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HOTEL COPIES: A copy of The Miami Herald will bedelivered to your room. A credit of US$0.25 will beposted to your account if delivery is declined. INTERNATIONAL EDITION MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2011

108TH YEAR I ©2011 THE MIAMI HERALD

INDEXTHE AMERICAS ...........4AU.S. NEWS ....................5AOPINION ........................7A COMICS & PUZZLES ...6B

REBELS CONVERGE NEAR GADHAFI STRONGHOLD, 3A

WAVE OF DEATHS AS RED CROSS CHIEF VISITS SYRIA, 6A

EUROPE NEEDS MORE PERFECT UNION, EXPERTS SUGGEST,BUSINESS FRONT

Strauss-Kahn makes low-key return to France

Files note close relations between Libya spies and CIA

2012 race begins in earnestthis month

Tribal clout remains critical in Yemen

BY ALISON SMALE AND COLIN MOYNIHANNew York Times Service

PARIS — Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the In-ternational Monetary Fund and onetime hopeful for the French presidency, returned to his native land early on Sunday morning, in a low-key coda to the internation-al furor that erupted when he was arrested in mid-May and charged with sexually assaulting a New York hotel housekeeper.

Strauss-Kahn and his wife, Anne Sinclair, landed at Charles de Gaulle airport shortly after 7 a.m. and emerged about 40 min-utes later, breezing past a crowd of reporters without speaking before getting into a car and leaving.

A cluster of women who said they administer a Facebook page in support of Strauss-Kahn were the only supporters on hand. One woman, who identifi ed herself only as Helene and appeared to be in her late 30s, insisted that Strauss-Kahn was innocent of all the charges against him.

Indeed, the charges were dis-missed at the request of the Man-hattan district attorney’s offi ce on Aug. 23 after doubts arose about the credibility of Strauss-Kahn’s accuser Nafi ssatou Diallo, a housekeeper at the Sofi tel in mid-town Manhattan.

But Strauss-Kahn, who was once seen as a contender in the 2012 French presidential elections

TURN TO STRAUSS-KAHN, 2A•

BY DAN BALZWashington Post Service

WASHINGTON — For U.S. President Barack Obama and the Republicans seeking to defeat him, the month of September will be when the 2012 campaign takes shape, with the coming weeks of-fering a series of tests that will sharply defi ne the choices in next year’s election and reveal more about the characters of those who seek to lead the country.

No one has more at stake than Obama, whose leadership is under challenge and whose reelection is now in doubt because of persis-tent unemployment and questions about his leadership. But nearly as much may be at stake for the Re-publicans, a party whose political brand remains troubled and whose presidential fi eld is only now com-ing into focus.

Beginning this week, two con-sequential debates will begin to unfold. The fi rst will pit the presi-dent against the Republican Party as the two sides lay out competing plans and visions for rescuing an economy still in distress. In some ways, that debate will be an exten-sion of the one that took place over the debt ceiling earlier this sum-mer, but with the focus likely to be much more a president whose poli-cies so far have not turned around the economy.

The second will take place within the family of Republicans, highlighted by a series of candidate forums that will not only defi ne more clearly where a GOP presi-dent might take the country but also should highlight potentially signifi cant differences in style and philosophy between the two lead-ing contenders for the nomination, Texas Gov. Rick Perry and for-mer Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney.

All this will play out against a backdrop of deep public dissatis-faction, which has intensifi ed in the aftermath of the polarized fi ght over raising the debt ceiling, which is now seen by some analysts as a pivotal moment in the country’s political history.

That fi scal battle, which took the country to the brink of default and brought a downgrading of the na-tion’s credit rating by Standard & Poor’s, produced further erosion in

TURN TO CAMPAIGN, 5A•

BY ROD NORDLANDNew York Times Service

TRIPOLI, Libya — Documents found at the abandoned offi ce of Libya’s former spymaster appear to provide new details of the close rela-tions the Central Intelligence Agen-cy shared with Libyan intelligence — most notably suggesting that the U.S. agency sent terrorism suspects at least eight times for questioning in Libya despite that country’s repu-tation for torture.

Although it has been known that Western intelligence services be-gan cooperating with Libya after it abandoned its program to build unconventional weapons in 2004, the fi les left behind as Tripoli fell to rebels show that the cooperation was much more extensive than gen-erally known with both the CIA and its British equivalent, MI-6.

Some documents indicate that the British agency was willing to trace phone numbers for the Libyans, and another appears to be a proposed speech written by the United States for Moammar Gadhafi about re-nouncing unconventional weapons.

The documents were discovered Friday by journalists and Human Rights Watch. There were at least three binders of English language documents, one marked CIA and the other two marked MI-6, among a larger stash of documents in Arabic.

It was impossible to verify their authenticity. But the binders includ-ed some documents that made spe-cifi c reference to the CIA, and their details seem consistent with what is known about the transfer of terror suspects abroad for interrogation and with other agency practices.

The scope of prisoner transfers to Libya has not been made public, but news media reports have some-times mentioned it as one country the United States used as part of its much criticized rendition program for terrorism suspects.

A CIA spokeswoman, Jennifer Youngblood, declined to comment on the documents Friday, but she said: “It can’t come as a surprise that the Central Intelligence Agency works with foreign governments to help protect our country from ter-rorism and other deadly threats.”

BY SUDARSAN RAGHAVANWashington Post service

SANA’A, Yemen — Hamid al Ahmar is not a member of Ye-men’s ruling party or its military. He holds no formal position in its opposition movement. Nor can he claim the authority of a religious leader.

Yet Ahmar is anything but a mere observer in the seven-month-old populist uprising to oust President Ali Abdullah Saleh. He is a billionaire, a scion of the country’s most powerful tribal family, and he is using his money and power to assert a role in a new Yemen.

He has bankrolled protest marches in 10 provinces, provid-ing everything from microphones to transportation. He commands tens of thousands of tribesmen, including a heavily armed con-tingent that guards him day and night. His tribe’s clout has bought him access and infl uence; now it is providing Ahmar with a power base, one that has brought fresh energy to the revolution but has also spawned more violence and chaos.

“I am living with this revolu-tion, day by day, hour by hour,” the 43-year-old said in an interview inside his opulent mansion.

Perhaps more than in any other country in the Middle East, the bonds of the vast extended fami-lies known as tribes occupy a cen-tral role in Yemen, a country ruled by two rival groupings, the Bakeel and the more powerful Hashid.

But Yemen is hardly alone in the region being riven by tribal loyalties; tribes are a factor in Libya, Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia and across the Persian Gulf. In some ways, they play a role just as

TURN TO YEMEN, 2A•

MOHAMMED HUWAIS/AFP-GETTY IMAGES

Fighters loyal to the Ahmar clan guard the area around the family home in Sana’a, Yemen.

JACQUES BRINON/AP

Dominique Strauss-Kahn exits Roissy airport in Paris with his wife, Anne Sinclair, on Sunday.

BOLT LEADS JAMAICA TO 4X100 WORLD RECORD,SPORTS FRONT

SOLDIER, THINKER, SOLDIER, THINKER, HUNTER, SPYHUNTER, SPY CIA agent dogged in

pursuit of al Qaeda

BY ELISABETH BUMILLERNew York Times Service

WASHINGTON — Every day, Michael G. Vickers gets an update on how many in al Qaeda’s senior leadership the United States has removed from the battlefi eld, and lately there has been much to report. Al Qaeda’s No. 2 died in a CIA drone strike late last month, another senior commander was taken out in June, and the Navy SEALs made history when they dispatched Osama bin Laden in May.

“I just want to kill those guys,” Vickers likes to say in meetings at the Pentagon, with a grin.

Vickers’ preoccupation — “my life,” he says — is dismantling al Qaeda. Under-neath an owlish exterior, he is an ex-Green Beret and former CIA operative with an exotic past. His title is under secretary of defense for intelligence, and he has risen to become one of the top counterterror-ism offi cials in Washington.

As covert U.S. wars — in Pakistan, Ye-men and Somalia — escalate in the second decade after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, so will the questions of legality, morality and risk that go along with them.

Vickers, a top advisor to Defense Sec-retary Leon Panetta who has helped shape U.S. military and intelligence policy for three decades, knows the perils well. He

bears some responsibility for the unin-tended consequences of helping arm the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviets in the 1980s, only to have them turn their weapons against U.S. troops years later.

In recent months, it was Vickers, an ad-ministration offi cial said, who helped per-suade a cautious Robert Gates, then the defense secretary, to go along with the bin Laden raid. It was Vickers who was a driv-er behind two other covert U.S. military operations, in Syria and Pakistan, which killed more than two dozen militants in late 2008. It was Vickers who made sure that Gen. Stanley McChrystal had enough drones at his disposal when he ran the military’s Special Operations Command, which staged secret raids in Iraq and Afghanistan.

During the Reagan administration, Vickers funneled weapons to, among oth-ers, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani, both now morphed into Afghan insurgent leaders who are fi ghting the United States.

“Yes, most of my colleagues from those days are now on the dark side,” Vickers acknowledged in a recent interview in his antiseptic offi ce. “We were well aware that they weren’t the ideal allies.”

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Top U.S. counterterrorism official Michael Vickers’ preoccupation — ‘my life,’ he says — is dismantling al Qaeda’s network.

BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/NEW YORK TIMES SERVICE

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