Negotiate or Continue to Fight?
  Trial shows Al Qaeda is still gunning for West -- but failing Aggressive surveillance has damaged the effectiveness of Osama bin Laden's network. Nevertheless, anti-terrorism officials remain wary of the evolving nature of the threat. By Sebastian Rotella
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

September 11, 2008

MADRID — The trial of eight Britons charged with plotting to blow up transatlantic flights ended in London this week with a mixed verdict. But to anti-terrorism officials, two things are clear: The 2006 plot was an ambitious effort by Al Qaeda to match the carnage of the Sept. 11 attacks.

And it failed.

Today's seventh anniversary of the attacks on the United States finds anti-terrorism officials optimistic that they have damaged Osama bin Laden's network and its offshoots, but wary of the evolving nature of the threat.

Newly disclosed intelligence illustrates that the airplane plot was part of a broader campaign. British anti-terrorism officials said information that couldn't be used in court linked the plot to the bombing of the London transportation system in July 2005 and a failed follow-up attack two weeks later. Intercepts and other evidence indicate that leaders of the plots had contact with each other, converged in Pakistan and were trained by Al Qaeda bosses, officials said.

But only the first attack, which killed 52 people on the public transportation network, succeeded.

Because a foremost objective of Al Qaeda has been to strike in the West, the absence of attacks since 2005 appears to reflect the network's weakened state. Its North African offshoot wages a deadly campaign in Algeria, but has done little elsewhere. Fears about returning fighters from Iraq targeting the West have not materialized. Bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman Zawahiri, are still fugitives and are thought to be in Pakistan. But a barrage of U.S. missile strikes near the Afghan border has slain at least three of their frontline operational chiefs this year.

"It's clear that pulling off big attacks is more difficult," said a senior European police official who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of his work. "The police have gotten better. Intelligence services have penetrated the networks. They have the desire to attack, but whether they have the capacity is less clear."

Still, anti-terrorism forces are on guard.

Al Qaeda's core leaders, and forces including foreign militants and Taliban fighters waging war in Afghanistan, have carved out a sanctuary in northwest Pakistan. The flow of militants that originates in the Muslim world and Europe has shifted its destination from Iraq to the Pakistan-Afghanistan border zone. The Internet has contributed to the rise of a generation of homegrown extremists. And past major attacks by Bin Laden's network took years to prepare.

"We don't want to let complacency sink in. That is exactly when something can happen," said a senior British anti-terrorism official. "The threat hasn't manifested itself in the West recently, but the picture looks a lot different if you are in Algiers or Islamabad."

The timing of terrorist attacks is dictated largely by logistics, targets and anniversaries of significance to extremists. Although Bin Laden interjected himself into the U.S. electoral debate in 2004 by releasing a video days before the presidential vote, the Western political calendar seems to have little effect, according to anti-terrorism officials.

A historic exception: Train bombings here in 2004 killed 191 people and influenced the Spanish elections three days later. The Madrid attacks displayed the devastating capacity of a makeshift cell with only indirect links to the broader Bin Laden network.

With the U.S. presidential election campaign in its homestretch, officials say they will heighten their vigilance. European anti-terrorism officials say they expect a final push by the Bush administration to capture or kill Bin Laden and top deputies. And the start of the countdown to the Nov. 4 election coincides this year with the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Although Ramadan is a period of reflection and prayer for most Muslims, it can also spur extremists to action.

"The analysis takes the American elections into account," said veteran anti-terrorism prosecutor Stefano Dambruoso, now director of international programs for Italy's Justice Ministry. "The threat could be from 'Qaedists' -- Internet radicals who are not directly in contact with Pakistan -- or directly from Al Qaeda. More likely the first than the second."

Al Qaeda remains determined to strike on American soil, anti-terrorism officials say. But it has run up against aggressive surveillance, tough border security and a lack of extremist communities in which to operate. Instead, officials say, it appears to have focused on using Europe to hit targets such as the flights bound for the United States from Britain.

Europe has its own worries. After Madrid and London were hit, Italy and France seemed vulnerable. But thus far, a crackdown on the European mainland has prevented any plot by widespread networks of North African militants from reaching advanced stages.

Meanwhile, the threat from Pakistani-based groups has widened from Britain. Last year, German and Danish police arrested suspects allegedly trained by the Al Qaeda bosses who were implicated in the British plots. Partly because of Danish caricatures of the prophet Muhammad published in 2005, Denmark has become a top target.

In January, an undercover informant for French intelligence helped Spanish police round up a group of Pakistanis accused of plotting a suicide bombing on the Barcelona subway. But no explosives were found. European and U.S. investigators say the danger was real, but the imminence was exaggerated.

European anti-terrorism chiefs also have worried about war-hardened foreign fighters in Iraq returning home. But many of the militants die in combat. Moreover, U.S. intelligence services work closely with allies to track surviving foreign fighters when they depart Iraq.

Security forces have detected a new trend starting this spring: Dozens of foreign fighters leaving Iraq have found refuge in Bosnia-Herzegovina rather than returning home, according to two senior European anti-terrorism officials. The veterans are assisted by an infrastructure of Arab militants who obtained Bosnian passports after fighting there in the 1990s, officials said.

"They go from Iraq to Bosnia and stay there awhile," an anti-terrorism official said. "They are mainly North Africans. It's not easy, but they enter Bosnia and live semi-clandestinely with the help of the mujahedin who have always been there. Eventually some show up in countries like France or Italy."

Despite Western worries about an attack tied to the Sept. 11 anniversary or the U.S. presidential vote, the danger is more long-term and profound, the senior British anti-terrorism official said.

"It's more the ongoing reality that we, and you, are high-profile targets and that there is active plotting," he said. "We know about passage of individuals to train in Pakistan. And that key individuals in the '06 and '05 cases are still at large."

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 What if he is finally right? Prince Charles warns GM crops risk causing the biggest-ever environmental disaster
Last Updated: 2:01pm BST 12/08/2008

 

The mass development of genetically modified crops risks causing the world's worst environmental disaster, The Prince of Wales has warned.


In his most outspoken intervention on the issue of GM food, the Prince said that multi-national companies were conducting an experiment with nature which had gone "seriously wrong".

The Prince, in an exclusive interview with the Daily Telegraph, also expressed the fear that food would run out because of the damage being wreaked on the earth's soil by scientists' research.

He accused firms of conducting a "gigantic experiment I think with nature and the whole of humanity which has gone seriously wrong".

"Why else are we facing all these challenges, climate change and everything?".


Relying on "gigantic corporations" for food, he said, would result in "absolute disaster".

"That would be the absolute destruction of everything... and the classic way of ensuring there is no food in the future," he said.

"What we should be talking about is food security not food production - that is what matters and that is what people will not understand.

"And if they think its somehow going to work because they are going to have one form of clever genetic engineering after another then again count me out, because that will be guaranteed to cause the biggest disaster environmentally of all time."

Small farmers, in particular, would be the victims of "gigantic corporations" taking over the mass production of food.

"I think it's heading for real disaster," he said.

"If they think this is the way to go....we [will] end up with millions of small farmers all over the world being driven off their land into unsustainable, unmanageable, degraded and dysfunctional conurbations of unmentionable awfulness."

The Prince of Wales's forthright comments will reopen the whole debate about GM food.

They will put him on a collision course with the international scientific community and Downing Street - which has allowed 54 GM crop trials in Britain since 2000.

His intervention comes at a critical time. There is intense pressure for more GM products, not fewer, because of soaring food costs and widespread shortages.

Many scientists believe GM research is the only way to guarantee food for the world's growing population as the planet is affected by climate change.

They will be dismayed by such a high profile and controversial contribution from the Prince of Wales at such a sensitive time.

The Prince will be braced for the biggest outpouring of criticism from scientists since he accused genetic engineers of taking us into "realms that belong to God and God alone" in an article in the Daily Telegraph in 1998.

In the interview the Prince, who has an organic farm on his Highgrove estate, held out the hope of the British agricultural system encouraging more and more family run co-operative farms.

When challenged over whether he was trying to turn back the clock, he said: "I think not. I'm terribly sorry. It's not going backwards. It is actually recognising that we are with nature, not against it. We have gone working against nature for too long."

The Prince of Wales cited the widespread environmental damage in India caused by the rush to mass produce GM food.

"Look at India's Green Revolution. It worked for a short time but now the price is being paid.

"I have been to the Punjab where you have seen the disasters that have taken place as result of the over demand on irrigation because of the hybrid seeds and grains that have been produced which demand huge amounts of water.

"[The] water table has disappeared. They have huge problems with water level, with pesticide problems, and complications which are now coming home to roost.

"Look at western Australia. Huge salinisation problems. I have been there. Seen it. Some of the excessive approaches to modern forms of agriculture."

He said that the scientists were putting too much pressure on nature.

"If you are not working with natural assistance you cause untold problems. which become very expensive and very difficult to undo.

It places impossible burdens on nature and leads to accumulating problems which become more difficult to sort out."

In a keynote speech last year the Prince of Wales warned that the world faces a series of natural disasters within 18 months unless a £15 billion action plan is agreed to save the world's rain forests.

He has set up his own rain forest project with 15 of the world's largest companies, environmental and economic experts, to try to find ways to stop their destruction.

Only two weeks ago British GM researchers lobbied ministers for their crops to be kept in high-security facilities or in fields at secret locations across the country to prevent them from being attacked and destroyed.

They spoke out after protesters ripped up crops in one of only two GM trials to be approved in Britain this year.

Scientists claim the repeated attacks on their trials are stifling vital research to evaluate whether GM crops can reduce the cost and environmental impact of farming and whether they will grow better in harsh environments where droughts have devastated harvests.

 Jeb Bush: what is Palin's deal? Former California governor makes breathtakingly candid remarks about Sarah Palin's presidential prospects. Read ArticleSee Interview   

Vendetta row can’t hold Sarah Palin back The governor and her husband are accused of hounding her brother-in-law. Tony Allen-Mills reports from Wasilla, Alaska Tony Allen-Mills in Wasilla div#related-article-links p a, div#related-article-links p a:visited { color:#06c; } As a former senior adviser to Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska, John Bitney helped America’s newest political celebrity throughout her successful 2006 election campaign, became the spokesman for her incoming administration and was ultimately named her chief liaison to the Alaskan legislature. Bitney grew up with Palin, played in a high school band with her and, like many other Alaskans, was awed by her rapid rise from a moose-infested rural backwater to the pinnacle of power in her state. He was one of her oldest and most loyal friends but when Palin abruptly sacked Bitney in July last year, she somehow failed to tell him. The first he learnt of it was when his state-issued mobile phone stopped working as he was driving to his office. He used another phone to check in and discovered that his name had been removed from the state employee directory. His offence, according to senior Republican sources in Anchorage, was to fall foul of Palin’s 43-year-old husband, Todd. It was an early sign that the self-styled “first dude” of Alaskan politics was playing an unexpectedly prominent role in his wife’s administration.

 Barack Obama still has reasons to be cheerful By Alex Spillius Fighting back: Barack Obama?s first year wasn?t as bad as the gossip in Washington would have it.Photo: Getty  We all know that honeymoons come to an end, and even on that sparkling January day a year ago this week when Barack Obama made it official with the American people, both sides realised that such bliss could not be eternal. But neither partner in that marriage foresaw that the honeymoon would end so soon, with the bride of public opinion packing her bags in the holiday hotel in a tearful rage, leaving the groom to plead, "I never said this would be easy … come back, I can still bring change". Americans have fallen out of love with their charming President at a fast rate, even as his popularity has remained high abroad. As early as October, his approval ratings had tumbled from 65-70 per cent to the high 40s. Obama's inheritance from George W Bush – some wedding present – was two wars, the worst recession for 70 years, unemployment heading for 10 per cent and a $1.2 trillion deficit. It guaranteed a first year of unprecedented challenge. Not content with dealing with all that, Obama decided to tame the monster of health care, tackle energy reform, sign a global green treaty, embrace the Muslim world, bring peace to the Middle East, establish a universe free of nuclear weapons and talk sense to the Iranians. Americans have baulked at the mind-boggling sums involved in his domestic reform: a $787 billion stimulus bill, a $1 trillion health care bill and plans for cap and trade that will cost industry dearly. In Congress, his fellow Democrats are fretting about losing seats in November's midterm elections. The party has already lost the governorships of New Jersey and Virginia in the first major post-Obama votes. Even the late Senator Edward Kennedy's seat is now a close call in tomorrow's by-election. The President has confessed to disappointment at breaking his vow on changing the political culture. "What I haven't been able to do in the midst of this crisis is bring the country together in a way that we had done in the inauguration," he admitted to People magazine. "That's what's been lost this year … that sense of changing how Washington works." Overseas, Obama may still be seen as the great anti-Bush, but at home the standard narrative is that he has taken on too much, lost the ability to inspire, can't impose his will on Congress and been too soft abroad. That said, in many ways it has been a remarkable first year. Obama is on the verge of seeing reforms passed that will provide health insurance for every American for the first time. Plenty of presidents have talked about that since 1947; none has done it. A last-minute defeat would not be for lack of compromise on his part. If passed, it could prove political Viagra for him and his party in the next 12 months and well beyond. He has propped up the economy, albeit with an inflated and, in places, misdirected stimulus bill. The housing market has bottomed out, and consumer confidence is returning. The possibility of a double-dip recession remains, but if most forecasters are right, unemployment should begin to fall. Belatedly, Obama and his ex-Goldman Sachs Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner have acknowledged popular outrage over the bail-out by proposing a special bank tax, a start towards easing Main Street's resentment over Wall Street's preferential treatment. Contrary to Obama's big-spending image, he has cut more superfluous spending programmes in Congress than his Republican predecessor. And despite the image of stagnation – created in large part by the
10-month health care debate – Congress has passed more legislation supported by a president than any before him, according to Congressional Quarterly. Furthermore, he has banned torture (just in case there was any confusion about America's position on this), ordered the closure of Guantánamo and sent the 9/11 suspects for trial in the civilian courts. Federal funding has been restored to stem-cell research, women's rights to equal pay have been improved, and new emissions standards have been set for vehicles. This is not a President who can't get things done. And lest we forget, by his very presence, and by his handling of race when it has reared into public debate, he has gone some way to erasing what Condoleezza Rice called America's birth defect. Critics have lambasted his foreign policy for appeasing terrorists, kowtowing to China and bowing to monarchs of far-off lands. With all this negotiation and reaching out, where are the results, they demand. But who seriously expected Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Kim Jong-il to respond to overtures when their existence depends in part on vilifying America? Changing the tone in the Middle East conflict was clumsily done but could still bring results. In his Egypt speech last June, Obama said: "I've come to Cairo to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world, one based on mutual interest and mutual respect." Those are powerful words. In time, they could come to mean something. In Britain, there has been speculation that Obama was going to jilt the US's greatest ally for another – the whole world. But after a rocky start with the Brits – that gift of DVDs to Gordon Brown still induce a wince – he does, at last, seem to be appreciating the value of the special relationship, thanks in chief to the British sacrifice in Helmand. Profound affinity there will never be, but practical friendship, yes. He has made mistakes in foreign policy and there was an overconfident assumption in the White House that his golden touch in Iowa and South Carolina would work just as well in Moscow and Tel Aviv. Allowing his speech to students in China to be suppressed by the authorities should not happen to American presidents. Nor should arriving at the Copenhagen summit without a climate deal. His decision to increase the number of US troops in Afghanistan while setting a deadline for withdrawal could prove a disastrous lack of incentive for allies in Pakistan and Afghanistan. And his initial response to the botched Christmas Day plane bomb was strangely detached; it made him seem more interested in America's, and his, image, than in its safety. It took a week before he summoned any visibly strong feelings about the fact that terrorists wanted to kill large numbers of his compatriots. In the heady early days leading to his inauguration, Obama's admirers forecast greatness. Would he be a Lincoln or a Kennedy or a Roosevelt, they pondered fondly. Such talk was still grossly premature – and remains so. But who knows? Ronald Reagan is regarded in the US as one of the best presidents of the post-war era. He came into office in 1981 with ratings just above 60 per cent, but by 1983 they had plummeted to below 40 per cent as the economy slid into recession. Less than two years later, he trounced Walter Mondale. The President and his advisers insist they are taking the long view – at the moment, given the polls, they have no choice – and they may be justified. Obama does have some defects to correct. He needs to stop blaming George W Bush for his problems and to find some of Bush's fire in the belly when it counts. There were encouraging signs of the latter when he delivered a forceful reaction to the Haiti disaster. It would help if he pruned his agenda. Hours after he had spoken about how the US would assist the Haitians, he spoke at the White House Forum on Modernising Government. Preparing for such events takes time that could be spent on weightier matters. Obama has travelled more than any other president in his first year, visiting 23 countries on 10 trips. It might disappoint his admirers abroad, but the President needs to stay at home more in the next year. The good news for Obama, and for all of us dependent on his success, is that he has shown he can learn from his mistakes. There was a long period at the start of the marathon 2008 campaign when his performances were lacklustre and his debating skills blunt. Possessing a self-awareness rare in politics, he identified his problems and corrected them. What he hasn't been able to change is the habit of making cocky asides. Asked to grade his first-year performance – never a question a politician should answer – he gave himself a B+. He smugly told People that "I'm pretty good" at being president. Obama's first year has not been nearly as bad as the received truth in Washington would have it. Having swooned for him in the campaign, the media has overcorrected its earlier collective abandonment of balanced reporting. But if he wants to win back those Americans he has lost, President Obama needs to appreciate that, as he often said on the stump, their relationship isn't about him, it is about them.    

Ethical Woes Fog Democrat HopesTwo possible ethics trials of senior Democratic members of Congress are compounding the governing party's political woes and raising GOP hopes of large gains in November elections.  Read Article   

22-year sentence in failed LAX bomb plot is ruled too lightA federal appeals court overturns the 22-year prison sentence for Ahmed Ressam, saying that the term was unreasonably lenient.

Obama Delays Release of Blagojevich Contacts Illinois Forms Panel to Consider Impeaching Governor ArticleComments more in Politics » By JONATHAN WEISMAN and DOUGLAS BELKIN President-elect Barack Obama's transition announced Monday it had completed its analysis of contacts between Obama staff and Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich and his aides, but would not release the findings until Christmas week. Obama transition spokesman Dan Pfeiffer said in a statement that the findings affirmed Mr. Obama's assertion that he had no contact with the governor or his staff and that the president-elect's staff was not involved in any inappropriate discussions about a successor for Mr. Obama's Senate seat.  Associated PressIllinois Gov.Rod Blagojevich departs his home in Chicago, on Monday.
But, he said, the public release of that study will be delayed until next week, at the request of the U.S. Attorney's office. (Read the full text of the statement.) Gregory Craig, Mr. Obama's choice for White House counsel, has been named the transition's contact point for the federal investigation. Separately, Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan took the first step toward the impeachment of Mr. Blagojevich, setting up a bipartisan committee to explore the possibility. The committee will be made up of 12 Democrats and nine Republicans and will seek the cooperation of both U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald and the governor's office. Assuming the plan wins passage of the House later on Monday, the committee will begin work Tuesday. "We're going to proceed with all due speed, but we're going to make sure that what we do is done correctly,'' the Chicago Democrat said. Once the committee makes a recommendation, the full House will decide whether to file impeachment charges against the governor. The Senate ultimately would rule on them. Mr. Madigan, a longtime political rival of the governor who nonetheless served as chairman of Mr. Blagojevich's 2006 re-election committee, said he wasn't surprised when he learned of Mr. Blagojevich's arrest. Last week, federal agents presented a 76-page criminal complaint, charging the governor among other things with attempting to sell the Senate seat vacated by President-elect Barack Obama. "I've had an opportunity to get to know Mr. Blagojevich over six years, so I was not surprised," Mr. Madigan said. Republican House leader Tom Cross said he supports the impeachment move, saying he wants the process to be "swift and fair."

PHOTOS: Chronicling the Obama FamilyHow romance changed everything for the woman who might become the country's first African American first lady. (Photo: Reuters) When Michelle Met Barack
How romance in the sedate corridors of a corporate law firm changed everything for the woman who might become the country's first African American first lady
By Liza Mundy
Sunday, October 5, 2008; W10In the summer of 1989, Michelle Robinson told her mother she was going to concentrate on her law career and not worry about dating. She was 25 and had just finished her first year as an associate at Sidley & Austin, a corporate law firm in her home town of Chicago. Not long after, the firm assigned her to mentor a summer associate named Barack Obama.Even then, there was a lot of buzz about this 27-year-old prodigy from Harvard Law School. Sidley didn't usually hire first-year law students as summer associates, so Barack's arrival was noteworthy. Martha Minow, a law professor at Harvard, told her father, Newton Minow, a high-ranking partner at Sidley, that Barack was possibly the most gifted student that she had ever taught. Michelle, who'd graduated from Harvard Law herself in 1988, felt annoyed by all the chattering. Why were people surprised that a black man might be articulate and capable?Her own skepticism took a different form. His name struck her as odd, as did the fact that he had grown up in Hawaii. She assumed he would be "strange and overly intellectual" and that she would almost certainly dislike him."He sounded too good to be true," she told David Mendell, author of "Obama: From Promise to Power." "I had dated a lot of brothers who had this kind of reputation coming in, so I figured he was one of these smooth brothers who could talk straight and impress people. So we had lunch, and he had this bad sport jacket and a cigarette dangling from his mouth, and I thought: 'Oh, here you go. Here's this good-looking, smooth-talking guy. I've been down this road before.' "The fact that she was Obama's mentor made her feel self-conscious. She often recounts how she resisted when Barack asked her out, saying in an interview that she felt it would be "tacky" if they started to date because they were "the only two black people" at the firm.That, anyhow, is how the story goes: Barack and Michelle, whose last name, of course, is now Obama, both enjoy telling it. But like many personal stories that get repeated during political campaigns, it's been polished and simplified for public consumption.As Newton Minow and others are quick to point out, Michelle and Barack were not the only black lawyers at the firm, now called Sidley Austin. Sidley made an effort to be socially progressive. The firm had a black partner, and more African American attorneys were being hired as associates every year. Even so, Minow recalls, there probably weren't more than a half-dozen, and it must have felt to Michelle as though she and Barack were under a microscope. Which, in a way, they were. Before Barack and Michelle became an official item, Minow and his wife, Jo, ran into them at the popcorn stand at a movie theater. Minow is not sure, but thinks it may have been their fabled first date to see the Spike Lee movie "Do the Right Thing." "I think they were a little embarrassed," Minow says with a laugh.And the truth is, if Michelle resisted, it wasn't for long. Andrew Goldstein, a Sidley attorney who worked with Michelle, says he had the impression that Michelle was pursuing Barack as much as he was pursuing her, and with plenty of resources. She was tall, poised, very put-together, with an air of strength and a dazzling smile. "She is just as charismatic as he is," he says.Another colleague, Mary Carragher, who at the time was a more senior associate assigned to work with Michelle, remembers how smitten Barack and Michelle seemed with each other. Sometimes, in the slow hours around 5:30 p.m., Carragher would go to Michelle's office to talk about a case or drop off some work, and, through the half-open door, she would see Barack, sitting on one corner of the desk. Michelle would be seated, the two of them rapt, oblivious, chatting."I could tell by the body language, he's just courting her," says Carragher, who would quietly depart without bothering them, thinking, 'You know what, I'm going back to my office.' "But between Barack's visits, Michelle would confide in Carragher, sharing the tidbits she was gleaning about him. It was clear that she was now intrigued -- rather than put off -- by his unlikely origins and upbringing, which she would relay piece by piece as she learned about them. " 'I can't believe he's got a white grandmother from Kansas!' " Carragher recalls Michelle telling her."She had all these little facts about him," says Carragher. "She was just learning about him and getting to know him, and she seemed to be quite taken with him." His biracial heritage -- he was the son of a foreign student from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas -- was part of the appeal. "She was just sort of amazed by him."Far from resistant, Carragher says, "she was falling hard." But Michelle, who declined to be interviewed for this article or the book it is adapted from, was careful to maintain her professional demeanor. When Carragher saw them interact, "she was not falling all over him. She was very cool."The romance with Barack was just one way that Michelle's three years at Sidley Austin were, for her, pivotal.Like Barack, Michelle also had spent a summer at Sidley before graduating from Harvard. One of the most prestigious firms in Chicago, Sidley was located in what is now called Chase Tower, a skyscraper famous for its distinctive, swooping profile, in the heart of the Loop, or downtown district.The firm's offices were just 10 miles from the neighborhood where Michelle had grown up. But the social and economic distance was much farther. Michelle came from the city's South Side, raised in a working-class neighborhood called South Shore that had gone from being all-white to all-black during the turbulent 1960s and '70s. Her father, Fraser Robinson, was employed by the city to tend boilers at a water treatment plant. He made just enough money for her mother, Marian, to be able to stay home with Michelle and her older brother, Craig.A driven, focused student, Michelle had propelled herself into the Ivy League and, as a summer associate at Sidley, was starting to reap the benefits. Along with 60 or so other law students, she spent the summer of 1987 being courted by the firm's highly paid partners -- going to baseball games, lunches and happy hours. Her stint there led to a full-time job offer and a stark choice: Work as an associate at a big-name law firm earning about $65,000 a year, or look for something more public service-oriented but likely to be less lucrative.Michelle would have been well qualified for a career in public service law. At Harvard, she had devoted hundreds of hours of her time to the law school's legal aid bureau, which was essentially a student-run law firm. She and other students who worked there spent at least 20 hours a week helping poor people with civil cases, a major time commitment on top of their studies. They did their work in Gannett House, a white-porticoed Greek Revival structure that is the oldest surviving Harvard Law School building.A few years later, Barack Obama would also spend untold hours in Gannett House, whose upper floor contained the offices of the Harvard Law Review. During his second year, he served as an editor of the law review, a much sought-after position, and then survived an even more grueling competition and was elected the law review's first African American president, a signal achievement that would attract national media attention. The law review was a steppingstone to any number of prominent careers, including Supreme Court clerkships.In contrast to her future husband, Michelle toiled in the lower part of the building, which housed the well regarded but less effete legal aid bureau. "There was a little bit of an upstairs-downstairs element to it," recalls Dave Jones, who was in Michelle's class and would go on to become a member of the California State Assembly. "There wasn't a whole lot of interaction when I was there between law review and legal aid bureau members, other than we would see them pass through the front door and go upstairs, while we were meeting with poor clients down in the basement."The bureau was multiracial, and its students were public-minded. They were helping people who needed a lawyer and could not afford one. "We handled landlord-tenant disputes; we handled public benefit disputes; we ran a pro se divorce clinic that empowered women to handle their own small, uncontested divorce matters," says Ronald Torbert, who worked alongside Michelle and was president of the bureau during his third year.The students could appear in court on behalf of their clients, doing trial work under the supervision of a licensed attorney. When not in the courtroom, they were on their own, unbossed, exercising their own discretion. Torbert calls the work "the most fun and the most memorable thing I did in my three years at Harvard."It must have been equally satisfying for Michelle, who had arrived at Harvard in 1985 after four uncomfortable years at Princeton University. In her senior thesis, she described the frosty reception she'd received on the New Jersey campus, where affirmative action admissions policies were under attack and where many African American students felt marginalized."My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my 'Blackness' than ever before," Michelle wrote in her thesis, "Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community." "I have found that at Princeton no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my White professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don't belong."Even so, she acknowledged that her years at Princeton had changed her. She entered the university, she wrote, determined to use her education to benefit the black community. But by the time she was preparing to graduate, she was not nearly so sure where her obligations lay. "As I enter my final year at Princeton, I find myself striving for many of the same goals as my White classmates -- acceptance to a prestigious graduate or professional school or a high paying position in a successful corporation. Thus, my goals after Princeton are not as clear as before."At Harvard's legal aid bureau, Michelle found herself doing the kind of work she'd envisioned when she entered college: using her education to help those in need. "She handled some of the more complex landlord and tenant issues," says Torbert, who saw a lot of Michelle back then and describes her as "very mature, very, very bright. I just remember her being very serious about the work she did, and she really cared a lot about the people she worked with."Dave Jones also was struck by Michelle's compassion, recalling her as someone who "came from a place in Chicago where she had very direct experiences with people living in dire and difficult circumstances, and I think she brought that to her work at the legal aid bureau."The other thing Torbert noticed was that Michelle expected a lot from other people. "If there's one thing that stood out about her, she is not easily impressed," says Torbert, now vice president and general counsel for Barton Malow, a construction management company based in Michigan. "You think you're working hard, and I think her attitude is: 'Well, that's what you're supposed to do.' "During their third year, Harvard students had to decide what to do with the rest of their lives. Students in the legal aid bureau were perhaps the ones most likely to go into public service, or legal aid, or, if they went with a private firm, to find one with pro bono opportunities. "It was something that a lot of us talked about and thought about," says Torbert. But while many found the idea of public service compelling, "the [recruiting] process channels you toward a corporate legal practice," says Neil Quinter, another of Michelle's classmates. Private firms interviewed incessantly, "offering all this money."In Michelle's case, Sidley Austin was offering a prestigious name and a lucrative starting salary. Michelle had grown up with parents who lived paycheck to paycheck. She had student loans to pay off. In the end, she went with the private firm, a conventional choice and one she would eventually urge others not to make.At Sidley, Michelle didn't follow the traditional route for newly minted associates by doing general litigation or antitrust work. Instead, she was recruited by the looser, more fun-loving lawyers in the marketing law group, also known as intellectual property or entertainment law. These attorneys represented companies that sold goods to the public: advertising agencies, automakers, beer manufacturers. One of the clients was the flamboyant boxing promoter Don King, whose appearances always created a stir in Sidley's otherwise sedate corridors.The marketing group "had the reputation in the firm of being a little more glitzy," says Brian Sullivan, an associate at the time who now practices in Vermont. Glitz, of course, is relative. They were still lawyers; they still wore suits; and they still worked long hours. Nevertheless, "it was the most fun area of practice in the firm, bar none," recalls Mary Carragher, who left Sidley in 1992 and now has her own practice. "We were the coolest people, and we had the best work. It was all popular culture stuff. You could do a lot of dull things in law, and this was, and still is, in my opinion, the best stuff."The pop culture aspect of the job must have been appealing to Michelle, who was such a huge fan of "The Brady Bunch" growing up, according to her brother, that she knew every episode by heart. And she'd be working within a relatively small group of lawyers, where a new associate could get a fair amount of responsibility. The group also had a sizable contingent of women. One of the partners was Mary Hutchings Reed, a good-humored and gregarious attorney who had worked hard to win advancement for women in the top echelon of the legal profession. Reed, who also writes fiction, would later insert Michelle as a bit character in a novel, "Courting Kathleen Hannigan," that explores the perils of being a woman trying to make partner in the 1980s and 1990s. The fictional character Michelle inspired was "Michelle Richardson" -- a young associate who is part of the defense team in a sex-discrimination case, and who soon after being introduced is usually sent off to research an aspect of the law. The character, Reed says, exemplifies that young associates, even highly competent ones like Michelle, mostly were seen and worked hard, but were not heard."I loved her," says Reed, who left Sidley in 1989 and is now of counsel at Winston & Strawn in Chicago. She remembers Michelle as a stylish dresser with a ready sense of humor, not cowed by the senior partners, a young woman with self-confidence who nevertheless was willing to admit what she did not know.Although she was a new associate, recalls colleague Andrew Goldstein, she would "push back" if she disagreed with an approach or had a different idea. "Michelle -- you didn't want to underestimate her," he says.The group went out of its way to give Michelle work suited to her interests. When an opportunity came in to handle the budding public television career of Barney, the purple dinosaur poised to become a phenomenon among American children, Goldstein says he and others felt it had Michelle's name written all over it."Michelle had some smattering of public interest" experience, says Goldstein, who is now at the firm of Freeborn & Peters in Chicago, "and so we said, 'That's it: Public television, you're in on it.' "The firm's task was to manage the trademark protection and distribution of Barney plush toys and other merchandise, Goldstein says, and to negotiate with public television stations that wanted to broadcast the show. "She had very little experience in that area," recalls Goldstein, "but she latched onto it and did a very good job with it."But Michelle could also frustrate her supervisors. Quincy White, the partner who helped recruit Michelle and who headed the marketing group, remembers finding her a challenge to manage. White, who is now retired from the firm, says he gave her the most interesting work he could find, in part because he wanted to see her advance, but also because she seemed perennially dissatisfied.She was, White recalls, "quite possibly the most ambitious associate that I've ever seen." She wanted significant responsibility right away and was not afraid to object if she wasn't getting what she felt she deserved, he says.At big firms, much of the work that falls to young associates involves detail and tedium. There were all sorts of arcane but important rules about what could and could not be said or done in product advertisements, and in the marketing group, all the associates, not just the new ones, reviewed scripts for TV commercials to make sure they conformed. As far as associate work goes, it could have been worse -- "Advertising is a little sexier than spending a full year reading depositions in an antitrust law suit or reviewing documents for a big merger," says White -- but it was monotonous and relatively low-level.Too monotonous for Michelle, who, White says, complained that the work he gave her was unsatisfactory. He says he gave her the Coors beer ads, which he considered one of the more glamorous assignments they had. Even then, he says, "she at one point went over my head and complained [to human resources] that I wasn't giving her enough interesting stuff, and the person came down to my office and said, 'Basically she's complaining that she's being treated like she's a second-year associate,' and we agreed that she was a second-year associate. I had eight or nine other associates, and I couldn't start treating one of them a lot better."White says he talked to Michelle about her expectations, but the problem could not be resolved because the work was what it was. He is not sure any work he had would have satisfied her. "I couldn't give her something that would meet her sense of ambition to change the world.""Not many people went over my head," says White. It was an unusual move for a young associate to make, and he believes it was consistent with her personality. She "wanted something that pushed her harder {lcub}hellip{rcub} Waiting five to seven years to make partner was a good career move for me but not for [her]. There are too many other opportunities out there {lcub}hellip{rcub} that mature faster than that."Abner Mikva, a former congressman and federal judge who is close to the Obamas and was an early mentor to Barack, finds that account of Michelle's 20-something impatience amusing. "It doesn't surprise me at all," he says. Michelle is "clearly somebody who likes to make decisions and likes to be involved in exciting and important stuff. I can imagine writing memos for other lawyers -- I don't think that would have been her favorite dish of tea."In that sense, she had much in common with Barack Obama, whose political ambition was already very apparent to those who knew him at Harvard. They were both driven, both eager to have an impact. And they wanted to do it right away.In interviews and speeches, Michelle frequently talks about her early impressions of Barack. When she first met him, she told her local newspaper, the Hyde Park Herald, "he had no money; he was really broke. He wasn't ever going to try to impress me with things. His wardrobe was kind of cruddy . . . His first car had so much rust that there was a rusted hole in the passenger door. You could see the ground when you were driving. He loved that car. It would shake ferociously when it would start up. I thought, 'This brother is not interested in ever making a dime.' "On one early date, he took her to a Chicago church, where he was meeting with a group of people he had worked with as a community organizer before he started law school. "The people gathered there together that day were ordinary folks doing the best they could to build a good life," Michelle recalled this summer in her speech to the Democratic National Convention. "They were parents trying to get by paycheck to paycheck; grandparents trying to get it together on a fixed income; men frustrated that they couldn't support their families after jobs had disappeared."And Barack stood up that day, and he spoke words that have stayed with me ever since. He talked about the world as it is, and the world as it should be. And he said that, all too often, we accept the distance between the two, and we settle for the world as it is, even when it doesn't reflect our values and aspirations."Barack's idealism and his desire to help poor African Americans swept Michelle off her feet. She took him to meet her family. Her older brother, Craig Robinson, has talked many times about Michelle's impossibly high standards when it came to men and the obstacles those standards created for would-be suitors: "She would meet guys and go out on a couple of dates, and that would be it."So when Barack came over for dinner, the whole family felt sorry for him, assuming he wouldn't be around for long. "He was very, very low-key," Craig, the head basketball coach at Oregon State University and a former star player at Princeton, told the Chicago Sun-Times. "I loved the way he talked about his family because it was the way we talked about our family. I was thinking: 'Nice guy. Too bad he won't last.' "Not long afterward, Michelle asked Craig to take Barack out on the basketball court to test his character. He obliged her, and emerged from that game with a positive report: Barack was self-confident but not a ball hog or a hotshot.At Sidley Austin, it was clear to Michelle's colleagues that the couple were sharing their aspirations. Michelle confided to Mary Carragher that Barack was planning to write a book, a project that he would not embark on for several years. Even then, it was the opinion of some at the firm that Barack was presidential timber. Andrew Goldstein remembers conversations around the water cooler in which people would tick off Barack's accomplishments, predicting that a résumé like his could only be leading toward one place: 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. " 'This guy's going to be the first African American president,' " he recalls one colleague declaring.Michelle has always insisted that she was unaware, early on, of Barack's political ambitions. "We didn't talk about politics specifically," she told me when I interviewed her in the summer of 2007 for a story about her husband. But Obama wasn't keeping his ambitions secret. Michelle's brother, also speaking to me in 2007, recounted one of the first times Michelle brought Barack to a party that included the extended family, during which Craig pulled Barack aside to quiz him on his prospects and clue him in to family members' personalities and eccentricities.When Craig asked about his career plans, Barack replied, "I think I'd like to teach at some point in time, and maybe even run for public office." Craig assumed Barack wanted to run for a post like city alderman, but Barack let him know that his sights were set higher. "He said no, at some point he'd like to run for the U.S. Senate," Craig recalled. "And then he said, 'Possibly even run for president at some point.' And I was like, 'Okay, that's great. But don't say that to my Aunt Gracie.' I was protecting him from saying something that might embarrass him." The Robinsons tended to be cynical about politics and politicians.When I related this anecdote to Michelle, she laughed as though she had not heard it before. "He probably should have said: Don't tell Michelle!" she cracked, meaning that she shared her family's antipathy toward politics and implying that she didn't realize Barack had serious political aspirations.Craig has his doubts about that. "She knew what she was getting into," he told Vanity Fair. The surprise, if there was one, he said, was how good a politician Barack would turn out to be.After Barack went back to Harvard, the couple had a long-distance romance. In interviews, Michelle is fond of recounting how, during this period, she began to pressure Barack to get married, and how Barack put her off, arguing that marriage was a meaningless institution and that the only thing that mattered was how they felt about each other. Michelle, whose parents had been married for some 30 years, wasn't buying it.Then, one night in 1991, he took her to Gordon, an expensive Chicago restaurant, and she started to press him again. He went into his usual tirade against marriage, a dissertation that went on until they ordered dessert. When it came, the plate had a box on it, and in the box was an engagement ring."'That kind of shuts you up, doesn't it?'" Michelle remembers Barack telling her. She acknowledged to a reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times that she doesn't remember what the dessert was, or whether she ate it. "I was so shocked and a little embarrassed because he did sort of shut me up."They married in 1992 at Trinity United Church of Christ, in a ceremony officiated by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whom Barack had gotten to know during his work as a community organizer and whose fiery sermons would become so controversial during Obama's bid for the Democratic presidential nomination that the couple would have to cut ties with him. Michelle wore an off-the-shoulder gown. They had the reception at the South Shore Cultural Center, a former country club that had once excluded blacks and Jews. They honeymooned on the West Coast and moved into a condo in Hyde Park, one of Chicago's most integrated and politically progressive communities.The year before they married, Michelle left Sidley Austin, and with it the practice of corporate law. Newton Minow remembers how Sidley offered Barack a job upon his graduation from Harvard and how Obama broke the news that he wanted to go into politics and would not be taking a job with the firm. Minow, who had served as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission under President John F. Kennedy, replied that public service was an admirable path and that the firm would do all it could to help advance his political career."Well, I don't think you're going to want to help me," Barack replied, telling him to sit down because he had even more bad news. "I thought, 'What the hell is this?' " says Minow, who sat down. Whereupon Barack said, "I'm taking Michelle with me." Minow began to sputter at Obama, "You no-good worthless rotten . . ." until Barack said, "Hold it, we're getting married."In fact, there was no need for Michelle to leave Sidley Austin just because she was marrying Barack. He was coming back to Chicago after Harvard, and she easily could have stayed with the firm. "As far as the firm was concerned . . . we considered it a real loss," says Minow. "We thought she was going to eventually become a partner and have a big role there."But Michelle was ready to revisit the choice she'd made when she graduated from Harvard. At the time, she was still reeling from the death of her father in 1991. Fraser Robinson had died while getting ready to go to work, felled by what Barack, in his book "The Audacity of Hope," describes as complications from a kidney operation. This was an event of enormous emotional and psychological magnitude for Michelle and the rest of her family. At the Democratic National Convention, she described her father as "our rock. Although he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in his early 30s, he was our provider. He was our champion, our hero. But as he got sicker, it got harder for him to walk. It took him longer to get dressed in the morning."But if he was in pain, he never let on. He never stopped smiling and laughing, even while struggling to button his shirt, even while using two canes to get himself across the room to give my mom a kiss. He just woke up a little earlier, and he worked a little harder."His death made Michelle aware of how short life can be and prompted her to reflect, she has said in interviews. "If what you're doing doesn't bring you joy every single day, what's the point?"Her father's death wasn't the only one she was grieving. In 1990, one of Michelle's closest friends from Princeton, Suzanne Alele, had died from cancer when she was only in her 20s. Alele, a computer specialist at the Federal Reserve, had always followed her heart, doing what felt right rather than what was expected of her. She was described in her alumni obituary as a "free spirit" who was much loved by her classmates.Michelle resolved to live her own life in that vein. "I wanted to have a career motivated by passion and not just money," she would tell the New York Times years later.That's what Barack was doing. He, too, had struggled with spending time in corporate law, even just a summer, and ultimately rejected private practice and other conventional paths. To Michelle's amazement, Barack wasn't interested in parlaying his presidency of the Harvard Law Review into a clerkship for a U.S. Supreme Court justice. "Never did it cross his mind," Michelle told me in 2007. "Here I am, knowing the power of his position: 'You're not going to clerk for them? You're kidding me!' "Instead, Barack took a less exalted job at a Chicago civil rights law firm, but first spent six months working on a voter registration drive, Project Vote, that targeted low-income African Americans. "We had many debates about how to best effect change," Michelle later told the Daily Princetonian. "We both wanted to affect the community on a larger scale than either of us could individually, and we wanted to do it outside of big corporations."In a 2004 interview with the Chicago Sun-Times, Michelle also expressed a lingering sense of guilt about enjoying so much material success as a big-firm lawyer while others who shared her origins and upbringing were not doing as well. She remembers asking herself, "Can I go to the family reunion in my Benz and be comfortable, while my cousins are struggling to keep a roof over their heads?"Moreover, she wasn't enthralled with the work at Sidley Austin and apparently didn't think many of her colleagues were, either. "I didn't see a whole lot of people who were just thrilled to be there," she told Newsweek earlier this year. "I met people who thought this was a good life. But were people waking up just bounding out of bed to get to work? No."Her brother would have the same epiphany while working on Wall Street. He had earned an MBA from the University of Chicago and gone to work first for Morgan Stanley Dean Witter and then as a partner in a boutique investment firm. For a while, he enjoyed his wealth, then realized that the job wasn't making him happy."I'm so embarrassed to admit it," Craig told a New York Times sports reporter in 2007. "I had a Porsche 944 Turbo. I had a BMW station wagon. Who gets a BMW station wagon? It's the dumbest car in the world. Why would you buy a $75,000 station wagon?" Concluding that "I've got all this stuff, and it hasn't made my life any better," Craig, in his late 30s, left investment banking for a job he loves: coaching basketball.During her last year at Sidley Austin, Michelle began meeting with general counsels for universities, trying to find an area of the law that might be more satisfying. In 1991, she wrote to Valerie Jarrett, deputy chief of staff for Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley. Jarrett, now one of Barack Obama's most important campaign aides, was instantly impressed with Michelle. "She was so confident and committed and extremely open," Jarrett would later tell Newsweek. She offered her a job in the mayor's office. But before Michelle would accept, she asked that Jarrett have dinner with her and Barack.Barack was worried, according to his biographer, David Mendell, that Michelle might be too straightforward and outspoken to survive in a political setting. He fretted, too, that if she was going to enter the realm of Chicago politics, she needed a mentor, someone to look out for her."My fiance wants to know who is going to be looking out for me and making sure that I thrive," Jarrett recalled Michelle saying. After the meal, Jarrett told the Chicago Tribune, she asked, "Well, did I pass the test?" Barack smiled and said she did.When Michelle was hired by the Daley administration, she was an assistant to the mayor, making about $60,000 a year. But Jarrett was promoted to head the Department of Planning and Development, and took Michelle with her. Michelle's new job was "economic development coordinator," which city records describe as "developing strategies and negotiating business agreements to promote and stimulate economic growth within the City of Chicago."After three years of toiling on behalf of Barney and Coors beer, Michelle was working to bring new jobs and vitality to Chicago's neighborhoods. It was a turning point in her career and in the way she would later frame her life story. Michelle didn't just leave the world of corporate law; she would go on to publicly reject it."We don't need a world full of corporate attorneys and hedge-fund managers," she said earlier this year as she campaigned in South Carolina.She and Barack both make a point of talking about how they left corporate America (After graduating from Columbia University, Barack spent one year as a researcher for a Manhattan financial firm before becoming a community organizer) and devoted themselves to public service. "We left corporate America, which is a lot of what we're asking young people to do," Michelle said at a campaign event in Ohio this past winter. "Don't go into corporate America. You know, become teachers. Work for the community. Be social workers. Be a nurse. Those are the careers that we need, and we're encouraging our young people to do that. But if you make that choice, as we did . . . then your salaries respond." Which is true, though she fails to mention that her own salary never fell that low and that, by 2006, she would be a highly paid administrator at the University of Chicago Hospitals, with a husband writing best-selling books.For the most part, the lawyers Michelle once worked with at Sidley Austin don't take offense at Michelle's dismissive words about corporate law or her description of their work as lucrative but uninspiring."I do understand," says Mary Hutchings Reed, who relished getting up every morning and winning a place for women in the corridors of legal power. Even so, Reed allows, "we're sitting here doing advertising." You can tell yourself that you're working for the protection of the American consumer, she says, but "working at a large law firm like this, sometimes looking for meaning, you can't look for meaning in your work.""At the beginning, it's so fun and interesting and new, and then after a few years you realize that it's pretty much all the same stuff," adds Mary Carragher. She points out that many young lawyers try big-firm work and decide that it's not for them. "It's not surprising that she would go the big-firm route for a while. When you're at a top school and you're a top candidate like that, you're getting recruited by every top law firm in the city. It takes a little while to say, 'Does this really fit for me?' "After Michelle left the firm, Carragher and Reed mostly lost touch with her. Carragher ran into her on Michigan Avenue a couple of years later, when Michelle was executive director of the nonprofit Public Allies, which prepares young people for jobs in public service. Michelle gave Carragher her card and seemed very happy.Carragher ran into her again two years ago in Chicago at a charity fashion show for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. By then, Michelle was earning close to $300,000 as vice president of community and external affairs at University of Chicago Hospitals. And she was the wife of the U.S. senator who had dazzled the country with his eloquence at the 2004 Democratic National Convention and was being talked about as a presidential candidate.Carragher had her mother and her 11-year-old daughter with her."I feel like I was 11 years old when I met you!" joked Michelle, marveling at how young and inexperienced she'd been at Sidley Austin.When Carragher introduced Michelle to her mother, Michelle told her, "Mary was my mentor and taught me so many things." Whereupon Carragher's mother -- who doesn't hear well and apparently thought Michelle simply said the two of them had worked together -- replied, "Oh yes, that's what Mary told me!" Carragher says she was mortified, but Michelle laughed."What a life you're having," Carragher said to her. And Michelle, the woman who could become the country's first African American first lady, replied, "I know."This article has been adapted from "Michelle: A Biography," which is being published this week by Simon & Schuster. The book's author, Liza Mundy, is a staff writer for the Magazine. She can be reached at \n This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .