China Hopes to Create Its Own Media Empires - NYTimes.com

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By DAVID BARBOZA

SHANGHAI — China plans to spend billions of dollars in the next few years to develop media and entertainment companies that it hopes can compete with global giants like the News Corporation and Time Warner, and will in the process loosen some of its tight control of these industries.

An ambitious plan, set forth in guidelines last week by China’s State Council, envisions the creation of entertainment, news and culture companies with a market orientation and with less government backing. China, in short, would like to consolidate its industry into companies resembling Bloomberg, Time Warner and Viacom, analysts say.

“There appears to be a feeling at the highest levels of government that they need a media machine commensurate to the rising status and power of China,” says Jim Laurie, a former ABC News correspondent who teaches at Hong Kong University and recently met with Chinese state broadcasting executives.

Beijing hopes the moves will even improve the nation’s image overseas — part of a longstanding effort to use “soft power,” rather than military might to win friends abroad.

Along the way, Beijing will allow private and foreign companies to invest in everything from music, film and television to theater, dance and opera productions — though largely through state-owned companies.

The News Corporation, Viacom and other Western media giants have for years been frustrated by their inability to win approval to produce films and television programs aimed at Chinese consumers; often, they have operated with Chinese joint venture partners and run into delays or political barriers. Several American companies said they were studying the new Chinese rules and declined to comment further on them.

In its announcement last week, Beijing said that state-owned groups would be reorganized to allow outside financing so that they could “live on their own rather than being attached to government departments as parasites.”

The companies will gain greater freedom to finance and produce a wider range of entertainment and cultural content for distribution inside the country, and even for export.

Though China has not provided a detailed plan yet, one exception is likely to be news programming, which falls under the control of the Communist Party. China has also been upgrading its state-run news media, with an eye on foreign language publications, wire services and television programs to reach readers and viewers overseas.

Among the first companies to benefit from the new government policy will be Shanghai Media Group, one of the country’s biggest state-run news and media conglomerates. In August, the government gave the company approval to reorganize its operations and to issue stock to the public.

S.M.G., as it is known, had close to $1 billion in revenue and $100 million in profit last year. It also has partnerships with companies like the News Corporation, Viacom and CNBC, and a profitable array of television units, including a home shopping network, an animation channel, fashion and lifestyle programming, as well as radio, newspaper, magazine and film production units.

The company is being split into a state-controlled nonprofit side that will house news programming and satellite transmission, and a profit-driven side focused on advertising, content development and distribution.

“The domestic media market is being changed dramatically,” says Li Ruigang, S.M.G.’s 40-year-old chairman and chief executive. “This will be a new S.M.G. In the future we’ll be a holding company, and there will be more than 10 subsidiaries.”

To help the company bulk up, the China Development Bank recently agreed to provide $1.5 billion in financing over the next five years.

The government policy bank will become a partner with S.M.G. on a separate $735 million private equity fund. That fund, China Media Capital, will invest in media and entertainment properties and is headed by Mr. Li, the chairman of S.M.G.

Michael Tung, the chief investment officer of China Media Capital, says the government is encouraging consolidation in the media and entertainment industry and that the fund will help develop bigger media groups.

“China’s market is very fragmented,” Mr. Tung said. “China should have four or five huge media groups. There’s nothing now like News Corp or Time Warner. But we’ll also be looking for overseas opportunities.”

Foreign media companies looking for greater access to China’s vast market may be disappointed, analysts say of the new guidelines.

“This is not an invitation for stakes by international media companies,” says Vivek Couto, director of Media Partners Asia, a Hong Kong-based research firm. “But this may be an invitation for private equity and foreign capital to do more.”

Investments by media companies, if they come, are expected to be through partnerships — something already done with government scrutiny.

“This is a good time for Western companies to come in and find partners,” says Zhu Mei, the head of Linden Consulting in Beijing.

Ms. Zhu says the policy seems likely to nurture partnerships like the joint venture formed by Gehua Cultural Development Group, a state-owned Beijing company, with Live Nation, the American concert and performance organizer.

But other experts warn of regulatory hurdles, because media and entertainment companies report to a variety of agencies, each with its own imperatives.

That may be one reason China Central Television, the nation’s largest broadcaster, was not selected for the first reorganization.

CCTV is considered the mouthpiece of the central government and recently underwent a management shake-up after a fire severely damaged part of its nearly finished $700 million headquarters in Beijing, designed by Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren.

Despite that setback, Mr. Couto and other analysts say some of China’s big media companies are flourishing, with film and other entertainment venues growing quickly as wealthy Chinese consumers seek leisure activities.

One of the country’s most famous film groups, Huayi Brothers Media Corporation, recently won approval to sell stock to the public in an offering that is expected to raise $90 million on China’s new Nasdaq-style exchange, the Growth Enterprises Market.

Over at S.M.G., Mr. Li concedes that taking his company public has long been one of his “obsessions.”

“This is to make the industry more market oriented,” he says. “We hope S.M.G. can be a pioneer of this reform.”

Childbirth at the Global Crossroads - The American Prospect

The auto-rickshaw driver honks his way through the dusty chaos of Anand, Gujarat, India, swerving around motorbikes, grunting trucks, and ancient large-wheeled bullock-carts packed with bags of fodder. Both sides of the street are lined with plastic trash and small piles of garbage on which untethered cows feed. The driver turns off the pavement onto a narrow, pitted dirt road, slows to circumvent a pair of black and white spotted goats, and stops outside a dusty courtyard. To one side stands a modest white building with a sign that reads, in English and Gujarati, "Akanksha Clinic." Two dozen dainty Indian women's sandals, toes pointed forward, are lined along the front porch. For it is with bare feet that one enters a clinic housing what may be the world's largest group of gestational surrogates -- women who rent their wombs to incubate the fertilized eggs from clients from around the globe. Since India declared commercial surrogacy legal in 2002, some 350 assisted reproductive technology (ART) clinics have opened their doors. Surrogacy is now a burgeoning part of India's medical tourism industry, which is slated to add $2 billion to the nation's gross domestic product by 2012. Advertisements describe India as a "global doctor" offering First World skill at Third World prices, short waits, privacy, and -- important in the case of surrogacy -- absence of red tape. To encourage this lucrative trend, the Indian government gives tax breaks to private hospitals treating overseas patients and lowers import duties on medical supplies. In his 2007 book, Supercapitalism, Robert B. Reich argues that while industrial and clerical jobs could be outsourced to cheaper labor pools abroad, service jobs would stay in America. But Reich didn't count on First World clients flying to the global South to find low-cost retirement care or reproductive services. The Akanksha clinic is just one point on an ever-widening two-lane global highway that connects poor nations in the Southern Hemisphere to rich nations in the Northern Hemisphere, and poorer countries of Eastern Europe to richer ones in the West. A Filipina nanny heads north to care for an American child. A Sri Lankan maid cleans a house in Singapore. A Ukrainian nurse's aide carries lunch trays in a Swedish hospital. Marx's iconic male, stationary industrial worker has been replaced by a new icon: the female, mobile service worker. We have grown used to the idea of a migrant worker caring for our children and even to the idea of hopping an overseas flight for surgery. As global service work grows increasingly personal, surrogacy is the latest expression of this trend. Nowadays, a wealthy person can purchase it all -- the egg, the sperm, and time in the womb. "A childless couple gains a child. A poor woman earns money. What could be the problem?" asks Dr. Nayna Patel, Akanksha's founder and director. But despite Patel's view of commercial surrogacy as a straightforward equation, it's far more complicated for both the surrogates and the genetic parents. Like nannies or nurses, surrogates perform "emotional labor" to suppress feelings that could interfere with doing their job. Parents must decide how close they are willing (or able) to get to the woman who will give birth to their child. As science and global capitalism gallop forward, they kick up difficult questions about emotional attachment. What, if anything, is too sacred to sell? *** I follow a kindly embryologist, Harsha Bhadarka, to an upstairs office of the clinic to talk with two surrogates whom I will call Geeta and Saroj. (Aditya Ghosh, a journalist with the Hindustan Times, has kindly offered to join me.) The room is small, and the two surrogate mothers enter the room nodding shyly. Both live on the second floor of the clinic, but most of its 24 residents live in one of two hostels for the duration of their pregnancy. The women are brought nutritious food on tin trays, injected with iron (a common deficiency), and supervised away from prying in-laws, curious older children, and lonely husbands with whom they are allowed no visits home or sex. Geeta, a 22-year-old, light-skinned, green-eyed beauty, is the mother of three daughters, one of whom is sitting quietly and wide-eyed on her lap. To be accepted as a surrogate, Akanksha requires a woman to be a healthy, married mother. As one doctor explains, "If she has children of her own, she'll be less tempted to attach herself to the baby." "How did you decide to become a surrogate?" I ask. "It was my husband's idea," Geeta replies. "He makes pav bhaji [a vegetable dish] during the day and serves food in the evening [at a street-side fast-food shop]. He heard about surrogacy from a customer at his shop, a Muslim like us. The man told my husband, 'It's a good thing to do,' and then I came to madam [Dr. Patel] and offered to try. We can't live on my husband's earnings, and we had no hope of educating our daughters." Geeta says she has only briefly met the parents whose genes her baby carries. "They're from far away. I don't know where," she says. "They're Caucasian, so the baby will come out white." The money she has been promised, including a monthly stipend to cover vitamins and medications, is wired to a bank account that Patel has opened in Geeta's name. "I keep myself from getting too attached," she says. "Whenever I start to think about the baby inside me, I turn my attention to my own daughter. Here she is." She bounces the child on her lap. "That way, I manage." Seated next to Geeta is Saroj, a heavy-set, dark woman with intense, curious eyes, and, after a while, an easy smile. Like other Hindu surrogates at Akanksha, she wears sindoor (a red powder applied to the part in her hair) and mangalsutra (a necklace with a gold pendant), both symbols of marriage. She is, she tells us, the mother of three children and the wife of a vegetable street vendor. She gave birth to a surrogate child a year and three months ago and is waiting to see if a second implantation has taken. The genetic parents are from Bangalore, India. (It is estimated that half the clients seeking surrogacy from Indian ART clinics are Indian and the other half, foreign. Of the foreign clients, roughly half are American.) Saroj, too, knows almost nothing about her clients. "They came, saw me, and left," she says. Given her husband's wages, 1,260 rupees (or $25) a month, Saroj turned to surrogacy so she could move to a rain-proof house and feed her family well. Yet she faced the dilemma of all rural surrogates: being suspected of adultery -- a cause for shunning or worse. I ask the women whether the money they earn has improved their social standing. For the first time the two women laugh out loud and talk to each other excitedly. "My father-in-law is dead, and my mother-in-law lives separately from us, and at first I hid it from her," Saroj says. "But when she found out, she said she felt blessed to have a daughter-in-law like me because I've given more money to the family than her son could. But some friends ask me why I am putting myself through all this. I tell them, 'It's my own choice.'" Since Dr. Patel began offering surrogacy services in 2004, 232 surrogates have given birth at Akanksha. A 2007 study of 42 Akanksha surrogates found that nearly half described themselves as housewives and the rest were a mix of domestic, service, and manual laborers. Hindu, Muslim, and Christian, most had seventh- to 12th-grade educations, six were illiterate, and one -- who turned to surrogacy to pay for a small son's heart surgery -- had a bachelor's degree. Each surrogate negotiates a different sum: One surrogate carrying twins for an Indian couple discovered she was being paid less (about $3,600) than a surrogate in the next bed who was carrying one baby for an American couple for about $5,600. Observers fear that a lack of regulation could spark a price war for surrogacy -- Thailand underselling India, Cambodia underselling Thailand, and so on -- with countries slowly undercutting fees and legal protections for surrogates along the way. It could happen. Right now international surrogacy is a highly complex legal patchwork. Surrogacy is banned in China and much of Europe. It is legal but regulated in New Zealand and Great Britain. Only 17 of the United States have laws on the books; it is legal in Florida and banned in New York. In India, commercial surrogacy is legal but unregulated, although a 135-page regulatory law, long in the works, will be sent to Parliament later this year. Even if the law is passed, however, some argue it would do little to improve life for women such as Geeta and Saroj. For example, it specifies that the doctor, not the surrogate, has the right to decide on any "fetal reduction" (an abortion). Moreover, most Indian federal laws are considered "advisory" to powerful state governments, and courts -- where a failure to enforce such laws might be challenged -- are backlogged for years, often decades. Dr. B.N. Chakravarty, the Calcutta-based chair of the surrogacy law drafting committee, says that the growth of the industry is "inevitable," but it needs regulating. Even if the law were written to protect surrogates and then actually enforced, it would do nothing to address the crushing poverty that often presses Indian women to "choose" surrogacy in the first place. For N.B. Sarojini, director of the Delhi-based Sama Resource Group for Women and Health, a nonprofit feminist research institute, the problem is one of distorted priorities. "The ART clinics are posing themselves as the answer to an illusory 'crisis' of infertility," she says. "Two decades back, a couple might consider themselves 'infertile' after trying for five years to conceive. Then it moved to four years. Now couples rush to ARTs after one or two. Why not put the cultural spotlight on alternatives? Why not urge childless women to adopt orphans? And what, after all, is wrong with remaining childless?" But Dr. Patel, a striking woman in an emerald green sari and with black hair flowing down her back, sees for-profit surrogacy as a "win-win" for the clinic, the surrogate, and the genetic parents. She also sees no problem with running the clinic like a business, seeking to increase inventory, safeguard quality, and improve efficiency. That means producing more babies, monitoring surrogates' diet and sexual contact, and assuring a smooth, emotion-free exchange of baby for money. (For every dollar that goes to the surrogates, observers estimate, three go to the clinic.) In Akanksha's hostel, women sleep on cots, nine to a room, for nine months. Their young children sleep with them; older children do not stay in the hostel. The women exercise inside the hostel, rarely leaving it and then only with permission. Patel also advises surrogates to limit contact with clients. Staying detached from the genetic parents, she says, helps surrogate mothers give up their babies and get on with their lives -- and maybe with the next surrogacy. This ideal of the de-personalized pregnancy is eerily reminiscent of Aldous Huxley's 1932 dystopian novel Brave New World, in which babies are emotionlessly mass-produced in the Central London Hatchery. Patel's business may seem coldly efficient, but it also has a touch of Mother Teresa. Akanksha residents are offered daily English classes and weekly lessons in computer use. Patel arranges for film screenings and gives out school backpacks and pencil boxes to surrogates' children. She hopes to attract donations from grateful clients to help pay children's school fees as well. "For me this is a mission," Patel says. In light of appalling government neglect of a population totally untouched by India's recent economic boom, this charity sounds wonderful. But is it wonderful enough to cancel out concerns about the factory? *** After leaving Anand, I head to Dr. Nandita Palshetkar's office in Mumbai. With Alifiya Khan, another journalist from the Hindustan Times, I meet with Leela, a lively 28-year-old who gave birth to a baby for Indian clients about six months ago. Like Geeta and Saroj, Leela had been desperate for money, but her experience of pregnancy was utterly different. On the day I meet her, she is dressed in a pink sari, hair drawn back from her olive-skinned face into a long black braid. She leans forward, smiling broadly, eager to talk about her baby, his genetic parents, and her feelings about being a surrogate mother. At age 20, Leela married a fellow worker at a Mumbai-based company canteen. "I didn't know he was alcoholic until after we married," she says. "My husband ran up a $7,000 debt with the moneylender who sent agents to pressure him to repay it. ... We couldn't stop the moneylender from hounding us. I decided to act. I heard from my sister-in-law that I could get money for donating my eggs, and I did that twice. When I came back to do it a third time, madam [Dr. Palshetkar] told me I could earn more as a surrogate." Was she able to pay off the debt? Leela lowers her head: "Half of it." She ate better food during her paid pregnancy than during her other pregnancies and delivered the baby in a better hospital than the one where she delivered her own children. Unlike others I spoke with, Leela openly bonded with her baby. "I am the baby's real mother," she says. "I carried him. I felt him kick. I prayed for him. At seven months I held a celebration for him. I saw his legs and hands on the sonogram. I suffered the pain of birth." The baby's genetic parents, Indians from a nearby affluent suburb, kindly reached out to Leela. The genetic mother "sees me as her little sister, and I see her as my big sister," Leela says. "They check in with me every month, even now, and call me the baby's 'auntie.' They asked if I wanted to see the baby. I said 'yes' and they brought him to my house, but I was disappointed to see he was long and fair, not like me. Still, to this day, I feel I have three children." A friendship of sorts arose between the two mothers, although Leela's doctor, like Patel, discouraged it. "I deleted their phone number from my list because madam told me it's not a good thing to keep contact for long," she says. In a November 2008 New York Times Magazine article titled "Her Body, My Baby," American journalist Alex Kuczynski describes searching through profiles of available surrogates. "None were living in poverty," she writes. Cathy, the woman she eventually chose to carry her son, was a college-educated substitute teacher, a gifted pianist, and fellow fan of Barack Obama. They shared a land, a language, a level of education, a political bent -- coming together to create a baby didn't seem like such a giant leap. But when the surrogate and genetic mother come from different corners of the globe -- when one is an Indian woman who bails monsoon rains from her mud-floor hut and the other is an American woman who drives an SUV and vacations at ski resorts -- the gap is more like a chasm. And as one childless American friend (rendered infertile through a defective Dalkon Shield intrauterine device) told me, "If I had hired a surrogate, I'm not sure how close I'd want to be to her. How open can you keep your heart when it's broken? Sometimes it's better not to touch unhealed wounds." A code of detachment seems almost necessary to circumvent the divide. But detachment isn't so easy in practice. Even if you can separate the genetic parents from the surrogate, you cannot separate the surrogate from her womb. One surrogate mother told the sociologist Amrita Pande, "It's my blood, even if it's their genes." Psychologists tell us that a baby in utero recognizes the sound of its mother's voice. Surrogates I spoke with seemed to be struggling to detach. One said, "I try to think of my womb as a carrier." Another said, "I try not to think about it." Is the bond between mother and child fixed by nature or is it a culturally inspired fantasy we yearn to be true? I asked Dr. Chakravarty if he thought that some children born of surrogacy would one day fly to India in search of their "womb mothers." (The proposed regulation requires parents to reveal to an inquiring child the fact of surrogacy, though not the identity of the surrogate.) "Yes," he said. But chances are such an 18-year-old would not find her womb mother. Instead, she might come to realize she had been made a whole person by uniting parts drawn from tragically unequal worlds. In a larger sense, so are we all. Person to person, family to family, the First World is linked to the Third World through the food we eat, the clothes we wear, and the care we receive. That Filipina nanny who cares for an American child leaves her own children in the care of her mother and another nanny. In turn, that nanny leaves her younger children in the care of an eldest daughter. First World genetic parents pay a Third World woman to carry their embryo. The surrogate's husband cares for their older children. The worlds of rich and poor are invisibly bound through chains of care. Before we leave the Akanksha clinic in Anand, the gentle embryologist, Bhadarka, remains across the table from Aditya and me after Geeta and Saroj have left the room. I ask Bhadarka if the clinic offers psychological counseling to the surrogates. "We explain the scientific process," she answers, "and they already know what they're getting into." Then she moves her hands across the table and adds softly, "In the end, a mother is a mother, isn't that true? In the birthing room there is the surrogate, the doctor, the nurse, the nurse's aide, and often the genetic mother. Sometimes we all cry." *** Special thanks to Aditya Ghosh and Alifiya Khan.
Arlie Hochschild's most recent books are The Commercialization of Intimate Life and (co-edited with Barbara Ehrenreich) Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy.

Federal Register Makes Itself More Web-Friendly - washingtonpost.com

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By Ed O'Keefe
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 5, 2009

Lawyers, lobbyists, librarians and concerned citizens, rejoice: As of Monday, it is much easier to access the Federal Register.

The de facto daily newspaper of the executive branch publishes approximately 80,000 pages of documents each year, including presidential disaster declarations, Medicare reimbursement rates, and thousands of agency rulings on policies ranging from banking to fishing to food. It's a must-read for anyone with business before the federal government or concerned about inside-the-Beltway decisions, including academics, good-government advocates and Register junkies (yes, they do exist).

Starting Monday, issues dating back to 2000 will be available at Data.gov in a form known in the Web world as XML, which allows users to transport data from a Web site and store it, reorganize it or customize it elsewhere. Officials suggested that the move puts readers, rather than the government, in charge of deciding how to access the Register's reams of information.

"In much the same way that newspapers have looked at making content more accessible by changing the print and typeface, we can now do the same thing by making the Federal Register available such that people can manipulate it and customize it and reuse the content to make the information even more accessible," said Beth Noveck, director of the White House Open Government Initiative.

Monday's launch is the outgrowth of President Obama's first executive order, which mandated greater transparency in federal government.

The Office of the Federal Register publishes the Register each business day. The first issue, in 1936, had 11 pages; Friday's had 157. According to the White House, the Register totaled 79,435 pages in fiscal 2008, with 31,879 documents, its largest year ever. Online readers downloaded more than 200 million Register documents in fiscal 2009, the White House said.

The Register may be the ultimate record of the business of the executive branch, but it is universally recognized as a difficult document to navigate.

Monday's release should make it easier for users to find their specific topic without having to wade through volumes of unrelated material. Government officials expect information-hungry users -- be they good-government groups, news organizations or the college student pulling an all-nighter -- to make the most of the new access. The technology will allow users, including Web site designers, to quickly gather data and manipulate the information with tools such as mapping software, word clouds, spreadsheets and e-mail alert systems, White House officials and government observers said.

Lawyers and activists tracking Environmental Protection Agency policies might subscribe to an e-mail alert system built by a good-government group that will notify them of updates published in the Register. A Maryland resident monitoring the impact of federal regulations on his neighborhood might visit a Web site that allows him to search the Register's items by state, county and Zip code.

"It makes it much easier to follow a specific topic area or look at specific regulations from a specific agency or search within a geographic area," said John Wonderlich, policy director of the Sunlight Foundation, an open-government advocacy group.

"It's not going to be useful for everyone, but if you're looking at making government processes more efficient, this view across the government will be very useful," Wonderlich said.

Noveck, her White House colleagues and staffers at the Federal Register and Government Printing Office have been working on the details of Monday's launch since Obama signed the executive order.

Mary Alice Baish, director of government relations for the American Association of Law Libraries, said members are "delighted" about the move. "This is a win-win situation for business, the regulatory community and consumers," she said.

"We see law libraries being able to use the data for empirical research by law professors who want to track agency activities. For being able to track trends in the regulated industries. Even for studies of semantics and language," she added.

It cost the government approximately $100,000 to convert the issues dating to 2000, according to Ray Mosley, director of the Federal Register, which is part of the National Archives and Records Administration. The Register went online in 1994, and converting issues from '94 to 2000 will cost at least another $150,000, Mosley said. He anticipated little effect on his 59-member staff of editors, technical experts and lawyers. He also noted, however, that the changes online may inspire someone to find the next best way to publish, display and distribute the Register.

"Someone could demonstrate something to us, and we could start the wheels rolling," Mosley said.

Hurdles Remain on Climate Change Goals - washingtonpost.com

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By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 5, 2009

Like most members of President Obama's climate team, David Sandalow was one of President Bill Clinton's negotiators in Kyoto. And he carries an indelible lesson from the experience of signing off on the international climate pact there 12 years ago: "Only agree abroad to what you can implement at home."

He had been elated at the deal by more than 180 nations in December 1997. But within months, a television ad appeared, decrying the agreement for not including developing nations such as China and India. "It's not global and it won't work," said the ad, which was sponsored by business groups including the American Association of Automobile Manufacturers and the American Petroleum Institute. It captured the growing discontent in the United States over the Clinton administration's signing off on a package that did not force similar cuts by major developing countries.

That political backlash is one of several reasons why any deal struck two months from now in Copenhagen will at best signal the start of a new global approach to tackling climate change, rather than its successful conclusion.

Kyoto's legacy -- including the decision to exclude major developing countries from the agreement, the failure of the United States to ratify it and the fact that many of its signatories have missed their emissions targets -- continues to dominate U.N. talks aimed at curbing the world's greenhouse gas output. It has made the United States more cautious about defining specific reductions, made other industrialized nations skeptical of the U.S. commitment and made developing countries more insistent on getting money from rich nations to address their problems.

"If we have any kind of international agreement in Copenhagen, there will have to be some accommodation of American political realities, but you have to meet a number of political realities on the other side," said Melinda Kimble, senior vice president of the U.N. Foundation and a lead negotiator for the State Department when Kyoto was forged.

These realities have made it harder for most of the key countries, whose representatives have been meeting in Bangkok, to reach an agreement by December, especially one that involves a massive shift of their nation's economic trajectories for the sake of a long-term reward. Even the Japanese have proposed abandoning the Kyoto agreement for a completely new structure.

"The Kyoto Protocol is a very historic protocol," said Kenichi Kobayashi, who directs the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs' climate change division. "But now the situation has greatly changed in the last 10 years."

The biggest change is that developing countries such as China, India and Brazil -- none of which are bound to specific climate targets under Kyoto, and continue to say they will not embrace them as part of an international treaty -- are much bigger carbon emitters than they used to be. China has surpassed the United States as the world's largest emitter, according to the International Energy Agency, with the two nations accounting for about 40 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions.

The agency said that 97 percent of the rise in energy-related carbon dioxide emissions will come from developing nations by 2030. That makes centrist Democrats such as Sen. Evan Bayh (Ind.) hesitate at the idea of backing mandatory curbs on U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. "I could not ask the American people to sacrifice and not solve the problem of global warming because the developing world was not participating," he said in an interview.

But Jairam Ramesh, India's minister of state for environment and forests, told reporters Friday that America's near-term climate targets remain too modest. "The stalemate in negotiations has not been caused by China and India," Ramesh said. "The make-or-break issue is emissions cuts. If there's no agreement on that, there's no agreement in Copenhagen."

Todd Stern, the U.S. special envoy for climate change, said he is focused on achieving "the art of the possible. . . . The task here is to get a deal consistent with those [constraints], which pushes us in the right direction."

In some ways the political climate has loosened the Obama's administration's constraints in recent months. Major U.S. companies such as Wal-Mart, General Electric and even utilities such as American Electric Power now back a federal cap on greenhouse gases, and the combination of the House-passed climate bill and legislation introduced last week by Democratic Sens. John F. Kerry (Mass.) and Barbara Boxer (Calif.) suggest that the president could meet his much-publicized goal of reducing the nation's emissions to their 1990 levels by 2020.

Several environmentalists say U.S. negotiators have been too hesitant to use provisions in the House bill -- such as its emissions targets and funding to help poor countries preserve their forests and cope with climate effects -- to lay the groundwork for a global deal.

"The ghost of Kyoto hangs over the U.S. more than it does over most nations," said Ned Helme, who heads the Center for Clean Air Policy. "I think we could be a bit bolder now because we have a good story to tell internationally."

But on Friday, Obama's top domestic climate adviser, Carol Browner, said it was "not likely" that a final bill would be signed by the president before Copenhagen. Stern is unwilling to codify targets internationally that the United States has yet to adopt.

"It's very difficult to do that right now if you have your eye on the prize, which is getting a good piece of legislation signed into law by the president," said Stern, who was in Kyoto as a White House staffer 12 years ago .

Instead U.S. negotiators, as well as ones like India's Ramesh, are exploring whether the world's major emitters could forge a pact that encompasses nationally binding goals and is subject -- at least to some extent -- to international review. James L. Connaughton, who chaired President Bush's Council on Environmental Quality, said the outcome in Copenhagen could resemble what Bush and his top deputies had sought for years.

"What countries came to realize after Kyoto was it was hugely problematic to have international environmental negotiations establishing domestic economic and energy policy without first forging a domestic consensus," said Connaughton, Constellation Energy's executive vice president for corporate affairs, public and environmental policy.

"What all major economies realized this time around is that they need to establish a domestic consensus on an agreed level of effort as a stronger basis for the commitments they make internationally, and as a catalyst for international cooperation."

At least this time, the White House might not face the same sort of attack ads. William O'Keefe, who now serves as chief executive of the libertarian George C. Marshall Institute and helped keep the anti-Kyoto ads on air in 1998, said he would probably accept a global pact that "pays allegiance to Kyoto but is much more flexible and focused on objectives" rather that one with specific emissions targets.

"If that happened, that would be a big step forward," O'Keefe said.

McChrystal Faulted On Troop Statements - washingtonpost.com

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By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 5, 2009

National security adviser James L. Jones suggested Sunday that the public campaign being conducted by the U.S. commander in Afghanistan on behalf of his war strategy is complicating the internal White House review underway, saying that "it is better for military advice to come up through the chain of command."

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who commands the 100,000 U.S. and international forces in Afghanistan, warned bluntly last week in a London speech that a strategy for defeating the Taliban that is narrower than the one he is advocating would be ineffective and "short-sighted." The comments effectively rejected a policy option that senior White House officials, including Vice President Biden, are considering nearly eight years after the U.S. invasion.

McChrystal's statement came a day after senior White House officials challenged him over his dire assessment of the war, and what it will take to improve the U.S. position there, during a videoconference from Kabul with President Obama and his national security team. Obama then summoned McChrystal to Copenhagen the day after the general's speech for a private meeting aboard Air Force One.

Speaking on CNN's "State of the Union," Jones said he had not spoken to Obama since the president met with McChrystal. But he indicated that the Obama administration, facing the most far-reaching foreign policy decision of its time in office, expects McChrystal and his military superiors to broaden the range of alternatives for how best to proceed in Afghanistan as the strategy review unfolds over the coming weeks.

"We will be examining different options," said Jones, a retired Marine general and former supreme allied commander in Europe. "And I'm sure General McChrystal and General Petraeus and Admiral Mullen will be willing to present different options and different scenarios in this discussion that we're having."

Jones was referring to Gen. David H. Petraeus, head of the Central Command, and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. A U.S. military official said Sunday that Pentagon leaders were alerted that McChrystal was speaking in London and were not concerned by his remarks.

"General McChrystal was simply speaking to the situation on the ground as he sees it and how he would execute the president's current strategy -- the mission he has been assigned," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive internal matter. "He was not pushing his views or in any way trying to influence policy."

Jones spoke as the White House and Pentagon reviewed the events surrounding a Taliban attack Saturday on U.S. and Afghan combat outposts near the Pakistan border. Eight U.S. soldiers and two members of the Afghan security forces were killed in what battlefield accounts describe as a day-long firefight against a numerically superior ground force.

The coordinated assault, resulting in the deadliest day for U.S. forces in a year, could factor into the administration's Afghan strategy review that so far has focused largely on McChrystal's 66-page assessment of the war. Military officials said his command would be investigating the attack, which is consistent with what Pentagon officials describe as the tactics of an increasingly able insurgency.

"We have seen over the course of the last year or so an increasing sophistication in tactics employed by the Taliban," the military official said. "In many ways, they are proving adept at what we would consider small-unit-like action."

One question at the core of the debate is whether the military benefit of sending additional U.S. combat forces to Afghanistan would outweigh the propaganda victory such a deployment would give the Taliban, which appeals to the public with messages of resistance to the foreign occupation.

McChrystal, whom Obama sent to Afghanistan in May after firing his predecessor, is calling for a new strategy that focuses on protecting Afghan civilians from the insurgency. The plan would require perhaps as many as 40,000 additional U.S. troops -- in addition to the 68,000 scheduled to be on the ground by the end of the year -- and other resources to carry out a nation-building effort on behalf of an Afghan government whose legitimacy has been severely undermined by the flawed Aug. 20 presidential election.

In his report, McChrystal warned that a "failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum" in the next 12 months "risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible."

But senior White House officials and some Democratic congressional leaders are challenging some of McChrystal's assumptions about how the war should be fought and whether the Taliban, a collection of armed groups with different political and economic objectives, can be managed in other ways.

Among the questions being asked of McChrystal is whether a return of the Taliban to a position of political strength would automatically result in a new sanctuary for al-Qaeda, the stated target of Obama's Afghanistan policy. Military officials think the Taliban's return to power would mean a new haven in Afghanistan for al-Qaeda, and a sanctuary for Pakistan's Taliban from which to stage attacks against that neighboring government.

Biden and others in the White House have argued for a narrower anti-terrorism campaign, which would expedite the training of Afghan forces, intensify Predator strikes on al-Qaeda operatives, and support the government of nuclear-armed Pakistan in its fight against the Taliban, which administration officials say is proceeding better than they had predicted. Republican leaders have urged Obama to approve the resources that McChrystal is seeking.

"I think the end is much more complex than just about adding X number of troops," Jones said on CNN. " But I don't foresee the return of the Taliban, and I want to be very clear that Afghanistan is not in imminent danger of falling."

Staff writer Ann Scott Tyson contributed to this report.

Politics and Prison in Venezuela - washingtonpost.com

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Student Protester's Saga Shines New Light on Chávez's Approach to Dissent

By Juan Forero
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, October 5, 2009

CARACAS, Venezuela -- President Hugo Chávez's government says Julio Cesar Rivas is a violent militant intent on fomenting civil war.

Rivas's supporters say the 22-year-old university student is just one of many Venezuelans jailed for challenging a populist government that they contend is increasingly intolerant of dissent.

As the Chávez government approaches 11 years in power, many of its most prominent opponents are in exile in foreign countries or under criminal investigation here.

But human rights and legal policy groups say that even more worrisome is the growing number of government foes in jail for what they allege are politically motivated reasons. There are more than 40 political prisoners in Venezuela, and 2,000 Chávez opponents are under investigation, the groups and human rights lawyers say.

"The government tries to defend itself by saying it has politicians who are prisoners," said Teodoro Petkoff, a newspaper editor critical of Chávez. "But however you label them, they are people who are prisoners for political reasons."

Chávez administration officials contend that politics is not a motivating factor in the arrests and that the prisoners, political opponents or not, violated criminal code.

The arrests come in a year in which the number of anti-government protests has grown dramatically in Caracas, the capital, and other major cities. In the first eight months of this year, 2,079 demonstrations took place, up from 1,602 in 2008, according to a recent study by Provea, a human rights organization, and Public Space, a policy group that monitors free speech issues. Nearly 500 people were hurt and 440 were detained, the study said.

Venezuela's chief prosecutor, Luisa Ortega, warned at the end of August that such demonstrations were "in effect, criminal civil rebellion." She said protesters could be charged with crimes carrying prison terms of up to 24 years.

"People who disturb order and the peace to create instability of institutions, to destabilize the government or attack the democratic system, we are going to charge and try them," she told reporters.

Soon after that, Rivas learned how swift Venezuelan justice could be.

On Sept. 7, two weeks after participating in a demonstration, Rivas was arrested at his home. The main charge against him: inciting civil war.

"I didn't commit any crime. I am a young student who is not a coup plotter," he said in an interview. "I am not a CIA agent as they say I am."

Rivas's lawyers said the evidence against him was flimsy. A video made by a state television crew shows him shaking a police barricade during the protest and then telling a reporter that "we want to go to the Congress because we have a right." The tape was repeatedly shown on state television before Rivas was arrested, his lawyers said.

Rivas also became a target of Mario Silva, host of a state television show, "The Razor," in which Chávez foes are skewered. Silva aired photographs from Rivas's Facebook page and suggested that they demonstrated his culpability in generating unrest.

Among the photos was one of Rivas wearing a gas mask, which drew howls of laughter from Silva, and others of him with well-known opposition leaders. "Look, these are his friends!" Silva said. "This is in his Facebook. How horrible."

Alfredo Romero, who works at a Caracas law firm that represents Rivas and others detained by the government, said the steps taken against Rivas were meant to send a message to others in a budding student movement.

"The government is using Julio Rivas as an example to all the students: If you're a student and you go to a mass protest, you're going to go to prison," Romero said.

But Interior and Justice Minister Tareck El Aissami said Rivas's release Monday, after 22 days in jail, debunked "countless opposition lies" alleging government repression. "Like never before, we say that our government, particularly President Hugo Chávez, respects human rights," he told state media.

Though now free, Rivas still faces charges. But Tuesday, a day after his release, he joined 50 university students on a hunger strike to protest the jailings.

Government critics singled out for prosecution have little right of redress because the Chávez administration controls the Supreme Court and the lower courts, said Carlos Ayala, a Venezuelan constitutional and human rights lawyer who is president of the Andean Commission of Jurists.

"Venezuelan justice has been subservient to political intervention," Ayala said.

Calls to Ortega, the attorney general, were not returned. But Chávez has frequently characterized criticism of Venezuela's human rights credentials -- as well as accusations that he controls the courts -- as the fabrications of CIA-supported coup plotters.

Some of those who have been prosecuted, though, say the government shows little mercy.

Five years ago, three Caracas police commissioners were convicted on charges that they ordered the killings of pro-government protesters in 2002.

"The government needed to blame someone, but it did not look for who was really responsible," said Ivan Simonovis, one of the commissioners, who is serving a 30-year term.

The Due Process of Law Foundation, a Washington group that promotes judicial reform, last year concluded after a six-month study that Venezuela had violated the police officials' rights. The foundation also raised questions about the independence of the judges.

Simonovis said the only way out now is if the opposition wins a majority in Congress next year and names what he calls independent judges to the judiciary.

"For the moment," Simonovis said, "the president controls it all, and uses it like a weapon to make criminals of the opposition."

Palestinian Brewer Leads Struggle for Economic Progress - washingtonpost.com

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Beermaker Draws Crowds to Town of Taybeh But Sees Roadblocks to Progress, Prosperity

By Howard Schneider
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, October 5, 2009

TAYBEH, West Bank, Oct. 4 -- There's more than a bit of Sam Adams in David Khoury, the mayor of this tiny Christian village in the occupied West Bank. Along with being a politician and patriot, he is a brewer, and he sees the craft as a symbol of the Palestinian state he hopes will emerge here one day.

To the usual images of conflict, checkpoints -- and in the case of areas influenced by Islamist groups such as Hamas, an intolerance of alcohol -- Khoury and his family-owned Taybeh brewery have added an Oktoberfest, a weekend of music, dancing, local crafts and free-flowing suds, just to the east of Ramallah and across the valley from nearby Israeli settlements. To the usual lineup of traditional products like olive oil and honey, he has added a lager that has caught on in Japan and been franchised for production in Germany.

"This is the other side of the coin," Khoury said of the two-day festival held this weekend outside his office. "It shows political freedom and democracy. It is resisting occupation by showing that we can grow the economy and build it."

It is a theme that is being heard more often among Palestinian officials and businesspeople these days. Prime Minister Salam Fayyad has issued a two-year plan to build the institutions needed for a Palestinian state and has argued that Palestinians should work toward that goal as if Israel were no longer present in the West Bank, rather than wait for an uncertain peace process to change the facts on the ground.

The few thousand people that migrated to Taybeh this weekend might seem a small contribution to that end. But it shows some of the larger dynamics at work in the West Bank, as the small and somewhat off-the-beaten-path village has put its stamp on Palestinian society.

Taybeh is by reputation the only village in the West Bank without a mosque, and its thousand or so year-round residents are dominated by two families, the Khourys and the Khouriehs.

The brewery was started in 1995 by David Khoury and his brother Nadim, who had returned from the United States with his head full of ideas about hops and German beer-purity laws as well as his own recipes. They almost went broke during the intifada that erupted in 2000, and while never directly challenged by Islamist groups, they feared that the enterprise would be pushed to the fringes of Palestinian society.

That has changed. The brewery now turns a profit, the beer is widely available at restaurants in the West Bank and Israel, and the Oktoberfest, now in its fifth year, is helping brand the town as a once-a-year destination.

Along with a handicraft bazaar, falafel stands and plenty of beer taps, the stage acts brought a sense of the West Bank's diversity -- traditional dubka dance groups alongside Palestine rock-rappers CultureShoc and the hip-hop band Ramallah Underground.

"It has been great," said Manar Naber, a handicrafts salesman who said that, beyond the occasional busload of Christian tourists coming to look at the local churches, there was rarely a crowd in Taybeh before the Oktoberfest.

The growing sense of normalcy in the West Bank has been important, Khoury said, though he added it should not be misunderstood.

As a businessman, he notes that his trucks of draft beer still have to travel to a special industrial checkpoint far to the south before crossing into Israel for delivery to restaurants in Jerusalem, turning a half-hour trip into a four-hour excursion.

As a politician, he sees the limits of what Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has done so far in pursuit of what he calls economic peace. Checkpoints and barriers have been removed, people are moving more freely into and around the West Bank, and the economy is picking up as a result. But industrial development, capital projects and private-sector risk-taking remain at a minimum, he said, something also noted by World Bank and other studies which have concluded that the West Bank economy remains heavily dependent on public spending and money from donor nations.

But as a brewer, he has to say that life is good. The Taybeh Brewing Co. sold more than 150,000 gallons last year and has been marketing a nonalcoholic "halal" beer to extend its reach to Muslims.

And just like Sam Adams, he has his eye on Boston. He has children in graduate school in New England, and the hope is to use a family-owned liquor store in the Brookline area as a takeoff point for U.S. distribution.

"It is life, liberty and the pursuit of good beer," Khoury said.

Peter W. Galbraith -- U.N. Isn't Addressing Fraud in Afghan Election - washingtonpost.com

By Peter W. Galbraith
Sunday, October 4, 2009

Before firing me last week from my post as his deputy special representative in Afghanistan, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon conveyed one last instruction: Do not talk to the press. In effect, I was being told to remain a team player after being thrown off the team. Nonetheless, I agreed.

As my differences with my boss, Norwegian diplomat Kai Eide, had already been well publicized (through no fault of either of us), I asked only that the statement announcing my dismissal reflect the real reasons. Alain LeRoy, the head of U.N. peacekeeping and my immediate superior in New York, proposed that the United Nations say I was being recalled over a "disagreement as to how the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) would respond to electoral fraud." Although this was not entirely accurate -- the dispute was really about whether the U.N. mission would respond to the massive electoral fraud -- I agreed.

Instead, the United Nations announced my recall as occurring "in the best interests of the mission," and U.N. press officials told reporters on background that my firing was necessitated by a "personality clash" with Eide, a friend of 15 years who had introduced me to my future wife.

I might have tolerated even this last act of dishonesty in a dispute dating back many months if the stakes were not so high. For weeks, Eide had been denying or playing down the fraud in Afghanistan's recent presidential election, telling me he was concerned that even discussing the fraud might inflame tensions in the country. But in my view, the fraud was a fact that the United Nations had to acknowledge or risk losing its credibility with the many Afghans who did not support President Hamid Karzai.

I also felt loyal to my U.N. colleagues who worked in a dangerous environment to help Afghans hold honest elections -- at least five of whom have now told me they are leaving jobs they love in disgust over the events leading to my firing.

Afghanistan's presidential election, held Aug. 20, should have been a milestone in the country's transition from 30 years of war to stability and democracy. Instead, it was just the opposite. As many as 30 percent of Karzai's votes were fraudulent, and lesser fraud was committed on behalf of other candidates. In several provinces, including Kandahar, four to 10 times as many votes were recorded as voters actually cast. The fraud has handed the Taliban its greatest strategic victory in eight years of fighting the United States and its Afghan partners.

The election was a foreseeable train wreck. Unlike the United Nations-run elections in 2004, this balloting was managed by Afghanistan's Independent Election Commission (IEC). Despite its name, the commission is subservient to Karzai, who appointed its seven members. Even so, the international role was extensive. The United States and other Western nations paid the more than $300 million to hold the vote, and U.N. technical staff took the lead in organizing much of the process, including printing ballot papers, distributing election materials and designing safeguards against fraud.

Part of my job was to supervise all this U.N. support. In July, I learned that at least 1,500 polling centers (out of 7,000) were to be located in places so insecure that no one from the IEC, the Afghan National Army or the Afghan National Police had ever visited them. Clearly, these polling centers would not open on Election Day. At a minimum, their existence on the books would create large-scale confusion, but I was more concerned about the risk of fraud.

Local commission staff members were hardly experienced election professionals; in many instances they were simply agents of the local power brokers, usually aligned with Karzai. If no independent observers or candidate representatives, let alone voters, could even visit the listed location of a polling center, these IEC staffers could easily stuff ballot boxes without ever taking them to the assigned location. Or they could simply report results without any votes being in the ballot boxes.

Along with ambassadors from the United States and key allies, I met with the Afghan ministers of defense and the interior as well as the commission's chief election officer. We urged them either to produce a credible plan to secure these polling centers (which the head of the Afghan army had told me was impossible) or to close them down. Not surprisingly, the ministers -- who served a president benefiting from the fraud -- complained that I had even raised the matter. Eide ordered me not to discuss the ghost polling centers any further. On Election Day, these sites produced hundreds of thousands of phony Karzai votes.

At other critical stages in the election process, I was similarly ordered not to pursue the issue of fraud. The U.N. mission set up a 24-hour election center during the voting and in the early stages of the counting. My staff collected evidence on hundreds of cases of fraud around the country and, more important, gathered information on turnout in key southern provinces where few voters showed up but large numbers of votes were being reported. Eide ordered us not to share this data with anyone, including the Electoral Complaints Commission, a U.N.-backed Afghan institution legally mandated to investigate fraud. Naturally, my colleagues wondered why they had taken the risks to collect this evidence if it was not to be used.

In early September, I got word that the IEC was about to abandon its published anti-fraud policies, allowing it to include enough fraudulent votes in the final tally to put Karzai over the 50 percent threshold needed to avoid a runoff. After I called the chief electoral officer to urge him to stick with the original guidelines, Karzai issued a formal protest accusing me of foreign interference. My boss sided with Karzai.

Afghanistan is deeply divided ethnically and geographically. Both Karzai and the Taliban are Pashtun, Afghanistan's dominant ethnic group, which makes up about 45 percent of the country's population. Abdullah Abdullah, Karzai's main challenger, is half Pashtun and half Tajik but is politically identified with the Tajiks, who dominate the north and are Afghanistan's second largest ethnic group. If the Tajiks believe that fraud denied their candidate the chance to compete in a second round, they may respond by simply not recognizing the authority of the central government. The north already has de facto autonomy; these elections could add an ethnic fault line to a conflict between the Taliban and the government that to date has largely been a civil war among Pashtuns.

Since my disagreements with Eide went public, Eide and his supporters have argued that the United Nations had no mandate to interfere in the Afghan electoral process. This is not technically correct. The U.N. Security Council directed the U.N. mission to support Afghanistan's electoral institutions in holding a "free, fair and transparent" vote, not a fraudulent one. And with so much at stake -- and with more than 100,000 U.S. and coalition troops deployed in the country -- the international community had an obvious interest in ensuring that Afghanistan's election did not make the situation worse.

President Obama needs a legitimate Afghan partner to make any new strategy for the country work. However, the extensive fraud that took place on Aug. 20 virtually guarantees that a government emerging from the tainted vote will not be credible with many Afghans.

As I write, Afghanistan's Electoral Complaints Commission is auditing 10 percent of the suspect polling boxes. If the audit shows this sample to be fraudulent, the commission will throw out some 3,000 suspect ballot boxes, which could lead to a runoff vote between Karzai and Abdullah. By itself, a runoff is no antidote for Afghanistan's electoral challenges. The widespread problems that allowed for fraud in the first round of voting must be addressed. In particular, all ghost polling stations should be removed from the books ("closed" is not the right word since they never opened), and the election staff that facilitated the fraud must be replaced.

Afghanistan's pro-Karzai election commission will not do this on its own. Fixing those problems will require resolve from the head of the U.N. mission in Afghanistan -- a quality that so far has been lacking.

galbraithvt@gmail.com

Peter W. Galbraith served as deputy special representative of the United Nations in Afghanistan from June until last week.

Somali American Terror Recruits Seen Posing Threat to U.S. - washingtonpost.com

Image by bryankennedy via Flickr

By Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 4, 2009

The suspected involvement of a young Seattle man in a suicide bombing last month has refocused attention on the recruitment of Somali Americans by Islamist extremists in Somalia and the growing role of al-Qaeda, U.S. counterterrorism officials said.

The FBI is investigating whether the American took part in a Sept. 17 twin truck bombing in the Somali capital, Mogadishu, which killed 21 people at an African Union peacekeeping base, law enforcement officials said. If confirmed, he would be the second U.S. citizen in the past year to have become a suicide bomber and at least the seventh radicalized U.S. youth to die after joining al-Shabab, an insurgent group seeking to topple Somalia's weak government, U.S. relatives and Somali activists said.

Overall, Shabab has sent dozens of Somali Americans and Muslim American converts through training conducted by elements of al-Qaeda's Pakistan-based terrorist network, National Counterterrorism Center Director Michael E. Leiter said last week.

Although al-Qaeda itself is under more pressure than at any time since 2001, the threat from affiliated groups such as Shabab is growing, said Leiter and FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III. In particular, such groups are providing al-Qaeda a pipeline of American and European fighters whose passports would make it easier for them to travel undetected and potentially attack Western targets, current and former U.S. officials said.

"The role of returning foreign fighters to the United States changes the nature of the threat to the homeland," Mueller said in written testimony last week to a Senate hearing into the evolving terrorist threat inside the United States.

Leiter's statement singled out Shabab and Lashkar-i-Taiba, a Pakistan-based militant group accused in the commando-style attack on Mumbai in November that killed more than 170 people. The latter "could pose a direct threat" inside the United States, particularly in collusion with al-Qaeda, although its focus has been on India and Afghanistan, Leiter said in written testimony.

Although Shabab has not launched attacks outside Somalia, al-Qaeda operatives might "commission" a U.S. strike, American officials said. They note that people trained in Somalia have been traced to several international plots, including one that Australia's police in August said was aimed at an army base there.

In the most striking recent revelation, U.S. officials confirmed that they think a key trainer of Somali American youths was Saleh Ali Nabhan, 30, a wanted Shabab leader and liaison to al-Qaeda in Pakistan who was killed in a U.S. commando-style helicopter raid Sept. 14.

Nabhan was sought by the FBI in the bombing of an Israeli hotel in Kenya and the attempted downing of an Israeli airliner in 2002, as well as his role in the 1998 al-Qaeda attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

Shabab spokesmen said the A.U. bombing last month was in retaliation for Nabhan's killing. Shabab released a video Sept. 20 pledging allegiance to al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and featuring a new, young American spokesman, according to private firms that monitor Islamist Web sites. The 49-minute video, titled, "At Your Service, O Usama," contained footage of a Somali training camp and showcased Omar Hammami, 25, a former University of South Alabama student.

"Any connection you have between American recruits and al-Qaeda trainers -- real senior, accomplished people like Nabhan -- that raises a lot of concerns," a senior U.S. counterterrorism official said last week.

"It's hard to tell where Shabab ends and al-Qaeda in East Africa begins. That's how closely the two are linked," another U.S. counterterrorism official said, adding that both "are intent on stepping up their terrorist activity in East Africa. . . . It's critical that we and our allies keep a close eye on them."

Abdirahman Warsame, a Bellevue, Wash., activist who runs the Terror Free Somalia Foundation, disclosed that he had spoken with the parents of an "Omar Mohamud" in Seattle whom federal agents are investigating on suspicion of involvement in the Mogadishu attack. FBI agents collected DNA samples from the parents, Warsame said. The bureau declined to comment about the investigation.

Several U.S. officials said it could take another week to confirm whether the man participated in the bombing. Witnesses said the bombers spoke English and drove two trucks with U.N. markings into the A.U. compound.

A nearly year-old FBI investigation into Somali American terrorism recruits is ongoing and "on track," said bureau spokesman E.K. Wilson. The investigation follows the departure of dozens of Somali American and other Muslim teenagers from Minneapolis, Seattle and Columbus, Ohio, as well as other areas, who law enforcement officials suspect were recruited to go to Somalia.

The FBI previously confirmed the death of Shirwa Ahmed, 27, a college student from Minneapolis, in a suicide bombing last October. Since then, U.S. relatives have reported the deaths of Burhan Hassan, 18; Jamal Bana, 20; Zakaria Maruf, 30; Mohamoud Hassan, 23; and Troy Kastigar, 28. Another man, Ruben Shumpert, an African American convert to Islam from Seattle, was killed in a U.S.-supported rocket attack.

The Justice Department disclosed this summer that three U.S. citizens -- Kamal Said Hassan and Salah Osman Ahmed of Minnesota and Abdifatah Yusuf Isse of Seattle -- have pleaded guilty to terrorism-related charges and await sentencing in this country after cooperating with investigators regarding their training in Somalia and Yemen.

Overall, a senior U.S. counterterrorism official said, "we've measured the numbers of Somali Americans that go back to Somalia to fight in the dozens."

By comparison, the number of Americans of Afghan, Pakistani, Iraqi or other descent who have gone overseas for training with groups related to al-Qaeda is "an order of magnitude smaller . . . in the handfuls," the official said.

Staff writer Mary Beth Sheridan and staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

Detainees Face Severe Conditions if Moved to U.S. - washingtonpost.com

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

By Peter Finn
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 4, 2009

For up to four hours a day, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, can sit outside in the Caribbean sun and chat through a chain-link fence with the detainee in the neighboring exercise yard at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Mohammed can also use that time to visit a media room to watch movies of his choice, read newspapers and books, or play handheld electronic games. He and other detainees have access to elliptical machines and stationary bikes.

At Guantanamo, such recreational activities interrupt an otherwise bleak existence, according to a Pentagon report of conditions at Camp 7, which houses 16 high-value detainees. But even those privileges may soon vanish.

The Justice Department has begun to hint in court filings that at least some of the defendants in the Sept. 11, 2001, case, as well as other prominent suspects, will be transferred to federal custody in the United States. While lawmakers and activist groups have been consumed with a debate over such a move, little attention has been paid to the conditions that Mohammed and other high-value detainees would face in the United States.

And those conditions, it turns out, would be vastly more draconian than they are at Guantanamo Bay.

"Where demanded by justice and national security, we will seek to transfer some detainees to the same type of facilities in which we hold all manner of dangerous and violent criminals within our borders," President Obama said in a speech at the National Archives in May. "Bear in mind the following fact: Nobody has ever escaped from one of our federal supermax prisons, which hold hundreds of convicted terrorists."

Based on what is known about restrictions in the country's highest-security federal prisons, Mohammed and other terrorism suspects would face profound isolation in the United States.

If sent to a facility such as the federal supermax prison in Florence, Colo., they would be sealed off for 23 hours a day in cells with four-inch-wide windows and concrete furniture. If they behave, and are allowed an hour's exercise each day in a tiny yard, they will do so alone. They will have little or no human contact except with prison officials. And the International Committee of the Red Cross, the only outside group with access to Camp 7, will no longer have contact with them.

"You will die with a whimper," U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema told Zacarias Moussaoui, before the Sept. 11 conspirator was taken to the supermax facility in Florence to serve a life sentence. "You will never again get a chance to speak."

The 490-bed prison, formally known as the Administrative Maximum Facility, holds some of the country's most infamous prisoners, including Mohammed's nephew Ramzi Yousef, who was convicted in the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center; the Unabomber, Theodore J. Kaczynski; FBI agent-turned-Soviet mole Robert P. Hanssen; and Terry L. Nichols, who was convicted in the 1995 bombing of an Oklahoma City federal building. Thirty-three international terrorists are held there.

Advocates for and against closing the Guantanamo Bay facility say the specter of hard time in Florence or elsewhere in the federal prison system is tangential to larger issues involved in Obama's decision to shut down the military prison.

The detention center at Guantanamo Bay "now provides the highest standard of security and humane detention of terrorists consistent with the standards of the Geneva Conventions," said Kirk S. Lippold, who served as the commander of the USS Cole and is now a senior military fellow at Military Families United, an advocacy group. "Unless the administration plans on spending millions of taxpayer dollars on drastically changing the conditions at the supermax facility, then moving the detainees to a prison like Florence would result in less humane conditions for detainees and less security for all Americans."

The American Civil Liberties Union, which is assisting military defense lawyers at Guantanamo Bay, said its principal goal is to get detainees tried in federal court, where the group believes it has a better chance of preventing a death sentence in the event of any conviction.

"Protections in the federal system are vastly superior," said Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the ACLU. "The absence of due process at Guantanamo makes it more of a black hole than Florence."

Although the Pentagon says that it has abided by the Geneva Conventions at Camp 7, Romero said he remains unconvinced that conditions there are as liberal as officials suggest. Attorneys for some of the detainees at Camp 7 have expressed concern about their clients' mental health -- describing in a court filing, for instance, the desire of one detainee to plead guilty and receive the death penalty as the manifestation of his "depression, hopelessness and despair."

The experience of Moussaoui, who was tried in federal court in Alexandria, offers an idea of the conditions Guantanamo detainees might face if transferred to the United States.

Moussaoui spent 23 hours a day alone in an 80-square-foot cell, according to officials at the Alexandria jail where he was held. The cell had a cement floor, bare white walls, a toilet and a mattress atop concrete. An entire unit of six cells and a common area was sealed off just for him. He was monitored on a closed-circuit security camera, and he never saw other inmates.

He spent most of his time quietly reading the Koran and praying on the floor on a blanket, officials said. One hour each day, he was escorted from his cell for a shower and exercise. If he was moved even one floor inside the jail -- always in shackles -- both of those floors were locked down.

Two terrorism suspects in Britain have appealed to the European Court of Human Rights to stop their extradition to the United States, arguing that conditions at Florence, where they assume they would be sent, are so severe that they amount to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. Various studies have found that the isolation experienced at supermax prisons can cause or exacerbate mental illness.

At Florence, inmates deemed high-security risks are in almost permanent lockdown and have a small black-and-white television, a radio and books to pass the time.

Bernard Kleinman, a lawyer who represented Yousef, said his client told him he rarely exercised at the prison because he refused to submit to the body-cavity search required every time he returned to his cell. When he was moved, he was always shackled in leg irons and black-box handcuffs.

Attempts by prisoners and their attorneys to challenge in court the conditions of confinement in Florence have repeatedly failed.

Said Kleinman, who has represented Yousef since 1998: "It's effectively solitary confinement for life."

Meanwhile, at Guantanamo, some officials argue that the military should create more liberal conditions for detainees.

The Pentagon review of conditions there, led by Adm. Patrick M. Walsh, recommended that Camp 7 detainees should be given opportunities for group prayer with three or more fellow prisoners. He also said recreation should be expanded to groups of three or more, with rotating partners.

It is unclear whether Walsh's recommendations were implemented. Military officials at Guantanamo Bay, despite repeated requests, did not provide information on current conditions at Camp 7.

Staff writer Jerry Markon contributed to this report.