Putting the Nixon tape in context

By Henry A. Kissinger
The Washington Post
Sunday, December 26, 2010;

For someone who lost in the Holocaust many members of my immediate family and a large proportion of those with whom I grew up, it is hurtful to see an out-of-context remark being taken so contrary to its intentions and to my convictions, which were profoundly shaped by these events. References to gas chambers have no place in political discourse, and I am sorry I made that remark 37 years ago.

In his Dec. 21 column, ['Beyond Kissinger's realism'], Michael Gerson used comments I made during a one-minute conversation with Richard Nixon to draw a contrast between the moral insensitivity of the so-called foreign policy realists and the broader humanistic view of their critics. As a general subject, this is beyond the scope of an op-ed comment. In this specific case, further reflection might counsel a limit to righteousness.

Context matters. Gerson presents the issue of Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union in the 1970s as if it had been an abstract debate between those who relied on a relaxation of tensions and advocates of ideological confrontation, in which the realists were willing to sacrifice Jewish emigration on the altar of detente. The opposite is true. That emigration existed at all was due to the actions of "realists" in the White House. Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union had never been put forward by any administration as a formal American position, not because of moral insensitivity but because intense crises imposed other priorities. In 1969, we introduced it into the presidential channel as a humanitarian issue because we judged that a foreign policy confrontation would lead to rejection and an increase of tensions with the Soviets. As a result, Jewish emigration rose from 700 a year in 1969 to near 40,000 in 1972. The total in Nixon's first term was more than 100,000. We also submitted, with some success, several hundred hardship cases at regular intervals. To maintain this flow by quiet diplomacy, we never used these figures for political purposes.

The issue became public because of the success of our Middle East policy when Egypt evicted Soviet advisers. To restore its relations with Cairo, the Soviet Union put a tax on Jewish emigration. There was no Jackson-Vanik Amendment until there was a successful emigration effort.

Sen. Henry Jackson, for whom I had, and continue to have, high regard, sought to remove the tax with his amendment. We thought the continuation of our previous approach of quiet diplomacy was the wiser course. But the issue became intense only when, the tax having been removed by our previous methods of quiet diplomacy, the Jackson-Vanik Amendment was institutionalized.

The conversation at issue arose not as a policy statement by me but in response to a request by the president that I should appeal to Sens. Javits and Jackson and explain why we thought their approach unwise. My answer tried to sum up that context in a kind of shorthand that, when read 37 years later, is undoubtedly offensive. It was addressed to a president who had committed himself to that issue and had never used it for political purpose to preserve its humanitarian framework.

The comment to Nixon that emigration was not a subject of foreign policy has to be seen in that context.

The conversation should also be understood as having occurred within 15 minutes of a meeting between Nixon and Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir that was attended also, and only, by myself and Israeli Ambassador Yitzhak Rabin. That meeting agreed on military deliveries (especially airplanes), a peace process via the White House, a negotiating position and steps to encourage Egypt to leave its alliance with the Soviet Union. It was to preserve that strategy that Nixon asked me to call the two senators.

Events proved our judgment correct. Jewish emigration fell to about a third of its previous high, not to be resumed at substantial levels for 20 years, as Gerson admits. That was during the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Gerson ascribes the collapse of the Soviet Union in part to the Jackson-Vanik Amendment. The amendment played no significant role in what resulted from imperial overstretch, incompetent economic management and the determined resistance of a succession of presidents from both parties, culminating in the Reagan period.

Gerson sneers at detente as if it were a kind of moral abdication. Memories are short. The conversation under discussion occurred on March 1, 1973. The Vietnam War had just ended; prisoners had not yet returned.

An effective global strategy was in place with the opening to China, a broad dialogue with the Soviet Union, and major progress in Egypt and on emigration. It was to preserve that policy that the conversation in the Oval Office took place, and it is in that context that it must be viewed.

The writer was secretary of state from 1973 to 1977.

Afghanistan's Hazaras gain clout in disputed parliamentary elections

By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, December 24, 2010; 12:00 AM

KABUL -- Ethnic chauvinism, which has long bedeviled this fiercely tribal country and fueled a destructive civil war in the early 1990s, is erupting again in a tense dispute over recent parliamentary elections. The poll, held in turbulent wartime conditions, disenfranchised several hundred thousand voters from the ethnic Pashtun majority and unexpectedly empowered the long-persecuted Hazara minority.

The fight has brought the political system to a standstill, pitted fledgling democratic institutions against one another and raised the specter of sectarian strife. It has also further weakened the grip of President Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun, whose ethnic support is splintering under the combined pressure and persuasion of Taliban insurgents based in many rural Pashtun enclaves.

The Hazaras, meanwhile, are feeling their oats. Highly organized and motivated, this fast-rising Shiite Muslim group has essentially become a political party. It is eagerly embracing Afghanistan's imperfect new democratic system as a steppingstone to power while larger, Sunni Muslim ethnic groups remain caught up in personality-based politics and warlord rivalries.

"We have been legally elected, and we are ready to go to parliament. We have the passion of a new generation behind us," said Mohammed Alizada, one of 11 Hazara candidates who swept the elections in Ghazni, winning all seats in the Pashtun-majority province. "We will do our best to represent the whole province," he said. "If our Pashtun brothers failed to vote, perhaps this will be a positive lesson for them in the future."
'No election at all here'

Pashtun leaders in Ghazni, however, assert that they were not given the chance to vote because of Taliban threats and poor security. Several Pashtun legislators from there, stunned after losing their seats, mounted a legal campaign to have the election results overturned nationwide, and the Supreme Court is reviewing the case. Of 249 seats in the lower house, 50 went to Hazaras, an outsize portion of power compared with their numbers.

"There was no election at all here. The Taliban are everywhere, and not a single government employee dares come to work," said Abdul Bari, an educator reached by phone in Ghazni's Andar district. More than 70,000 people registered to vote in Andar, which is virtually all Pashtun, but only three ballots were cast. "I have no doubt the Hazaras are eager to help the province, but 80 percent of the voters were disappointed," Bari said. "We all want the election canceled."

It is a remarkable sign of progress that the contretemps has not come to blows, and that both winning and losing candidates are politely waiting for an official decision. Just 15 years ago, Pashtun and Hazara militias, along with ethnic Tajiks and Uzbeks, were slaughtering each other in the streets of Kabul. There were tales of appalling atrocities on all sides, and the grudges run deep.

The Hazara-Pashtun conflict is especially enduring. It parallels both the latent tensions between Afghan Sunnis and Shiites and the regional struggle for influence between Sunni-dominated Pakistan and Shiite Iran. Historically, the more numerous and warlike Pashtuns oppressed the meeker Hazaras, driving them from farmlands and forcing them into menial jobs such as pulling cargo carts.

Prejudice is still rampant, and Hazaras face blatant discrimination. Several Hazara cabinet ministers chosen by Karzai were rejected by parliament earlier this year, one reason Hazaras savored their unexpected success in the September elections. Hazaras are obsessed with educating their children, but Hazara leaders say even their top students are often turned down by Kabul University.

"I have a PhD and many years of experience, but I was rejected for a position at Kabul University. As a minority, we have never gotten our rights," said Amin Ahmadi, dean of two small Shiite colleges in Kabul. Yet he also said it was not "happy news" for Hazaras that the Pashtuns had lost so badly in the legislature. "This is a multiethnic country, and all groups need to be represented," he said. "Our greatest enemy is ethnic nationalism."

In addition to insurgent violence, some Pashtun voters and candidates complained of widespread fraud in the elections and charged that the national election commission was biased. One losing Pashtun candidate in Kabul told friends she received calls offering to declare her a winner if she paid $150,000, and she refused. Yet commission officials insisted that the polling was much fairer than the fraud-plagued presidential poll last year.

"We delivered a well-managed and impartial process, voters made their choices and the results were certified. We are not prepared to change them," said Abdullah Ahmadzai, a commission member. "I am a Pashtun and an appointee of President Karzai, and I can guarantee the nonexistence of political motives in the commission."

Karzai has vowed that a new parliament will be installed on schedule in late January, but it is not clear how the political and legal stalemate will be resolved. The president could ease tensions by giving key Pashtun legislators, who lost in the lower house, consolation seats in the partly appointed upper house.
Torn Pashtun loyalties

Several analysts said Pashtuns hurt themselves in the elections as much as the Taliban hurt them. They said Pashtuns fielded far too many candidates in some areas and did not allow women to vote in others. Pashtuns are also suffering from ambivalent loyalties as the Karzai government flounders and sends out erratic signals on the Taliban, relations with Washington and other issues.

In rural Pashtun areas, the Taliban can often gain a foothold through local clan ties, frustration with government neglect or belief that the insurgents represent Pashtun interests. This gives its militiamen the opportunity to intimidate opponents and persuade fence-sitters that the insurgency has more to offer than the election process does.

"The Pashtuns are fragmented. They don't have a party or a single leader to rally around, so they don't feel inspired to vote. The Hazaras, on the other hand, have turned their entire ethnic group into a political organization," said Ahmad Nader Nadery, who heads an independent election monitoring group. "For them, this was an opening and they took it."

Some Pashtuns complain that the Hazaras' growing clout is a result of financial and political support from Iran, a charge that Hazara leaders deny. These critics also feel betrayed by Karzai, who confirmed recently that he had been accepting cash assistance from Tehran. Public displays of Shiism, once virtually underground, were on bold display throughout Kabul during last week's festival of Muharram, a major Shiite event.

But Hazaras insist that it is their focus on hard work, ethnic unity and keeping the peace that has enabled them to gain political ground. In Ghazni, where Pashtun-majority districts such as Andar were chaotic and cowed on election day, Hazara districts such as Jaghori were calm and orderly, allowing mass voter participation.

"Everyone here wants security, so we don't let the Taliban come in and start trouble. Everything was quiet and 95 percent of people voted," said Hadi Besharat, a teacher reached by phone in Jaghori. "The Pashtuns don't defend themselves the way we do. They are not sure what they want, but we are. We want democracy, not only for Hazaras but for the whole country."

Number of civilian casualties in Afghan war rises 20%, U.N. report shows

By Ernesto Londono
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, December 23, 2010; 10:00 PM

KABUL - The number of civilians killed or wounded in the Afghan war increased by 20 percent during the first 10 months of this year, compared with the same period last year, according to a U.N. report issued this week.

The top U.N. envoy to Afghanistan, Staffan de Mistura, said as the world body released its latest quarterly report that insurgents are likely to stage high-profile attacks in the months ahead.

"Before it gets better, it may get worse," he said.

The report concluded that the number of civilian casualties attributable to insurgents increased by 25 percent during the 10-month period. It said insurgent groups were responsible for killing or injuring 4,738 civilians during that period, while 742 were killed or wounded by Afghan and international troops - a drop of 18 percent.

In a statement Thursday on its Web site, the Taliban called the civilian casualty figures in the report "a propaganda stunt aimed at concealing American brutalities."

U.S. airstrikes, long controversial in Afghanistan because of the high incidence of civilian casualties associated with them, were the leading cause of civilian deaths by NATO forces, the report said. At least 162 civilians were killed in airstrikes and 120 were wounded during the 10-month period.

On Thursday, NATO said it was investigating reports that one of its units had mistakenly killed two Afghans in northwestern Faryab province.

The grim statistics come as U.S. military officials are claiming some success in their effort to halt the Taliban's momentum as the war enters its 10th year.

De Mistura said insurgent groups are likely to try to undermine NATO's sense of traction by staging spectacular attacks in the near future.

"We should be ready, I'm afraid, for the next few months, for some tense security environment," he said.

The quarterly report said the period between July and October saw a 66 percent spike in security incidents compared with the same time frame last year. Assassinations reached an all-time high in August, it said, with most attacks targeting civilians and Afghan police. Suicide attacks occurred an average of three times a week, most of them directed at NATO troops, police and Afghan government officials.

Five civilians were wounded in a suicide bombing Thursday in Kunduz City, in northern Afghanistan, NATO said in a statement.

The number of NATO troops killed this year also reached a new high, according to a tally kept by the Web site icasualties.org. At least 705 international troops were killed here this year, far more than the 521 killed in 2009, the previous record.

The report also said the United Nations "welcomes the spirit" of President Hamid Karzai's attempt to oust private security companies from Afghanistan, which he says have operated here with impunity for years. But it also expressed concern that the firms' disbandment "before security could be assured by Afghan authorities" would lead to "a withdrawal of many development projects and activities."

The Killing In Iraq

Kamel Makhloufi
October 27, 2010












Kamel Makhloufi developed a simple but powerful pixel diagram that highlights the past human death toll during the Iraq war. Each pixel has a color, where blue stands for "friendly", green represents "host Nation", orange are "civilians" and grey denotes "enemies".

The left diagram is ordered by category, whereas the right one lists the casualties by time, or how you can dilute the media impact of a massacre by killing a few people each day for 6 years. Just remember that host nation + civilian + enemies = mostly Iraqis. Used the cleaned dump from The Guardian.

Swiss official urges 3 charged with nuke smuggling

John Heilprin
Associated Press
12/23/2010

BERN, Switzerland – Smuggling charges should be brought against three Swiss engineers suspected of giving nuclear weapons technology to a rogue network in Pakistan, a magistrate said Thursday, in a case involving CIA ties, shredded documents and national security implications.

Investigating magistrate Andreas Mueller said his recommendation that the trio, two brothers and a father, face trial is based on an exhaustive probe into an alleged nuclear smuggling ring. Mueller submitted his confidential report to federal prosecutors, who will decide whether to bring charges on violating Swiss nonproliferation laws.

Mueller oversaw the last three years of a six-year federal probe against Urs Tinner, his brother Marco and their father Friedrich. The politically sensitive case was slowed down after the Swiss government repeatedly ordered evidence destroyed in the case, allegedly under pressure from senior U.S. officials.

The Tinners are suspected of links to the nuclear smuggling network of Abdul Qadeer Khan — the creator of Pakistan's atomic bomb. They allegedly supplied Khan's black market nuclear network with the technical expertise and equipment used to make gas centrifuges. Khan sold the centrifuges for secret nuclear weapons programs in countries that included Libya and Iran before his operation was disrupted in 2003.

Mueller, who said he is relieved to be done with the investigation, harshly criticized the Swiss government for having "massively interfered in the wheels of justice by destroying almost all the evidence." He said the government also ordered federal criminal police not to cooperate with him.

"There are many parts. It's like a puzzle and if you put the puzzle together you get the whole picture," Mueller said at a news conference. "There is not (just) one piece of evidence, there are many pieces of evidence."

U.S. officials in Bern had no immediate comment.

Mueller said he recommended the three face charges for "supporting the development of atomic weapons" in violation of nonproliferation laws, while Marco Tinner should face additional charges of money laundering.

Mueller's 174-page report "is now being studied in detail" by the Swiss attorney general's office, which "will inform the public in due course" on whether charges will be filed against the Tinners, Federal Prosecutors Office spokeswoman Jeannette Balmer said.

Mueller said the Tinners did not deny working for the A.Q. Khan network, but claimed they did not know his aim was to produce nuclear weapons. He also said the Tinners had worked for the CIA since June 2003.

"The findings are that the Tinners might be part of the Khan network," Mueller told The Associated Press after the news conference.

"And beginning where they should have known that Khan produced atomic weapons, in May 1998, until they started to collaborate with the secret services, in June 2003, they in their specific roles were part of this network, and delivered parts to the network that the network then itself delivered to other countries, (such) as Libya," Mueller said.

He told AP that "there is no contrary proof that they were not on the payroll" of the CIA.

In June 2009, the Swiss government ordered the destruction of about 100 pages of evidence linked to Mueller's investigation of the Tinner family, saying they contained information that could have endangered national security and needed to be kept out of "the wrong hands."

The Cabinet, or Federal Council, said those documents were "the most explosive" material in the case's file of more than 1,000 pages.

Copies of some of the shredded files have reportedly resurfaced, however, and could form part of the case against the Tinners — who have repeatedly maintained they are innocent.

The documents are copies of files destroyed in 2007 under a previous order that led to protests from lawmakers and legal experts, who said the government had undermined the prosecution in the smuggling case. The copies were found in prosecutors' archives in December 2008.

Less sensitive documents, such as those dealing with uranium enrichment, were ordered kept under high security at the Federal Justice Department. The government said investigators, prosecutors, courts and the Tinner family's lawyers would be able to view them under tight restrictions, but the documents would be destroyed at the end of legal proceedings.

A report this week by a Washington-based think tank found the Swiss authorities, the CIA and the Tinners were all responsible for failing to limit the spread of nuclear weapon technology and know-how.

The Institute for Science and International Security's report particularly pointed blame at Swiss justice and U.S. intelligence officials for their failure to cooperate. It also says the Tinners persuaded businesses to make parts for machines without knowing their true purpose.

Mueller said the shredding of files had complicated an already complex case and made it harder to piece together a complete picture of the Tinners' alleged involvement in the Khan ring. Switzerland's highest criminal court has criticized the government for opting to destroy further evidence and said it was disappointed not to be informed earlier.

Complicating the case further are claims by Urs Tinner that he supplied the CIA with information that led to the breakup of Khan's network. In a recent documentary, Tinner told Swiss TV he tipped off U.S. intelligence about a delivery of centrifuge parts meant for Libya.

The shipment was seized at the Italian port of Taranto in 2003, forcing Libya to admit and eventually renounce its efforts to acquire nuclear weapons.

Former Swiss Justice Minister Christoph Blocher said the government decided to destroy the original documents after he refused in 2007 an American request to hand over thousands of the files.

Urs Tinner was released in December 2008 after almost five years in investigative detention and has yet to be charged. A Swiss parliamentary panel has investigated the government-ordered shredding of thousands of files of evidence in the case

The Khan network was disrupted when Western intelligence agencies intercepted the centrifuge parts meant for Libya's nuclear weapons program.

University Study: Fox Viewers More Misinformed

By John Aloysius Farrell
U.S.News & World Report
December 22, 2010

I have a warm spot in my heart for the University of Maryland. Though I didn't end up in College Park, they were nice enough to offer me admission when few other colleges (given my high school grades) were inclined to do so. The Terps saw something in me that others did not. They have now come under fire from Fox News, and I rise to their defense.

Scholars at the university have conducted a survey on the impact of the news business on good citizenship. Not surprisingly, they found that voters who made the effort to watch TV news and read about the issues were less likely to be misinformed. Not surprisingly, there was a significant exception: Fox News.

MSNBC took some hits, but it was the daily viewers of Fox News who were significantly more misinformed about healthcare, climate change, and Barack Obama. They were 14 points more likely to mistakenly believe that "the stimulus legislation did not include any tax cuts," and 13 points more likely to erroneously believe that "the auto bailout only occurred under Obama," and 12 points more likely to hold the incorrect belief that "when TARP came up for a vote most Republicans opposed it." By 30 points, they mistakenly believed that "most scientists do not agree that climate change is occurring."

And of course, they were 31 percent more likely to believe the Birther whopper that "it is not clear that Obama was born in the United States."

It was not a matter of partisan self-selection. Democrats who watched Fox, as well as Republicans, came away misled and misinformed.

One would think that, in replying to the findings of the Maryland survey, Fox would strive to be reasoned and accurate. A major American university, after all, had raised serious questions about Fox's objectivity and reliability. These are core journalistic values.

Instead, a Fox spokesman told the New York Times that Maryland is a school for lazy inebriates.

"The latest Princeton Review ranked the University of Maryland among the top schools for having `Students Who Study the Least," and being the `Best Party School.' Given these fine academic distinctions, we'll regard the study with the same level of veracity it was 'researched' with," said Fox's Michael Clemente.

Apparently, Clemente was...um...misinformed.

The Times' Brian Stelter checked the facts. He reports that "for the record, the Princeton Review says the University of Maryland ranks among the 'Best Northeastern Colleges.' "

And, much as its students and alumni would like to claim the honor, Maryland was not Number One on the Review's list of party schools.

It barely made the top 20.

Obama administration readies indefinite detention order for Guantanamo detainees

By Peter Finn and Anne E. Kornblut
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, December 21, 2010; 7:30 PM

The Obama administration is preparing an executive order that would formalize indefinite detention without trial for some detainees at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, but allow those detainees and their lawyers to challenge the basis for continued incarceration, U.S. officials said.

The administration has long signaled that the use of prolonged detention, preferably at a facility in the United States, was one element of its plan to close Guantanamo. An interagency task force found that 48 of the 174 detainees remaining at the facility would have to be held in what the administration calls prolonged detention.

"We have a plan to close Guantanamo, and this detainee review process is one element," said an administration official who discussed the order on the condition of anonymity because it has yet to reach the president.

However, almost every part of the administration's plan to close Guantanamo is on hold, and it could be crippled this week if Congress bans the transfer of detainees to the United States for trial and sets up steep hurdles to the repatriation or resettlement in third countries of other detainees.

Officials worked intensively on the executive order over the past several weeks, but a senior White House official said it had been in the works for more than a year. If Congress blocks the administration's ability to put detainees on trial or transfer them out of Guantanamo, the official said, the executive order could still be implemented.

"I would argue that you still have to go ahead because you can't simply have people confined to a life sentence without any review and then fight another day with Congress," the administration official said. "One of things we're mindful of is [that] you can't have a review conducted by the same people, in the same process, who made the original decision to detain. You have to have something that is different and is more adversarial, which the Bush administration never had."

Under the system established by the previous administration, Guantanamo detainees could go before military review panels with "personal representatives," also military officers, who explained the process but could not act as lawyers. The system envisioned under the executive order would be more adversarial and would allow detainees to challenge their incarceration periodically, possibly every year.

"There isn't a single serious commentator on the subject who hasn't thought something like this wasn't necessary as part of a rule-of-law approach," said the senior White House official, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Provisions in the defense authorization bill, which has passed the House and is before the Senate, would effectively ban the transfer of any detainee to the United States for any purpose. That rules out civilian trials for all Guantanamo detainees, including Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. His potential prosecution had remained possible even though the administration had balked in the face of political opposition to a trial in New York.

The defense bill, if it passes the Senate, would effectively force the administration to conduct only military commissions and at Guantanamo Bay, which would also have to remain open to house those held indefinitely. The bill would also create new requirements before the administration could repatriate or resettle detainees who were cleared for release by the interagency task force.

"If it passes, it is the final, decisive blow to the president's plan," said Tom Malinowski, head of the Washington office of Human Rights Watch.

In a speech at the National Archives in May 2009, President Obama said his administration would use criminal trials, reformed military commissions, transfers to other countries, releases and continued detention in pursuit of its commitment to close Guantanamo.

An administration task force ultimately determined that at least 48 detainees were too dangerous to release but could not be put on trial. Officials have said the evidence against these detainees has been tainted by torture or cannot be used in court because it is classified or would not meet legal standards.

"When the review panel puts someone in the category of long-term detention, the 48 people, what happens then?" the administration official said. "Are they there for the rest of their lives? What's the review mechanism? How impartial is it? Do they have a chance to contest it? All of that stuff has to be answered. And we have been working on an executive order laying out these elements."

Those designated for prosecution but who are not charged could also have their cases reviewed under the proposed system in the executive order, the White House official said.

Detainees at Guantanamo would continue to have access to the federal courts to challenge their incarceration under the legal doctrine of habeas corpus. Officials said the plan would give detainees who have lost their habeas petition the prospect of one day ending their time in U.S. custody. And officials said the International Committee of the Red Cross has been urging the administration to create a review process.

Some civil liberties groups oppose any form of indefinite detention, even with a built-in mechanism to challenge incarceration.

"Indefinite detention without charge or trial is wrong, whether it comes from Congress or the president's pen," said Laura W. Murphy, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Washington legislative office. "Our Constitution requires that we charge and prosecute people who are accused of crimes. You cannot sell an indefinite detention scheme by attaching a few due-process baubles and expect that to restore the rule of law. That is bad for America and is not the form of justice we want other nations to emulate."

The executive order, however, could be an effort to preempt legislation supported by some Republicans, which would create a system of indefinite detention not only for some Guantanamo detainees but also for future terrorism suspects seized overseas.

Malinowski said there is a "big difference" between using an executive order, which can be rescinded, to handle a select group of detainees that Obama inherited, and legislating a general indefinite detention scheme.

finnp@washpost.com kornbluta@washpost.com

Which bums will be thrown out next?

FOREIGN POLICY
DECEMBER 21, 2010

Elections to Watch in 2011

BY MAX STRASSER
FOREIGN POLICY
DECEMBER 21, 2010

EGYPT

Type: Presidential

Date: September

What to watch: President Hosni Mubarak has held power for almost three decades and, at age 82, shows no sign of letting go. Mubarak, who once promised to stay in office "until the last breath in my lungs and the last beat in my heart," is widely rumored to be in failing health, but most analysts still expect him to run for reelection in September. Mubarak has held power since the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981. In 2005, he was reelected in what were officially called the first multiparty elections of his presidency, but reports of fraud were widespread and the country's most popular opposition group, the Muslim Brotherhood, was prohibited from fielding a candidate.

The most recent parliamentary elections in November were again marred by fraud and were boycotted by prominent opposition leaders including former International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei, who has also urged a boycott of next year's presidential vote.

With little in the way of credible opposition, attention is mostly focused on the Mubarak family itself. A high-ranking member of Mubarak's party said in November that the president will run for reelection "unless he chooses otherwise." Meanwhile, his son Gamal, who is being groomed as a possible replacement, is running a popular street campaign -- with his father's blessing, of course. But if the elder Mubarak runs again and wins, the real question becomes who will take power should he die in office. The answer, at least so far, is unclear.

The zombie war in Afghanistan

Posted By Stephen M. Walt
FOREIGN POLICY
Friday, December 17, 2010

Perhaps you noticed the following two headlines from today's New York Times (print edition; the online headline is different):

"U.S. Will Widen War on Militants Inside Pakistan" and "Germany Will Begin Afghan Exit Next Year."

Those two stories tell you a lot about the situation in Central Asia, especially when read in the context of the latest strategy review. Surprise, surprise: that review reaffirmed virtually all of the Obama administration's justifications for continuing the war, and offered just enough upbeat assessments to support a continued effort. At the same time, it provides just enough prophylactic pessimism to appear "realistic."

But what's missing in all this role-playing was a clear and convincing statement of costs and benefits. For all the talk of defeating al Qaeda (which isn't in Afghanistan any more), or preventing "safe havens," the administration scrupulously avoided the question of whether the money spent, lives lost, and presidential time consumed is worth it in terms of advancing core American interests. While parsing the evidence that it is making progress, the administration carefully avoids the question of whether the resources devoted to achieving something that might be defined as "success" are worth spending. Similarly, it avoids asking whether the costs of disengagement would be all that significant; it simply assumes that getting out would lead to catastrophe. So it just repeats the usual affirmations that "we must...." and "we will...." while avoiding the far more important issue of whether we should. Our German allies appear to have asked themselves that question, and come up with a different answer.

And the news that the United States intends to expand the war even further into Pakistan is especially worrisome. On the one hand, it suggests that the administration has figured out that it cannot ever win in Afghanistan so long as the Taliban have a safe haven across the border (and the tacit or active support of some key elements in the Pakistani military). But as Anatol Lieven notes in The Nation, unleashing additional violence in Pakistan could have long-term destabilizing consequences that would be far more significant than whatever ultimately happens in Afghanistan.

And it is hard not to see echoes of Nixon's decision to invade Cambodia in 1970, in a failed attempt to eradicate Viet Cong bases there. The two situations are hardly identical, but both illustrate the tendency for wars to expand in both the scope and extent of violence, especially when they aren't going well. You send more troops, but that doesn't turn things around. So you send a few more, and you widen the war to new areas. But that doesn't work either, so you decide you have to alter the rules of engagement, use more missiles, bombs, or drones, or whatever. Maybe that will work, but it's looking more and more like the strategic equivalent of the Hail Mary pass. And so we have the bizarre situation where the president who won the Nobel Peace Prize in his first year in office has now escalated the war twice, expanded the use of drones, and now intends to widen the war in Pakistan even more.

Let's not forget that the invasion of Cambodia in 1970 also helped destabilize that country, and helped usher in the brutal rule of the Khmer Rouge. I'm not predicting a similar outcome here, but that example is a cruel reminder that military force is a crude instrument whose ultimate effects are difficult to anticipate in advance.

Decades from now, historians will look back and wonder how the United States allowed itself to get bogged down in a long and costly war to determine the political fate of landlocked country whose entire gross national product is about a quarter the size of the New York city budget. And when they reflect on the fact that the United States did this even after a major financial collapse and in the face of persistent budget deficits and macroeconomic imbalances, they will shake their heads in amazement.

Young Russians in search of faith are turning to Islam

By Will Englund
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, December 21, 2010; 9:28 PM

ALMETYEVSK, RUSSIA Rustam Sarachev should have had a hangover the first time he set foot in the central mosque here. He had wanted to throw a raucous party the night before, a send-off for himself on his way to Islam. But the guys he was with had mocked him for even thinking about the mosque, and had gone off drinking on their own.

So here he was, regretfully clearheaded in the daylight, 500 rubles unspent on vodka and still in his pocket, heading up the steps of the big salmon-colored mosque that dominates one end of this minor oil city east of the Volga.

It was late September 2006, the beginning of Ramadan. As he looks back on it now, he remembers that he wasn't sure why he had decided to come, or what to expect. He was 17, at loose ends, a self-described hooligan, a troublemaker, starting to get hardened by a life that was heading for the verges of the law, yet still vulnerable to the insults and disdain that seek out young men with no future here.

When he walked through the great double door of the mosque, he was taking his first steps toward joining an intense Islamic revival here in the Muslim heartland of Russia that is drawing particular strength from its young people.

Sarachev was 2 years old when the Soviet Union collapsed, 5 when the first war in Chechnya broke out, 12 on 9/11. His whole life has been an era of cataclysms, of an old world being torn apart, of war against Muslims, at home and abroad. Old identities, old certainties, have proved empty. And now he was joining others here of his own generation who are finding, in religion, an alternate authority. They are joining a global community, and at a time when great passions are stirring that community.

They learn at the mosque that Allah is punishing Iraqis for their heresies. They learn that 9/11 was carried out by American agents, or maybe agents from somewhere else, to provoke a war against Muslims. But they learn, too, that those who want to go and join the fight in Afghanistan, or Pakistan - and young men who aimed to do precisely that have passed through Almetyevsk - are in error. This is not the time. Islam needs them here, in Russia.

Their faith, in any case, is not ignited by politics. If it were, the Russian authorities would have cracked down on the mosque long ago. Sarachev came up those steps, on that day four years ago, not out of anger but in search of a way out of the pointlessness of his own life.

Built in the 1990s with Saudi backing, the mosque makes a strong physical statement. Inside, it features intricate woodwork, handsome red and green carpets and painstakingly assembled blue tile mosaics. On holidays, believers pack its services. During afternoon prayers, as they face to the southwest, toward Mecca, a window to their right might give them glimpses of a glorious pearly pink sky, otherworldly almost, even as the setting sun glints off the five golden domes of the Orthodox church across the way.

"I was shocked," remembers Sarachev. "I couldn't understand where I was. There were only young people, all around. They treated me so well. I'd never been welcomed like that before."

He saw familiar faces. Almas Tikhonov, who had been a big partier and a roughneck, and then had dropped from sight, was there, praying. Sarachev was impressed by the way Almas looked; there was a compelling serenity about him.

In the days that followed, that picture lingered in Sarachev's mind. He decided to go back to the mosque, and then again, and again. He had to endure the jibes of his old friends, and that was hard - but maybe it stiffened his resolve, too. As he began to see them in a new light, it made it simpler to give up the drinking, the hanging out on street corners, the sneaking off to a village where they could party all night, away from parents' eyes. Sarachev eventually came to understand that the world is full of devils, and that the duty of a good Muslim is to overcome those devils.

And somewhere here, he knows, though he's still working it through in his own mind, lies the meaning of jihad. "It's a struggle against those who don't believe," he says. "It's not a test. Jihad is a war."

Sarachev is a Tatar. His ancestors converted to Islam in the 9th century, when Tatarstan was a powerful state in its own right. For the past 450 years, the Tatars have lived under Russian domination; proud of their heritage, they consider themselves the natural leaders of Russia's 30 million Muslims.

But Sarachev's forebears didn't practice Islam the way he understands it today. Over a millennium, Tatars had developed a rich and complicated theology, comfortable with rational thought and mindful of the need to coexist with the Christian Russians. In Kazan, Tatarstan's capital, the religious establishment endeavors to carry on that tradition today.

But Soviet hostility to religion left most Tatars with only a perfunctory sense of their own Muslim inheritance. Growing up, Sarachev remembers, religion meant grandparents and holidays, and little else. Yet even then, just after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Arab proselytizers had come to Tatarstan, and they were preaching a different sort of Islam - starker, simpler, more puritanical. It has taken root here, and it appeals powerfully to young people who, like Sarachev, are drawn to its order and rules, and to its purity.


Slow acceptance

Almetyevsk, a city of 150,000 with no history to speak of - it was founded in 1955 - lies among low brown ridges, a four-hour drive east of Kazan. It's not material poverty here that drives young Tatars to Islam, because oil and gas have brought prosperity, but a spiritual poverty in a country where every institution, from schools to hospitals to the police, is riddled with cynicism and corruption.

Sarachev's parents divorced when he was young. His mother works at a pipe factory; Sarachev has a job there now, too, operating a hydraulic press. He still lives at his mother's apartment.

When he embraced Islam he learned that everyone is born with an inner faith, "and it is the parents who turn a person away from religion." Not necessarily one's literal parents, he adds; it could be a metaphor for society. But it's little wonder that his own mother and father were unhappy with his religious awakening and rejection of the culture they lived in.

"They didn't understand," he says. "There were fights and quarrels. But of course they had been very mad at me when I was getting home late and drunk." So when they saw that that stopped, they started, slowly, to come around. Now, he says, if his mother sees him praying at home, she'll close the door and won't interfere. (She adamantly refused to be interviewed for this article.)

This year, for the first time, they gave him the money to buy a sacrificial sheep.

Nov. 16 was the day Muslims honored Ibrahim, who intended to slit his son Ismail's throat but sacrificed a ram instead. After an early-morning service at the mosque, a large crowd moved outdoors to a parking area for buses. Now it was filled with farmers' trucks, each carrying a dozen or so restless sheep. Under a damp sky, the chief imam, in a gray hat made from fetal lamb's skin, presided. With him stood the head of the city administration, the veterinary officer, and plainclothes leaders from the security services.

The sheep - more than 600 of them, each hobbled with three feet tied together - were carried to wooden pallets laid out on the ground, where their jugular veins were slashed. Blood flowed down gutters that ran the length of each pallet. At times a butcher would have to sit on an animal for a minute or more after its head was half severed, as it kicked and heaved.

Then the carcasses were skinned and cut into three equal parts: one for the purchaser, one for his relatives, and one for the poor.

"Those who cut a Muslim into three parts are much worse than those who cut a sheep into three parts," said the imam, Nail bin Ahmad Sakhibzyanov.

Sarachev went home happy, proud in the profession of his faith. The imam went home happy, too. It was the biggest slaughter yet in Almetyevsk.


Striving for faith

Sakhibzyanov, 53, studied to be an imam in what was then Soviet Uzbekistan. He says he dealt with the KGB agents who infiltrated religious schools in those days by telling them what they wanted to hear. What a man says, he suggests, is not necessarily what's in his heart.

Today, this is what Sakhibzyanov says: that his goal is to help Tatars regain their traditional religion. Yes, he studied in Saudi Arabia in the 1990s, and yes, the school he runs uses a Saudi curriculum. But naturally he subscribes to the Tatars' traditional Hanafi branch of Islam, he says; if he didn't, his school would lose its license. He only wants to help the wayward Tatars, buffeted by centuries of Russian and Soviet rule, find their way.

His opponents in Kazan say his Islam is Hanafi in name only, that it otherwise bears the hallmarks of its Arab - or Salafi - origins. They say its focus on Islamic purity is the flip side of intolerance toward other Muslims, and narrow-minded zeal.

"Almetyevsk is the center of Islamic radicalism in Russia," says Rafik Mukhametshin, rector of the Russian Islamic University in Kazan. "They're trying to return to a mythical Islam. And they're unpredictable because they refuse to learn from history."

Almetyevsk, he says, is the most dangerous spot in Russia.

And yet part of Islam's appeal for Sarachev was its promise of simple domestic happiness.

"I had a choice," he says. "Either the street - alcohol and cigarettes and all that stuff - or a very pleasant atmosphere and pleasant people."

Now, instead of partying, he plays on an all-Muslim rugby team. He drinks coffee instead of vodka, and where once he danced, now he likes to take walks. The job is just a job, but the pay allows him to spend convivial hours at the banya - the Russian sauna.

His new friends at the mosque have married, and they have jobs and kids and cars. Sarachev's aim is to live the good, respectable life. He sees Islam as the way to achieve it.

That's not exactly radical. But he knows, uneasily, that there's more to his Islam than that. Faith is difficult and much is demanded. Islam has powerful enemies, not only the non-believers who wage war on Muslims but also the devil that lives in everyone. Error is widespread, and Sarachev is keen to avoid it, if he can only be sure how.

Sakhibzyanov tells his followers that the struggle is between the soul and the brain - between faith, in other words, and thought. The Muslim must strive for faith.

If that's true, his detractors argue, it's no wonder the imam's Islam has such a strong appeal for those who learned their values on the street, in the with-us-or-against-us world at the margins of society.

But not every young worshiper here has that background. Guzel Sharipova, 23, was everything as a student that Sarachev was not; she studied chemistry on a full scholarship in Kazan, and graduated with highest honors. It was in Kazan that Islam found her, thanks to an Arab boyfriend. She was living with her great-aunt, Galima Abdullina, a retired schoolteacher, and began asking her about the prayers she recited. Eventually, she put on a veil.

"She was a girl who loved life, and suddenly she became so religious," says Enzhe Anisimova, Abdullina's daughter. "We watched her as a baby, and she was so beautiful, and spreading light. Now she's so serious. Islam is very close to me, but that doesn't mean that I accept everything. Something in it really attracts Guzel. But what is it? If she has found answers to the questions she was trying to find answers to, maybe that solved something for her."

Sharipova says, "Everyone has a time to come to Islam." She draws deep satisfaction from the rules it imposes. That frees up so much. She works now as a chemist - with her brain - but she gives her attention to her soul.

And where Sarachev hopes Islam will bring him modest comforts, Sharipova treasures the way it allows her to discard life's vanities. "I'm trying to spend time on only necessary things," she says.


New expectations

Rustam Sarachev came to the mosque knowing almost nothing about Islam. Now he knows that praying to ancestors, or saints, is the worst imaginable sin. He knows that being Muslim is more important than being a Tatar. He knows that the Russian special services don't like Islam because the alcohol and tobacco Muslims reject are big businesses. He knows those same special services dread the day when all people turn to Islam.

His ancestors, in centuries past, drank beer and mead at weddings and often sought the intercession of their forebears in prayer. Would Sarachev consider them Muslims if he met them today - or devils? In his earnest way, he's only beginning to deal with the difficult questions. He's happy that Islam is helping him find the answers.

"Everyone eventually asks, 'Why am I here? Why will I die? What will happen after I die?' You gradually start to understand who you are and why you were created."

It is, he says, to live a pure Muslim's life. And, through Islam, all is spelled out. "The prophet showed people everything - from how to go to the toilet to how to run a state." But there's still so much to get straight in his own mind.

Last year, Sarachev got to know some young men who wanted to pick up guns and go fight abroad. They weren't from the mosque. He thinks they had taught themselves Islam on the Internet. Sometimes, when they met on the street, they'd start urging him to go off and fight against Americans.

He says he was troubled by it, and as he describes it he still looks troubled by it. He's struggling to understand even now what's expected of him by his religion. He went to the mosque and asked the imams for advice.

They explained to him, he says, that these young men were mistaken. "Those people who say they want to fight, they're like foam on water. There's a lot of foam, but it's useless."

Eventually they went away, he doesn't know where. Sarachev, yearning to dig deeper into Islam, is still uncertain about jihad, and the fight against devils. "It's very complicated. I don't want to be wrong."

Sakhibzyanov knew about the would-be fighters. All Muslims, he says, know they are part of a larger community that must defend itself. But leaving Tatarstan to fight elsewhere is, he says, the wrong choice. "They are needed here."

The imam is a savvy navigator in a potentially hostile culture. Islam, he says, is a peaceful religion, violence is a sin and the task for Rustam Sarachev and other young Muslims is to keep studying and deepening their certainty in its purity and oneness. And then more will follow, and then more.

King: What's radicalizing Muslim Americans?

By PETER KING
December 20, 2010

U.S. Rep. Peter King says if the GOP

Peter King (R-Seaford) represents New York's 3rd Congressional District.

Earlier this month, I was elected by the House Republican Conference to be chairman of the Homeland Security Committee. I've made it clear that I'll focus the committee on counterterrorism and hold hearings on a wide range of issues, including radicalization of the American Muslim community and homegrown terrorism.

I've received many expressions of support and congratulations from government leaders, police and fire officials, and ordinary citizens. But my selection has not been received with universal acclaim. This is nothing new - the unwarranted criticisms go back years.

To some in the strata of political correctness, I'm a pretty bad guy. To be blunt, this crowd sees me as an anti-Muslim bigot. A spokesman for the Committee on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) denounced me last year for making "bigoted remarks . . . about Muslims and mosques (that) have no place in national security discussions."

In a 2006 CNN report about comments I'd made about Muslim leaders on Long Island, Paula Zahn said my charges were "causing a lot of outrage" before proceeding to asking me "Are you a Muslim hater?"

This, after a Newsday editorial assailed me for "playing with fire" and conducting a "holy war." Newsday has since moved from moralistic condemnation to sorrowful rebuke, writing this fall: "We wish King was less given to bellicose broadsides about Muslims. Alienating loyal Muslim Americans won't make us safer."

So what's the story that CAIR and the mainstream media aren't telling you?

Before 9/11, few if any American politicians had a closer relationship with the Muslim community and its leadership than I did. During my first months in Congress in 1993, I traveled to the Balkans - including Bosnia, Macedonia and Kosovo - to support that region's Muslims from aggression by Serbian Orthodox Christians. I was one of a bare handful of Republicans who supported President Bill Clinton's military offensives in Bosnia in 1995 and Kosovo in 1998.

I attended the Islamic Center of Long Island (ICLI) in Westbury on a regular basis, visited socially with local Muslim leaders, had Muslim students intern in my office, and advocated for Pakistan's position against India in Kashmir. Indeed, in 1995 the ICLI honored me for my "support of the Muslim community in general" and my "advocacy of human rights in Bosnia and Kashmir."

In the days following 9/11, I made several television and radio appearances supporting American Muslims, saying that they had nothing to do with the attacks and were as loyal and patriotic as any Americans. I particularly warned that we could not do to Muslims what was done to Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor.

Even today I cannot begin to describe the disappointment, anger and outrage I felt when, barely a month after those attacks that killed so many hundreds of Long Islanders, prominent Long Island Muslim leaders were insisting there was no evidence that al-Qaida was responsible for the attacks - even saying it could have been the CIA, the FBI or the Zionists!

Even more troubling is that to this day, no Muslim leader has denounced those vile remarks. Nor did Newsday say a word about these slanders - no moral outrage or condemnation. No demand for an apology or even an explanation.

As I became more immersed in attempting to unravel the radical Islamic threat to our nation and our civilization, it became more and more obvious to me that the moral myopia of Long Island's Muslim leaders and their apologists in the media was the rule - and that there were few exceptions.

Federal and local law enforcement officials throughout the country told me they received little or - in most cases - no cooperation from Muslim leaders and imams.

This noncooperation was perilous enough in the years following 9/11, when the main Islamist threat to the homeland emanated from overseas. Fortunately, that aspect of the jihadist threat has subsided because of the effective counterterrorism infrastructure constructed by the Bush administration. Some Bush policies, such as sharing and receiving intelligence with and from our allies, were relatively non-controversial. Others such as enhanced interrogations, wiretapping foreign terrorists phoning into the United States, the prison at Guantánamo, and monitoring terrorist financial transactions were routinely condemned - but all were necessary and effective.

Al-Qaida has adjusted to this new reality and is recruiting Muslims living legally in the United States - homegrown terrorists who have managed to stay under the anti-terror radar screen. This is why the hearings I will hold next year are so critical.

In the past 15 months we saw Najibullah Zazi, who was raised and educated in Queens, attempt to attack the New York City subway system with liquid explosives, using skills he learned in terrorist training camps in Afghanistan. We learned about Zazi by chance when his name came up on a wiretap. The case was almost compromised when a Queens imam - ostensibly cooperating with the New York City Police Department - tipped off Zazi.

Then there was Nidal Hasan, the Army major accused in the murder of 13 innocent people at Fort Hood last year. And Faisal Shahzad, an American citizen trained in Pakistan, who attempted to detonate a car bomb in Times Square in May. There have also been the recent arrests of homegrown Muslim terrorists in Texas, Chicago, Virginia, Riverdale, North Jersey, San Diego and Portland, Ore.

The great majority of Muslims in our country are hardworking, dedicated Americans. Yet a Pew Poll showed that 15 percent of Muslim Americans between 18 and 29 say suicide bombing is justified. I also know of imams instructing members of their mosques not to cooperate with law enforcement officials investigating the recruiting of young men in their mosques as suicide bombers. We need to find the reasons for this alienation.

There's a disconnect between outstanding Muslims who contribute so much to the future of our country and those leaders who - for whatever reason - acquiesce in terror or ignore the threat. It is this disconnect that threatens the security of us all.

As chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, I will do all I can to break down the wall of political correctness and drive the public debate on Islamic radicalization. These hearings will be a step in that direction. It's what democracy is all about.

King vows hearings on Muslims

By: Jennifer Epstein
Capitol News
December 20, 2010 08:23 AM EST

Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) is vowing to hold hearings next year on what he calls the “radicalization of the American Muslim community and homegrown terrorism.”

The incoming chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security said he plans to examine the “disconnect” between law-abiding American Muslims and the homegrown terrorists who have plotted failed attacks in places like Times Square and Portland, Ore.

With the hearings in his committee, “I will do all I can to break down the wall of political correctness and drive the public debate on Islamic radicalization,” King wrote in a Newsday op-ed.

Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, told POLITICO he fears the hearings will become a “witch hunt.” Any hearing King holds, Hooper said, “is just going to further marginalize American Muslims and demonize Islam.”

Hooper said that most American Muslims are "as patriotic as everyone else," noting that potential attacks have been thwarted because of concerns expressed to law enforcement officials by Muslims about people in their own communities.

But King said he sees real threats coming from American Muslims as Al Qaeda is “recruiting Muslims living legally in the United States — homegrown terrorists who have managed to stay under the anti-terror radar screen.”

King added that he is especially concerned by the imams who, he said, “acquiesce in terror or ignore the threat” by telling members of their mosques “not to cooperate with law enforcement officials."

Top Secret America- Interactive map

Top Secret America - Monitoring America

Dana Priest and William M. Arkin
The Washington Post
Monday, December 20, 2010; 1:40 AM

Nine years after the terrorist attacks of 2001, the United States is assembling a vast domestic intelligence apparatus to collect information about Americans, using the FBI, local police, state homeland security offices and military criminal investigators.

The system, by far the largest and most technologically sophisticated in the nation's history, collects, stores and analyzes information about thousands of U.S. citizens and residents, many of whom have not been accused of any wrongdoing.

The government's goal is to have every state and local law enforcement agency in the country feed information to Washington to buttress the work of the FBI, which is in charge of terrorism investigations in the United States.

Other democracies - Britain and Israel, to name two - are well acquainted with such domestic security measures. But for the United States, the sum of these new activities represents a new level of governmental scrutiny.

This localized intelligence apparatus is part of a larger Top Secret America created since the attacks. In July, The Washington Post described an alternative geography of the United States, one that has grown so large, unwieldy and secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs or how many programs exist within it.

Today's story, along with related material on The Post's Web site, examines how Top Secret America plays out at the local level. It describes a web of 4,058 federal, state and local organizations, each with its own counterterrorism responsibilities and jurisdictions. At least 935 of these organizations have been created since the 2001 attacks or became involved in counterterrorism for the first time after 9/11.

The months-long investigation, based on nearly 100 interviews and 1,000 documents, found that:

* Technologies and techniques honed for use on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan have migrated into the hands of law enforcement agencies in America.

* The FBI is building a database with the names and certain personal information, such as employment history, of thousands of U.S. citizens and residents whom a local police officer or a fellow citizen believed to be acting suspiciously. It is accessible to an increasing number of local law enforcement and military criminal investigators, increasing concerns that it could somehow end up in the public domain.

* Seeking to learn more about Islam and terrorism, some law enforcement agencies have hired as trainers self-described experts whose extremist views on Islam and terrorism are considered inaccurate and counterproductive by the FBI and U.S. intelligence agencies.

* The Department of Homeland Security sends its state and local partners intelligence reports with little meaningful guidance, and state reports have sometimes inappropriately reported on lawful meetings.

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Counterterrorism on Main Street
In cities across Tennessee and across the nation local agencies are using sophisticated equipment and techniques to keep an eye out for terrorist threats -- and to watch Americans in the process. Launch Gallery »

The need to identify U.S.-born or naturalized citizens who are planning violent attacks is more urgent than ever, U.S. intelligence officials say. This month's FBI sting operation involving a Baltimore construction worker who allegedly planned to bomb a Maryland military recruiting station is the latest example. It followed a similar arrest of a Somali-born naturalized U.S. citizen allegedly seeking to detonate a bomb near a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland, Ore. There have been nearly two dozen other cases just this year.

"The old view that 'if we fight the terrorists abroad, we won't have to fight them here' is just that - the old view," Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told police and firefighters recently.

The Obama administration heralds this local approach as a much-needed evolution in the way the country confronts terrorism.

Top Secret America is a project two years in the making that describes the huge security buildup in the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Today’s story is about those efforts at the local level, including law enforcement and homeland security agencies in every state and thousands of communities. View previous stories, explore relationships between government organizations and the types of work being done, and view top-secret geography on an interactive map.

However, just as at the federal level, the effectiveness of these programs, as well as their cost, is difficult to determine. The Department of Homeland Security, for example, does not know how much money it spends each year on what are known as state fusion centers, which bring together and analyze information from various agencies within a state.

The total cost of the localized system is also hard to gauge. The DHS has given $31 billion in grants since 2003 to state and local governments for homeland security and to improve their ability to find and protect against terrorists, including $3.8 billion in 2010. At least four other federal departments also contribute to local efforts. But the bulk of the spending every year comes from state and local budgets that are too disparately recorded to aggregate into an overall total.

The Post findings paint a picture of a country at a crossroads, where long-standing privacy principles are under challenge by these new efforts to keep the nation safe.

The public face of this pivotal effort is Napolitano, the former governor of Arizona, which years ago built one of the strongest state intelligence organizations outside of New York to try to stop illegal immigration and drug importation.

Napolitano has taken her "See Something, Say Something" campaign far beyond the traffic signs that ask drivers coming into the nation's capital for "Terror Tips" and to "Report Suspicious Activity."

She recently enlisted the help of Wal-Mart, Amtrak, major sports leagues, hotel chains and metro riders. In her speeches, she compares the undertaking to the Cold War fight against communists.

"This represents a shift for our country," she told New York City police officers and firefighters on the eve of the 9/11 anniversary this fall. "In a sense, this harkens back to when we drew on the tradition of civil defense and preparedness that predated today's concerns."

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From Afghanistan to Tennessee

On a recent night in Memphis, a patrol car rolled slowly through a parking lot in a run-down section of town. The military-grade infrared camera on its hood moved robotically from left to right, snapping digital images of one license plate after another and analyzing each almost instantly.

Suddenly, a red light flashed on the car's screen along with the word "warrant."

"Got a live one! Let's do it," an officer called out.

The streets of Memphis are a world away from the streets of Kabul, yet these days, the same types of technologies and techniques are being used in both places to identify and collect information about suspected criminals and terrorists.

The examples go far beyond Memphis.

* Hand-held, wireless fingerprint scanners were carried by U.S. troops during the insurgency in Iraq to register residents of entire neighborhoods. L-1 Identity Solutions is selling the same type of equipment to police departments to check motorists' identities.

* In Arizona, the Maricopa County Sheriff's Facial Recognition Unit, using a type of equipment prevalent in war zones, records 9,000 biometric digital mug shots a month.

* U.S. Customs and Border Protection flies General Atomics' Predator drones along the Mexican and Canadian borders - the same kind of aircraft, equipped with real-time, full-motion video cameras, that has been used in wars in Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan to track the enemy.

The special operations units deployed overseas to kill the al-Qaeda leadership drove technological advances that are now expanding in use across the United States. On the front lines, those advances allowed the rapid fusing of biometric identification, captured computer records and cellphone numbers so troops could launch the next surprise raid.

Here at home, it's the DHS that is enamored with collecting photos, video images and other personal information about U.S. residents in the hopes of teasing out terrorists.

The DHS helped Memphis buy surveillance cameras that monitor residents near high-crime housing projects, problematic street corners, and bridges and other critical infrastructure. It helped pay for license plate readers and defrayed some of the cost of setting up Memphis's crime-analysis center. All together it has given Memphis $11 million since 2003 in homeland security grants, most of which the city has used to fight crime.

"We have got things now we didn't have before," said Memphis Police Department Director Larry Godwin, who has produced record numbers of arrests using all this new analysis and technology. "Some of them we can talk about. Some of them we can't."

One of the biggest advocates of Memphis's data revolution is John Harvey, the police department's technology specialist, whose computer systems are the civilian equivalent of the fancier special ops equipment used by the military.

Harvey collects any information he can pry out of government and industry. When officers were wasting time knocking on the wrong doors to serve warrants, he persuaded the local utility company to give him a daily update of the names and addresses of customers.

When he wanted more information about phones captured at crime scenes, he programmed a way to store all emergency 911 calls, which often include names and addresses to associate with phone numbers. He created another program to upload new crime reports every five minutes and mine them for the phone numbers of victims, suspects, witnesses and anyone else listed on them.

Now, instead of having to decide which license plate numbers to type into a computer console in the patrol car, an officer can simply drive around, and the automatic license plate reader on his hood captures the numbers on every vehicle nearby. If the officer pulls over a driver, instead of having to wait 20 minutes for someone back at the office to manually check records, he can use a hand-held device to instantly call up a mug shot, a Social Security number, the status of the driver's license and any outstanding warrants.

The computer in the cruiser can tell an officer even more about who owns the vehicle, the owner's name and address and criminal history, and who else with a criminal history might live at the same address.

Take a recent case of two officers with the hood-mounted camera equipment who stopped a man driving on a suspended license. One handcuffed him, and the other checked his own PDA. Based on the information that came up, the man was ordered downtown to pay a fine and released as the officers drove off to stop another car.

That wasn't the end of it, though.

A record of that stop - and the details of every other arrest made that night, and every summons written - was automatically transferred to the Memphis Real Time Crime Center, a command center with three walls of streaming surveillance video and analysis capabilities that rival those of an Army command center.

There, the information would be geocoded on a map to produce a visual rendering of crime patterns. This information would help the crime intelligence analysts predict trends so the department could figure out what neighborhoods to swarm with officers and surveillance cameras.

But that was still not the end of it, because the fingerprints from the crime records would also go to the FBI's data campus in Clarksburg, W.Va. There, fingerprints from across the United States are stored, along with others collected by American authorities from prisoners in Saudi Arabia and Yemen, Iraq and Afghanistan.

There are 96 million sets of fingerprints in Clarksburg, a volume that government officials view not as daunting but as an opportunity.

This year for the first time, the FBI, the DHS and the Defense Department are able to search each other's fingerprint databases, said Myra Gray, head of the Defense Department's Biometrics Identity Management Agency, speaking to an industry group recently. "Hopefully in the not-too-distant future," she said, "our relationship with these federal agencies - along with state and local agencies - will be completely symbiotic."

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The FBI's 'suspicious' files

At the same time that the FBI is expanding its West Virginia database, it is building a vast repository controlled by people who work in a top-secret vault on the fourth floor of the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building in Washington. This one stores the profiles of tens of thousands of Americans and legal residents who are not accused of any crime. What they have done is appear to be acting suspiciously to a town sheriff, a traffic cop or even a neighbor.

If the new Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative, or SAR, works as intended, the Guardian database may someday hold files forwarded by all police departments across the country in America's continuing search for terrorists within its borders.

The effectiveness of this database depends, in fact, on collecting the identities of people who are not known criminals or terrorists - and on being able to quickly compile in-depth profiles of them.

"If we want to get to the point where we connect the dots, the dots have to be there," said Richard A. McFeely, special agent in charge of the FBI's Baltimore office.

In response to concerns that information in the database could be improperly used or released, FBI officials say anyone with access has been trained in privacy rules and the penalties for breaking them.

But not everyone is convinced. "It opens a door for all kinds of abuses," said Michael German, a former FBI agent who now leads the American Civil Liberties Union's campaign on national security and privacy matters. "How do we know there are enough controls?"

The government defines a suspicious activity as "observed behavior reasonably indicative of pre-operational planning related to terrorism or other criminal activity" related to terrorism.

State intelligence analysts and FBI investigators use the reports to determine whether a person is buying fertilizer to make a bomb or to plant tomatoes; whether she is plotting to poison a city's drinking water or studying for a metallurgy test; whether, as happened on a Sunday morning in late September, the man snapping a picture of a ferry in the Newport Beach harbor in Southern California simply liked the way it looked or was plotting to blow it up.

Suspicious Activity Report N03821 says a local law enforcement officer observed "a suspicious subject . . . taking photographs of the Orange County Sheriff Department Fire Boat and the Balboa Ferry with a cellular phone camera." The confidential report, marked "For Official Use Only," noted that the subject next made a phone call, walked to his car and returned five minutes later to take more pictures. He was then met by another person, both of whom stood and "observed the boat traffic in the harbor." Next another adult with two small children joined them, and then they all boarded the ferry and crossed the channel.

All of this information was forwarded to the Los Angeles fusion center for further investigation after the local officer ran information about the vehicle and its owner through several crime databases and found nothing.

Authorities would not say what happened to it from there, but there are several paths a suspicious activity report can take:

At the fusion center, an officer would decide to either dismiss the suspicious activity as harmless or forward the report to the nearest FBI terrorism unit for further investigation.

At that unit, it would immediately be entered into the Guardian database, at which point one of three things could happen:

The FBI could collect more information, find no connection to terrorism and mark the file closed, though leaving it in the database.

It could find a possible connection and turn it into a full-fledged case.

Or, as most often happens, it could make no specific determination, which would mean that Suspicious Activity Report N03821 would sit in limbo for as long as five years, during which time many other pieces of information about the man photographing a boat on a Sunday morning could be added to his file: employment, financial and residential histories; multiple phone numbers; audio files; video from the dashboard-mounted camera in the police cruiser at the harbor where he took pictures; and anything else in government or commercial databases "that adds value," as the FBI agent in charge of the database described it.

That could soon include biometric data, if it existed; the FBI is working on a way to attach such information to files. Meanwhile, the bureau will also soon have software that allows local agencies to map all suspicious incidents in their jurisdiction.

The Defense Department is also interested in the database. It recently transferred 100 reports of suspicious behavior into the Guardian system, and over time it expects to add thousands more as it connects 8,000 military law enforcement personnel to an FBI portal that will allow them to send and review reports about people suspected of casing U.S. bases or targeting American personnel.

And the DHS has created a separate way for state and local authorities, private citizens, and businesses to submit suspicious activity reports to the FBI and to the department for analysis.

As of December, there were 161,948 suspicious activity files in the classified Guardian database, mostly leads from FBI headquarters and state field offices. Two years ago, the bureau set up an unclassified section of the database so state and local agencies could send in suspicious incident reports and review those submitted by their counterparts in other states. Some 890 state and local agencies have sent in 7,197 reports so far.

Of those, 103 have become full investigations that have resulted in at least five arrests, the FBI said. There have been no convictions yet. An additional 365 reports have added information to ongoing cases.

But most remain in the uncertain middle, which is why within the FBI and other intelligence agencies there is much debate about the effectiveness of the bottom-up SAR approach, as well as concern over the privacy implications of retaining so much information on U.S. citizens and residents who have not been charged with anything.

The vast majority of terrorism leads in the United States originate from confidential FBI sources and from the bureau's collaboration with federal intelligence agencies, which mainly work overseas. Occasionally a stop by a local police officer has sparked an investigation. Evidence comes from targeted FBI surveillance and undercover operations, not from information and analysis generated by state fusion centers about people acting suspiciously.

"It's really resource-inefficient," said Philip Mudd, a 20-year CIA counterterrorism expert and a top FBI national security official until he retired nine months ago. "If I were to have a dialogue with the country about this . . . it would be about not only how we chase the unknowns, but do you want to do suspicious activity reports across the country? . . . Anyone who is not at least suspected of doing something criminal should not be in a database."

Charles Allen, a longtime senior CIA official who then led the DHS's intelligence office until 2009, said some senior people in the intelligence community are skeptical that SARs are an effective way to find terrorists. "It's more likely that other kinds of more focused efforts by local police will gain you the information that you need about extremist activities," he said.

The DHS can point to some successes: Last year the Colorado fusion center turned up information on Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan-born U.S. resident planning to bomb the New York subway system. In 2007, a Florida fusion center provided the vehicle ownership history used to identify and arrest an Egyptian student who later pleaded guilty to providing material support to terrorism, in this case transporting explosives.

"Ninety-nine percent doesn't pan out or lead to anything" said Richard Lambert Jr., the special agent in charge of the FBI's Knoxville office. "But we're happy to wade through these things."

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Expert training?

Ramon Montijo has taught classes on terrorism and Islam to law enforcement officers all over the country.

"Alabama, Colorado, Vermont," said Montijo, a former Army Special Forces sergeant and Los Angeles Police Department investigator who is now a private security consultant. "California, Texas and Missouri," he continued.

What he tells them is always the same, he said: Most Muslims in the United States want to impose sharia law here.

"They want to make this world Islamic. The Islamic flag will fly over the White House - not on my watch!" he said. "My job is to wake up the public, and first, the first responders."

With so many local agencies around the country being asked to help catch terrorists, it often falls to sheriffs or state troopers to try to understand the world of terrorism. They aren't FBI agents, who have years of on-the-job and classroom training.

Instead, they are often people like Lacy Craig, who was a police dispatcher before she became an intelligence analyst at Idaho's fusion center, or the detectives in Minnesota, Michigan and Arkansas who can talk at length about the lineage of gangs or the signs of a crystal meth addict.

Now each of them is a go-to person on terrorism as well.

"The CIA used to train analysts forever before they graduated to be a real analyst," said Allen, the former top CIA and DHS official. "Today we take former law enforcement officers and we call them intelligence officers, and that's not right, because they have not received any training on intelligence analysis."

State fusion center officials say their analysts are getting better with time. "There was a time when law enforcement didn't know much about drugs. This is no different," said Steven W. Hewitt, who runs the Tennessee fusion center, considered one of the best in the country. "Are we experts at the level of [the National Counterterrorism Center]? No. Are we developing an expertise? Absolutely."

But how they do that is usually left up to the local police departments themselves. In their desire to learn more about terrorism, many departments are hiring their own trainers. Some are self-described experts whose extremist views are considered inaccurate and harmful by the FBI and others in the intelligence community

Like Montijo, Walid Shoebat, a onetime Muslim who converted to Christianity, also lectures to local police. He too believes that most Muslims seek to impose sharia law in the United States. To prevent this, he said in an interview, he warns officers that "you need to look at the entire pool of Muslims in a community."

When Shoebat spoke to the first annual South Dakota Fusion Center Conference in Sioux Falls this June, he told them to monitor Muslim student groups and local mosques and, if possible, tap their phones. "You can find out a lot of information that way," he said.

A book expanding on what Shoebat and Montijo believe has just been published by the Center for Security Policy, a Washington-based neoconservative think tank. "Shariah: The Threat to America" describes what its authors call a "stealth jihad" that must be thwarted before it's too late.

The book's co-authors include such notables as former CIA director R. James Woolsey and former deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin, along with the center's director, a longtime activist. They write that most mosques in the United States already have been radicalized, that most Muslim social organizations are fronts for violent jihadists and that Muslims who practice sharia law seek to impose it in this country.

Frank Gaffney Jr., director of the center, said his team has spoken widely, including to many law enforcement forums.

"Members of our team have been involved in training programs for several years now, many of which have been focused on local law enforcement intelligence, homeland security, state police, National Guard units and the like," Gaffney said. "We're seeing a considerable ramping-up of interest in getting this kind of training."

Government terrorism experts call the views expressed in the center's book inaccurate and counterproductive. They say the DHS should increase its training of local police, using teachers who have evidence-based viewpoints.

DHS spokeswoman Amy Kudwa said the department does not maintain a list of terrorism experts but is working on guidelines for local authorities wrestling with the topic.

So far, the department has trained 1,391 local law enforcement officers in analyzing public information and 400 in analytic thinking and writing skills. Kudwa said the department also offers counterterrorism training through the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which this year enrolled 94 people in a course called "Advanced Criminal Intelligence Analysis to Prevent Terrorism."

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A lack of useful information

The DHS also provides local agencies a daily flow of information bulletins.

These reports are meant to inform agencies about possible terror threats. But some officials say they deliver a never-ending stream of information that is vague, alarmist and often useless. "It's like a garage in your house you keep throwing junk into until you can't park your car in it," says Michael Downing, deputy chief of counterterrorism and special operations for the Los Angeles Police Department.

A review of nearly 1,000 DHS reports dating back to 2003 and labeled "For Official Use Only" underscores Downing's description. Typical is one from May 24, 2010, titled "Infrastructure Protection Note: Evolving Threats to the Homeland."

It tells officials to operate "under the premise that other operatives are in the country and could advance plotting with little or no warning." Its list of vulnerable facilities seems to include just about everything: "Commercial Facilities, Government Facilities, Banking and Financial and Transportation . . ."

Bart R. Johnson, who heads the DHS's intelligence and analysis office, defended such reports, saying that threat reporting has "grown and matured and become more focused." The bulletins can't be more specific, he said, because they must be written at the unclassified level.

Recently, the International Association of Chiefs of Police agreed that the information they were receiving had become "more timely and relevant" over the past year.

Downing, however, said the reports would be more helpful if they at least assessed threats within a specific state's boundaries.

States have tried to do that on their own, but with mixed, and at times problematic, results.

In 2009, for instance, after the DHS and the FBI sent out several ambiguous reports about threats to mass-transit systems and sports and entertainment venues, the New Jersey Regional Operations Intelligence Center's Threat Analysis Program added its own information. "New Jersey has a large mass-transit infrastructure," its report warned, and "an NFL stadium and NHL/NBA arenas, a soccer stadium, and several concert venues that attract large crowds."

In Virginia, the state's fusion center published a terrorism threat assessment in 2009 naming historically black colleges as potential hubs for terrorism.

From 2005 to 2007, the Maryland State Police went even further, infiltrating and labeling as terrorists local groups devoted to human rights, antiwar causes and bike lanes.

And in Pennsylvania this year, a local contractor hired to write intelligence bulletins filled them with information about lawful meetings as varied as Pennsylvania Tea Party Patriots Coalition gatherings, antiwar protests and an event at which environmental activists dressed up as Santa Claus and handed out coal-filled stockings.

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'We have our own terrorists'

Even if the information were better, it might not make a difference for the simplest of reasons: In many cities and towns across the country, there is just not enough terrorism-related work to do.

In Utah on one recent day, one of five intelligence analysts in the state's fusion center was writing a report about the rise in teenage overdoses of an over-the-counter drug. Another was making sure the visiting president of Senegal had a safe trip. Another had just helped a small town track down two people who were selling magazine subscriptions and pocketing the money themselves.

In the Colorado Information Analysis Center, some investigators were following terrorism leads. Others were looking into illegal Craigslist postings and online "World of Warcraft" gamers.

The vast majority of fusion centers across the country have transformed themselves into analytical hubs for all crimes and are using federal grants, handed out in the name of homeland security, to combat everyday offenses.

This is happening because, after 9/11, local law enforcement groups did what every agency and private company did in Top Secret America: They followed the money.

The DHS helped the Memphis Police Department, for example, purchase 90 surveillance cameras, including 13 that monitor bridges and a causeway. It helped buy the fancy screens on the walls of the Real Time Crime Center, as well as radios, robotic surveillance equipment, a mobile command center and three bomb-sniffing dogs. All came in the name of port security and protection to critical infrastructure.

Since there hasn't been a solid terrorism case in Memphis yet, the equipment's greatest value has been to help drive down city crime. Where the mobile surveillance cameras are set up, criminals scatter, said Lt. Mark Rewalt, who, on a recent Saturday night, scanned the city from an altitude of 1,000 feet.

Flying in a police helicopter, Rewalt pointed out some of the cameras the DHS has funded. They are all over the city, in mall parking lots, in housing projects, at popular street hang-outs. "Cameras are what's happening now," he marveled.

Meanwhile, another post-9/11 unit in Tennessee has had even less terrorism-related work to do.

The Tennessee National Guard 45th Weapons of Mass Destruction Civil Support Team, one of at least 50 such units around the country, was created to respond to what officials still believe is the inevitable release of chemical, biological or radiological material by terrorists.

The unit's 22 hazardous-materials personnel have the best emergency equipment in the state. A fleet of navy-blue vehicles - command, response, detection and tactical operations trucks - is kept polished and ready to roll in a garage at the armory in Smyrna.

The unit practices WMD scenarios constantly. But in real life, the crew uses the equipment very little: twice a year at NASCAR races in nearby Bristol to patrol for suspicious packages. Other than that, said Capt. Matt Hayes, several times a year they respond to hoaxes.

The fact that there has not been much terrorism to worry about is not evident on the Tennessee fusion center's Web site. Click on the incident map, and the state appears to be under attack.

Red icons of explosions dot Tennessee, along with blinking exclamation marks and flashing skulls. The map is labeled: "Terrorism Events and Other Suspicious Activity.

But if you roll over the icons, the explanations that pop up have nothing to do with major terrorist plots: "Johnson City police are investigating three 'bottle bombs' found at homes over the past three days," one description read recently. ". . . The explosives were made from plastic bottles with something inside that reacted chemically and caused the bottles to burst."

Another told a similar story: "The Scott County Courthouse is currently under evacuation after a bomb threat was called in Friday morning. Update: Authorities completed their sweep . . . and have called off the evacuation."

Nine years after 9/11, this map is part of the alternative geography that is Top Secret America, where millions of people are assigned to help stop terrorism. Memphis Police Director Godwin is one of them, and he has his own version of what that means in a city where there have been 86 murders so far this year.

"We have our own terrorists, and they are taking lives every day," Godwin said. "No, we don't have suicide bombers - not yet. But you need to remain vigilant and realize how vulnerable you can be if you let up."