WAshington Post: Obama seeks options for sending fewer to war

Obama seeks options for sending fewer to war

He asks Pentagon chiefs for alternatives to troop requests on Afghanistan

WASHINGTON - President Obama has asked the Pentagon's top generals to provide him with more options for troop levels in Afghanistan, two U.S. officials said late Friday, with one adding that some of the alternatives would allow Obama to send fewer new troops than the roughly 40,000 requested by his top commander.

Obama met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the White House on Friday, holding a 90-minute discussion that centered on the strain on the force after eight years of war in two countries. The meeting -- the first of its kind with the chiefs of the Navy, Army, Marine Corps and Air Force, who were not part of the president's war council meetings on Afghanistan in recent weeks -- prompted Obama to request another such meeting before he announces a decision on sending additional troops, the officials said.

The military chiefs have been largely supportive of a resource request by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, that would by one Pentagon estimate require the deployment of 44,000 additional troops. But opinion among members of Obama's national security team is divided, and he now appears to be seeking a compromise solution that would satisfy both his military and civilian advisers.

Obama is expected to receive several options from the Pentagon about troop levels next week, according to the two officials, who discussed the deliberations on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly.

Which strategy to embrace?
Before he can determine troop levels, his advisers have said, he must decide whether to embrace a strategy focused heavily on counterinsurgency, which would require additional forces to protect population centers, or one that makes counterterrorism the main focus of U.S. efforts in the country, which would rely on relatively fewer American troops.

One option under review involves a blend of the two approaches, featuring an emphasis on counterterrorism in the north and some parts of western Afghanistan as well as an expanded counterinsurgency effort in the south and east, one of the officials said. Obama has also asked for a province-by-province review of the country to determine which areas can by managed effectively by local leaders.

The president appears committed to adding at least 10,000 to 15,000 troops in Afghanistan in an effort to bolster the training of Afghan army and police officers in the country. Current plans call for the United States to double the size of the Afghan army and police forces to about 400,000 in the hope that they can take over security responsibilities.

In meeting with the military chiefs, Obama heard their assessment of the how prepared the services are to handle a new commitment. "Each chief discussed the state of their own service, how they are doing today and what the long-term consequences will be for each of their services," an administration official said. The military advisers also put the troop deployments in the context of the rest of their global deployments, including in Iraq.

It was not a "recommendations meeting," with concrete options of how to proceed, the official said. That will presumably come in the next such meeting, which has not been scheduled.

Timeframe?
The timing of Obama's decision on Afghanistan remains up in the air. But his request for another meeting with the military chiefs -- and the expectation that he will meet again with his top national security advisers before reaching a conclusion -- may leave him too little time to decide the issue before he travels to Asia on Nov. 11. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton plans to be overseas for much of that time, except for a brief stint at home from Wednesday to Friday, giving Obama little opportunity to convene his war council in person. It appears increasingly likely that Obama will not announce his new Afghanistan strategy until after returning to the United States on Nov. 20.

Obama has come under criticism from Republicans, notably former vice president Richard B. Cheney, for deliberating so long, but his advisers have said he is determined to get the decision right rather than satisfy his critics.

In contrast to Iraq, where there was significant dissension on whether to deploy an additional 30,000 troops in 2007, the top brass has been mostly united in the support of McChrystal's call for more troops in Afghanistan.

Both Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top commander in the Middle East, have told the administration that they agree with McChrystal's dire assessment of the security situation and his call for more forces to wrest the initiative back from the Taliban.

Concerns about ‘dwell time’
The service chiefs have not publicly voiced either support or opposition. Gen. James T. Conway, the Marine Corps chief, had campaigned hard this year for the Marines to play a much larger role in the country. In internal meetings, Army chief Gen. George W. Casey Jr. has raised concerns about "dwell time" -- the periods that troops have at home between deployments.

The Army is particularly concerned that soldiers who spend less than 18 months at home between combat tours do not have enough time to train for high-intensity tank warfare.

A U.S.-Iraq security pact requires the United States to withdraw its forces from Iraq by the end of 2011, which would reduce some of the strain on the American military. But bombings this week in Baghdad, which killed more than 155 Iraqis, raise questions about whether Iraq is stable enough to allow for an accelerated drawdown in advance of that deadline, as some military officials had hoped.

Foxnews: Pakistan President Vows to Wipe Out Militants

Pakistan President Vows to Wipe Out Militants

ISLAMABAD — Pakistan's offensive in tribal regions that shelter Taliban fighters will continue until all the country's militants are wiped out, top officials insisted, an apparent reaction to U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's warning that Al Qaeda also need to be targeted.

President Asif Ali Zardari, speaking to members of his Pakistan People's Party, said Friday that "there was no turning back ... until the complete elimination of the militants," according to a statement from his office.

Two weeks ago, Pakistan launched a major offensive in South Waziristan, a desolate tribal region along Afghanistan's mountainous border, where the central Pakistani government has long had only minimal control.

Earlier this week, during a visit to Pakistan, Clinton said she found it "hard to believe" that no one in Pakistan's government knew where Al Qaeda's leadership was hiding and that once the current offensive is finished, "the Pakistanis will have to go on to try to root out other terrorist groups, or we're going to be back facing the same threats."

American officials have long said Usama bin Laden and top Al Qaeda lieutenants accused in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks operate out of the region along Pakistan's border with Afghanistan — a region that includes South Waziristan.

Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, the army's chief spokesman, told Geo TV on Friday that the offensive would not simply disperse militants to other parts of the country.

"They are running, but our strategy is not to let them run," he said. The military's goal was to "kill the maximum of them in this area (South Waziristan) because after running they will destroy the peace in other areas."

Foxnews: Clinton's Tough Talk in Pakistan Drives Home Message: It's Not a One-Way Street

Tellis said he believes Pakistan knows the whereabouts of Afghan Taliban leaders, and he said the country likely has intelligence on where some Al Qaeda members are hiding.

"They're not pursuing them aggressively enough because they fear that if they apprehend them quickly, they will not remain a target of American interest and partnership," he said.

Clinton's Tough Talk in Pakistan Drives Home Message: It's Not a One-Way Street

The secretary of state's blunt remarks, foreign policy experts say, give Pakistan's leadership a much-needed dose of reality: their relationship with the United States is not a one-way street.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took off the gloves and delivered a no-holds-barred message to Pakistan this week, telling the American ally that it must step up its efforts to apprehend Al Qaeda terrorists and demonstrate a real commitment to democracy.

The secretary's blunt remarks, foreign policy experts say, give Pakistan's leaders a much-needed dose of reality: their relationship with the United States is not a one-way street.

America's top diplomat struck an unusually frank tone when she said Pakistan has squandered opportunities to kill or capture Al Qaeda leaders -- including Usama Bin Laden.

"I find it hard to believe that nobody in your government knows where they are and couldn't get them if they really wanted to," she told a group of Pakistani journalists in Lahore as she wrapped up her three-day visit to Pakistan. "Maybe that's the case. Maybe they're not gettable. I don't know."

During her trip, Clinton reaffirmed America's pledge to provide $7.5 billion in non-military aid to the troubled nation over the next five years. But she made clear that it will not be a handout.

Clinton said the U.S. wants to partner with Pakistan on more than just the military front, but she made clear that the government in Islamabad will have to be America's partner in tracking down and capturing the terrorists who masterminded the September 11 attacks, among so many others throughout the world.

Clinton defended the bluntness of her remarks in an interview Friday on ABC's "Good Morning America, saying, "Trust is a two-way street. There is trust deficit."

"It will not be sufficient to achieve the level of security that Pakistanis deserve if we don't go after those who are still threatening not only Pakistan, but Afghanistan, and the rest of the world."

Foreign policy analysts said Clinton's words were necessary to convey a tough and clear message, but that the impact on the Pakistanis remains to be seen.

"This is going to bring some realism to the relationship," said Ashley Tellis, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, adding that Clinton's comments are a "useful corrective to the Pakistan overdependency that's at risk of developing."

Tellis said he believes Pakistan knows the whereabouts of Afghan Taliban leaders, and he said the country likely has intelligence on where some Al Qaeda members are hiding.

"They're not pursuing them aggressively enough because they fear that if they apprehend them quickly, they will not remain a target of American interest and partnership," he said.

Clinton's transparent message -- said at the highest level of government -- made clear that the U.S. will accept nothing less than a two-way dialogue, Tellis said.

But others, like Rick "Ozzie" Nelson, a senior fellow at the International Security Program in Washington, say Clinton went too far in suggesting Pakistan is deliberately dodging attempts to locate Al Qaeda.

"To say categorically that Pakistan knows where Al Qaeda leaders are but doesn't want to get them is a little bit of a stretch," Nelson told FoxNews.com, saying Clinton's frustration is understandable, but that the situation is "not as black and white as her comments may indicate."

"If we want them to help us with our security concerns, we have to be willing to help them with their national security concerns," Nelson said.

New York Times: Old Trick Threatens the Newest Weapons (Trojan Horses, Viruses Implanted in Circuitry, Insecure DOD Hardware Manufacture)

Old Trick Threatens the Newest Weapons

Despite a six-year effort to build trusted computer chips for military systems, the Pentagon now manufactures in secure facilities run by American companies only about 2 percent of the more than $3.5 billion of integrated circuits bought annually for use in military gear.

That shortfall is viewed with concern by current and former United States military and intelligence agency executives who argue that the menace of so-called Trojan horses hidden in equipment circuitry is among the most severe threats the nation faces in the event of a war in which communications and weaponry rely on computer technology.

As advanced systems like aircraft, missiles and radars have become dependent on their computing capabilities, the specter of subversion causing weapons to fail in times of crisis, or secretly corrupting crucial data, has come to haunt military planners. The problem has grown more severe as most American semiconductor manufacturing plants have moved offshore.

Only one-fifth of all computer chips are now made in the United States, and just one-quarter of the chips based on the most advanced technologies are built here, I.B.M. executives say. That has led the Pentagon and the National Security Agency to expand significantly the number of American plants authorized to manufacture chips for the Pentagon’s Trusted Foundry program.

Despite the increases, semiconductor industry executives and Pentagon officials say, the United States lacks the ability to fulfill the capacity requirements needed to manufacture computer chips for classified systems.

“The department is aware that there are risks to using commercial technology in general and that there are greater risks to using globally sourced technology,” said Robert Lentz, who before his retirement last month was in charge of the Trusted Foundry program as the deputy assistant defense secretary for cyber, identity and information assurance.

Counterfeit computer hardware, largely manufactured in Asian factories, is viewed as a significant problem by private corporations and military planners. A recent White House review noted that there had been several “unambiguous, deliberate subversions” of computer hardware.

“These are not hypothetical threats,” the report’s author, Melissa Hathaway, said in an e-mail message. “We have witnessed countless intrusions that have allowed criminals to steal hundreds of millions of dollars and allowed nation-states and others to steal intellectual property and sensitive military information.”

Ms. Hathaway declined to offer specifics.

Cyberwarfare analysts argue that while most computer security efforts have until now been focused on software, tampering with hardware circuitry may ultimately be an equally dangerous threat. That is because modern computer chips routinely comprise hundreds of millions, or even billions, of transistors. The increasing complexity means that subtle modifications in manufacturing or in the design of chips will be virtually impossible to detect.

“Compromised hardware is, almost literally, a time bomb, because the corruption occurs well before the attack,” Wesley K. Clark, a retired Army general, wrote in an article in Foreign Affairs magazine that warns of the risks the nation faces from insecure computer hardware.

“Maliciously tampered integrated circuits cannot be patched,” General Clark wrote. “They are the ultimate sleeper cell.”

Indeed, in cyberwarfare, the most ancient strategy is also the most modern.

Internet software programs known as Trojan horses have become a tool of choice for computer criminals who sneak malicious software into computers by putting it in seemingly innocuous programs. They then pilfer information and transform Internet-connected PCs into slave machines. With hardware, the strategy is an even more subtle form of sabotage, building a chip with a hidden flaw or a means for adversaries to make it crash when wanted.

Pentagon executives defend the manufacturing strategy, which is largely based on a 10-year contract with a secure I.B.M. chipmaking plant in Burlington, Vt., reported to be valued as high as $600 million, and a certification process that has been extended to 28 American chipmakers and related technology firms.

“The department has a comprehensive risk-management strategy that addresses a variety of risks in different ways,” said Mitchell Komaroff, the director of a Pentagon program intended to develop a strategy to minimize national security risks in the face of the computer industry’s globalization.

Mr. Komaroff pointed to advanced chip technologies that made it possible to buy standard hardware components that could be securely programmed after they were acquired.

But as military planners have come to view cyberspace as an impending battlefield, American intelligence agency experts said, all sides are arming themselves with the ability to create hardware Trojan horses and to hide them deep inside the circuitry of computer hardware and electronic devices to facilitate military attacks.

In the future, and possibly already hidden in existing weapons, clandestine additions to electronic circuitry could open secret back doors that would let the makers in when the users were depending on the technology to function. Hidden kill switches could be included to make it possible to disable computer-controlled military equipment from a distance. Such switches could be used by an adversary or as a safeguard if the technology fell into enemy hands.

A Trojan horse kill switch may already have been used. A 2007 Israeli Air Force attack on a suspected partly constructed Syrian nuclear reactor led to speculation about why the Syrian air defense system did not respond to the Israeli aircraft. Accounts of the event initially indicated that sophisticated jamming technology was used to blind the radars. Last December, however, a report in an American technical publication, IEEE Spectrum, cited a European industry source in raising the possibility that the Israelis might have used a built-in kill switch to shut down the radars.

Separately, an American semiconductor industry executive said in an interview that he had direct knowledge of the operation and that the technology for disabling the radars was supplied by Americans to the Israeli electronic intelligence agency, Unit 8200.

The disabling technology was given informally but with the knowledge of the American government, said the executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. His claim could not be independently verified, and American military, intelligence and contractors with classified clearance declined to discuss the attack.

The United States has used a variety of Trojan horses, according to various sources.

In 2004, Thomas C. Reed, an Air Force secretary in the Reagan administration, wrote that the United States had successfully inserted a software Trojan horse into computing equipment that the Soviet Union had bought from Canadian suppliers. Used to control a Trans-Siberian gas pipeline, the doctored software failed, leading to a spectacular explosion in 1982.

Crypto AG, a Swiss maker of cryptographic equipment, was the subject of intense international speculation during the 1980s when, after the Reagan administration took diplomatic actions in Iran and Libya, it was widely reported in the European press that the National Security Agency had access to a hardware back door in the company’s encryption machines that made it possible to read electronic messages transmitted by many governments.

According to a former federal prosecutor, who declined to be identified because of his involvement in the operation, during the early ’80s the Justice Department, with the assistance of an American intelligence agency, also modified the hardware of a Digital Equipment Corporation computer to ensure that the machine — being shipped through Canada to Russia — would work erratically and could be disabled remotely.

The American government began making a concerted effort to protect against hardware tampering in 2003, when Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz circulated a memorandum calling on the military to ensure the economic viability of domestic chipmakers.

In 2005, the Defense Science Advisory Board issued a report warning of the risks of foreign-made computer chips and calling on the Defense Department to create a policy intended to stem the erosion of American semiconductor manufacturing capacity.

Former Pentagon officials said the United States had not yet adequately addressed the problem.

“The more we looked at this problem the more concerned we were,” said Linton Wells II, formerly the principal deputy assistant defense secretary for networks and information integration. “Frankly, we have no systematic process for addressing these problems.”

New York Times: Ask John Burns: Karzai’s Brother and the C.I.A.

October 28, 2009, 11:21 am

Ask John Burns: Karzai’s Brother and the C.I.A.

By John F. Burns

This week John Burns, the chief foreign correspondent for The New York Times, will answer questions about an article in Wednesday’s paper about the brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Times reporters Dexter Filkins, Mark Mazzetti and James Risen write that the brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, the most powerful figure in southern Afghanistan and who is accused of having ties to the nation’s huge opium trade, has been on the C.I.A. payroll since 2001. Ahmed Wali Karzai denies involvement in the drug trade and receiving direct payments from the C.I.A., but the issue is deeply dividing officials in the Obama administration.

In the early days of the Afghan war, immediately after the Taliban fell, United States commanders saw little need for a large American military presence in the country and sought control and stability by paying local warlords.

But many critics say that policy has become counter-productive as the Taliban has regained strength, in part with money from the opium trade, and a strong central government is increasingly viewed as crucial for United States’ success and troops returning home. Does U.S. support of President Karzai’s brother undermine the credibility of both the central government and the American military effort there? Or is support and intelligence from Ahmed Wali Karzai essential for a difficult fight in the south against the Taliban?

Mr. Burns has reported extensively from Afghanistan, from the period of the Soviet withdrawal in 1989 through to the American-led overthrow of the Taliban in 2001 and its aftermath.

New York Times: Iran Rejects Deal to Ship Out Uranium, Officials Report

Iran Rejects Deal to Ship Out Uranium, Officials Report

WASHINGTON — Iran told the United Nations nuclear watchdog on Thursday that it would not accept a plan its negotiators agreed to last week to send its stockpile of uranium out of the country, according to diplomats in Europe and American officials briefed on Iran’s response.

The apparent rejection of the deal could unwind President Obama’s effort to buy time to resolve the nuclear standoff.

In public, neither the Iranians nor the watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, revealed the details of Iran’s objections, which came only hours after Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, insisted that “we are ready to cooperate” with the West.

But the European and American officials said that Iranian officials had refused to go along with the central feature of the draft agreement reached on Oct. 21 in Vienna: a provision that would have required the country to send about three-quarters of its current known stockpile of low-enriched uranium to Russia to be processed and returned for use in a reactor in Tehran used to make medical isotopes.

If Iran’s stated estimate of its stockpile of nuclear fuel is accurate, the deal that was negotiated in Vienna would leave the country with too little fuel to manufacture a weapon until the stockpile was replenished with additional fuel, which Iran is producing in violation of United Nations Security Council mandates.

American officials said they thought that the accord would give them a year or so to seek a broader nuclear agreement with Iran while defusing the possibility that Israel might try to attack Iran’s nuclear installations before Iran gained more fuel and expertise.

The Obama administration was anticipating that Iran would seek to back out of the deal, and in recent days the head of the nuclear agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, traveled secretly to Washington to talk about what to do if that happened, according to several American officials. Last weekend, President Obama called President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia and President Nicolas Sarkozy of France in an effort to maintain a unified front in dealing with Tehran’s leadership.

A senior European official characterized the Iranian response as “basically a refusal.” The Iranians, he said, want to keep all of their lightly enriched uranium in the country until receiving fuel bought from the West for the reactor in Tehran.

“The key issue is that Iran does not agree to export its lightly enriched uranium,” the official said. “That’s not a minor detail. That’s the whole point of the deal.”

American officials said it was unclear whether Iran’s declaration to Dr. ElBaradei was its final position, or whether it was seeking to renegotiate the deal — a step the Americans said they would not take.

Michael Hammer, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said that “we await clarification of Iran’s response,” but that the United States was “unified with our Russian and French partners” in support of the agreement reached in Vienna. That agreement explicitly called for Iran to ship 2,600 pounds of low-enriched uranium to Russia by Jan. 15, according to officials who have seen the document, which has never been made public.

News of the accord led to a political uproar in Iran, with some leading politicians arguing that the West could not be trusted to return Iran’s uranium, produced at the Natanz nuclear enrichment plant. Clearly, however, the Iranian government does not want to appear to be rejecting the agreement. Mr. Ahmadinejad, in a speech in the northeastern city of Mashhad that was broadcast live on state television on Thursday, said, “We welcome cooperation on nuclear fuel, power plants and technology, and we are ready to cooperate.”

He did not address Iran’s efforts to change the deal, but cast it as a victory for Iranian steadfastness against the West. “A few years ago, they said we had to completely stop all our nuclear activities,” Mr. Ahmadinejad said. “Now, look where we are today. Now, they want nuclear cooperation with the Iranian nation.”

In fact, the Iranians found something to like in the Vienna deal. It essentially acknowledged their right to use low-enriched uranium that Iran produced in violation of three Security Council agreements. The Obama administration and its allies were willing to create that precedent because the material would be returned to Iran in the form of fuel rods, usable in a civilian nuclear plant but very difficult to convert to weapons use.

Mr. Ahmadinejad’s remarks seemed to extend Iran’s two-track public position on the nuclear dispute, offering a degree of compliance while also insisting that there were limits to its readiness for cooperation.

“As long as this government is in power, it will not retreat one iota on the undeniable rights of the Iranian nation,” Mr. Ahmadinejad said. “Fortunately, the conditions for international nuclear cooperation have been met. We are currently moving in the right direction and we have no fear of legal cooperation, under which all of Iran’s national rights will be preserved, and we will continue our work.”

Mr. Ahmadinejad also suggested that Iran expected Western countries to honor payments for nuclear assistance it made before the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Iran paid more than $1 billion to help build a French reactor in return for access to that reactor’s fuel. After the revolution, France reneged on the contract.

“We have nuclear contracts,” Mr. Ahmadinejad said. “It has been 30 years, we have paid for them. Such agreements must be fulfilled.”

Iran’s envoy to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, arrived in Vienna on Wednesday night to deliver Iran’s response to the plan. On Thursday he told the ISNA news service that Tehran held a “positive view” of the Vienna talks.

An atomic energy agency team returned to the headquarters in Vienna on Thursday after inspecting a second nuclear enrichment plant, at Fordo, near the city of Qum, the state-run Press TV reported on its Web site.

Iran had kept the plant a state secret until a few days before the United States and other Western powers disclosed its existence last month.

In Washington on Thursday, the Senate Banking Committee unanimously approved a measure that would let the White House impose stronger sanctions on Iran. The Senate bill, passed a day after the House Foreign Affairs Committee passed a similar measure, would authorize sanctions against companies that provide Iran with refined petroleum products and would ban most trade between the countries, exempting food and medicine.

New York Times: Clinton Challenges Pakistanis on Al Qaeda

Clinton Challenges Pakistanis on Al Qaeda

LAHORE, Pakistan — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, on a visit meant to improve relations with Pakistan, strongly suggested Thursday that some Pakistani officials bore responsibility for allowing terrorists from Al Qaeda to operate from safe havens along this country’s frontier.

“I find it hard to believe that nobody in your government knows where they are, and couldn’t get to them if they really wanted to,” she said to a group of Pakistani journalists on her second day here. “Maybe that’s the case; maybe they’re not gettable. I don’t know.”

It is extremely rare for an official of Mrs. Clinton’s rank to say publicly what American politicians and intelligence officials have said in more guarded ways for years. The remarks upset her hosts, who have seen hundreds of soldiers and civilians killed as Pakistan has taken on a widening campaign against militant groups that have threatened the country from its tribal areas.

But the remarks gave voice to the longtime frustration of American officials with what they see as the Pakistani government’s lack of resolve in rooting out not only Al Qaeda, but also the Taliban leadership based in Quetta, and a host of militant groups that use the border region to stage attacks on American and NATO forces in Afghanistan.

Mrs. Clinton’s statement was only one of several pointed remarks on issues ranging from security to poor tax collection during a day in which she ran into a wall of distrust and mostly hostile questioning in public appearances intended to soothe relations, suggesting she was no longer willing merely to listen to Pakistan’s grievances.

The shift in tone came after a meeting with university students in which she expressed regret about past injustices in the American-Pakistani relationship, as well as about the disputed American presidential election in 2000, which she said showed that all democracies were flawed.

“We have to decide if we want to move beyond the past in your country and in our country,” Mrs. Clinton said. “We are now at a point where we can chart a different course.”

Rarely in her travels as secretary of state has Mrs. Clinton encountered an audience so uniformly suspicious and immune to her star power as the polite, but unsmiling, university students who challenged her at Government College University in Lahore.

One after another, they lined up to grill Mrs. Clinton about what they see as the dysfunctional relationship between Pakistan and the United States. They described a litany of slights, betrayals and misunderstandings that add up to a national narrative of grievance, against which she did her best to push back.

Why did the United States abandon Pakistan after the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan, they asked. Why did the Bush administration support the previous military government of Gen. Pervez Musharraf? What about reports in the Pakistani news media that American contractors illegally carried weapons in Islamabad?

In a later exchange with American journalists, Mrs. Clinton did not try to temper her remarks, saying they would contribute to a healthier, more open relationship with Pakistan. But the American ambassador, Anne W. Patterson, sought to put them in a broader context of efforts to persuade the government to root out militants in its frontier regions.

“We often say there needs to be a focus on finding these leaders,” Ms. Patterson said.

“Most of Al Qaeda is in South Waziristan,” she added, referring to the frontier area near Afghanistan where the Pakistani Army is conducting a campaign against militants.

Mrs. Clinton’s comments were prominently played on Pakistani news channels, and government officials rejected her assertion.

“If we knew where Al Qaeda’s leaders were, or if we had meaningful intelligence on their whereabouts shared with us, we would act against them,” said a senior official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly on this issue.

At times during this three-day visit, Mrs. Clinton has sounded less like a diplomat than a marriage counselor. But her soothing approach has won her few friends. She got tepid applause from the students here, some of whom groaned when she defended American policies.

Two weeks ago, by contrast, Mrs. Clinton challenged the Russian government to open up its political system, allow more dissent and strengthen its legal system, in a speech at Moscow State University. She got an enthusiastic standing ovation from the nearly 2,000 students.

Here, even her fans came armed with spears. A young female medical student thanked Mrs. Clinton for being an inspiration to women, then asked her how the United States could justify ordering Predator strikes on targets in Pakistan without sharing intelligence with its military.

Mrs. Clinton declined to comment on the program, which is run by the Central Intelligence Agency. But she said, “The war that your government and your military are waging right now is an important one for the country.”

The Obama administration’s aggressive support for Pakistan’s campaign in South Waziristan has put Mrs. Clinton in a delicate position. She has praised the army at every opportunity, while expressing regret for the wave of terrorist attacks the campaign has set off across the country, like the fiery car bomb that killed more than 100 people in the northwest city of Peshawar hours after her arrival on Wednesday.

Despite heightened security concerns, Mrs. Clinton stuck to her schedule, traveling to Lahore to meet opposition leaders and tour the majestic Badshahi Mosque, as thousands of police officers lined the route of her motorcade, shutting down the center of this city of 10 million.

At the university, a young man said that President Obama had failed to fix policies on Iraq or detainees, and told Mrs. Clinton that the United States was forcing Pakistan into a ruinous war.

Mrs. Clinton noted that the government had decided to fight only after its efforts to cut a deal with militants failed. “Slowly, but insidiously, you were losing territory,” she said. “If you want to see your territory shrink, that’s your choice. But I don’t think that’s the right choice.”

Those comments, made at the end of the meeting, set the stage for Mrs. Clinton’s feisty appearance later in the day.

At a roundtable session with businesspeople, Mrs. Clinton bluntly told an all-male audience that Pakistan needed to do a better job of collecting taxes and taking care of its poor. “When you ask for a partnership, you have to ask what Pakistan’s equity stake is,” she said.

Listening patiently to a litany of grievances from journalists about American policies, Mrs. Clinton said, “I am more than willing to hear every complaint about the United States.” But she said the relationship had to be a “two-way street.”

Newsweek: Afghan Corruption: Shocking Revelations. Also, Gambling Happens in Casinos.

Afghan Corruption: Shocking Revelations. Also, Gambling Happens in Casinos.

Mark Hosenball

The revelation in today's New York Times that a brother of Afghan president Hamid Karzai, Ahmed Wali Karzai, has been receiving regular payments for years from the CIA is sort of like reporting that the Pope is Catholic and that bears relieve themselves in the woods. While CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano said that the CIA does not comment on "these kinds of allegations," other current and former U.S. government officials say that nobody should be the slightest bit surprised to learn that the U.S. government has been paying for the goodwill of Karzai's brother—and likely that of other (perhaps many other) members of the Afghan president's circle. Nor, say the officials, should anyone be surprised that such Afghan personalities might have ties to the local opium trade, as the Times alleges Ahmed Wali Karzai does (with somewhat less certainty than its assertions regarding CIA payments). If anything, what is somewhat surprising is that U.S. officials say that the available evidence suggests that Hamid Karzai himself is relatively "clean." One U.S. official who has recently been looking into Afghan corruption said that President Karzai has filed an official disclosure listing his only wealth as about $10,000 worth of clothing and jewelry. While there is no way to verify this information, the official and another former U.S. official said that Hamid Karzai's reputation is relatively free of the allegations of corruption that have been laid against his brother. Nonetheless, the officials say the Afghan president does have wealthy friends and supporters who might give him a helping hand materially or financially if and when he needs it. Ahmed Wali told the Times that while he cooperated with U.S. military and civilian officials, he did not take money from the CIA and is not involved in the drug trade.

While few among the Washington cognoscenti are questioning the Times's allegations, the story has set off a round of speculation about why it surfaced now, who might have leaked it, and for what reason. Despite strong suspicions to the contrary, early indications are that the story was not deliberately leaked by the Obama administration or its political proxies as part of some clandestine campaign to undermine politically besieged Hamid Karzai's prospects in an anticipated presidential runoff election. Whatever the intent behind the disclosures, however, they're certainly another wild card in an Afghan political outlook that by the day appears more uncertain and fraught.

Newsweek: North Korea's Untapped Mineral Wealth

North Korea's Untapped Mineral Wealth

Newsweek

By Jerry Guo

North Korea is a regime battling two major deficits: a near-total lack of economic competence and of natural resources. Or so the half-true story goes. Turns out North Korea is not as resource-starved as we thought. A recent Goldman Sachs report found that Pyongyang sits on mineral deposits worth some $3.7 trillion; South Korea puts the figure higher, at $6 trillion or more. The North's economy, dominated by heavy industry, has traditionally been powered by a plentiful supply of coal (the report estimates its reserves at about $505 billion). But the country's deposits of magnesite, limestone, and uranium ore in fact outrank coal as potential earners, and billions of dollars of gold, zinc, manganese, iron, and copper are also waiting to be tapped. Marcus Noland, deputy director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, says that mining experts outside North Korea have indicated that "many of [their] mines are flooded or otherwise in disrepair, but could be rehabilitated."

Yet North Korea's crumbling infrastructure has crippled its ability to bring its treasures to market. A 2008 study by Noland found that a mere 10 percent of North Korea's exports in 2005 (the most recent year available) were minerals or ores. Still, this hasn't stopped several Western companies--including London-based Koryo Asia and the Swiss mining firm Quintermina--from knocking on Pyongyang's door in search of a competent business partner. Koryo Asia's chairman, Colin McAskill, said he just signed a letter of intent with the sealed-off government for a joint venture to mine "strategic metals." "North Koreans have and can conduct legitimate business," he said. Tell that to the U.N. Security Council.

Newsweek: In New Justice Case, a Terror Leader Returns From the Dead

In New Justice Case, a Terror Leader Returns From the Dead

Michael Isikoff

The U.S. may be intensifying its Predator missile campaign against Al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan, as Declassified reported this morning.

But a new Justice Department criminal case announced today raises a more fundamental question: are the missile strikes as effective as U.S. government officials would like to believe?

Consider the case of Ilyas Kashmiri, the alleged operational chief of a Qaeda-linked terror group in Pakistan and a central figure in the new Justice case. Just last month, on Sept. 7, Kashmiri (considered one of the most dangerous terrorists in Pakistan) was reported in the U.S. media to have been killed by an American missile, supposedly making him latest “big fish” casualty in the Predator campaign targeting Qaeda commanders in that country.

But much like Mark Twain, the reports of Kashmiri’s death now appear to have been greatly exaggerated.

Today’s Justice Department case alleges that two Chicago men—including a former Pakistani military officer—were plotting with Kashmiri as recently as a few weeks ago to mount terror attacks in Copenhagen against a Danish newspaper that published controversial cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad.

Indeed, the case alleges that one of the men, David Coleman Headley, was on his way to meet Kashmiri in Pakistan (after being assured the terror leader was very much alive) on Oct. 3 before being arrested by the FBI at Chicago’s O’Hare airport as he was about to board his flight.

And as if that weren’t enough evidence of Kashmiri’s return from the dead, one U.S. law-enforcement official pointed Declassified today to an Oct.15 interview the Pakistani gave to the Asia Daily Times in which he threatened new attacks even more deadly than last year’s bombings in Mumbai that killed 173 people. “That was nothing compared to what has already been planned for the future,” Kashmiri told the newspaper (a comment that has been interpreted by some as suggesting that Kashmiri’s 313 Brigade commando group may have played a role in the Mumbai attacks).

Even though there was apparently no plan to launch attacks inside the United States, the direct link to Kashmiri makes the charges filed against the Chicago men, Headley and Tahawwur Hussain Rana, among the more serious in a recent spate of FBI terrorism cases that have garnered international headlines, according to the U.S. law-enforcement official (who asked not to be identified talking about an ongoing case).

"This was no sting," said the official, referring to FBI operations in which agents pose as terrorist plotters in order to build cases against criminal suspects believed to be predisposed to committing terror attacks, but against whom the bureau often has no direct evidence. "These guys clearly had the means and the medium [to mount terrorist attacks] and they were in direct communications with senior players."

In fact, Kashmiri may well be the most senior suspected terrorist with whom anybody in the United States was alleged to have been in direct communication since the rash of post-9/11 cases involving such figures as Jose Padilla and Ali Al-Marri. (Both Padilla and Al-Marri were alleged to have been in communication with Qaeda leaders, including 9/11 architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed). A former Pakistani Army commander, Kashmiri is the operational chief of Harakat-ul-Jihad-i-Islami, a Pakistani group the U.S. government believes to be closely aligned with Al Qaeda; he reportedly is the head of the 313 Brigade.

According to the criminal charges unsealed in Chicago Tuesday, Headley (who worked for a Chicago immigration company but performed "little if any actual work for the firm") was incensed by the 2005 Muhammad cartoons published by the Danish newspaper Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten.

The complaint alleges that in late 2008, he began communicating via Internet and cell phone with two conspirators in Pakistan as well as his suspected boss in Chicago, Rana, about a plan to exact revenge against the newspaper. (The U.S. law-enforcement official confirmed what is implicit in the criminal complaint: that U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement officials were tipped off to the plot by electronic intercepts.)

According to the complaint, Headley flew to Denmark and allegedly began conducting surveillance for attacks against the newspaper. (The conspirators referred to their plot as "the Mickey Mouse Project." Among the plots they allegedly discussed was assassinating the paper’s cultural editor—apparently because they mistakenly believed the editor was Jewish.) In January 2009, the Justice case says, Headley then flew to Pakistan, where he met up with one of the co-conspirators identified only as "Individual A." The two then traveled to the Federally Administered Trial Area region in northwestern Pakistan and met with Kashmiri.

After the U.S. missile drone attack, Headley allegedly became concerned that Kashmiri was indeed dead and would no longer be in a position to back the plot. "Our company has gone into bankruptcy, then," he reportedly told his co-conspirator. (The news allegedly prompted Headley to turn to another Pakistani terror group, Lashkar-e-Taiba.) But then on Sept. 21, Headley spoke again with his co-conspirator and learned that Kashmiri was alive after all, prompting him to proclaim, "Now many other great things about him have come to surface, his supernatural powers and miracles."

New York Times: Reported Ties From C.I.A. to a Karzai Spur Rebukes

Reported Ties From C.I.A. to a Karzai Spur Rebukes

WASHINGTON — Senior lawmakers from both parties on Wednesday criticized what American officials said were financial ties between the Central Intelligence Agency and Ahmed Wali Karzai, a brother of the Afghan president, with one top Democrat suggesting that intelligence officials had misled him about Mr. Karzai’s role in Afghanistan’s opium trade.

The Democrat, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, demanded that members of Congress receive “untainted” information about Mr. Karzai’s drug connections in light of a news report that Mr. Karzai was on the C.I.A. payroll.

Mr. Kerry’s statement came days after he said in a public forum that there was no “smoking gun” evidence linking Mr. Karzai to the drug trade. Mr. Kerry said he had repeatedly been assured by intelligence officials that the evidence was inconclusive.

Mr. Kerry and other senior members of Congress were reacting to an article in The New York Times on Wednesday in which current and former American officials said that Mr. Karzai, the younger brother of President Hamid Karzai and a powerful figure in southern Afghanistan, was on the C.I.A. payroll for much of the past eight years.

The Obama administration is wrestling with a new Afghanistan strategy amid uncertainty about whether President Karzai’s government can survive questions about its legitimacy.

Ahmed Wali Karzai is believed by many top American military and civilian officials to be enriching himself from the opium trade, although some American intelligence officials said that there was no concrete proof.

“We should not condemn Ahmed Wali Karzai or damage our critical relations with his brother, President Karzai, on the basis of newspaper articles or rumors,” Mr. Kerry said Wednesday.

“But the appropriate Congressional committees must be immediately provided with the most comprehensive and untainted information about his alleged entanglements,” he said.

George Little, a C.I.A. spokesman, said agency officials “engage regularly with Congress, providing objective information on a wide range of national security topics.”

In Kabul last week, Mr. Kerry helped cajole President Karzai to agree to a runoff election with his top competitor after the Afghan elections in August were marred by widespread voting fraud.

Senator John McCain of Arizona, a leading Republican voice on national security issues, reacted angrily to the news about Ahmed Wali Karzai, calling the C.I.A. payments “wrong” and suggesting that military commanders in Afghanistan opposed the strategy. “Karzai’s brother should not be in the country,” Mr. McCain said on “The Early Show” on CBS.

Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesman, declined to comment on Mr. Karzai’s financial relationship with the C.I.A., referring questions to the spy agency.

New York Times: U.S. Quietly Speeds Aid for Pakistani Drives on Taliban

U.S. Quietly Speeds Aid for Pakistani Drives on Taliban

WASHINGTON — Even as the Pakistani government plays down the American role in its military operations in Taliban-controlled areas along the border with Afghanistan, the United States has quietly rushed hundreds of millions of dollars in arms, equipment and sophisticated sensors to Pakistani forces in recent months, said senior American and Pakistani officials.

During preparations this spring for the Pakistani campaigns in Swat and South Waziristan, President Obama personally intervened at the request of Pakistan’s top army general to speed the delivery of 10 Mi-17 troop transport helicopters. Senior Pentagon officials have also hurried spare parts for Cobra helicopter gunships, night vision goggles, body armor and eavesdropping equipment to the fight.

American military surveillance drones are feeding video images and target information to Pakistani ground commanders, and the Pentagon has quietly provided the Pakistani Air Force with high-resolution, infrared sensors for F-16 warplanes, which Pakistan is using to guide bomb attacks on militants’ strongholds in South Waziristan.

In addition, the number of American Special Forces soldiers and support personnel who are training and advising Pakistani Army and paramilitary troops has doubled in the past eight months, to as many as 150, an American adviser said. The Americans do not conduct combat operations.

The increasing American role in shoring up the Pakistani military’s counterinsurgency abilities comes as the Obama administration debates how much of a troop commitment to make in neighboring Afghanistan. It also takes place as Taliban attacks are spreading into Pakistani cities. It is unclear whether Pakistani authorities are using any of the sophisticated surveillance equipment to combat the urban terrorism.

Underscoring the complexity of the relationship between the allies, Pakistani officials are loath to publicize the aid because of the deep-seated anti-American sentiment in Pakistan. And they privately express frustration about the pace and types of aid, which totals about $1.5 billion this year.

At a military briefing on Saturday, the Pakistani Army spokesman, Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, said the fight in South Waziristan was a purely Pakistani enterprise, unaided by the United States or anyone else. “Let us finish the job on our own,” he told reporters.

Hasan Askari Rizvi, a military analyst in Lahore, said that publicly acknowledging the military aid — an open secret in Pakistan — could hand militants fresh ammunition for propaganda attacks. “The Pakistan military would not like to talk about the U.S. assistance,” he said, “so that the Islamists, most of whom are opposed to military operations, do not get additional reason to criticize the military and the government.”

American officials in Pakistan — whom the Pakistani government directed earlier this year not to discuss the United States role in providing humanitarian aid to hundreds of thousands of people displaced from their homes by the fighting in Swat — said the same edict applied to war assistance.

“The Pakistanis insist on ‘no American face’ on their war. Period,” said one senior American military officer in Southwest Asia, who would speak only anonymously because he did not want to jeopardize his relationship with his Pakistani counterparts.

Given the reluctance of Pakistani and American officials to speak openly about the assistance, it is difficult to assess how effective the American aid has been in the current combat operations.

Beneath their official silence, many senior Pakistani military officials seethe at the months, or even years, of delay by the Pentagon in delivering promised hardware and troop reimbursements. They also gripe that the United States is denying them the best technology, like Predator drones or Apache helicopter gunships.

“We are grateful for the generosity but believe that we have now learned to fight with what all we possess and not what has been promised,” said one senior Pakistani officer, who was granted anonymity to provide a candid assessment.

Shuja Nawaz, director of the South Asia Center of the Atlantic Council, a nonprofit policy and research group, sharply criticized the Obama administration in an essay on the organization’s Web site last week. “Pakistan still does not have all the weapons or assistance that it needs to do the job right,” he wrote.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton acknowledged the frustrations in an interview this week with Dawn, a Pakistani daily newspaper, before arriving on a trip to Pakistan.

“We both have bureaucracies,” Mrs. Clinton said. “We know how it is sometimes that things get delayed or they’re slower than we want, but we’re really trying to accelerate everything we can to help the Pakistani military.” Mrs. Clinton did not provide any details.

An American adviser in Pakistan, who was granted anonymity to discuss internal United States policy, said, “U.S. current military assistance either demonstrates U.S. resolve and offsets anti-Americanism, or is deliberately underplayed to boost Pakistani military and political credibility, and the latter meets our policy objectives more closely.”

The United States has provided Pakistan with about $12 billion in military assistance and payments since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The Pentagon reimburses Pakistan about $1 billion a year to cover its costs of fielding more than 100,000 troops along the Afghan border in counterinsurgency operations.

But in the past year, the Defense Department has significantly increased the shipment of military equipment to Pakistan to combat the increasingly violent insurgency.

Most significant was Mr. Obama’s involvement in speeding the delivery of the 10 Russian-built Mi-17s, at the request of the Pakistani army chief of staff, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. Four of the transport helicopters were leased to Pakistan in June, and the rest were provided under different authorities to move Pakistani Army soldiers in the border region near Afghanistan.

“The president was engaged on this issue in the spring,” said a White House official, who spoke anonymously because he was discussing Mr. Obama’s involvement.

Also involved was Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who repeatedly pressed his staff to find the Mi-17s in American inventories and to figure out a way to provide them to Pakistan.

This year alone, the Pentagon is sending more than $500 million in arms, equipment and training assistance to Pakistan, to help train and equip the Pakistani military for counterinsurgency operations.

Included in that package is nearly $13 million in electronic eavesdropping equipment to intercept militants’ cellphone calls. In July, the Pentagon supplied Pakistan with 200 night vision goggles, 100 day/night scopes, more than 600 radios and 9,475 sets of body armor.

The Pentagon has also sharply increased programs to bring Pakistani officers to the United States for training, particularly in counterterrorism.

“We’ve put military assistance to Pakistan on a wartime footing, as up to now it has been in a peacetime process,” said Lt. Col. Mark Wright, a Pentagon spokesman. “We are doing everything within our power to assist Pakistan in improving its counterinsurgency capabilities.”

New York Times: Loosening of F.B.I. Rules Stirs Privacy Concerns

Loosening of F.B.I. Rules Stirs Privacy Concerns

WASHINGTON — After a Somali-American teenager from Minneapolis committed a suicide bombing in Africa in October 2008, the Federal Bureau of Investigation began investigating whether a Somali Islamist group had recruited him on United States soil.

Instead of collecting information only on people about whom they had a tip or links to the teenager, agents fanned out to scrutinize Somali communities, including in Seattle and Columbus, Ohio. The operation unfolded as the Bush administration was relaxing some domestic intelligence-gathering rules.

The F.B.I.’s interpretation of those rules was recently made public when it released, in response to a Freedom of Information lawsuit, its “Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide.” The disclosure of the manual has opened the widest window yet onto how agents have been given greater power in the post-Sept. 11 era.

In seeking the revised rules, the bureau said it needed greater flexibility to hunt for would-be terrorists inside the United States. But the manual’s details have alarmed privacy advocates.

One section lays out a low threshold to start investigating a person or group as a potential security threat. Another allows agents to use ethnicity or religion as a factor — as long as it is not the only one — when selecting subjects for scrutiny.

“It raises fundamental questions about whether a domestic intelligence agency can protect civil liberties if they feel they have a right to collect broad personal information about people they don’t even suspect of wrongdoing,” said Mike German, a former F.B.I. agent who now works for the American Civil Liberties Union.

But Valerie Caproni, the F.B.I.’s general counsel, said the bureau has adequate safeguards to protect civil liberties as it looks for people who could pose a threat.

“Those who say the F.B.I. should not collect information on a person or group unless there is a specific reason to suspect that the target is up to no good seriously miss the mark,” Ms. Caproni said. “The F.B.I. has been told that we need to determine who poses a threat to the national security — not simply to investigate persons who have come onto our radar screen.”

The manual authorizes agents to open an “assessment” to “proactively” seek information about whether people or organizations are involved in national security threats.

Agents may begin such assessments against a target without a particular factual justification. The basis for such an inquiry “cannot be arbitrary or groundless speculation,” the manual says, but the standard is “difficult to define.”

Assessments permit agents to use potentially intrusive techniques, like sending confidential informants to infiltrate organizations and following and photographing targets in public.

F.B.I. agents previously had similar powers when looking for potential criminal activity. But until the recent changes, greater justification was required to use the powers in national security investigations because they receive less judicial oversight.

If agents turn up something specific to suggest wrongdoing, they can begin a “preliminary” or “full” investigation and use additional techniques, like wiretapping. But even if agents find nothing, the personal information they collect during assessments can be retained in F.B.I. databases, the manual says.

When selecting targets, agents are permitted to consider political speech or religion as one criterion. The manual tells agents not to engage in racial profiling, but it authorizes them to take into account “specific and relevant ethnic behavior” and to “identify locations of concentrated ethnic communities.”

Farhana Khera, president of Muslim Advocates, said the F.B.I. was harassing Muslim-Americans by singling them out for scrutiny. Her group was among those that sued the bureau to release the manual.

“We have seen even in recent months the revelation of the F.B.I. going into mosques — not where they have a specific reason to believe there is criminal activity, but as ‘agent provocateurs’ who are trying to incite young individuals to join a purported terror plot,” Ms. Khera said. “We think the F.B.I. should be focused on following actual leads rather than putting entire communities under the microscope.”

Ms. Caproni, the F.B.I. lawyer, denied that the bureau engages in racial profiling. She cited the search for signs of the Somali group, Al Shabaab, linked to the Minneapolis teenager to illustrate why the manual allows agents to consider ethnicity when deciding where to look. In that case, the bureau worried that other such teenagers might return from Somalia to carry out domestic operations.

Agents are trained to ignore ethnicity when looking for groups that have no ethnic tie, like environmental extremists, she said, but “if you are looking for Al Shabaab, you are looking for Somalis.”

Among the manual’s safeguards, agents must use the “least intrusive investigative method that effectively accomplishes the operational objective.” When infiltrating an organization, agents cannot sabotage its “legitimate social or political agenda,” nor lead it “into criminal activity that otherwise probably would not have occurred.”

Portions of the manual were redacted, including pages about “undisclosed participation” in an organization’s activities by agents or informants, “requesting information without revealing F.B.I. affiliation or the true purpose of a request,” and using “ethnic/racial demographics.”

The attorney general guidelines for F.B.I. operations date back to 1976, when a Congressional investigation by the so-called Church Committee uncovered decades of illegal domestic spying by the bureau on groups perceived to be subversive — including civil rights, women’s rights and antiwar groups — under the bureau’s longtime former director, J. Edgar Hoover, who died in 1972.

The Church Committee proposed that rules for the F.B.I.’s domestic security investigations be written into federal law. To forestall legislation, the attorney general in the Ford administration, Edward Levi, issued his own guidelines that established such limits internally.

Since then, administrations of both parties have repeatedly adjusted the guidelines.

In September 2008, Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey signed the new F.B.I. guidelines that expanded changes begun under his predecessor, John Ashcroft, after the Sept. 11 attacks. The guidelines went into effect and the F.B.I. completed the manual putting them into place last December.

There are no signs that the current attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., plans to roll back the changes. A spokeswoman said Mr. Holder was monitoring them “to see how well they work” and would make refinements if necessary.

The F.B.I., however, is revising the manual. Ms. Caproni said she was taking part in weekly high-level meetings to evaluate suggestions from agents and expected about 20 changes.

Many proposals have been requests for greater flexibility. For example, some agents said requirements that they record in F.B.I. computers every assessment, no matter how minor, were too time consuming. But Ms. Caproni said the rule aided oversight and would not be changed.

She also said that the F.B.I. takes seriously its duty to protect freedom while preventing terrorist attacks. “I don’t like to think of us as a spy agency because that makes me really nervous,” she said. “We don’t want to live in an environment where people in the United States think the government is spying on them. That’s an oppressive environment to live in and we don’t want to live that way.”

What the public should understand, she continued, is that the F.B.I. is seeking to become a more intelligence-driven agency that can figure out how best to deploy its agents to get ahead of potential threats.

“And to do that,” she said, “you need information.”

Newmax: Iran Supreme Leader: Questioning Elections a Crime

Iran Supreme Leader: Questioning Elections a Crime

TEHRAN, Iran -- Iran's supreme leader said Wednesday that questioning the results of Iran's June presidential election is a crime, his strongest warning yet to opposition leaders who continue to insist the vote was rigged.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the final say on all state matters in Iran, did not go so far as to order the arrest of those leaders, as called for by hard-liners, but his words signaled the government could take stronger action if the criticism continues.

"The day after the election, some people, without logic or reason, called the glorious election a lie," state TV quoted Khamenei as saying.

He said questioning the election was "the biggest crime."

Opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi has said President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stole the June 12 election from him through massive vote fraud. Hundreds of thousands of protesters poured into the streets in the days after the vote, prompting the government to stage a violent crackdown.

Although the street protests died down months ago, Mousavi and other leading opposition figures, including fellow presidential candidate Mahdi Karroubi and former President Mohammad Khatami, have refused to silence their protests.

Khamenei said he sent private messages to those who continue to question the election telling them they may not be able to control the future direction of events _ an implied threat of additional government action if they fail to cease their activities. He did not name specific individuals.

The supreme leader has supported Ahmadinejad throughout the election crisis, including during the subsequent crackdown that resulted in hundreds of arrests and multiple deaths. The government has confirmed 30 people were killed, while the opposition says the 72 died.

The simmering post-election unrest has received less international attention in recent weeks, overshadowed by speculation about whether Iran will accept a U.N.-drafted plan to ship most of its low-enriched uranium to Russia for further enrichment.

Iran will deliver its response to the U.N. on Thursday, almost a week after the West had hoped to secure Tehran's approval, according to the semiofficial Mehr news agency. Iran needs the fuel for a research reactor that makes medical isotopes.

But it appears Iran wants to modify the deal to send its uranium stockpile out of the country in multiple batches rather than the big single shipment envisioned by the agreement _ a change opposed by the West.

"Should we accept the option of sending uranium in return for fuel, we need to ship out a small part of it," the official Islamic Republic News Agency quoted lawmaker Hossein Ebrahimi as saying Wednesday.

"Should the other party remain committed to its obligations, this gradual trend will continue. We should not empty our uranium storehouses," said Ebrahimi.

Western powers say it's critical for Iran to send out at least 70 percent of its uranium store in one load as envisioned by the draft agreement to eliminate _ at least temporarily _ its options to make a nuclear weapon. Iran insists its nuclear program is peaceful.

The draft U.N. plan, which was formalized last week during talks in Vienna between Iran, Russia, France and the U.S., calls for Iran to send 2,420 pounds (1,100 kilograms) of low-enriched uranium to Russia in one batch by the end of the year.

After further enrichment in Russia, France would covert the uranium into fuel rods for return to Iran for use in the reactor in Tehran.

Significantly smaller batches or gradual shipments by Iran would leave the country with enough uranium to potentially produce a nuclear weapon.

A sum of 2,205 pounds (1,000 kilograms) is the commonly accepted amount of low-enriched uranium needed to produce weapons-grade uranium for a single nuclear warhead.

Foxnews: Pakistan Bombing Shows Greater Challenge Awaits Obama

Pakistan Bombing Shows Greater Challenge Awaits Obama

A massive car bomb that killed at least 100 people and wounded more than 200 others in northwestern Pakistan on Wednesday shows that drastic action will be needed to combat terrorism throughout the region -- not just in Afghanistan, where U.S. troops are winding up their deadliest month since the war began eight years ago.

As President Obama ponders sending tens of thousands more American soldiers to war, he is confronting a military challenge that is much larger than Afghanistan alone.

A massive car bomb that killed at least 100 people and wounded more than 200 others in northwestern Pakistan on Wednesday shows that drastic action will be needed to combat terrorism throughout the region -- not just in Afghanistan, where U.S. troops are winding up their deadliest month since the war began eight years ago.

Wednesday's marketplace bombing was the third in Peshawar this month by Taliban forces who seek to undercut support for the Pakistani army and expose the weakness of the Pakistani government. The combined death toll from the three blasts is 250 people.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was in Islamabad, Pakistan's capital, visiting the country for the first time as America's chief diplomat when the attack occurred, and she pledged the U.S. will support Pakistan in its ongoing campaign against militants.

Pakistan is currently struggling against "tenacious and brutal extremist groups," Clinton told reporters at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. "I want you to know this fight is not Pakistan's alone. ... These extremists are committed to destroying what is dear to us as much as they are committed to destroying that which is dear to you and to all people. So this is our struggle as well."

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters in Washington that Obama extends his condolences to "innocent victims" of violent extremists in Afghanistan or Pakistan.

"The events in Pakistan demonstrate the lengths extremists will go to and the type of threat they pose not just for this country, but for the country of Pakistan as well," he said.

But as Obama continues to deliberate whether to send additional troops to Afghanistan -- Stanley McChrystal, his top general there, has asked for 40,000 more troops to join the 68,000 already committed -- Wednesday's deadly bombing in Pakistan shows drastic action is needed elsewhere in the region.

Wednesday's bombing was part of a "real campaign" by extremists to demonstrate that they're a "force that can strike at any time and any place," said Gabe Schoenfeld, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a Washington-based think tank.

"The war has been in Pakistan for some time," Schoenfeld told Foxnews.com. "The Taliban and Al Qaeda are heading for any point that's weak. This is their pushback, an attempt to try and destabilize Pakistan before they're crushed.

"It's a very critical moment. If the Pakistani military can deprive them of a safe haven, they can make it much more difficult for them to operate."

But, he said, the Pakistani authorities so far "cannot stop them."

"The Pakistani government needs to snuff this out and will require pressing hard against the Taliban and their safe haven," he said.

Back in August 2007, during the presidential campaign, Obama was sharply criticized for saying in a debate against Clinton that he would send U.S. troops into Pakistan without that country's approval if it meant stopping terrorists.

"I find it amusing that those who helped to authorize and engineer the biggest foreign policy disaster in our generation are now criticizing me for making sure that we are on the right battlefield and not the wrong battlefield in the war against terrorism," he said at the time. "If we have actionable intelligence on Al Qaeda operatives, including [Usama] bin Laden, and [then] President Musharraf cannot act, then we should. That's just common sense."

Obama has stepped far back from that stance since then and embraced attempts at diplomatic ways to stem extremism in the region. The Pakistani leadership has also changed, as with Asif Ali Zardari replacing Pervez Musharraf as president.

Malou Innocent, a foreign policy analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute, said any consideration of sending U.S. troops into Pakistan would have "blowback written all over it." She likened the possibility to "kicking over a hornet's nest."

"It's no coincidence we see this absence of authority in the Pashtun regions of both Afghanistan and Pakistan," she said. "These are indigenous tribes who have always wanted authority and are zealously hostile towards foreign governments and invaders."

Schoenfeld disagreed, saying a "military solution" may be the only possible route against the Taliban in Pakistan.

"The Taliban in Pakistan have to be decisively defeated," he said.

On Wednesday, Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2010, which began on Oct. 1. In it is a provision to pay off low-level Taliban who renounce the insurgency, similar to a plan that was used for insurgents in Iraq. The administration hopes that finding jobs and resources for Taliban will lure them from violence and increase stability in Afghanistan.

Innocent said she agreed with U.S. Central Command Chief Gen. David Petraeus' suggestion that negotiations with some members of the Taliban could lead to reductions in violence in areas of Afghanistan. But Wednesday's bombing is proof that "anarchy flourishes" in the absence of a legitimate state authority in Pakistan.

"The original Afghani Taliban can be dealt with politically," Innocent said. "But the Pakistani Taliban is a far more nefarious problem and one that can be dealt with only by the Pakistanis themselves."

Earlier this month, Obama signed a law granting a $7.5 billion aid package for Pakistan over five years. The Pakistani government, however, criticized the bill as tantamount to U.S. meddling in its internal affairs.

Foxnews: New Terrorism Support Charge Filed Against Chicago Man in Alleged Muhammad Cartoon Plot

New Terrorism Support Charge Filed Against Chicago Man in Alleged Muhammad Cartoon Plot

A Chicago man accused of plotting terrorist attacks against overseas targets including a Danish newspaper that printed inflammatory cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad was charged Wednesday with providing support for terrorism — doubling the amount of time he might spend in prison.

Prosecutors added the charge of providing material support for terrorist acts Wednesday morning against 48-year-old Tahawwur Hussain Rana, hours before they argued he shouldn't be freed on bond.

He already had been charged with conspiring to provide material support for terrorism.

The second terror support charge means Rana could face more prison time — 30 years instead of 15, as each carries a maximum 15-year penalty — if he is convicted.

Later Wednesday prosecutors argued that Rana, one of two Chicago men accused in the alleged plot, is a serious flight risk and should stay behind bars without bond.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Collins told federal Magistrate Judge Nan Nolan that Rana was a danger to the community and should not be released.

But his lawyer denied that his client might be planning to flee and said he could have been the innocent dupe of an alleged coconspirator.

Nolan said she needed more information and set another hearing in the case for Tuesday, although she said she wouldn't decide the matter then, either.

The husky, full-bearded Rana appeared at the hearing wearing the bright orange jumpsuit of a federal prisoner but did not say anything to the judge.

The complaint says Rana — a Canadian national who was born in Pakistan and owns a grocery store and immigration service in Chicago — provided travel services and other help to another man charged in the case, David Coleman Headley, as Headley scouted out the offices of Denmark's Jyllands-Posten newspaper for a possible terrorist attack.

The newspaper published twelve cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad in 2005 that triggered outrage throughout the Muslim world. One cartoon showed Muhammad wearing a bomb-shaped turban. Any depiction of the prophet, even a favorable one, is forbidden by Islamic law as likely to lead to idolatry.

Rana's attorney, Patrick Blegen, told Nolan the evidence in an FBI affidavit outlining allegations against his client could easily support the notion that he was merely an innocent dupe of Headley and knew nothing about any plan to attack the Danish newspaper.

Prosecutors say Headley, whose former name was Daood Gilani, envisioned a plan to murder the cartoonist and the newspaper's former cultural editor.

Headley's attorney, David Theis, has said he would have comment. Headley's bond hearing is set for Dec. 4 before U.S. Magistrate Judge Arlander Keys.

Blegen said the new charge against Rana upped the possible sentence to 30 years in prison from 15.

Rana is to remain at the Metropolitan Correctional Center.

Blegen said two of Rana's brothers in New Jersey were willing to post their homes as bond and relatives in Canada would post "what amounts to their life savings" to get him out of federal custody pending resolution of the case.

Nolan said requiring numerous relatives to post their homes and savings would be helpful because it "puts more eyes on the street" to watch Rana and make certain he would not flee and leave them without their assets.

Foxnews: Imam Who Led Radical Islam Group Killed in FBI Raid

Imam Who Led Radical Islam Group Killed in FBI Raid

DETROIT — Federal authorities on Wednesday arrested several members of a radical Sunni Islam group in the U.S., killing one of its leaders at a shootout in a Michigan warehouse, the U.S. attorney's office said.

Agents were trying to arrest Luqman Ameen Abdullah, 53, at a Dearborn warehouse on charges that included conspiracy to sell stolen goods and illegal possession and sale of firearms. Authorities also conducted raids elsewhere to try to round up 10 followers named in a federal complaint.

Abdullah refused to surrender, fired a weapon and was killed by gunfire from agents, FBI spokeswoman Sandra Berchtold said.

In the 43-paged complaint unsealed Wednesday, the FBI said Abdullah, also known as Christopher Thomas, was an imam, or prayer leader, of a radical group named Ummah whose primary mission is to establish an Islamic state within the United States.

No one was charged with terrorism. But Abdullah was "advocating and encouraging his followers to commit violent acts against the United States," FBI agent Gary Leone said in an affidavit.

He told them it was their "duty to oppose the FBI and the government and it does not matter if they die," Leone said.

Abdullah regularly preached anti-government rhetoric and was trained, along with his followers, in the use of firearms, martial arts and swords, the agent said.

Leone said members of the national group mostly are black and some converted to Islam while in prisons across the United States.

"Abdullah preaches that every Muslim should have a weapon, and should not be scared to use their weapon when needed," Leone wrote.

Seven of the 10 people charged with Abdullah were in custody, including a state prison inmate, the U.S. attorney's office said. Three were still at large. Another man not named in the complaint also was arrested.

The group believes that a separate Islamic state in the U.S. would be controlled by Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, formerly known as H. Rap Brown, who is serving a life sentence in a federal prison in Colorado for shooting two police officers in Georgia in 2000, Leone said. Al-Amin, a veteran of the black power movement, started the group after he converted to Islam in prison.

"They're not taking their cues from overseas," said Jimmy Jones, a professor of world religions at Manhattanville College and a longtime Muslim prison chaplain. "This group is very much American born and bred."

The movement at one time was believed to include a couple of dozen mosques around the country. Ummah is now dwarfed in numbers and influence by other African-American Muslim groups, particularly the mainstream Sunnis who were led by Imam W.D. Mohammed, who recently died.

By evening, authorities still were working the scene near the Detroit-Dearborn border and the warehouse was surrounded by police tape.

The U.S. attorney's office said an FBI dog was also killed during the shootout.

Abdullah's mosque is in a brick duplex on a quiet, residential street in Detroit. A sign on the door in English and Arabic reads, in part, "There is no God but Allah."

Several men congregated on the porch Wednesday night and subsequently attacked a photographer from The Detroit News who was taking pictures from across the street. Ricardo Thomas had his camera equipment smashed and had a bloody lip from the attack.

Imad Hamad, regional director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee in Dearborn, said the FBI had briefed him about Wednesday's raids and told him they were the result of a two-year investigation.

"We know that this is not something to be projected as something against Muslims," Hamad said.

The complaint shows the FBI built its case with the help of confidential sources close to Abdullah who recorded conversations.

A source said that Abdullah regularly beat children inside the mosque with sticks, including a boy who was "unable to walk for several days," Leone said.

The source, according to the agent, regularly listened to a recording of a 2004 sermon in which Abdullah said, "Do not carry a pistol if you're going to give it up to police. You give them a bullet!"

In January 2009, members were evicted from a former mosque for failing to pay property taxes. An FBI search turned up empty shell casings and large holes in the concrete wall of a "shooting range," Leone said.

Dawud Walid, executive director of the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said the federal authorities' description of Abdullah's extremist links didn't match what he knew of Abdullah.

"I knew him to be charitable," Walid said. "He would open up the mosque to homeless people. He used to run a soup kitchen and feed indigent people. ... I knew nothing of him that was related to any nefarious or criminal behavior."

Abdullah had a wife and children, Walid said. A phone number for the family had been disconnected.