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A jury deliberated less than two days before finding Adis Medunjanin guilty of conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction, attempting to commit an act of terrorism and other terrorism charges. At trial, the jurors had heard the first-time testimony from admitted homegrown terrorists about al-Qaida‘s determination to strike America on its home turf.

Hear Medunjanin’s 911 call here:

The former classmates, Najibullah Zazi and Zarein Ahmedzay, testified that the three men sought terror training after falling under the influence of inflammatory recordings of U.S.-born extremist cleric Anwar al-Awlaki that they downloaded and listened to on their iPods.
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Medunjanin’s “journey of radicalization led him from Flushing, Queens to Peshawar, Pakistan, to the brink of a terrorist attack in New York City,” U.S. Attorney Loretta Lynch said in a statement. “As this case has proved, working against sophisticated terrorist organizations and against the clock, our law enforcement and intelligence agencies can detect, disrupt and destroy terrorist cells before they strike, saving countless innocent lives.”

Medunjanin, 27, showed no emotion as the jury foreman announced the verdict in federal court in Brooklyn. Afterward, the former security guard asked defense attorney Robert Gottlieb to “tell his family to be strong,” the lawyer said.

Gottlieb said there would be an appeal. His client faces a possible life term at sentencing on Sept. 7.

The government’s case was built on the testimony of Zazi, Ahmedzay and two other men: a British would-be shoe bomber and a man originally from Long Island who gave al-Qaida pointers on how best to attack a Walmart store.

Zazi and Ahmedzay, who testified as part of plea deal, told jurors that the scheme unfolded after the trio traveled to Pakistan in 2008 to avenge the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.

While receiving terror training at outposts in the South Waziristan region of Pakistan, al-Qaida operatives encouraged the American recruits to return home for a suicide-bombing mission intended to spread panic and cripple the economy. Among the targets considered were New York Stock Exchange, Times Square and Grand Central Terminal, the men testified.

In a later meeting in New York, the plotters decided to strap on bombs and blow themselves up at rush hour on Manhattan subway lines because the transit system is “the heart of everything in New York City,” Zazi said.

Zazi told jurors how he learned to extract explosives ingredients from nail polish remover, hydrogen peroxide and other products sold at beauty supply stores. When leaving Pakistan, he relocated to Colorado, where he perfected a homemade detonator in a hotel room and set out for New York City by car around the eighth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.

The plot – financed in part by $50,000 in credit card charges – was abandoned after Zazi noticed that everywhere he drove in New York, a car followed.

“I think law enforcement is on us,” he recalled telling Ahmedzay. Later, he said he told Medunjanin in a text message, “We are done.”

Defense attorneys had admitted that the Bosnian-born Medunjanin wanted to fight for the Taliban, but they insisted he never agreed to spread death and destruction in the city where his family put down roots.

Medunjanin went overseas to fulfill a “romantic version of jihad. … His plan and intent was to join the Taliban and stand up for what he believes in,” Gottlieb said in his closing. “That was his purpose.”

Before trial, the defense had failed to get a judge to bar incriminating post-arrest statements by Medunjanin that his lawyers said were coerced.

According to FBI reports, Medunjanin recounted telling his al-Qaida handlers that “he had prayed but still wasn’t sure he was ready to be a martyr,” the reports said. He later was sent home on his own, the reports said, to “provide financial support” for the terror network.

He told the agents who interviewed him that they “were like enemy combatants to him,” the reports added.

Aside from Zazi and Ahmedzay, two other convicted terrorists were called as witnesses to give a rare glimpse into al-Qaida’s training methods and the mindset of its leadership.

In a videotaped deposition made public for the first time during the trial, Saajid Badat recounted a clandestine meeting where Osama bin Laden explained the rationale behind the failed plot for Badat and Richard Reid to attack trans-Atlantic flights with bombs hidden in shoes.

Bin Laden “said the American economy is like a chain,” the British man said. “If you break one – one link of the chain – the whole economy will be brought down. So after Sept. 11 attacks, this operation will ruin the aviation industry and in turn the whole economy will come down.”

Bryant Neal Vinas, of Patchogue on Long Island, testified that he went to Pakistan in 2007 and later joined al-Qaida forces in an attack against American soldiers.

Vinas described how he suggested to others in al-Qaida in the summer of 2008 that they could plant explosives in suitcase aboard a Long Island Rail Road train or hide them inside a television that was being returned to a Walmart.

An attack on the popular retail outlet “would cause a very big economy hit,” he said.

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A video about the atrocities carried out by Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army is rocketing into viral video territory and is racking up millions of page views seemingly by the hour.

The marketing campaign is an effort by the advocacy group Invisible Children to create even greater awareness about a jungle militia leader who is wanted for atrocities by the International Criminal Court and is being hunted by 100 U.S. Special Forces operators in four Central African countries.

The group’s roughly 30-minute video, which was released Monday, had more than 21 million views on YouTube by Thursday. The movie is part of an effort called KONY 2012 that targets Kony and the LRA.

According to the official, Holder plans to say in a major speech on Monday at Northwestern University law school in Chicago that lethal force is legal under a Sept. 18, 2001, joint congressional resolution.

The Authorization for Use of Military Force enacted a week after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks authorizes the use of all necessary force in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States.

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The official said Holder also will address how the Obama administration reformed military commissions and how both the Obama and the George W. Bush administrations have successfully used civilian courts to convict and sentence terrorists. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the contents of the speech haven’t been released.

In recent months, the Obama administration has engaged in an internal debate about how much to reveal about the legal justification for the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki.

The al-Qaida cleric who was born in New Mexico and once preached at an Islamic center in Falls Church, Va., was killed in September by a joint CIA-U.S. military drone strike on a convoy in Yemen. He had been in the U.S. crosshairs since his killing was approved by President Barack Obama in April 2010 – making him the first American placed on the CIA “kill or capture” list.

At least three recently filed lawsuits have sought to force the Obama administration to publicly release its legal justification for the attack. The justification is contained in a secret Justice Department memo.

The administration has provided some details about what al-Awlaki was doing that made him so dangerous to the United States. In that vein, the Justice Department disclosed that a Nigerian man who tried to blow up an international flight on Christmas 2009 told FBI agents that his mission was approved after a three-day visit with al-Awlaki.

The man, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was sentenced last month to life in prison after admitting he attempted to blow up the plane with a bomb in his underwear as the plane approached Detroit.

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Amine El Khalifi of Alexandria, Va., was taken into custody with an inoperable gun and inert explosives, according to a counter-terrorism official. He arrived near the Capitol in a van with the two undercover FBI officers, and walked toward the building, according to court papers. He was arrested before he left the parking garage.

El Khalifi made a brief appearance in federal court in Alexandria, Va., on Friday afternoon, wearing a green shirt and black pants and holding his arms together behind his back. A judge set a bail hearing for Wednesday at 2 p.m.

FBI agents in blue jackets raided a red brick rambler in Arlington after the arrest. A police car blocked the entrance.

A criminal complaint charges him with knowingly and unlawfully attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction against property that is owned and used by the United States. The charge carries a maximum penalty of life in prison.

El Khalifi, who was under constant surveillance, expressed interest in killing at least 30 people and considered targeting a building in Alexandria and a restaurant, synagogue and a place where military personnel gather in Washington before he settled on the Capitol after canvassing that area a couple of times, the counterterrorism official said. During the investigation, El Khalifi went with undercover operatives to a quarry in West Virginia in January to practice detonating explosives, according to court documents.

El Khalifi came to the U.S. when he was 16 years old and is unemployed and not believed to be associated with al-Qaida. He had been under investigation for about a year and had overstayed his visitor visa, which expired in 1999, making him in the country illegally, according to court documents.

According to the affidavit filed by an FBI agent, El Khalifi told acquaintances in January 2011 that he agreed the “war on terrorism” was a “war on Muslims” and that they needed to be ready for war.

Before settling on a plot to conduct a suicide bombing in the Capitol, El Khalifi considered blowing up an office building in Alexandria, where military officials worked and a restaurant in Washington to target military officials who gathered there. He even purchased supplies including nails for the operation, according to the affidavit.

Later, when he settled on bombing the Capitol, El Khalifi asked his associates for more explosives that would be detonated by dialing a cellphone number. In January, he unknowingly told authorities he wanted to know if an explosion would be large enough to destroy an entire building.

El Khalifi met with two undercover law enforcement officers, who gave him an automatic weapon, which had been rendered inoperable. El Khalifi carried the firearm around the room, practiced pulling the trigger and looking at himself in the mirror.

A former landlord in Arlington, Va., said he believed El Khalifi was suspicious and called police a year and a half ago.

Frank Dynda said when he told El Khalifi to leave, the suspect said he had a right to stay and threatened to beat up Dynda. Dynda said he thought El Khalifi was making bombs, but police told him to leave the man alone. Dynda had El Khalifi evicted in 2010.

El Khalifi had several men staying with him and based on packages left for him, Dynda said. It appeared that he was running a luggage business from the apartment, though Dynda never saw any bags.

“I reported to police I think he’s making bombs,” Dynda said. “I was ready to get my shotgun and run him out of the building, but that would have been a lot of trouble.”

Two people briefed on the matter told The Associated Press he FBI has had him under surveillance around the clock for several weeks. They spoke on a condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

Police are close to arresting one of El Khalifi’s associates on charges unrelated to the terror conspiracy, the counterterrorism official said. The associate was said to also be a Moroccan, living here illegally. Police are investigating others El Khalifi associated with, but not because they believe the associates were part of a terror conspiracy, the official said.

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Abdulrazak Jbero was on his way by from Damascus to Idlib when he was shot, said Hicham Hassan, an ICRC spokesman in Geneva. An ICRC statement said he was riding in a “vehicle clearly marked with a Red Crescent emblem” and expressed shock at the killing.

Syria’s state-run media blamed “terrorists” for the attack.

President Bashar Assad’s regime claims terrorists acting out a foreign conspiracy are behind the country’s 10-month-old uprising, not protesters seeking change in one of the region’s most autocratic states.

The Syrian revolt, which began 10 months ago with largely peaceful protests, has grown increasingly militarized in recent months, as frustrated regime opponents and army defectors arm themselves and fight back against government forces.

On Wednesday, government forces clashed with army defectors and stormed rebellious districts in central Syria, firing mortars and deploying snipers in violence that killed at least seven people, including a mother and her 5-year-old child, activists said.

Pressure on Syria to end 10 months of bloodshed has so far produced few results. Gulf states led by Saudi Arabia have pulled out of the Arab League’s observers mission, asking the U.N. Security Council to intervene. Decisive action from the U.N. appeared unlikely, however, as Russia, a strong Syrian ally, has opposed moves like sanctions.

While Syria has approved extension of the observers’ presence for another month, Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem signaled on Tuesday that the crackdown on protests will continue, insisting that Syria will solve its own problems.

A Syrian military assault near Hama began Tuesday night, according to the Local Coordination Committees, an umbrella group of activists and opposition members. Shells slammed into several districts around Hama’s Bab Qebli area, the LCC said.

“It was impossible to rescue the wounded due to the ongoing arbitrary shelling,” the group said in a statement.

Two people were killed by sniper fire, according to the LCC and another opposition group, the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

In the town of Qusair near the central city of Homs, a woman and her 5-year-old child were killed when a shell struck their home during clashes between government troops and gunmen believed to be army defectors, both groups said.

Three other people were killed during raids in a Damascus suburbs.

The Arab strategy to solve the crisis appears to be collapsing. After announcing their pullout from the observers mission, Gulf Arab countries urged the U.N. Security Council to take all “necessary measures” to force the country to implement a League peace plan announced Sunday to create a national unity government in two months.

Damascus has rejected the plan as a violation of national sovereignty.

The U.S., the European Union, the Arab League and Turkey all have introduced sanctions against Damascus in response to Assad’s crackdown, but Russia threatens to veto such measures.

Syria informed the Arab League Wednesday that it had agreed to extend the observer mission one month, until Feb. 24, said Adnan al-Khudeir, head of Cairo operations room that handles reports by the monitors.

He also said the League has put together a new group of observers to replace the 55 GCC monitors, who were leaving Wednesday. They consist of 15 Mauritanians, 10 Palestinians and six Egyptians, and they will head to Syria within a week, he said.

Defectors clashed with government soldiers Wednesday in northern Syria’s Idlib province, activists said.

Soldiers siding with a group of anti-regime army defectors known as the Free Syrian Army are also known to be active in Hama, and some in the city said they were the target of the current government assault.

Residents near Hama reported hearing loud explosions throughout the night and on Wednesday and said phone lines to the targeted areas were down.

“They are trying to storm the Bab Qebli, Hamidiyeh and Malaab districts because defectors are there,” said Ahmad al-Jimejmi, an activist who spoke by telephone from a town several miles away.

A Jordanian man of Palestinian origin accused pro-regime forces of kidnapping and killing his 27-year old son in Hama.

Hafez Abu Osbeh said his son, Ahmed, 27, was kidnapped last Friday, and his body was left outside his mother’s residence three days later with gunshot wounds to his head. He said a description of the kidnappers’ vehicle pointed to government loyalists.

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Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich’s sentence ends a six-year prosecution for the 2005 attack that failed to win any manslaughter convictions. Eight Marines were initially charged; one was acquitted and six others had their cases dropped.

Wuterich, who admitted ordering his squad to “shoot first, ask questions later” after a roadside bomb killed a fellow Marine, ended his manslaughter trial by pleading guilty on Monday to a single count of negligent dereliction of duty.

The deal that dropped nine counts of manslaughter sparked outrage in the besieged Iraqi town and claims that the U.S. didn’t hold the military accountable.

“I was expecting that the American judiciary would sentence this person to life in prison and that he would appear and confess in front of the whole world that he committed this crime, so that America could show itself as democratic and fair,” said survivor Awis Fahmi Hussein, showing his scars from a bullet wound to the back.

Military judge Lt. Col. David Jones recommended three months of confinement, which prosecutors said Wuterich deserved; but after learning the terms governing the plea agreement, Jones said the deal prevented any jail time for the Marine.

Jones recommended that the sergeant’s rank be reduced to private, but not to dock his pay because the divorced father has sole custody of his three daughters. The rank reduction has to be approved by a Marine general, who already signed off on the plea deal.

Wuterich read a statement apologizing to the victims’ families and said he never fired on or intended to harm innocent women and children. But he said his plea shouldn’t be seen as a statement that he believes his squad dishonored their country.

“When my Marines and I cleared those houses that day, I responded to what I perceived as a threat and my intention was to eliminate that threat in order to keep the rest of my Marines alive,” he said. “So when I told my team to shoot first and ask questions later, the intent wasn’t that they would shoot civilians, it was that they would not hesitate in the face of the enemy.”

“The truth is I never fired my weapon at any women or children that day,” Wuterich told Jones.

The contention by Wuterich, 31, of Meriden, Conn., contradicts prosecutors and counters testimony from a former squad mate who said he joined Wuterich in firing in a dark back bedroom where a woman and children were killed.

Prosecutors argued that Wuterich’s knee-jerk reaction of sending the squad to assault nearby homes without positively identifying a threat went against his training and caused needless deaths of 10 women and children.

“That is a horrific result from that derelict order of shooting first, ask questions later,” said Lt. Col. Sean Sullivan, who also asked the judge to reduce Wuterich’s rank and require forfeiture of two-thirds of his pay.

Defense attorney Neal Puckett said Wuterich has been falsely labeled a killer who carried out a massacre in Iraq and insisted he only intended to protect his Marines in an “honorable and noble” act.

“The appropriate punishment in this case, your honor, is no punishment,” Puckett said.

Wuterich directly addressed family members of the Iraqi victims, saying there were no words to ease their pain.

“I wish to assure you that on that day, it was never my intention to harm you or your families. I know that you are the real victims of Nov. 19, 2005,” he said.

Military prosecutors worked for more than six years to bring Wuterich to trial on manslaughter charges that could have sent him away to prison for life. But only weeks after the long-awaited trial started, they offered Wuterich the deal that stopped the proceedings and dropped the nine counts of manslaughter.

It was a stunning outcome for the last defendant in the case once compared with the My Lai massacre in Vietnam.

The Haditha attack is considered among the war’s defining moments, further tainting America’s reputation when it was already at a low point after the release of photos of prisoner abuse by U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison.

Legal experts said the case was fraught with errors made by investigators and the prosecution that let it drag on for years. The prosecution was also hampered by the credibility of witnesses who acknowledged they initially lied and later testified in exchange for having their cases dropped.

Wuterich was also seen as taking the fall for senior leaders and more seasoned combat veterans, analysts said. It was his first time in combat.

Brian Rooney, an attorney who represented a former defendant, said cases like Haditha are difficult to prosecute because a military jury is unlikely to question decisions made in combat unless wrongdoing is clear-cut and egregious, like rape.

“If it’s a gray area, fog-of-war, you can’t put yourself in a Marine’s situation where he’s legitimately trying to do the best he can,” said Rooney, who represented Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani, the highest-ranking Marine charged in the case. “When you’re in a town like Haditha or Fallujah, you’ve got bad guys trying to kill you and trying to do it in very surreptitious ways.”

During the trial before a jury of combat Marines who served in Iraq, prosecutors argued Wuterich lost control after seeing the body of his friend blown apart by the bomb and led his men on a rampage, blasting their way in with gunfire and grenades. Among the dead was a man in a wheelchair.

Wuterich said his orders were based on the guidance of his platoon commander at the time. He has acknowledged the squad did not take any gunfire during the 45-minute raid.

Many of his squad mates testified that they do not believe to this day that they did anything wrong because they feared insurgents were inside hiding.

Haditha prompted commanders to demand troops be more careful in distinguishing between civilians and combatants.

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War:

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Terrorism: The French word terrorisme in turn derives from the Latin verb terreō meaning “I frighten.” Although “terrorism” originally referred acts committed by a government, currently it usually refers to the killing of innocent people by a non-government group in such a way as to create a media spectacle.

From the above, we see that war is between willing participants, and terrorism is a more no-holds-barred approach to attacking an enemy. The act of terrorism leaves civilians as potential targets.

When Timothy McVeigh help blow up a building April 19, 1995 in Oklahoma City, it made American’s stomach turn. What was even more mind blowing was the mentality of the killer. An American named Timothy McVeigh created unthinkable pain and suffering. Coming off cool as he wanted to be, his position on the innocent peopled killed was “To the people in Oklahoma who have lost a loved one, I’m sorry but it happens every day. You’re not the first mother to lose a kid, or the first grandparent to lose a grandson or a granddaughter. It happens every day, somewhere in the world. I’m not going to go into that courtroom, curl into a fetal ball and cry just because the victims want me to do that.”Terrorist follow the thought process of, “If you get caught in the crossfire, too bad for you.”

Before getting shot by Navy SEAL Team 6, Osama Bin Laden was known for allowing civilians to die without the least bit of concern. This was first apparent when he bombed Kenya in 1998. I was outraged then, but few others seemed concerned since it happened in Africa. Not long after, Bin Laden attacked on American soil and many American’s are still healing from the emotional scar. Once sharing his military philosophy Bin Laden said “In today’s wars, there are no morals. We believe the worst thieves in the world today and the worst terrorists are the Americans. We do not have to differentiate between military or civilian. As far as we are concerned, they are all targets.”

The above statement is far away from what the Prophet Muhammad taught his followers. According to the first Caliph of Islam, Abu Bakr, the general outline is “Stop, O people, that I may give you ten rules for your guidance in the battlefield. Do not commit treachery or deviate from the right path. You must not mutilate dead bodies. Neither kill a child, nor a woman, nor an aged man. Bring no harm to the trees, nor burn them with fire, especially those which are fruitful. Slay not any of the enemy’s flock, save for your food. You are likely to pass by people who have devoted their lives to monastic services; leave them alone.” Apparently what the founder of Islam taught, has fallen on many deaf ears of those that consider themselves to be ardent followers of the faith.

It wasn’t until I saw the compelling documentary The Power of Nightmares that I began to understand the psychology of how Muslim terrorists legitimize their horrific actions.

Obviously any group who uses terrorism will find an excuse (no matter how flimsy). No excuse is valid in reality.

So when Occupy Wall St. emerged, I was ready for the spectacle. Occupy has been a spectacle indeed. I’m sure to a 1%’er sitting aloft his Manhattan suite, the vision of the American masses letting their voices be heard must be frightening. Watching it spread from New York, to DC, to LA to Oakland and Portland was inspiring as well. I called a good friend of mine in New York and asked his opinion of Occupy movement? What he said stuck with me, genuinely. He said “As long is it stays nonviolent, I support it.”

For the most part it did. Despite heavy handed scenarios in various cities by some of the police, many Occupy activists have done a great job of keeping it nonviolent. But then they went after the Port of Oakland.

Some estimated the cost of the Port of Oakland shut down between 4-8 million dollars.

“The Occupy people say they respect the 99 percent, when they disrespect and disrupt what we do,” said Lavelle Brown, an independent trucker who lives in San Francisco. “If they want to protest the 1 percent, they should go to the Financial district.”

Another echoed what many to this day don’t understand about Occupy. Who are they for real? What do they want? Besides hitting the block what are they prepared to do?

“I’m trying to figure out what these people want with their movement,” said John Carino, a Tracy resident and truck driver who was attempting to deliver rice. “I’m trying to make a living doing this. These shutdowns are hurting us.”

There is no doubt that a lot of Oakland businesses have been cut bad by Occupy.

I saw a guy on the news who shined shoes downtown in Oakland. He said Occupy ran most of his customers away. He said that they made it so he can hardly survive. Beyond that, he said he none of the Occupy people ever got their shoes shined by him or kicked in money for the inconvenience they caused him.

The more I watch Occupy, the more I feel the nebulous strength that gave them power in the beginning has fizzled out. Now it seems their formless movement is losing effect and impact. I don’t say this out of disrespect. I understand the economic frustration the masses have. I am one of the frustrated masses. I also support free speech and the right to assemble peacefully. But all the economic collateral damage other 99%’ers have taken on makes me resent Occupy a little bit. I know they “mean well”, but if another 1%’er is suffering because of their actions, maybe they need to take new actions.

If they want to make war on the 1% they need to find direct, surgical tactics that leave others in the 99% economically sound and secure. If they don’t refine their psychology and actions, Occupy could disintegrate into the status of terrorists. I don’t want that for Occupy. Corporate greed is out of control. Many politicians are serving themselves and ignoring the needs of the people. But I don’t want 99%’ers to suffer economically. So what do we do?

I have never hit the block for an Occupy protest. Based on the collateral damage I’ve seen, I doubt I ever will. At the same time, I support the spirit of what they are doing. How do we close the gap?

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Several current and former U.S. officials said the most substantive give-and-take to date between U.S. and Taliban negotiators could happen in the next week, with the goal of establishing what the U.S. calls confidence-building measures – specific steps that the U.S. and the insurgents agree to take ahead of formal talks. Those talks, if they ever take place, would include the United States, the Taliban and the Afghan government of President Hamid Karzai, a senior U.S. official said.

Like others interviewed, the official spoke on condition of anonymity to describe sensitive diplomacy. Elements of the U.S. outreach to the Taliban are also classified.

The diplomatic, military and intelligence branches of the U.S. government differ over the value of talks with the Taliban or whether now is the right time to so publicly shift focus away from the ongoing military campaign that primarily targets Taliban insurgents. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and some uniformed military leaders have recently sounded some of the strongest notes of caution, especially on when to grant Taliban requests for the transfer of several of its prisoners from the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, military and other U.S. officials said.

The latest Afghan National Intelligence Estimate warns that the Taliban will grow stronger, using the talks to gain credibility and run out the clock until U.S. troops depart Afghanistan, while continuing to fight for more territory, say U.S. officials who have read the classified document. They spoke on condition of anonymity to describe the roughly 100-page review, an amalgam of intelligence community’s predictions of possible scenarios for the Afghan war through the planned end to U.S. combat in 2014.

It says the Afghan government has largely failed to prove itself to its people and will likely continue to weaken and find influence only in the cities. It predicts that the Taliban and warlords will largely control the countryside.

Meanwhile, Karzai is still uneasy with the pace and direction of talks. He resents the selection of Qatar as the site of a Taliban political office, although he has reluctantly agreed to that U.S.-backed plan. And he worries that the United States will strike a deal with the Taliban and force that deal on his government, two Afghan officials told The Associated Press, speaking on condition of anonymity to describe sensitive discussions. Karzai wanted the office located in Saudi Arabia, Turkey or Afghanistan.

U.S. officials close to the negotiations say that despite these warnings the Taliban high command is more ready for talks than in the past, at least with the United States if not the elected Afghan government it opposes.

One sign was the surprising public endorsement by the Taliban of the plan to open a negotiating office in the Persian Gulf state of Qatar. But U.S. officials also cite more subtle indications of a shift toward peace negotiations, including the recent participation in preliminary talks of more senior and influential Taliban representatives.

The senior U.S. official said negotiators are now confident they are talking to credible intermediaries for the main Taliban command based in Pakistan.

The administration’s top negotiator, Marc Grossman, was building support for talks among regional allies such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia this week, to be followed by discussions with Taliban representatives, U.S. and other government officials said. Ahead of those sessions, officials described them as the most substantive and highest-level to date, with plans to cover specifics of the new office and the sequence of further good faith efforts on both sides that would set the stage for real talks.

One topic was expected to be a U.S. offer to release two or three Taliban prisoners from Guantanamo to custody in Qatar, although two officials said that effort is moving more slowly than plans for the office. A waiting period would follow that transfer before any other Taliban transfers would be considered. U.S. officials said Congress would be consulted throughout.

The Taliban had sought both the office and the prisoner release as preconditions for real talks.

The senior U.S. official said the U.S. has set clear conditions for opening the office, including that the Taliban must agree not to use it for fundraising or propaganda, or to run insurgent operations. Larger conditions include assurances that the insurgents are truly interested in a political settlement and not using negotiations as a way to run out the clock until U.S. forces leave.

The central political office confers instant, though controversial, legitimacy on the diffuse insurgency as a political movement and provides a site for formal talks. The idea is to give the Taliban room to negotiate in a location with less direct pressure from Pakistan, which has ties to some militant groups and houses parts of the Taliban leadership.

The U.S. intelligence assessment looks past the near horizon for talks.

It predicts the likely outcome of two strategies: moderate engagement, in which the U.S. continues special operations raids against key Taliban leaders, and village outreach to strengthen local government, while conventional forces train Afghanistan’s army and police force, and limited engagement, in which the U.S. would continue economic and political support, and some Afghan security training, but most troops would withdraw.

Both strategies can weaken the Taliban, the analysts say, but ultimately, neither course of action is likely to stop the continued weakening of the Afghan state, the officials said. The NIE did suggest eliminating top Taliban leaders in the next two years and continuing to build Afghan government could help offset that.

In that way, the NIE’s bleak predictions also give the White House reason to hasten the reconciliation process, in order to pull U.S. troops out what some analysts termed a hopeless stalemate.

Arsala Rahmani a former Taliban official turned Afghan peace negotiator, said that in the past year the Taliban leadership had expressed to the United States a new willingness to negotiate.

“Something happened,” said Rahmani, a member of the Afghanistan peace council. “The leadership of the Taliban saw a green light from the Obama administration and after that, the Taliban leadership appointed people to get involved in the negotiation process.”

Although U.S. and Taliban representatives have met secretly several times over the past year in Europe and the Persian Gulf, the Taliban endorsement of the office plan on Jan. 3 was the first time it has publicly expressed willingness for substantive negotiations.

U.S. and other officials also said they are encouraged by the insurgents’ apparent plans to staff the new headquarters office with senior figures with ties to top Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar.

The U.S. considers full peace negotiations on the model of Northern Ireland or the former Yugoslavia to be a long shot now, several officials said. But the administration is trying to build a framework for political discussions between the Taliban and the Karzai government that could span the next two years when U.S. combat forces will withdraw.

The Taliban sought direct talks with the U.S., whom it considers the true power broker in Afghanistan, as an alternative to talks with the Karzai government. The United States had shunned such contacts for years, saying talks must be led by Afghans and that military gains must be consolidated before talks would be productive.

The Obama administration shifted course last year and opened the direct channel in secret. The U.S. acknowledged the previously clandestine contacts only after they were revealed publicly, apparently by allies of Karzai who felt undermined by the separate channel.

There were multiple avenues of communication between the U.S. and the Taliban over the last year, some public and others through back channels. The senior U.S. official said none was judged to be an authentic direct message from Omar.

The United States considers Omar a terrorist who could be killed by U.S. forces in the same manner as Osama bin Laden. But the U.S. also recognizes that Omar is the linchpin to a deal that could finally end the war that began with the 2001 U.S. invasion and ouster of the ruling Taliban government. The Taliban has sought a return to political and territorial influence ever since, primarily through guerrilla tactics.

U.S. and Afghan officials think Omar is interested.

A personal emissary of Omar, Tayyab Agha, conducted the initial, tentative contacts with the U.S. last year and remains a lead negotiator.

Rahmani said other Taliban negotiators include Shahabuddin Dilawar, former Taliban ambassador to Saudi Arabia; and Mohammed Sher Abbas Stanikzai., former deputy health minister during the Taliban regime. Without approval from Omar, these people would not have been appointed, he said.

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Authorities said Kabiru Sokoto planned the bombing that killed 38 people at St. Theresa Catholic Church in Madalla, just outside Nigeria’s capital Abuja. But his arrest at the mansion of a state governor in Abuja, and subsequent escape, raised more questions about the government’s ability to stop the radical sect, known as Boko Haram, which claimed responsibility for the church attack.

Federal police spokesman Olusola Amore said in statement that a local commissioner ordered Sokoto transferred to another police station in Abaji, just outside of Abuja and that the policemen escorting him were attacked by suspected sect gang members who freed him.

Commanders have suspended the local police commissioner and are investigating his actions, as well as those of the officers guarding Sokoto, Amore said.

Amore did not say whether there were injuries suffered in the attack. He could not be immediately reached for comment.

The statement did not address Sokoto’s arrest occurring at the official compound of the Borno state governor in Abuja as widely reported in the media. Borno state, in Nigeria’s arid and dusty northeast, is Boko Haram’s spiritual home.

The Christmas Day bombing targeted target worshippers at a Catholic church as they were leaving Mass, witnesses said. It was one of several attacks that day that killed at least 42 people, drawing worldwide criticism and new attention to Boko Haram.

The sect has carried out increasingly sophisticated and bloody attacks in its campaign to implement strict Shariah law across Nigeria, a multiethnic nation of more than 160 million people. Boko Haram, whose name means “Western education is sacrilege” in the local Hausa language, is responsible for at least 510 killings last year alone, according to an Associated Press count.

So far this year, the group, that has warned it will kill Christians living in Nigeria’s predominantly Muslim north, has been blamed for at least 74 killings. That has further inflamed religious and ethnic tensions in Nigeria, which has seen ethnic violence kill thousands in recent years.

Boko Haram also claimed responsibility an August suicide car bombing that targeted the U.N. headquarters in the capital, killing 25 people and wounding more than 100.

In a video released last week, Imam Abubakar Shekau a Boko Haram leader, said the government could not handle attacks by the group.

Though President Goodluck Jonathan, a Christian from southern Nigeria, has declared emergency rule in some regions, the sect is blamed for almost daily attacks.

Jonathan has said he believes the sect has infiltrated security agencies and government offices in the country, though he has offered no evidence to back up the claim.

On Tuesday, authorities blamed Boko Haram gunmen for killing seven people in three separate attacks. Gunmen shot dead two soldiers distributing food to other service members, Borno state police commissioner Simeone Midenda said.

Two others were killed Monday when gunmen invaded their homes, military field operation officer Col. Victor Ebhaleme said. In Damaturu in nearby Yobe state, gunmen from the sect shot and killed three more people from Chad on Monday, Yobe state police chief Tanko Lawan said.

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And for just as long, they have known in their hearts it was wrong.

The video that surfaced this week of four Marines apparently urinating on three Taliban corpses has stirred outrage in the U.S. and beyond, but also focused attention on the brutalizing effects of war on those sent to wage it.

Reserve Marine Lt. Col. Paul Hackett, who teaches the law of war to Marines before they are sent off to Afghanistan, made it clear Friday that he was not condoning the Marines’ actions. But he warned against judging them too harshly, saying: “When you ask young men to go kill people for a living, it takes a whole lot of effort to rein that in.”

In the long history of war, the episode pales in comparison to other battlefield atrocities. But one difference this time was that, in the Internet age, it was captured on camera and instantly shared with the rest of the world.

“This outrage is so interesting to me because it almost tops that” of other, more ghastly war crimes, said psychologist Eric Zillmer, a Drexel University professor and co-editor of the book “Military Psychology: Clinical and Operational Applications.” “Because of the technology, the video, you actually see it. Most of the other war crimes, you heard about, you read about.”

The Geneva Conventions forbid the desecration of the dead, and officials in the U.S. and abroad have called for swift punishment for the four Marines, identified as members of the 3rd Battalion, 2nd Marines, which fought in the Afghan province of Helmand for seven months before returning to Camp Lejeune, N.C.

The prohibition against desecrating the battlefield dead is almost as old as war itself.

In Homer’s “Iliad,” the epic poem about the Trojan War, which may have occurred in the 12th century B.C., Achilles kills Hector and refuses to allow for a proper burial. He relents after Zeus sends word that Achilles “tempts the wrath of heaven too far” with his desire to “vent his mad vengeance on the sacred dead.”

In the 7th century, Abu Bakr, father-in-law of the prophet Muhammad and Islam’s first caliph, issued 10 rules to his people for their guidance on the battlefield. Among them: “You must not mutilate dead bodies.”

In 1907, the Hague Convention said that after every engagement, the combatants should take steps to protect the dead against “pillage.” The first Geneva Convention in 1949 addressed preventing the dead from “being despoiled.”

The history of war is replete with stories of atrocities committed to send a message. In the 15th century, Prince Vlad III of Wallachia struck fear in his Turkish enemies – and earned his gruesome nickname, Vlad the Impaler – by littering the battlefield with the impaled corpses of the vanquished.

Over the centuries, fingers, scalps and other body parts have been taken as battlefield trophies.

Nevertheless, Zillmer said the desecration of a dead foe is “taboo across cultures.”

“It doesn’t need to be explained to be inappropriate,” he said. “Anybody who looks at it says it’s disgusting.”

But, like Hackett, he said it can be difficult for soldiers, particularly members of a tightknit group, to go on killing missions and then just “switch off.” And he said the inhibitions against such misconduct tend to fall away as the number of participants increases, a phenomenon he calls “diffusion of responsibility.”

Soldiers have long understood that savagery begets savagery – or at least breeds indifference.

In his World War II memoir “With the Old Breed,” E.B. Sledge wrote of seeing the bloated, blackened corpse of a fellow Marine on the Pacific island of Peleliu, his head and hands cut off, his severed penis stuffed in his mouth.

“My emotions solidified into rage and a hatred for the Japanese beyond anything I ever had experienced,” he wrote. “From that moment on I never felt the least pity or compassion for them no matter what the circumstances. My comrades would field-strip their packs and pockets for souvenirs and take gold teeth, but I never saw a Marine commit the kind of barbaric mutilation the Japanese committed if they had access to our dead.”

Urinating on the dead is not exactly a new idea.

In the same book, Sledge wrote with disgust about a young Marine officer on Okinawa: “If he could, that `gentleman by the act of Congress’ would locate a Japanese corpse, stand over it, and urinate in its mouth. It was the most repulsive thing I ever saw an American do in the war. I was ashamed that he was a Marine officer.”

On the very day the video from Afghanistan emerged, Sgt. Sanick Dela Cruz took the stand in a courtroom at Camp Pendleton in California and testified that he urinated on the skull of a dead Iraqi in 2005. Dela Cruz made the admission during the court-martial of a Marine charged in the killings of 24 Iraqis in the town of Haditha.

Dela Cruz said he was overcome with grief over a comrade killed by a roadside bomb. “The emotion took over, sir,” he told a military defense attorney.

Marty Brenner, an anger management specialist in Beverly Hills, Calif., who treats combat veterans and civilians, said the acts depicted in the video – and the Marines’ recording of it – demonstrate rage.

“They have no other way of expressing their anger at these people,” Brenner said, “so what they’re doing is urinating on them to show, `I’m better. I want the world to see you guys are crap and that’s what you deserve.’”

In Jacksonville, N.C., the home of Camp Lejeune, some people resented criticism of the Marines over the video, and some expressed fear the footage would make their job harder.

“It demolished me to see that,” said Arthur Wade, a Vietnam veteran who retired in 1989. “If one of those men being urinated on was your father, would you want to help the United States?”

But Maynard Sinclair, a Marine veteran of Vietnam and the peacekeeping mission in Beirut, said the outrage shows the public’s naivete about war.

“I did a hell of a lot worse in Vietnam than urinate on some dead bodies,” he said. “We cut left ears off and wore them around our necks to show we were warriors, and we knew how to get revenge.”

Gary Solis, a former Marine Corps prosecutor and judge who teaches law of war at Georgetown University, said the Internet has added a dimension that soldiers in the past did not have to deal with: “In Vietnam, when you screwed up, no one back home heard about it.”

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The attacks by the sect known as Boko Haram come after it promised to kill Christians living in Nigeria’s largely Muslim north, exploiting long-standing religious and ethnic tensions in the multiethnic nation of more than 160 million people. The pledge by the leader of an umbrella organization called the Christian Association of Nigeria now raises the possibility of retaliatory violence.

In the last few days alone, Boko Haram has killed at least 44 people, despite the oil-rich nation’s president declaring a state of emergency in regions hit by the sect.

Speaking Saturday to journalists, Pastor Ayo Oritsejafor, president of the Christian Association of Nigeria, vowed the group’s members would adequately protect themselves from the sect. He declined to offer specifics, raising concerns about retaliation.

“We have decided to work out means to defend ourselves against these senseless killings,” Oritsejafor said.

In Yola, the capital of Adamawa state, gunmen covered their faces with black cloth when they attacked Apostolic Church on Friday night, local police commissioner Ade Shinaba said. Shinaba said at least eight worshippers died in that attack.

At a nearby beauty salon, at least three others were killed in a similar attack.

“Three gunmen with their faces covered with black cloth burst into my salon and started shooting at customers, chanting, ‘God is great, God is great,’” said Stephen Tizhe, 35.

Responding to the violence, Adamawa state Gov. Murtala Nyako ordered a 24-hour curfew through the rural state. The violence comes ahead of a planned gubernatorial election later this month.

In the town of Potiskum in Yobe state, gunmen set two banks ablaze with gasoline bombs, starting a gunfight with police that lasted three hours, local police commissioner Tanko Lawan said. At least two people were killed in the fight, he said.

On Saturday, sect gunmen also shot and killed two Christian students who attend the University of Maiduguri in nearby Borno state, local police commissioner Simeon Midenda said.

No arrests have been made in any of the attacks, authorities said.

The attacks came after gunmen claimed by Boko Haram attacked a town hall earlier that day in Mubi, Adamawa state, killing at least 20 people who had gathered for a meeting of the Christian Igbo ethnic group. On Thursday night, the sect also attacked a church in Gombe state, killing at least eight people.

In a statement Friday to The Daily Trust, the newspaper of record in Nigeria’s north, a Boko Haram spokesman using the nom de guerre Abul-Qaqa claimed responsibility for the attacks in Gombe and Mubi.

“We want to prove to the federal government of Nigeria that we can always change our tactics,” the spokesman said.

Boko Haram, whose name means “Western education is sacrilege” in the local Hausa language, is responsible for at least 510 killings last year alone, according to an Associated Press count. It has targeted churches in the past in its campaign to implement strict Shariah law across Nigeria.

The group claimed responsibility for attacks that killed at least 42 people in a Christmas Day strikes that included the bombing of a Catholic church near Abuja. The group also claimed an August suicide car bombing that targeted the U.N. headquarters in the capital, killing 25 people and wounding more than 100.

Nigeria’s central government has been slow to respond to the sect. On Dec. 31, President Goodluck Jonathan declared regions of Borno, Niger, Plateau and Yobe states to be under a state of emergency, meaning authorities can make arrests without proof and conduct searches without warrants. He also ordered international borders near Borno and Yobe state to be closed.

However, the areas where the recent church and town hall attacks happened are not in the areas marked by the president.

Boko Haram promised to begin attacking Christians in Nigeria’s north several days before the recent violence. The new killings have sparked fears among Christians living in the north about the group and caused some to flee. There also has been at least one report of retaliatory violence against Muslims living in Nigeria’s mostly Christian south in recent days as well.

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Pastor Johnson Jauro said the gunfire sprayed the Deeper Life Church in Gombe, the capital of Gombe state, injuring several worshippers and killing his wife and two others. He spoke at a local hospital, where a joint team of soldiers and police officers stood guard. Two other people later died at the hospital from their wounds and an Associated Press reporter saw their bodies.

Local police spokesman Ahmed Muhammad confirmed the attack, but declined to say how many people the gunmen killed and wounded.

The assault occurred as Nigeria remains under attack by the sect known as Boko Haram. The oil-rich nation’s president recently put regions of the country under a state of emergency due to the threat, but that did not include Gombe, which sits about 350 miles (570 kilometers) from Nigeria’s central capital, Abuja.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack, but suspicion immediately fell on Boko Haram. The sect has carried out increasingly sophisticated and bloody attacks in its campaign to implement strict Shariah law across Nigeria, a multiethnic nation of more than 160 million people.

Boko Haram, whose name means “Western education is sacrilege” in the local Hausa language, is responsible for more than 500 killings this year alone, according to an Associated Press count. The group claimed responsibility for an attack that killed at least 39 people in a Christmas Day bombing of a Catholic church near Abuja, as well as a suicide car bombing targeting the U.N. headquarters in the capital that killed 25 people and wounded more than 100.

Nigeria’s weak central government has been slow to respond to the sect.

On Dec. 31, President Goodluck Jonathan declared regions of Borno, Niger, Plateau and Yobe states to be under a state of emergency – meaning authorities can make arrests without proof and conduct searches without warrants. He also ordered international borders near Borno and Yobe state to be closed.

However, it remains unclear what effect that will have on a sect that has adopted hit-and-run attacks and suicide bombings to target the country’s military and police, as well as civilians.

Meanwhile, a military spokesman said Thursday that soldiers killed two armed men suspected to be Boko Haram members after “resisting arrest” in the northeastern city of Maiduguri. Lt. Col. Hassan Ifijeh Mohammed said the army believes the gunmen were responsible for an attack Wednesday evening that left two people dead.

However, human rights activists say security forces have carried out so-called “extra-judicial killings” out of frustration and anger at being unable to stop Boko Haram.

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Although U.S. and Taliban representatives have met secretly several times over the past year in Europe and the Persian Gulf, this is the first time the Islamist insurgent group has publicly expressed willingness for substantive negotiations.

In recent months, the idea of a Taliban political office in the Qatari capital of Doha has become a central element in U.S. efforts to draw the insurgents into such talks. The idea is to give the Taliban more legitimacy to negotiate in a location that presumably would at least partly shield them from Pakistani pressure.

Asked about the Taliban announcement, White House spokesman Jay Carney welcomed “any step … of the Afghan-led process toward reconciliation.” He noted that “peace cannot come to Afghanistan without a political settlement.”

But negotiations could falter if they do not sufficiently involve President Hamid Karzai’s government, which the Taliban have dismissed as a puppet regime. Karzai’s inner circle derailed last year’s behind-the-scenes talks, and the Afghan leader only grudgingly agreed to the idea of the Taliban’s setting up a liaison office in Qatar.

Another potential spoiler is Pakistan, which houses most of the Taliban leadership as well as the Haqqani network, which carries out major attacks in the Afghan capital of Kabul. Pakistan believes it should have a say in any talks involving neighboring Afghanistan, which it fears will develop an alliance with its archrival, India.

Pakistan has rejected U.S. requests to mount an offensive against the Haqqani network, and relations between the two countries are at an all-time low following a cross-border incident that resulted in NATO airstrikes killing 24 Pakistani soldiers.

As the United States begins to draw down the nearly 100,000 forces it has in Afghanistan, President Barack Obama’s administration wants to use its current extensive military campaign and an acknowledged but incomplete plan for a long-term American presence in the country as leverage to draw the Taliban into talks with Karzai representatives.

The likelihood that the Taliban will remain a potent fighting force after most foreign forces leave by the end of 2014 is driving the U.S. and NATO to seek even an incomplete bargain with the insurgents that would keep them talking with the Kabul government.

For the U.S., one goal of such talks would be to identify cease-fire zones that could be used as a steppingstone toward a full peace agreement that stops most fighting.

The gradual process of handing over areas of the country to Afghan security control would ideally be marshaled toward encouraging peace talks, by identifying areas where a cease-fire could be tested, a senior administration official told The Associated Press last week.

Obama is hosting a NATO summit in his hometown of Chicago in May that will focus on Afghanistan, and his administration would like some good news to announce in an election year. U.S. officials are always careful to say that talks with the Taliban are not a reward for good behavior, but rather that they serve American interests.

“You don’t negotiate with your friends,” State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said Tuesday.

“But this process will only be successful if those Taliban are prepared to renounce violence, break ties with al-Qaida, support the Afghan constitution in all of its elements, including human rights for all citizens, and particularly for women,” Nuland said.

It was unclear why the Taliban agreed publicly to hold talks. Previously, the official Taliban position was no talks until the U.S.-led coalition leaves Afghanistan.

By their own admission, the Taliban hope to win the release of about five prisoners from the U.S. lockup at Guantanamo Bay.

The militants have taken a pounding in their southern heartland, and foreign troops have escalated a campaign against them in eastern Afghanistan. Hundreds of their low- and middle-level commanders have been picked up in night raids carried out by Afghan and coalition forces.

Talks have been held in the past about a location for a Taliban office, and other locations included Saudi Arabia and Turkey. But Qatar apparently emerged as a preferred neutral Islamic country where the U.S. also has a large military presence.

“The Taliban have chosen Qatar because it supported their government, and the Americans chose it because they have their big military and intelligence base in Qatar,” said Abdul Hadi Khaled, an ethnic Tajik who served as a deputy interior minister in Karzai’s Cabinet.

“Overall I hope that this is a start, but the rest of the work should be in this country and the Afghan government should be fully involved in the peace process,” Khaled said.

The Taliban announcement came in the form of a statement e-mailed to the Kabul press corps and posted on the militants’ website.

“Right now, having a strong presence in Afghanistan, we still want to have a political office for negotiations,” said the statement, attributed to Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid. “In this regard, we have started preliminary talks and we have reached a preliminary understanding with relevant sides, including the government of Qatar, to have a political office for negotiations with the international community.”

The statement did not say when the office would open.

One member of the Taliban negotiating team has been publicly identified as Tayyab Aga, an emissary of Pakistan-based Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar. Other participants include a former Taliban ambassador to Saudi Arabia and a former Taliban deputy health minister, a senior Afghan official in the region said recently on condition that he not be identified.

The Taliban statement indicated that the liaison office will conduct negotiations with the international community but not with the Afghan government – a condition that Karzai has indicated he would reject.

“There are two essential sides in the current situation in the country that has been ongoing for the past 10 years. One is the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan and the other side is the United States of America and their foreign allies,” Mujahid said, referring to the name of Afghanistan under Taliban rule more than a decade ago.

Karzai’s office had no immediate comment.

The prospect of formal peace talks suffered a serious setback in September when Burhanuddin Rabbani, a former Afghan president and the head of the High Peace Council, was assassinated by an attacker posing as a Taliban peace emissary.

After Rabbani’s death, Karzai said peace efforts could take place only if the Taliban established a political office that would be authorized to conduct talks.

Last month, Karzai initially balked when the plan for Qatar appeared to have been settled without him, officials said, and recalled his ambassador to Doha for consultations. Karzai backed down in late December.

The U.S. goal is to midwife talks between the insurgents and the American-backed Afghan government led by Karzai, who frequently has felt sidelined by the U.S. as it pursues talks with the Taliban. He bills peace talks as an Afghan-led process, which the U.S. insists is also its goal.

The U.S. outreach is meant to jump-start negotiations, U.S. officials have said, but they acknowledge that their efforts can feed the perception that Karzai is not fully in charge.

Wahid Muzhda, a former Taliban foreign ministry official and an analyst on issues related to the group, said any talks would probably be “between the Americans and Taliban, but the Afghan government or High Peace Council representatives will be in the talks.”

For its part, the Taliban statement said the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan has “requested for the exchange of prisoners from Guantanamo.”

The AP has learned the identity of some of these prisoners, including Khairullah Khairkhwa, former Taliban governor of Herat, and Mullah Mohammed Fazl, a former top Taliban military commander believed responsible for sectarian killings before the U.S. invasion that toppled the Taliban government in Afghanistan in 2001.

At the White House, Carney said “we’re not in a position to discuss ongoing deliberations or individual detainees, but our goal of closing Guantanamo is well-established and widely understood.”

The Taliban are holding Bowe Bergdahl, a 25-year-old U.S. Army sergeant from Hailey, Idaho. Bergdahl, the only U.S. soldier held by the insurgents, was captured on June 30, 2009, in Afghanistan.

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The aid group said Friday that the exact circumstances of the gunfire a day earlier is not immediately clear. However, a security guard, Ahmed Ali, said Thursday that a disgruntled former employee of Doctors Without Borders, a Somali dismissed the day before, had returned and opened fire.

The aid group identified the victims as Philippe Havet, 53, of Belgium, and Andrias Karel Keiluhu, 44, an Indonesian doctor best known as Kace.

In its statement, Doctors Without Borders said one victim died on the spot and the second at a hospital after surgery.

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At least 35 people died at St. Theresa and dozens more were wounded as radical Muslim militants launched coordinated attacks across Africa’s most populous nation within hours of one another. Four more people were killed in other violence blamed on the group known as Boko Haram.

Crowds gathered among the burned-out cars in the church’s dirt parking lot Monday, angry over the attack and fearful that the group will target more of their places of worship.

It was the second year in a row that the extremists seeking to install Islamic Shariah law across the country of 160 million staged such attacks. Last year, a series of bombings on Christmas Eve killed 32 people in Nigeria.

Rev. Father Christopher Jataudarde told The Associated Press that Sunday’s blast happened as church officials gave parishioners white powder as part of a tradition celebrating the birth of Christ. Some already had left the church at the time of the bombing, causing the massive casualties.

In the ensuing chaos, a mortally wounded man had cradled his wounded stomach and begged a priest for religious atonement. “Father, pray for me. I will not survive,” he said.

At least 52 people were wounded in the blast, said Slaku Luguard, a coordinator with Nigeria’s National Emergency Management Agency. Victims filled the cement floors of a nearby government hospital, some crying in pools of their own blood.

Pope Benedict XVI denounced the bombing at his post-Christmas blessing Monday, urging people to pray for the victims and Nigeria’s Christian community.

“In this moment, I want to repeat once again with force: Violence is a path that leads only to pain, destruction and death. Respect, reconciliation and love are the only path to peace,” he said.

The U.N. Security Council condemned the attacks “in the strongest terms” and called for the perpetrators, organizers, financiers and sponsors “of these reprehensible acts” to be brought to justice.

The African Union also condemned the attacks and pledged to support Nigeria in its fight against terrorism.

“Boko Haram’s continued acts of terror and cruelty and absolute disregard for human life cannot be justified by any religion or faith,” said a statement attributed to AU commission chairman Jean Ping.

On Sunday, a bomb also exploded amid gunfire in the central Nigeria city of Jos and a suicide car bomber attacked the military in the nation’s northeast. Three people died in those assaults.

After the bombings, a Boko Haram spokesman using the nom de guerre Abul-Qaqa claimed responsibility for the attacks in an interview with The Daily Trust, the newspaper of record across Nigeria’s Muslim north. The sect has used the newspaper in the past to communicate with the public.

“There will never be peace until our demands are met,” the newspaper quoted the spokesman as saying. “We want all our brothers who have been incarcerated to be released; we want full implementation of the Sharia system and we want democracy and the constitution to be suspended.”

Boko Haram has carried out increasingly sophisticated and bloody attacks in its campaign to implement strict Shariah law across Nigeria. The group, whose name means “Western education is sacrilege” in the local Hausa language, is responsible for at least 504 killings this year alone, according to an Associated Press count.

Last year, a series of Christmas Eve bombings in Jos claimed by the militants left at least 32 dead and 74 wounded. The group also claimed responsibility for the Aug. 26 bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Nigeria’s capital Abuja that killed 24 people and wounded 116 others.

While initially targeting enemies via hit-and-run assassinations from the back of motorbikes after the 2009 riot, violence by Boko Haram now has a new sophistication and apparent planning that includes high-profile attacks with greater casualties.

That has fueled speculation about the group’s ties as it has splintered into at least three different factions, diplomats and security sources say. They say the more extreme wing of the sect maintains contact with terror groups in North Africa and Somalia.

Targeting Boko Haram has remained difficult, as sect members are scattered throughout northern Nigeria and the nearby countries of Cameroon, Chad and Niger.

Analysts say political considerations also likely have played a part in the country’s thus-far muted response: President Goodluck Jonathan, a Christian from the south, may be hesitant to use force in the nation’s predominantly Muslim north.

Speaking late Sunday at a prayer service, Jonathan described the bombing as an “ugly incident.”

“There is no reason for these kind of dastardly acts,” the president said in a ceremony aired by the state-run Nigerian Television Authority. “It’s one of the burdens as a nation we have to carry. We believe it will not last forever.”

However, others don’t remain as sure as the president. The northern state section of the powerful Christian Association of Nigeria issued a statement late Monday night demanding government protection for its churches, warning that “the situation may degenerate to a religious war.”

“We shall henceforth in the midst of these provocations and wanton destruction of innocent lives and property be compelled to make our own efforts and arrangements to protect the lives of innocent Christians and peace loving citizens of this country,” the statement read.

“We are therefore calling on all Christians to be law abiding but defend themselves whenever the need arises.”

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Authorities say at least 25 people were killed by the explosion at the St. Theresa Catholic Church in Madalla, near the Nigerian capital, Abuja. Boko Haram, a radical Muslim sect waging a sectarian fight claimed the attack and another bombing near a church in the restive city of Jos.

The assaults come a year after a series of Christmas Eve bombings in Jos claimed by the militants left at least 32 dead and 74 wounded.

Benedict didn’t refer explicitly to the bombings in his Christmas Day survey of the world’s trouble spots, delivered from the sun-drenched loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica. But the Vatican issued a statement denouncing them as a sign of “cruelty and absurd, blind hatred” that shows no respect for human life.

Elsewhere, Christians braved lashing rains and wind to celebrate Christmas Mass in Jesus’ traditional birthplace on Bethlehem’s Manger Square. St. Catherine’s Church is attached to the smaller Church of the Nativity, which is built over a grotto where the faithful believe Jesus was born.

“We wanted to be part of the action,” said Don Moore, 41, a psychology professor from Berkeley, Calif., who came to Bethlehem with his family. “This is the place, this is where it all started. It doesn’t get any more special than that.”

The holy town of Bethlehem is no stranger to violence. Like the rest of the West Bank, it fell on hard times after the Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation broke out in late 2000. Although civil affairs in the biblical town on Jerusalem’s southeastern outskirts are run by Palestinian authorities, security control remains in the hands of Israel, which built a barrier around three sides of the town to keep Palestinian attackers out.

Palestinians say the barrier has badly hurt the local economy, which depends heavily on tourism, by severely restricting movement in and out of the town.

But as the violence has subsided, tourists have returned in large numbers. On Saturday, turnout for Christmas Eve festivities in Bethlehem was at its highest since the uprising began driving tourists away. An estimated 100,000 visitors streamed into Manger Square on Christmas Eve, up from 70,000 the previous year, according to the Israeli military’s count.

The Holy Land and the entire Mideast were very much on Benedict’s mind as he delivered his traditional “Urbi et Orbi” speech (Latin for “to the city and to the world”).

Speaking just a few hours after celebrating a late-night Christmas Eve Mass, Benedict said he prayed that the birth of Jesus, which Christmas celebrates, would send a message to all who need to be saved from hardships.

He said he prayed that God would help the Israelis and the Palestinians resume peace talks and “bring an end to the violence in Syria, where so much blood has already been shed.”

He called for international assistance for refugees from the Horn of Africa and flood victims in Thailand, among others, and urged greater political dialogue in Myanmar, and stability in Iraq, Afghanistan and Africa’s Great Lakes region, which includes Congo, Uganda and Rwanda.

After his speech, Benedict delivered Christmas greetings in 65 different languages, from Mongolian to Maori, Aramaic to Albanian, Tamil to Thai. He finished the list with Guarani and Latin, as the bells tolled from St. Peter’s enormous bell towers.

In the piazza below, thousands of jubilant tourists and pilgrims, and hundreds of colorful Swiss Guards and Italian military bands mingled around the Vatican’s giant Christmas tree and larger-than-life sized nativity scene.

In the U.K., the leader of the world’s Anglicans, the Archbishop of Canterbury, said the summer riots in Britain and the financial crisis have broken bonds and abused trust in British society.

In his Christmas Day sermon, Rowan Williams appealed to those congregated at Canterbury Cathedral to learn lessons about “mutual obligation” from the events of the past year. He said Sunday that “the most pressing question” now facing Britain is “who and where we are as a society.”

“Bonds have been broken, trust abused and lost,” he said.

Britain’s royal family, meanwhile, celebrated Christmas with one notable absence. Queen Elizabeth II’s husband Prince Philip remained hospitalized after having a coronary stent put in after doctors determined the heart pains that sent him to the hospital on Friday were caused by a blocked artery.

And in the United States, members of the loose-knit hacking movement known as “Anonymous” claimed to have stolen 200 GB of e-mails and credit card data from U.S. security think tank Stratfor, promising a weeklong Christmas-inspired assault on targets including the U.S. Army, the U.S. Air Force, Goldman Sachs and MF Global.

The group has previously claimed responsibility for attacks on companies such as Visa, MasterCard and PayPal, as well as others in the music industry and the Church of Scientology.

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Those two men, Najibullah Zazi at the mosque and Adis Medunjanin at the school, would go on to be accused of plotting a subway bombing that officials have called the most serious terrorist threat to the United States since Sept. 11, 2001.

Ever since The Associated Press began revealing New York Police Department spying programs on mosques, student groups, Muslim businesses and communities, those activities have been stoutly defended by police and supporters as having foiled a list of planned attacks.

Recently, for instance, when three members of Congress suggested an inquiry into those programs, Republican Rep. Peter King of New York rallied to the NYPD’s defense.

“Under Commissioner Ray Kelly’s leadership, at least 14 attacks by Islamic terrorists have been prevented by the NYPD,” King said.

But a closer review of the cases reveals a more complicated story.

The list cited by King includes plans that may never have existed as well as plots the NYPD had little or no hand in disrupting. According to a review of public documents, materials obtained by the AP and interviews with dozens of city and federal officials, the most controversial NYPD spying programs produced mixed results. The officials interviewed spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk publicly.

There indeed have been successes, such as the 2004 plot uncovered by the NYPD to bomb the Herald Square subway station in Manhattan.

And there have been failures, like Zazi and Medunjanin, who were exactly the kind of people police intended to spot when they developed the spying programs.

And there were other efforts that compiled data on innocent people but produced no meaningful results at all.

Kelly has spent hundreds of millions of dollars transforming the department into one of the nation’s most aggressive domestic intelligence agencies. In a city that still hurts from 9/11 and still sees a hole in the ground near where the World Trade Center stood, people have had little interest in questioning whether that effort has been effective. City lawmakers, for instance, learned about many of the department’s secretive programs from the AP.

For New Yorkers, the result is that fear of another terrorist attack is used to justify spying on entire neighborhoods. And the absence of another attack is held up as evidence that it works.

—

Some of the NYPD intelligence programs were born out of fear and desperation. After 9/11, police reached for whatever might work.

One idea was to use informants to trawl local mosques and monitor imams to watch for signs of radicalization. Though the NYPD denies the term exists, several former officials said the informants were known as “mosque crawlers.” They would listen in mosques and report back to their handlers.

It was the CIA that first developed that idea overseas and came up with the name. The NYPD program was a version of that effort, according to former CIA officials who were familiar with it. Like many interviewed about the NYPD, they insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss intelligence programs.

Former senior CIA officials said the mosque crawlers were ineffective.

In New York, however, the program persisted. With help from the mosque crawlers and secret NYPD squads, documents show, police intelligence analysts scrutinized every mosque in and around the city and infiltrated dozens. The monitoring of imams included even those who worked closely with police and preached against violence.

These days, however, fewer imams are under investigation, an official said.

The NYPD has pledged to do all it can to prevent terrorism. So when a new intelligence program is conceived, several current and former officials said, there is little discussion of its prospects for success.

NYPD intelligence chief David Cohen, a former top CIA official, was asked about that in September 2005 during a deposition in a lawsuit over the department’s policy of randomly searching the bags of subway riders. Civil rights lawyers asked how police knew whether a program deterred terrorism.

“If it works against them, then it works for us,” Cohen replied. “That is deterrent to one degree or other.”

Cohen was asked, How do you know it works? Is there some police methodology?

“I never bothered to look,” Cohen said. “It doesn’t exist, as far as I could tell.”

At times, police officials themselves have raised concerns about intelligence-gathering programs. In about 2008, for instance, police began monitoring everyone in the city who legally changed names. Anyone who might be a Muslim convert or appeared to be Americanizing his or her name was investigated and personal information was put into police databases.

Current and former officials say it produced no results. Police still receive the list of names of people who change their names, court officials said. But one official said the program is on hold while its effectiveness is evaluated.

Kelly has said the NYPD does not trawl neighborhoods and instead only pursues leads. But those leads can be ambiguous, officials say, and can be used to justify widespread surveillance programs.

For example, the NYPD began the “Moroccan Initiative,” a secret program that chronicled Moroccan neighborhoods, after suicide bombings killed 45 people in the Moroccan city of Casablanca in 2003, and after Moroccan terrorists were linked to the 2005 train bombing in Madrid. New York police put people, including U.S. citizens, under surveillance and catalogued where they ate, worked and prayed.

“What we were doing is following leads,” Kelly told City Council members during an October hearing when asked about that program. “The Moroccan issue that was mentioned had to do with a specific investigation.”

But officials involved in the program said there was no specific threat to New York from Moroccans. The Moroccan Initiative thwarted no plots and led to no arrests, officials said.

—

Much of the information in the Moroccan Initiative was gathered by a secretive squad known as the Demographics Unit. Using plainclothes officers known as “rakers,” the squad infiltrated local businesses and community organizations looking for trouble or “hot spots.” Their daily reports helped create searchable databases of life in New York’s Muslim neighborhoods.

One NYPD official said that unit identified a Brooklyn bookstore as a hot spot. That led police to open an investigation and send in an informant and undercover detective, ultimately leading to the arrests of two men in the Herald Square case.

The work of that secret unit, the official said, helped the NYPD arrest a Pakistani immigrant named Shahawar Matin Siraj and foiled an attack.

For years, police have said publicly that the Herald Square case began with a tip but have not elaborated. Siraj’s lawyer, Martin Stolar, said prosecutors provided no documents related to the Demographics Unit at trial.

Siraj was convicted and sentenced to 30 years in federal prison in 2007. But defense attorneys, and even some inside the NYPD intelligence unit, said police had coaxed the men into making incriminating statements and there was no proof Siraj ever obtained explosives.

The case is arguably the NYPD’s greatest counterterrorism success. But there are others.

The NYPD played an important role in the case against Carlos Amonte and Mohammed Alessa, two New Jersey men who pleaded guilty to charges they tried to leave the country in 2010 to join the al-Qaida-linked terrorist group al-Shabaab. The FBI long had been aware of the two men but had been unable to win their trust with an informant or undercover agent, federal officials said. The NYPD, with its deep roster of Muslim officers, provided the undercover officer who ultimately succeeded in winning their confidence.

When the NYPD’s effectiveness is questioned, the department’s most ardent supporters frequently point to a long list of terrorist plots said to have targeted New York since 9/11. The list often is described as plots thwarted by the NYPD.

“One can’t argue with results,” said Peter Vallone, the New York city councilman who heads the Public Safety Committee. “The results of this gargantuan effort have been that at least 13 planned attacks on New York City have been prevented.”

In reality, however, the NYPD played little or no role in preventing many of those attacks.

Some, like a cyanide plot against the subway system, were discovered among evidence obtained overseas but were never set into motion. Others, like the 2006 plot to blow up U.S.-bound airliners using liquid explosives, were thwarted by U.S. and international authorities, and plans never got off the ground.

And some, like the 2008 subway plot, went unnoticed by the NYPD despite the money and manpower devoted to monitoring Muslim communities, according to the NYPD files obtained by the AP. The files along with interviews show the NYPD was monitoring Zazi’s mosque, and also the Muslim student organization Medunjanin attended. Zazi and Medunjanin were friends and had been praying together regularly since 9th grade. As the years passed, Zazi grew increasingly upset about civilians killed by the U.S. military in Afghanistan; Medunjanin was outraged by the way Muslims were treated at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, and he promoted jihad at the mosque and after basketball games with friends, according to court documents. He said his friends didn’t have the “balls” to do anything.

The plot was discovered after U.S. intelligence intercepted an email revealing that Zazi was trying to make a bomb.

Those programs, meanwhile, have widened the chasm between the police and the city’s Muslims, a community the Obama administration says is a crucial partner in the effort to prevent another terrorist attack. Fed up with a decade of being under scrutiny, some Muslim groups now urge against going directly to police when someone hears radical, anti-American talk.

They reason that the person is probably a police informant.

—

Each morning at the NYPD, Cohen meets his senior officers to discuss the latest intelligence before he briefs Kelly. There is no bigger target for terrorists than New York, the nation’s largest city and the heart of the financial and media world. Cohen repeatedly reminds his officers that, on any given day, they might be the only thing standing in the way of disaster. It’s a mentality that officials say underscores the seriousness of the threat and the NYPD’s commitment to the effort.

Several current and former officials point to that pressure to explain why programs rarely get scrapped, even when there are doubts about their effectiveness. Nobody wants to be the one to abandon a program, only to witness a successful attack that it might have prevented.

At the federal level, intelligence programs are reviewed by Congress, inspectors general and other watchdogs. The NYPD faces no such scrutiny from the City Council or city auditors. Federal officials, too, have been reluctant to question the effectiveness of the NYPD, despite spending more than $1.6 billion in federal money on the department since 9/11.

After House Democrats circulated a letter signed by 34 members of Congress recently asking for a federal review of the NYPD’s intelligence programs, King, the New York Republican, accused them of smearing the police department.

The Justice Department under Eric Holder repeatedly has sidestepped questions about what it thinks about the NYPD programs revealed by the AP. Some Democrats in Congress have asked prosecutors to investigate. Since August, the department has said only that it is reviewing those requests.

During the Bush administration, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and senior Justice Department officials received a briefing in New York about the NYPD’s capabilities, according to a former federal official who attended.

Gonzales left convinced, the official said, that the federal government could not replicate those programs. The NYPD had more manpower and operated under different rules than the federal government, the Justice Department concluded. And the mayor had accepted the political risk that came with the programs.

It was a policy briefing only, the former official said, meaning the federal government did not review the NYPD programs to determine whether they were lawful.

The NYPD’s terrorist cases include ones the federal government has declined to prosecute. Last year, a grand jury declined to indict Ahmed Ferhani and Mohamed Mamdouh on the most serious charge initially brought against them, a high-level terror conspiracy count that carried the potential for life in prison without parole. They were indicted on lesser state terrorism and hate crime charges, including one punishable by up to 32 years behind bars.

Last month, NYPD detectives arrested Jose Pimentel on terrorism-related charges. A state grand jury has yet to indict him on those charges. Federal and city law enforcement officials who reviewed the case told the AP there were concerns that Pimentel lacked the mental capacity to act on his own. The NYPD informant’s drug use in the case also created serious issues, the officials said.

FBI Director Robert Mueller has tried to mute criticisms of the NYPD. On a visit to the Newark, N.J., FBI office a few years ago, current and former officials recall, agents asked Mueller how the NYPD was allowed to operate undercover in the state, with no FBI coordination. Mueller replied that it was a reality the bureau would have to live with, the officials said.

There will always be some debate over the effectiveness of intelligence-gathering programs, particularly ones that butt up against civil liberties. Nearly a decade after the last terrorist suspect was waterboarded in a secret CIA prison in 2003, for instance, politicians and experts still debate whether the tactic gleaned valuable information and whether it could have been obtained without such harsh methods.

During the Bush administration, officials repeatedly pointed to the years without a successful terrorist attack to justify the most contentious programs from the war on terrorism. Vice President Dick Cheney used the years without an attack to defend the secret National Security Agency wiretapping program. Gonzales credited the USA Patriot Act and military actions abroad. And President George W. Bush said the years without an attack validated his polices.

“While there’s room for honest and healthy debate about the decisions I’ve made – and there’s plenty of debate,” Bush said in the final days of his presidency, “there can be no debate about the results in keeping America safe.”

When questioned about its own programs, the NYPD has made the same arguments.

During the 2005 deposition over the subway searches, lawyers pressed Cohen to explain how the NYPD could be so sure its programs really worked.

“They haven’t attacked us,” he said.

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On Tuesday, federal officials took the unprecedented step of asking those scientists not to publicize all the details of how they did it.

The worry: That this research with lots of potential to help the public might also be hijacked by would-be bioterrorists. The labs found that it appears easier than scientists had thought for the so-called H5N1 bird flu to evolve in a way that lets it spread easily between at least some mammals.

“It wasn’t an easy decision,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, infectious diseases chief at the National Institutes of Health, which funded the original research.

The scary-sounding viruses are locked in high-security labs as researchers at the Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands and the University of Wisconsin-Madison prepare to publish their findings in leading scientific journals. That’s the way scientists share their work so that their colleagues can build on it, perhaps creating better ways to monitor bird flu in the wild, for example.

But biosecurity advisers to the government recommended that the journals Science and Nature publish only the general discoveries, not the full blueprint for these man-made strains. Tuesday, the government announced that it agreed and made the request.

In statements, the two research teams say they’re making some changes, if reluctantly. The journals are mulling what to do, and the government didn’t say precisely what should be left out.

But Science editor-in-chief Dr. Bruce Alberts said his journal pushed the U.S. government to set up a system where certain international researchers will be able to get the full genetic recipe for these lab-bred strains – especially those in bird flu-prone countries like China and Indonesia.

“This is a sort of watershed moment,” said Alberts, noting it’s believed to be the first time this kind of secrecy has been sought from legitimate public health research.

He doesn’t want to publish an abbreviated version of the findings unless he can direct scientists how to get the full, if confidential, details.

“It’s very important to get this information out to all the people around the world who are living with this virus and are working on it,” Alberts said.

NIH’s Fauci said the system should be working very soon, so that international public health officials, scientists and drug companies with “a legitimate need to know can have access to that information.”

Nature’s editor-in-chief, Dr. Philip Campbell, also called the recommendations unprecedented.

“It is essential for public health that the full details of any scientific analysis of flu viruses be available to researchers, he said in a statement. The journal is discussing how “appropriate access to the scientific methods and data could be enabled.”

H5N1 has caused outbreaks in wild birds and poultry in a number of countries around the world. But it only occasionally infects people who have close contact with infected poultry, particularly in parts of Southeast Asia. It’s known to have sickened nearly 600 people over the past decade. But it’s highly deadly, killing about 60 percent of the time.

The concern is that one day, bird flu might begin spreading easily between people and cause a pandemic. The NIH wanted to know what genetic changes it should monitor for, as a warning.

In surprise findings, the two teams of researchers separately re-engineered bird flu to create strains that can spread easily between ferrets. That animal mimics how humans respond to influenza.

That doesn’t necessarily mean the new lab-bred flu strains could infect people, Fauci cautioned.

Still, the viruses are being kept under special conditions along with other so-called “select agents” for security and to guard against a lab accident, as researchers try to learn more about just how risky the H5N1 that circulates in the wild really could become.

“There is clearly a public health threat that has been lingering and smoldering with regard to H5N1 for several years,” said Fauci, who adds that a naturally occurring flu pandemic is much more likely than any man-made one.

“Nature is the worst bioterrorist. We know that through history,” he said.

More information on the two research projects isn’t being released until the journals decide what to publish.

But in a statement last month, Dutch lead researcher Dr. Ron Fouchier said his discovery showed what mutations to watch for so “we can then stop the outbreak before it is too late.”

Tuesday, Erasmus Medical Center said researchers were complying with the U.S. request to change their scientific report. But, “academic and press freedom will be at stake as a result of the recommendation. This has never happened before,” the statement said.

The University of Wisconsin said virologist Yoshihiro Kawaoka’s team likewise would comply.

“While recognizing the potential for misuse of scientific discovery, the research described by UW-Madison researchers is essential for public health, global influenza surveillance activities and the development of vaccines and drugs to counter any potential pandemic,” said a university statement.

An independent biosecurity expert called Tuesday’s announcement a good middle-ground but said scientists should think twice about re-engineering influenza given the potential global consequences of an accident. The two labs involved are highly regarded, but more and more labs around the world can try similar work, noted Dr. D.A. Henderson of the Center for Biosecurity of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

“Influenza is certainly a unique beast in its capability to spread,” said Henderson, who played a key role in the eradication of a different killer, smallpox. “The question is how can we assure experiments like this really aren’t done in ways that the organism is apt to escape.”

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Before leaving, they rolled down the windows of their pickup truck and called over the children to give them chocolate.

That was 18 months ago, and since then, the bearded men in tunics like those worn by Osama bin Laden have returned for water every week. Each time they go to lengths to exchange greetings, ask for permission and act neighborly, according to locals, in the first intimate look at how al-Qaida tries to win over a village.

Besides candy, the men hand out cash. If a child is born, they bring baby clothes. If someone is ill, they prescribe medicine. When a boy was hospitalized, they dropped off plates of food and picked up the tab.

With almost no resistance, al-Qaida has implanted itself in Africa’s soft tissue, choosing as its host one of the poorest nations on earth. The terrorist group has create a refuge in this remote land through a strategy of winning hearts and minds, described in rare detail by seven locals in regular contact with the cell. The villagers agreed to speak for the first time to an Associated Press team in the “red zone,” deemed by most embassies to be too dangerous for foreigners to visit.

While al-Qaida’s central command is in disarray and its leaders on the run following bin Laden’s death six months ago, security experts say, the group’s 5-year-old branch in Africa is flourishing. From bases like the one in the forest just north of here, al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM, is infiltrating local communities, recruiting fighters, running training camps and planning suicide attacks, according to diplomats and government officials.

Even as the mother franchise struggles financially, its African offshoot has raised an estimated $130 million in under a decade by kidnapping at least 50 Westerners in neighboring countries and holding them in camps in Mali for ransom. It has tripled in size from 100 combatants in 2006 to at least 300 today, say security experts. And its growing footprint, once limited to Algeria, now stretches from one end of the Sahara desert to the other, from Mauritania in the west to Mali in the east.

The group’s stated aim is to become a player in global jihad, and suspected collaborators have been arrested throughout Europe, including in the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, England and France. In September, the general responsible for U.S. military operations in Africa, Army Gen. Carter Ham, said AQIM now also poses a “significant threat” to the United States.

The answer to why the group has thrived can be found in this speck of a town, where homes are made of mud mixed with straw and families eke out a living either in the fields of rice to the south or in the immense forest of short, stout trees to its north.

It’s here, under a canopy stretching over an area three times larger than the city of New York, that Sokolo’s herders take their cattle. They avoid overgrazing by organizing themselves into eight units linked to each of the eight wells, labeled N1 through N8, along the 50-mile-long perimeter of the Wagadou forest. They pay $5 per year per head of cattle, and $3 per head of sheep, for the right to water their animals.

When the al-Qaida fighters showed up about 1 1/2 years ago with four to five jerrycans and asked for water, they signaled that they did not intend to plunder resources. They stood out in their tunics stopping a little below the knees, small turbans and beards, a foreign style of dress associated with the Gulf states and bin Laden.

“From the moment you lay eyes on them, you know that they’re not Malian,” said 45-year-old herder Amadou Maiga.

They started to come every four or five days in Land Cruisers, with Kalashnikovs slung over their shoulders. At first they stayed for no more than 15 to 20 minutes, said the villagers, including herders, a hunter and employees of the Malian Ministry of Husbandry who travel to the area to vaccinate animals and repair broken pumps. If on Monday they took water from one well, on Wednesday they would go to another, always varying their path.

Fousseyni Diakite, 51, a pump technician who travels twice a month to the forest to check the generators used to run the wells, first ran into the cell in May 2010, when he saw four men in Arab dress inside a Toyota Hilux truck, all with AK-47s at their feet.

He said the men come with medical supplies and try to find out if anyone is sick.

“There is one who is tall with a big chest – he’s Arab, possibly Algerian. He’s known for having an ambulatory pharmacy. He goes from place to place giving treatment for free,” Diakite said.

They venture into the camps where the herders sleep at dusk and hand out cash to villagers who join them for prayers, he said – bills of 10,000 West African francs (about $20), equal to nearly half the average monthly salary in Mali.

Most of the herders sleep in lean-to’s in camps at the forest’s edge. Because these are temporary settlements, they do not have mosques, unlike most villages in this nation twice the size of France that is 90 percent Muslim.

In Boulker, a hamlet near the forest, the fighters left 100,000 francs (around $200), instructing locals to buy supplies and build an adobe mosque, Diakite said.

“They said that for every population center with at least 10 people, there should be a mosque,” he said.

Along with its poverty, Mali has an enormous geography and a weak central government – not unlike Afghanistan, where bin Laden first used the charm offensive to secure the loyalty of the local people, said Noman Benotman, a former jihadist with links to al-Qaida, now an analyst at the London-based Quilliam Foundation.

“We used to teach our people about this. It’s part of the military plan – how to treat locals. This is the environment that keeps them alive,” said Benotman, who first met bin Laden in Sudan and who spent years fighting alongside al-Qaida in Afghanistan. He said bin Laden gave his fighters specific instructions on how to conduct themselves: Don’t argue about the price, just make the locals happy. Become “like oxygen” to them.

AQIM is taking the lesson to heart. Soon after they began taking water, one of the bearded fighters approached a shepherd at the pump to buy a ram. The fighters were looking to slaughter it to feed themselves. The shepherd offered it to him for free – too afraid to ask for money, said Maiga, the man’s friend.

But the stranger refused to take the ram without payment, and immediately handed over a generous sum.

“They seem to know all the prices ahead of time. They point to a ram and say, ‘I’ll buy that one for 30,000 cfa ($60),’” said Maiga, quoting the highest sum a herder could expect to get for a ram in these parts. “They never bargain.”

AQIM grew out of the groups fighting the Algerian government in the 1990s, after the military canceled elections to stave off victory for an Islamist party. Over the next decade, they left a trail of destruction in Algeria. Around 2003, they sent an emissary to Iraq to meet an al-Qaida intermediary, according to Benotman. Three years later, the insurgents joined the terror family, in what second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri called “a blessed union.”

Since then, their attacks have taken on the hallmarks of al-Qaida. A pair of explosions this August killed 18 people as they tore through the mess hall of Algeria’s military academy, with the second bomb timed to hit emergency responders.

Al-Qaida in turn appears to be learning from its affiliates, which have used kidnappings for ransom in Algeria, Yemen, Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan. After bin Laden’s death in May, investigators found files on his hard drive showing plans to turn to kidnapping to compensate for a decline in donations.

AQIM in particular has perfected what analysts call a “kidnap economy,” drawing on its refuge in Mali, according to diplomats, hostage negotiators and government officials. In 2003, the group kidnapped and transported 32 mostly German tourists from southern Algeria to Mali, where, according to a member of Mali’s parliament, they struck a deal with local authorities that is still in effect today.

“The agreement was, ‘You don’t hurt us, we won’t hurt you,’” said the parliament member, formerly involved in hostage negotiations, who asked not to be identified because of the danger involved.

The government of Mali denies these accusations, but officials cited in diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks make the same assertion. The president of neighboring Mauritania, Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, told his American counterparts in 2009 that Mali is “at peace with AQIM to avoid attacks on its territory.” Whereas the al-Qaida cell has captured more than 50 foreigners in Algeria, Niger and Mauritania, hardly any of the violence has touched Mali.

The cell has also managed to recruit local fighters, including 60 to 80 Tuaregs, the olive-skinned nomads who live in the Sahara desert, according to a security expert. And villagers say they have seen black-skinned sub-Saharan Africans in the pickups speaking the languages of Mali, Guinea and Nigeria.

“The situation in Mali is they have become locals – they are not foreigners,” said Benotman. “This is really, really very, very difficult to do, and it makes it very hard to get rid of them.”

One thing still stands in al-Qaida’s way: Its hardcore ideology does not gel with the moderate Islam practiced by Mali’s nomads. Most of them said they were afraid, caught between need for the money al-Qaida offers and wariness of its extremist beliefs.

When bin Laden died, the members of the local cell went from well to well to ask people to pray for his soul, according to Amaye ag Ali Cisse, an employee of the Ministry of Husbandry who travels twice a month to the wells to oversee the vaccination of animals.

“Everyone is uncomfortable,” he said. “This is a religion that doesn’t belong to us.”

The herders say the fighters have not tried to impose their ideology by force. Instead, they say that the AQIM members wait until they have seen a herder at least a few times before broaching the subject.

“It was the third time that I saw them that they started preaching to me,” said Maiga. “They said that everything they do is in order to seek out God.”

Herder Baba Ould Momo, 29, said he tries to come up with an excuse to leave when the pickup trucks arrive at the well, because he’s afraid the terror cell will pull him in. He said they backed off when they noticed he wasn’t interested.

“The first thing they try to do is invite people to join them in the forest. If they see that the person is wavering, it’s then that they start preaching – saying everything is transitory,” said Momo, who like most of the herders wears plastic flip-flops, with a robe of wrinkled cloth. “But if the person is categorical in saying ‘No,’ they leave them alone.”

In June, Mauritania and Mali led a rare joint attack on the al-Qaida cell in the Wagadou Forest. However, herders say that a week earlier, the al-Qaida fighters told them that an attack was imminent and that they had laid down land mines in the forest. Mauritania blames Malian officials for tipping off AQIM.

The herders said that for around two weeks, they didn’t see the bearded fighters. Then they returned with a new fleet of Hilux pickup trucks, and with more men. Since then, the fighters’ tracks have been all over the forest floor, in a map of constant movement, said 60-year-old hunter Cheickana Cisse. They no longer sleep in the same place.

Just as Cisse was taking a drink of water at the N7 pump on a recent evening, two pickup trucks mounted with anti-aircraft cannons and loaded with combatants drove up. The men had chains of ammunition strapped across their chests, and belts loaded with cartridges.

They laid their AK-47s in a circle on the ground to create a space to pray, like a symbolic mosque. One of them asked Cisse if he had heard of bin Laden.

“He said, ‘We’re like this with bin Laden,’” Cisse explained, intertwining his right and left index fingers like a link in a chain. “He said, ‘We’re al-Qaida.’”

The elderly hunter tried to slip away just as one of the fighters made the call to prayer.

“And they said, ‘You? Aren’t you going to pray?’ They told me to come into the circle. I could feel them watching me,” he said.

The men kneeled inside the circle of weapons. Four others guarded them, including one who climbed on the roof of the truck. Cisse tiptoed inside and began going through the prayer. “I kept stealing glances to see if they were doing the same moves as me,” he said. “I know the words, but I was scared.”

When the group had finished, the four who had kept vigil took their turn inside the circle. Cisse quietly walked away.

They didn’t try to stop him.

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“Across this great country, on Thanksgiving tables nationwide, infidel Americans are unwittingly going to be serving halal turkeys to their families this Thursday. Turkeys that are halal certified — who wants that, especially on a day on which we are giving thanks to G-d for our freedom? I wouldn’t knowingly buy a halal turkey — would you? Halal turkey, slaughtered according to the rules of Islamic law, is just the opposite of what Thanksgiving represents: freedom and inclusiveness, neither of which are allowed for under that same Islamic law.”

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Gellar calls these turkeys “Stealth Halal” . Does this mean that the turkeys don’t know they are halal? Or does it mean that the halal turkeys are being sold to Americans who may not know they are halal? Could George Washington and Honest Abe taste the difference between a halal turkey and a kosher turkey? We’re not sure that matters. On the Butterball official website they plainly state:

“Butterball is one of the largest global turkey providers in the world. For more than 25 years, Butterball® has been providing quality turkey to markets around the globe. Currently, exporting over 100 million pounds of turkey products annually to over 50 countries, it’s no wonder that Butterball is one of the most celebrated choices for turkey. Butterball is committed to developing the best new products to specifically cater to all international cultures. From our bilingual packaging to flavor profiles geared toward international palates, we are continually developing unique ideas that satisfy the tastes of our customers.

As an international turkey provider, we have the expertise in serving different countries and different customs, and will work with you to meet any and all product needs. We have met the requirements for the following certifications: USDA Approved, Russian Approved, Halal Certified, and employ a Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HAACP) food safety system with Good Manufacturing processes. From great customer service to new product innovation to the proper certifications, Butterball has the experience you need to get our great tasting turkey in your market.”

We’ll keep you posted on how effective this “boycott” works out. You can read the full story from Illume Magazine.

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The mother of Jose Pimentel spoke to reporters outside her upper Manhattan home the day after her son was arraigned in state court on terrorism-related charges.

“I didn’t raise my son in that way,” Carmen Sosa said. “I feel bad about this situation.”

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She also praised the New York Police Department, saying, “I think they handled it well.”

Officials with the NYPD, which conducted the undercover investigation using a confidential informant and a bugged apartment, said the department had to move quickly because Pimentel was about to test a pipe bomb made out of match heads, nails and other ingredients bought at neighborhood hardware and discount stores.

Two law enforcement officials said Monday that the NYPD’s Intelligence Division had sought to get the FBI involved at least twice as the investigation unfolded. Both times, the FBI concluded that Pimentel lacked the mental capacity to act on his own, they said.

The FBI thought Pimentel “didn’t have the predisposition or the ability to do anything on his own,” one of the officials said.

The officials were not authorized to speak about the case and spoke on condition of anonymity. The FBI’s New York office and the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan both declined to comment on Monday.

Pimentel’s lawyer, Joseph Zablocki, said his client was never a true threat.

“If the goal here is to be stopping terror … I’m not sure that this is where we should be spending our resources,” he said.

Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly defended the handling of the case Monday, saying the NYPD kept federal authorities in the loop “all along” before circumstances forced investigators to take swift measures using state charges.

“No question in my mind that we had to take this case down,” Kelly said. “There was an imminent threat.”

Added Kelly: “This is a classic case of what we’ve been talking about – the lone wolf, an individual, self-radicalized. This is the needle in the haystack problem we face as a country and as a city.”

Authorities described Pimentel as an unemployed U.S. citizen and “al-Qaida sympathizer” who was born in the Dominican Republic. He had lived most of his life in Manhattan, aside from about five years in the upstate city of Schenectady, where authorities say he had an arrested for credit card fraud.

His mother said he was raised Roman Catholic. But he converted to Islam in 2004 and went by the name Muhammad Yusuf, authorities said.

Using a tip from police in Albany, the NYPD had been watching Pimentel using a confidential informant for the past year. Investigators learned that he was energized and motivated to carry out his plan by the Sept. 30 killing of al-Qaida’s U.S.-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, police said.

Pimentel was under constant surveillance as he shopped for the pipe bomb materials. He also was overheard talking about attacking police patrol cars and postal facilities, killing soldiers returning home from abroad and bombing a police station in Bayonne, N.J., authorizes said.

The arrest marked the second time this year that the police department took the unusual step of working with a state prosecutor to bring a terrorism case. In May, two men were indicted on charges they told an NYPD undercover detective about their desire to attack synagogues.

A grand jury declined to indict Ahmed Ferhani and Mohamed Mamdouh on the most serious charge initially brought against them – a high-level terror conspiracy count that carried the potential for life in prison without parole. They were, however, indicted on lesser state terrorism and hate crime charges, including one punishable by up to 32 years behind bars.

Attorneys for Ferhani said hate crime charges and a rarely used state terrorism law were misapplied to what they have called a case of police entrapment.

State prosecutors insist that there’s ample evidence that Pimentel went well beyond merely talking about terrorism – and that he was acting on his own initiative.

“The people whom we’re prosecuting have well crossed that line,” Adam Kaufmann, head of the district attorney’s investigative division, said Monday. “They’ve gone from sort of espousing an idea to creating a plan to act upon it.”

At an arraignment where Pimentel was ordered held without bail, prosecutors said investigators have “countless hours” of audio and video in this case. And in a criminal complaint, an intelligence division detective alleges Pimentel told him after the arrest that he was about an hour away from finishing the bomb and felt Islamic law obligates all Muslims to wage war against Americans to avenge U.S. military action in their homelands.

A former federal prosecutor praised the police and state prosecutors for going through with the investigation and charges.

“A person who puts out conspiratorial information and then takes steps to build a bomb should not be walking the streets of New York,” whatever his mental state or his interactions with an informant, said Michael Wildes, a former assistant U.S. attorney in Brooklyn who worked on terrorism-related cases. “Considering the facts that have been revealed to the public, the decision was done well, in this instance, to go ahead with this case and for the FBI not to be the lead agency.”

Publicly, NYPD and federal officials claim they have a strong working relationship. But behind the scenes, there has been tension ever since the department mounted its own aggressive anti-terrorism effort, including undercover investigations targeting potential homegrown threats.

The effort is needed, NYPD officials say, because the city remains a prime terrorist target a decade after the Sept. 11 attack. Mayor Michael Bloomberg said there have been at least 14 foiled plots against the city, including the latest suspected scheme.

The most serious threats came from Pakistani immigrant Faisal Shahzad, who tried to detonate a car bomb in Times Square in May 2010 and is now serving a life sentence, and Najibullah Zazi, who targeted the subway system a year earlier. Zazi pleaded guilty to federal terrorism charges and is awaiting sentencing.

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The FBI concluded that Pimentel “didn’t have the predisposition or the ability to do anything on his own,” one of the officials said.

The officials were not authorized to speak about the case and spoke on condition of anonymity. The FBI’s New York office declined to comment Monday.

New York authorities said Pimentel is an “al-Qaida sympathizer” motivated by terrorist propaganda and resentment of U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said police had to move quickly to arrest Pimentel on Saturday because he was ready to carry out his plan.

He also talked of bombing a police station in Bayonne, N.J., Kelly said.

“He was in fact putting this bomb together,” Kelly said. “He was drilling holes and it would have been not appropriate for us to let him walk out the door with that bomb.”

The 27-year-old suspect was being held after his arraignment Sunday on terrorism-related charges.

His lawyer Joseph Zablocki said his client’s behavior leading up to the arrest was not that of a conspirator trying to conceal some violent scheme. Zablocki said Pimentel was public about his activities and was not trying to hide anything.

“I don’t believe that this case is nearly as strong as the people believe,” Zablocki said. “He (Pimentel) has this very public online profile. … This is not the way you go about committing a terrorist attack.”

New York City authorities said that the FBI was involved in the case but did not specifically say it declined to pursue the charges.

Kelly said the NYPD worked very closely with federal authorities on the case.

“We just believed that we couldn’t let it go any further,” he said. “We had to act.”

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Jose Pimentel of Manhattan was described by Mayor Michael Bloomberg at a Sunday news conference announcing Pimentel’s arrest as “a 27-year-old al-Qaida sympathizer” who was motivated by terrorist propaganda and resentment of U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said police had to move quickly to arrest Pimentel on Saturday because he was ready to carry out his plan.

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“He was in fact putting this bomb together,” Kelly said. “He was drilling holes and it would have been not appropriate for us to let him walk out the door with that bomb.”

Ten years after 9/11, New York remains a prime terrorism target. Bloomberg said at least 14 terrorist plots, including the latest alleged scheme, have targeted the city since the Sept. 11 attacks. No attack has been successful, however. Pakistani immigrant Faisal Shahzad is serving a life sentence for trying to detonate a car bomb in Times Square in May 2010.

Kelly said Sunday that Pimentel was energized and motivated to carry out his plan by the Sept. 30 killing of al-Qaida’s U.S.-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki.

“He decided to build the bomb August of this year, but clearly he jacked up his speed after the elimination of al-Awlaki,” Kelly said.

An unemployed U.S. citizen originally from the Dominican Republic, Pimentel was “plotting to bomb police patrol cars and also postal facilities as well as targeted members of our armed services returning from abroad,” Bloomberg said.

He also talked of bombing a police station in Bayonne, N.J., Kelly said.

New York police had him under surveillance for at least a year and were working with a confidential informant; no injury to anyone or damage to property is alleged, Kelly said. In addition, authorities have no evidence that Pimentel was working with anyone else, the mayor said.

“He appears to be a total lone wolf,” the mayor said. “He was not part of a larger conspiracy emanating from abroad.”

At Pimentel’s arraignment, his lawyer Joseph Zablocki said his client’s behavior leading up to the arrest was not that of a conspirator trying to conceal some violent scheme. Zablocki said Pimentel was public about his activities and was not trying to hide anything.

“I don’t believe that this case is nearly as strong as the people believe,” Zablocki said. “He (Pimentel) has this very public online profile. … This is not the way you go about committing a terrorist attack.”

Pimentel, also known as Muhammad Yusuf, was denied bail and remained in custody. The bearded, bespectacled man wore a black T-shirt and black drawstring pants and smiled at times during the proceeding. His mother and brother attended the arraignment, Zablocki said.

Pimentel is accused of having an explosive device Saturday when he was arrested, one he planned to use against others and property to terrorize the public. The charges accuse him of conspiracy going back at least to October 2010, and include first-degree criminal possession of a weapon as a crime of terrorism, and soliciting support for a terrorist act.

Bloomberg said at the news conference that Pimentel represents the type of threat FBI Director Robert Mueller has warned about as U.S. forces erode the ability of terrorists to carry out large scale attacks.

“This is just another example of New York City because we are an iconic city … this is a city that people would want to take away our freedoms gravitate to and focus on,” Bloomberg said.

Kelly said a confidential informant had numerous conversations with Pimentel on Sept. 7 in which he expressed interest in building small bombs and targeting banks, government and police buildings.

Pimentel also posted on his website trueislam1.com and on blogs his support of al-Qaida and belief in jihad, and promoted an online magazine article that described in detail how to make a bomb, Kelly said.

Among his Internet postings, the commissioner said, was an article that states: “People have to understand that America and its allies are all legitimate targets in warfare.”

The New York Police Department’s Intelligence Division was involved in the arrest. Kelly said Pimentel spent most of his years in Manhattan and lived about five years in Schenectady. He said police in the Albany area tipped New York City police off to Pimentel’s activities.

Asked why federal authorities were not involved in the case, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. said there was communication with them but his office felt that given the timeline “it was appropriate to proceed under state charges.”

About 1,000 of the city’s roughly 35,000 officers are assigned each day to counterterrorism operations. The NYPD also sends officers overseas to report on how other cities deal with terrorism. Through federal grants and city funding, the NYPD has spent millions of dollars on technology to outfit the department with the latest tools — from portable radiation detectors to the network of hundreds of cameras that can track suspicious activity.

Alexis Smith, 22, who lives in an apartment in the same building as Pimentel, said she was shocked that he was a suspect in a terrorist plot. “He was always very courteous to us,” she said, adding that Pimentel helped her carry groceries and luggage into the building.

“It’s nice to know he was only working alone,” she said.

LAGOS, Nigeria — A radical Muslim sect responsible for attacks that left more than 100 people dead in northeast Nigeria this week could bomb three luxury hotels frequented by foreigners in the oil-rich nation’s capital, the U.S. Embassy warned Sunday.

The unusually specific warning from U.S. diplomats identified possible targets of the sect known locally as Boko Haram as the Hilton, Nicon Luxury and Sheraton hotels. Those hotels draw diplomats, politicians and Nigeria’s business elite daily in the country’s central capital of Abuja.

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The embassy said the attack may come as Nigeria celebrates the Muslim holiday Eid al-Adha and that its diplomats and staff had been instructed to avoid those hotels.

Deb MacLean, an embassy spokeswoman, declined to offer further details about the threat or the source of the information Sunday.

The warning came as a Nigerian Red Cross official said Sunday that more than 100 died in a series of attacks in northeast Nigeria launched by the radical Muslim sect, as sect gunmen shot and killed another police officer.

Ibrahim Bulama told The Associated Press he expected the number of dead to rise as local clinics and hospitals tabulate the casualty figures from the attacks Friday in Damaturu, the capital of rural Yobe state.

While the hard-hit city remained calm and its Muslim inhabitants celebrated a religious holiday Sunday, army and police units manned roadblocks leading into the town and streets remained largely quiet, Bulama said.

Meanwhile, the sect known locally as Boko Haram killed a police inspector Sunday in the city of Maiduguri, the sect’s spiritual home about 80 miles (130 kilometers) east of Damaturu. Sect gunmen stopped the officer’s car at gunpoint as he neared a mosque to pray with his family, local police commissioner Simeon Midenda said.

Gunmen ordered the family away, then shot the inspector to death, Midenda said. The sect members later allowed his family to drive the car away, he said.

The killing prompted a frank acknowledgment from the police commander, whose men remain under siege from constant assassinations by the radical sect.

“Our men who live in the midst of the Boko Haram are not safe,” Midenda said.

Statements issued late Saturday show the U.N. Security Council called the attacks Friday in the cities of Damaturu and Maiduguri “criminal and unjustifiable” and asked members to help Nigerian authorities bring those responsible to justice.

A statement on behalf of Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called for “an end to all violence in the area,” while offering sympathy for the victims.

Pope Benedict XVI on Sunday appealed for an end to all violence, saying it only increases problems, sowing hatred and division even among the faithful. He told tourists in St. Peter’s Square that he is following with apprehension the news from Nigeria.

Boko Haram claimed responsibility for the attacks Friday, which included suicide bombings and shootings.

Boko Haram wants to implement strict Shariah law across Nigeria, an oil-rich nation of more than 160 million which has a predominantly Christian south and a Muslim north. Its name means “Western education is sacrilege” in the local Hausa language, but instead of schooling, it rejects Western ideals like Nigeria’s U.S.-styled democracy that followers believe have destroyed the country with corrupt politicians.

Boko Haram’s attacks occurred ahead of Sunday’s celebration, or the feast of sacrifice, when Muslims around the world slaughter sheep and cattle in remembrance of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of his son. Police elsewhere in the country had warned of violence ahead of the celebration in Nigeria.

An Associated Press count shows the group has killed at least 361 people this year alone.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab answered questions from U.S. District Judge Nancy Edmunds before pleading guilty to all eight charges he faced, including conspiracy to commit terrorism and attempted murder.

“Are you therefore pleading guilty freely and voluntarily?” Edmunds asked.

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“That’s right, yes,” Abdulmutallab replied.

Edmunds reviewed the charges and possible penalties with Abdulmutallab before he entered his pleas, including that he faces a sentence of up to life in prison.

He’s accused of trying to blow up Northwest Airlines Flight 253 with a bomb in his underwear on Christmas 2009. The bomb didn’t work, and passengers jumped on Abdulmutallab when they saw smoke and fire.

Prosecutors’ evidence was stacked high. Abdulmutallab was badly burned in a plane full of witnesses. The government said he told FBI agents he was working for al-Qaida and directed by Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical, American-born Muslim cleric recently killed by the U.S. in Yemen.

There are also photos of his scorched shorts as well as video of Abdulmutallab explaining his suicide mission before departing for the U.S.

2002

Bali Bombings

In October 2002, a suicide bomber and a carbomb detonated outside popular nightclubs in Bali, Indonesia. Another bomb detonated by the U.S. Consulate but caused only minimal damage. The bombs killed 202 people including 88 Australian tourists. Three members of the violent Islamic group, Jemaah Islamiyah, were convicted and sentenced to death for the attack.

2002

Moscow Theater Hostage Crisis

In October 2002, dozens of Armed Chechnyan rebels took 850 hostages at a theater in Moscow, demanding that Russia end the war in Chechnya. After using an unknown chemical, Russian forces killed 39 rebels and 129 hostages.

2003

Istanbul bombings

In November of 2003, four truck bomb attacks carried out in Istanbul, Turkey. The first two bombs hit synagogues, and the next two hit the headquarters of HSBC Bank and the British Consulate five days later. The bombings killed 57 people and injured more than 700. A Turkish group affiliated with Al Qaeda was prosecuted for planning and executing the attack with Osama Bin Laden’s approval.

2004

Madrid Train Bombings

On March 11th 2004, several bombs went off in Madrid’s subway system, killing 191 people and wounding 1,800. The bombings were three days before Spain’s national elections and may have swayed the vote to the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party. Eventually Moroccan national Jamal Zougam was found guilty of the attack which was said to be inspired by Al Qaeda.

2004

Beslan School Hostage Crisis

In September of 2003, Chechnyan rebels took a whole school hostage in the town of Beslan, North Ossetia, which is part of the Russian Federation. They were once again demanding the end of the Russian war in Chechnya. When Russian troops stormed the school, 334 hostages were killed, including 186 children.

2005

London Train Bombings

In 2005, a series of coordinated suicide bombings in the London train and bus system killed 52 people and injured 700. The attacks were carried out by 4 Islamic men of Pakistani descent and a Jamaican convert. The attacks were inspired by Al Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden, and Ayman al-Zawahiri. The bombers left videos claiming their actions were in response to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

2005

Egypt Resort Attacks

In October of 2005, the Egyptian resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh was hit be a series of explosions that would kill 88 and wound over 200. A carbomb, a suitcase bomb and a truck bomb all detonated in the downtown area of Sharm el-Sheikh as well as a popular tourist hotel. Abdullah Azzam Brigades, a group tied to Al Qaeda, took credit for the attack and cited the war in Iraq as their motivation.

2005

New Dehli Bombings

In October 2005 during the Hindu festival of Diwali, three bombs went off in New Dehli, India, killing 62 and wounding 210. The bombs were placed in a car, a motorcycle and on a bus. Indian officials believe the bombs came from separatists from the oft disputed Kashmir region.

2008

Mumbai Attacks

On November, 26th 2008 in Mumbai, India, 10 coordinated shooting and bombing attacks killed 164 people and wounded 308. The attacks occurred at two luxury hotels, a hospital, a Jewish Center, and a movie theater. Only one attacker was captured alive who was later sentenced to death. The India government blamed a Pakistani Millisent terrorist group.

2011

Norway Bombing/Shooting

In July of 2011, Anders Behring Breivik, an anti-Mulsim, right wing Christian planted a bomb in Oslo, Orway near the Prime Minister’s Office killing 8 people. He then went to an island retreat for young members of the ruling Labor Party and shot and killed 89 teenagers.

Check more of our 9/11 tenth anniversary coverage here

Mayor Michael Bloomberg says New Yorkers should be vigilant. But he says there’s no need for people to change their daily routines.

U.S. counterterrorism officials are chasing a credible but unconfirmed al-Qaida threat to use a car bomb on bridges or tunnels in New York or Washington.

Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly says police are setting up vehicle checkpoints and doing bomb sweeps of parking garages.

City residents will see more bomb-sniffing dogs, bag checks at subways and additional officers at Grand Central Terminal and Penn Station on Friday.

Kevin Harpham reached a deal with federal prosecutors for a recommended sentencing range of 27 to 32 years in prison just days before his trial was to begin in U.S. District Court.

The pipe bomb was loaded with lead fishing weights coated in a chemical, prosecutors said.

The 37-year-old said it took him a month to build the bomb, and he acknowledged placing the bomb along the parade route in an attempt to commit a hate crime.

The backpack bomb was discovered by parade and disabled before it could explode last Jan. 17, preventing what otherwise might have been mass casualties, prosecutors said.

Harpham originally was charged with committing a hate crime, using a firearm in relation to a crime of violence, attempt to use a weapon of mass destruction and unauthorized possession of an unregistered explosive device. He could have faced up to life in prison.

The deal was accepted by U.S. District Court Judge Justin Quackenbush.

Harpham, of Addy, Wash., is an Army veteran who has extensive ties to white supremacist groups but no record of past crimes.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, has said that Harpham made more than 1,000 postings on a racist website called the Vanguard News Network. The center also has said that Harpham belonged to a neo-Nazi group called the National Alliance.

Harpham served from 1996 to 1999 in the U.S. Army at what is now Joint Base Lewis-McChord, near Tacoma, Washington. His lawyers have said Harpham had not been recently employed.

He has remained in the Spokane County Jail without bail since his arrest.

Prosecutors recently revealed that Harpham took pictures of young black children gathering for the march and of a Jewish man who was wearing a yarmulke.

The hate crime charge, used for the first time in the Eastern District of Washington, contended Harpham targeted the parade in downtown Spokane “because of actual or perceived race, color and national origin of any person.”

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At the same time, German authorities are keeping a close eye on Mr. Cuspert as they consider him a top security risk who celebrates hate and incites violence with inflammatory videos and speeches that praise terrorists.

German authorities say people like him inspired the fatal shootings of two American airmen at the Frankfurt airport in March. The 21-year-old man accused of the killings, Arid Uka, whose trial began in Frankfurt on Wednesday, has said he opened fire on a busload of American service members after seeing a video that claimed to show a Muslim woman being raped by men in United States military uniforms.

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The brazen assault in a neighborhood surrounded by heavily fortified diplomatic posts represented the first suicide attack to target foreigners in oil-rich Nigeria, where people already live in fear of the radical Boko Haram sect. The group, which has reported links to al-Qaida, wants to implement a strict version of Shariah law in the nation and is vehemently opposed to Western education and culture.

While police officers and local officials have primarily bore the brunt of Boko Haram’s rage, now everyone seems to be a target in a nation often divided by religion and ethnicity.

“It is an attack on the global community,” said Viola Onwuliri, a junior Nigerian foreign minister, as she looked at the bomb site.

A sedan loaded with explosives crashed through two gates at the exit of the United Nations compound Friday morning as guards tried in vain to stop it, witnesses told The Associated Press. The suicide bomber inside drove the car through the glass front of the main reception area of the building and detonated the explosives, inflicting the most damage possible, a spokesman for the Nigerian National Emergency Management Agency said.

“I saw scattered bodies,” said Michael Ofilaje, a UNICEF worker at the four-story building, which he said shook with the explosion. “Many people are dead.”

At least 18 people died in the attack, according to an AP survey of morgues at four major Abuja hospitals. Nigerian Health Minister Mohammad Ali Pate made a public appeal for blood donations, saying there were at least 60 injured people alone at the nearby National Hospital.

The headquarters, known as U.N. House, had offices for about 400 employees working for 26 U.N. humanitarian and development agencies. Authorities worked Friday to account for everyone in the building at the time of the blast.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called the car bombing “an assault on those who devote their lives to helping others.”

“We condemn this terrible act, utterly,” Ban told reporters at U.N. headquarters. “We do not yet have precise casualty figures but they are likely to be considerable. A number of people are dead; many more are wounded.”

Said Djinnit, the special representative of the U.N. secretary-general for West Africa, told the AP that he expects the casualties are mostly local staff.

The attack was one of the deadliest attacks on the United Nations in a decade. Seventeen U.N. civilian staff members were killed along with dozens of others in two terrorist car bombings that targeted U.N. and other premises in Algiers on Dec. 11, 2007. Friday’s bombing also came just days after the U.N. marked the eighth anniversary of the Aug. 19, 2003 bombing of U.N. headquarters in Baghdad that killed 15 U.N. staff including top envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello and seven others.

The attack was also condemned by leaders around the world and members of the U.N. Security Council who individually deplored the targeting of the U.N. at an open meeting on U.N. peacekeeping.

U.S. President Barack Obama called the attack “horrific and cowardly” and expressed strong support for the U.N.’s work.

“The people who serve the United Nations do so with a simple purpose: to try to improve the lives of their neighbors and promote the values on which the U.N. was founded — dignity, freedom, security, and peace,” Obama said in a statement. “An attack on Nigerian and international public servants demonstrates the bankruptcy of the ideology that led to this heinous action.”

The explosion punched a huge hole in the building, located in the same neighborhood as the U.S. embassy and other diplomatic posts in Abuja. Workers brought three large cranes to the site within hours of the attack, trying to pull away the concrete and rubble to find survivors. Others at the site stood around, stunned, as medical workers began carrying out what appeared to be the dead.

“This is getting out of hand,” said a U.N. staffer who identified himself as Bodunrin. “If they can get into the U.N. House, they can reach anywhere.”

Local police spokesman Jimoh Moshood said detectives had begun an investigation. In a statement, Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan’s office called the attack “barbaric, senseless and cowardly.” The statement also promised to increase security in the nation’s capital.

However, Jonathan’s administration has struggled to improve security in Nigeria, a nation of 150 million largely split between a Christian south and Muslim north. The Christian president’s election in April brought religious and ethnic violence across the north that left 800 people dead.

A spokesman for Boko Haram claimed responsibility for the attack later Friday in a communique to the BBC’s Hausa language shortwave radio service, which is widely trusted and listened to throughout Nigeria’s Muslim north. The sect has made such claims before to the service.

Boko Haram, which means “Western education is sacrilege,” has carried out a series of bombings and assassinations in northern Nigeria in the last year. It claimed a car bombing that struck Nigeria’s federal police headquarters in June that killed at least two people.

The sect came to national prominence in 2009, when its members rioted and burned police stations near its base of Maiduguri, a dusty northeastern city on the cusp of the Sahara Desert. Nigeria’s military violently put down the attack, crushing the sect’s mosque into shards as its leader was arrested and died in police custody. About 700 people died during the violence.

Sect members are scattered throughout northern Nigeria and nearby Cameroon, Chad and Niger. In the last year, they’ve unleashed a series of targeted killings and bombings.

But attacking foreigners is a new, troubling step for the group. Earlier this month, the commander for U.S. military operations in Africa told the AP that Boko Haram may be trying to coordinate attacks with two al-Qaida-linked groups — al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, which operates in northwest Africa, and with al-Shabab in Somalia.

“I think it would be the most dangerous thing to happen not only to the Africans, but to us as well,” Gen. Carter Ham said Aug. 17.

The attack Friday shows Boko Haram has aspirations beyond targeting local government officials, said Innocent Chukwuma, a Nigerian criminologist and director of a police reform organization.

“Today’s has taken it to the international level,” Chukwuma said. “The choice of target shows we are perhaps dealing with a group well-connected to international networks.”

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