Secret Desert Force Set Up by Blackwater’s Founder

 Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater, has a new project.

ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — Late one night last November, a plane carrying dozens of Colombian men touched down in this glittering seaside capital. Whisked through customs by an Emirati intelligence officer, the group boarded an unmarked bus and drove roughly 20 miles to a windswept military complex in the desert sand.

Sheik Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan of Abu Dhabi hired Erik Prince to build a fighting force.

The Colombians had entered the United Arab Emirates posing as construction workers. In fact, they were soldiers for a secret American-led mercenary army being built by Erik Prince, the billionaire founder of Blackwater Worldwide, with $529 million from the oil-soaked sheikdom.

Mr. Prince, who resettled here last year after his security business faced mounting legal problems in the United States, was hired by the crown prince of Abu Dhabi to put together an 800-member battalion of foreign troops for the U.A.E., according to former employees on the project, American officials and corporate documents obtained by The New York Times.

The force is intended to conduct special operations missions inside and outside the country, defend oil pipelines and skyscrapers from terrorist attacks and put down internal revolts, the documents show. Such troops could be deployed if the Emirates faced unrest in their crowded labor camps or were challenged by pro-democracy protests like those sweeping the Arab world this year.

The U.A.E.’s rulers, viewing their own military as inadequate, also hope that the troops could blunt the regional aggression of Iran, the country’s biggest foe, the former employees said. The training camp, located on a sprawling Emirati base called Zayed Military City, is hidden behind concrete walls laced with barbed wire. Photographs show rows of identical yellow temporary buildings, used for barracks and mess halls, and a motor pool, which houses Humvees and fuel trucks. The Colombians, along with South African and other foreign troops, are trained by retired American soldiers and veterans of the German and British special operations units and the French Foreign Legion, according to the former employees and American officials.

In outsourcing critical parts of their defense to mercenaries — the soldiers of choice for medieval kings, Italian Renaissance dukes and African dictators — the Emiratis have begun a new era in the boom in wartime contracting that began after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. And by relying on a force largely created by Americans, they have introduced a volatile element in an already combustible region where the United States is widely viewed with suspicion.

The United Arab Emirates — an autocracy with the sheen of a progressive, modern state — are closely allied with the United States, and American officials indicated that the battalion program had some support in Washington.

“The gulf countries, and the U.A.E. in particular, don’t have a lot of military experience. It would make sense if they looked outside their borders for help,” said one Obama administration official who knew of the operation. “They might want to show that they are not to be messed with.”

Still, it is not clear whether the project has the United States’ official blessing. Legal experts and government officials said some of those involved with the battalion might be breaking federal laws that prohibit American citizens from training foreign troops if they did not secure a license from the State Department.

Mark C. Toner, a spokesman for the department, would not confirm whether Mr. Prince’s company had obtained such a license, but he said the department was investigating to see if the training effort was in violation of American laws. Mr. Toner pointed out that Blackwater (which renamed itself Xe Services ) paid $42 million in fines last year for training foreign troops in Jordan and other countries over the years.

The U.A.E.’s ambassador to Washington, Yousef al-Otaiba, declined to comment for this article. A spokesman for Mr. Prince also did not comment.

For Mr. Prince, the foreign battalion is a bold attempt at reinvention. He is hoping to build an empire in the desert, far from the trial lawyers, Congressional investigators and Justice Department officials he is convinced worked in league to portray Blackwater as reckless. He sold the company last year, but in April, a federal appeals court reopened the case against four Blackwater guards accused of killing 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad in 2007.

Mark Mazzetti reported from Abu Dhabi and Washington, and Emily B. Hager from New York. Jenny Carolina González and Simon Romero contributed reporting from Bogotá, Colombia. Kitty Bennett contributed research from Washington.

 

Secret Held if Bin Laden Lived Here, Village Says

Bin Laden’s youngest wife, who was detained after the raid that killed her husband, told Pakistani investigators that they lived for more than five years in their last home, in Abbottabad, and before that spent two and a half years in this village of roughly 1,500 people, some 25 miles to the south.

But the feudal landlord who owns much of the land in the area, his tenant farmers and the local police were all in disbelief.

“It’s a joke, played on all of us,” the local police inspector said as he patrolled the village, checking on security after a horde of journalists turned up there looking for Bin Laden’s erstwhile home. “It’s absurd,” he said. He asked not to be named in keeping with police force rules.

“It’s impossible,” said Liaquat Khan, the main landowner in the region, whose ancestor Shah Muhammad gave his name to the village and founded the nearby town of Haripur. “It is a very open place, with 50 houses, and they are very poor people who live there,” he said.

While the surrounding district has been known to harbor militants, there seemed little sign here that this village could. There is no walled compound or well-protected house like that used by Bin Laden in the city of Abbottabad. Farmers live in simple houses, with a few rooms surrounding a courtyard where children play among the buffalo and chickens. Most everyone knows everyone else here, and many are related in some way.

“Everybody has a very small house and they are overcrowded,” said Muhammad Saleem, a 35-year-old chicken farmer. “There is no place to rent, and we could not give a room to a stranger.”

Mr. Khan insisted that the feudal system is such that no villager would host an outsider without checking first with him. “They give me daily reports from the village,” he said of his tenants.

The one anomaly in the village was the mullah’s house, which was a palatial two-story building with high columns and deep verandah — but uninhabited and still under construction. The mullah, Noor Muhammad, was not at home but his two sons said that it went against tradition to rent your home out to a stranger.

“There is only one stranger here,” said Muhammad Iqbal, 36, one of the mullah’s sons. “He lives in the next-door village. He is Roshan Khan, an Afghan shepherd, and he lives in a tent,” he said. Mr. Iqbal said the money to build the house had come from another brother who had been working for 10 years in Saudi Arabia.

Still, if Chak Shah Muhammad does not reveal an obvious hiding place for a fugitive, the town of Haripur, just a mile away, and the wider Haripur District, which adjoins Abbottabad, has harbored its share of militants.

Over the years since the Sept. 11 attacks, about 20 militants have been arrested in the district, the police say. Most of the militants were members of Pakistani groups, like Sipah-e-Sahaba, but at least one was a foreigner suspected of ties to Al Qaeda.

In May 2009, a local house owner went to the police to complain that his tenant, an Egyptian, had not paid him rent for three months. The police raided the house and detained the man, who was known as Abdullah al-Misri, and found a wealth of jihadist propaganda videos and other material. Mr. Misri had been living in the house, just 10 minutes from the center of Haripur, for four years apparently unknown to and unhindered by the local police and intelligence services.

The police, who believed Mr. Misri was a member of Al Qaeda, allowed his wife and four daughters to remain in the house but kept them under surveillance. Then later that year, gunmen attacked the police and tried to take the women away. Three policemen were killed in the attack and one gunman was killed. He was named as Ijaz, from Abbottabad, and was found to have connections to Al Qaeda.

As often happens in Pakistan, the state failed to prosecute Mr. Misri on any charges of militancy or terrorism. He was imprisoned on immigration violations and released on bail in 2010, whereupon he disappeared, along with his family.

On Saturday, officials in Haripur District did not seem to take the report of Bin Laden hiding here seriously.

The deputy police chief of Haripur, Najib Bhagvi, conceded that there were people with extremist sympathies in the district who could help such fugitives. Nevertheless he ruled out the chances that Bin Laden had lived in the area. “There is not a single chance of having such a high-level target here,” he said.

“If he was in this area, certainly the authorities should have been looking much more carefully,” said Omar Ayub Khan, a former state minister of finance who lives in Haripur. “But he came here from Afghanistan, and American forces should have been looking more carefully when he escaped from there,” he said.

An employee of The New York Times contributed reporting from Haripur, Pakistan.

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Secret Case Against Detainee Crumbles

But there was more to the story, as there so often is at the Guantánamo Bay prison in Cuba. Eight months after that newly disclosed assessment of Mr. Gharani was written by military intelligence officials, a federal judge examined the secret evidence. Saying that it was “plagued with internal inconsistencies” and largely based on the word of two other Guantánamo detainees whose reliability was in question, he ruled in January 2009 that Mr. Gharani should be released. The Obama administration sent him to Chad about five months later.

The secret assessment of Mr. Gharani, like many of the detainee dossiers made available to The New York Times and other news organizations, reflected few doubts about the peril he might have posed. He was rated “high risk,” and military officials recommended that he not be freed. But now, a comparison of the assessment’s conclusions with other information provides a case study in the ambiguities that surround many of the men who have passed through the prison at Guantánamo Bay.

The murkiness of the secret intelligence — and the fact that interrogators gathered much of their information from the Guantánamo equivalent of jailhouse informers — has been highlighted in news reports and has drawn criticism from human rights groups in recent days. But some commentators who say the government faced difficulties sorting intelligence in a time of war have noted that such reports were often uncertain, based on bits of information, educated guesses and accounts of witnesses with their own agendas.

“Why is anybody shocked here?” asked James Jay Carafano, a national security expert at the Heritage Foundation in Washington. “The nature of intelligence is it is ambiguous sometimes. It is sometimes based on sources you wouldn’t take to Sunday school.”

Mr. Gharani’s was not the only case to crumble when the Guantánamo intelligence was tested in court. Judges have been unpersuaded by the government’s evidence in several habeas corpus cases, including another federal judge who in 2009 threw out “90 percent” of the case against a young detainee from Afghanistan, Mohammed Jawad, because it was based on a confession he gave that she ruled was “the function of torture.” Mr. Jawad was released soon after.

Mr. Gharani, who was one of Guantánamo’s youngest prisoners, has said he was subjected to abusive treatment at the prison, including solitary confinement and?sleep deprivation.

His May 2008 prisoner assessment unambiguously states the most elementary of facts: born in Medina, Saudi Arabia, in 1981.

The document, though, contains few clues that even such statements may be uncertain. In an interview, Mr. Gharani’s lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, called the quality of the information in the dossier “drivel.” He said Mr. Gharani was six years younger than the military believed. That means he would have been 11, not 17, when he was said to have been linked to a London terrorist cell.

“After seven years of having him in custody,” Mr. Stafford Smith said, “they didn’t even know how old he was.”

The dossier noted that at Guantánamo, Mr. Gharani had confessed to being a member of Al Qaeda and then retracted his admission. “His original admission is assessed to be truthful,” the file said with little explanation.

The strongest statements in the assessment, which was a pattern in many of the files, were attributed to other detainees. In Mr. Gharani’s case, two of those were a Yemeni and a Saudi detainee who provided incriminating information that was quoted in many of the dossiers.

For Mr. Gharani’s file, the two serial informers provided telling details. One, Yasim Muhammed Basardah, said he recalled traveling with Mr. Gharani and other members of Al Qaeda. The other, Abdul Hakim Bukhary, said he had heard that Mr. Gharani was a member of the London terrorist cell and claimed that he “would sing about what he was going to do to the Americans” if he were released.

The assertions from the two men, both since released from Guantánamo, did not note information that might have put their damaging claims in context.

Mr. Basardah, according to other documents reviewed by federal judges in court cases, was an unreliable informer with serious psychiatric problems. The references to Mr. Bukhary did not provide an important caveat: his own dossier said he had acknowledged deliberately misleading interrogators and “has no recollection of a lot of things.”