In New York, a Turf War in the Battle Against Terrorism

By Dafna Linzer
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 22, 2008; A01

NEW YORK -- Not long after Sept. 11, 2001, as New York City began to build a counterterrorism effort to rival those of most nations, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly decided to put an end to the department's reliance on the FBI for classified data coming in from Washington.

Kelly, who was working to protect the city against another attack, wanted his own access to the stream of threat reporting concerning New York. The solution was to install a classified-information vault, like the FBI's, at the headquarters of the New York City Police Department.

Kelly made the request in the spring of 2002 and waited six years for an answer. After questions from The Washington Post for this story, the FBI said it has decided to approve the vault, a specially designed, guarded room known as a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility.

No other police department in the United States has responded to the threats of terrorism in quite the same way as the NYPD -- or clashed as sharply with the nation's primary counterterrorism agency, the FBI.

A thousand NYPD officers are assigned full time to operations drawing on the traditional missions of the CIA and the FBI. The department's liaison officers have been deployed from Nairobi to Singapore, while its networks of domestic informants stretch across the five boroughs of New York City.

In the past seven years, Kelly and his deputies have formed close working relationships with key intelligence agencies and the Department of Homeland Security. The NYPD has so many native foreign-language speakers that it lends translators to the Pentagon.

But the FBI, protective of turf and disdainful of local initiative, froze Kelly's department out of two New York-related terrorism investigations, officials say. When more than 100 top police detectives joined the FBI's joint terrorism task force, they were initially not permitted to read the bureau's case files.

"People have information, and they want to control information," Kelly said in an interview at police headquarters, just five blocks from where the World Trade Center once stood. "Controlling information is power, and they don't want to let it go -- it is as fundamental as that."

Working largely on its own, the NYPD has transformed an unmarked Brooklyn warehouse into a counterterrorism center with a national and global reach. In a second facility in Manhattan, the department runs undercover operations, recruits spies and houses intelligence analysts.

Inside police headquarters is a high-tech situation room where rows of computer monitors give off a moody blue light and floor-to-ceiling television screens beam images from around the world. It is staffed 24 hours a day with officers tracking local and international threats, as well as the movements of as many as a dozen NYPD detectives on foreign assignments.

During a recent interview there, Kelly and David Cohen, the deputy commissioner for intelligence, were interrupted by a liaison officer calling from the scene of a suicide bombing in Israel to report on a new technique employed by the bomber.

Successes include the arrest in 2004 of two Muslim men on charges of plotting to blow up a subway station near the Republican National Convention, and the arrest and deportation in 2003 of two Iranian men who were filming a subway track in Queens, Cohen said. The former probe, in which one of the men pleaded guilty and the other received a 30-year prison term, was based on a year of undercover work by one of Cohen's top detectives.

"Local law enforcement is best placed to gather ground-level intelligence," said Roger Cressey, the principal deputy to the counterterrorism chief at the National Security Council from 1999 to November 2001. "Only when you combine that with what you are getting at the federal level will you create a holistic picture of the threat. NYPD has done that and is a model for other major metropolitan cities to follow."

For Kelly, the vast and pricey operation fulfills a pledge to protect the city and provide its 8 million residents with a sense of security. Kelly, a former Marine and a Customs Service chief in the Clinton administration, is serving his second stint as commissioner and often chides himself and the city for not being more aggressive after the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

He said he is not prepared to rely entirely on others for the city's protection. "We just see ourselves very much at risk here, the top of the target list," he said.
Shut Out of Local Cases

In March 2003, working from information gleaned by the CIA, NYPD detectives and FBI agents investigated and then arrested a Pakistani national named Uzair Paracha. Investigators said Paracha had been working with several senior al-Qaeda suspects, including Majid Khan -- whose family lives in the Baltimore area -- on plots that included blowing up gas stations on the East Coast.

The detectives and agents learned enough to tip off the CIA to the whereabouts of Paracha's father, a businessman and alleged al-Qaeda financier who investigators said had met with Osama bin Laden. Four months after the younger Paracha's arrest, the CIA picked up Saifullah Paracha in Thailand and then secretly rendered him to a CIA prison at Bagram air base in Afghanistan.

NYPD detectives had previously been to Bagram, with Pentagon permission, to interview detainees connected to New York. But the Paracha case was treated differently. For the first time, the FBI blocked detectives from joining a bureau interrogator who was traveling to Bagram to interview the elder Paracha.

The FBI agent in charge in New York, Joe Billy, said the interrogator would brief detectives on her discoveries, but she went on extended leave after her return, according to a former NYPD official. As a result, whatever detail was extracted about the Paracha family's contacts or intentions in New York went unreported to the police, the official said.

"We wanted to send our lead detective on the case to Bagram with the FBI agent to talk to Paracha," said James Waters, a deputy commissioner and the senior ranking NYPD officer in the joint task force. But "the FBI just didn't want the NYPD there."

The ban on NYPD visits to Bagram, where hundreds of prisoners were detained by the CIA and the U.S. military, lasted two years and outraged New York detectives working on the task force, two officials recalled in interviews. By the time access was restored, Paracha had been moved to the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. New York detectives interviewed him there, years after his arrest.

FBI spokesman John Miller said: "There were a number of issues and agencies involved in the Paracha case. We worked through it, and we're all fine now."

Just as the Paracha investigation was getting underway, FBI agents in Ohio were secretly questioning a Kashmiri-born truck driver named Iyman Faris. On orders from Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the orchestrator of al-Qaeda's attacks against the United States, Faris plotted to help bring down the Brooklyn Bridge, prosecutors later alleged.

After two scouting trips, Faris reported back to Mohammed that security in New York was too tight to carry out the attack, prosecutors said in court documents. In May 2003, two months after Faris was secretly detained, then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft held a news conference to announce his indictment for allegedly planning an al-Qaeda attack in New York.

The NYPD was stunned -- the department had not been told about the plot or Faris's visits to New York. Although Faris was cooperating with federal agents in Ohio, the FBI in New York was not following up on his contacts in the city, where he stayed during his visits and where he might have tried to buy explosives.

For months afterward, top NYPD officials -- Michael Sheehan, an ex-Army Ranger who had served as the State Department's top counterterrorism official, and Cohen, a former deputy director of the CIA -- sought access to Faris so detectives could question him about his trips. They also wanted Faris's computer, phone and address book. They were turned away.

The Justice Department moved swiftly against Faris, and he was sentenced just six months after his arrest. By the time the NYPD finally questioned him, he was serving a 20-year sentence, claiming that his guilty plea had been an error and refusing to cooperate. "We'll never even know what we missed, what leads we might have pulled," said a senior NYPD official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid creating tensions with FBI colleagues.

Asked for comment, FBI spokesman Miller said: "We realigned the way headquarters communicates with the field offices on terrorism matters, and it's unlikely that glitch could occur today."
NYPD's Global Reach

On a whiteboard in Cohen's office at One Police Plaza is a list of locations that currently trouble him. None of them are in the United States, and few of them are noted publicly by intelligence officials or counterterrorism experts in Washington.

Working with detectives posted overseas, undercover officers in New York and informants, Cohen has identified towns in South Africa, Yemen, Egypt, Jordan and Morocco that he wants NYPD officers to know. If they arrest anyone who has been to those towns, he wants to be told.

Cohen, the only person to have led the CIA's clandestine service and its analytical division, still drinks coffee out of a CIA mug. He said his work with the NYPD has given him a sense of professional freedom and accomplishment that is hard to achieve in the bureaucratized intelligence world of Washington.

A fifth of Cohen's staff was born overseas. He has 70 Arabic speakers working on counterterrorism cases, and lends some to the Defense Department and foreign intelligence agencies.

The NYPD's foreign contacts provoked early FBI complaints, particularly when the department embedded homicide detectives with Britain's Scotland Yard, Israel's Shin Bet and other overseas security services.

"The FBI had essentially a monopoly on counterterrorism work nationally, and all of a sudden this local police department shows up and is beginning to send persons around the world, is developing a system of listening posts and trip wires, and to use the most benign word I can find, they were miffed," Cohen said.

But, recently, officials in the FBI and the NYPD said the bitterness that plagued their first years after the 2001 attacks has faded. The NYPD has successfully obtained $100 million in federal funds for its counterterrorism effort.

Both departments credit the improvement to a pivotal meeting, 2 1/2 years ago, between Kelly and FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III that coincided with a change in the FBI's top staff in New York.

Mark Mershan, the FBI's assistant director in charge of New York, said he and Mueller discussed whether the NYPD's practice of posting detectives overseas was harming the bureau, and decided it was not.

Mershan said senior officials at the FBI opposed giving the NYPD its own Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) because it would have allowed the department to "bypass the FBI and establish its own links with the intelligence community. Clearly that has happened anyway, so I have called David Cohen and told him that we will be pleased to certify the SCIF."

Mershan emphasized that the FBI's task force has become highly cooperative in the past several years. Last month, he signed travel orders for a bureau agent and an NYPD detective to go to the Horn of Africa to investigate a new lead in the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings. "They are going together, as partners," he said.

Staff researcher Julie Tate in Washington contributed to this report.

Dual U.S.-Russia Citizens Face Spy Charges

Secrets Sought From Energy Firm, FSB Alleges; Tie to British Council Cited

By Peter Finn
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, March 21, 2008; A13

MOSCOW, March 20 -- Two brothers who hold dual U.S.-Russian citizenship have been charged with industrial espionage after they allegedly attempted to obtain classified information for foreign energy companies, the domestic successor of the KGB said Thursday.

Ilya Zaslavsky, who worked for a Russian venture of the British oil giant BP, and his brother Alexander were arrested March 12, according to the Federal Security Service, known as the FSB.

The two were detained as they met with a Russian employee of a major Russian energy company in an alleged effort to procure secret material, the FSB told the Russian news media.

The service described Alexander Zaslavsky as an employee of the British Council, a culture and arts organization that is financed by the British government, but the organization said he is not and is simply a member of a British Council alumni club for graduates of British universities.

The Russian government recently forced the council to close its regional offices, saying it was operating illegally. Leading politicians, including President-elect Dmitry Medvedev, have accused the organization of being a front for spies.

The FSB said the brothers were formally charged Tuesday but remained free on a signed pledge not to leave Moscow.

On Wednesday, Russian investigators searched the offices of TNK-BP, a joint venture between BP and three Russian billionaires.

The FSB said investigators found "material evidence" of espionage during the search, including "copies of documents issued by Russian state and executive agencies, reports, analytical materials concerning mineral development, which, according to the preliminary information, comprised commercial secrets."

TNK-BP rejected any suggestion it was involved in espionage. "The company has never countenanced or supported any action designed to contradict or damage the interests of Russia," a company statement said.

The FSB also said it found business cards from employees of "foreign defense departments and the Central Intelligence Agency," according to the Russian news agency Interfax.

A spokesman for the FSB declined to discuss the case; it was unclear whether the FSB meant that the business card was from someone it merely suspected was a CIA operative or whether it was saying that CIA employees were handing out business cards identifying themselves as such.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. Embassy declined to comment on the arrests, saying that the mission, as a matter of policy, does not discuss consular affairs of a legal nature.

The probe has led to speculation here that it may be linked to an effort to force TNK-BP's Russian partners to sell their stake to Gazprom, the state-controlled energy company. The company was forced to agree to sell its share in a major gas field to Gazprom last June, but completion of the deal has stalled several times over the final price.

After a Decade at War With West, Al-Qaeda Still Impervious to Spies

By Craig Whitlock
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, March 20, 2008; A01

BARCELONA -- A decade after al-Qaeda issued a global declaration of war against America, U.S. spy agencies have had little luck recruiting well-placed informants and are finding the upper reaches of the network tougher to penetrate than the Kremlin during the Cold War, according to U.S. and European intelligence officials.

Some counterterrorism officials say their agencies missed early opportunities to attack the network from within. Relying on Cold War tactics such as cash rewards for tips failed to take into account the religious motivations of Islamist radicals and produced few results.

Since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, officials said, al-Qaeda has tightened its internal security at the top, placing an even greater emphasis on personal and tribal loyalties to determine who can gain access to its leaders.

Alain Chouet, former chief of the security intelligence service of the DGSE, France's foreign spy agency, said it can take years for informants to burrow their way into radical Islamist networks. Even if they're successful at first, he said, new al-Qaeda members are often "highly disposable" -- prime candidates for suicide missions.

He said it might be too late for Western intelligence agencies, having missed earlier chances, to redouble efforts to infiltrate the network. "I think you cannot penetrate such a movement now," he said.

At the same time, those agencies have made their task harder by blowing the cover of some promising informants and mishandling others.

In January, Spanish police arrested 14 men in Barcelona who they suspected were preparing to bomb subways in cities across Europe. Investigators disclosed in court documents that the arrests had been prompted by a Pakistani informant working for French intelligence.

The revelation infuriated French officials, who were forced to withdraw the informant -- a rare example of an agent who had successfully infiltrated training camps in Pakistan. Spanish authorities expressed regret but said they had no choice; after they failed to find bombs or much other evidence during the arrests, the case rested largely on the informant's word.

"Suicide attacks don't allow for a lot of margin to make a decision," said Vicente Gonzales Mota, the lead prosecutor. "Acting after an attack would be a tragedy."

Ten years ago, on Feb. 23, 1998, Osama bin Laden issued a fatwa declaring it "the individual duty of every Muslim" to kill Americans and their allies around the world. Looking back, some U.S. and European intelligence officials said their governments had underestimated the enemy and thought they could rely on old methods to destabilize al-Qaeda.

During the Cold War, for example, the CIA had enjoyed some success in recruiting KGB moles and persuading Soviet officials to defect. The agency was also able to buy off Afghan warlords with suitcases of cash, persuading them to fight Soviet forces in the 1980s and to turn on the Taliban in 2001. A similar approach has worked, to a limited extent, against insurgents in Iraq: An informant's tip led directly to the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of the group al-Qaeda in Iraq, in 2006.

But al-Qaeda's core organization in Pakistan and Afghanistan has so far proved impervious to damaging leaks.

Part of the problem is that the CIA and FBI had very few Arabic-speaking officers who could handle or recruit informants. Instead of making it a priority to develop human sources, the agencies assumed they could rely on spy satellites and other high-tech tools.

Arab and Pakistani spy agencies, preoccupied with domestic politics and other threats, weren't much help either, officials said.

From 1992 until November 2004, "we worked side by side with the Egyptians, the Jordanians -- the very best Arab intelligence services -- and they didn't recruit a single person who could report on al-Qaeda," said Michael Scheuer, who in the 1990s led the CIA unit dedicated to finding bin Laden. He left agency in November 2004.

After Sept. 11, U.S. officials tried another tried-and-true tactic: offering huge rewards for information leading to the capture or death of al-Qaeda leaders, including $25 million apiece for bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

That lure, however, has proved largely ineffective in Pakistan and Afghanistan. No rewards have been publicly announced under the program in either country since Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the organizer of the Sept. 11 attacks, was captured in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, in March 2003.

Scheuer said money and other traditional inducements are unlikely to persuade Islamist radicals to betray a religious cause to which they are fervently committed. While people operating on the fringes of al-Qaeda -- arms suppliers, narcotics dealers and rival extremists -- might be tempted, he said, the chances are remote with people higher up the chain of command.

"We're still kind of stuck in the Cold War approach to this," Scheuer said. "This is a much more difficult target than the Soviets were. These people are true believers. They're living according to their beliefs, not in the lap of luxury."

Walled Off Against Spies

Since Sept. 11, 2001, the FBI and European law enforcement agencies have had some luck recruiting informants in their own countries, enabling them to break up alleged terrorist cells in Miami, New York, London and Copenhagen.

But al-Qaeda's central leadership in Pakistan has remained immune, in part by further tightening its already sophisticated internal security apparatus, current and former intelligence officials said.

Its recruiters cautiously seek out new operatives at training camps run by other radical groups, such as the Taliban. Those chosen are given specific assignments and rarely come into contact with high-ranking al-Qaeda figures. They must also pass extensive background checks, which usually require personal references from movement sympathizers, officials said.

Tribal or family connections are paramount, and certain categories of people automatically come under suspicion, officials said. For years, al-Qaeda avoided Algerian recruits, they added, because it was assumed that Algerian terrorist groups had been infiltrated by that country's security services.

"We're facing a very disciplined organization," said Louis Caprioli, former chief of international counterterrorism for France's domestic security service and now a consultant for GEOS, a global security firm. "These people have well understood they are the target of informants, so it makes it all the more difficult to penetrate them."

U.S. and European spy agencies have avoided sending their own undercover officers to training camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan, officials said.

Few operatives, they said, have the language skills, personal backgrounds and knowledge of radical Islam that would enable them to talk their way into the camps. Plus, the political consequences of having a spy unmasked by al-Qaeda would be enormous, they added.

Beyond that, undercover officers usually require an extensive support network that would be hard to sustain for the several years it might take to worm into the al-Qaeda hierarchy, said a former senior British intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Undercover operatives might also find themselves ordered by al-Qaeda to organize a suicide attack or kill someone. "Which you can't let them do," the former British official said. "You have an obligation to prevent it from happening."

Attempting to wiggle out of such an assignment would only raise suspicions. Al-Qaeda people are "very canny about this sort of thing," the former official said. "They have this preemptive and fairly brutal approach. If you're suspected of being an informant or agent, you're dead."

Recruiting outsiders to serve as spies has its own challenges. The United States and European countries have restrictions on hiring informants with shady pasts. In 1995, for instance, the CIA adopted guidelines that require special approval to recruit paid sources who have been accused of human rights abuses or serious crimes.

Partnering with such people, moreover, can backfire.

Last month, authorities in Casablanca arrested a Belgian-Moroccan citizen, Abdelkader Belliraj, and charged him with plotting terrorist acts. Investigators said he worked closely with al-Qaeda and had met in Afghanistan with Zawahiri, the network's deputy leader, in 2001. During his interrogation, according to Moroccan officials, Belliraj confessed to involvement in six unsolved murders in Belgium in the late 1980s.

The case exploded into a scandal a few days later when newspapers in Brussels reported that Belliraj had served as a paid informant for Belgium's domestic intelligence service, even as his network plotted assassinations and robbed armored cars in Europe.

'Inside the Jihad'

But counterterrorism officials maintain the hope that one day they will succeed in placing someone inside al-Qaeda. The network does have a vulnerability, they note: It remains dependent on a fresh flow of outsiders to replenish its ranks, and agents could be introduced into that flow.

On March 6, Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, an al-Qaeda commander, posted an audio recording on the Internet in which he advertised for recruits to fight NATO and U.S. troops in Afghanistan. The network has a particular need for engineers and doctors, he said, adding, "Your brothers in Afghanistan are waiting for you."

Al-Qaeda has also shown that it will accept newcomers from unusual backgrounds.

Adam Gadahn, a 29-year-old Californian with Jewish roots, moved to Pakistan after he converted to Islam a decade ago. He joined al-Qaeda a few years later and now serves as a propaganda adviser, in direct contact with Zawahiri and other top leaders. In 2006, he was indicted for treason by a U.S. grand jury.

In the mid-1990s, a Moroccan-born informant working for France's foreign intelligence service infiltrated two training camps in Afghanistan and forged a personal relationship with several high-ranking al-Qaeda figures.

The informant -- a wine-loving, tobacco-smoking Muslim with the gift of the gab -- found his way to the camps simply by showing up in Pakistan and asking around, according to a book he published in 2006 titled "Inside the Jihad."

Writing under the pseudonym Omar Nasiri, the informant said his French handlers had discouraged him from undertaking the mission because they doubted he could succeed.

"I was a gift that walked in the door, but they always underestimated me," Nasiri said in a recent interview. "I told them, 'You know, guys, I'm not doing even 10 percent of what I can do.' And it made them mad when I said that. But they knew I was right."

He was placed in a witness protection program in 2000. European intelligence officials confirmed that he had worked as an informant but would not discuss details.

In the interview, Nasiri said it would be very difficult, but not impossible, for paid informants to infiltrate al-Qaeda in South Asia today. "Every moment of my existence was a test, every little answer, every little movement," he recalled of his time in the camps. "You had to show complete devotion to the cause. If someone does all this to blend in, even if it is deception, the risk is that sooner or later he will believe it."

Special correspondent Cristina Mateo-Yanguas in Madrid contributed to this report.

C.I.A. Secretly Held Qaeda Suspect, Officials Say

By MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON — The Central Intelligence Agency secretly detained a suspected member of Al Qaeda for at least six months beginning last summer as part of a program in which C.I.A. officers have been authorized by President Bush to use harsh interrogation techniques, American officials said Friday.

The suspect, Muhammad Rahim, is the first Qaeda prisoner in nearly a year who intelligence officials have acknowledged has been in C.I.A. detention. The C.I.A. emptied its secret prisons in the fall of 2006, when it moved 14 prisoners to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, but made clear that the facilities could be used in the future to house high-level terrorism suspects.

Mr. Bush has defended the use of the secret prisons as a vital tool in American counterterrorism efforts, and last July he signed an executive order that formally reiterated the C.I.A.’s authority to use interrogation techniques more coercive than those permitted by the Pentagon.

Mr. Bush used his veto power last weekend to block legislation that would have prohibited the agency from using the techniques, and this week the House of Representatives failed to override the veto.

Military and intelligence officials said that Mr. Rahim was transferred earlier this week to the military prison at Guantánamo Bay. In a message to agency employees on Friday, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the C.I.A. director, said Mr. Rahim had been put into the C.I.A. program because of “his past and the continuing threat he presented to American interests.”

Intelligence officials would not say whether the C.I.A. had used any of what it calls an approved list of “enhanced” interrogation techniques against Mr. Rahim during his months in secret detention.

“This detention, like others, was conducted in accordance with U.S. law,” said Paul Gimigliano, a C.I.A. spokesman. He declined to say whether the C.I.A. currently had custody of any other prisoners.

Government officials described Mr. Rahim, an Afghan who has fought battles for two decades, as a Qaeda planner and facilitator who at times in recent years had been a translator for Osama bin Laden.

They said he was captured and detained by local forces last summer in a country they would not name before being transferred to C.I.A. custody. Pakistani newspapers reported last summer that Pakistani operatives arrested Mr. Rahim in Lahore in August.

Before Mr. Rahim, the last prisoner the C.I.A. acknowledged it had detained was Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, an Iraqi Kurd held by the agency for six months before being transferred to Guantánamo last April.

In his message to C.I.A. employees on Friday, General Hayden called Mr. Rahim a “tough, seasoned jihadist” with “high-level contacts” who at times had served as a personal translator for Mr. bin Laden. The message said that in 2001, Mr. Rahim helped prepare the Afghan cave complex of Tora Bora as a hideout for Qaeda fighters fleeing the American-led offensive.

According to an American counterterrorism official, Mr. Rahim is in his 40s and is a native of Nangarhar Province in Afghanistan, a rugged mountain territory that has long been a hive of jihadi activity.

The counterterrorism official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said that Mr. Rahim had attended radical madrasas, or religious schools, in Pakistan.

The Bush administration last month formally charged six Qaeda operatives said to have been involved in plotting the Sept. 11 attacks. Five of the six detainees, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the attacks, had been in C.I.A. custody until September 2006, when they were among the 14 prisoners moved to Guantánamo.

Military prosecutors have decided to seek the death penalty against the six men, government officials have said. During a speech on Friday in London, Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey said he hoped that the six men would not receive the death penalty. If they were to be executed, he said, “they would see themselves as martyrs.”

Also on Friday, a lawyer representing Majid Khan, who had spent more than three years in the C.I.A.’s secret prisons, briefed Senate Intelligence Committee staff members on her client’s description of his treatment there as torture. The lawyer, Gitanjali Gutierrez of the Center for Constitutional Rights, is the first lawyer to speak to Congress after meeting with a prisoner who was in the C.I.A. program.

The 90-minute meeting was closed, and Ms. Gutierrez said that she could not reveal what Mr. Khan had said about his treatment because the government declared prisoners’ statements to be classified.

Ms. Gutierrez said her testimony was aimed at giving Congress independent information on the C.I.A. program, which she said “is operating criminally, shamefully and dangerously.” C.I.A. officials say all of the agency’s interrogation techniques were lawful at the time they were used.

Scott Shane contributed reporting.

Pentagon Cites Tapes Showing Interrogations

By MARK MAZZETTI and SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON — The Defense Department is conducting an extensive review of the videotaping of interrogations at military facilities from Iraq to Guantánamo Bay, and so far it has identified nearly 50 tapes, including one that showed what a military spokesman described as the forcible gagging of a terrorism suspect.

The Pentagon review was begun in late January after the Central Intelligence Agency acknowledged that it had destroyed its own videotapes of harsh interrogations conducted by C.I.A. officers, an action that is now the subject of criminal and Congressional investigations.

The review was intended in part to establish clearer rules for any videotaping of interrogations, Defense officials said. But they acknowledged that it had been complicated by inconsistent taping practices in the past, as well as uncertain policies for when tapes could be destroyed or must be preserved.

The officials said it appeared that only a small fraction of the tens of thousands of interrogations worldwide since 2001 had been recorded.

The officials said the nearly 50 tapes they identified documented interrogations of two terrorism suspects, Jose Padilla and Ali al-Marri, and were made at a Navy detention site in Charleston, S.C., where the two men have been held.

The initial findings of the Pentagon review represent the first official acknowledgment that military interrogators had videotaped some sessions with detainees and could widen the controversy over the treatment of prisoners in American custody. A Pentagon spokesman, Geoff Morrell, cautioned that the review was incomplete, and a spokesman for the Defense Intelligence Agency, Don Black, said that interrogation videotapes had been routinely destroyed if they were judged to have no continuing value.

The only tape the officials described is of Mr. Marri, a citizen of Qatar who was arrested in December 2001 while in college in Illinois and moved five years ago to the jail after being designated an “enemy combatant.” Government officials say they believe he was an operative for Al Qaeda who was plotting attacks.

Two government officials said that the tape showed Mr. Marri being manhandled by his interrogators, but did not show waterboarding or any other treatment approaching what they believed could be classified as torture. According to one Defense Department official, the interrogators dispensing the rough treatment on the tape were F.B.I. agents.

An F.B.I. spokesman declined to comment, citing a continuing review of detention practices that is being carried out by the Department of Justice’s inspector general.

Mr. Black, the spokesman for the Defense Intelligence Agency, said its director, Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples, had reviewed the tape and was satisfied that Mr. Marri’s treatment was acceptable.

He said that Mr. Marri was chanting loudly, disrupting his interrogation, and that interrogators used force to put duct tape on his mouth, while Mr. Marri resisted. Mr. Black said most of the videos showing Mr. Marri’s interrogations had been destroyed. The government has never charged Mr. Marri, but because of his designation as an enemy combatant, the Pentagon is allowed to hold him indefinitely.

The scale of detention and interrogation by the military, with tens of thousands of prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, dwarfs that of the C.I.A., which has held fewer than 100 high-level Qaeda suspects. The C.I.A. has acknowledged videotaping only two terrorism suspects, in 2002, and military officials said that the review, ordered in late January by James R. Clapper, the Pentagon’s senior intelligence official, had similarly found that only a small number of detainee interrogations had been videotaped.

“This is not a widespread practice,” said Mr. Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary. He said that it was up to individual military commanders whether to tape interrogations and that the videotapes were often used as the basis of written intelligence reports. In addition to the existing interrogation videotapes, there are existing recordings that show interactions between military guards and terrorism suspects, including detainees’ forcible removal from cells at Guantánamo, military officials said.

Images of rough treatment of detainees is a delicate subject for the Pentagon. Soldiers’ snapshots of the abusive treatment of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq set off a firestorm and led to prison terms for a number of military personnel.

Congress imposed a ban in 2005 on all harsh interrogation methods by the military but left a loophole for the C.I.A. Last month, Congress voted to extend the ban to the C.I.A., but President Bush vetoed the bill.

The C.I.A. acknowledged in December that in 2005 it had destroyed the only interrogation videotapes that its officers had made; the tapes showed two detainees, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al- Rahim al-Nashiri.

Lawyers for Mr. Marri, who have challenged his imprisonment in court, sought access to any tapes or other records of his interrogations, but in 2006 a federal judge in South Carolina said the government did not have to produce any tapes. That decision is being appealed.

Jonathan Hafetz, one of the lawyers, said Mr. Marri had heard guards describe “a cabinet full of tapes” showing his interrogations, but had never had independent confirmation that such tapes existed. Mr. Marri has alleged that earlier in his imprisonment he was deprived of sleep, isolated and exposed to prolonged cold.

Mr. Hafetz said he planned to file papers in court on Thursday describing the psychological harm done to Mr. Marri. “Locking someone up for five years without charges is a disgrace and a betrayal of American and constitutional values,” he said.

The difficulties in the Pentagon’s review can be glimpsed in a seven-page court filing last month by Rear Adm. Mark H. Buzby, the military commander at Guantánamo Bay.

Admiral Buzby’s report describes an array of digital video recorders used to capture “activities” — it does not specify whether interrogations are included — in at least four subcamps at Guantánamo. But the systems automatically recorded over older material when they reached capacity, he wrote.

In some cases, Admiral Buzby wrote, “We suspect that the recording devices contain recorded data but we are unable technologically to confirm whether data remains.”

U.N. Says Taliban Are Impeding Aid

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — A tenth of Afghanistan is off limits to aid workers because of attacks by Taliban insurgents, hindering the delivery of assistance to vulnerable Afghans, a United Nations report says.

The assessment echoes a finding by the director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell, who told a Senate committee last month that Taliban insurgents controlled about 10 percent of the country.

Afghanistan’s intelligence chief, Amrullah Saleh, said in response this month that only 8 of Afghanistan’s 364 districts were not under government control.

But the United Nations report, released in New York on Monday, said 36 districts — including most of those in the east, southeast and south — are largely inaccessible to Afghan officials and aid workers.

“Despite tactical successes by national and international military forces, the antigovernment elements are far from defeated,” the report said.

It said violence last year was at the highest level since an offensive led by the United States toppled the Taliban in late 2001.

There were 160 suicide attacks and 68 thwarted attempts in 2007, compared with 123 suicide attacks and 17 failed attempts in 2006, it said.

Afghanistan had more than 8,000 conflict-related deaths last year, including 1,500 civilian deaths, the United Nations said.

U.N. Alleges Nuclear Work By Iran's Civilian Scientists

By Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 11, 2008; A01

Iranian nuclear engineer Mohsen Fakhrizadeh lectures weekly on physics at Tehran's Imam Hossein University. Yet for more than a decade, according to documents attracting interest among Western governments, he also ran secret programs aimed at acquiring sensitive nuclear technology for his government.

Experts at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have repeatedly invited Fakhrizadeh to tea and a chat about Iran's nuclear work. But for two years, the government in Tehran has barred any contact with the scientist, who U.S. officials say recently moved to a new lab in a heavily guarded compound also off-limits to U.N. inspectors.

The exact nature of his research -- past and present -- remains a mystery, as does the work of other key Iranian scientists whose names appear in documents detailing what U.N. officials say is a years-long, clandestine effort to expand the country's nuclear capability. The documents, which were provided to the IAEA, the U.N. nuclear agency, in recent months by two countries other than the United States, partly match information in a stolen Iranian laptop turned over by Washington.

IAEA officials say these documents identify Fakhrizadeh and other civilian scientists as central figures in a secret nuclear research program that operated as recently as 2003. So far, however, Iran is refusing to shed light on their work or allow U.N. officials to question them. After being presented with copies of some of the new documents, Tehran denied that some of the scientists exist.

"When the allegations are raised, Iran simply dismisses them," said a Western diplomatic official familiar with the agency's dealings with Iran. "It insists that the documents are mostly fakes."

The standoff over interview requests has cast a shadow over a five-year U.N. effort to excavate the truth about Iran's nuclear past. In that search, Western anxieties have been compounded by Tehran's reluctance to clarify the history of its interest in technologies that could be used for either nuclear power or weapons.

A similar set of uncertainties helped provoke the U.S. war with Iraq, which the Bush administration justified partly by positing that Baghdad was deliberately concealing nuclear weapons research from U.N. inspectors. The outcome of that invasion suggests caution, however, since U.S. troops were unable to find any convincing evidence of banned weapons work, and deposed Iraqi officials said they had been secretive to conceal from regional opponents that they had ended such work, not continued it.

In Iran's case, U.N. officials say, the new evidence does not prove that the scientists carried out plans to build a nuclear device, but shows that Fakhrizadeh and other scientists struggled to master associated technologies. Several of the scientists, including Fakhrizadeh, appear to have moved freely between military and civilian research venues.

The documents purport to show advanced research into a variety of nuclear-related technologies, including uranium ore processing, warhead modification and the precision-firing of high explosives of the type used to detonate a nuclear device. Other documents point to attempts by civilian scientists to purchase sensitive equipment of the kind Iran would eventually use in its uranium enrichment plants.

Some of the new documents came from inside Iran, according to European officials familiar with them. None specifically include the word "nuclear," and IAEA officials say there is no evidence that any of the plans advanced beyond the paper stage.

The National Council of Resistance of Iran, a major opposition group that claims to have informants inside Iran's government, contends in materials provided to The Washington Post that nuclear weapons design work persists and has migrated to universities and schools. But U.S. and U.N. officials say they cannot corroborate the group's claim.

Instead, U.S. intelligence officials have said that Iran worked on weapons design in the past but halted the research in 2003. But government officials and weapons experts acknowledge concerns over Iran's refusal to answer questions or explain what key scientists are doing now.

"It's not the first time we've seen individuals who seem to wear white hats but are working on very different projects behind the scenes," said Leonard Spector, a former Energy Department nonproliferation official who is now deputy director of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. He noted that other countries, particularly Pakistan, have used civilian scientists as cover for secret nuclear research.

Although the IAEA has not publicly described the contents of the new documents, the U.N. Security Council adopted new sanctions against Iran last week, in part because of what European leaders described as Tehran's "abysmal" performance in answering the IAEA's questions about past nuclear research.

"As long as Iran's choice remains one of non-cooperation, we for our part will remain determined to demonstrate the costs and consequences of that choice," British Ambassador Simon Smith said in a statement last week on behalf of Britain, Germany and France, which have taken the lead in trying to persuade Iran to stop making enriched uranium, a critical ingredient used in both nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants.

Calls placed to Iran's U.N. mission in New York were not returned.

Fakhrizadeh is prominent in several of the documents, according to two officials who have seen them. A personnel chart listed him as the senior authority overseeing all the research projects. Another paper, purportedly signed by Fakhrizadeh, establishes spending guidelines for the research programs, while a third sets rules for communication among scientists, suggesting, for example, that researchers avoid putting their names on correspondence that might eventually become public, according to a Europe-based diplomat who viewed the documents.

Fakhrizadeh, 47, who became a Revolutionary Guard Corps member after the overthrow of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in 1979, is a former leader of the Physics Research Center, which U.N. officials say was heavily involved in drawing up plans and acquiring parts for Iran's first uranium enrichment plant. He was among eight Iranians placed under international travel and financial restrictions under the terms of a U.N. resolution adopted last year because of his alleged ties to "nuclear or ballistic missile" research, U.N. records show.

According to the Iranian opposition group, in addition to holding the university post, Fakhrizadeh recently was appointed the director of a new Center for Readiness and New Defense Technology, which is in Tehran and is under direct military command. Several of his deputies have been reassigned to nuclear departments at ostensibly civilian schools such as Shahid Beheshti University, also in Tehran.

"Fakhrizadeh is a key person, but he is not the only player," said Mohammad Mohaddessin, chairman of the opposition group's foreign affairs committee.

Analysis: DHS stages cyberwar exercise

Published: March 10, 2008 at 11:28 AM

By SHAUN WATERMAN
UPI Homeland and National Security Editor
WASHINGTON, March 10 (UPI) -- Officials from 18 federal agencies, nine states, four foreign governments and more than three dozen private companies will take part in a cyberwar exercise staged by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security this week.

The war game, codenamed Cyber Storm II, will run Monday to Thursday, based at U.S. Secret Service headquarters in Washington. It is the second DHS biannual cyber-exercise, designed to test the ability of federal agencies and their partners in state, local and foreign governments and the private sector to respond to and recover from cyberattacks on their computer networks.

"The goal of Cyber Storm II is to examine the processes, procedures, tools, and organizational response to a multi-sector coordinated attack through, and on, the global cyber infrastructure," says a fact sheet from the department.

Details of the planning for the event are closely held, in part to avoid tipping off participants. The fact sheet says only that the exercise -- the culmination of more than 18 months of planning led by DHS' National Cyber Security Division -- will simulate a series of coordinated physical and cyberattacks on IT and communications systems and chemical, rail and pipeline infrastructure.

The attacker is not identified, but has "a specific political and economic agenda," says the fact sheet. In the last Cyber Storm exercise in 2006, the enemy was an anarchistic coalition of "hacktivists" -- politically motivated hackers -- called the Worldwide Anti-Globalization Alliance, joined by a number of "independent actors."

In the scenario, the attackers penetrated state health records' databases, attacked Federal Aviation Administration systems and defaced newspaper sites.

"Key elements of the hacker attack plan were to strike at trusted cyber systems that were used to control both physical infrastructures and digital commerce and services," says the DHS' after-action report, released in September 2006. "The attackers focused on maximizing economic harm and fomenting general distrust of big business and government by disrupting services and misleading news media and other information outlets."

The choice of adversary -- which the report stressed "was neither a forecast of any particular threats … currently existing nor an expression of any specific concerns" -- raised some eyebrows. Among U.S. military planners, nation states, and in particular China, are considered the actually existing adversaries with the most significant capabilities to launch attacks on, or through, the Internet.

One report, by Washington Post blogger Brian Krebs, said Cyber Storm II will feature a nation-state attacker, but a DHS official familiar with the planning said only that this was "a possibility."

The official added that the adversary was "more sophisticated" than in 2006. The scenario was "designed to examine the response to some of the threats that are out there in the real world," he said.

Having a nation-state adversary would make sense, former DHS preparedness chief George Foresman told UPI.

"The top candidates for adversaries would be states, terrorist groups and criminal enterprises" as they were in the real world, said Foresman, who was only involved in the very early stages of planning the event.

As in 2006, the attacks this week will be simulated on special systems set up for the exercise "and will not impact any live networks," says the fact sheet.

Participants in the exercise, which consists of a series of detailed scenarios unfolding according to a strict timetable, will learn of developments via more than 1,700 pre-scripted "injects" in the form of phone calls or e-mails from exercise managers, or through a mock TV news channel set up for the event.

But some of what players will learn from the channel will be bogus, former DHS official Jerry Dixon told Krebs' Security Fix blog.

"They'll inject some red herring attacks and information to throw intelligence analysts and companies off the trail of the real attackers," said Dixon, who helped plan the exercise.

The $6 million event will involve thousands of participants across the world, including from departments of the Australian, British, Canadian and New Zealand governments, and from U.S. agencies including the Department of Defense, CIA, National Security Agency and FBI.

Foresman said the foreign countries participating, all signatories to the 1947 UKUSA intelligence-sharing accords with the United States, were chosen because "there is a shared basis by which you can deal with classified information."

In Australia, which has ramped up its level of participation since the last exercise in 2006, officials from the federal police, Attorney General's Department and AUSCERT -- the Australian national Computer Emergency Response Team -- will all take part, Attorney General Robert McClelland told a news conference Friday.

In New Zealand, participating agencies include the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Ministry of Health, the Customs Service and the New Zealand Defense Forces, according to ComputerWorld.co.nz.

Companies taking part include ANZ National Bank, Cisco Systems Inc., which owns much U.S. Internet infrastructure, Dow Chemical, IBM, computer security firm McAfee, software giant Microsoft and Verizon.

International and private-sector participation is essential, said Foresman. "A cyberattack against the United States with real-world effects inside our borders can be launched from anywhere in the world," he said, adding that the attacks would target or utilize infrastructure owned by the private sector.

Cyber-warfare is "inherently international and inherently private (sector)," he said.

The 2006 after-action report said Cyber Storm I was designed to test basic elements of communication and decision-making in a complex environment of interdependent systems and multiple stakeholders. "Effective response to the scenario was designed to require rapid communications and de-confliction of critical information between players in all sectors and organizations, as well as strategic integration of information to gain accurate situational awareness," it said.

"It's all about the information," Foresman said, adding that "the ability to communicate highly technical information in real-time" between government officials without a common vocabulary had been a major challenge identified by Cyber Storm I.

"Collaboration between the government and the private sector" was something planners continued to wrestle with. "We haven't mastered that piece yet," he said.

Senate panel critiques prewar claims by White House

'Nobody is going to be happy' with the long-delayed report's mixed verdict on whether the Bush administration misused intelligence to argue for war with Iraq, an official says.
By Greg Miller
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

10:59 PM PDT, March 9, 2008

WASHINGTON — After an acrimonious investigation that spanned four years, the Senate Intelligence Committee is preparing to release a detailed critique of the Bush administration's claims in the buildup to war with Iraq, congressional officials said.

The long-delayed document catalogs dozens of prewar assertions by President Bush and other administration officials that proved to be wildly inaccurate about Iraq's alleged stockpiles of banned weapons and pursuit of nuclear arms.

But officials say the report reaches a mixed verdict on the key question of whether the White House misused intelligence to make the case for war.

The document criticizes White House officials for making assertions that failed to reflect disagreements or uncertainties in the underlying intelligence on Iraq, officials said. But the report acknowledges that many claims were consistent with intelligence assessments in circulation at the time.

Because of the nuanced nature of the conclusions, one congressional official familiar with the document said: "The left is not going to be happy. The right is not going to be happy. Nobody is going to be happy."

The report helps culminate a series of investigations that the committee has carried out in connection with the war in Iraq. The "statements report" was stalled repeatedly, in part because of the complexity of the task but also because of partisan disagreements among senators.

The findings are likely to be a source of political discomfort for the White House by reviving the controversy over the Bush administration's case for war. That issue has largely faded from view on Capitol Hill at a time when the White House is sparring with Congress over other intelligence-related issues: CIA interrogation tactics and the scope of the government's wiretapping authority.

The report could also become political fodder for the presidential race, which has focused on the differing positions of the remaining candidates on the decision to invade Iraq.

Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee had initially pushed for the report to focus not only on the prewar claims of the Bush administration but also on statements made by members of Congress, including Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), who is vying for her party's presidential nomination.

"The statements report is clearly the most political of all the reports the committee has done," said a senior committee aide. "It's inherently problematic to try to climb inside the heads [of policymakers] and know what they knew at the time."

Officials said the report is divided into categories that focus on prewar claims about Iraq's alleged chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs, as well as its supposed ties to Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups.

Each section includes a catalog of as many as 20 prewar claims, as well as a summary conclusion on whether the assertions were generally warranted.

"The whole purpose of this exercise is to answer questions about whether the administration was honest in its use of intelligence when it made the case for war," said a senior aide to Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

In many cases, statements that were later proven wrong -- such as President Bush's assertion in September 2002 that Iraq "possesses biological and chemical weapons" -- were largely in line with U.S. intelligence assessments at the time.

Prewar assertions about Iraq's nuclear program were more problematic because they were supported by some intelligence assessments but not others.

"They were substantiated," a congressional official said, "but didn't convey the disagreements within the intelligence community."

In August 2002, for example, Vice President Dick Cheney said in a speech that "Saddam [Hussein] has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons." But by that time, the State Department's intelligence bureau was challenging the assumption that Iraq's nuclear program had been reactivated.

White House suggestions that Iraq had ties to Al Qaeda were at odds with intelligence assessments that voiced skepticism about such a relationship.

The report marks the culmination of a multipart investigation that the committee launched in February 2004. The only remaining task is an investigation into the activities of a Pentagon office led by Douglas J. Feith, then undersecretary of Defense for policy and one of the architects of the Iraq war.

Congressional officials said the panel is nearing completion of a report on that subject that will focus largely on a secret post-Sept. 11 meeting between two Defense Department officials who worked for Feith and an Iranian exile, Manucher Ghorbanifar, who had been a middleman in the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s and was regarded by the CIA as unreliable.

The report focusing on the Bush administration's prewar statements is set to be delivered to members of the committee this week, officials said. But it could be weeks away from public release because members may push for changes, and much of the material cited in the report has yet to be approved for declassification by U.S. intelligence officials.

Dissatisfied with the scope of the report, Republicans on the panel are expected to attach a section outlining their objections and calling attention to prewar claims by prominent Democrats, including Clinton.

In an October 2002 speech on the Senate floor, Clinton said that if left unchecked, Hussein "will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons."

greg.miller@latimes.com

Ex-Defense Official Assails Colleagues Over Run-Up to War

By Thomas E. Ricks and Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, March 9, 2008; A01

In the first insider account of Pentagon decision-making on Iraq, one of the key architects of the war blasts former secretary of state Colin Powell, the CIA, retired Gen. Tommy R. Franks and former Iraq occupation chief L. Paul Bremer for mishandling the run-up to the invasion and the subsequent occupation of the country.

Douglas J. Feith, in a massive score-settling work, portrays an intelligence community and a State Department that repeatedly undermined plans he developed as undersecretary of defense for policy and conspired to undercut President Bush's policies.

Among the disclosures made by Feith in "War and Decision," scheduled for release next month by HarperCollins, is Bush's declaration, at a Dec. 18, 2002, National Security Council meeting, that "war is inevitable." The statement came weeks before U.N. weapons inspectors reported their initial findings on Iraq and months before Bush delivered an ultimatum to Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Feith, who says he took notes at the meeting, registered it as a "momentous comment."

Although he acknowledges "serious errors" in intelligence, policy and operational plans surrounding the invasion, Feith blames them on others outside the Pentagon and notes that "even the best planning" cannot avoid all problems in wartime. While he says the decision to invade was correct, he judges that the task of creating a viable and stable Iraqi government was poorly executed and remains "grimly incomplete."

Powell, Feith argues, allowed himself to be publicly portrayed as a dove, but while Powell "downplayed" the degree and urgency of Iraq's threat, he never expressed opposition to the invasion. Bremer, meanwhile, is said to have done more harm than good in Iraq. Feith also accuses Franks of being uninterested in postwar planning, and writes that Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security adviser during most of Feith's time in office, failed in her primary task of coordinating policy on the war.

He describes Bush as having wrestled seriously with difficult problems but as being ill-served by subordinates including Powell and Rice. Feith depicts former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld with almost complete admiration, questioning only his rough handling of subordinates.

Feith left the administration in mid-2005 and is now on the Georgetown University faculty. He was the subject of an investigation early last year by the Pentagon's inspector general for his office's secret prewar intelligence assessments outlining strong ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda. His reports, deemed "inconsistent" with those of the intelligence community, were judged "inappropriate" but not illegal.

In his book, Feith defends the intelligence activities on grounds that the CIA was "politicizing" intelligence by ignoring evidence in its own reports of ties between Hussein and international terrorists.

A copy of the nearly 900-page manuscript -- midway through the editing process -- was obtained by The Washington Post. Reached at his home yesterday evening, Feith declined to discuss its contents.

Despite its bulk, the book does not address some of the basic facts of the war, such as the widespread skepticism inside the top of the U.S. military about invading Iraq, with some generals arguing that doing so would distract attention from the war against global terrorists. Nor does Feith touch on the assertion of his fellow war architect, then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz, that Iraq would be able to pay for its reconstruction with oil revenue.

Feith says surprisingly little new about the conduct of the war on the ground, instead focusing on the policy battles in Washington and asserting that most accounts thus far have been written from the point of view of the State Department and the CIA. He attacks those criticisms as "fear-mongering" that serves the interests of certain officials and journalists.

Powell and his deputy, Richard L. Armitage, are described as repeatedly working behind the scenes to undercut sound proposals by Feith and other Pentagon officials and to undermine decisions Bush had made. Feith criticizes Powell's failure to persuade France and Germany to support U.S. war policy at the United Nations, and to gain Turkey's approval for U.S. troop movements in its territory, as failures of effort and commitment. Feith also asks what would have happened if Powell had argued with Bush against overthrowing Hussein. Powell might have persuaded the president, Feith writes, or, if not, could have resigned.

Feith's disdain for Armitage, with whom he sparred at NSC deputies meetings, is palpable. Powell's deputy, he says, "reflexively opposed any idea originating at the Pentagon."

In an introduction to the manuscript, Feith writes that he has tried to avoid polemic and seeks only to contribute to the historical record. He argues, as have other Iraq hawks such as Richard Perle -- a former Reagan administration Pentagon official and outside Rumsfeld adviser -- that the administration's careful approach to Iraq, including a swift transition to Iraqi control, was prevented from succeeding by ill-informed or disloyal subordinates.

The idea to which Feith appears most attached, and to which he repeatedly returns in the book, is the formation of an Iraqi Interim Authority. Feith's office drew up a plan for the body -- to be made up of U.S.-appointed Iraqis who would share some decision-making with U.S. occupation forces -- in the months before the invasion. But while he says that Bush approved it, he charges that Bremer refused to implement it.

The key mistake that the United States made in Iraq, Feith asserts, was "the mishandling of the political transition." The good that Bremer did, he concludes, "was outweighed by the harm caused by the fact of occupation."

In an interview yesterday, Bremer disputed Feith's narrative, saying he believes that Bush gave up on the idea of a quick transition shortly after Baghdad fell and widespread looting broke out in April 2003.

"By the time I sat down with the president on May 3, it was clear that he wasn't thinking about a short occupation," Bremer said. After consulting his records, Bremer also said that at a White House meeting on May 8, Vice President Cheney said, "We are not yet at the point where people we want to emerge can yet emerge." He said that Feith omits that comment. On May 22, he added, the president wrote to him, saying that he knew "our work will take time."

Others have criticized Feith's plan as relying too heavily on Iraqi exile politicians, including Ahmed Chalabi. Feith says that he considered Chalabi one of the most astute and democratically minded Iraqis but that he had no special brief for him. Instead, he charges that the State Department, the CIA and the military's Central Command were pathologically opposed to the exiles and to Chalabi in particular.

Feith continually denounces the CIA, accusing it of producing poor intelligence, intruding on the formulation of policy, and then using leaks to the media to defend itself and attack its bureaucratic opponents. Most notably, he charges that intelligence officials ignored and refused to investigate possible links between al-Qaeda and Hussein's government.

He reports, as others have, that Franks, who commanded the U.S. invasion force, treated him disrespectfully, sometimes rolling his eyes when Feith asked a question. But he indicates that Franks's disregard grew partly out of the general's lack of interest in planning for the postwar period. When Feith tried to talk to him about one aspect of that, Franks walked around the table, leaned over and said, "Doug, I don't have time for this [expletive]." He concludes that Franks failed in part because of advice he received from his advisers at the CIA and the State Department.

In contrast with the reputation of Gen. Richard B. Myers, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for pliability, Feith reports that Myers grew irate at what he saw as administration attempts to get around the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners following the 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. Myers, he writes, threatened to bypass Rumsfeld and take his concerns directly to Bush, but calmed down after being told that the administration would distinguish between legitimate prisoners of war and al-Qaeda and Taliban detainees.

In summarizing his view of what went wrong in Iraq, Feith writes that it was a mistake for the administration to rely so heavily on intelligence reports of Hussein's alleged stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons and a nuclear weapons program, not only because they turned out to be wrong but also because secret information was not necessary to understand the threat Hussein posed.

Hussein's history of aggression and disregard of U.N. resolutions, his past use of weapons of mass destruction and the fact that he was "a bloodthirsty megalomaniac" were enough, Feith maintains.

He blames both the CIA and Powell, who outlined the weapons case in a February 2003 speech at the United Nations, for overemphasizing the threat. But Feith appears to ignore the crucial role that statements from Cheney and Rice, about the imminence of "mushroom clouds" emanating from Iraqi nuclear weapons, played in the case the administration made for war.

U.S. role in Philippine raid questioned

A Philippine general says American intelligence guided his troops in a hunt for militants, but eight villagers were slain.
By Paul Watson
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

March 9, 2008

IPIL, PHILIPPINES — In a hut on stilts with paper-thin walls of bamboo strips, an off-duty Philippine soldier was asleep alongside four members of his family when the crackle of assault rifle fire and shudder of grenade blasts awakened them early last month.

Within minutes, Cpl. Ibnun Wahid, 35, was dead, along with seven other villagers, including two children, age 4 and 9, two teenagers and two women, one of them pregnant. All were shot at close range, witnesses said in interviews and sworn affidavits gathered by the provincial governor's staff to support expected criminal charges.

Like many on Sulu island, provincial Gov. Abdusakur Tan believes the dead were victims of coldblooded killings by government troops. The independent Commission on Human Rights of the Philippines has called for charges to be filed against troops and officers involved in gathering intelligence for and planning the operation, as well those directly responsible for the deaths.

Gen. Ruben Rafael, commander of Philippine troops on the island, also known as Jolo, said in an interview that a U.S. military spy plane circling high above this seaside village provided the intelligence that led to the Feb. 4 assault. He said the crew of the P-3 Orion turboprop, loaded with a sophisticated array of surveillance equipment, pinpointed the village as a stronghold and arms depot for the radical Islamist Abu Sayyaf movement. Government soldiers were ambushed in the area in August, Rafael said.

"The intelligence was very excellent because they have identified the houses, the men with the guns and all the armed men who were occupying these houses," the general said. Rafael said the U.S. military also warned his troops during a firefight that dozens of militants were approaching to counterattack -- information he said was also gathered from the spy plane.

"Because of that, we had to fly our choppers and they were able to prevent these people from reinforcing" insurgents already in the village, the general said. "So that was very crucial support given to us by the U.S."

Maj. Eric Walker, commander of U.S. forces on the island, declined an interview request, and the U.S. military spokesman for the region referred questions to the U.S. Embassy in Manila.

Without specifically confirming any flights over Ipil, U.S. Embassy spokeswoman Karen Schinnerer said that "an aerial reconnaissance vehicle" gathered intelligence over Sulu "at the request of, and in coordination with," Philippine forces.

No witnesses have said there were U.S. forces on the ground when the killings occurred, and Schinnerer said that none were. She also said that intelligence gathering does not violate a prohibition against U.S. forces engaging in combat here.

The human rights commission report recommending criminal and administrative proceedings against troops and officers involved in the operation was written before a Times reporter informed the panel of Rafael's account of U.S. surveillance. The commission gets its mandate from the Philippine Constitution.

Asked whether the U.S. military would assist Philippine authorities in any prosecution arising from the assault, Schinnerer said, "It would be inappropriate to speculate on what remains a hypothetical situation." But, she added, "as a general rule, the U.S. would provide such support to the [Philippine government] if asked."

Under the Philippine Constitution, the hundreds of U.S. military advisors in the southern Philippines are not allowed to engage in combat while helping train local forces in the hunt for militants with Abu Sayyaf and the Indonesia-based Jemaah Islamiah.Both groups are allied with Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network.

The guerrilla force that Rafael said the Orion spotted would have been unusually large for Sulu. No insurgents were captured, wounded or killed approaching the village, according to the military's accounts. A small arms cache, including a .45-caliber handgun, an M-16 assault rifle and some rifle grenades were seized in the raid, Rafael said.

Two soldiers were killed and five wounded in the Ipil operation, statistics the army cites as proof of a battle with militants. Villagers contend that the soldiers were killed in their own crossfire. Commission investigators found that was a possibility, but suggested Wahid may have opened fire on the troops as they swarmed around his house.

The Philippine military said an internal investigation had cleared its troops of any wrongdoing, which many here see as a whitewash.

While condemning the findings, attorney Jose Manuel Mamauag, regional director of the Commission on Human Rights, said he was glad the military had issued its conclusions, allowing the commission to take the next step.

"Definitely, we will file charges against the soldiers," Mamauag said.

Sulu Gov. Tan, taking a rare stand against the powerful military, has directed provincial officials and police to build a separate criminal case against as yet unidentified soldiers and commanders involved in the Ipil assault.

Counterinsurgency missions on Sulu have been held up as a model in the battle against militants because a combination of aid programs and military force has brought relative peace to the island. But insurgents are staging a comeback, and clashes have escalated over the last year.

With kidnappings and decapitations fairly common, tourists rarely risk coming anymore. Yet anger and suspicion toward Philippine forces and U.S. advisors also run deep here, even though, Rafael said, U.S. aid for projects including new schools, roads and drainage is expected to total more than $12 million over the next 18 months.

Ipil is a small village on Sulu's southern shore, accessible only by water. Most of its people earn a meager living farming seaweed that yields agar, used as a laxative as well as a gelatin substitute and thickener for soups, desserts and pharmaceuticals.

The Philippine military says a dense network of seaside mangroves here are prime Abu Sayyaf turf and that the assault, which included U.S.-trained Special Forces, was an effort to rout them. Since the troops didn't identify themselves, Wahid, a former rebel who joined the army as part of a 1996 peace pact, feared they were bandits or insurgents, relatives said.

He drew his licensed .45-caliber handgun from its holster and went out on the rickety bamboo porch, ready to defend his family, which insists he did not fire it. When he saw fellow soldiers, he put the gun down, raised his hands and shouted, "Papa Alpha, Papa Alpha," signaling he was in the Philippine army, said his wife, Rawina Lahim Wahid, 24.

Within minutes, Wahid, his wife and parents, and 9-year-old nephew, Nurjimer Lahim, were ordered to lie face-down on the white sand, according to his widow and parents, Udam Lahim, 70, and Andiyang Lahing, 65.

Soldiers tied Wahid's hands behind his back. Then one leveled an assault rifle at his head, and pulled the trigger, his widow said. The weapon jammed. The soldier recocked the M-16 and fired a bullet into Wahid's head, said family members, who were later released.

On the other side of the small, southern Philippine village, 17 members of three families were fleeing the gunfire in a long canoe. They headed straight toward a blocking unit of Philippine soldiers on the edge of a thick mangrove swamp.

From a few yards away, the soldiers opened fire, and kept shooting, ignoring the screaming villagers' pleas, witnesses said.

"It was not an accident," said Saida Failan, 21, whose 4-year-old daughter, Marisa, was shot dead. "We were shouting, 'Stop firing, we are civilians!' and children were crying."

When the shooting stopped, six people in the boat were dead. Villagers also found the body of a local councilor, Eldisim Lahim, shot dead outside his home.

Soon after sunrise, Philippine troops prepared to move the bodies by boat, but Rawina Wahid refused to let them take her husband's corpse without her. "I was afraid they were going to throw him in the ocean, so there would be no evidence," she said.

She said she joined them and was taken to a naval vessel offshore, which she was unable to identify. Rafael said it was a Philippine military "support ship."

As she stepped onto the boat, she said, she saw four foreign men in American camouflage fatigues, each armed with an assault rifle, standing next to a second deck railing.

"They were smiling," she said. "They were happy."

She said she had no way of knowing what the men, who she assumed were Americans, were doing on the ship, or whether they were aware of the horrors she and her neighbors had suffered.

"That's not important, as long as justice is done," she said.

paul.watson@latimes.com

The Unstudied Art of Interrogation

By SCOTT SHANE

Washington

HOW do you get a terrorist to talk? Despite the questioning of tens of thousands of captives in Iraq and Afghanistan in the last six years, and a high-decibel political battle over torture, experts say there has been little serious research to answer that crucial question.

The Bush administration has yet to fill the void, instead getting enmeshed in a defense of waterboarding — which the Central Intelligence Agency says it has not used in five years but which critics have seized on as a powerful symbol of how not to conduct war. And Congress, for its part, has skipped over the question in passing a bill (knowing that it would be vetoed by President Bush) that bans harsh interrogations but requires the C.I.A. to use only the tactics listed in the Army’s playbook.

Certainly the debate is rich in emotion, with each side claiming the moral heights: You approve torture! You’re coddling terrorists! But the arguments have been scant on science to back them up.

“We don’t have any idea — other than anecdote or moral philosophy — what really works,” said Benjamin Wittes of the Brookings Institution, author of “Law and the Long War: The Future of Justice in the Age of Terror,” set to be published in June.

There is the Army Field Manual 2-22.3, officially titled “Human Intelligence Collector Operations.” It eschews coercion and instead offers general advice on behavior (“People tend to want to talk when they are under stress and respond to kindness and understanding during trying circumstances”). It offers 19 approaches to interrogation that Congress wants the C.I.A. to stick to, including Mutt and Jeff, or good cop, bad cop; We Know All, in which the interrogator pretends merely to be confirming details of a story he knows already; Rapid-Fire Questioning, to produce contradictions that can then be challenged; Ego Up, in which flattery produces a bond; and False Flag, in which an American interrogator poses as one from another nation. The principles are familiar to anyone who’s watched enough police procedurals.

But the manual’s inherited wisdom has not been updated to reflect decades of corporate analysis of how to influence consumers. Behavioral economists have dissected decisionmaking, and academic psychologists have studied political persuasion, but their lessons have not informed the interrogator’s art either. Nor has there been a systematic effort to analyze the successes and blunders of the interrogations carried out since the attacks of 2001.

Steven M. Kleinman, a colonel in the Air Force reserve and a veteran interrogator in Iraq and elsewhere, says the government spends billions on spy satellites but almost nothing on studying interrogation. This is true, he said, despite a broad consensus that interrogation might be the best source of information on an elusive, low-tech, stateless foe like Al Qaeda.

“We need to bring scientific standards for interrogation to the same level of sophistication that we bring to satellite imagery and intercepting communications,” said Mr. Kleinman, who has studied the American interrogation programs used for high-level German and Japanese prisoners during World War II, which he judges superior to those developed since 2001.

Both Mr. Wittes and Mr. Kleinman occupy a middle ground of sorts in the standoff between Congress and the White House. They are outspoken opponents of the harshest methods used by the C.I.A. in 2002 and 2003. But they also argue that the Congressional bill imposing the Army’s methods would make bad policy in the long run by stifling creativity and deterring serious study of a critical subject.

Mr. Kleinman said he envisioned a new intelligence agency or subagency devoted solely to interrogation — sponsoring research, conducting training and building a team of sophisticated interrogators with linguistic and psychological skills. He speaks of creating a high-level interrogation center in the United States where settings could be customized for a particular suspect, Hollywood-style, “whether it’s a Bedouin tent or a suite at the Waldorf.”

“The overriding principle should be: Make it as easy as possible for someone to cooperate with you,” he said. “If we want someone to re-create in minute detail something that happened three years ago, how can we help them remember?”

Mr. Kleinman said such a center would be wired for video and audio recording, in part to assure that interrogators follow the rules but also to let analysts with various kinds of expertise return to the suspect’s exact words and body language.

In a quiet effort to shift public talk from the past (waterboarding) to the future, a panel of experts, named by the Intelligence Science Board, which advises the intelligence agencies, has been pressing the administration to begin research on identifying the most effective, humane ways of questioning terrorist suspects. Robert A. Fein, a Harvard psychologist who heads the group, made such a presentation to 70 officials at the White House in January. According to people who have heard his talks, Dr. Fein, who declined to comment for this article, is concerned that even the word “interrogation” is tainted by torture. He uses the term “intelligence interviewing” for the skills he promotes.

All the talk of comfortable conditions, helping terrorists remember and preserving sessions on videotape stands in almost comic contrast to the C.I.A.’s approach in 2002, which resorted to exposure to heat and cold, bombardment with noise, sleep deprivation and waterboarding.

A C.I.A. spokesman, Paul Gimigliano, said the agency’s methods “have proven to be very effective, producing information that has led to the capture of terrorists and the disruption of their operations.” All the methods were lawful, he said, noting that the program “has evolved over time.”

The argument against the use of pain or physical torture is practical as well as moral. From the Spanish Inquisition to Pol Pot’s Cambodia, brutal interrogations have been used to force confessions, often without regard to truth.

The government stopped sponsoring interrogation research in the 1970s, after Congressional investigators uncovered gruesome accounts of “mind control” experiments with drugs like LSD. In the polarized atmosphere of the waterboarding debate, it remains to be seen whether Congress or the public will endorse a carefully regulated program to find new ways of persuading people to give up their secrets.

Bush vetoes bill outlawing CIA waterboarding

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W. Bush on Saturday vetoed legislation passed by Congress that would have banned the CIA from using waterboarding and other controversial interrogation techniques.

Lawmakers included the anti-torture measure in a broader bill authorizing U.S. intelligence activities.

"Because the danger remains, we need to ensure our intelligence officials have all the tools they need to stop the terrorists," Bush said in his weekly radio address. He added that the vetoed legislation "would diminish these vital tools."

The House of Representatives approved the legislation in December and the Senate passed it in February despite White House warnings it would be vetoed.

CIA Director Michael Hayden told Congress last month that government interrogators used waterboarding on three suspects captured after the September 11 attacks.

The simulated drowning technique has been condemned by many members of Congress, human rights groups and other countries as a form of illegal torture.

The U.S. Army Field Manual prohibits waterboarding and seven other interrogation methods and the bill would have aligned CIA practices with the military's.

In his remarks, Bush did not specifically mention waterboarding.

But he said: "The bill Congress sent me would not simply ban one particular interrogation method, as some have implied. Instead, it would eliminate all the alternative procedures we've developed to question the world's most dangerous and violent terrorists."

It is unlikely that Democrats, the majority party in Congress, could muster enough votes to overturn Bush's veto. The bill passed the House and Senate on partisan votes, short of the support needed to reverse the president.

(Reporting by Richard Cowan; Editing by Xavier Briand)

Colombian Rebels' Ties to Chávez Come Into Focus

Computer Files Found In Raid Detail Efforts To Gain Arms, Money

By Juan Forero
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, March 7, 2008; A11

BOGOTA, Colombia, March 6 -- A trove of correspondence recovered during a raid on a guerrilla camp is providing a rare window into how Colombia's largest rebel group has drawn closer to Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez in an effort to acquire money, arms and the political recognition the organization craves.

If authentic, the documents would make clear for the first time that Chávez's affinity for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, has translated into more than rhetoric on its behalf.

The documents were discovered Saturday on three laptop computers and two hard drives after Colombian forces bombed a rebel camp 2,000 feet inside Ecuador, killing 24 guerrillas, including Luis Edgar Devia, a member of the FARC's ruling secretariat who used the name Raúl Reyes.

The correspondence appears to show that Venezuelan officials are eager to work with rebel commanders to isolate Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, an ally of the Bush administration. The documents also include letters to Chávez from FARC leader Manuel Marulanda.

There are no missives from Chávez, however, and on Wednesday the Venezuelan president called Colombia's characterization of his ties to the FARC a lie.

"I deny it. I have to deny it as absolutely false," he said.

The e-mails and letters that form the brunt of the correspondence recount meetings with Chávez, top Venezuelan intelligence officials and other emissaries sent by the government in Caracas to convene secretly with FARC commanders. Colombia's National Police released 15 documents culled from the computers and hard drives this week. Another 30 documents, provided on two CDs to The Washington Post by senior government officials, paint a fuller picture of the rebels' ties with Chávez.

"What's important is for your government and the FARC to have ample relations as friends and good neighbors for the future of our two people," Marulanda said in a letter dated Sept. 22.

Full of Colombian slang and revolutionary lingo, the documents appear to be briefing papers that analyze the FARC's relationship with Chávez and discuss options available to the guerrilla group. They suggest that commanders see a clear benefit to building a relationship with the Venezuelan leader. Many letters are signed by Devia, who was the group's public face.

The chief of Colombia's National Police, Brig. Gen. Óscar Naranjo, said the government has asked a team from Interpol to examine the laptops and hard drives to confirm that they belonged to FARC commanders. That multinational team is to work in Bogota on Tuesday.

"We have nothing to hide," Naranjo said by phone Thursday afternoon. "We're entirely open to any technical review."

The raid on the camp has triggered a regional crisis, with Ecuador, Venezuela and now Nicaragua -- a close ally of Chávez's government -- breaking off relations with Colombia. The Colombian government has responded with an aggressive diplomatic offensive in Latin America and Europe to highlight what officials often have said privately but are now saying publicly -- that Chávez supports a terrorist group that has killed thousands of Colombians.

"What's true is we're going to use all the political and judicial resources on a situation we consider grave, the support of President Chávez to the Colombian guerrillas," Vice President Francisco Santos said Thursday during a trip to Brussels, according to the Reuters news service. "It's a clear support, a support that's in clear evidence in the documents pulled from Raúl Reyes's computer."

In several letters, FARC commanders discuss funding received from Venezuela, both in cash and through partnerships in which the rebels would sell gasoline in Colombia and launder money in Venezuela. There are also messages about a drug-trafficking deal, though they do not implicate Venezuelan officials, and talk of the acquisition of armaments.

"We're talking arms and money, gasoline and political space," said one intelligence official who is sifting through the material and who spoke on condition of anonymity.

FARC commanders refer to "300" they are to receive from Venezuela -- which intelligence officials here believe signifies $300 million. The commanders do not elaborate on what "300" means, but there are missives in which they discuss ensuring that it makes it into their hands safely.

The man overseeing the operation, according to the documents, is "Angel," who Colombian authorities believe is Chávez.

"A bird in your hand is worth more than 100 in the air, say those who know the business," Devia wrote in late 2007. Jorge Briceño, considered the FARC's top military strategist, asked in a Jan. 14 note to other commanders, "Who, where, when and how will we receive the dollars and store them?"

In another letter, addressed to the rest of the FARC secretariat, Devia reports that a leading Colombian senator has received money for social programs in Colombia. "If that's correct, we can't dismiss getting ourselves 250 million for the Plan," he said, referring to the group's efforts to isolate the Uribe government and strengthen rebel forces.

The Colombian strike against the FARC has outraged Chávez, who has called it "a war crime," while raising the specter of war with Uribe's government.

In recent weeks, Chávez has drawn closer to the FARC and more antagonistic toward Uribe's government and its benefactor, the United States. Colombia's government characterizes the FARC as little more than a murderous band of drug traffickers, though the group retains some support in rural hamlets where the state has almost no presence. The United States and Europe have listed the group as a terrorist organization.

In January, to rousing approval in Venezuela's Congress, Chávez said the FARC was not a terrorist group but an insurgent force that had a "project that is respected here." The FARC's stated goal, well-known to most Colombians and also made clear in several of the recovered documents, is to topple Uribe's government.

Chávez has met in Caracas with Iván Márquez, another member of the FARC's inner circle, and other guerrillas to negotiate the release of six Colombian hostages. He has recently been working to liberate others.

In the documents, the guerrillas see Chávez's involvement as benefiting their cause of being removed from international lists of terrorist groups. "He wins for his geopolitical objectives, and we, without a doubt, will win recognition as a belligerent force," Marulanda told other commanders on Sept. 22.

FARC commanders also see an alliance with Chávez as crucial to the strengthening of their military position and the possibility of "consolidating" along the loosely patrolled, 1,300-mile border between the two countries. "He's permitting us to advance together on the Bolivarian project," Briceño, the military strategist, told the secretariat in a Nov. 22 note, referring to Chávez's self-styled revolution.

Much of the correspondence deals with the so-called humanitarian accord, swapping four dozen high-profile hostages for hundreds of FARC members held in Colombian jails. In the correspondence, FARC commanders discuss Chávez's proposals to win the release of hostages, as well as a plan to move the hostages and 500 jailed guerrillas to Venezuela. The documents show Chávez as eager to meet with guerrillas and win the release of hostages.

"He also asked about Ingrid," Márquez said to the secretariat Dec. 23, referring to Ingrid Betancourt, the best-known hostage. "But we told him that if we did that, we'd be left without any chips."

In the documents, particularly in letters to Chávez, the guerrillas praise the Venezuelan president's rule and frequently appear to address many of the issues he considers important. Foremost is opposing capitalism and U.S. influence in Colombia.

In his Sept. 22 letter to Chávez, Marulanda said the United States has a 3,000-man military contingent in Colombia.

"What do you think of that, Mr. President?" he asked.

Staff writer Karen DeYoung in Washington contributed to this report.

GAO Seeks Review of Spy Agencies

The Outgoing Chief Auditor Makes a Pitch on Capitol Hill

By Paul Kane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 7, 2008; A15

As he leaves his post as the nation's top auditor, David M. Walker is again asking Congress to give the Government Accountability Office the power to review the finances of the CIA and other intelligence agencies.

Walker, whose 10-year term as comptroller general concludes Wednesday, is supporting legislation that would give the GAO access to the last major area of the federal government not subject to its audits and investigations.

With some support on Capitol Hill, Walker said he is fighting powerful legislative patrons of intelligence agencies, especially the CIA, who have resisted examinations of how taxpayer dollars are spent.

"Everybody's for accountability in Washington until they're the ones subjected to it," Walker said in an interview. "There are a lot of forces that are vested in the status quo."

The GAO, Congress's investigative arm, has the power to review the finances and management of most government agencies. But the Justice Department issued a ruling in the early 1990s that restricted oversight of the CIA to House and Senate select committees on intelligence.

That authority has been a sensitive topic since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when information sharing between the CIA and law enforcement agencies that might have revealed the plot was bungled. More recently, the corruption scandal involving former congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-Calif.), who used his influence to steer intelligence contracts in return for bribes, has added to calls for more oversight.

Prompted by recommendations from the 9/11 Commission, the House and Senate in 2004 reorganized the way their committees oversee intelligence and homeland security issues. But the lawmakers have never pushed to allow the GAO to examine CIA spending. They have questioned whether the GAO is too closely aligned with the congressional majority and whether its investigators have the proper clearances to handle classified intelligence matters.

"You can't just sort of wander in and do this stuff like you're investigating FAA weather stations," said Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), chairman of the Senate intelligence committee. Rockefeller called GAO investigations of the intelligence world a "rather bad idea" and suggested his committee should have more oversight authority, including the power to appropriate funds to intelligence agencies.

"The GAO does precisely what the majority [in Congress] asks them to do. It follows what the majority asks," said Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), who chaired the intelligence committee before Rockefeller. "I don't want any further politicization of intelligence."

Walker, however, said he is not asking to look into the "sources and methods" used by spy agencies. Instead, he wants the GAO to look into "basic management transformation challenges" such as how the CIA recruits and retains top talent and, more important, how the agency has allocated its multibillion-dollar budget.

The GAO is already empowered to examine the finances of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and it has highlighted many examples of waste, fraud and abuse. Walker said. "I have little doubt that those challenges exist within the intelligence community," he said.

The CIA disagrees. Mark Mansfield, a spokesman for the agency, said that in 2007, CIA officers testified at more than 60 hearings on Capitol Hill, gave more than 500 briefings, delivered 100 "congressional notifications about our most sensitive programs" and answered more than 1,200 on-the-record questions posed by members of Congress.

"That's hardly a culture of rejecting oversight. It's a recognition of the importance of it," Mansfield said. He said CIA critics have no basis for alleging that the agency is littered with waste.

Sen. Daniel K. Akaka (D-Hawaii), sponsor of the bill that would give the GAO access to the intelligence community, said there is no way to know about problems unless the GAO can wade into CIA finances and management strategies. But in a brief interview, Akaka said he doubts the bill can clear the chamber given the bipartisan questioning it faces.