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      Should Hundreds of Millions in Seized Assets Go to ISIS Victims?

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      The State and Justice Departments disagree about what to do with more than half a billion dollars after a French company pleaded guilty to aiding militants in war-torn Syria.Biden administration officials are divided over what to do with $687 million in assets a French company forfeited after pleading guilty to aiding terrorist groups like the Islamic State, according to people familiar with internal deliberations.The dispute, which has pit the State Department against the Justice Department, raises a tangle of legal, moral and policy problems about the financial implications of executive branch officials handling an unusually large amount of money that has not gone through the usual process of being appropriated for a specific purpose by Congress.Among the points of contention: whether the administration can or should funnel some of the money toward helping international victims of ISIS, most of whom are still in Syria or are refugees elsewhere in the Middle East.Adding to the complications, a group of ISIS victims now living in the United States also want a share of the assets. They are represented by Amal Clooney, a prominent human rights lawyer who is married to George Clooney, the actor who is helping raise money for Mr. Biden’s re-election campaign, and by Lee Wolosky, a former Biden administration official.The vast sum at stake comes from the first prosecution of a corporation for conspiring to provide material support to a terrorist organization. In 2022, the French building materials giant Lafarge pleaded guilty to paying off ISIS and another terrorist group in Syria, the Nusra Front, in 2013 and 2014, to ensure that it could keep operating a plant in the region.When the civil war in Syria broke out, Lafarge had just built an expensive cement factory in the northern part of that country. Officials at the company struck the unusual agreement with militant groups, court papers said, in part so it would be in a position to profit off the need to rebuild in Syria when the war ended.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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      War Crimes Hearing Gives Public Virtual Look Inside a Secret C.I.A. Prison

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      Years after the agency’s “black site” program was shut down, details are slowly emerging during trials at Guantánamo Bay.The public on Monday got its first view of a C.I.A. “black site,” including a windowless, closet-size cell where a former Qaeda commander was held during what he described as the most humiliating experience of his time in U.S. custody.The former commander, Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, led the 360-degree virtual tour of the site, Quiet Room 4, during a sentencing hearing at Guantánamo Bay that began last week. He described being blindfolded, stripped, forcibly shaved and photographed naked on two occasions after his capture in 2006.He never saw the sun, nor heard the voices of his guards, who were dressed entirely in black, including their masks.Mr. Hadi, 63, was one of the last prisoners to be held in the overseas black site network where the George W. Bush administration held and interrogated about 100 terrorism suspects after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.Even now, years after the Obama administration shut the program down, its secrets remain. But the details are slowly emerging at the national security trials of former prisoners at Guantánamo Bay.In court on Monday, spectators saw Quiet Room 4, a 6-foot-square empty chamber, which Mr. Hadi said resembled the place he was held for three months — minus a bloodstain that was on the wall of his cell then.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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      Russian Forces Quash Prison Mutiny Led by Terrorism Suspects, State Media Reports

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      The assailants had taken two guards hostage and were killed, the prison service said.Russian special forces have quashed a short-lived mutiny at a provincial detention center on Sunday, killing detainees, some charged with terrorism, who had broken out of their cells earlier in the day, according to Russian state media.Six detainees who awaited court appearances at a pretrial detention center in the southern city of Rostov-on-Don had managed to take control of the facility, state media reported. Armed with knives, the suspects took two guards hostage, the reports said.A video posted on Rostov’s local news channels and reposted by some Russian officials appeared to show a man identified as one of the detainees brandishing a knife and demanding a car to leave the detention center for an unspecified destination. A detainee is seen in the video holding a black flag associated with the Islamic State. The video could not immediately be verified.Security agents had surrounded the detention center by Sunday morning. Soon after, Russian state media published a short statement from the country’s prison service saying that security agents had stormed the facility, “liquidated” the mutinied detainees and freed the hostages unharmed.The Rostov governor and senior federal officials have yet to comment on the episode.The Rostov mutiny comes less than three months after assailants staged the deadliest terrorist attack in Russia in more than a decade at a concert hall near Moscow. The attack, which killed nearly 150 people, took place despite U.S. intelligence services providing a detailed warning to their Russian counterparts of the impending plot.The Islamic State took responsibility for the concert hall attack. President Vladimir V. Putin, however, has blamed it on Ukraine and Western intelligence services, without providing evidence.Mr. Putin’s critics said those accusations were an attempt to deflect his government’s failure to deal with the threat of Islamist terrorism as their attention shifted to the war in Ukraine.Sunday’s attack could renew the public discussion of that threat, which is fueled by the Kremlin’s suppression of separatist Muslims inside Russia and Mr. Putin’s support for the Islamic State’s enemies in Syria.At least one Russian official publicly questioned how the Rostov detainees managed to break out of their cells and overpower the guards.“They clearly were planning this for a while,” Andrei Medvedev, a Russian propagandist and regional lawmaker in Moscow, wrote on the Telegram messaging app on Sunday. “Where is the protocol for dealing with especially dangerous detainees?”Hwaida Saad More

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      Israeli Defense Chief Rebuffs French Effort to End Israel-Hezbollah Fighting

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      The United States, France and other mediators have sought for months to reach an agreement that would stop the tit-for-tat missile strikes over Israel’s border with Lebanon.Israel’s defense minister on Friday rejected a diplomatic effort by France aimed at ending months of cross-border strikes between Israel and Hezbollah that have been intensifying this week and raising fears of a full-blown war.The United States, France and other mediators have sought for months to find a way to stop the tit-for-tat strikes between Israel and Hezbollah, a powerful militia and political faction backed by Iran, which has been launching rockets and drones into northern Israel from southern Lebanon.More than 150,000 people on both sides of the border have been displaced by the fighting. And Israel has warned that it is prepared to take stronger action to dislodge Hezbollah militants from southern Lebanon.This week, both sides ramped up their attacks, raising fears of another front in the war as Israel presses ahead with its offensive against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.On Thursday, Emmanuel Macron, the French president, said France and the United States had agreed in principle to establish a trilateral group with Israel to “make progress” on a French proposal to end the violence.But Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, who has called for Israel to take a harsher tack against Hezbollah, rebuffed Mr. Macron’s overture on Friday. It was not clear if Mr. Gallant was speaking for the Israeli government.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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      Mali Claims Death of Abu Huzeifa, Terrorist Who Helped Lead Fatal Ambush in Niger

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      The West African country said it killed Abu Huzeifa, a commander in an Islamic State affiliate who was involved in a 2017 attack in neighboring Niger that killed American Green Berets and Nigerien forces.Mali said on Monday that it had killed a high-value Islamist commander who helped lead a 2017 attack in which four American and four Nigerien soldiers were killed alongside an interpreter.The U.S. State Department had put a $5 million bounty on the head of the commander, Abu Huzeifa — a member of an affiliate of the Islamic State — after his participation in an attack in Tongo Tongo, Niger, on American Green Berets and their Nigerien comrades.At that time, the attack was the largest loss of American troops during combat in Africa since the “Black Hawk Down” debacle in Somalia in 1993.In a post on social media on Monday, Mali’s armed forces said that on Sunday they had “neutralized a major terrorist leader of foreign nationality during a large-scale operation in Liptako” — a tri-border region that contains parts of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger.Officials at the U.S. State and Defense Departments said on Tuesday that they are aware of the report, but are seeking more information.Mali has been in crisis since 2012, when rebels and jihadists took control of swaths of its desert north. The intervention of foreign forces — led by France, which deployed thousands of troops — failed to stop the unrest.In 2020, coup plotters overthrew Mali’s elected government, using the security crisis to justify their power grab. But since then the ruling junta has pursued the same military-first strategy that the foreign forces did, and nearly four years later, analysts say the situation is worse.After a ten-year fight against the Islamists, French troops pulled out in 2022. The junta in Mali turned instead to Russian military advisors and mercenaries with the Wagner group, who were accused of committing atrocities in the course of pursuing the militants.Eric Schmitt More

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      Judge in Sept. 11 Case Visits Former C.I.A. Black Site

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      Col. Matthew McCall toured the part of the prison at Guantánamo Bay where, in 2007, federal agents obtained now-disputed confessions from terrorism suspects.In a first, a military judge at Guantánamo Bay on Friday crossed into the security zone containing the wartime prison and inspected a former C.I.A. “black site” facility at the center of a dispute over the taint of torture in the Sept. 11, 2001, case.It was a noteworthy moment in the arc of the two-decade history of the Guantánamo trials. No war court judge had before made the five-mile trip to look at the detention operations, where the military maintains the only known, still-intact remnant of the network of overseas prisons that the C.I.A. operated from 2002 to 2009.But Col. Matthew N. McCall, the judge, is edging toward a decision on whether the accused mastermind of the attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and three co-defendants voluntarily confessed to conspiring in the attacks in their fourth year of detention, under questioning by F.B.I. agents at Guantánamo prison.And the prison site he visited, called Camp Echo, has played a central but covert role in the case. From 2003 to 2004, the C.I.A. kept five prized prisoners there, near the prison facilities but out of reach of the International Red Cross. It was part of its secret overseas network that hid about 120 “high-value detainees” in such far-flung sites as Afghanistan, Thailand and Poland.In April 2004, the agency closed the black site at Guantánamo and moved those five prisoners to other secret sites, on the advice of the Justice Department, to avoid a looming U.S. Supreme Court decision later that year that granted detainees at U.S.-controlled Guantánamo Bay access to lawyers.After President George W. Bush ordered Mr. Mohammed and 13 other C.I.A. prisoners be moved to Guantánamo in September 2006 to face trial, federal agents used the same portion of Camp Echo to obtain ostensibly lawful confessions by what the prosecutors called “clean teams.”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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      Terry Anderson, Reporter Held Hostage for Six Years, Dies at 76

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      The Beirut bureau chief for The Associated Press, he was kidnapped in 1985 by Islamic militants.Terry Anderson, the American journalist who had been the longest-held Western hostage in Lebanon when he was finally released in 1991 by Islamic militants after more than six years in captivity, died on Saturday at his home in Greenwood Lake, N.Y., in the Hudson Valley. He was 76.The cause was apparently complications of recent heart surgery, said his daughter, Sulome Anderson.Mr. Anderson, the Beirut bureau chief for The Associated Press, had just dropped his tennis partner, an A.P. photographer, at his home after an early morning tennis match on March 16, 1985, when men armed with pistols yanked open his car door and shoved him into a Mercedes-Benz. The same car had tried to cut him off the day before as he returned to work from lunch at his seaside apartment.The kidnappers, identified as Shia Hezbollah militants of the Islamic Jihad Organization in Lebanon, beat him, blindfolded him and kept him chained in some 20 hideaways for 2,454 days in Beirut, South Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley.The militants, supported by Iran, indicated that they were retaliating against Israel’s use of American weapons in earlier strikes against Muslim and Druze targets in Lebanon. They also had been seeking to pressure the Reagan administration to secretly facilitate the illegal sales of weapons to Iran — an embarrassing scheme that became known as the Iran-Contra Affair because the administration had planned to use proceeds from the arms sales to secretly subsidize the right-wing Contra rebels in Nicaragua.Mr. Anderson was the last of 18 Western hostages released by the kidnappers. After his release, he married his fiancé, who had been pregnant when he was kidnapped, and, for the first time, met his 6-year-old daughter.While he had not been tortured during his captivity, he said, he was beaten and chained. He spent a year or so, on and off, in solitary confinement, he 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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      Surveillance Law Section 702 Keeps Us Safe

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      This is an extraordinarily dangerous time for the United States and our allies. Israel’s unpreparedness on Oct. 7 shows that even powerful nations can be surprised in catastrophic ways. Fortunately, Congress, in a rare bipartisan act, voted early Saturday to reauthorize a key intelligence power that provides critical information on hostile states and threats ranging from terrorism to fentanyl trafficking.Civil libertarians argued that the surveillance bill erodes Americans’ privacy rights and pointed to examples when American citizens got entangled in investigations. Importantly, the latest version of the bill adds dozens of legal safeguards around the surveillance in question — the most expansive privacy reform to the legislation in its history. The result preserves critical intelligence powers while protecting Americans’ privacy rights in our complex digital age.At the center of the debate is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Originally passed in 1978, it demanded that investigators gain an order from a special court to surveil foreign agents inside the United States. Collecting the communications of foreigners abroad did not require court approval.That line blurred in the digital age. Many foreign nationals rely on American providers such as Google and Meta, which route or store data in the United States, raising questions as to whether the rules apply to where the targets are or where their data is collected. In 2008, Congress addressed that conundrum with Section 702. Instead of requiring the government to seek court orders for each foreign target, that provision requires yearly judicial approval of the rules that govern the program as a whole. That way, the government can efficiently obtain from communication providers the calls and messages of large numbers of foreign targets — 246,073 in 2022 alone.Since then, Section 702 has supplied extraordinary insight into foreign dangers, including military threats, theft of American trade secrets, terrorism, hacking and fentanyl trafficking. In 2022 intelligence from 702 helped the government find and kill the Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri, one of the terrorists responsible for Sept. 11. Almost 60 percent of the articles in the president’s daily intelligence briefing include information from Section 702.Although Section 702 can be used only to target foreigners abroad, it does include Americans when they interact with foreign targets. Not only is such incidental collection inevitable in today’s globalized world; it can be vital to U.S. security. If a terrorist or spy abroad is communicating with someone here, our government must find out why.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