Core Al Qaeda essential gone - US officials report in 2012

WASHINGTON (AP) – A year after the Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaeda that carried out the Sept. 11 attacks is essentially gone but its affiliates remain a threat to America, U.S. counterterrorist officials say. Core al-Qaeda's new leader, Ayman al-Zawahri, still aspires to attack the U.S., but his Pakistan-based group is scrambling to survive, under fire from CIA drone strikes and lying low for fear of another U.S. raid. That has lessened the threat of another complex attack like a nuclear dirty bomb or a biological weapon, the officials say. Al-Qaeda's loyal offshoots are still dangerous, especially Yemen's al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP. While not yet able to carry out complex attacks inside the U.S., such groups are capable of hitting Western targets overseas and are building armies and expertise while plotting violence, according to senior U.S. counterterrorist officials who briefed reporters Friday. "Each will seek opportunities to strike Western interests in its operating area, but each group will have different intent and ability to execute those plans," said Robert Cardillo, a deputy director at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The other officials were authorized to speak only on condition of anonymity. The shift from a single, deadly group to a more amorphous threat may not seem much of an improvement. But the U.S. believes that the bin Laden raid and continued U.S. counterterrorist action have reduced the chance of a sophisticated, multipronged attack on the U.S. like the attacks of Sept. 11 or the deadly bombings in Madrid in 2004 and in London in 2005. An attack with weapons of mass destruction — chemical, biological or nuclear — by any al-Qaeda-related terror group also seems less likely in the coming year, Cardillo said. Al-Qaeda's Zawahri has not managed to harness multiple groups into a cohesive force focused on a single, catastrophic attack, officials said. Al-Qaeda's key affiliates in Yemen, Somalia, Iraq and North Africa have pledged allegiance to Zawahri but, unimpressed with his leadership, "have not offered the deference they gave bin Laden," Cardillo said. Zawahri has a reputation as an abrasive manager and a less than charismatic speaker. That loss of a single, charismatic voice likely means "multiple voices will provide inspiration for the movement," leading to a bout of soul-searching as to what the splinter groups want to target and why, Cardillo said. "There will be a vigorous debate about local versus global jihad within and among terror organizations," he said. Another potentially positive sign is al-Qaeda's failure to hijack the Arab Spring revolt in Egypt, Tunisia or Libya. On the negative side, the officials said, al-Qaeda is working hard to co-opt rebels in Syria. If the political wrangling in any of the post-revolt nations fails to produce stable, responsive governments, al-Qaeda and its ilk may be able to seize the void, the officials said. That's what has occurred in Yemen, where AQAP has taken full advantage of the local government's preoccupation fighting multiple political opponents. AQAP has grown in size and territory covered despite constant and expanded targeting by Yemeni and U.S. counterterrorist forces, the officials said. Another threat they cited: Homegrown extremists, either lone actors or small groups inspired by al-Qaeda, who remain intent on committing violence. The officials also noted that every time U.S. counterterrorist forces strike, they must take care to avoid everything from civilian casualties to hitting the wrong target, lest the blowback produce more enemies. "The key challenge will be balancing aggressive counterterrorism operations, with the risk of exacerbating the anti-Western global agenda" of al-Qaeda and its affiliates, Cardillo said.

Panetta recalls Raid on Osama in 2012

ABOARD A U.S. MILITARY AIRCRAFT (AP) – The picture in Defense Secretary Leon Panetta's office captures the "mission accomplished" moment.It shows Panetta, then the head of the CIA, and a group of U.S. commandos and others in the CIA operations center on the night of May 2 with their arms around each other — a quiet celebration just after U.S. helicopters crossed back over the border into Afghanistan.

Not until then — 90 minutes after U.S. special operations forces had lifted off from the heavily fortified compound in Pakistan where they went in search of Osama bin Laden — was he sure they could breathe a sigh of relief.

"We got the job done," Panetta said Friday as he recalled the long silences and the tense, heart-pounding moments before Adm. William McRaven's words finally came through loud and clear. "Geronimo EKIA" — the code name for bin Laden, and the signal for "enemy killed in action."

With the first anniversary of the al-Qaeda leader's death approaching, Panetta spoke to reporters on his plane as he flew back from a series of meetings with defense leaders in South America. Perched on a table inside the Airstream trailer — dubbed the Silver Bullet— that serves as his office inside his C-17 transport plane, Panetta traced back through the nerve-wracking moments of that night.

And he talked about its impact over the past year. "I don't think there's any question that America is safer as a result of the bin Laden operation," he said.

While al-Qaeda and its offshoots remain a threat, he said, the military and intelligence communities have learned to work better together since Sept. 11, 2001. Still, he acknowledged, there is no single, completely effective way to destroy the terror network.

"The way this works is that the more successful we are at taking down those who represent their spiritual, ideological leadership, the greater our ability to weaken their threat to this country," he said.

The story of the raid is well-known: The SEALs and special operations forces that flew deep into Pakistan; the wrenching moment when one of the helicopters went down in the heat, landing hard with its tail on the wall; the SEALs' assault on the house where they believed bin Laden and his wives had been living for several years; and what Panetta on Friday called the "fingernail-biting moments."

"We knew that there were gunshots and firing, but after that we just didn't know," said Panetta, describing the nearly 20 minutes of silence after the SEALs went into the house.

Then came confusion.

McRaven, commander of the operation, told him that he thought he'd picked up the word "Geronimo."
"The way he said it was like, you know, 'We think,'" said Panetta. "It wasn't ideal. We were still waiting."

A few minutes later came the KIA message. Then came the long flight out of Pakistan.

"By that time they had blown the helicopter that was down and we knew we had woken up all of Pakistan to the fact that something had happened," Panetta said with a laugh. "The concern was just exactly what were they thinking and how were they going to respond."

The moment they crossed the border, he said, was "the moment when we finally knew the mission had been accomplished." Then they could embrace the victory.

The raid created a deep fissure into the already rocky U.S.-Pakistan relations. U.S. officials, including members of Congress, were irate that the al-Qaeda leader had been able to hide — virtually in plain sight — in a Pakistani military town.

Some suggested there was at least some knowledge of his hiding place. Pakistani leaders, meanwhile, were outraged that the U.S. had launched a military mission deep within the country's borders without alerting them, violating their sovereignty.

Islamabad's military commanders were embarrassed that the U.S. was able to carry out the raid without being detected.

The bin Laden saga has continued in Pakistan. His three wives and their families were deported early Friday to Saudi Arabia.

Officials have said that the wives and as many as eight children and some grandchildren were living in the compound when it was raided. The anniversary has triggered security warnings for Americans in Pakistan. The U.S. Embassy said its employees would be restricted from restaurants and markets in Islamabad for the next two weeks. While there was no mention of bin Laden, the period includes the anniversary date.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/story/2012-04-28/panetta-osama-bin-laden-raid/54593266/1

Should job-hogging over-50s all resign?

Too few jobs. Rising unemployment, especially for young people. Here's a radical solution, says commentator on office and workplace life, Lucy Kellaway of the Financial Times (born 1959). Wasting time on the internet recently I came upon a nasty statistic. In the next 10 years, there will be 1.2bn young people looking for work and only 300m jobs to go around. Next to this stark stat was an invitation to write an essay on what you would do to solve the problem. My essay is quite short and can be summarised in one word. Resign. This inescapable, awkward truth has been rammed home to me in the past few months as I keep meeting bright people in their 20s and 30s desperate for a job in journalism - and for mine in particular. I fob them off with platitudes but the real reason they can't do my job is that I'm doing it myself. The same is true for almost all professions. The young can't advance because everywhere they find my complacent generation is in situ. Thus the only way of solving the problem is to make everyone of a certain age, say over 50, walk the plank. Before I go any further, I ought to make one thing clear. This is not a resignation letter - I intend to hang on for dear life. It is just that I can't resist pointing out the obvious, even though it is not in my interests to do so. The choice boils down to whether it's better for people to have a decade at the beginning or at the end of their careers where they are demoralised and underemployed. The answer is easy: surely it is better to be more active at the beginning To have people idle at a time when they are full of energy and their grey-cell count is at a maximum is a shocking waste. And in any case, my generation has had it very good for much too long. We bought houses when they were still just about affordable. We had free education and pensions. It's all been jolly nice, and I've enjoyed it a lot. Now is the time to start to pay. Shifting from old to young would bring down wages and would also solve the executive pay problem in one shot. Almost all the people earning grotesque amounts are over 50 - getting rid of them would mean CEO pay would come thumping down. I have tried this idea out on various contemporaries and they all say it's rubbish. They mutter about the "lump of labour fallacy" with a panicky look in their eyes. Then they say think about the loss of experience. I reply that experience can be overrated; in any case, I'm not advocating giving huge jobs to children, but to those in their 40s, who have 15 or 20 years' experience, which is surely just as good as 30 or even 40. Then they protest that the people at the top are there because they are good, and getting rid of good people is stupid. This is true up to a point, but there are surely younger people who are good too. Anyway, I might bend the rules to let some ageing superstars - of whom there are very, very few - stay on. I'm not saying I like the idea. I'm just saying I believe it. And I'm submitting this as my essay for the prize. I see that the winner gets $10,000. I hope I don't win. Although if I do, I'll need the money. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17855240

Teenage and Baby Costing Calculators

Point of View - In defence of obscure words

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17777556 We chase "fast culture" at our peril - unusual words and difficult art are good for us, says Will Self. We are living in a risk-averse culture - there's no doubt about that. But the risk that people seem most reluctant taking is not a physical but a mental one: just as the concrete in children's playgrounds has been covered with rubber, so the hard truth about the effort needed for intellectual attainment is being softened by a sort of semantic padding. Our arts and humanities education at secondary level seems particularly afflicted by falling standards - so much so that universities are now being called upon to help write new A-level syllabuses in order to cram our little chicks with knowledge that, in recent years, has come to seem unpalatable, if not indigestible - knowledge such as English vocabulary beyond that which is in common usage. Both general readers and specialist critics often complain about my own use of English - not only in my books, but also in my newspaper articles and even in radio talks such as these. "I have to look them up in a dictionary", they complain - as if this were some kind of torture. In over twenty years of publishing fiction and journalism, I've become pretty much inured to these slings and arrows, regarding them as par for the anti-intellectual course. I used to remonstrate with those who raised the S-word (S being for sesquipedalian, an obscure word that means 'a lover of obscure words). I'd point out that my texts were as full of resolutely Anglo-Saxon slang as they were the flowery and the Latinate. I'd observe that English, being a mishmash of several different languages, had a large and exciting vocabulary, and that it seemed a shame not to use it - especially given that it went on growing all the time, spawning argot and specialist terminology as freely as an oyster does its milt. But as time has gone by, I've stopped bothering - after all, one of the great things about writing, as opposed to other media, is that it makes no claims on people unless they engage with it: words, no matter how torturous, don't leap out of books and articles and assault you. You have to go looking for them. No, now I confine myself to making the rueful point that although the subject matter of my stories and novels - which includes such phenomena as sexual deviance, drug addiction and mental illness - has become quite unexceptionable, the supposedly difficult language they are couched in seems to have become more and more offensive to readers. "Difficult" is the key word here. In the past, before the withering away of censorship, it was the depiction of sexuality and the bodily in general - together with anything smacking of anti-authoritarianism - that was perceived as difficult. Virginia Woolf objected to Joyce's Ulysses on the grounds of its being prurient, not because it contained such tropes as "ineluctable modality of the visible", while because Joyce himself refused to alter a single line in his short story Ivy Day in the Committee Room - one poking fun at the then Prince of Wales - his publisher delayed publication for more than a decade. To a contemporary audience, who can access graphic pornographic imagery and treasonable extremism with a few facile keystrokes, such taboos may appear absurd; yet in a large part, the cultural history of the 20th Century - in the West at least - was taken up with one battle after another, as the territory formerly deemed "difficult" was conquered and renamed "commonplace". The problem is that at the same time these victories were being won another province was being abandoned without a fight, and this is the realm where films, paintings, novels and even newspaper articles, radio and television programmes are intellectually challenging. I don't for a moment mean to suggest that no-one produces anymore cultural artefacts that are "difficult" in this sense - of course they do - it's just that these works are no longer regarded as the desiderata that any well-cultivated person aspires to an appreciation of. Rather, "difficult" works are parcelled off, and the great plurality and ubiquity of our media means that their specialist audience can be readily catered to - whether they are foot fetishists, or Fourierists or anything else. The suspicion that mass media lead to a banal middlebrow culture is as old as the printing press - arguably even older, given that Plato thought that writing was itself an intolerable derogation of the poetry of the spoken word. But from the vantage of each successive wave crest of popularisation, the anxieties of preceding generations seem touchingly premature. Take the American cultural critic Dwight MacDonald, who coined the expression "midcult" to refer to those works which "pretend to respect the standards of high culture, while in fact (they) water them down and vulgarize them". MacDonald was writing at a time when Nabokov's Lolita was the fastest-selling novel in American history. "Aha!", you may say: "But that was purely because of its titillating subject matter'; to which I would reply: Quite possibly, but along with the paedophilia Nabokov managed to thrust into his readers' tender lexicons many other difficult words such as 'grue', 'heliotropic', 'solipsism', and 'venus febriculosa' - often at a rate of more febriculosa' - often at a rate of more than one a page! The coincidence of these two kinds of difficulty, was, I believe, nothing of the kind: in attempting to push forward into the realm of deadening conformity, the artists and writers of the 20th Century employed all the weapons that there were to hand - and by making their works intellectually challenging, they deflected the accusation that their sexual or violent content was only there to arouse. Recall, the defence against a charge of obscenity remains, to this day, that a work exhibit genuine artistic merit. But now that all formerly difficult subject matter is, if not exactly permitted, readily accessible, cultural artificers have no need to aim high. The displacement of aesthetically and intellectually difficult art as the zenith has resulted in all sorts of sad and interrelated phenomena. In the literary world, books intended for child readers are repackaged and sold to kidult ones, while even notionally highbrow arbiters - such as Booker judges - are obsessed by that nauseous confection "a jolly good read". That Shakespeare remains our national writer is, frankly, bizarre, given that with his recondite vocabulary, myriad historical references, and convoluted metaphorical language, were he to be seeking publication in the current milieu, his sonnets and plays would undoubtedly also be branded as 'too difficult'. As for visual arts, the current Damien Hirst retrospective at Tate Modern is a perfect opportunity to see what becomes of an artificer whose impulse towards difficult subject matter was unsupported by any capacity for hard cogitation or challenging artistry. The early works - the stuffed animals and fly-bedizened carcasses - retain a certain - albeit recherché - shock value, while the subsequent ones degenerate steadily to the condition of knocked-off merchandise, making the barrier between the gift shop and the exhibition space evaporate in a puff of consumerism. But the most disturbing result of this retreat from the difficult is to be found in arts and humanities education, where the traditional set texts are now chopped up into boneless nuggets of McKnowledge, and students are encouraged to do their research - such as it is - on the web. In place of the difficulty involved in seeking out the literary canon, younger people are coming to rely on search engines to do their thinking for them. The end result of this will be a standardisation of understanding itself, as people become unable to think outside of the box-shaped screen. The nadir came for me when my daughter - who had been assigned Great Expectations as a GCSE text - was told the novel's ending by her English teacher, on the grounds that, having read the little gobbets served up for interpretation, according to her pedagogue there was no necessity for her to try and choke down the whole indigestible meal. My figures of food are entirely fitting, because we are in danger of becoming morbidly obese through the consumption of such fast culture. The contrast with sport is instructive: in both realms of human endeavour, the consumers are largely passive, but at least sports fans - unlike cultural ones - don't protest against elite athletes, or bar them from competing on the grounds that they are too fast, too strong, or too limber. On the contrary, we are repeatedly told by the likes of Sebastian Coe that athletes capable of the most difficult feats offer vital inspiration to couch-potato kids. Let the same be the case for mental athletics, because without the bar to jump over set high, we'll all end up simply playing in the sandpit.

Inside Mexico's climate revolution

Following a vote in its Senate on Thursday evening, Mexico is poised to become just the second country in the world to enshrine long-term climate targets into national legislation. The margin of the vote was huge - 78-0 - indicating that all political parties have found common ground on this issue. Now all that's needed is the signature of President Felipe Calderon, which is expected to materialise next week. The bill enshrines a number of measures in law, including: 30% reduction in emission growth measured against a "business as usual" pathway by 2020, and 50% by 2050 35% of energy to come from renewable sources by 2024 obligation for government agencies to use renewables establishment of a national mechanism for reporting on emissions in various sectors The targets look pretty demanding at first sight - especially for a country where the population is growing and the economy expanding, and where oil makes a significant contribution to the national coffers. So why is it taking steps that to the eyes of many will probably look like economic suicide? Tlajomulco, on the outskirts of Guadalajara, recently saw a major oil pipeline fire I had a chance to ask three Mexican parliamentarians recently when they came to London to look at how the UK, the first country in the world with this sort of national legislation, is doing it. The views of Eric Luis Rubio Barthell, Nicolas Bellizia Aboaf and Porfirio Munoz Ledo were quite diverse - perhaps not surprising, as they come from different political parties. "Mexico has a long tradition in multilateral politics," said Mr Munoz Ledo, a founder member of the centre-left Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) who now chairs the Foreign Affairs Commission. That tradition re-asserted itself at the UN climate summit in Cancun in 2010, he said - and "this legislation is a strong commitment coming out of Cancun" to reflect that international commitment on climate change in national legislation. For Mr Bellizia Aboaf, a member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which despite its name is considered more of a centrist party these days, it was more about practical issues. "My state of Tabasco has suffered quite heavily the consequences of climate change," he said. Low-lying Tabasco has traditionally suffered from flooding but the events of 2007, when water covered 80% of the state, were especially severe. Traditionally, big hydrocarbon-producing countries have fought tooth and nail against action on climate change; and Mr Rubio Barthell, also of the PRI, said Middle Eastern oil-exporting countries have repeatedly asked Mexico to take this stance too. But as the country has developed, oil and gas have become progressively less important to the economy as a whole. That's why a more green economic vision makes sense for a number of politicians. "I personally think this climate change topic should be an economic and energy issue, not an ecological issue, though I recognise that opinions are divided on this," said Mr Rubio Barthell. And for Mr Munoz Ledo, the transition implied by a 35% renewable energy target is necessary and absolutely achievable. The 2010 summit in Cancun put the UN climate convention's journey back on the road "Mexico is aware this is the end of the oil era, so we need to implement this fiscal reform - and if we go through it, we'll be able to do without this oil," he said. Solar energy, hydro-electricity, geothermal, biofuels and nuclear are options that are going to be explored. The irony is, of course, that Mexico has traditionally been a younger and poorer cousin of the giant to its north, the United States, which has repeatedly declined to establish legislation of anything like this strength, citing impacts on economic growth. "Power for the US is based on the army and energy and oil," Mr Munoz Ledo said. "In 1989 you had [George] Bush senior coming into office from an oil background; if you go through Clinton and Obama, they serve the oil interest first. "We're talking about the politics of neo-liberalism here which is based on oil interests and indebtedness - this is why so many in the US don't accept climate change, even though it's based on scientific evidence." The three parliamentarians came to the UK to learn from its experience in setting up a robust carbon-curbing system, and pick up ideas. Mr Bellizia Aboaf cited the Committee on Climate Change, which advises the government and monitors its actions, and the Carbon Trust that promotes low-carbon technologies, as bodies of interest, and also the UK experience with public-private funding models. There are two big differences between the two nations' laws. Firstly, as a developing country, Mexico isn't cutting emissions but cutting the rate at which they'll rise. Secondly, it will require international financial support to deliver its targets - as is mandated in the UN climate convention. The Cancun summit agreed to establish an international Green Climate Fund that is supposed to provide much of that support. But some of its details have yet to be finalised, and it is a long way from receiving the huge sums of money it is supposed to receive - maybe $100bn a year by 2020 - so whether Mexico will get the support it needs is, for now, an open question. Although Messrs Munoz Ledo, Rubio Barthell and Bellizia Aboaf appeared to find their London trip fruitful, I couldn't help feeling they were looking forward to getting back to the less frigid climes of Mexico, where solar power - as they remarked - seems a much more viable venture http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17777327