Starting Points

Dec 28, 2009

As books go beyond printed page to multisensory experience, what about reading?

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By Monica Hesse
Monday, December 28, 2009; C01

The mysterious man looks completely wrong to me.

In the text of conspiracy thriller "Embassy," an online novel by Richard Doetsch, the character is described as "a starkly thin fellow with a protruding Adam's apple." My brain goes: Alan Rickman!

But when I click on the chapter's accompanying video, the man is younger, tanner, scruffier. He's dressed like he should be bumming clove cigarettes at a concert, not spying on the Greek Embassy.

What I'm reading is a Vook -- a video/book hybrid produced in part by Simon & Schuster's Atria Books. Interspersed throughout the text are videos and links that supplement the narrative. In one chapter, the Greek ambassador receives a mysterious DVD, and readers must click on an embedded video to learn what's on it. In another, kidnapper Jack ominously tells his hostage that he's going to prove that he means business.

"How are you going to do that?" Kate asks.

"Are you squeamish?" Jack replies.

Below that dialogue, a little box encourages readers to "SEE WHAT HAPPENED NEXT" by clicking the play button.

(What happened next, in a comically foreboding scene: Jack grabbed Kate's hand and threatened to chop off her fingers with a kitchen knife.)

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It's a dizzying experience, reading Vooks. But they represent just a few examples of a new genre that has been alternatively dubbed v-books, digi-books, multimedia books and Cydecks, all with essentially the same concept: It's a book . . . but wait, there's more!

There will certainly be more of them. The first six books of text/Web hybrid "The 39 Clues" have nearly 5 million copies in print, and nearly 700,000 registered users for the site. A seventh book will be released in February. "The Amanda Project," released this fall, is set to be an eight-book series. Brad Inman, founder of Vook, said that his company will release as many as 200 titles next year -- a goal made more feasible by the relative cheapness of producing his online-only books. "It's very inexpensive in scale. We're talking thousands of dollars, not even tens of thousands of dollars" for each project.

Is a hybrid book our future? Maybe. "As discourse moves from printed pages to network screens, the dominant mode will be things that are multi-modal and multilayered," says Bob Stein, founder of the Institute for the Future of the Book. "The age of pure linear content is going to pass with the rise of digital network content."

Predicting the eventual death of the traditional novel sounds practically heretical. But keep in mind that the genre has actually existed in English for only about 300 years, and that experimentation and evolution have always been a part of the way we tell stories.

Perhaps the folly isn't in speculating that the book might change, but in assuming that it won't.

Choose your adventure

The bells and whistles in hybrid books are endless. In "The Sherlock Holmes Experience" -- one of six books, including "Embassy," published by Vook since the company launched in October -- two classic Arthur Conan Doyle stories are annotated with video clips of historians sharing Holmesian trivia. Hyperlinks pepper the text, sending readers to Wikipedia pages explaining old-fashioned terms.

Image via Wikipedia

In "The Amanda Project," a young-adult series launched earlier this fall, three teens investigate the disappearance of a mutual friend, primarily in a book but also on a companion Web site, where readers are encouraged to upload their own "clues" to Amanda's presence. Some contributions will be incorporated into the second book, due out in February.

In "Skeleton Creek," another work for tweens, the narrative alternates between the written diary of Ryan, a housebound teen trying to investigate strange occurrences in his home town, and the video missives of his best friend, Sarah. Ryan -- and the reader -- access Sarah's transmissions by logging onto a Web site with various passwords, provided at the end of each chapter.

Myebook, which helps users self-publish books online, is flexible with the definition of "book," allowing text to be mashed up with video and applications.

These hybrid books "truly [are] groundbreaking, and I don't use that word lightly," says David Levithan, a Scholastic editor who worked on "Skeleton Creek" as well as "The 39 Clues," a series involving an elaborate online game. "It's expanding the notion of what storytelling can be."

If readers visit every hyperlink, watch every video and play every game, it is possible for the experience of consuming a single book to become limitless -- a literal neverending story. It's also possible for the user to never read more than a few chapters in sequence, before excitedly scampering over to the next activity.

Hybrid books might be the perfect accessory for modern life. They allow immediate shortcuts to information. They feel like instant gratification and guided, packaged experiences. What they don't feel like, at least in certain examples, is reading.

Envision, for a moment, what it feels like to delve into your favorite book. Picture losing yourself in the fictional world for hours on end -- the way the characters sound in your mind, the way unfamiliar references give you pause. What is a nosegay, anyway?

If you could see the authoritative version of a character right away, without waiting for the movie version, would you?

If a floral dictionary were just a click away, would you interrupt your reading to visit it?

Would these abilities represent a breakthrough, the sort of enhanced involvement that book lovers have always dreamed of? Or would they tamper with our imaginations, completely changing the experience of reading?

Can you imagine?

It's not coincidence that many current hybrid books are aimed at kids -- the first generation of "digital natives" who, we're repeatedly told, feel stark naked without a cellphone, iPhone and a couple of laptops strapped to their persons.

"What they really love is staying in that world," says Lisa Holton of Fourth Story Media, which packaged "The Amanda Project." The non-text components "give them a way to dive even further. When you hang out with kids and you watch what they're doing, we as adults can't even begin to understand their relationships with technology." Holton left a job in traditional publishing to found Fourth Story and explore new forms of storytelling.

But what happens to the traditional reading experience, the one involving a fat novel, a fireplace and a cup of tea?

"It's very common for [a 15-year-old] to read, but have her phone there and her computer there," says Patrick Carman, who wrote "Skeleton Creek" and one volume of "The 39 Clues." "For her, having this multimedia experience is like sitting down with a cup of tea."

He directs me to his niece, an exceedingly generationally aware 14-year-old named Madison Wilcox. "The books with the videos, I think they keep our interest better," Madison says. "The generation we're in is always using technology. [Books like 'Skeleton Creek'] are easy to blend in with our lifestyles."

Inman of Vook says it would be a mistake to compare products like his with traditional texts, the two genres being independent entities.

"We don't pretend that it's a book because it's not." With the Vook, "there's an expectation that you're not gulping the text," as you would in a traditional novel. Instead, Inman says, "you're tasting the text," dipping in and out of it at will.

One wonders how this tasting affects the way we read -- that shortening of attention span we've read so much about.

"When you go from one task to another, your brain does slow down," says Earl Miller, a professor of neuroscience at MIT. "Your brain has to reconfigure its cognitive network. For the first few seconds [of the new activity] there's an increase in errors," in how well we comprehend what we're reading or viewing.

"The way the brain handles language is very different than the way it handles pictures," says Clifford Nass, a Stanford professor who studies multitasking. "One of the ways is pacing. You read a book and you stop whenever you'd like. When you watch a video, you can't do that. It goes on." It's active entertainment vs. passive.

Retention and comprehension are moot points when the narrative in question is, for example, "Embassy." Missing a paragraph or two won't affect a reader's understanding of the plot; missing a plot point or two isn't a life-or-death scenario.

In reading "Embassy," what concerned me wasn't that my brain was getting overworked but that my imagination wasn't.

The pleasure of reading has always been its uniquely transporting experience: the way a literary world might look completely different to two readers. One might picture the fictional heroine as a Natalie Portman type; the other might see her as Freida Pinto.

But when the "true" representation -- like clove cigarette guy -- is immediately provided to the reader, imaginary worlds could be squelched before they have a chance to be born. Reading Vooks made me feel a little like a creative slacker. Maybe there was no point in imagining what someone or something looked like, if I was going to be helped along anyway.

David Sousa is a consultant in educational neuroscience and author of "How the Brain Learns to Read." In his classroom research, he says, "we find that kids are not able to do imagining and imaging as exercises" as well as they once did, "because video's doing the work for them. . . . They still have the mental apparatus for that, the problem is they're not getting the exercise."

Reading has traditionally been one of imagination's personal trainers, and while skipping from medium to medium might provide other benefits (catering to a variety of learning styles rather than just the visual reader's), it might adversely affect the way we create our own worlds.

Of course, some hybrid books' companion activities seem designed to exercise creativity. Readers of "The Amanda Project," for example, are encouraged to contribute to the site's catalogue of reader-submitted stories in a sort of organized fan fiction compendium. Madison, the 14-year-old, says that though she's never been what you would call a bookworm, the multimedia aspects of her uncle's books have made her more willing to read other things.

And Stein of the Institute for the Future of the Book says that whatever assumptions we might make now about hybrid books, there's a good chance they won't hold true when the medium grows up. "Things like the Vook are trivial. We're going to see an explosion of experimentation before we see a dominant new format. We're at the very beginning stages" of figuring out what narrative might look like in the future. "The very, very beginning."

Howard Kurtz on the evolution of media in the Awful Aughts

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By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 28, 2009; C01

Are you better off, as a media consumer, than you were 10 years ago?

Having lived through the Awful Aughts -- which began with news organizations vowing to get serious after 9/11 and ended with Jon and Kate, Octomom and Balloon Boy -- do you feel better served by the news establishment?

The easy answer, of course, is you must be kidding. Shriveling news operations seem increasingly seduced by the sensational, at least when they're not boring people with inside political baseball.

But tilt the picture just a bit. On Jan. 1, 2000, there was no Huffington Post or Daily Kos or National Review Online or Politico or Facebook or Twitter. There were a relative handful of bloggers -- I joined their ranks that summer -- but nothing like the tens of millions who permeate cyberspace today. If you had a BlackBerry, it was a two-way pager. The iPhone was but a glimmer in Steve Jobs's eye. The only mass medium for downloading music was six-month-old Napster. The fledgling Google was covered mainly by tech writers.

Fox News was the third-place cable network in prime time, averaging 248,000 viewers. Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings and Dan Rather drew nearly 30 million viewers. In short, while the Internet had delusions of grandeur -- AOL was 10 days away from swallowing Time Warner in that ill-conceived marriage -- the old gatekeepers still reigned.

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There are many reasons why the 2000s have been hard on the dinosaur media, but I, for one, would not want to return to the days before instantaneous search, smartphones, online video, Wikipedia and the rowdy, raucous arena known as the blogosphere. This eruption has drawn the masses into the maelstrom, enabling them to do what the pros do, sometimes faster and better.

But first let's examine what Time, in one of a spate of similar pieces, calls the "Decade from Hell." The media scorecard wasn't all bad. Chronicling the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks helped reassure and comfort a shaken nation. Newspapers exposed George W. Bush's domestic surveillance program and secret CIA prisons abroad and the deplorable conditions at Walter Reed. The aggressive approach to Hurricane Katrina revealed negligence and ineptitude on a stunning scale. And war correspondents have shown incredible bravery, in some cases paying with their limbs or lives.

* * *

But the two biggest disasters of early-21st-century coverage remain a permanent stain on journalism. The failure to challenge the Bush administration's case for invading Iraq -- and an accompanying tendency to dismiss antiwar voices -- is now regretted by the news organizations themselves. And having served mainly as cheerleaders for the tech bubble that popped in 2000, the press fell way short on the housing and lending bubble that nearly sank our economy in 2008. I know a few financial journalists sounded warnings, but, collectively, the media did far too little to spotlight a shadow banking system built on preposterously exotic risks and federal regulators who blithely looked the other way.

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It was complicated and dull, yes -- much like the year-long effort at health-care reform that finally passed the Senate on Christmas Eve. I would credit the media with a valiant attempt to explain and examine this legislative morass, even to the point of declaring that the high-decibel charges about death panels were bogus. But polls showed that many Americans believed the kill-Grandma theme nonetheless, just as a stubborn minority persists in believing that Barack Obama was not born in Hawaii, despite the media's dismissal of such nonsense.

If news organizations have lost much of the public's trust, some have themselves to blame. Over the past decade, the breathtaking fabrications of Jayson Blair at the New York Times and Jack Kelley at USA Today revealed dysfunctional newsrooms that missed the flashing red lights. Rather's reliance on suspect documents in challenging Bush's National Guard service, which cost Rather the CBS anchor chair, was a huge setback as well. That story was driven in part by conservative bloggers, just as the scandal over Alberto Gonzales politicizing the selection of U.S. attorneys was galvanized by the liberal site Talking Points Memo.

Partisanship is unabashed on the Web, and increasingly on cable, as is evident from the prime-time parade of Republican lawmakers and commentators on Fox and Democratic lawmakers and pundits on MSNBC. This has fueled the fragmentation of a business that can benefit by reinforcing what its followers already believe. At the same time, the media mainstream played a central role in fostering sky-high expectations for Obama, which, inevitably, crashed into the messy reality of governing.

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The rise of niche journalism is taking place as old-line organizations more frequently chase tabloid melodramas. Cable television and morning shows breathlessly pursue narratives involving missing white women, a runaway bride, a mom with octuplets, a beauty queen who opposes gay marriage. Reality television manufactures faux stars -- remember the media mobs over Paris Hilton's brief jail term? -- who wind up on real newscasts. It is a mind-set that breathes life into celebrity deaths -- such as the two-week frenzy over Michael Jackson's -- and gorges on misbehavior by the likes of David Letterman and Tiger Woods. (Imagine if all the reporters chasing Woods's many mistresses had been assigned to study whether Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.)

* * *

As fate would have it, all this has coincided with the collapse of the business model that sustained mainstream outfits for generations. The digital revolution has killed off several newspapers and sent those in Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia and Baltimore into bankruptcy; the Washington Times, which is cutting nearly half its staff, has just ended its weekend print run. Plummeting revenue has killed off numerous magazines -- Portfolio, Gourmet and Vibe among the latest victims. And when Comcast struck a deal to buy NBC Universal, the television network itself was treated like scrap metal.

If the declining health of the traditional media is the barometer, the '00s have been an unmitigated bummer. But the past decade has also brought such digital delights as Twitter, where I learn new things every day. Those posting there provide links to stories that eluded my radar, striking observations about the news, zingers in ongoing debates, and perhaps a funny line or two. Many of those I follow are journalists and pundits, but some are regular folks who have dived into the rolling conversation, no credentials necessary.

Sometimes I think back to the cumbersome business of information-gathering when you actually had to call people rather than pinging them by e-mail. I can remember searching for ancient newspaper articles on microfilm; going to the Justice Department to pore over lobbying records; visiting C-SPAN to watch videotapes of campaign commercials from far-flung local races. Now huge storehouses of knowledge are available with a couple of mouse clicks.

What a head-snapping contrast: a low moment for old-fashioned journalism and a soaring moment for instantaneous information. Now those of us in the news racket have to figure out ways to exploit and organize this treasure trove while somehow getting people to pay for what we produce rather than Googling it for free. That's a big mountain to climb, and if we have another decade like the last one, we may be permanently stranded in Death Valley.

Kurtz also works for CNN and hosts its weekly media program, "Reliable Sources."

Iraqi Shiites protest Maliki's government

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By Qais Mizher
Monday, December 28, 2009; A09

KARBALA, IRAQ -- A group of 5,000 Iraqi Shiite demonstrators in the city of Karbala turned the religious observance of Ashura into a political protest against the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki on Sunday, expressing wide-ranging criticisms as the country prepares for a critical national election in early March.

The protesters gathered outside the Imam Hussein shrine to greet the hundreds of thousands of pilgrims who had descended on the city. "We don't vote for people who steal public money," the protesters shouted.

The anti-government overtones surrounding the religious holiday, banned under Saddam Hussein's regime, were a marked change from recent years.

After the U.S. invasion, the day had been embraced by the country's Shiite majority as a moment to express solidarity in their newfound political power and long-frustrated religious freedom.

This year, Ashura fell at the beginning of the campaign season for the March 7 national election, which is to decide the face of the Iraqi government during and after the U.S. withdrawal. Tens of thousands of Iraqi security forces were deployed on the streets to prevent possible violence that would further weaken the credibility of Maliki's government, which has been severely tested by a string of deadly bombings.

On Saturday in Baghdad, Shiite leader Amar al-Hakim, head of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, offered thinly veiled criticisms of the government during a speech commemorating Ashura, comparing what he claimed were the struggles of Imam Hussein's fight against corruption to the present day.

Ashura is the day of mourning for Imam Hussein, the Shiite saint whose death in the 7th century sealed the rift between Sunni and Shiite Muslims over the succession of the prophet Muhammad.

"We can see that history is repeating itself. We can see the political money, temptations and seductions," Hakim said at the Kihlani mosque in central Baghdad. "Iraqi people don't want the promises to disappear after the elections. People will not obey any extortions."

The political potential of Ashura was exactly why Saddam Hussein had so feared it, according to Shakir al-Najjar, a 70-year-old poet who helped organize the protests in Karbala.

"We had believed that Maliki's government and most of the politicians were a part of us, and we used to support them, especially after they executed Saddam," he said. "But finally we discovered that they don't represent us, so we decided to protest against them for the first time on Ashura this year."

In Baghdad on Sunday, tens of thousands of pilgrims marched toward the al-Kadihmiyia mosque, braving the threat of bombings and violence, and shedding their own blood with cuts on their foreheads to commemorate the martyrdom of Imam Hussein.

"The politicians want to associate themselves with such a great leader as Imam Hussein," said 29-year-old shopkeeper Bajir Hassan.

Red Crescent tents were set up to deal with pilgrims who had passed out from loss of blood and dehydration.

Although Shiite pilgrims had been the target of multiple attacks over the past week, there was only one major bombing on Sunday, in Kirkuk, killing four pilgrims and injuring 18, according to police officials.

Mizher is a special correspondent. Special correspondent Michael Hastings contributed to this report.

Argentina puts officials on trial over the abuses of the 'Dirty War'

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By Juan Forero
Washington post foreign service
Monday, December 28, 2009; A08

They are old and balding now, the 15 defendants standing trial before a three-judge panel near the Argentine capital's bustling port. But prosecutors say they were once the feared henchmen of a brutal military dictatorship.

Argentina has tried military men before. But this trial, of officers and policemen who ran clandestine torture centers known as the Athletic Club, the Bank and Olimpo, is one of a string of new proceedings that by next year will close some of the most emblematic cases of alleged state terrorism under Argentina's 1976-1983 dictatorship.

With former generals and admirals well into their 70s and the courts emboldened to hand down severe penalties, Argentina is finally close to delivering justice for the estimated 30,000 people killed by state security services during the "Dirty War," including some who were thrown from airplanes after being tortured and sedated.

"I think and I hope this is the beginning of the end of a long process that began in 1983 with the return of democracy," said Gastón Chillier, director of the Center for Legal and Social Studies, a Buenos Aires rights group. "Next year will be especially critical."

The trials in Argentina come as other South American countries grapple with delivering justice for the victims of dictatorships and government-linked death squads.

In Brazil, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is proposing a commission to investigate allegations of torture by the military during that country's 1964-1985 dictatorship. In Peru, a former president, Alberto Fujimori, was convicted of murder in April for death-squad activities during his 10-year rule. And in Colombia, army generals and colonels accused of widespread human rights abuses are for the first time being investigated by civilian prosecutors.

Among the countries that have most aggressively sought to address past crimes is Chile, which has convicted 277 members of Gen. Augusto Pinochet's 16-year dictatorship of myriad rights abuses, according to New York-based Human Rights Watch.

But no country has gone after former state agents as sweepingly as Argentina.

Using ordinary penal law and the criminal courts, prosecutors have won about 60 convictions since 2005 against defendants accused of violating human rights. An additional 627 former military officers, policemen and officials have been charged. In all, 325 cases are open nationwide, most involving former members of the security services accused of kidnapping and killing leftists, according to the Center for Legal and Social Studies.

Achieving justice has not been easy. Barracks revolts in the 1980s led to a "full-stop" law that ended investigations and a "due obedience" law that absolved those who said they were following the orders of superiors, a defense rejected at the Nuremberg trials. In the 1990s, President Carlos Menem pardoned those who had been convicted.

But in 2005, Argentina's Supreme Court annulled the amnesties, and a revitalized judicial system began to prosecute. Convictions have been won against once-influential figures in Argentina's security forces, including Luciano Menéndez, a former regional army commander, and Miguel Etchecolatz, a former Buenos Aires provincial police commissioner.

Now, though, the men on the block include some of the dictatorship's most notorious figures.

Among them are former Gen. Jorge Rafael Videla, who led the junta that governed after a 1976 coup, and Argentina's last dictator, Reynaldo Bignone. There is also Alfredo Astiz, nicknamed "Blond Angel of Death." Using his boyish good looks, prosecutors say, Astiz infiltrated a leading human rights group in 1977. That led to the abduction and murder of three of the group's founders, a journalist and two French nuns.

In a trial that began Dec. 11, Astiz and 18 others are accused of plying their trade at the Navy Mechanics School, which processed 5,000 prisoners, most of whom never came out alive. Next year, trials begin for those charged with participating in Operation Condor, in which dictatorships across much of South America cooperated in hunting down and killing leftists.

Estela de Carlotto, president of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a rights group, said justice is being served.

"We are giving the predators the opportunity they never gave our children," said de Carlotto, whose daughter was abducted and never seen again. "We are giving them the opportunity to defend themselves in court, to speak out, to have a just process. But we are also asking for convictions."

The courts here have requested declassified U.S. cables that detail what the United States knew about Argentine military operations in the war against leftist guerrilla groups.

Carlos Osorio, who oversees the Argentina project for the National Security Archive, a Washington policy group that compiles government documents, said Argentine prosecutors may end up using several hundred of about 8,000 declassified State Department documents. Those papers show how U.S. Embassy officials compiled reports on such issues as the pursuit of suspected guerrillas outside Argentina's borders and details on the abductions by Argentine intelligence operatives. Osorio said Argentina's ambassador in Washington, Héctor Timerman, has been petitioning the CIA and other agencies to open their files on Argentina.

"The documents that have been declassified are very rich, but there are some holes, and they can be filled with the documents in the hands of the American intelligence agencies," Osorio said.

Delia Barrera, who was tortured in the Athletic Club detention center in 1977, is now among the witnesses for the prosecution. Speaking outside the courtroom on a recent day, she recalled how her husband told her to fight on for him after he was led away by military officers. She never saw him again.

"For me, this is a fight for justice, for memory, for truth -- it's a commitment for life," she said. "Everything I do and will continue to do, until the last day of my life, is a commitment with those words, which have stayed with me in my soul."

The not-so-sweet side of closing 'doughnut hole'

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By Amy Goldstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 28, 2009; A03

Six years after Congress added a prescription drug benefit to Medicare, Democrats in the House and Senate are poised to make a central change that they and most older Americans have wanted all along: getting rid of a quirk that forces millions of elderly patients with especially high expenses for medicine to pay for much of it on their own.

The closing of an unusual gap in Medicare drug coverage -- a gap that Republicans had, when they controlled Capitol Hill and the White House, insisted was needed for the government to be able to afford the program -- would "forever end this indefensible injustice for American's seniors," Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) said in announcing that the Senate would join the House in supporting the change.

But details of the change underscore that, for patients and the federal budget alike, the implications of the sprawling health-care bills pushed through by congressional Democrats are more nuanced than lawmakers' talking points.

The Democrats and President Obama have been clear that the "doughnut hole," as the gap is known, would disappear gradually over the next 10 years. They have not mentioned that Medicare patients would, according to House figures, face a slightly larger hole in coverage during two of the next three years than they do today.

Proponents say the government can afford to eliminate the gap because the pharmaceutical industry would pay for the phaseout. But less than half of the $80 billion that drugmakers agreed to provide, under a health-care reform agreement over the summer with Senate Democrats and the White House, would be used to help fill the gap, according to Senate Democratic aides. Moreover, there are no budget forecasts far enough into the future to show how much the expanded drug benefit would cost the government once the gap is fully closed.

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Despite such uncertainties, the prospect of filling the hole in drug coverage responds to a strong desire among older Americans -- a significant constituency that tends to be wary of changes to the health-care system. The 2003 law that added the drug benefit to Medicare was the largest expansion since the creation of the federal health insurance system for the elderly four decades ago. The new coverage became available in 2006. As of last year, about 32 million people, nearly three-fourths of everyone on Medicare, had it.

Nancy LeaMond, executive vice president for social impact at AARP, the lobby for people age 50 and over, said that although the benefits have proven popular, "you really can't have a meeting with a chapter, you can't have a town hall" without complaints surfacing about the doughnut hole. "It's a major pocketbook issue."

Pat Liberti, a retired nurse in Salem, Mass., who has heart disease and diabetes and has had five small strokes, takes 16 prescription drugs. She is 59, six years younger than the typical age to join Medicare, and is eligible because her health problems have classified her as disabled. She's entered the doughnut hole each year, this year in May. At that point, her Blue Cross/Blue Shield plan stopped paying 75 percent of her medicine's price. Since then, she has spent $2,206 on drugs.

"You know, I did everything right. I worked. I saved. I own my own home. I have an IRA," Liberti said. She had hoped to save the long-term disability checks she gets from her former job for her old age. Instead, she spends them on medicine.

How many people are in similar circumstances is unclear. The Kaiser Family Foundation, a health policy organization on whose figures House Democrats relied, estimated that, in 2007, one-quarter of the Medicare patients with drug coverage fell into the gap. Less publicized figures by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the agency responsible for the program, show that about half that many fell into it. Kaiser and the agency disagree on how often people who reach the gap stop taking some of their medicine.

However many people have been affected, closing the doughnut hole has been a rallying cry among the elderly. During the second week in December alone, LeaMond said, AARP members placed 240,000 calls to 29 Senate offices, asking them to follow the House in eliminating the gap.

Under the health-care bill the House passed in November, people who reach the doughnut hole would be $500 better off next year than they would otherwise. But the impact over the next few years would be subtler than it appears at first for two reasons: The gap -- without any change -- is scheduled to expand each year, and the bill would fill it gradually. As a result, patients would face a larger coverage hole in 2011 and 2012 than this year, according to Ways and Means Committee data. After that, it would shrink more rapidly and disappear in 2019.

The just-passed Senate measure would narrow the gap halfway. Even before the bill was approved, Reid and the chairman of the two Senate committees that handle health-care issues said they would, as part of negotiations to resolve differences between the two bills, accept the House's goal of closing the hole completely.

Congressional budget analysts have not said how much that would cost. Instead, they predicted a savings of $43 billion over the next decade -- based on the combined effect of filling the hole and two steps the pharmaceutical industry has said it would take in part under the deal earlier this year with the White House and the Senate. As one of those steps, drug manufacturers would repay the government the difference between the prices the companies charge for medicine for low-income patients in Medicare and the prices they used to charge in Medicaid, before the drug benefit existed. As the other step, the House bill requires the manufacturers to give a 50 percent discount for brand-name drugs that patients buy once they enter the doughnut hole -- and to give the government the equivalent of that money after the hole closes.

Budget analysts say the discounts for brand-name drugs would end up costing the government money; fewer people would switch to cheaper generic medicine, in turn causing more people to reach the gap's far side, beyond which almost all remaining drug expenses are covered.

Without a Congressional Budget Office prediction, the only estimate of the cost of filling the gap comes from the Medicare program's chief actuary, Richard S. Foster, who told House Republicans it would be $31 billion over the next decade. No one has analyzed how expensive the expanded drug benefits would become after that, although health-care options prepared a year ago by the CBO provided a clue: It said that, if the gap were eliminated right away, it would cost $134 billion over 10 years.

Democrats predict that, in the end, pharmaceutical companies will provide enough money to cover the expense. Republicans are skeptical. "They are shielding the true cost by phasing it in," said Sage Eastman, spokesman for Rep. Dave Camp (Mich.), ranking Republican on the Ways and Means Committee.

Meanwhile, no one knows how much the pharmaceutical industry could end up benefiting by an expansion in coverage that could drive up spending on brand-name drugs. Said one health policy expert who favors closing the gap: "It's not very transparent."

Equipment to detect explosives is available

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By Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 28, 2009; A04

The explosive allegedly used in the failed bombing plot aboard a transatlantic jetliner over Detroit on Christmas Day could have been detected by existing screening equipment, and the failure to do so reflects significant weaknesses in aviation security and intelligence, former U.S. government officials and international security experts said.

The compound that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab allegedly brought aboard Northwest Flight 253 from Amsterdam was PETN, or pentaerythritol tetranitrate, the same plastic explosive used almost exactly eight years ago by would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid, the FBI said. The attack sped the launch of the Transportation Security Administration, which took over and expanded airport security screening.

But technology and methods that might have detected the explosive have been deployed in airports on a limited basis in the face of concerns about privacy, cost and the potential to slow airport security lines.

The TSA and its counterpart in the Netherlands, where Amsterdam Schipohl Airport is regarded as one of the most secure in the world, have fielded two types of screening equipment able to detect PETN, a commonly used military and commercial explosive, even if hidden beneath clothing, experts said.

However, the first type, detectors that test swabs wiped on passengers and baggage for traces of explosives, weren't used because they are generally reserved for travelers who trigger added scrutiny. Abdulmutallab's name was not placed on TSA watch lists despite warnings by his father to the State Department, officials said.

Abdulmutallab also did not pass through the second type of machine, whole-body imaging scanners that use X-rays or radio waves to detect objects under clothing, equipment that is also used at Schipohl. Not all passengers are required to walk through the scanners, whose availability has been limited because of cost, opposition from privacy groups and industry concerns about bottlenecks.

"Security failed," said Doron Bergerbest-Eilon, Israel's senior-ranking counterterrorism officer from 1997 to 2000 and a former national regulator for aviation security. It is of little comfort that Abdulmutallab was stopped only after he allegedly failed to properly detonate the bomb, instead igniting a fire that alerted fellow passengers, Bergerbest-Eilon said.

"The system repeatedly fails to prevent attacks and protect passengers when challenged," he said, adding that, in the minds of security experts, "for all intents and purposes, Northwest Flight 253 exploded in midair."

On Sunday, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said Abdulmutallab's case was isolated and noted that he was apprehended before damage was done. Although the suspect's name came up "somewhere, somehow" in the government's master terrorism database, information that would have stopped him was never entered on law enforcement watch lists, she said.

"Once this incident occurred, the system worked," Napolitano told ABC's "This Week," adding that the public is safe. U.S. and Dutch authorities are investigating, she said, but "have no suggestion" that screening was not properly done at Schipol. "You can't rely on just one part of your security system," she said. "You have to look at the system as a whole."

But Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism analyst at Georgetown University, called the suspect's ability to smuggle the device on board profoundly disturbing, given that the TSA has spent more than $30 billion on aviation security since 2004, the world's airlines collectively spend an additional $5.9 billion a year, and PETN is well-known as a favored material for terrorist suicide bombers.

"This incident was a compound failure of both intelligence and physical security, leaving prevention to the last line of defense -- the passengers themselves," Hoffman wrote in an e-mail. Several current and former U.S. security officials faulted delays in fielding new imaging scanners.

Michael Chertoff, homeland security secretary from 2005 to last January, said terrorists are exploiting a long-known vulnerability that has been extended by politicians' reluctance to spend the money and political capital needed to make imaging technology more widespread, and travelers' resistance to undergo thorough pat-down searches.

"While the technology does exist to detect such threats, it is not fully deployed," said Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Homeland Security subcommittee on intelligence.

According to the TSA's Web site, the agency is using 40 radio wave imaging units at 19 airports nationwide, and in most cases, the units are used for passengers requiring added scrutiny. At six of those airports, the machines are used for primary, or first-level, screening in one security line. TSA has announced plans to field 878 units by 2014.

Privacy groups say whole-body imaging scanners conduct a "virtual strip search," and have mounted a campaign to stop what they predict will be the abuse of electronic images of naked individuals. In a nonbinding vote in June, the House overwhelmingly approved a measure to prevent scanners from being used for primary screening.

The International Air Transport Association, a trade group of 230 airlines, is urging U.S. and European regulators to re-engineer the aviation security system, noting that the volume of data that governments collect on travelers has mushroomed.

"We've spent eight years looking for little scissors and toenail clippers," said Ken Dunlap, IATA's director of security in North America. "Perhaps the emphasis should be looking for bad people."

Jacques Duchesneau, head of Canada's Air Transport Security Authority from 2002 to 2008, and Bergerbest-Eilon said that instead of trying to push virtually all travelers through similar screening processes, authorities should improve and expand the use of intelligence and behavioral assessments to cull out those deemed to pose the greatest risk, and target improved technology to find them.

While such methods have been "wrongly perceived as racial profiling," Bergerbest-Eilon said, "past events have taught us that we cannot rely on intelligence alone to thwart major terror attacks."

Pakistani scientist depicts more advanced nuclear program in North Korea

Image via Wikipedia

By R. Jeffrey Smith and Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 28, 2009; A02

North Korea has constructed a plant to manufacture a gas needed for uranium enrichment, according to a previously unpublicized account by the father of Pakistan's atomic bomb program, a development that indicates Pyongyang opened a second way to build nuclear weapons as early as the 1990s.

Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan also said that North Korea may have been enriching uranium on a small scale by 2002, with "maybe 3,000 or even more" centrifuges, and that Pakistan helped the country with vital machinery, drawings and technical advice for at least six years.

North Korea's nuclear program is among the world's most opaque, and Khan's account could not be independently corroborated. But one U.S. intelligence official and a U.S. diplomat said his information adds to their suspicions that North Korea has long pursued the enrichment of uranium in addition to making plutonium for bombs, and may help explain Pyongyang's assertion in September that it is in the final stages of such enrichment.

Khan's account of the pilot plant, which he says North Korea built without help, is included in a narrative that depicts relations between the two countries' scientists as exceptionally close for nearly a decade. Khan says, for example, that during a visit to North Korea in 1999, he toured a mountain tunnel. There his hosts showed him boxes containing components of three finished nuclear warheads, which he was told could be assembled for use atop missiles within an hour.

"While they explained the construction [design of their bombs], they quietly showed me the six boxes" containing split cores for the warheads, as well as "64 ignitors/detonators per bomb packed in 6 separate boxes," Khan said.

Old assumptions

His visit occurred seven years before the country's first detonation, prompting some current and former U.S. officials to say that Khan's account, if correct, suggests North Korea's achievements were more advanced than previously known, and that the country may have more sophisticated weapons, or a larger number, than earlier estimated.

But Siegfried S. Hecker, a former Los Alamos National Laboratory director who was allowed to see some North Korean plutonium during a visit to its nuclear facilities in January 2004, said after hearing Khan's description of the trip he remains unconvinced that the country in 1999 had enough fissile material on hand to make such weapons.

Hecker said Khan may have tried to get himself "off the hook, to say what [he] . . . did was not that bad because these guys already had nuclear weapons. That's a nice way to cover his own tracks."

Since some of Khan's actions were exposed in 2003 and 2004, top Pakistani officials have called him a rogue proliferator. Khan said, however, there was a tacit agreement between the two governments that his laboratory "would advise and guide them with the centrifuge program and that the North Koreans would help Pakistan in fitting the nuclear warhead into the Ghauri missile" -- his country's name for its version of the Nodong missiles that Pakistan bought from North Korea.

Pakistan gave North Korea vital equipment and software, and in return North Korea also "taught us how to make Krytrons" -- extremely fast electrical switches that are used in nuclear detonations and are tightly controlled in international commerce. Contradicting Pakistani statements that the government had no involvement in such sensitive transfers, Khan says his assistance was approved by top political and Army officials, including then-Lt. Gen. Khalid Kidwai, who currently oversees Pakistan's atomic arsenal.

Khan, 73, is under house arrest in Islamabad. He has threatened to disclose sensitive information if he remains in confinement.

A contentious issue

The issue of what the hermetic country has been doing with uranium and when it started has been especially contentious since 2002. When an Obama administration envoy, Stephen Bosworth, visited North Korea this month, he "strongly put down a marker" that future talks must include discussion of uranium, a senior U.S. official said.

Pakistani officials in Washington dismissed Khan's assertions as baseless, without responding to questions about Kidwai's role. "Pakistan, as a nuclear weapons state, has always acted with full responsibility and never engaged itself in any activity in violation of the non-proliferation norms," the embassy said in a statement.

Song Ryol Han, the North Korean ambassador to the United Nations, denied that his country had a uranium program before last spring or that it ever discussed the issue "with Dr. Khan in Pakistan." Song said that "only after last April, when the U.S. hostility entered extremely critical stage" did the country start such a program as a "nuclear deterrence" measure.

Khan described his dealings with the country in official documents and in correspondence with a former British journalist, Simon Henderson, who said he thinks an accurate understanding of Pakistan's nuclear history is relevant for U.S. policymaking. The Washington Post independently verified that the documents were produced by Khan.

In his written account, Khan said the capacity of North Korea's plant for making the centrifuge feedstock, a caustic material known as uranium hexafluoride, "initially was two tons per year" and later was raised to 10 tons a year. He did not give the plant's location but said that at one point North Korea sent a kilogram of the gas it had made to Pakistan for testing. He also stated that Pakistan shared a sample of its own gas to be used as a manufacturing standard by the North Koreans.

A U.S. government nuclear expert, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject, said constructing a plant of this size will probably be seen as "a very serious commitment" to making nuclear arms with a method that is hard to detect. The official noted that the country was obligated to report such facilities under a global treaty to which it was a party until 2003.

Khan said he understood that North Korea's ambition was to produce enriched uranium fuel for an aged reactor because it could not rely on a continuing foreign supply of such fuel. But two officials noted that if North Korea indeed had 3,000 or more centrifuges operating by 2002, which Khan called "quite likely," then work on that scale opens the door to industrial-scale enrichment for weapons as well.

Khan said he negotiated the purchase of 10 Nodong missiles and related technology for $150 million after visiting North Korea in 1994 at the request of Benazir Bhutto, then Pakistan's prime minister, and top army officials. "As a result of this deal, 10 North Korean experts came to Kahuta and were housed within the complex," Khan said, referring to the city in northeastern Pakistan where his laboratory is situated.

Khan said three army staff chiefs approved the stay of the North Koreans, who "were officially allowed to visit all the workshops and meet and discuss freely with the scientists and engineers," including those working on P-1 centrifuges, as well as more advanced models known as P-2s.

After gaining the approval of an army chief and after the payment of funds by North Korea, "I asked my people to prepare 20 outdated P-1 machines and gave them. Since they were working in the plant and were familiar with the P-2 machines, they asked for 4 of these too."

Undermining a pledge?

Several former U.S. officials, after being informed of Khan's statements, said they undermine North Korea's 1994 pledge to work with the United States "for peace and security on a nuclear-free Korean peninsula."

"This paints a picture of even more collaboration than I assumed those countries had," said Robert G. Joseph, a prominent critic of the 1994 agreement. Joseph served as the principal nonproliferation official at the White House under President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2005 and then as undersecretary of state for arms control.

Khan said Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the chief of the army staff from 1998 to 2007 and president from 2001 to 2008, and "his right-hand men" -- including Kidwai, Khan asserted -- "knew everything and were controlling incoming and outgoing consignments." Kidwai heads the group that controls Pakistan's arsenal, estimated by some U.S. government analysts at more than 100 weapons.

But Musharraf, in his 2006 autobiography, said that Khan was responsible for all of the nuclear-related exports to North Korea and that "neither the Pakistan Army nor any of the past governments of Pakistan was ever involved or had any knowledge of A.Q.'s proliferation activities."

Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

Uninvestigated terrorism warning about Detroit suspect called not unusual

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By Karen DeYoung and Michael Leahy
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, December 28, 2009; A01

When Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's father in Nigeria reported concern over his son's "radicalization" to the U.S. Embassy there last month, intelligence officials in the United States deemed the information insufficient to pursue. The young man's name was added to the half-million entries in a computer database in McLean and largely forgotten.

The lack of attention was not unusual, according to U.S. intelligence officials, who said that thousands of similar bits of information flow into the National Counterterrorism Center each week from around the world. Only those that indicate a specific threat, or add to an existing body of knowledge about an individual, are passed along for further investigation and possible posting on airline and border watch lists.

"It's got to be something that causes the information to sort of rise out of the noise level, because there is just so much out there," one intelligence official said.

The report entered on Abdulmutallab, 23, after his father's Nov. 19 visit to the embassy was "very, very thin, with minimal information," said a second U.S. official familiar with its contents.

Abdulmutallab's alleged attempt to blow up a Detroit-bound commercial airliner on Christmas Day has put the information in a new light, however. It has unleashed sharp criticism of the watch-list procedures and the explosive-detection systems that apparently allowed him to board Northwest Airlines Flight 253 with materials for a bomb.

On Sunday, the air travel system responded to another alert when a second Nigerian man locked himself in the bathroom on the same Northwest Airlines flight into Detroit. Officials said he was belligerent but genuinely sick and not a threat, according to the Associated Press.

Republican leaders placed responsibility for what they called lapses in preparedness squarely on the Obama administration Sunday, and questioned whether the president appreciates terrorist threats. "I think there's much to investigate here," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said on ABC's "This Week."

Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) joined GOP critics in asking how the suspect was able to retain a U.S. visa -- issued by the U.S. Embassy in London in 2008 -- after his name appeared in the terrorist database.

"What happened after this man's father called our embassy in Nigeria?" Lieberman asked. "What happened to that information? Was there follow-up to try to determine where this suspect was?"

White House officials struggled to explain the complicated system of centralized terrorist data and watch lists, stressing that they were put in place years ago by the Bush administration. Spokesman Robert Gibbs said President Obama has ordered reviews of the watch-list system and the airport explosives screening.

"The president is very confident that this government is taking the steps that are necessary to take -- to take our fight to those that seek to do us harm," Gibbs said, emphasizing stepped-up military activity against al-Qaeda in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told CNN's "State of the Union" that Abdulmutallab's assertions of al-Qaeda contacts and training in Yemen were being investigated, but that "right now, we have no indication" his actions were "part of anything larger."

A Justice Department official said Abdulmutallab was released Sunday from a Michigan hospital where he was treated for burns suffered in the failed bombing. He was in a federal prison in Milan, Mich., according to the Associated Press. He is scheduled to appear in federal court in Michigan on Jan. 8.

The youngest of 16 children of a prominent Nigerian bank executive, and the son of the second of his father's two wives, Abdulmutallab was raised at the family home in Kaduna, a city

in Nigeria's Muslim-dominated north, relatives there said. He graduated with an engineering degree from City University in London. Later, his father sent him to Dubai to study for an advanced business degree.

In July, relatives said, his father agreed to his request to study Arabic in Yemen. The family became concerned in August when Abdulmutallab called to say he had dropped the course but would remain in Yemen for an undisclosed purpose. Several days later, they said, he sent a text message saying he was severing all ties with his family.

Relatives said that message provoked his father's visits to the U.S. Embassy in Abuja and to the Nigerian intelligence service. U.S. intelligence officials insisted Sunday that the visit did not occur until mid-November.

Abdulmutallab's movements after that are unclear, although a Nigerian official said Sunday that he "sneaked" into the country on the 24th. He paid cash for a ticket on a Dec. 24 KLM flight from Lagos to Amsterdam, connecting to Northwest 253 to Detroit on Christmas Day.

"The e-ticket was purchased from KLM airport office in Accra [Ghana] on 16th December 2009," Harold Demuren, a Nigerian aviation official, told a news conference in Lagos. "His passport was scanned, his U.S. visa was scanned, and the APIS [Advanced Passenger Information System] returned with no objection."

Abdulmutallab's name would have bounced back if he appeared on the U.S. "no-fly" or "selectee" watch lists. Although the size of the government's overall terrorist database has expanded since such information began to be systematically collected in 2003, the number of people prohibited from boarding a domestic or U.S.-bound aircraft, or subject to special scrutiny and notification of U.S. law enforcement, has shrunk, from an estimated 30,000 in early 2007 to 18,000 today.

Widespread complaints in the past tended to focus on lists seen as too long, rather than too short. Many came from members of Congress who objected to constituents and spouses being delayed or prevented from boarding flights because information about them or someone with a similar name had been listed.

The White House review will examine protocols for watch-listing individuals, currently based on a "reasonable suspicion" standard, according to the intelligence official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

"Do we as a country believe that the bar is too high in light of this one individual who didn't reach it? Do we want to lower the bar? If we do, what are the implications? We are going to have a lot more people on the list."

The existing system was established by the Intelligence Reform Act of 2004. It was designed to close gaps in intelligence-sharing that allowed a number of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers to enter the United States, although the CIA had identified them overseas as terrorism suspects.

The reforms set up the National Counterterrorism Center, which administers a huge database of terrorism information called the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, or TIDE.

Each day, thousands of pieces of intelligence information from around the world -- field assessments, captured documents, news from foreign allies and the media, and reports from worried fathers -- pour into the NCTC computers in McLean. At 11 each night, selected information from TIDE is downloaded into the Terrorist Screening Database, or TSDB, administered by the FBI. Overnight entries are examined each morning by an interagency team drawn from across the government.

Under FBI direction, individuals assessed as significant risks are then "nominated" to specific watch lists, each of which has different criteria. In addition to the "no-fly" and "selectee" lists, the State Department maintains a list of people who should not be granted visas; other lists single out people who cross land borders and domestic fugitives.

In Abdulmutallab's case, a single, non-specific entry in TIDE was not enough to send his information to the TSDB, so he was never considered for a watch list. Among the gaps in the system already being addressed by computer technicians, officials said, is the absence of an "automatic feedback loop" that would have let TIDE know that the random report from Nigeria referred to a man who already had a valid U.S. entry visa, issued more than a year before.

Staff writers Carrie Johnson and Joby Warrick in Washington and Anne E. Kornblut in Kailua, Hawaii, and special correspondent Aminu Abubakar in Kano, Nigeria, contributed to this report.

Al-Qaeda group in Yemen gaining prominence

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By Sudarsan Raghavan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, December 28, 2009; A01

SANAA, YEMEN -- The al-Qaeda branch linked to the attempt to blow up a Detroit-bound Northwest Airlines flight has for the past year escalated efforts to exploit Yemen's instability and carve out a leadership role among terrorist groups, say Yemeni and Western officials, terrorism analysts, and tribal leaders.

U.S. authorities say Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab, the Nigerian suspect who tried to ignite explosive chemicals with a syringe sewn into his underwear, may have been equipped and trained by an al-Qaeda bombmaker in Yemen. He allegedly made that claim to FBI agents after his arrest.

If the claim is true, it represents a significant increase in the activities of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and the emergence of a major new threat to the United States, the Middle East and the Horn of Africa.

"Al-Qaeda started in Yemen and the Arabian Peninsula, but it was raised and nurtured in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and other places. Now it is clear that it is coming back to its roots and growing in Yemen," said Saeed Obaid, a Yemeni terrorism expert. "Yemen has become the place to best understand al-Qaeda and its ambitions today."

Image by bbcworldservice via Flickr

The branch, known as AQAP, is still a work in progress, officials and analysts said. It is led by a new generation of Yemeni and Saudi militants keen on transforming Yemen into a launching pad for jihad against the United States, its Arab allies and Israel.

They have used Yemen's vast stretches of ungoverned, rugged terrain; loose-knit tribal structures and codes; widespread sympathy for al-Qaeda; and animosity toward U.S. policies to lure new recruits and set up training bases.

The group has yet to notch a catastrophic attack against the United States or its allies, suggesting that the organization is still too weak to operate effectively outside Yemen. Yet despite operative failures and setbacks, it has shown a resilience and ability to quickly regroup and cause havoc inside the country.

The branch appears to be trying to fill a void left by al-Qaeda's central body, led by Osama bin Laden, which has been weakened by military assaults in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Although the branch mostly operates independently, AQAP leader Nasir al-Wuhayshi, who comes from a wealthy family and once served as bin Laden's personal secretary, is believed to have strong contacts with the al-Qaeda head, analysts say.

The Yemeni government, under heavy U.S. pressure and with significant U.S. assistance, has intensified its efforts to crack down on the al-Qaeda branch. In the past 10 days, it has launched aerial and ground raids that Yemeni officials say have killed more than 50 militants.

Yemen's weak central government is struggling with a civil war in the north, a secessionist movement in the south and a crumbling economy. U.S. officials are concerned that Yemen, the poorest country in the Middle East, could become as volatile as Afghanistan or Pakistan.

The attempt to down the airliner came less than 24 hours after Yemeni forces, backed by the United States, carried out an airstrike on a meeting of suspected al-Qaeda leaders in Shabwa, a southern province.

U.S. and Yemeni officials say Wuhayshi and his deputy, Said al-Shihri, a Saudi national and former detainee at the U.S facility at Guantanamo Bay, were at the meeting, along with Anwar al-Aulaqi, the radical Yemeni American cleric linked to the gunman charged with killing 13 people at Fort Hood, Tex., Nov. 5. The fate of the three men is still unknown. Eyewitnesses and tribal leaders in the area expressed doubts that the men had died or were even at the meeting.

Yemen, where bin Laden's father was born, has long been an exporter of jihadists. Thousands of Yemenis have fought in Afghanistan and Iraq; many returned to Yemen. In 2000, al-Qaeda militants rammed the USS Cole with an explosives-packed speedboat off the southern city of Aden, killing 17 U.S. sailors.

The current AQAP generation has its roots in a February 2006 jailbreak of 23 prisoners from a maximum-security prison in Sanaa, the capital. U.S. and Yemeni officials said the prisoners were aided by Yemeni intelligence officials sympathetic to al-Qaeda.

The escapees included Wuhayshi and several high-profile operatives behind the Cole bombings.

Wuhayshi, who is believed to be in his early 30s and to have fought alongside bin Laden in Afghanistan, soon began to rebuild the branch.

Until a year ago, the branch mostly targeted tourists, missionaries, oil installations and other soft targets in Yemen. In September 2008, heavily armed al-Qaeda gunmen attacked the U.S. Embassy, detonating a car bomb that left 16 dead, including six of the assailants. The embassy attack, analysts and officials said, was believed to have been a direct order from bin Laden.

In January, the Yemeni and Saudi Arabian branches of al-Qaeda merged to create AQAP.

Today, the branch has about 100 core operatives, most in their 20s and 30s. But it has countless sympathizers and immense tribal support in southern and eastern provinces, said Abdulelah Hider Shaea, a Yemeni journalist with close ties to al-Qaeda. Shaea, who interviewed Wuhayshi in an al-Qaeda hideout earlier this year, said he saw several Muslims with Australian, German and French citizenships.

In a report to parliament last week, Deputy Prime Minister for Defense and Security Rashad al-Alimi said militants killed in a Dec. 17 airstrike included Yemenis, Saudis, Pakistanis and Egyptians. U.S. officials have said some militants are leaving Pakistan and Afghanistan to fight in Yemen.

Since the merger, AQAP has improved its abilities to spread its message. It has an online magazine called Sada al-Malahim, or "the echo of epic battles," and regularly beams videos and communiques to Web sites and jihadist forums. On Oct. 29, AQAP published an article in its online magazine saying "that whoever wants to carry out jihad with us," the group would "guide him in the appropriate way to kill."

The group has launched five attacks this year, compared with 22 in 2008, Western diplomats said. But the targets have been higher-profile.

In August, the branch dispatched a Saudi suicide bomber with explosives hidden on or in his body who slipped past airport security checkpoints and nearly killed Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, the head of the kingdom's counterterrorism operations. The bomber, according to some reports, used the same chemical explosives that Abdulmuttalab allegedly did.

Last month, AQAP militants ambushed and killed three senior Yemeni security officers and four bodyguards in Hadramawt province. And last week, Alimi said the branch was planning to launch suicide bombings against the British Embassy and foreign schools.

On Sunday, AQAP issued a communique declaring that it would take revenge for the Dec. 17 airstrikes.