Across the Nation, Politicians Speak About 9/11

Perhaps more than any other day during the year, the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks elicits dozens of comments from politicians about the same issue. Below is a small sample of statements released Tuesday:

“When the history books are written, the true legacy of 9/11 will not be one of fear or hate or division. It will be a safer world; a stronger nation; and a people more united than ever before.” – President Obama

“On this most somber day, those who would attack us should know that we are united, one nation under God, in our determination to stop them and to stand tall for peace and freedom at home and across the world.” - Mitt Romney, Republican candidate for President and former Massachusetts governor.

U.S. Missile Defense Strategy Is Flawed, Expert Panel Finds

After two years of study, a panel of top scientists and military experts working for the National Research Council has concluded that the nation’s protections against missile attack suffer from major shortcomings, leaving the United States vulnerable to certain kinds of long-range strikes.

In a report, the panel suggested that President Obama shift course and expand a system inherited from President George W. Bush, setting aside parts of an antimissile strategy he initiated in 2009. By doing so, the panel said, the nation’s defenses would be better prepared to defeat the long-range missiles that the report suggests Iran may be developing.

It is the first time that the research council — an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, chartered by Congress to give scientific and technical advice to the government and considered the nation’s preeminent group of scientists — has weighed in on the nation’s overall plans for defeating missile attacks.

“For too long, the U.S. has been committed to expensive missile defense strategies without sufficient consideration of the costs and real utility,” said L. David Montague, the panel’s co-chairman and a retired president of Lockheed Martin Missiles and Space. The Pentagon must strengthen its technical analyses, he added, so it “can better evaluate new initiatives.”

Mr. Montague, an engineer by training, is an independent consultant and one of the few members of the 16-person panel whose roots lie in the defense industry. The others are scientists, engineers, and weapons experts from universities, think tanks and national laboratories, including the nuclear weapons lab at Livermore, Calif.

In its highly technical, 260-page report, the panel recommends an overhaul that would make the antimissile system “far more effective,” including new sensors and interceptors, as well as an additional base for interceptors in Maine or New York; existing ones are in California and Alaska.

The report calls the plan affordable, saying it could fit within current antimissile spending -- which runs about $10 billion a year -- if the military eliminated what the panel describes as costly and unneeded systems.

The assessment is a major blow to President Obama’s strategy of playing down the long-range defenses he inherited from President Bush and focusing instead on defenses in Europe against shorter-range Iranian missiles. He articulated the shift in September 2009, calling the envisioned system “stronger, smarter and swifter.”

But the report, released Tuesday, faults the results of this strategy as weak. It says the domestic defenses currently in place can probably handle crude missiles fired from North Korea but criticizes the antimissile arms as “fragile” and full of “shortcomings that limit their effectiveness against even modestly improved threats.”

The report gives Mr. Obama’s European shift conditional approval if planned advances materialize. But it recommends that the plan’s final phase -- intended to protect the United States from long-range Iranian missiles -- be scrapped in favor of the panel’s proposal for a stronger domestic system.

In short, the panel would undo part of Mr. Obama’s shift and strengthen Mr. Bush’s antimissile approach, creating more of a hybrid.

Philip E. Coyle III, a former national security official in the Obama White House and former director of weapons testing at the Pentagon, said the panel’s report revealed an antimissile proclivity for “producing and fielding hardware rather than facing up to physical realities.”

The report comes as worries rise over Iran’s nuclear program and fears that Tehran might one day decide to develop warheads for its rapidly growing fleet of missiles. Today, its missiles are short and medium range. The new report looks ahead a decade or more to what it calls the “likely development” of Iranian missiles designed to rain warheads down on the United States.

Since the 1980s, when President Ronald Reagan began the modern hunt for defenses against long-range missiles, Washington has spent more than $200 billion devising ways to zap incoming enemy warheads that move at speeds in excess of four miles per second. Critics have long ridiculed the aim as delusional, saying that any country smart enough to make intercontinental ballistic missiles could also make simple countermeasures sure to foil any defense.

In a nod to critics, the new report identifies enemy countermeasures as the main obstacle of the domestic antimissile system, with many of its recommendations aimed at creating improved technologies to meet the challenge.

Israeli Leader Sharpens Call on U.S. to Set Limits on Iran

JERUSALEM — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel harshly criticized the Obama administration on Tuesday over recent statements that the United States would not set deadlines or draw “red lines” for Iran over its disputed uranium enrichment activities, calling such comments a signal to the Iranians that they could build atomic bombs with impunity.
Mr. Netanyahu’s remarks laid bare the underlying tensions between the United States and Israel over how to deal with Iran, and they threatened to elevate the Iranian uranium enrichment program as a virulent campaign issue less than two months before the American presidential election.

In what appeared to be a further sign of escalating tension in the American-Israeli relationship, Israeli news media reported Tuesday night that the Obama administration had rejected a request from Mr. Netanyahu’s office for a meeting with Mr. Obama when the Israeli leader visits the United States this month to attend the United Nations General Assembly. There was no immediate confirmation from either government on the Israeli reports.

Mr. Netanyahu’s remarks were among the strongest he has made over the Iranian enrichment activities, which the Israelis have repeatedly called part of a clandestine Iranian plan to build nuclear weapons despite Tehran’s denials. Mr. Netanyahu’s government, which considers Iran to be Israel’s most dangerous enemy, has threatened to bomb suspected Iranian enrichment sites.

He appeared to be reacting on Tuesday in particular to an assertion by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in an interview with Bloomberg Radio on Sunday in which Mrs. Clinton was asked if the administration would articulate explicit consequences for Iran’s refusal to halt its enrichment program, as the United Nations Security Council has repeatedly requested. Mrs. Clinton said “we’re not setting deadlines.”

On Monday, the State Department spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland, reiterated President Obama’s commitment not to allow Iran to obtain nuclear weapons and said “it is not useful to be parsing it, to be setting deadlines one way or the other, red lines.”

Addressing reporters here in Jerusalem on Tuesday, Mr. Netanyahu unequivocally rejected those comments and slapped back at the United States. Speaking in English, he said, “The world tells Israel: ‘Wait, there’s still time.’ And I say, ‘Wait for what? Wait until when?’ Those in the international community who refuse to put red lines before Iran don’t have a moral right to place a red light before Israel.”

In his remarks, made at a joint news conference with the visiting prime minister of Bulgaria, Boyko Borisov, Mr. Netanyahu also said: “Now if Iran knows that there is no red line, if Iran knows that there is no deadline, what will it do? Exactly what it’s doing. It’s continuing, without any interference, toward obtaining nuclear weapons capability and from there, nuclear bombs.”

He criticized the litany of economic sanctions imposed on Iran by the United States and the European Union as ineffective in stopping the enrichment program. “The fact is that every day that passes, Iran gets closer and closer to nuclear bombs,” Mr. Netanyahu said.

Mr. Netanyahu has said that Israel and the United States were in talks on setting what he has called a “clear red line’ for when Iran’s nuclear program surpasses a threshold of tolerance that would be met with a military response. But Obama administration officials have been more circumspect about those talks, and Mrs. Clinton’s comments on Sunday appeared to contradict Mr. Netanyahu.

The Israelis first signaled their displeasure over the American comments on Monday. An Israeli government official, who was not authorized to respond publicly to Mrs. Clinton, said: “without a clear red line Iran will not cease its race toward a nuclear weapon. These statements will not stop Iran’s centrifuges from spinning. Unfortunately the opposite could be true.”

Michael Oren, the Israeli ambassador to the United States, echoed those comments in an interview in Washington on Monday night, asserting that the Israeli leadership wanted Mr. Obama and the international community to set clear “red lines” for Iran. “We know that the Iranians see red,” Mr. Oren said. “We know they can discern the color red. We know that the redder the line, the lesser the chance that they will pass it.”

The Israeli government’s worries about Iran were further elevated last month when the International Atomic Energy Agency, the nuclear monitor of the United Nations, reported that Iran had sharply increased its capacity to enrich uranium with centrifuges assembled at a subterranean site in the holy Iranian city of Qum. The site may be impervious to a bombing attack because it is so deep underground.

Israel has not publicly specified what its red lines should be, and there may not be one single view.
  

Records Missing on Afghan Army Fuel Costs

KABUL, Afghanistan — The American and NATO training missions in Afghanistan have told United States government investigators that more than four years of financial records covering about $475 million worth of fuel purchases for the Afghan National Army may have been shredded, raising concerns about potential fraud.

Additionally, the agency also says that American and NATO forces have no proper system in place for estimating the Afghan Army’s future fuel requirements, a critical point now because control over the budget on fuel spending is about to be increased and handed over from United States and NATO authority to the Afghan government.

The findings come out of a report to be published Monday by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, the government agency charged with accounting for how billions of dollars in American reconstruction funds are being spent.

Warning about the potential for theft and waste, the agency recommended that future fuel spending for Afghan forces, proposed to rise to about $555 million in 2014, should be reduced and frozen at 2012 levels, about $306 million annually, until proper methods for accountability and estimating the Afghan Army’s fuel requirements are established.

In a letter to Secretary of Defense Leon E. Panetta and senior military officials including Gen. John R. Allen, the top commander of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, the agency’s new inspector general, John F. Sopko, said he had opened an investigation into the apparent destruction of the documents covering payments from October 2006 to February 2011.

Officials in Afghanistan were also unable to supply records for a current audit covering the period March 2011 to March 2012, he said.

“The destruction of records and the unexplained failure to provide other records violate DOD and Department of the Army policies,” Mr. Sopko wrote in the letter.

The agency’s report on fuel purchases said the training missions’ methods for estimating finance requirements did not include “basic information such as the actual number and capacity of Afghan National Army storage locations, the inventories of vehicles and generators in active use, and fuel consumption at each A.N.A. location.”

A spokeswoman for the NATO and American commands responsible for equipping and training the Afghan security forces did not reject the inspector general’s findings, but said both commands would be looking into the agency’s conclusions and cooperating with its investigation.

The spokeswoman, Lt. Lenaya Rotklein, said in an e-mailed statement that the training missions had methods in place to work out the fuel needs of the Afghan forces, but that they would work with the agency to make them better. “We make funding recommendations based on military requirements,” she said. “We are committed to stewardship of our taxpayer dollars and take seriously the responsibility entrusted to us by the Department of Defense.”

The American Embassy in Kabul and coalition officials declined to comment.

The inspector general’s agency, known by its acronym, Sigar, was created in 2008 and has had a troubled few years. In 2011, a former inspector general, Arnold Fields, a retired major general, resigned after he was criticized by some members of Congress who said that he had not been aggressive enough in tracking how American money had been spent in Afghanistan. Now, Mr. Sopko has told his staff he wants to bring a new aggressiveness to oversight of spending in Afghanistan.

Last month in another report, the inspector general criticized lack of progress by the Afghanistan Infrastructure Fund in building American-financed infrastructure projects. A handful of these projects were meant to build popular support for the Afghan government, but the inspector general found that in most cases no significant construction work had yet begun.

More Young Adults Have Insurance After Health Care Law, Study Says

WASHINGTON — The share of young adults without health insurance fell by one-sixth in 2011 from the previous year, the largest annual decline for any age group since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began collecting the data in 1997, according to a new report released on Monday.

The estimates are drawn from a federal survey of about 35,000 households. It did not ask how the newly insured obtained coverage, but the study’s author, Matthew Broaddus, a research analyst at the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said the increased coverage for young people was almost certainly due to a provision in the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act that allows children to stay on their parents’ insurance policies until their 26th birthday.

Joseph Antos, a health care policy expert at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, agreed that the provision of the new law was the only plausible explanation for the increase. He pointed out that young people have been among the hardest hit in the recession and would otherwise have been expected to be less likely to be insured. “Nothing else went well for this age group,” he said.

The share of people ages 19 to 25 who lacked health insurance fell to 27.9 percent, down from 33.9 percent in 2010, or about 1.6 million fewer uninsured people, according to the data from the federal study, known as the National Health Interview Survey. For the next age group — those 26 to 35 years old — the share of the uninsured rose, a further sign, Mr. Broaddus said, that the health care law was driving the decline among the younger group.

The dependents’ provision of the health care law took effect in September 2010, and the number of uninsured young adults declined that year, too, though by a smaller amount. Obama administration officials said that drop showed that the law, which was broadly opposed by Republicans, was having an effect.

The decrease in the number of young adults without health coverage helped drive an overall decline in the share of uninsured people in the country, the first since 2007, before the recession.

The share of all Americans without health insurance stood at 15.1 percent in 2011, or about 46 million people, the center reported, down from 16 percent in 2010. It remained above the level in 2007, when 14.5 percent of Americans lacked health insurance.

Before the dependents’ provision took effect, young adults were typically forced off their parents’ plans at 18 or 21, after high school or college. The C.D.C. data for 2011 captured the first full year that the provision allowed young people to stay on their parents’ policies.

The report comes two days before the Census Bureau is to release its annual report detailing changes in health insurance coverage for the nation. That report, based on data from the Current Population Survey, is considered the standard because it includes information from about 100,000 households, a very large sample.

The C.D.C. data is drawn from a smaller sample, and Mr. Antos said it was likely to indicate the direction of the Census Bureau’s report, though that is not always the case. The C.D.C. says its numbers are preliminary and subject to revision.

Children under the age of 18 are far more likely to be insured than adults, according to the C.D.C. Just 7 percent of children lacked health insurance in 2011. The poor are among the least likely to have coverage. Forty percent of poor Americans under age 65 lacked health coverage last year — still high, but an improvement over the 42 percent who were uninsured in 2010, according to C.D.C. estimates.

The findings are in line with those of another study, released in June by the National Bureau of Economic Research, which found that young adults were a third more likely to be on their parents’ employer policies since the provision on dependents went into effect.

That study, based on a different data set, the Census Bureau’s Survey of Income and Program Participation, which tracks individual households over time, allowed researchers to pinpoint the details of the change in coverage for young adults.

Kosali Simon, a professor of health economics at Indiana University, Bloomington, and a co-author of the study, said that only half of that increase was made up of dependents who did not have any coverage to start. The other half, she said, had some form of coverage but switched to their parents’ policies.

To Smuggle More Drugs, Traffickers Go Under the Sea

KEY WEST, Fla. — For more than 24 hours last September, a Coast Guard helicopter and speedboat pursued drug traffickers and their contraband across the Caribbean Sea. Finally they caught up with the improbable vessel, the latest innovation in the decades-old drug war. It was a submarine.

The low-slung, diesel-propelled vessel, painted a dark shade to blend with the water, was believed to be carrying several tons of cocaine. But after the submersible’s crew scuttled the vessel and abandoned ship, the Coast Guard was able to salvage only two 66-pound bales of narcotics.

This is the new challenge faced by the United States and Latin American countries as narcotics organizations bankroll machine shops operating under cover of South America’s triple-canopy jungles to build diesel-powered submarines that would be the envy of all but a few nations.

After years of detecting these craft in the less trafficked Pacific Ocean, officials have seen a spike in their use in the Caribbean over the last year. American authorities have discovered at least three models of a new and sophisticated drug-trafficking submarine capable of traveling completely underwater from South America to the coast of the United States.

The vessel involved in the September chase was an older model that was only semi-submersible. That model presents a silhouette above water barely larger than a kitchen table, but requires a snorkel to bring in air for the diesel engine, which has a range of about 3,000 miles. The three newer, fully submersible vessels already captured were capable of hauling 10 tons of cocaine and, by surfacing at night to charge their batteries off the onboard diesel engine, could sail beneath the surface all the way from Ecuador to Los Angeles.

With the use of these craft on the rise, American officials say they fear that the trafficking networks are moving away from so-called fast boats, the high-powered fishing and leisure boats that can carry about a ton of cocaine and are easier to spot, to semi-submersible and fully submersible vessels that can surreptitiously carry many more tons of drugs, which are unloaded in shallow waters or transported to shore by small boats.

More troubling for American officials is their belief that these vessels could be used by terrorists to transport attackers or weapons, though they emphasize that no use of submersibles by militants has been detected.

Drug networks historically were organized to combine the tasks of production, transportation and distribution, and they have seen little reason to cooperate with terrorists. But these new advanced submarines are built in some cases by independent contractors who may be more willing to sell the vessels to anybody offering the right price.

“These vessels are seaworthy enough that I have no doubt in my mind that if they had enough fuel, they could easily sail into a port in the United States,” said Cmdr. Mark J. Fedor of the Coast Guard, who commands the cutter Mohawk, the 200-foot vessel whose fast boat and helicopter interdicted the submersible in the Caribbean last September.

In addition to the Coast Guard ships and aircraft patrolling the seas, the American effort includes a sophisticated command center that combines intelligence from across the United States government and from nations in the region, which are increasingly cooperating to battle cocaine trafficking.

This growing American counternarcotics effort is part of a larger shift to new missions for the nation’s security and intelligence agencies after a decade spent focused on the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

That mission to sort and analyze intelligence on drug trafficking and then coordinate the response occurs around the clock behind the walls of an interagency task force in Key West, which sent the intelligence report to Commander Fedor’s ship and coordinated its response.

The intelligence report, based on surveillance from a Coast Guard plane over the Caribbean and intelligence tidbits from nations in Latin America, said the submersible had left Colombia headed for Honduras.

Although the craft was 300 miles away, the Mohawk was the closest American vessel to it. So Commander Fedor immediately ordered his 100 crew members to direct the ship off Honduras to intercept the craft.

Cocaine-filled submarines and semi-submersible crafts “are the Super Bowl of counternarcotics,” Commander Fedor said. “When you hear one is moving, you say: ‘Wow. Game on.’ ”

After a day’s travel, the cutter got within a few miles of the craft and deployed the cutter’s fast boat and a helicopter.

A New Kind of Warfare

Cybersecurity efforts in the United States have largely centered on defending computer networks against attacks by hackers, criminals and foreign governments, mainly China. Increasingly, however, the focus is on developing offensive capabilities, on figuring out how and when the United States might unleash its own malware to disrupt an adversary’s networks. That is potentially dangerous territory.

Such malware is believed to have little deterrent value against criminals who use computers to steal money from banks or spies who pilfer industrial secrets. But faced with rising intrusions against computers that run America’s military systems and its essential infrastructure — its power grid, for instance, and its telecommunications networks — the military here (and elsewhere) sees disruptive software as an essential new tool of war. According to a study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the 15 countries with the biggest military budgets are all investing in offensive cyber capabilities.

The latest step occurred last month when the United States sent out bids for technologies “to destroy, deny, degrade, disrupt, corrupt or usurp” an adversary’s attempt to use cyberspace for advantage. The Air Force asked for proposals to plan for and manage cyberwarfare, including the ability to launch superfast computer attacks and withstand retaliation.

The United States, China, Russia, Britain and Israel began developing basic cyberattack capabilities at least a decade ago and are still figuring out how to integrate them into their military operations. Experts say cyberweapons will be used before or during conflicts involving conventional weapons to infect an adversary’s network and disrupt a target, including shutting down military communications. The most prominent example is the Stuxnet virus deployed in 2010 by the United States and Israel to set back Iran’s nuclear program. Other cyberattacks occurred in 2007 against Syria and 1998 against Serbia.

Crucial questions remain unanswered, including what laws of war would apply to decisions to launch an attack. The United States still hasn’t figured out what impact cyberweapons could have on actual battlefield operations or when an aggressive cyber response is required. Nor has Washington settled on who would authorize an attack; experts see roles for both the president and military commanders. There is also the unresolved issue of how to minimize collateral damage — like making sure malware does not cripple a civilian hospital.

Another big concern is China, which is blamed for stealing American military secrets. Washington has not had much success persuading Beijing to rein in its hackers. There is a serious risk of miscalculation if, for example, there is a confrontation in the South China Sea. China could misinterpret a move, unleash a cyberattack and trigger a real cyberwar. What’s clearly needed are new international understandings about what constitutes cyber aggression and how governments should respond. Meanwhile, the United States must do what it can to protect its own networks.