IHT : U.S. adapts Cold War idea to fight terrorists

U.S. adapts Cold War idea to fight terrorists

By Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker | March 18, 2008

WASHINGTON: In the days immediately after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, members of President George W. Bush's war cabinet declared that it would be impossible to deter the most fervent extremists from carrying out even more deadly terrorist missions with biological, chemical or nuclear weapons.

Since then, however, administration, military and intelligence officials assigned to counterterrorism have begun to change their view. After piecing together a more nuanced portrait of terrorist organizations, they say there is reason to believe that a combination of efforts could in fact establish something akin to the posture of deterrence, the strategy that helped protect the United States from a Soviet nuclear attack during the Cold War.

Interviews with more than two dozen senior officials involved in the effort provided the outlines of previously unreported missions to mute Al Qaeda's message, turn the jihadi movement's own weaknesses against it and illuminate Al Qaeda's errors whenever possible.

A primary focus has become cyberspace, which is the global haven of terrorist networks. To counter efforts by terrorists to plot attacks, raise money and recruit new members on the Internet, the government has mounted a secret campaign to plant bogus e-mail messages and Web site postings, with the intent to sow confusion, dissent and distrust among militant organizations, officials confirm.

At the same time, U.S. diplomats are quietly working behind the scenes with Middle Eastern partners to amplify the speeches and writings of prominent Islamic clerics who are renouncing terrorist violence.

At the local level, the authorities are experimenting with new ways to keep potential terrorists off guard.

In New York City, as many as 100 police officers in squad cars from every precinct converge twice daily at randomly selected times and at randomly selected sites, like Times Square or the financial district, to rehearse their response to a terrorist attack. City police officials say the operations are believed to be a crucial tactic to keep extremists guessing as to when and where a large police presence may materialize at any hour.

"What we've developed since 9/11, in six or seven years, is a better understanding of the support that is necessary for terrorists, the network which provides that support, whether it's financial or material or expertise," said Michael Leiter, acting director of the National Counterterrorism Center.

"We've now begun to develop more sophisticated thoughts about deterrence looking at each one of those," Leiter said in an interview. "Terrorists don't operate in a vacuum."

In some ways, government officials acknowledge, the effort represents a second-best solution. Their preferred way to combat terrorism remains to capture or kill extremists, and the new emphasis on deterrence in some ways amounts to attaching a new label to old tools.

"There is one key question that no one can answer: How much disruption does it take to give you the effect of deterrence?" said Michael Levi, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of a new book, "On Nuclear Terrorism."

The emerging belief that terrorists may be subject to a new form of deterrence is reflected in two of the nation's central strategy documents.

The 2002 National Security Strategy, signed by the president one year after the Sept. 11 attacks, stated flatly that "traditional concepts of deterrence will not work against a terrorist enemy whose avowed tactics are wanton destruction and the targeting of innocents."

Four years later, however, the National Strategy for Combating Terrorism concluded: "A new deterrence calculus combines the need to deter terrorists and supporters from contemplating a WMD attack and, failing that, to dissuade them from actually conducting an attack."

For obvious reasons, it is harder to deter terrorists than it was to deter a Soviet attack.

Terrorists hold no obvious targets for American retaliation as Soviet cities, factories, military bases and silos were under the Cold War deterrence doctrine. And it is far harder to pinpoint the location of a terrorist group's leaders than it was to identify the Kremlin offices of the Politburo bosses, making it all but impossible to deter attacks by credibly threatening a retaliatory attack.

But over the six and a half years since the Sept. 11 attacks, many terrorist leaders, including Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, have successfully evaded capture, and U.S. officials say they now recognize that threats to kill terrorist leaders may never be enough to keep America safe.

So U.S. officials have spent the last several years trying to identify other types of "territory" that extremists hold dear, and they say they believe that one important aspect may be the terrorists' reputation and credibility with Muslims.

Under this theory, if the seeds of doubt can be planted in the mind of Al Qaeda's strategic leadership that an attack would be viewed as a shameful murder of innocents - or, even more effectively, that it would be an embarrassing failure - then the order may not be given, according to this new analysis.

Senior officials acknowledge that it is difficult to prove what role these new tactics and strategies have played in thwarting plots or deterring Al Qaeda from attacking. Senior officials say there have been several successes using the new approaches, but many involve highly classified technical programs, including the cyberoperations, that they declined to detail.

They did point to some older and now publicized examples that suggest that their efforts are moving in the right direction.

George Tenet, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, wrote in his autobiography that the authorities were concerned that Qaeda operatives had made plans in 2003 to attack the New York City subway using cyanide devices.

Zawahiri reportedly called off the plot because he feared that it "was not sufficiently inspiring to serve Al Qaeda's ambitions," and would be viewed as a pale, even humiliating, follow-up to the 9/11 attacks.

Terrorists hold little or no terrain, except on the Web. "Al Qaeda and other terrorists' center of gravity lies in the information domain, and it is there that we must engage it," said Dell Dailey, the State Department's counterterrorism chief.

Some of the government's most secretive counterterrorism efforts involve disrupting terrorists' cyberoperations. In Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, specially trained teams have recovered computer hard drives used by terrorists and are turning the terrorists' tools against them.

"If you can learn something about whatever is on those hard drives, whatever that information might be, you could instill doubt on their part by just countermessaging whatever it is they said they wanted to do or planned to do," said Brigadier General Mark Schissler, director of cyberoperations for the air force and a former deputy director of the anti-terrorism office for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Other American efforts are aimed at discrediting Al Qaeda's operations, including the decision to release seized videotapes showing members of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a largely Iraqi group with some foreign leaders, training children to kidnap and kill, as well as excerpts of a 49-page letter said to have been written by one of the group's leaders that describes the organization as weak and plagued by low morale.

Even as security and intelligence forces seek to disrupt terrorist operations, counterterrorism specialists are examining ways to dissuade insurgents from even considering an attack with unconventional weapons. They are looking at aspects of the militants' culture, families or religion to undermine the rhetoric of terrorist leaders.

For example, the government is seeking ways to amplify the voices of respected religious leaders who warn that suicide bombers will not enjoy the heavenly delights promised by terrorist literature and that their families will be dishonored by such attacks. Those efforts are aimed at undermining a terrorist's will.

"I've got to figure out what does dissuade you," said Lieutenant General John Sattler, the Joint Chiefs' director of strategic plans and policy. "What is your center of gravity that we can go at? The goal you set won't be achieved, or you will be discredited and lose face with the rest of the Muslim world or radical extremism that you signed up for."

Efforts are also under way to persuade Muslims not to support terrorists. It is a delicate campaign that U.S. officials are trying to promote and amplify - but without leaving telltale American fingerprints that could undermine the effort in the Muslim world.

Senior Bush administration officials point to several promising developments.

Saudi Arabia's top cleric, Grand Mufti Sheik Abdul Aziz al-Asheik, gave a speech last October warning Saudis not to join unauthorized jihadist activities, a statement directed mainly at those considering going to Iraq to fight the U.S.-led forces.

And Abdul-Aziz el-Sherif, a top leader of the armed Egyptian movement Islamic Jihad and a longtime associate of Zawahiri, the second-ranking Qaeda official, has just completed a book that renounces violent jihad on legal and religious grounds.

Such dissents are serving to widen rifts between Qaeda leaders and some former loyal backers, Western and Middle Eastern diplomats say.

"Many terrorists value the perception of popular or theological legitimacy for their actions," said Stephen Hadley, Bush's national security adviser. "By encouraging debate about the moral legitimacy of using weapons of mass destruction, we can try to affect the strategic calculus of the terrorists."

As the top Pentagon policy maker for special operations, Michael Vickers creates strategies for combating terrorism with specialized military forces, as well as for countering the proliferation of nuclear, biological or chemical weapons.

Much of his planning deals with how the military's most elite combat teams should capture and kill terrorists. But with each passing day, more of his time is spent in the new world of terrorist deterrence theory, trying to figure out how to prevent attacks by persuading terrorist support networks - those who enable terrorists to operate - to refuse any kind of assistance to stateless agents of extremism.

"Obviously, hard-core terrorists will be the hardest to deter," Vickers said. "But if we can deter the support network - recruiters, financial supporters, local security providers and states who provide sanctuary - then we can start achieving a deterrent effect on the whole terrorist network and constrain terrorists' ability to operate.

"We have not deterred terrorists from their intention to do us great harm," Vickers said, "but by constraining their means and taking away various tools, we approach the overall deterrent effect we want."

IHT : Europe has new counterterrorism weapon: Blind detectives

Europe has new counterterrorism weapon: Blind detectives

By Dan Bilefsky | October 29, 2007

ANTWERP, Belgium: Sacha van Loo, 36, is not your typical cop. He wields a white cane instead of a gun. And from the purr of an engine on a wiretap, he can discern whether a suspect is driving a Peugeot, a Honda or a Mercedes.

Van Loo is one of Europe's newest weapons in the global fight against terrorism and organized crime: a blind Sherlock Holmes, whose disability allows him to spot clues sighted detectives don't see.

"Being blind has forced me to develop my other senses, and my power as a detective rests in my ears," he said from his office at the Belgian Federal Police, where a bullet-riddled piece of paper from a recent target-shooting session was proudly displayed on the wall. "Being blind also requires recognizing your limitations," he added with a smile, noting that a sighted trainer guided his hands during target practice "to make sure no one got wounded."

Van Loo, a slight man who has been blind since birth, is one of six blind police officers in a pioneering unit specializing in transcribing and analyzing wiretap recordings in criminal investigations. An accomplished linguist who taught himself Serb Croat for fun, he laments that he is not entitled to carry a gun on the job or make arrests. But such is his acute sense of hearing that Paul van Thielen, a director at the Belgian Federal Police, compares his powers of observation to those of a "superhero."

When police eavesdrop on a suspected terrorist making a phone call, van Loo can listen to the tones dialed and immediately identify the number. By hearing the sound of a voice echoing off of a wall, he can deduce whether a suspect is speaking from an airport lounge or a crowded restaurant. After the Belgian police recently spent hours struggling to identify a drug smuggler on a faint wiretap recording, they concluded he was Moroccan. Van Loo, who has a "library of accents in his head," listened and deduced he was Albanian, a fact confirmed after his arrest.

"I have had to train my ear to know where I am. It is a matter of survival to cross the street or get on a train," he said. "Some people can get lost in background noise, but as a blind man I divide hearing into different channels. It is these details that can be the difference between solving and not solving a crime."

Grappling with his handicap, he says, also has given him the thick emotional skin necessary for dealing with the job's stresses. "I have overheard criminals plotting to commit murder, drug dealers making plans to drop off drugs, men beating each other up. Being blind helps not to let it get to me because I have to be tough."

The blind police unit, which became operational in June, originated after van Thielen heard about a blind police officer in the Netherlands, and was looking at ways to improve community outreach. He made the connection that blind people could prove more adept than the sighted at listening to and interpreting wiretaps. That idea, he says, was given added impetus after the Belgian government passed a law a few years ago giving the police extended powers to use wiretaps in the investigation of 37 areas of crime, including terrorism, murder, organized crime and the abduction of minors.

The police also recognized that blind officers like van Loo could be particularly valuable in counterterrorism investigations because wiretap recordings - derived from a phone tap or bug placed in the safe house of a terrorist group - are often muffled by loud background noise, requiring a highly trained ear to discern voices. Alain Grignard, a senior counterterrorism officer at the Brussels Federal Police, notes that wiretaps proved instrumental in the recent arrests of a large terrorist cell in Belgium recruiting for the insurgency in Iraq.

Beyond his keenly developed ears, van Loo is also a trained translator who speaks seven languages, including Russian and Arabic - a skill Grignard said makes him indispensable, since his knowledge of accents can help him to differentiate between, say, an Egyptian or Moroccan suspect. "You need every edge in a terrorism investigation, and a blind officer with languages could be a powerful weapon."

The Belgian police say they were amazed at the number of qualified blind applicants for the posts. Scoring high marks on a hearing test was a prerequisite for the job, as was being at least 33 percent blind. Van Thielen, the police chief, says he was forced to turn away dozens of applicants whose sight was too good, including one "blind" man who shocked police recruiters by arriving at his interview in a car.

Recruiting blind people posed other challenges, van Thielen recalls. Because they would be used almost exclusively for wiretap investigations and the force did not want to expose them to dangerous situations, they were given special status under a 2006 law tailored for forensic work that grants civilians some police powers, but forbids them from making arrests or carrying guns.

Van Thielen, a no-nonsense police veteran, also faced some resistance from other veterans on the force, who feared that having blind colleagues would be a burden. Others felt awkward about how to behave in front of blind people and wondered if saying "au revoir" - literally "see you again" - would cause offense. To assuage their concerns, van Thielen arranged for sensitivity training sessions with blind volunteers. One hint: don't leave computer cables trailing on the floor since blind officers could trip on them.

"At first when members of the police heard that blind people were coming to work here, they laughed and told me that we were a police force and not a charity," said van Thielen. "But attitudes changed when the blind officers arrived and showed their determination to work hard and be useful."

It wasn't only attitudes that needed updating. In addition to installing elevators with voice-activated buttons at the police station, the force issued each blind officers with a special €10,000 computer equipped with Braille keyboards, and a voice system that transmits visual images into sound.

As van Loo transcribed a wiretap recording on a recent day, he wore earphones and passed his index finger over a long strip of Braille characters on the bottom of the keyboard, whose characters altered to replicate whatever was on his computer screen, which was turned off. When he goes outside, he carries a compact police-issued global positioning system device, with a voice that directs him to his destination, street by street.

A father of two, van Loo attributes his success to having parents who taught him at an early age to be independent. He recalls that, as a young child, his father, a film buff, took him to watch movies. His father also taught him to drive a car by hoisting him on his lap and guiding his hands on the steering wheel. His ability to adapt, he says, was further reinforced by his attending a regular high school. He also attended a special school for the blind, where he learned how to maneuver with a cane and to read Russian in Braille. To relax, he skis, rides horses and plays the Arabic lute.

"My parents accepted my blindness, which also helped me to accept it," he said. "That they were not risk averse also helped."

Cindy Gribomont, head of training at the Brussels-based Braille League, an institute for the blind that helped the police with recruiting, says that overcoming employers' prejudices is her greatest challenge. "Employers need to be encouraged because they are afraid of employing handicapped people."

Van Loo, for his part, says he remains determined not to let his handicap overwhelm him. "Being blind isn't always very easy," he said. "I don't focus on it. I don't deny it. But it is rather tragic that a blind policeman is still viewed as an exception."

WaPo : From Casinos to Counterterrorism

From Casinos to Counterterrorism

Las Vegas Surveillance, U.S. Security Efforts Involve Similar Tactics

By Ellen Nakashima | Washington Post Staff Writer | October 22, 2007

LAS VEGAS -- This city, famous for being America's playground, has also become its security lab. Like nowhere else in the United States, Las Vegas has embraced the twin trends of data mining and high-tech surveillance, with arguably more cameras per square foot than any airport or sports arena in the country. Even the city's cabs and monorail have cameras. As the U.S. government ramps up its efforts to forestall terrorist attacks, some privacy advocates view the city as a harbinger of things to come.

In secret rooms in casinos across Las Vegas, surveillance specialists are busy analyzing information about players and employees. Relying on thousands of cameras in nearly every cranny of the casinos, they evaluate suspicious behavior. They ping names against databases that share information with other casinos, sometimes using facial-recognition software to validate a match. And in the marketing suites, casino staffers track players' every wager, every win or loss, the better to target high-rollers for special treatment and low- and middle-rollers for promotions.

"You could almost look at Vegas as the incubator of a whole host of surveillance technologies," said James X. Dempsey, policy director for the Center for Democracy and Technology. Those technologies, he said, have spread to other commercial venues: malls, stadiums, amusement parks.

And although that is "problematic," he said, "the spread of the techniques to counterterrorism is doubly worrisome. Finding a terrorist is much harder than finding a card counter, and the consequences of being wrongly labeled a terrorist are much more severe than being excluded from a casino."

Eyes in the Sky

The casino industry, like the national security industry, is seeking information to answer a fundamental question: Who are you?

"It's, are you a good guy or a bad guy? A threat or a non-threat?" explained Derk Boss, the vice president for surveillance for the Stratosphere hotel and casino, whose crew operates under what he calls the IOU system: Identify, Observe and Understand.

"There are going to be people that just want to come and gamble and enjoy your services," he said. "And there are going to be people that are going to come to take your money. Our job is to distinguish between those two groups."

In the surveillance room, 50 monitors are linked to 2,000 cameras, from the casino entrance to the tower observation deck. Two employees keep an eye on the monitors. Guests are on camera from the moment they enter -- except in their rooms and in bathrooms. An investigator tracking a suspect could go back and review old tape, assembling a mosaic of a visitor's moves for the past two weeks.

What happens in Vegas does indeed stay in Vegas -- for a lot longer than most patrons realize.

On a recent Friday night, the surveillance team at the Stratosphere is watching a casino host they suspect of handing out unwarranted "comps," or vouchers for free rooms and meals to guests.

Might he be taking kickbacks?

Down on the floor, the pit boss is observing players, looking for "tells" -- behavioral signs of cheaters or other undesirables. The night before, investigators identified a blackjack player as a card counter. Casinos dislike card counters because they can determine when the cards are to their advantage and raise their bets accordingly. When the pit boss told the card counter he could bet only the minimum amount, he cashed in his chips and left.

While casinos have been monitoring suspicious behavior for years, the Department of Homeland Security is just now deploying specially trained officers to look for behavioral clues and facial expressions.

Casinos have tried to use facial-recognition software to identify known cheats in real time, but with little success. Casino lighting is often dim, and a player who wants to conceal his identity can hide behind a hat, sunglasses or a false beard.

But in a few years, some say, iris-scan technology will be mature enough to use in gaming. Casinos might ask people to sit for a scan of the iris, which, like a fingerprint, has a unique pattern. That pattern would be transformed into a template to be matched against a database.

After Sept. 11, 2001, several airports tested facial-recognition software, with little success. But the government is continuing to invest in biometric technologies, and the military already uses iris scans on suspects captured in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Following the Links

On occasion, national security and casino security interests directly intersect. Jeff Jonas discovered that after he developed a computer program for the casino industry that helps detect cheats using aliases.

A 43-year-old technology visionary and high-school dropout, Jonas soon realized that his system could also identify employees colluding with gamblers, say, by discovering that they share a home address. He calls his program NORA -- for Non-Obvious Relationship Awareness.

Every time a player registers for a loyalty card or a hotel room, Jonas explained from his lab near the Strip, the player's name, address and other data are sent to NORA. Also in the casinos' NORA database is information about employees and vendors.

NORA can spot links that a casino employee probably would never discover, such as a phone number shared by two different names, Jonas said. It once identified a casino promotions director who picked a winning ticket that belonged to her sister, he said.

The idea was so powerful that the CIA's private investment arm, In-Q-Tel, poured more than $1 million into NORA to help root out corruption in federal agencies. Then, after the Sept. 11 attacks, it became clear that link analysis could be useful in tracking terrorist networks.

In 2002, Jonas shared his technology with Pentagon officials, who were researching a more controversial technique called pattern-based data mining. Their aim was to identify terror networks from patterns of behavior, by plowing through vast beds of data such as hotel, flight and rental-car reservations. Jonas, now an IBM chief scientist, said narrowly focused link analysis is less invasive because it starts with a known suspect rather than casting about in the general population.

At the U.S. Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, for example, investigators have used link analysis to track money laundering. From one Suspicious Activity Report -- which financial institutions are required to send to the government -- they have identified a money launderer's partners in crime. FinCEN has a decade's worth of data on 170 million report forms. "We find a tremendous amount of connectivity," said Steve Hudak, FinCEN spokesman. "We find suspects linked by addresses, suspects linked by phone numbers. So we definitely know that these people are operating together."

But privacy advocates warn that the farther it moves from the suspect, the more likely link analysis is to snare innocent people.

Chips Tracking Chips

Rolland Steil moves a stack of 34 casino chips across the felt of a baccarat table. On a monitor linked to the table in this desert laboratory, 34 numbers pop up. Each chip is embedded with a radio frequency identification (RFID) chip that enables the casino to track how much money is being wagered on this roulette number or that baccarat spot.

Steil, a product manager for Progressive Gaming International, which developed the chips, expects all casinos to use RFID-enabled chips soon -- to detect counterfeiters, to keep track of chip flow at tables, to know instantly how much a player has bet, won or lost.

"We're providing so much data to the casinos, they're drooling for it," he said.

In the outside world, counterterrorism and Homeland Security officials are looking for ways RFID technology can help them, too. RFID chips are in new passports, EZPasses, credit cards and building passes. Soon they might be in clothing.

All this electronic data is trackable, as are text messages sent from cellphones or instant messages from laptops. Following the trail could uncover a terrorist network.

Or an innocent group of, say, bird-watchers.

"We often hear of the surveillance technology du jour, but what we're seeing now in America is a collection of surveillance technologies that work together," said Barry Steinhardt, the American Civil Liberties Union's technology and liberty project director. "It isn't just video surveillance or face recognition or license plate readers or RFID chips. It's that all these technologies are converging to create a surveillance society."

'We Know Who You Are'

Under the elegant chandeliers at Caesars Palace, 10,000 people a day willingly give up personal information -- name, address, birthday -- and allow their gambling habits to be tracked so they can win free hotel rooms and show tickets. In nearly a decade, 40 million have signed up for Harrah's Total Rewards loyalty card.

Harrah's Entertainment, owner of Ceasars Palace and the industry leader in data mining for marketing, can then customize the gambler's experience. A guest celebrating her birthday might insert her card in a slot machine and be surprised by a promotions manager bearing a birthday card and a cookie.

"It's really about, how do we convince these people to be more loyal and give them a sense of 'We know who you are,' " said David W. Norton, senior vice president at Harrah's.

Guests may or may not see that as a good thing.

In December 2003, faced with a warning that terrorists were about to attack Las Vegas, the FBI asked hotels, rental-car agencies and airlines for customer data. Some balked, but others produced the data, sometimes voluntarily, sometimes when presented with a subpoena.

The data sweep turned up no leads. One gambler who was there at the time said he approved of the tactic. "The only people who have anything to worry about are the people who have something to hide," said Dale Weinstein, a Los Angeles media market consultant sitting at a Caesar's Palace slot machine where he had just won a $2,000 jackpot.

But for David Richardson, a real estate inspector from in Upstate New York, the data gathering crossed a line. "They have no right to get in your shorts," he said, strolling between casinos. "It's all about gathering personal information, which I'm not so crazy about the government knowing. It's none of their business."

Below the Radar

Despite all the high-tech gizmos, some casino targets still slip through.

On a Sunday afternoon, Mike Aponte slides onto a stool at a blackjack table in a medium-size casino on the Strip and lays $300 on the felt. Aponte draws little notice in a town filled with droves of other Asian gamblers.

Both the dealer and floor manager urge him to sign up for a player's card. He demurs. Within 15 minutes, he's up by $700.

At one point, Aponte has a 12, with the dealer showing a 3. Basic strategy dictates that Aponte should take another card. But he has been counting and knows mostly high cards are left, so he has a good chance of busting. He stands, the dealer busts and he wins the hand.

An hour and 15 minutes later, Aponte cashes in, $500 richer.

No one realizes it at this casino, but Aponte is a veteran of the card-counting team of math whizzes from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The team reportedly took more than $10 million from casinos in its heyday from 1994 to 2000.

Aponte has been barred from more than 100 casinos in the United States and a few overseas. In St. Kitts, he said, he was recognized by a Biometrica database, and now he avoids the biggest, most modern casinos.

The team's No. 1 downfall, he said, was information sharing. Once the members' faces began showing up in databases, their days were numbered.

NYT : Congress Nears Passage of Anti-Terrorism Bill

Congress Nears Passage of Anti-Terrorism Bill

By ERIC LIPTON | July 25, 2007

WASHINGTON, July 25 — Congress is moving toward approval of anti-terrorism legislation that requires a greater share of homeland security grants to be based on risk, instead of a political formula, and seeks to tighten security for cargo carried on ships and passenger planes.

But it is uncertain how effective some of the promised security enhancements will be because Democrats, to ensure passage of the measure, agreed to compromises that diluted some provisions.

The compromises were necessary because of a veto threat from President Bush and opposition by Republican members of Congress. The bill, expected to come up for final votes next week, had cleared the House in January and the Senate in March but had been stalled until recently. Republicans claimed that some of the initiatives being pushed by Democrats, such as a requirement that all ship containers headed to the United States from overseas be checked for nuclear threats, were impractical and would disrupt global trade.

Democrats, struggling to win final passage for at least a few pieces of legislation before the summer recess, agreed to the changes, which will allow them to claim a victory.

“To get a bill passed is an art of compromise,” Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, the chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, said in an interview Wednesday. “But I don’t think we weakened our systems of protection in the process.”

The bill, which still must be approved once again by the full House and Senate, makes a major change in the way state homeland security grants are distributed. It cut the guaranteed minimum grant each state would get to about $1.9 million this year from $3.8 million, .That allows Homeland Security officials to distribute more discretionary grants to states where the threat and consequences of a terror strike are deemed greatest.

The change in the formula moves in the direction advocated by the Sept. 11 Commission, whose recommendations were the inspiration for this bill. Still, the minimum amount set aside for small population states like Wyoming, West Virginia and Montana, is 50 percent higher than the House first proposed when the bill was introduced in January. In past years, officials from some big states, including New York, that were considered likely terrorist targets complained that small or rural states collected outsized grants.

Democrats also agreed to drop a provision that would have required that airport security screeners be given collective bargaining rights like most other federal workers, giving them more power to object to work hours or assignments, a measure that brought a veto threat from President Bush.

And they agreed to a Republican request that broad legal coverage be offered to people who report suspicious activity. The measure was inspired by an incident last year in Minneapolis, where six Muslim men were removed from a flight after a passenger complained, which provoked a lawsuit against the passenger.

Some of the most significant compromises necessary to win passage came involved cargo screening.

For more than two years, Democrats have sought to require that all cargo carried by passenger airplanes be inspected for explosives and that ship cargo containers bound for the United States from foreign ports be scanned for nuclear or radiological weapons.

The air cargo requirement, in the final version of the bill, still requires that within three years that all cargo carried by passenger jets be checked, but the legislation now specifically says it must be “screened” instead of “inspected.”

That language could mean that perhaps as much as 60 percent of the air cargo could be exempt from a mandatory physical inspection at the airport, under a new program to be known as a “Certified Shipper,” Homeland Security officials who participated in the negotiations said.

Companies that participate in this program will be still be required to follow security rules, including conducting their own inspection of the packages and putting special tamperproof seals on containers. But packages handled by these companies, which is likely to represent the bulk of the air cargo industry, would generally be exempt from a mandated electronic, canine or other kind of physical inspection at the airport.

Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, a leading advocate for the air cargo inspections, said he was pleased with the outcome and did not consider it to be weakened from his original goal.

“It is a significant increase in the level of security,” he said.

After negotiators for both parties reached agreement Wednesday, the House Republican leaders claimed credit. “Republicans One-Up House Democrats, Claim Victory on Key 9/11 Protection Against Terrorist Activity,” they said in a news release, a nearly certain sign that after months of negotiating, the bill is likely to pass with bipartisan support when it comes up for a final votes by the end of next week.

N&W : Bush's (Latest) Pakistan Problem

Bush's (Latest) Pakistan Problem

By Kevin Whitelaw | July 18, 2007

The new U.S. intelligence assessment on the terrorist threat has put President Bush's dilemma over Pakistan into uncomfortably sharp relief. The national intelligence estimate warned that a resurgent al Qaeda has "regenerated" a comfortable safe haven in the northwestern tribal regions of Pakistan—a country that also happens to be one of Bush's most frequently praised allies in the struggle against terrorism.

The upshot is tough. Not only has al Qaeda survived a six-year "war on terrorism," but it has also harnessed the invasion and occupation of Iraq to fuel its own growth, managed to rebuild its operational leadership, and resumed plotting ambitious attacks on the United States, all from inside a nation that has received as much as $10 billion in U.S. aid since 2001.

So, given that a key plank in Bush's counterterrorism strategy is to deny terrorists sanctuary, the NIE puts pressure on the Bush administration to take direct action to eliminate this new safe haven. After all, if al Qaeda does manage to pull off an attack in the coming months that is traced back to Pakistan, Bush administration officials will not be able to claim that they had no warning.

But the Bush administration has long been deeply reluctant to operate openly inside Pakistan. Thomas Fingar, the deputy director of national intelligence for analysis, recently warned about "the risk of taking actions in the less-well-governed areas of Pakistan...that would increase the problem." U.S. officials fear that open American intervention could prove akin to pouring gasoline on a brush fire. "There are an awful lot of potential recruits that are being engaged in the struggle in Kashmir that are held in check by the security forces in the rest of Pakistan," Fingar recently told Congress. "So it is not too great an exaggeration to say there is some risk of turning a problem in northwest Pakistan into the problem of all of Pakistan."

Indeed, perhaps because the options are so limited, Bush administration officials continue to put great stock in Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and his public commitment to take on terrorism and extremism. Bush frequently mentions how perilous Musharraf's own position is in Pakistan, having survived multiple assassination attempts. It is also true that that some of the biggest counterterrorism successes (including the capture of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed) came with Pakistan's assistance.

Bush's aides are eagerly latching on to Pakistan's latest offensive. Musharraf "gave a speech and said he's going to root out extremism in every nook of Pakistan," White House homeland security adviser Frances Townsend told NPR's Morning Edition on Wednesday. "And every indication is that President Musharraf takes this very seriously and is going after it."

Early signs are mixed. Musharraf did send Pakistani troops back into some of the country's tribal regions in an operation that has killed scores of soldiers and militants. The move reverses a disastrous treaty with the country's tribes that ended up giving al Qaeda even more breathing room. It also comes after a bloody assault that ended an embarrassing six-month standoff with vigilantes in a radical mosque in Islamabad who were trying to forcibly impose their version of Islamic law.

Musharraf also faces a complicated political situation. Having come to power in a military coup, he relies on the country's religious parties for much of his support these days, particularly as Pakistan's secular parties grow increasingly frustrated with the lack of progress in restoring democracy.