-Pakistan frontier.

Bin Laden's message was the 89th this year by Al-Qaida's media wing, Al-Sahab, an average of one every three days, double the rate in 2006, according to IntelCenter, a U.S. counterterrorism group that monitors militant messaging.

Al-Qaida 'Rolodex' Found in Iraq Raid

UPI reports:

A September raid near the Syrian border uncovered what U.S. military officials term "an al-Qaida Rolodex" of hundreds of foreign fighters in Iraq.

A senior U.S. military official in Baghdad has confirmed to CNN that the raid netted documents listing the identities of more than 700 foreign fighters believed to have entered the country in the past year.

The official said the documents, along with other intelligence, indicated that as many as 60 percent of the foreign fighters were from Saudi Arabia and Libya, CNN reported.
White House spokeswoman Nikki McArthur said the United States continued to work with countries in the region to stem the flow of foreign fighters into Iraq.

"These statistics remind us that extremists continue to go to Iraq because they do not want the United States nor the Iraqis to succeed in establishing a democracy there that is an ally in the way on terror," McArthur told CNN.

Exclusive: FBI: Al Qaeda May Strike U.S. Shopping Malls in LA, Chicago

ABC News reports:

The FBI is warning that al Qaeda may be preparing a series of holiday attacks on U.S. shopping malls in Los Angeles and Chicago, according to an intelligence report distributed to law enforcement authorities across the country this morning.

The alert said al Qaeda "hoped to disrupt the U.S. economy and has been planning the attack for the past two years."

Law enforcement officials tell ABCNews.com that the FBI received the information in late September and declassified it yesterday for wide distribution.
The alert, like similar FBI and Department of Homeland Security terror alerts issued over the past five years at holiday times, raised questions about the credibility of the information.

The bulletin acknowledges that U.S. intelligence officers are uncertain as to whether the information is real, and intelligence officers say there is a concern that it could be "disinformation."

Law enforcement officials at three different agencies told ABCNews.com the FBI alert was based on a source who has proved reliable in the past.

The source reportedly had only "indirect access" to al Qaeda and word of the actual threat came to U.S. intelligence officers "through a lengthy chain" of contacts.

With the shopping season approaching, however, the FBI officials decided it was necessary to share the information.

For the past few years, jihadist chat rooms have regularly posted comments from anonymous individuals who have suggested or boasted about similar plans to attack such soft targets as shopping malls.

"Out of abundance of caution, and for any number of other reasons, raw intelligence is regularly shared within the intelligence and law enforcement communities -- even when the value of the information is unknown," said Special Agent Richard Kolko. "In the post-9/11 era, sharing information is our top priority. Al-Qa'ida messaging has clearly stated they intend to attack the U.S. or its interests; however, there is no information to state this is a credible threat. As always, we remind people to remain vigilant and report suspicious activity to authorities."

"We have no credible, specific information suggesting an imminent attack," a DHS official said.

FBI Working to Bolster Al Qaeda Cases

The LA Times reports:

The FBI is quietly reconstructing the cases against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and 14 other accused Al Qaeda leaders being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, spurred in part by U.S. concerns that years of CIA interrogation have yielded evidence that is inadmissible or too controversial to present at their upcoming war crimes tribunals, government officials familiar with the probes said.

The process is an embarrassment for the Bush administration, which for years held the men incommunicado overseas and allowed the CIA to use coercive means to extract information from them that would not be admissible in a U.S. court of law -- and might not be allowed in their military commissions, some former officials and legal experts said. Even if the information from the CIA interrogations is allowed, they said, it would probably risk focusing the trials on the actions of the agency and not the accused.

The FBI investigations, involving as many as 300 agents and analysts in a "Guantanamo task force," have been underway for as long as two years. They were requested by the Defense Department shortly after legal rulings indicated that Mohammed -- the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks -- and the other Al Qaeda suspects probably would win some form of trial in which evidence would have to be presented, according to senior federal law enforcement officials.

The task force has reviewed intelligence, interviewed the 15 accused Al Qaeda leaders and traveled to several nations to talk to witnesses and gather evidence for use in the tribunals, the federal law enforcement officials said. Like most others interviewed for this article, they spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the investigations, which are being coordinated with the Pentagon.

A Pakistan-based U.S. official who has participated in the hunt for Al Qaeda leaders since 2001 said he was interviewed by FBI agents four months ago in Washington. They were "very aggressively pursuing KSM and all of the things he's been involved in," he said, referring to the accused terrorist by his initials.

The FBI is especially interested in Mohammed, who during the more than three years he spent in CIA custody boasted that he had killed Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl and orchestrated more than two dozen other terrorist plots. Several senior counter-terrorism officials said they believed that Mohammed falsely confessed to some things, including the Pearl slaying, under duress or to obscure the roles played by operatives who might still be on the loose.

Mohammed's prosecution is expected to be the centerpiece of the military commissions, which could occur as early as next year. However, some U.S. officials familiar with them said the tribunals could be delayed for years by legal challenges.

The FBI's efforts appear in part to be a hedge in case the commissions are ruled unconstitutional or never occur, or the U.S. military detention center at Guantanamo Bay is closed. Under those scenarios, authorities would have to free the detainees, transfer them to military custody elsewhere, send them to another country or have enough evidence gathered by law enforcement officials to charge them with terrorism in U.S. federal courts, some current and former counter-terrorism officials and legal experts said.

"I think there's no surprise that they have to call in the FBI to clean up the mess left by the CIA secret detention program," said Jumana Musa, advocacy director for Amnesty International. "They would be smart to use evidence that did not come out of years of secret detentions, interrogations and torture."

Special Agent Richard Kolko, an FBI spokesman, said the investigations were a natural outgrowth of a long-standing interagency effort. "The FBI will support the prosecution of KSM and other high-value detainees by making its investigative and evidentiary expertise available to the prosecution team," he said. He referred all other questions to the Defense Department.

Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey D. Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman, said the Defense Department was working closely with its interagency counterparts in "building a case against KSM and scores of other men at Guantanamo alleged to have committed law of war violations -- including the attacks of 9/11, USS Cole bombing [in 2000] and East Africa embassy bombings [in 1998]."

Neither those two men nor CIA spokesman George E. Little would comment on whether the FBI investigations were being conducted to bolster shortcomings in the cases against Mohammed and the others that are, at least in part, the result of CIA interrogations.

FBI officials interviewed for this article emphasized that the bureau's probes should not be viewed as a repudiation of the CIA's efforts, noting that the spy agency's primary responsibility has been to gather intelligence to prevent further attacks, not collect evidence for trial.

But some former and current U.S. officials said concerns about the potential inadmissibility of the CIA interrogations, and the controversy surrounding them, were the primary reasons the FBI agents were sent to gather more evidence, in some cases reinterviewing suspects and witnesses.

The FBI and CIA have appeared to be headed for a collision on the issue of detainee interrogations since shortly after the September 2001 attacks.

From the outset, the FBI has played a central role in the hunt for Al Qaeda leaders, helping the CIA, the military and foreign governments track them and process evidence against them. FBI agents initially helped interview some of the suspects, with an eye toward gathering evidence for a criminal trial.

After Mohammed's March 2003 capture in Pakistan, some FBI agents and federal prosecutors made clear they wanted him tried before a jury. The Al Qaeda leader had been indicted by a federal grand jury in New York in 1996 for his role in an alleged Philippines-based plot to blow up U.S. airliners in mid-flight over the Pacific Ocean.

But the CIA moved aggressively to take over the interrogations of Mohammed and other senior Al Qaeda detainees, beginning with suspected training camp coordinator Abu Zubeida, who was captured in Pakistan in 2002. Some current and former FBI officials said the spy agency began using coercive techniques such as waterboarding, or simulated drowning, in an effort to get the detainees to talk immediately about the terrorist network's plans.

CIA officials told The Times that the FBI wasn't getting crucial information about pending attacks out of Zubeida that they knew he possessed, and that their "enhanced" techniques ultimately worked better and faster. Current and former FBI officials said those CIA techniques resulted in false confessions that were obtained illegally.

By mid-2002, several former agents and senior bureau officials said, they had begun complaining that the CIA-run interrogation program amounted to torture and was going to create significant problems down the road -- particularly if the Bush administration was ever forced to allow the Al Qaeda suspects to face their accusers in court.

Some went to FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III, according to the former bureau officials. They said Mueller pulled many of the agents back from playing even a supporting role in the interrogations to avoid exposing them to legal jeopardy, in the belief that White House and Justice Department opinions authorizing the coercive techniques might be overturned.

"Those guys were using techniques that we didn't even want to be in the room for," one senior federal law enforcement official said. "The CIA determined they were going to torture people, and we made the decision not to be involved."

A senior FBI official who since has retired said he also complained about the lack of usable evidence and admissible statements being gathered. "We knew there were going to be problems back then. But nobody was listening," he said. "Now they have to live with the policy that they have adopted. I don't know if anyone thought of the consequences."

Another retired FBI agent who helped lead the bureau's Al Qaeda investigations said one fundamental flaw in the tribunal process was that the accused terrorists might be granted the right to confront their accusers in court -- even a military one. And the CIA is likely to prohibit its officers from taking the stand to face cross-examination about their interrogation techniques and other highly classified aspects of the spy agency's detainee program.

"They have put themselves in a very bad situation here," the former agent said. "They have to redo everything because they have to come up with clean statements from these [detainees], if they can get them, obtained by law enforcement people who can actually testify. The CIA agents are not going to testify, nor should they."

Pentagon spokesman Gordon and CIA spokesman Little said no decision had been made on how much information gathered by the CIA, including the interrogations, would be allowed into evidence at the commissions. They also said it was too early to tell whether the CIA agents would testify, although the courtrooms for the military commissions, Gordon said, would be designed with partitions to protect the witnesses' identities and with mute buttons to allow for classified testimony.

"When it comes to the high-value detainees," Little said, "it was, most of all, the efforts of the CIA -- following a lawful, effective and safe process -- that led these terrorists to share concrete, actionable intelligence that our government used to identify other terrorist figures and disrupt their activities."

Some former FBI officials and legal analysts said that even if evidence gathered through the CIA interrogations were admissible, it had lost significant credibility because of the allegations of coercion and torture.

CIA officials have said that they never tortured the detainees and that they operated within the law.

Ultimately, some of the terrorism suspects confessed. But the coercive techniques made even some CIA officials skeptical of whether their confessions were believable, much less sustainable in any court, one former CIA counter-terrorism covert officer said.

The decision to minimize the FBI's role in interrogating the suspects "was regarded by many as really being in error, in part because [CIA officers] don't have the expertise as to what is evidentiary and what isn't," the official said. "And now there are all of these consequences."

Musa of Amnesty International said: "People like KSM should be held accountable. And the real tragedy would be that the focus of the commissions won't be on scrutinizing the conduct of Mohammed and the others, but on the conduct of the CIA."

Federal law enforcement officials believe they have gathered enough admissible evidence to try the high-value detainees. "We've redone everything, and everything is fine," one official said. "So what's the harm?"

Al-Qaeda In Iraq Reported Crippled

Many Officials, However, Warn Of Its Resilience

In the Washington Post, Thomas E. Ricks and Karen DeYoung write:

The U.S. military believes it has dealt devastating and perhaps irreversible blows to al-Qaeda in Iraq in recent months, leading some generals to advocate a declaration of victory over the group, which the Bush administration has long described as the most lethal U.S. adversary in Iraq.

But as the White House and its military commanders plan the next phase of the war, other officials have cautioned against taking what they see as a premature step that could create strategic and political difficulties for the United States. Such a declaration could fuel criticism that the Iraq conflict has become a civil war in which U.S. combat forces should not be involved. At the same time, the intelligence community, and some in the military itself, worry about underestimating an enemy that has shown great resilience in the past.

"I think it would be premature at this point," a senior intelligence official said of a victory declaration over AQI, as the group is known. Despite recent U.S. gains, he said, AQI retains "the ability for surprise and for catastrophic attacks." Earlier periods of optimism, such as immediately following the June 2006 death of AQI founder Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in a U.S. air raid, not only proved unfounded but were followed by expanded operations by the militant organization.

There is widespread agreement that AQI has suffered major blows over the past three months. Among the indicators cited is a sharp drop in suicide bombings, the group's signature attack, from more than 60 in January to around 30 a month since July. Captures and interrogations of AQI leaders over the summer had what a senior military intelligence official called a "cascade effect," leading to other killings and captures. The flow of foreign fighters through Syria into Iraq has also diminished, although officials are unsure of the reason and are concerned that the broader al-Qaeda network may be diverting new recruits to Afghanistan and elsewhere.

The deployment of more U.S. and Iraqi forces into AQI strongholds in Anbar province and the Baghdad area, as well as the recruitment of Sunni tribal fighters to combat AQI operatives in those locations, has helped to deprive the militants of a secure base of operations, U.S. military officials said. "They are less and less coordinated, more and more fragmented," Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the second-ranking U.S. commander in Iraq, said recently. Describing frayed support structures and supply lines, Odierno estimated that the group's capabilities have been "degraded" by 60 to 70 percent since the beginning of the year.

Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, head of the Joint Special Operations Command's operations in Iraq, is the chief promoter of a victory declaration and believes that AQI has been all but eliminated, the military intelligence official said. But Adm. William J. Fallon, the chief of U.S. Central Command, which oversees Iraq and the rest of the Middle East, is urging restraint, the official said. The military intelligence official, like others interviewed for this report, spoke on the condition of anonymity about Iraq assessments and strategy.

Senior U.S. commanders on the ground, including Gen. David H. Petraeus, the head of U.S. forces in Iraq, have long complained that Central Command, along with the CIA, is too negative in its analyses. On this issue, however, Petraeus agrees with Fallon, the military intelligence official said.

For each assessment of progress against AQI, there is a cautionary note that comes from long and often painful experience. Despite the increased killings and captures of AQI members, Odierno said, "it only takes three people" to construct and detonate a suicide car bomb that can "kill thousands." The goal, he said, is to make each attack less effective and lengthen the periods between them.

Right now, said another U.S. official, who declined even to be identified by the agency he works for, the data are "insufficient and difficult to measure."

"AQI is definitely taking some hits," the official said. "There is definite progress, and that is undeniable good news. But what we don't know is how long it will last . . . and whether it's sustainable. . . . They have withstood withering pressure for a long period of time." Three months, he said, is not long enough to consider a trend sustainable.

Views of the extent to which AQI has been vanquished also reflect differences over the extent to which it operates independently from Osama bin Laden's central al-Qaeda organization, based in Pakistan. "Everyone has an opinion about how franchisement of al-Qaeda works," a senior White House official said. "Is it through central control, or is it decentralized?" The answer to that question, the official said, affects "your ability to determine how successfully [AQI] has been defeated or neutralized. Is it 'game over'?"

In Baghdad, the White House official said, the group's "area of operations has been reduced quite a bit for a variety of reasons, some good and some bad." Three years of sectarian fighting have eliminated many mixed Sunni-Shiite neighborhoods. Those areas had been the most fertile and accessible places for AQI, which is composed of extremist Sunnis, to attack Shiite civilians, security forces and government officials. But the death of mixed neighborhoods also has made another Bush administration priority -- promoting political reconciliation -- more difficult.

The expanded presence of U.S. troops in combat outposts in many parts of Baghdad has also put pressure on AQI, but a major test of gains against the organization will come when the U.S. military begins to turn security in those areas over to Iraqi forces next year.

Recent suicide bombings in northern Iraq have convinced some officials that AQI has moved its operations in that direction. But the officials said they do not know whether AQI militants have permanently decamped from Baghdad and Anbar province, or whether they are merely lying low in anticipation of a U.S. departure or the failure of Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to end the sectarian divisions that AQI fostered and now feeds upon.

While a victory declaration might have the "psychological aspect" of discouraging recruitment to a perceived lost cause, the White House official said, advantages overall would be minimal. "I recognize that there are pros to saying, 'Hey, listen, the bad guys are on the run.' " But if AQI were later able to demonstrate residual capabilities with a series of bombings, "even though it was temporary," he said, "the question becomes: How does this play out in terms of public opinion?"

Bush Administration Leak Severed a Link to Al-Qaeda's Secrets

Firm Says Bush Administration's Handling of Video Ruined Its Spying Efforts

The Washington Post reports:

A small private intelligence company that monitors Islamic terrorist groups obtained a new Osama bin Laden video ahead of its official release last month, and around 10 a.m. on Sept. 7, it notified the Bush administration of its secret acquisition. It gave two senior officials access on the condition that the officials not reveal they had it until the al-Qaeda release.

Within 20 minutes, a range of intelligence agencies had begun downloading it from the company's Web site. By midafternoon that day, the video and a transcript of its audio track had been leaked from within the Bush administration to cable television news and broadcast worldwide.

The founder of the company, the SITE Intelligence Group, says this premature disclosure tipped al-Qaeda to a security breach and destroyed a years-long surveillance operation that the company has used to intercept and pass along secret messages, videos and advance warnings of suicide bombings from the terrorist group's communications network.

"Techniques that took years to develop are now ineffective and worthless," said Rita Katz, the firm's 44-year-old founder, who has garnered wide attention by publicizing statements and videos from extremist chat rooms and Web sites, while attracting controversy over the secrecy of SITE's methodology. Her firm provides intelligence about terrorist groups to a wide range of paying clients, including private firms and military and intelligence agencies from the United States and several other countries.

The precise source of the leak remains unknown. Government officials declined to be interviewed about the circumstances on the record, but they did not challenge Katz's version of events. They also said the incident had no effect on U.S. intelligence-gathering efforts and did not diminish the government's ability to anticipate attacks.

While acknowledging that SITE had achieved success, the officials said U.S. agencies have their own sophisticated means of watching al-Qaeda on the Web. "We have individuals in the right places dealing with all these issues, across all 16 intelligence agencies," said Ross Feinstein, spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

But privately, some intelligence officials called the incident regrettable, and one official said SITE had been "tremendously helpful" in ferreting out al-Qaeda secrets over time.

The al-Qaeda video aired on Sept. 7 attracted international attention as the first new video message from the group's leader in three years. In it, a dark-bearded bin Laden urges Americans to convert to Islam and predicts failure for the Bush administration in Iraq and Afghanistan. The video was aired on hundreds of Western news Web sites nearly a full day before its release by a distribution company linked to al-Qaeda.

Computer logs and records reviewed by The Washington Post support SITE's claim that it snatched the video from al-Qaeda days beforehand. Katz requested that the precise date and details of the acquisition not be made public, saying such disclosures could reveal sensitive details about the company's methods.

SITE -- an acronym for the Search for International Terrorist Entities -- was established in 2002 with the stated goal of tracking and exposing terrorist groups, according to the company's Web site. Katz, an Iraqi-born Israeli citizen whose father was executed by Saddam Hussein in the 1960s, has made the investigation of terrorist groups a passionate quest.

"We were able to establish sources that provided us with unique and important information into al-Qaeda's hidden world," Katz said. Her company's income is drawn from subscriber fees and contracts.

Katz said she decided to offer an advance copy of the bin Laden video to the White House without charge so officials there could prepare for its eventual release.

She spoke first with White House counsel Fred F. Fielding, whom she had previously met, and then with Joel Bagnal, deputy assistant to the president for homeland security. Both expressed interest in obtaining a copy, and Bagnal suggested that she send a copy to Michael Leiter, who holds the No. 2 job at the National Counterterrorism Center.

Administration and intelligence officials would not comment on whether they had obtained the video separately. Katz said Fielding and Bagnal made it clear to her that the White House did not possess a copy at the time she offered hers.

Around 10 a.m. on Sept. 7, Katz sent both Leiter and Fielding an e-mail with a link to a private SITE Web page containing the video and an English transcript. "Please understand the necessity for secrecy," Katz wrote in her e-mail. "We ask you not to distribute . . . [as] it could harm our investigations."

Fielding replied with an e-mail expressing gratitude to Katz. "It is you who deserves the thanks," he wrote, according to a copy of the message. There was no record of a response from Leiter or the national intelligence director's office.

Exactly what happened next is unclear. But within minutes of Katz's e-mail to the White House, government-registered computers began downloading the video from SITE's server, according to a log of file transfers. The records show dozens of downloads over the next three hours from computers with addresses registered to defense and intelligence agencies.

By midafternoon, several television news networks reported obtaining copies of the transcript. A copy posted around 3 p.m. on Fox News's Web site referred to SITE and included page markers identical to those used by the group. "This confirms that the U.S. government was responsible for the leak of this document," Katz wrote in an e-mail to Leiter at 5 p.m.

Al-Qaeda supporters, now alerted to the intrusion into their secret network, put up new obstacles that prevented SITE from gaining the kind of access it had obtained in the past, according to Katz.

A small number of private intelligence companies compete with SITE in scouring terrorists' networks for information and messages, and some have questioned the company's motives and methods, including the claim that its access to al-Qaeda's network was unique. One competitor, Ben Venzke, founder of IntelCenter, said he questions SITE's decision -- as described by Katz -- to offer the video to White House policymakers rather than quietly share it with intelligence analysts.

"It is not just about getting the video first," Venzke said. "It is about having the proper methods and procedures in place to make sure that the appropriate intelligence gets to where it needs to go in the intelligence community and elsewhere in order to support ongoing counterterrorism operations."

Germans Relying on Pakistani Interrogation Methods

Aleem Nasir was interrogated in Pakistan and then picked up by the German police when he landed in Frankfurt.

Der Spiegel reports:

German prosecutors attempting to prove a salesman guilty of al-Qaida membership have been relying on the results of his interrogation in Pakistan. He says his testimony was extracted by means of torture.

When Aleem Nasir returned from Pakistan on Aug. 25, an unusual VIP service was waiting for him at Frankfurt Airport: A police car took the dealer in semi-precious stones directly to a clinic in Mainz, where he was given a blood test and his hand and arm were photographed. The 45-year-old, who lives in Germersheim in the German state of Rhineland-Palatinate, was far from overjoyed about this unexpected medical examination. After all, the investigators were hoping for a diagnosis that would hardly be favorable to him: They were hoping to prove him a terrorist.

The enforced medical examination had been requested by the Office of the Federal Prosecutor, which had been given carte blanche by Ulrich Hebenstreit, an investigative judge at Germany's Federal Court, in early August. According to a court order written with apparent haste, the examination was intended to prove that Nasir had spent time in an al-Qaida training camp in northern Pakistan. It was alleged that he had attempted to mix "250 grams (8.8 ounces) of potassium nitrate with red phosphorus" and "injured his right hand and arm" when the dangerous concoction exploded.

But so far, the attempt to secure evidence from Nasir's body has not yielded the unambiguous results that had been hoped for. And now the investigators face another problem: The tip-off about Nasir's alleged handling of explosives came from the notorious Pakistani intelligence agency Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) who interrogated him in Islamabad in June. Nasir says the ISI men, some of them masked, beat him "until I could no longer stand it." The interrogations would routinely begin with between three and five punches and slaps. He was held in an ice-cold cell in a special prison with just five cells run by Americans, Nasir says. In the end, he says, he gave a false testimony just to get out of there.

The allegations are explosive -- particularly in Germany. It is the first time since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks that German authorities have based the core part of an ongoing terrorism case on the results of questionable interrogation methods. The evidence comes from a country that Amnesty International accuses of carrying out "arbitrary arrests" and of not paying much heed to suspects' basic human rights, particularly terror suspects. Former inmates report having been tortured, says Amnesty. And the German Foreign Ministry also calls the human rights situation in Pakistan "as problematic as ever."

'Forbidden Fruits Marked with Blood'

The case is adding fire to a debate in Berlin about where exactly the line should be drawn in the fight against terrorism, and about whether German authorities "profited from forbidden fruits still marked with dried blood," as Wolfgang Wieland, a member of the opposition Green Party, puts it. A parliamentary commission is currently exploring this question in the Bundestag. In 2006 the chancellery already prohibited Germany's foreign intelligence agency, the Federal Intelligence Service (BND), from carrying out interrogations in countries such as Syria and Pakistan.

Has Germany's Chief Federal Prosecutor Monika Harms tolerated her staff making use of testimonies extracted by torture?

Since then investigators have continued to evaluate information coming from dubious sources. But using such information in preliminary proceedings was considered taboo -- even for officials working for Germany's Chief Federal Prosecutor Monika Harms. This led the prosecutors to shred US files containing interrogation statements by Ramzi Binalshibh -- the alleged chief logistician behind the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks -- when it transpired the CIA sometimes uses interrogation techniques such as "waterboarding," which involves submerging the prisoner in water. The transcripts of a visit German investigators paid the Syrian-born German citizen Mohammed Haydar Zammar in Damascus were also not used in German proceedings -- because Zammar, another al-Qaida member, had been interrogated in Syrian prisons.

The federal prosecutors have strayed from this clear principle in the case of Nasir, even if Justice Minister Brigitte Zypries from the Social Democrat Party (SPD) presents sophisticated arguments to show it is all just a matter of following an "investigative lead." Zypries does not believe a precedent has been set.

The behavior of the investigators also reveals how much they suspect Nasir -- and how difficult it would be to prove him guilty. The father of four was born in Pakistan, is married to a German and has been a German citizen since 1992. The German authorities have considered him a "danger" for some time. Indeed, federal prosecutors had already investigated Nasir once before when he allegedly remarked, after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, that such attacks would now occur "everywhere, including Germany." The investigation didn't lead to a conviction.

So the Germans were of course excited when they heard about Nasir's arrest in Pakistan on June 18, 2007. He simply corresponds too well to the image German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble of the Christian Democrat Party (CDU) has been conjuring up for months: that of German Islamists' Pakistan connection.

While Nasir himself admits to having been in Wana, a city in the lawless region of Pakistan widely held to be an al-Qaida stronghold, he also says all he did there was purchase lapis lazuli. And in fact he was carrying 25 kilograms (55 lbs) of the semi-precious stones when he was arrested.

The ISI reports, on the other hand, state that Nasir admitted to having been invited to a training camp by an al-Qaida functionary, Abdul Rehman, and that while there he mixed the explosives correctly the first time around, and injured himself during his second attempt. According to the ISI, Nasir also provided al-Qaida with binoculars and night vision devices in addition to transporting money for the group.

Another statement by Nasir illustrates just how closely Germany and Pakistan have cooperated on this case -- if the statement is true. Nasir says that his Pakistani interrogators repeatedly showed him photographs of Fritz Gelowicz. The German convert to Islam was part of the Islamist cell recently discovered (more...) in Germany's Sauerland region, which is accused of planning terror attacks in the country. The images of Gelowicz -- mostly photos taken while he was under observation -- come from the German prosecutors' files. Nasir says he did not encounter German investigators in the prison where he was held. "But," he adds, "my interrogators had been fully briefed by the German authorities."

Osama Bin Laden Makes Rare Appearance In Video

Mail & Guardian reports:

Osama bin Laden praises martyrdom in a new videotape posted on a militant website on Sunday by al-Qaeda's media-production wing.

The Bin Laden clip, which lasted less than a minute, was undated and part of a 40-minute video featuring purported al-Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan paying tribute to fellow militants who had been killed in the country.

Bin Laden glorifies those who die in the name of Jihad, or holy war, saying even the Prophet Muhammad "had been wishing to be a martyr".

"The happy [man] is the one that God has chosen him to be a martyr," adds Bin Laden, who appears weary and is shown outdoors wearing army fatigues.

Bin Laden was last heard from in a July 1 2006 audio tape in which he voiced support for the new leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq and warned nations not to send troops to fight a hard-line Islamic regime that had seized power in Somalia.

Sunday's video, dedicated to Muslims who have left their homes to fight jihad, included a series of animated scenes showing green fields overlaid with Arabic names written in gold, representing Arab fighters who had died in Afghanistan.

Following one such sequence, the self-proclaimed leader of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan appears praising his fellow fighters.

"Your hero sons, courageous knights have left to the land of Afghanistan ... the land of jihad and martyrdom, answering the call for the sake of God to kick out the occupier who has desecrated the pure soil of Afghanistan," says Mustafa Abu al-Yazeed.

In another clip, a man identified as Mujahid Haidarah al-Hawn is shown sitting in front of a tree with an AK-47 paying tribute to a Syrian fighter, Osama al-Hamawi, who died in an air raid in Afghanistan.

"I lived with him for four years," says al-Hawn, who wears a black scarf to cover his face. "He used to be my emir [commander] ... he was a brother with extreme modesty."

A photo of al-Hamawi's face, apparently taken after his death, was broadcast, showing bruises around his eye and a red gash on his forehead.

A bearded man identified as Abu Yahia al-Libi, a Libyan al-Qaeda operative in Afghanistan, appears in the video wearing a black turban, saying the Muslim world is "offering the best of its men and sacrificing the good of its sons ... to protect its ideology".

Al-Libi escaped United States custody in 2005 and is believed to be behind a suicide bombing that killed 23 people outside the main US base in Afghanistan during a February visit by US Vice-President Dick Cheney.

Several other al-Qaeda operatives from various countries who had apparently committed suicide attacks in Afghanistan were shown reading statements lashing out at the West before their deaths.

The video also contained a series of clips with militants wearing traditional Afghan dress and carrying rifles and rocket launchers through the mountains. Militants could also be seen exercising in training camps.

At the end of the broadcast, images of the September 11 attacks are shown, and a voice can be heard saying: "In a few days, the crusaders' landmarks were flattened."

The authenticity of the video could not be verified, but it appeared on a website commonly used by Islamic militants and carried the logo of as-Sahab, al-Qaeda's media-production wing.

Osama Bin Laden Appears in 'New' Al Qaeda Video

A new videotaped message purportedly from Osama bin Laden has surfaced on a radical Islamist website. The al Qaeda leader is dressed in army fatigues during a one-minute message praising martydom.

The Christian Science Monitor reports:


A new video from Al Qaeda's media arm, with previously unseen and undated footage of Osama bin Laden praising the group's "martyrs," underscores the extent to which the group's propaganda campaign has improved in both production quality and volume over the past year.

Experts on the group say that nothing in the video indicates that Al Qaeda is, or is not, planning a major strike on Western targets, despite comments from US Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff last week saying that he has a "gut feeling" that Al Qaeda may stage a spectacular attack this summer.

But there is no question that Al Qaeda propaganda outlets have been working at a high rate over the past year, with frequent and timely broadcasts from the group's No. 2, the Egyptian doctor Ayman al-Zawahiri, who, like Mr. bin Laden, is believed to live in either Afghanistan or the tribal areas of neighboring Pakistan.

"It's a drumbeat. If they disappear for a while people say, 'Oh, they're dead or they're gone.' So they want to keep up with the drumbeat," says Evan Kohlmann, an author who closely tracks the propaganda efforts of Al Qaeda and other jihadi groups.

Mr. Kohlmann attributes the increased media output to three causes: better technology, a more secure position, and competition from other jihadi groups.

When the Al Qaeda media wing, known as As Sahab, became active at the end of 2005, it might have been worried that producing too many videos would lead to capture. But when that didn't happen, he says, they were encouraged to produce more of them, in addition to outsourcing the distribution and improving their technological savvy.

Sahab has released at least 63 audio and video messages so far this year, compared with 58 in 2006, according to the Associated Press. In many of those, Mr. Zawahiri has been able to respond to the news events within days, getting his group's perspective on radical Islamic websites.

Zawahiri has issued at least 10 messages since January on events such as Hamas's takeover of Gaza to the recent siege on a Pakistani mosque.

Some analysts say that this new technological prowess by Al Qaeda indicates that its leadership has recaptured the reins and it is far from being cut off and on the run.

This assessment is bolstered by a report from the US intelligence establishment that Al Qaeda has been gaining strength in many areas. Last week, AP reported a leak of a US intelligence summary titled "Al Qaeda better positioned to strike the West." That summary effectively declared that US operations against Al Qaeda since 9/11 have been a failure.

It says the organization has "regrouped to an extent not seen since 2001," that it has established effective havens in Pakistan for training and operational planning and that it has improved its ability to infiltrate operatives into Europe.

This newest video has attracted a fair degree of interest because of the footage of bin Laden. According to a translation by CNN, bin Laden asked in the video, "What is this status that the best of mankind wished for himself?" "He wished to be a martyr. He himself said: 'By Him in whose hands my life is! I would love to attack and be martyred.' "

But experts say there's nothing up-to-date in his brief and vague comments incorporated there and that his contribution could be months, if not years, old.

"If you look at the video, a lot of it looks rehashed, looks like it's from the archive. There's nothing in the video so new and unusual," says Kohlmann. "I don't really understand what it is about this video [that's attracting attention] other than it's coming in a week when Michael Chertoff said he had a 'gut feeling' Al Qaeda will attack again."

He said there have been other videos released in the past year with short clips of bin Laden taken from around the same period as the latest clip, which he suspects is pre-9/11.

Rita Katz, who runs the Search for International Terrorist Entities (SITE) institute, the world's most active tracker of jihadi propaganda, agrees that the latest video is no departure from the norm. "The phones have been ringing off the hook [but] there's nothing in this video. It's just another propaganda video. The video of bin Laden is old."

The only point of interest in the latest tape, from Ms. Katz's perspective, is its focus on "martyrs" from Afghanistan.

Al Qaeda's media arm has put out similarly slick montages of men who have died in Iraq and other locations in the past, but she said as far as she knows this is the first one focusing on Afghanistan.

The 40-minute video, dedicated to Muslims who have left their homes to fight, included a series of animated scenes showing green fields overlaid with Arabic names written in gold, representing Arab fighters who had died in Afghanistan. Following one such sequence, the self-proclaimed leader of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan appeared, praising his fellow fighters.

"Your hero sons, courageous knights have left to the land of Afghanistan ... the land of jihad and martyrdom, answering the call for the sake of God to kick out the occupier who has desecrated the pure soil of Afghanistan," said Mustafa Abu al-Yazeed.

The Islamic hadith, or sayings attributed to the prophet Muhammad, make a number of references of praise for those who fight and die for God and Islam, promising them paradise.

Where the debate arises for Muslims is in the matter of what causes are merited, and whether the killing of civilians is allowed, whether the cause is just or not.

Most mainstream Muslims believe that acceptable jihads are defensive ones. Al Qaeda has, in turn, created a narrative in which all of Islam is under constant attack by the US and the "West" and, therefore, almost any act that they interpret as hurting the US or its allies is, in their view, allowed.

U.S. Deploys 10,000 Troops in Iraq Offensive

MSNBC reports:

The U.S. military deployed 10,000 soldiers backed by attack helicopters in a big offensive against al-Qaida north of Baghdad on Tuesday as a truck bomber struck in the capital, killing 75 people near a Shiite mosque.

The troops, under cover of attack helicopters, killed at least 22 insurgents in the offensive, the U.S. military said.



The thunderous explosion at the Khillani mosque in the capital’s commercial area of Sinak sent smoke billowing over concrete buildings. On Sunday, officials lifted a curfew aimed at preventing retaliatory violence after last week’s bombing of a Shiite mosque in Samarra.

Gunfire erupted shortly after the blast, which police said occurred in a parking lot near the mosque, causing the outer wall and a building just inside it to crumble.

A police officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of security concerns, said the car that exploded was parked in a lot near the mosque and it damaged the outer wall of the building.

Police and hospital officials said at least 75 people were killed and 204 were wounded, adding that the toll could rise as bodies were pulled from the debris.

"Sick souls"
The mosque’s imam, Sheik Saleh al-Haidari, said it was a truck bomb and the explosion hit worshippers as they were leaving afternoon prayers.

“This attack was planned and carried out by sick souls, damaging the mosque’s outer wall and collapsing my office and the room above it,” al-Haidari told The Associated Press by telephone.

“There are number of bodies being pulled from the rubble and a number of worshippers were killed or injured,” he said, adding that he was not inside the mosque when the blast occurred.

The Khillani mosque is named after a much-revered Shiite figure who, according to Shiite tradition, was one of four deputies anointed by the Imam Mohammed al-Mahdi, who disappeared in the 9th century and will return to restore justice to humanity.

AP Television News video showed a huge pile of rubble where the wall used to be, but its turquoise dome was intact.

The Imam Ali hospital in the Shiite district of Sadr City was packed with victims, many badly burned.

Karim Abdullah, the 35-year-old owner of a clothing store, said he was on his way to pray at the mosque when the explosion caused his motorcycle to wobble, forcing him to pull over.

“I stopped in shock as I saw the smoke and people on the ground. I saw two or three men in flames as they were getting out of their car,” he added.

Raids launched in darkness
The U.S. raids, dubbed “Operation Arrowhead Ripper,” took place in Baqouba, the capital of Diyala province, and involved air assaults under the cover of darkness, the military said. The operation was still in its opening stages, it said.

The commander of Iraqi military operations in Diyala, Maj. Gen. Abdul-Karim al-Rubaie, said handcuffs, swords and electricity cables — apparently used as torture implements — had been seized from militant safe houses in the area.

The operation was part of new U.S. and Iraqi attacks on Baghdad’s northern and southern flanks, which military officials said were aimed at clearing out Sunni insurgents, al-Qaida fighters and Shiite militiamen who had fled the capital and Anbar during a four-month-old security operation.

Concerted attacks
A top U.S. military official said American forces were taking advantage of the arrival of the final brigade of 30,000 additional U.S. troops to open the concerted attacks.

“We are going into the areas that have been sanctuaries of al-Qaida and other extremists to take them on and weed them out, to help get the areas clear and to really take on al-Qaida,” the senior official said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about the operation. “Those are areas in the belts around Baghdad, some parts in Anbar province and specifically Diyala province.”

The Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars denounced the joint operations in Diyala, calling them “barbaric acts” and promising they “will not stop the people from persisting in their efforts to gain their liberty, unity and independence.”

Al-Qaida has proven to be an extremely agile foe for U.S. and Iraqi forces, as shown by its ability to transfer major operations to Baqouba from Anbar province, the sprawling desert region in western Iraq.

There is no guarantee that driving the organization out of current sanctuaries would prevent it from migrating to other regions to continue the fight.

In recent months, the verdant orange and palm groves of Diyala have become one of the most fiercely contested regions in Iraq. The province is a tangle of Shiite and Sunni villages that has played into the hands of al-Qaida and allied militants who have melted into the tense region and sought to inflame existing sectarian troubles.

Al-Qaida has conducted public killings in the Baqouba main square and otherwise sought to enforce an extreme Taliban-style Islamic code. The terror organization’s actions in the province have caused some Sunni militants, al-Qaida’s natural allies, to turn their guns on the group with U.S. assistance and blessing. Some militant Shiites are likewise joining government forces in a bid to oust the foreign fighters and Muslim extremists.

Soldier killed in Baghdad
Separately, the U.S. military announced the death of an American soldier in Baghdad. The soldier was killed by small arms fire during combat in an eastern section of the capital, a military statement said. No other soldiers were wounded in the attack, which took place Monday, it said.

The death brought to at least 3,528 the number of U.S. military personnel who have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an AP count. The figure includes seven military civilians. At least 2,889 died as a result of hostile action, according to the military’s numbers.

A relative gives water to a bombing victim on Tuesday in Imam Ali hospital in Baghdad's Sadr City. A suicide truck bomber killed 75 people when he rammed his vehicle into a Shi'ite mosque hours after the U.S. military deployed 10,000 soldiers in an offensive against al-Qaida.
[Stringer/Iraq/Reuters]

In southern Iraq, police and hospital officials said the death toll reached 30 in clashes that continued into a second day between Mahdi Army fighters and Iraqi security forces in Nasiriyah, about 200 miles southeast of Baghdad.

Some 150 people were wounded, authorities said. The officials, who declined to be identified because they feared retribution, said most of the casualties were police officers or militiamen.

A delegation from radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr’s office arrived in the city to try to end the fighting, according to the city council.

A curfew was imposed on Nasiriyah on Monday, and remained in effect a day later.

Iranian-made rockets were seized in raids in central Nasiriyah, police said.

In other violence reported by police, a roadside bomb killed the head of a Shiite tribe and two people traveling with him near Hillah, about 60 miles south of Baghdad.

A roadside bomb also missed a police patrol but hit two civilian cars in the Shiite neighborhood of Zafaraniyah in southeastern Baghdad, killing two people and wounding five.

Bush Details Iraqi Link To Al Qaeda Threat

At Coast Guard commencement, he unveils newly declassified intelligence on plans for terrorist attacks in the U.S. and elsewhere.

The LATimes reports:

President Bush on Wednesday sought to bolster his argument that terrorism in Iraq poses a threat to the U.S., offering details from previously classified intelligence to underscore his warning that the war was at a "pivotal moment."

The 2-year-old information, declassified by the White House a day earlier, provided new information about what Bush described as orders from Osama bin Laden to a key ally in Iraq, Abu Musab Zarqawi, to develop plans for terrorist strikes in other countries, including the United States.
He outlined the intelligence in a commencement address at the Coast Guard Academy here, drawing criticism from opponents over his practice of divulging national security secrets to back up his case for the war. As in previous instances in which he declassified intelligence, Bush cited the information to show a continuing threat to Americans.

"I've often warned that if we fail in Iraq, the enemy will follow us home. Many ask, how do you know? Today, I'd like to share some information with you that attests to Al Qaeda's intentions," Bush told the graduating cadets.

He went on to list a series of plots, all previously described by U.S. authorities, and offered what he said was new information about the Bin Laden directive to Zarqawi. Bush did not say Wednesday whether the alleged cell ever became operational and, if so, what kind of plots it envisioned.

But several lawmakers and counter-terrorism officials said they knew of no instances in which Zarqawi-led operatives had succeeded in entering the United States.

"I've learned to be a little bit skeptical of the initial comments of the president on these things," said Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee's terrorism subpanel. "As the information comes out, we'll have to drill down to learn more about the specific threat — whether there was anything to it, if there are any specifics."

The existence of such an effort by Al Qaeda is not new; U.S. authorities have suspected for more than two years that Bin Laden and his chief deputy, Ayman Zawahiri, wanted to expand Zarqawi's footprint outside Iraq and have him launch an attack on U.S. soil.

The Homeland Security Department issued a classified bulletin in March 2005 warning of the plan. At the time, the intelligence was described as credible but not specific, and did not prompt the administration to raise the national terrorism alert level.

Some of the president's critics on Wednesday cited what they considered a misguided and misleading effort to link the war in Iraq with the broader counter-terrorism campaign.

"Yet again, the selective release of intelligence to buttress the notion that Iraq is the central front in the war on terrorism undermines the intelligence community and fails to make the case," said Rand Beers, formerly the top Bush White House counter-terrorism official, and now one of its vocal critics.

Beers said Bush was trying to portray Iraq as a base for Al Qaeda's worldwide movement, when the organization is more centered along the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, where a U.S. search has faltered.

Bush has disclosed intelligence secrets before. In 2005, he referred to 10 foiled terrorist plots in defense of his foreign policy. A year later, he divulged portions of a high-level intelligence report to rebut leaks in news reports about the effect of the Iraq war on Islamic radicalism worldwide. And earlier this year, an intelligence report with mixed findings about Iraq was released to back up Bush's new strategy of building up troop levels.

Frances Townsend, the administration's domestic security and counter-terrorism advisor, told reporters aboard Air Force One before the address Wednesday that the administration waited to make sure it had "gotten through all the leads" and that releasing the information would not compromise the usefulness of the intelligence.

"Frankly, if political advantage was the name of the game, we would have gotten it a lot sooner," she said.

Bush said the intelligence showed that in January 2005, Bin Laden tasked Zarqawi with setting up a cell that would use Iraq as a staging ground for attacks in the U.S. and elsewhere.

At the time, Zarqawi was Al Qaeda's senior leader in Iraq after years of operating quasi-independently. He was killed in Iraq in a June 2006 U.S. airstrike.

Bush said two of Bin Laden's top operational commanders, Abu Hamza Rabia and Abu Faraj Libbi, were involved with Zarqawi's efforts to create the cell. Bin Laden emphasized that America should be Zarqawi's No. 1 priority in terms of foreign attacks, Bush said.

"Zarqawi welcomed this direction," Bush said. "He claimed that he had already come up with some good proposals."

Rabia was killed by a U.S. Predator strike in Pakistan in December 2005. Libbi was captured in May 2005 and taken into CIA custody. He is being held at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Bush addressed 228 graduates on a clear New England day as congressional leaders put the final touches on a compromise war-spending bill that would include only symbolic timetables for progress. Despite hardened opposition to the war, Bush argued against comparisons to Vietnam.

"There are many differences between the two conflicts, but one stands out above all," he said. "The enemy in Vietnam had neither the intent nor the capability to strike our homeland. The enemy in Iraq does."

CIA Transfers Senior Al Qaeda Leader To Guantanamo

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/6601087.stm

Profile: Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi
The Pentagon has described Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, who has been detained and transferred to Guantanamo Bay, as a trusted lieutenant of al-Qaeda leaders Osama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi's role in Iran was a key interest of the US

The US said Mr Hadi, whose real name was Nashwan abd al-Razzaq abd al-Baqi, was arrested as he tried to return to Iraq.

However, no other details have been released on his capture.

A US intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the BBC that Mr Hadi had a long-standing and deep awareness of al-Qaeda's training activities and operational planning.

Mr Hadi, a man with a reputation for being a skilled and intelligent commander, had been in CIA custody since late 2006, the official said.

US intelligence services were particularly interested in his activities in relation to Iran, he said.

It believes in addition to supporting terrorist activities in Iraq, Mr Hadi was involved in "causing problems in Iran as well", he said.

Al-Hadi also met with al-Qaeda members in Iran and believed they should be doing more with the fight
Pentagon

Who's who in al-Qaeda

Mr Hadi wanted Iranian al-Qaeda operatives to be more aggressive in their attacks in Iraq and possibly in Iran as well, the official said.

Mr Hadi has cooperated during interrogation, providing insights into al-Qaeda's command and control structure, the official said.

Shura Council

Mr Hadi was born in Mosul, Iraq, in 1961, the Pentagon said.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was believed one of Mr Hadi's key links

He was formerly a major in the Iraqi army in the 1980s.

The US said he was in Afghanistan for 15 years, but that he had been a member of al-Qaeda "since the late 1990s".

Prior to the suicide plane attacks on the US in September 2001, Mr Hadi was a member of the 10-strong Shura Council - the advisory body to Bin Laden.

Mr Hadi was also said to be a member of al-Qaeda's Military Committee, which oversaw the group's operations and training.

The Pentagon said he was a direct link between al-Qaeda leaders and the Taleban in organising attacks on US forces in Afghanistan.

Later he was also believed to be a key link between Bin Laden and the head of the group in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who has since been killed.

Mr Hadi was also alleged to have been involved in plots to assassinate Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and an unnamed UN official.

Richard Clarke's Take On Terror

What Bush's Ex-Adviser Says About Efforts To Stop War On Terror

Richard Clarke, former White House terrorism adviser, talks to Lesley Stahl about September 11
^{"I find it outrageous that the President is running for re-election on the grounds that he's done such great things about terrorism. He ignored it." ~Richard Clarke}

CBS reports:
In the aftermath of Sept. 11, President Bush ordered his then top anti-terrorism adviser to look for a link between Iraq and the attacks, despite being told there didn't seem to be one.

The charge comes from the adviser, Richard Clarke, in an exclusive interview on 60 Minutes.

The administration maintains that it cannot find any evidence that the conversation about an Iraq-9/11 tie-in ever took place.

Clarke also tells CBS News Correspondent Lesley Stahl that White House officials were tepid in their response when he urged them months before Sept. 11 to meet to discuss what he saw as a severe threat from al Qaeda.

"Frankly," he said, "I find it outrageous that the president is running for re-election on the grounds that he's done such great things about terrorism. He ignored it. He ignored terrorism for months, when maybe we could have done something to stop 9/11. Maybe. We'll never know."

Clarke went on to say, "I think he's done a terrible job on the war against terrorism."

The No. 2 man on the president's National Security Council, Stephen Hadley, vehemently disagrees. He says Mr. Bush has taken the fight to the terrorists, and is making the U.S. homeland safer.

Clarke says that as early as the day after the attacks, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was pushing for retaliatory strikes on Iraq, even though al Qaeda was based in Afghanistan.

Clarke suggests the idea took him so aback, he initally thought Rumsfeld was joking.

Clarke is due to testify this week before the special panel probing whether the attacks were preventable.

His allegations are also made in a book, "Against All Enemies," by Free Press, a subsidiary of Simon & Schuster. Both CBSNews.com and Simon & Schuster are units of Viacom.

Clarke helped shape U.S. policy on terrorism under President Reagan and the first President Bush. He was held over by President Clinton to be his terrorism czar, then held over again by the current President Bush.

In the 60 Minutes interview and the book, Clarke tells what happened behind the scenes at the White House before, during and after Sept. 11.

When the terrorists struck, it was thought the White House would be the next target, so it was evacuated. Clarke was one of only a handful of people who stayed behind. He ran the government's response to the attacks from the Situation Room in the West Wing.

"I kept thinking of the words from 'Apocalypse Now,' the whispered words of Marlon Brando, when he thought about Vietnam. 'The horror. The horror.' Because we knew what was going on in New York. We knew about the bodies flying out of the windows. People falling through the air. We knew that Osama bin Laden had succeeded in bringing horror to the streets of America," he tells Stahl.

After the president returned to the White House on Sept. 11, he and his top advisers, including Clarke, began holding meetings about how to respond and retaliate. As Clarke writes in his book, he expected the administration to focus its military response on Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. He says he was surprised that the talk quickly turned to Iraq.

"Rumsfeld was saying that we needed to bomb Iraq," Clarke said to Stahl. "And we all said ... no, no. Al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan. We need to bomb Afghanistan. And Rumsfeld said there aren't any good targets in Afghanistan. And there are lots of good targets in Iraq. I said, 'Well, there are lots of good targets in lots of places, but Iraq had nothing to do with it.

"Initially, I thought when he said, 'There aren't enough targets in-- in Afghanistan,' I thought he was joking.

"I think they wanted to believe that there was a connection, but the CIA was sitting there, the FBI was sitting there, I was sitting there saying we've looked at this issue for years. For years we've looked and there's just no connection."

Clarke says he and CIA Director George Tenet told that to Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Clarke then tells Stahl of being pressured by Mr. Bush.

"The president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, 'I want you to find whether Iraq did this.' Now he never said, 'Make it up.' But the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said Iraq did this.

"I said, 'Mr. President. We've done this before. We have been looking at this. We looked at it with an open mind. There's no connection.'

"He came back at me and said, "Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there's a connection.' And in a very intimidating way. I mean that we should come back with that answer. We wrote a report."

Clarke continued, "It was a serious look. We got together all the FBI experts, all the CIA experts. We wrote the report. We sent the report out to CIA and found FBI and said, 'Will you sign this report?' They all cleared the report. And we sent it up to the president and it got bounced by the National Security Advisor or Deputy. It got bounced and sent back saying, 'Wrong answer. ... Do it again.'

"I have no idea, to this day, if the president saw it, because after we did it again, it came to the same conclusion. And frankly, I don't think the people around the president show him memos like that. I don't think he sees memos that he doesn't-- wouldn't like the answer."

Clarke was the president's chief adviser on terrorism, yet it wasn't until Sept. 11 that he ever got to brief Mr. Bush on the subject. Clarke says that prior to Sept. 11, the administration didn't take the threat seriously.

"We had a terrorist organization that was going after us! Al Qaeda. That should have been the first item on the agenda. And it was pushed back and back and back for months.

"There's a lot of blame to go around, and I probably deserve some blame, too. But on January 24th, 2001, I wrote a memo to Condoleezza Rice asking for, urgently -- underlined urgently -- a Cabinet-level meeting to deal with the impending al Qaeda attack. And that urgent memo-- wasn't acted on.

"I blame the entire Bush leadership for continuing to work on Cold War issues when they back in power in 2001. It was as though they were preserved in amber from when they left office eight years earlier. They came back. They wanted to work on the same issues right away: Iraq, Star Wars. Not new issues, the new threats that had developed over the preceding eight years."

Clarke finally got his meeting about al Qaeda in April, three months after his urgent request. But it wasn't with the president or cabinet. It was with the second-in-command in each relevant department.

For the Pentagon, it was Paul Wolfowitz.

Clarke relates, "I began saying, 'We have to deal with bin Laden; we have to deal with al Qaeda.' Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, said, 'No, no, no. We don't have to deal with al Qaeda. Why are we talking about that little guy? We have to talk about Iraqi terrorism against the United States.'

"And I said, 'Paul, there hasn't been any Iraqi terrorism against the United States in eight years!' And I turned to the deputy director of the CIA and said, 'Isn't that right?' And he said, 'Yeah, that's right. There is no Iraqi terrorism against the United States."

Clarke went on to add, "There's absolutely no evidence that Iraq was supporting al Qaeda, ever."

When Stahl pointed out that some administration officials say it's still an open issue, Clarke responded, "Well, they'll say that until hell freezes over."

By June 2001, there still hadn't been a Cabinet-level meeting on terrorism, even though U.S. intelligence was picking up an unprecedented level of ominous chatter.

The CIA director warned the White House, Clarke points out. "George Tenet was saying to the White House, saying to the president - because he briefed him every morning - a major al Qaeda attack is going to happen against the United States somewhere in the world in the weeks and months ahead. He said that in June, July, August."

Clarke says the last time the CIA had picked up a similar level of chatter was in December, 1999, when Clarke was the terrorism czar in the Clinton White House.

Clarke says Mr. Clinton ordered his Cabinet to go to battle stations-- meaning, they went on high alert, holding meetings nearly every day.

That, Clarke says, helped thwart a major attack on Los Angeles International Airport, when an al Qaeda operative was stopped at the border with Canada, driving a car full of explosives.

Clarke harshly criticizes President Bush for not going to battle stations when the CIA warned him of a comparable threat in the months before Sept. 11: "He never thought it was important enough for him to hold a meeting on the subject, or for him to order his National Security Adviser to hold a Cabinet-level meeting on the subject."

Finally, says Clarke, "The cabinet meeting I asked for right after the inauguration took place-- one week prior to 9/11."

In that meeting, Clarke proposed a plan to bomb al Qaeda's sanctuary in Afghanistan, and to kill bin Laden.

The president's new campaign ads highlight his handling of Sept. 11 -- which has become the centerpiece of his bid for re-election.

"You are writing this book in the middle of this campaign," Stahl tells Clarke. "The timing, I'm sure, you will be questioned about and criticized for. Why are you doing it now?"

"Well, I'm sure I'll be criticized for lots of things," says Clarke. "And I'm sure they'll launch their dogs on me."

Does a person who works for the White House owe the president his loyalty?

"Yes ... Up to a point. When the president starts doing things that risk American lives, then loyalty to him has to be put aside," says Clarke. "I think the way he has responded to al Qaeda, both before 9/11 by doing nothing, and by what he's done after 9/11 has made us less safe. Absolutely."

Hadley staunchly defended the president to Stahl: "The president heard those warnings. The president met daily with ... George Tenet and his staff. They kept him fully informed and at one point the president became somewhat impatient with us and said, 'I'm tired of swatting flies. Where's my new strategy to eliminate al Qaeda?'"

Hadley says that, contrary to Clarke's assertion, Mr. Bush didn't ignore the ominous intelligence chatter in the summer of 2001.

"All the chatter was of an attack, a potential al Qaeda attack overseas. But interestingly enough, the president got concerned about whether there was the possibility of an attack on the homeland. He asked the intelligence community: 'Look hard. See if we're missing something about a threat to the homeland.'

"And at that point various alerts went out from the Federal Aviation Administration to the FBI saying the intelligence suggests a threat overseas. We don't want to be caught unprepared. We don't want to rule out the possibility of a threat to the homeland. And therefore preparatory steps need to be made. So the president put us on battle stations."

Hadley asserts Clarke is "just wrong" in saying the administration didn't go to battle stations.

As for the alleged pressure from Mr. Bush to find an Iraq-9/11 link, Hadley says, "We cannot find evidence that this conversation between Mr. Clarke and the president ever occurred."

When told by Stahl that 60 Minutes has two sources who tell us independently of Clarke that the encounter happened, including "an actual witness," Hadley responded, "Look, I stand on what I said."

Hadley maintained, "Iraq, as the president has said, is at the center of the war on terror. We have narrowed the ground available to al Qaeda and to the terrorists. Their sanctuary in Afghanistan is gone; their sanctuary in Iraq is gone. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are now allies on the war on terror. So Iraq has contributed in that way in narrowing the sanctuaries available to terrorists."

Does Clarke think that Iraq, the Middle East and the world is better off with Saddam Hussein out of power?

"I think the world would be better off if a number of leaders around the world were out of power. The question is what price should the United States pay," says Clarke. "The price we paid was very, very high, and we're still paying that price for doing it."

"Osama bin Laden had been saying for years, 'America wants to invade an Arab country and occupy it, an oil-rich Arab country. He had been saying this. This is part of his propaganda," adds Clarke.

"So what did we do after 9/11? We invade an oil-rich and occupy an oil-rich Arab country which was doing nothing to threaten us. In other words, we stepped right into bin Laden's propaganda. And the result of that is that al Qaeda and organizations like it, offshoots of it, second-generation al Qaeda have been greatly strengthened."

When Clarke worked for Mr. Clinton, he was known as the terrorism czar. When Mr. Bush came into office, though remaining at the White House, Clarke was stripped of his Cabinet-level rank.

Stahl said to Clarke, "They demoted you. Aren't you open to charges that this is all sour grapes, because they demoted you and reduced your leverage, your power in the White House?"

Clarke's answer: "Frankly, if I had been so upset that the National Coordinator for Counter-terrorism had been downgraded from a Cabinet level position to a staff level position, if that had bothered me enough, I would have quit. I didn't quit."

Until two years later, after 30 years in government service.

A senior White House official told 60 Minutes he thinks the Clarke book is an audition for a job in the Kerry campaign.

"I'm an independent. I'm not working for the Kerry campaign," says Clarke. "I have worked for Ronald Reagan. I have worked for George Bush the first, I have worked for George Bush the second. I'm not participating in this campaign, but I am putting facts out that I think people ought to know."

60 Minutes received a note from the Pentagon saying: "Any suggestion that the president did anything other than act aggressively, quickly and effectively to address the al Qaeda and Taliban threat in Afghanistan is absurd."