Author: News Polite

Frank Heffernan thought his daughter Megan was in South Korea where she was working as an English teacher when he heard the news of a devastating terrorist attack on the Indonesian island of Bali on Oct. 12, 2002.

Then the State Department called.

Megan Heffernan, 28, who was born and raised in Alaska and had a passion for travel, was among the 202 people who were killed in the coordinated bombings carried out by an affiliate of Al Qaeda at a pub and nearby club in Bali. She had gone there with friends on a vacation.

“Not a day goes by that I don’t think of her,” said Mr. Heffernan, mopping his eyes with a tissue at his home in Florida.

In the random, cruel fashion of terrorism, the bombing killed tourists and workers from 22 nations who happened to be in a commercial district, including 38 Indonesians. Among the dead were Australian and British citizens who were there for a rugby match, Americans passionate about surfing — and Megan and two Korean friends, who were out sightseeing when the bombs exploded.

Now, 20 years later, about a dozen relatives who carry the memory of the mostly forgotten attack are heading to another faraway place, Guantánamo Bay, in the U.S.-controlled portion of Cuba. There they will represent the dead for a military jury charged with deciding a prison sentence for two Malaysian men who pleaded guilty to conspiring in the bombings.

Among those making the trip are Mr. Heffernan and his wife, Bonnie K. Hall, whose own daughters knew Megan in Anchorage. Megan’s mother, Sandra, died of the coronavirus three years ago. Mr. Heffernan said he was going to “express to the court the true loss” of his daughter, “a very thoughtful and religious girl who loved to travel.”

He said he trusts the court — the judge and the military jury that is expected to be assembled next week — to decide a fair sentence.

“We don’t even know the involvement of those two men,” Ms. Hall said of the prisoners, who have been held by the United States since 2003, first by the C.I.A. and then from 2006 at Guantánamo Bay.

In an interview, Mr. Heffernan said he had not dwelled on trying to understand what was behind the attack.

“Whatever the depraved and twisted reasoning behind the bombing, whether it was because of government, religion or national differences, the bombing cost 202 people their lives,” he wrote in his victim impact statement for the court.

It has left “eternal heartache to thousands of family members and friends,” he added.

Prosecutors never proposed the death penalty in the three-defendant Bali bombing case, unlike in the Sept. 11 case at Guantánamo. Now, with this week’s guilty pleas, only an Indonesian man known as Hambali will face trial as the accused “operational mastermind” of the Jemaah Islamiyah movement, which carried out the bombing. That trial could start next year.

Mr. Heffernan said he became an opponent of capital punishment years ago after a visit to Vatican City, where he saw Pope John Paul II. It was an epiphany of sorts, he said, that brought him in line with “the theology against the death penalty.”

“Also, being old, I realize that if you are given enough grace to live that long, you can look back and regret the things that you’ve done,” he added.

Megan’s favorite color was purple, and she favored a T-shirt whose slogan read, “Life Is Uncertain. Eat Dessert First,” Mr. Heffernan said. She would have turned 50 last month.

Every year since she died, Mr. Heffernan has marked Megan’s birthday, Dec. 12, by donating a set of purple vestments for a priest to wear while celebrating Mass. Each has a little tag commemorating his daughter.

Last year’s donation has already been sent to Alaska, Ms. Hall said. “They will travel with a priest from village to village.”

By the time of her death, Megan Heffernan had skied in Argentina, taken a trip during high school to Greece and visited Ireland with her older brother Michael, younger sister Maureen and Maureen’s husband. Their father paid for the trip but did not tag along for fear he might spoil the fun.

“Children born to a Heffernan father are the luckiest kids in the world,” said Ms. Hall, who recalled how he wrote Megan every week, using a No. 2 pencil and legal pad, after she moved to Busan, South Korea, to teach English to doctors, practicing physicians, in a post-doctorate education program. Sometimes he sent care packages of Pringles, cookies and other favorites.

She traveled throughout Asia, to Japan, Taiwan and Thailand. She went from China to Vietnam on riverboats, down the Mekong and took a bus to Hanoi, her father said. He had visited some of those places during the Vietnam War when, in 1967 and 1968, he was an Army helicopter medevac pilot and earned the Distinguished Flying Cross for his valor. “She would go somewhere and tell us afterward,” Mr. Heffernan said.

She had plenty of ideas of how she wanted to spend the rest of her life. She took photos with a camera her father had given her. He thought she might want to be a photographer. She was pretty enough to be a model, he said, and had the grace to perhaps be an actress. When she was finished traveling, she wanted to buy a lodge in Alaska.

The State Department called within a day or so of the bombings. Mr. Heffernan learned his daughter had been on vacation in Indonesia. Rescue workers in Bali, 13 time zones away, were trying to identify the survivors, the injured and the missing.

The next call asked for Megan’s dental records. It was then, he said, that he began praying for forgiveness for any faults he had made along the way in raising his eldest daughter.

Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota, a Democrat running a long-shot primary challenge to President Biden, said on Saturday that he would consider running on the ticket of No Labels, a centrist group exploring an independent bid, if it appeared the general election would be a rematch between Mr. Biden and Donald J. Trump.

In an interview, Mr. Phillips publicly articulated for the first time the circumstances in which he would accept the No Labels presidential nomination, and said he was in regular communication with Nancy Jacobson, the group’s chief executive. Democratic allies of Mr. Biden have been alarmed by No Labels, worrying that any candidate it runs could siphon votes from him.

“People are criticizing them because they believe whomever they offer on their ticket will hurt Joe Biden,” Mr. Phillips said after a town-hall event at a senior center in Nashua, N.H. “That’s false. If they put someone at the top of the ticket who could actually drive votes from Donald Trump, every Democrat in the United States of America should be celebrating it. They haven’t made that determination.”

Mr. Phillips has a long relationship with Ms. Jacobson and No Labels from his tenure in the group’s congressional Problem Solvers Caucus, an organization that promotes policies with bipartisan support. He said he had told Ms. Jacobson he would not discuss running as the No Labels candidate “at this time.”

But Mr. Phillips did say he would consider running as the No Labels candidate if polling suggested that Mr. Biden would lose in November to Mr. Trump.

“It would have to be a Joe Biden-Donald Trump rematch that shows Joe Biden is almost certain to lose,” Mr. Phillips said. “That is the only condition in which I would even entertain a conversation with any alternative.”

He added, “Everybody should keep their head and heart and mind open, because why would we shut off possibilities to defeat this horrific danger to democracy?”

Three months after beginning his presidential campaign, Mr. Phillips remains a little-known curiosity in the New Hampshire primary race. A poll released on Jan. 9 by the University of New Hampshire showed him with 7 percent support in the Democratic primary. He told reporters on Saturday he would be happy with “mid-twenties” support in the election on Tuesday.

Mr. Phillips has spent millions of dollars of his own money on his bid, and his TV ads are ubiquitous on New Hampshire television, but it’s not clear how much support he has.

New Hampshire voters at his Saturday event in Nashua were vastly outnumbered by out-of-state college students, political tourists and journalists. It is also atypical for presidential candidates to publicly float running as a third-party or independent candidate while still competing in a major party’s primary race.

Mr. Trump, at his own rally on Saturday night in Manchester, N.H., offered a mocking endorsement of Mr. Phillips. “Democrats should vote for the congressman,” he said.

Mr. Biden’s name will not be on the primary ballot in New Hampshire. His campaign declined to participate after the state refused to cooperate with his shake-up of the Democratic presidential nominating calendar, which moved South Carolina to the first spot.

A well-funded group of Biden loyalists has mounted its own campaign in New Hampshire, encouraging Democrats to write in Mr. Biden’s name on the ballot on Tuesday.

Groups of Democrats allied with the Biden campaign have been working in concert for months to scuttle Ms. Jacobson’s aspirations to offer an alternative presidential candidate in November. They fear that any vote for a third-party or independent presidential candidate will take votes away from Mr. Biden, given his campaign’s focus on making the 2024 election a referendum on Mr. Trump’s fitness for office.

Ms. Jacobson has tried to recruit Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and former Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland, among others, in an attempt to find a high-profile figure to lead the No Labels presidential ticket. Ms. Jacobson has told donors privately that the group plans to choose a Republican as its presidential nominee. Mr. Hogan — who until recently was a member of the No Labels board — has said so publicly.

A spokesman for the Biden campaign declined to discuss Mr. Phillips.

Ms. Jacobson said Saturday that it was “too early to speculate” on whom No Labels might select as its standard-bearer or if the group would follow through on its plans to run a presidential candidate.

“Dean Phillips is a terrific member of the Problem Solvers Caucus,” she said. “He embodies the ethos of the No Labels movement.”

In the interview, Mr. Phillips said repeatedly that he was “not ruling anything out” and denounced absolutist language from other politicians.

“No Labels can either be the goat or the hero,” he said. “I will also do what I can to ensure that they’re the latter.”

Iran accused Israel of launching an airstrike on the Syrian capital, Damascus, on Saturday that killed senior Iranian military figures, the latest in a series of Israeli attacks on officials from Iran and two of its proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah. Iran vowed to retaliate, raising fears of even deeper regional turmoil rippling out from the war in Gaza.

Separately, several U.S. troops in Iraq were being evaluated for traumatic brain injuries on Saturday evening after their air base in the western part of the country came under heavy rocket and missile fire from what American officials said were Iran-backed militants. It was the latest of roughly 140 such rocket and missile strikes against U.S. troops based in Iraq and Syria over the past several months.

The two incidents underlined the volatility that has been growing in the Middle East since Oct. 7, when Hamas, an ally of Iran, charged into Israel and carried out its terror attacks. Israel has responded with a ferocious war in Gaza. Across the region, a dizzying array of strikes and counterstrikes risk spinning the conflict into a wider war.

In the last week alone, the list of attacks and reprisals has been long and daunting: Iran fired missiles toward Iraq, Syria and Pakistan; Pakistan responded by striking Iranian territory. Turkey hit Kurdish targets in northern Iraq and Syria; Hamas fired rockets toward Israel; Israel continued to pound southern Gaza and struck southern Lebanon, where Hezbollah militants have fired rockets toward Israel in recent months. Houthi militants in Yemen took aim at commercial ships in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, and the United States retaliated with seven rounds of strikes against Houthi targets.

Some of those attacks had no apparent connection to the war in Gaza. But taken together, they highlighted the danger that a particularly deadly strike — an accident or a deliberate provocation — could lead to irreversible escalation and a broader conflict.

Among those killed in the strikes in Damascus on Saturday were Hojatallah Omidvar, the head of intelligence in Syria for the Quds Force, the overseas arm of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, and his deputy, according to the Iranian news media and an Israeli defense official.

The Iranian state news media reported that President Ebrahim Raisi condemned the strikes on Syria, saying, “The Islamic Republic of Iran will not leave the crimes of the Zionist regime unanswered.”

The Israeli defense official, who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence issues, would not say who was behind the attack, but did not deny that it was Israel.

The Revolutionary Guards said in a statement published online that five of its members who were in Syria as military advisers were killed, along with several Syrians. Syria is a close ally of Iran and a conduit for Iranian weapons shipments to its proxies, especially Hezbollah.

For years, Israel has been locked in a shadow war with Iran, conducting covert strikes and targeted killings aimed at crippling Iran’s nuclear and military capabilities and its supply lines to proxy forces around the region.

The Quds Force has played a major role in supporting those proxies, including the Houthis in Yemen as well as Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. General Omidvar, the senior Iranian officer killed in the strike in Damascus on Saturday, oversaw intelligence sharing and gathering with the proxy militias and coordinated weapons distribution throughout the region, according to Israeli defense officials and an Iranian affiliated with the Guards. The officials asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the general.

After the Oct. 7 attacks and the outbreak of the Gaza war, Iran kept a low profile, content to operate through its proxies and sometimes disavowing any involvement in their attacks. But after a string of Israeli assassinations of Iranian security officials and others, Tehran changed course recently, launching attacks with its own forces and publicly framing them as acts of vengeance.

Tensions began to escalate in December, when Iran accused Israel of killing a high-level military figure, Brig. Gen. Sayyed Razi Mousavi, a senior adviser to the Revolutionary Guards, with a missile strike in Syria. Israel declined to comment directly on the accusation.

General Mousavi was said to have helped oversee the shipment of missiles and other arms to Hezbollah, which has been trading rocket and artillery fire with Israel since war broke out in Gaza.

Early this month, an Israeli strike killed the deputy political leader of Hamas, Saleh al-Arouri, in Beirut, Lebanon. That was followed by a suicide bomb attack by the Sunni terrorist group ISIS that killed nearly 100 people in the Iranian city of Kerman. The United States also assassinated a senior commander in an Iranian-aligned militia in Baghdad.

Tehran responded first by sending its own commandos to seize an oil tanker off the coast of Oman. It launched a missile strike this week on the city of Erbil in the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq, saying it was aimed at an Israeli “espionage center.” Iran said its attacks over the past week were in retaliation, among other things, for the assassination of General Mousavi.

Israel has not responded to the claim that the target in Erbil was an Israeli spy outpost. But Iraqi officials rejected the accusation, saying that only civilians had been killed, including a businessman, his infant daughter and her babysitter.

So far, Iran has appeared to stop short of a major escalation that might further inflame an intensifying regional conflict centered on the war between an Iran-backed Hamas and Iran’s regional archenemy, Israel. Analysts say Iran wanted the attacks to be measured, flexing its muscles without getting into a direct fight with Israel, the United States or their allies.

The Houthis in Yemen are at the center of escalating tensions on another regional front. The group has been attacking ships in the Red Sea, provoking retaliatory airstrikes recently by the United States and the United Kingdom.

On Saturday, the U.S. Central Command said American forces had conducted airstrikes against a Houthi anti-ship missile “that was aimed into the Gulf of Aden and was prepared to launch.” It was the seventh time in 10 days that the United States has struck Houthi targets in Yemen.

The strikes have so far failed to deter the Houthis from attacking shipping lanes in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden that connect with the Suez Canal. The Iran-backed group says it will keep up its attacks until Israel halts its military campaign in Gaza.

President Biden said on Thursday that U.S. airstrikes against the Houthis will continue even though they have not halted the group’s attacks on Red Sea shipping.

“Are they stopping the Houthis? No,” Mr. Biden said. “Are they going to continue? Yes.”

Reporting was contributed by Eric Schmitt from Washington, Alissa J. Rubin from Iraq, Ronen Bergman from Tel Aviv, Lara Jakes from Rome, David E. Sanger from Berlin and Thomas Fuller from San Francisco.