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      How Mike Johnson Got to ‘Yes’ on Aid to Ukraine

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      Intelligence, politics and personal considerations converted the Republican speaker, who had largely opposed aid to Ukraine as a rank-and-file member, into the key figure pushing it through Congress.Speaker Mike Johnson successfully defied the anti-interventionalist wing of the Republican Party and got the House to approve a $95 billion foreign aid package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesFor weeks after the Senate passed a sprawling aid package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, Speaker Mike Johnson agonized over whether and how the House would take up funding legislation that would almost certainly infuriate the right wing of his party and could cost him his job.He huddled with top national security officials, including William J. Burns, the C.I.A. director, in the Oval Office to discuss classified intelligence. He met repeatedly with broad factions of Republicans in both swing and deep red districts, and considered their voters’ attitudes toward funding Ukraine. He thought about his son, who is set to attend the U.S. Naval Academy in the fall.And finally, when his plan to work with Democrats to clear the way for aiding Ukraine met with an outpouring of venom from ultraconservatives already threatening to depose him, Mr. Johnson, an evangelical Christian, knelt and prayed for guidance.“I want to be on the right side of history,” Representative Michael McCaul of Texas, the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, recalled the speaker telling him.Mr. Johnson’s decision to risk his speakership to push the $95 billion foreign aid bill through the House on Saturday was the culmination of a remarkable personal and political arc for the Louisiana Republican. It was also an improbable outcome for a man plucked from relative obscurity last fall by the hard right — which had just deposed a speaker they deemed a traitor to their agenda — to be the speaker of a deeply dysfunctional House.As a rank-and-file hard-liner, Mr. Johnson had largely opposed efforts to fund Kyiv’s war effort. And early in his speakership, he declared he would never allow the matter to come to a vote until his party’s border demands were met.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      U.S. Intelligence Warning to Moscow Named Specific Target of Attack

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      The C.I.A. told Russia that Islamic State terrorists were plotting an attack on Crocus City Hall, a concert venue.The U.S. warning to Russia ahead of a terrorist attack near Moscow was highly specific: Crocus City Hall was a potential target of the Islamic State, according to U.S. officials.The warning had the right venue but imprecise timing, suggesting that the attack could come within days. Indeed, the public warning by the United States Embassy on March 7 warned of potential terrorist attacks in the next two days.Gunmen stormed the hall on March 22, killing 144 people, the deadliest attack in Russia in nearly 20 years. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack, and Russia charged four men from Tajikistan, accusing them of carrying out the massacre.But President Vladimir V. Putin and other top officials have continued to claim, without evidence, that Ukraine could have played a role in the attack, a statement that American officials have repeatedly said was baseless.The news that the U.S. warning specified the precise target of the attack was reported earlier Tuesday by The Washington Post.The United States works intensely to collect intelligence on potential plots by the Islamic State and its Afghanistan-based branch, ISIS-Khorasan.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      New Havana Syndrome Studies Find No Evidence of Brain Injuries

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      The findings from the National Institutes of Health are at odds with previous research that looked into the mysterious health incidents experienced by U.S. diplomats and spies.New studies by the National Institutes of Health failed to find evidence of brain injury in scans or blood markers of the diplomats and spies who suffered symptoms of Havana syndrome, bolstering the conclusions of U.S. intelligence agencies about the strange health incidents.Spy agencies have concluded that the debilitating symptoms associated with Havana syndrome, including dizziness and migraines, are not the work of a hostile foreign power. They have not identified a weapon or device that caused the injuries, and intelligence analysts now believe the symptoms are most likely explained by environmental factors, existing medical conditions or stress.The lead scientist on one of the two new studies said that while the study was not designed to find a cause, the findings were consistent with those determinations.The authors said the studies are at odds with findings from researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, who found differences in brain scans of people with Havana syndrome symptoms and a control groupDr. David Relman, a prominent scientist who has had access to the classified files involving the cases and representatives of people suffering from Havana syndrome, said the new studies were flawed. Many brain injuries are difficult to detect with scans or blood markers, he said. He added that the findings do not dispute that an external force, like a directed energy device, could have injured the current and former government workers.The studies were published in The Journal of the American Medical Association on Monday alongside an editorial by Dr. Relman that was critical of the findings.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Ukraine Faces Losses Without More U.S. Aid, Officials Say

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      William J. Burns, the C.I.A. director, and Avril D. Haines, the director of national intelligence, described an increasingly dire situation.Senior intelligence officials warned on Monday that without additional American aid, Ukraine faced the prospect of continued battlefield losses as Russia relies on a network of critical arms suppliers and drastically increases its supply of technology from China.In public testimony during the annual survey of worldwide threats facing the United States, the officials predicted that any continued delay of U.S. aid to Ukraine would lead to additional territorial gains by Russia over the next year, the consequences of which would be felt not only in Europe but also in the Pacific.“If we’re seen to be walking away from support for Ukraine, not only is that going to feed doubts amongst our allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific; it’s going to stoke the ambitions of the Chinese leadership in contingencies ranging from Taiwan to the South China Sea,” William J. Burns, the C.I.A. director, told Congress.The assessment marked a sharp turn from just a year ago, when Ukraine’s military appeared on the march and the Russians seemed to be in retreat.Over the course of just over two hours of testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mr. Burns and the director of national intelligence, Avril D. Haines, described an increasingly dire situation for Ukraine, one in which Russia is producing far more artillery shells and has worked out a steady supply of drones, shells and other military goods from two key suppliers.“It is hard to imagine how Ukraine will be able to maintain the extremely hard-fought advances it has made against the Russians, especially given the sustained surge in Russian ammunition production and purchases from North Korea and Iran,” Ms. Haines said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Biden’s Armageddon Moment: When Nuclear Detonation Seemed Possible in Ukraine

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      For a few weeks in October 2022, the White House was consumed in a crisis whose depths were not publicly acknowledged at the time. It was a glimpse of what seemed like a terrifying new era.President Biden was standing in an Upper East Side townhouse owned by the businessman James Murdoch, the rebellious scion of the media empire, surrounded by liberal New York Democrats who had paid handsomely to come hear optimistic talk about the Biden agenda for the next few years.It was Oct. 6, 2022, but what they heard instead that evening was a disturbing message that — though Mr. Biden didn’t say so — came straight from highly classified intercepted communications he had recently been briefed about, suggesting that President Vladimir V. Putin’s threats to use a nuclear weapon in Ukraine might be turning into an operational plan.For the “first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis,” he told the group, as they gathered amid Mr. Murdoch’s art collection, “we have a direct threat of the use of a nuclear weapon if in fact things continue down the path they’ve been going.” The gravity of his tone began to sink in: The president was talking about the prospect of the first wartime use of a nuclear weapon since Hiroshima and Nagasaki.And not at some vague moment in the future. He meant in the next few weeks.The commander of a Ukrainian assault unit, standing by an abandoned Russian tank in October 2022. That period appears to have been the high-water mark of Ukraine’s military performance over the past two years.Ivor Prickett for The New York TimesThe intercepts revealed that for the first time since the war in Ukraine had broken out, there were frequent conversations within the Russian military about reaching into the nuclear arsenal. Some were just “various forms of chatter,” one official said. But others involved the units that would be responsible for moving or deploying the weapons. The most alarming of the intercepts revealed that one of the most senior Russian military commanders was explicitly discussing the logistics of detonating a weapon on the battlefield.Fortunately, Mr. Biden was told in his briefings, there was no evidence of weapons being moved. But soon the C.I.A. was warning that, under a singular scenario in which Ukrainian forces decimated Russian defensive lines and looked as if they might try to retake Crimea — a possibility that seemed imaginable that fall — the likelihood of nuclear use might rise to 50 percent or even higher. That “got everyone’s attention fast,” said an official involved in the discussions.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Military Judge to Rule on C.I.A. Torture Program in Sept. 11 Case

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      Lawyers argued over the rare legal doctrine in an effort to dismiss the case at the start of pretrial hearings in the Sept. 11 case at Guantánamo Bay.A defense lawyer asked a military judge on Monday to dismiss the Sept. 11 conspiracy charges against a Saudi prisoner who was tortured in C.I.A. custody, describing the secret overseas prison network where the man was held as part of a “vast criminal international enterprise” that trafficked in torture.Defense lawyers in the case have said for years that the case should be dismissed based on a rarely successful legal doctrine involving “outrageous government conduct.”On Monday, Walter Ruiz became the first defender to present the argument to a military judge on behalf of Mustafa al-Hawsawi, who is accused of helping the Sept. 11 hijackers with money transfers and travel arrangements.The interrogation and detention program as carried out on his client so “shocks the conscience,” he said, that Mr. Hawsawi should be dropped from the conspiracy case.In a nearly daylong presentation, Mr. Ruiz used government documents to argue that the prisoner was sexually assaulted in his first month of detention, waterboarded by C.I.A. interrogators without permission, deprived of sleep and kept isolated in darkened dungeonlike conditions starting in 2003.In order to build their cases against former C.I.A. prisoners, prosecutors had so-called clean teams of federal agents reinterrogate the defendants at Guantánamo Bay in 2007, without using or threatening violence.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Bali Bombing Conspirators Get 5 More Years at Guantánamo Bay

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      A military jury sentenced two Malaysian men to 23 years for helping perpetrators of the bombing that killed 202 people, but a side deal reduced the punishment.A military jury at Guantánamo Bay sentenced two prisoners to 23 years in confinement on Friday for conspiring in the 2002 terrorist bombing that killed 202 people in Bali, Indonesia. But the men could be freed by 2029 under a secret deal and with sentencing credit.Mohammed Farik Bin Amin and Mohammed Nazir Bin Lep, both Malaysians, have been held by the United States since the summer of 2003, starting with three years in C.I.A. black site prisons where they were tortured. They pleaded guilty to war crimes charges last week.About a dozen relatives of tourists who were killed in the attacks spent an emotional week at the court and testified to their enduring grief. A jury of five U.S. military officers, assembled to decide a sentence in the 20-to-25-year range, returned 23 years after deliberating for about two hours on Friday.But, unknown to the jurors, a senior Pentagon official reached a secret agreement over the summer with the defendants that they would be sentenced to at most six more years. In exchange for the reduced sentence, they were required to provide testimony that might be used at the trial of an Indonesian prisoner, known as Hambali, who is accused of being a mastermind of the Bali bombing and other plots as a leader of the Qaeda affiliate group Jemaah Islamiyah.Then, separately, the judge, Lt. Col. Wesley A. Braun, cut 311 days off Mr. Bin Amin’s sentence and 379 days off Mr. Bin Lep’s because prosecutors missed court deadlines for turning over evidence to defense lawyers as they prepared their case.But the men could go home earlier. “The pretrial agreement contemplates the possibility of repatriation before the sentence is complete,” said Brian Bouffard, Mr. Bin Lep’s lawyer. When they are returned, he added, it will be to Malaysia’s state-run deradicalization program and a lifetime of monitoring by national security authorities.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      In Bali Bombing Trial, Victims Describe Their Pain and Prisoners Apologize

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      A Guantánamo military court heard anguishing testimony at the sentencing hearing for two Malaysian prisoners who pleaded guilty after 20 years of detention.Relatives of tourists killed in the 2002 terrorist bombing in Bali, Indonesia, spoke of endless, devastating grief, and two prisoners who conspired in the attack renounced violence in the name of Islam on Thursday for a U.S. military jury assembled at Guantánamo Bay to deliberate their sentence.The prisoners, Mohammed Farik Bin Amin and Mohammed Nazir Bin Lep, both Malaysians, pleaded guilty last week to war crimes charges for conspiring with an affiliate of Al Qaeda that carried out the attack. The bombings killed 202 people from 22 nations.“No God of any religion rewards such acts of horror,” said Solomon Lamagni-Miller, 18, of London. He was born after his uncle, Nathaniel Dan Miller, 31, was killed in the bombing and read a statement written by the victim’s mother, his grandmother.Christopher Snodgrass of Glendale, Ariz., said the loss of his daughter, Deborah, 33, in the bombing and other “terrorist activities worldwide” left him despising “over 20 percent of the world population, Muslims. I’m a religious person, and the hate-filled person I have become is certainly not what I wanted.”Echoing the sentiment of several family members, he appealed to the jury to “deal with these murderers in such a manner that they can’t do to others as they’ve done to us.”For hours this week, fathers, mothers, a brother and three sisters of the victims offered anguished descriptions of searches for missing relatives, of life-altering burns and of the vacuum left by the deaths of young people who had gone on vacation in Bali and never came home.Two of Mr. Bin Amin’s elder brothers tearfully asked the jury for leniency. Then both defendants renounced their terrorist pasts, apologized to the families and said they were tortured while in the C.I.A.’s secret overseas prison network from 2003 to 2006.The men were captured in Thailand in June 2003. A U.S. military jury is hearing the case to decide a sentence in the 20- to 25-year range, and cannot grant credit for time served. There is, however, a secondary, secret agreement in which the men could return to Malaysia later this year.Mr. Bin Amin’s brothers flew in from Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital, and sat in the public portion of the spectators’ gallery, where a blue curtain separated relatives of the dead from the United States, Britain and Germany.The oldest brother, Fadil, 62, an architect who was educated in Birmingham, England, sorrowfully told the court that his mother taught all 10 of her children a peaceful form of Islam. “He somehow got sidetracked” and made bad choices, he said.In the gallery sat Matthew Arnold, who traveled to Guantánamo from his home in Birmingham and testified that his brother Timothy, 43, was in Bali for a rugby tournament when he was killed “by this atrocity.”“My family’s lives have been changed completely by the actions of the perpetrators of this crime,” he said. “And I would like the court and Mr. Bin Amin, and Mr. Bin Lep, to be aware of the devastating effects of their actions on so many innocent and decent people.”Mr. Bin Amin, who hung his head at the defense table throughout the hours of testimony, apologized to the victims, his family and “all Muslims. This is not what I was taught as a child,” he said.In his two decades of U.S. detention, he said, “I have changed. I am not an angry young man anymore. I am a reformed man. My faith has evolved.”As part of their plea deal, both men offered secret testimony earlier this week for the future war crimes trial of Encep Nurjaman, a prisoner known as Hambali whom prosecutors portray as a mastermind of terrorist attacks in Indonesia in 2002 and 2003. But both men said in their confessions that they had no firsthand knowledge of Mr. Hambali’s role in the attack.On Thursday, Mr. Bin Amin went further.“I didn’t know anything about the Bali bombing until after it happened,” he said, describing his role in the plot as helping some of the perpetrators after the bombing and assisting in money transfers that could be used for other attacks.He showed drawings he made of himself being tortured, which were recently declassified to show the jury.Col. George C. Kraehe, the case prosecutor, did not object to the artwork that showed Mr. Bin Amin nude, hooded, shackled in painful positions and at one point held spread-eagle on a plastic tarp by masked guards, with one pouring water into his nose and mouth.Christine A. Funk, Mr. Bin Amin’s lawyer, said the artwork display was to help the jury “in weighing appropriate punishment.” Mr. Bin Lep said he did not want the legacy of torture “to define who I am.”Also, he said, “I forgive the people who tortured me.”He admitted to his crimes. “I am guilty of my role in the Bali bombing,” he said.He described himself as “young, immature and stubborn” when he was drawn to Afghanistan in 2000 and 2001 to train with Al Qaeda.“All I wish for now is peace,” he said. “I wish that peace for everyone here, but especially the victims and their families.” More