How Bush Lost the "War on Terror"

War of Error
How Osama bin Laden Beat George W. Bush
By Peter Bergen, New America Foundation
The New Republic | October 22, 2007

To understand the terror network’s resurgence -- and its continued ability to harm us -- we need to reexamine all the ways in which the administration has failed to crush it.

Omar bin Laden, the fourth son of the Al Qaeda leader, cuts a striking figure. In one photo, he stares out from beneath an Adidas baseball cap, his beard closely trimmed -- an entirely different look from his father’s seventh-century aesthetic. He wears jeans and sits next to his much older wife, a pale-faced British woman with pig tails, whom he divorced a mere five months into their marriage. While his father would not approve of his lifestyle choices, few men know the terrorist mastermind so well. When the Sudanese government exiled bin Laden in 1996, Omar was part of the small contingent that flew in a jet to Al Qaeda’s Afghan sanctuary. He spent nearly five years living in the notorious training camps that bin Laden assembled.

But, between his departure from Sudan and his marriage, something happened to Omar: He turned against his father. I caught a small glimpse of his anger when I spoke with Huthaifa Azzam, the son of Palestinian cleric Abdullah Azzam, one of Osama bin Laden’s most important mentors. In 2003, Huthaifa had accompanied Omar on a Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, where they spent four days together living in the same tent, performing religious observances, and talking about life in Afghanistan. Omar heaped abuse on his father for attacking the United States. "It’s craziness. ... Those guys are dummies," he said. "They have destroyed everything, and for nothing. What did we get from September 11?" In fact, these attacks had driven a permanent wedge between father and son. Soon after planes struck New York and Washington, Omar left Afghanistan in disgust. And, in the years since, he appears to have had no contact with his father.

When Omar fled the Al Qaeda training camps, the organization was in disarray. A 2002 letter written by an Al Qaeda member -- and addressed to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the operational commander of the September 11 attacks -- gives a sense of just how demoralized the group was:

Consider all the fatal and successive disasters that have afflicted us during a period of no more than six months. Those observing our affairs wonder what has happened to us. Today we are experiencing one setback after another and have gone from misfortune to disaster. ... I say today we must completely halt all external actions until we sit down and consider the disaster we caused. The East Asia, Europe, America, Horn of Africa, Yemen, Gulf, and Morocco [terrorist] groups have fallen, and Pakistan has almost been drowned in one push.

Al Qaeda’s cadres were right to be dispirited. The United States appeared to have soundly defeated the terrorist organization. As Bruce Hoffman, a Georgetown professor and one of the world’s leading authorities on terrorism, told me, "It’s difficult to recall the extent to which it was believed that a decisive corner had been turned in 2002 as a result of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. We believed not simply that Al Qaeda was on the run, but that it had been smashed to bits."

But that was five very long years ago -- five years during which Al Qaeda has not only survived but also managed to rebuild at an astonishing clip. The group’s leadership has reconstituted itself and now operates rather comfortably along the largely lawless Afghan-Pakistan border. Last year, it came close to downing ten U.S. airplanes using liquid explosives -- an attack that would have rivaled September 11 in magnitude. Al Qaeda has continually massacred Iraqi civilians over the past three years and has managed to keep the country locked in the grip of sectarian violence. Swathes of Afghanistan are in danger of reverting to Islamist control. The largest Algerian terrorist group announced last year that it was putting itself under Al Qaeda’s umbrella -- and has subsequently launched a series of attacks in North Africa against Western targets. Britain’s domestic intelligence chief said last November that 30 terrorist plots were underway in her country -- some of which would involve "mass-casualty suicide attacks" -- and that Al Qaeda’s Pakistan-based leadership was giving direction to its British followers "on an extensive and growing scale." Last month, Al Qaeda linked militants who had trained at camps in Pakistan were arrested in Germany, where a prosecutor said they had acquired enough chemicals for what would have been "massive bomb attacks" targeting Americans in the country. In a small but telling sign of its restored confidence, Al Qaeda’s production arm has cranked out a record number of videos and audiotapes this year. To top things off, according to Hoffman, the group’s "determination to strike the United States from abroad again remains undiminished." And it may be getting closer to doing just that: A recent National Intelligence Estimate noted that Al Qaeda "has protected or regenerated key elements of its Homeland attack capability."

America’s most formidable foe -- once practically dead -- is back. This is one of the most historically significant legacies of President Bush. At nearly every turn, he has made the wrong strategic choices in battling Al Qaeda. To understand the terror network’s resurgence -- and its continued ability to harm us -- we need to reexamine all the ways in which the administration has failed to crush it.

War of Error
How Osama bin Laden Beat George W. Bush
By Peter Bergen, New America Foundation
The New Republic | October 22, 2007

To understand the terror network’s resurgence -- and its continued ability to harm us -- we need to reexamine all the ways in which the administration has failed to crush it.

Omar bin Laden, the fourth son of the Al Qaeda leader, cuts a striking figure. In one photo, he stares out from beneath an Adidas baseball cap, his beard closely trimmed -- an entirely different look from his father’s seventh-century aesthetic. He wears jeans and sits next to his much older wife, a pale-faced British woman with pig tails, whom he divorced a mere five months into their marriage. While his father would not approve of his lifestyle choices, few men know the terrorist mastermind so well. When the Sudanese government exiled bin Laden in 1996, Omar was part of the small contingent that flew in a jet to Al Qaeda’s Afghan sanctuary. He spent nearly five years living in the notorious training camps that bin Laden assembled.

But, between his departure from Sudan and his marriage, something happened to Omar: He turned against his father. I caught a small glimpse of his anger when I spoke with Huthaifa Azzam, the son of Palestinian cleric Abdullah Azzam, one of Osama bin Laden’s most important mentors. In 2003, Huthaifa had accompanied Omar on a Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, where they spent four days together living in the same tent, performing religious observances, and talking about life in Afghanistan. Omar heaped abuse on his father for attacking the United States. "It’s craziness. ... Those guys are dummies," he said. "They have destroyed everything, and for nothing. What did we get from September 11?" In fact, these attacks had driven a permanent wedge between father and son. Soon after planes struck New York and Washington, Omar left Afghanistan in disgust. And, in the years since, he appears to have had no contact with his father.

When Omar fled the Al Qaeda training camps, the organization was in disarray. A 2002 letter written by an Al Qaeda member -- and addressed to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the operational commander of the September 11 attacks -- gives a sense of just how demoralized the group was:

Consider all the fatal and successive disasters that have afflicted us during a period of no more than six months. Those observing our affairs wonder what has happened to us. Today we are experiencing one setback after another and have gone from misfortune to disaster. ... I say today we must completely halt all external actions until we sit down and consider the disaster we caused. The East Asia, Europe, America, Horn of Africa, Yemen, Gulf, and Morocco [terrorist] groups have fallen, and Pakistan has almost been drowned in one push.

Al Qaeda’s cadres were right to be dispirited. The United States appeared to have soundly defeated the terrorist organization. As Bruce Hoffman, a Georgetown professor and one of the world’s leading authorities on terrorism, told me, "It’s difficult to recall the extent to which it was believed that a decisive corner had been turned in 2002 as a result of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. We believed not simply that Al Qaeda was on the run, but that it had been smashed to bits."

But that was five very long years ago -- five years during which Al Qaeda has not only survived but also managed to rebuild at an astonishing clip. The group’s leadership has reconstituted itself and now operates rather comfortably along the largely lawless Afghan-Pakistan border. Last year, it came close to downing ten U.S. airplanes using liquid explosives -- an attack that would have rivaled September 11 in magnitude. Al Qaeda has continually massacred Iraqi civilians over the past three years and has managed to keep the country locked in the grip of sectarian violence. Swathes of Afghanistan are in danger of reverting to Islamist control. The largest Algerian terrorist group announced last year that it was putting itself under Al Qaeda’s umbrella -- and has subsequently launched a series of attacks in North Africa against Western targets. Britain’s domestic intelligence chief said last November that 30 terrorist plots were underway in her country -- some of which would involve "mass-casualty suicide attacks" -- and that Al Qaeda’s Pakistan-based leadership was giving direction to its British followers "on an extensive and growing scale." Last month, Al Qaeda linked militants who had trained at camps in Pakistan were arrested in Germany, where a prosecutor said they had acquired enough chemicals for what would have been "massive bomb attacks" targeting Americans in the country. In a small but telling sign of its restored confidence, Al Qaeda’s production arm has cranked out a record number of videos and audiotapes this year. To top things off, according to Hoffman, the group’s "determination to strike the United States from abroad again remains undiminished." And it may be getting closer to doing just that: A recent National Intelligence Estimate noted that Al Qaeda "has protected or regenerated key elements of its Homeland attack capability."

America’s most formidable foe -- once practically dead -- is back. This is one of the most historically significant legacies of President Bush. At nearly every turn, he has made the wrong strategic choices in battling Al Qaeda. To understand the terror network’s resurgence -- and its continued ability to harm us -- we need to reexamine all the ways in which the administration has failed to crush it.



****

Al Qaeda has always had a fundamentally apocalyptic mindset, but never more so than in December 2001. In the snowy mountains of eastern Afghanistan, a place with the cinematic name of Tora Bora, bin Laden and his men prepared for their final stand. They had watched the United States evict the Taliban from power while incurring only small numbers of casualties, and, now, they were on the run. As bin Laden would later recount in a 2003 video, the 300 Al Qaeda militants assembled at the mountain hideaway dug 100 trenches over an area of one square mile in preparation for the battle to come. Ayman Saeed Abdullah Batarfi, a Yemeni doctor now being held at Guantánamo, painted for American interrogators a scene of desperation. "I was out of medicine and I had a lot of casualties," Batarfi recalled. "I did a hand amputation by a knife, and I did a finger amputation with scissors."

I got a sense for just how pessimistic Al Qaeda’s leadership must have felt on my visits to Tora Bora in the years following the battle. The complex of mountains dotted with caves lies a three-hour drive up a narrow mud-and-stone road from the eastern Afghanistan city of Jalalabad. You can still find bin Laden’s shattered two-room mud house and a destroyed crude swimming pool. In nearby fields, I saw enormous craters where 1,500-pound daisy-cutters had left their mark. "Day and night," bin Laden would later recall, "American forces were bombing us by smart bombs that weigh thousands of pounds and bombs that penetrate caves."

In fact, those bombs very nearly killed him. Late in the night of December 9, according to Abu Jaafar Al Kuwaiti, an Al Qaeda operative who was at Tora Bora, U.S. forces hit the bunker where bin Laden had been staying with "massive and terrorizing explosions." Al Qaeda’s leader, however, was 200 meters away, having moved just two nights before.

Bin Laden was clearly in trouble, and he knew it. At some point during the battle, he would sustain a serious wound to his left shoulder. And, on December 14, around the time he finally fled Tora Bora, he wrote a final testament that included this bleak message to his offspring: "As to my children, forgive me because I have given you only a little of my time since I answered the jihad call. I have chosen a road fraught with dangers and for this sake suffered from hardships, embitterment, betrayal, and treachery. I advise you not to work with Al Qaeda."

Yet, even as bin Laden contemplated his own death and Al Qaeda seemed on the verge of defeat, Gary Berntsen, then commander of CIA operations in eastern Afghanistan, was worried. A gung-ho officer who speaks Dari, the local Afghan language, Berntsen realized that Afghan soldiers were likely not up to the task of taking on Al Qaeda’s hard core at Tora Bora. In the first days of December, he had requested a battalion of Rangers -- that is, between 600 and 800 soldiers -- to assault the complex of caves where bin Laden and his lieutenants were believed to be hiding and to block their escape routes. That request was denied by the Pentagon, for reasons that have never been fully clarified. In the end, there were probably more journalists at Tora Bora than the 50 or so Delta and Green Beret soldiers who participated in the fight.

And so the task of encircling the area was passed off to local warlords -- one of whom declared a truce with Al Qaeda at a critical moment in the battle, allowing members of the group to slip away. Muhammad Musa, a massively built, laconic Afghan commander who led several hundred of his soldiers on the Tora Bora front line, told me, "There were six American soldiers with us, U.S. Special Forces. They coordinated the air strikes. My personal view is if they had blocked the way out to Pakistan, Al Qaeda would not have had a way to escape." The strategy of relying on local proxies -- a tactic that had served America so well in overthrowing the Taliban -- proved disastrous at the Afghan campaign’s crucial moment.

Everyone knows what happened next: Al Qaeda’s leaders fled into the tribal areas of western Pakistan, where they began the long process of rebuilding their devastated organization. That process has gone far better than they could possibly have imagined as they slipped out of Afghanistan in late 2001 to the hum of American munitions blowing apart their last refuge in a country that had once, more or less, been theirs.

Over the subsequent six years, administration officials and their defenders have offered two arguments to minimize the American failure at Tora Bora. The first is that we don’t really know whether bin Laden himself was there. In fact, there is a great deal of evidence that Al Qaeda’s leader was at the mountain holdout in December 2001. Batarfi, the Yemeni doctor, has said he saw him there. Moreover, Berntsen told me that CIA officers at Tora Bora who were monitoring local radio transmissions overheard bin Laden talking during the battle. And an American military officer who was on the battlefield confirmed that American "collectors" scanning for radio signals in the area heard Al Qaeda’s leader speak several times between December 7 and December 14.

The second argument is that, even if we did allow bin Laden and Al Qaeda’s other top commanders to escape, they are no longer all that crucial to the organization’s operations. And it is true that, in recent years, Al Qaeda has become more decentralized than it was before September 11. But, while they may no longer be ordering attacks over the phone, no one should doubt the continuing ability of bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman Al Zawahiri -- who also escaped from Tora Bora -- to set Al Qaeda’s worldwide agenda. Since December 2001, their videos and audiotapes have reached hundreds of millions of people worldwide, many carrying specific instructions for militant cells. For instance, in September 2003, Zawahiri denounced Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf for supporting the U.S. campaign against Al Qaeda. Within three months, militants had launched two assassination attempts against Musharraf. In October 2003, bin Laden called for action against Spain because of its troop presence in Iraq. Five months later, terrorists killed 191 commuters in Madrid. In December 2004, bin Laden called for attacks against Saudi oil facilities. Fourteen months later, Al Qaeda attacked a plant in Abqaiq, one of the most important oil production facilities in the world.

In short, allowing Al Qaeda’s leadership to escape from Tora Bora and fight another day has proven to be a costly mistake. And it was only the first of many.

****

The Bush team's next major misstep came as it set about rebuilding the country it had just conquered -- or rather, for the most part, didn’t. Afghanistan should have been a demonstration project of American resolve and American compassion: a signal to our enemies that, once evicted from their sanctuaries, they would never be allowed back; and a signal to our friends that democracy could flourish in a land where militant Islamists had once reigned. But, as Lieutenant General David Barno, the commanding general in Afghanistan in 2003, has dryly noted, "'Nation-building’ was explicitly not part of the formula." According to a study by RAND, "Afghanistan has received the least amount of resources out of any major American-led, nation-building operation over the last 60 years." Specifically, the initial deployment of American soldiers to Afghanistan following the fall of the Taliban was the smallest per capita peacekeeping force of any U.S. post-conflict deployment since World War II -- some 6,000 soldiers in a country that is both 50 percent bigger geographically than Iraq and more populous too. Moreover, based apparently on its aversion to allies, the administration blocked any non-U.S. troops from deploying outside Kabul for the first two years of the occupation. Not only were we unwilling to police Afghanistan; we weren’t going to let anyone else do it, either. The absence of Western boots on the ground meant that responsibility for security was often entrusted to local warlords -- whose increased clout, in turn, slowed the formation of a real Afghan national army.

You get what you pay for, and, today, Afghanistan resembles nothing so much as Iraq in the fall of 2003, when the descent into chaos began. In 2006, IED attacks doubled, assaults on international forces tripled, and suicide bombings quintupled. In fact, last year saw the highest number of U.S. military and NATO casualties since the fall of the Taliban. And 2007 is shaping up to be even worse, with suicide bombings up 69 percent from last year. What’s more, Afghanistan is now supplying almost all of the world’s heroin. In Helmand and Kandahar -- provinces in southern Afghanistan -- more than a quarter of the population supports the Taliban, according to a poll released in March. Just one in ten Afghans has access to electricity, while the capital, Kabul, only has electricity for a few hours a day. America’s neglect of Afghanistan since 2001 can only be described as an enormous missed opportunity.

And the reason for that missed opportunity was simple: By the time the Taliban fell, the Bush administration’s attention was already elsewhere. According to Bob Woodward’s book Plan of Attack, in late November 2001 -- even before the battle of Tora Bora -- Bush asked the Pentagon to revamp its 800-page Iraq war plan. General Tommy Franks "was incredulous," Woodward writes. "They were in the midst of one war in Afghanistan and now they wanted detailed planning for another in Iraq? Goddamn,’ Franks said, what the fuck are they talking about?’" In the months and years to come, the Iraq war would divert important resources, military and otherwise, from Afghanistan -- missile-firing Predators, satellites, and key units such as the 5th Special Forces Group, which specializes in the Middle East and was pulled out of the country in the spring of 2002. It is heartbreaking, today, to imagine what might have been accomplished if the money spent on the Iraq war -- hundreds of billions of dollars so far -- had been plunged into creating a model state in Afghanistan.

The removal of Saddam Hussein would prove to be a boon to Al Qaeda -- creating a base for the terrorist organization where none had existed before, energizing jihadists around the world, and confirming for many Muslims bin Laden’s contention that the United States was at war with Islam. "Al Qaeda in Iraq" was founded in 2004 by Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, who had previously run a Jordanian terrorist outfit that was somewhat competitive with Al Qaeda. His group’s subsequent attacks against Shia shrines, clerics, and civilians were the critical factor in Iraq’s slide into civil war. Suicide attacks -- the vast majority perpetrated by Al Qaeda -- have killed more than 10,000 Iraqi civilians, according to Mohammed Hafez of the University of Missouri, whose 2007 book, Suicide Bombings in Iraq, is the authoritative study of the phenomenon.

To be sure, the administration has been able to claim some victories over Al Qaeda in Iraq during the last year. When it controlled the western province of Anbar in 2006, Al Qaeda imposed Taliban-style measures and punishments on the population and killed tribal leaders it considered rivals. This allowed U.S. forces an opening to begin turning Sunni tribal leaders against Al Qaeda -- and, eventually, the group was run out of the province. The Anbar model of recruiting Sunni leaders to fight Al Qaeda is now being applied in other parts of the country with some success. But Al Qaeda in Iraq is hardly down for the count. According to the U.S. military, more than 4,000 Iraqis were killed or injured by Al Qaeda suicide attacks in the first half of 2007.

The fallout from the rise of Al Qaeda in Iraq has been felt far outside the country. Bush defenders have claimed that Iraq will reduce terrorism by drawing jihadists to the country like moths to a flame -- where they can be killed or captured before doing damage in the West. But this assertion is unconvincing, because it incorrectly assumes that the world contains a finite number of jihadists. In fact, the pool of potential terrorists has expanded in the past four years. As the administration’s own 2006 National Intelligence Estimate explains, "[T]he Iraq War has become the cause celebre’ for jihadists ... and is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives." To test that thesis empirically, Paul Cruickshank of New York University and I compared the period after September 11 through the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 with the period from March 2003 through September 2006. Using numbers from the authoritative RANDterrorism database, we found that the rate of deadly attacks by jihadists had increased sevenfold since the invasion. And, even excluding terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan, fatal attacks by jihadists in the rest of the world have increased by more than one-third since March 2003.

This was not the way things were supposed to unfold. Indeed, not so long ago, the jihadists themselves believed that the United States was eliminating terrorists at an impressive rate. In 2004, Abu Musab Al Suri, a key Al Qaeda ideologue, released a book that summarized the damage sustained by his fellow militants in the immediate aftermath of September 11:

America destroyed the Islamic Emirate in Afghanistan, which became the refuge for the mujahideen. They killed hundreds of mujahideen who defended the Emirate. Then America captured more than six hundred Jihadists from different Arab countries and Pakistan jailed them. The Jihad movement rose to glory in the ‘60s, and continued through the ‘70s and ‘80s, and resulted in the rise of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, but was destroyed after 9/11.

But, since then, Iraq and Afghanistan have become locked in a self-reinforcing downward spiral -- one that has handed the momentum in the war on terrorism back to our adversaries. After Saddam’s fall, Iraq became a new headquarters of sorts for jihadists. Meanwhile, with the Bush administration’s attention elsewhere, Al Qaeda took the opportunity to reassert itself along the Afghan- Pakistan border. And jihadists began to travel between the two regions, worsening the situation in both. As Art Keller, a CIA officer stationed in the tribal areas of Pakistan in 2006, told me, "People are going from the Afghan-Pakistan border to Iraq to learn the tactics and then come back. Seems like the reverse of the way the war on terror was supposed to work."

****

In September 2006, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf made one of his periodic visits to the United States. He was here, in part, to promote his grandiose memoir, In the Line of Fire, by sitting for an interview with NBC’s Today show and bantering on Comedy Central with Jon Stewart. (Stewart obsequiously served the dictator tea and pronounced the book "remarkable.") But Musharraf wasn’t just looking to drive up his Amazon ranking. As always, he was here partly to have his despotic ring kissed by Bush. And the president did not disappoint. At a joint Washington press conference, after telling Musharraf, "I admire your courage and leadership," Bush went on to address a deal that the Pakistani government had recently signed with militants in the tribal area of North Waziristan on the Afghan border. Bush assured the assembled reporters that his Pakistani counterpart knew what he was doing: "When President Musharraf said the peace deal is intended to reject Talibanization of the people and there will not be Taliban, there will not be Al Qaeda -- I believe him."

Unfortunately, several months after that peace deal was signed, Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry, the top American commander in Afghanistan, disclosed that cross-border attacks from that area of Pakistan were 200 percent higher than the year before; and a U.S. military intelligence officer told the Associated Press that, following the deal, attacks in the border area had ballooned by 300 percent. Shortly thereafter, Lieutenant General Michael Maples, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told the Senate Intelligence Committee, "Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan remains a haven for Al Qaeda’s leadership and other extremists. In a September accord with the Pakistan government, North Waziristan tribes agreed to curtail attacks into Afghanistan, cease attacks on Pakistani forces, and expel foreign fighters. However, the tribes have not abided by most terms of the agreement." Finally, after months of denial, administration officials were forced this summer to concede the obvious: that Musharraf’s policy of appeasing the militants had been a failure.

And that, in a nutshell, characterizes Bush’s approach to Pakistan: showering Musharraf with affection and largesse, only to receive progressively less in return with each passing year. America has handed $10 billion to the Pakistani government since September 11. Yet the Taliban and Al Qaeda remain headquartered in Pakistan. A U.S. military official in Afghanistan with access to intelligence information told me this spring that Taliban leader Mullah Omar "is still in Quetta," a major Pakistani city. And a Western official based in Pakistan told me that "target folders" about the locations of high-value Taliban and Al Qaeda targets were provided by the U.S. government to Pakistan in late 2006 -- but never acted upon. Moreover, the Bush administration has, on at least one occasion, refused to do what Pakistan will not: This July, The New York Times reported that Donald Rumsfeld nixed a proposed 2005 attack on a meeting of Al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan -- a meeting thought to include Zawahiri -- in part because the operation, which would have involved several hundred special forces and CIA personnel, could have destabilized Musharraf.

In the past few years, Musharraf has convinced the Bush administration that he is the only person who can prevent radical Islamists from taking over his country and getting their hands on Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. But this is self-serving fiction. A September poll found that Pakistan’s coalition of militant Islamist parties, known as the MMA, would receive only 3.5 percent of the vote in a contested election. (Last week, Musharraf coasted to reelection, as opposition parties boycotted the vote.) Having been duped by the myth of Musharraf’s indispensability, Bush officials are now overly reluctant to push the Pakistani leader too hard on confronting Al Qaeda -- for fear he will be seen as an American stooge, eventually toppled, and replaced by someone far worse.

This situation has been compounded by the fact that, for much of the past six years, few American spies were operating in Pakistan’s tribal areas. Keller, the CIA officer, ran a spy network in one of the tribal regions in early 2006. While he noted that more agents have since been deployed, he said that, at the time, he was one of only a "handful" of CIA officers doing this kind of work in the seven tribal regions where Al Qaeda and Taliban militants are concentrated. "A great deal of the resources have gone to Iraq," he explained. "I don’t think it’s appreciated that the CIA is not really a very large organization in terms of field personnel."

Small wonder, then, that Al Qaeda continues to enjoy a safe haven in Pakistan’s tribal areas. Or that militants linked to Al Qaeda have killed 200 Pakistani soldiers in suicide attacks during the past two months. Six years after September 11, the Bush administration has yet to receive the cooperation it needs from Pakistan. To borrow a word from Jon Stewart, this is "remarkable."

*****

Inthe early 1990s, a former sergeant in the U.S. Army who went by the name "Jeff" began taking photos in Nairobi. Jeff, it turned out, had traded in his job with Uncle Sam for a position with Al Qaeda, and Osama bin Laden had asked him to scout potential targets for an attack in Kenya. Among the sites he studied was the U.S. Embassy. Eventually, having drawn diagrams and compiled a report, Jeff decamped for Khartoum, where he presented his findings to Al Qaeda’s top brass. "Bin Laden looked at the picture of the American Embassy," Jeff would later recall, "and pointed to where a truck could go as a suicide bomber."

Jeff’s report would serve as the basis for Al Qaeda’s bombing of the U.S. Embassy in August 1998, an attack that killed more than 200 people. For much of the ‘90s, Jeff had lived a double life: shuttling in and out of Sudan and Afghanistan as an Al Qaeda operative while also working as a computer network specialist in California. One month after the 1998 bombing, Jeff -- whose real name is Ali Mohamed -- was arrested by the FBI in New York. Prior to September 11, he was the highest-level Al Qaeda operative in U.S. custody.

In time, Mohamed would prove to be a treasure trove of information about Al Qaeda. Facing the possibility of life in prison without parole, he entered a guilty plea and, as part of the bargain, detailed bin Laden’s personal involvement in the 1998 embassy bombings as well as Al Qaeda’s dealings with Hezbollah in the mid-’90s. He also agreed to cooperate in prosecutions of other terrorists. None of this was easy, of course. Daniel Coleman, a former FBI special agent who dealt with Mohamed and is regarded as one of the nation’s leading authorities on Al Qaeda, recalls that "it took two years to get him to the point where we could safely say that he was reliable and not leading us on." But, eventually, he did -- and physical coercion was not involved. "There is no need to use anything else other than the full legal scope and power of the justice system," Coleman says of his approach to interrogations. "To go outside of that is completely unnecessary."

Indeed, Coleman thinks the Bush administration’s treatment of captured terrorists -- holding so many outside the traditional justice system at Guantánamo while authorizing interrogation techniques that some observers would consider torture -- has been largely a bust. He told me that most of the information he saw coming out of Guantánamo until his retirement in 2004 "was of no particular value." And Coleman believes that, unlike the intelligence the FBI extracted from Ali Mohamed, the information provided by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed -- the September 11 operational commander who is reported to have been subjected to waterboarding while in U.S. custody -- is "suspect" and "not useful in a court of law."

Coleman isn’t the only one who feels this way. Michael Rolince, who, from 2002 to 2005, was special agent in charge of counterterrorism in the FBI’s Washington field office -- which handles not just threats to the capital region, but also many overseas cases -- told me, "I don’t recall any information that was relevant [to my office] coming out of Guantánamo." He also points out that "torture and coercion gets you, in the vast majority of cases, wrong information that takes you off on wild goose chases." And Brad Garrett, a former FBI agent who obtained uncoerced confessions from two notorious terrorists -- Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and Mir Aimal Kansi, killer of two CIA employees outside agency headquarters that same year -- told me that "coercive interrogation techniques have proven to be ineffective in producing reliable intelligence."

But Bush’s decision to operate outside the boundaries of U.S. and international law has been worse than simply unnecessary; it has also actively harmed American interests. For one thing, by refusing to bring terrorists to trial, we have passed up valuable opportunities to dispassionately present evidence of Al Qaeda’s bloodlust to the world at large. (Testimony in the 2001 embassy-bombing trial established for the first time that Al Qaeda had tried to acquire highly enriched uranium in the mid-’90s -- which had the effect of publicly underscoring the group’s plans for mass murder.) Moreover, Bush’s legal approach to the war on terrorism has torpedoed America’s good reputation around the world. In a BBC survey released this year, of the more than 26,000 people polled in 25 different countries, seven out of ten disapproved of the treatment of Guantánamo inmates, while half thought the United States plays a mostly negative role in the world. The numbers are far worse in Muslim countries -- including democratic ones that should be natural allies. According to a recent Pew poll, America’s favorability rating stands at 9 percent in Turkey (down from 52 percent before September 11) and 29 percent in Indonesia (down from 75 percent before September 11).

If, as the president explained in a speech last year, the United States is today engaged "in the decisive ideological struggle of the twenty-first century," right now we are on the losing side of the battle of ideas. Garrett, for one, understands why. "Interrogation techniques that violate human decency ... can weaken others supporting us in fighting terrorism and can actually create more enemies," he says. In other words, Bush’s legal strategy in the war on terrorism has been counterproductive. And the consequences for our safety are real.

****

Yet for all Bush’s obvious missteps, there is one inarguable bright spot in the war on terrorism, and it is no small matter: Since September 11, America has not been attacked again. Bush, unsurprisingly, has not been shy about taking credit for this. Al Qaeda, he explained last year, has failed to strike the United States a second time "because our government has changed its policies -- and given our military, intelligence, and law enforcement personnel the tools they need to fight this enemy and protect our people." And a fair-minded observer might conceivably ask: Is it possible that, despite all he has done wrong, Bush has somehow managed to get the single most important thing right?

There is no doubt that some of the measures Bush has taken since September 11 have made us safer. First, the much- maligned Patriot Act accomplished something quite important, which was to break down the legal "wall" that had been blocking the flow of information between the CIA and the FBI. Second, the creation of the National Counter Terrorism Center has led to various agencies sharing data and analyzing it under one roof. (Although it should be noted that the center was the brainchild of the 9/11 Commission -- whose establishment the Bush administration fought tooth-and-nail for more than a year.) Third, it is now much harder for terrorists to get into the country thanks to no-fly lists. Finally, cooperation between U.S. and foreign intelligence agencies has generally been strong since September 11. For instance, Al Qaeda’s plot to bring down ten U.S. airliners was disrupted last year by the joint work of U.S., British, and Pakistani intelligence services.

That said, the key reason we have not been attacked again has nothing to do with Bush. In sharp contrast to Muslim populations in European countries like Britain -- where Al Qaeda has found recruits for multiple terrorist plots -- the American Muslim community has overwhelmingly rejected the ideological virus of radical Islam. The American Dream has generally worked well for Muslims in the United States, who are both better-educated and wealthier than the average American. There is no analogous "British Dream," "French Dream," or, needless to say, "EU Dream." None of this is to say that the limited job opportunities and segregation that are the lot of many European Muslims are the causes of terrorism in Europe -- only that such conditions create favorable circumstances in which Al Qaeda can recruit. And, in the absence of those conditions on this side of the Atlantic, radical Islam has never gained much of a foothold -- largely sparing us the scourge of homegrown terrorism. This is fundamentally a testament to American pluralism, not the Bush administration.

Consider the jihadists who have plotted or carried out the worst attacks here in recent years. Yousef flew in from Pakistan for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian, tried to drive in from Canada on his way to bomb LAX airport in 1999. The September 11 hijackers all traveled to the United States specifically for the attacks. Of course, there are almost certainly homegrown Al Qaeda wannabes in America. But, without the Al Qaeda infrastructure that exists in Europe, these would-be terrorists are unlikely to have the training or capabilities to pull off mass-casualty attacks.

For America, then, the threat does not come from within, but rather from abroad. And, while Bush can take some credit for measures that have made it harder for foreign terrorists to get into the country, he must take the blame for the fact that his policies -- in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and Guantánamo -- have greatly increased the pool of jihadist terrorists around the world. Since September 11, we have largely managed to block these jihadists from entering. But no country, no matter how vigilant, no matter how powerful, can hope to lock out every last member of an ever-multiplying, ever-more-sophisticated gang of trained killers forever. Which is why our best bet -- and maybe our only hope -- in the war on terrorism is to stop Al Qaeda long before it gets here.

****

It has been six years since we were a few hundred maddening meters from killing Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora -- and, perhaps, a few hundred soldiers from finishing off his top lieutenants as well. Tora Bora seems very far away from New York, and, in many ways, it is. But the disastrous chain of events that began there in December 2001 -- a bungled bid to snag bin Laden, followed by a war in Iraq that gave new life to Al Qaeda, accompanied by a virtual abandonment of Afghanistan, compounded by a naïve approach toward Pakistan, topped off by a set of legal policies that has made America the bane of world opinion -- may yet end in the streets of Manhattan. Indeed, if the last few years have taught us anything, it is that the steps from Tora Bora to Waziristan to Anbar to London -- to beyond? -- are not so large at all.

And so it bears mentioning that, the last few times I visited Jalalabad, my Afghan friends warned me strongly against traveling to Tora Bora. The area, they explained, had been taken over by jihadists. They were right: In August, American soldiers went into Tora Bora to take on hundreds of Taliban and Al Qaeda militants holed up there.

Meanwhile, reports surfaced that perhaps bin Laden had been in the area. Alas, we didn’t get him this time either.
Copyright 2007, The New Republic

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Foreign Fighters in Iraq Are Tied to Allies of U.S. - New York Times

Foreign Fighters in Iraq Are Tied to Allies of U.S.

Saudi Arabia and Libya, both considered allies by the United States in its fight against terrorism, were the source of about 60 percent of the foreign fighters who came to Iraq in the past year to serve as suicide bombers or to facilitate other attacks, according to senior American military officials.

The data come largely from a trove of documents and computers discovered in September, when American forces raided a tent camp in the desert near Sinjar, close to the Syrian border. The raid’s target was an insurgent cell believed to be responsible for smuggling the vast majority of foreign fighters into Iraq.

The most significant discovery was a collection of biographical sketches that listed hometowns and other details for more than 700 fighters brought into Iraq since August 2006.

The records also underscore how the insurgency in Iraq remains both overwhelmingly Iraqi and Sunni. American officials now estimate that the flow of foreign fighters was 80 to 110 per month during the first half of this year and about 60 per month during the summer. The numbers fell sharply in October to no more than 40, partly as a result of the Sinjar raid, the American officials say.

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Patience Please - Perfection Takes Time

Rice: Iraq War 'Worth the Sacrifice' - washingtonpost.com
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice this morning asked Americans "to be patient" as the war in Iraq entered its fifth year, acknowledging early missteps in the conflict but saying "it is worth the sacrifice" to have toppled former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

With a new security plan underway and more American troops deployed to help dampen sectarian violence, "we will start to know relatively soon whether the Iraqis are living up to their obligations," to take more responsibility for security, Rice said in a morning interview on NBC.

Bush to Ask for Patience in Iraq War
President Bush marked the fourth anniversary of the war in Iraq on Monday as the White House tried to counter Democratic attempts to force a withdrawal of U.S. troops.

Bush was expected to issue a plea for more patience in the war, which has stretched longer with higher costs than the White House ever anticipated. The president was to make a statement in the Roosevelt Room.

"It can be tempting to look at the challenges in Iraq and conclude that our best option is to pack up and go home," Bush was to say, according to an administration official who saw an advance text of his remarks. "While that may be satisfying in the short run, the consequences for American security would be devastating."

Rice: Iraq War 'Worth the Sacrifice'
Secretary Asks for Patience as Deadly Bombings Rock Baghdad and Kirkuk

By Karin Brulliard and Howard Schneider
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 19, 2007; 9:52 AM

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice this morning asked Americans "to be patient" as the war in Iraq entered its fifth year, acknowledging early missteps in the conflict but saying "it is worth the sacrifice" to have toppled former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

With a new security plan underway and more American troops deployed to help dampen sectarian violence, "we will start to know relatively soon whether the Iraqis are living up to their obligations," to take more responsibility for security, Rice said in a morning interview on NBC.

As she and other administration officials conducted television interviews on the four-year anniversary of the "shock and awe" invasion of the country, Rice said, "I would ask the American people to be patient...We have invested a lot. It is worth the sacrifice."

More than 3,200 American military personnel have died in the conflict. Bush is scheduled to make remarks about the war at 11:30, following a video-conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

In a separate interview with CBS, Rice said it was probably a mistake not to have put in place a "more localized, more decentralized" plan to rebuild the country, and that the U.S. from earlier on should have put in place the more forceful counterinsurgency strategy now being pursued under the command of Gen. David Petraeus, wire services reported.

As Rice spoke, wire services in Baghdad reported a wave of fresh bombings, including an explosion at a Shiite mosque in Baghdad and four blasts in rapid succession in the oil-rich region of Kirkuk.

The mosque bombing during a prayer service killed at least eight worshipers, wire services reported. In Kirkuk, four car bombs went off within around half an hour of each other, killing about a dozen people, according to an Associated Press report.

A day before in Baghdad, insurgents disguised as mechanics slipped into car repair shops on the ground floor of a hotel used as an Iraqi army post in Anbar province, a hub of the Sunni insurgency, then furtively planted bombs before fleeing and blowing up the building on Sunday, police said.

Iraqi army and police forces also discovered the beheaded bodies of nine police officers in an abandoned post office east of Anbar's provincial capital, Ramadi, police Col. Tareq Aduleimi said. The bodies, found as the forces raided suspected hideouts of the insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq, showed signs of torture, he said.

The violence in the volatile Sunni-dominated province came on a day that the Iraqi military reported the details of a raid this month on a Sunni legislator's home, where officials said soldiers seized 65 Kalashnikov rifles and found traces of explosives on four cars.

Seven people were arrested in the March 8 raid at the home of Dhafir al-Ani, a lawmaker with the largest Sunni bloc in the Shiite-led parliament, Iraqi military spokesman Qassim al-Moussawi said at a news conference. One man, who had a sniper rifle, remains in custody, he said.

Reached by telephone, Ani called the raid "a humiliation attempt" but declined to place blame for it.

He said all his weapons were registered with the government and denied that his cars contained explosives. The vehicles frequently entered the fortified Green Zone, he said, where they were sniffed by police dogs. He said that those detained were his guards and that they had been tortured by the military.

While a security crackdown in Baghdad has brought relative calm to the capital, bloodshed has risen in surrounding provinces, including Anbar, where insurgents are clashing with U.S.-backed Sunni tribal chiefs for control. Hundreds of American troops have been killed in the province since the U.S.-led invasion four years ago.

The blasts on Sunday demolished Fallujah's al-Salam Hotel -- which means "peace hotel" in Arabic -- and killed or wounded at least 20 people, said Khaled al-Eulaimy, a lieutenant with the Fallujah police.

The U.S. military confirmed that a building in Fallujah was bombed but did not provide details.

In a statement posted on its Web site, the Islamic State of Iraq, a Sunni insurgent group, asserted responsibility for the bombing and said 25 Iraqi soldiers had been killed.

"Brave soldiers of the Islamic State of Iraq booby-trapped the building and the building was fully destroyed," the statement said. "With the help of God, all who were in it died."

At 7:20 a.m. Sunday, Eulaimy said, "a number" of insurgents wearing grease-stained clothing and toting tools entered the car repair shops on the ground floor of the three-story hotel. They used remote controls to detonate the hidden bombs, he said.

Sabah al-Ani, a doctor who lives near the hotel, said he was awakened by what sounded like a "very, very big explosion." By the time he arrived at the hotel a few minutes later, ambulances and military vehicles had surrounded what appeared to be a pile of rubble, he said.

On Friday, hundreds of people were sickened and as many as eight people were killed when three suicide bombers detonated trucks carrying chlorine and explosives near Fallujah and Ramadi. A U.S. military spokesman said al-Qaeda in Iraq probably was behind the attack.

A U.S. Marine was killed in combat in the province on Saturday, the military reported Sunday.

The U.S. military also reported the deaths of two soldiers on Saturday. One was killed in Diyala province in an explosion that wounded five other soldiers. Another died in a noncombat incident; the death is under investigation, the military said.

Also Sunday, a car bomb exploded in Baghdad at a market in the Shiite neighborhood of Shaab, killing at least 12 people and injuring 16, said Abdullah Salman, an officer with the Interior Ministry.

Police found the bodies of 18 people, with gunshot wounds and their hands tied behind their backs, dumped across the capital between Saturday and Sunday afternoons, he said. All showed signs of torture.

Other bombings and shootings Sunday in Baghdad killed at least eight people, police said.

Brulliard reported from Iraq. Special correspondents Salih Dehema and Waleed Saffar in Baghdad and other Washington Post staff in Iraq contributed to this report.




Bush to Ask for Patience in Iraq War
Bush to Issue Plea for Patience in Iraq War; Snow Says Withdrawal Will Give Enemy a Victory
By BEN FELLER
The Associated Press

WASHINGTON - President Bush marked the fourth anniversary of the war in Iraq on Monday as the White House tried to counter Democratic attempts to force a withdrawal of U.S. troops.

Bush was expected to issue a plea for more patience in the war, which has stretched longer with higher costs than the White House ever anticipated. The president was to make a statement in the Roosevelt Room.

"It can be tempting to look at the challenges in Iraq and conclude that our best option is to pack up and go home," Bush was to say, according to an administration official who saw an advance text of his remarks. "While that may be satisfying in the short run, the consequences for American security would be devastating."

White House press secretary Tony Snow went a step further, telling reporters in his morning briefing that a war spending bill up for consideration by the full House this week would "provide victory for the enemy." The legislation, in addition to providing funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for the year, would effectively require the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq by the fall of 2008.

"That is not a fund-the-troops bill but a withdraw-the-troops bill," Snow said. "We think that is an approach that is conducive to defeat. It is a recipe for failure, not for victory. ... It would provide victory for the enemy and not the much-needed and deserved victory for the people of Iraq. Furthermore, it would forfeit the sacrifice that our troops have made in the field."

The president also was to meet with his National Security Council on the war and hold a closed-circuit television conference call with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in Baghdad.

Entering its fifth year, the war has claimed the lives of more than 3,200 members of the U.S. military.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice earlier Monday staunchly defended going to war but acknowledged the administration should have sent more troops initially to quell the civil strife following the invasion.

Asked on CBS's "The Early Show" to say what the administration could have done better, she said that, early on, officials "might have looked to a more localized, more decentralized approach to reconstruction.

"... And I do believe that the kind of counterinsurgency strategy in which Gen. (David) Petraeus is now pursuing, in which we have enough forces to clear an area and hold it, so that building and governance can emerge, is the best strategy. And that probably was not pursued in the very beginning."

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a persistent critic of the war strategy but a supporter of the war itself, has repeatedly complained that not enough U.S. troops were placed on the ground in the weeks and months following the March 2003 invasion.

Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., also appearing on CBS, maintained that "the only way you end sectarian violence is to occupy a country or have a decentralized government.

"You've got to give these people (the Sunnis, Shia and Kurds) breathing room like we did in Bosnia," Biden said. "You've got to separate these people. This is a failed strategy."

On Sunday, President Bush's national security adviser said that House Democrats will assure failure in Iraq and waste the sacrifice of U.S. soldiers with their legislation to remove troops. The House's war spending bill includes a troop withdrawal deadline of Sept. 1, 2008.

Lawmakers know the president will veto the measure, national security adviser Stephen Hadley said, making the exercise a "charade."

Democratic lawmakers say the public put them in charge of Congress to demand more progress in Iraq and to start getting the U.S. troops out.

The timeline for troop withdrawal under the House bill would speed up if the Iraqi government cannot meet its own benchmarks for providing security, allocating oil revenues and other essential steps. The administration opposes setting such timelines.

The House plan appears to have little chance of getting through the Senate, where Democrats have a slimmer majority. Even if it did, Bush has promised to veto it. But the White House is aggressively trying to stop it anyway, fearful of the message the world will hear if the House approves a binding bill to end the war.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Sunday the House bill could make it impossible for military commanders to do their work.

Congressional Democrats, put in power in large part because of anti-war public sentiment, are trying to use their power of the purse to force action. So far, Iraq's leadership is struggling to meet the major benchmarks that it has pledged to the United States.

The impending House vote concerns a $124 billion spending bill, $95.5 billion of which is targeted for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Some of the other money is for unrelated domestic programs, which also has angered the White House.

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Copyright © 2007 ABC News Internet Ventures

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Memory File: William Kristol Predicts Surge showing hope of victory

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The Problem, in A Fundamental Nutshell: 'Is Your Baby Gay?' - washingtonpost.com

The Problem, in A Fundamental Nutshell: 'Is Your Baby Gay?'

By Lynne Duke
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 18, 2007; Page D01

Pity the poor fetus. There's a lot coming its way. And now there's talk on a conservative evangelical blog of a hypothetical hormone patch that an expectant mother might wear to eradicate her fetus's natural gayness.

The patch, the biological determinism: It's all conjecture, for now. But it hit like a theological IED when it turned up earlier this month on the blog of the Rev. R. Albert Mohler Jr., one of the leading voices of the 16 million-strong Southern Baptist Convention. He blogged on these issues under the appropriately provocative headline: "Is Your Baby Gay? What if You Could Know? What if You Could Do Something About It?" In his postings, he raises the possibility of a biological basis for homosexuality and prods his flock to think about how it should respond.

At a time when homosexuality in the military has reemerged as a flash point, causing presidential candidates to deflect and dance gingerly around the topic, Mohler has taken up the debate about the origins of homosexuality in a way he admits has roiled many in the Christian right.

For seeming to contradict a basic tenet of anti-gay thinking -- that homosexuality is a lifestyle choice, not a state of nature -- Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, was inundated with e-mails from readers who castigated him, he said on his blog Friday.

And for expressing his approval of a hypothetical prenatal intervention to change a baby's sexual orientation, he was verbally attacked by gay-rights advocates. Some of them likened him to the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele for seeming to advocate the manipulation of nature to "basically wipe out gay people," said Wayne R. Besen, founder of Truth Wins Out, a group that fights efforts to convert gays to heterosexuality.

To quiet the storm, Mohler's blog on Friday attempted to more fully explain his thinking, sparked by an article by Tyler Gray, entitled "Is Your Baby Gay?," in the March issue of Radar magazine.

"My purpose in writing my previous article was, in the main, to draw attention to a very real threat to human dignity that lurks as a possibility on our horizon, a possibility explicitly described in the Radar magazine article," Mohler wrote. "This is the possibility that, if a biological marker (real or not) is ever claimed to mark homosexuality in prenatal testing, widespread abortion of such babies might well follow," a prospect he denounced.

In an interview on Friday, Mohler said that Christian couples "should be open" to the prospect of changing the course of nature -- if a biological marker for homosexuality were to be found. He would not support gene therapy but might back other treatments, such as a hormonal patch.

"I think any Christian couple would want their child to be whole and healthy," he said. "Knowing that that child is going to be a sinner, we would not want to make their personal challenges more difficult if they could be less difficult."

On his blog, he said "Christians must be very careful not to claim that science can never prove a biological basis for sexual orientation. . . . The general trend of the research points to at least some biological factors behind sexual attraction, gender identity and sexual orientation."

Indeed, some scientific research suggests homosexuality may stem from biological influences including genetics and hormones. A 2006 study published in Proceedings of the National Academies of Science concluded that homosexuality in some men may be a result of an immune response in a mother's womb if she has previously given birth to one or more boys. Earlier studies revealed a genetic variation that might influence homosexuality.

On his blog, Mohler wrote that the search for a biological cause of the "disorder" could also lead to a "cure." In the interview, however, he distanced himself from the "therapeutic language of a 'cure' " and spoke instead of "salvation through Christ." Homosexual behavior is sinful, he said, whether based in nature or nurture.

The Rev. Rob Schenck, a pastor and member of the Evangelical Church Alliance, which he said is probably the most conservative of the evangelical groups, applauded Mohler for launching a dialogue.

But, he warned, "this is such a delicate and risky conversation to have for a number or reasons . . . We're going to have to be extremely prayerful and careful about making any decision to tinker with a child's genetic or biochemical construction. We may be awfully close to violating the sanctity of that child's life and their integrity as a person."

Mohler has "touched the third rail of the radical religious right's view of homosexuality," said the Rev. Bob Edgar, executive secretary of the National Council of Churches, which represents 35 denominations and 45 million congregants.

"What he said lends credence to the fact that it's God's creation. His brothers in faith would be more surprised than liberals with his comments." Ironically, Mohler's musings on these subjects were based on an article in an irreverent pop culture magazine. Gray, the article's author, said he was "not real happy" with the way Mohler used his writings.

"You can't just pick the parts that you like and say, 'I'm going to use this to say that I would be okay with a treatment that would eradicate homosexuality,' " said Gray, whose article raised the prospect for hypocrisy among conservatives and liberals faced with choices about the sexuality of their unborn children.

Mohler's missive has had a "chilling and frightening effect" on the homosexual community, said Harry Knox, director of the religion and faith program at the Human Rights Campaign, a gay rights advocacy group. "My word for [Christian conservatives] is they should be more focused on repentance for the sins they have committed against homosexuals than on manipulating the next generation of the unborn."

Besen said Mohler's musing are akin to calling for a "final solution" for gays.

"It's the first time I've ever used such a term, and having a family background that included the Holocaust I don't take that lightly," said Besen, author of "Anything but Straight: Unmasking the Scandals and Lies Behind the Ex-Gay Myth."

"However . . . if you follow what he said there would be no gay people in the future."

Homosexuality is a "huge challenge" to Christianity, said Mohler, referring, in part, to the Rev. Ted Haggard, former president of the National Association of Evangelicals, who was forced to step down last November because of a gay sex scandal. And the Rev. Lonnie Latham, a member of the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention, was embroiled in a gay sex scandal but was found not guilty of having solicited sex from another man.

"In our churches and in our families there are people struggling with homosexuality and for a long time this was kind of hidden," Mohler said in the interview. "It is no longer hidden, and the fact is we've got to be coming up with genuinely Christian responses to Christians who are in this struggle."

Asked if he perhaps was moving ahead of the science on homosexuality's origins, Mohler said, "I don't think it's that far off. The battle for human dignity is already here.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/17/AR2007031701162.html

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Onward Injured Soldiers

The Substance

As the military scrambles to pour more soldiers into Iraq, a unit of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division at Fort Benning, Ga., is deploying troops with serious injuries and other medical problems, including GIs who doctors have said are medically unfit for battle. Some are too injured to wear their body armor, according to medical records.

On Feb. 15, Master Sgt. Jenkins and 74 other soldiers with medical conditions from the 3rd Division's 3rd Brigade were summoned to a meeting with the division surgeon and brigade surgeon. These are the men responsible for handling each soldier's "physical profile," an Army document that lists for commanders an injured soldier's physical limitations because of medical problems -- from being unable to fire a weapon to the inability to move and dive in three-to-five-second increments to avoid enemy fire. Jenkins and other soldiers claim that the division and brigade surgeons summarily downgraded soldiers' profiles, without even a medical exam, in order to deploy them to Iraq. It is a claim division officials deny.

The Army is ordering injured troops to go to Iraq
At Fort Benning, soldiers who were classified as medically unfit to fight are now being sent to war. Is this an isolated incident or a trend?

By Mark Benjamin

Mar. 11, 2007 | "This is not right," said Master Sgt. Ronald Jenkins, who has been ordered to Iraq even though he has a spine problem that doctors say would be damaged further by heavy Army protective gear. "This whole thing is about taking care of soldiers," he said angrily. "If you are fit to fight you are fit to fight. If you are not fit to fight, then you are not fit to fight."

As the military scrambles to pour more soldiers into Iraq, a unit of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division at Fort Benning, Ga., is deploying troops with serious injuries and other medical problems, including GIs who doctors have said are medically unfit for battle. Some are too injured to wear their body armor, according to medical records.

On Feb. 15, Master Sgt. Jenkins and 74 other soldiers with medical conditions from the 3rd Division's 3rd Brigade were summoned to a meeting with the division surgeon and brigade surgeon. These are the men responsible for handling each soldier's "physical profile," an Army document that lists for commanders an injured soldier's physical limitations because of medical problems -- from being unable to fire a weapon to the inability to move and dive in three-to-five-second increments to avoid enemy fire. Jenkins and other soldiers claim that the division and brigade surgeons summarily downgraded soldiers' profiles, without even a medical exam, in order to deploy them to Iraq. It is a claim division officials deny.

The 3,900-strong 3rd Brigade is now leaving for Iraq for a third time in a steady stream. In fact, some of the troops with medical conditions interviewed by Salon last week are already gone. Others are slated to fly out within a week, but are fighting against their chain of command, holding out hope that because of their ills they will ultimately not be forced to go. Jenkins, who is still in Georgia, thinks doctors are helping to send hurt soldiers like him to Iraq to make units going there appear to be at full strength. "This is about the numbers," he said flatly.

That is what worries Steve Robinson, director of veterans affairs at Veterans for America, who has long been concerned that the military was pressing injured troops into Iraq. "Did they send anybody down range that cannot wear a helmet, that cannot wear body armor?" Robinson asked rhetorically. "Well that is wrong. It is a war zone." Robinson thinks that the possibility that physical profiles may have been altered improperly has the makings of a scandal. "My concerns are that this needs serious investigation. You cannot just look at somebody and tell that they were fit," he said. "It smacks of an overstretched military that is in crisis mode to get people onto the battlefield."

Eight soldiers who were at the Feb. 15 meeting say they were summoned to the troop medical clinic at 6:30 in the morning and lined up to meet with division surgeon Lt. Col. George Appenzeller, who had arrived from Fort Stewart, Ga., and Capt. Aaron K. Starbuck, brigade surgeon at Fort Benning. The soldiers described having a cursory discussion of their profiles, with no physical exam or extensive review of medical files. They say Appenzeller and Starbuck seemed focused on downplaying their physical problems. "This guy was changing people's profiles left and right," said a captain who injured his back during his last tour in Iraq and was ordered to Iraq after the Feb. 15 review.

Appenzeller said the review of 75 soldiers with profiles was an effort to make sure they were as accurate as possible prior to deployment. "As the division surgeon and the senior medical officer in the division, I wanted to ensure that all the patients with profiles were fully evaluated with clear limitations that commanders could use to make the decision whether they could deploy, and if they did deploy, what their limitations would be while there," he said in a telephone interview from Fort Stewart. He said he changed less than one-third of those profiles -- even making some more restrictive -- in order to "bring them into accordance with regulations."

In direct contradiction to the account given by the soldiers, Appenzeller said physical examinations were conducted and that he had a robust medical team there working with him, which is how they managed to complete 75 reviews in one day. Appenzeller denied that the plan was to find more warm bodies for the surge into Baghdad, as did Col. Wayne W. Grigsby Jr., the brigade commander. Grigsby said he is under "no pressure" to find soldiers, regardless of health, to make his unit look fit. The health and welfare of his soldiers are a top priority, said Grigsby, because [the soldiers] are "our most important resource, perhaps the most important resource we have in this country."

Grigsby said he does not know how many injured soldiers are in his ranks. But he insisted that it is not unusual to deploy troops with physical limitations so long as he can place them in safe jobs when they get there. "They can be productive and safe in Iraq," Grigsby said.

The injured soldiers interviewed by Salon, however, expressed considerable worry about going to Iraq with physical deficits because it could endanger them or their fellow soldiers. Some were injured on previous combat tours. Some of their ills are painful conditions from training accidents or, among relatively older troops, degenerative problems like back injuries or blown-out knees. Some of the soldiers have been in the Army for decades.

And while Grigsby, the brigade commander, says he is under no pressure to find troops, it is hard to imagine there is not some desperation behind the decision to deploy some of the sick soldiers. Master Sgt. Jenkins, 42, has a degenerative spine problem and a long scar down the back of his neck where three of his vertebrae were fused during surgery. He takes a cornucopia of potent pain pills. His medical records say he is "at significantly increased risk of re-injury during deployment where he will be wearing Kevlar, body armor and traveling through rough terrain." Late last year, those medical records show, a doctor recommended that Jenkins be referred to an Army board that handles retirements when injuries are permanent and severe.

A copy of Jenkins' profile written after that Feb. 15 meeting and signed by Capt. Starbuck, the brigade surgeon, shows a healthier soldier than the profile of Jenkins written by another doctor just late last year, though Jenkins says his condition is unchanged. Other soldiers' documents show the same pattern.

One female soldier with psychiatric issues and a spine problem has been in the Army for nearly 20 years. "My [health] is deteriorating," she said over dinner at a restaurant near Fort Benning. "My spine is separating. I can't carry gear." Her medical records include the note "unable to deploy overseas." Her status was also reviewed on Feb. 15. And she has been ordered to Iraq this week.

The captain interviewed by Salon also requested anonymity because he fears retribution. He suffered a back injury during a previous deployment to Iraq as an infantry platoon leader. A Humvee accident "corkscrewed my spine," he explained. Like the female soldier, he is unable to wear his protective gear, and like her he too was ordered to Iraq after his meeting with the division surgeon and brigade surgeon on Feb. 15. He is still at Fort Benning and is fighting the decision to send him to Baghdad. "It is a numbers issue with this whole troop surge," he claimed. "They are just trying to get those numbers."

Another soldier contacted Salon by telephone last week expressed considerable anxiety, in a frightened tone, about deploying to Iraq in her current condition. (She also wanted to remain anonymous, fearing retribution.) An incident during training several years ago injured her back, forcing doctors to remove part of her fractured coccyx. She suffers from degenerative disk disease and has two ruptured disks and a bulging disk in her back. While she said she loves the Army and would like to deploy after back surgery, her current injuries would limit her ability to wear her full protective gear. She deployed to Iraq last week, the day after calling Salon.

Her husband, who has served three combat tours in the infantry in Afghanistan and Iraq, said he is worried sick because his wife's protective vest alone exceeds the maximum amount she is allowed to lift. "I have been over there three times. I know what it is like," he told me during lunch at a restaurant here. He predicted that by deploying people like his wife, the brigade leaders are "going to get somebody killed over there." He said there is "no way" Grigsby is going to keep all of the injured soldiers in safe jobs. "All of these people that deploy with these profiles, they are scared," he said. He railed at the command: "They are saying they don't care about your health. This is pathetic. It is bad."

His wife's physical profile was among those reevaluated on Feb. 15. A copy of her profile from late last year showed her health problems were so severe they "prevent deployment" and recommended she be medically retired from the Army. Her profile at that time showed she was unable to wear a protective mask and chemical defense equipment, and had limitations on doing pushups, walking, biking and swimming. It said she can only carry 15 pounds.

Though she says that her condition has not changed since then, almost all of those findings were reversed in a copy of her physical profile dated Feb. 15. The new profile says nothing about a medical retirement, but suggests that she limit wearing a helmet to "one hour at a time."

Spc. Lincoln Smith, meanwhile, developed sleep apnea after he returned from his first deployment to Iraq. The condition is so severe that he now suffers from narcolepsy because of a lack of sleep. He almost nodded off mid-conversation while talking to Salon as he sat in a T-shirt on a sofa in his girlfriend's apartment near Fort Benning.

Smith is trained by the Army to be a truck driver. But since he is in constant danger of falling asleep, military doctors have listed "No driving of military vehicles" on his physical profile. Smith was supposed to fly to Iraq March 9. But he told me on March 8 that he won't go. Nobody has retrained Smith to do anything else besides drive trucks. Plus, because of his condition he was unable to train properly with the unit when the brigade rehearsed for Iraq in January, so he does not feel ready.

Smith needs to sleep with a CPAP (continuous positive airway pressure) machine pumping air into his mouth and nose. "Otherwise," he says, "I could die." But based on his last tour, he is not convinced he will be able to be in places with constant electricity or will be able to fix or replace his CPAP machine should it fail.

He told me last week he would refuse to deploy to Iraq, unsure of what he will be asked to do there and afraid that he will not be taken care of. Since he won't be a truck driver, "I would be going basically as a number," says Smith, who is 32. "They don't have enough people," he says. But he is not going to be one of those numbers until they train him to do something else. "I'm going to go to the airport, and I'm going to tell them I'm not going to go. They are going to give me a weapon. I am going to say, 'It is not a good idea for you to give me a weapon right now.'"

The Pentagon was notified of the reclassification of the Fort Benning soldiers as soon as it happened, according to Master Sgt. Jenkins. He showed Salon an e-mail describing the situation that he says he sent to Army Surgeon General Lt. Gen. Kevin C. Kiley. Jenkins agreed to speak to Salon because he hopes public attention will help other soldiers, particularly younger ones in a similar predicament. "I can't sit back and let this happen to me or other soldiers in my position." But he expects reprisals from the Army.

Other soldiers slated to leave for Iraq with injuries said they wonder whether the same thing is happening in other units in the Army. "You have to ask where else this might be happening and who is dictating it," one female soldier told me. "How high does it go?"

-- By Mark Benjamin
Copyright ©2007 Salon Media Group, Inc.

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Bin Laden Trail 'Stone Cold'

File this under buried leads:

That was December 2001. Only two months later, Bush decided to pull out most of the special operations troops and their CIA counterparts in the paramilitary division that were leading the hunt for bin Laden in Afghanistan to prepare for war in Iraq, said Flynt L. Leverett, then an expert on the Middle East at the National Security Council.

"I was appalled when I learned about it," said Leverett, who has become an outspoken critic of the administration's counterterrorism policy. "I don't know of anyone who thought it was a good idea. It's very likely that bin Laden would be dead or in American custody if we hadn't done that."

Several officers confirmed that the number of special operations troops was reduced in March 2002.

Bin Laden Trail 'Stone Cold'
U.S. Steps Up Efforts, But Good Intelligence On Ground is Lacking

By Dana Priest and Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, September 10, 2006; A01

The clandestine U.S. commandos whose job is to capture or kill Osama bin Laden have not received a credible lead in more than two years. Nothing from the vast U.S. intelligence world -- no tips from informants, no snippets from electronic intercepts, no points on any satellite image -- has led them anywhere near the al-Qaeda leader, according to U.S. and Pakistani officials.

"The handful of assets we have have given us nothing close to real-time intelligence" that could have led to his capture, said one counterterrorism official, who said the trail, despite the most extensive manhunt in U.S. history, has gone "stone cold."

But in the last three months, following a request from President Bush to "flood the zone," the CIA has sharply increased the number of intelligence officers and assets devoted to the pursuit of bin Laden. The intelligence officers will team with the military's secretive Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and with more resources from the National Security Agency and other intelligence agencies.

The problem, former and current counterterrorism officials say, is that no one is certain where the "zone" is.

"Here you've got a guy who's gone off the net and is hiding in some of the most formidable terrain in one of the most remote parts of the world surrounded by people he trusts implicitly," said T. McCreary, spokesman for the National Counterterrorism Center. "And he stays off the net and is probably not mobile. That's an extremely difficult problem."

Intelligence officials think that bin Laden is hiding in the northern reaches of the autonomous tribal region along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. This calculation is based largely on a lack of activity elsewhere and on other intelligence, including a videotape, obtained exclusively by the CIA and not previously reported, that shows bin Laden walking on a trail toward Pakistan at the end of the battle of Tora Bora in December 2001, when U.S. forces came close but failed to capture him.

Many factors have combined in the five years since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to make the pursuit more difficult. They include the lack of CIA access to people close to al-Qaeda's inner circle; Pakistan's unwillingness to pursue him; the reemergence of the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan; the strength of the Iraqi insurgency, which has depleted U.S. military and intelligence resources; and the U.S. government's own disorganization.

But the underlying reality is that finding one person in hiding is difficult under any circumstances. Eric Rudolph, the confessed Olympics and abortion clinic bomber, evaded authorities for five years, only to be captured miles from where he was last seen in North Carolina.

It has been so long since there has been anything like a real close call that some operatives have given bin Laden a nickname: "Elvis," for all the wishful-thinking sightings that have substituted for anything real.

After playing down bin Laden's importance and barely mentioning him for several years, Bush last week repeatedly invoked his name and quoted from his writings and speeches to underscore what Bush said is the continuing threat of terrorism.

Many terrorism experts, however, say the importance of finding bin Laden has diminished since Bush first pledged to capture him "dead or alive" in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. Terrorists worldwide have repeatedly shown they no longer need him to organize or carry out attacks, the experts say. Attacks in Europe, Asia and the Middle East were perpetrated by homegrown terrorists unaffiliated with al-Qaeda.

"Will his capture stop terrorism? No," Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), vice chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said in a recent interview. "But in terms of a message to the world, it's a huge message."

Despite a lack of progress, at CIA headquarters bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, are still the most wanted of the High Value Targets, referred to as "HVT 1 and 2." The CIA station in Kabul still offers a briefing to VIP visitors that declares: "We are here for the hunt!" -- a reminder that finding bin Laden is a top priority.

Gary Berntsen, the former CIA officer who led the first and last hunt for bin Laden at Tora Bora, in December 2001, says, "This could all end tomorrow." One unsolicited walk-in. One tribesman seeking to collect the $25 million reward. One courier who would rather his kids grow up in the United States. One dealmaker, "and this could all change," Berntsen said.
Bin Laden Still Alive

On the videotape obtained by the CIA, bin Laden is seen confidently instructing his party how to dig holes in the ground to lie in undetected at night. A bomb dropped by a U.S. aircraft can be seen exploding in the distance. "We were there last night," bin Laden says without much concern in his voice. He was in or headed toward Pakistan, counterterrorism officials think.

That was December 2001. Only two months later, Bush decided to pull out most of the special operations troops and their CIA counterparts in the paramilitary division that were leading the hunt for bin Laden in Afghanistan to prepare for war in Iraq, said Flynt L. Leverett, then an expert on the Middle East at the National Security Council.

"I was appalled when I learned about it," said Leverett, who has become an outspoken critic of the administration's counterterrorism policy. "I don't know of anyone who thought it was a good idea. It's very likely that bin Laden would be dead or in American custody if we hadn't done that."

Several officers confirmed that the number of special operations troops was reduced in March 2002.

White House spokeswoman Michele Davis said she would not comment on the specific allegation. "Military and intelligence units move routinely in and out," she said. "The intelligence and military community's hunt for bin Laden has been aggressive and constant since the attacks."

The Pakistani intelligence service, notoriously difficult to trust but also the service with the best access to al-Qaeda circles, is convinced bin Laden is alive because no one has ever intercepted or heard a message mourning his death. "Al-Qaeda will mourn his death and will retaliate in a big way. We are pretty sure Osama is alive," Pakistan's interior minister, Aftab Khan Sherpao, said in a recent interview with The Washington Post.

Pakistani intelligence officials also say they think bin Laden remains actively involved in al-Qaeda activities. They cite the interrogations of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a key planner of the bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998, and Abu-Faraj al-Libbi, who served as a communications conduit between bin Laden and senior al-Qaeda operatives until his capture last year.

Libbi and Ghailani, who was arrested in Pakistan in July 2004, were the last two people taken into custody to have met with and taken orders from Zawahiri and to hear directly from bin Laden. "Both Ghailani and Libbi were informed that Osama was well and alive and in the picture by none other than Zawahiri himself," one Pakistani intelligence official said.

Two Pakistani intelligence officials recently interviewed in Karachi said that the last time they received firsthand information on bin Laden was in April 2003, when an arrested al-Qaeda leader, Tawfiq bin Attash, disclosed having met him in the Khost province of Afghanistan three months earlier.

Attash, who helped plan the 2000 USS Cole bombing, told interrogators that the meeting took place in the Afghan mountains about two hours from the town of Khost.

By then, Pakistan was the United States' best bet for information after an infusion of funds from the U.S. intelligence community, particularly in the area of expensive NSA eavesdropping equipment.

"For technical intelligence ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) works hand in hand with the NSA," a senior Pakistani intelligence official said. "The U.S. assistance in building Pakistan's capabilities for technical intelligence since 9/11 is superb."

Since early 2002, the United States has stationed a small number of personnel from the NSA and the CIA near where bin Laden may be hiding. They are embedded with counterterrorism units of the Pakistan army's elite Special Services Group, according to senior Pakistani intelligence officials.

The NSA and other specialists collect imagery and electronic intercepts that their CIA counterparts then share with the Pakistani units in the tribal areas and with the province of Baluchistan to the south.

But even with sophisticated technology, the local geography presents formidable obstacles. In a land of dead-end valleys, high peaks and winding ridge lines, it is easy to hide within the miles of caves and deep ravines, or to live unnoticed in mud-walled compounds barely distinguishable from the surrounding terrain.

The Afghan-Pakistan border is about 1,500 miles. Pakistan deploys 70,000 troops there. Its army had never entered the area until October 2001, more than a half century after Pakistan's founding.
Pakistani Sources Lost

A Muslim country where many consider bin Laden a hero, Pakistan has grown increasingly reluctant to help the U.S. search. The army lost its best source of intelligence in 2004, after it began raids inside the tribal areas. Scouts with blood ties to the tribes ceased sharing information for fear of retaliation.

They had good reason. At least 23 senior anti-Taliban tribesmen have been assassinated in South and North Waziristan since May 2005. "Al-Qaeda footprints were found everywhere," Interior Minister Sherpao said in a recent interview. "They kidnapped and chopped off heads of at least seven of these pro-government tribesmen."

Pakistani and U.S. counterterrorism and military officials admit that Pakistan has now all but stopped looking for bin Laden. "The dirty little secret is, they have nothing, no operations, without the Paks," one former counterterrorism officer said.

Last week, Pakistan announced a truce with the Taliban that calls on the insurgent Afghan group to end armed attacks inside Pakistan and to stop crossing into Afghanistan to fight the government and international troops. The agreement also requires foreign militants to leave the tribal area of North Waziristan or take up a peaceable life there.

In Afghanistan, the hunt for bin Laden has been upstaged by the reemergence of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, and by Afghan infighting for control of territory and opium poppy cropland.

Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, who commanded U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2003, said he thinks bin Laden kept close to the border, not wandering far into either country. That belief is still current among military and intelligence analysts.

"We believe that he held to a pretty narrow range of within 15 kilometers of the border," said Vines, who now commands the XVIII Airborne Corps, "so that if the Pakistanis, for whatever reason, chose to do something to him, he could cross into Afghanistan and vice versa."

He said he thinks bin Laden's protection force "had a series of outposts with radios that could alert each other" if helicopters were coming or other troop movements were evident.

Pakistani military officials in Wana, the capital of South Waziristan, described bin Laden as having three rings of security, each ring unaware of the movements and identities of the other. Sometimes they communicated with specially marked flashlights. Sometimes they dressed as women to avoid detection by U.S. spy planes.

Pakistan will permit only small numbers of U.S. forces to operate with its troops at times and, because their role is so sensitive politically, it officially denies any U.S. presence. A frequent complaint from U.S. troops is that they have too little to do. The same complaint is also heard from U.S. forces in Afghanistan, where there were few targets to go after.

Although the hunt for bin Laden has depended to a large extent on technology, until recently unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) were in short supply, especially when the war in Iraq became a priority in 2003.

In July 2003, Vines said that U.S. forces under his command thought they were close to striking bin Laden, but had only one drone to send over three possible routes he might take. "A UAV was positioned on the route that was most likely, but he didn't go that way," Vines said. "We believed that we were within a half-hour of possibly getting him, but nothing materialized."

Faced with the most sophisticated technology in the world, bin Laden has gone decidedly low-tech. His 23 video or audiotapes in the last five years are thought to have been hand-carried to news outlets or nearby mail drops by a series of couriers who know nothing about the contents of their deliveries or the real identity of the sender, a simple method used by spies and drug traffickers for centuries.

"They are really good at operational security," said Ben Venzke, chief executive officer of IntelCenter, a private company that analyzes terrorist information and has obtained, analyzed and published all bin Laden's communiques. "They are very good at having enough cut-outs" to move videos into circulation without detection. "It's some of the simplest things to do."
Uncertain Command Structure

Bureaucratic battles slowed down the hunt for bin Laden for the first two or three years, according to officials in several agencies, with both the Pentagon and the CIA accusing each other of withholding information. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's sense of territoriality has become legendary, according to these officials.

In early November 2002, for example, a CIA drone armed with a Hellfire missile killed a top al-Qaeda leader traveling through the Yemeni desert. About a week later, Rumsfeld expressed anger that it was the CIA, not the Defense Department, that had carried out the successful strike.

"How did they get the intel?" he demanded of the intelligence and other military personnel in a high-level meeting, recalled one person knowledgeable about the meeting.

Gen. Michael V. Hayden, then director of the National Security Agency and technically part of the Defense Department, said he had given it to them.

"Why aren't you giving it to us?" Rumsfeld wanted to know.

Hayden, according to this source, told Rumsfeld that the information-sharing mechanism with the CIA was working well. Rumsfeld said it would have to stop.

A CIA spokesman said Hayden, now the CIA director, does not recall this conversation. Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said, "The notion that the department would do anything that would jeopardize the success of an operation to kill or capture bin Laden is ridiculous." The NSA continues to share intelligence with the CIA and the Defense Department.

At that time, Rumsfeld was putting in place his own aggressive plan, led by the U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), to dominate the hunt for bin Laden and other terrorists. The overall special operations budget has grown by 60 percent since 2003 to $8 billion in fiscal year 2007.

Rows and rows of temporary buildings sprang up on SOCOM's parking lots in Tampa as Rumsfeld refocused the mission of a small group of counterterrorism experts from long-term planning for the war on terrorism to manhunting. The group "went from 20 years to 24-hour crisis-mode operations," one former special operations officer said. "It went from planning to manhunting."

In 2004, Rumsfeld finally won the president's approval to put SOCOM in charge of the "Global War on Terrorism."

Today, however, no one person is in charge of the overall hunt for bin Laden with the authority to direct covert CIA operations to collect intelligence and to dispatch JSOC units. Some counterterrorism officials find this absurd. "There's nobody in the United States government whose job it is to find Osama bin Laden!" one frustrated counterterrorism official shouted. "Nobody!"

"We work by consensus," explained Brig. Gen. Robert L. Caslen Jr., who recently stepped down as deputy director of counterterrorism under the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "In order to find Osama bin Laden, certain departments will come together. . . . It's not that effective, or we'd find the guy, but in terms of advancing United States power for that mission, I think that process is effective."

But Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the JSOC commander since 2003, has become the de facto leader of the hunt for bin Laden and developed a good working relationship with the CIA to the extent that he recently was able to persuade the former station chief in Kabul to become his special assistant. He asks for targets from the CIA, and it tries to comply. "We serve the military," one intelligence officer said.

McChrystal's troops have shuttled between Afghanistan and Iraq, where they succeeded in killing al-Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and killed or captured dozens of his followers.

Under McChrystal, JSOC has improved its ability to quickly turn captured documents, computers and cellphones into leads and then to act upon them, while waiting for more analysis from CIA or SOCOM.

Industry experts and military officers say they are being aided by computer forensic field kits that let technicians retrieve information from surviving hard drives, cellphones and other electronic devices, as was the case in the Zarqawi strike.

McChrystal, who has commanded JSOC since 2003, now has the authority to go after bin Laden inside Pakistan without having to seek permission first, two U.S. officials said.

"The authority," one knowledgeable person said, "follows the target," meaning that if the target is bin Laden, the stakes are high enough for McChrystal to decide any action on his own. The understanding is that U.S. units will not enter Pakistan, except under extreme circumstances, and that Pakistan will deny giving them permission.

Such was the case in early January, when JSOC troops clandestinely entered the village of Saidgai, two officials familiar with the operation said, and Pakistan protested.

A week later, acting on what Pakistani intelligence officials said was information developed out of Libbi's interrogation, the CIA ordered a missile strike against a house in the village of Damadola, about 120 miles northwest of Islamabad, where Pakistani and American officials thought Zawahiri to be hiding.

The missile killed 13 civilians and several suspected terrorists. But Zawahiri was not among them. The strike "could have changed the destiny of the war on terror. Zawahiri was 100 percent sure to visit Damadola . . . but he disappeared at the last moment," one Pakistani intelligence official said.

Tens of thousands of Pakistanis staged an angry anti-American protest near Damadola, shouting, "Death to America!"

"Once again, we have lost track of Ayman al-Zawahiri," the Pakistani intelligence official said in a recent interview. "He keeps popping on television screens. It's miserable, but we don't know where he or his boss are hiding."

Contributing to this report were staff writers Bradley Graham, Thomas E. Ricks, Josh White, Griff Witte and Allan Lengel in Washington, Kamran Khan in Islamabad and John Lancaster in Wana, Pakistan, and staff researchers Julie Tate and Robert E. Thomason.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/09/AR2006090901105.html

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