My View From Las Vegas
Tuesday, August 09, 2005
Reuters
An Iraqi walking through the aftermath of a suicide bombing in Baghdad that killed seven people and wounded at least 90
August 9, 2005
A Violent Day in Baghdad Kills More Than 20
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 6:20 p.m. ET
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- A suicide car bomber struck a U.S. convoy waiting at an intersection Tuesday in Baghdad, killing seven people -- including one American soldier -- and wounding more than 90. More than a dozen others died in scattered attacks across the capital.
Also, a U.S. Marine assigned to the 2nd Marine Division was killed Monday by small-arms fire in Ramadi, 70 miles west of Baghdad, the U.S. military said. The deaths brought the number of U.S. service members killed in Iraq this month to at least 32.
Violence raged as Iraqi political leaders showed little sign of compromise less than a week before a deadline for approving a new constitution. Faction leaders conferred for about four hours Tuesday night hoping to overcome their differences and produce a charter by Monday.
Participants said the talks focused on Kurdish demands for a federal state and although some progress was made, there was no final agreement on the issue. More talks were set for Wednesday.
The American convoy was stopped at a busy intersection when a driver detonated a vehicle packed with explosives, the U.S. Army said. Six Iraqi civilians also were killed; scores of Iraqis and two U.S. soldiers were wounded.
At least 1,836 members of the U.S. military have died since the Iraq war started in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.
The United States hopes progress on the political front, including adoption of a democratic constitution, will help deflate the Sunni Arab-led rebellion and enable the Americans and their partners to begin withdrawing troops next year.
''It's important that they stay with their timetable'' on the constitution, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Tuesday. ''This will be a critical step in persuading the majority of the Iraqis that the new Iraq is worth fighting for, that they have a stake in it.''
Rumsfeld told Pentagon reporters that the constitution ''could well turn out to be one of the most powerful weapons to be deployed against the terrorists'' and the insurgents are ''determined to stop the constitutional process through terror and intimidation.''
Late Tuesday, representatives of political factions met for a second round of talks aimed at breaking the deadlock over the constitution, which the parliament must approve by Aug. 15. Talks were postponed Monday by a severe sandstorm.
The constitution also needs approval from voters in an Oct. 15 referendum. Passage would lead to elections in mid-December.
At the beginning of the meeting, presidential spokesman Kamran Qaradaghi told reporters the latest talks would focus on federalism, distribution of wealth and the elections law.
Kurds demand that Iraq be transformed into a federal state so they can continue to run their autonomous mini-state in the north. Sunni Arabs oppose federalism because they fear the Kurds want to secede and dismember Iraq.
Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani joined the talks Tuesday. Barzani, who was stranded in northern Iraq by the sandstorms, has vowed not to compromise on federalism.
A prominent Sunni Arab on the constitutional committee, Saleh al-Mutlaq, suggested that federalism be decided by the parliament to be elected in December.
''We will not accept federalism in these circumstances,'' al-Mutlaq told The Associated Press. He warned that if Kurdish demands are accepted, ''they will have grave consequences'' for the future of Iraq. He did not elaborate.
Kurdish parliament member Mahmoud Othman said that during the meeting, U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad repeatedly called President Jalal Talabani and parliament speaker Hajim al-Hassani for updates -- a sign of U.S. pressure for a deal.
''The problem is that they started discussing the most difficult issue,'' Othman said, referring to federalism.
Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a Shiite, hinted that political leaders might not resolve all issues before next week's deadline but said he remained hopeful the draft could be completed by then.
''But if some matters block us ... then it might take a little time'' after the Monday deadline, he told AP.
Al-Jaafari said Iraqi leaders have struggled against deadlines before -- including forming a new government after January elections -- and were able to meet them.
Asked if leaders would succeed this time, he said: ''We hope so, God willing. I see that most of the groups have a strong will, and, God willing, we will cooperate to finish it.''
In other developments:
--U.S. troops Tuesday killed four insurgents trying to plant a roadside bomb in the city of Ramadi, police Lt. Mohammed al-Obeidi said.
--Violence targeting Iraqi police left 10 officers dead, including five policemen slain while sleeping in their car. Lt. Col. Ahmed Aboud said the men had spent the night on patrol and were waiting for replacements.
--Late Tuesday, gunmen killed an Iraqi Cabinet employee, Abbas Ibrahim Mohammed, in Baghdad. In addition, three civilians were killed in a mortar attack, police said.
--U.S. and Iraqi forces killed two insurgents and arrested 22 others in northern Iraq, the U.S. military said Tuesday. Soldiers from the U.S. Army's 3rd Battalion, 21st Infantry Regiment killed the insurgents, found setting up a mortar tube Monday in Mosul.
--The mayor of Baghdad, Alaa al-Timimi, was fired and responsibility for managing the city transferred to the provincial governor, government spokesman Laith Kubba said. He refused to say why the provincial council sacked the mayor.
--The mayor of Samawah, a southern Shiite city gripped by riots over lack of municipal services, resigned under pressure. The decision came Monday during a visit by delegates sent by the prime minister, according to Sheik Mohannad al-Gharrawi.
About 750 Japanese troops are based in Samawah, 230 miles southeast of Baghdad.
Associated Press writers Qassim Abdul-Zahra, Omar Sinan and Sinan Salaheddin contributed to this report.
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August 9, 2005
Four in 9/11 Plot Are Called Tied to Qaeda in '00
By DOUGLAS JEHL
WASHINGTON, Aug. 8 -
More than a year before the Sept. 11 attacks, a small, highly classified military intelligence unit identified Mohammed Atta and three other future hijackers as likely members of a cell of Al Qaeda operating in the United States, according to a former defense intelligence official and a Republican member of Congress.
In the summer of 2000, the military team, known as Able Danger, prepared a chart that included visa photographs of the four men and recommended to the military's Special Operations Command that the information be shared with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the congressman, Representative Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania, and the former intelligence official said Monday.
The recommendation was rejected and the information was not shared, they said, apparently at least in part because Mr. Atta, and the others were in the United States on valid entry visas. Under American law, United States citizens and green-card holders may not be singled out in intelligence-collection operations by the military or intelligence agencies. That protection does not extend to visa holders, but Mr. Weldon and the former intelligence official said it might have reinforced a sense of discomfort common before Sept. 11 about sharing intelligence information with a law enforcement agency.
A former spokesman for the Sept. 11 commission, Al Felzenberg, confirmed that members of its staff, including Philip Zelikow, the executive director, were told about the program on an overseas trip in October 2003 that included stops in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But Mr. Felzenberg said the briefers did not mention Mr. Atta's name.
The report produced by the commission last year does not mention the episode.
Mr. Weldon first spoke publicly about the episode in June, in a little-noticed speech on the House floor and in an interview with The Times-Herald in Norristown, Pa. The matter resurfaced on Monday in a report by GSN: Government Security News, which is published every two weeks and covers domestic-security issues. The GSN report was based on accounts provided by Mr. Weldon and the same former intelligence official, who was interviewed on Monday by The New York Times in Mr. Weldon's office.
In a telephone interview from his home in Pennsylvania, Mr. Weldon said he was basing his assertions on similar ones by at least three other former intelligence officers with direct knowledge of the project, and said that some had first called the episode to his attention shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
The account is the first assertion that Mr. Atta, an Egyptian who became the lead hijacker in the plot, was identified by any American government agency as a potential threat before the Sept. 11 attacks. Among the 19 hijackers, only Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi had been identified as potential threats by the Central Intelligence Agency before the summer of 2000, and information about them was not provided to the F.B.I. until the spring of 2001.
Mr. Weldon has long been a champion of the kind of data-mining analysis that was the basis for the work of the Able Danger team.
The former intelligence official spoke on the condition of anonymity, saying he did not want to jeopardize political support and the possible financing for future data-mining operations by speaking publicly. He said the team had been established by the Special Operations Command in 1999, under a classified directive issued by Gen. Hugh Shelton, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to assemble information about Al Qaeda networks around the world.
"Ultimately, Able Danger was going to give decision makers options for taking out Al Qaeda targets," the former defense intelligence official said.
He said that he delivered the chart in summer 2000 to the Special Operations Command headquarters in Tampa, Fla., and said that it had been based on information from unclassified sources and government records, including those of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
"We knew these were bad guys, and we wanted to do something about them," the former intelligence official said.
The unit, which relied heavily on data-mining techniques, was modeled after those first established by Army intelligence at the Land Information Warfare Assessment Center, now known as the Information Dominance Center, at Fort Belvoir, Va., the official said.
Mr. Weldon is an outspoken figure who is a vice chairman of both the House Armed Services Committee and the House Homeland Security Committee. He said he had recognized the significance of the episode only recently, when he contacted members of the military intelligence team as part of research for his book, "Countdown to Terror: The Top-Secret Information That Could Prevent the Next Terrorist Attack on America and How the C.I.A. Has Ignored It."
Mr. Weldon's book prompted one veteran C.I.A. case officer to strongly dispute the reliability of one Iranian source cited in the book, saying the Iranian "was a waste of my time and resources."
Mr. Weldon said that he had discussed the Able Danger episode with Representative Peter Hoekstra, the Michigan Republican who is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and that at least two Congressional committees were looking into the episode.
In the interview on Monday, Mr. Weldon said he had been aware of the episode since shortly after the Sept. 11 attack, when members of the team first brought it to his attention. He said he had told Stephen J. Hadley, then the deputy national security adviser, about it in a conversation in September or October 2001, and had been surprised when the Sept. 11 commission report made no mention of the operation.
Col. Samuel Taylor, a spokesman for the military's Special Operations Command, said no one at the command now had any knowledge of the Able Danger program, its mission or its findings. If the program existed, Colonel Taylor said, it was probably a highly classified "special access program" on which only a few military personnel would have been briefed.
During the interview in Mr. Weldon's office, the former defense intelligence official showed a floor-sized chart depicting Al Qaeda networks around the world that he said was a larger, more detailed version similar to the one prepared by the Able Danger team in the summer of 2000.
He said the original chart, like the new one, had included the names and photographs of Mr. Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi, as well as Mr. Mihdhar and Mr. Hazmi, who were identified as members of what was described as an American-based "Brooklyn" cell, as one of five such Al Qaeda cells around the world.
The official said the link to Brooklyn was meant as a term of art rather than to be interpreted literally, saying that the unit had produced no firm evidence linking the men to the borough of New York City but that a computer analysis seeking to establish patterns in links between the four men had found that "the software put them all together in Brooklyn."
According to the commission report, Mr. Mihdhar and Mr. Hazmi were first identified in late 1999 or 2000 by the C.I.A. as Qaeda members who might be involved in a terrorist operation. They were tracked from Yemen to Malaysia before their trail was lost in Thailand. Neither man was put on a State Department watch list before they flew to Los Angeles in early 2000. The F.B.I. was not warned about them until the spring of 2001, and no efforts to track them were made until August 2001.
Neither Mr. Shehhi nor Mr. Atta was identified by the American intelligence agencies as a potential threat, the commission report said. Mr. Shehhi arrived in Newark on a flight from Brussels on May 29, 2000, and Mr. Atta arrived in Newark from Prague on June 3 that year.
The former intelligence official said the first Able Danger report identified all four men as members of a "Brooklyn" cell, and was produced within two months after Mr. Atta arrived in the United States. The former intelligence official said he was among a group that briefed Mr. Zelikow and at least three other members of the Sept. 11 commission staff about Able Danger when they visited the Afghanistan-Pakistan region in October 2003.
The official said he had explicitly mentioned Mr. Atta as a member of a Qaeda cell in the United States. He said the staff encouraged him to call the commission when he returned to Washington at the end of the year. When he did so, the ex-official said, the calls were not returned.
Mr. Felzenberg, the former Sept. 11 commission spokesman, said on Monday that he had talked with some of the former staff members who participated in the briefing.
"They all say that they were not told anything about a Brooklyn cell," Mr. Felzenberg said. "They were told about the Pentagon operation. They were not told about the Brooklyn cell. They said that if the briefers had mentioned anything that startling, it would have gotten their attention."
As a result of the briefing, he said, the commission staff filed document requests with the Pentagon for information about the program. The Pentagon complied, he said, adding that the staff had not hidden anything from the commissioners.
"The commissioners were certainly told of the document requests and what the findings were," Mr. Felzenberg said.
Philip Shenon and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting for this article.
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Courtesy of the Statue of Liberty National Monument, the Ellis Island Immigration Museum and the Aperture Foundation
When Old and New World Met in a Camera Flash
By KATHRYN SHATTUCK
If Peter Mesenh?ller expected to find the misery of the tired, the poor, the wretched emanating from a few photographs displayed in the Ellis Island Immigration Museum the day he first visited in 1996, he was in for a surprise. "I immediately got stunned by the dignity, the pride, the self-confidence," Mr. Mesenh?ller, a cultural anthropologist specializing in early still photography and immigration studies, said by phone from his home in Cologne, Germany. "It was totally different from the usual image we have of the huddled masses."
Mr. Mesenh?ller had alighted on the photography of Augustus Frederick Sherman, a registry clerk in Ellis Island's immigration division in the early 20th century. In the hours when he wasn't determining the fate of some of the thousands of immigrants disembarking daily in New York Harbor from foreign vessels, he was coaxing the hopeful to open their trunks, don their finest attire and level their gaze at his camera.
Some 75 photographs of these immigrants are on view at the Ellis Island museum in "Augustus Frederick Sherman: Ellis Island Portraits 1905-1920." Organized by Mr. Mesenh?ller and Diana Edkins, director of exhibitions and limited-edition prints for the Aperture Foundation, a nonprofit photography organization, the show coincides with the group's publication of a book of the same title with 40 more images. The show continues through Sept. 6 before traveling to 16 sites in the United States and abroad.
Understanding Mr. Mesenh?ller's fascination - obsession, really - requires no great stretch of the imagination. As they hover disconcertingly between art and artifact, Sherman's portraits are powerful in their directness yet almost antiseptic in their disaffection.
Dressed gallantly in their native costumes, solemn families and individuals announce themselves to their new world with no apologies. A Romanian shepherd sits with hand on hip, his decoratively embroidered sheepskin coat opened to reveal a lush pelt of curly wool. A Ruthenian, from Ukraine, stares out with pale eyes, her neck encircled by loops of iridescent beads above a peasant blouse and shearling vest. Two men from Borana, in Ethiopia, with sculptural hair ornaments sticking straight up from their heads display their shields; the woman between them hides her hair beneath a wrap.
Striking though they are, the portraits are only nominally personal, annotated occasionally by simple captions but mostly left unexplained: "Eleazar Kaminetzko - 26 - Russian Hebrew SS Hamburg June 23 - 1914. Vegetarian," Sherman wrote on the photograph of a young man with enormous eyes and long, glossy curls. Only a few details, like "Col. Helen R. Bastedo + Osman Lewis, 13, Belgian Stowaway," make up the 1921 caption for a boy with floppy hair and Sunday suit, his arm around the waist of an unrelated woman who protectively cups his hand. And then, with fedora, spectacles and pale smudge of mustache, there is Mary Johnson, 50, from Canada, who, Sherman wrote, "came as 'Frank Woodhull' " on Oct. 4, 1908, and "dressed 15 yrs in men's clothes."
Information on Sherman is nearly as scant. He was born on July 9, 1865, in Lynn, Pa., Mr. Mesenh?ller said, and was a member of the Episcopal Church; he was hired by the executive division of the Bureau of Immigration at Ellis Island in 1892, eight years after moving to New York, and moved up through the ranks.
"We've been looking for personnel files throughout the United States with all the official records and didn't find anything," Mr. Mesenh?ller said. "Up to now, Sherman is a question mark in a way."
Mr. Mesenh?ller speculates that as a higher-level officer, Sherman had unfettered access to the island's detention area, where immigrants were held for a day, a week or a few months after routine questioning raised doubts about whether they should be allowed in the country.
"The technical procedures in those days were very difficult," he said. "You had these huge tripod cameras and the exposure took how many seconds, and you had to get the lighting just right and have your subjects sit perfectly still. And with an average of about 5,000 people each day coming through Ellis Island at peak times, it must have been quite an undertaking."
In an essay in the book, Mr. Mesenh?ller writes that historians view these images as "one of the most substantial photographic records of that period of mass immigration."
Capturing his subjects against mostly plain backgrounds in the native finery they would soon discard for American clothing, Sherman simultaneously documented the richness of their heritage while labeling them specimens for anthropologic scrutiny. "Sherman considered these people as ethnic types, being representative of the new American species," said Mr. Mesenh?ller, who called on a broad swath of colleagues to help him identify the origins of various costumes and discern the differences in, say, the headdresses of Protestant and Catholic women from the Netherlands.
In addition to Sherman's Dutch, Italian, Romanian, Moroccan and Finnish prototypes, there are also the "oddities" - the giants and dwarves, the microcephalics, the physically deformed - he cataloged in later years.
Still, the Aperture Foundation's Ms. Edkins said, the photographer "didn't impose his own feeling on these people. He really showed it in a very stripped-down documentarylike way."
Such images may hold particular interest today "because immigration is so much in our mind," she said. "You know, we shed those things, those differences. We're all jeans and Gap and now there's a commonality."
Roy Glerum of Totowa, N.J., the son of one of those Ellis Island immigrants, said the reality of the melting pot hit him at the exhibition's opening in June. There he saw his father's 12-year-old eyes peering out at him from Sherman's 1907 portrait of his Dutch grandparents and their 11 children. Pinned to their chests was the number of the ship that would take them back to the Netherlands if they failed to pass inspection.
Mr. Glerum's grandfather, Dingenis, had sold his lobster boat to finance the family's journey. Growing up in New Jersey, Mr. Glerum's father, Fran?ois, soon known as Frank, took odd jobs running a bakery wagon before apprenticing as a shop boy at the Manhattan Rubber Company and working his way into an electrician's position, from which he retired 50 years later.
"My dad talked very, very little about earlier life," Mr. Glerum, 78, said. "He didn't want us to speak Dutch. He felt that being in America was the greatest thing and that we never needed to learn about the rest."
His recent museum visit was his first to Ellis Island, Mr. Glerum said. "I was really overwhelmed," he added. "Not knowing the language, giving up everything to come over here - I just thought they must have had great courage."
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Courtesy of the Statue of Liberty National Monument, the Ellis Island Immigration Museum and the Aperture Foundation
