ANALYSIS: U.S. safer, but not safe enough

By NANCY BENAC/The Associated Press
September 3, 2011 | 5:01 p.m. CDT

EDITOR'S NOTE: An occasional look at government promises and how well they are kept.

WASHINGTON — We are safer, but not safe enough.

In the decade since the Sept. 11 attacks, the government has taken giant steps to protect the nation from terrorists, spending eye-popping sums to smarten up the federal bureaucracy, hunt down enemies, strengthen airline security, secure U.S. borders, reshape America's image and more. Still, the effort remains a work in progress, and in some cases a work stalled.

Whole alphabets of acronyms have been born and died in pursuit of homeland security, a phrase that wasn't even used much before 9/11.

Hello, TSA, DNI, DHS, NCTC, CVE, NSI and ICE. Goodbye, TTIC, INS and more.

How quaint that travelers used to be asked a few questions about whether they'd packed their own bags. Now, people routinely strip off their belts and shoes, dump their gels in small plastic bags, power up their laptops to prove they aren't bombs and submit to full body scans and pat downs once reserved for suspected criminals.

We have gone from "Let's roll" to "Don't touch my junk."

The bipartisan Sept. 11 commission in 2004 laid out a 585-page road map to create an America that is "safer, stronger, wiser."

Many of the commission's recommendations are now reality. But in some cases, results haven't lived up to expectations. Other proposals are just that, ideas awaiting action.

"What I've come to appreciate is there's no magic wand on some of these things," said Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who said that progress overall has been significant.

But remember how some of the police and firefighters who rushed to the twin towers in New York couldn't talk to one other because their radios weren't in sync? There's still no nationwide communications network for disasters, as the commission envisioned, although individual cities have made progress.

It's understandable if you've never heard of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, created to ensure that the government doesn't go overboard with new terrorism-fighting powers bestowed by the Patriot Act and other counterterrorism measures. The board has no members, no staff, no office.

Despite a top-to-bottom reorganization of the country's intelligence superstructure, it's still a challenge for analysts to tease out the critical clues needed to prevent an attack.

On Christmas Day 2009, lots of people in government had information about a Nigerian man whose behavior was raising red flags. But because no one had pieced all the information together, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab managed to stroll onto a plane headed for Detroit with a bomb in his underwear. Only his failure to detonate the explosives properly saved the people on that plane.

Lee Hamilton, a co-chairman of the Sept. 11 commission, said it's probably a combination of hard work and good luck that's kept the U.S. from experiencing another all-out terrorist attack. But he worries that success is breeding complacency.

"The lack of urgency concerns me," Hamilton said. "The likelihood is that sometime in the future, we will be attacked again."

A look at some of the 9/11 commission's recommendations and the results:

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RECOMMENDATION: Tighter security checks on all airline passengers. The Transportation Security Administration and Congress "must give priority attention to improving the ability of screening checkpoints to detect explosives on passengers."

RESULT: There have been awkward moments as the government searches for a system that will protect passengers without infuriating them: A gravely ill 95-year-old woman had to remove her wet diaper before she could get through security in Florida in June. Video of a 6-year-old girl getting frisked in Louisiana in March went viral. "Don't touch my junk" became a national rallying cry.

The TSA was created soon after the attacks, underscoring the priority placed on securing the sky. Since then, the U.S. has poured $50 billion into aviation security. The commission suggested specific actions for the agency: check travelers against terrorist watch lists and screen every passenger who warrants extra security for explosives. Both are now being done. But airport security procedures continue to evolve as the threat mutates. Those intrusive pat-downs began after Abdulmutallab boarded that flight for Detroit.

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RECOMMENDATION: "We recommend the establishment of a National Counterterrorism Center. ... The current position of Director of Central Intelligence should be replaced by a National Intelligence Director."

RESULT: The government has turned its intelligence-sharing policies nearly upside down as it tries to make it easier to manage and share all the rushing streams of information that flow through 15 agencies. There's a new National Counterterrorism Center; its mission is to bring together intelligence and analysts from across the government. There's a new director of national intelligence, a distinct agency, to coordinate it all. Overall, the intelligence budget has more than doubled since Sept. 11.

But Hamilton says "it's not clear that the DNI is the driving force for intelligence community integration that the commission envisioned."

The vision of a strong director supreme over all the intelligence agencies has yet to be fully realized in large part because of the way the job is structured, with lots of responsibility but not much authority. In a town where dollars equal clout, the intelligence director has no ability to redirect, cut off or increase spending at the different agencies.

The position, sometimes derided as the "convener-in-chief," is fast becoming one of the most thankless jobs in Washington. Three directors have come and gone since the job was created in 2005. Each was engaged in turf battles with the CIA and the National Security Council.

Retired Adm. Dennis Blair, who held the job from 2009 to 2010, complained in a recent address that the White House had undermined his authority.

"They sided enough with the CIA in ways that were public enough that it undercut my position," Blair said.

Asked with whom the president would side among current officials at the DNI, CIA and Pentagon, Blair said the White House would do the coordinating. He then added, "My experience is that the White House isn't a very good place to coordinate intelligence, much less to integrate it."

The current director, retired three-star Air Force Lt. Gen. James Clapper, is said to be well thought of by the White House, partly because he is openly deferential to the CIA.

After the 9/11 attacks, the government did work to combine its terrorist watchlists. Now even a beat cop in Seattle can check to see if the person pulled over for speeding is a known or suspected terrorist.

There are some worries that all this broad sharing of information has made it too easy for national secrets to leak. Think WikiLeaks.

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RECOMMENDATION: Creation of a nationwide radio network to allow different public safety agencies to communicate with one another during disasters. "Congress should support pending legislation which provides for the expedited and increased assignment of radio spectrum for public safety purposes."

RESULT: Still no network, legislation still pending.

As fires raged at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, firefighters, police and other emergency personnel couldn't effectively communicate with one another because of their archaic and incompatible radios.

To fix the problem, the commission recommended creating a network that would allow different public safety agencies to talk to each other during disasters, from forest fires to terrorist attacks.

But lawmakers, public safety officials and telecommunications companies have spent years haggling over the best way to build the system, which would cost billions to construct and operate. Legislation backed by the Obama administration would devote high-quality radio spectrum to a nationwide wireless public safety network, and raise the money to pay for it by auctioning other airwaves to spectrum-hungry wireless companies.

Even if a law is enacted this year, setting up the network would take time. "Congress must not approach this urgent matter at a leisurely pace, because quite literally lives are at stake," Hamilton and commission co-chairman Tom Kean said in a June letter to the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee.

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RECOMMENDATION: "There should be a board within the executive branch to oversee adherence to the guidelines we recommend and the commitment the government makes to defend our civil liberties."

RESULT: Within weeks of the attacks, President George W. Bush signed the Patriot Act, giving the government powers to search records and conduct roving wiretaps in pursuit of terrorists. That generated worries that personal and civil liberties would be overrun.

The five-person Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board was established and operated for a few years. But since 2008 it has been dormant. President Barack Obama nominated two people to serve, but they have not been confirmed by the Senate.

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RECOMMENDATION: "Afghanistan must not again become a sanctuary for international crime and terrorism." The commission called for a "long-term commitment to a secure and stable Afghanistan."

RESULT: And how: The U.S. commitment has been long term, both in dollars and military might. But Afghanistan is far from secure. Afghan civilian deaths remain alarmingly high. President Hamid Karzai's corruption-riddled government has little power outside of Kabul. As Obama seeks to pull out combat troops over the next three years, the government's hand might weaken further. Al-Qaida, however, has had to relocate much of its operational planning to Pakistan and Yemen, where weak governments leave terrorists an opening.

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RECOMMENDATION: "The United States should support Pakistan's government in its struggle against extremists with a comprehensive effort that extends from military aid to support for better education, so long as Pakistan's leaders remain willing to make difficult choices of their own."

RESULT: Pakistan has embraced democracy, after years under the military-led regime of Pervez Musharraf. Increased U.S. aid has helped shore up the weak democratic government and deliver some counterterrorism successes.

Yet all of Washington's money and support haven't severed links between militants and Pakistan's army and intelligence services. The Taliban can cross into Afghanistan freely to fight U.S. forces, and Pakistanis harbor extremely negative opinions of the U.S.

Relations between U.S. and Pakistani authorities have been consistently difficult. The U.S. discovery and killing of Osama bin Laden in a military town near Pakistan's capital in May only deepened the mutual mistrust and tension. Pakistani officials were furious that the raid was carried out without any warning to authorities in Islamabad, and that has jeopardized cooperation in the fight against al-Qaida. The U.S. has provided about $20 billion in assistance to Pakistan since 9/11, and many Americans are questioning the wisdom of giving more.

The country's direction is very unpredictable.

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RECOMMENDATION: "The problems in the U.S.-Saudi relationship must be confronted, openly."

RESULT: The Saudi government has fought al-Qaida on its own turf and proved a sturdy ally of the U.S. against Iran, yet has struggled to stem the flow of support for groups hostile to the United States. The two countries also haven't seen eye to eye on the wave of protests in North Africa and the Middle East. The commission's call for a "shared commitment to political and economic reform" is unfulfilled.

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RECOMMENDATION: A new approach to the Muslim world, one less tolerant of undemocratic governments. "One of the lessons of the long Cold War was that short-term gains in cooperating with the most repressive and brutal governments were too often outweighed by long-term setbacks for America's stature and interests."

RESULT: The Obama administration has seized on the anti-government uprisings of the Arab spring to reposition U.S. foreign policy, moving away from support for strongmen such as Egypt's Hosni Mubarak and more toward democratic reforms and respect for human rights. The administration hopes that new democracies in the region will offer frustrated young men greater dignity and new economic opportunities, leaving them less vulnerable to the appeal of extremism. But efforts to re-establish the U.S. as a moral leader around the globe have been hindered somewhat by the stalled U.S.-led peace effort between Israelis and Palestinians, high civilian death rates in Afghanistan and Obama's failure to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay as he promised.

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RECOMMENDATION: "The United States should engage other nations in developing a comprehensive coalition strategy against Islamist terrorism."

RESULT: Bush got strong backing from much of the world after 9/11, but that unity splintered when the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003. Still, countries are sharing more intelligence and working together to combat terrorist financing. No government has permitted al-Qaida to operate freely within its borders. Obama's election ushered in a new spirit of cooperation among countries which had often complained of U.S. heavy-handedness and unilateralism under Bush.

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RECOMMENDATION: "Congress should create a single, principal point of oversight and review for homeland security."

RESULT: When the Sept. 11 commission issued its report, 88 congressional committees, subcommittees and caucuses claimed at least some jurisdiction over the Department of Homeland Security.

The commission called the oversight system splintered, dysfunctional, an impediment to improving national security. It also was keenly aware of how hard it is to pry even 1 inch of turf away from a power-hungry member of Congress, warning presciently that "few things are more difficult to change in Washington than congressional committee jurisdiction and prerogatives."

By 2011, the number of congressional panels claiming jurisdiction had risen to 108. In 2009 alone, the department calculated it spent a collective 66 work years responding to questions from Congress.

"We are constantly briefing staff, appearing at hearings, preparing reports, responding to inquiries," said Napolitano. "It is a problem." And the problem goes way beyond the hassle of answering to lots of congressional chieftains.

Hamilton warns: "When everyone has oversight, nobody has oversight."

Legacy of 9/11 impacts both Bush, Obama presidencies

By BEN FELLER/The Associated Press
September 3, 2011 | 6:31 p.m. CDT

President Barack Obama and former President George W. Bush stand for the closing prayer in January 2009 after Obama was sworn in as the 44th president on Capitol Hill in Washington. Sept. 11 defined one presidency. It still hangs over another. Every big ramification of that day — two wars, tremendous debt, Guantanamo Bay prison, the hunt for Osama bin Laden and the dead still coming home at Dover — have bridged the decade from George W. Bush to Barack Obama. The White House, like the rest of the country, has been forever changed. ¦ Jae C. Hong/The Associated Press

WASHINGTON — The country has moved on. To the presidents who lead it, Sept. 11 never ends.

The ramifications of the worst terrorist attack in American history live on, bridging the decade from George W. Bush to Barack Obama.

Two wars. Huge debt. The Guantanamo Bay quandary. The evolving threat of terrorism. The end of Osama bin Laden. The hardening of executive power.

And the remains of fallen soldiers still coming home in flag-covered cases.

Sept. 11, 2001, defined Bush's presidency. It drives Obama's, even if more quietly.

"I remember President Bush used to warn people that it was going to be a long slog," said Michael Chertoff, Bush's second homeland security secretary. "There wasn't going to be a Battleship Missouri moment. The critical issue for us was to persevere without being overwrought. I think that was an accurate prediction."

But persevere for how long?

That is perhaps the biggest legacy at the presidential level: a new mindset.

The expectation now is that terrorists are always plotting to attack America. The realization is that they have succeeded once on a grand scale.

The old model of security — military might and war overseas, law enforcement at home — has given way to a vastly integrated system designed to prevent terrorism across the spectrum.

For the public, 2001 seems a different time. Those maligned color-coded terrorism warnings are gone. So is the utter fear that the country lived in at the time.

The al-Qaida attacks killed nearly 3,000 people in New York City, at the Pentagon and in Shanksville, Pa.

Right before the horror began, in a Gallup poll conducted as late as Sept 10, 2001, not even 1 percent of those surveyed said terrorism was the most important problem facing the country. A month later, that number was 46 percent.

And now? Terrorism is all the way back below 1 percent as the chief concern.

"In some ways, that's what victory is going to look like," said Ben Rhodes, Obama's deputy national security adviser for strategic communications. He called it a good sign that there is "an American people that is resilient, that sees terrorism in a broader context, that sees it as something that doesn't have to dominate their attention and our broader discourse."

Presidents view it differently.

They begin their day reviewing the latest threats from people seeking to kill Americans.

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On the morning the towers fell, Bush and Obama recognized that the world had changed.

One was a new president establishing his footing after the most disputed election in American history. The other was a state senator in Illinois who was years away from being famous.

"The story of that week is the key to understanding my presidency," Bush wrote recently in his memoirs. Obama, looking back on Sept. 11 in a book of his own, put it this way: "Chaos had come to our doorstep. As a consequence, we would have to act differently, understand the world differently."

Some analysts of war and politics say it was not Sept. 11 that forever changed America, but rather America's response to it in all the choices that followed.

The Iraq war, launched on what was discovered to be bad intelligence, grew out of a post-Sept. 11 push to contain Saddam Hussein.

Obama opposed the war in Iraq, then inherited it. He plans to pull out all troops by the end of this year, although it was Bush who put the U.S. on the path to ending the war before he left office. Iraq and the U.S. might still strike a deal to keep some U.S. forces in Iraq beyond 2011.

On Afghanistan, Obama took the footprint he got from Bush and went the other direction.

He saw this as the necessary and forgotten war, and he tripled the number of forces to blunt the Taliban and target al-Qaida. He has started to pull them home now, but the U.S. combat mission is not expected to end in Afghanistan until the end of 2014.

That would be more than 13 years after the terrorist attacks.

Combined, more than 6,000 members of the U.S. military have died in Iraq and Afghanistan. More than 45,000 have been wounded.

The wars have cost roughly $1.3 trillion since Sept. 11, 2001.

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So many of the challenges now facing the United States tie back to the effects of Sept. 11, said James Pfiffner, a professor of public policy at George Mason University. The United States has had to deal with rebuilding its standing abroad and cope with rising competitors such as China.

Of course, had the White House not responded aggressively to the attacks or kept after bin Laden, that would have caused outrage, too.

"I guess it's a matter of degree," Pfiffner said. "A lot of it was necessary and legitimate — certainly the stuff that's related to al-Qaida seems justified and important. But I think we went far beyond that, first with the Iraq war and then the creation of a whole lot of new intelligence agencies. It does seem like we went overboard."

Obama has been unable to keep his bold promise to close the post-Sept. 11 prison camp for suspected terrorists that sits on a U.S. Navy base in Cuba. The Guantanamo Bay center and the fate of the detainees imprisoned there are proving enormously thorny problems. Some detainees are being held indefinitely as a matter of policy.

The underlying threat to America all along has been the al-Qaida network that sent men on a suicide mission to hijack jetliners and cause historic destruction.

The signature moment of U.S. success came this year, when American forces killed bin Laden, the mastermind of the attacks, in his Pakistan hideaway.

Obama ordered the raid and phoned Bush with the results. "Good call," Bush told him.

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New Defense Secretary Leon Panetta now says the strategic defeat of al-Qaida is within reach.

Yet that is hard to visualize for a country that has grown accustomed to being in a rather constant state of war.

"The question that no one has addressed is, how do you know when you've won against al-Qaida?" said Joshua Rovner, associate professor of strategy and policy at the U.S. Naval War College in Rhode Island. "When are you comfortable declaring victory? When is it good enough? There is going to have to be a time in the next few years when the administration is going to have to make a hard political decision."

Michael Chertoff, Bush's homeland security chief, said the real story is the degree of continuity between the Bush and Obama administrations. National security has not been a massive partisan entanglement.

Yet Chertoff, too, spoke of a persistent threat for which an end point will be hard to ever determine. Even if the threat from al-Qaida diminishes, other transnational networks could pose a risk, and the types of potential attacks are changing.

"Once they were able to land a significant blow," he said of al-Qaida, "they've set a mark for other groups that will be hostile to the United States, whatever their ideological motivation. We're just going to have to recognize that we live in a much more fragmented world."

Obama, in fact, says his biggest concern is no longer a grand orchestrated attack. He told an interviewer just ahead of the 10th anniversary that he worries of a "lone wolf terrorist."

"When you've got one person who is deranged or driven by a hateful ideology, they can do a lot of damage," the president said. He promised the U.S. will not drop its guard.

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On Sept. 11, 2011, Obama and Bush will be together at a memorial service at ground zero in New York City.

In the days leading up to it, Obama plans to honor the service of people who have joined the military in response to the terrorist attacks.

Like Bush, who says Sept. 11 redefined sacrifice and duty, Obama says those who have served in this decade of war deserve honor.

"How do we honor these patriots — those who died and those who served?" Obama said recently. "In this season of remembrance, the answer is the same as it was 10 Septembers ago. We must be the America they lived for and the America they died for."

Don’t Fear Islamic Law in America

September 2, 2011
NYT
By ELIYAHU STERN

New Haven

MORE than a dozen American states are considering outlawing aspects of Shariah law. Some of these efforts would curtail Muslims from settling disputes over dietary laws and marriage through religious arbitration, while others would go even further in stigmatizing Islamic life: a bill recently passed by the Tennessee General Assembly equates Shariah with a set of rules that promote “the destruction of the national existence of the United States.”

Supporters of these bills contend that such measures are needed to protect the country against homegrown terrorism and safeguard its Judeo-Christian values. The Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has said that “Shariah is a mortal threat to the survival of freedom in the United States and in the world as we know it.”

This is exactly wrong. The crusade against Shariah undermines American democracy, ignores our country’s successful history of religious tolerance and assimilation, and creates a dangerous divide between America and its fastest-growing religious minority.

The suggestion that Shariah threatens American security is disturbingly reminiscent of the accusation, in 19th-century Europe, that Jewish religious law was seditious. In 1807, Napoleon convened an assembly of rabbinic authorities to address the question of whether Jewish law prevented Jews from being loyal citizens of the republic. (They said that it did not.)

Fear that Jewish law bred disloyalty was not limited to political elites; leading European philosophers also entertained the idea. Kant argued that the particularistic nature of “Jewish legislation” made Jews “hostile to all other peoples.” And Hegel contended that Jewish dietary rules and other Mosaic laws barred Jews from identifying with their fellow Prussians and called into question their ability to be civil servants.

The German philosopher Bruno Bauer offered Jews a bargain: renounce Jewish law and be granted full legal rights. He insisted that, otherwise, laws prohibiting work on the Sabbath made it impossible for Jews to be true citizens. (Bauer conveniently ignored the fact that many fully observant Jews violated the Sabbath to fight in the Prussian wars against Napoleon.)

During that era, Christianity was seen as either a universally valid basis of the state or a faith that harmoniously coexisted with the secular law of the land. Conversely, Judaism was seen as a competing legal system — making Jews at best an unassimilable minority, at worst a fifth column. It was not until the late 19th century that all Jews were granted full citizenship in Western Europe (and even then it was short lived).

Most Americans today would be appalled if Muslims suffered from legally sanctioned discrimination as Jews once did in Europe. Still, there are signs that many Americans view Muslims in this country as disloyal. A recent Gallup poll found that only 56 percent of Protestants think that Muslims are loyal Americans.

This suspicion and mistrust is no doubt fueled by the notion that American Muslims are akin to certain extreme Muslim groups in the Middle East and in Europe. But American Muslims are a different story. They are natural candidates for assimilation. They are demographically the youngest religious group in America, and most of their parents don’t even come from the Middle East (the majority have roots in Southeast Asia). A recent Pew Research Center poll found that Muslim Americans exhibit the highest level of integration among major American religious groups, expressing greater degrees of tolerance toward people of other faiths than do Protestants, Catholics or Jews.

Given time, American Muslims, like all other religious minorities before them, will adjust their legal and theological traditions, if necessary, to accord with American values.

America’s exceptionalism has always been its ability to transform itself — economically, culturally and religiously. In the 20th century, we thrived by promoting a Judeo-Christian ethic, respecting differences and accentuating commonalities among Jews, Catholics and Protestants. Today, we need an Abrahamic ethic that welcomes Islam into the religious tapestry of American life.

Anti-Shariah legislation fosters a hostile environment that will stymie the growth of America’s tolerant strand of Islam. The continuation of America’s pluralistic religious tradition depends on the ability to distinguish between punishing groups that support terror and blaming terrorist activities on a faith that represents roughly a quarter of the world’s population.

Eliyahu Stern, an assistant professor of religious studies and history at Yale, is the author of the forthcoming “The Genius: Elijah of Vilna and the Making of Modern Judaism.”

Federal government sues major banks over Fannie and Freddie losses

By Brady Dennis, Steven Mufson and Zachary A. Goldfarb,
Published: September 2, 2011
The Washington Post

Federal regulators launched a broad legal assault on big banks Friday, claiming they sold nearly $200 billion in fraudulent mortgage investments to housing giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that led to massive losses during the financial crisis.

The suits, brought by the Federal Housing Finance Agency, name 17 domestic and foreign banks as defendants. Among them: Bank of America, J.P. Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and Deutsche Bank.

According to the court filings, those firms and others “falsely represented” the quality of the loans that were bundled into securities and sold to investors and “significantly overstated the ability of the borrower to repay their mortgage loans.” The result, the suits claim, were investments that were far riskier than the banks led taxypayer-backed Fannie and Freddie to believe, and the securities ultimately were worth a fraction of their original value.

Friday’s filings in New York and Connecticut represent an escalation in the government’s effort to recoup taxpayer losses incurred during the financial crisis. But the lawsuits also raised questions about the toll they might have on the health of the already struggling banking sector and the prospects for a housing market recovery.

The federal action also underscored the often contradictory relationship between the government and financial firms in the wake of the crisis. At times, government officials have come to the rescue of banks and counted on them to help accelerate the nation’s lagging economic recovery. But often, officials have derided the practices that fueled the financial meltdown and sought to keep banks in check, either through new regulations or negotiated settlements or, as on Friday, potentially costly litigation.

Some financial analysts said the lawsuits come at a particularly bad time because bank lending is already sluggish. They warned that the lawsuits could sap capital from banks, leaving them with even less money to lend, and further weaken the economy. Others argued that Fannie and Freddie were sophisticated investors who helped shape the very securities they purchased.

One former top executive at a financial institution that bought and sold mortgage securities, and who spoke on the condition of anonymity, criticized the suits, saying that “the whole thing has gotten ridiculous and out of hand. The banks are big boys. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are big boys. The people who invested in private securities are big boys.”

Added another bank official: “These are folks that were involved in creating these securities. The idea that Fannie and Freddie were victims in this, it defies credibility.”

But James Millstein, a former Treasury official who oversaw the reorganization of bailed-out insurance giant American International Group, said “the anti-fraud provisions of the securities laws don’t have a big boy exemption. There isn’t one rule for little investors and another rule for big investors.”

He added that the government had an obligation to pursue its claims. “I don’t think it’s going to do anybody any good if the price of getting banks to do what they’re supposed to do is giving them a pass on violating the securities laws,” he said, “particularly when it involves an entity currently being subsidized by the taxpayers.”

One factor driving FHFA to act now was the Sept. 8 expiration of the statute of limitations on claims related to securities sold before the government seized Fannie and Freddie three years ago. The FHFA has been negotiating with the banks for months, said people familiar with those talks, but it had to file suit now to protect its claims.

The biggest came against Bank of America and its Merrill Lynch and Countrywide Financial divisions, which together are facing claims on about $57.5 billion worth of securities sold to Fannie and Freddie. After Bank of America, the banks accused of selling the largest totals of allegedly fraudulent securities were J.P. Morgan with $33 billion and Royal Bank of Scotland with $30.4 billion.

Bank of America, whose shares were down more than 8 percent Friday, has been working to bolster its balance sheet by paring assets and building up reserves. Nonetheless, its shares have dropped 45 percent since the beginning of the year, and the company has been battered by other investors seeking billions in mortgage-related claims.

In a statement Friday, the bank argued that Fannie and Freddie previously have acknowledged “that their losses in the mortgaged-backed securities market were due to the unprecedented downturn in housing prices and other economic factors, including sustained high unemployment. Also, they claimed to understand the risks inherent in investing in subprime securities and, in fact, continued to invest heavily in those securities even after their regulator told them they did not have the risk management capabilities to do so.”

The FHFA lawsuits say that the banks routinely assembled mortgage investments using loans that had been singled out as falling short of guidelines. In the case against Countrywide, the regulator cites the example of loans reviewed in 2006 and 2007 by a third party, Clayton Holdings, which found that 26 percent of the residential mortgages fell outside underwriting guidelines. Yet, the FHFA asserts, Countrywide “waived in” 12 percent of the defective mortgages, putting them into a security it then sold to investors.

The FHFA also alleges that Countrywide overstated the percentage of mortgages that were for owner-occupied properties. People are far less likely to default on these kind of loans. In one tranche of securities, Countrywide said that 25.3 percent of the residences were not owner-occupied, but the FHFA said the true figure was 44.8 percent.

The abundance of mortgage-backed securities created by the financial industry during the lead-up to the crisis continues to cost some firms dearly.

A handful of the nation’s largest banks currently are embroiled in settlement negotiations with federal officials and state attorneys general over shoddy foreclosure practices that sparked a national uproar last fall. That potential settlement could cost the banks about $20 billion in penalties and force them to revamp the way they service loans and deal with troubled borrowers seeking to stay in their homes.

Separately, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has undertaken an investigation into the way banks packaged and sold securities in an effort to determine the extent of any wrongdoing.

The FHFA’s actions against the banks aren’t unprecedented. In July, the agency filed a similar suit against UBS Americas Inc. in a federal court in New York, alleging federal securities law violations. The case accuses UBS of misleading investors who bought into pools of loans that had been packed together into mortgage-backed securities. The suit alleges that the company misstated certain facts and omitted others, including information about the creditworthiness of the borrowers and the underwriting practices used in making the loans. UBS has said it will “vigorously” defend the charges.

Fannie and Freddie loaded up on mortgage-backed securities during the years of the housing boom, many of them backed by risky loans, and suffered staggering losses when the real estate market collapsed.

Those losses largely have been plugged with more than $150 billion in federal aid under a deal arranged in September 2008, when the government seized the two firms to keep them from failing.

FHFA is an independent regulator, theoretically insulated from political influence in much the same way as the Federal Reserve. Still, the agency has been under pressure recently from the Obama administration, which has sought new measures to boost the weak housing market. Those ideas include a generous refinancing program that lets struggling borrowers get new mortgages at existing low rates.

So far, the FHFA has proved to be a reluctant partner in those efforts. While initiatives that speed a housing recovery ultimately shore up Fannie and Freddie’s bottom line, they also could cause further losses in the short term. As a regulator, FHFA might prefer the former. As a conservator of Fannie and Freddie in charge of protecting shareholders — who happen to be taxpayers — it has shown deep concern about the latter.

“I think it’s an irresolvable conflict,” Karen Shaw Petrou, managing partner of Federal Financial Analytics, said of the fact that FHFA’s acting chief, Edward DeMarco, must play dual roles as a regulator and a chairman of the board. “It’s like asking [J.P. Morgan Chief Executive] Jamie Dimon to be Ben Bernanke. You don’t, because it’s an inherent conflict.”

FHFA suit: Which banks are involved?

By Sarah Halzack
The Washington Post

The FHFA has sued 17 major banks, alleging that the firms sold risky mortgage-backed securities to taxpayer-backed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Here is a list of the banks that have been targeted in the suit and how much money the FHFA argues the toxic assets were worth:

Name Amount in billions
Ally Financial, formerly GMAC 6
Bank of America 6
Barclays Bank 4.9
Citigroup 3.5
Countrywide Financial 26.6
Credit Suisse Holdings 14.1
Deutsche Bank                                 14.2
First Horizon National Corporation    0.883
General Electric Company 0.549
Goldman Sachs 11.1
HSBC North America Holdings 6.2
JPMorgan Chase 33
Merrill Lynch 24.853
Morgan Stanley 10.58
Nomura Holding America 2
The Royal Bank of Scotland 30.4
Société Générale 1.3
Total 196.165

Five myths about 9/11

By Brian Michael Jenkins, Published: September 2 2011
The Washington Post

We all remember where we were on Sept. 11, 2001, when al-Qaeda launched its horrific attacks on the United States. In the decade since, no number of commissions, books, films and reports has been able to end the misconceptions about what 9/11 meant, America’s response to it and the nature of the ongoing threat. As the anniversary nears, let’s tackle some of the most persistent myths.

1.Sept. 11 was unimaginable.

In 2002, the White House described 9/11 as “a new type of attack that had not been foreseen.” An understandable response to being caught off guard, perhaps — but the fact is that the possibility of hijacked airliners crashing into buildings was neither unimaginable nor unimagined. The idea dates at least to 1972, when hijackers, during a protracted domestic incident, shot the co-pilot of a Southern Airways flight and threatened to crash the plane into the nuclear facility at Oak Ridge, Tenn.

After the 1993 bombing at the World Trade Center, a “red team” of consultants (myself included) hired by the center to explore future threats to the site identified a plane crashing into one of the towers as a possible scenario. In 1994, hijackers of an Air France jet reportedly considered crashing the aircraft into the Eiffel Tower. And a terrorist plot discovered in 1995 involving Ramzi Yousef, one of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers, and Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-described architect of 9/11, contemplated crashing an explosives-laden plane into the headquarters of the CIA.

Nonetheless, the 9/11 attacks transformed our perceptions of plausibility. Terrorist scenarios deemed far-fetched on Sept. 10, 2001, became operative presumptions one day later; even a 1 percent chance of something happening was sufficient cause to treat the possibility seriously. This skepticism-free environment multiplied public fears and security spending. Meanwhile, terrorists carried out more predictable low-tech attacks on commuter trains and subways.

2.The attacks were a strategic success for al-Qaeda.

An audacious and unprecedented strike, 9/11 certainly was a tactical success. But it also was a strategic miscalculation.

In Osama bin Laden’s eyes, the United States was a hollow power. Despite the nation’s apparent military strength, in his view Americans had no stomach for losses, and a devastating terrorist attack on the U.S. homeland would drive the Americans out of the Middle East. In his 1996 fatwa declaring war on America, bin Laden pointed out that the United States withdrew its forces from Lebanon after the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut. And in 1993, after 18 U.S. soldiers were killed on a single day in Mogadishu in an attack for which al-Qaeda claimed some credit, the United States hastily got out of Somalia.

Many of al-Qaeda’s commanders disagreed, predicting that an enraged United States would focus its fury on the terrorist group and its allies, but bin Laden pushed ahead. When the United States did just what the others had feared, bin Laden switched gears, asserting that he had intended all along to provoke the United States into waging a war that would galvanize all of Islam against it. That didn’t happen, either.

3.Washington overreacted.

In the decade since Sept. 11, the U.S. homeland has been the target of far fewer terrorist attacks than in any decade going back to the 1960s — making it easy now to regard 9/11 as a lucky terrorist punch and the U.S. response as excessive.

At the time, however, no one knew how many more attacks were on the way. Immediate action was required to destroy the terrorist enterprise responsible for 9/11; no administration, Republican or Democratic, could have waited to see if the strikes were an anomaly. That meant improving intelligence, strengthening security at home and using military force abroad — the only way the United States could quickly break up al-Qaeda’s training camps and disrupt further plots.

America’s invasion of Iraq was not, strictly speaking, an overreaction to 9/11. The Iraq war was a strategic decision by the Bush administration to remove a hostile government and a potential threat. The fact that the invasion was portrayed as part of the global war on terrorism — in an effort to gain domestic political support — does not make it so. In fact, the war was a huge diversion of U.S. resources from the terrorist fight and a boon to al-Qaeda recruiting.

4.A nuclear terrorist attack is a near inevitability.

Shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, a CIA source called Dragonfire reported that al-Qaeda terrorists had smuggled a nuclear weapon into New York. The source turned out to be wrong, but in the shadow of 9/11, al-Qaeda’s nuclear capabilities became an obsession. Despite North Korea’s demonstrated possession of nuclear weapons and Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons program, in 2008, then-CIA Director Michael Hayden identified al-Qaeda as the agency’s “number one nuclear concern.”

Yet, while everyone agrees that al-Qaeda’s leaders have nuclear aspirations, there is zero evidence that the organization has ever had any nuclear capabilities. Fear has made al-Qaeda the world’s top terrorist nuclear power, yet it possesses not a single nuke. This is a lesson in how terrorism works.

5.U.S. civil liberties were decimated after the attacks.

Civil libertarians understandably worried that 9/11 would lead to police-state-style restrictions on individual freedoms in the United States. Instead, the Constitution has held as the government has steered a middle course.

Preventive detention of terrorism suspects, a procedure common in a number of democratic countries, was rejected. The government held Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen and al-Qaeda operative, as an “enemy combatant,” but his case was ultimately referred to the courts. And domestic intelligence efforts were increased, but Congress rejected the idea of a separate domestic intelligence service — an American MI5.

Still, domestic authorities were pushed toward preventive action against terrorism instead of a traditional law enforcement approach. Federal authorities were granted more discretion in opening terrorism-related cases, and the FBI began thousands of investigations. Not surprisingly, only a small percentage have resulted in prosecutions.

The 9/11 attacks did lead to some expansion of executive authority, most notably in bypassing procedures set up in 1978 to ensure that electronic surveillance is judicially authorized. Congress pushed back on the Bush administration’s warrant-less wiretapping program and in 2008 restored judicial oversight, although not as powerfully as before.

Where U.S. values failed to prevail was in the treatment of foreign combatants and suspects apprehended abroad who were held in secret prisons, delivered to countries where they faced torture or, in some cases, subjected to coercive interrogation tantamount to torture in American hands.

outlook@washpost.com

Brian Michael Jenkins, a senior adviser to the president of the Rand Corporation, is co-editor of “The Long Shadow of 9/11: America’s Response to Terrorism.”

Lancet report says 12,000 Iraqi civilians died in suicide attacks since 2003

By Annie Gowen, Saturday, September 3, 4:15 AM 2011
The Washington Post

BAGHDAD — Along with the good news that August was the first month without American troop deaths in Iraq comes a grim statistic: more than 12,000 Iraqi civilians have died in suicide bomb attacks since the war began, according to a new study.

The study, published in the British medical journal Lancet this week, reports that 12,284 civilians died in 1003 suicide bomb attacks in Iraq from March 2003 to the end of last year. In contrast, 79 suicide attacks on coalition forces resulted in 200 deaths, the study said.

Suicide bombs “kill significantly more Iraqi civilians than coalition forces,” the study’s authors wrote. “Among civilians, children are more likely to die than adults when injured by suicide bombs.”

The report was written by doctors and researchers from the Health Service and Population Research Department of King’s College London.

For the study, researchers relied on data from Iraqbodycount.org, a civilian research project that attempts to chronicle deaths in Iraq through a variety of means — Arab and English-language press reports, hospital records and information from nongovernmental organizations operating in Iraq. In the report, Lancet researchers acknowledged that the database was “extensive but incomplete.”

The Lancet caused a stir in 2006 when it published a report saying more than 600,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed in the conflict. That claim was widely criticized as flawed.

Gilbert Burnham, of the Center for Refugee and Disaster Response at Johns Hopkins University, wrote in an analysis of the new Lancet report’s findings that prevention of suicide attacks is difficult because of their complex origins, but the U.S. military has had an edge.

“The military’s approach of controlling access and attacking suspicious targets has protected coalition forces in Iraq, but the resulting deaths of civilians have alienated many Iraqis ... Attempts to stop bombers are often futile,” Burnham wrote.

On Aug. 15, more than 80 people were killed across Iraq in a series of coordinated suicide bombs, car bombs and assassinations. Al-Qaeda in Iraq later vowed to carry out 100 attacks in the country to avenge the death of Osama bin Laden. Last Sunday evening, more than 28 worshippers were killed in a suicide bomb attack at Umm al-Qura, Baghdad’s largest Sunni mosque.

The U.S. military reported earlier this week that August was the first month since the beginning of the Iraq war when there was no death among U.S. troops in the country. Fourteen troops were killed in July.

9/11 anniversary security sharpened; materials at bin Laden compound worry officials

By Peter Finn and Jerry Markon, Updated: Friday, September 2, 4:35 PM 2011
The Washington Post

The 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks is prompting heightened security measures across the United States, particularly in New York, where Presidents Obama and George W. Bush will mark the occasion at Ground Zero inside what police call a “frozen zone.”

Law enforcement officials said they have no intelligence about a credible terrorist plot around the anniversary. But a number of federal and local officials said they are acutely aware that before Osama bin Laden was killed, he seemed fixated on attacking the United States again on Sept. 11.

In the trove of digital and handwritten materials found at bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan in May, there were numerous references to the 10-year anniversary of the attacks on New York and Washington. The material also contained various inchoate ideas about how al-Qaeda might construct a terrorist operation, according to law enforcement and intelligence officials.

“We would be paying extra attention because of the Sept. 11 anniversary alone without what was found at the bin Laden compound, but the fact that in the aftermath of his death there were documents indicating an attack on or about the anniversary – that has certainly focused our planning,” said Paul J. Browne, chief spokesman for the New York City Police Department. Because the assumption is “that New York remains on top of the terrorist target list . . . there will be a full-court press on Sept. 11 and in the days leading up to it.’’

One official who reviewed the materials said that the date became more significant to al-Qaeda mainly because bin Laden and others tracked U.S. media and noted the public’s preoccupation with 9/11.

“Our obsession with anniversaries had an impact on him,” said a senior U.S. counter-terrorism official who reviewed the bin Laden materials. “He learned over time we are particularly sensitive about particular dates.”

Increased security will also be visible in the Washington area, where, as in New York, there will be more police on the street, with a focus on anniversary ceremonies, airports, mass transit and athletic events.

“Everything we’ve learned and the way local police agencies have evolved over the past 10 years puts us in a very different place than we were on Sept. 11,” said D.C Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier.

She said police have been preparing for several months trying to prevent an attack and ramping up measures to respond if there is one. She added that there has been “tremendous cooperation and collaboration among law enforcement partners throughout the region.’’

A federal law enforcement official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because security measures are not public, said that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security have been conducting intensified briefings with local law enforcement officials across the country for several months.

“The safety and security of the American public remains our highest priority,” DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano said in a statement Friday. “While threats remain, our nation is stronger than it was on 9/11, more prepared to confront evolving threats, and more resilient than ever before.”

John Brennan, the president’s homeland security and counterterrorism adviser, has chaired senior-level meetings on security preparations over the past four months, according to the White House.

“These senior-level reviews of our security posture will continue through the 9/11 anniversary and beyond in order to ensure the federal government remains fully prepared to take whatever steps are necessary to mitigate any potential attacks,” said White House spokesman Clark W. Stevens.

Officials said that a major concern is a “lone wolf” attack such as the one in Norway in July, when a 32-year-old man, acting alone, shot and killed 77 people at a political youth camp outside Oslo.

“You know, when you’ve got one person who is deranged or driven by a hateful ideology, they can do a lot of damage, and it’s a lot harder to trace those lone-wolf operators,” Obama said in a interview with CNN last month, describing the potential for such an attack as “the biggest concern we have right now.”

Obama and first lady Michelle Obama will also attend ceremonies in Pennsylvania and at the Pentagon on Sept. 11.

Det. Crystal Nosal, a spokeswoman for the Arlington County Police Department, said that officials “are taking security measures that are heightened beyond a normal day.’’

She said that the measures will be across the county and extend to a run that passes by the Pentagon on Sept. 10.

In New York, police will create what they call a frozen zone around Ground Zero that will extend for several blocks in all directions. Only people with credentials will be able to get into the traffic-free zone, and residents wanting to return to their apartments will have to be escorted by police officers. Police snipers will be on the rooftops near the World Trade Center site, Browne said.

Browne said the overall effort is an attempt to “intercept an attack if one is coming our way and to respond to any number of threats, including the active shooters you saw in Mumbai, anything coming in over the water, chemical, biological, radiological.’’

In November 2008 in Mumbai, India’s commercial capital, a group of gunmen with Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistani militant group, killed 166 people and wounded hundreds in coordinated attacks on hotels, a railroad station and a Jewish center.

Staff writer Greg Miller contributed to this report.

CIA shifts focus to killing targets

By Greg Miller and Julie Tate, Published: September 1 2011
The Washington Post

Behind a nondescript door at CIA headquarters, the agency has assembled a new counterterrorism unit whose job is to find al-Qaeda targets in Yemen. A corresponding commotion has been underway in the Arabian Peninsula, where construction workers have been laying out a secret new runway for CIA drones.

When the missiles start falling, it will mark another expansion of the paramilitary mission of the CIA.

In the decade since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the agency has undergone a fundamental transformation. Although the CIA continues to gather intelligence and furnish analysis on a vast array of subjects, its focus and resources are increasingly centered on the cold counterterrorism objective of finding targets to capture or kill.

The shift has been gradual enough that its magnitude can be difficult to grasp. Drone strikes that once seemed impossibly futuristic are so routine that they rarely attract public attention unless a high-ranking al-Qaeda figure is killed.

But framed against the upcoming 10th anniversary of the 2001 attacks — as well as the arrival next week of retired Gen. David H. Petraeus as the CIA’s director — the extent of the agency’s reorientation comes into sharper view:

●The drone program has killed more than 2,000 militants and civilians since 2001, a staggering figure for an agency that has a long history of supporting proxy forces in bloody conflicts but rarely pulled the trigger on its own.

●The CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, which had 300 employees on the day of the attacks, now exceeds al-Qaeda’s core membership around the globe. With about 2,000 on its staff, the CTC accounts for 10 percent of the agency’s workforce, has designated officers in almost every significant overseas post and controls the CIA’s expanding fleet of drones.

●Even the agency’s analytic branch, which traditionally existed to provide insights to policymakers, has been enlisted in the hunt. About 20 percent of CIA analysts are now “targeters” scanning data for individuals to recruit, arrest or place in the cross­hairs of a drone. The skill is in such demand that the CIA made targeting a designated career track five years ago, meaning analysts can collect raises and promotions without having to leave the targeting field.

Critics, including some in the U.S. intelligence community, contend that the CIA’s embrace of “kinetic” operations, as they are known, has diverted the agency from its traditional espionage mission and undermined its ability to make sense of global developments such as the Arab Spring.

Human rights groups go further, saying the CIA now functions as a military force beyond the accountability that the United States has historically demanded of its armed services. The CIA doesn’t officially acknowledge the drone program, let alone provide public explanation about who shoots and who dies, and by what rules.

“We’re seeing the CIA turn into more of a paramilitary organization without the oversight and accountability that we traditionally expect of the military,” said Hina Shamsi, the director of the National Security Project of the American Civil Liberties Union.

CIA officials defend all aspects of the agency’s counterterrorism efforts and argue that the agency’s attention to other subjects has not been diminished. Fran Moore, head of the CIA’s analytic branch, said intelligence work on a vast range of issues, including weapons proliferation and energy resources, has been expanded and improved.

“The vast majority of analysts would not identify themselves as supporting military objectives,” Moore said in an interview at CIA headquarters. Counterterrorism “is clearly a significant, growing and vibrant part of our mission. But it’s not the defining mission.”

Agency within an agency

Nevertheless, those directly involved in building the agency’s lethal capacity say the changes to the CIA since Sept. 11 are so profound that they sometimes marvel at the result. One former senior U.S. intelligence official described the agency’s paramilitary transformation as “nothing short of a wonderment.”

“You’ve taken an agency that was chugging along and turned it into one hell of a killing machine,” said the former official, who, like many people interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence matters. Blanching at his choice of words, he quickly offered a revision: “Instead, say ‘one hell of an operational tool.’ ”

The engine of that machine is the CTC, an entity that has accumulated influence, authority and resources to such a degree that it resembles an agency within an agency.

The center swelled to 1,200 employees in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks and nearly doubled in size since then.

The CTC occupies a sprawling footprint at the CIA campus in Langley, including the first floor of what is known as the “new headquarters” building. The chief of the center is an undercover officer known for his brusque manner, cigarette habit and tireless commitment to the job.

A CIA veteran said he asked the CTC chief about the pace of strikes against al-Qaeda last year and got a typically profane reply: “We are killing these sons of bitches faster than they can grow them now.”

The headquarters for that hunt is on a separate floor in a CTC unit known as the Pakistan-Afghanistan Department, referred to internally as PAD. Within the past year, the agency has created an equivalent department for Yemen and Somalia in the hope that it can replicate the impact of PAD.

Inside the PAD entrance is a photographic tribute to the seven CIA employees who were killed by a suicide bomber in December 2009 at a remote base in the Afghan city of Khost. Two were former targeters who had worked in the CTC.

Beyond that marker is a warren of cubicles and offices. On the walls are maps marked with the locations of CIA bases in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well as whiteboards with lists of pending operations and code names of spies. Every paid informant is given a unique “crypt” that starts with a two-letter digraph designating spies who are paid sources of the CTC.

PAD serves as the anchor of an operational triangle that stretches from South Asia to the American Southwest. The CIA has about 30 Predator and Reaper drones, all flown by Air Force pilots from a U.S. military base in a state that The Post has agreed, at the request of agency officials, not to name. The intelligence that guides their “orbits” flows in from a constellation of CIA bases in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

CIA officials insist that drone strikes are among the least common outcomes in its counter­terrorism campaign.

“Of all the intelligence work on counterterrorism, only a sliver goes into Predator operations,” a senior U.S. official said. The agency’s 118 strikes last year were outnumbered “many times” by instances in which the agency provided tips to foreign partners or took nonlethal steps.

“There were investigations, arrests, debriefings . . . these are all operational acts,” the official said.

The Obama administration dismantled the CIA’s system of secret prisons, but it continues to use foreign partners to apprehend suspects in some countries, including Somalia.

The CIA also was heavily involved in the raid by U.S. Special Operations troops on a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in May. Osama bin Laden was killed by U.S. Navy SEALs, but the operation was carried out under CIA authority, planned in a room at agency headquarters and based on intelligence gathered over a period of years by the CTC.

Growing collaboration

The assault was the most high-profile example of an expanding collaboration between the CIA and the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command, which oversees the nation’s elite military teams.

Their comingling at remote bases is so complete that U.S. officials ranging from congressional staffers to high-ranking CIA officers said they often find it difficult to distinguish agency from military personnel.

“You couldn’t tell the difference between CIA officers, Special Forces guys and contractors,” said a senior U.S. official after a recent tour through Afghanistan. “They’re all three blended together. All under the command of the CIA.”

Their activities occupy an expanding netherworld between intelligence and military operations. Sometimes their missions are considered military “preparation of the battlefield,” and others fall under covert findings obtained by the CIA. As a result, congressional intelligence and armed services committees rarely get a comprehensive view.

Hybrid units called “omega” or “cross matrix” teams have operated in Afghanistan, Iraq and Yemen, according to senior U.S. military officials.

Those employed in Afghanistan were “mostly designed against specific high-value targets with the intent of looking across the border” into Pakistan, said a former senior U.S. military official involved in Special Operations missions. They wore civilian clothes and traveled in Toyota Hilux trucks rather than military vehicles.

“They were designed to develop sources and leads” but also to “be prepared if necessary to be the front end of a more robust lethal force.”

On at least five occasions, officials said, Special Operations units working closely with the CIA ventured into Pakistan in exercises designed to test their ability to close in on a target without being detected by Pakistani authorities. The operations, which took place between 2002 and 2006, amounted to early rehearsals of the bin Laden raid.

The CIA’s post-Sept. 11 arsenal has also included elite Afghan militias trained and led by the agency’s Special Activities Division, its paramilitary branch. In a measure of the murkiness surrounding such programs, the purpose of the Counterterror Pursuit Teams is a source of disagreement among senior officials in government.

“They can fire in self-defense, but they don’t go out to try and kill a target,” a U.S. official familiar with CIA operations in Afghanistan said. “They’re mostly arresting people and turning them over to” the Afghan security services.

But the former senior U.S. military official said the teams’ objectives were “more kill-capture” than capture-kill. “It wasn’t always high-value targets,” he said. “They were trying to pursue and kill sometimes lower-hanging fruit.”

In some cases, the pursuit teams used more indiscriminate means, including land mines, to disrupt insurgent networks, the former official said. Two current U.S. military officials said one of the CIA’s pursuit teams was disbanded after a botched assault in which it killed the wrong target.

A U.S. intelligence official disputed that account, and said none of the teams were ever shut down. The official acknowledged that Pash­tun-dominated militias have been used by the CIA to gather intelligence inside Pakistan. Any need to use them to pursue targets has been diminished by the expanding lethal reach of the drones.

Given the scope of the CIA’s paramilitary activities, human rights groups say the death toll over the past decade from CIA-
directed operations undoubtedly exceeds the casualty count associated with strikes from drones.

U.S. intelligence and congressional officials insist that the number of people killed in CIA operations outside the drone campaign is negligible, but say they have never seen an agency-produced casualty count that includes other categories of operations.

“That’s a very small number — I’m struggling to come up with a single example,” said a U.S. official involved in overseeing CIA operations since 2004.

The demands of the counterterror mission have affected the organization in more subtle but pervasive ways. A U.S. official who worked closely with former CIA director Leon E. Panetta said the then-chief spent at least 30 percent of his time on counterterrorism matters.

Panetta’s predecessor, Michael V. Hayden, answered questions about his priorities with a jumble of letters, “CTCPROW,” meaning counterterrorism, counterproliferation and, finally, rest of the world.

CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Youngblood said, “While we don’t discuss the details of our counterterrorism operations, the fact that they are a top priority and effective is precisely what the American people expect.”

Yet officials describe a distortion effect in collecting intelligence. Dependence on counterterrorism cooperation from a country such as Egypt makes it more risky to engage in activities that might jeopardize that relationship, such as gathering intelligence on corruption in the government or its fragile hold on power.

Senior officials also voice concern about changes in the agency’s analytic branch, where 35 percent are now in jobs where their main function is to support operators and 10 percent are deployed abroad.

“We were originally set up with a more singular focus on policymakers,” said Moore, the head of the CIA’s analytic branch. But for a growing number of analysts, “it’s not just about writing for the president. It’s about gaining leads.”

Putting analysts alongside operators gives them a clearer view of sources and the quality of raw intelligence. In turn, the analysts can help operators vet sources and gain a complex understanding of their adversaries.

But the collaboration also carries risks, including a concern that analysts may become too invested in the outcomes of operations, too eager to be part of the agency’s counterterrorism team.

There is also a self-serving aspect to the arrangement.

“When CIA does covert action, who does the president turn to to judge its effectiveness?” a former senior U.S. intelligence official. “To the CIA.”

In this new operation-focused era, targeters play a critical role. The job is more complex than it sounds, and involves assembling vast quantities of data on terrorist networks or other organizations to pinpoint their most vulnerable points. It could be a source for the CIA to recruit or a shipment that an illicit nuclear weapons program can’t do without.

In counterterrorism operations, it also means placing militants in the remotely controlled sights of Predator and Reaper drones.

The CIA’s skill and efficiency at doing so has given the drone program a momentum of its own. More broadly, an agency that some argued should be dismantled after failures leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks and the Iraq war has achieved a standing as an indispensable counterterrorism tool.

U.S. officials said President Obama’s decision to approve the agency’s new drone base in the Arabian Peninsula and begin Predator patrols over Yemen was driven by the agency’s unique authorities and capabilities.

JSOC has been flying armed drones over Yemen for much of the past year. But those flights fall under conventional military authorities that require permission or at least a level of acquiescence from Yemen. The CIA is in a better position to keep flying even if that cooperation stops.

The administration is also counting on the lethal proficiency of the targeters settling into their cubicles in the latest addition to the sprawling offices of the CTC, a department focused exclusively on Yemen and Somalia.

“The kinetic piece of any counterterror strike is the last 20 seconds of an enormously long chain of collection and analysis,” said a U.S. official involved in the creation of the new department. “Traditional elements of espionage and analysis have not been lost at the agency. On the contrary. The CT effort is largely an intelligence game. It’s about finding a target . . . the finish piece is the easy part.”

‘Top Secret America’: A look at the military’s Joint Special Operations Command

By Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, Friday, September 2, 1:41 PM 2011
The Washington Post

The CIA’s armed drones and paramilitary forces have killed dozens of al-Qaeda leaders and thousands of its foot soldiers. But there is another mysterious organization that has killed even more of America’s enemies in the decade since the 9/11 attacks.

CIA operatives have imprisoned and interrogated nearly 100 suspected terrorists in their former secret prisons around the world, but troops from this other secret organization have imprisoned and interrogated 10 times as many, holding them in jails that it alone controls in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, this secretive group of men (and a few women) has grown tenfold while sustaining a level of obscurity that not even the CIA managed. “We’re the dark matter. We’re the force that orders the universe but can’t be seen,” a strapping Navy SEAL, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said in describing his unit.

The SEALs are just part of the U.S. military’s Joint Special Operations Command, known by the acronym JSOC, which has grown from a rarely used hostage rescue team into America’s secret army. When members of this elite force killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in May, JSOC leaders celebrated not just the success of the mission but also how few people knew their command, based in Fayetteville, N.C., even existed.

This article, adapted from a chapter of the newly released “Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State,” by Washington Post reporters Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, chronicles JSOC’s spectacular rise, much of which has not been publicly disclosed before. Two presidents and three secretaries of defense routinely have asked JSOC to mount intelligence-gathering missions and lethal raids, mostly in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also in countries with which the United States was not at war, including Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, the Philippines, Nigeria and Syria.

“The CIA doesn’t have the size or the authority to do some of the things we can do,” said one JSOC operator.

The president has also given JSOC the rare authority to select individuals for its kill list — and then to kill, rather than capture, them. Critics charge that this individual man-hunting mission amounts to assassination, a practice prohibited by U.S. law. JSOC’s list is not usually coordinated with the CIA, which maintains a similar, but shorter roster of names.

Created in 1980 but reinvented in recent years, JSOC has grown from 1,800 troops prior to 9/11 to as many as 25,000, a number that fluctuates according to its mission. It has its own intelligence division, its own drones and reconnaissance planes, even its own dedicated satellites. It also has its own cyberwarriors, who, on Sept. 11, 2008, shut down every jihadist Web site they knew.

Obscurity has been one of the unit’s hallmarks. When JSOC officers are working in civilian government agencies or U.S. embassies abroad, which they do often, they dispense with uniforms, unlike their other military comrades. In combat, they wear no name or rank identifiers. They have hidden behind various nicknames: the Secret Army of Northern Virginia, Task Force Green, Task Force 11, Task Force 121. JSOC leaders almost never speak in public. They have no unclassified Web site.

Despite the secrecy, JSOC is not permitted to carry out covert action like the CIA. Covert action, in which the U.S. role is to be kept hidden, requires a presidential finding and congressional notification. Many national security officials, however, say JSOC’s operations are so similar to the CIA’s that they amount to covert action. The unit takes its orders directly from the president or the secretary of defense and is managed and overseen by a military-only chain of command.

Under President George W. Bush, JSOC’s operations were rarely briefed to Congress in advance — and usually not afterward, either — because government lawyers considered them to be “traditional military activities” not requiring such notification. President Obama has taken the same legal view, but he has insisted that JSOC’s sensitive missions be briefed to select congressional leaders.

Lethal force

JSOC’s first mission in 1980, Operation Eagle Claw, an attempted rescue of diplomats held hostage by Iranian students at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, ended in a helicopter collision in the desert and the death of eight team members. The unit’s extreme secrecy also made conventional military commanders distrustful and, as a consequence, it was rarely used during conflicts.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, smarting from the CIA’s ability to move first into Afghanistan and frustrated by the Army’s slowness, pumped new life into the organization. JSOC’s core includes the Army’s Delta Force, the Navy’s SEAL Team 6, the Air Force’s 24th Special Tactics Squadron and the Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment and the 75th Ranger Regiment.

The lethality of JSOC was demonstrated in the December 2001 mountain battle at Tora Bora. Although bin Laden and many of his followers eventually escaped across the border into Pakistan, an Army history said that on the nights of Dec. 13 and 14, JSOC killed so many enemy forces that “dead bodies of al-Qaeda fighters were carted off the field the next day” by the truckload.

It also made mistakes. On July 1, 2002, in what the Rand Corp. labeled “the single most serious errant attack of the entire war,” a JSOC reconnaissance team hunting Taliban came under attack and an AC-130 gunship fired upon six sites in the village of Kakarak . The estimates of civilian deaths ranged from 48 to hundreds. The “wedding party incident,” as it became known because a wedding party was among the targets accidentally hit, convinced many Afghans that U.S. forces disregarded the lives of civilians.

Nevertheless, on Sept. 16, 2003, Rumsfeld signed an executive order cementing JSOC as the center of the counterterrorism universe. It listed 15 countries and the activities permitted under various scenarios, and it gave the preapprovals required to carry them out.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, lethal action against al-Qaeda was granted without additional approval. In the other countries — among them Algeria, Iran, Malaysia, Mali, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, Somalia and Syria — JSOC forces needed the tacit approval from the country involved or at least a sign-off from higher up on the American chain of command. In the Philippines, for example, JSOC could undertake psychological operations to confuse or trap al-Qaeda operatives, but it needed approval from the White House for lethal action. To attack targets in Somalia required approval from at least the secretary of defense, while attacks in Pakistan and Syria needed presidential sign-off.

In the fall of 2003, JSOC got a new commander who would turn the organization into arguably the most effective weapon in the U.S. counterterrorism arsenal. From his perch as vice director of operations on the Joint Staff, Brig. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal had come to believe there was an aversion to decision making at the top of government. No one wanted to be wrong, so they either asked more questions or added more layers to the process. The new emphasis on interagency cooperation also meant meetings were bigger and longer. Any one of a multitude of agencies could stifle action until it was too late.

McChrystal believed he had “to slip out of the grip” of Washington’s suffocating bureaucracy, he told associates. He moved his headquarters to Balad Air Base, 45 miles northeast of Baghdad, and worked inside an old concrete airplane hangar with three connecting command centers: one to fight al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Iraq, one for the fight against Shiite extremists in the country and a third for himself, so he could oversee all operations.

He coaxed the other intelligence agencies to help him out — the CIA presence grew to 100; the FBI and National Security Agency to a combined 80. He won their loyalty by exposing the guts of his operation to everyone involved. “The more people you shared your problem with, the better you’d do in solving it,” he would say.

McChrystal installed a simple, PC-based common desktop and portal where troops could post documents, conduct chats, tap into the intelligence available on any target — pictures, biometrics, transcripts, intelligence reports — and follow the message traffic of commanders in the midst of operations.

Then he gave access to it to JSOC’s bureaucratic rivals: the CIA, NSA, FBI and others. He also began salting every national security agency in Washington with his top commandos. In all, he deployed 75 officers to Washington agencies and 100 more around the world. They rotated every four months so none would become disconnected from combat.

Some thought of the liaisons as spies for an organization that was already too important. But those suspicions did little to derail JSOC or McChrystal.

Stories spread that he ate just one meal and ran 10 miles every day. He looked the part, with his taut face, intense eyes and thin physique. A sign inside the wire at Balad said it all: “17 5 2.” Seventeen hours for work, five hours for sleep, two hours for eating and exercise.

McChrystal’s legendary work ethic mixed well with his Scotch Irish exuberance and common-man demeanor. He viewed beer calls with subordinates as an important bonding exercise. He made people call him by his first name. He seemed almost naively trusting. (This trait would become McChrystal’s undoing in 2010, after he was promoted to commander of forces in Afghanistan. He and members of his inner circle made inappropriate comments about their civilian leaders in the presence of a Rolling Stone reporter. McChrystal offered to resign, and Obama quickly accepted).

Harnessing technology

The Iraqi insurgency’s reliance on modern technology also gave tech-savvy JSOC and its partners, particularly the National Security Agency, an advantage. The NSA learned to locate all electronic signals in Iraq. “We just had a field day,” said a senior JSOC commander, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe secret operations.

One innovation was called the Electronic Divining Rod, a sensor worn by commandos that could detect the location of a particular cellphone. The beeping grew louder as a soldier with the device got closer to the person carrying a targeted phone.

Killing the enemy was the easy part, JSOC commanders said; finding him was the hard part. But thanks to Roy Apseloff, director of the National Media Exploitation Center, the U.S. government’s agency for analyzing documents captured by the military and intelligence community, JSOC’s intelligence collection improved dramatically. Apseloff offered to lend McChrystal his small staff, based in Fairfax, to examine items captured in raids. Apseloff’s team downloaded the contents of thumb drives, cellphones and locked or damaged computers to extract names, phone numbers, messages and images. Then they processed and stored that data, linking it to other information that might help analysts find not just one more bad guy but an entire network of them.

The major challenge was how to find the gems in the trash quickly enough to be useful. The key was more bandwidth, the electronic pipeline that carried information like e-mail and telephone calls around the world. Luckily for the military and JSOC, the attacks of 2001 coincided with an unrelated development: the dot-com bust. It created a glut in commercial satellite capacity, and the military bought up much of it.

Within a year after McChrystal’s arrival, JSOC had linked 65 stations around the world to enable viewers to participate in the twice-daily, 45-minute video teleconferences that he held. By 2006, JSOC had increased its bandwidth capability by 100 times in three years, according to senior leaders.

The other challenge JSOC faced was a human one: Ill-trained interrogators had little information about individual detainees and didn’t know what questions to ask or how to effectively ask them. Worse, some members of the JSOC’s Task Force 121 were beating prisoners.

Even before the Army’s Abu Ghraib prison photos began circulating in 2004, a confidential report warned that some JSOC interrogators were assaulting prisoners and hiding them in secret facilities. JSOC troops also detained mothers, wives and daughters when the men in a house they were looking for were not at home. The report warned these detentions and other massive sweep operations were counterproductive to winning Iraqi support.

Another investigation of JSOC detention facilities in Iraq during a four-month period in 2004 found that interrogators gave some prisoners only bread and water, in one case for 17 days. Other prisoners were locked up in cells so cramped they could not stand up or lie down while their captors played loud music to disrupt sleep. Still others were stripped, drenched with cold water and then interrogated in air-conditioned rooms or outside in the cold.

Eventually, 34 JSOC task force soldiers were disciplined in five cases over a one-year period beginning in 2003.

McChrystal ordered his intelligence chief, Michael Flynn, to professionalize the interrogation system. By the summer of 2005, JSOC’s interrogation booths at Balad sat around the corner from the large warren of rooms where specialists mined thumb drives, computers, cellphones, documents to use during interrogations. Paper maps were torn down from the walls and replaced with flat-panel screens and sophisticated computerized maps. Detainees willing to cooperate were taught how to use a mouse to fly around their virtual neighborhoods to help identify potential targets.

JSOC had to use the rules laid out in the Army Field Manual to interrogate detainees. But its interrogators were — and still are — permitted to keep them segregated from other prisoners and to hold them, with the proper approvals from superiors and in some case from Defense Department lawyers, for up to 90 days before they had to be transferred into the regular military prison population.

The new interrogation system also included an FBI and judicial team that collected evidence needed for trial by the Iraqi Central Criminal Court in Baghdad. From early 2005 to early 2007, the teams sent more than 2,000 individuals to trial, said senior military officials.

Body counts

Al-Qaeda used the U.S. invasion of Iraq as a call to arms to terrorists and recruits throughout the Middle East who flooded in from Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Saudi Arabia — as many as 200 of them a month at the high point. By the end of 2005, a shocking picture emerged: Iraq was rife with semiautonomous al-Qaeda networks.

Al-Qaeda had divided Iraq into sections and put a provincial commander in charge of each. These commanders further divided their territory into districts and put someone in charge of each of those, too, according to military officials. There were city leaders within those areas and cells within each city. There were leaders for foreign fighters, for finance and for communications, too.

By the spring of 2006, using the expanded bandwidth and constant surveillance by unmanned aircraft, JSOC executed a series of raids, known as Operation Arcadia, in which it collected and analyzed 662 hours of full-motion video shot over 17 days. The raid netted 92 compact discs and barrels full of documents, leading to another round of raids at 14 locations. Those hits yielded hard drives, thumb drives and a basement stacked with 704 compact discs, including copies of a sophisticated al-Qaeda marketing campaign. Operation Arcadia led, on June 7, 2006, to the death of the al-Qaeda leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, when JSOC directed an airstrike that killed him.

JSOC’s lethality was evident in its body counts: In 2008, in Afghanistan alone, JSOC commandos struck 550 targets and killed roughly a thousand people, officials said. In 2009, they executed 464 operations and killed 400 to 500 enemy forces. As Iraq descended into chaos in the summer of 2005, JSOC conducted 300 raids a month. Over 50 percent of JSOC Army Delta Force commandos now have Purple Hearts.

The most intense Iraqi raids reminded McChrystal of Lawrence of Arabia’s description of “rings of sorrow,” the emotional toll casualties take on small groups of warriors. Greatly influenced by Lawrence’s life story, McChrystal thought of his JSOC troops as modern-day tribal forces: dependent upon one another for kinship and survival.

If killing were all that winning wars was about, the book on JSOC would be written. But no war in modern times is ever won simply by killing enough of the enemy. Even in an era of precision weaponry, accidents happen that create huge political setbacks.

Every JSOC raid that also wounded or killed civilians, or destroyed a home or someone’s livelihood, became a source of grievance so deep that the counterproductive effects, still unfolding, are difficult to calculate. JSOC’s success in targeting the right homes, businesses and individuals was only ever about 50 percent, according to two senior commanders. They considered this rate a good one.

“Sometimes our actions were counterproductive,” McChrystal said in an interview. “We would say, ‘We need to go in and kill this guy,’ but just the effects of our kinetic action did something negative and they [the conventional army forces that occupied much of the country] were left to clean up the mess.”

In 2008, Bush also briefly sent JSOC into Pakistan. To soothe the worries of U.S. Ambassador Anne Patterson about the mounting civilian deaths from JSOC raids in other countries, commandos brought her a Predator console so she could witness a raid in real time. Because of public outcry in Pakistan, U.S. officials canceled the mission after only three raids. The CIA has continued to conduct drone strikes there.

Targeting bureaucracy

The Defense Department has given JSOC a bigger role in nonmilitary assignments as well, including tracing the flow of money from international banks to finance terrorist networks. It also has become deeply involved in “psychological operations,” which it renamed “military information operations” to sound less intimidating. JSOC routinely sends small teams in civilian clothes to U.S. embassies to help with what it calls media and messaging campaigns.

When Obama came into office, he cottoned to the organization immediately. (It didn’t hurt that his CIA director, Leon Panetta, has a son who, as a naval reservist, had deployed with JSOC.) Soon Obama was using JSOC even more than his predecessor. In 2010, for example, he secretly directed JSOC troops to Yemen to kill the leaders of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

The Arab Spring forced the White House to delay some JSOC missions. In the meantime, the organization is busy with its new 30,000-square-foot office building turned command center. Unlike previous offices, it is not located in some obscure part of the world. It sits across the highway from the Pentagon in pristine suburban splendor, just a five-minute drive from McChrystal’s civilian office and the former general’s favorite beer call restaurants.

As its name implies, the focus of Joint Special Operations Task Force-National Capital Region is not the next terrorist network but another of its lifelong enemies: the Washington bureaucracy. Some 50 battle-hardened JSOC warriors and a handful of other federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies work there.

Mexico is at the top of its wish list. So far the Mexican government, whose constitution limits contact with the U.S. military, is relying on the other federal agencies — the CIA, the Department of Homeland Security, the Drug Enforcement Administration and Immigration and Customs Enforcement — for intelligence collection and other help.

But JSOC’s National Capital task force is not just sitting idly by, waiting to be useful to its southern neighbors. It is creating targeting packages for U.S. domestic agencies that have sought its help, including the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, the second-largest federal law enforcement agency and the latest to make a big play for a larger U.S. counterterrorism role.

From the book “Top Secret America” Copyright 2011 by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin. Reprinted by permission of Little, Brown and Company, New York, NY. All rights reserved.

Public opinion surprises

Released: September 1, 2011

United in Remembrance, Divided over Policies

Ten Years after 9/11

Overview

Ten years after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the events of that day retain a powerful hold on the public’s collective consciousness. Virtually every American remembers what they were doing at the moment the attacks occurred. Substantial majorities say that 9/11 had a profound personal impact and that the attacks changed the country in a major way.
Yet the public continues to be divided over many of the anti-terrorism policies that arose in the wake of Sept. 11, and these differences extend to opinions about whether U.S. wrongdoing prior to 9/11 may have motivated the attacks: 43% say yes, while 45% disagree. In late September 2001, 33% said U.S. wrongdoing might have motivated the attacks, compared with 55% who said it did not.
The latest national survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, conducted Aug. 17-21 among 1,509 adults, finds that the public offers generally positive ratings of the government’s response to the terrorist threat. Yet when asked why there has not been another major attack on the U.S., 43% credit government policies while only somewhat fewer (35%) say it is because the country has been lucky so far.
Overall, most think terrorists have either the same (39%) or an even greater (23%) ability to launch another major attack on the U.S. today as they did ten years ago. Just 35% think it is harder for terrorists to reach us today. Despite the killing of Osama bin Laden, as many say the U.S. has not captured or killed most of those responsible for the 9/11 attacks as say it has (47% vs. 45%).
Moreover, only about a quarter say the wars in Iraq (26%) and Afghanistan (25%) have lessened the chances of terrorist attacks in the United States. In both cases majorities say the wars either have increased the risk of terrorism in this country or made no difference.
A decade after 9/11, most Americans reject the argument that the attacks triggered a “clash of civilizations” between the West and the Muslim world. Nearly six-in-ten (57%) say the Sept. 11 attacks led to a conflict with a small, radical group, while 35% say they began a major conflict between people in the West and the people of Islam.
Yet Americans’ concerns about Islamic extremism, both in the United States and around the world, remain extensive. Two-thirds (67%) say they are very or somewhat concerned about the possible rise of Islamic extremism in this country, while 73% are at least somewhat concerned about the rise of Islamic extremism around the world.
Notably, these concerns are generally shared by Muslim Americans. A comprehensive survey of U.S. Muslims, released Aug. 30, 2011, found that large majorities express concern about the possible rise of Islamic extremism here, and its rise around the world. However, the general public and Muslim Americans differ over the amount of support for extremism among Muslims in the U.S.: 40% of the public says there is a great deal or fair amount of support for extremism compared with just 21% of Muslim Americans. (For more, see “Muslim Americans: No Sign of Growth in Alienation or Support for Extremism.”)

Vivid Memories of a Terrible Day

Virtually every adult today remembers exactly where they were or what they were doing the moment they heard the news of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. This recall is as high among those younger than 30 – who were only eight to 19 years old when the attacks occurred – as it is among older Americans.
Among eight other historic events tested, only one – the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 – is a vivid memory for virtually all of those old enough to remember the tragedy: 95% of Americans who were born in 1955 or earlier, and who would have been eight or older in 1963, say they can recall exactly where they were or what they were doing. That is virtually unchanged from 1999 (96%).
Both 9/11 and Kennedy’s assassination stand apart from other developments, including some recent events. For instance, 81% of adults recall where they were in May when
President Obama announced that Osama bin Laden had been killed by U.S. forces.
The other national event that resonated as widely as 9/11 and Kennedy’s death among those old enough to recall is Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. The Pew Research Center’s 1999 study found that 89% of those who were eight or older at the time of Pearl Harbor were able to recall exactly where they were or what they were doing when they first heard of the attack.
The clear memories that nearly all Americans have of Sept. 11 reflects the emotional toll the events of that day took at the time. In a Pew Research Center survey conducted shortly after the attacks (Sept. 13-17, 2001), 71% said they felt depressed, 63% said they simply couldn’t stop watching news about the attacks, 49% said they had had difficulty concentrating, and a third reported having trouble sleeping in the days following the tragedy. (For more, see “American Psyche Reeling From Terror Attacks,” Sept. 19, 2001.)
Even today, 75% of Americans say the attacks affected them emotionally a great deal, and this feeling crosses regional, political and demographic lines, with one exception: 55% of those currently younger than 30 say the event moved them or affected them a great deal. That compares with 81% of people who are today ages 30 and older.
Six-in-ten (61%) Americans say the terrorist attacks changed life in America in a major way, while just one-in-ten (10%) say life in America is basically the same as it was before the attacks (28% say life changed “only a little bit”). Again, this impression spans all segments of the country, including both young and old.

Looking Back at Bush’s Handling of 9/11

When George W. Bush left office in Jan. 2009, his job approval rating stood at just 24%. But retrospective evaluations of how Bush dealt with the 9/11 attacks in the time right after 9/11 are generally positive: 56% today say they approve and 38% disapprove
Nonetheless, this is a substantially lower rating than Bush enjoyed at the time, when 86% approved of his job performance, including 96% of Republicans, 85% of independents, and 81% of Democrats.
In September 2001, a majority of Americans (55%) rejected the idea that there were things the U.S. did wrong in its dealings with other countries that might have motivated the terrorists to attack us, while 33% agreed with this idea. Public views are more evenly divided today: 43% say U.S. wrongdoing may have motivated the attacks while 45% say it did not.
Republicans overwhelmingly reject this idea (65%), just as they did ten years ago, but the views of Democrats and independents have shifted. In fact, today half of independents (50%) believe U.S. actions may have been a motivating factor in the attacks, up from 34% ten years ago.
Younger Americans are also more likely to say U.S. actions might have motivated the attacks: 52% of 18 to 29 year-olds, and 47% of 30 to 49 year olds express this view. This compares with just 39% of 50 to 64 year olds and 20% of those 65 and older.

National Security, Wars in Iraq, Afghanistan

Three-quarters (76%) of Americans say the government is doing very (27%) or fairly (49%) well in reducing the threat of terrorism, and for most of the past ten years, at least two-thirds of the American public, including majorities across party lines, have offered this generally positive assessment.
The one notable exception was in January 2007, as George W. Bush announced his “surge” strategy for the war in Iraq. Positive assessments of government performance on terrorism fell to a ten-year low of 54%, due mostly to the negative assessments of Democrats.
While 2007 was an extreme, there has been a partisan divide in assessments of government performance on terrorism from the very beginning. The direction of this gap switched when Barack Obama took office. From 2001 through 2008 Democrats offered decidedly more critical views of government performance on terrorism. But by October 2010, Democrats expressed more positive views of the government’s anti-terrorism efforts than did Republicans.
When asked why the U.S. has not suffered another major attack since 9/11, fewer than half (43%) say the main reason is that the government is doing a good job protecting the country; 35% say America has been lucky so far, while 16% say the main reason is that America is a difficult target for terrorists.
Throughout much of the past decade, there has been substantial skepticism that the war in Iraq has improved America’s security.  Currently, 31% say U.S. involvement in Iraq increased the chances of another terrorist attack here, and 39% say it made no difference.  Just 26% say the war in Iraq has lessened the chances of another attack.
Evaluations of the war in Afghanistan are similar – 37% say it has increased chances of another terrorist attack in the U.S., 25% say it has lessened the chances of an attack, and 34% say it has not made a difference. Democrats are more likely than Republicans to say the war in Afghanistan has increased the chances of another attack on U.S. soil (42% vs. 29%). Independents tend to share the views of Democrats, with 41% saying the U.S. is more at risk because of the war in Afghanistan.
One of the largest gender gaps in the survey is over Afghanistan’s effect on our national security. Women are far more likely than men to say that the war in Afghanistan has increased the chances of another terrorist attack against the United States (47% vs. 28%). Men are far more likely than women to say it has made us more secure (32% vs. 18%).

National ID Card Favored

As time has passed since 9/11, fewer Americans think it will be necessary to give up civil liberties in order to curb terrorism in this country. Currently, 40% say the average person will have to give up some civil liberties, compared with 43% five years ago, 49% one year after the attacks, and 55% in the weeks following the 2001 attacks.
And for the most part, there has been little change in the public’s view of specific policies and policy proposals. A 57% majority is in favor of requiring all citizens to carry a national identity card at all times to show to a police officer. Support for this idea was as high as 70% in the weeks following the attacks in 2001, but fell to 59% by August of 2002 and has remained steady since.  Just over half (53%) support allowing airport personnel to do extra checks on passengers who appear to be of Middle Eastern descent, while 43% are opposed to this. Again, the balance of opinion is largely unchanged.
Americans have more qualms about government monitoring and data collection efforts. More oppose (55%) than favor (42%) the U.S. government monitoring credit card purchases as a means of reducing the terrorist threat, and by an even larger 68% to 29% margin, most oppose the U.S. government monitoring personal telephone calls and emails.
There also has been little change over the years in opinions about the use of torture against suspected terrorists. Currently, a majority (53%) says the use of torture against suspected terrorists in order to gain important information can be often (19%) or sometimes (34%) justified; fewer say the use of torture under these circumstances can be rarely (18%) or never (24%) justified.
When the Pew Research Center first asked this question in July 2004, a majority (53%) said the use of torture could be only rarely or never justified. But in November 2009 and in the current survey, narrow majorities have said torture can at least sometimes be justified.
As in the past, there are wide partisan differences in views of whether torture can be justified to gain important information from suspected terrorists. A substantial majority of Republicans (71%) say torture can be at least sometimes justified, compared with 51% of independents and 45% of Democrats.

Concern about Islamic Extremism

Two-thirds of Americans (67%) say they are at least somewhat concerned about the possible rise of Islamic extremism in the U.S., with roughly half of those (36% overall) saying they are very concerned. Concerns about the possible rise of Islamic extremism have declined since April 2007. At that time, 78% were at least somewhat concerned, while 46% were very concerned.
Concerns about possible domestic Islamic extremism are particularly acute among Republicans 54% are very concerned about this, compared with 36% of independents and 24% of Democrats.
Republicans also are likely to say there is at least a fair amount of support for extremism among Muslims in the U.S., as well as to say that support for extremism is growing. Overall, the public is divided over how much support for extremism exists in the U.S. – 40% say there is a great deal or a fair amount, while 45% say there is little or none.
More than half of Republicans (55%) say there is a great deal or fair amount of support for extremism among Muslims in this country; that compares with 39% of independents and 33% of Democrats. And Republicans are also more likely to think Islamic extremism is already rising in this country – 35% are of this view, compared with 18% of Democrats and 25% of independents.
For the most part, the public does not see the Sept. 11 attacks as the start of a major conflict between the people of America and Europe, and the people of Islam. But more see such a major clash between Islam and the West than did so in October 2001, a month after the attacks.
Currently, 57% say the 9/11 attacks were the start of a conflict with a small, radical group while 35% think the attacks began a broader conflict between the people in the West and the people of Islam. In October 2001, Americans rejected, by a two-to-one margin (63% to 28%), the idea that the attacks signified the start of a major conflict between the people of the West and the people of Islam.

Generational Divides in Views of 9/11

People who are currently younger than 30 are far less likely than older Americans to say that the Sept. 11 attacks affected them a great deal emotionally.
There also are large age differences in post-Sept. 11 attitudes related to Islam and Muslim Americans. Americans age 65 and older are about twice as likely as those under age 30 to say they are very concerned about Islamic extremism in the U.S. Conversely, the young are roughly twice as likely as seniors to be bothered by their belief that Muslims are singled out for increased government surveillance and monitoring. Younger Americans also are less supportive of extra airport checks on people who appear to be of Middle Eastern descent.
At the same time, younger Americans are the most concerned that the war in Afghanistan has increased the chance of another attack in the United States. And while about half of those younger than 30 and those 30 to 49 say there are things the U.S. did prior to 9/11 that may have motivated the attacks, far fewer older Americans express this view.

About the Surveys

Most of the analysis in this report is based on telephone interviews conducted August 17-21, 2011, among a national sample of 1,509 adults 18 years of age or older living in the continental United States (905 respondents were interviewed on a landline telephone, and 604 were interviewed on a cell phone, including 268 who had no landline telephone). The survey was conducted by interviewers at Princeton Data Source under the direction of Princeton Survey Research Associates International. A combination of landline and cell phone random digit dial samples were used; both samples were provided by Survey Sampling International. Interviews were conducted in English and Spanish. Respondents in the landline sample were selected by randomly asking for the youngest adult male or female who is now at home. Interviews in the cell sample were conducted with the person who answered the phone, if that person was an adult 18 years of age or older. For detailed information about our survey methodology, see http://people-press.org/methodology/
The combined landline and cell phone sample are weighted using an iterative technique that matches gender, age, education, race, Hispanic origin, region, and population density to parameters from the March 2010 Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey. The sample also is weighted to match current patterns of telephone status and relative usage of landline and cell phones (for those with both), based on extrapolations from the 2010 National Health Interview Survey. The weighting procedure also accounts for the fact that respondents with both landline and cell phones have a greater probability of being included in the combined sample and adjusts for household size within the landline sample. Sampling errors and statistical tests of significance take into account the effect of weighting. The following table shows the sample sizes and the error attributable to sampling that would be expected at the 95% level of confidence for different groups in the survey:

Sample sizes and sampling errors for other subgroups are available upon request.
In addition to sampling error, one should bear in mind that question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of opinion polls.
Some of the analysis in this report is based on telephone interviews conducted July 20-24, 2011 among a national sample of 1,501 adults 18 years of age or older living in the continental United States (916 respondents were interviewed on a landline telephone, and 585 were interviewed on a cell phone, including 254 who had no landline telephone). The survey was conducted by interviewers at Princeton Data Source under the direction of Princeton Survey Research Associates International. A combination of landline and cell phone random digit dial samples were used; both samples were provided by Survey Sampling International. Interviews were conducted in English and Spanish. Respondents in the landline sample were selected by randomly asking for the youngest adult male or female who is now at home. Interviews in the cell sample were conducted with the person who answered the phone, if that person was an adult 18 years of age or older.
The combined landline and cell phone sample are weighted using an iterative technique that matches gender, age, education, race, Hispanic origin, region, and population density to parameters from the March 2010 Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey. The sample also is weighted to match current patterns of telephone status and relative usage of landline and cell phones (for those with both), based on extrapolations from the 2010 National Health Interview Survey. The weighting procedure also accounts for the fact that respondents with both landline and cell phones have a greater probability of being included in the combined sample and adjusts for household size within the landline sample. Sampling errors and statistical tests of significance take into account the effect of weighting. The following table shows the sample sizes and the error attributable to sampling that would be expected at the 95% level of confidence for different groups in the survey:

Sample sizes and sampling errors for other subgroups are available upon request.
In addition to sampling error, one should bear in mind that question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of opinion polls.
Additional analysis in this report is based on telephone interviews conducted July 21-24, 2011, among a national sample of 999 adults 18 years of age or older living in the continental United States (602 respondents were interviewed on a landline telephone, and 397 were interviewed on a cell phone, including 169 who had no landline telephone). The survey was conducted by interviewers at Princeton Data Source under the direction of Princeton Survey Research Associates International. A combination of landline and cell phone random digit dial samples were used; both samples were provided by Survey Sampling International. Interviews were conducted in English. Respondents in the landline sample were selected by randomly asking for the youngest adult male or female who is now at home. Interviews in the cell sample were conducted with the person who answered the phone, if that person was an adult 18 years of age or older.
The combined landline and cell phone sample are weighted using an iterative technique that matches gender, age, education, race, Hispanic origin, region, and population density to parameters from the March 2010 Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey. The sample also is weighted to match current patterns of telephone status, based on extrapolations from the 2010 National Health Interview Survey. The weighting procedure also accounts for the fact that respondents with both landline and cell phones have a greater probability of being included in the combined sample and adjusts for household size within the landline sample. Sampling errors and statistical tests of significance take into account the effect of weighting. The following table shows the sample sizes and the error attributable to sampling that would be expected at the 95% level of confidence for different groups in the survey:

Sample sizes and sampling errors for other subgroups are available upon request.
In addition to sampling error, one should bear in mind that question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of opinion polls.