IDAHO MAN CHARGED WITH ATTEMPT TO ASSASSINATE OBAMA

[The FBI searched the White House grounds and found “several confirmed bullet impact points on the south side of the building on or above the second floor,” FBI agent Chris Ormerod wrote in the affidavit. “The second and third stories of the White House are known to be the residence of the First Family. Several bullets and fragments were also collected in that area.”]

By Paul Duggan

In the past year, authorities say, Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez became more and more agitated. Louder and louder, his mind warned him that the government was plotting against him. As he saw it, one man personified the threat:

President Obama.

About a month ago, Ortega-Hernandez, 21, abruptly left his home in Idaho Falls, Idaho, climbed into his 1998 Honda Accord and drove away without explanation, acquaintances there later said. One of them knew that Ortega-Hernandez owned a powerful rifle. This person “looked in Ortega-Hernandez’s room for the gun,” a federal agent wrote in a court affidavit. “And the gun was not there.”

Last Friday night, law enforcement officials allege, Ortega-Hernandez stopped his black four-door Honda near 17th Street and Constitution Avenue NW, about 750 yards from the south face of the White House.

He had traveled 2,200 miles.

In the car, they say, he had a loaded Romanian-made Cugir SA semiautomatic rifle equipped with telescopic sight, three spare magazines filled with 7.62x39mm ammunition, and several boxes of bullets, along with brass knuckles and an aluminum baseball bat.

What possessed him? The acquaintances later reported that Ortega-Hernandez had told them that he “needed to kill” the president, that Obama was “the devil” and “the anti-Christ” and that he “will not stop until it’s done.” Just past 9 p.m., authorities say, he aimed the rifle out of a window of his car, toward the White House.

And he allegedly squeezed the trigger again and again. Some of the rounds struck the exterior of the residential area of the mansion, according to the affidavit, which was made public Thursday. Investigators would later find nine spent shell casings in Ortega-Hernandez’s abandoned sedan.

An official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the attack is under investigation, said authorities have found no evidence of anyone else being involved in the shooting. Ortega-Hernandez has not been linked to any radical organizations or co-conspirators, the official said.

It’s unclear whether any of Ortega-Hernandez’s acquaintances warned authorities about him before last Friday — whether they told police about the alleged threats toward Obama, about Ortega-Hernandez’s sudden departure from Idaho or about the rifle.

Arrested Wednesday in western Pennsylvania after a five-day manhunt, Ortega-Hernandez was charged with attempting to assassinate Obama, punishable by up to life in prison. A federal magistrate in Pittsburgh ordered him jailed Thursday pending a yet-to-be-scheduled appearance in U.S. District Court in Washington, where he will be prosecuted.

The president and first lady Michelle Obama were in San Diego at the time of the shooting. As for the couple’s two daughters and their grandmother, a spokeswoman for the first lady would not say where they were that night. She referred questions to the Secret Service, which declined to comment on the family.

No one was injured in the shooting.

On Tuesday, four days after the gunfire, the Secret Service said it found a bullet hole in a window on the south side of the White House. The slug had pierced the “historic exterior glass” but was stopped by ballistic glass behind it, the Secret Service said.

The FBI searched the White House grounds and found “several confirmed bullet impact points on the south side of the building on or above the second floor,” FBI agent Chris Ormerod wrote in the affidavit. “The second and third stories of the White House are known to be the residence of the First Family. Several bullets and fragments were also collected in that area.”

Over the past year, “Ortega-Hernandez’s opinion and comments regarding the government and President Obama have gotten worse,” Ormerod wrote, based on an interview with an acquaintance of the suspect’s.

“Ortega-Hernandez was very specific that President Obama was the problem with the government, and Ortega-Hernandez was ‘preparing for something,’ ” the affidavit says, quoting the acquaintance. “Ortega-Hernandez stated that President Obama ‘needed to be taken care of,’ ” the acquaintance told investigators.

At least two people witnessed the gunfire, Ormerod wrote. One heard about eight “popping sounds” coming from a dark-colored sedan; the other described “puffs of air” from a window on the passenger’s side. The car then sped away.

Minutes later, Ortega-Hernandez’s Honda came to a sudden stop on the lawn of the U.S. Institute of Peace, in the 2300 block of Constitution Avenue, about six blocks west of the White House, the affidavit says. It says that a person who saw the Honda began to approach it, wondering whether the driver needed help.

“While walking toward the vehicle, [the witness] observed the operator attempt to restart the car, and then get out and flee the area on foot,” Ormerod wrote. Authorities said Ortega-Hernandez ran across the nearby Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Bridge, over the Potomac River and into Virginia.

FBI ballistics experts were trying to determine whether the slugs recovered on the White House grounds came from the rifle found in Ortega-Hernandez’s car.

In searching for him, the Secret Service said, agents distributed photos of Ortega-Hernandez in places where they learned he had been in recent weeks, including a Hampton Inn just outside Indiana, Pa., about 60 miles east of Pittsburgh.

Ortega-Hernandez returned to the hotel Wednesday, authorities said. Employees recognized him from the photo and called Pennsylvania State Police, who arrested him.

Police said he gave up peacefully.

@ The New York Times

IN PAKISTAN, A DEEP CIVIL-MILITARY DIVIDE

[As the saga escalated Thursday, many in Pakistan’s media began predicting that Zardari would sacrifice Haqqani. Even commentators sympathetic to him and the government said that asking for U.S. assistance in forestalling a coup would be an unpardonable offense. The Express-Tribune editorial treated Haqqani’s role as a disappointing fact, referring to it as “galling” and saying that the controversy will only “strengthen the military’s hand in castigating the civilian government as sell-outs to the Americans.”]

By Karin Brulliard and Karen DeYoung

ARIF ALI/AFP/Getty Images -  Pakistan’s powerful army 

has become enraged after a secret memo indicated 

President Asif Ali Zardari’s government asked for U.S. 

help to prevent a military coup following the 

Navy SEAL raid in May that killed Osama bin Laden.

LAHORE, Pakistan — A growing storm over a confidential memo is laying bare the profound division between Pakistan’s powerful army and its civilian government, and the nation’s relationship with the United States is again at the center of the gulf.

At issue are allegations that the government of President Asif Ali Zardari asked for U.S. help to prevent a military coup after the Navy SEAL raid in May that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. The claim is thought to have enraged Pakistan’s army, and the resulting controversy prompted Pakistan’s ambassador to Washington, Husain Haqqani, to offer his resignation this week.

Zardari’s government has nominally been leading Pakistan since 2008. But real power remains in the hands of the military, which has ruled the South Asian nation for half its 64-year existence and was livid after the U.S. operation against bin Laden. Though both the army and the civilian government receive billions of dollars in American assistance, the military views the United States, and its support for Zardari’s unpopular administration, with deep distrust.

That attitude is widespread in Pakistan, where patriotism is equated with support for the military and the United States is often seen more as bully than friend.

Against that backdrop, a column published last month in the Financial Times has proved explosive. In it, Pakistani American businessman Mansoor Ijaz asserted that a senior Pakistani diplomat — whom he identified Thursday as Haqqani — asked him to help relay a request to the then-chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, to stop the military from staging a coup.

The memo, a copy of which was provided by Ijaz to The Washington Post, warns that a military takeover would result in “potentially the platform for far more rapid spread of al Qaeda’s brand of fanaticism and terror.” The upheaval in the wake of the bin Laden killing, it said, provided “a unique window of opportunity” for “civilians to gain the upper hand over army and intelligence directorates.”

It said that in exchange for U.S. “direct intervention” to convey a strong no-coup message to Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, leader of Pakistan’s military, a newly appointed civilian national security team would shepherd an independent investigation of the bin Laden matter and terminate any “active service officers” found to have been complicit in concealing the al-Qaeda leader.

Pakistan, it said, would also move to hand over all remaining al-Qaeda leaders on its soil, as well as Taliban leader Mohammad Omar and Sirajuddin Haqqani of the Haqqani insurgent network. Alternatively, it could give “U.S. military forces a ‘green light’ to conduct the necessary operations to capture or kill them on Pakistani soil,” the memo said.

It said the civilian government would eliminate “Section S” of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency, a unit that handles relations with insurgent groups; bring to justice the perpetrators of the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai; and implement new measures to secure Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.

The memo was unsigned but said it was being submitted by “the members of the new national security team who will be inducted by the President of Pakistan with your support in this undertaking.” Ijaz said the names included Husain Haqqani and his two predecessors as ambassador, both retired military officers. Ijaz said the names were given orally to Mullen by the emissary who delivered the memo. Ijaz did not name the emissary.

In an e-mail with the attached document sent to the intermediary May 11, the day of the delivery to Mullen, Ijaz wrote that it “has the support of the President of Pakistan.”

Nearly two weeks after the Ijaz column was published, the Pakistani government dismissed the account as “fictitious,” even as Pakistani media speculated that Haqqani was the diplomat in question and Zardari summoned Haqqani home for consultations. But this week, a Mullen spokesman confirmed to Foreign Policy magazine that he had received the memo, although the spokesman said it was not acted on or taken seriously.

Haqqani subsequently acknowledged speaking regularly to Ijaz but said the e-mail and text messages Ijaz has released were misleading and did not indicate that the diplomat helped draft the memo or authorized its delivery.

“I fail to understand why Mr. Ijaz claims on the one hand to have helped the civilian government by delivering his memo and on the other insists on trying to destroy democracy by driving a wedge between elected civilians and the military in Pakistan with his persistent claims,” Haqqani said in a statement Thursday.

A Pakistani military intelligence official, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said Kayani had demanded that Zardari summon Haqqani.

Analysts say the military is especially skeptical of Haqqani, who is viewed in Washington as a shrewd and effective envoy and is known in Pakistan for his “principled opposition to military dominance over civilian affairs,” according to an editorial in the Express-Tribune, an English-language daily. Pakistani intelligence is widely thought to have circulated negative reports about Haqqani in the past.

As the saga escalated Thursday, many in Pakistan’s media began predicting that Zardari would sacrifice Haqqani. Even commentators sympathetic to him and the government said that asking for U.S. assistance in forestalling a coup would be an unpardonable offense. The Express-Tribune editorial treated Haqqani’s role as a disappointing fact, referring to it as “galling” and saying that the controversy will only “strengthen the military’s hand in castigating the civilian government as sell-outs to the Americans.”

DeYoung reported from Washington. Special correspondent Shaiq Hussain in Islamabad, Pakistan, contributed to this report.

@ The Washington Post