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From Los Angeles Times

Panetta says U.S. is 'within reach' of defeating Al Qaeda

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta says intelligence uncovered in the Bin Laden raid showed that U.S. operations have left the terrorist network with only 10 to 20 remaining key operatives.

by David S. Cloud, Los Angeles Times

July 10, 2011

Reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan

Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta declared Saturday that the United States was "within reach" of defeating Al Qaeda as a terrorist threat, but that doing so would require killing or capturing what he called the group's 10 to 20 remaining leaders.

Heading to Afghanistan for the first time since taking office earlier this month, Panetta said that intelligence uncovered in the American raid in Pakistan that killed Osama bin Laden in May showed that 10 years of U.S. operations against Al Qaeda had left it with fewer than two dozen key operatives, most of whom are in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and North Africa.

"If we can be successful at going after them, I think we can really undermine their ability to do any kind of planning to be able to conduct any kinds of attack on this country," Panetta told reporters on his way to Afghanistan aboard a U.S. Air Force jet, adding that was why he believed the defeat of Al Qaeda to be "within reach."

Panetta's comments were the most detailed recent assessment of Al Qaeda's strength by a senior U.S. official. They come in the wake of President Obama's decision to withdraw 30,000 troops from Afghanistan over the next year and a half, a move that he said was possible in part because of the damage inflicted on Al Qaeda and its allies in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Some terrorism experts were skeptical that Al Qaeda has been so weakened that it no longer poses a threat to the U.S. or its allies.

"It is certainly true that Al Qaeda's leadership has been significantly eroded over the past two years," said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University, but "there is no empirical evidence that either the appeal of its message or the flow of recruits into its ranks has actually diminished."

Nor is a weaker Al Qaeda likely to have much impact on the Afghan insurgency.

The Afghan conflict is driven by homegrown insurgent groups such as the Taliban that do not necessarily rely on assistance from Al Qaeda to carry on their fight against U.S. and NATO troops. Only a relatively small number of fighters directly linked to Al Qaeda are thought to be in Afghanistan, although Taliban offshoots such as the Pakistan-based Haqqani network are thought to have closer links with the organization.

The Taliban movement has a primarily domestic agenda that differs from the global jihad espoused by Al Qaeda, and links between the two groups have loosened considerably in the nearly 10 years since the Taliban gave sanctuary to Bin Laden in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Panetta, a former California congressman who headed the CIA before being chosen by Obama to replace Robert M. Gates at the Pentagon, did not estimate how long it might take to defeat Al Qaeda, and he acknowledged that it would take "more work."

Panetta said during his confirmation hearings last month that Al Qaeda had been severely damaged, but he has not claimed before that it was nearing defeat. The CIA and the military's Joint Special Operations Command have kept lists of senior terrorist leaders for years, adding new names as individuals on the list were killed or captured. It was unclear whether Panetta was indicating that the U.S. now believes it is nearing the end of the known militant leaders.

"Now is the moment following the death of Bin Laden to put maximum pressure on them, because I do believe that if we continue this effort we can really cripple Al Qaeda as a threat to this country," he said.

The U.S. believes Ayman Zawahiri, the Egyptian who succeeded Bin Laden as Al Qaeda's top leader, was probably hiding in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas, the remote and largely ungoverned region along the border with Afghanistan where a stew of militant groups now operates, Panetta said.

But getting help in finding him from Pakistan, which has severely scaled back cooperation with the U.S. on drone strikes and other operations since the Bin Laden raid, could be more difficult than ever.

Before Bin Laden was killed by U.S. troops in the garrison town of Abbottabad, Pakistani officials had for years dismissed U.S. claims that the Saudi militants was hiding in their country. Since the raid, which was undertaken without warning to Islamabad, Pakistan has halted or reduced most joint operations with the U.S.

In one of his last meetings as CIA director, Panetta said, he told the head of Pakistan's intelligence service that the U.S. had a list of targets that it wanted help in pursuing.

Zawahiri "is one of those we would like to see the Pakistanis target along with our help," he said. At least one senior Al Qaeda operative, Ilyas Kashmiri, was killed recently in a U.S. drone strike in Pakistan, a U.S. official said last week.

Panetta said that Yemen — not Pakistan — poses the most potent threat of terrorist attacks on America, from an Al Qaeda offshoot known as Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

The group has gained strength in recent months as unrest has swept through Sana, the country's capital, and large swaths of its rugged hinterlands, where militants are growing in strength.

The administration last week revealed that it had captured and interrogated Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame, an alleged Somali militant with ties to the group, on a boat traveling between Yemen and Somalia. The U.S. has also targeted Anwar Awlaki, a U.S. citizen hiding in Yemen, in a drone strike but missed killing him.

"There's no question that when you look at what constitutes the biggest threat in terms of attacks on the United States, more of that comes from Yemen and from people like Awlaki," Panetta said.

Gen. David H. Petraeus, who is stepping down as the top commander in Afghanistan this month to take over Panetta's old job at the CIA, echoed Panetta's comments while speaking to reporters later in Kabul, the Afghan capital.

The Al Qaeda offshoot in Yemen "is the one to keep an eye on now," he warned. But he said, "There has been enormous damage done to Al Qaeda in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas … and it does hold the prospect of really a strategic defeat" of Al Qaeda, noting that the organization's offshoots have suffered substantial setbacks in Iraq.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-panetta-qaeda-20110710,0,2028357,print.story

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Kadafi again threatens to attack Europe with suicide bombers

Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi says 'hundreds of Libyans will martyr in Europe' in a defiant speech. He made a similar threat in a message on July 1.

by David Zucchino, Los Angeles Times

July 10, 2011

Reporting from Benghazi, Libya

For the second time in a week, Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi has threatened to dispatch hundreds of Libyan suicide bombers to attack targets in Europe in retaliation for NATO strikes against his regime.

"Hundreds of Libyans will martyr in Europe," Kadafi said late Friday in a defiant speech before thousands of Libyans in Tripoli's Green Square. "I told you it is eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth."

The latest threats came as pro-government forces launched a counterattack on rebels attempting to push toward Tripoli, the capital, from their enclave in the port city of Misurata, 125 miles to the east. A spokesman in the eastern rebel bastion of Benghazi said that at least seven rebel fighters were killed and 17 wounded in the fighting late Friday.

On Saturday, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization said its aircraft carried out a "precision strike" that destroyed a government missile battery hidden in a group of farm buildings outside Misurata. The missile battery had been "used to launch indiscriminate attacks on Libyan civilians, including the port and city of Misurata," a NATO statement said.

"By using civilian sites for military purposes, the Kadafi regime has once again shown complete disregard for the welfare of Libyan civilians," said Canadian air force Lt. Gen. Charles Bouchard, commander of NATO's Libya campaign.

Kadafi first threatened to attack Europe in a recorded message played at a rally July 1 in Tripoli. He warned Europeans that Libyan attackers would "target your homes, offices and families, which would become legitimate targets."

Kadafi has portrayed the NATO mission as an illegal invasion of a Muslim nation by the West.

In Benghazi, a spokesman for the rebel Transitional National Council dismissed Kadafi's threats.

"He's just bragging," spokesman Mohammed Kesh said. "If he could do it, he would have done it already without talking about it."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-libya-fighting-20110710,0,3010177,print.story

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State prison protest continues

About 1,600 inmates continued to take part in a hunger strike protesting conditions in the state prison system's maximum-security isolation units, down significantly from the peak of roughly 6,600 strikers over the July 4 weekend, said Terry Thornton, a spokesperson for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

Meantime, about 60 people converged on a sidewalk outside the Men's Central Jail in downtown Los Angeles, shouting and raising signs of support for the strikers, even though the jail is not part of the state-run system affected by the hunger strike.

"The conditions are deplorable, the worst a human being can live in,” said Victor Amaya, who said his son Alex Amaya, 24, incarcerated at Pelican Bay State Prison for attempted murder and currently in an isolation unit, is among the strikers. “These men have done bad things in their lives, but the way they are treating them is completely inhumane.”

The protest started July 1 at the Security Housing Unit at Pelican Bay, a prison near the Oregon border that houses some of the state's most hard-core offenders. The isolation units there -- part of a trio of such units statewide -- are reserved for prisoners considered to be extremely violent, many of them with gang ties. The units have cells that are windowless and soundproof, to limit inmate communication. Prisoners are released for about an hour a day so they can walk freely in a small area with high concrete walls.

Inmates involved in the strike have a number of complaints, including a need for better food, warmer clothes and improved educational opportunities.

Thornton noted that the strike has remained nonviolent and that inmates are being monitored by prison doctors. She also said prison officials are maintaining “an open dialogue” with the protesters.
Of the state's 33 prisons, eight currently have striking inmates, down from a high of 13, Thornton said.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/

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