Chicago Trial May Unmask Pakistan’s Links to Militants

Mr. Headley told Indian investigators that the officer, known only as Major Iqbal, “listened to my entire plan to attack India.” Another officer with the intelligence service, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, “assured me of the financial help,” Mr. Headley said.

As the United States presses Pakistan for answers about whether the ISI played a role in harboring Osama bin Laden, Mr. Headley is set to recount his story of the Mumbai attack in a federal courthouse in Chicago. What he discloses could deepen suspicions that Pakistani spies are connected to terrorists and could potentially worsen relations between Washington and Islamabad.

India, the site of the November 2008 attacks, will be monitoring the trial for evidence of the ISI’s duplicity. Pakistan will also be listening to — and is likely to deny — Mr. Headley’s every word. Islamabad has been dismissing his accusations against the ISI as little more than a desperate performance by a man hoping to avoid the death penalty.

An American official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that the United States government’s view of Mr. Headley — like the debate that has raged in Washington about the ISI for the last decade — was bitterly divided. No agreement exists in Washington on whether the ISI guided Mr. Headley and the attacks on Mumbai.

“It’s not very clear,” the official said. “A lot of this is going to come out of the trial. His claim could just be his claim.”

Still, the very fact that the government is presenting Mr. Headley as a prosecution witness suggests that at least some in the government believe he is telling the truth. And the authorities said they expected the government to present e-mails and tapes of telephone conversations to support his story.

Any new evidence of ISI malfeasance that emerges from the trial will reverberate in Washington, with the relationship between the United States and Pakistan at its most tenuous in years.

A growing chorus on Capitol Hill argues that the discovery of Bin Laden’s hideout and the evidence in Mr. Headley’s case leave no doubt that the ISI and its Pakistani military overseers have played a cynical double game with the United States. Pakistan has received $20 billion in military and development assistance since 2001, and its military, they say, has sheltered Bin Laden, supported Afghan Taliban who kill American troops and guided the militants who attacked Mumbai.

Mr. Headley himself is not on trial. But he will be the main witness against Tahawwur Hussain Rana, a Chicago businessman who is accused of providing financial and logistical support for the 2008 siege in Mumbai. The attack, a barrage of gunfire and grenades, killed at least 163 people, including six Americans. Mr. Rana’s defense is that he agreed to support Mr. Headley’s activities in India because he was led to believe he was working for the ISI, and therefore the Pakistani government.

Bruce O. Riedel, a terrorism expert at the Brookings Institution and former Central Intelligence Agency officer, predicted that the trial would be “the next nail in the coffin of U.S.-Pakistan relations, as the ISI’s role in the murder of six Americans is revealed in graphic detail.”

American authorities have kept much of the evidence secret. Citing national security concerns, they have successfully moved to quash the defense lawyers’ subpoenas for State Department cables and records held by the F.B.I. that discuss Pakistan’s links with militants.

And though the government has charged four other men, including the officer known as Major Iqbal, with aiding and abetting the murder of American citizens, the indictment refers to them either as commanders or associates of the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, not as having links to the ISI.

In interviews in recent days, American military and intelligence officials who have served in Pakistan argued that the ISI’s story is complex. Some of them portray it as an unwieldy bureaucracy that even Pakistani generals struggle to control. The United States should try to reform the ISI, they argue, not abandon it.

 

Abroad: 50 Years After Trial, Eichmann Secrets Live On

The 50th anniversary of Eichmann’s trial this spring has cast the early days of the postwar Federal Republic in a fresh historical light. Those were the years when the new West Germany held itself up as the cure for what ailed a humiliated and broken nation, and as an alternative to the Communist East.

That era was also the populist heyday of the organization man. And the classic portrait of Eichmann as a soulless cog in the machinery of totalitarianism, a petty bureaucrat acting out of “blind obedience,” in the incredulous description by Moshe Landau, the presiding judge at the trial — who, as it happens, died just the other day, at 99 — has also come to seem a sacred but dubious shibboleth of the time.

A different picture of the man, and the period, has begun to circulate. Bild, the German tabloid, having recently forced the BND through the courts to release a few files, uncovered an index card from 1952 that made clear that West German intelligence officials already knew Eichmann was living in Argentina. The card listed his alias there, or something close to it, and a contact who edited a well-known Nazi magazine in Buenos Aires, Der Weg.

West German authorities had claimed they had no clue where Eichmann went until the Israelis found him. Then in 2006 declassified C.I.A. documents showed they knew as early as 1956. Now it turns out they knew even earlier. Considering that Eichmann’s wife and children settled in Argentina in 1952 — living openly with Eichmann under their own names, in a house that was under his name — it seems remarkable today that authorities got away with claiming ignorance for so long.

Germans reacted to the Bild article with a familiar shake of the head that, here, implies not a lack of concern but stoic resignation. The bigger kerfuffle, though, has been around the more than 4,000 pages of undisclosed intelligence about Eichmann.

“The postwar period remains sensitive,” explained Bettina Stangneth, the author of a new German book on Eichmann, “because many Germans want to preserve the positive image they have of that time.”

She meant the postwar years of Konrad Adenauer’s chancellorship and the so-called economic miracle. Few West German officials, or for that matter American ones, had any interest in hunting for Eichmann during the 1950s, Ms. Stangneth noted. Both countries employed ex-Nazis in government jobs. Eichmann had beans to spill. Better to leave him in obscurity, they figured.

That Adenauer’s close adviser, Hans Globke, helped strip Jews of their rights under the Nazis was a widely publicized scandal, but it only distracted from the larger shame that countless lesser-known Nazis lived and worked under the radar throughout West German society, including in the ranks of the BND.

A new exhibition about the trial at the Topography of Terror Museum here devotes a section to reappraising the work of the philosopher Hannah Arendt, pointing out that she failed to attend much of the trial, never saw Eichmann cross-examined and thus didn’t witness his “just following orders” defense crumble.

“Neither perverted nor sadistic,” is how Arendt described Eichmann, but “terribly and terrifyingly normal.” In Argentina Eichmann had been interviewed by an ex-Nazi, Willem Sassen, who, along with some other ex-Nazis there, dreamed about exonerating Hitler and inaugurating a Fourth Reich. Confronted with some of the Sassen material at the trial, Eichmann was exposed. He had told Sassen that he only regretted not having murdered more Jews. “I could have done more and should have done more,” he said.

The German historian Ulrich Herbert, during a recent interview with a German newspaper, described Eichmann as typical of many high-ranking Nazis, priding himself on being “an anti-Semite without anti-Semitic emotions.” Historians like Mr. Herbert have increasingly been questioning Arendt’s iconic concept of the “banality of evil.” As an underling to ultimate Nazi policy makers like Himmler and Heydrich, Eichmann was following orders, but was also “convinced of his actions,” Mr. Herbert insisted.

 

Discussions Outside Court Are Raised at Fire Trial

A limited view of this dynamic was revealed on Thursday in a Manhattan courtroom, where a construction worker testified about his sometimes uneasy relationship with a prosecutor in the trial of three men charged in the deaths of two firefighters battling a blaze at the former Deutsche Bank building.

And in an awkward moment, the prosecutor, Joel J. Seidemann, had to confront the worker, Diego Marin, just moments after Mr. Marin spoke about the tension.

At issue was whether Mr. Seidemann, a veteran assistant district attorney who can be feisty in legal battles, pressured Mr. Marin into saying certain things.

Under cross-examination, Edward J. M. Little, who represents one of the defendants, Jeffrey Melofchik, asked Mr. Marin if Mr. Seidemann had asked him repeatedly in a private, pretrial interview whether a pipe shown to him in a photograph was a “high-pressured pipe.”

“Yes, because what he was saying was that I had told him that it was a high-pressured pipe,” Mr. Marin said through an interpreter.

But what he actually told Mr. Seidemann, Mr. Marin testified, was that it seemed like a high-pressured pipe. He could not be sure, he said, because he was not a plumber.

The pipe in question is a standpipe in the building’s basement. Its identity is important because lawyers for the defendants — Mr. Melofchik, a site safety supervisor; and two abatement supervisors, Mitchel Alvo and Salvatore DePaola — say their clients did not have the expertise to know what the pipe was.

Prosecutors blame the defendants for severing the pipe less than a year before a blaze in the upper floors led to the deaths of two firefighters.

Mr. Little asked Mr. Marin if he had told investigators that “this prosecutor acted crazy and pushed you around a lot.”

“No,” Mr. Marin responded. “It was just that I was starting to feel uncomfortable.”

Mr. Marin also testified that an unidentified employee of the district attorney’s office slapped Mr. DePaola’s hand out of the way recently when the two were trying to shake hands.

When Mr. Seidemann got up to ask Mr. Marin more questions after Mr. Little was finished, there was a moment of silence.

“You’re smiling, I see,” Mr. Seidemann said.

“I’ve lost two days of work,” Mr. Marin responded.

“I’m sorry about that,” Mr. Seidemann said.

He showed Mr. Marin two photographs on which Mr. Marin had made notations during an interview at the district attorney’s office. The photographs were of pipes in the basement of the former Deutsche Bank building.

Mr. Marin said he had written on them that “it looks like the picture of a high-pressured pipe.”

While it is unusual for prosecutors to be testy with their own witnesses, Mr. Seidemann asked Mr. Marin if he was being honest in what he wrote.

“Yes, I’ve tried to tell the truth,” he said. “I’ve told the truth.”

Then, raising his voice, Mr. Seidemann asked Mr. Marin if he wrote anywhere on the photographs that he was unsure it was a high-pressured water pipe. The defense objected, and the judge told Mr. Marin not to answer the question.

 

A Trial Run for School Standards That Encourage Deeper Thought

Last month, for a paper on the influence of media on teenagers, she had them read a survey on the effects of cellphones and computers on young people’s lives, a newspaper column on the role of social media in the Tunisian uprising and a 4,200-word magazine article titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”

A math teacher, José Rios, used to take a day or two on probabilities, drawing bell-shaped curves on the blackboard to illustrate the pattern known as normal distribution. This year, he stretched the lesson by a day and had students work in groups to try to draw the same type of graphic using the heights of the 15 boys in the class.

“Eventually, they figured out they couldn’t because the sample was too small,” Mr. Rios said. “They learned that the size of the sample matters, and I didn’t have to tell them.”

In three years, instruction in most of the country could look a lot like what is going on at Hillcrest, one of 100 schools in New York City experimenting with new curriculum standards known as the common core.

Forty-two states, the District of Columbia and the Virgin Islands have signed on to the new standards, an ambitious set of goals that go beyond reading lists and math formulas to try to raise the bar not only on what students in every grade are expected to learn, but also on how teachers are expected to teach.

The standards, to go into effect in 2014, will replace a hodgepodge of state guidelines that have become the Achilles’ heel of the No Child Left Behind law. Many states, including New York, lowered standards in a push to meet the law’s requirement that all students reach grade level, as measured by each state, in English and math. President Obama has expressed a desire to rewrite the law, and many experts predict the common core will be a centerpiece of the effort.

The new standards give specific goals that, by the end of the 12th grade, should prepare students for college work. Book reports will ask students to analyze, not summarize. Presentations will be graded partly on how persuasively students express their ideas. History papers will require reading from multiple sources; the goal is to get students to see how beliefs and biases can influence the way different people describe the same events.

There are a number of challenges.

There are guidelines for what students are expected to do in each grade, but it is still up to districts, schools and teachers to fill in the finer points of the curriculum, like what books to read.

There is no national body responsible for seeing that the standards are carried out, because of fears of giving too much control of education to the federal government. So far, only a few other large cities, including Boston, Cleveland and Philadelphia, have begun to apply the standards in the classroom. And depending on how No Child Left Behind is refashioned, it may still be left to each state to measure its own success.

“The standards create a historic opportunity in that we now have a destination worth aiming for, but only time will tell if they’ll create historic change,” said Chester E. Finn Jr., an assistant secretary of education in the Reagan administration and the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a group that supports national standards.

With 3,200 students, Hillcrest is the second largest school in the city’s pilot. Its size and diversity — whites are a minority (4 percent), Muslims are the religious plurality (about 30 percent) and one-tenth of students are learning English — made it an ideal laboratory to test how the standards might work in the city, officials said.

On a recent Wednesday, Jill Lee, an English teacher, closed a unit on the meaning of the American dream not by assigning a first-person essay, as she once did, but by asking each student to interview an immigrant and write a profile of the person.

Eleni Giannousis made a change in her 10th-grade English class that might make some purists blanch. She had students watch the filmed stage performance of “Death of a Salesman,” starring Dustin Hoffman as Willy Loman, before they read the play. The idea was to have students absorb information through a medium they use for entertainment, one way she was experimenting with her lesson plans to try to meet the new goals.

“It wasn’t about making things easier for the students, but about challenging them to experience a classic in a different way,” Ms. Giannousis said.

While English classes will still include healthy amounts of fiction, the standards say that students should be reading more nonfiction texts as they get older, to prepare them for the kinds of material they will read in college and careers. In the fourth grade, students should be reading about the same amount from “literary” and “informational” texts, according to the standards; in the eighth grade, 45 percent should be literary and 55 percent informational, and by 12th grade, the split should be 30/70.

Shael Polakow-Suransky, the city’s chief academic officer, said the city plans to create an instructional package with exercises that teachers at Hillcrest and other schools have used; student work they have assigned; and guidelines for evaluating the work.

At a training session last month, teams representing several schools in the pilot were asked to list lessons they had learned. Teachers from the Forward School of Creative Writing, a middle school in the Williamsbridge section of the Bronx, wrote on a piece of cardboard: “Visuals help students make meaning” and “Many students are reading far below grade level.”

Timothy Shanahan, a professor of urban education at the University of Illinois at Chicago who helped write the common core standards for how to incorporate reading into science instruction, said that as a whole, the standards make no adjustments for students who are learning English or for children who might enter kindergarten without having been exposed to books.

“If I’m teaching fifth grade and I have a youngster in my class who reads as a first grader, throwing him a grade-level text is not going to do him any good, no matter what the standards say,” he said.

Mr. Polakow-Suransky, too, cautioned against overly optimistic expectations.

“This isn’t one of those things where you flip the switch and tomorrow, everything is going to be different,” he said.

 

Trial in China Tests Limits of Legal System Reform

BEIJING — In a case that has galvanized lawyers across China and provided a window into how the next generation of leaders may view the country’s fragile legal system, a defense lawyer went on trial Tuesday charged with fabricating testimony in favor of his client.

The lawyer, Li Zhuang, a 50-year-old from Beijing, has been accused of inciting a client to fake testimony. Mr. Li was previously convicted on similar charges after one of his clients, a convicted gangster from the western city of Chongqing, testified against him late last year. Mr. Li is currently serving 18 months in prison.

Yet few Chinese commentators seem to believe that Mr. Li is guilty in either case. Many think he was framed for fighting what they see as a crude campaign against corruption.

“The Li Zhuang case is so important because it is an indicator of how far China has come on its legal reform,” said a Peking University law professor, He Weifang, who has also posted a sharp criticism of the case on his blog. “It sets China’s legal reform back 30 years.”

The unusual case began in 2007, when one of the country’s best-known politicians, Bo Xilai, took charge of Chongqing, a sprawling municipality of 30 million people in western China. The appointment was seen as a challenge for Mr. Bo, the son of one of China’s most powerful leaders. It also was widely seen as a sign that Mr. Bo was angling for a top job himself.

He had been minister of commerce, so it was a notable move because Chongqing was poor and suffered from some of the worst environmental problems in China and a plague of organized crime.

But Mr. Bo embarked on a series of spectacular actions to stay in the national limelight. Using methods reminiscent of political campaigns in the early era of Communist rule, he mobilized neighborhood cleanups and sent out greetings to local residents with old-style Communist slogans, although via text messages. Mostly, he began a ferocious crackdown on organized crime.

Caught up in the campaign was Gong Gangmo, whose family had hired Mr. Li in late 2009 to defend him. Mr. Li, a successful lawyer who had previously defended those accused of organized crime, traveled to Chongqing and met with Mr. Gong. A few days later, Mr. Gong told prosecutors that Mr. Li advised him to falsely testify that he had been beaten for eight days and nights.

Within a month, Mr. Li had been tried and sentenced to two and a half years in prison. This was reduced to one and a half years because Mr. Li was said to have cooperated. At the sentencing, however, Chinese news reports said that Mr. Li angrily called out that he had been framed.

On Tuesday, Mr. Li went back on trial. Prosecutors say that he was involved in fraud and that he enticed a witness to fabricate evidence.

Many Chinese say they are appalled at what appears to be a crude use of the courts for political gain. In both trials, Chinese court procedure has been ignored. Mr. Li has not, for example, been able to face his accusers, and his lawyers could not cross-examine them.

Newspapers and magazines have reported widely on this case, with, for example, one of the country’s leading magazines, Caixin, devoting a cover story to it and an editorial in the current issue. Several Web sites had minute-by-minute coverage. Many say that if Mr. Li is convicted, it will be impossible for other lawyers to defend their clients. “Defending Li Zhuang is defending the right to work as a lawyer in China and the ideal of justice,” Wei Rujiu, one of his lawyers, wrote on his blog on Tuesday.

The publicity is in striking contrast to the many lawyers who have been quietly rounded up in a recent political crackdown. One explanation, analysts say, is that Mr. Li is not a political dissident, making it acceptable for the Chinese media to report on the issue.

But it may also signal that forces are opposing Mr. Bo’s efforts to use Chongqing as a springboard back to Beijing, and possibly the Standing Committee of the Politburo.

“Bo is not uncontroversial in the party,” said Joshua Rosenzweig of the Dui Hua Foundation, a human rights monitoring group, in Hong Kong. “It feeds into concern over how Bo has handled criminal justice in Chongqing.”

That could have broader ramifications for China because Mr. Bo, should he win a seat on the Standing Committee, is also expected to be put in charge of law and order. That could make Mr. Li’s treatment a harbinger for the next government’s view of the legal system.