By STEPHEN CASTLE
Published: October 28, 2010
BRUSSELS — The European Union approved plans to tighten the rules governing the euro early Friday, and said it would seek more changes and a limited alteration to the bloc’s main treaty in December.
At a meeting in Brussels, the leaders of the 27-nation bloc approved a set of tougher budget rules, crafted by their finance ministers, which included new sanctions against eurozone states that fail to keep deficits and debt in check, and earlier warnings over asset bubbles and declining competitiveness.
Its declaration also said the union will consider ways to change its governing treaty in December to set up a permanent fund to help eurozone nations in times of crisis.
But moves by the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, for a more radical alteration to the treaty were rebuffed, as the leaders emphasized a more limited and technical set of changes.
That effectively tabled Ms. Merkel’s ideas of a more significant amendment of the treaty, aiming to deprive spendthrift nations of their EU voting rights.
In their declaration, the EU leaders said Ms. Merkel's idea would be considered “subsequently,” suggesting it was not a priority.
“Most member countries, including us, are against the idea that voting rights can be withdrawn, also those related to the economic and monetary union," said Jean-Claude Juncker, prime minister of Luxembourg.
In May, Mrs. Merkel reluctantly helped create a temporary crisis fund for the euro zone and, to make this permanent when its mandate expires in 2013, Ms. Merkel has said that she would need a treaty chance to satisfy Germany’s constitutional court.
On that issue the German Chancellor, who already had the support of France, won broad agreement.
“We need a robust and credible permanent crisis mechanism,” said Herman Van Rompuy, President of the European Council, where national governments meet. “Today all heads of state agreed on that need."
But most governments are alarmed at the prospect of a full-scale treaty change, which might trigger referenda in some nations. Less than a year after the Lisbon Treaty went into force - a process that took eight years to bring to fruition – few nations feel ready for another lengthy and difficult exercise in institutional change requiring voter approval.
Mr. Van Rompuy, who will draw up the options for treaty change by December, said the changes would be “limited” and would be made “if possible using a quick procedure” – a formulation that excludes the idea of removing voting rights from nations that fail to comply with EU guidelines.
Instead it suggests that the EU is likely to opt for a simplified procedure for revising its treaty, which can only be used for more technical changes.
Earlier Ms. Merkel had pressed the case for changes that would curb voting rights for spendthrift nations.
"I also want to discuss the withdrawal of voting rights, Ms. Merkel told reporters on arrival in Brussels. "We have a Lisbon treaty in which there already is a withdrawal of rights when fundamental values of the European Union are damaged."
But Jose Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission, sought to limit the scope of any treaty change.
“If treaty change is to reduce the rights of member states on voting, I find it unacceptable, and frankly speaking it is not realistic,” he told a media conference.
The start of the two-day meeting was also marked by calls from the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, for austerity in the EU budget, prompting an unprecedented debate among about a dozen leaders at the start of discussions.
While many European nations, including Britain, have embarked on aggressive public spending cuts, the European Parliament voted last week for an increase of around 6 percent in the bloc’s budget.
"At a time when European countries, including the United Kingdom, are taking tough decisions on their budgets and having to cut some departments, it is completely wrong that European institutions should be spending more money on themselves in the way that they propose," Mr. Cameron said.
As he arrived in Brussels Thursday, he began lobbying other leaders.
"Six percent is not acceptable," he added, as he appealed for support to restrain the bloc's budget increase to no more than the 2.91 percent jump agreed by the 27 EU nations in August.
The European Parliament now has joint powers in budget setting and negotiations are underway with the national governments.
But the parliament’s President, Jerzy Buzek, defended its stance when hea ddressed heads of government, sparking a debate led by Mr. Cameron.
“The Parliament has not called for unreasonable budgetary increases,” Mr. Buzek said in a speech to leaders. "We have shown some moderation.”
Later at a media conference, Mr. Buzek said between 10 to 12 leaders had intervened – the first time a lengthy debate has followed a presentation by the President of the European Parliament to summit meetings.
At Mr. Cameron’s request, the declaration agreed upon early Friday mentioned the need for budgetary restraint within the EU.
27/10 Assembly Again Urges U.S. to Lift Cuba Embargo
World Briefing United Nations
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
Published: October 27, 2010
The annual General Assembly resolution calling for the United States to lift its longstanding economic embargo against Cuba passed by the lopsided vote of 187 to 2. Only the United States and Israel opposed the nonbinding measure, the 19th such resolution in a row, while three Pacific island allies of Washington abstained. The Cuban foreign minister, Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla, accused President Obama of promising to change relations with Cuba but falling under the thrall of the exile community in the United States. In response, the United States said that it had expanded trade and other ties with the Caribbean nation but that improved relations hinged on greater domestic freedom.
A version of this brief appeared in print on October 27, 2010, on page A8 of the New York edition.
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
Published: October 27, 2010
The annual General Assembly resolution calling for the United States to lift its longstanding economic embargo against Cuba passed by the lopsided vote of 187 to 2. Only the United States and Israel opposed the nonbinding measure, the 19th such resolution in a row, while three Pacific island allies of Washington abstained. The Cuban foreign minister, Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla, accused President Obama of promising to change relations with Cuba but falling under the thrall of the exile community in the United States. In response, the United States said that it had expanded trade and other ties with the Caribbean nation but that improved relations hinged on greater domestic freedom.
A version of this brief appeared in print on October 27, 2010, on page A8 of the New York edition.
30/10 China’s Fast Rise Leads Neighbors to Join ForcesBy MARK LANDLER, JIM YARDLEY and MICHAEL WINES
Published: October 30, 2010
This article is by Mark Landler, Jim Yardley and Michael Wines.
Pool photo by Barbara Walton
Prime Minister Wen Jiabao of China, left, with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India on Friday in Hanoi, Vietnam. India is promoting itself in the region as a counterweight to China
HANOI, Vietnam — China’s military expansion and assertive trade policies have set off jitters across Asia, prompting many of its neighbors to rekindle old alliances and cultivate new ones to better defend their interests against the rising superpower.
A whirl of deal-making and diplomacy, from Tokyo to New Delhi, is giving the United States an opportunity to reassert itself in a region where its eclipse by China has been viewed as inevitable.
President Obama’s trip to the region this week, his most extensive as president, will take him to the area’s big democracies, India, Indonesia, South Korea and Japan, skirting authoritarian China. Those countries and other neighbors have taken steps, though with varying degrees of candor, to blunt China’s assertiveness in the region.
Mr. Obama and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India are expected to sign a landmark deal for American military transport aircraft and are discussing the possible sale of jet fighters, which would escalate the Pentagon’s defense partnership with India to new heights. Japan and India are courting Southeast Asian nations with trade agreements and talk of a “circle of democracy.” Vietnam has a rapidly warming rapport with its old foe, the United States, in large part because its old friend, China, makes broad territorial claims in the South China Sea.
The deals and alliances are not intended to contain China. But they suggest a palpable shift in the diplomatic landscape, on vivid display as leaders from 18 countries gathered this weekend under the wavelike roof of Hanoi’s futuristic convention center, not far from Ho Chi Minh’s mausoleum, for a meeting suffused by tensions between China and its neighbors.
China’s escalating feud with Japan over another set of islands, in the East China Sea, stole the meeting’s headlines on Saturday, and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton proposed three-way negotiations to resolve the issue.
Most Asian countries, even as they argue that China will inevitably replace the United States as the top regional power, have grown concerned at how quickly that shift is occurring, and what China the superpower may look like.
China’s big trading partners are complaining more loudly that it intervenes too aggressively to keep its currency undervalued. Its recent restrictions on exports of crucial rare earths minerals, first to Japan and then to the United States and Europe, raised the prospect that it may use its dominant positions in some industries as a diplomatic and political weapon.
And its rapid naval expansion, combined with a more strident defense of its claims to disputed territories far off its shores, has persuaded Japan, South Korea, Vietnam and Singapore to reaffirm their enthusiasm for the American security umbrella.
“The most common thing that Asian leaders have said to me in my travels over this last 20 months is, ‘Thank you, we’re so glad that you’re playing an active role in Asia again,’ ” Mrs. Clinton said in Hawaii, opening a seven-country tour of Asia that included a last-minute stop in China.
Few of China’s neighbors voice their concerns about the country publicly, but analysts and diplomats say they express wariness about the pace of China’s military expansion and the severity of its trade policies in private.
“Most of these countries have come to us and said, ‘We’re really worried about China,’ ” said Kenneth G. Lieberthal, a China adviser to President Bill Clinton who is now at the Brookings Institution.
The Obama administration has been quick to capitalize on China’s missteps. Where officials used to speak of China as the Asian economic giant, they now speak of India and China as twin giants. And they make clear which one they believe has a closer affinity to the United States.
“India and the United States have never mattered more to each other,” Mrs. Clinton said. “As the world’s two largest democracies, we are united by common interests and common values.”
As Mr. Obama prepares to visit India in his first stop on his tour of Asian democracies, Mr. Singh, India’s prime minister, will have just returned from his own grand tour — with both of them somewhat conspicuously, if at least partly coincidentally, circling China.
None of this seems likely to lead to a cold war-style standoff. China is fully integrated into the global economy, and all of its neighbors are eager to deepen their ties with it. China has fought no wars since a border skirmish with Vietnam three decades ago, and it often emphasizes that it has no intention of projecting power through the use of force.
At the same time, fears that China has become more assertive as it has grown richer are having real consequences.
India is promoting itself throughout the region as a counterweight to China; Japan is settling a dispute with the United States over a Marine air base; the Vietnamese are negotiating a deal to obtain civilian nuclear technology from the United States; and the Americans, who had largely ignored the rest of Asia as they waged wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, see an opportunity to come back in a big way.
In July, for example, Mrs. Clinton reassured Vietnam and the Philippines by announcing that the United States would be willing to help resolve disputes between China and its neighbors over a string of strategically important islands in the South China Sea.
China’s foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, reacted furiously, accusing the United States of plotting against it, according to people briefed on the meeting. Mr. Yang went on to note that China was a big country, staring pointedly at the foreign minister of tiny Singapore. Undaunted, Mrs. Clinton not only repeated the American pledge on the South China Sea in Hanoi on Saturday, but expanded it to include the dispute with Japan.
China’s rise as an authoritarian power has also revived a sense that democracies should stick together. K. Subrahmanyam, an influential strategic analyst in India, noted that half the world’s people now live in democracies and that of the world’s six biggest powers, only China has not accepted democracy.
“Today the problem is a rising China that is not democratic and is challenging for the No. 1 position in the world,” he said.
Indeed, how to deal with China seems to be an abiding preoccupation of Asia’s leaders. In Japan, Prime Minister Naoto Kan and Mr. Singh discussed China’s booming economy, military expansion and increased territorial assertiveness.
“Prime Minister Kan was keen to understand how India engages China,” India’s foreign secretary, Nirupama Rao, told reporters. “Our prime minister said it requires developing trust, close engagement and a lot of patience.”
South Korea was deeply frustrated earlier this year when China blocked an explicit international condemnation of North Korea for sinking a South Korean warship, the Cheonan. South Korea accused North Korea of the attack, but China, a historic ally of the North, was unwilling to hold it responsible.
India has watched nervously as China has started building ports in Sri Lanka and Pakistan, extending rail lines toward the border of Nepal, and otherwise seeking to expand its footprint in South Asia.
India’s Defense Ministry has sought military contacts with a host of Asian nations while steadily expanding contacts and weapons procurements from the United States. The United States, American officials said, has conducted more exercises in recent years with India than with any other nation.
Mr. Singh’s trip was part of his “Look East” policy, intended to broaden trade with the rest of Asia. He has said it was not related to any frictions with China, but China is concerned. On Thursday, People’s Daily, the Communist Party newspaper, ran an opinion article asking, “Does India’s ‘Look East’ Policy Mean ‘Look to Encircle China’?”
That wary view may well reflect China’s reaction to the whole panoply of developments among its neighbors.
“The Chinese perceived the Hanoi meeting as a gang attack on them,” said Charles Freeman, an expert on Chinese politics and economics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “There’s no question that they have miscalculated their own standing in the region.”
Mark Landler reported from Hanoi, Jim Yardley from New Delhi, and Michael Wines from Beijing.
A version of this article appeared in print on October 31, 2010, on page A1 of the New York edition..
This article is by Mark Landler, Jim Yardley and Michael Wines.
Pool photo by Barbara WaltonPrime Minister Wen Jiabao of China, left, with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India on Friday in Hanoi, Vietnam. India is promoting itself in the region as a counterweight to China
HANOI, Vietnam — China’s military expansion and assertive trade policies have set off jitters across Asia, prompting many of its neighbors to rekindle old alliances and cultivate new ones to better defend their interests against the rising superpower.
A whirl of deal-making and diplomacy, from Tokyo to New Delhi, is giving the United States an opportunity to reassert itself in a region where its eclipse by China has been viewed as inevitable.
President Obama’s trip to the region this week, his most extensive as president, will take him to the area’s big democracies, India, Indonesia, South Korea and Japan, skirting authoritarian China. Those countries and other neighbors have taken steps, though with varying degrees of candor, to blunt China’s assertiveness in the region.
Mr. Obama and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India are expected to sign a landmark deal for American military transport aircraft and are discussing the possible sale of jet fighters, which would escalate the Pentagon’s defense partnership with India to new heights. Japan and India are courting Southeast Asian nations with trade agreements and talk of a “circle of democracy.” Vietnam has a rapidly warming rapport with its old foe, the United States, in large part because its old friend, China, makes broad territorial claims in the South China Sea.
The deals and alliances are not intended to contain China. But they suggest a palpable shift in the diplomatic landscape, on vivid display as leaders from 18 countries gathered this weekend under the wavelike roof of Hanoi’s futuristic convention center, not far from Ho Chi Minh’s mausoleum, for a meeting suffused by tensions between China and its neighbors.
China’s escalating feud with Japan over another set of islands, in the East China Sea, stole the meeting’s headlines on Saturday, and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton proposed three-way negotiations to resolve the issue.
Most Asian countries, even as they argue that China will inevitably replace the United States as the top regional power, have grown concerned at how quickly that shift is occurring, and what China the superpower may look like.
China’s big trading partners are complaining more loudly that it intervenes too aggressively to keep its currency undervalued. Its recent restrictions on exports of crucial rare earths minerals, first to Japan and then to the United States and Europe, raised the prospect that it may use its dominant positions in some industries as a diplomatic and political weapon.
And its rapid naval expansion, combined with a more strident defense of its claims to disputed territories far off its shores, has persuaded Japan, South Korea, Vietnam and Singapore to reaffirm their enthusiasm for the American security umbrella.
“The most common thing that Asian leaders have said to me in my travels over this last 20 months is, ‘Thank you, we’re so glad that you’re playing an active role in Asia again,’ ” Mrs. Clinton said in Hawaii, opening a seven-country tour of Asia that included a last-minute stop in China.
Few of China’s neighbors voice their concerns about the country publicly, but analysts and diplomats say they express wariness about the pace of China’s military expansion and the severity of its trade policies in private.
“Most of these countries have come to us and said, ‘We’re really worried about China,’ ” said Kenneth G. Lieberthal, a China adviser to President Bill Clinton who is now at the Brookings Institution.
The Obama administration has been quick to capitalize on China’s missteps. Where officials used to speak of China as the Asian economic giant, they now speak of India and China as twin giants. And they make clear which one they believe has a closer affinity to the United States.
“India and the United States have never mattered more to each other,” Mrs. Clinton said. “As the world’s two largest democracies, we are united by common interests and common values.”
As Mr. Obama prepares to visit India in his first stop on his tour of Asian democracies, Mr. Singh, India’s prime minister, will have just returned from his own grand tour — with both of them somewhat conspicuously, if at least partly coincidentally, circling China.
None of this seems likely to lead to a cold war-style standoff. China is fully integrated into the global economy, and all of its neighbors are eager to deepen their ties with it. China has fought no wars since a border skirmish with Vietnam three decades ago, and it often emphasizes that it has no intention of projecting power through the use of force.
At the same time, fears that China has become more assertive as it has grown richer are having real consequences.
India is promoting itself throughout the region as a counterweight to China; Japan is settling a dispute with the United States over a Marine air base; the Vietnamese are negotiating a deal to obtain civilian nuclear technology from the United States; and the Americans, who had largely ignored the rest of Asia as they waged wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, see an opportunity to come back in a big way.
In July, for example, Mrs. Clinton reassured Vietnam and the Philippines by announcing that the United States would be willing to help resolve disputes between China and its neighbors over a string of strategically important islands in the South China Sea.
China’s foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, reacted furiously, accusing the United States of plotting against it, according to people briefed on the meeting. Mr. Yang went on to note that China was a big country, staring pointedly at the foreign minister of tiny Singapore. Undaunted, Mrs. Clinton not only repeated the American pledge on the South China Sea in Hanoi on Saturday, but expanded it to include the dispute with Japan.
China’s rise as an authoritarian power has also revived a sense that democracies should stick together. K. Subrahmanyam, an influential strategic analyst in India, noted that half the world’s people now live in democracies and that of the world’s six biggest powers, only China has not accepted democracy.
“Today the problem is a rising China that is not democratic and is challenging for the No. 1 position in the world,” he said.
Indeed, how to deal with China seems to be an abiding preoccupation of Asia’s leaders. In Japan, Prime Minister Naoto Kan and Mr. Singh discussed China’s booming economy, military expansion and increased territorial assertiveness.
“Prime Minister Kan was keen to understand how India engages China,” India’s foreign secretary, Nirupama Rao, told reporters. “Our prime minister said it requires developing trust, close engagement and a lot of patience.”
South Korea was deeply frustrated earlier this year when China blocked an explicit international condemnation of North Korea for sinking a South Korean warship, the Cheonan. South Korea accused North Korea of the attack, but China, a historic ally of the North, was unwilling to hold it responsible.
India has watched nervously as China has started building ports in Sri Lanka and Pakistan, extending rail lines toward the border of Nepal, and otherwise seeking to expand its footprint in South Asia.
India’s Defense Ministry has sought military contacts with a host of Asian nations while steadily expanding contacts and weapons procurements from the United States. The United States, American officials said, has conducted more exercises in recent years with India than with any other nation.
Mr. Singh’s trip was part of his “Look East” policy, intended to broaden trade with the rest of Asia. He has said it was not related to any frictions with China, but China is concerned. On Thursday, People’s Daily, the Communist Party newspaper, ran an opinion article asking, “Does India’s ‘Look East’ Policy Mean ‘Look to Encircle China’?”
That wary view may well reflect China’s reaction to the whole panoply of developments among its neighbors.
“The Chinese perceived the Hanoi meeting as a gang attack on them,” said Charles Freeman, an expert on Chinese politics and economics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “There’s no question that they have miscalculated their own standing in the region.”
Mark Landler reported from Hanoi, Jim Yardley from New Delhi, and Michael Wines from Beijing.
A version of this article appeared in print on October 31, 2010, on page A1 of the New York edition..
U.S. Sees Complexity of Bombs as Link to Qaeda Group
By MARK MAZZETTI and ROBERT F. WORTH
Published: October 30, 2010
WASHINGTON — The powerful bombs concealed inside cargo packages and destined for the United States were expertly constructed and unusually sophisticated, American officials said Saturday, further evidence that Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen is steadily improving its abilities to strike on American soil.
As investigators on three continents conducted forensic analyses of two bombs shipped from Yemen and intercepted Friday in Britain and Dubai, American officials said evidence was mounting that the top leadership of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, including the radical American-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, was behind the attempted attacks.
Yemeni officials on Saturday announced the arrest of a young woman and her mother in connection with the plot, which also may have involved two language schools in Yemen. The two women were not identified, but a defense lawyer who has been in contact with the family, Abdul Rahman Barham, said the daughter was a 22 year-old engineering student at Sana University.
Yemen’s president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, said Saturday night during a news conference that Yemeni security forces had identified her based on a tip from American officials, but he did not indicate her suspected role.
Investigators said that the bomb discovered at the Dubai airport in the United Arab Emirates was concealed in a Hewlett-Packard desktop printer, with high explosives packed into a printer cartridge to avoid detection by scanners.
“The wiring of the device indicates that this was done by professionals,” said one official involved in the investigation, who like several officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the inquiry was continuing. “It was set up so that if you scan it, all the printer components would look right.”
The bomb discovered in Britain was also hidden in a printer cartridge.
The terror plot broke publicly in dramatic fashion on Friday morning, when the two packages containing explosives and addressed to synagogues or Jewish community centers in Chicago were found, setting off an international dragnet and fears about packages yet to be discovered. It also led to a tense scene in which American military jets escorted a plane to Kennedy International Airport amid concerns — which turned out to be unfounded — that there might be explosives on board.
On Saturday, in news conferences in London and Yemen, and from interviews with investigators here and abroad, the contours of the investigation began to emerge, along with new details of the frantic hours leading to the discovery of the packages.
American officials said their operating assumption was that the two bombs were the work of Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri, Al Qaeda in Yemen’s top bomb-maker, whose previous devices have been more rudimentary, and also unsuccessful. Mr. Asiri is believed to have built both the bomb sewn into the underwear of the young Nigerian who tried to blow up a trans-Atlantic flight last Dec. 25, and the suicide bomb that nearly killed Saudi Arabia’s intelligence chief, Mohammed bin Nayef, months earlier. (In the second episode, American officials say, Mr. Asiri hid the explosives in a body cavity of his brother, the suicide bomber.)
Just as in the two previous attacks, the bomb discovered in Dubai contained the explosive PETN, according to the Dubai police and Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security. This new plot, Ms. Napolitano said, had the “hallmarks of Al Qaeda.”
The targets of the bombs remained in question.
Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain said on Saturday that the parcel bomb intercepted in England was designed to explode while the plane was flying. The country’s home secretary, Theresa May, said that British investigators had also concluded the device was “viable and could have exploded.”
“The target may have been an aircraft, and had it detonated, the aircraft could have been brought down,” she said.
But earlier in the day, Representative Michael McCaul of Texas, the ranking Republican on the House homeland security intelligence subcommittee, said that federal authorities indicated to him that the packages were probably intended to blow up the Jewish sites in Chicago rather than the cargo planes, since they do not carry passengers.
Based on a conversation with Ms. Napolitano, he said that authorities were also leaving open the possibility that other packages with explosives had not yet been found. On Saturday, Deputy Commissioner Paul J. Browne, the New York Police Department’s chief spokesman, said that no specific threats had been made against synagogues or Jewish neighborhoods in the city, but that officers were watching them more closely as a precaution.
It was a call from Mr. bin Nayef, the Saudi intelligence chief, on Thursday evening to John O. Brennan, the White House senior counterterrorism official and former C.I.A. station chief in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, that set off the search, according to American officials. They said Mr. bin Nayef also notified C.I.A. officials in Riyadh.
Saudi Arabia has sometimes been a reluctant ally in America’s global campaign against radical militants. But it sees Yemen, its impoverished next door neighbor, as a different matter. The Saudis consider the Qaeda branch in Yemen its biggest security threat and Saudi intelligence has set up both a web of electronic surveillance and spies to penetrate the organization.
Reviewing the evidence, American intelligence officials say they believe that the plot may have been blessed by the highest levels of Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen, including Mr. Awlaki.
“We know that Awlaki has taken a very specific interest in plotting against the United States, and we’ve found that he’s usually behind any attempted attack on American targets,” said one official.
Still they cautioned that it was still early to draw any firm conclusions and they did not present proof of Mr. Awlaki’s involvement.
This year, the C.I.A. designated Mr. Awlaki — an American citizen — as a high priority for the agency’s campaign of targeted killing.
According to one official involved in the investigation, the package that was discovered in Dubai had a woman’s name and location in Sana on the return address. The package left Yemen on Thursday, the official said, where it was flown to Doha, Qatar, and on to Dubai.
Also on Saturday, the Department of Homeland Security dispatched a cable warning that the bombs may have been associated with two schools in Yemen — the Yemen American Institute for Languages-Computer Management, and the American Center for Training and Development.
That connection would echo the attempted bombing last Dec. 25; the Nigerian who was implicated had studied at a different Sana language school before training with Al Qaeda. If language schools are again involved, it opens the possibility that a foreign student or students may have participated in the plot.
Security forces in Yemen were in a state of heightened alert on Saturday, as investigators questioned cargo employees and shut down the FedEx and U.P.S. offices in Sana, the Yemeni capital.
Obama administration officials said they were discussing a range of responses to the thwarted attack. The failed attack on Dec. 25 created an opportunity for the White House to press Yemen’s government to take more aggressive action against Qaeda operatives there, and some American officials believe the conditions are similar now.
A thinly veiled campaign of American missile strikes in Yemen this year has achieved mixed results. American officials said that several Qaeda operatives had been killed in the attacks, but there have also been major setbacks, including a strike in May that accidentally killed a deputy governor in a remote province of Yemen. That strike infuriated Yemen’s president, Mr. Saleh, and forced a months-long halt in the American military campaign.
In recent months, the Obama administration has been debating whether to escalate its secret offensive against the Qaeda affiliate in Yemen. The C.I.A. has a fraction of the staff in Yemen that it currently has in Pakistan, where the spy agency is running a covert war in the country’s tribal areas, but over the course of the year the C.I.A. has sent more case officers and analysts to Sana as part of a task force with the military’s Joint Special Operations Command.
American officials have been considering sending armed drone aircraft to Yemen to replicate the Pakistan campaign, but such a move would almost certainly require the approval of the mercurial Mr. Saleh.
Yemeni officials have declined to comment on details of the plot, saying only that they are investigating. But new checkpoints appeared in the capital on Saturday, with officers checking the identity cards of drivers and pedestrians.
Mark Mazzetti reported from Washington, and Robert F. Worth from Beirut, Lebanon. Reporting was contributed by John F. Burns from London; Eric Schmitt from Washington; and Liz Robbins, Al Baker and Angela Macropoulos from New York.
A version of this article appeared in print on October 31, 2010, on page A1 of the New York edition..
Published: October 30, 2010
WASHINGTON — The powerful bombs concealed inside cargo packages and destined for the United States were expertly constructed and unusually sophisticated, American officials said Saturday, further evidence that Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen is steadily improving its abilities to strike on American soil.
As investigators on three continents conducted forensic analyses of two bombs shipped from Yemen and intercepted Friday in Britain and Dubai, American officials said evidence was mounting that the top leadership of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, including the radical American-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, was behind the attempted attacks.
Yemeni officials on Saturday announced the arrest of a young woman and her mother in connection with the plot, which also may have involved two language schools in Yemen. The two women were not identified, but a defense lawyer who has been in contact with the family, Abdul Rahman Barham, said the daughter was a 22 year-old engineering student at Sana University.
Yemen’s president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, said Saturday night during a news conference that Yemeni security forces had identified her based on a tip from American officials, but he did not indicate her suspected role.
Investigators said that the bomb discovered at the Dubai airport in the United Arab Emirates was concealed in a Hewlett-Packard desktop printer, with high explosives packed into a printer cartridge to avoid detection by scanners.
“The wiring of the device indicates that this was done by professionals,” said one official involved in the investigation, who like several officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the inquiry was continuing. “It was set up so that if you scan it, all the printer components would look right.”
The bomb discovered in Britain was also hidden in a printer cartridge.
The terror plot broke publicly in dramatic fashion on Friday morning, when the two packages containing explosives and addressed to synagogues or Jewish community centers in Chicago were found, setting off an international dragnet and fears about packages yet to be discovered. It also led to a tense scene in which American military jets escorted a plane to Kennedy International Airport amid concerns — which turned out to be unfounded — that there might be explosives on board.
On Saturday, in news conferences in London and Yemen, and from interviews with investigators here and abroad, the contours of the investigation began to emerge, along with new details of the frantic hours leading to the discovery of the packages.
American officials said their operating assumption was that the two bombs were the work of Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri, Al Qaeda in Yemen’s top bomb-maker, whose previous devices have been more rudimentary, and also unsuccessful. Mr. Asiri is believed to have built both the bomb sewn into the underwear of the young Nigerian who tried to blow up a trans-Atlantic flight last Dec. 25, and the suicide bomb that nearly killed Saudi Arabia’s intelligence chief, Mohammed bin Nayef, months earlier. (In the second episode, American officials say, Mr. Asiri hid the explosives in a body cavity of his brother, the suicide bomber.)
Just as in the two previous attacks, the bomb discovered in Dubai contained the explosive PETN, according to the Dubai police and Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security. This new plot, Ms. Napolitano said, had the “hallmarks of Al Qaeda.”
The targets of the bombs remained in question.
Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain said on Saturday that the parcel bomb intercepted in England was designed to explode while the plane was flying. The country’s home secretary, Theresa May, said that British investigators had also concluded the device was “viable and could have exploded.”
“The target may have been an aircraft, and had it detonated, the aircraft could have been brought down,” she said.
But earlier in the day, Representative Michael McCaul of Texas, the ranking Republican on the House homeland security intelligence subcommittee, said that federal authorities indicated to him that the packages were probably intended to blow up the Jewish sites in Chicago rather than the cargo planes, since they do not carry passengers.
Based on a conversation with Ms. Napolitano, he said that authorities were also leaving open the possibility that other packages with explosives had not yet been found. On Saturday, Deputy Commissioner Paul J. Browne, the New York Police Department’s chief spokesman, said that no specific threats had been made against synagogues or Jewish neighborhoods in the city, but that officers were watching them more closely as a precaution.
It was a call from Mr. bin Nayef, the Saudi intelligence chief, on Thursday evening to John O. Brennan, the White House senior counterterrorism official and former C.I.A. station chief in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, that set off the search, according to American officials. They said Mr. bin Nayef also notified C.I.A. officials in Riyadh.
Saudi Arabia has sometimes been a reluctant ally in America’s global campaign against radical militants. But it sees Yemen, its impoverished next door neighbor, as a different matter. The Saudis consider the Qaeda branch in Yemen its biggest security threat and Saudi intelligence has set up both a web of electronic surveillance and spies to penetrate the organization.
Reviewing the evidence, American intelligence officials say they believe that the plot may have been blessed by the highest levels of Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen, including Mr. Awlaki.
“We know that Awlaki has taken a very specific interest in plotting against the United States, and we’ve found that he’s usually behind any attempted attack on American targets,” said one official.
Still they cautioned that it was still early to draw any firm conclusions and they did not present proof of Mr. Awlaki’s involvement.
This year, the C.I.A. designated Mr. Awlaki — an American citizen — as a high priority for the agency’s campaign of targeted killing.
According to one official involved in the investigation, the package that was discovered in Dubai had a woman’s name and location in Sana on the return address. The package left Yemen on Thursday, the official said, where it was flown to Doha, Qatar, and on to Dubai.
Also on Saturday, the Department of Homeland Security dispatched a cable warning that the bombs may have been associated with two schools in Yemen — the Yemen American Institute for Languages-Computer Management, and the American Center for Training and Development.
That connection would echo the attempted bombing last Dec. 25; the Nigerian who was implicated had studied at a different Sana language school before training with Al Qaeda. If language schools are again involved, it opens the possibility that a foreign student or students may have participated in the plot.
Security forces in Yemen were in a state of heightened alert on Saturday, as investigators questioned cargo employees and shut down the FedEx and U.P.S. offices in Sana, the Yemeni capital.
Obama administration officials said they were discussing a range of responses to the thwarted attack. The failed attack on Dec. 25 created an opportunity for the White House to press Yemen’s government to take more aggressive action against Qaeda operatives there, and some American officials believe the conditions are similar now.
A thinly veiled campaign of American missile strikes in Yemen this year has achieved mixed results. American officials said that several Qaeda operatives had been killed in the attacks, but there have also been major setbacks, including a strike in May that accidentally killed a deputy governor in a remote province of Yemen. That strike infuriated Yemen’s president, Mr. Saleh, and forced a months-long halt in the American military campaign.
In recent months, the Obama administration has been debating whether to escalate its secret offensive against the Qaeda affiliate in Yemen. The C.I.A. has a fraction of the staff in Yemen that it currently has in Pakistan, where the spy agency is running a covert war in the country’s tribal areas, but over the course of the year the C.I.A. has sent more case officers and analysts to Sana as part of a task force with the military’s Joint Special Operations Command.
American officials have been considering sending armed drone aircraft to Yemen to replicate the Pakistan campaign, but such a move would almost certainly require the approval of the mercurial Mr. Saleh.
Yemeni officials have declined to comment on details of the plot, saying only that they are investigating. But new checkpoints appeared in the capital on Saturday, with officers checking the identity cards of drivers and pedestrians.
Mark Mazzetti reported from Washington, and Robert F. Worth from Beirut, Lebanon. Reporting was contributed by John F. Burns from London; Eric Schmitt from Washington; and Liz Robbins, Al Baker and Angela Macropoulos from New York.
A version of this article appeared in print on October 31, 2010, on page A1 of the New York edition..
30/10 Explosive on Planes Was Used in Past Plots
By KENNETH CHANG
Published: October 30, 2010
Pentaerythritol tetranitrate, or PETN, the explosive found in two bombs hidden in printer cartridges that were being shipped via jets from Yemen to the United States, is a hallmark of earlier Qaeda-linked terrorism attempts on airplanes.
In 2001, PETN was found hidden in the shoes of Richard C. Reid during an American Airlines flight. Last Christmas, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had three ounces of PETN hidden in his underwear on a Northwest flight from Amsterdam to Detroit.
An assassination attempt in August 2009 on Saudi Arabia’s intelligence chief, Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, also employed PETN. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, an arm of the terrorist network, claimed responsibility for the attack, which took the life of only one person, the suicide bomber’s.
But other terrorist groups have also used PETN, and the presence of the explosive itself does not decisively point to Al Qaeda. “That’s a very common explosive,” said Jimmie C. Oxley, a professor of chemistry at the University of Rhode Island. “There’s no reason to think a lot of people didn’t have access to do that.”
PETN, a white powder that was introduced after World War I, belongs to the same chemical family as nitroglycerin. It is about 70 percent more powerful than T.N.T., and is stable. PETN generally does not explode when dropped or set on fire. Usually, a strong shock wave from a blasting cap or an exploding wire detonator is needed to set it off.
Those properties make it well suited for a variety of commercial applications. PETN is a major ingredient of the plastic explosive Semtex and is used in detonation cables.
For terrorists, PETN is an attractive choice for package bombs. Its stability means it is unlikely to explode prematurely, but at its destination, it will go off with deadly force when detonated. (Conversely, the stability of PETN also thwarted the attacks of Mr. Reid and Mr. Abdulmutallab, who were not able to detonate their explosives.)
Dubai officials said that the printer cartridge bomb intercepted there on Friday included lead azide, an explosive to detonate the PETN, and a cellphone circuit, presumably to allow the bomb to be set off remotely. Neal Langerman, president of Advanced Chemical Safety, a consulting firm in San Diego, said it appeared “to be a fairly sophisticated device.”
Judging from photos of the Dubai bomb, Dr. Oxley estimated that the printer cartridge contained about two pounds of PETN.
The British home secretary, Theresa May, said Saturday that the second bomb, intercepted in Britain on Friday, contained enough explosive to bring down a plane.
The target of the bombs remains unclear; they could have been directed at the synagogues or Jewish community centers in Chicago to which they were addressed.
Placement of a bomb in a plane can be as important as its size in determining the amount of damage it could cause, Dr. Oxley said. While the printer cartridge contained more PETN than Mr. Reid’s shoes or Mr. Abdulmutallab’s underwear, the bomb maker could not be certain where in the airplane the package would be located. Mr. Reid and Mr. Abdulmutallab tried to detonate their devices close to the wall of the respective planes on which they were flying, to increase chances that the explosion would blow a hole in the aircraft.
“Last year, the guy had more control,” Dr. Oxley said, referring to Mr. Abdulmutallab. But the printer cartridge bomb, she said, had so much more PETN that “my guess, and this is only a guess, it may have had a higher probability” of taking down an airplane.
Dr. Langerman said it was curious that the two most recently intercepted devices apparently were different in design. That may indicate that the explosive makers had different targets in mind.
A version of this article appeared in print on October 31, 2010, on page A12 of the New York edition.
Published: October 30, 2010
Pentaerythritol tetranitrate, or PETN, the explosive found in two bombs hidden in printer cartridges that were being shipped via jets from Yemen to the United States, is a hallmark of earlier Qaeda-linked terrorism attempts on airplanes.
In 2001, PETN was found hidden in the shoes of Richard C. Reid during an American Airlines flight. Last Christmas, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had three ounces of PETN hidden in his underwear on a Northwest flight from Amsterdam to Detroit.
An assassination attempt in August 2009 on Saudi Arabia’s intelligence chief, Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, also employed PETN. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, an arm of the terrorist network, claimed responsibility for the attack, which took the life of only one person, the suicide bomber’s.
But other terrorist groups have also used PETN, and the presence of the explosive itself does not decisively point to Al Qaeda. “That’s a very common explosive,” said Jimmie C. Oxley, a professor of chemistry at the University of Rhode Island. “There’s no reason to think a lot of people didn’t have access to do that.”
PETN, a white powder that was introduced after World War I, belongs to the same chemical family as nitroglycerin. It is about 70 percent more powerful than T.N.T., and is stable. PETN generally does not explode when dropped or set on fire. Usually, a strong shock wave from a blasting cap or an exploding wire detonator is needed to set it off.
Those properties make it well suited for a variety of commercial applications. PETN is a major ingredient of the plastic explosive Semtex and is used in detonation cables.
For terrorists, PETN is an attractive choice for package bombs. Its stability means it is unlikely to explode prematurely, but at its destination, it will go off with deadly force when detonated. (Conversely, the stability of PETN also thwarted the attacks of Mr. Reid and Mr. Abdulmutallab, who were not able to detonate their explosives.)
Dubai officials said that the printer cartridge bomb intercepted there on Friday included lead azide, an explosive to detonate the PETN, and a cellphone circuit, presumably to allow the bomb to be set off remotely. Neal Langerman, president of Advanced Chemical Safety, a consulting firm in San Diego, said it appeared “to be a fairly sophisticated device.”
Judging from photos of the Dubai bomb, Dr. Oxley estimated that the printer cartridge contained about two pounds of PETN.
The British home secretary, Theresa May, said Saturday that the second bomb, intercepted in Britain on Friday, contained enough explosive to bring down a plane.
The target of the bombs remains unclear; they could have been directed at the synagogues or Jewish community centers in Chicago to which they were addressed.
Placement of a bomb in a plane can be as important as its size in determining the amount of damage it could cause, Dr. Oxley said. While the printer cartridge contained more PETN than Mr. Reid’s shoes or Mr. Abdulmutallab’s underwear, the bomb maker could not be certain where in the airplane the package would be located. Mr. Reid and Mr. Abdulmutallab tried to detonate their devices close to the wall of the respective planes on which they were flying, to increase chances that the explosion would blow a hole in the aircraft.
“Last year, the guy had more control,” Dr. Oxley said, referring to Mr. Abdulmutallab. But the printer cartridge bomb, she said, had so much more PETN that “my guess, and this is only a guess, it may have had a higher probability” of taking down an airplane.
Dr. Langerman said it was curious that the two most recently intercepted devices apparently were different in design. That may indicate that the explosive makers had different targets in mind.
A version of this article appeared in print on October 31, 2010, on page A12 of the New York edition.
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