Seizures Show Somalia Rebels Need Money

By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

NAIROBI, Kenya — The Shabab, Somalia’s most fearsome Islamist group, the one leading a guerrilla war against the weak transitional government, may be running into a problem with its cash flow.

In the past week, Shabab rebels have seized two French security advisers originally captured by a different band of Somalian gunmen, and now they are widely suspected of another kidnapping on Saturday morning along the Kenya-Somalia border.

“They need money,” said one Western diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing diplomatic protocol. “It’s a fact.”

Another fact: kidnapping is one of the few money-making industries left in shattered Somalia.

According to a new posting on a Somalian insurgent Web site, the Shabab will soon try the Frenchmen in an Islamic court. And though the Shabab’s brand of justice often involves amputations and even beheadings, the Web site said that in this case, commanders were considering a “fine,” a signal that they may be after money more than blood.

Recent events bear that out, analysts say. While Somalia’s transitional government got a 40-ton pile of guns and ammunition from the United States in June, the Shabab’s outside support may be slowing down.

Kidnapping has been a lucrative business in Somalia for years, but now more than ever. The country’s central government imploded in 1991, and ever since then marauding gangs, warlords, teenage street fighters and various Islamist factions have scrambled for power and money. Pirates off Somalia’s coast netted tens of millions of dollars last year alone, seizing ships and ransoming back the crews. These days, the few foreigners who enter Somalia need platoons of gunmen to make sure they are not the next victims.

At a meeting last week with reporters in Paris, Claude Guéant, chief of staff for the French president, was asked if the kidnapping of the two French security advisers, who were snatched from their Mogadishu hotel on Tuesday, was a “money issue.”

Mr. Guéant answered that “it was likely” to be one.

Challengers in Kurdish Elections in Iraq Face Uphill Task

By Nada Bakri
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, July 19, 2009

SULAYMANIYAH, Iraq -- It was not yet noon when Hallo Rasch left his squat, two-story house in this eastern Kurdish city and strode down the road to his office, where a group of black-clad widows sat waiting for him in a sweltering room.

He bowed and thanked them for coming.

"If I wanted power and money, I would have pursued that," Rasch told them. "But I am here because I want to work for you, because I care about you and I want to help you get your rights."

Done, he moved to an adjacent room where several more women, men and children waited. He bowed and thanked them, too.

"If I wanted power and money," he started again, reprising his stump speech.

The campaign season is in full swing in northern Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region, ahead of parliamentary and presidential elections Saturday. The two groups in Rasch's office represented supporters that even the 58-year-old presidential hopeful acknowledges are scant, in a bid for office that he acknowledges is quixotic.

Rasch is running as an independent against the incumbent, Massoud Barzani, who was elected president of Iraqi Kurdistan in 2005. The pragmatic and cautious Barzani has been at the center of Kurdish politics -- in the region, in the rest of Iraq and in the broader Kurdish homeland -- since succeeding his father, a legendary guerrilla leader, as head of the Kurdistan Democratic Party more than 30 years ago.

Rasch's uphill candidacy is playing out in a region simultaneously considered the most democratic in Iraq and not all that democratic. Two main parties -- Barzani's Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, headed by Iraqi President Jalal Talabani -- have for years exercised a stranglehold on the region, dividing between them politics, patronage, investments and business deals.

"My candidacy is upsetting this equation," Rasch said in a recent interview from his house in Sulaymaniyah. "It is good for democracy. We can't call it a democracy with only one candidate running."

Rasch and four other presidential challengers are trying to break the two parties' monopoly. By nearly all accounts, they have little chance of winning. But their supporters contend that an electoral victory is less important than what their candidacies represent: an effort to set the stage for a more democratic political life.

Equally important is the backdrop of growing public dissatisfaction with the two main parties. Complaints of corruption, nepotism, high unemployment rates and low wages are common among party supporters and opposition groups alike.

"During the days of Saddam, we had hope that his regime would be toppled one day," said Mohammed Mahmud, a retired teacher, referring to the late Iraqi dictator. "But today we've lost hope. They are the same people and the same faces, rotating again and again."

If elected, the challengers have promised to fight graft, reform public institutions, provide job opportunities and, above all, instill a sense of accountability. "We don't just have a program. We have a program and a time frame," said Rasch, who heads a list of independent parliamentary candidates. "In three months, we will accomplish so and so, and if not, we will leave."

The newcomers' political inexperience is overshadowed by the sheer prestige of the two dominant parties. Despite the complaints, both draw on a deep loyalty that transcends everyday politics. The parties, though occasionally bitter foes, led the Kurdish region to autonomy after the 1991 Persian Gulf War, when Saddam Hussein was still in power, and to prosperity after his fall in 2003.

Irbil, the region's capital, is booming. High-rise buildings and cranes dot the skyline. Sprawling, luxurious housing projects are under construction. Shopping malls are adding a Western look to the city. But beneath the veneer of prosperity, residents say, many struggle daily to make ends meet and to deal with the challenges of inadequate health care and poor schools. Residents of Sulaymaniyah, 100 miles southeast of Irbil, cite water and electricity shortages.

The annual budget for the region is huge -- about 17 percent of Iraq's budget this year -- but many Kurds complain that only the elite benefit from it, widening a gap between rich and poor.

"People are not happy with corruption," said Barham Salih, the Iraqi deputy prime minister and a candidate for prime minister of the Kurdish region. "That has to change."

Politicians in Baghdad and in the north say Salih may benefit from the old system. If the two parties perform as expected, they said, he appears assured of securing the post of prime minister as the consensus choice. But his tenure could prove tumultuous.

"The opposition will change the current situation," said Abdel-Salam Omed, a 29-year-old lawyer sipping tea at Michko, a popular old cafe in Irbil.

In his office in Sulaymaniyah, Rasch, who was a member of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan until last year, courted voters with pleas and promises.

The widows were wives of fighters with the Patriotic Union who had died in clashes between the two main Kurdish parties in the 1990s. Among the other group visiting his office were former members of the party who said they had lost faith in their leaders when their pleas for better living conditions went unheeded.

"Don't vote for them," Rasch urged. "If Iraq was a poor country, we would have accepted this, but it is not."

Rasch is known to most people in the Kurdish region as Hallo Ibrahim Ahmed, after his father, Ibrahim Ahmed, a respected Kurdish thinker and a founder of the Kurdistan Democratic Party. Several years after its creation, Ahmed broke ranks with the party, joined by his son-in-law, Talabani, who would later form the Patriotic Union. Educated in England and Sweden, Rasch was a professor of computer sciences at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm until 2000, when he moved back to Sulaymaniyah and started a group that worked with young people.

Rasch said his differences with the Patriotic Union stemmed from his attempts to reform the leadership. Party leaders had a different take on his departure: They said he was engaged in a family dispute with his sister, Talabani's wife.

Today, his independent campaign for the regional presidency has an amateurish feel. In his office, black-and-white posters printed on letter-size paper decorate the walls. "The road to Kurdistan is ahead," one reads. "With progress, we will have a brighter future," proclaims another. Money is tight, and campaign workers are scarce. The well-funded and well-run main parties, meanwhile, dominate the news.

"I will lose," Rasch said, before correcting himself: "I may lose."

But, he added: "I want to show people that nobody will kill you if you run. And the next time, people will have better chances."

Obama's Domestic Agenda Teeters

By Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie
Sunday, July 19, 2009

Barely six months into his presidency, Barack Obama seems to be driving south into that political speed trap known as Carter Country: a sad-sack landscape in which every major initiative meets not just with failure but with scorn from political allies and foes alike. According to a July 13 CBS News poll, the once-unassailable president's approval rating now stands at 57 percent, down 11 points from April. Half of Americans think the recession will last an additional two years or more, 52 percent think Obama is trying to "accomplish too much," and 57 percent think the country is on the "wrong track."

From a lousy cap-and-trade bill awaiting death in the Senate to a health-care reform agenda already weak in the knees to the failure of the stimulus to deliver promised jobs and economic activity, what once looked like a hope-tastic juggernaut is showing all the horsepower of a Chevy Cobalt. "Give it to me!" the president egged on a Michigan audience last week, pledging to "solve problems" and not "gripe" about the economic hand he was dealt.

Despite such bravura, Obama must be furtively reviewing the history of recent Democratic administrations for some kind of road map out of his post-100-days ditch.

So far, he seems to be skipping the chapter on Bill Clinton and his generally free-market economic policies and instead flipping back to the themes and comportment of Jimmy Carter. Like the 39th president, Obama has inherited an awful economy, dizzying budget deficits and a geopolitical situation as promising as Kim Jong Il's health. Like Carter, Obama is smart, moralistic and enamored of alternative energy schemes that were nonstarters back when America's best-known peanut farmer was installing solar panels at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Like Carter, Obama faces as much effective opposition from his own party's left wing as he does from an ardent but diminished GOP.

And perhaps most important, as with Carter, his specific policies are genuinely unpopular. The auto bailout -- which, incidentally, is illegal, springing as it has from a fund specifically earmarked for financial institutions -- has been reviled from the get-go, with opposition consistently polling north of 60 percent. Majorities have said no to bank bailouts and to cap and trade if it would make electricity significantly more expensive.

According to a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll, more than 80 percent are concerned that health-care reform will increase costs or diminish the quality of care. Even as two House committees passed a reform bill last week, the director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office warned that the proposal "significantly expands the federal responsibility for health-care costs" and dramatically raises the cost "curve." This sort of voter and expert feedback can't be comforting to the president.

As writers who inveighed against last year's GOP candidate and called George W. Bush's presidency a "disaster," we're equal-opportunity critics. As taxpayers with children and hence some small, almost certainly unrecoverable stake in this country's future (not to mention that of General Motors, Chrysler and AIG), we write with skin in the game and the fear that our current leader will indeed start busting out the 1970s cardigans.

Of course, it's too early to write Obama off. Just a few years ago, Republicans and Democrats alike were puzzling over the "permanent" GOP majority. And less than two years ago, the smart set was buying advance tickets for Rudy vs. Hillary. Yet there's no question that Obama's massively ambitious domestic agenda is at a fork in the road: One route leads to Plains, Ga., and early retirement, the other to Hope, Ark., a second term and the revitalization of the American economy.

The key to understanding Obama's predicament is to realize that while he ran convincingly as a repudiation of Bush, he is in fact doubling down on his predecessor's big-government policies and perpetual crisis-mongering. From the indefinite detention of alleged terrorists to gays in the military to bailing out industries large and small, Obama has been little more than the keeper of the Bush flame. Indeed, it took the two of them to create the disaster that is the 2009 budget, racking up a deficit that has already crossed the historic $1 trillion mark with almost three months left in the fiscal year.

Beyond pushing the "emergency" $787 billion stimulus package (even while acknowledging that the vast majority of funds would be released in 2010 and beyond), Obama signed a $410 billion omnibus spending bill and a $106 billion supplemental spending bill to cover "emergency" expenses in Iraq and Afghanistan (and, improbably, a "cash for clunkers" program). Despite pledges to achieve a "net spending cut" by targeting earmarks and wasteful spending, Obama rubber-stamped more than 9,000 earmarks and asked government agencies to trim a paltry $100 million in spending this year, 0.003 percent of the federal budget.

In the same way that Bush claimed to be cutting government even while increasing real spending by more than 70 percent, Obama seems to believe that saying one thing, while doing another, somehow makes it so. His first budget was titled "A New Era of Fiscal Responsibility," even as his own projections showed a decade's worth of historically high deficits. He vowed no new taxes on 95 percent of Americans, then jacked up cigarette taxes and indicated a willingness to consider new health-care taxes as part of his reform package. He said he didn't want to take over General Motors on the day that he took over General Motors.

Such is the extent of Obama's magical realism that he can promise to post all bills on the Internet five days before signing them, serially break that promise and then, when announcing that he wouldn't even try anymore, have a spokesman present the move as yet another example of "providing the American people more transparency in government."

What the new president has not quite grasped is that the American people understand both irony and cognitive dissonance. Instead, Obama has mistaken his personal popularity for a national predilection toward emergency-driven central planning. He doesn't get that Americans prefer the slower process of building political consensus based on reality, and at least a semblance of rational deliberation rather than one sky-is-falling legislative session after another.

On this last point, Obama is a perfect extension of Bush's worst trait as president. In the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the Bush administration pushed through the Patriot Act, a massive, transformative piece of legislation that plainly went unread even as Congress overwhelmingly voted aye. Bush whipped up an atmosphere of crisis every time he sensed a restive Congress or a dissatisfied electorate. And at the end of his tenure, he rammed through the TARP bailout at warp speed, arguing that the United States yet again faced catastrophe at the hands of an existential threat.

But contrary to the dreams of dystopians and paranoiacs everywhere, there simply is no outside threat to the American way of life. No country can challenge us militarily; no economic system stands to dislodge capitalism; no terrorist group can do anything more than land the occasional (if horrendous) blow. And as history has shown, the U.S. economy is resilient enough to overcome the worst-laid plans from the White House.

Bush learned the hard way that running government as a perpetual crisis machine leads to bad policy and public fatigue. Obama's insistence on taking advantage of a crisis to push through every item on the progressive checklist right now is threatening to complete that cycle within his first year.

What are his options? First, stop doing harm. Throwing money all over the economy (and especially to sectors that match up with Democratic interests) is the shortest path to what Margaret Thatcher described as the inherent flaw in socialism: Eventually you run out of other people's money.

No matter how many fantastical multipliers Obama ascribes to government spending, with each day comes refutation of the administration's promises on jobs and economic growth. Even his chief source on the topic, economic adviser Christina Romer, now grants that calculating jobs "created or saved" by Team Obama is simply impossible.

Which leads to the second point: Stop it with the magical realism already.

Save terms such as "fiscal responsibility" for policies that at least minimally resemble that notion. Don't pretend that a budget that doubles the national debt in five years and triples it in 10 is the work of politicians tackling "the difficult choices." Americans have a pretty good (if slow-to-activate) B.S. detector, and the more you mislead them now, the worse they'll punish you later. Toward that end, producing real transparency instead of broken promises is the first step toward building credibility.

That the administration is now spending millions of dollars to revamp its useless stimulus-tracking site Recovery.gov is one more indication that, post-Bush, the White House still thinks of citizens as marks to be rolled.

Finally, it's time to connect the poster boy for hope to the original Man From Hope. After Bill Clinton bit off more domestic policy than even he could chew, leading to a Republican rout in the midterm elections of 1994, the 42nd president refocused his political intelligence on keeping his ambitions and, as a result, the size of government growth, limited. Though there is much to complain about in his record, the broad prosperity and mostly sound economic policy under his watch aren't included.

This shouldn't be a difficult task for Obama. As a political animal, he has always resembled Clinton more than Carter. This might help him avoid the Carteresque pileup he's driving into. Far more important, it just might help the rest of us.

Nick Gillespie is the editor of Reason.com and Reason.tv. Matt Welch is editor of Reason magazine. They will discuss this article online at 11 a.m. on Monday at www.washingtonpost.com/liveonline.

Venezuela's Drug-Trafficking Role Is Growing Fast, U.S. Report Says

By Juan Forero
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, July 19, 2009

BOGOTA, Colombia, July 18 -- A report for the U.S. Congress on drug smuggling through Venezuela concludes that corruption at high levels of President Hugo Chávez's government and state aid to Colombia's drug-trafficking guerrillas have made Venezuela a major launching pad for cocaine bound for the United States and Europe.

Since 1996, successive U.S. administrations have considered Venezuela a key drug-trafficking hub, the Government Accountability Office report says. But now, it says, the amount of cocaine flowing into Venezuela from Colombia, Venezuela's neighbor and the world's top producer of the drug, has skyrocketed, going from an estimated 60 metric tons in 2004 to 260 metric tons in 2007. That amounted to 17 percent of all the cocaine produced in the Andes in 2007.

The report, which was first reported by Spain's El Pais newspaper Thursday and obtained by The Washington Post on Friday, represents U.S. officials' strongest condemnation yet of Venezuela's alleged role in drug trafficking. It says Venezuela has extended a "lifeline" to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, which the United States estimates has a hand in the trafficking of 60 percent of the cocaine produced in Colombia.

The report, scheduled to be made public in Washington on Monday, drew an angry response from Chávez, whose government has repeatedly clashed with the United States. Speaking to reporters in Bolivia on Friday, the populist leader characterized the report as a political tool used by the United States to besmirch his country. He also said the United States, as the world's top cocaine consumer, has no right to lecture Venezuela.

"The United States is the first narco-trafficking country," Chávez said, adding that Venezuela's geography -- particularly its rugged 1,300-mile border with Colombia -- makes it vulnerable to traffickers. He also asserted that Venezuela had made important gains in the drug war since expelling U.S. counter-drug agents in 2005, a measure the GAO says made Venezuela more attractive to Colombian traffickers.

"Venezuela has begun to hit narco-trafficking hard since the DEA left," Chávez said, referring to the Drug Enforcement Administration. "The DEA is filled with drug traffickers."

Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.) commissioned the GAO study in February 2008, asking the nonpartisan agency to determine whether Venezuela was "in the process of becoming a narco-state, heavily dependent [on] and beholden to the international trade in illegal drugs."

In a statement about the GAO report, Lugar, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the findings "have heightened my concern that Venezuela's failure to cooperate with the United States on drug interdiction is related to corruption in that country's government." He said the report underscores a need for a comprehensive review of U.S. policy toward Venezuela.

The release of the report is expected to provide ammunition to some Republican lawmakers who have criticized the Obama administration's efforts to reinstate the deposed president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, a close ally of Chávez. U.S. diplomats have said that despite his ties to Chávez, Zelaya should be returned to power to serve the six months left in his term.

A Democratic aide in Congress who works on Latin American policy issues suggested that the call for a review of U.S. policy toward Venezuela could interfere with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's bid to improve relations with Caracas, which were badly frayed during the Bush years. "The administration inherited a messy bilateral relationship and deserves a chance to put it on a more even keel," the aide said.

The GAO report describes how cocaine produced in Colombia is smuggled into Venezuela via land and river routes, as well as on short flights originating from remote regions along Colombia's eastern border. Most of the cocaine is then shipped out on merchant vessels, fishing boats and so-called go-fast boats. Though most of it is destined for U.S. streets, increasing amounts are being sent to Europe, the report says.

The GAO contends that corruption in Venezuela, reaching from officers in the National Guard to officials in top levels of government, has contributed to the surge in trafficking.

In September, the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control designated three Venezuelan high-ranking officials, all close aides to Chávez, as "drug kingpins" for protecting FARC drug shipments and providing arms and funding to Colombian guerrillas. They are Hugo Armando Carvajal Barrios, director of the military's Intelligence Directorate; Henry de Jesús Rangel Silva, head of the Directorate of Intelligence and Prevention Services; and Ramón Rodríguez Chacín, former interior and justice minister.

News of the GAO report came as Colombian officials in Bogota released an internal FARC video in which the rebel group's second-in-command, Jorge Briceño, reads the deathbed manifesto, written in March 2008, by the then-supreme commander, Manuel Marulanda. In the video, seized in May from a FARC operative and obtained by the Associated Press, Marulanda stresses the strategic importance of "maintaining good political relations, friendship and confidence with the governments of Venezuela and Ecuador."

Marulanda's letter also laments that a trove of internal e-mails, many of them compromising Venezuelan and Ecuadoran officials, fell into the hands of Colombian authorities that month. Briceño, reading the letter to a group of guerrillas in a jungle clearing, announces that among FARC "secrets" that were lost is information about the "assistance in dollars" to Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa's 2006 presidential campaign.

Venezuela did not immediately respond to the video. But on Saturday, Correa, an ally of Chávez, denied receiving campaign funds from the FARC and suggested the video was a "setup."

"There is a setup to damage the image of the country and the government," he said in a radio address.

Flare-Ups of Ethnic Unrest Shake China's Self-Image

By Ariana Eunjung Cha
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, July 19, 2009

YINGDE, China -- Six weeks after a violent confrontation between police and villagers in this old tea farming region, Xu Changjian remains in the hospital under 24-hour guard.

After being hit in the head multiple times by police, Xu's brain is hemorrhaging, leaving him paralyzed on the right side. He can barely sit up. Local government officials say Xu's injuries and that of other farmers were regrettable but unavoidable. They say that villagers attacked their police station on the afternoon of May 23 and that the police were forced to defend themselves with batons, dogs, pepper spray, smoke bombs and water cannons.

The villagers, most of them Vietnamese Chinese, tell a different story. They say that about 30 elderly women, most in their 50s and 60s, went to the police station that day to stage a peaceful protest. Four farmers' representatives, who had taken their grievances about land seizures to government officials a few days earlier, had been detained, and villagers in the countryside of the southern province of Guangdong demanded that they be freed. As the hours passed, several thousand supporters and curious passersby joined them. Then, farmers say, hundreds of riot police bused from neighboring towns stormed in without warning and started indiscriminately pummeling people in the crowd.

The violence in Guangdong was echoed in the far western city of Urumqi, when clashes between ethnic Uighurs and Han Chinese on July 5 killed 192 people and injured about 1,700. Both incidents have shaken China's view of itself as a country that celebrates diversity and treats its minority populations better than its counterparts in the West do.

The incidents in Guangdong and Urumqi fit a pattern of ethnic unrest that includes the Tibetan uprising in March 2008, followed by bombings at police stations and government offices in the majority Uighur province of Xinjiang that left 16 officers dead shortly before the August Olympics.

Each conflict has had specific causes, including high unemployment, continued allegations of corruption involving public officials and charges of excessive force by police. But for the Chinese government, they add up to a major concern: Friction among the nation's 56 officially recognized ethnic groups is considered one of the most explosive potential triggers for social instability. Much of the unrest stems from a sense among some minority populations that the justice system in China is stacked against them. In March, hundreds of Tibetans, including monks, clashed with police in the northwestern province of Qinghai. The fight was apparently triggered by the disappearance of a Tibetan independence activist who unfurled a Tibetan flag while in police custody. Some said he committed suicide, but others said he died while trying to escape.

In April, hundreds of members of China's Hui Muslim minority clashed with police in Luohe in Henan province when they surrounded a government office and blocked three bridges. The protesters were angry about what they viewed as the local authorities' mishandling of the death of a Hui pedestrian who was hit by a bus driven by a Han man.

"In the United States and other countries, if a few police beat one person, it is big news; but here in China, it is nothing," said Zhang Shisheng, 52, a grocery store owner whose right shin and calf bones were shattered during the attacks. Metal rods now support his shin, and he will not be able to walk for at least six more months.

"I feel that Chinese cops can kill people like ants with impunity."

Xiang Wenming, a local party official and head of the Stability Maintenance Office in the area of Yingde where the clash occurred, said that "if some violence happened, that is because some people didn't listen to the police."

He denies that the Vietnamese Chinese protesters were treated any differently than non-minorities in the same situation would have been and said that if they feel set apart from other Chinese, it is their own doing. "The way they speak is not like they are Chinese but like they are foreigners," he said. "They never appreciate the assistance made by the government. They don't think they are Chinese even after they have lived here for more than 30 years."

Xiang said that about 10 villagers, including an "old woman" who was "slightly injured," were hurt during the conflict. But he acknowledges that the official government count does not include the large number of people detained by police and treated at the station, as well as those who fled the scene and avoided going to the hospital for fear of being arrested.

Vietnamese Chinese who were involved in or witnessed the confrontation said hundreds were injured.

Zhang's neighbor, 63-year-old Xie Shaochang, is still bleeding from a gash in his head that he said was caused by police. And 56-year-old Zhong Yuede can no longer straighten his arm because it was so badly beaten in the attack.

The unrest in Yingde began with a simple land dispute.

The villagers, many of whom were welcomed to China from Vietnam in 1978-79 because their ancestors had lived here, were farming tea and vegetables until a few years ago, when the local government sold part of their land to Taiwanese developers. They have been petitioning the local government ever since for compensation in the form of money, other land or subsidies for houses.

The Vietnamese Chinese villagers said that despite their efforts to assimilate -- the younger generations speak Chinese dialects rather than Vietnamese -- discrimination has been a big part of their lives.

Residents say that in 2006, when there was a flood, the Vietnamese Chinese villagers received only five kilograms of rice per person -- worth about 20 yuan, or $3 -- while others received 200 yuan, or $30, from the local government. They also say that their roads have not been paved, while those of villages inhabited largely by Han people, the country's majority ethnic group, have been. They say that factory bosses and other employers discriminate against them and that it is difficult to find decent jobs.

"The government doesn't help us, mainly because we are Vietnam Chinese. We are poor and uneducated, so no one in our group works for the government," said Chen Ruixiang, 53, a farmer who raises silkworms and grows tangerines. "The government knows we are a weak group."

On the day of the incident, Chen Ajiao, 55, the village doctor, was in the front row near the police station door with the elderly female protesters when the soldiers came toward her. She said one of them took his baton and whacked her friend on the head. The woman lost consciousness and collapsed. Chen ran, and on the way out, she said, she saw other villagers bleeding from their wounds.

When bystanders saw the women being attacked, villagers said, they grabbed stones, bricks, bamboo sticks and anything else they could find and fought back. Some men took gasoline from nearby motorcycles, put it in bottles and threw it at the police cars to set them on fire.

Zhang, who was about 30 yards outside the gates, said four police officers came at him with batons and an iron stick. He said that after he collapsed in pain, he was taken to the police station, where he was not treated by doctors until he submitted to an interrogation. He said he was asked: Who organized this? Who informed you?

"Before, I thought police would protect people. Now, I am terrified of them," he said.

Researcher Zhang Jie contributed to this report.

Interviews Offer Look at Roles of CIA Contractors During Interrogations

By Joby Warrick and Peter Finn
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, July 19, 2009

In April 2002, as the terrorism suspect known as Abu Zubaida lay in a Bangkok hospital bed, top U.S. counterterrorism officials gathered at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., for a series of meetings on an urgent problem: how to get him to talk.

Put him in a cell filled with cadavers, was one suggestion, according to a former U.S. official with knowledge of the brainstorming sessions. Surround him with naked women, was another. Jolt him with electric shocks to the teeth, was a third.

One man's certitude lanced through the debate, according to a participant in one of the meetings. James E. Mitchell, a retired clinical psychologist for the Air Force, had studied al-Qaeda resistance techniques.

"The thing that will make him talk," the participant recalled Mitchell saying, "is fear."

Now, as the Senate intelligence committee examines the CIA's interrogation program, investigators are focusing in part on Mitchell and John "Bruce" Jessen, former CIA contractors who helped design and oversee Abu Zubaida's interrogation. These men have been portrayed as eager proponents of coercion, but the former U.S. official, whose account was corroborated in part by Justice Department documents, said they also rejected orders from Langley to prolong the most severe pressure on the detainee. The former official's account, alongside the recollections of those familiar with events at the CIA's secret prison in Thailand, yields a more nuanced understanding of their role than has previously been available.

Interviews with nearly two dozen current and former U.S. officials also provide new evidence that the imposition of harsh techniques provoked dissension among the officials charged with questioning Abu Zubaida, from the time of his capture through the period when the most grueling torments were applied.

In August 2002, as the first anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks approached, officials at CIA headquarters became increasingly concerned that they were not learning enough from their detainee in Thailand. When the interrogators concluded that Abu Zubaida had no more to tell, Langley scolded them: "You've lost your spine." If Mitchell and his team eased up and then al-Qaeda attacked the United States again, agency managers warned, "it would be on the team's back," recalled the former U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified information.

The officials who authorized or participated in harsh interrogations continue to dispute how effective such methods were and whether important information could have been obtained from Abu Zubaida and others without them. In March, The Washington Post reported that former senior government officials said that not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida's coerced confessions.

The International Committee of the Red Cross, in a 2007 report made public this year, said the application of harsh interrogation methods, "either singly or in combination, constituted torture."

George Little, a CIA spokesman, said harsh interrogation was always "a small fraction of the agency's counterterrorism mission." Now, he added, "the CIA is focused not on the past, but on analyzing current terrorist threats and thwarting terrorist plots."

Mitchell, 58, who remained a CIA contractor until this spring, declined to be interviewed. In conversations with close colleagues in recent months, he has rejected the popular portrayal of his role, maintaining that he steered the agency away from far more brutal methods toward practices that would not cause permanent harm to detainees.

Jessen, 60, declined to comment.

Yesterday, Mitchell issued a brief statement: "It may be easy for people who were not there and didn't feel the pressure of the threats to say how much better they could have done it. But they weren't there. We were and we did the best that we could."

The 'Manchester Manual'

A silver-maned, voluble man, Mitchell had retired from the Air Force before the Sept. 11 attacks and won several government contracts, including one from the CIA to study ways to assess people who volunteered information to the agency. While still in the military training program known as SERE -- for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape -- he and his colleagues called themselves "Masters of the Mind [Expletive]," according to two military officials who worked in the program.

In December 2001, the CIA asked Mitchell to analyze the "Manchester Manual," a document seized in a raid in Britain that described al-Qaeda resistance techniques. Mitchell asked Jessen, a senior SERE psychologist, to help prepare the assessment, according to Senate investigators.

The Mitchell-Jessen memo, which was distributed widely within the CIA, discussed the efficacy of techniques such as sleep deprivation and noise bombardment but did not broach waterboarding.

"It is not realistic to think someone who is hardened will talk unless they fear that something bad is going to happen to them," said the former U.S. official, describing Mitchell and Jessen's thinking. "They didn't think rapport-building techniques would work. But they also didn't [advocate] using waterboarding right away."

Mitchell told acquaintances that he also drew important lessons from the theory of "learned helplessness," a term psychologists use to describe people or animals reduced to a state of complete helplessness by some form of coercion or pain, such as electric shock. Mitchell insisted, however, that coercive interrogation should not reduce a prisoner to despair. Instead, he argued, "you want them to have the view that something they could say would hold the key to getting them out of the situation they were in," according to the former official.

"If you convince [a terrorism suspect] he's helpless, he's no good to you," the former official said.

A Breakthrough in Bangkok

In early April 2002, some officials at the CIA's Counterterrorist Center were not convinced that the man in U.S. custody was indeed Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Hussein, Abu Zubaida's given name. The Saudi-born Palestinian, then 29, had been sought by the FBI on suspicion that he played a role in a foiled 1999 plan to attack Los Angeles International Airport and tourist destinations in Jordan.

The detainee had been captured in Pakistan in late March 2002 after a firefight that left him wounded in the thigh, groin and stomach. After being treated in Pakistan, he was flown to Thailand for interrogation.

The CIA dispatched FBI agents Ali Soufan and Steve Gaudin for an initial look. The two men arrived a few hours before the wounded man was transferred to a hastily assembled CIA interrogation facility near one of Bangkok's airports.

Details of their experience and that of the CIA officials who followed them to Thailand with Mitchell were gleaned from public testimony, official documents and interviews with current and former intelligence and law-enforcement officials with access to confidential files. Through the FBI, Gaudin declined to comment for this article, and Soufan referred reporters to his congressional testimony and other public statements.

Soufan, a Lebanese American, later described the FBI's method as "informed interrogation." It was based on "leveraging our knowledge of the detainee's culture and mind-set, together with using information we already know about him," he told a Senate panel in May.

On the agents' first night in Thailand, Abu Zubaida went into septic shock because of his wounds and was rushed to a local hospital. Gaudin and Soufan dabbed his lips with ice, told him to ask God for strength and cleaned him up after he soiled himself, according to official documents and interviews.

At his bedside, Gaudin asked Soufan to show Abu Zubaida a photograph of Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah, an Egyptian suspect in the bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998. The two agents had photos of terrorism suspects on a handheld computer, and Gaudin accidentally displayed the wrong photo.

Abu Zubaida said: "This is Mukhtar. This is the mastermind of 9/11."

The agents did not know that Mukhtar, a name that had surfaced in some raw intelligence and an Osama bin Laden video, was a nickname for Khalid Sheik Mohammed. Nor did they know that Mohammed was an al-Qaeda member.

Abu Zubaida had given the agents the first positive link to the man who would later be charged as the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks.

'Creating the Atmosphere'

With the FBI's breakthrough, the CIA recognized that the captured man was indeed Abu Zubaida and began assembling a team to send to Thailand. Agency officials had no firm notion of what a post-Sept. 11 interrogation of a terrorism suspect should look like.

"It was not a job we sought out," said one former senior intelligence official involved in early decisions on interrogation. "The generals didn't want to do it. The FBI said no. It fell to the agency because we had the [legal] authorities and could operate overseas."

In Mitchell, the CIA found an authoritative professional who had answers, despite an absence of practical experience in interrogating terrorism suspects or data showing that harsh tactics work.

"Here was a guy with a title and a shingle," recalled the participant in the Langley meeting, "and he was saying things that others in the room already believed to be true."

Mitchell boarded a CIA plane for Bangkok with R. Scott Shumate, a CIA psychologist; two agency officers who worked undercover; and a small team of analysts and support staff, including security personnel to control Abu Zubaida.

Among those on the plane was an agency expert on interrogation and debriefing, an officer who was part of a training program intended to help the agency detect double agents and assess recruits for foreign espionage. The trainers taught strategies for extracting sensitive information but prohibited coercive tactics.

When Mitchell and the CIA team arrived in Thailand, Abu Zubaida was still in the hospital. The two FBI agents, Soufan and Gaudin, met the CIA officers at a nearby hotel for a debriefing.

Although senior CIA officials in Bangkok were nominally in charge, they deferred to Mitchell, according to several sources familiar with events at the prison.

"There was a big sense of arrogance about him," one source said.

After Abu Zubaida was discharged, the FBI was shut out of the interrogations as Mitchell began establishing the conditions for Abu Zubaida's interrogation -- "creating the atmosphere," as he put it to colleagues.

In the initial stages, Abu Zubaida was stripped of his clothes while CIA officers took turns at low-intensity questioning. Later, Mitchell added sleep deprivation and a constant bombardment of loud music, including tracks by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. After each escalation, he would dispatch an interrogator into Abu Zubaida's cell to issue a single demand: "Tell me what I want to know."

Mitchell sometimes spoke directly to the prisoner, but unlike the CIA officers, he wore a mask, according to two sources familiar with the events in Thailand.

He repeatedly sought authorization from the CIA's Counterterrorist Center for his actions.

"The program was fully put together, vetted and run by the counterterrorism folks at the agency," the former U.S. official said. "CIA headquarters was involved directly in every detail of interrogation. Permission had to be obtained before every technique was used, and the dialogue was very heavy. There were cables and also an IM system. All Mitchell's communications were with the Counterterrorist Center."

In Bangkok, word circulated among those at the secret site that the tactics had been approved "downtown" -- agency jargon for the White House.

Escalating Torment

Soufan testified to Congress in May that Abu Zubaida went silent once Mitchell took charge. Within days of the CIA team's arrival, the cables between Bangkok and Langley became devoid of new revelations. Agency officials decided to let the FBI back into the interrogations, but on the condition that forced nudity and sleep deprivation be allowed to continue.

The CIA team lowered the temperature in Abu Zubaida's cell until the detainee turned blue. The FBI turned it back up, setting off a clash over tactics.

Under FBI questioning, Abu Zubaida identified an operative he knew as Abdullah al-Mujahir, the alias, he said, of an American citizen with a Latino name. An investigation involving multiple agencies identified the suspect as Jose Padilla, the al-Qaeda operative later convicted of providing material support for terrorism.

"In two different bits, after sleep deprivation, is when Abu Zubaida gave clues about who Padilla might be," the former U.S. official said. "When that was put together with other CIA sources, they were able to identify who he was. . . . The cables will not show that the FBI just asked friendly questions and got information about Padilla."

As more miseries were heaped on Abu Zubaida, some members of the CIA team joined the FBI agents in pushing back. Among them was Shumate, the CIA psychologist, who voiced regret that he had played a role in recommending Mitchell to the agency, former associates said. Shumate did not return phone calls and e-mails seeking comment.

Soufan later told Justice Department investigators examining the FBI's role in detainee interrogations that he viewed Mitchell's early methods as "borderline torture."

In addition, one of the CIA team members told others in the group that he believed Abu Zubaida was being honest when he claimed to know nothing about significant al-Qaeda plots, according to two officials with access to classified reports.

Although Abu Zubaida was not a member of al-Qaeda and had limited relations with bin Laden, he was a font of information on the membership of the terrorist group because of his long-standing ties with Mohammed and North African jihadists, according to former intelligence and law-enforcement officials who have read his files. Abu Zubaida's attorneys maintain that he had no connection with al-Qaeda.

"You've got it all wrong," the detainee told one interrogator in May 2002, according to a former intelligence official with access to sensitive records. Abu Zubaida said that al-Qaeda had been surprised at the devastating efficacy of the Sept. 11 attacks and that any plans for future attacks were mere aspirations.

Abu Zubaida was lying but eventually would disclose everything, Mitchell asserted to his colleagues, citing his backers at the Counterterrorist Center. He repeated that his methods had been approved "at the highest levels," one of the interrogators later told the Justice Department investigators.

At the secret prison, dissent over Mitchell's methods peaked. First Shumate left, followed by Soufan. At the site, Shumate had expressed concerns about sleep deprivation, and back in Langley he complained again about Mitchell's tactics, according to the former U.S. official and another source familiar with events in Thailand.

Then one of the CIA debriefers left. In early June, Gaudin flew to Washington for a meeting on what was happening in Thailand, and the FBI did not allow him to return.

Jessen, newly retired from the military, arrived in Thailand that month. Mitchell and his partner continued to ratchet up the pressure on Abu Zubaida, although Bush administration lawyers had not yet authorized the CIA's harshest interrogation measures. That came verbally in late July and then in writing on Aug. 1, paving the way to new torments.

Interrogators wrapped a towel around Abu Zubaida's neck and slammed him into a plywood wall mounted in his cell. He was slapped in the face. He was placed in a coffin-like wooden box in which he was forced to crouch, with no light and a restricted air supply, he later told delegates from the Red Cross.

Finally, he was waterboarded.

Abu Zubaida told the Red Cross that a black cloth was placed over his face and that interrogators used a plastic bottle to pour water on the fabric, creating the sensation that he was drowning.

The former U.S. official said that waterboarding forced Abu Zubaida to reveal information that led to the Sept. 11, 2002, capture of Ramzi Binalshibh, the key liaison between the Hamburg cell led by Sept. 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta and al-Qaeda's leadership in Afghanistan.

But others contend that Binalshibh's arrest was the result of several pieces of intelligence, including the successful interrogation by the FBI of a suspect held at Bagram air base in Afghanistan who had been in contact via satellite phone with Binalshibh, as well as information gleaned from an interview Binalshibh gave to the television network al-Jazeera.

Abu Zubaida was waterboarded 83 times over four or five days, and Mitchell and Jessen concluded that the prisoner was broken, the former U.S. official said. "They became convinced that he was cooperating. There was unanimity within the team."

One More Time

CIA officials at the Counterterrorist Center were not convinced.

"Headquarters was sending daily harangues, cables, e-mails insisting that waterboarding continue for 30 days because another attack was believed to be imminent," the former official said. "Headquarters said it would be on the team's back if an attack happened. They said to the interrogation team, 'You've lost your spine.' "

Mitchell and Jessen now found themselves in the same position as Soufan, Shumate and others.

"It was hard on them, too," the former U.S. official said. "They are psychologists. They didn't enjoy this at all."

The two men threatened to quit if the waterboarding continued and insisted that officials from Langley come to Thailand to watch the procedure, the former official said.

After a CIA delegation arrived, Abu Zubaida was strapped down one more time. As water poured over his cloth-covered mouth, he gasped for breath. "They all watched, and then they all agreed to stop," the former official said.

A 2005 Justice Department memo released this year confirmed the visit. "These officials," the memo said, "reported that enhanced techniques were no longer needed."

Staff writers Walter Pincus and R. Jeffrey Smith and staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

Mauritania Opposition Rejects Presidential Election Results

By Scott Stearns Nouakchott, Mauritania 19 July 2009 Mauritanian opposition candidates are rejecting results from a presidential election that show former military leader Mohammed Ould Abdel Aziz winning. With more than 70 percent of ballots counted, Mauritania's electoral commission says Aziz is winning more than 52 percent of the vote. If that count holds up, the leader of last August's coup would win election in the first round - avoiding a run-off in which his main political opponents had vowed to unite against him. Those opponents immediately rejected the provisional results as an "electoral charade, which is trying to legitimize the coup." In a joint statement, Ahmed Ould Daddah, Ely Ould Mohamed Vall, Messaoud Ould Boulkheir, and Hamai Ould Meimou denounced what they called "prefabricated results." They are calling for the international community to investigate what they say were voting irregularities, including counting opposition ballots for Aziz. The opposition leaders are asking "competent bodies", including the country's constitutional council and Interior Ministry to not validate the results. Their joint statement is urging Mauritanians to mobilize to defeat what opposition leaders are calling an "electoral coup d'etat." During the campaign, Daddah said he was quiet when he says vote fraud denied him victory in presidential elections in 1991 and 2007. But he said this time he is not prepared to be silent if the election is stolen and told his supporters neither should they. Arab electoral observers monitored more than 300 of Mauritania's 2,500 polling stations. They saw irregularities including partisan electoral officials, security forces inside polling stations, and the denial of voters who registered after June 6th - most of whom support the opposition. But the group's preliminary report says it does not believe those irregularities will affect the overall outcome of the vote. Mohsen Marzouk is Secretary General of the Arab Democracy Foundation. Marzouk says Mauritania is a crucial point that will affect all its people. He called for political parties and official institutions to adhere strictly to democracy as the best way to solve the political crisis and promote stability and development. Arab observers say they will consider opposition complaints and include them in its final report. Boulkheir and Daddah had both publicly pledged to support the other in a potential run-off against Aziz if no candidate won more than 50 percent of the vote. This election was meant to restore constitutional rule to Mauritania after Aziz led a coup 11 months ago that toppled the nation's first freely-elected leader. Aziz ran a populist campaign, calling himself the "Candidate of the Poor" pledging to improve access to health care while lowering food and fuel prices. To the cheers of his supporters, he vowed to build more jails to imprison his political opponents, who he says are corrupt. Aziz campaigned far longer than most of his opponents as he began running for a previously-scheduled June election that he agreed to postpone as part of a power-sharing deal that included the opposition dropping their electoral boycott.

Indonesian Police Say Jakarta Bombings Are Work of Jemaah Islamiyah

By Brian Padden Jakarta 19 July 2009

Indonesian Police say the bombings of two hotels in Jakarta on Friday was the work of Jemaah Islamiyah, a terrorist group with al-Qaida ties. Analysts say it is likely that Noordin Top, a Malaysian fugitive who leads an affiliated group within a Southeast Asian militant network, planned and organized the attacks. The two blasts killed nine people, including the two suspected attackers, and wounded 50, many of them foreigners.

Indonesian national police spokesman Nanan Soekarna says the bombing attacks on the Marriott and Ritz Carlton Hotels in Jakarta on Friday were the work of Jemaah Islamiyah. The group with ties to Al-Qaida, has carried out dozens of bombings in Indonesia in the past decade, including a 2002 attack in Bali that left more than 200 people dead, mostly foreign tourists.

A poster bearing image of Southeast Asia terror ringleaders Noordin M. Top, left, and Azhari bin Husin is put on a tree in Jakarta (File)

He told reporters Sunday an unexploded bomb left in a guest room of the Marriott hotel, which was attacked along with the nearby Ritz-Carlton, resembled explosives used in Bali and one discovered in a recent raid on an Islamic boarding school.

Sidney Jones, an analyst with the International Crisis Group, says Noordin Top, a Malaysian who leads the most militant faction of Jemaah Islamiyah, is the likely organizer of the attacks.

"Noordin is the only person of the various leaders of radical groups in Indonesia who is continued to be determined to attack western targets and particularly American targets," said Jones.

Jones says Noordin has used suicide bombers in the past like the ones used in Friday's attacks. And she says before the bombing police had some intelligence indicating Noordin may have been planning something.

"It was clear in the last two weeks that something was afoot. And the police were very actively searching this area in South Central Java called Cilacap because they believe some of Noordin's associates were active there," said Jones. "And we now know there is linkage between explosive materials used in these hotel bombings with some of the materials found in Cilacap by police."

But Jones says Noordin Top may have split from the main Jemaah Islamiyah organization, or JI, which had recently turned away from violence because it was turning public opinion against them.

"The bulk of JI members are not interested in violence now because they regard this kind of bombing as counter-productive," added Jones. "They need to rebuild their organization and they do that by recruiting new members through religious outreach. This kind of bombing does not bring you any new members, it creates outrage in the community."

Jones says bombing the Marriott Hotel, which was also attacked in 2003, was probably meant to demonstrate that their group is still active and able penetrate the increased security.

Bombing Suspects Spent Two Days at Hotel

By TOM WRIGHT

JAKARTA -- The suspects in the two deadly bombings here Friday checked into one of the targeted hotels two days earlier and assembled explosives in their room, evading the kind of tight security that has helped convince foreigners it is again safe to do business in Indonesia.

Suicide bombers at the JW Marriott and nearby Ritz-Carlton hotels killed eight people and injured 53, striking at the heart of corporate Indonesia.

The Ritz-Carlton and JW Marriott are seen as symbols of the country's new economic strength and growing appeal to foreign investors. They have marble floors and gold-plated columns, and Indonesia's rich and famous dine at their restaurants and hammer out business deals in their lounges, adorned with spacious armchairs and grand pianos. Nearby are some of the city's most expensive restaurants, which often have Ferraris parked outside.

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Both hotels have security measures intended to prevent terrorists from driving a car full of explosives toward their lobbies, as Islamist radicals did at the JW Marriott in 2003, killing 12 people. Since Indonesia's last terrorist attack in Bali in 2005, new security measures and a major crackdown on Islamic terrorists by U.S.-trained Indonesian antiterrorism police made Westerners feel more secure.

On Friday, some of Jakarta's best-known Western and Indonesian business figures gathered for a regular 8 a.m. breakfast meeting at the Marriott hosted by Jim Castle, an American who runs CastleAsia, a prominent local consulting firm.

Mr. Castle, who has lived for almost 30 years in Indonesia and regularly appears on cable news shows, was at the Marriott during the 2003 blast. He wasn't injured then, and has expressed a cautious optimism about the country's prospects. Among topics for discussion at the conference: The success of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, a former army general who was re-elected a week earlier on a platform of restoring law and order.

Bombings Shake Jakarta: Photos

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Violence Strikes: Past Attacks

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A Restive Region: Map

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• Earlier: Deadly Blasts Rock Jakarta Hotels

Upstairs, in Room 1808, a number of guests had checked in Wednesday under aliases -- including one similar to the alias of Southeast Asia's most-wanted terrorist suspect. A police spokesman declined to say how many people had checked in or to give their nationalities.

Shortly before 8 a.m. Friday, security video footage showed, a man wearing a cap and pulling a bag on wheels crossed the lobby of the JW Marriott, walking toward the restaurant. A flash followed, and smoke filled the air.

A few minutes later a blast went off at the restaurant of the Ritz-Carlton. Cho Insang, a South Korean who runs a modeling agency and was organizing a fashion show in the hotel in August, was having breakfast when the bomb exploded. He was knocked to the floor, and was able to run out into the lobby. "The room was full of smoke and people panicking," he said. He suffered minor facial injuries.

The lobby areas of both hotels were left a mangled mess of steel and glass, full of damaged furniture and other debris. The sidewalks outside were caked with blood.

The blasts sent workers running into the street, many in their nightclothes or underwear. Local television showed images of mangled and bloodied bodies slumped on the floor. Plumes of smoke from the blasts shrouded the area as the injured were laid out on a nearby square of undeveloped land.

When the dust settled, two well-known expatriate business leaders attending the CastleAsia breakfast were dead: Timothy Mackay, a New Zealander who headed Swiss cement maker Holcim Ltd.'s local operations, and Nathan Verity, an Australian who ran his own Jakarta-based recruitment company.

Authorities didn't release the identities of all of the other six people killed, and it remained unclear whether the suicide bombers were among them

The injured who were at the breakfast included Noke Kiroyan, an Indonesian former chairman of miner Rio Tinto's local operations; Andy Cobham, an American who previously headed cellphone company Motorola Inc. in Indonesia; and David Potter, an executive at Phoenix-based Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold Inc.

Mr. Castle's hearing was affected after the blast but he was in a stable condition, his assistant said.

Authorities later found a third, unexploded bomb in Room 1808. An Indonesian bomb squad detonated the device, the police spokesman said.

The attacks appeared to be the work of highly capable bomb makers, security experts said. The investigation is focusing on Islamist terrorists, primarily, Noordin Mohamed Top, who is considered an expert bomb maker from Jemaah Islamiyah, a local affiliate of al Qaeda.

In a televised address, a visibly angry Mr. Yudhoyono said the bombings were attempts to destabilize the country after the elections. "I'm confident just like when we have uncovered [terrorists] in the past, the perpetrators and those who moved this act of terrorism will be caught and brought to justice," Mr. Yudhoyono said, pausing for seconds at a time to control his emotions.

Write to Tom Wright at tom.wright@wsj.com

Chinese Question Police Absence in Ethnic Riots

By EDWARD WONG

URUMQI, China, July 18 — As this shattered regional capital sorts through the corpses from China’s deadliest civil unrest in decades, another loss has become apparent: faith in the government’s ability to secure the peace and quell mass disturbances. In many neighborhoods, police officers remained absent for hours as the carnage unfolded, witnesses say.

The bloodletting here on July 5, in which ethnic Uighurs pummeled and stabbed ethnic Han to death, was just the latest episode in a nationwide upswing in large-scale street violence that had already prompted concerned officials in Beijing to look for new ways to defuse such outbursts. In all of the recent cases, not only were officials and security forces unable to contain the violence, but average people clashed with the police en masse — a sign of the profound distrust of local authority throughout much of China.

“In the last several years, the level of violence and speed with which these incidents can turn violent has increased,” said Murray Scot Tanner, an analyst of Chinese security. “It raises a very, very serious question: To what extent are the Chinese people afraid of their police anymore?”

In parts of the Uighur quarter and in poorer, mixed areas of south Urumqi, young Uighur men with sticks, knives and stones went on a bloody rampage for about five hours while police officers remained mostly absent, according to interviews with dozens of residents. In some areas where police officers arrived but were outnumbered by rioters, the officers stood around or fled, witnesses said.

“Where were the police while people were being killed?” said Cheng Wei, 41, a landscaper whose neighbors, poor fruit vendors from Henan Province, lost a son in the riots. “They were completely useless.”

Large street protests that turn violent, and that officials and security forces have been powerless to stop, have been on the rise in recent years, analysts say. The government usually avoids reporting the number of protests or riots in China, but an article in January in Outlook Weekly, a policy magazine published by Xinhua, the state news agency, said there were 90,000 such events in 2006, up from 60,000 in 2003.

The central government still can completely lock down areas when it anticipates protests, as it did across the Tibetan plateau in the spring or for the 20th anniversary of the student rallies at Tiananmen Square in June. But increasingly, security forces seem to have been caught unaware.

The rampage by Uighurs on July 5 was followed for days by reprisal killings by Han vigilantes who defied police orders to refrain from violence. At least 192 people were killed and 1,721 injured in all of the violence, most of them Han, according to the government. Many Uighurs say the Uighur casualties have been severely undercounted. The Han, who dominate China, are the majority in Urumqi, even though the Uighurs, a Turkic people largely resentful of Chinese rule, are the biggest ethnic group in this western region of Xinjiang.

In March 2008, rioters in Tibet openly defied police officers who, caught by surprise, largely disappeared during the first 24 hours of violence. At least 19 people died.

Last month, tens of thousands of residents of Shishou, in Hubei Province, clashed with riot police officers over the mysterious death of a hotel chef. A year earlier, in Weng’an County of Guizhou Province, at least 30,000 people rioted over the handling of an inquiry into the death of a 17-year-old girl, torching police cars, the main police station and the government headquarters.

Frustration at legal injustice and Communist Party corruption is a common thread. The violence in Xinjiang began as a peaceful protest on July 5, when Uighurs called for a proper inquiry into a factory brawl in southern China that had left two Uighurs dead.

“The absence of an independent legal system is the party’s biggest mistake, because when people can’t take their grievances to the courts, they take them to the streets,” said Nicholas Bequelin, an Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch.

So concerned are Chinese leaders over the rise in mass violence and the growing contempt for law enforcement that they have taken new measures to ensure stability, with the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the People’s Republic coming up in October.

Vice President Xi Jinping, pegged as the next leader of China, took charge of a committee to ensure social stability. Separately, party officials and police officers down to the county level have taken part in training for managing civil unrest. The drills include teaching them to disable local Internet service during an outbreak and emphasizing that leaders take part in dialogue at the front lines rather than resort to shows of force.

But party leaders and police officers in Urumqi failed to avert disaster the night of July 5 even though government officials say the police knew as early as 1 a.m. that day that Uighurs were planning to hold a protest.

In the early evening of July 5, galvanized by Internet messages, Uighurs began gathering at People’s Square in the city center, near the headquarters of the regional Communist Party and government offices, to protest the handling of the earlier factory brawl. Police officers quickly encircled the crowd, witnesses said.

A mile south, about 6 p.m., people also began gathering on the northern edge of the old Uighur quarter, said Adam Grode, an American teacher who watched the scene from his 16th-floor apartment. The crowd swelled to more than 1,000 people, including women and the elderly.

There were at first only a few traffic police officers standing around. But by 6:30 p.m., a line of troops from the People’s Armed Police, a paramilitary force, had formed to the north and was trying to push the crowd down into the Uighur quarter. Some officers charged with batons. The crowd surged back against the troops, fists raised.

Another wave of troops arrived. They were better equipped, with body padding and riot shields, Mr. Grode said. Some had rifles slung across their bodies.

Young men began hurling stones and bricks as the police attacked with batons. People also threw rocks at buses that had been halted. A full-fledged street battle erupted, though the police officers at this point did not use their guns, Mr. Grode said.

Just a few hundred yards south, at the busy Grand Bazaar area, there were few officers. The handful there just stood by as rioters set upon any Han civilians they saw, witnesses said. One taxi driver, who gave his name as Mr. Han, said he was dragged from his car by Uighurs with knives while policemen watched. He managed to escape.

After 8 p.m., rioters showed up in mixed neighborhoods about two miles southeast of the Uighur quarter. Police officers did not arrive until after 1 a.m., witnesses said. These areas were among the worst hit; witnesses said bodies were strewn all around Dawan North Road, for instance.

“The police arrived around 1:30 a.m., and they put down their riot shields to move bodies,” said Mr. Cheng, the landscaper.

Earlier, at twilight, back in the northern half of the Uighur quarter, officers sprinted through alleyways to beat down and handcuff Uighur men. By around 10 p.m., they had begun opening fire with guns and tear gas rifles, Mr. Grode said, adding that he heard occasional series of single-shot gunfire. Another foreigner also said she heard gunfire after dark.

By 1 a.m., the rioting had ebbed, and police officers in the Uighur quarter were putting scores of handcuffed men onto buses.

Han residents keep asking why security forces showed up so late in the southern neighborhoods, where Han live close to Uighurs and are clearly vulnerable. Mr. Tanner, the security analyst, said that 11 years after the Tiananmen Square protests, security forces were ordered to handle protests cautiously, but that if rioting broke out, officers and paramilitary troops could use “decisive force” as long as senior local officials had given approval. They are not supposed to let a riot run its course, he said.

But security forces also make securing government buildings, financial centers and other strategic points a top priority, Mr. Tanner said. Indeed, a local reporter wrote that he saw many police officers after 8 p.m. on Zhongshan Road, where government buildings are. This could help explain why officers did not show up in the residential areas until much later.

At the most basic level, though, the policing failure appears rooted in the government’s inability to understand the Uighur-Han relationship. “There’s a severe failure of intelligence about society and about social tensions,” Mr. Tanner said. “In this case, what I think they were clearly unprepared for is the level of organized intercommunal violence.”

Two days after the killings by the Uighurs, thousands of Han with sticks and knives clashed with police officers as the Han tried storming the Uighur quarter. None of them trusted the government to mete out proper punishment or to protect the Han.

A man who gave his name as Mr. Li, waving a wooden chair leg, said, “I’m here to safeguard justice.”

Jonathan Ansfield contributed reporting from Beijing. Huang Yuanxi and Zhang Jing contributed research from Urumqi.

Rescued Banks Post Multibillion-Dollar Profits

By Binyamin Appelbaum
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, July 18, 2009

The huge profits reported this week by some of the nation's largest banks showed that the government is succeeding in its rescue of the financial industry, but the details of those earnings reports made it clear that the broader economy is not seeing the benefits.

Bank of America and Citigroup yesterday became the latest megabanks to report multibillion-dollar profits in the second quarter, joining J.P. Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs. The four banks together earned $13.6 billion only half a year after they lost a combined $20.8 billion.

Washington once celebrated such profits as evidence of economic strength, but the current round of earnings has instead become a political problem.

Simmering public anger over the pay practices of large financial companies has been fanned by the news that banks rescued so recently are now profiting so massively, particularly because trillions of dollars worth of federal aid has yet to revive lending, a critical step toward economic recovery.

The Obama administration moved yesterday to harness that anger in the service of its proposal to reform financial regulations.

The president's chief economic adviser, Lawrence H. Summers, said after a speech at the Petersen Institute for International Economics that the profits were made possible by "the extraordinary public support provided by the federal government." While he welcomed the performance as "a positive indicator for the economy," Summers said that the government still needs to reform financial regulations to prevent companies from engaging in the kinds of excesses that produced the crisis.

"No one should be confused about the extent to which the public sector has provided a foundation for financial recovery," Summers said. "And in that context, it is the obligation of the public sector to insist that reforms be put in place so that the mistakes of the past are not repeated."

The earnings reports also showed that the recovery is incomplete. The core business of banking -- lending money to companies and consumers -- remains deeply troubled. The number of borrowers defaulting on existing loans continued to rise rapidly, and the banks continued to respond by shrinking the total volume of their lending.

There are few signs that it is getting easier for Americans to borrow money.

Administration officials and financial experts said that the profits were a necessary step forward: The banks led the economy into recession, and now they must lead the recovery.

"It's a prerequisite for that augmented lending to have the restoration of health, which seems to be happening," said Douglas J. Elliott, a financial expert at the Brookings Institution.

But Elliott and others noted that the problem cannot be solved by the banks alone. Before the recession, about 40 percent of lending was funded by investors. Lenders went to Wall Street to raise the money they provided to borrowers. But it has been two years since investors have been willing to provide significant amounts of money, a point underscored this week by the death throes of small-business lender CIT Group, which depended on those capital markets and now faces the prospect of bankruptcy.

Experts say that lending cannot recover completely until investors start providing money again.

Bank of America posted earnings of $3.22 billion for the second quarter, or 33 cents a share. That was down from $3.41 billion (72 cents) in the period last year, but it represented a large turnaround from the bank's struggles in the fall. Citigroup reported a $4.3 billion profit, or 49 cents a share, reversing a loss during the comparable period last year of $2.5 billion (55 cents). As with reports earlier this week from Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan Chase, the earnings exceeded analyst predictions by a wide margin.

Despite offering emergency aid to the firms, the government gets little direct benefit from their profits, which go mostly to employees and common shareholders. The government will soon hold common shares in Citigroup, which could increase in value, and it still holds preferred shares in Bank of America, which do not fluctuate in value but do pay a regular dividend. Officials have said the investments were intentionally structured to produce modest returns because the real goal was increased lending.

The two companies reporting yesterday earned large sums from the sale of business units and other investments. Bank of America made $5.3 billion by selling part of an investment in China Construction Bank, and $3.8 billion from the sale of a merchant-processing business. Citigroup booked a $6.7 billion gain on the sale of a majority interest in its Smith Barney brokerage.

The companies also benefited from a revival in the investment-banking business. The value of investments started to rebound, and investors started to spend money again. The big banks all benefited from the absence of former rivals such as Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns, but the strongest banks benefited the most. Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan Chase also were able to draw business away from Citigroup and Bank of America, according to financial analysts and executives.

The revival, however, was a product of federal intervention as much as economic recovery. The Federal Reserve provided all the banks with vast sums of cheap money, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. helped banks to borrow from private investors.

"The reason we have strong capital markets is because the government is guaranteeing everyone's liquidity," said Paul Miller, a financial analyst at FBR Capital Markets.

Citigroup has required the most help. The government has invested a total of $45 billion, guaranteed to limit the company's losses on a huge portfolio of troubled loans, and allowed the company to repay the government with common stock, rather than requiring the regular dividend payments that other banks are required to make.

Bank of America is a close second. The company also got a $45 billion investment and a government guarantee to limit losses on troubled loans.

J.P. Morgan Chase last month repaid $25 billion in federal aid, and Goldman Sachs repaid $10 billion, but both companies continue to rely on the emergency borrowing programs.

The aid has allowed the banks to survive despite suffering major losses on loans made during the economic boom.

Bank of America said it had abandoned efforts during the second quarter to collect on almost 14 percent of its outstanding credit card loans, almost doubling its loss rate during the period last year. Its loss rate on mortgage loans increased more than sevenfold. Unlike in past downturns, the rate of defaults has continued to increase more rapidly than unemployment, as many Americans who still have jobs still prove unable to repay loans.

Bank of America chief executive Kenneth D. Lewis said he does not expect the numbers to improve until next year.

"We have to get through the next few quarters," Lewis told financial analysts on a conference call yesterday.

Government officials have repeatedly said that the aid programs are designed to spark new lending, but experts said that was never a realistic goal.

"This is all about survival at this point. You look at all these balance sheets, they're shrinking. Nobody's really adding liquidity to the system," Miller said. "It's going to take a while for this system to heal itself. There's a lot of damage out there, and it's going to take a while to get through it."

U.S. Commanders Are Concerned About New Iraqi Restrictions on American Troops

By Ernesto Londoño and Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, July 18, 2009

BAGHDAD, July 17 -- The Iraqi government has moved to sharply restrict the movement and activities of U.S. forces in a new reading of a six-month-old U.S.-Iraqi security agreement that has startled American commanders and raised concerns about the safety of their troops.

In a curt missive issued by the Baghdad Operations Command on July 2 -- the day after Iraqis celebrated the withdrawal of U.S. troops to bases outside city centers -- Iraq's top commanders told their U.S. counterparts to "stop all joint patrols" in Baghdad. It said U.S. resupply convoys could travel only at night and ordered the Americans to "notify us immediately of any violations of the agreement."

The strict application of the agreement coincides with what U.S. military officials in Washington say has been an escalation of attacks against their forces by Iranian-backed Shiite extremist groups, to which they have been unable to fully respond.

If extremists realize "some of the limitations that we have, that's a vulnerability they could use against us," a senior U.S. military intelligence official said. "The fact is that some of these are very politically sensitive targets" thought to be close to the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

The new guidelines are a reflection of rising tensions between the two governments. Iraqi leaders increasingly see the agreement as an opportunity to show their citizens that they are now unequivocally in charge and that their dependence on the U.S. military is minimal and waning.

The June 30 deadline for moving U.S. troops out of Iraqi towns and cities was the first of three milestones under the agreement. The U.S. military is to decrease its troop levels from 130,000 to 50,000 by August of next year.

U.S. commanders have described the pullout from cities as a transition from combat to stability operations. But they have kept several combat battalions assigned to urban areas and hoped those troops would remain deeply engaged in training Iraqi security forces, meeting with paid informants, attending local council meetings and supervising U.S.-funded civic and reconstruction projects.

The Americans have been taken aback by the new restrictions on their activities. The Iraqi order runs "contrary to the spirit and practice of our last several months of operations," Maj. Gen. Daniel P. Bolger, commander of the Baghdad division, wrote in an e-mail obtained by The Washington Post.

"Maybe something was 'lost in translation,' " Bolger wrote. "We are not going to hide our support role in the city. I'm sorry the Iraqi politicians lied/dissembled/spun, but we are not invisible nor should we be." He said U.S. troops intend to engage in combat operations in urban areas to avert or respond to threats, with or without help from the Iraqis.

"This is a broad right and it demands that we patrol, raid and secure routes as necessary to keep our forces safe," he wrote. "We'll do that, preferably partnered."

U.S. commanders have not publicly described in detail how they interpret the agreement's vaguely worded provision that gives them the right to self-defense. The issue has bedeviled them because commanders are concerned that responding quickly and forcefully to threats could embarrass the Iraqi government and prompt allegations of agreement violations.

A spate of high-casualty suicide bombings in Shiite neighborhoods, attributed to al-Qaeda in Iraq and related Sunni insurgent groups, has overshadowed the increase of attacks by Iran-backed Shiite extremists, U.S. official say.

Officials agreed to discuss relations with the Iraqi government and military, and Iranian support for the extremists, only on the condition of anonymity because those issues involve security, diplomacy and intelligence.

The three primary groups -- Asaib al-Haq, Khataib Hezbollah and the Promised Day Brigades -- emerged from the "special groups" of the Jaish al-Mahdi (JAM) militia of radical Iraqi Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, which terrorized Baghdad and southern Iraq beginning in 2006. All receive training, funding and direction from Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force.

"One of the things we still have to find out, as we pull out from the cities, is how much effectiveness we're going to have against some of these particular target sets," the military intelligence official said. "That's one of the very sensitive parts of this whole story."

As U.S. forces tried to pursue the alleged leaders of the groups and planned missions against them, their efforts were hindered by the complicated warrant process and other Iraqi delays, officials said.

Last month, U.S. commanders acquiesced to an Iraqi government request to release one of their most high-profile detainees, Laith Khazali. He was arrested in March 2007 with his brother, Qais, who is thought to be the senior operational leader of Asaib al-Haq. The United States thinks they were responsible for the deaths of five American soldiers in Karbala that year.

Maliki has occasionally criticized interference by Shiite Iran's Islamic government in Iraqi affairs. But he has also maintained close ties to Iran and has played down U.S. insistence that Iran is deeply involved, through the Quds Force, in training and controlling the Iraqi Shiite extremists.

U.S. intelligence has seen "no discernible increase in Tehran's support to Shia extremists in recent months," and the attack level is still low compared with previous years, U.S. counterterrorism official said. But senior military commanders maintained that Iran still supports the Shiite militias, and that their attacks now focus almost exclusively on U.S. forces.

After a brief lull, the attacks have continued this month, including a rocket strike on a U.S. base in Basra on Thursday night that killed three soldiers.

The acrimony that has marked the transition period has sowed resentment, according to several U.S. soldiers, who said the confidence expressed by Iraqi leaders does not match their competence.

"Our [Iraqi] partners burn our fuel, drive roads cleared by our Engineers, live in bases built with our money, operate vehicles fixed with our parts, eat food paid for by our contracts, watch our [surveillance] video feeds, serve citizens with our [funds], and benefit from our air cover," Bolger noted in the e-mail.

A spokesman for Bolger would not say whether the U.S. military considers the Iraqi order on July 2 valid. Since it was issued, it has been amended to make a few exemptions. But the guidelines remain far more restrictive than the Americans had hoped, U.S. military officials said.

Brig. Gen. Heidi Brown, the commander overseeing the logistical aspects of the withdrawal, said Iraqi and U.S. commanders have had fruitful discussions in recent days about the issue.

"It's been an interesting time, and I think we've sorted out any misunderstandings that were there initially," she said in an interview Friday.

One U.S. military official here said both Iraqi and American leaders on the ground remain confused about the guidelines. The official said he worries that the lack of clarity could trigger stalemates and confrontations between Iraqis and Americans.

"We still lack a common understanding and way forward at all levels regarding those types of situations," he said, referring to self-defense protocols and the type of missions that Americans cannot conduct unilaterally.

In recent days, he said, senior U.S. commanders have lowered their expectations.

"I think our commanders are starting to back off the notion that we will continue to execute combined operations whether the Iraqi army welcomes us with open arms or not," the U.S. commander said. "However, we are still very interested in and concerned about our ability to quickly and effectively act in response to terrorist threats" against U.S. forces.

DeYoung reported from Washington.