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UP IN THE AIR
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
Where is the Iraq war headed next?
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/051205fa_fact

Issue of 2005-12-05
Posted 2005-11-28

In recent weeks, there has been widespread speculation that President George W. Bush, confronted by diminishing approval ratings and dissent within his own party, will begin pulling American troops out of Iraq next year. The Administration’s best-case scenario is that the parliamentary election scheduled for December 15th will produce a coalition government that will join the Administration in calling for a withdrawal to begin in the spring. By then, the White House hopes, the new government will be capable of handling the insurgency. In a speech on November 19th, Bush repeated the latest Administration catchphrase: “As Iraqis stand up, we will stand down.” He added, “When our commanders on the ground tell me that Iraqi forces can defend their freedom, our troops will come home with the honor they have earned.” One sign of the political pressure on the Administration to prepare for a withdrawal came last week, when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told Fox News that the current level of American troops would not have to be maintained “for very much longer,” because the Iraqis were getting better at fighting the insurgency.

A high-level Pentagon war planner told me, however, that he has seen scant indication that the President would authorize a significant pullout of American troops if he believed that it would impede the war against the insurgency. There are several proposals currently under review by the White House and the Pentagon; the most ambitious calls for American combat forces to be reduced from a hundred and fifty-five thousand troops to fewer than eighty thousand by next fall, with all American forces officially designated “combat” to be pulled out of the area by the summer of 2008. In terms of implementation, the planner said, “the drawdown plans that I’m familiar with are condition-based, event-driven, and not in a specific time frame”—that is, they depend on the ability of a new Iraqi government to defeat the insurgency. (A Pentagon spokesman said that the Administration had not made any decisions and had “no plan to leave, only a plan to complete the mission.”)

A key element of the drawdown plans, not mentioned in the President’s public statements, is that the departing American troops will be replaced by American airpower. Quick, deadly strikes by U.S. warplanes are seen as a way to improve dramatically the combat capability of even the weakest Iraqi combat units. The danger, military experts have told me, is that, while the number of American casualties would decrease as ground troops are withdrawn, the over-all level of violence and the number of Iraqi fatalities would increase unless there are stringent controls over who bombs what.

“We’re not planning to diminish the war,” Patrick Clawson, the deputy director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told me. Clawson’s views often mirror the thinking of the men and women around Vice-President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. “We just want to change the mix of the forces doing the fighting—Iraqi infantry with American support and greater use of airpower. The rule now is to commit Iraqi forces into combat only in places where they are sure to win. The pace of commitment, and withdrawal, depends on their success in the battlefield.”

He continued, “We want to draw down our forces, but the President is prepared to tough this one out. There is a very deep feeling on his part that the issue of Iraq was settled by the American people at the polling places in 2004.” The war against the insurgency “may end up being a nasty and murderous civil war in Iraq, but we and our allies would still win,” he said. “As long as the Kurds and the Shiites stay on our side, we’re set to go. There’s no sense that the world is caving in. We’re in the middle of a seven-year slog in Iraq, and eighty per cent of the Iraqis are receptive to our message.”

One Pentagon adviser told me, “There are always contingency plans, but why withdraw and take a chance? I don’t think the President will go for it”—until the insurgency is broken. “He’s not going to back off. This is bigger than domestic politics.”

Current and former military and intelligence officials have told me that the President remains convinced that it is his personal mission to bring democracy to Iraq, and that he is impervious to political pressure, even from fellow Republicans. They also say that he disparages any information that conflicts with his view of how the war is proceeding.

Bush’s closest advisers have long been aware of the religious nature of his policy commitments. In recent interviews, one former senior official, who served in Bush’s first term, spoke extensively about the connection between the President’s religious faith and his view of the war in Iraq. After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the former official said, he was told that Bush felt that “God put me here” to deal with the war on terror. The President’s belief was fortified by the Republican sweep in the 2002 congressional elections; Bush saw the victory as a purposeful message from God that “he’s the man,” the former official said. Publicly, Bush depicted his reëlection as a referendum on the war; privately, he spoke of it as another manifestation of divine purpose.

The former senior official said that after the election he made a lengthy inspection visit to Iraq and reported his findings to Bush in the White House: “I said to the President, ‘We’re not winning the war.’ And he asked, ‘Are we losing?’ I said, ‘Not yet.’ ” The President, he said, “appeared displeased” with that answer.

“I tried to tell him,” the former senior official said. “And he couldn’t hear it.”

There are grave concerns within the military about the capability of the U.S. Army to sustain two or three more years of combat in Iraq. Michael O’Hanlon, a specialist on military issues at the Brookings Institution, told me, “The people in the institutional Army feel they don’t have the luxury of deciding troop levels, or even participating in the debate. They’re planning on staying the course until 2009. I can’t believe the Army thinks that it will happen, because there’s no sustained drive to increase the size of the regular Army.” O’Hanlon noted that “if the President decides to stay the present course in Iraq some troops would be compelled to serve fourth and fifth tours of combat by 2007 and 2008, which could have serious consequences for morale and competency levels.”

Many of the military’s most senior generals are deeply frustrated, but they say nothing in public, because they don’t want to jeopardize their careers. The Administration has “so terrified the generals that they know they won’t go public,” a former defense official said. A retired senior C.I.A. officer with knowledge of Iraq told me that one of his colleagues recently participated in a congressional tour there. The legislators were repeatedly told, in meetings with enlisted men, junior officers, and generals that “things were fucked up.” But in a subsequent teleconference with Rumsfeld, he said, the generals kept those criticisms to themselves.

One person with whom the Pentagon’s top commanders have shared their private views for decades is Representative John Murtha, of Pennsylvania, the senior Democrat on the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. The President and his key aides were enraged when, on November 17th, Murtha gave a speech in the House calling for a withdrawal of troops within six months. The speech was filled with devastating information. For example, Murtha reported that the number of attacks in Iraq has increased from a hundred and fifty a week to more than seven hundred a week in the past year. He said that an estimated fifty thousand American soldiers will suffer “from what I call battle fatigue” in the war, and he said that the Americans were seen as “the common enemy” in Iraq. He also took issue with one of the White House’s claims—that foreign fighters were playing the major role in the insurgency. Murtha said that American soldiers “haven’t captured any in this latest activity”—the continuing battle in western Anbar province, near the border with Syria. “So this idea that they’re coming in from outside, we still think there’s only seven per cent.”

Murtha’s call for a speedy American pullout only seemed to strengthen the White House’s resolve. Administration officials “are beyond angry at him, because he is a serious threat to their policy—both on substance and politically,” the former defense official said. Speaking at the Osan Air Force base, in South Korea, two days after Murtha’s speech, Bush said, “The terrorists regard Iraq as the central front in their war against humanity. . . . If they’re not stopped, the terrorists will be able to advance their agenda to develop weapons of mass destruction, to destroy Israel, to intimidate Europe, and to break our will and blackmail our government into isolation. I’m going to make you this commitment: this is not going to happen on my watch.”

“The President is more determined than ever to stay the course,” the former defense official said. “He doesn’t feel any pain. Bush is a believer in the adage ‘People may suffer and die, but the Church advances.’ ” He said that the President had become more detached, leaving more issues to Karl Rove and Vice-President Cheney. “They keep him in the gray world of religious idealism, where he wants to be anyway,” the former defense official said. Bush’s public appearances, for example, are generally scheduled in front of friendly audiences, most often at military bases. Four decades ago, President Lyndon Johnson, who was also confronted with an increasingly unpopular war, was limited to similar public forums. “Johnson knew he was a prisoner in the White House,” the former official said, “but Bush has no idea.”

Within the military, the prospect of using airpower as a substitute for American troops on the ground has caused great unease. For one thing, Air Force commanders, in particular, have deep-seated objections to the possibility that Iraqis eventually will be responsible for target selection. “Will the Iraqis call in air strikes in order to snuff rivals, or other warlords, or to snuff members of your own sect and blame someone else?” another senior military planner now on assignment in the Pentagon asked. “Will some Iraqis be targeting on behalf of Al Qaeda, or the insurgency, or the Iranians?”

“It’s a serious business,” retired Air Force General Charles Horner, who was in charge of allied bombing during the 1991 Gulf War, said. “The Air Force has always had concerns about people ordering air strikes who are not Air Force forward air controllers. We need people on active duty to think it out, and they will. There has to be training to be sure that somebody is not trying to get even with somebody else.” (Asked for a comment, the Pentagon spokesman said there were plans in place for such training. He also noted that Iraq had no offensive airpower of its own, and thus would have to rely on the United States for some time.)

The American air war inside Iraq today is perhaps the most significant—and underreported—aspect of the fight against the insurgency. The military authorities in Baghdad and Washington do not provide the press with a daily accounting of missions that Air Force, Navy, and Marine units fly or of the tonnage they drop, as was routinely done during the Vietnam War. One insight into the scope of the bombing in Iraq was supplied by the Marine Corps during the height of the siege of Falluja in the fall of 2004. “With a massive Marine air and ground offensive under way,” a Marine press release said, “Marine close air support continues to put high-tech steel on target. . . . Flying missions day and night for weeks, the fixed wing aircraft of the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing are ensuring battlefield success on the front line.” Since the beginning of the war, the press release said, the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing alone had dropped more than five hundred thousand tons of ordnance. “This number is likely to be much higher by the end of operations,” Major Mike Sexton said. In the battle for the city, more than seven hundred Americans were killed or wounded; U.S. officials did not release estimates of civilian dead, but press reports at the time told of women and children killed in the bombardments.

In recent months, the tempo of American bombing seems to have increased. Most of the targets appear to be in the hostile, predominantly Sunni provinces that surround Baghdad and along the Syrian border. As yet, neither Congress nor the public has engaged in a significant discussion or debate about the air war.

The insurgency operates mainly in crowded urban areas, and Air Force warplanes rely on sophisticated, laser-guided bombs to avoid civilian casualties. These bombs home in on targets that must be “painted,” or illuminated, by laser beams directed by ground units. “The pilot doesn’t identify the target as seen in the pre-brief”—the instructions provided before takeoff—a former high-level intelligence official told me. “The guy with the laser is the targeteer. Not the pilot. Often you get a ‘hot-read’ ”—from a military unit on the ground—“and you drop your bombs with no communication with the guys on the ground. You don’t want to break radio silence. The people on the ground are calling in targets that the pilots can’t verify.” He added, “And we’re going to turn this process over to the Iraqis?”

The second senior military planner told me that there are essentially two types of targeting now being used in Iraq: a deliberate site-selection process that works out of air-operations centers in the region, and “adaptive targeting”—supportive bombing by prepositioned or loitering warplanes that are suddenly alerted to firefights or targets of opportunity by military units on the ground. “The bulk of what we do today is adaptive,” the officer said, “and it’s divorced from any operational air planning. Airpower can be used as a tool of internal political coercion, and my attitude is that I can’t imagine that we will give that power to the Iraqis.”

This military planner added that even today, with Americans doing the targeting, “there is no sense of an air campaign, or a strategic vision. We are just whacking targets—it’s a reversion to the Stone Age. There’s no operational art. That’s what happens when you give targeting to the Army—they hit what the local commander wants to hit.”

One senior Pentagon consultant I spoke to said he was optimistic that “American air will immediately make the Iraqi Army that much better.” But he acknowledged that he, too, had concerns about Iraqi targeting. “We have the most expensive eyes in the sky right now,” the consultant said. “But a lot of Iraqis want to settle old scores. Who is going to have authority to call in air strikes? There’s got to be a behavior-based rule.”

General John Jumper, who retired last month after serving four years as the Air Force chief of staff, was “in favor of certification of those Iraqis who will be allowed to call in strikes,” the Pentagon consultant told me. “I don’t know if it will be approved. The regular Army generals were resisting it to the last breath, despite the fact that they would benefit the most from it.”

A Pentagon consultant with close ties to the officials in the Vice-President’s office and the Pentagon who advocated the war said that the Iraqi penchant for targeting tribal and personal enemies with artillery and mortar fire had created “impatience and resentment” inside the military. He believed that the Air Force’s problems with Iraqi targeting might be addressed by the formation of U.S.-Iraqi transition teams, whose American members would be drawn largely from Special Forces troops. This consultant said that there were plans to integrate between two hundred and three hundred Special Forces members into Iraqi units, which was seen as a compromise aimed at meeting the Air Force’s demand to vet Iraqis who were involved in targeting. But in practice, the consultant added, it meant that “the Special Ops people will soon allow Iraqis to begin calling in the targets.”

Robert Pape, a political-science professor at the University of Chicago, who has written widely on American airpower, and who taught for three years at the Air Force’s School of Advanced Airpower Studies, in Alabama, predicted that the air war “will get very ugly” if targeting is turned over to the Iraqis. This would be especially true, he said, if the Iraqis continued to operate as the U.S. Army and Marines have done—plowing through Sunni strongholds on search-and-destroy missions. “If we encourage the Iraqis to clear and hold their own areas, and use airpower to stop the insurgents from penetrating the cleared areas, it could be useful,” Pape said. “The risk is that we will encourage the Iraqis to do search-and-destroy, and they would be less judicious about using airpower—and the violence would go up. More civilians will be killed, which means more insurgents will be created.”

Even American bombing on behalf of an improved, well-trained Iraqi Army would not necessarily be any more successful against the insurgency. “It’s not going to work,” said Andrew Brookes, the former director of airpower studies at the Royal Air Force’s advanced staff college, who is now at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, in London. “Can you put a lid on the insurgency with bombing?” Brookes said. “No. You can concentrate in one area, but the guys will spring up in another town.” The inevitable reliance on Iraqi ground troops’ targeting would also create conflicts. “I don’t see your guys dancing to the tune of someone else,” Brookes said. He added that he and many other experts “don’t believe that airpower is a solution to the problems inside Iraq at all. Replacing boots on the ground with airpower didn’t work in Vietnam, did it?”

The Air Force’s worries have been subordinated, so far, to the political needs of the White House. The Administration’s immediate political goal after the December elections is to show that the day-to-day conduct of the war can be turned over to the newly trained and equipped Iraqi military. It has already planned heavily scripted change-of-command ceremonies, complete with the lowering of American flags at bases and the raising of Iraqi ones.

Some officials in the State Department, the C.I.A., and British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government have settled on their candidate of choice for the December elections—Iyad Allawi, the secular Shiite who served until this spring as Iraq’s interim Prime Minister. They believe that Allawi can gather enough votes in the election to emerge, after a round of political bargaining, as Prime Minister. A former senior British adviser told me that Blair was convinced that Allawi “is the best hope.” The fear is that a government dominated by religious Shiites, many of whom are close to Iran, would give Iran greater political and military influence inside Iraq. Allawi could counter Iran’s influence; also, he would be far more supportive and coöperative if the Bush Administration began a drawdown of American combat forces in the coming year.

Blair has assigned a small team of operatives to provide political help to Allawi, the former adviser told me. He also said that there was talk late this fall, with American concurrence, of urging Ahmad Chalabi, a secular Shiite, to join forces in a coalition with Allawi during the post-election negotiations to form a government. Chalabi, who is notorious for his role in promoting flawed intelligence on weapons of mass destruction before the war, is now a deputy Prime Minister. He and Allawi were bitter rivals while in exile.

A senior United Nations diplomat told me that he was puzzled by the high American and British hopes for Allawi. “I know a lot of people want Allawi, but I think he’s been a terrific disappointment,” the diplomat said. “He doesn’t seem to be building a strong alliance, and at the moment it doesn’t look like he will do very well in the election.”

The second Pentagon consultant told me, “If Allawi becomes Prime Minister, we can say, ‘There’s a moderate, urban, educated leader now in power who does not want to deprive women of their rights.’ He would ask us to leave, but he would allow us to keep Special Forces operations inside Iraq—to keep an American presence the right way. Mission accomplished. A coup for Bush.”

A former high-level intelligence official cautioned that it was probably “too late” for any American withdrawal plan to work without further bloodshed. The constitution approved by Iraqi voters in October “will be interpreted by the Kurds and the Shiites to proceed with their plans for autonomy,” he said. “The Sunnis will continue to believe that if they can get rid of the Americans they can still win. And there still is no credible way to establish security for American troops.”

The fear is that a precipitous U.S. withdrawal would inevitably trigger a Sunni-Shiite civil war. In many areas, that war has, in a sense, already begun, and the United States military is being drawn into the sectarian violence. An American Army officer who took part in the assault on Tal Afar, in the north of Iraq, earlier this fall, said that an American infantry brigade was placed in the position of providing a cordon of security around the besieged city for Iraqi forces, most of them Shiites, who were “rounding up any Sunnis on the basis of whatever a Shiite said to them.” The officer went on, “They were killing Sunnis on behalf of the Shiites,” with the active participation of a militia unit led by a retired American Special Forces soldier. “People like me have gotten so downhearted,” the officer added.

Meanwhile, as the debate over troop reductions continues, the covert war in Iraq has expanded in recent months to Syria. A composite American Special Forces team, known as an S.M.U., for “special-mission unit,” has been ordered, under stringent cover, to target suspected supporters of the Iraqi insurgency across the border. (The Pentagon had no comment.) “It’s a powder keg,” the Pentagon consultant said of the tactic. “But, if we hit an insurgent network in Iraq without hitting the guys in Syria who are part of it, the guys in Syria would get away. When you’re fighting an insurgency, you have to strike everywhere—and at once.”

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FLOOR WAR
by Hendrik Hertzberg
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?051205ta_talk_hertzbe…

Issue of 2005-12-05
Posted 2005-11-28

A hoary tradition of the Congress of the United States, inherited from the Mother of Parliaments across the sea, is the maiden speech. The most recent such speech was delivered by Jean Schmidt, who, on September 6th, became the Member of the House of Representatives from the Second District of Ohio. After being sworn in, she was permitted to address her new colleagues for one minute. In happy contrast to the rancor that has marked our political life of late, her words were soothing:

Honorable people can certainly agree to disagree. However, here today I accept a second oath. I pledge to walk in the shoes of my colleagues and refrain from name-calling or the questioning of character. It is easy to quickly sink to the lowest form of political debate. Harsh words often lead to headlines, but walking this path is not a victimless crime. This great House pays the price.
So, at this moment, I begin my tenure in this Chamber, uncertain of what history will say of my tenure here.

It didn’t take long for Congresswoman Schmidt to provide history with the only thing it is likely to say of her tenure. On November 18th, the House took up a one-line resolution, “Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that the deployment of United States forces in Iraq be terminated immediately.” The resolution was a fake—a sham, a travesty—put up by the Republican leadership in order to blunt the force of a declaration made the day before by John P. Murtha, a seventy-three-year-old Democrat from the coal country around Johnstown, Pennsylvania.

Again, Schmidt was given the floor for one minute. She used it to say that she had just received a call from a Marine reserve colonel. “He asked me to send Congress a message: Stay the course,” she said, and then added, her voice rising, “He also asked me to send Congressman Murtha a message: that cowards cut and run, Marines never do.” She kept talking, but the Democrats in the chamber had already erupted in full-throated fury, the presiding officer was shouting “The House will be in order!” and pounding his gavel, and the damage—to Schmidt, not to Murtha—was done.

Murtha’s statement had condemned the Bush Administration’s conduct of the war as “a flawed policy wrapped in illusion,” argued that the occupation was impeding progress in Iraq and putting the future of the American military at risk, and called for American troops to be redeployed as “a quick reaction force in the region.” It was a cogent critique of the war, but its astounding impact was due mainly to who made it. Murtha spent thirty-seven years in the Marine Corps and the Marine Corps Reserve. He was awarded the Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts, and, in 1974, became the first Vietnam vet to be elected to Congress. The authoritative “Almanac of American Politics” describes him as “hawkish and patriotic,” an old-fashioned pol who devotes himself to “protecting the Pentagon and the troops.”

Schmidt explained a few days later that neither she nor her Marine friend—a Christianist-right state legislator who had helped her win a photo-finish race against an Iraq-war veteran named Paul Hackett, in a district that normally goes Republican by fifty points—had had any idea who Jack Murtha was. Apparently his dissent on the war was sufficient reason to call him a coward. Jean Schmidt is the backwardest of backbenchers, and fellow-Republicans, including the friend she had quoted, hastened to distance themselves from her miscalculation. What gave it resonance was that she was reflecting—in a fun-house mirror—the thuggish behavior of her nominal betters.

Within hours of Murtha’s declaration, the White House press office accused him of advocating “surrender to the terrorists.” This was consistent with a broader White House campaign, which President Bush himself launched in a Veterans Day speech—delivered at an Army facility before a uniformed audience, hardly a suitable venue for a partisan attack—that pictured “Democrats and antiwar critics” as undermining the troops. The theme of this campaign is that, as Vice-President Cheney put it the other day, “any suggestion that prewar information was distorted, hyped, or fabricated by the leader of the nation is utterly false.” He added, quoting John McCain (perhaps to the senator’s discomfort), “It is a lie to say that the President lied to the American people.”

No one has suggested that the leader of the nation “fabricated” prewar information; he may be a receiver of counterfeit goods, such as the phony documents about uranium from Niger which he cited in his 2003 State of the Union address, but he was not the forger. By now, however, the evidence is overwhelming that he, his Vice-President, and many members of his Administration did, precisely, distort and hype. And the distorting and hyping was not limited to prewar information. It has spilled over into postwar—or during-war—information, too. For example, on Veterans Day Bush asserted that “more than a hundred Democrats in the House and the Senate—who had access to the same intelligence—voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power.” As an analysis by James Kuhnhenn and Jonathan S. Landay, of the Knight Ridder Newspapers, put it, “This isn’t true.” Congress didn’t vote to support removing Saddam from power, it voted to authorize the President to “defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq” and to “enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq.” Too picky? Well, it’s not so picky to point out that Congress had no access to the great bulk of intelligence information, including the President’s Daily Brief, and that such information as the Administration did impart had been scrubbed of the doubts and refutations of intelligence professionals. Last week, Murray Waas reported on the National Journal Web site that ten days after September 11, 2001, “Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda.” This information, too, was not shared with Congress before the war, and was likewise kept from the commissions and senatorial committees that have since investigated the run-up to it.

Lies can be slippery. Lying can be subjective. It is not a lie, for example, to say that it is a lie to say that it is a lie to say that the President lied to the American people. It is a judgment, a judgment thrice removed, and probably an unsound one. Did the President and the Administration lie us into war? No member of Congress, so far as can be ascertained, has made that accusation in so many words. But the public is not so respectful of the niceties. A Pew poll a month ago found that while forty-one per cent of those surveyed thought that government officials claimed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction “mostly because they were themselves misinformed,” slighty more—forty-three per cent—thought it was “mostly because they lied to provide a reason for invading Iraq.” And in an NBC-Wall Street Journal poll fifty-seven per cent of those surveyed agreed that “President Bush deliberately misled people to make the case for war with Iraq.” The war of occupation—dubious in origin, incompetent in execution, opaque but ominous in ultimate consequences—continues. Congressman Murtha is deeply worried. And many Americans are becoming deeply angry.

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Tomgram: Nick Turse on Bush`s Expanding "Fallen Legion"
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=39653

This post can be found at http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=39653

Back in mid-October, I noted that informal "walls" and exhibits to honor those Americans (and sometimes Iraqis) who fell -- and continue to fall -- in the Bush administration`s war and occupation of choice in Iraq have been arising on and off-line for some time. I suggested then that "the particular dishonor this administration has brought down on our country calls out for other ‘walls` as well. Perhaps, for instance, we need some negative walls built, stone by miserable stone, to cronyism, corruption, and incompetence." At that moment, Tomdispatch author (and Associate Editor) Nick Turse began to build a verbal "wall" of honor to those who have "fallen" in government service while fighting in some fashion to hold the line against this administration. A previously hardly noted "Legion of the Fallen," these other "casualties" -- men and women who were honorable or steadfast enough in their government duties that they found themselves with little alternative but to resign in protest, quit, retire, or simply be pushed off the cliff by cronies of this administration -- turned out to be far larger than we initially imagined. Here, then, is the second installment in Nick Turse`s "Fallen Legion" series. The names for a third installment, meant for January, are already largely in place and we`re hoping that, by then, we might have an actual on-line wall to go with it.

Tom

Bush`s Burgeoning Body Count
Fallen Legion II
By Nick Turse

About six weeks ago, at the urging of fellow TomDispatch author Rebecca Solnit, I undertook the beginnings of an on-line memorial to the Fallen Legion of the Bush administration. It was, in effect, a proposal for a virtual "wall" made up of the seemingly endless and ever-growing list of top officials as well as beleaguered administrators, managers, and career civil servants who had quit their government posts in protest or were defamed, threatened, fired, forced out, demoted, or driven to retire by administration strong-arm tactics, cronyism, and disastrous policies. As a start, I offered 42 prospective names for a Fallen Legion (and brief descriptions of their fates). These ranged from well-known figures like the President`s former chief adviser on terrorism on the National Security Council, Richard Clarke, former Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki, and former Treasury Secretary Paul O`Neill to the archivist of the United States, the state director of the Bureau of Land Management in Idaho, and three members of the White House Cultural Property Advisory Committee (who resigned over the looting of Iraq after Baghdad fell to U.S. troops). I also called upon readers to aid my future efforts and to send suggestions to: [e-mail]. (And I renew that call in this piece.)

The response has been, in a word, overwhelming. Hundreds of letters poured in -- from readers who took me to task for the omission of their own personal picks for such a "Wall" to notes of encouragement from courageous former officials already included in my listing (like Teresa Chambers, the U.S. Park Police Chief who was fired for speaking out and now has a website documenting her long struggle). Some of the fallen whose stories, sad to say, I hadn`t even heard of, wrote in as well.

Here, then, is the second installment in what is by now an ongoing series at Tomdispatch dedicated to continuing to build the Fallen Legion Wall, "brick" by "brick." Included in this installment is one honorary legionnaire, former NFL football player Pat Tillman, and a consideration of some officials picked by readers for spots of honor whose departure from government service was less than clear cut. This new installment adds approximately 175 additional casualties to the rolls of "the Fallen." But bear in mind that this list is not yet close to being finished. Many suggested Fallen Legionnaires (even some who wrote in personally) do not appear below, but will take their bows in future follow-ups.

Additional Casualties

Jesselyn Radack: An attorney in the Justice Department`s Professional Responsibility Advisory Office who worked on the case of John Walker Lindh, the so-called American Taliban, Radack warned federal prosecutors that interrogating him without his attorney present would be unethical. When the FBI interviewed Lindh anyway, Raddack told Tomdispatch, she "then recommended that [the transcript] be sealed and only used for intelligence-gathering purposes, not for criminal prosecution." Again, her advice was ignored. Later, when Lindh was on trial, Radack learned that the judge in the case had requested copies of all internal correspondence concerning Lindh`s interrogation. Although Radack had written more than a dozen e-mails on the subject, she discovered that only two of them had been turned over and neither reflected her contention that the FBI had committed an ethics violation.

Checking the hard-copy office file, she discovered that the rest of her e-mail messages were missing. With the help of technical support, she "resurrected the e-mails from her computer archives, documented them, provided them to her boss, and took home a copy for safekeeping in case they ‘disappeared` again." She would later turn over copies of the e-mails to Newsweek magazine in compliance with the Whistleblower Protection Act. She has paid a heavy price for her stand against the government. As she told TomDispatch:

"I was forced out of my job at the Justice Department, fired from my subsequent private sector job [with the law firm of Hawkins, Delafield & Wood] at the government`s behest, placed under criminal investigations, referred to the state bars in which I`m licensed as an attorney, and put on the "no-fly" list. I have spent $100,000 defending against a criminal investigation that was dropped and a bar charge that was dismissed. The D.C. Bar Complaint is still pending after two years and despite the fact that I was elected to the D.C. Bar`s Legal Ethics Committee."

Resigned, April 2002.

Sibel Edmonds: Hired shortly after the 9/11 attacks as an FBI translator of documents related to the war on terror (due to her knowledge of Turkish, Farsi, and Azerbaijani), Edmonds alleged security breaches, mismanagement, and possible espionage within the FBI in late 2001 and early 2002, and was fired. She then sued the Justice Department, alleging "that her rights under the Privacy Act and her First and Fifth amendment rights had been violated by the government," but her case was dismissed by a U.S. District Court judge after then-Attorney General John Ashcroft invoked the state-secrets privilege, which allows the government to withhold information to safeguard national security. A summary of a report by the Justice Department`s Inspector General, released in January 2005, however "conclude[d] that Edmonds was fired for reporting serious security breaches and misconduct in the agency`s translation program." Fired, March 2002

Stephen R. Kappes: deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency`s clandestine services resigned, according to the Washington Post, after a confrontation with Patrick Murray, chief of staff to the new CIA director and Bush administration enforcer, former Congressman Porter Goss, who was said to be "treating senior officials disrespectfully." According to the Baltimore Sun, a "former senior CIA official said that the White House ‘doesn`t want Steve Kappes to reconsider his resignation.`" Resigned, November 2004.

Robert Richer: After less than a year on the job, Stephen Kappes` replacement as the number two official in the Central Intelligence Agency`s Directorate of Operations "quit" the agency as well. In a highly unusual move, the former CIA station chief in Amman, Jordan, and head of the Near East division, attended "a closed session of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence… to answer questions about how his concern over a lack of leadership at the agency triggered his retirement." But before meeting with the Senate committee, he first went right to Goss and, according to a CIA agent whose identity (wrote the Washington Post), is protected by law, "Rob laid at his doorstep, in a collegial way, that Goss is out of touch… It fell on deaf ears." As a result, "Richer left the meeting angry and walked out of the Langley headquarters for perhaps the last time, several officers said." Retired, September, 2005.

Central Intelligence Agency (30-90 personnel): Kappes and Richer were not alone. The Washington Post recently reported that under Porter Goss -- a Bush appointee who is "close to the White House"-- "[a]t least a dozen senior officials -- several of whom were promoted under Goss-- have resigned, retired early or requested reassignment." The Post also noted that in "the clandestine service alone… Goss has lost one director, two deputy directors, and at least a dozen department heads, station chiefs and division directors -- many with the key language skills and experience he has said the agency needs." Since Goss took over, according to Robert Dreyfuss in the American Prospect, "between 30 and 90 senior CIA officials have made their exit, some fleeing into retirement, others taking refuge as consultants. Others, unable to retire, have stayed, but only to mark time at the agency." Resigned/Retired/Reassigned, 2004-2005.

The Justice Department`s Civil Rights Division (dozens of employees): According to a recent report in the Washington Post, the agency responsible for enforcing "the nation`s anti-discrimination laws for nearly half a century, is in the midst of an upheaval that has driven away dozens of veteran lawyers and has damaged morale for many of those who remain, according to former and current career employees." The Post notes that -- in addition to a 40% drop in "prosecutions for the kinds of racial and gender discrimination crimes traditionally handled by the division" over the last five years, "[n]early 20 percent of the division`s lawyers left in fiscal 2005, in part because of a buyout program that some lawyers believe was aimed at pushing out those who did not share the administration`s conservative views on civil rights laws." Additionally, it was reported that "dozens" of those who remained with the agency were reassigned "to handle immigration cases instead of civil rights litigation." According to Richard Ugelow, a law professor at American University who left the Civil Rights Division in 2004,"Most everyone in the Civil Rights Division realized that with the change of administration, there would be some cutting back of some cases. But I don`t think people anticipated that it would go this far, that enforcement would be cut back to the point that people felt like they were spinning their wheels." Retired/Resigned, 2005.

The Office of Special Counsel (7 employees): After Elaine Kaplan, a Clinton-appointee who headed the U.S. Office of Special Counsel -- the agency that investigates federal whistleblowers` allegations -- failed to be reappointed to a second term by President Bush, she tendered her resignation stating, "in these times of heightened concern about national security, it is very important that OSC be viewed as a credible, non-partisan advocate on behalf of whistleblowers." She was replaced by Scott Bloch, a Bush appointee who has been called "a gay-hating, secretive, partisan, political hack" and previously served as deputy director of the Task Force for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. Bloch, reports the Project On Government Oversight, went on to order "more than 20 percent of his headquarters legal and investigative staff to relocate or be fired. According to a letter of protest filed… by three national whistleblower watchdog groups, those targeted for forced moves [were] all career employees hired before Scott Bloch became Special Counsel, as part of a purge to stifle dissent and re-staff the agency with handpicked loyalists." Most refused to uproot their lives and, within a mandatory 60-day time limit, move from Washington, D.C. to Dallas, Oakland, or Detroit and were dismissed as a result. Fired, 2005.

Individual Ready Reserve (73 soldiers): Members of a special reserve program of "inactive troops" who are still under contract to the armed forces and were called back to service due to the Bush administration`s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, they "defied orders to appear for wartime duty, some for more than a year, yet the Army has quietly chosen not to act against them." Refused service, 2005.

Brent Scowcroft: A retired Lieutenant General, national security adviser to President Gerald Ford, and longtime friend and former national security adviser to George H.W. Bush, Scowcroft served as the chairman of President George W. Bush`s President`s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB). This group advises the chief executive on "the quality and adequacy of intelligence collection, of analysis and estimates, of counterintelligence, and of other intelligence activities" and is composed, says the White House, of "distinguished citizens outside the government who are qualified on the basis of achievement, experience, independence, and integrity." In August 2002, Scowcroft wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal whose title made its point abundantly clear: "Don`t Attack Saddam." As a result, "his old friends in high office -- Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rice, and so forth -- stopped speaking to him" and his appointment to the PFIAB was not renewed when his term expired in 2004. Failed to be reappointed, 2004.

John J. DiIulio Jr.: The first director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, he quit his post after only seven months on the job. In an interview with Esquire magazine DiIulio disclosed, "There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus. What you`ve got is everything -- and I mean everything -- being run by the political arm. It`s the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis." He also decried "a virtual absence as yet of any policy accomplishments that might, to a fair-minded nonpartisan, count as the flesh on the bones of so-called compassionate conservatism." Resigned, August 2001.

David Kuo: After serving in the White House for two-and-a-half years as a Special Assistant to the President and deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, he left his post in 2003. Kuo wrote, "I have deep respect, appreciation, and affection for the president," but went on to say that "[t]here was minimal senior White House commitment to the faith-based agenda" and that there never really was great concern over what he called "the ‘poor people stuff.`" Resigned, December 2003.

Marlene Braun: A 13-year veteran of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM), she was appointed manager of Carrizo Plain National Monument -- 250,000 acres of native grasses and Native American sacred sites, located about 120 miles northwest of Los Angeles. Once the Bush administration came to power, the BLM, under Interior Secretary Gale Norton, "began crafting a grazing policy that lifted protections for wildlife and habitat across 161 million acres of public lands in the West, including the Carrizo." In an August 2005 article the Los Angeles Times wrote, that Braun "was torn between the demands of a new boss who she felt favored the region`s ranchers, and conservation policies adopted nearly a decade ago to protecting the austere swath of prairie she shared with pronghorn antelope and peregrine falcons, the California condor and the California jewelflower." That boss, said Braun, stripped her of "almost all my influence on the Plain," transferring it to those she deemed to be "pro-grazing." She repeatedly clashed with him and wrote to colleagues, "I ... can`t keep fighting indefinitely, I don`t think… [but m]aybe fighting is better than capitulating.... The Carrizo could lose a lot if I give up.... But hell, you only live, and die, once!!!!" When Braun contacted other officials at the Department of Fish and Game as well as the Nature Conservancy about "several public misstatements she believed [her boss] had made about federal grazing law," he found out and suspended her. Braun appealed the suspension, but on February 15, 2005, her appeal was denied. Braun remained in touch with Bureau of Land Management officials concerning issues related to management of the Carrizo Plain and was repeatedly reprimanded for it. As a result, she told friends, she was certain she would be fired from the Bureau. Braun forwarded the disciplinary memos she continued to receive to officials at the Department of Fish and Game and the Nature Conservancy. She wrote, "I will no longer be participating in this mess.... I will not take being treated like a whipping girl..." The next day she put a .38 caliber pistol to her head and pulled the trigger. Committed Suicide, May 2, 2005.

The Used: An Honorary Fallen Legionnaire

Pat Tillman: A defensive back in the National Football League who turned down a $3.6 million contract to join the military after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, he died in a hail of bullets in Afghanistan. Tillman, following in the tradition of the long-ago cast aside Jessica Lynch, was embraced by the administration as a poster-boy for the American war effort. His name was invoked by the White House as well as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld as a "symbo[l] of our country`s courage and determination." But even in death, Tillman proved too tough for the administration to tame. Steve Coll of the Washington Post revealed that, while "records show Tillman fought bravely and honorably until his last breath," they also revealed "that his superiors exaggerated his actions and invented details as they burnished his legend in public, at the same time suppressing details that might tarnish Tillman`s commanders." In fact,"the Army kept the soldiers on the ground quiet and told Tillman`s family and the public that he was killed by enemy fire while storming a hill," reporting that "Tillman was part of a coalition combat patrol that was ambushed" by enemy forces. It turned out, however, that he had been gunned down by U.S. troops and that fact was simply covered up by military officials. Soon his family spoke up. Said his mother, Mary Tillman:

"Pat had high ideals about the country; that`s why he did what he did. The military let him down. The administration let him down. It was a sign of disrespect. The fact that he was the ultimate team player and he watched his own men kill him is absolutely heartbreaking and tragic. The fact that they lied about it afterward is disgusting."

His father, Patrick Tillman Sr., was equally furious, stating:

"After it happened, all the people in positions of authority went out of their way to script this. They purposely interfered with the investigation, they covered it up. I think they thought they could control it, and they realized that their recruiting efforts were going to go to hell in a hand basket if the truth about his death got out. They blew up their poster boy."

And from beyond the grave, the administration`s would-be propaganda puppet (who, it turns out was a major Noam Chomsky fan) had the last word -- via the recollections of his close friend, Army Specialist Russell Baer, who served with Tillman in Iraq:

"We were outside of [a city in southern Iraq] watching as bombs were dropping on the town. We were at an old air base, me, Kevin [Tillman, Pat`s brother] and Pat, we weren`t in the fight right then. We were talking. And Pat said, ‘You know, this war is so f____ illegal.` And we all said, ‘Yeah.` That`s who he was. He totally was against Bush."

The Fallen?

Numerous readers sent in possible additions to the list of "the Fallen." Among them were cases of high officials who left government service under somewhat ambiguous circumstances. Did they or didn`t they resign in protest? Were they forced out? Was it cover-your-ass infused political self-preservation or total revulsion with administration policies? You make the call:

Christine Todd Whitman: A favorite of readers who want to believe the best about humanity, Whitman was appointed by Bush in 2001 as chief of the Environmental Protection Agency and served two-and-a-half years before resigning. Her tenure was plagued by scandal over an alleged cover-up concerning the air quality in lower Manhattan following the 9/11 attacks and, according to Jeff Ruch, the executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), she also "presided over the greatest rollback in environmental enforcement in history… [and] pushed pollution control policies that put corporations rather than public health considerations in the driver`s seat." Whitman noted that she sometimes had arguments with the White House that were "a little awkward" -- and, after leaving office, she authored a book, It`s My Party, Too: The Battle for the Heart of the GOP and the Future of America in which she mildly criticized the current state of the Republican party. It didn`t stop her, however, from becoming co-chair of Bush`s 2004 reelection campaign in New Jersey and one of the campaign`s "Rangers" -- an elite group of fundraisers, each of whom was responsible for gathering up more than $200,000 for the president.

Colin Powell: A professional soldier for 35 years, including service as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Powell was appointed Secretary of State by Bush and served in that capacity for the President`s entire first term in office. During his tenure, Powell was said to have been a lone voice advocating diplomacy in the rush to war with Iraq. Despite this, it was Powell who appeared before the United Nations Security Council and made the case for war on the basis of supposed weapons of mass destruction that were later proved to be non-existent. In his letter of resignation, Powell stated that he was "pleased to have been part of a team that launched the Global War Against Terror, liberated the Afghan and Iraqi people, brought the attention of the world to the problem of proliferation, [and] reaffirmed our alliances…" In the time since, Powell has admitted that making the case for war will remain a "blot" on his record. "I`m the one who presented it on behalf of the United States to the world, and [it] will always be a part of my record. It was painful. It`s painful now," he said. But as former CIA analyst Melvin Goodman said recently on a Democracy Now segment devoted to discussing "The Fallen Legion":

"The sad thing about the list… is the resignation that didn`t take place. And that`s Colin Powell. So, you have the great American story. And Colin Powell is that. But he`s always going to have to live with the fact that he used the phony intelligence that the C.I.A. prepared for him, and he had to know that some of this was really bogus, that he was really stretching a point. And he had John Negroponte, the U.N. ambassador, sitting behind him, along with [CIA Director] George Tenet, while these lies were told to an international community, therefore jeopardizing American credibility."

Charlotte Beers: A top advertising executive who was, in the immediate wake of 9/11, tasked with "spearhead[ing] a public diplomacy campaign aimed at winning the hearts and minds of the Muslim world," she submitted her resignation in March 2003, claiming "health reasons" as the cause of her departure. CNN, however, reported that an unnamed "U.S. official" said the real reasons were due to "problems she encountered in the job."

General Kevin P. Byrnes: A Vietnam veteran, he ranked third in seniority among the Army`s 11 four-star generals and headed the Army`s Training and Doctrine Command (TRACDOC). While Byrnes was said to have "a previously unblemished record [and] was set to retire… after 36 years of service," he was sacked -- the first case, said Army officials, of a "four-star general being relieved of duty in modern times." The official reasons for this, wrote the Washington Post, were "allegations that he had an extramarital affair with a civilian." But the newspaper also noted, "Relieving a general of his command amid such allegations is extremely unusual, especially given that he was about to retire" and some commentators raised the possibility that the "White House`s need to block anti-torture legislation on detainees" figured into the general`s firing. A number of others similarly called attention to the odd fact that, as Ariana Huffington wrote, at the Pentagon, "Torture is Rewarded While Sex is a Firing Offense."

The Mounting Toll

Over the years, presidents who have launched illegitimate military actions and pursued ruinous policies have often left a trail of wrecked careers in their wake. While he publicly defended Lyndon Johnson`s policies, Undersecretary of State George Ball privately argued against military escalation in Vietnam, eventually resigning his post in 1966. Jimmy Carter`s secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, resigned in protest over the failed military operation to rescue U.S. hostages in Iran, which he had opposed. In all, "eight of Jimmy Carter`s cabinet members eventually resigned during his one term in office," while "[o]ther top administration officials, including Carter`s Ambassador to the United Nations, Andrew Young, were forced out… because of unauthorized meetings with PLO leaders." Analysis of their archives by Lexis-Nexis researchers found that Ronald Reagan "saw all but one of his cabinet positions change hands during his two terms in office from 1981-1989" and that he had a total of "four chiefs of staff and six national security advisors." Lexis-Nexis also determined that "(b)efore he finished his second term in office, [Bill Clinton] had 10 of his original cabinet members resign and several of their replacements also resign." Further, resignations on moral and ethical grounds during the Clinton Administration included "top Department of Health and Human Services officials Peter Edelman, Mary Jo Bane and Wendell Primus." They resigned in protest "over President Clinton`s decision to sign a welfare bill that the officials thought would be a disaster for the poor and the country." Meanwhile, in a 1998 article in the New York Times, a then-less-known Judith Miller reported that a then-less-known United Nations weapons inspector, Scott Ritter, had resigned…[from his UN post] charging that the U.N. secretary-general, the Security Council and the Clinton administration had stymied the inspectors… ." Not exactly one of Clinton`s "Fallen," but, in light of revelations since, worth mentioning nonetheless.

Over the years, many public servants from many administrations have been fired, forced out, or have quit their posts in protest. Unfortunately no one, to my knowledge, has bothered to catalogue them all. Despite a lack of precise figures, it also seems that no administration in recent memory has come close to the Bush presidency in producing so many high-profile public statements of resignation, dissatisfaction, or anger over administration policies, actions or inaction. Even discounting an entire class of ambiguously "fallen" officials and appointees, from Whitman and Powell to Valerie Plame (who is, apparently, still a CIA employee) and her husband ex-ambassador Joseph Wilson (the one-mission man), there are a seemingly endless number of legionnaires whose names have yet to be inscribed next to the approximately 217 already on "the Fallen Legion Wall." When added to the rolls of the real "Fallen" -- Iraqis and Afghans; Americans and other coalition forces; civilians, guerillas, mercenaries, and soldiers -- the human cost of the Bush administration`s actions and policies will prove staggering.

[NOTE: If you know of others, or are one of the "Fallen Legion" yourself, please send the information (and whatever supporting material you would care to supply) to [e-mail] with the subject heading: "fallen legion" to add another name to the "wall." This is a subject TomDispatch will definitely return to in the future.]

Nick Turse works in the Department of Epidemiology at Columbia University and is the Associate Editor and Research Director of TomDispatch.com. He has written for the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Village Voice, and regularly for Tomdispatch on the military-corporate complex, the homeland security state, and various other topics. In addition to sending in suggestions of possible fallen legionnaires, if you have whistles to blow or muck you think Nick should rake, send your insider information to [e-mail].

Copyright 2005 Nick Turse

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Latest Coalition Fatality: Nov 26, 2005
Military Fatalities US, UK, Other

http://www.icasualties.org/oif/IraqiDeaths.aspx

Regelmäßige Updates von Meldungen aus dem Irak:
http://icasualties.org/oif/

Da bei ´Today im Irak´ die Postings immer länger werden, hier den Link für alle Interessierte: http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

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The Real McCain
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051212/berman

This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051212/berman

by ARI BERMAN

[from the December 12, 2005 issue]

Over the Senate`s August recess, John McCain returned to Arizona to quash a brewing conservative insurgency in his home state. The Arizona Republican Assembly, a grassroots right-wing group, had recently censured McCain for "ignoring the opinions of his constituents expressed in numerous polls and personal pleas." The anti-immigrant Minuteman vigilantes had rallied on the Arizona-Mexico border in protest of his progressive immigration policy. Discord gripped the state GOP leadership. So the man who in 2000 dubbed himself "Luke Skywalker fighting his way out of the Death Star" headed straight into enemy territory, organizing a town hall meeting with rank-and-file conservatives in the desert town of Mesa. "Many of those in the crowd Thursday wore stickers with a circle and a slash--the symbol for `no`--across the words `McCain 2008,`" the local East Valley Tribune reported.

But the senator they saw projected a far more conciliatory image than the trash-talking maverick portrayed in the national media. Before the event he had endorsed teaching "intelligent design" alongside evolution in public schools, and he had expressed support for a rigid state ban on gay marriage that denies government benefits to any unmarried couple. After brief opening remarks, McCain took questions for more than two hours, referring to Reagan as "my hero," invoking the support of other conservatives on issues such as stem-cell research and immigration, and strenuously defending President Bush`s Iraq policy.

The détente with conservatives that began with his vigorous embrace of Bush during the 2004 campaign has become a full-on charm offensive. "If he decides to run for President, the friendship has to be re-established," says McCain political consultant Max Fose. "There haven`t always been town halls. There hasn`t always been a dialogue." McCain isn`t just reaching out on the home front. His office holds regular meetings with conservative leaders in South Carolina, where his approval rating sits at 65 percent. He has met with the Rev. Jerry Falwell, whom he denounced as one of the religious right`s "peddlers of intolerance" after the 2000 South Carolina primary. After the antitax Club for Growth began running ads against McCain in New Hampshire, a state he won in 2000, he reversed positions and supported a procedural repeal of the estate tax. He has endorsed conservative Republican Ken Blackwell for Ohio governor. At the suggestion of conservative activist and longtime nemesis Grover Norquist, he campaigned for Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger`s failed referendum initiatives in California, particularly the "paycheck protection" provision targeting unions` political activities. McCain`s likely to be the most requested Republican campaigner in 2006 races. "He`s the closest thing to a rock star in the Republican Party today," says Michigan Republican Party chair Saul Anuzis.

Unfortunately, most campaigns are a battle between who a politician is and who he needs to be to win. There have always been two sides to McCain: the conservative loyalist and the unpredictable maverick so often featured in the media. In preparation for 2008, McCain has largely chosen to unveil and market the conservative side. Many conservatives are warming to his routine; some are even beginning to like and trust him. It`s fair to assume, though, that the more orthodox conservatives agree with McCain, the more he risks alienating moderates and forfeiting the independence that makes him unique and suggests he could become a great President. It`s an uncomfortable predicament for a pragmatic problem solver with sky-high approval ratings and crossover appeal. "He`ll have to decide whether he wants to be CBS`s favorite senator or the Republican nominee," says Norquist. "He can`t do both."

In late September, as Bush`s presidency tailspinned, McCain headlined a dinner of conservative intellectuals sponsored by The American Spectator magazine. "Campaigning with George W. Bush was one of the proudest moments of my life," McCain declared. He downplayed his differences with Bush over immigration. (Both support a temporary-guest-worker program, but Bush wants illegals to return to their host countries after six years, while McCain advocates a "path to citizenship.") He railed against government spending and urged a hard line on Iran and North Korea. "McCain spoke fervently and with obvious sincerity about how much he admires Bush and the job he has been doing," wrote Michael Barone of US News & World Report.

"He thinks, not necessarily incorrectly, that he can pick off a few of us," says David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, which rates conservative lawmakers. "It adds up to making him acceptable. He doesn`t need 65 percent of the party to adore him, but he needs to defang their hostility." In this effort, McCain has been criticizing Republicans mostly from the right, shrewdly bolstering both his anti-establishment and conservative credentials--largely through appeals to what he calls "one of the bases of the Republican Party, a very important one, that believes in fiscal restraint and fiscal discipline." McCain has signed a "No Pork Pledge," fought against wasteful bridges in Alaska and urged deep cuts to nondefense and non-homeland-security-related spending--cuts that Democratic Senate minority leader Harry Reid dubs "immoral." At a recent appearance before the ultraconservative Heritage Foundation, McCain described himself as a "Barry Goldwater Republican" who "revere Ronald Reagan and his stand of limited government." The routine has won him praise from the likes of National Review editor Rich Lowry, who recently wrote: "For the first time in years, conservatives have listened to McCain talk about a high-profile domestic issue and have nodded their heads vigorously."

In fact, McCain has always been far more conservative than either his supporters or detractors acknowledge. In 2004 he earned a perfect 100 percent rating from Phyllis Schlafly`s Eagle Forum and a 0 percent from NARAL. Citizens Against Government Waste dubs him a "taxpayer hero." He has opposed extension of the assault-weapons ban, federal hate crimes legislation and the International Criminal Court. He has supported school vouchers, a missile defense shield and private accounts for Social Security. Well before 9/11 McCain advocated a new Reagan Doctrine of "rogue-state rollback."

"He`s a foreign policy hawk, a social conservative and a fiscal conservative who believes in tax cuts but not at the expense of the deficit," says Marshall Wittmann, a former McCain staffer and conservative activist who now works at the Democratic Leadership Council. McCain`s ideology resembles an exotic cocktail of Teddy Roosevelt, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan--a conservative before conservatism was bankrupted by fundamentalism and corporatism. His centrist reputation simply proves how far right the center has shifted in Republican politics. "The median stance for Senate Republicans in the early 1970s was significantly to the left of current GOP maverick John McCain," write political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson in their book Off-Center. "By the early 2000s, however, the median Senate Republican was essentially twice as conservative--just shy of the ultraconservative position of Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania."

Much of the moderates` love affair with McCain, and much of the conservatives` distrust of him, stems from 2000, when The Weekly Standard dubbed his reformist campaign an "insurrection." After the religious right smeared him during the South Carolina primary, McCain condemned Bush as "a Pat Robertson Republican" in Robertson`s hometown of Virginia Beach, Virginia. Following Bush`s election, McCain continued to stump relentlessly for campaign-finance reform, opposed Bush`s tax cuts, became the Democrats` favorite co-sponsor on issues like global warming and a patients` bill of rights and fought government corruption harder than anyone in Congress. By 2004 he was flirting with the idea of becoming John Kerry`s running mate.

The turning point came when McCain not only endorsed Bush for re-election but made more than twenty campaign appearances with the President and defended his Iraq policy at the Republican National Convention. Relationships with the Bush team have thawed considerably; when McCain now bucks the White House on, say, uniform Army restrictions on torture, it isn`t viewed as a personal betrayal. McCain campaigned with Bush on his push for Social Security privatization last spring. And after leading a gang of fourteen senators who brokered a compromise on judicial nominees and the filibuster, McCain strongly supported all three of Bush`s Supreme Court picks. Asked recently by Fox News how he gets along with the White House, McCain responded, "Very well. Very well."

"Do I want to be President? Sure," McCain told the Wall Street Journal in October. "Do I want to run for President? That`s the question." Yet it`s one of the worst-kept secrets in Washington that McCain is running, so long as his health holds up (he`ll be 72 in August 2008, and he bears a deep scar along his swollen left cheek from melanoma treatments). The obvious question then becomes, Can he win?

McCain`s staff and supporters believe he can reach "mainstream conservatives"--who value low taxes, less government and an assertive foreign policy more than social concerns--without alienating the middle. Another key, says Greg Stevens, McCain`s media adviser from 2000, will be electability. According to one recent national poll, McCain runs neck and neck with Rudy Giuliani and bests Hillary Clinton 52 percent to 39 percent. "The party is pretty heavy with Bush people right now, and they will want to win again," says Stevens. "Many are very interested in John because they think he`s got the best chance." Bush`s media adviser in 2000 and 2004, Mark McKinnon, has reportedly already signed on with the McCain campaign. McCain`s aides even told The New Yorker last May that Bush brain Karl Rove might lend a helping hand. If electability doesn`t work, there`s always McCain`s heroic life story--the Vietnam card. "He was in Hanoi for five years, two spent hanging from one arm," says Stevens. "I`m happy to run that footage." Of course, an overreliance on war-hero machismo could backfire--just ask Kerry.

Even with such a mainstream conservative message, who makes up McCain`s base? "It`s not the far right but conservative, practical thinkers in the Republican Party," says Fose. And how many of those currently exist? "Enough," he chuckles.

But right-wing Republicans like Norquist still hold McCain`s occasional moderation and rebel style in deep suspicion. Many observers believe they will rally around a more ideologically pure candidate like Senator George Allen of Virginia or Sam Brownback of Kansas. "The politicized, active part of the Republican base has been stepped on by McCain," says Norquist, citing McCain`s opposition to Bush`s tax cuts as well as his support for greenhouse gas reductions and his pioneering of contemporary campaign-finance reform. "It`d be hard to imagine we`d be supporting Senator McCain," agrees former Congressman Pat Toomey, president of the Club for Growth.

Some of that criticism can be chalked up to McCain`s testy relationship with parts of the GOP`s Beltway establishment. Toomey`s Club for Growth is being sued by the Federal Election Commission for violating a section of the campaign-finance laws that McCain wrote. Norquist is implicated in McCain`s current investigation of how über-lobbyist Jack Abramoff and former Christian Coalition director Ralph Reed milked millions in casino money from unsuspecting Indian tribes. But among social conservatives, McCain`s standing is unquestionably precarious. Though he has always voted with the right on abortion, McCain opposed a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage (on states` rights grounds). He supports expanding federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research, and he helped preserve the filibuster by stalling the "nuclear option" for judicial nominees in the Senate.

Throughout his career, McCain has rarely talked about social issues or paid lip service to the religious right--prompting activists to question his devotion. "Some point to his record on pro-life issues and other questions and they say he really is acceptable," says evangelical leader Paul Weyrich, an influential founder of the modern conservative movement. "Others point to his reaction after the South Carolina primary and feel that underneath he is hostile." The bottom line? "I could not support him for President." Weyrich estimates that 60 percent of social conservative leaders feel the same way. "Social conservatives are the majority of the boots on the ground," says the Rev. Richard Land, a close Bush ally and director of the evangelical Southern Baptist Convention. "If fiscal conservatives and neocons and libertarians want to test that theory, they`re in for an electoral debacle."

Recent history, however, isn`t nearly that clear. Many religious-right leaders supported fringe candidates like John Ashcroft, Steve Forbes and Alan Keyes before rallying around Bush in 2000. McCain even won the endorsement of evangelical leader Gary Bauer after he promised to appoint only antiabortion judges. "I admire the religious right for the dedication and zeal they put into the political process," McCain told Larry King recently. If he`s not making an outright play for the social conservative vote, McCain is certainly trying to blunt their dislike of him--hence his recent positions on intelligent design and gay marriage in Arizona, and his sit-down with Falwell. "McCain doesn`t need to get majority support of the social conservatives, just a portion," says John Pitney, a government expert at Claremont McKenna College. "Bush 41 was not a favorite of social conservatives in 1988, but he had enough support to get through."

Over the next year, we`re bound to see both sides of McCain. He`ll continue to push for noteworthy reforms in the Senate--on torture, lobbying, defense procurement, immigration and other issues--while quietly and not-so-quietly courting elements of the conservative base. Right now, he`s offering Republican activists a firm handshake. If it ever becomes a bear hug, akin to his embrace of Bush on the campaign trail in 2004, the John McCain of `08 may look quite different to moderates and independents from the John McCain they think they know now. If the heir to Barry Goldwater emerges as the new face of conservatism, it`ll be clear that even straight talkers know how to spin.

Copyright © 2005 The Nation

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JAMES CARROLL
Running scared
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/arti…

By James Carroll | November 28, 2005

WHEN I was a boy, I delivered what was thought of as the afternoon newspaper, but in December I made my rounds in the dark. Always, at this time of year, I choke on one particular memory -- the frightened thrill of dashing through the last part of my paper route.

I couldn`t wait for my canvas bag to be nearly empty, so that I could really start to run. Flinging the last of the rolled up newspapers at the blurry doorways, I took off for home as fast as I could go. I hurdled hedges, cut across lawns, one act of trespass after another: What did I care?

It was not the dark I was afraid of so much as my own imagination. I steered clear, for example, of trees whose silhouettes made me think of ghouls, and I was always sure that slimy night crawlers were waiting in the grass to snare my legs, which I kept moving. The faster I went, the more certain I was that someone, something was gaining on me.

I had no way of knowing that such honed fear of what does not actually exist is an ingenious adaptation of the human species, what enables us to handle it when some unexpected monster does in fact show itself. Dread of the ghoul behind the darkened tree, that is, prepared our ancestors in the vast savannah to respond when a mundane but still deadly beast leapt out of the bush. Those humanoids who were cursed with a capacity to vividly conjure the nonexistent threat defined the arc of natural selection that lands, eons later, on us. Just because we have domesticated the beasts of prey does not mean we have eliminated the cruelties of contingency.

Now the monster leaping out of the shadows may be a pink slip at work or a patch of ice on the highway or an IRS audit. It may be a diagnosis or a phone call at 3 a.m. If we find it possible to respond with calm and the focus needed to cope, it is because we rehearsed for the shock by picturing it countless times before it came.

All of this is to the good. Staying with my own case, I have a life because I have been hustling through the dark all these years, heading home. But such motivating fear can be a bad thing, too. When response to the imagined threat moves beyond the adrenalin rush that usefully heightens perception, to an inhibiting construction of defenses or to actual attacks against the dark, then, considered individually, what the person has fallen prey to is clinical paranoia. Considered socially, what we have in such reaction is the politics of terror. Alert to one monster, we create another.

The United States is now undergoing a great reckoning. With collapsing confidence in the government, obsessive debate about the war, rising contempt for the president, shame in relation to the plight of our young soldiers, acrimony at holiday tables -- ``I told you so" versus ``What would you have us do?" -- the nation confronts the all-too-human fact that our frightened responses to Al Qaeda, at home and abroad, have done us far more damage than the nihilist terrorists ever could have. Our communal dread, instead of sharpening our responses, made them reckless.

But the damage has not only been to us. It is as if the frightened newsboy leapt away from an innocuous shadow into the path of an onrushing truck, causing a terrible accident. In America`s case, it was not a truck, but a bus loaded with children.

At one moment, the newsboy is darting among shapes in the dark, and the next he is staggering in the road among the groaning victims of actual carnage he has caused. Add to that horror the facts that more buses loaded with children are rushing down the road toward the accident scene, soon to crash, and that there is no rescue squad to call, no ``security force."

The boy wants to split, but that seems wrong, given what he started. He rolls up his empty newspaper sack and offers it to one of the injured children as a pillow. But the next bus roars toward them. The boy sees nothing else to do than get out of the way. He steps off the road, into the shadows. He then starts running again, through the darkness.

Now the American boy knows something new, that the thing to be afraid of is himself.

James Carroll`s column appears regularly in the Globe.
© Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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Eines Morgens stand ich auf und war berühmt!

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Published on Monday, November 28, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
Meet The Orwellian Consultants
http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/print.cgi?file=/views05/…
by Christian Christensen


"Former FEMA Director Michael Brown, heavily criticized for his agency`s slow response to Hurricane Katrina, is starting a disaster preparedness consulting firm to help clients avoid the sort of errors that cost him his job." (link: http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/1125-01.htm)

This mind-bending news got me to thinking: If it is possible to convert ill-managed catastrophes into personal financial gain, what kind of consultancy work could other power-brokers get into once their careers started to wind down?

The Consultant: George W. Bush
The Company Name: The Bring It On Group
The Pitch: President George W. Bush made a career out of failing to understand the basic tenets of geo-political strategy. Who can forget the incredible moment when the Commander-in-Chief of the United States military actually encouraged the enemy to attack his own troops with the infamous line, "Bring it on!"? This timeless piece of macho, bone-headed leadership paved the way for the formation of The Bring It On Group: a consultancy firm dedicated to eliminating testosterone-soaked managerial decisions that could, in retrospect, seem like organizational suicide.

The Consultant: Rupert Murdoch
The Company Name: Socialist Advisory Cooperative
The Pitch: With a stable of media companies that includes Fox News, The Sun (UK), and The New York Post, Rupert Murdoch is ideally placed to help organizations eliminate harmful corporate practices such as war-mongering, xenophobia, sexism and narrow-minded bigotry. Groups hoping to instill egalitarian, socialist values into their organization should consider the Socialist Advisory Cooperative. Rupert Murdoch, via his News Corporation tentacles, made billions in profits from playing (simultaneously) the soft-porn, populist, moralistic, xenophobic and nationalist cards. His hypocrisy and double-standards knew no bounds! Now that your organization wishes to go in the opposite direction, Mr. Murdoch can lead the way.

The Consultant: John Kerry
The Company Name: The Relatively-Moderate-Yet-Patriotic Consulting Company of Jonathan Forbes Kerry
The Pitch: Are your mangers indecisive? Wishy-Washy? Pampered? The Relatively-Moderate-Yet-Patriotic Consulting Company of Jonathan Forbes Kerry is here to help. We are not exactly sure how, but we are probably better than the Bring It On Group...not that loving America or supporting Guantanamo are wrong. We`re just better. But not in a snobby East Coast way. We like beer like the rest of you. We were in Vietnam. We wanted to bomb Iraq like everyone else. Don`t get us wrong.

The Consultant: Bill Bennett
The Company Name: Blackjack Consultancy
The Pitch: When Bill Bennett drops a few hundred thousand at the tables in Las Vegas, it isn`t the house that wins...your company does! After making a career out of pontificating about everything from the state of education in the United States, to drugs, to the ethical decline of our nation, Bennett can offer your business priceless insights into the perils of taking the moral high-ground once too often. Employees love guidance, but when bosses cross the line and become pompous hypocrites, company morale can sag along with management credibility. Let Blackjack Consultancy help you avoid the pitfalls of self-righteousness!

The Consultant: John Bolton
The Company Name: One Globe Solutions
The Pitch: In an increasingly globalized world, companies require expert advice on how to build meaningful, lasting relationships across religious, geographic and cultural boundaries. Clients will benefit from John Bolton`s vast experience of consensus-destruction and strong-arm bullying. Who better to help your organization adopt an internationalist outlook than the man who put the "UN" in "Unilateral"?

The Consultant: Samuel Robson "Rob" Walton (Chairman of the Board of Directors, Wal-Mart)
The Company Name: Living Wage Consultancy
The Pitch: Workers in large corporations are often subjected to the union-busting tactics of their owners. Living Wage Consultancy is here to help workers break free of those shackles! Rob Walton can teach unions the "tricks of the trade" used by mega-corporations to destroy worker solidarity and maximize profits, such as: reducing healthcare costs by not hiring anyone who looks like they might get sick in the next 15 years; forcing workers to buy their own insurance at rip-off rates; and -- the old classic -- threatening to fire anyone and everyone who even looks at a union leaflet.

The Consultant: Pat Robertson
The Company Name: WWJD Consultants
The Pitch: WWJD (What Would Jesus Do?) Consultants can help businesses integrate Christian pacifist ethics into their corporate operations. As any literate third-grader could tell you, Jesus would probably have been opposed to the state-sanctioned murder of an elected head of a sovereign nation. Still, this didn`t stop WWJD founder Pat Robertson from endorsing such an action against Hugo Chavez! With Pat at the helm, WWJD Consultants can teach organizations, corporations, governments and individuals the Christian values of equal wealth redistribution, turning the other cheek and the evils of violence. The Reverend Robertson misunderstood the Bible...let him show you how to avoid his sins!

The Consultants: Wolf Blitzer, Judy Miller & Dan Rather
The Company Name: Soft Ball Consulting
The Pitch: Leaders of news organizations who wish to train their journalists in the arts of tough cross-examination and investigative reporting need look no further. Soft Ball Consulting sees the creation of the journalistic "Dream Team" of Blitzer, Miller and Rather. This trio has an unparalleled history of pandering to the powerful, lobbing cream-puff questions to the corrupt power elite, accepting the party line as gospel, and ignoring issues central to the workings of American democracy in favor of the inane and the sexy. They have now learned from their myriad mistakes, and so can you.

The Consultant: Tony Blair
The Company Name: The Poodle Group
The Pitch: The Poodle Group, led by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, is dedicated to helping individuals and organizations who find themselves under the thumb of a more powerful co-worker, organization, or "ally". Nothing creates tension more than an imbalanced power relationship: a situation which can lead to undignified fawning and gutless sycophancy. Let the Poodle Group teach you how to assert your individuality and opinions, while maintaining your dignity. (!!!Ask about our 90% discount for U.S. customers!!!)

The Consultant: Dick Cheney
The Company Name: Go Fuck Yourself Consulting
The Pitch: If not Dick Cheney to tell you that government contracts are unfairly awarded to companies with the closest ties to the administration in power, then who? If your business wishes to bid for a government contract, but you are worried that it will simply be palmed off to a company with party hacks on the payroll, Dick Cheney and his partners have three words for you: "Go Fuck Yourself!"

Christian Christensen is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Communication at Bahcesehir University in Istanbul, Turkey. He can be reached at [e-mail]

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Published on Monday, November 28, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
10 Reasons Why I Am No Longer Proud to be an American
by Gary Alan Scott
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1128-33.htm

I am an ex-patriot living and working in Belgium. I have traveled widely over the last 30 years and have lived in three countries besides my native America. I am presently the Director of an International Residence House. One of my students asked me the other day whether I consider myself "proud" to be an American.

I responded by saying that I love my country`s founding values, its natural beauty and so, so many people in it, but that I can no longer say that I am proud to be an American. Here are ten reasons why.

1. The War in Iraq was Illegal, unjust, and unnecessary. I am not proud of the doctrine of "pre-emption" because I don`t think America should start wars needlessly, especially if they are based upon lies.

Our "leaders" chose to take our country into an illegal, unjust, and unnecessary war by hyping intelligence and scaring people into fearful submission. This war has now killed tens of thousands of Americans and Iraqis and wounded tens of thousands more, while costing us nearly $300 billion dollars and making us far less safe and far more hated than we were before this debacle. The American people may not know the "real" reason for this radical policy, but here are some of the stated reasons:

"Saddam Hussein has WMD"; "Saddam Hussein is a brutal dictator;" "Saddam Hussein had a role in 9/11;" "Saddam Hussein has ties to al-Queda;" "We want to bring democracy to the Middle East;" "We are going to fight the terrorists abroad so we don`t have to fight them at home;" "Iraq is the front-line of the War on Terror;" (and my personal favorite) "He tried to kill my daddy;"

And of course, there was the unstated reason, widely supposed, but rarely acknowledged: "They`ve got a lot of oil and gas in that region and we use a lot of it in America."

2. America has acted as a rogue nation, even a pariah state, over the past five years, and I am not proud of our "my way or the highway" unilateralism. If this were elementary school, this Administration would receive an "Unsatisfactory" grade for "Gets along well with others."

Our current Administration has thumbed its collective nose at all forms of multilateralism and international cooperation, withdrawing from the land mine treaty, the Kyoto protocol, the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty (so the warmongers will be free to design "mini-nukes", "bunker busters" and the desire to control outer space), the World Court, many of the Geneva conventions against torture and prisoner abuse, and are one of two countries which have not signed the Rights of the Child document (the other being Somalia)! The U.S. has now committed many of the same acts for which the "war criminals" at Nuremburg were tried and convicted.

3. The country I love practices respect for human rights, and I am not proud of the fact that we have become a nation of torturers.

Our present rulers seem to find it perfectly acceptable to torture other human beings, hold people without charge or legal representation indefinitely, and is now accused of using chemical weapons (white phosphorus and a new form of napalm) against a country that was alleged to have WMD, but, in fact, did not. How ironic is it that the CIA uses abandoned Soviet Gulags and that we used the same chemical weapon on Iraqi civilians in Fallujah that Saddam used on the Kurds in 1991!

4. I am not proud of the reverse Robin Hood syndrome that has recently gripped our economy.

Our cyrrebt rulers have been recklessly looting our countries wealth and resources, stealing from the poor and giving the spoils to the rich. No "welfare queen" ever had it as good as these "pigs at the trough" who never met a tax cut for the rich or a pork project in their district that they didn`t love. The result has been the largest income redistribution in our history, revealing shameful poverty in the world`s richest nation, and budget deficits as far as the eye can see.

5. I am not proud of the movement toward plutocracy, and I`m even less proud of kleptocracy, as Paul Krugman and Jim Hightower have dubbed the present form of government.

America has become a country of the corporation, by the corporation and for the corporation, opening up the environment to the polluters, while cynically calling such initiatives "clear skies" and the like. It would seem that the country as a whole is (in the words of a famous bumper sticker) "spending our children`s inheritance!"

6. I am not proud of the way our Constitution and, in general, the rule of law have been undermined by the cabal in charge of America.

Our rulers place themselves above the law and above the Constitution, from which our other laws are derived. They also disregard international laws and pursue their private interests at the expense of both public goods and fundamental values, Examples range from the illegal war in Iraq, to the deceptively-named "USA Patriot Act" that assaults civil liberties, to the many scandals currently embroiling the likes of Scooter Libby, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, Tom DeLay, Bill Frist, Michael Scanlon, Jack Abramoff, Kenneth Tomlinson, and so on. Oh, and how is former Enron CEO Ken Lay doing these days?

7. I am not proud of what has happened to America`s standing in the world.

Even our closest allies must keep at arm`s length from us, lest they be infected with the contagion of corruption. America has recently thumbed its collective nose at the rest of the world, acting as a global hegemon that tolerates no rivals, while carelessly disregarding the lessons to be learned from past Empires. Other countries and their peoples now regard the U.S. as a greater threat to world security, peace, and justice than either terrorism or the most brutal dictators on the planet.

8. I am not proud of the way our democracy has been undermined or hijacked.

From the role of money in the election process, to the voting scandals of 2000, 20004, and 2005, to the emergence of a one-party country, the corporate party comprised of two branches: Republican and Republican-lite. The U.S. is in real danger of losing its democracy, when we cannot even verify election results. We are fast becoming a democracy in name only. There is little left at present of the founders` robust notion of democracy.

9. I am not proud of the way the separation between church and state has been eroded.

The separation of church and state is a fundamental principle of our Constitution and it is being eroded. Those in power use religion shamelessly to "turn out the base" over issues such as gay-marriage, abortion rights, physician-assisted suicide, Terri Schaivo, stem-cell research, and so on, but these same rulers display no moral principles in their own conduct and policies. They use religion and talk a lot about morality and/or values, but they exemplify none of it, as far as I can tell. "Ye shall know me by my works."

10. I am not proud of the job the media have done in functioning as the fourth estate.

Do not forget that Thomas Jefferson famously said that if he had to choose between a free press without a government or a government without a free press, he would choose the former.

America no longer can boast of a high-quality, independent media, now that four corporations control all media, for whom profit is a greater concern than the truth or an informed electorate, and instead of being skeptical (or even critical) has come to act as the public address system for the Administration.

Please, somebody, call or write me when you find my America.

Dr. Gary Alan Scott is a philosophy professor at Loyola College in Maryland. He is currently the Director of Loyola`s International Nachbahr Huis in Leuven, Belgium. He is currently working on a book entitled "The Failure to Reason." You can email him at [e-mail].

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BUSH ISSUES OFFICIAL LIST OF THINGS TO BE THANKFUL FOR
Not Talking to Cindy Sheehan High On List
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In a special pre-Thanksgiving radio address broadcast from the White House, President George W. Bush asked his fellow Americans to join him in giving thanks for the following things:

“My fellow Americans, let’s be thankful for global warming, because as these winter months approach, it makes the world such a nice, toasty place.

“Let’s be thankful to Brownie for doing such a good job, even if he doesn’t have it anymore.

“Let’s be thankful that we live in a place like America and not in a place like China where the doors are really tricky to open.

“Let’s be thankful that even though my approval numbers are falling, they’re still higher than my grades at Yale.

“Let’s be thankful for Sony PlayStation Portable, which really helps you get through those long Cabinet meetings when they’re going on and on about the economy.

“Let’s be thankful that the year’s almost over and I’ve managed to avoid talking to Cindy Sheehan.

“Let’s be thankful that John Kerry waited until a year after the election to start saying smart things about Iraq.

“Let’s be thankful to Rep. “Mean Jean” Schmidt (R-Ohio) for saying, ‘Cowards cut and run, but the brave serve in the Alabama National Guard.’

“Let’s be thankful that in nine months it will be August and then I can go on summer vacation again.

“Let’s be thankful that we have such courageous men and women working at the CIA, and that we all know their names.

“And finally, my fellow Americans, let’s be thankful that, even though we still haven’t brought Osama bin Laden to justice, we did finally get Robert Blake.”

http://www.borowitzreport.com/archive_rpt.asp?rec=1267&srch=

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Da gibt es noch einige, die behaupten, wenn die US-Truppen abziehen würde, würde ein Bürgerkrieg ausbrechen. Nur der Bürgerkrieg tobt schon längst. Und eine der Hauptursachen ist die Anwesenheit der US-Truppen.

November 29, 2005
Sunnis Accuse Iraqi Military of Kidnappings and Slayings
By DEXTER FILKINS
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/29/international/middleeast/2…

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Nov. 28 - As the American military pushes the largely Shiite Iraqi security services into a larger role in combating the insurgency, evidence has begun to mount suggesting that the Iraqi forces are carrying out executions in predominantly Sunni neighborhoods.

Hundreds of accounts of killings and abductions have emerged in recent weeks, most of them brought forward by Sunni civilians, who claim that their relatives have been taken away by Iraqi men in uniform without warrant or explanation.

Some Sunni men have been found dead in ditches and fields, with bullet holes in their temples, acid burns on their skin, and holes in their bodies apparently made by electric drills. Many have simply vanished.

Some of the young men have turned up alive in prison. In a secret bunker discovered earlier this month in an Interior Ministry building in Baghdad, American and Iraqi officials acknowledged that some of the mostly Sunni inmates appeared to have been tortured.

Bayan Jabr, the interior minister, and other government officials denied any government involvement, saying the killings were carried out by men driving stolen police cars and wearing police and army uniforms purchased at local markets. "Impossible! Impossible!" Mr. Jabr said. "That is totally wrong; it`s only rumors; it is nonsense."

Many of the claims of killings and abductions have been substantiated by at least one human rights organization working here - which asked not to be identified because of safety concerns - and documented by Sunni leaders working in their communities.

American officials, who are overseeing the training of the Iraqi Army and the police, acknowledge that police officers and Iraqi soldiers, and the militias with which they are associated, may indeed be carrying out killings and abductions in Sunni communities, without direct American knowledge.

But they also say it is difficult, in an already murky guerrilla war, to determine exactly who is responsible. The American officials insisted on anonymity because they were working closely with the Iraqi government and did not want to criticize it publicly.

The widespread conviction among Sunnis that the Shiite-led government is bent on waging a campaign of terror against them is sending waves of fear through the community, just as Iraqi and American officials are trying to coax the Sunnis to take part in nationwide elections on Dec. 15.

Sunnis believe that the security forces are carrying out sectarian reprisals, in part to combat the insurgency, but also in revenge for years of repression at the hands of Saddam Hussein`s government.

Ayad Allawi, a prominent Iraqi politician who is close to the Sunni community, charged in an interview published Sunday in The London Observer that the Iraqi government - and the Ministry of Interior in particular - was condoning torture and running death squads.

The allegations raise the possibility of the war being fought here by a set of far messier rules, as the Americans push more responsibility for fighting it onto the Iraqis. One worry, expressed repeatedly by Americans and Iraqis here, is that an abrupt pullout of American troops could clear the way for a sectarian war.

One Sunni group taking testimony from families in Baghdad said it had documented the death or disappearance of 700 Sunni civilians in the past four months.

An investigator for the human rights organization said it had not been able to determine the number of executions carried out by the Iraqi security forces. So far, the investigator said, the evidence was anecdotal, but substantial.

"There is no question that bodies are turning up," said the investigator, who agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity, citing safety concerns. "Quite a few have been handcuffed and shot in the back of the head."

As an example, the human rights investigator said that the group had been able to verify that a number of Sunni men taken from the Baghdad neighborhood of Huriya and shot to death last August. Relatives of the dead told the group that more than 30 men had been taken from their homes by the Iraqi police in what appeared to be a roundup of Sunni males.

In the Iskan neighborhood in Baghdad, the human rights group said it had confirmed that 36 Sunni men had been abducted and killed in the neighborhood in August. Sunni groups say the men were taken from their homes by men who identified themselves as intelligence agents from the Interior Ministry.

"The stories are pretty much consistent across the board, both in the manner that the men are being abducted and in who they say is taking them," the human rights investigator said.

More than 15 Sunni families interviewed for this article gave similar accounts of people identifying themselves as Iraqi security forces taking their relatives away without warrants. The families said that most of those said to have been abducted were later found dead.

On Nov. 12, according to the Samarraie family in Gazalia, a Baghdad neighborhood, a group of masked men identifying themselves as agents of the Interior Ministry broke down the family`s door. Outside, the family members said, was a line of white pickup trucks with machine guns mounted on them.

The men in masks said they were looking for Yasir, 36, one of the Samarraie brothers, the family said. They took him away.

"We are intelligence people from the Ministry of the Interior," one of the men said, according to Yasir`s wife, Wuroud Sami Younis.

A few days later, the police found Yasir`s body in an empty field a couple of neighborhoods away. His skull was broken, and there were two bullet holes in his temple, family members said. Officials at the city morgue confirmed Mr. Yasir`s death.

"The government is trying to terrorize and dominate the Sunni people," said Yasir`s brother, Shuhaib.

The claims of direct involvement by the Iraqi security services are extremely difficult to verify. In a land where rumor and allegation are commonly used as political weapons, the truth is difficult to distill.

Mr. Jabr, the interior minister, acknowledged that many civilians were being killed in Baghdad and around Iraq, and that some of them were being killed for sectarian reasons. "When we have cases like that, we investigate them, and if we can find the culprits we arrest them," he said.

The chief suspects, according to Sunni leaders, human rights workers and a well-connected American official here, are current and former members of the Badr Brigade, the Iranian-backed militia controlled by the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a principal part of the current government. Since the fall of the Hussein government in April 2003, Badr gunmen are suspected of having assassinated dozens of its former officials, as well as suspected insurgents.

Since April, when the Shiite-led government came to power, Badr fighters have joined the security services, like the police and commando units under the control of the interior minister, Mr. Jabr, who is also a senior member of the Supreme Council.

With Badr gunmen operating inside and outside the government, the militia can act with what appears to be official backing. It is not clear who is directing the security services, the government officials or the heads of the militias.

"The difference between the Ministry of the Interior and the Badr Brigade has become very blurry," the human rights investigator said.

"You have these people in the security services, and they have different masters," said the American official in Baghdad. "There isn`t a clear understanding of who is in charge."

The alarm in the Sunni community is so great the Um al-Qura Mosque, one of the largest temples in Baghdad, has begun documenting cases of allegations of executions and abductions. Mazan Taha, who is overseeing the project, said he has compiled the names of some 700 Sunni men who have disappeared or been killed in the past four months.

In one Sunni neighborhood, Sababkar, residents said the Iraqi Army surrounded the neighborhood and took away 11 of its Sunni men in July. Most of the bodies were found the next day; television stations here showed pictures of bodies that had been burned with acid and drilled with holes by electric drills. Most of the men had been shot in their temples.

"How did these killers get police uniforms?" Mr. Taha asked of the details surrounding many of the killings. "How was it that they were operating freely after curfew? That they had police cars?"

Each day, Sunni families with little faith that the Shiite-led government will help them line up at Mr. Taha`s office instead, to tell of family members who have been killed and disappeared.

"They took three of my sons!" wailed Naima Ibrahim, waving three government-issued identification cards, as Mr. Taha quietly wrote the information down. "They took three of my sons!"

The grief in Baghdad`s Sunni neighborhoods has begun to spill onto the streets.

On Friday, hundreds of Iraqi Sunnis marched through the Amriya neighborhood to protest the killing of a prominent Sunni leader and three of his sons last Wednesday. Witnesses said the killers were wearing Iraqi army uniforms and came in the middle of the night, when the curfew has been strictly enforced. The Sunni leader, Kadhim Surhid, was buried, but much was unclear.

"They killed them in their beds," said Jama Hussein, a friend who attended the funeral. He jutted his palms out from his body. "I myself carried them from their beds."

John F. Burns and Mona Mahmoud contributed reporting for this article.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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A Growing Wariness About Money in Politics
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11…

By Jeffrey H. Birnbaum
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 29, 2005; A01

For several years now, corporations and other wealthy interests have made ever-larger campaign contributions, gifts and sponsored trips part of the culture of Capitol Hill. But now, with fresh guilty pleas by a lawmaker and a public relations executive, federal prosecutors -- and perhaps average voters -- may be concluding that the commingling of money and politics has gone too far.

After years in which big-dollar dealings have come to dominate the interaction between lobbyists and lawmakers, both sides are now facing what could be a wave of prosecutions in the courts and an uprising at the ballot box. Extreme examples of the new business-as-usual are no longer tolerated.

Republicans, who control the White House and Congress, are most vulnerable to this wave. But pollsters say that voters think less of both political parties the more prominent the issue of corruption in Washington becomes, and that incumbents generally could feel the heat of citizen outrage if the two latest guilty pleas multiply in coming months.

No fewer than seven lawmakers, including a Democrat, have been indicted, have pleaded guilty or are under investigation for improper conduct such as conspiracy, securities fraud and improper campaign donations. Congress`s approval ratings have fallen off the table, in some measure because of headlines about these scandals.

"The indictments and the investigations have strengthened the feeling that people have that in fact there`s too much money in Washington and that the money is being used to influence official decisions," said William McInturff, a Republican pollster with Public Opinion Strategies. "Polls show that neither party is held in high regard."

The latest court case came yesterday in San Diego when Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-Calif.) wept openly after pleading guilty to tax evasion and conspiracy. His plea bargain came less than a week after public relations executive Michael Scanlon coolly admitted his role in a conspiracy to try to bribe a congressman.

Members of Congress, lawyers and pollsters recognize that both events taken together could signal the start of a cyclical ritual in the nation`s capital: the moment when lawmakers and outsiders are widely seen as getting too cozy with each other and face a public backlash -- and legal repercussions -- as a result.

"I`ve been in town for 30 years, and it seems that every 10 years or so there is an episode of this type," said Jan W. Baran, a Republican ethics lawyer at Wiley Rein & Fielding. "We clearly are at that period now."

"It`s gotten to a level that it can`t be ignored anymore," agreed Stanley M. Brand, a criminal defense lawyer at Brand & Frulla who used to work for Democrats in Congress.

The worst of the blowback, both legal and electoral, could be blunted if ongoing probes turn up little or nothing. Indeed, some of the investigations are in the early stages and may take months or years to resolve. In addition, experts say that the most prominent cases are aberrational or else there would be even more investigations and indictments than there are.

Yet the activities under scrutiny can also be viewed as logical extensions of actions that once were rare but over time have become commonplace: massive political fundraising, freewheeling private travel given to lawmakers by groups interested in legislation, and the bestowing of other gifts and benefits on government officials by lobbyists.

As the Scanlon case demonstrates, the extent of this favor-buying has gone so far that the Justice Department is no longer deterred from bringing charges even if the gifts fall within Congress`s gift-giving limits or are below campaign finance maximums. "It doesn`t matter," Brand said. Charges could come, he said, if "anything of value is given to a public official that can be linked to an official act."

Scanlon was a partner of lobbyist Jack Abramoff, and they are under investigation for allegedly improperly extracting $82 million from Indian tribes. Scanlon has agreed to return $19 million and is cooperating with authorities, who have broadened their inquiries to include at least half a dozen lawmakers, some lawmakers` spouses and several aides-turned-lobbyists, lawyers involved in the case have said.

Prosecutors have told one lawmaker, Rep. Robert W. Ney (R-Ohio), and his former chief of staff that they are preparing a possible bribery case against them, The Washington Post has reported. About 40 investigators and prosecutors are also looking into the activities of several lawmakers, including Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.), Rep. John T. Doolittle (R-Calif.) and former House majority leader Tom DeLay (R), who is facing unrelated campaign finance charges in his home state of Texas. Burns, Doolittle and DeLay have denied any wrongdoing.

The Post has also reported that investigators are gathering information about Abramoff`s hiring of several congressional spouses, including DeLay`s wife, Christine, who worked from 1998 to 2002 with a lobbying firm run by former DeLay staffers, and Doolittle`s wife, Julie, who owned a consulting firm that was hired by Abramoff and his former law firm, Greenberg Traurig, to do fundraising for a charity he founded.

Separately, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) has been subpoenaed in connection with probes by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department into his sale of millions of dollars` worth of stock in HCA Inc., the Nashville-based hospital chain founded by his father and brother. In yet another case, Rep. William J. Jefferson (D-La.) is under investigation by the Justice Department for possible violations connected with a telecommunications deal he was trying to arrange in Nigeria. Both lawmakers say they did nothing wrong.

At least partly because of public reports of these inquiries, voters` feelings about Congress have turned upside down since the start of 2001. In January 2001, 59 percent of Americans approved of the way Congress was doing its job and 34 percent disapproved, according a Washington Post-ABC survey. Earlier this month, the same poll showed that 37 percent approved and 59 percent disapproved.

In addition, for the first time in its 15-year history, the Wall Street Journal-NBC poll this year showed that the public`s negative feelings exceeded its positive feelings about both political parties at the same time. "These are cautionary notes that are affecting both parties` political standing," McInturff said.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company

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Thoughts on the Middle East, History,and Religion
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Juan Cole is Professor of History at the University of Michigan

http://www.juancole.com/

Tuesday, November 29, 2005

Khalilzad to talk to Iranians

Monday in Iraq was characterized by the usual mayhem, much of it with a dark sectarian character. Two prominent members of the Sunni Iraqi Islamic Party and a third politician from the Association of Muslim Scholars (hard line Sunni) were assassinated in Baghdad. South of the capital, two Britons of South Asian heritage who had gone on pilgrimage to the Shiite holy city of Karbala were killed in an ambush. northern Iraq, 6 Iranian pilgrims were kidnapped.

In Baqubah four US troops were wounded by a suicide bombing. In Baiji, US troops opened fire when a bomb went off, and they killed a leader of the Shamar tribe, among the larger and more powerful in Iraq. Vice President Ghazi al-Yawir is from the Shamar. So too was one of the suicide bombers who blew up the Radisson SAS in Amman recently. Killing Shamar shaikh = not good.

US ambassador in Baghdad Zalmay Khalilzad is going to start direct talks with the Iranians.

Say what? Wasn`t Scott Ritter saying only last winter that a Bush military attack on Iran was in the offing? What has changed?

Well

1. The security situation in Iraq is deteriorating over time.

2. The Shiite religious parties won the Jan. 30 elections, which was not what Bush had hoped for.

3. The Neocons are going to jail or given sinecures, and their star is falling faster than the Chicxulub meteor that killed off the dinosaurs.

Veteran journalist Jim Lobe has put it all together in a tight analysis I haven`t seen elsewhere.

It is the return of Realism in Washington foreign policy. You need the Iranians, as I maintain, for a soft landing in Iraq? So you do business with the Iranians. This opening may help explain why Ahmad Chalabi went to Tehran before he went to Washington, and why he was given such a high-level (if unphotographed) reception in Washington.

Likewise, it helps explain the Cairo Conference sponsored by the Arab League, the results of which were an effort to reach out to the Sunni Arab guerrillas. The Iraqi government even recognized that it was legitimate for the guerrillas to blow up US troops! This is a startling admission for a government under siege with very few allies. But it recategorizes the Sunni Arab leaders from being terrorists to being a national liberation force. You could imagine dealing with, and bringing in from the cold, mere nationalists. Terrorists are poison.

The Neocons began by wanting to destroy the Sunni Arabs of Iraq and their Baath Party, and then going to to overthrow the ayatollahs in Iran. They inducted Bush and Cheney into this over-ambitious and self-contradictory plan, which depended on putting the Shiite Iraqis in power in Baghdad. But wouldn`t the Sunni Arabs violently object? Wouldn`t the Iraqi Shiites establish warm relations with Tehran.

Of course. The Neocons kept getting their promoters to proclaim how brilliant they are. But Wolfowitz isn`t exactly well published as an academic, and Feith is notoriously as thick as two blocks of wood. Their plain was stupid. It is hard to escape the conclusion that they are, as well.

And now the stupid plan has collapsed, as anyone could have foreseen (I did, in 2002). And Realism is reasserting itself.

The two beneficiaries of the 180 degree turn by Bush`s ship of state toward the fabled shores of Reality? The Neo-Baath of Sunni Iraq and the ayatollahs in Tehran.
But who cares? If the US dealing with them can get our troops home and prevent a regional war that screws up the whole world, it will be well worth it.

Ambassador Khalilzad has all along been the most pragmatic of the Neocons. There was even a time in the mid-1990s when he was willing to deal with the Talaban to get a gas pipeline built from Turkmenistan. His pragmatism (which the Neocons may well castigate as a lack of principle) will stand him in good stead in his talks with Tehran. The thing you always worry about is that it is already too late.

posted by Juan @[url11/29/2005 06:30:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/11/khalilzad-to-talk-to-iranians-monday.html[/url] 0 comments

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POLITICS-US:
Realists Tighten Grip as Talks Open with Iran
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=31217

Jim Lobe

In a new indication that the balance of power within the administration of President George W. Bush has tilted strongly in favour of the realists, Washington`s influential ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, has disclosed that Bush has authorised him to open direct talks with Iran about stabilising Iraq.

WASHINGTON, Nov 28 (IPS) - The announcement, which came in an interview with Newsweek magazine, marks a major change in policy. The two countries have not held direct talks since mid-May 2003, shortly after the U.S. ouster of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, when the influence of neo-conservatives was at its zenith.

At that time, the administration charged that al Qaeda attacks carried out in Saudi Arabia had been coordinated from Iranian territory. It promptly broke off an ongoing diplomatic dialogue with Iran in Geneva that was led by Khalilzad himself and dealt primarily with Afghanistan and Iraq.

"I`ve been authorised by the president to engage the Iranians as I engaged them in Afghanistan directly," Khalilzad told Newsweek. "There will be meetings, and that`s also a departure and an adjustment (to U.S. policy)," he added.

The decision to reopen direct talks with Iran, which has not yet reacted to Khalilzad`s announcement, provoked a heated intra-administration debate earlier this fall about engaging Iran more deeply, particularly in light of U.S. concerns -- and threats -- concerning Tehran`s nuclear programme.

Some hard-liners, including neo-conservatives associated with the Committee on the Present Danger, have urged the administration to open an interest section in Tehran to gain more direct access to and intelligence about opposition groups. They argue that with sufficient U.S. support, these groups could subvert the regime in much the same way that U.S. support for Solidarity in Poland allegedly helped create the conditions for the end of Communist rule there.

But others have warned against any steps that could be seen as granting the regime international legitimacy would be a mistake, particularly in light of the hard-line rhetoric of the country`s controversial new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

"On the one hand, I think it`s a good idea to maintain back-channel contacts with adversaries," says Raymond Tanter, a former National Security Council staffer whose Iran Policy Committee has called for Washington to deploy the Iraq-based Mujahadin-e Khalq, which is listed as a "terrorist" group by the State Department, against Tehran.

"On the other hand, when you go public after Ahmadinejad says he wants to wipe Israel off the map, it seems to reward Iranian belligerence. I don`t know why it`s being done," he says.

But to a critic of the hard-liners, University of Michigan Middle East historian Juan Cole, the message was clear. "It`s a sign of desperation and a recognition that (the administration) needs Iranian goodwill to get out of Iraq," he told IPS. "To the extent you can have a soft landing in Iraq, the Iranians have to be involved."

Indeed, Khalilzad depicted the decision as part of a more general strategy, long urged by realists such as Bush Sr.`s national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, and some Democrats, including the party`s ranking foreign policy spokesman, Sen. Joseph Biden, to enlist the cooperation of Baghdad`s neighbours in stabilising Iraq sufficiently to permit a substantial drawdown of U.S. troops.

That goal has become far more urgent in the past month as public support for the U.S. presence in Iraq has plummeted, as has confidence in Bush`s performance there and in the general "war on terror".

As Bush`s poll numbers have dropped to levels not seen since the Richard Nixon administration in the early 1970s, Democrats have become more aggressive in urging a major policy shift toward realism, while Republicans have grown restive. The White House was badly shaken earlier this month when a majority of Senate Republicans voted with Democrats to require the administration to submit regular reports on prospects for withdrawing substantial numbers of troops in 2006 and progress in training Iraqi troops to take their place.

Even if the administration has been slow -- at least rhetorically -- to react to the erosion of public support, the Pentagon, and particularly senior military officers who have been talking up the necessity of a substantial withdrawal in 2006 since last summer, has seen the writing on the wall for some time.

According to a number of published reports, the Pentagon has prepared plans to begin withdrawing large numbers of the nearly 160,000 U.S. troops currently deployed in Iraq to about 140,000 soon after next month`s elections, to about 115,000 by next July and around 100,00 or less by next November`s mid-term Congressional elections.

But those hopes are based not only on the military`s ability to train and equip tens of thousands of members of Iraq`s armed forces and police, but also on a political strategy to both reduce the strength and virulence of the largely Sunni insurgency. At the same time, it is key to ensure that Shiite groups, especially the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), that are most closely tied to Tehran, are prepared to go along with any measures that may be needed to pacify the Sunnis.

It is in this light that the intensified diplomacy within the region of the past several weeks should be seen -- particularly last week`s Arab League meeting in Cairo where both Sunni and Shiite Iraqi parties, as well as the predominantly Sunni Arab governments that make up the League, joined together to call for reconciliation and a withdrawal of non-Arab troops. The fact that Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, who has long been close to Iran, flew immediately to Tehran after the meeting did not go unnoticed.

Nor was it missed here that, two weeks after Secretary of State Rice publicly raised the possibility of direct talks with Iran, Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Chalabi, a long-time friend of Khalilzad who had fallen out of favour in Washington 18 months ago amid charges that he was working with Iranian intelligence, held high-level talks in Tehran just before arriving here in early November for the first time in two years.

While Chalabi was received rapturously by hard-line neo-conservatives at the American Enterprise Institute, who did so much to champion his efforts to bring U.S. troops to Iraq, it now appears that his official reception here by senior administration officials, including Rice, national security adviser Stephen Hadley, and Vice President Dick Cheney, was linked to his perceived usefulness in extricating those troops from a political quagmire -- and, more specifically, gaining Tehran`s cooperation in doing so.

"Perhaps that`s why he was given such a good reception," noted Cole.

Washington`s growing reliance on and support for regional diplomacy marks a serious setback to neo-conservatives who, long before the Iraq war, had championed the unilateral imposition of a Pax Americana in the Middle East that would put an end to what in their view constituted the chief threats to Israel`s security -- Arab nationalism and Iranian theocracy.

Now, two and a half years after invading Iraq to put that peace into place, the administration finds itself seeking the support of both forces, just as the realists had warned. (FIN/2005)


Copyright © 2005 IPS-Inter Press Service

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Zum vorigen Posting:

Aus Newsweek
[urlThe New Way Out]http://msnbc.msn.com/id/10219753/site/newsweek/ U.S. leaders finally have a coherent approach—but patience is wearing thin.[/url]

Das Interview mit US-Botschafter Khalilzad:
[url`Failure Is Not an Option`]http://msnbc.msn.com/id/9865066/site/newsweek/ Washington`s envoy to Iraq speaks out about the new Constitution, and his strategy for containing the insurgency.[/url]

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Ex-Powell Aide Hits Cheney, Rumsfeld

Former chief of staff says they exploited Bush`s aloofness to advance bad Iraq policy.

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-fg-exai…

From Associated Press

November 29, 2005

WASHINGTON — A top aide to former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said Monday that wrongheaded ideas for the handling of foreign detainees arose from White House and Pentagon officials who argued that "the president of the United States is all-powerful."

In an interview, Powell`s former chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, also said that President Bush was "too aloof, too distant from the details" of postwar planning. Underlings exploited Bush`s detachment and made poor decisions, Wilkerson said.

Wilkerson blamed Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and like-minded aides. He said Cheney must have sincerely believed that Iraq could be a spawning ground for new terrorist assaults, because "otherwise I have to declare him a moron, an idiot or a nefarious bastard."

On the question of detainees picked up in Afghanistan and elsewhere, Wilkerson said Bush heard two sides of an impassioned argument within his administration.

Cheney`s office, Rumsfeld aides and others argued "that the president of the United States is all-powerful, that as commander in chief the president of the United States can do anything he damn well pleases," Wilkerson said.

On the other side were Powell, others at the State Department and top military brass, and occasionally Condoleezza Rice, then the national security advisor, Wilkerson said.

Powell raised frequent and loud objections, his former aide said, once yelling into a telephone at Rumsfeld: "Donald, don`t you understand what you are doing to our image?"

Wilkerson said Bush tried to work out a compromise in 2001 and 2002 that recognized that the war on terrorism was different from past wars and required greater flexibility in handling prisoners who don`t belong to an enemy state or follow the rules themselves.

Bush`s stated policy, which was heatedly criticized by civil liberties and legal groups at the time, was defensible, Wilkerson said. But it was quickly undermined in practice, he said.

In the field, the United States followed the policies of hard-liners who wanted essentially unchecked ability to detain and harshly interrogate prisoners at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and elsewhere, Wilkerson said.

Wilkerson left government with Powell in January. He became a surprise critic of the Iraq war-planning effort and other administration decisions this fall, and he has said that Powell did not put him up to it.


Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times

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Wie wärs mit der Urlaubsplanung für Sommer 07. Mit der Eisenbahn nach Tibet(Lhasa).
Nov 30, 2005

The iron rooster in the land of snows
By Rui Xia

With much publicity and drum-beating in local media, China announced last month the completion of one of the most ambitious infrastructure projects in its history: the Qinghai-Tibet (or Qingzang) Railway (see map below), which connects enclosed, remote Tibet with the rest of China via the city of Golmud, in Qinghai province.

The actual tracks have all been laid, officials said, although there will be another 15 months of experiments and checks before the line opens to commercial traffic in 2007.
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A rail line linking Tibet with lowland China has long been an ambition of the Chinese Communist Party, but the project faced many hurdles, including technical, financial and political obstacles, and has been delayed again and again over the past 30 years. Railway engineers from Switzerland checked the terrain during the 1990s and declared the line "mission impossible", but in 2001, Beijing embarked on the project again, with the assistance of Russian scientists, and began laying the tracks, which are expected to dramatically change the face of Tibet.

A few statistics show the staggering scale of the project: The new line runs 1,142 kilometers, mostly through almost uninhabitable wilderness at more than 4,000 meters above sea level, with 30 kilometers of tunnels and 286 bridges. The highest mountain pass en-route is over 5,000 meters above sea level. Over 70,000 workers, mainly Han Chinese from inland areas, were recruited for the project, laying rail through some of the world`s highest, most difficult terrain - encompassing mountain ranges afflicted by dust and thunderstorms, heavy snowfalls, earthquakes and landslides, and covered in a thick layer of permafrost. It`s little wonder, then, that Beijing depicts the US$3.1 billion railway as one of the country`s greatest-ever engineering achievements.

The thick ice
But all is not quiet on the western front. This jaw-dropping accomplishment raises many questions about the economic, political and environmental future of Tibet, as well as doubts about the long-term feasibility of operating a railway on such inhospitable terrain. The main technical challenge for China`s railway engineers was permafrost (earth which remains frozen year round). About half the length of the railway was built over permafrost zones, in which the uppermost layer (called seasonal frost) thaws in summer. The many bridges with foundations sunk deep into the ice are meant to overcome this problem by keeping the rail line stable throughout the seasons and changes in ground level.

Another technique, invented specifically for the Qingzang project, is the "slab-stone ventilation system" developed by Chinese scientist Zhang Luxin, in which parts of the line are built on large slabs intended to allow cool air to circulate and thus prevent the upper layer of permafrost from thawing. "The technique sounds like a logical way to deal with permafrost," says Norwegian Railway museum researcher Hans Schaefer, who`s been taking repeated trips to China to research the Chinese rail system, "but it [has] never [been] done before and we`ll just have to wait and see whether it works".

Other railways were built on ice in Siberia and Scandinavia, Schaefer explains, but due to the southern location and high altitude of Tibet, the scorching summer sun causes a much greater amount of the seasonal frost to thaw than is the case in these northern areas, which can bring changes of up to 2 meters in ground level. Even with all the technological efforts, it has been reported that the railway is already unstable, and will require a continuous and enormously costly maintenance effort to remain open.

Environmentalists have expressed unease with the railway and its manner of dealing with permafrost. Tibet is one of the regions most affected by global warming. With or without a railway, the plateau is melting away, as a recent Greenpeace report put it, which will make the railway even harder to maintain by exacerbating the seasonal melting problem.

Admittedly, the Chinese government has been paying much attention to the environmental issues, for example, by planting vegetation on the barren land to cool the ground and prevent the permafrost receding, and also taking care to build underpasses under the railroad to allow animals to migrate across the track. The main fear of environmentalists, however, is the influx of people and goods the railway is expecting to bring into Tibet, a tide that may place heavy socioeconomic pressure on the roof of the world.
Taming the wild
The rail link between China and Tibet will bring with it many economic and cultural changes: welcomed by some, and feared by others. Lhasa, the capital city of Tibet and once the sacred seat of the Dalai Lamas, now contains more shops, high-rises, roads, and Han people - the ethnic Chinese who, despite Beijing`s denials, are now estimated to constitute an absolute majority in the city. There is no denying that Lhasa`s economic situation has improved greatly during the past few years: more businesses are being opened, greater numbers of tourists pass through and more money is flowing in, especially in government subsidies.

The question is, to whom is all the money going? Government statistics from 2003 show Tibet to be the second-ranking province in China when it comes to wages of state workers. This includes cadres in the local government, and also the railway workers, both skilled and unskilled.

These workers are mainly Han Chinese. Despite government efforts to qualify more Tibetans, about 80% of ethnic Tibetans still live in the countryside, and an additional quarter are still nomads. For these people, argue Tibetan human rights activists, the rail link simply means further marginalization, and less job opportunities.

"On the surface, it looks like Tibet is going to benefit from the railway," said one Tibetan intellectual who asked to remain anonymous, "but in fact, I believe it`ll hurt the Tibetan people. Already, fluency in Chinese is almost essential for getting a job in Lhasa and other towns in Tibet. Chinese immigrants are taking over jobs traditionally done by Tibetans, so the economic situation for many Tibetans not only hasn`t improved, it has worsened, and is expected to worsen further with the great wave of Han immigration that will start with the completion of the railway."

She is a frail, soft-spoken woman, a graduate from one of China`s finest universities who speaks passionately for the Tibetan people. "The few cities in Tibet appear to be prosperous, but go only fifty kilometers out of Lhasa, and living conditions are appalling by any standard. Not enough money is allocated for education; Tibetan youths are being marginalized and discriminated against in their own country. They face a grimmer future than ever."

The key problem, she says, is that of participation. "Just as they`re building underpasses for animal migration under the railway, the government is trying to make us Tibetans walk down a certain, narrow path. Ever since the Chinese occupation [began] in 1950, Tibetans were never asked whether, or in what way, they want to see their country developing. Even now, with more economic freedom and more money coming in, the human rights situation in Tibet is still very bad. This year, some people in Lhasa were detained for the sole `crime` of watching a Dalai Lama lecture on DVD. Tibet needs real autonomy, not just economic benefits," she concludes.

This view, however, is hardly shared by all in Lhasa. Small business owners, Han and Tibetans alike, are looking at the railway with mixed feelings of anticipation and suspicion. The railway is expected to bring many tourists and business people to Lhasa, helping local small enterprises and providing more job opportunities. Prices of goods will probably go down with easier, cheaper shipment.

"Many people believe the railway will accelerate the current opening-up and globalization trends in Tibet," said Arthur Holcombe, president of the US-based Tibet Poverty Alleviation Fund. "This will mean an increasing flow of lower cost consumer and durable goods to Tibet, making them available to broader segments of the Tibetan population living in urban and rural areas. The railway is also likely to stimulate increased growth and job opportunities along its route in such places as Amdo, Nakchu and Damshung Township areas, as well as in Lhasa," Holcombe added.

The big winner, it seems, will be the growing middle class in Lhasa, although many Lhasa residents worry about the modern ailments the rail link may bring in along with its benefits. Crime and prostitution, already mushrooming at the other end of the rail track, in Qinghai province, are winding their way into the once pristine plateau. Air pollution, so far unheard of, is expected to rise with the coming of more factories and cars. Whilst even the Dalai Lama`s administration in India acknowledges the need for infrastructure development in Tibet, many feel the rights and wishes of common people are not being fully addressed.

Is the economic miracle going west?
In spite of all the efforts, it is debatable whether truly large-scale investments will ever reach Tibet. Many analysts argue the area is simply too remote, too backward and distant from major industrial centers to attract investors. The only industry universally expected to leap forward is tourism. The "roof of the world", with its stunningly beautiful landscape and unique Buddhist culture, has certainly got a lot to offer to both foreign and Chinese sightseers, and the railway, once operational, will definitely make the trip much easier.

The ride, China railway`s brochures promise, will be a luxurious one with private toilets and showers in each car, and windows offering panoramic views of the Kunlun mountain range. The cars, to be built by Bombardier Transportation of Canada (which has attracted criticism for its participation in the project), will even be pressurized to protect lowland passengers from altitude sickness, and outfitted with UV-protection systems to prevent sunburn. No doubt, many middle-class Chinese, who are enthusiastic travelers inside their own country, and have more money than ever to spend on vacations, are looking forward to the trip.

Another benefit, almost certainly more important from the government`s point of view, is easier access for military troops to secure both Tibet itself and the borders with India and Nepal. Tighter military control, alongside Chinese immigration prompted as the Chinese version of "go west, young man", might finally integrate Tibet, for decades a thorn in China`s side, into the fast modernizing mainland.

Of course, many foreign journalists, as well as "free Tibet" activists, see this, rather than economic development, to be the main objective behind the mammoth rail project. Tibetan historian Tsering Shakya, author of The Dragon in the Land of Snows, said in a 2002 interview: "Tibet`s natural economy faces westwards towards south Asia; Beijing wants to tie it firmly eastwards with China and to encourage more migration from the interior".

But this is not the whole story, either. As in other areas of western China, one of the main objectives of the Qingzang rail link is improving access to some of the natural resources buried under the frozen land. Tibetan uranium, especially, is important for China`s future nuclear programs. Oil, gold, and other minerals will be loaded on the rail cars to be shipped east to the booming coastal economy. It seems that, yet again, investments in the west mainly contribute to the already flourishing east, leaving millions of local residents in wretched poverty with an ever-slimmer chance of improvement.

The Chinese-educated Tibetan woman feels the pain of her people, but sees little chance for any change. "The Tibetans have been weakening ever since the Fifties. They`re losing their culture and traditional way of life, and are offered little in return. I`d like to see China adopting the Dalai Lama`s `Middle Path` philosophy, and moving towards real dialogue and real autonomy for Tibet, but I don`t see this happening under the current regime."

To judge by her words - and the sad look in her eyes - it seems like the thud of the coming trains is also an announcement of a new era for the Himalayan region, and possibly the beating of funeral drums for traditional Tibet.

Rui Xia is a Western teacher and freelance writer living in China. Rui Xia is her unofficial Chinese name.

(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us for information on sales, syndication and republishing .)

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Nov 30, 2005

America`s unsung war dead
By David Isenberg
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GK30Ak03.html

When America marked the death last month of the 2,000th US service member in Iraq, many commented that this was a meaningless milestone made up by the media and no more important than any other death figures.

They were in fact right, but not for the reason they thought. America actually reached the milestone of 2,000 long before. The reason, however, nobody commented about it was that these fatalities came from America`s other army; that of the private sector. As of November 14, at least 280 coalition contractors have been killed.

Although contractors for private military and security companies (PMC and PSC respectively; the main difference being that a security contractor actually engages in combat when necessary) have been working for and with the American military, various coalition allies, the old Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) and the Iraqi government, the dimension of their role and activities are still poorly understood.

Although a few of them have received the glare of publicity due to the gruesome deaths of some of their employees (Blackwater had four of its contractors killed, their bodies burned and mutilated, and two of them strung up on a bridge over the Euphrates in Fallujah in March 2004) or scandal (Custer Battles, which was accused of overcharging occupation authorities by millions of dollars), most are still unknown to the general public.

That is hardly surprising. Similar to the lack of planning for post major combat operations, private contractors were hastily called on to fill a security vacuum and throughout 2003 and 2004 were largely left on their own to do the job.

PSCs provide such services as: personal security details for senior civilian officials, non-military site security (buildings and infrastructure), and non-military convoy security. Rather than working directly for the US government or the CPA, most PSCs are sub-contracted to provide protection for prime contractor employees or are hired by other entities such as Iraqi companies or private foreign companies seeking business opportunities in Iraq.

The lack of security in post-war Iraq has created an enormous demand for PMC services. In 2004, according to the inspector general for the CPA, at least 10 to 15 cents of every dollar spent on reconstruction was for security. For some contractors the security costs are substantially higher, approaching or even exceeding 30% of a project`s cost. While firms are reluctant to reveal how much they are spending on security and insurance it is estimated that for every $100 in salary paid by the employer, at least $20 is spent on the life insurance premium.

For most of the time since the US invasion in 2003 nobody knew for certain how many PMCs operated in Iraq. Last year in response to a request from Congress, a CPA-compiled report listed 60 PMCs with an aggregate total of 20,000 personnel (including US citizens, third-country nationals and Iraqis). But that list was incomplete. Missing, for example, are companies implicated in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal such as Titan CAC and SOS Interpreting Ltd. News reports peg the number of interrogators from private contractors there between 30 and 40. Most of the armed personnel were the more than 14,000 Iraqi guards who worked the oil field security contract for the British firm Erinys. The Iraqi government has since resumed that task.

The total number of (non-Iraqi) PMC gun-toting personnel is certainly fewer then 20,000; perhaps as few as 6,000 security contractors. And despite claims to the contrary, PMCs do not constitute the second- or third-largest army in Iraq; they are not coordinated into one cohesive whole, nor do they engage in offensive operations.

Their anonymity, however, has not prevented them from taking causalities. On November 14, two South Africans working for DynCorp were killed by a roadside bomb in central Baghdad.

The Pentagon does not distinguish between contractors working for firms such as Halliburton or its Kellogg, Brown and Root subsidiary and security contractors.

According to a report last month by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) there was a workforce of about 38,000 employees (including foreign nationals and subcontractor personnel) working on the Logistics Civil Augmentation Program (LOGCAP) in Iraq from March 2003 to November 2004. But at least 524 US military contract workers, many of them Iraqis, have been killed in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion, according to an October 27 Bloomberg news report.

At least 25 Blackwater workers have been killed in Iraq. San Diego, California-based Titan Corp, which provides military translators, has lost 148, the most among the 43 companies that have filed death-benefit claims with the Labor Department.

At least another 3,963 were injured, according to Department of Labor insurance-claims statistics obtained by Knight Ridder news service. If one assumes the base is the CBO number, that works out to 10% of the total. Those statistics, which experts said were the most comprehensive listing available on the toll of the war, are far from complete. Two of the biggest contractors in Iraq, Halliburton and its Kellogg Brown and Root subsidiary, said their casualties were higher than the figures the Labor Department had for them.

The government`s listing shows the contractors` casualty rate is increasing. In the first 21 months of the war, 11 contractors were killed and 74 injured each month on average. This year, the monthly average death toll is nearly 20 and the average monthly number of injured is 243.

While casualties are widespread, profits are concentrated. Last year 12 contractors had contracts totaling an estimated $951,614,615 (including the $293 million contract awarded to Aegis Defense Services for coordinating security operations). As not all of them are big contracts, it seems clear that a majority of the overall PMC contracts are concentrated in a small number of firms.

However, the financial rewards can be overplayed, especially since the downsides for PMC contractors can be considerable. For instance, companies enforce regular periods of unpaid mandatory leave out of country on their employees every few months for rest and recharge; although it is for some tax-free, under US law citizens are still liable to US tax if they reside within the US for more than one month in the year.

The use of private military and security contractors to date is mixed. Generally they have done reasonably well in fulfilling their contracts in Iraq. They have performed difficult missions under trying circumstances. In several, little-noted cases, they performed above and beyond the call of duty.

While some of them have been implicated in human-rights abuses such as occurred in Abu Ghraib prison, they have on the whole been far more professional than the regular military forces.

But, with the advantage of hindsight it seems clear that a lack of strategic planning has affected private sector operations in Iraq in the same way it has affected the regular US military. Coordination of PMCs was deficient, and they failed to be given sufficient early warning before the war about how much their services would be needed.

Things should improve in the future as last month the Pentagon finally released a long-awaited directive on the roles and functions of the contractor on the battlefield. But issuing and implementing directives are widely different things, so progress will be slow.

David Isenberg, a senior analyst with the Washington-based British American Security Information Council (BASIC), has a wide background in arms control and national security issues. The views expressed are his own.

(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us for information on sales, syndication and republishing .)

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Da einige Leute Schwierigkeiten haben Faschismus zu definieren. Erst einmal die Definition von Mussolini und dan die Bemerkung von Görring, dass es nicht auf die Staatsform ankommt, um die Menschen zu verführen.
Dann eine Definition von Eco zu dem Begriff.
Man sieht Faschismus beginnt sehr viel früher, lang bevor die Menschen in die Gaskammern wandern. Er ist schleichend.
Der vollständige Eco-Artikel ist nur gegen Bezahlung zu erhalten. Link siehe auf der Seite oder über [urlWriting in New York Review of Books, 22 June 1995]http://www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview?article_id=1856[/url]
Nach Eco beginnt der Faschismus mit der Rückbesinnung auf traditionelle Werte und einer Diskussion darüber, wobei Gegenentwürfe abgelehnt werden.

Benito Mussolini: "fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power."

Herman Goerring: "It is always simply a matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."


Eternal Fascism:
Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt
http://www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_blackshirt.html
By Umberto Eco

Writing in New York Review of Books, 22 June 1995, pp.12-15. Excerpted in Utne Reader, November-December 1995, pp. 57-59.

The following version follows the text and formatting of the Utne Reader article, and in addition, makes the first sentence of each numbered point a statement in bold type. Italics are in the original.

For the full article, consult the New York Review of Books, purchase the full article online; or purchase Eco`s new collection of essays: Five Moral Pieces.

In spite of some fuzziness regarding the difference between various historical forms of fascism, I think it is possible to outline a list of features that are typical of what I would like to call Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism. These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.

* * *

1. The first feature of Ur-Fascism is the cult of tradition.

Traditionalism is of course much older than fascism. Not only was it typical of counterrevolutionary Catholic thought after the French revolution, but is was born in the late Hellenistic era, as a reaction to classical Greek rationalism. In the Mediterranean basin, people of different religions (most of the faiths indulgently accepted by the Roman pantheon) started dreaming of a revelation received at the dawn of human history. This revelation, according to the traditionalist mystique, had remained for a long time concealed under the veil of forgotten languages -- in Egyptian hieroglyphs, in the Celtic runes, in the scrolls of the little-known religions of Asia.

This new culture had to be syncretistic. Syncretism is not only, as the dictionary says, "the combination of different forms of belief or practice;" such a combination must tolerate contradictions. Each of the original messages contains a sliver of wisdom, and although they seem to say different or incompatible things, they all are nevertheless alluding, allegorically, to the same primeval truth.

As a consequence, there can be no advancement of learning. Truth already has been spelled out once and for all, and we can only keep interpreting its obscure message.

If you browse in the shelves that, in American bookstores, are labeled New Age, you can find there even Saint Augustine, who, as far as I know, was not a fascist. But combining Saint Augustine and Stonehenge -- that is a symptom of Ur-Fascism.

2. Traditionalism implies the rejection of modernism.

Both Fascists and Nazis worshipped technology, while traditionalist thinkers usually reject it as a negation of traditional spiritual values. However, even though Nazism was proud of its industrial achievements, its praise of modernism was only the surface of an ideology based upon blood and earth (Blut und Boden). The rejection of the modern world was disguised as a rebuttal of the capitalistic way of life. The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.

3. Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action`s sake.

Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Hermann Goering`s fondness for a phrase from a Hanns Johst play ("When I hear the word `culture` I reach for my gun") to the frequent use of such expressions as "degenerate intellectuals," "eggheads," "effete snobs," and "universities are nests of reds." The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for having betrayed traditional values.

4. The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism.

In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge. For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason.

5. Besides, disagreement is a sign of diversity.

Ur-Fascism grows up and seeks consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference. The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.

6. Ur-Fascism derives from individual or social frustration.

That is why one of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups. In our time, when the old "proletarians" are becoming petty bourgeois (and the lumpen are largely excluded from the political scene), the fascism of tomorrow will find its audience in this new majority.

7. To people who feel deprived of a clear social identity, Ur-Fascism says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country.

This is the origin of nationalism. Besides, the only ones who can provide an identity to the nation are its enemies. Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia. But the plot must also come from the inside: Jews are usually the best target because they have the advantage of being at the same time inside and outside. In the United States, a prominent instance of the plot obsession is to be found in Pat Robertson`s The New World Order, but, as we have recently seen, there are many others.

8. The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies.

When I was a boy I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers of Ur-Fascism must also be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.

9. For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.

Thus pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. It is bad because life is permanent warfare. This, however, brings about an Armageddon complex. Since enemies have to be defeated, there must be a final battle, after which the movement will have control of the world. But such "final solutions" implies a further era of peace, a Golden Age, which contradicts the principle of permanent war. No fascist leader has ever succeeded in solving this predicament.

10. Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology, insofar as it is fundamentally aristocratic, and aristocratic and militaristic elitism cruelly implies contempt for the weak.

Ur-Fascism can only advocate a popular elitism. Every citizen belongs to the best people in the world, the members or the party are the best among the citizens, every citizen can (or ought to) become a member of the party. But there cannot be patricians without plebeians. In fact, the Leader, knowing that his power was not delegated to him democratically but was conquered by force, also knows that his force is based upon the weakness of the masses; they are so weak as to need and deserve a ruler.

11. In such a perspective everybody is educated to become a hero.

In every mythology the hero is an exceptional being, but in Ur-Fascist ideology heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death. It is not by chance that a motto of the Spanish Falangists was Viva la Muerte ("Long Live Death!"). In nonfascist societies, the lay public is told that death is unpleasant but must be faced with dignity; believers are told that it is the painful way to reach a supernatural happiness. By contrast, the Ur-Fascist hero craves heroic death, advertised as the best reward for a heroic life. The Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death.

12. Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters.

This is the origin of machismo (which implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality). Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons -- doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise.

13. Ur-Fascism is based upon a selective populism, a qualitative populism, one might say.

In a democracy, the citizens have individual rights, but the citizens in their entirety have a political impact only from a quantitative point of view -- one follows the decisions of the majority. For Ur-Fascism, however, individuals as individuals have no rights, and the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to be their interpreter. Having lost their power of delegation, citizens do not act; they are only called on to play the role of the People. Thus the People is only a theatrical fiction. There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.

Because of its qualitative populism, Ur-Fascism must be against "rotten" parliamentary governments. Wherever a politician casts doubt on the legitimacy of a parliament because it no longer represents the Voice of the People, we can smell Ur-Fascism.

14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak.

Newspeak was invented by Orwell, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, as the official language of what he called Ingsoc, English Socialism. But elements of Ur-Fascism are common to different forms of dictatorship. All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning. But we must be ready to identify other kinds of Newspeak, even if they take the apparently innocent form of a popular talk show.

* * *

Ur-Fascism is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes. It would be so much easier for us if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, "I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Blackshirts to parade again in the Italian squares." Life is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances — every day, in every part of the world. Franklin Roosevelt`s words of November 4, 1938, are worth recalling: "If American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land." Freedom and liberation are an unending task.

Umberto Eco (c) 1995

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Dazu möchte den Krugman-Artikel empfehlen mit einer anderen Sichtweise. [urlAge of Anxiety]http://select.nytimes.com/2005/11/28/opinion/28krugman.html?n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2dEd%2fOp%2dEd%2fColumnists%2fPaul%20Krugman[/url]
oder im Thread #33462

Tempered capitalism -- a story untold
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archiv…

- E. J. Dionne Jr., Washington Post Writers Group
Tuesday, November 29, 2005

Washington -- DECADES AGO, Walter Reuther, the storied head of the United Auto Workers union, was taken on a tour of an automated factory by a Ford Motor Company executive.

Somewhat gleefully, the Ford honcho told the legendary union leader: "You know, not one of these machines pays dues to the UAW."

To which Reuther snapped: "And not one of them buys new Ford cars, either."

The historian William L. O`Neill tells this story in "American High," his fine and appropriately titled book about the 1950s, a time when "autoworkers were the best-paid production line operatives in the world." It helps explain why General Motors` layoffs of 30,000 workers, announced last week, have become a new litmus test in American politics.

Almost everybody right of center sees the job losses as inevitable, the result of the American auto industry`s failure to meet foreign competition and the "excessively" generous wages, health benefits and, especially, retirement programs negotiated by Reuther`s union.

The believers in inevitability inevitably cite the economist Joseph Schumpeter to the effect that capitalism "is by nature a form or method of economic change and not only never is, but never can be, stationary." It is capitalism`s gift for "creative destruction," Schumpeter argued, that guaranteed new consumer goods, new methods of production and new forms of organization.

A different story is told left of center, though it will come as no shock that progressives can`t quite agree on a single narrative. The left is united in talking about rising health-care costs and the fact that most of our foreign competitors have government-run health insurance systems that take the burden of health care off employers. The iconic number: Providing health care for workers and retirees accounts for $1,500 in the cost of each American-made car.

Critics of globalization tell an additional story of how free trade is sending many of our best-paying blue-collar jobs offshore.

The contrast between these two accounts explains why economic conservatives currently hold the upper hand in America`s political debate. The conservatives have a single, coherent story and stick to it: Economic change is good for everyone, especially for consumers, who get better stuff at lower prices.

The left`s narrative is less compelling not only because there is no single story, but also because few on the left attack the system with the same gusto the right brings to defending it. Much of the left accepts a certain amount of creative destruction because, in Margaret Thatcher`s phrase, there is no alternative.

But this muddle reflects a default on parts of the left and, especially, within the Democratic Party. Because so many Democrats fear that they might sound like -- God forbid! -- socialists, they are unwilling to challenge the right`s core story. Capitalism, all by itself, would never have achieved the rising living standards that were the pride of the United States in O`Neill`s 1950s and still are today. The rules enforced by the National Labor Relations Board made it possible for Reuther`s union to organize by protecting workers` rights. Cheap 30-year mortgages, which became the norm because of Federal Housing Administration guarantees, created a nation of homeowners.

As medical costs rise, more Americans will need government help. More employers will need to offload the costs of medical insurance to avoid bankruptcy. Yes, that`s "socialized medicine," just like Medicare. But don`t tell anyone. The phrase plays terribly in focus groups.

For 60 years, New Dealers and social democrats, liberals and progressives turned Schumpeter on his head. They insisted that few would embrace capitalism`s innovations if the system`s tendency toward creative destruction were not balanced by public innovations to spread the bounty and protect millions from being injured by change. It`s a compelling story. Walter Reuther knew it well. Too bad it isn`t told very often anymore.

Page B - 9
URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archiv…
©2005 San Francisco Chronicle

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Latest Update: #33440 27.11.05 21:59:57
Latest Coalition Fatality: Nov 29, 2005
Military Fatalities US, UK, Other: Nov.05: 83


Iraker 11/28/05: Civilian: 561 Police/Mil: 159 Total: 720
http://www.icasualties.org/oif/IraqiDeaths.aspx

Regelmäßige Updates von Meldungen aus dem Irak:
http://icasualties.org/oif/

Da bei ´Today im Irak´ die Postings immer länger werden, hier den Link für alle Interessierte: http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

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WACO, TX (IWR News Satire) - President Bush today said he supported the teaching of intelligent snake handling in medical schools, instead of [urlmodern medical treatments, which are based on the theory of evolution.]http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/search/topicbrowse2.php?topic_id=47[/url]
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Author doesn`t give a flying Fisk about fisking
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thes…

Nov. 29, 2005. 01:00 AM
ANTONIA ZERBISIAS

The controversial British foreign correspondent whose name birthed the ugliest phrase in the blogosphere — "being fisked" — doesn`t know what it means.

"I have to be honest: I don`t use the Internet. I`ve never seen a blog in my life. I don`t even use email," says the Independent`s Robert Fisk. "I don`t waste my time with this. I am not interested. I couldn`t care less. I think the Internet has become a hate machine for a lot of people and I want nothing to do with it."

Oh-kay.

We are sitting in the boardroom of publisher HarperColllins`s offices, a couple of hours before Fisk is to speak to a rapt standing-room-only crowd of about 800 at the University of Toronto last Wednesday.

He`s here promoting his 1,328- page memoir/history/cry for justice, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. It`s part of a worldwide whirlwind tour that has him asking me what date it is. He also asks me what "being fisked" means. I explain that it`s a term coined by right-wing bloggers to describe the point-by-point deconstruction of a column or piece of reportage.

It is not a compliment to be fisked, and Fisk won the honour with his reporting about being attacked by Afghan refugees in Pakistan in late 2001. He wrote that he did not blame them for the bloody assault, given that their country was being bombed by U.S. forces — all of which was thoroughly fisked by the right and added to his anti-American reputation.

"People in America believe that journalists who challenge authority are unpatriotic and thus potentially subversive," he says, shrugging off the barbs. "(Polemicist) Alan Dershowitz, in a radio interview on Sept. 11, said that to ask the question `why` meant that you were supporting terrorism, and that I was a dangerous man. I was anti-American and that was the same as being anti-Semitic."

Fisk has also been attacked by U.S. neo-con Richard Perle, who once called the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh a "terrorist.`` Perle charged that Fisk supported Saddam`s regime, primarily because he called the invasion of Iraq illegal.

Challenging the institutionalized and official version of reality is the theme of Fisk`s book.

In his introduction, he recounts a discussion with Israeli journalist Amira Hass. She tells him that journalism is not about writing the first draft of history but about monitoring "the centres of power."

"I think, in the end," says Fisk, "that is the best definition of journalism I have heard; to challenge authority — all authority — especially when governments and politicians take us to war, when they have decided that they will kill and others will die."

Of course, it isn`t easy.

Says Fisk, who has called Beirut home for nearly 30 years, "If you`re going to work in the Middle East, you have to take the sticks and stones."

You might have to take more than that.

Right now, coverage of the war in Iraq has been reduced to "mouse journalism," says Fisk. That`s because it`s too dangerous for journalists to venture into the streets for more than 20 minutes or so. That`s all it takes for a cellphone call to be placed and a car of men to arrive.

"NBC lives behind a kind of cage on the 7th floor of a hotel. Their armed security men tell them they can use the café downstairs but not the swim pool which is overlooked by an apartment block in which Iraqis live. The Associated Press lives behind two steel walls in the Palestine Hotel. It takes 10 minutes to negotiate your way into the newsroom. The New York Times has a stockade of concrete and steel with four watchtowers and Iraqis wearing T-shirts with New York Times on them and armed with Kalashnikov rifles.

"My objection is not that they don`t leave their hotels," says Fisk. "My objection is that they don`t tell their readers, listeners and viewers that they don`t leave their hotels — giving the impression that they can make a tour d`horizon, they can check out stories on the streets."

Instead, journalists must rely on official spokespeople from the U.S. or British authorities.

"The Americans and the British are very happy that we can`t go and check what they say," says Fisk ruefully.

Of course, the alternative is not very appetizing.

"The fear of all journalists is the kidnap and what follows, which is, `Please Mr. Blair, withdraw the British troops by Friday.` And you can imagine Blair back at Downing Street, `Poor old Bob, hahaha.`"

Given Fisk`s dispatches from the war, that`s easy to picture.

"The Middle East is such hard work now, that the Perles, the (pundits), the blogospots, I couldn`t care less. If I can stay alive, keep writing and have an editor who trusts me — which I do, thank goodness — I`m okay."

Copyright Toronto Star Newspapers Limited

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Published on Tuesday, November 29, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
Of Darwinism and Social Darwinism
by Robert B. Reich
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1129-28.htm


The Conservative Movement, as its progenitors like to call it, is now mounting a full-throttled attack on Darwinism even as it has thoroughly embraced Darwin’s bastard child, social Darwinism. On the face of it, these positions may appear inconsistent. What unites them is a profound disdain for science, logic, and fact.

In The Origin of the Species, published 150 years ago, Charles Darwin amassed evidence that mankind evolved through the ages from simpler forms of life through a process he called "natural selection." This insight became the foundation of modern biological science. But it also greatly disturbed those who believe the Bible’s account of creation to be literally true. In recent years, as America’s Conservative Movement has grown, some of these people have taken over local and state school boards with the result that, for example, Kansas’s new biology standards now single out evolution as a "controversial theory." Until a few weeks ago, teachers in Dover, Pennsylvania were required to tell their students they should explore "intelligent design" as an alternative to evolution. (The good citizens of Dover just booted out the school board responsible for this, summoning a warning from Conservative Coalition broadcaster Pat Robertson that God would wreak disaster on them.)

Social Darwinism was developed some thirty years after Darwin’s famous book by a social thinker named Herbert Spencer. Extending Darwin into a realm Darwin never intended, Spencer and his followers saw society as a competitive struggle where only those with the strongest moral character should survive, or else the society would weaken. It was Spencer, not Darwin, who coined the phrase "survival of the fittest." Social Darwinism thereby offered a perfect moral justification for America’s Gilded Age, when robber barons controlled much of American industry, the gap between rich and poor turned into a chasm, urban slums festered, and politicians were bought off by the wealthy. It allowed John D. Rockefeller, for example, to claim that the fortune he accumulated through the giant Standard Oil Trust was "merely a survival of the fittest, ... the working out of a law of nature and a law of God."

The modern Conservative Movement has embraced social Darwinism with no less fervor than it has condemned Darwinism. Social Darwinism gives a moral justification for rejecting social insurance and supporting tax cuts for the rich. "In America," says Robert Bork, "‘the rich’ are overwhelmingly people – entrepreneurs, small businessmen, corporate executives, doctors, lawyers, etc. – who have gained their higher incomes through intelligence, imagination, and hard work." Any transfer of wealth from rich to poor thereby undermines the nation’s moral fiber. Allow the virtuous rich to keep more of their earnings and pay less in taxes, and they’ll be even more virtuous. Give the non-virtuous poor food stamps, Medicaid, and what’s left of welfare, and they’ll fall into deeper moral torpor.

There is, of course, an ideological inconsistency here. If mankind did not evolve according to Darwinist logic, but began instead with Adam and Eve, then it seems unlikely societies evolve according to the survival-of-the-fittest logic of social Darwinism. By the same token, if you believe one’s economic status is the consequence of an automatic process of natural selection, then, presumably, you’d believe that human beings represent the culmination of a similar process, over the ages. That the conservative mind endures such cognitive dissonance is stunning, but not nearly as remarkable as the repeated attempts of conservative mouthpieces such as the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal and the Weekly Standard to convince readers the conservative movement is intellectually coherent.

The only consistency between the right’s attack on Darwinism and embrace of social Darwinism is the utter fatuousness of both. Darwinism is correct. Scientists who are legitimized by peer review and published research are unanimous in their view that evolution is a fact, not a theory. Social Darwinism, meanwhile, is hogwash. Social scientists have long understood that one’s economic status in society is not a function of one’s moral worth. It depends largely on the economic status of one’s parents, the models of success available while growing up, and educational opportunities along the way.

A democracy is imperiled when large numbers of citizens turn their backs on scientific fact. Half of Americans recently polled say they don’t believe in evolution. Almost as many say they believe income and wealth depend on moral worthiness. At a time when American children are slipping behind on international measures of educational attainment, especially in the sciences; when global competition is intensifying; and when the median incomes of Americans are stagnating and the ranks of the poor are increasing, these ideas, propagated by the so-called Conservative Movement, are moving us rapidly backwards.

Robert B. Reich is Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. He has written ten books, including The Work of Nations, which has been translated into 22 languages; the best-sellers The Future of Success and Locked in the Cabinet, and his most recent book, Reason. His articles have appeared in the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. Mr. Reich is co-founding editor of The American Prospect magazine.

This article can also be found in The American Prospect, December 2005.

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Nochmal einen Satz aus dem vorigen Posting über Sozialdarwinismus:
Social Darwinism was developed some thirty years after Darwin’s famous book by a social thinker named Herbert Spencer. Extending Darwin into a realm Darwin never intended, Spencer and his followers saw society as a competitive struggle where only those with the strongest moral character should survive, or else the society would weaken. It was Spencer, not Darwin, who coined the phrase "survival of the fittest." Social Darwinism thereby offered a perfect moral justification for America’s Gilded Age, when robber barons controlled much of American industry, the gap between rich and poor turned into a chasm, urban slums festered, and politicians were bought off by the wealthy.

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Einige beginnen zu träumen!

Published on Tuesday, November 29, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
Carpe Diem, Progressives
by David Michael Green
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1129-31.htm


Can you feel it? This, finally, is our moment.

We may not have spent forty years in the desert, but the twenty-five since Reagan the cardboard cowboy rode into town have been plenty long enough. And, anyway, the last five have been like five hundred for anybody with a brain or a heart.

But the good news is that today, without question, the movement of regressive politics in America (also known – wrongly – as conservatism) is crashing up against the shoals of its own inanity, and the American public is finally beginning to sober up after cutting loose on a quarter-century’s bender, fueled by the frightening fantasies of the right. Just the last two weeks alone feel like an attitudinal sea change in America.

Unfortunately, it probably took a war to achieve this effect. And, even more unfortunately, not just any war, but a losing war. And not just any losing war, but a losing war with significant American casualties. I’m delighted beyond words that reality is now catching up to the Bush administration, but the awful truth is that if America had invaded Iraq and actually won the war back when our dress-up-doll-would-be-fighter-jock president announced that we had, we’d all be cruising along, wallowing fat, dumb and happy in our private puddle of mud, and he would be a hero. Similarly, the American military could probably get away with decimating a hundred thousand Iraqis (and quite possibly already has) and the affair would still be seen as a success if few Americans were likewise consumed by the war.

So there is both more and less to George W. Bush’s current free-fall in popularity and public trust (his current job approval ratings are down to 34 percent and sinking). The ‘less’ part are these particular circumstances of the war, which have little to do with the moral revulsion the rest of the world feels about it. But the ‘more’ part goes to a much broader dissatisfaction with the policies and performance of the administration.

Silly Americans. What’s not to like about W? A war based on lies which has split the country, claimed over 2,000 American lives as well as those of 30,000-100,000 or more Iraqis, wounded 15,000 Americans, cost $300 billion and made the world hate us? Demolition derby fiscal policies which have now plunged the country into $8 trillion debt – more than $50,000 for every American taxpayer – plus interest, and exploding further every day, thus making Bush a bigger borrower than all his 42 predecessors combined? Tax policies which will have the effect of transferring massive revenue liabilities from the rich to the middle class, and from the present generation to the next? And, hey, what about all those jobs not created, as were promised to justify the tax cuts? Speaking of which, there are also the (non-)existing jobs being exported overseas in droves, with tax incentives for doing so, no less, making Bush the first president since the Great Depression to lose jobs on his watch (and more coming – witness the 30,000 GM layoffs announced this week). How ‘bout environmental destruction, including irreversible global warming, in exchange for quick profits to a handful of the already rich? A country deeply and angrily divided, intentionally, by the Great Uniter-Not-A-Divider and his Rasputin Rove?

Really, if Bush were actively trying to become the worst president in American history, he could hardly have amassed a more powerful case for himself. Hey, and there’s three more years yet to go!

Three more years, indeed. Mr. Bush’s fun has really only just begun. The economy feels tenuous at best. Get out of the way of the angry horde stampeding toward 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, tar and feathers in hand, should a serious recession hit. The war in Iraq has nowhere to go but down, and Bush faces stark choices – while he has choices at all – between failure or disaster there. As one American officer in-country recently put it, the US now has two options remaining. We can either lose the war in Iraq, or we can lose the war in Iraq and our army both. Not even Rove on his best days (that is to say his worst) – which seem to have departed him anyhow (and he hasn’t even been indicted yet) – can spin Bush out of that one. You can wrap-up a civil war, or an internationalized civil war, or a theocracy, or a Saddam-like government sans Saddam himself, or all of the above in pretty bows and call it a ‘victory’, but no one is going to believe it anymore. Bush’s credibility is about as tangible as Saddam’s WMD these days, and it ain’t ever coming back. Then there’s home heating oil costs, about to make some already angry Americans really furious this winter. And, as if that weren’t a bleak enough future for the Bush administration, there are about six scandals (and no doubt sixteen more that we don’t yet know about) headed in the direction of the White House, like a tsunami crossing the Atlantic. All told, George Bush the Lifelong Failure is about to reprise his one and only act, but this time with no billionaire Saudis to throw him a rope, or any other safety net there to save him. Instead of a victory lap, Bush’s second term is already turning into a prison sentence.

Yes, this is – finally – truly our moment. However, it is a moment to be seized, not to be passively received. For everything is at stake in how progressives handle the meltdown of the right.

What is crucial is that current developments not be recorded in the public consciousness as a failed presidency alone, but rather as a disastrously failed ideology. Progressives must make sure that what is now happening is understood – that is, framed – for what it in fact is, not for what a desperate right will try to spin it as, once they too have thrown the plummeting Bush overboard in a scramble to save their own skins. This is a once-only opportunity for us destroy the cancer of regressive conservatism in America for a generation or more, and we must not miss this train.

We must turn this ugly chapter in American history into something akin to how Germans view their grandparents’ embrace of fascism – that is, as an inexplicable and shameful turn to the Dark Side. It must also be understood to be all of a piece, and everything about it must be seen to have been wrong, foolish, immoral, dangerous, corrupt, arrogant and vile. It is not enough, by any stretch, for us to simply cripple or even destroy the Bush White House (or, more accurately, to stand by and watch as they do this to themselves). We must destroy this entire movement which has promised and delivered so much grief to America and the world.

Not only Bush and Cheney, but Congress, the increasingly conservative courts, and virtually every Republican in the land must be mutually repudiated. In fact, they must be tied together so tightly that they repudiate each other, and collectively drown each other as the public casts them over the side of the ship of state.

The contemporary Republican Party has shown enormous party discipline in recent years, and now, equally, it must be disciplined as a party. The so-called moderates of the GOP are currently jumping from a rapidly sinking ship (hell, even Rick Santorum is nowadays trying to distance himself from the president, talking about the mistakes Bush has made in the ‘war on terror’), but they were the same folks who made this nightmare possible. Anytime any progressive starts feeling any sympathy for a Colin Powell or a John McCain, we must remind ourselves of their crucial legitimizing and enabling performances, such as those at the UN or the Republican Convention, respectively, not to mention the votes cast for the war, the tax cuts and more.

I believe the potential exists – even in conservative, frightened, America – to eradicate this movement almost completely, along with most of what it stands for. It is its own worst enemy. All we have to do is to make sure it all hangs together as a singular piece. Americans now know the war was a lie, a tragedy, an open wound on the treasury and the military, and a national security debacle. They know that the fiscal program of the regressive movement has been disastrous, though they don’t yet entirely understand its real motivation as a vehicle for the transfer of wealth in America. They know that they disagree with the right on everything from reproductive choice to environmental policy to Social Security to managing Terri Schiavo’s medical care.

But, so far, these and the other failures of the Bush/DeLay/Scalia Axis of Evil have not been tied to each other in the public consciousness, and, more importantly, have not been tied to a central storyline which (accurately, as opposed to Republican frames) explains its motivation and aspirations to pillage the American middle class, dominate the world, and destroy American democracy and civil liberties.

We are at a critical turning point now, a moment of opportunity with huge potential. It seems extremely likely that George Bush is going to go down, and hard, in the coming months and years. And it is apparent that Cheney and DeLay and possibly Frist are on political death row, as well, with loads of their cronies in tow. That’s all well and good, and of course could hardly be more welcome or deserved.

What is crucial, though, is that this moment not be understood as the failure of one intelligence-challenged president, but rather as the failure of a movement and the party it captured, a movement which is purely evil in its intent – even, ironically, in a biblical sense. Americans must come to understand that their democracy and their personal fortunes have, by the grace of good luck, just survived a near-death experience. It must be understood that the conservative movement represents a completely rapacious, completely disingenuous, completely hypocritical, completely un-American predatory conspiracy which was launched against the United States and the world, and nearly succeeded in its intent.

And it must be understood that this movement was anything and everything but what it cleverly masked itself as. It wasn’t interested in guaranteeing American security – it now essentially ignores the guy whom it claims did 9/11. It couldn’t care less about WMD in Iraq – hell, it was supplying them for a profit at the time those weapons were actually being used. It couldn’t care less about creating democracy in the Middle East or anywhere else – just ask the Saudis, Egyptians or Pakistanis. And it couldn’t care less about a ‘war on terror’ either – that was always a ridiculous rubric (Are we at war with the IRA, ETA and FARC, then? And not with al Qaeda, should they adopt other methods?) except for purposes of justifying an invasion of Iraq and smashing the Palestinians.

This movement doesn’t give a damn about cutting the burden on American taxpayers – it only ever sought to shift that burden from the rich to the rest of us. It couldn’t possibly be bothered with jobs in America – it gave tax breaks to corporations for moving those jobs off-shore. It had to bite its own tongue to keep from laughing out loud as it sold the notion of saving Social Security – meanwhile, its patently obvious aspiration was to turn the public domain into something profitable for the rich, just as Rick Santorum recently tried to privatize national weather data, and corporations in Latin America are trying to own and sell water to peasants used to dipping their jug in a public stream. Now the Republican Congress is trying to pass legislation to actually protect wealthy tax-cheats from prosecution.

This movement never cared a whit about running an efficient and competent government – it was always more important to have proper dinner reservations in Baton Rouge. They never gave a damn about being good Christians – but they were delighted to fool people who thought that’s what they were into being the shock troops of their own plundering. They were never anything remotely like patriots – but they were glad to smear American war heros, even Republican American war heros, who got in their way, while none of them had gone to war themselves. They don’t really care a bit about abortion, or homosexuality, or stem cell research – they themselves do everything and anything they want in their personal lives, and simply use social issues like these to mobilize frightened and vulnerable masses who (are encouraged to) misinterpret the source of their problems in life and to demonize the so-called aberrant sexual behaviors of other people (and themselves, truth be told).

This list of false conservative politics is endless, and the very act of composing it alone demonstrates the immense power of framing. How could half of America have fallen for this crap? How could 30-40 percent still buy into it today? Are there really that many traders on Wall Street buying second and third yachts off this trash? Obviously not, so what in the world possessed the rest of America to unwittingly participate in their own looting? The simple answer to that question is framing, and it shows again just how critical this moment is, because now is a time in which the existing frames are dissolving, and the next generation’s worth are up for grabs.

At this ‘melting of all solids’ moment, it is crucial that progressives do two things.

The first is to (accurately) portray the regressive program as a dangerous and disastrous movement of predatory destruction, hidden behind a wall of lies and hypocrisy. Conservatism must be framed so as to become a one-word evocation of all these and sundry other obscenities, just as liberalism has in the recent past been morphed into a single-word aspersion that could alone win elections, with all its freighted associations to weakness, licentiousness, snobbery and government rip-offs. In just the same fashion, we must so repudiate the ideas of the modern conservative movement such that to be so labeled would constitute the kiss of death for any politician north of Waco. Just as Republican candidates are now uninviting the president to come stump for them and are even finding themselves very busy, um, licking envelopes, should he happen to be in-state anyhow (like Santorum, for example – now there’s a laugh – did you know that the poor fellow was really an anti-war liberal all along and has somehow been misperceived as a conservative?), so should the very label ‘conservative’ become an albatross that can be hung around the neck of deserving politicians, simultaneously and mutually repudiating beyond redemption both the politicians and the label itself.

Conservatism must become a synonym for corruption, disaster and stupidity, and, ultimately, a laughingstock as well. To use the word must be to evoke images in people’s minds ranging simultaneously from Darth Vader (soon to be replaced by Dick Cheney) to Dan Quayle (soon to be replaced by George W. Bush), mixed all together with associations like that still-frightening-but-now-somewhat-humorous memory from when you were nineteen, got really wasted and did something incredibly stupid, yet somehow miraculously survived. Think of, uh, Arnold Schwarzenegger gone national.

The so carefully crafted image of conservatism/Republicanism which is at the moment headed for an exit, stage-left, was one of toughness, optimism, regular-guy-friend-of-the-working-classism, patriotism and piousness. In a word, Reagan. But it was never any more real than was Reagan actually the Gipper, however much the difference between reality and B-rate movies was apparently lost on the man himself. The pre-packaged, off-the-shelf-ready-to-go, one-week-solid media extravaganza that was his funeral procession was only the most obvious effort in an elaborate movement to do the same thing to reality that Hollywood sound stages have been doing for a century. So now everyone thinks the guy actually imposed fiscal responsibility on a federal government run amok with liberal taxing, spending and deficits, that he looked after the regular joe, and that he won the Cold War. (Let me see if I have this last bit straight, now. We start spending a lot more on weapons procurement (driving ourselves deep into debt, mind you), and the Soviets (with their 20,000-plus strategic nuclear warheads fully intact) just throw in the towel, quit the global struggle after forty years, and explode their country into fifteen pieces? Hmmm... Interesting theory, that.)

It doesn’t matter that, not only was none of this true, but in fact the opposite of these images is far closer to the reality. This is the power of framing. Ask Americans today for their image of Reagan and you’re likely to get all sweetness and light, the avuncular savior of America and the free world, one of the greatest presidents, etc. Just as not a contrary word was spoken in the media during the all-saints week celebration of his funeral, no memory exists in the collective American mind of tax cuts for the rich, quadrupling of the national debt, the worst recession since the Great Depression, James Watt and his environmental destruction campaign, dead campesinos in Nicaragua, Guatemala and El Salvador, dead Marines in Lebanon, or Ollie North and the Iran-Contra scandal.

Progressives must seize the opportunity of the present moment in order to reframe conservatism and its apparatus, the Republican Party. Our job will be far easier than theirs has been, because we don’t have to sell a sow’s ear as a silk purse. We don’t have to tell people they’re happier when they’re poorer, we don’t have to say we’re winning a war we’re transparently losing, and we don’t have to make them believe that dismantling Social Security is a good thing for them. Truth is on our side, but that doesn’t mean we can’t continue to fail from our own (or at least the Democratic Party’s) ineptitude. After all, we’ve become quite experienced at doing just that, and there’s no substitute for experience. But now we have a chance to eradicate this entire cancer on the American body politic, wholesale. George Bush and his gaggle of cronies and fellow-travelers are likely headed for an ugly rendezvous with destiny in the near future, but the potential still exists for other conservative pathogens to survive, and that is why it is so important to destroy the entire disease now, while such an opportunity exists.

That is the first order of business. The second thing that must be done is to frame a positive alternative. This is at once harder and a bit less crucial, but fully necessary for a swing in American politics back toward the progressive tradition of the 1930s and 1960s. Again, it is the conservative movement of the last several decades which, unfortunately and more unfortunately still, provides the model here. They have been expert at keying into a handful of succinct, powerful and emotionally-evocative images which attract voters where they actually live – in their guts – not in their heads.

Progressives and Democrats can do the same thing, with, again, the additional ease of having truth on their side, which is important because it means the leap is far shorter, or even non-existent. It’s the difference between selling dinner to someone ending a fast versus another person just finishing a Thanksgiving feast. That does not make the process easy, however – only easier. It will still require thoughtfulness, courage and discipline, three elements heretofore on near-permanent holiday in this generation’s Democratic Party.

But the potential payoff is about as big as it gets in national politics. We are talking here about the opportunity for a sea change, a tidal wave, a generational realignment. Indeed, depending on the degree of disaster produced by the war, and the scope and intensity of the Abramoff, Treasongate and as-yet-unnamed scandals, it is not inconceivable that the Republican Party – now powerfully ascendant over the entirety of American government – might actually implode into non-existence, just as the Whigs once did, creating the opportunity for Lincoln’s Republicans to rise up and become America’s second party.

In fact, through their jaw-dropping levels of arrogance, incompetence, hypocrisy and deceit, today’s Republicans are doing an excellent job at hanging themselves, even as we speak.

Still, it is not enough. We progressives – generous souls that we are – must do our part to make sure that they are adequately supplied with sufficient rope to do the job right.

David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers` reactions to his articles ([e-mail]), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond.

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November 29, 2005
Editorial
Shake and Bake
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/29/opinion/29tue1.html

Let us pause and count the ways the conduct of the war in Iraq has damaged America`s image and needlessly endangered the lives of those in the military. First, multilateralism was tossed aside. Then the post-invasion fiasco muddied the reputation of military planners and caused unnecessary casualties. The W.M.D. myth undermined the credibility of United States intelligence and President Bush himself, and the abuse of prisoners stole America`s moral high ground.

Now the use of a ghastly weapon called white phosphorus has raised questions about how careful the military has been in avoiding civilian casualties. It has also further tarnished America`s credibility on international treaties and the rules of warfare.

White phosphorus, which dates to World War II, should have been banned generations ago. Packed into an artillery shell, it explodes over a battlefield in a white glare that can illuminate an enemy`s positions. It also rains balls of flaming chemicals, which cling to anything they touch and burn until their oxygen supply is cut off. They can burn for hours inside a human body.

The United States restricted the use of incendiaries like white phosphorus after Vietnam, and in 1983, an international convention banned its use against civilians. In fact, one of the many crimes ascribed to Saddam Hussein was dropping white phosphorus on Kurdish rebels and civilians in 1991.

But white phosphorus has made an ugly comeback. Italian television reported that American forces used it in Falluja last year against insurgents. At first, the Pentagon said the chemical had been used only to illuminate the battlefield, but had to backpedal when it turned out that one of the Army`s own publications talked about using white phosphorus against insurgent positions, a practice well known enough to have one of those unsettling military nicknames: "shake and bake."

The Pentagon says white phosphorus was never aimed at civilians, but there are lingering reports of civilian victims. The military can`t say whether the reports are true and does not intend to investigate them, a decision we find difficult to comprehend. Pentagon spokesmen say the Army took "extraordinary measures" to reduce civilian casualties, but they cannot say what those measures were.

They also say that using white phosphorus against military targets is legal. That`s true, but the 1983 convention bans its use against "civilians or civilian objects," which would make white phosphorus attacks in urban settings like Falluja highly inappropriate at best. The United States signed that convention, but the portion dealing with incendiary weapons has been awaiting ratification in the Senate.

These are technicalities, in any case. Iraq, where winning over wary civilians is as critical as defeating armed insurgents, is no place to be using a weapon like this. More broadly, American demands for counterproliferation efforts and international arms control ring a bit hollow when the United States refuses to give up white phosphorus, not to mention cluster bombs and land mines.

The United States should be leading the world, not dragging its feet, when it comes to this sort of issue - because it`s right and because all of us, including Americans, are safer in a world in which certain forms of conduct are regarded as too inhumane even for war. That is why torture should be banned in American prisons. And it is why the United States should stop using white phosphorus.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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Der Ausblick ist verhalten optimistisch, wie auch sonst. Aber nach den gesamten Manipulationen an der Wirtschaftsstatistik bleibt die Frage wie weit entsprechen die Zahlen noch der Realität und wie aussagekräftig sind sie noch.

November 30, 2005
Economic Memo
Upbeat Signs Hold Cautions for the Future
By VIKAS BAJAJ
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/30/business/30econ.html?ei=50…

Gasoline is cheaper than it was before Hurricane Katrina slammed into New Orleans. Consumer confidence jumped last month and new- home sales hit a record. The stock market has been rising. Even the nation`s beleaguered factories seem headed for a happy holiday season.

By most measures, the economy appears to be doing fine. No, scratch that, it appears to be booming.

But as always with the United States economy, it is not quite that simple.
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For every encouraging sign, there is an explanation. Consumer confidence is bouncing back from what were arguably some of its worst readings in years. Gasoline prices - the national average is now $2.15, according to the Energy Information Administration - have fallen because higher prices held down demand and Gulf Coast supplies have been slowly restored.

The latest reading on home sales, released yesterday, contradicts most recent measures of housing activity, which generally indicate a slowdown. And, yes, manufacturers` fortunes are on the mend, but few besides airplane makers are celebrating.

It all means the economy is likely to end the year with a splash. But before you splurge on a new car, consider this: Many economists do not expect the party to continue, especially if the Federal Reserve continues taking the punchbowl away and raises interest rates. That could further slow the housing market, damp consumer spending and crimp corporate profits.

Indeed, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said yesterday that 2005 growth would most likely settle at 3.6 percent, down from 4.2 percent in 2004. The organization also forecast 2006 growth at 3.5 percent, but other economists think that may be too optimistic.

"The two major concerns are the extent of slowdown in housing and how it can feed into growth and consumer spending," said Joshua Shapiro, chief United States economist at Maria Fiorini Ramirez Inc., a research firm in New York.

Many analysts, including Mr. Shapiro, say a housing slowdown is already under way. Along with rising interest rates and anemic job growth, any such drop-off could sap the economy next year - by just how much is still subject to debate.

Americans have taken advantage of historically low mortgage rates to buy homes, refinance existing loans and borrow money for renovations or other household needs, all of them important and substantial spurs to spending, Mr. Shapiro said. 00

While neither he nor others expect that activity to dry up, even a modest tapering off could knock growth down a peg or two. Mr. Shapiro, for one, says growth could drop from 3.5 percent in 2005 to 3.2 percent in 2006.

The average interest rate on a 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage was 6.28 percent last week, up from a low of 5.53 percent in June, according to Freddie Mac, the housing-finance company.

The Commerce Department said yesterday that new-home sales jumped 13 percent in October, to an annual pace of 1.42 million, a record. But that contradicted earlier data showing sales of existing homes slowing, construction activity easing, mortgage applications falling and confidence declining among home builders.

Two possible explanations for the record pace of new-home sales are that buyers see a final opportunity to purchase a new house before interest rates go up again, and they are taking advantage of sales incentives that some home builders are now offering. But not everyone agrees.

"I basically have a wait-and-see attitude with some healthy suspicion about this report," said David F. Seiders, chief economist at the National Association of Home Builders. "Either there is something that all of those other reports are not telling us, or this will get revised."

In another seemingly upbeat report, the Conference Board, a research group supported by business, said consumer confidence jumped 16 percent. Still, it is below the pre-Katrina level. And the Commerce Department said orders for durable goods - big-ticket items that last more than three years - jumped 3.4 percent, but most of that increase was concentrated in military and commercial planes.

In addition to housing, the Federal Reserve and businesses will have a big part in setting the economy`s pace next year - the Fed through interest rates and companies by their hiring decisions.

There is great speculation about how much more the Fed, where Ben S. Bernanke is expected to succeed Alan Greenspan as chairman in February, will raise its benchmark short-term rate, now at 4 percent, before Mr. Greenspan leaves.

There is also the question of whether Mr. Bernanke will feel compelled to prove his inflation-fighting mettle by nudging them higher still. The question may seem like splitting hairs, especially when the debate is whether the rate will be 4.5 percent or 4.75 percent, but it certainly has investors` attention.

The recent rally in the bond market, which is considered a haven in periods of economic stress, indicates that many investors are betting that the Fed "is likely to overshoot in its tightening," Ethan S. Harris, chief United States economist at Lehman Brothers, wrote in a note to clients.

A harder question, and one that could greatly influence policy makers, is whether business will pick up any of the slack if consumers are no longer spending as much.

So far the evidence is inconclusive.

After adding an average of 202,000 jobs a month for the first seven months of the year, companies hit a slow patch late in the summer. In August, businesses created just 148,000 jobs; that was followed by a decline of 8,000 in September after Katrina. And just when economists expected a big bounce back in October, the Labor Department reported a net increase of just 56,000 jobs.

Analysts are eagerly awaiting the Labor Department`s next jobs report, out Friday, and hoping the recent weakness will prove temporary. But they worry that job creation may turn out to be disappointing because of deep-rooted concerns about thinning profit margins, caused by, among other things, high energy costs.

"This is only a fear that has sprung up recently," said Mr. Shapiro of Maria Fiorini Ramirez.

Economists expect 220,000 new jobs will be created, according to a survey by Bloomberg News.

Another hard-to-measure factor that could have a positive bearing on both businesses and consumers is rebuilding activity in the Gulf Coast and parts of Florida. The reconstruction that accompanies major disasters has been known to have a greater economic impact than the initial series of shocks.

Many analysts say a housing-led slowdown is likely to be delayed until the second half of 2006 because billions of dollars that the federal government and insurance companies are starting to pump into hurricane-affected regions will make up for softer consumer spending.

"That is going to push up production activity into the first half of the year," said Michael C. Fratantoni, an economist at the Mortgage Bankers Association, which expects 3.7 percent economic growth in 2006, up from 3.6 percent in 2005. "The second half of the year, we see somewhat of a drop-off."

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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Achtung keine Satire!

Rumsfeld`s War On `Insurgents`
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11…

By Dana Milbank
Wednesday, November 30, 2005; A18

Last weekend, while other Americans were watching football and eating leftover turkey, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld ended the Iraqi insurgency.

It was easy, really: He declared that the insurgents would, henceforth, no longer be called insurgents.

"Over the weekend, I thought to myself, `You know, that gives them a greater legitimacy than they seem to merit,` " Rumsfeld, at a Pentagon briefing yesterday, said of his ban on the I-word. "It was an epiphany," he added, throwing his hands in the air.

Encouraging reporters to consult their dictionaries, the defense secretary said: "These people aren`t trying to promote something other than disorder, and to take over that country and turn it into a caliphate and then spread it around the world. This is a group of people who don`t merit the word `insurgency,` I think."

Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Peter Pace, standing at Rumsfeld`s side, evidently didn`t get the memo about the wording change. Describing combat in Iraq, he paused and said, "I have to use the word `insurgent` because I can`t think of a better word right now."

" `Enemies of the legitimate Iraqi government` -- how`s that?" Rumsfeld proposed.

"What the secretary said," Pace continued, to laughter. But Rumsfeld`s new description -- ELIG, if you prefer an acronym -- didn`t stick with the general. Smiling, he uttered the forbidden word again while discussing explosive devices.

The secretary recoiled in mock horror. "Sorry, sir," Pace explained. "I`m not trainable today."

It was not the first time the defense secretary sought to reorder the world according to his tastes. Also not for the first time, the world wasn`t following his plan. This summer Rumsfeld tried to change the "war on terror" to the "global struggle against violent extremism," or GSAVE. President Bush ended that plan.

This time, it`s the Joint Chiefs chairman, still new to the job, who isn`t marching to Rumsfeld`s orders.

When UPI`s Pam Hess asked about torture by Iraqi authorities, Rumsfeld replied that "obviously, the United States does not have a responsibility" other than to voice disapproval.

But Pace had a different view. "It is the absolute responsibility of every U.S. service member, if they see inhumane treatment being conducted, to intervene, to stop it," the general said.

Rumsfeld interjected: "I don`t think you mean they have an obligation to physically stop it; it`s to report it."

But Pace meant what he said. "If they are physically present when inhumane treatment is taking place, sir, they have an obligation to try to stop it," he said, firmly.

Rumsfeld was defense secretary in 2003 when the United States invaded Iraq, and he has remained in that job for the occupation of the past 32 months. But in his briefing yesterday, he at times sounded as if he were merely observing the Iraq war on television.

On a question about banning white phosphorous on the battlefield, Rumsfeld turned to his briefing partner and asked, "General Pace?"

Asked how widespread the abuse in Iraq was, he replied: "I am not going to be judging it from 4,000 miles away." Asked about the "uneven performance" of Iraqi police, Rumsfeld pointed out that the police until recently "had been reporting up through the Department of State."

Reuters`s Charlie Aldinger asked about "uniformed death squads" in Iraq. Rumsfeld replied: "I`m not going to comment on hypothetical questions."

When Aldinger protested that the question was not hypothetical, Rumsfeld replied that Iraq is "a sovereign country" and suggested the death-squad allegations could be politically motivated. "I just don`t know," he said. "I can only talk about what I know." With an exaggerated shrug, he added: "That`s life."

If such deflections did not make things clear enough, the secretary spelled out his philosophy of responsibility in a podium-thumping soliloquy.

"We have an orientation that tends to make us think that everything is our responsibility and that we should be doing this," he said. "It is the Iraqis` country, 28 million of them. They are perfectly capable of running that country. . . . Our problem is that anytime something needs to be done, we have a feeling we should rush in and fill the vacuum and do it ourselves."

Fortunately for the Iraqis, things are going well there, in Rumsfeld`s view. He rattled off a series of improving statistics -- "seven operational divisions and 31 operational brigade headquarters"-- accompanied by a collection of favorable descriptions: "Largely peaceful . . . liberating and securing . . . solid progress . . . positive . . . a darn good job."

"The strategy is working, and we should stick to it," Rumsfeld judged.

Particularly now that the insurgents have become ELIGs.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company

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November 30, 2005
U.S. to Respond to Inquiries Over Detentions in Europe
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN and IAN FISHER
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/30/international/europe/30dip…

WASHINGTON, Nov. 29 - The Bush administration, responding to European alarm over allegations of secret detention camps and the transport of terror suspects on European soil, insisted Tuesday that American actions complied with international law but promised to respond to formal inquiries from European nations.

The administration`s comments came after the new German foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, raised concerns on Tuesday with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice about reported American practices in the handling and interrogation of captives, according to American and German officials.

In addition, European officials said the British foreign secretary, Jack Straw, sent a letter to Ms. Rice on Tuesday on behalf of the European Union asking for clarifications. Britain currently holds the union`s presidency.

"The United States realizes that these are topics that are generating interest among European publics as well as parliaments, and that these questions need to be responded to," said Sean McCormack, the State Department spokesman. He added that Ms. Rice said the administration would respond to any official request for more information.

The question of whether European nations have been complicit in the administration`s actions has seized the attention of Europe`s press, public and politicians since The Washington Post first reported on Nov. 2 that prisoners had been secretly held in bases in Europe or transported through them.

The newspaper withheld the names of specific nations at the request of the Bush administration, which has not confirmed or denied any details since then. Several European governments have denied playing a role or have demanded explanations.

"Like I said, and we have said many times from this podium, we`re just not in a position to confirm those reports," Mr. McCormack said Tuesday. He added that confronting terrorism was "a shared responsibility of all countries" and that perpetrators of terrorist acts "don`t comply with any laws."

"All U.S. actions comply with U.S. laws," Mr. McCormack said. "They comply with the United States Constitution, and they comply with our international obligations." Mr. McCormack declined to answer whether he was sure American actions complied with European laws.

European and American officials say Ms. Rice is beginning to realize that the issue has become so inflamed that she will probably have to prepare a more lengthy response before traveling to Europe next week.

"It`s becoming one of the public issues she`s going to have to address on her next trip," said a European official, asking not to be identified in discussing the delicate matter of pressures on the United States. "The mood in Europe is one of increasing concern over what people call the American `gulag` and the reports of all these stopovers in Europe for prisoners."

European and administration officials, speaking on condition of anonymity both out of protocol and because they are legally barred from discussing intelligence matters, say that no matter what has occurred, the standard practice of not commenting on clandestine operations has made the United States vulnerable to harsh, even potentially debilitating criticism.

"The truth is these are only allegations within newspapers at the moment, but they are allegations that are playing strongly in Europe," another European official said. "What European leaders are doing right now is asking questions and hoping for some clarifications."

There are two investigations of American practices under way, one by the 25-member European Union and the other by the Council of Europe, a 46-member group founded after World War II that specializes in human rights inquiries. The United States sits on the council as an official observer.

A European official said Mr. Straw presided over a tense meeting of European foreign ministers on Nov. 21, where several of them voiced growing unease over the allegations of secret prisons and harsh treatment that some view as torture, a characterization the administration disputes categorically.

In response, Mr. Straw agreed to draft a letter to Ms. Rice seeking "clarifications."

Mr. McCormack said the letter had not arrived as of Tuesday afternoon. It was not known whether Europe would demand to know the locations of detention facilities, whose operations would have to be arranged with at least the tacit permission of the individual governments.

After The Washington Post reported that detention camps had been used in unidentified Eastern European countries, Human Rights Watch and other advocacy groups in Europe said that based on aircraft flight records, Poland and Romania might have been host to such sites or might have otherwise cooperated with the Americans. Both countries have denied the allegations.

Meanwhile, separate allegations spread in Europe, raising questions about the possible use of European airports or air bases for the transport of terror suspects.

On Monday, the justice and home affairs commissioner for the European Union, Franco Frattini, said in Berlin that any member found to have permitted detention camps could face "serious consequences," including a loss of voting rights in the union. But other European officials say there is no legal basis for such an action.

Administration officials said this week that they were taken aback by the intensity of the European reaction to the reports. They acknowledged that the furor had been fed by two years of disclosures about American treatment of detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and in Afghanistan.

The uproar has been especially strong in Spain, Germany, Italy, Romania and Poland. Although the British press has covered the issue extensively, the government there has not been critical of the American position.

The Council of Europe`s investigation has been led by Dick Marty, a Swiss lawmaker, who said last week in Romania that he did not believe there was a prison in the region comparable to the one in Guantánamo.

"But it is possible that there were detainees that stayed 10, 15 or 30 days," Mr. Marty told reporters. "We do not have the full picture."

Administration officials say that despite the bad publicity in Europe, the United States is continuing to work closely with Europe on various issues and that those efforts have not been affected by the controversy.

Steven R. Weisman reported from Washington for this article, and Ian Fisher from Rome.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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Man verspricht eine neue technische Revolution:
[urlEconomy of Scale Might Inspire Companies to Ditch IT Departments]http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/29/AR2005112901096.html[/url]

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November 30, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
The Autumn of the Patriarchy
By MAUREEN DOWD
http://select.nytimes.com/2005/11/30/opinion/30dowd.html

In the vice president`s new, more fortified bunker, inside his old undisclosed secure location within the larger bunker that used to be called the West Wing of the White House, Dick Cheney was muttering and sputtering.

12. bei NYTimes ARE MEN NECESSARY?, by Maureen Dowd. (Putnam, $25.95.) A New York Times columnist considers the relationship between the sexes.

He wasn`t talking to the pictures on the wall, as Nixon did when he finally cracked. Vice doesn`t trust those portraits anyway. The walls have ears. He was talking to the only reliable man in a city of dimwits, cowards, traitors and fools: himself.

He hurled a sheaf of news reports with such force it knocked over the picture of Ahmad Chalabi that he keeps next to the picture of Churchill. Winston Chalabi, he likes to call him.

Vice is fed up with all the whining and carping - and that`s just inside the White House. The only negativity in Washington is supposed to be his own. He`s the only one allowed to scowl and grumble and conspire.

The impertinent Tom DeFrank reported in New York`s Daily News that embattled White House aides felt "President Bush must take the reins personally" to save his presidency.

Let him try, Cheney said with a sneer. Things are nowhere near dire enough for that. Even if Junior somehow managed to grab the reins to his presidency, Vice holds Junior`s reins. So he just needs to get all these sniveling, poll-driven wimps and losers back on board with the master plan.

Things had been going so smoothly. The global torture franchise was up and running. Halliburton contracts were flowing. Tax cuts were sailing through. Oil companies were raking it in. Alaska drilling was thrillingly close. The courts were defending his executive privilege on energy policy, and people were still buying all that smoke about Saddam`s being responsible for 9/11, and that drivel about how we`re fighting them there so we don`t have to fight them here. Everything was groovy.

But not anymore. Cheney could not believe that Karl had made him go out and call that loudmouth Jack Murtha a patriot. He was sure the Pentagon generals had put the congressman up to calling for a withdrawal from Iraq. Is the military brass getting in touch with its pacifist side? In Wyoming, Vice shoots doves.

How dare Murtha suggest that Cheney dodged and dodged and dodged and dodged and dodged the draft? Murtha thinks he knows about war just because he served in one and was a marine for 37 years? Vice started his own war. Now that`s a credential!

It always goes this way with the cut-and-run crowd. First they start nitpicking the war, complaining about little things like the lack of armor for the troops. Then they complain that there aren`t enough troops. Well, that would just require more armor that we don`t have. Then they kvetch about using incendiary weapons in a city like Falluja. Vice likes the smell of white phosphorus in the morning.

What really enrages him is all the Republicans in the Senate making noises about timetables. Before you know it, it`s going to be helicopters on the rooftop at the Baghdad embassy.

Just because Junior`s approval ratings are in the 30`s, people around here are going all wobbly. Vice was 10 points lower and he wasn`t worried. Numbers are for sissies.

Why do Harry Reid and his Democratic turncoats think they can call the White House on the carpet? Do they think Vice would fear to lie about lying about the rationale for going to war? A real liar never stops lying.

He didn`t want to have to tell the rest of the senators to go do to themselves what he had told Patrick Leahy to go do to himself.

Now all these idiots are getting caught, even Scooter. DeLay`s on the ropes and the Dukester is a total embarrassment, spending bribes on antique commodes and a Rolls-Royce. Vice should never have let an amateur get involved with defense contracts.

Republican moderates are running scared in the House, worried about re-election. Even senators seem to have forgotten which side their bread is oiled on. Ted Stevens let oil company executives get caught lying about the energy task force meeting, while Vice can`t even get a little thing like torture chambers through the Senate. What`s so wrong with a little torture?

And now John Warner wants Junior to use fireside chats to explain his plan for Iraq. When did everybody get the un-American idea that the president is answerable to America?

Vice is fed up with the whining of squirrelly surrogates like Brent Scowcroft and Lawrence Wilkerson on behalf of peaceniks like George Senior and Colin Powell. If Poppy`s upset about his kid`s mentor, he should be man enough to come slug it out.

Poppy isn`t getting Junior back, Vice vowed, muttering: "He`s my son. It`s my war. It`s my country."

(And the bad news is: this man is our vice president.)


* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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Thoughts on the Middle East, History,and Religion
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Wednesday, November 30, 2005

Cole in Salon and Truthdig

[urlIn Salon.com today, I ask]http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2005/11/30/al_jazeera/[/url] "Did Bush plan to Bomb al-Jazeera?" And present new evidence that Rumsfeld considered the Arabic satellite station`s reporting to be a form of murder.

My article on Rumsfeld`s complicity with Saddam Hussein when… is at Truthdig.com, a new site, the force behind which is veteran journalist and truth-teller Bob Scheer.


Cole will be travelling the next week or so. Blog entries will be made, but perhaps at unpredictable times. Email contact chancy. I`ve saved the Achcar & Shalom editorial, for which I`m grateful, for Thursday.

posted by Juan @ [url11/30/2005 10:14:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/11/cole-in-salon-and-truthdig-in-salon.html[/url] 0 comments

Wilkerson: Cheney May be a War Criminal

[urlLawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff of Colin Powell,]http://www.guardian.co.uk/frontpage/story/0,16518,1653937,00.html[/url] told the BBC that Vice President Dick Cheney may be guilty of war crimes for arguing that all restrictions on torturing prisoners should be done away with.

The Wilkerson transcript is here. Money grafs:



>BBC: But you`re talking about the abuse - the alleged abuse - by American forces aren`t you?

I am, and I concluded that we had had an impassioned debate in the statutory process. And in that debate, two sides had participated: one that essentially wanted to do away with all restrictions and the other which said no, Geneva should prevail and the president walked right down the middle.

He made a decision that Geneva would in fact govern all but al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda look-alike detainees. Any other prisoners of course would be governed by traditional methods, international law, Geneva and so forth.

>BBC: Who was calling for doing away with all the normal practices if you like?

Who is right now very publicly lobbying the congress of the United States, advocating the use of terror? The vice-president of the United States . . .

>BBC: And that question of detainee abuse - are you saying that the implicit message allowing it to happen was sanctioned by Dick Cheney - it came from his office?

Well you see two sides of this debate in the statutory process. You see the side represented by Colin Powell, Will Taft, all arguing for Geneva.

You see the other side represented by Yoo, John Yoo from the Department of Justice, Alberto Gonzales - you see the other side being argued by them and you see the president compromising.

Then you see the secretary of defence moving out in his own memorandum to act as if the side that declared everything open, free and anything goes, actually being what`s implemented.

And so what I`m saying is, under the vice-president`s protection, the secretary of defence moved out to do what they wanted to do in the first place even though the president had made a decision that was clearly a compromise . . .

> BBC: If what you say is correct, in your view, is Dick Cheney then guilty of a war crime?

Well, that`s an interesting question - it was certainly a domestic crime to advocate terror and I would suspect that it is - for whatever it`s worth - an international crime as well.

posted by Juan @ [url11/30/2005 10:07:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/11/wilkerson-cheney-may-be-war-criminal.html[/url] 0 comments

Shiite Militiamen Terrorize Sunni Arabs
Khalilzad Agrees to Talk to Sunni Guerrillas

Now terrorists are killing Christian (Chaldo-Assyrian) politicians.

[urlThe New York Times seems to have become convinced]http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/11/29/news/sunnis.php[/url] of the credibility of Sunni Arab charges that Shiite religious militiamen have infiltrated the new Iraqi army and security forces, and are conducting a campaign of murder against Sunni Arabs. Since the Bush administration is heavily depending on the Iraqi army and security forces to make Iraq safe as US troops withdraw, the implication is that the Sunni Arabs don`t have much of a future. The same militia-infiltrated forces in Najaf and Karbala have now taken over security details from the Marines, who have departed those cities.

On the other hand, Sunni Arab guerrillas are killing and kidnapping Shiite pilgrims.

[urlUS Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, in an interview on ABC on Tuesday,]http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2005%5C11%5C30%5Cstory_30-11-2005_pg4_1[/url] said that he was willing to talk to leaders of the Iraqi guerilla movement save for two groups. One was Saddam loyalists and the other was followers of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Since there are virtually no Saddam loyalists, that exclusion is not important. Since the followers of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi wouldn`t talk to Khalilzad, and are a small group, that doesn`t matter much either.

Most of the 36 guerrilla groups in Iraq are Iraqi nationalists, Sunni Arab natioanlists, or local Salafi fundamentalists. If Khalilzad can open lines of communication to them, that would be all to the good. Coming on the heels of his announcement that he has been authorized to talk to Iran, it suggests a new pragmatism by the Bush administration in Iraq. These policies sound more like traditional State Department policies, and not at all like the kind of hard line that the civilian leadership of the Defense Department keeps pushing. Khalilzad is making all the right announcements. Let us see how the actual negotiations go.

[urlAs Robert Dreyfus implies,]http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20051129/the_path_to_peace.php[/url] Khalilzad is building on the momentum of the Cairo Conference, which made concessions to the Sunni Arabs.

[urlThe US military has been planting stories with a positive spin]http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-infowar30nov30,0,5638790.story?coll=la-home-headlines[/url] in Arabic-language Iraqi newspapers, and paying for the placement via the Lincoln Group. The Iraqi National Congress, led by Ahmad Chalabi, has a newspaper called al-Mu`tamar, which has run the articles as though they were news. Other editors could tell that they were editorials, but did not know they were coming from the Pentagon.

Of course, some of these "positive" articles in Arabic (which are not inaccurate in detail but simply grossly one-sided) may then get translated by the Foreign Broadcast Information Service of the CIA, the articles from which in turn are often picked up by BBC World Monitoring; or Iraqi bloggers may put out the information and perspective so that it gets into English. The Pentagon is forbidden from planting articles in the US press, but this method gets around the prohibition.

The other thing that can be done is to pass an idea for a psy-ops article over to the British military, which then places it in the US press covertly, not being forbidden by UK law from doing so. The Guardian reported that the British military had placed newspaper articles in the US press in the run-up to the Iraq war. The same arrangement gets around laws barring the USG from spying on Americans; they can just have the British MI6 do it and then share the information back with the US government.

Too bad Jeff Jarvis, who is always insisting on having good news from Iraq, can`t read Arabic-- these articles are just what he seems to be looking for. Maybe the Lincoln group would agree to send him the English originals. Oh, but Jarvis has already denied that Iraqi writers might be being manipulated by US psy-ops . . .

By the way, [urlJarvis]http://www.buzzmachine.com/[/url] now claims he did not support the transitional government of Iyad Allawi, and for proof he offers an NPR item that he quoted. OK, if he says so, I accept it and am sorry if I pegged him wrong.

I take it he now regrets that Bush appointed Allawi transitional prime minister, and is hoping that Allawi`s list does poorly in the Dec. 15 election. He hasn`t said so.

But he is being typically over-dramatic when he says I had no basis for the inference. I went back and read his blog for summer-fall 2004 when Allawi was in power. There are constant demands that the press do "positive" stories about Iraq then. Wouldn`t you conclude that that was a sign he was happy with the transitional government? And then he says thank God for the blogger, Omar.


[urlAnd Omar publishes this guest opinion in November of 2004:]http://iraqthemodel.blogspot.com/2004_11_01_iraqthemodel_archive.html[/url]



On November 8, 2004, the Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi rightfully realizing that there could be no political or diplomatic solution with the insurgents in Fallujah, he ordered the Iraqi armed forces to storm Fallujah and he called upon the coalition forces to assist.

Allawi and the majority of Iraqis, including a great number of Fallujan citizens know that the Zarkawis and the Iraqi insurgents must be eliminated in order to pave the way for a successful and democratic election process in January 2005.

. . . In the week leading to the American election, the Secretary General of the U.N., Kofi Annan remarked that Fallujah should not be resolved through military action but through a political process . . . Once again, Kofi Annan is on the wrong side of the Iraqis. The Iraqi-American military operation must continue to the bitter end of ridding Fallujah of the extremists and enemies of Iraq, and thereby sleuth once and for all the anima of Saddam.

Dr. Joseph Ghougassian was US Ambassador to Qatar and Advisor in CPA/DoD. His email is [e-mail]

Posted by Omar @ 19:31



So Jarvis is pushing this site, and this site is publishing praise of Allawi for his complicity in leveling Fallujah. But Jarvis now says he didn`t approve of Allawi. But he doesn`t mention the Fallujah campaign, that I could see, at his blog. And he has only bile for Iraqi bloggers like Riverbend who were anti-Allawi. But he praised sites that praised Allawi. But he was against Allawi.

In fact his blog is deliberately hard to decipher as to its politics, except that he announces himself in sync with Andrew Sullivan and Bill Safire but then he says he is a Democrat but the Democrats complain to him when he blasts Kerry as indecisive . . .

If I`m accused of not being able to get a clear picture of where he stands, I plead guilty. But it is because he is his own unreliable narrator.

posted by Juan @ [url11/30/2005 09:07:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/11/shiite-militiamen-terrorize-sunni.html[/url] 0 comments

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Leading article: Some light is thrown on a shadowy and malign force
Editorial
http://comment.independent.co.uk/leading_articles/article330…

The Independent

Published: 30 November 2005

Colin Powell may have vanished from the scene; not so Lawrence Wilkerson. The man who was chief of staff to the former Secretary of State has now become the most vocal critic of Iraq policy from within the US administration.

Last month, Mr Wilkerson accused the Vice-President Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, of operating a cabal that ran the war, steamrollering General Powell and anyone else who dared to counsel restraint. This week, Mr Wilkerson elaborated. He told the Associated Press that President Bush was "too aloof, too distant in post-war planning" and this allowed Messrs Cheney and Rumsfeld to make policy on the treatment of prisoners that has returned to haunt the administration. In an interview with the BBC yesterday, he went further still, blaming Mr Cheney, the most powerful Vice-President in modern US history, for creating the climate that led to the abuse at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, and implying that Mr Cheney might be liable to charges of war crimes.

Whether or not Mr Wilkerson is speaking for, or with the tacit blessing of, his former boss scarcely matters. Mr Powell had his chance to influence events. Instead, he was bested in bureaucratic combat by the Cheney/ Rumsfeld "cabal", while his reputation has been sullied - probably irreparably - by the now-infamous speech to the United Nations in which he made a bogus case for war, based on false evidence about Saddam Hussein`s non-existent weapons. What matters is the light Mr Wilkerson throws on Mr Cheney`s continuing malign influence on policy-making.

Mr Cheney has all along held two overriding beliefs. The first is in the supreme power of the presidency, a power that frees Mr Bush of the need to observe the constraints of international agreements. The second is that Islamic terrorism represents an existential threat to the United States. Therefore all means to defeat it are legitimate. From this mindset stem most of the decisions that have stained America`s reputation: the reckless treatment of pre-war intelligence on weapons of mass destruction, ignoring the views of the UN and the International Atomic Energy Agency, the prison abuse scandals in Afghanistan, at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib - even the use of white phosphorus in Fallujah.

Perhaps the most poignant of Mr Wilkerson`s claims this week was his recollection of General Powell once screaming down a phone to the Defence Secretary as the international furore grew about the US treatment of prisoners: "Donald, don`t you understand what you are doing to our image?" Even if they understood, Donald and Dick evidently did not care.

In one sense, Mr Wilkerson`s forays are part of a belated fightback by a defeated old guard with scores to settle. But they come as public opinion in America turns clearly against the war and questions the means employed to prosecute it. In recent weeks, the Senate has voted by overwhelming bipartisan margins to require the White House to give regular accounting of its policies, and to set explicit limits on interrogation techniques.

Amazingly, Mr Cheney is trying to reverse the latter vote. He is pleading for an exemption for the CIA, apparently not caring whether the rest of the world would thereby be convinced that the US government now sanctions torture. In the meantime, he defiantly insists that pre-war intelligence was properly used, accusing those who suggest otherwise of "reprehensible" attempts to "rewrite history". Some claim Mr Cheney has lost the President`s favour, but there is scant sign of it. And until that happens, the world will see America less as a beacon of light than a harbinger of darkness.

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U.S. Military Covertly Pays to Run Stories in Iraqi Press

Troops write articles presented as news reports. Some officers object to the practice.

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-fg-infowar…

By Mark Mazzetti and Borzou Daragahi
Times Staff Writers

November 30, 2005

WASHINGTON — As part of an information offensive in Iraq, the U.S. military is secretly paying Iraqi newspapers to publish stories written by American troops in an effort to burnish the image of the U.S. mission in Iraq.

The articles, written by U.S. military "information operations" troops, are translated into Arabic and placed in Baghdad newspapers with the help of a defense contractor, according to U.S. military officials and documents obtained by the Los Angeles Times.

Many of the articles are presented in the Iraqi press as unbiased news accounts written and reported by independent journalists. The stories trumpet the work of U.S. and Iraqi troops, denounce insurgents and tout U.S.-led efforts to rebuild the country.

Though the articles are basically factual, they present only one side of events and omit information that might reflect poorly on the U.S. or Iraqi governments, officials said. Records and interviews indicate that the U.S. has paid Iraqi newspapers to run dozens of such articles, with headlines such as "Iraqis Insist on Living Despite Terrorism," since the effort began this year.

The operation is designed to mask any connection with the U.S. military. The Pentagon has a contract with a small Washington-based firm called Lincoln Group, which helps translate and place the stories. The Lincoln Group`s Iraqi staff, or its subcontractors, sometimes pose as freelance reporters or advertising executives when they deliver the stories to Baghdad media outlets.

The military`s effort to disseminate propaganda in the Iraqi media is taking place even as U.S. officials are pledging to promote democratic principles, political transparency and freedom of speech in a country emerging from decades of dictatorship and corruption.

It comes as the State Department is training Iraqi reporters in basic journalism skills and Western media ethics, including one workshop titled "The Role of Press in a Democratic Society." Standards vary widely at Iraqi newspapers, many of which are shoestring operations.

Underscoring the importance U.S. officials place on development of a Western-style media, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Tuesday cited the proliferation of news organizations in Iraq as one of the country`s great successes since the ouster of President Saddam Hussein. The hundreds of newspapers, television stations and other "free media" offer a "relief valve" for the Iraqi public to debate the issues of their burgeoning democracy, Rumsfeld said.

The military`s information operations campaign has sparked a backlash among some senior military officers in Iraq and at the Pentagon who argue that attempts to subvert the news media could destroy the U.S. military`s credibility in other nations and with the American public.

"Here we are trying to create the principles of democracy in Iraq. Every speech we give in that country is about democracy. And we`re breaking all the first principles of democracy when we`re doing it," said a senior Pentagon official who opposes the practice of planting stories in the Iraqi media.

The arrangement with Lincoln Group is evidence of how far the Pentagon has moved to blur the traditional boundaries between military public affairs — the dissemination of factual information to the media — and psychological and information operations, which use propaganda and sometimes misleading information to advance the objectives of a military campaign.

The Bush administration has come under criticism for distributing video and news stories in the United States without identifying the federal government as their source and for paying American journalists to promote administration policies, practices the Government Accountability Office has labeled "covert propaganda."

Military officials familiar with the effort in Iraq said much of it was being directed by the "Information Operations Task Force" in Baghdad, part of the multinational corps headquarters commanded by Army Lt. Gen. John R. Vines. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were critical of the effort and were not authorized to speak publicly about it.

A spokesman for Vines declined to comment for this article. A Lincoln Group spokesman also declined to comment.

One of the military officials said that, as part of a psychological operations campaign that has intensified over the last year, the task force also had purchased an Iraqi newspaper and taken control of a radio station, and was using them to channel pro-American messages to the Iraqi public. Neither is identified as a military mouthpiece.

The official would not disclose which newspaper and radio station are under U.S. control, saying that naming them would put their employees at risk of insurgent attacks.

U.S. law forbids the military from carrying out psychological operations or planting propaganda through American media outlets. Yet several officials said that given the globalization of media driven by the Internet and the 24-hour news cycle, the Pentagon`s efforts were carried out with the knowledge that coverage in the foreign press inevitably "bleeds" into the Western media and influences coverage in U.S. news outlets.

"There is no longer any way to separate foreign media from domestic media. Those neat lines don`t exist anymore," said one private contractor who does information operations work for the Pentagon.

Daniel Kuehl, an information operations expert at National Defense University at Ft. McNair in Washington, said that he did not believe that planting stories in Iraqi media was wrong. But he questioned whether the practice would help turn the Iraqi public against the insurgency.

"I don`t think that there`s anything evil or morally wrong with it," he said. "I just question whether it`s effective."

One senior military official who spent this year in Iraq said it was the strong pro-U.S. message in some news stories in Baghdad that first made him suspect that the American military was planting articles.

"Stuff would show up in the Iraqi press, and I would ask, `Where the hell did that come from?` It was clearly not something that indigenous Iraqi press would have conceived of on their own," the official said.

Iraqi newspaper editors reacted with a mixture of shock and shrugs when told they were targets of a U.S. military psychological operation.

Some of the newspapers, such as Al Mutamar, a Baghdad-based daily run by associates of Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Chalabi, ran the articles as news stories, indistinguishable from other news reports. Before the war, Chalabi was the Iraqi exile favored by senior Pentagon officials to lead post-Hussein Iraq.

Others labeled the stories as "advertising," shaded them in gray boxes or used a special typeface to distinguish them from standard editorial content. But none mentioned any connection to the U.S. military.

One Aug. 6 piece, published prominently on Al Mutamar`s second page, ran as a news story with the headline "Iraqis Insist on Living Despite Terrorism." Documents obtained by The Times indicated that Al Mutamar was paid about $50 to run the story, though the editor of the paper said he ran such articles for free.

Nearly $1,500 was paid to the independent Addustour newspaper to run an Aug. 2 article titled "More Money Goes to Iraq`s Development," the records indicated. The newspaper`s editor, Bassem Sheikh, said he had "no idea" where the piece came from but added the note "media services" on top of the article to distinguish it from other editorial content.

The U.S. military-written articles come in to Al Mutamar, the newspaper run by Chalabi`s associates, via the Internet and are often unsigned, said Luay Baldawi, the paper`s editor in chief.

"We publish anything," he said. "The paper`s policy is to publish everything, especially if it praises causes we believe in. We are pro-American. Everything that supports America we will publish."

Yet other Al Mutamar employees were much less supportive of their paper`s connection with the U.S. military. "This is not right," said Faleh Hassan, an editor. "It reflects the tragic condition of journalists in Iraq. Journalism in Iraq is in very bad shape."

Ultimately, Baldawi acknowledged that he, too, was concerned about the origin of the articles and pledged to be "more careful about stuff we get by e-mail."

After he learned of the source of three paid stories that ran in Al Mada in July, that newspaper`s managing editor, Abdul Zahra Zaki, was outraged, immediately summoning a manager of the advertising department to his office.

"I`m very sad," he said. "We have to investigate."

The Iraqis who delivered the articles also reaped modest profits from the arrangements, according to sources and records.

Employees at Al Mada said that a low-key man arrived at the newspaper`s offices in downtown Baghdad on July 30 with a large wad of U.S. dollars. He told the editors that he wanted to publish an article titled "Terrorists Attack Sunni Volunteers" in the newspaper.

He paid cash and left no calling card, employees said. He did not want a receipt. The name he gave employees was the same as that of a Lincoln Group worker in the records obtained by The Times. Although editors at Al Mada said he paid $900 to place the article, records show that the man told Lincoln Group that he gave more than $1,200 to the paper.

Al Mada is widely considered the most cerebral and professional of Iraqi newspapers, publishing investigative reports as well as poetry.

Zaki said that if his cash-strapped paper had known that these stories were from the U.S. government, he would have "charged much, much more" to publish them.

According to several sources, the process for placing the stories begins when soldiers write "storyboards" of events in Iraq, such as a joint U.S.-Iraqi raid on a suspected insurgent hide-out, or a suicide bomb that killed Iraqi civilians.

The storyboards, several of which were obtained by The Times, read more like press releases than news stories. They often contain anonymous quotes from U.S. military officials; it is unclear whether the quotes are authentic.

"Absolute truth was not an essential element of these stories," said the senior military official who spent this year in Iraq.

One of the storyboards, dated Nov. 12, describes a U.S.-Iraqi offensive in the western Iraqi towns of Karabilah and Husaybah.

"Both cities are stopping points for foreign fighters entering Iraq to wage their unjust war," the storyboard reads.

It continues with a quote from an anonymous U.S. military official: " `Iraqi army soldiers and U.S. forces have begun clear-and-hold operations in the city of Karabilah near Husaybah town, close to the Syrian border,` said a military official once operations began."

Another storyboard, written on the same date, describes the capture of an insurgent bomb-maker in Baghdad. "As the people and the [Iraqi security forces] work together, Iraq will finally drive terrorism out of Iraq for good," it concludes.

It was unclear whether those two storyboards have made their way into Iraqi newspapers.

A debate over the Pentagon`s handling of information has raged since shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks.

In 2002, the Pentagon was forced to shut down its Office of Strategic Influence, which had been created the previous year, after reports surfaced that it intended to plant false news stories in the international media.

For much of 2005, a Defense Department working group has been trying to forge a policy about the proper role of information operations in wartime. Pentagon officials say the group has yet to resolve the often-contentious debate in the department about the boundaries between military public affairs and information operations.

Lincoln Group, formerly known as Iraqex, is one of several companies hired by the U.S. military to carry out "strategic communications" in countries where large numbers of U.S. troops are based.

Some of Lincoln Group`s work in Iraq is very public, such as an animated public service campaign on Iraqi television that spotlights the Iraqi civilians killed by roadside bombs planted by insurgents.

Besides its contract with the military in Iraq, Lincoln Group this year won a major contract with U.S. Special Operations Command, based in Tampa, to develop a strategic communications campaign in concert with special operations troops stationed around the globe. The contract is worth up to $100 million over five years, although U.S. military officials said they doubted the Pentagon would spend the full amount of the contract.

*

Mazzetti reported from Washington and Daragahi reported from Baghdad.



Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times

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Rummi war auch schon mal geistreicher. Siehe auch #33513

Rumsfeld Hasn`t Hit a Dead End in Forging Terms for Foe in Iraq

The defense chief`s lexicon on the topic keeps changing. Now `insurgents` is out.

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-fg-word…

By Paul Richter
Times Staff Writer

November 30, 2005

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon`s long struggle over how to describe the war in Iraq moved to new ground Tuesday as Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said he wanted to retire the term "insurgents" in favor of "enemies of the legitimate Iraqi government."

Rumsfeld, who has previously described the foe as "deadenders," "former regime elements" and in other terms, told a Pentagon news conference that the insurgent label lent the enemy "more legitimacy than they seem to merit." Iraqis now have a constitutional government that offers them legitimate means of political expression, and the foe lacks broad popular support, Rumsfeld argued.

"These people don`t have a legitimate gripe," he said. "These people aren`t trying to promote something other than disorder…. This is a group of people who don`t merit the word `insurgency.` "

According to the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, an insurgent is "a person who revolts against civil authority or an established government."

This isn`t the first time the Pentagon has tried to retire such a term.

Immediately after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, American military commanders referred to non-uniformed attackers as the "Saddam Fedayeen," and then "regime death squads."

After the military declared an end to initial major combat operations in spring 2003, Rumsfeld began calling them "dead-enders" and "former regime loyalists." When it was pointed out that the word "loyalists" might have too positive a connotation, the military began calling them "former regime elements."

But some objected that the acronym — "FRE" — sounded too much like "free." "Rebels" was also rejected early on as having a neutral, or even slightly positive, connotation.

Separately, a battle broke out this summer at the highest levels of the Bush administration over what to call the larger fight against terrorism.

Rumsfeld and White House national security advisor Stephen Hadley favored changing the name from the "global war on terrorism" (G-WOT) to the "global struggle against violent extremism" (G-SAVE). They contended that the latter name was more accurate because it suggested that the struggle was not exclusively a military matter.

But after an outcry from some conservative commentators, President Bush firmly rejected G-SAVE in favor of retaining G-WOT.

The effort to shift the lexicon is generating confusion among members of the public and military.

Marine Gen. Peter Pace, appearing on the podium with Rumsfeld on Tuesday, slipped and used the term "insurgents" before catching himself in front of his boss.

"I have to use the word `insurgent` because I can`t think of a better word right now," said Pace, who is chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Later, Pace acknowledged abashedly, "I`m sure I`ll make a mistake and slip back into it."


Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times

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Tomgram: Dreyfuss on Bush`s Deadly Dance with Islamic Theocrats
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=39971

This post can be found at http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=39971

During his embattled summer vacation in Crawford, Texas, George Bush managed to launch a new promotional ditty for his war in Iraq: "As Iraqis stand up, we will stand down." Since then there has been much commentary from the administration, from military officials, and from the media on the question of how successfully the Iraqi military is actually "standing up." (Not especially successfully is the usual answer.) There has, however, been scarcely any serious discussion about what that new Iraqi army, heavily infiltrated by Shiite and Kurdish militiamen from the ruling parties in the Iraqi government, is actually going to stand up for. And yet this is an important question.



Only recently, for instance, American forces uncovered some striking evidence of what our new Iraq has increasingly come to look like. In a bunker in Baghdad they discovered a detention and torture center run by the Interior Ministry, itself headed by Bayan Jabr, a senior member of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. SCIRI is the main Shiite religious party in the government and has a 20,000-man strong militia, the Badr Organization. While the bunker`s discovery caused an uproar here (and in Iraq), it is but the tip of the iceberg. In some sense, it is not even a new story.



For well over a year now, Human Rights Watch has been cataloguing Interior Ministry abuses and warning about a human rights catastrophe unraveling in "our" Iraq. Last July, Peter Beaumont of the British Observer revealed that the Shiite religious/political powers-that-be had set up not one detention-and-torture center but a whole "ghost network" of them -- in some cases, he gave locations – in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities, partly financed by British and American funds originally intended for the rebuilding of the police force. In these centers, torture methods "resurrected from the time of Saddam" were being used; and the centers, in turn, were connected to paramilitary commando units (and police units) -- basically kidnapping and death squads -- being run by the Interior Ministry as well as by the Shiite religious parties. Such units are increasingly engaged in a war of revenge with Sunni insurgents and in an ever growing campaign of assassinations, summary executions, and disappearances in Sunni neighborhoods which months ago reached "epidemic levels." Human rights organizations in the country have hundreds of cases of disappearances on their lists -- as well as assassinations, torture of every sort, and an endless raft of human rights violations.



When asked about these practices by the Washington Post`s Ellen Knickmeyer, Abdul Aziz Hakim, head of SCIRI, responded with complaints that the Bush administration wasn`t letting his men act aggressively enough. The United States, he insisted, "is tying Iraq`s hands in the fight against insurgents" -- oddly enough the very (tortured) image Vice President Dick Cheney recently used in opposing Senator John McCain`s anti-torture amendment in the Senate. (The amendment, he said, "would bind the president`s hands in wartime.")



This week, just as Saddam Hussein went back into court, a new voice was added to the discussion about the "collapse of human rights in Iraq" -- that of Iyad Allawi, the former Iraqi Prime Minister in the American-sponsored Interim Government. Running for office again in the upcoming elections, he accused the Iraqi government -- essentially the Shiite religious parties -- of sponsoring "human rights abuses in Iraq (that) are now as bad as they were under Saddam Hussein and are even in danger of eclipsing his record." He told the Observer`s Beaumont that "the brutality of elements in the new security forces rivals that of Saddam`s secret police," and added, "We are even witnessing Sharia courts based on Islamic law that are trying people and executing them." The former American favorite "now has so little faith in the rule of law that he had instructed his own bodyguards to fire on any police car that attempted to approach his headquarters without prior notice, following the implication of police units in many of the abuses."



All this, by the way, from a man, who was the head of an exile organization, the Iraqi National Accord, which, according to a little noted June 2004 front-page article in the New York Times, planted car bombs and other explosives in Baghdad in the 1990s in an attempt to destabilize Saddam`s regime -- and did so under the "direction" of the CIA.



Robert Dreyfuss has a particularly vivid way of catching the strange dilemma George Bush`s war has left us in today. American forces in Iraq, he writes below, are now "the Praetorian Guard" for a radical right-wing Iraqi theocratic government in Baghdad, one deeply indebted to that full member of the "axis of evil," Iran. Dreyfuss is the author of a remarkable new book, The Devil`s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam. It`s a striking history of how, for the last half century, successive American administrations have bedded down with right-wing Islamic movements. James Norton, former Middle East editor for the Christian Science Monitor, recently called the book "a chronicle of mistakes made, opportunities lost, and lessons most vividly not learned. It`s also the story of the historical error that has come to define U.S. foreign policy in the Muslim world: the Machiavellian use of political Islam as a sword and shield against communism and Arab nationalism… Devil`s Game records the long and sordid history of right-wing and hard-line elements in the U.S. government finding common cause with fundamentalist groups in the Middle East… By feeding the monster of militant Islamism to fulfill short-term goals, Dreyfuss argues, the United States helped unleash the most challenging foreign policy crisis of the new millennium" It is a must read. In the meantime, consider his latest take on the Bush administration and the Islamic right.

Tom

Political Islam vs. Democracy
The Bush Administration`s Deadly Waltz with Shiite Theocrats in Iraq and Muslim Brotherhood Fanatics in Syria, Egypt, and Elsewhere
by Robert Dreyfuss

Nearly three years into the war in Iraq, the Bush administration tells us that it wasn`t about weapons of mass destruction or Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda, but about America`s holy mission to spread democracy to the benighted regions of the Middle East. However, postwar Iraq is anything but a democracy. In fact, if Iraq manages to avoid all-out civil war, it is likely to end up with a government that is fiercely undemocratic -- a Shiite theocratic dictatorship that rules by terror, torture, and armed might.

What President Bush has wrought in Iraq is just the latest in a long string of U.S. efforts to make common cause with the Islamic right. But like the Sorcerer`s Apprentice, the Mickey Mouse character whose naïve and inexperienced use of magic blows up in his face, American efforts to play with the forces of political Islam have proved to be dangerous, volatile, and often uncontrollable.

The problem goes far beyond the Shiites in Iraq. In the Sunni parts of that country, the power of Islamism is growing, too -- and by this I do not mean the forces associated with Al Qaeda but the radical-right Muslim Brotherhood, represented there by the Iraqi Islamic Party, and other manifestations of the Salafi- and Wahhabi-style religious right. In Egypt, Syria, and elsewhere, the radical religious right is also gaining strength. Meanwhile; sometimes deliberately, sometimes by sheer ignorance and incompetence, the Bush administration is encouraging the spread of political Islam. Were we to "stay the course," not only Iraq but much of the rest of the Middle East could fall to the Islamic right.

Does this mean that Al Qaeda-style fanatics will take power? No. Whether in the form of Iraq`s Shiite theocrats or the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood in Syria and Egypt, the Islamic right cannot be compared to Al Qaeda. Yet, just as the U.S. Christian right has its clinic bombers, just as the Israeli Jewish right spawned the assassin of Yitzhak Rabin and settler-extremists who kill dozens at Muslim holy sites, the Islamic right provides ideological support and theological justification for more extreme (and, yes, terrorist) offspring. Even the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization with a long history of violence, which once maintained a covert "secret apparatus" and a paramilitary arm, has not convincingly renounced its past, nor demonstrated that it sees democracy as anything more than a tool it can use to seize power.

Shiite "Islamofascists" Rule Iraq

The case of Iraq could not be clearer. In 2002, as Vice President Dick Cheney pushed the White House and the Pentagon inexorably toward war, it was increasingly obvious to experienced Iraq hands that post-Saddam Iraq would be ruled by its restive Shiite majority. It was no less obvious that the dominant force within that Shiite majority would be the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, or SCIRI, and a parallel force associated with Al Dawa (The Islamic Call), a forty-five year-old Shiite underground terrorist party. From the mid-1990s on, and especially after 2001, the United States provided overt and covert assistance to these organizations as part of the effort to force regime change in Iraq. Like Ahmed Chalabi`s Iraqi National Congress, with which both worked closely and which had offices in Teheran, SCIRI and Dawa were based in Iran. SCIRI, in fact, was founded in 1982 by Ayatollah Khomeini and its paramilitary arm, the Badr Brigade, was trained and armed by Iran`s Revolutionary Guards. Certainly, to the Bush administration, SCIRI and Dawa were known quantities.

David Phillips, the former adviser to the State Department`s war-planning effort and author of Losing Iraq: Inside the Postwar Reconstruction Fiasco, has assured me that, in the run-up to the war, many of his colleagues were well aware that SCIRI-type Islamists, not Chalabi, would inherit post-Saddam Iraq. Other insiders, too, have told me of foreign-policy professionals and Iraq specialists in the U.S. intelligence community who warned (to no avail) that SCIRI would be a major force in Iraq after any invasion. The point is, whether they bothered to pay attention or not, the Bush-Cheney team was informed, well in advance, that by toppling Saddam there was a strong possibility they would be installing a Shiite theocracy.

Today, the unpleasant reality is that 150,000 U.S. troops, who are dying at a rate of about 100 a month, are the Praetorian Guard for that radical-right theocracy. It is a regime that sponsors Shiite-led death squads carrying out assassinations from Basra (where freelance reporter Steven Vincent, himself murdered by such a unit, wrote that "hundreds" of former Baathists, secular leaders, and Sunnis were being killed every month) to Baghdad. Scores of bodies of Sunnis regularly turn up shot to death, execution-style.

The latest revelation is that SCIRI`s Badr Brigade, now a 20,000-strong militia, operated a secret torture prison in Baghdad holding hundreds of Sunni detainees. There, prisoners had their skin flayed off, electric shocks applied to their genitals, or power drills driven into their bones. SCIRI and Al Dawa are the senior partners in an Iraqi government which has imposed a unilateralist constitution on the country that elevates the power of the Shiite-dominated provinces and enshrines their vision of Islam in the body politic. Two weeks ago, during his visit to Washington, D.C., I asked Adel Abdul Mahdi, a top SCIRI official and Iraq`s deputy president, about the charges of death squads and brutality. "All of the terrorists are on the other side," he sniffed. "What you refer to is a reaction to that."

Perhaps the ultimate irony of Bush`s war on terrorism is this: While the President asserts that the war in Iraq is the central front in the struggle against what he describes as "Islamofascism," real "Islamofascists" are already in power in Baghdad -- and they are, shamefully, America`s allies.

Of course, among the Iraqi opposition, too, the Islamic right is growing. The forces of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi`s Al Qaeda in Iraq have gained some limited support from Iraqis, and Zarqawi is using the war in Iraq to rally support from jihadists throughout the region. More broadly, the U.S. occupation is pushing ever larger numbers of Sunni Arabs toward support for Islamists. In Iraq, the Muslim Brotherhood is represented by the Iraqi Islamic Party (IIP). Although it draws much of its strength from radicalized Sunnis who hate the occupation, the IIP has shown itself to be the part of the Sunni opposition most willing to cooperate with the U.S.-allied Shiite theocrats. It has, from time to time, taken part in the various interim governments that the United States has set up in post-war Iraq; and, in October, the IIP endorsed the ersatz Iraqi constitution, setting itself apart from the vast majority of Iraq`s Sunnis. (For that, its headquarters in Baghdad was attacked by the resistance, and many of its offices around the country were blown up or assaulted.) Still, the growth of the IIP and other similar manifestations of the Islamic right among Iraq`s Sunnis has encouraged some Shiite theocrats to envision a Sunni-Shiite Islamist partnership in the country. However unlikely that may be, given the passions that have already been inflamed, the growth of the radical right among Sunnis cannot possibly be a good thing for Iraq, for the region, or for U.S. interests.

Syria: The Muslim Brotherhood Waits

Now, consider the broader issue of Bush`s supposed push for regional democracy. That effort, it should be noted, is being coordinated under the know-nothing supervision of none other than Elizabeth Cheney, the vice president`s daughter. She is currently the principal deputy assistant secretary of state for Near East affairs and is charged with the task of democracy-building in the "Greater Middle East."

Undeterred by the failure of the U.S. experiment in installing democracy in Iraq, next on the chopping block -- that is, next to receive the benefits of U.S.-imposed democracy -- is Syria. That small, oil-poor, militarily weak state is, at the moment, feeling the full force of Bush administration pressure. Its army and security forces have been driven out of Lebanon, at the risk of sparking civil war in that country again. It has been targeted by the Syrian Accountability Act (reminiscent of the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act) and hit with related U.S. economic sanctions. It has been accused, by John Bolton and other neoconservatives, of maintaining a weapons-of-mass-destruction program far beyond the very limited chemical arms it probably possesses. It is accused, by many U.S. officials, including our ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, of sponsoring the resistance fighters in Iraq -- though there is nearly zero evidence that it is doing so. Liz Cheney and other top U.S. officials are already meeting with Chalabi-like Syrian exile leaders to plot "regime change."

As in Iraq, where Islamic fundamentalist Shiites stepped in to fill the vacuum, so in Syria the most likely power waiting in the wings to replace the government of President Bashar Assad is not some group of Syrian secular democrats and nationalists but Syria`s Muslim Brotherhood.

The Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928, is an underground secret society with a long history of terrorism and the use of assassination. With financial and organizational help from Saudi Arabia`s Wahhabi establishment, the Brotherhood has spread to every corner of the Muslim world. Although it now officially eschews violence, in recent years it has given succor to, and even spawned, far more radical versions of itself. One of its chief theoreticians, Sayyid Qutb, created the theological justification for Osama bin Laden`s Al Qaeda. Even today, the Brotherhood and Al Qaeda are at least fellow travelers. It is far from clear how to draw the line between the Muslim Brotherhood and other forces of "conservative" political Islam and those associated with radical-right, violence-prone Islamists. Certainly, many experienced U.S. diplomats and intelligence officers disagree about where one stops and the other starts.

Because Syria -- with a mostly Sunni population (though, as in Iraq, highly complex with a rich mix of minorities) -- is a closed society, it is impossible to say just how powerful the Muslim Brotherhood is there. But with an exile leadership in London and other cities in Western Europe, with a network of supporters among the Sunni Arab petit bourgeoisie, and with power centers in a string of cities from Damascus to Homs, Hama, and Aleppo, it is widely considered a major player in future Syrian politics. Recently, the Brotherhood joined with secular intellectuals and others in an ad hoc, anti-Assad coalition, but the rest of the coalition has few forces on the ground. Only it has "troops." In that, this coalition is reminiscent of the one that formed in 1978 to overthrow the Shah of Iran. After the Shah`s fall, Ayatollah Khomeini`s gang picked off its erstwhile allies one by one -- the communists, the National Front (the remnant of the nationalist forces associated with Prime Minister Mossadegh in the 1950s), the intellectuals, and finally the moderate Islamists such as President Abolhassan Bani-Sadr -- to establish the authoritarian theocracy that is the Islamic Republic of Iran.

It cannot be that the Bush administration is unaware of the power of the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria. Rather, they evidently simply don`t care. Their enmity for the Assad government is so all-powerful that, as in Iraq, they evidently are willing to risk an Islamist regime. How can it be that Mr. War on Terrorism blithely condones one Islamic extremist regime in Baghdad and courts another in Damascus?

History shows that there is precedent. In the 1970s and early 1980s, two U.S. allies -- Israel and Jordan -- actively supported the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood in a bloody civil war against the government of President Hafez Assad, Bashar`s father. The Israeli- and Jordanian-sponsored terrorists killed hundreds of Syrians, exploded car bombs, and assassinated Soviet diplomats and military personnel in Syrian cities. All of this was known to the United States at the time -- and viewed benignly. The Syrian civil war came to a brutal end when Rifaat Assad, the president`s brother, led elite units of the military into Hama, where the Muslim Brotherhood had seized power and where hundreds of Syrian government officials had been dragged from their offices and murdered. Rifaat Assad carried out a massive repression in which many thousands died. Yet the forces of the Brotherhood recovered, and today the Bush administration seems content to squeeze the brittle Assad government until it collapses, even if it means that the Muslim Brotherhood takes power.

Middle Eastern Dominos?

Aficionados of the Cold War domino theory often suggested that communism, allowed to topple a single state, would then be able topple country after country; that if communism was victorious in South Vietnam, then Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines and other distant lands would follow. That may have been silly, but in the Middle East a domino theory might actually have some application. At the very least, it is important to understand that the Muslim Brotherhood is a supranational force, not simply a country-by-country phenomenon. From Algeria to Pakistan, its leaders know each other, talk to each other, and work together. In addition, the virulent force of religious fanaticism, fed by anger, bitterness, and despair, knows no national boundaries.

Egypt, the anchor of the Arab world and by far its most populous country, is threatened with a Muslim Brotherhood-style regime. Virtually all observers of Egyptian politics agree that the Muslim Brotherhood is the chief opposition party in Egypt. Mere prudence suggests that the United States should not press Egypt too hard for democracy and free elections, given how difficult it is to transition from an authoritarian state to a democratic one. Moreover, it is arguably none of America`s business what sort of government Egypt has. The very idea that democracy is the antidote for terrorism has been proven false, most authoritatively by F. Gregory Gause in his essay, "Can Democracy Stop Terrorism?" in the September/October issue of Foreign Affairs magazine.

Yet the Bush administration is pushing hard for its brand of democracy. Two weeks ago, at a regional forum in the Gulf, Egyptian officials bluntly rebuffed the imperial U.S. Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, who seemed stunned that the government in Cairo did not want meddlers from the National Endowment for Democracy, USAID, and other agencies pouring money into Egyptian opposition groups. President Mubarak, a long-time American ally, was considered indispensable by a succession of administrations during the Cold War. A fierce anti-communist who kept the peace with Israel and helped the United States in its anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and again in the 1991 Gulf War, is now regularly denounced as a dictator by the likes of Newt Gingrich and Richard Perle.

Because of Egypt`s history as an ally, no Bush administration official (and not even many neocons) dare say that they want "regime change" in Cairo, but that is precisely what they do want, and many of them may be willing to risk the creation of a Muslim Brotherhood-style regime to get it. Reuel Marc Gerecht, a leading neoconservative strategist and former CIA officer who is now a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote the following in his book The Islamic Paradox, comparing Ayatollah Khomeini favorably to Mubarak:

"Khomeini submitted the idea of an Islamic republic to an up-or-down popular vote in 1979, and regular elections with some element of competition are morally essential to the regime`s conception of its own legitimacy, something not at all the case with President Husni Mubarak`s dictatorship in Egypt. … Anti-Americanism is the common denominator of the Arab states with ‘pro-American` dictators. By comparison, Iran is a profoundly pro-American country."

True, Mubarak rigs Egyptian elections, but in recent parliamentary elections, the Muslim Brotherhood still showed tremendous strength. With a third round of elections still to go, it is on track to win up to a quarter of the seats in the new national assembly. Gerecht isn`t worried: "It is certainly possible," he writes, "that fundamentalists, if they gained power in Egypt, would try to end representative government. … But the United States would still be better off with this alternative than with a secular dictatorship."

In the 1950s, British intelligence and the CIA worked with the Muslim Brothers against Gamal Abdel Nasser, the founder of modern Arab nationalism. Said Ramadan, the son-in-law of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna, who set up the organization`s global nerve center in Geneva, Switzerland, was a CIA agent. Twice, in 1954 and in 1965, the Brotherhood tried to assassinate Nasser. From this period to the present, the Brotherhood has received financial support from the ultra-right Saudi establishment.

A Formula for Endless War in the Middle East

Iraq, Syria, and Egypt are not the only places threatened by fundamentalism. In recent Palestinian elections, Hamas -- the official branch of the Muslim Brotherhood there -- has shown remarkable strength, threatening to undo the Palestinian Authority`s accomplishments and wreck any chance of a Palestinian-Israeli accord. Ironically, a great deal of Hamas` present power exists only because of the support offered its founders by the Israeli military authorities in decades past. From the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 well into the 1980s, Israel supported the growth of Hamas-style Islamism as a counterweight to the nationalists in the Palestine Liberation Organization. Ahmed Yassin, Hamas` founder, was backed by Israel during those years, as his followers clashed with PLO supporters in Gaza and the West Bank. Too late, Israel recognized that it had created a monster and began to wage war on Hamas, including assassinating Yassin.

From Israel and Palestine to Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and beyond -- in Algeria, Sudan, the Gulf states, Pakistan, and even Saudi Arabia -- the region is beset by Islamist movements. The right way to combat this upsurge is not through military action or a Bush administration-style Global War on Terrorism. That, as many observers have pointed out, is likely to further fuel the growth of such movements, not subdue them.

Only if the temperature is lowered throughout the region might the momentum of the Islamic right be slowed and, someday, reversed. Unfortunately, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq have raised that temperature to the boiling point. So has the long-term American military build-up in the Persian Gulf and Central Asia. So have the proclamations from President Bush & Co. about a nonsensical "World War IV" against "Islamofascism." So has the Israeli policy of expanding settlements and building a giant barrier that virtually annexes huge swaths of the West Bank for Greater Israel. All of these policies cause Islamist sympathies to grow -- and out of them bubble recruits not only for organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood, but for Al Qaeda-style terrorist groups.

The Bush administration has put into operation an utterly paradoxical and self-defeating strategy. First, its policies inflame the region, feeding the growth of political Islam and its extremist as well as terrorist offshoots. Then, as in Iraq -- and as seems to be the case in Syria and Egypt -- it seeks "regime change" in countries where it knows that the chief opposition and likely inheritor of power will be the Muslim Brotherhood or its ilk. This is a formula for endless war in the region.

Robert Dreyfuss is the author of Devil`s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam. He covers national security for Rolling Stone and writes frequently for The American Prospect, Mother Jones, and the Nation. He is also a regular contributor to TomPaine.com, the Huffington Post, and other sites, and writes the blog, "The Dreyfuss Report," at his web site.

Copyright 2005 Robert Dreyfuss


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http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2005/11/30/al_jazeera/p…

Did Bush plan to bomb Al-Jazeera?

The American press is predictably ignoring the story. Yet it is only too plausible that Bush wanted to wipe out what he saw as a nest of terrorists.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2005/11/30/al_jazeera/p…

By Juan Cole

Nov. 30, 2005 | Last week, the British newspaper the Daily Mirror reporte
d that George W. Bush had told U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair in April 2004 that he was planning to bomb the Al-Jazeera offices in Qatar. The report, based on a leaked top-secret government memo, claimed that Blair dissuaded Bush from bombing the Arab cable news channel`s offices. An anonymous source told the Mirror, "There`s no doubt what Bush wanted, and no doubt Blair didn`t want him to do it." The Mirror quoted a government spokesperson, also anonymous, as suggesting that Bush`s threat had been "humorous, not serious." But the newspaper quoted another source who said, "Bush was deadly serious, as was Blair. That much is absolutely clear from the language used by both men."

White House press secretary Scott McClellan brushed off the report, telling the Associated Press in an e-mail, "We are not interested in dignifying something so outlandish and inconceivable with a response." In a response to a question asked in Parliament, Tony Blair denied that Bush had told him he planned to take action against Al-Jazeera. The two men involved in the leak have been charged with violating Britain`s Official Secrets Act.

The report kicked off a furor in Europe and the Middle East. It was, predictably, virtually ignored by the American press. It would be premature to claim that the Mirror`s report, based on anonymous sources and a document that has not been made public, proves that Bush intended to bomb Al-Jazeera. But the frightening truth is that it is only too possible that the Mirror`s report is accurate. Bush and his inner circle, in particular Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, had long demonized the channel as "vicious," "inexcusably biased" and abetting terrorists. Considering the administration`s no-holds-barred approach to the "war on terror," the closed circle of ideologues that surround Bush, and his own messianic certainty about his divine mission to rid the world of "evil," the idea that he seriously considered bombing what he perceived as a nest of terrorist sympathizers simply cannot be ruled out. Add in the fact that the U.S. military had previously bombed Al-Jazeera`s Kabul, Afghanistan, and Baghdad, Iraq, offices (the U.S. pleaded ignorance in the Kabul case, and claimed the Baghdad bombing was a mistake), and the case becomes stronger still.

Skeptics have argued that it is inconceivable that even Bush would consider bombing an office containing 400 journalists, located in the friendly Gulf nation of Qatar. But again, it is more than conceivable that Bush decided that it was essential to neutralize an enemy outpost, and left the tactical question of execution to spooks and generals. Certainly there is strong evidence that Bush and his advisors, in particular Rumsfeld, were thinking along these lines.

Ironically, Rumsfeld himself had telegraphed the strategy during an interview in 2001 on ... Al-Jazeera! On Oct. 16, 2001, Rumsfeld talked to the channel`s Washington anchor Hafez Mirazi (who once worked for the Voice of America but left in disgust at the level of censorship he faced there). Although most such interviews are archived at the Department of Defense, this one appears to be absent. Mirazi showed it again on Monday, and it contained a segment in which Rumsfeld defended the targeting of radio stations that supported the Taliban. He made it clear right then that he believed in total war, and made no distinction between civilian and military targets. The radio stations, he said, were part of the Taliban war effort.

In fact, Al-Jazeera bears no resemblance to the pro-Taliban radio stations that Rumsfeld defended attacking.

Despite the extensive censorship regimes in the Middle East, Arab intellectuals joke, it is possible to get news about everything from only two sources. The Al-Jazeera television channel will report frankly on every Arab government save that of Qatar, its host and benefactor. On the other hand, Saudi pan-Arab newspapers published in London will report fully on all Arab governments save Saudi Arabia`s own. Put them together, and you have complete coverage.

Al-Jazeera was founded in the 1990s by disgruntled Arab journalists, many of whom had worked for the BBC Arabic service, though a few came from the Voice of America. The station was a breath of fresh air in the stultified world of Arab news broadcasting, where news producers` idea of an exciting segment is a stationary camera on two Arab leaders sitting ceremonially on a Louis XIV sofa while martial music plays for several minutes. In contrast, Al-Jazeera anchors host live debates that often turn heated, and do not hesitate to ask sharp questions.

Despite the false stereotypes that circulate in the United States among pundits and politicians who have never watched the station, most of Al-Jazeera`s programming is not Muslim fundamentalist in orientation. The rhetoric is that of Arab nationalism, and the reporters are only interested in fundamentalism to the extent that it is anti-imperialist in tone. This slant gives many of the programs the musty, antiquated feel of an old Gamal Abdul Nasser speech from the 1960s. In the Arab world, clothes speak to politics. The male anchors and reporters usually sport business suits, and the mostly unveiled women might as well be on the runway of a European fashion show. The station does carry a program with the Egyptian cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a Muslim brother who fled Abdul Nasser`s regime. But even al-Qaradawi gave a fatwa (ruling) allowing Muslims to fight in the U.S. military against al-Qaida in Afghanistan.

Al-Jazeera broadcasts videotapes by Muslim radicals such as Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, angering Bush administration officials. But broadcasting their tapes does not constitute an endorsement, and it seems clear what the al-Qaida leaders would do to the modern, non-theocratic journalists of Al-Jazeera if they took over Qatar. The sensibilities about such matters, in any case, differ from country to country. There was a time when an Irish Republican Army figure such as Gerry Adams could not be shown speaking on British television, on the grounds that he was a terrorist. But the U.S. was notoriously unhelpful in boycotting the IRA, whose cause was popular among many Irish-Americans. Rumsfeld has complained bitterly about other news servicing, calling the German press, for example, "worse than al-Qaida."

Political scientist Marc Lynch, in his just-published "Voices of the New Arab Public," notes that despite their tilt toward Arab nationalism, the station`s anchors often ask sharp questions of state spokesmen. For example, one quizzed Iraq Foreign Minister Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf (later notorious as "Baghdad Bob") in 1998, inquiring why, if Iraq had no forbidden weapons, it did not simply allow the inspectors into the country.

Among the chief criticisms launched by Bush administration figures such as Rumsfeld against Al-Jazeera was that it showed graphic images of the dead and wounded from both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. The Bush administration had learned the lesson of Vietnam, that images of actual warfare generally appall the American public, which seems less bothered by words describing the horrors than it does by pictures. Reporters were forbidden to photograph the caskets of dead American soldiers coming into Dover Air Force base. U.S. newspaper editors exercised a rigorous self-censorship, routinely declining the more graphic images of war on offer from the wire services, apparently on the belief that they would not be acceptable to an American public.

Al-Jazeera was the prime source of pictures of warfare, including dead and wounded, for the Afghanistan war. On Nov. 11, 2001, the New York Times quoted Auberi Edler, a foreign news editor at France 2, as complaining about the Pentagon policy of embargoing images from the war: "Our greatest pressure is that we have no images ... The only interesting images we get are from Al-Jazeera. It`s bad for everybody."

The U.S. tactic of using smart bombs to target foreign fighters holing up in urban areas proved a challenge to Western news photographers, both in Afghanistan and Iraq. If they were not embedded with U.S. troops in areas where such bombing was taking place, they were in extreme danger. If they were with the troops, they could say little more than that they had heard bombing in the distance. The horror sometimes inflicted on civilians, despite the best efforts of military targeters, remained off camera for American audiences. Al-Jazeera, however, developed stringers who could provide that footage.

Rumsfeld became increasingly exasperated with the channel as the Iraq adventure went bad. In early 2004, according to Fox News, he began equating its news coverage of Iraq with murder: "`We are being hurt by Al-Jazeera in the Arab world,` he said. `There is no question about it. The quality of the journalism is outrageous -- inexcusably biased -- and there is nothing you can do about it except try to counteract it.` He said it was turning Arabs against the United States. `You could say it causes the loss of life,` he added. `It`s causing Iraqi people to be killed` by inflaming anti-American passions and encouraging attacks against Iraqis who assist the Americans, he added."

The notion that reporting on the guerrilla war in Iraq abets terrorism is typical of the logic of any extreme right-wing political movement. All censorship by all military regimes in the Middle East has been imposed on the grounds that journalists` speech is dangerous to society and could cause public turmoil (fitna). Rumsfeld`s reasoning in this regard would be instantly recognizable to any Arab journalist from their experience with their own governments.

Of course, Rumsfeld did not consider how many lives -- tens of thousands -- have been lost because of his own inaccurate statements to the American public about Iraq, which he maintained had dangerous weapons of mass destructions and even more dangerous weapons programs. He and Vice President Dick Cheney also alleged an operational connection between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden that did not exist, implying repeatedly that Saddam was involved in Sept. 11. If speech really is murder, Rumsfeld is the Ted Bundy of governmental officials.

Rumsfeld, then, considered Al-Jazeera an accessory to terror, and there is no reason to suppose that Bush did not share this view. Seen in this light, Bush`s plan to bomb its central offices makes perfect sense. Bush has often boasted about his harshness toward murderers, and during his debate with Al Gore in 2000, he positively scared some in his audience by the macho swagger with which he described executing criminals while he was governor of Texas.

The secretary`s rage grew in intensity thereafter. At the height of the first U.S. attack on Fallujah, which was ordered by Bush in a fit of pique over the killing and desecration of four private security guards (three of them Americans, one South African), Rumsfeld exploded at a Pentagon briefing on April 15:

If I could follow up, Monday General Abizaid chastised Al-Jazeera and al-Arabiyah for their coverage of Fallujah and saying that hundreds of civilians were being killed. Is there an estimate on how many civilians have been killed in that fighting? And can you definitively say that hundreds of women and children and innocent civilians have not been killed?

SEC. RUMSFELD: I can definitively say that what al-Jazeera is doing is vicious, inaccurate and inexcusable.

Do you have a civilian casualty count?

SEC. RUMSFELD: Of course not, we`re not in the city. But you know what our forces do; they don`t go around killing hundreds of civilians. That`s just outrageous nonsense! It`s disgraceful what that station is doing.

In fact, local medical authorities put the number of dead at Fallujah, most of them women, children and noncombatants, at around 600.

As the London Times pointed out on Sunday, Bush`s conference with Blair, at which he announced his plan to bomb the channel`s Doha offices, occurred the very next day.

The outrage of the Bush administration had to do in part with what it saw as inaccuracies in Al-Jazeera reporting (as when it incorrectly alleged that spring that a U.S. helicopter had been downed, based on local eyewitnesses or Iraqi guerrilla sources). In the fog of war, however, most news outlets commit such errors. The real source of Rumsfeld`s volcanic ire, and Bush`s alleged turn as would-be mafia don and war criminal, was the graphic images of the warfare in Iraq that Al-Jazeera was willing to display at a time when no major U.S. news source would do so. Enraged, Rumsfeld began accusing the station of sins it never committed. In summer of 2005, in Singapore, the secretary of defense said, "If anyone lived in the Middle East and watched a network like the Al-Jazeera day after day after day, even if he was an American, he would start waking up and asking what`s wrong. But America is not wrong. It`s the people who are going on television chopping off people`s heads, that is wrong. And television networks that carry it and promote it and jump on the spark every time there is a terrorist act are promoting the acts."

In fact, according to its media spokesman Jihad Ballout, Al-Jazeera "has never, ever shown a beheading of any hostage." Nor had its anchors come on the screen and urged beheadings in the manic way that Rumsfeld suggested. Al-Jazeera reporters may not like U.S. imperialism very much, but they are not fundamentalist murderers.

Despite the smokescreens that politicians and diplomats are attempting to throw up by suggesting that Bush was just joking, there is every reason to suspect that he was deadly serious and that Blair barely managed to argue him out of this parlous course of action. First, the Kabul and Baghdad offices of Al-Jazeera had already been bombed by the U.S. military. In each case the action was called a mistake. One such bombing might indeed have been an error, but two arouses suspicion. And now we know there was talk of a third.

The reaction in the Arab world to the Daily Mirror report has been a firestorm of outrage. Some Qataris are calling for the government to end U.S. basing rights in that country. Others are lamenting the hypocrisy of a superpower that represents itself as the leading edge of liberty in the Middle East but has so little respect for press freedom that its leader would cavalierly speak of wiping out hundreds of civilian journalists. If the British documents surface and the story`s seriousness is borne out, whatever shreds of credibility Bush still has in the Middle East will be completely gone. After all, the current phase of U.S. involvement in the Middle East, and the two wars Americans have fought in the region, came in response to the terrorist bombing of innocent civilians in downtown office buildings.

-- By Juan Cole

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U.S. occupation makes Hussein regime look good
- Robert Scheer, Creators Syndicate
Wednesday, November 30, 2005
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archiv…

SO, IT IS MISSION IMPOSSIBLE that Bush has accomplished: A terminally inept U.S. occupation of Iraq now threatens to make the despot we overthrew look good by comparison. But don`t take my word for it; hear it from the United States` No. 1 ally in that increasingly nightmarish land.

"[Authorities] are doing the same as [in] Saddam`s time and worse," former interim Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi told the London Observer, of human-rights abuses by the U.S.-backed Iraqi government. "It is an appropriate comparison. People are remembering the days of Saddam. These were the precise reasons that we fought Saddam and now we are seeing the same things." Allawi, one of Hussein`s victims, became a trusted CIA asset and later was handpicked by the United States to be the leader of the new Iraq. He now is the leading secular alternative to the Shiite theocrats expected to win the Dec. 15 election.

What Allawi decries is the brutal behavior of new security forces empowered by the U.S. invasion but beholden, according to most reports, to Shiite religious parties intent on controlling Iraq. To accomplish their mission, they`re using the kind of "ethnic cleansing" terror seen so recently in Rwanda and the Balkans.

"We are hearing about secret police, secret bunkers where people are being interrogated," said Allawi. "A lot of Iraqis are being tortured or killed in the course of interrogations. We are even witnessing Shariah courts based on Islamic law that are trying people and executing them."

Allawi was not alone in painting a grim picture this week of what our president trumpets as an emerging democracy.

"Hundreds of accounts of killings and abductions have emerged in recent weeks, most of them brought forward by Sunni civilians, who claim that their relatives have been taken away by Iraqi men in uniform without warrant or explanation," reports the New York Times. "Shiite Muslim militia members have infiltrated Iraq`s police force and are carrying out sectarian killings under the color of law, according to documents and scores of interviews," reports the Los Angeles Times.

Through our careless and uncaring attempts at "nation-building," the United States has put itself in the position of providing a convenient shield for what is increasingly looking like a takeoff on the Cambodian Killing Fields -- down to the continued targeting of academics of all ethnicities by self-appointed executioners. Civil war is no longer a possibility; it is a reality.

Amazingly, in Bush`s Iraq, just as in Hussein`s, you`re a victim or a victimizer -- often both. The grim ironies of this Darwinist nightmare are everywhere. For example, while the military is defending the use of white phosphorus on the battlefield -- "shake and bake" in U.S. military slang -- by citing chemical weapons restriction loopholes, it can`t look good to the world that one of the human-rights crimes Hussein himself is charged with is -- you guessed it -- shelling Kurdish rebels and civilians with chemical weapons in 1991.

When presented with such consensus depictions of Iraq as it is, not as our cloistered and purposely ignorant president believes it to be, those who still defend the occupation make two main claims: This is all just the birthing pains of a democracy, and the civil war will get worse if we leave. I don`t agree with either prediction; the U.S. presence fuels both the Sunni insurgency and Shiite radicalism. The argument, however, should be moot anyway, because both the Iraqi and American publics have clearly signaled they want us to get out, starting now.

Yet, as investigative reporter Seymour Hersh reports in the current issue of the New Yorker, it is unclear what it`s going to take to convince our increasingly isolated commander in chief to change course. Bush, according to a highly placed unnamed source Hersh cites, thinks his razor-thin win in 2004 is "another manifestation of divine purpose," and that history will judge him well.

"The president is more determined than ever to stay the course," a former defense official told Hersh. "He doesn`t feel any pain. Bush is a believer in the adage, `People may suffer and die, but the Church advances.` "

Maybe that is not the thinking that motivates Bush, but can anyone come up with a more rational explanation for his determination to stay the course that leads into the abyss? It is time we called a halt to our mindless messing in other people`s lives. As we wind down the third year of an occupation that has killed and maimed tens of thousands of Americans and Iraqis and cost U.S. taxpayers upwards of $300 billion, isn`t it time to give the Iraqis the chance to see if they can do better -- on their own?

Page B - 9
URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archiv…
©2005 San Francisco Chronicle

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IN RUN-UP TO WAR, BUSH CONSIDERED BOMBING NPR
British PM Blair Talked Him Down, New Report Says
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British PM Blair Talked Him Down, New Report Says

A new report published today indicates that President George W. Bush briefly contemplated bombing National Public Radio in the run-up to the Iraq war but was ultimately talked out of it by British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

According to the report, Mr. Blair had just convinced Mr. Bush not to bomb the Arabic-language television network al-Jazeera when the president suddenly shifted gears, turning his sights on the left-leaning NPR.

“Those clowns at NPR have been tearing me a new one, Tony,” the president reportedly said. “Well, that’s nothing a good old daisy cutter wouldn’t fix.”

Mr. Blair reportedly raised strong objections to Mr. Bush’s plan to bomb NPR, after which the president said, “All right already – I’ll just cut their funding instead.”

According to a source quoted in the report, the president had drawn up an elaborate plan that involved bombing several prominent media outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Charlie Rose Show.

“The only thing left standing was Fox News,” the source is quoted as saying.

Mr. Bush was eventually talked out of bombing The Washington Post when a top aide reminded him, “If we take out the Post, we won’t have any way to leak things to Bob Woodward.”

As for bombing The New York Times, Mr. Bush ultimately backed down from his plan but suggested launching a smart bomb to take out the Op-Ed page.

Elsewhere, calling it a “rookie mistake,” Rep. Jean Schmidt (R-Ohio) apologized today for taking to the floor of the House and stridently demanding that Hawaii be named a state.

http://www.borowitzreport.com/archive_rpt.asp?rec=1269&srch=

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Published on Wednesday, November 30, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
Colin Powell: Still Craven After All These Years
by Norman Solomon
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1130-29.htm


Newspapers across the United States and beyond told readers Wednesday about sensational new statements by a former top assistant to Colin Powell when he was secretary of state. After interviewing Lawrence Wilkerson, the Associated Press reported he "said that wrongheaded ideas for the handling of foreign detainees after Sept. 11 arose from a coterie of White House and Pentagon aides who argued that `the president of the United States is all-powerful,` and that the Geneva Conventions were irrelevant."

AP added: "Wilkerson blamed Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and like-minded aides. Wilkerson said that Cheney must have sincerely believed that Iraq could be a spawning ground for new terror assaults, because `otherwise I have to declare him a moron, an idiot or a nefarious bastard.`"

Such strong words are headline grabbers when they come from someone widely assumed to be speaking Powell`s mind. And as a Powell surrogate, Wilkerson is certainly on a tear this week, speaking some truth about power. But there are a few big problems with his zeal to recast the public record: 1) Wilkerson should have spoken up years ago. 2) His current statements, for the most part, are foggy. 3) The criticisms seem to stem largely from tactical critiques and image concerns rather than moral objections. 4) Powell is still too much of a cagey opportunist to speak out himself.

Appearing on the BBC`s "Today" program Tuesday, Wilkerson said: "You begin to wonder was this intelligence spun? Was it politicized? Was it cherry-picked? Did, in fact, the American people get fooled? I am beginning to have my concerns."

So Wilkerson, who was Powell`s chief of staff from 2002 till early this year, has started to "wonder" whether the intelligence was spun, politicized, cherry-picked. At the end of November 2005, he was "beginning" to have "concerns."

"Beginning to have my concerns" is a phrase that aptly describes the Colin Powell approach.

Overall, appearances remain key. And so, Wilkerson included this anecdote in his AP interview: "Powell raised frequent and loud objections, his former aide said, once yelling into a telephone at Rumsfeld: `Donald, don`t you understand what you are doing to our image?`"

Now there`s a transcendent reason to begin to have concerns: Torturing prisoners is bad for "our image."

Rest assured that if the war had gone well by Washington`s lights, we`d be hearing none of this from Powell`s surrogate. The war has gone bad, from elite vantage points, not because of the official lies and the unrelenting carnage but because military victory has eluded the U.S. government in Iraq. And with President Bush`s poll numbers tanking, and Dick Cheney`s even worse, it`s time for some "moderate" sharks to carefully circle for some score-settling and preening.

In its account of Wilkerson`s BBC appearance, the British Guardian newspaper reported Wednesday: "Asked whether the vice president was guilty of a war crime, Mr. Wilkerson replied: `Well, that`s an interesting question -- it was certainly a domestic crime to advocate terror and I would suspect that it is ... an international crime as well.` In the context of other remarks it appeared he was using the word `terror` to apply to the systematic abuse of prisoners."

Strong stuff, especially since it`s obvious that Wilkerson is channeling Powell with those statements. But Powell was a team player and a very effective front man for the administration that was doing all that politicizing and cherry-picking -- and then proceeding with the policies that Wilkerson now seeks to pin on Cheney as possible war crimes.

White House war makers deftly hyped Powell`s "moderate" credibility while the Washington press corps lauded his supposed integrity. Powell was the crucial point man for giving "diplomatic" cover to the Iraq invasion fixation of Bush and Cheney. So, typically, Powell proclaimed three weeks into 2003: "If the United Nations is going to be relevant, it has to take a firm stand."

When Powell made his dramatic presentation to the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003, he fudged, exaggerated and concocted, often presenting deceptions as certainties. Along the way, he played fast and loose with translations of phone intercepts to make them seem more incriminating. And, as researchers at the media watch group FAIR (where I`m an associate) pointed out, "Powell relied heavily on the disclosure of Iraq`s pre-war unconventional weapons programs by defector Hussein Kamel, without noting that Kamel had also said that all those weapons had been destroyed." But the secretary of state wowed U.S. journalists.

Powell`s televised U.N. speech exuded great confidence and authoritative judgment. But he owed much of his touted credibility to the fact that he had long functioned inside a media bubble shielding him from direct challenge. It might puzzle an American to read later, in a book compiled by the London-based Guardian, that Powell`s much-ballyhooed speech went over like a lead balloon. "The presentation was long on assertion and muffled taped phone calls, but short on killer facts," the book said. "It fell flat."

Fell flat? Well it did in Britain, where a portion of the mainstream press immediately set about engaging in vigorous journalism that ripped apart many of Powell`s assertions within days. But not on the western side of the Atlantic, where Powell`s star turn at the United Nations elicited an outpouring of media adulation. In the process of deference to Powell, many liberals were among the swooners.

In her Washington Post column the morning after Powell spoke, Mary McGrory proclaimed that "he persuaded me." She wrote: "The cumulative effect was stunning." And McGrory, a seasoned and dovish political observer, concluded: "I`m not ready for war yet. But Colin Powell has convinced me that it might be the only way to stop a fiend, and that if we do go, there is reason."

In the same edition, Post columnist Richard Cohen shared his insight that Powell was utterly convincing: "The evidence he presented to the United Nations -- some of it circumstantial, some of it absolutely bone-chilling in its detail -- had to prove to anyone that Iraq not only hasn`t accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without a doubt still retains them. Only a fool -- or possibly a Frenchman -- could conclude otherwise."

Inches away, Post readers found Jim Hoagland`s column with this lead: "Colin Powell did more than present the world with a convincing and detailed X-ray of Iraq`s secret weapons and terrorism programs yesterday. He also exposed the enduring bad faith of several key members of the U.N. Security Council when it comes to Iraq and its `web of lies,` in Powell`s phrase." Hoagland`s closing words sought to banish doubt: "To continue to say that the Bush administration has not made its case, you must now believe that Colin Powell lied in the most serious statement he will ever make, or was taken in by manufactured evidence. I don`t believe that. Today, neither should you."

On the opposite page the morning after Powell`s momentous U.N. speech, a Washington Post editorial was figuratively on the same page as the Post columnists. Under the headline "Irrefutable," the newspaper laid down its line for rationality: "After Secretary of State Colin L. Powell`s presentation to the United Nations Security Council yesterday, it is hard to imagine how anyone could doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction."

Also smitten was the editorial board of the most influential U.S. newspaper leaning against the push for war. Hours after Powell finished his U.N. snow job, the New York Times published an editorial with a mollified tone -- declaring that he "presented the United Nations and a global television audience yesterday with the most powerful case to date that Saddam Hussein stands in defiance of Security Council resolutions and has no intention of revealing or surrendering whatever unconventional weapons he may have."

By sending Powell to address the Security Council, the Times claimed, President Bush "showed a wise concern for international opinion." And the paper contended that "Mr. Powell`s presentation was all the more convincing because he dispensed with apocalyptic invocations of a struggle of good and evil and focused on shaping a sober, factual case against Mr. Hussein`s regime."

Later, in mid-September 2003, straining to justify Washington`s refusal to let go of the occupation of Iraq, Colin Powell used the language of a venture capitalist: "Since the United States and its coalition partners have invested a great deal of political capital, as well as financial resources, as well as the lives of our young men and women -- and we have a large force there now -- we can`t be expected to suddenly just step aside."

Now, after so much clear evidence has emerged to discredit the entire U.S. war effort, Colin Powell still can`t bring himself to stand up and account for his crucial role. Instead, he`s leaving it to a former aide to pin blame on those who remain at the top of the Bush administration. But Powell was an integral part of the war propaganda machinery. And we can hardly expect the same media outlets that puffed him up at crucial times to now scrutinize their mutual history.

This article includes an excerpt from Norman Solomon`s new book "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death." For information, go to: www.WarMadeEasy.com

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Published on Wednesday, November 30, 2005 by the Progressive
Bush’s Bloody Strategy for Victory
http://www.progressive.org/

by Matthew Rothschild


We’re beginning to see the outlines of Bush’s military strategy in Iraq. It’s not withdrawal. Don’t kid yourself.

Bush intends to prevail.

While he may, under domestic pressure, bring 10,000 or 20,000 or even 50,000 troops home, he has no intention of ending this war.

As Seymour Hersh notes in the latest issue of The New Yorker, Bush plans on replacing a reliance on U.S. troops with a reliance on U.S. bombers.

“Departing American troops will be replaced by American airpower,” Hersh writes. “Quick, deadly strikes by U.S. warplanes are seen as a way to improve dramatically the combat capability of even the weakest Iraqi combat units.”

Already, “the tempo of American bombing seems to have increased,” Hersh reports. And he cites a Pentagon press release that notes that one Marine aircraft unit alone has “dropped more than 500,000 tons of ordnance.”

This could lead to a much higher civilian death toll in Iraq, which is now at least 27,000, according to Iraqbodycount.net, and perhaps more than 100,000, according to the October 2004 Johns Hopkins University study published in The Lancet.

U.S. bombers could become tools of vindictive Iraqis who want to settle scores, Hersh says, since Iraqis on the ground may ultimately have the ability to call in the bombs on targets of their own choosing.

While all this will be going on from the air, on the ground, we’re likely to see more of the Salvador option: The use of death squads to abduct, torture, and kill any Sunni suspected of being part of the resistance.

“Some Sunni males have been found dead in ditches and fields, with bullet holes in their temples, acid burns on their skin, and holes in their bodies apparently made by electric drills,” The New York Times reports in a front-page story on November 29.

Even former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi has decried these human rights abuses. “People are doing the same as Saddam’s time and worse,” he told the London Observer.

“We are hearing about secret police, secret bunkers where people are being interrogated. A lot of Iraqis are being tortured or killed in the course of interrogations.”

Cheney and Rumsfeld have been trumpeting the Salvador option for some time now.

During the 2004 Vice Presidential debate, Dick Cheney said, “Twenty years ago, we had a similar situation in El Salvador. . . . And today, El Salvador is a whale of a lot better.”

Donald Rumsfeld said virtually the same thing right after the election. “The Iraqi people can find much to admire in El Salvador’s recent history,” Rumsfeld said in San Salvador on November 11, 2004.

Cheney and Rumsfeld implicitly were putting their seal of approval on the tens of thousands of civilians the Salvadoran death squads tortured and murdered.

Rumsfeld even invoked the murdered Salvadorans to bless the U.S. invasion of Iraq. “For millions of Salvadorans back then, peace and prosperity was little more than a distant hope,” he said in San Salvador. “In that struggle for freedom, many lives were lost. I think they would be proud to know that . . . soldiers from a peaceful and democratic El Salvador are today fighting alongside U.S. and coalition forces to help to secure freedom and prosperity for the people of Iraq.”

Bush, for his part, is so ga-ga with messianic delusions that he doesn’t care about the deaths along the way, Hersh contends. “He doesn’t feel any pain,” one former defense official told Hersh. “Bush is a believer in the adage, ‘People may suffer and die but the Church advances.’ ”

All the more reason for those of us in the peace movement to demand not only to bring the troops home, but to bring this bloody war to an immediate end.

Matthew Rothschild has been with The Progressive since 1983. His McCarthyism Watch web column has chronicled more than 150 incidents of repression since 9/11.

© 2005 The Progressive

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Rocky Mountain News

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Littwin: In Bush`s bubble, it`s a rose-colored world
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/news_columnists/articl…

November 30, 2005

pictureIt was an extremely select audience that went to see the president - we`ll call it the Bush in a Bubble tour - Tuesday at the Brown Palace.

You knew it was a select crowd not only because of the $1,000-a-plate price tag for the Marilyn Musgrave fundraiser - and, for the record, she was not wearing a pink skirt.

No, this was the real giveaway: Many people in the audience - for all I know, all of them - apparently still believe George W. Bush knows what he`s doing in Iraq.
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Joyce Wells, of Denver, holds a sign with a photo of her
son, a lieutenant in the Army Medical Corps, as she
protests President Bush and his policies outside the
Brown Palace Hotel. Bush spoke at a fundraiser for
Rep. Marilyn Musgrave on Tuesday.
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I know, it sounds crazy. But I was there to see it myself.

They cheered when he said, "We have a strategy for victory in Iraq." Even as I kept wondering what strategy that could possibly be.

They cheered when he said, "We will defeat the enemy in Iraq. We will protect the American people." As if one necessarily follows the other.

Of course, they also cheered when Bush planted the full-forehead smooch on Musgrave, the congresswoman being a powerful advocate for the traditional man-on-woman smooch.

Give Bush`s handlers credit. It`s no easy matter to find such an uncritical audience - not if you even remotely trust Bush`s poll numbers.

Try these. According to the latest CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll, 63 percent of Americans believe Bush is mishandling the war in Iraq, and 60 percent say it wasn`t worth it to have gone to Iraq in the first place.

And then there`s this: In an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, 57 percent say the Bush administration misled the American public on the way to Iraq.

And then there`s the nearly 100 percent dissent-free world in which Bush travels. It is Dan Froomkin of WashingtonPost.com who calls this world Bush`s bubble - one in which there`s almost no possibility of Bush ever hearing a discouraging word.

Bush`s post-Thanksgiving-weekend schedule, Froomkin notes, includes speeches at the U.S. Border Patrol office, an Air Force base, the Naval Academy, two Republican fundraisers and one Republican donor reception.

In other words, he`s going no place where he might bump into either, say, John Murtha or the Denver Three.

In his speech at the Naval Academy today, Bush is expected to offer the latest upbeat assessment on Iraq and of the progress being made by the Iraqi army.

The reception there might be better than the one he got from the maybe 500 protesters who stood behind the barriers outside the Brown Palace Tuesday.

I don`t think Bush heard them as he drove quickly past them to and from the hotel. And I doubt anyone on his staff will make him a DVD.

Bill Owens, who rode with Bush from the airport, said the president did see the protesters, but didn`t pay them any attention.

"He`s used to it," Owens said.

Well, yeah. Or maybe you missed Bush on his less than triumphant Asian and South American tours.

This was a particularly unfriendly crowd of protesters, who should be thankful they live in a country where you can flip off the president and chant "Impeach Bush" while banging pans with a spatula and no one will arrest you and lock you up as an enemy combatant or for crimes against Miss Manners.

At least I think no one will.

Still, it`s not the kind of photo-op you want as you`re trying to rehabilitate your presidency. The victory strategy here is clearer.

First, there is the campaign to change the conversation on Iraq. You can`t change people`s minds once they turn on a war. But you can convince them that you`re trying to find a way out.

The other is to try to get in front of the immigration issue, where he`s getting hammered by Republicans like U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo and state Rep. Dave "Doc" Schultheis, who think his program is really an amnesty program.

On Iraq, it looks as if Bush will declare progress - as opposed to victory - and work to bring home some of the troops before the 2006 congressional elections.

You can, all too easily, miss the news of the progress. If you listen, say, to the Sunni complaints that Iraqi troops are targeting Sunni neighborhoods. Or to former Iraq prime minister Ayad Allawi telling the Guardian in London that torture today in Iraq is "the same as (in) Saddam`s time or worse." Or if you note the reports of as many as 100 insurgent attacks daily.

As for the readiness of Iraqi troops, the cover story by James Fallows in The Atlantic this month is headlined: "Why Iraq Has No Army." Gen. George Casey told Congress in late September that only one battalion was ready to fight the insurgents without U.S. help. That was down from an estimate of three in June.

OK, maybe not so much progress.

On immigration, Bush got the biggest cheer Tuesday when he said, "I stand strongly against amnesty." He was just back from the border, where he had said the same thing - only at the time he was wearing a nifty Border Patrol jacket.

It`s Bush getting tough on illegal immigration. But you can`t get tough enough to please people like Schultheis, the pistol-packing border patroller, who was calling Bush`s plan "totally unacceptable." And even Musgrave opposed Bush`s plan last year.

Still, Bush raised some $450,000 for Musgrave, considered one of the GOP`s most vulnerable incumbents, at Tuesday`s bash. He showed, in fact, he remains an unabashed hit among those who can spend $1,000 for lunch.

That`s a lot, even inside a bubble.

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Copyright 2005, Rocky Mountain News. All Rights Reserved.

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"In Baghdad, the trial of Saddam Hussein began again today, after a five-week delay which saw two of the former dictator`s lawyers executed and a third flee the country. In addition, the trial was adjourned after it was discovered that a key witness against Saddam had been found dead. Although, on the bright side, that witness died of cancer. Which I believe in Iraq is a very hopeful sign. To see someone there live long enough to die of a disease, I think they`re turning things around." --Jon Stewart
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December 1, 2005
Editorial
Plan: We Win
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/01/opinion/01thur1.html

We`ve seen it before: an embattled president so swathed in his inner circle that he completely loses touch with the public and wanders around among small knots of people who agree with him. There was Lyndon Johnson in the 1960`s, Richard Nixon in the 1970`s, and George H. W. Bush in the 1990`s. Now it`s his son`s turn.

It has been obvious for months that Americans don`t believe the war is going just fine, and they needed to hear that President Bush gets that. They wanted to see that he had learned from his mistakes and adjusted his course, and that he had a measurable and realistic plan for making Iraq safe enough to withdraw United States troops. Americans didn`t need to be convinced of Mr. Bush`s commitment to his idealized version of the war. They needed to be reassured that he recognized the reality of the war.

Instead, Mr. Bush traveled 32 miles from the White House to the Naval Academy and spoke to yet another of the well-behaved, uniformed audiences that have screened him from the rest of America lately. If you do not happen to be a midshipman, you`d have to have been watching cable news at midmorning on a weekday to catch him.

The address was accompanied by a voluminous handout entitled "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq," which the White House grandly calls the newly declassified version of the plan that has been driving the war. If there was something secret about that plan, we can`t figure out what it was. The document, and Mr. Bush`s speech, were almost entirely a rehash of the same tired argument that everything`s going just fine. Mr. Bush also offered the usual false choice between sticking to his policy and beating a hasty and cowardly retreat.

On the critical question of the progress of the Iraqi military, the president was particularly optimistic, and misleading. He said, for instance, that Iraqi security forces control major areas, including the northern and southern provinces and cities like Najaf. That`s true if you believe a nation can be built out of a change of clothing: these forces are based on party and sectarian militias that have controlled many of these same areas since the fall of Saddam Hussein but now wear Iraqi Army uniforms. In other regions, the most powerful Iraqi security forces are rogue militias that refuse to disarm and have on occasion turned their guns against American troops, like Moktada al-Sadr`s Mahdi Army.

Mr. Bush`s vision of the next big step is equally troubling: training Iraqi forces well enough to free American forces for more of the bloody and ineffective search-and-destroy sweeps that accomplish little beyond alienating the populace.

What Americans wanted to hear was a genuine counterinsurgency plan, perhaps like one proposed by Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr., a leading writer on military strategy: find the most secure areas with capable Iraqi forces. Embed American trainers with those forces and make the region safe enough to spend money on reconstruction, thus making friends and draining the insurgency. Then slowly expand those zones and withdraw American forces.

Americans have been clamoring for believable goals in Iraq, but Mr. Bush stuck to his notion of staying until "total victory." His strategy document defines that as an Iraq that "has defeated the terrorists and neutralized the insurgency"; is "peaceful, united, stable, democratic and secure"; and is a partner in the war on terror, an integral part of the international community, and "an engine for regional economic growth and proving the fruits of democratic governance to the region."

That may be the most grandiose set of ambitions for the region since the vision of Nebuchadnezzar`s son Belshazzar, who saw the hand writing on the wall. Mr. Bush hates comparisons between Vietnam and Iraq. But after watching the president, we couldn`t resist reading Richard Nixon`s 1969 Vietnamization speech. Substitute the Iraqi constitutional process for the Paris peace talks, and Mr. Bush`s ideas about the Iraqi Army are not much different from Nixon`s plans - except Nixon admitted the war was going very badly (which was easier for him to do because he didn`t start it), and he was very clear about the risks and huge sacrifices ahead.

A president who seems less in touch with reality than Richard Nixon needs to get out more.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Compan

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Phased withdrawal http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/shared-blogs/ajc/luckovic…
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December 1, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
The Age of Skepticism
By DAVID BROOKS
http://select.nytimes.com/2005/12/01/opinion/01brooks.html

War is a cultural event. World War I destroyed the old social order in Europe and disillusioned a generation of talented young Americans. World War II bred a feeling of American unity and self-confidence. Vietnam helped trigger a counterculture.

The Iraq war is not going to have that kind of pervasive cultural impact, but it has already shifted the zeitgeist. There has been a sharp drop in Americans` faith in their institutions. Trust in government has fallen back to about half of where it was in 2001. More Americans believe that government is almost always wasteful and inefficient, according to surveys by the Pew Research Center.

There has been a sharp decline in support for the United Nations. There has been a sharp rise in the number of people who say the U.S. should mind its own business when it comes to world affairs. Isolationist sentiment is about where it was just after Vietnam.

Americans are increasingly cynical about politics and their parties. Only 24 percent of Americans say the Republicans represent their priorities, according to an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, and only 26 percent say the Democrats do.

The hammer of disapproval has fallen hardest on the Republicans, of course, but the public is just as eager to think the worst of the Democrats. Seventy percent of Americans say Democratic criticism of the war is hurting troop morale, according to a poll by RT Strategies. Most Americans cynically believe that Democrats are leveling their attacks on the war to gain partisan advantage, while only 30 percent believe that they are genuinely trying to help U.S. efforts.

Finally, a brackish tide of pessimism has descended upon the country. Roughly two-thirds of Americans say the country is headed in the wrong direction. Iraq is not the only issue that is driving this sour pessimism, but it is the main issue. (Katrina has had a surprisingly modest impact.)

And Americans are in this awful mood despite rising consumer confidence and strong economic growth, 4.3 percent. Americans are not pessimistic about their own individual futures, but they are pessimistic about their leadership and their country`s future.

In this atmosphere of general weariness, the political pendulum is no longer swinging on a left-to-right axis. As Christopher Caldwell noted recently in The Financial Times, the same phenomenon is striking country after country: the governing party is sinking, but the opposition party is not rising. Problems on the right do not lead to a resurgence on the left, or vice versa. In other words, the Democrats may win elections in 2006 or 2008, but that doesn`t mean they will have the public`s confidence or a mandate for change.

In this atmosphere of exhaustion, the political pendulum swings from engagement to cynicism. When polarized voters lose faith in their own side, they don`t switch to the other. They just withdraw.

The chief cultural effect of the Iraq war is that we are now entering a period of skepticism. Many Americans are going to be skeptical that their government can know enough to accomplish large tasks or be competent enough to execute ambitious policies. More people are going to be skeptical of plans to mold reality according to our designs or to solve the deep problems that are rooted in history and culture. They are going to be skeptical of our ability to engage with or understand faraway societies in the Middle East or Africa or elsewhere.

In theory, skepticism leads to prudence, not a bad trait. But when it is tinged with cynicism, as it is now, skepticism turns into passivity. In skeptical ages, people are quick to decide that longstanding problems, like poverty and despotism, are intractable and not really worth taking on. They find it easy to delay taking any action on the distant but overwhelming problems, like the deficits, that do not impose immediate pain. They find it easy to dawdle on foreign problems, like Iran`s nuclear ambitions, rather than confronting them.

As the Harvard economist Benjamin Friedman has observed, Americans begin social reforms when they are feeling confident, not when they are weary and insecure.

Already the resolve to rebuild New Orleans and seize the post-Katrina moment has dissipated. The bipartisan desire to do something ambitious about energy policy is going nowhere. Even the problem of Darfur evokes little more than sad sighs and shrugs.

What`s at stake in Iraq is not only the future of that country, but the future of American self-confidence. We may have to endure a cycle of skepticism before we can enjoy another cycle of hope.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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December 1, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
Bush Hits Rewind
By BOB HERBERT
http://select.nytimes.com/2005/12/01/opinion/01herbert.html

It`s weird. It`s like watching a computerized model of a president. Somebody programs George W. Bush, carefully embedding the information to be dispensed over the next several hours, and then he goes out and addresses the nation - as a computerized bundle of administration talking points.

"We will never back down," said Mr. Bush in his speech at the U.S. Naval Academy yesterday. "We will never give in. And we will never accept anything less than complete victory."

I don`t think there were many people who believed him. Members of Mr. Bush`s own party are nervously eyeing next year`s Congressional elections. They would abandon Iraq in a heartbeat if it meant the difference between getting re-elected or having to hunt for a real job.

This war (which has already cost the lives of more than 2,100 Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis) was cynically launched (it was never about Sept. 11) and incompetently fought (we have never sent enough troops or sufficient equipment), and will be brought to a close by people obsessed not with the security of the United States and the welfare of the troops, but with the political calendar.

"I will settle for nothing less than complete victory," said Mr. Bush. He then dutifully defined victory as follows:

"Victory will come when the terrorists and Saddamists can no longer threaten Iraq`s democracy, when the Iraqi security forces can provide for the safety of their own citizens, and when Iraq is not a safe haven for terrorists to plot new attacks on our nation."

Those were some of yesterday`s talking points. Here`s today`s reality: the $6-billion-a-month U.S. military mission in Iraq is unsustainable, as is the political support for the war. There is now a virtual consensus that a significant American troop withdrawal will get under way in 2006.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi security forces are ill equipped, understaffed and widely infiltrated by private militia members and insurgents. In many ways, it`s an amateurish operation.

As Senator Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat who served in the 82nd Airborne, told reporters this week:

"Without an effective ministry that can keep track of soldiers and police, pay those soldiers and police, apply those soldiers and police and essentially provide the foundation, then you`re going to have some tactically trained units, but they`re not going to be a coherent or effective force."

Despite the rosy scenarios offered by President Bush, American-style democracy is nowhere in sight in Iraq. Among other things, the evidence of horrific human rights abuses by Iraqi forces allied with us - including kidnappings, torture and murders - is increasing.

In short, the picture in Iraq is not a pretty one, and there is no indication that substantial improvements are coming soon.

If the president gets any of this, you couldn`t tell it by his appearance yesterday. He stuck to his talking points. "To all who wear the uniform," he said, "I make you this pledge: America will not run in the face of car bombers and assassins so long as I am your commander in chief."

We may not cut and run in Iraq, but with the G.O.P. sweating out next year`s elections, the plans are already under way for American forces by the tens of thousands to cut and speed-walk toward the exits. Mr. Bush could have been honest about this yesterday, but he chose not to be.

If the administration does not address this inevitable pullout, or pullback, seriously, it will be conducted as incompetently as the post-invasion operation.

The inevitable drawdown of U.S. forces is hardly a secret. In addition to the political pressures coming from the G.O.P., there`s the fact that we don`t have enough people in the military - and can`t entice enough people into the military - to back up the president`s blithe promises.

Senator Joseph Biden, a Delaware Democrat, said in an op-ed article in The Washington Post that it was likely that 50,000 troops would be redeployed out of Iraq by the end of next year and "a significant number" of the remainder in 2007.

A president who`s little more than a bundle of talking points cannot possibly maintain the long-term trust and confidence of the public. There`s a disturbing remoteness to President Bush that seems especially odd in a politician who was selected by his party because of his supposed ability to project warmth and the kind of fundamental authenticity that his Democratic opponents lacked.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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Thoughts on the Middle East, History,and Religion
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Juan Cole is Professor of History at the University of Michigan

http://www.juancole.com/


Thursday, December 01, 2005

Questions about Readiness of Iraqi Army
New US Assault

[urlThe strategy of the Bush administration in Iraq]http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-11-30-bush-speech-cover-story_x.htm[/url] depends heavily on standing up battle-ready units of the new Iraqi army. The USA Today quotes experts on how unrealistic that plan is in the short to medium term.

I have heard from contacts in Iraq that the soldiers in the new army often don`t get their paychecks, and aren`t properly equipped, and sometimes are reduced to selling their bullets on the black market. Guess who buys them?

[urlA further step in the break-up of Iraq:]http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-oildeal1dec01,0,4057840.story?coll=la-home-headlines[/url] according to the LA Times, the Kurdish regional confederacy is giving a Norwegian oil company the right to develop new oil fields in its area without consulting the federal government in Baghdad. The Kurds and Norwegians maintain that this is legal according to the new Iraqi constitution, which devolves control over natural resources discovered in the future to the provinces or provincial confederacies. Next the Shiites in the South will do the same thing. Baghdad will be starved of these new revenue streams, and the provinces will have their own source of income. I don`t see how the country stays together this way, or how the central goverment ever amounts to anything.

[urlReuters reports on severe Sunni-Shiite tensions]http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/GEO041813.htm[/url] deriving from political assassinations, even among Iraqis who are trying to forge electoral alliances across the sectarian divide.

The British government is investigating the trophy video that shows mercenaries in Iraq shooting at civilians on the roadway.

The US military has launched yet another operation in western Iraq, on the eve of the Dec. 15 parliamentary elections. The UN had asked the US to stop these operations, which disrupt Anbar province and make it difficult for people there to vote, until after the polls. Bush and Rumsfeld clearly just don`t care about those concerns, and want to create the image that they are accomplishing something in Iraq. They will never pacify those little Sunni Arab towns over near Syria; all they can do is make people run away from them temporarily.

posted by Juan @ 1[url2/01/2005 06:32:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/12/questions-about-readiness-of-iraqi.html[/url] 0 comments

Guest Editorial: Achcar & Shalom, on US Withdrawal


"Strategic Redeployment" vs. "Out Now"

Gilbert Achcar and Stephen R. Shalom



Whatever the limitations of Rep. Murtha`s call to redeploy U.S. troops from Iraq that we have already emphasized ("On John Murtha`s Position," ZNet, Nov. 21), he went much too far for most Democrats or for the Bush administration. Nevertheless, there have been others who have urged the redeploying of some of the U.S. forces in Iraq.

In October, Lawrence Korb and Brian Katulis, writing for the Center for American Progress, a liberal organization headed by Clinton`s former chief of staff John Podesta, issued a report calling for what they termed "strategic redeployment." (Lawrence J. Korb and Brian Katulis, Strategic Redeployment: A Progressive Plan for Iraq and the Struggle Against Violent Extremists, Washington, DC: Center for American Progress, October 2005.)

Like Murtha, Korb and Katulis (who served in the Reagan and Clinton administrations, respectively) make telling observations. For example, they note that:

"most Iraqis do not want us there and they do not feel our presence makes them safer. One half says they support insurgent attacks on coalition forces and a majority says they feel less safe when foreign troops patrol their neighborhoods, according to polling of Iraqi citizens sponsored by the US government earlier this year."

They conclude, however, that what is needed is a "strategic redeployment," specifically rejecting "calls for an immediate and complete withdrawal." Under their proposal, during 2006, 46,000 national guard and reserves would be returned to the United States, 20,000 troops would be sent to other theaters (18,000 to Afghanistan, 1,000 to Southeast Asia, and 1,000 to Africa), and 14,000 troops would be stationed in Kuwait and off-shore in the Persian Gulf. The 60,000 U.S. troops remaining in Iraq would be redeployed away from urban areas to minimize inflaming Iraqi opinion. By the end of 2007, most of these troops would be withdrawn (to unspecified locations), leaving only "counterterrorist units."

"This presence, along with the forces in Kuwait and at sea in the Persian Gulf area will be sufficient to conduct strikes coordinated with Iraqi forces against any terrorist camps and enclaves that may emerge and deal with any major external threats to Iraq."
Some analysts (for example, Slate`s Fred Kaplan) have suggested that Murtha got his plan from Korb and Katulis, though he speeds up their timetable and moves his entire residual force out of Iraq. But the same reasons given in our original essay for why the anti-war movement should avoid confusing Murtha`s position with its own apply with even greater force to the Korb-Katulis position. Korb and Katulis wisely point out that to enhance U.S. security President Bush should announce that the United States "will not build permanent military bases in Iraq, counteracting arguments made in recruitment pitches by militants and Iraqi insurgents." But where are the U.S. counterterrorist units in Iraq going to be housed if not at bases? In any event, it`s not just designs on military bases that need to be disavowed, but plans to dominate Iraqi oil too, which are proceeding apace. (See Greg Muttitt, Crude Designs: The Rip-Off of Iraq’s Oil Wealth, London: PLATFORM with Global Policy Forum, Institute for Policy Studies [New Internationalism Project], New Economics Foundation, Oil Change International and War on Want, November 2005.) And a two-year timetable is unacceptable. As we noted earlier, two to three months is plenty of time to remove all U.S. troops, if that is one’s genuine interest. Protracted “timetables” only make sense if one is trying to secure a continuing dominance over Iraqi politics and resources before leaving.
In the Washington Post of November 26, Joe Biden of Delaware, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and an aspiring presidential candidate, wrote an oped column entitled "Time for An Iraq Timetable." Biden declared that in 2006 U.S. troops

"will begin to leave in large numbers. By the end of the year, we will have redeployed about 50,000. In 2007, a significant number of the remaining 100,000 will follow. A small force will stay behind -- in Iraq or across the border -- to strike at any concentration of terrorists."

Biden`s language is interesting -- he doesn`t quite call for this, but essentially predicts it. His prediction seems to be based on the fact that the Senate by a vote of 79-19 and over the objections of the White House adopted an amendment requiring the President to provide quarterly reports on the progress of U.S. policy and military operations in Iraq. (This vote took place after the Senate defeated a Democratic-sponsored amendment asking the president to prepare an estimated timetable for withdrawal from Iraq.) Given that the successful amendment has no teeth at all, it`s hard to see why it presages much of anything.

Nevertheless, Biden`s comment is consistent with various hints from the Bush administration itself. Obviously the Republicans don`t want to go into the 2006 elections, let alone the 2008 elections with an increasingly unpopular and seemingly endless occupation of Iraq on display. In part this leads them to make optimistic comments about how soon Washington will be able to reduce the number of troops in Iraq (glossing over the fact that several thousand troops were added before the October 15 referendum, so a withdrawal of these would indicate no progress at all). During the Vietnam War there were countless optimistic predictions of when the troops would come home, only to have the president send more troops when the situation deteriorated further. And we`ve been hearing similar optimistic comments from the Bush administration for more than two years; for example, on October 19, 2003, the Washington Post reported on its front page:

"There are now 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. The plan to cut that number is well advanced.... and has been described in broad outline to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld but has not yet been approved by him. It would begin to draw down forces next spring, cutting the number of troops to fewer than 100,000 by next summer and then to 50,000 by mid-2005, officers involved in the planning said."

True, in 2003 Iraq was nowhere near the political liability for the Bush administration that it is now, so we shouldn`t discount the prospect of a real policy shift. Clearly the Bush administration has scaled back its more grandiose goals in Iraq, but it`s unlikely that it would choose to withdraw its forces without being confident that it could secure its more basic goal -- domination of the oil resources of the region -- unless, of course, this were made untenable. It is possible that the U.S. will fall back on a strategy of trying to replace its troops with air power, hoping that the reduction in U.S. casualties will make the war more palatable to the American public. In late August, the head of the air force told the New York Times that after any withdrawal of U.S. ground troops, "we will continue with a rotational presence of some type in that area more or less indefinitely," adding "We have interests in that part of the world...." (Eric Schmitt, "U.S. General Says Iraqis Will Need Longtime Support From Air Force," Aug. 30) To support these interests Washington is upgrading 16 different bases in the Middle East and Southwest Asia (New York Times, Sept. 18, 2005). According to Seymour Hersh in the Dec. 5 New Yorker, plans are being drawn up precisely to replace U.S. ground troops in Iraq with warplanes. Hersh reports that some Pentagon officials are worried about what it would mean to have Iraqis calling in bombing targets to the U.S. air force, but no matter who calls in the coordinates, white phosphorus, cluster munitions, and 500-pound bombs are not going to address the problem of the insurgency; indeed, they are going to generate more recruits for both the insurgency and terrorism.

For the anti-war movement, it is critical to insist on the complete withdrawal of U.S. and coalition forces, from Iraq and from the region, because retaining any of them -- whether counterinsurgency units ready to intervene or air power to level further Iraqi cities -- will violate Iraqi sovereignty and continue to fuel insurgency and hatred. And the anti-war movement must insist as well on immediate withdrawal, because the Bush administration itself will soon be talking of future drawdowns -- and indeed it already is.

We should bear in mind that the mere fact that the antiwar movement raises the "Out Now" slogan does not mean that U.S. forces are going to leave Iraq overnight. During the Vietnam War, a much more powerful movement than anything we have seen in the U.S. in the last few decades demanded that U.S. troops get "Out Now." This did not lead -- even when the U.S. power elite reached the conclusion that the war should be terminated -- to a "precipitous" withdrawal, but to a withdrawal that was completed only after the Paris Accords were concluded with the three main Vietnamese parties involved. Nevertheless, the pressure of the antiwar movement in the U.S. was decisive in compelling Washington to opt for this withdrawal.

The issue with "Out Now" is therefore not about the logistical details of withdrawal, but about how to be most effective in countering Washington`s imperial aims. "Out Now" is a slogan around which one can build a large coalition of forces, from those who only care about "our boys" to those who care about the Iraqi people’s freedom, whereas any dilution of the "responsible exit strategy" kind -- aside from the fact that it would be extremely difficult even to agree on what the "conditions" for the withdrawal should be -- would only provide the Bush administration, along with pro-war Democrats, an argument for justifying the protracted presence of U.S. troops.

We are not calling for a "cut and run" withdrawal, abandoning Iraq to its fate (like in the "selfish" nationalist rhetoric of the isolationist Right). We are perfectly aware that, given what the United States has been doing in Iraq, tragically disrupting the situation in that country, if the U.S. troops were just to leave Iraq suddenly, say in 48 hours, without prior notice, that would definitely create a dangerous chaotic situation. But this is not what we are demanding. The demand for the immediate withdrawal of the troops is, first of all, a demand for an immediate political decision to withdraw the troops. Once the political decision is taken and proclaimed publicly, it becomes possible, in fact indispensable, to prepare the best conditions for its implementation in the shortest possible timeframe, while starting without delay to bring troops back home. To be sure, the modalities through which this should be completed in a way not to harm the Iraqi people must be worked out with their elected representatives.

If Washington were to make clear that it wants to complete the withdrawal of its troops within a timetable stretching over weeks, or very few months, this would provide a very powerful incentive for the Iraqis to reach an agreement among themselves on a way to run their country together peacefully and start to concentrate their efforts on the huge task of its reconstruction. The consensus reached at the recent Cairo conference is an important step in that direction and proves that it is perfectly possible, and much easier indeed, to reach such agreements when U.S. representatives are not there constantly interfering and calling the shots.

Finally, those who accuse the antiwar movement of wanting to "cut and run" and pretend that they care more for the interests of the Iraqis -- whereas most of them are actually worried about U.S. imperial interests -- would be better advised to demand that the U.S. respect Iraqi sovereignty over Iraqi natural resources and reconstruction. For our part, we believe that there is a moral obligation for the U.S. government to pay reparations to the Iraqi people for all that they have suffered as a consequence of U.S. criminal policies -- from the deliberate destruction of Iraq’s infrastructure in the 1991 war to the devastation brought by the present invasion and occupation, through the green light given to the Ba’athist regime to crush the mass insurrections of March 1991 and, above all, the murderous embargo inflicted on the Iraqi population from 1991 to 2003.

The withdrawal of U.S. and coalition forces, the end of U.S. economic domination, and the payment of reparations: this is the way to truly serve the principles of justice, as well as the best interests of the people of Iraq and the U.S. population.

-- November 28, 2005



Gilbert Achcar is the author of The Clash of Barbarisms and Eastern Cauldron, both published by Monthly Review Press. Stephen R. Shalom is on the editorial board of New Politics, and the author of Imperial Alibis (South End Press) and Which Side Are You On? An Introduction to Politics (Longman). This article was written for the journal New Politics as a postscript to their earlier article, "On John Murtha`s Position," ZNet, Nov. 21.

posted by Juan @ [url12/01/2005 06:11:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/12/guest-editorial-achcar-indeed-they-are.html[/url] 0 comments

Poll Shows Mixed Results for Bush


[urlHighlights of the CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll]http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/11/30/iraq.poll/[/url] on Bush and Iraq. It is a very small poll with a whopping plus or minus %5 percent margin of error, but presumably the errors should all run the same way, so it does tell us something.

Does Bush have a plan that will achieve victory for the US in Iraq?


Yes: 41%; No: 55%



How has Bush handled the Iraq War?


Well: 44%; Poorly: 54%



Can a democratic government in Iraq be established that won`t be overthrown?


Likely: 47%; Unlikely: 49%



Will Iraq be able to prevent terrorists from using their country as a base of operations?



Yes: 33%; No: 63% (!!!)



But then 48 percent said that the war will make the US safer from terrorism in the long run. (43 percent said no.) I guess the item above is short to medium term.

I interpret this poll as fairly good news for Bush. His base still thinks he is doing a good job. A big majority think the Iraq war will prevent terrorism in the long run, though with a lot of short term dangers. About half think Iraq can be stood up as a democratic regime. Although a majority think Bush is doing a bad job in Iraq and hasn`t a clue how to achieve victory, it isn`t a really big majority and the Red States seem still to be with him.

posted by Juan @ [url12/01/2005 06:10:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/12/poll-shows-mixed-results-for-bush.html[/url] 0 comments

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NEWS ANALYSIS
Bush Is Now in Step With His Generals
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-na-assess1…

By Tyler Marshall and Mark Mazzetti
Times Staff Writers


December 1, 2005

WASHINGTON — Much of the rhetoric was familiar. But in his U.S. Naval Academy speech Wednesday, President Bush seemed to accept the hard realities both on the ground in Iraq and politically in the United States by pledging a smaller American force.

After months of a lingering disconnect between the White House and senior military commanders, Bush`s comments at the academy in Annapolis, Md., seemed to bring him into line not just with America`s military but with much of his administration.

Repeatedly, military commanders have made the case that only a drawdown of U.S. troops would make Iraqi forces take control of their nation`s security.

On Wednesday, Bush finally seemed to buy into the argument. The revised mission would reduce the exposure of U.S. troops to enemy attack and the potential for U.S. casualties.

In many ways, his speech was an artful domestic tightrope walk, one in which he forcefully rejected his critics` calls for an immediate troop pullout — or even a timetable for one — and repeated the applause lines cherished by his core supporters.

"I will settle for nothing less than complete victory," he said at one point. "We will stay as long as necessary to complete the mission."

Yet behind these words, Bush`s glowing assessment of the progress of Iraqi forces provided a response to two of his most crucial political constituencies: his core supporters desperate for reassurances that a plan exists for the victory he has so often promised, and the growing number of supporters-turned-skeptics who now demand a viable exit strategy.

The thrust of Bush`s remarks easily dovetailed with earlier statements made by his two top commanders in the region, Army Gen. John P. Abizaid, head of U.S. forces in the Middle East, and Army Gen. George W. Casey, the military`s senior officer in Iraq.

In Senate testimony two months ago, the two generals had argued that a smaller U.S. force was necessary because the very presence of Americans was fueling the insurgency and fostering a dependency on a continued U.S. presence by the nascent Iraqi security force.

"We believe at some point, in order to break this dependence on the … coalition, you simply have to back off and let the Iraqis step forward," Abizaid and Maj. Gen. Douglas Lute, operations director for the Middle East, told reporters in August.

In private conversations, U.S. military officers also have expressed concern that trying to maintain current troop levels in Iraq beyond next year could irreparably harm recruitment efforts and retention levels — the lifeblood of America`s volunteer military.

Still, those following the events in Iraq question Bush`s upbeat characterization of Iraqi forces and caution that placing so many of his political chips on a strong performance from Iraq`s fledgling troops carries its own dangers. Such forecasts have been made previously, and each time the military found itself unable to escape its role on the front lines against Iraqi insurgents.

As the U.S.-led coalition prepared to hand political power to an interim Iraqi government in June 2004, several commanders said they expected U.S. troops would be able to move to the sidelines as Iraqi troops stepped up to defend the country. Earlier this year, as the Pentagon began refocusing its mission on training Iraqi troops, again the military said it expected to step back from major counterinsurgency missions.

Yet, on both occasions, Iraqi troops proved to be unprepared and U.S. forces found themselves once again leading dangerous missions in remote Iraqi villages and nighttime raids on the streets of Baghdad.

As the development of Iraq`s fragile democracy failed to defuse the insurgency or reduce the attacks on U.S. forces, senior commanders in Iraq this year began publicly lowering expectations about what the U.S. military would be able to achieve before beginning a gradual withdrawal.

They stopped defining the goal of defeating the insurgency as their mission, and began focusing on building a capable Iraqi army that could take on insurgents after U.S. troops had left the country.

"The day after the [parliamentary] elections, the insurgency will still be there," a senior military official in Baghdad told The Times in January. "And it will continue for several years to come."

But commanders over the course of several months began citing progress by Iraqi troops, and during the spring and early summer Casey said a number of times that he believed improvements could lead to a "substantial reduction" of U.S. forces in 2006.

In June, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld began to endorse the view of his commanders. However long U.S. troops stay, Rumsfeld told Congress, remnants of a well-armed insurgency will continue to fight them.

"If [the insurgency] does go on for four, eight, 10, 12, 15 years, whatever … it is going to be a problem for the people of Iraq," Rumsfeld said. "They`re going to have to cope with that insurgency over time."

Yet even as the president`s senior military and civilian advisors began to lay the groundwork, Bush remained firm in his insistence that the U.S. military`s mission would not be complete until the insurgency was defeated.

"When that mission of defeating the terrorists in Iraq is complete, our troops will come home," Bush said at his ranch near Crawford, Texas, in August.

But amid much of the same rhetoric Wednesday, Bush showed how far the White House had moved toward embracing a reality that the military and much of the rest of the administration had articulated months earlier.

The military`s mission, Bush said, was to train an Iraqi force that could take on the insurgents after U.S. troops have left the country.

"Our goal is to train enough Iraqi forces so they can carry the fight," Bush said at the Naval Academy.


Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times

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Victory, Mr President?

"Our strategy in Iraq is clear... I will settle for nothing less than complete victory" George Bush, yesterday

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article330464.e…

By Rupert Cornwell in Washington
Published: 01 December 2005

President George Bush said yesterday that America was on course for "complete victory" and he ruled out any firm timetable for the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. Instead he declared that Iraqi forces were beginning to take the lead in the battle against the insurgency.

In a speech aimed squarely at restoring morale on the home front, and to meet the growing clamour for a pull-out, Mr Bush set out what critics say he has conspicuously failed to deliver: a clear exit strategy from the two-and-a-half-year conflict.

In the midst of a war that has cost the lives of more than 2,100 US troops and in which public opinion has turned decisively against the President, he was trying to persuade the home front that despite evidence to the contrary, they were winning.

Victory would come, he said, thanks to the same Iraqi forces which critics say are demoralised, divided and ineffective. In front of a cheering audience at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Mr Bush held out the prospect of a gradual troop withdrawal, under a new approach that would mean US soldiers moving out of Iraqi cities and making fewer patrols, leaving that to newly trained Iraqi soldiers and police. "As Iraqi forces gain experience and the political process advances, we will be able to decrease our troop level in Iraq without losing our capability to defeat the terrorists," Mr Bush said.

Standing before a gold and blue banner proclaiming "Plan For Victory", the President added that decisions about troop levels would be dictated by conditions on the ground in Iraq and the judgement of US commanders, "not by artificial timetables set by politicians in Washington".

In practical terms, neither the 30-minute speech, nor a 35-page National Strategy for Victory in Iraq issued by the administration beforehand, offered great novelty. The aim was to convince Americans deeply sceptical about the handling of a war that has taken the lives of so many US troops and is costing $6bn (£3.47bn) a month, that the White House had a policy beyond a mantra-like repetition of "stay the course".

Polls show a majority of Americans think the US is bogged down in a Vietnam-like conflict that has made the US more, not less, vulnerable to terrorism, and Mr Bush`s approval ratings have slumped to a dismal 37 per cent, the lowest of his presidency.

The key to the conflict, Mr Bush says, is that the Iraqis themselves assume responsibility for securing their country. He acknowledged there had been "some setbacks" in the creation of a capable force, and that the performance of Iraqi troops was "still uneven in some areas". But progress was being made, the President declared, claiming more than 120 army and police battalions (average strength 700) were ready to fight unaided, and 80 more battalions were in combat beside coalition forces.

These figures are hotly contested by critics (and challenged even by many US commanders) who say only a handful of Iraqi units are able to fight on their own and morale is low.

Republicans hailed the speech as a clear and realistic blueprint for the future, but Democrats were scathing. Harry Reid, the Senate minority leader, accused Mr Bush of "recycling his tired rhetoric of `stay the course`." He had "again missed an opportunity to lay out a real strategy for success in Iraq that will bring our troops safely home".

Senator Edward Kennedy described the speech as "a continuation of a political campaign to shore up the failed policies in Iraq ... It does not respond to what the American people want."

Mr Bush portrayed Iraq as "the central front" in the war on terror, saying a precipitate US departure would send the wrong signal to its enemies. "Pulling our troops out before they achieve their purpose is not a plan for victory," he said. "America will not run in the face of car bombers and assassins as long as I am your commander-in-chief."

There were a few hints of change, but on tactics, not on underlying strategy. "If by `stay the course` they mean we will not allow the terrorists to break our will, they`re right," he said. "If by `stay the course` they mean we will not permit al-Qa`ida to turn Iraq into what Afghanistan was under the Taliban, they`re right as well." But if critics interpreted `stay the course` as an inability to learn from experience, "then they`re flat wrong".

The new White House document defines who the US sees as the enemy in Iraq. The largest group are "rejectionists", primarily Sunnis who prospered under Saddam Hussein. The document says this resistance will diminish if a democratic government that emerges from the December elections protects minority rights.

The second group are "Saddamists", former regime members who kept influence. Their power, says the administration, will prove no match for better-organised Iraqi forces.

The White House has dropped its insistence that foreign fighters were the main foe and now concedes that terrorists linked to al-Qa`ida are the smallest component of the insurgency.

nThe first female suicide bomber of European origin was identified yesterday when prosecutors said a Belgian-born woman was the perpetrator of an attack on US forces in Baghdad earlier this month. The woman, thought to be 37 or 38 years old, is said to have gone to Iraq to carry out the attack after marrying a radical Muslim and converting. Identified only by her first name, either Mireille or Muriel, the women is said to have come from southern Belgian city of Charleroi.

What the President said... and the reality of the war

`Our strategy in Iraq is clear. Our tactics are flexible and dynamic. We have changed them as conditions required and they are bringing us victory against a brutal enemy.`

After two-and-a-half years of war, nobody in Iraq believes the US is winning against the insurgents who have the active or passive support of the five million-strong Sunni Arab community. A key objective for Mr Bush is troop reduction and convincing the public the administration has a "strategy". No-one anticipates withdrawal of all troops any time soon.

`This war is going to take many turns. And the enemy must be defeated on every battlefield. Yet the terrorists have made it clear that Iraq is the central front in their war against humanity. And so we must recognise Iraq as the central front in the war on terror.`

The supporters of al-Qa`ida now have a haven in Iraq which they did not have before the war. Prior to invasion, there was no serious al-Qa`ida presence in Iraq. CIA director Porter Goss said that "Islamic extremists are exploiting the Iraqi conflict to recruit new anti-US jihadists." Mr Bush has admitted that al-Qa`ida accounts for only a tiny part of the insurgency. The aim of the bulk of the insurgency appears to be localised - namely driving out the US.

`Iraqi security forces are on the offensive against the enemy, cleaning out areas controlled by the terrorists and Saddam loyalists, leaving Iraqi forces to hold territory taken from the enemy, and following up with targeted reconstruction to help Iraqis rebuild their lives.`

The US has been taking territory from the insurgents since the start of the fighting but the war is still intensifying. There is little sign of reconstruction.

`Iraqi forces are earning the trust of their countrymen who are willing to help them in the fight against the enemy. As the Iraqi forces grow in number, they`re helping to keep a better hold on the cities taken from the enemy. And as Iraqi forces grow more capable, they`re increasingly taking the lead in the fight against the terrorists.`

Iraq is getting closer to outright civil war. Sunnis are terrified of Shia troops and police. The Kurds want to reclaim Kirkuk. Each side has its death squads. John Pike, a military analyst, said it was impossible to assess the ability of Iraqi forces. "If they`re saying there has been a change around and American forces are not taking the lead, but that Iraqi units are taking the lead, then it`s difficult to understand why they are still shipping home so many body-bags."

`At this time last year there were only a handful of Iraqi battalions ready for combat. Now there are over 120 Iraqi army and police combat battalions in the fight against the terrorists, typically comprised of between 350 and 800 Iraqi forces.`

Iraqi government officials say that without US support they could not hold much of Baghdad. Many Iraqi units are "ghost battalions", the number of soldiers inflated by commanders who pocket the pay of non-existent men.

`These decisions about troop levels will be driven by the conditions on the ground in Iraq and the good judgment of our commanders, not by artificial timetables set by politicians in Washington. Some are calling for a deadline for withdrawal. Many advocating an artificial timetable for withdrawing our troops are sincere, but I believe they`re sincerely wrong.`

He could scarcely say anything else, to talk of a timetable to pull out would have pointed to US desperation to extricate itself. The leader of the Sunni - the core of the uprising - say armed resistance will continue until the US pulls out. But the recent demand by some Iraqi parties for a timetable to pull out may be part of the choreography that will, in practice, hand Bush an opportunity to discuss withdrawal.

Patrick Cockburn and Andrew Buncombe

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Patrick Cockburn: Military progress claimed by White House is an illusion
http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/article330424.…
The Independent

Published: 01 December 2005

The Iraqi armed forces on the ground in Baghdad look very different from the encouraging picture of them painted by President George Bush. Its men are often packed into pathetically vulnerable convoys of ageing white pick-up trucks.

The much-feared paramilitary police commandos drive at breakneck speed through the streets firing into the air as civilian cars scatter in terror.

"I`ve been watching a lot of movies about the Wild West because it was so like Iraq today," said a diplomat in Baghdad yesterday. "There are armed men everywhere but frequently you don`t know who they are or whose side they are on."

Mr Bush said there were 120 army and police battalions ready to fight on their own against "the terrorists". A further 80 will fight alongside US troops. He stated the American achievement in terms of training, but the real problem for the US in Iraq is about motivation. On several occasions the US military has claimed it had built a powerful force only to see it dissolve or change sides in battle. During an insurgent uprising in Mosul, in northern Iraq, in November 2004 some 3,000 US-trained police went home, abandoning 30 police stations and $40m (£23m) worth of equipment.

This is why the American goal of suppressing the uprising in Iraq has proved so elusive. If the US was fighting a limited number of foreign "terrorists" it would have made progress in two and a half years. But it is confronting the five million-strong Sunni Arab community which can carry on the fight for as long as it wants.

There is a further problem that Mr Bush did not address. Hostility between the three main Iraqi communities - the Shia and Sunni Arabs and the Kurds - is growing by the day.

Sectarian divisions cut through the armed forces making it difficult to deploy them. The Iraqi Defence Ministry reportedly believes that out of 115 battalions it looked at this summer 60 were wholly Shia, 45 were Sunni, nine were Kurdish and just one was mixed. The danger is that if a Shia battalion is employed in a Sunni area it will provoke a furious reaction. In the Sunni stronghold of Fallujah, west of Baghdad, Shia units are more hated than the Americans, said a resident.

From late last year checkpoints manned by police commandos, under the interior ministry, became a frequent sight in Baghdad. But under the government of Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the ministry of the interior, formerly dominated by Sunni, was taken over by the Badr Brigade, the militia of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a Shia political party. Again and again Sunni men arrested by the 12,000-strong commando brigades would be found tortured and shot dead. Little attempt was made to conceal what was happening.

Mr Bush said yesterday that Iraqi armed forces were being created to take over from US troops who will then be able to withdraw from Iraq. But the loyalty of these units is often less to the Iraqi government than their own community or militia. The Sunni community has also learnt that its armed resistance is very effective in achieving its aims. The military progress claimed by Mr Bush is largely illusory.

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Latest Update: #33501 29.11.05 15:15:17
Latest Coalition Fatality: Nov 30, 2005
Military Fatalities US, UK, Other: : Total: 2314 , US: 2113 , Nov.05: 86

Iraker 11/30/05: Civilian: 580 Police/Mil: 176 Total: 756
http://www.icasualties.org/oif/IraqiDeaths.aspx

Regelmäßige Updates von Meldungen aus dem Irak:
http://icasualties.org/oif/

Da bei ´Today im Irak´ die Postings immer länger werden, hier den Link für alle Interessierte: http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

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[urlA president who seems less in touch with reality than Richard Nixon.]http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/01/opinion/01thur1.html?hp[/url]
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No more Watergates

Bob Woodward brought down Nixon, but failed to exhibit the same scepticism about Bush

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1654480,00.ht…
Sidney Blumenthal
Thursday December 1, 2005

Guardian
In the beginning, seasoned political reporters at the Washington Post disdained the Watergate story as insignificant, implausible and unserious. But two young journalists doggedly pursued every lead, helping bring about Richard Nixon`s resignation. Three decades later, Bob Woodward had come to embody the ultimate Washington insider. Over the past month, however, he has personified the stonewalling and covering up he once shattered to launch his brilliant career. His unravelling is as surprising and symptomatic a story of Bush`s Washington as his making was of Nixon`s.

On October 27, the night before Vice-President Cheney`s chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, was indicted on five counts of perjury and obstruction of justice, Woodward appeared on CNN. Asked about the case, he said: "I`m quite confident we`re going to find out that it started as a kind of gossip ... There`s a lot of innocent actions in all of this ... I don`t know how this is about the build-up to the war." He expressed his sympathy for those who might be indicted: " ... what distresses me is, you know, so and so might be indicted and so and so is facing ... And it is not yet proven." He concluded with invective against Patrick Fitzgerald, "a junkyard dog prosecutor".

On November 16 Woodward admitted he had been called to testify on November 3 before the prosecutor, having been given up by a source after Libby`s indictment. Woodward, it turned out, was the first journalist to learn Plame`s identity. "I hunkered down," he told his own newspaper. "I`m in the habit of keeping secrets. I didn`t want anything out there that was going to get me subpoenaed." Woodward claimed he heard about Plame in an interview he conducted in June 2003 for his book Plan of Attack, which failed to contain this startling information. While two Post reporters testified before the prosecutor, Woodward hid his role as material witness. With the disclosure, the storyteller lost the plot.

Woodward advocates no ideas and is indifferent to the fate of government. His fabled access has been in the service of his technique of accumulating mountains of facts whose scale fosters an image of omniscience. As his bestsellers and wealth piled up, he lost a sense of journalism as provisional and inherently imperfect, seeing it instead as something engraved in stone. But his method made him particularly vulnerable to manipulation by cunning sources.

Woodward`s 2002 book Bush At War, based partly on selected National Security Council documents leaked to him at White House instruction, was invaluable to the administration for its portrait of Bush as strong and decisive. Its omissions are as striking as its fragmentary facts, such as the absence of analysis of the disastrous operation at Tora Bora that allowed Bin Laden to escape. Plan of Attack includes intriguing shards of information about the twisting of intelligence to justify the war, but he fails to develop the material and theme.

By the publication of Plan of Attack, Woodward was "hunkered down," hiding his "secrets" from his newspaper, its readers and the prosecutor. He cryptically told one of the subpoenaed Post reporters to "keep him out of the reporting". He said there were "reasonable grounds to discredit" Joseph Wilson, the whistleblower. He asserted that a CIA assessment had determined that Plame`s outing had done no damage, but the CIA said no damage assessment report had been done. But when a source outed Woodward to the prosecutor, his cover-up was revealed. Above all, the extent of his credulity is exposed. It is more than paradoxical that the reporter who investigated Nixon and worked closely with professionals in government alarmed by the abuses should exhibit so little scepticism about Bush.

· Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President Clinton, is the author of The Clinton Wars

[e-mail]
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

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Published on Thursday, December 1, 2005 by the Agence France Presse
Flight Logs Reveal Hundreds of CIA Flights to Europe: Report
http://www.afp.org/


More than 300 CIA flights have landed at European airports, a British newspaper said, adding a new element to claims that Washington has been transporting terrorist suspects to secret prisons in Europe.

The Guardian daily said it had seen flight logs documenting the flights by 26 planes operated by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

The information showed an "unprecedented" amount of travel by the agency but did not reveal which planes took part in alleged prison transfers, it said.

The CIA has been accused in reports of using European countries for the transport, illegal detention and torture of suspected Islamist terrorists in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.

Outrage over the reports mounted in Europe this week as EU Justice Commissioner Franco Frattini threatened sanctions on Monday for any member nation hosting CIA prison camps on their soil.

The Council of Europe`s parliamentary assembly has announced a probe into reports of the clandestine prisons, including one that may be in Romania.

The Guardian said the flight logs revealed that the CIA visited Germany 96 times and Britain 80 times, though when charter flights were added this figure rose to more than 200.

France was only visited twice and Austria not at all, the newspaper said.

The logs also showed regular trips to eastern Europe, including 15 stops in Prague.

"Only one visit is recorded to the Szymany airbase in northeast Poland, which has been identified as the alleged site of a secret CIA jail," The Guardian reported.

Poland and Romania have denied hosting CIA prisons, it added.

The Guardian said the flight logs were obtained from Federal Aviation Administration data and sources in the aviation industry.

The United States has promised a timely and forthright reply to a EU letter demanding answers following the reports.

The issue threatens to dominate a five-day swing through the continent next week by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, after European Union chiefs warned member states involved in the alleged scheme could face sanctions.

Rice received the two paragraph letter from British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters.

"We will ... endeavor to respond to this letter to the best of our ability, in a timely and forthright manner," he said, but declined to say if a reply would go out before Rice leaves for Europe on Monday.

McCormack declined to release the letter, but said it asked for information from the United States over press reports about alleged detention or transporting of suspects through EU member states.

"The letter does talk about the fact that these press reports have attracted considerable attention among European publics as well as parliaments," he said.

Citing intelligence concerns, McCormack declined to say whether the flights or the alleged prisons existed, and could not say either whether such information could be included in the reply to the EU.

Straw, acting in Britain`s current capacity as rotating EU president, meanwhile told reporters he was awaiting a reply from Rice, with whom he has worked closely over issues like Iraq and Iran`s nuclear program.

"Of course when I get the reply I will circulate it to all my foreign minister colleagues," Straw told reporters in London.

Rice discussed the issue with visiting German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier on Tuesday, and the controversy looks set to surface during her trip through Germany, Romania, Ukraine and Brussels next week.

Germany and nearly a dozen other European countries have launched their own investigations into alleged CIA flights transporting detainees via their territories.

The United States has defended the use of methods outside normal legal procedures for terror suspects by arguing it is fighting a "different kind of war" against terrorism which renders traditional methods obsolete.

But it contends that it has not broken international law, or infringed its own constitution.

McCormack played down the notion that publics in European countries, which polls show are often highly sceptical of the Bush administration, would be further angered by the latest controversy.

"I think the very fact that the people of Europe themselves have experienced terrorism, they have suffered losses in this war against terrorism -- whether that is on the battlefields of Afghanistan or Iraq or in the capitals of Madrid or London -- I think they understand very clearly what kind of war it is that we`re fighting."

"This is an enemy that is determined to strike at them when they are engaged in their daily activities: riding a bus, getting on a train, flying on an airplane."

Copyright © 2005AFP

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49/2005

Abflug in die Folterkammer

Vertrauliche Ermittlungsakten offenbaren die Methoden der CIA im Kampf gegen den Terror. Mitten in Europa verschwinden Menschen. Manche tauchen nicht wieder auf. Welche Rolle spielen die deutschen Sicherheitsbehörden?

http://www.zeit.de/2005/49/Verschleppung?page=all

Von Florian Klenk und Ulrich Ladurner

Bevor die Weltpolitik in Gestalt eines bärtigen, langhaarigen Mannes sein kleines Büro im bayerischen Provinzstädtchen Neu-Ulm betrat, war Manfred Gnjidic, wie er es nennt, »nur ein kleiner Anwalt«. Ladendiebe und Verkehrssünder verteidigen, Ausländer vom benachbarten »Multikultizentrum« vor den immer strenger werdenden Behörden vertreten – das war sein Alltag. Ja, ein wenig hatte er das Brummen der Welt schon vorher mitbekommen, »denn auch hier in Ulm waren die Behörden ja nach dem 11. September hinter jedem Bärtigen her«. Der richtige »Krieg gegen den Terrorismus«, der wütete jedoch woanders. Ein verdächtiges CIA-Flugzeug, Frankfurt 2003© Niehues/advebtage media service; [e-mail] BILD

Und dann stand plötzlich einer dieser Bärtigen in seiner Kanzlei, stellte sich als Khaled al-Masri vor und wollte eine »große Geschichte« erzählen. »Wie Robinson Crusoe hat er damals ausgesehen«, erinnert sich Gnjidic und befürchtete, wieder so einen »Quengelmandanten« vor sich zu haben. Al-Masri aber sagte: »Ich bin Deutscher, ich wurde vom CIA in einen afghanischen Folterkeller entführt und nach monatelangen Verhören in einem albanischen Wald wieder ausgesetzt.« Gnjidic dachte zunächst: »Verarsch doch einen anderen!« Doch Khaled al-Masri beharrte auf seiner Geschichte. Er begann zu erzählen, er legte Dokumente vor, er zitterte und weinte. Anwalt Gnjidic hörte genau zu, dann kippte er seine Tasse Kaffee hinunter und dachte: »Da ist eine Riesensauerei im Gange. Das musst Du offen legen, wenn du deine Prinzipien und deinen Rechtsstaat verteidigen willst.

Das war vor über einem Jahr. Da wurde aus dem »kleinen Anwalt« ein weiteres Rädchen einer langsam anlaufenden Maschine, die gegen ein Unrecht kämpft, das heute die europäische Öffentlichkeit aufwühlt: Menschenraub von vermeintlichen Terroristen, organisiert vom amerikanischen Geheimdienst im Rahmen des »Krieges gegen den Terror«. Seit Jahren schon berichten US-Medien über staatliche Verschleppungen und anschließende Folterverhöre durch die CIA. Doch erst seit die Washington Post Anfang November aufdeckte, dass die für diese Entführungen benutzten Flugzeuge regelmäßig auch Militärbasen und Gefängnisse in Europa ansteuern, regt sich erstmals lauter Protest in der EU. Es gebe »ernst zu nehmende, beunruhigende Indizien für geheime US-Transporte gefangener Islamisten«, sagte vergangene Woche der Sonderermittler des Europarates, Dick Marty, der nun Licht in die geheimen Praktiken der CIA bringen und Europas Regierungen in einem speziellen Verfahren zu Ermittlungen zwingen will.

Die ZEIT nahm Einsicht in Ermittlungsakten, Telefonüberwachungsprotokolle und Zeugenaussagen von Sicherheitsbehörden aus mehreren europäischen Ländern. Die Dokumente zeichnen ein detailliertes Bild der Entführungen. Was beharrliche Ankläger, Journalisten und Menschenrechtsaktivisten in den letzten Monaten gesammelt haben, lässt vermuten, dass hinter den Entführungen ein System steckt, über das selbst hartgesottene europäische Geheimdienstler staunen – von dem aber auch europäische Sicherheitsbehörden profitiert haben könnten.

Italien, Mailand. Was für den Anwalt aus Ulm wie ein Schock wirken mochte, war für die junge in Mailand lebende Ägypterin Fatima M. (Name geändert, Anm. d. Red.) allzu bekannt. Wie viele Angehörige der islamischen Gemeinde in Mailand kannte sie die Geschichte des Islamisten Abu Talal. Der war 1995 in der kroatischen Hauptstadt Zagreb unter mysteriösen Umständen verschwunden und nie wieder aufgetaucht. Abu Talal war Sprecher der Al-Dschama’a al-Islamiya, einer in Ägypten verbotenen extremistischen Organisation. Sein Verschwinden schürte in der Mailänder Muslimgemeinde die Furcht, dass jederzeit einer der »Ihrigen« verschleppt werden könnte. Gerüchte kursierten über potenzielle Täter: der ägyptische Geheimdienst, die Italiener vielleicht, die CIA, die man seit dem 11. September 2001 am meisten fürchtete. So gingen die Gerüchte, so verfestigte sich die Sorge.

Deshalb auch erzählte Fatima M. einer Freundin, was sie am 17. Februar 2003 zwischen 11.30 und 12 Uhr in der Via Guerzoni in Mailand beobachtet hatte: Sie kam gerade mit ihren Kindern vom Einkauf beim Bäcker, als sie einen Lieferwagen bemerkte, der den Bürgersteig blockierte. Ein Mann arabischen Aussehens stand an eine Hauswand gelehnt, ihm gegenüber zwei Männer in westlicher Kleidung. Sie kontrollierten offensichtlich die Papiere des Arabers. Einer telefonierte dabei mit einem Mobiltelefon. Fatima M. wechselte die Straßenseite. Da hörte sie Lärm. Sie drehte sich um. Der Lieferwagen brauste davon. Der Araber und die beiden Männer waren verschwunden.

Aufgrund dieser Zeugenaussage von Fatima M. erlassen die italienischen Behörden ein Jahr später Haftbefehle gegen 22 US-Bürger. Sie sollen an der Entführung des Ägypters Abu Omar beteiligt gewesen sein, dessen Verschwinden Fatima M. an jenem 17. Februar 2003 beobachtet hatte. Der Mann hatte 2001 politisches Asyl erhalten, auch er war ein Aktivist der Al-Dschama’a al-Islamiya. Die Anklageschrift ist 234 Seiten stark. Zwischen den Zeilen ist das Staunen der italienischen Polizei über die ganze Aktion, vor allem aber auch über die Dreistigkeit der Entführer herauszulesen. Spürbar ist auch die Enttäuschung der Italiener, von Verbündeten im »Kampf gegen den Terror« hintergangen worden zu sein.

Immerhin war nach Erkenntnissen der italienischen Ermittler ein Beamter am mutmaßlichen Menschenraub beteiligt, den sie gut kannten: Robert Seldon Lady, der Verbindungsoffizier der CIA am US-Konsulat von Mailand. Die Italiener nannten ihn freundschaftlich »Bob«, und sie hatten eng und oft mit ihm kooperiert, denn Mailand hat eine aktive Islamistenszene, zu der auch der später vom CIA entführte Abu Omar gehörte. Auch die italienische Polizei hatte den Ägypter bereits im Visier. Sie ermittelte gegen ihn wegen Verbindungen zum internationalen Terrorismus. CIA-Mann »Bob« sollte ihnen dabei helfen und gleichzeitig italienische Hilfe erhalten. Der Kampf gegen den Terror war doch ein gemeinsamer Kampf. Dachten die Italiener.

Und plötzlich war Abu Omar spurlos verschwunden. Mehr als die Zeugenaussage von Fatima M. hatten die Italiener nicht in der Hand. Die angefragten US-Stellen waren nicht besonders kooperativ. Abu Omar, beschied die angefragte US-Behörde, habe sich an einen unbekannten Ort auf dem Balkan begeben. »Eine Angabe«, heißt es in der Anklageschrift trocken, »die sich später als völlig haltlos herausstellte«. Vielleicht war dies auch nur ein Versuch der Amerikaner, den Italienern eine falsche Spur zu legen.

Italiens Ermittler kamen jedenfalls nicht weiter. Der mutmaßliche Menschenraub war bereits zu den Akten gelegt worden, als am 20. April 2004, mehr als ein Jahr nach der Entführung, in einer Mailänder Wohnung das Telefon klingelte. Der entführte Prediger Abu Omar rief seine in Italien lebende Frau aus dem Haus seines Bruders in Alexandria an. Abu Omar erzählte hastig, man habe ihn soeben freigelassen. Dann berichtete er, wie er entführt worden war. Der Lieferwagen, in den er geworfen worden war, hielt nach einer rund fünf Stunden langen Fahrt an einem Militärflughafen. Man setzte Abu Omar in ein Flugzeug, nach einer Stunde Flug landete er auf einem weiteren großen Militärflughafen, wo er in ein anderes Flugzeug umsteigen musste. Schließlich landete er in einem ägyptischen Gefängnis. Die Beamten dort folterten ihn schwer. Und nun hatten sie ihn freigelassen – unter der Bedingung, wie er seiner Frau berichtete, dass er niemanden erzählte, was mit ihm geschehen war. »Sie haben mir gesagt, dass dich viele Journalisten aufsuchen werden«, berichtete Abu Omar seiner Frau und schärfte ihr ein: »Sprich mit niemandem, mit niemandem, verstehst Du? Niemandem!«

Die Warnung war nutzlos, denn die italienische Polizei hörte das Gespräch ab. Nun hatte sie einen Faden in der Hand, um das Geheimnis hinter Omars Verschwinden aufzuklären. Sie begann mit einer äußerst komplexen Ermittlung. An ihrem Ende standen für die Fahnder nicht nur die 22 Namen der an der Entführung beteiligten CIA-Beamten fest. Auch der Hergang der Aktion konnte genau rekonstruiert werden, da die mutmaßlichen Entführer Mobiltelefone und Kreditkarten benutzt hatten und so Bewegungsprofile der Agenten erstellt werden konnten. Außerdem hatten die Entführer in ihren Hotels ihre Namen hinterlassen. Sie fühlten sich sicher, und sie hatten reichlich Geld zur Verfügung. »Nur Subjekte, die einer Organisation mit enormen Mitteln angehören, können sich das leisten«, heißt es in der Anklage. Die Agenten hatten in weniger als drei Wochen 120000 Euro in Luxushotels ausgegeben. Nach ihrem Einsatz hatten sie in Venedig noch einmal kräftig gefeiert. Abu Omar hingegen wurde drei Wochen nach dem Anruf bei seiner Frau im April 2004 erneut zur Polizei in Alexandria gerufen und ist seither verschwunden. Die Haftbefehle gegen Robert Seldon Lady und 21 weitere Amerikaner sind bis heute nicht vollzogen worden. Vom CIA-Mann und seinen mutmaßlichen Komplizen fehlt jede Spur. Die US-Behörden haben auf entsprechende Anfragen der italienischen Ermittler nicht geantwortet.

Eine Mauer des Schweigens. Davon kann auch der Ulmer Anwalt Manfred Gnjidic ein Lied singen. Auch er kommt gemeinsam mit dem Münchner Staatsanwalt Martin Hofmann im Fall des nach Afghanistan verschleppten Deutschen Khaled al-Masri nicht weiter, weil amerikanische Behörden die Rechtshilfeersuchen ignorieren. Nur ab und zu dringen Auskünfte über das Kidnapping des Deutschen nach außen. Al-Masri sei leider mit einem Namensvetter eines Bekannten der 9/11-Attentäter verwechselt worden. US-Außenministerin Condoleezza Rice, damals noch George W. Bushs Sicherheitsberaterin, habe sogar persönlich für seine Freilassung interveniert. Alles sei sehr unangenehm. Doch die USA seien keinesfalls bereit, sich für das Unrecht zu entschuldigen, geschweige denn Entschädigung zu zahlen.

Der Fall des Abu Omar und die penible Ermittlungsarbeit der Mailänder Staatsanwaltschaft dokumentiert bisher am genauesten das Vorgehen der CIA-Greiftrupps. Offenbar können sie sich ungehindert von Stützpunkt zu Stützpunkt bewegen, bis sie ihr Ziel erreicht haben – meist ist es ein Land, wo Folterknechte ihr Handwerk frei ausüben können. Im Fall Abu Omar haben die italienischen Fahnder mittels Handy-Rufdatenrückerfassung sehr glaubhaft nachgewiesen, dass der Entführte zuerst in die norditalienische US-Luftwaffenbasis Aviano gebracht wurde, von dort ins deutsche Ramstein und dann weiter nach Kairo.

»Nach Aktenlage«, so steht es in den Unterlagen der Mailänder Staatsanwaltschaft, habe am 17. Februar 2003 der Learjet 35, Flugkennzeichen »Spar92«, um 18.20 Uhr den Flughafen Aviano mit dem Ziel Ramstein verlassen. Er war kurze Zeit vorher erst aus Ramstein nach Aviano gekommen. Im Jet saß der Entführte Abu Omar. Nach Erkenntnissen der italienischen Behörden wurde er 50 Minuten nach der Landung in Ramstein, um 20.31 Uhr, nach Kairo ausgeflogen.

Von CIA-Beamten wird mittlerweile bestätigt, dass eine Luftflotte, die sich hinter privaten Tarnfirmen versteckt, Gefangene transportiert, meist in den arabischen Raum. Ein Flugzeug wurde womöglich fotografiert. Am 21. Januar 2003 stiegen Piloten des österreichischen Bundesheeres mit ihren Abfangjägern in die Luft, weil sie eine »pseudozivile Maschine« über dem österreichischen Luftraum geortet hatten. Sie fotografierten die Maschine – eine Herkules, die von der Rhein-Main-Airbase in Frankfurt kam. Das Bundesheer will nicht ausschließen, dass auch dieser Jet, den die USA bereits im Kosovo-Krieg benutzt hatten, Gefangene transportierte.

Der Fall Abu Omar zeigt die Flexibilität der privaten Firmen, unter deren Namen die Agenten fliegen. Der Jet, der Abu Omar von Ramstein nach Kairo flog, wird nach Berichten der Chicago Tribune üblicherweise von der Baseballmannschaft Boston Red Sox für Auswärtsspiele benutzt. Der Besitzer des Flugzeuges habe darüber informiert, dass sein Jet von der CIA angemietet wurde.

All das verlangt nach Aufklärung. Doch die Politik blieb angesichts solcher Vorfälle bis vor kurzem merkwürdig still. »Ich habe sowohl an Bundeskanzler Gerhard Schröder als auch an Außenminister Joschka Fischer geschrieben, um diplomatische Rückendeckung zu bekommen. Doch ich erhielt nur eine formelle Antwort, man werde sich um den Fall kümmern. Dabei wurde ja kein Kaugummi, sondern ein Deutscher geklaut«, sagt Manfred Gnjidic, der Anwalt des verschleppten Ulmers al-Masri. Inzwischen hat sich die Stimmung gewandelt. Nun dringen deutsche Politiker aus Regierungs- und Oppositionsreihen auf Aufklärung über die Flüge der CIA.

Auch die Rolle deutscher Behörden muss dabei geklärt werden. Profitieren auch sie von »Ermittlungsergebnissen«, von Folterverhören und Entführungen? Erste Indizien sprechen dafür. Erst vergangene Woche berichtete der Spiegel, dass deutsche Ermittler im Far-Filastin-Gefängnis, einem berüchtigten syrischen Folterkeller, auftauchten, um einen verschleppten Freund der New Yorker Todespiloten vom 11. September 2001, den Hamburger Mohammed Haydar Zammar, zu verhören. Und auch Khaled al-Masri, der Verschleppte aus Ulm, hat den deutschen Ermittlern in stundenlangen Verhören verstörende Details geschildert, die nach Deutschland weisen.

Al-Masri war auf einer Urlaubsreise an der makedonisch-albanischen Grenze aus dem Bus geholt, verhaftet, in ein abgedunkeltes Hotelzimmer nahe der US-Botschaft gebracht und dann in die »Salzhöhle«, ein berüchtigtes US-Geheimgefängnis in Afghanistan, verschleppt worden. Maskierte Männer hatten ihm zuvor die Kleider vom Leib geschnitten, Windelhosen angelegt, ihn in einen orangefarbenen Overall gesteckt, einen schwarzen Sack über den Kopf gestülpt und dann mit einer Betäubungsspritze in die Schulter ruhig gestellt. Es gebe nun, so erklärte man ihm, »keine Rechte mehr«. Dafür gab es verdrecktes Wasser und ausgekochte Hühnerknochen, die man ihm zum Fraß vorwarf. Laut al-Masri war auch ein Vernehmungsbeamter mit norddeutschem Akzent anwesend, der sich als »Sam« vorstellte und erstaunlich viele Details über die Ulmer Islamistenszene kannte. Er wusste sogar, dass al-Masri mit einem Islamisten unlängst im Ulmer Metro-Markt Fisch kaufen war. Woher hatte der Mann das Wissen aus der deutschen Provinz? Al-Masri fragte »Sam«, ob er »für Deutschland« arbeite. Der sagte nur: »Diese Frage werde ich nicht beantworten.« Die deutschen Behörden bestreiten solche Vorwürfe, und sie stellen in Abrede, dass »Sam« einer von ihnen ist.

In Schweden ist die Kooperation zwischen CIA-Entführungskommandos und der Polizei inzwischen aktenkundig. Das geht aus einem Urteil hervor, das der ermittelnde Justizombudsmann Mats Melin verfasst hat. Er stellte fest, Schwedens Geheimdienst habe CIA-Agenten »freie Hand gelassen«, die unter Extremismusverdacht stehenden ägyptischen Asylwerber Mohammed al-Zery und Achmed Agiza vom Stockholmer Bromma-Flughafen in ägyptische Folterkeller auszufliegen. Ein glatter Verstoß gegen das Folterverbot, urteilte in diesem Fall auch das UN-Komitee gegen Folter. Der entführte Agiza, so berichtete seine Mutter nach einem Haftbesuch, soll dort mit Elektroschocks gefoltert worden sein. In ihren Aussagen vor schwedischen Ermittlungsbehörden schilderten die schwedischen Geheimdienstleute nicht nur die gleichen Details wie der Ulmer al-Masri, sie zeigten sich auch erstaunt, wie professionell das amerikanische Team vorging: »Sie trugen Kapuzen. Alles war still. Sie benutzten eine Form von Zeichensprache. Sie durchsuchten und zerschnitten seine Kleider auf der Toilette. Dann machte es nur ›schwipps‹, und er hatte einen orangefarbenen Klettverschluss-Overall und eine Kapuze übergezogen.«

Auch in den USA ist nun eine heftige Debatte über diese Entführungen und die Verhörpraktiken der CIA ausgebrochen. In der jüngsten Ausgabe der Zeitschrift The New Yorker wird detailliert nachgezeichnet, wie ein CIA-Mann einen Häftling in der »Kruzifix-Stellung« an ein Fenster kettete, ihm eine schwarze Kapuze überzog und so nicht merkte, wie dieser vor seinen Augen blau anlief und verstarb. Der CIA-Mann versieht unbehelligt weiter seinen Dienst.

Anwälte in Europa und den USA bringen sich angesichts solcher Zustände bereits in Stellung, tauschen Akten und Information aus. »In London wurde meinem Mandanten während des Verhörs angedroht, ihn an ein Militärcamp der Amerikaner auszuliefern, wenn er nicht gesteht«, berichtet die Londoner Anwältin Gareth Pierce. »Es gibt in diesen Fällen fast keine Öffentlichkeit. Also müssen wir klagen und Prozesse anhängig machen. Nur so finden wir heraus, was in den letzten Jahren passiert ist«, sagt Joshua Colangelo-Bryan von der Anwaltssozietät Dorsey & Whitney, der verschleppte Mandanten aus Bahrain vertritt und die Medien dort mit Informationen füttert. Der Bremer Anwalt Bernhard Docke, der den seit drei Jahren in Guantánamo ohne Anklage und ohne Richter festgehaltenen Deutsch-Türken Murat Kurnaz vertritt, spricht angesichts der Entführungen von einem »kafkaesken System«, in dem der Rechtsstaat keine Geltung mehr habe. Auch Docke beklagt mangelndes Engagement deutscher Behörden.

Mit weiteren Klagen, Prozessen und Enthüllungen ist zu rechnen. Wenn sich dabei herausstellen sollte, dass europäische Behörden mehr wussten, als sie bisher zugeben, wird aus diesem amerikanischen Skandal ein transatlantischer. Dabei ist es schon schlimm genug, dass europäische Geheimdienste angeblich ahnungslos waren, während aus ihren Ländern Gefangene in Foltergefängnisse verschleppt wurden.

(c) DIE ZEIT 01.12.2005 Nr.49

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48/2005

Folterstaat Amerika

Menschen ohne Rechte: Das wollten die Väter der Constitution für immer ausschließen. Unter der Regierung Bush gibt es sie wieder. Und seit wann wussten deutsche Behörden davon?
http://www.zeit.de/2005/48/Menschenrechte?page=all

Von Michael Naumann

Der Europarat, die Kommission der Europäischen Union, Mitglieder des Europäischen Parlaments, Politiker Schwedens, Norwegens, Islands, Italiens und auch der neue deutsche Außenminister Frank Steinmeier auf Antrittsbesuch in Washington geben sich aufgeschreckt, verstört, verärgert oder unterinformiert: Der Hauptverbündete der Nato, der wichtigste Handelspartner Europas, die einzig verbleibende Weltmacht, die Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika sollen auf dem Boden der alten Welt illegal Gefangene gemacht oder transportiert, mehr noch, sie sollen in Polen und Rumänien geheime CIA-Verhörzentren betrieben haben, in denen Gefangene des „war on terrorism“ befragt und womöglich auch gefoltert worden seien. Nach Artikel 52 der Europäischen Menschenrechtskonvention müssen beide Staaten dem ansonsten politisch zahnlosen Europarat wahrheitsgetreue Auskunft geben. Sie bestreiten es aber - noch.
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Eine C17 Globemaster der US-Luftwaffe startet vom Rhein-Main-Flughafen in
Frankfurt am Main, im Hintergrund stehen Lufthansa-Flugzeuge (Archivfoto vom
10.10.2005). Der US-Luftwaffenstützpunkt in Frankfurt am Main war nach
Informationen der Berliner Zeitung von 2002 bis 2004 wohl das »wichtigste
Drehkreuz für geheime CIA-Flüge in Europa.« Welchen Zweck die Flüge hatten,
ist aber unklar
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Man wolle, so versichern die Politiker mit angebrachter Empörung, der Sache nachgehen. Steinmeier mochte sich nicht auf Zeitungsmeldungen verlassen. Dabei hatte Innenminister Otto Schily schon im Februar beim CIA-Chef Porter Goss wegen der Entführung eines deutschen Staatsbürgers, Khaled el-Masri, interveniert: Der war, nach Folterungen in Afghanistan, mit einer CIA-Maschine nach Deutschland zurückgebracht worden.

Die Nachricht vom „Archipel CIA“ ( Der Spiegel ) in Europa stammt aus der Washington Post. Die Zeitung, die einst mit ihren investigativen Reportern Woodward und Bernstein die Regierung Nixon über den Watergate-Skandal gestürzt hatte, berief sich auf Quellen innerhalb der CIA. Genauer, auf Mitarbeiter des Geheimdienstes, die ganz offenkundig nicht einverstanden sind mit dem rechtsstaatlich zweifelhaften Kurs, den die Vereinigten Staaten seit dem 11. September 2001 im „Krieg gegen den Terrorismus“ nehmen. Auf die Verschwiegenheit des US-Senats können sich die Folter-Befürworter im Weißen Haus und in Geheimdienstkreisen auch nicht mehr verlassen – unter Anleitung des einst selbst in Vietnam gefolterten Senators McCain wächst der politische Widerstand gegen die offenkundigen Menschenrechtsverbrechen der eigenen Regierung. Und so neu sind die Vorwürfe gegen die USA auch nicht: Bereits im Februar hatte die Londoner Zeitung Independent gemeldet, dass zwei Flugzeuge, die offenkundig im Dienst der CIA unterwegs waren, Flughäfen in Großbritannien und Irland benutzten, um Gefangene zu „verschieben“. Aber erst nach der Meldung der Washington Post Ende dieses Monats wachten Europarat, Europaparlament, einige Außenminister und die Europakommission auf und kündigten Nachforschungen an. Allein in Frankfurt soll es zwischen 2002 und 2004 etwa 85 Starts und Landungen von so genannten „CIA-Flugzeugen“ gegeben haben, die womöglich Gefangene transportierten. Bestätigte sich dies, wäre die Bundesrepublik unwillentlich zum Gehilfen der Folterpraxis geworden.

Für die neue Bundesregierung kommt der inneramerikanische Zwist unpassend. Wie soll sie sich verhalten, wo liegen in Washingtons Kräftefeldern die zukünftigen Mehrheiten? Angela Merkel neigt zur guten alten Bündnistreue, come what may. Doch die Jahre sind vorüber, in denen deutsche Washington-Korrespondenten garantierte Bestseller wie „Unser Amerika“ (Dieter Kronzucker) oder „Der fremde Freund: Amerika“ (Klaus Harpprecht) schreiben konnten. „Unser Amerika“ und Europa sind sich zumindest auf politischer Ebene von Bush-Jahr zu Bush-Jahr fremder geworden. Selbst der stereotype Antiamerikanismus-Vorwurf gegen alle Versuche, diese Fremdheit beim Namen zu nennen, ist „im alten Europa“ verstummt. Denn Amerika ist ein Folterstaat geworden. Die einzig hoffnungsvolle Seite dieses Vorwurfs ist in der Tatsache beschlossen, dass die Beweise für diesen erschreckenden Sachverhalt aus dem amerikanischen politischen System selbst stammen – eruiert von zivilgesellschaftlichen Organisationen wie „Human Rights Watch“, von Zeitungen wie der Washington Pos und New York Times, aber auch von Untersuchungsausschüssen des amerikanischen Kongresses.

Wenn die Hinrichtung eines Menschen die ultimative Form der Folter ist, dann trifft das Etikett „Folterstaat“ schon längst auf die Vereinigten Staaten zu. Alle zehn Tage wird ein Mensch in den Vereinigten Staaten exekutiert – seit dreißig Jahren geht das so. Zwar nicht in allen Einzelstaaten, ganz besonders aber in Texas. Präsident George W. Bush hat über 150 zum Tode verurteilten Delinquenten während seiner Amtszeit als texanischer Gouverneur jegliche Gnade verweigert. Sie wurden von Staats wegen vergiftet. In einem Fall halfen auch die inständigen Bitten des Papstes nicht. Diese barbarische Rechtssitte teilen die Nordamerikaner vor allem mit den Chinesen.

Dennoch versichert George W. Bush immer wieder mit aller Inbrunst: „Wir foltern nicht.“ Sein Vize Richard Cheney sieht das anders. Amerika, so sagte er nach dem Anschlag auf das World Trade Center vor vier Jahren, müsse bei der Abwehr des Terrorismus „andere, neue Wege gehen“. Cheney sei, so sagte vorige Woche der ehemalige CIA-Chef Admiral Turner, der „Vizepräsident für Folter“.

Einzigartig unter den Nationen des westlichen Zivilisations- und Kulturkreises ist die staatlich autorisierte Praxis der Folter durch amerikanische Soldaten, CIA-Agenten im Verbund mit Schergen nahöstlicher Verbündeter, an der Spitze das diktatorisch geführte Ägypten. Dem Gemüt des „alten Europas“ unvorstellbar, aber dennoch wahr ist der handschriftliche Vorschlag eines Nato-Verteidigungsministers, Gefangene zum Beispiel nicht vier, sondern zehn Stunden lang stehen zu lassen (Donald Rumsfeld) – eine der grausamsten Torturen in der Tradition des sowjetischen NKWD. „Ich selbst“, schrieb Rumsfeld an den Rand eines Folter-Memorandums, „stehe ja auch zehn Stunden täglich.“ Allerdings nicht, wie in einer amerikanischen Zelle im US-Gefängnis von Baghram bei Kabul geschehen (und von Pentagon-Juristen nachgewiesen) an eine Wand gekettet – auf den Zehenspitzen, bis der Tod eintritt.

Wie einst die Geheimdienste der totalitären Staaten, ob Gestapo oder KGB, verfügt die CIA seit dem 11. September 2001 über eigene Gefängnisse, jenseits aller bürgerlichen Rechtsstaatlichkeit und geschützt vor dem Zugriff der zivilen amerikanischen Justiz. Laut New York Times hält der amerikanische Nachrichtendienst derzeit „zwei bis drei Dutzend“ Gefangene fest, und „mehr als 100 sind von dem Dienst von einem Land ins andere verfrachtet worden“, wo sie von einheimischen Polizisten oder Soldaten im Auftrag und bisweilen auch in Anwesenheit der Amerikaner verhört – oder, wie Davongekommene berichten, auch gefoltert werden. Nicht anders ist der amerikanische Luftverkehr über Europa mit Verdächtigen „im Gepäck“ zu erklären.

In Ländern, in denen heute noch mit Kneifzangen und chirurgischem Besteck ermittelt wird, in solchen mittelalterlichen Polizei-Milieus hoffen Washingtons Agenten ganz offenkundig durch einheimische „Kräfte“ schneller zu erfahren, was sie durch die eigenen, womöglich weniger brutale Methoden nicht zu hören bekommen. Dabei zählen zu den zehn offiziellen, genehmigten „innovativen Verhörmethoden“ (CIA-Chef Porter Goss) bekannte totalitäre Schreckenstechniken, zum Beispiel Schlafentzug (eine der üblichen bolschewistischen Foltermethoden, wie Solschenizyns „Archipel Gulag“ bezeugt), ohrenbetäubende Beschallung durch Heavy Metal-Musik, Unterkühlung und schließlich auch „submarino“ – berüchtigt nach Erzählungen von Überlebenden aus Verliesen südamerikanischer Diktaturen. Der Gefangene wird auf einem Brett festgeschnallt. Dann wird er kopfüber in einen Wasserbottich getunkt, bis er glaubt zu ertrinken. Die Prozedur, inzwischen „waterboarding“ genannt, wird so lange wiederholt, bis der Gefangene aus Todesangst gesteht, was von ihm verlangt wird.

Vor Amerikas Gerichten wären derlei erzwungene Aussagen aus Verfassungsgründen unbrauchbar. Also werden sie bislang auch nicht als belastende Beweise in öffentliche Verfahren gegen die wenigen amerikanischen Bürger eingebracht, denen bisher wegen des Verdachts terroristischer Vergehen ein Prozess gemacht wurde beziehungsweise wird. Meistens, das belegen die Geschichten von Folteropfern der jüngeren Vergangenheit, stimmen ihre Geständnisse ebenso wenig wie einst in Europas finsteren Inquisitionsprozessen: Hexen, die sich selbst nach unfassbaren Qualen dem Scheiterhaufen auslieferten, waren natürlich keine. Washingtons Exekutive scheinen diese historischen Wahrheiten genau so egal zu sein wie ihre völkerrechtliche Institutionalisierung in der Konvention gegen Folter. Ganz egal war aber auch dem britischen Außenministerium der Bericht seines Botschafters Craig Murray in Usbekistan, der im Jahre 2004 nach London meldete, dass ein usbekischer Terrorverdächtiger, von amerikanischen Agenten aus dem Nahen Osten nach Taschkent verschleppt, in einem Gefängnis zu Tode gequält wurde: „Submarino“, diesmal wahrscheinlich in kochendem Wasser. Der entsetzte Botschafter, ein Ehrenmann, demissionierte. Ausgerechnet der britische Außenminister Straw soll sich nun im Namen der Europäischen Union in Washington über die Machenschaften der CIA in Washington kundig machen.

In die republikanische Verfassung der Vereinigten Staaten hat die Folter-Praxis im so genannten „war on terrorism“ inzwischen einen tiefen Riss geschlagen, der so leicht nicht zu schließen sein wird – es sei denn, die Bush-Regierung ändert radikal ihren Kurs. Das System der Gewaltenteilung, der checks and balances, ist gestört. Ein vom US-Senat mit neunzigprozentiger Zustimmung verabschiedetes, absolutes Folter-Verbot im Inland und im Ausland, das in Wirklichkeit nur alle diesbezüglichen völkerrechtlichen Konventionen wiederholt, die von den Vereinigten Staaten unterzeichnet worden sind, wird derzeit von George W. Bush mit einem Veto bedroht. Es wäre das erste seiner Amtszeit.

Inzwischen beansprucht das Pentagon weiterhin die militärische Jurisdiktion über seine islamischen Gefangenen, ohne sie als klassische Kriegsgefangene anzuerkennen. Die meisten sind der US-Army keineswegs im Kampf in die Hände geraten, manche aber sind mit Hilfe der CIA oder anderer geheimer US-Organisationen entführt worden, zum Beispiel aus Spanien, Italien oder Schweden und aus westafrikanischen Staaten. Washington weigert sich, ihnen den völkerrechtlich geschützten Status von Kombattanten im Sinnen der Haager Landkriegsordnung bzw. der Genfer Konventionen zuzugestehen. Unter dem Phantasie-Titel „enemy combattant“ sind sie vogelfrei – verlorene Menschen ohne Anspruch auf Gehör, zivilen Anwalt oder gar geltendes Recht.

Spätestens seit den Skandalen von Abu Ghraib und Baghram (wo mehrere Gefangene von GIs zu Tode geprügelt wurden) sind die zum Himmel schreienden Vorgänge in den amerikanischen Gefängnissen von Guantanamo, Baghram, Mosul und anderswo notorisch in aller Welt. US-Militäranwälte ermitteln – wenngleich höchst zögerlich - den Hergang von 26 Todesfällen in irakischen und afghanischen Verliesen. Darüber hinaus sind im Pentagon über 300 Folter-Vorwürfe aktenkundig, nicht wenige aufgrund von Protesten der eigenen Soldaten. Und spätestens seit die Journalistin Jane Mayer im vergangenen Februar die „outgesourcten Folter-Praktiken“ der Bush-Administration im New Yorker en detail enthüllte, ist bekannt, dass seit den Anschlägen von „9/11“ Dutzende Terrorverdächtige in einem geheimdienstlichen amerikanischem Projekt Namens „Rendition“, das heißt „Überführung“, in menschenrechtlich kriminelle Nationen wie Ägypten, Syrien, Marokko und Jordanien, verschleppt wurden. Alle vier stehen auf der „Folterstaaten-Liste“ des State Departments.

Die stellenweise Kollaboration des englischen Geheimdienstes M1-6 bei derlei Aktionen schien die Europäische Union und auch den Europarat bis vor kurzem nicht sonderlich zu stören. Die Bestätigung, dass der polnische Geheimdienst in unheiliger Allianz mit den amerikanischen Kollegen das schmutzige Verhörgeschäft betreibe, würde die Europäische Union in eine ihrer schwersten moralischen Krisen werfen – wie wäre politisch umzugehen mit einem neuen Mitglied, das sich in die Polizeipraxis seiner kommunistischen Vergangenheit zurückbegibt? Und Rumänien? Zumindest in diesem Falle könnte niemand behaupten, überrascht worden zu sein.

Das außenpolitische Gewicht der Bundesrepublik ist zu gering, um die Vereinigten Staaten erfolgreich zu drängen, von Folter und Rechtlosigkeit abzulassen. Die Regierung ist allerdings aufgefordert, dem Parlament und der Öffentlichkeit zu erklären, seit wann deutsche Nachrichtendienste von der amerikanischen Praxis der Gefangenen-„Verfrachtung“ über deutschen Boden wissen – und ob sie gar an Verhören im Ausland teilgenommen haben. Ein parlamentarischer Untersuchungsausschuss wird den naheliegenden Verdacht überwinden können, in einer Großen Koalition würde über mögliche Verfehlungen des Staates auch ein Großer Schleier geworfen. Mit dem Vorwurf des Alarmismus müsste die Abgeordneten leben; denn, mit Aristoteles gesprochen, „Freunden der Verfassung“ ist es erlaubt, ihre möglichen Gefährdungen zu übertreiben. Sind es aber keine Übertreibungen, so käme ein solcher Ausschuss womöglich schon zu spät.

(c) ZEIT online, 29.11.2005

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Published on Thursday, December 1, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
War Profiteer Knows How to Party
by Sarah Anderson
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1201-30.htm


Over the past few months, I’ve gotten all kinds of flak from CEOs who were the subject of a report I co-authored about executive pay among defense contractors. Jack London of CACI International, whose employees interrogated prisoners at Abu Ghraib, denounced what I wrote as “shameful” and “ignorant.” A United Technologies official accused me (falsely) of slander.

But the man who got the worst skewering was silent. David H. Brooks, CEO of bulletproof vest maker DHB Industries, earned $70 million in 2004, 13,349 percent more than his pre-9/11 compensation, according to “Executive Excess,” co-published by the Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy. On top of that, Brooks sold company stock worth about $186 million last year, spooking investors who drove DHB’s share price from more than $22 to as low as $6.50.

Shareholders were mighty ticked, but what makes Brooks’ $250 million in war windfalls particularly obscene is that the equipment which boosted his fortunes appears not to work very well. In May 2005, the US Marines recalled more than 5,000 DHB armored vests after questions were raised about their effectiveness in stopping 9 mm bullets. In November, the Marines and Army announced a recall of an additional 18,000 DHB vests.

Hearing nothing from DHB’s PR team in response to media coverage of the report, I thought Mr. Brooks might be cowering in shame. Instead, I now find out that he was busy planning a party. And not just any party.

The New York Daily News estimates that the bat mitzvah Brooks threw for his daughter over the weekend cost an estimated $10 million. Virtually every musician that you might guess would appeal to a 50-something Long Island CEO was flown in by private jet: Aerosmith, Tom Petty, the Eagles` Don Henley and Joe Walsh, who performed with Fleetwood Mac`s Stevie Nicks, Kenny G. As a likely concession to his daughter`s tastes, Brooks also booked 50 Cent, DJ AM (Nicole Richie`s fiancée) and rap diva Ciara.

According to Daily News gossip columnist Lloyd Grove, Brooks was so pumped for Aerosmith that he changed his wardrobe for their performance from a “black-leather, metal-studded suit -- accessorized with biker-chic necklace chains and diamonds from Chrome Hearts jewelers -- into a hot-pink suede version of the same lovely outfit.” The CEO then reportedly mounted the stage, clowned with Steven Tyler and insisted that his teenage nephew be permitted to sit in on drums.

Gallivanting with celebrities no doubt does wonders to relieve the mind of unpleasant matters. And Brooks has plenty to ponder. Under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission for financial wrongdoing, he also faces a number of investor class action lawsuits for fraud and insider trading. On top of the Marine recall, DHB had to settle a lawsuit in April with the New York Police Department and the Southern States Police Benevolent Association by replacing an estimated 2,609 potentially defective pieces of body armor. DHB stock, already in the tank, has slumped even further, to about $4.

Grotesque as it may be, Brooks` blowout is merely one of the more visible symbols of rampant war profiteering in the post-9/11 era. Our study showed that defense contractor CEOs received raises on average of 200 percent between 2001 and 2004, compared to only 7 percent for average large company CEOS.

Compared to the pay of those on the frontlines of the war, the gap has grown even faster. The ratio between defense CEO pay and that of a military general has doubled during this period, from 12-to-1 to 23-to-1. The defense CEOs make 160 times the pay of an army private in combat.

Americans haven’t always been so blasé about war profiteering. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt famously said: "I don`t want to see a single war millionaire created in the United States as a result of this world disaster.”

FDR’s strong feelings about war profiteering were shared by his successor, Harry Truman. As a Senator, Truman had traveled around the country going from one defense industry factory to another to investigate charges that executives were reaping unfair rewards. He later formed an investigative committee that saved billions in military costs. Imagine if Truman and FDR were alive today what they might have to say about Brooks’ extravaganza.

Two and a half years into this war, the costs are painfully clear. The U.S. death toll alone is more than 2,000 and rising fast. The bill for taxpayers is more than $200 billion and growing. The damage to Americans’ image in the world is immeasurable. But one man has had a helluva party.

Sarah Anderson is a Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies and the co-author of Field Guide to the Global Economy (New Press, 2005) and Executive Excess.

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December 01, 2005
Americans Skeptical Bush Has "Victory" Plan
Few believe president`s conditions for victory likely to be met soon, but reject fixed timetable
http://poll.gallup.com/content/?ci=20224

by David W. Moore


GALLUP NEWS SERVICE

PRINCETON, NJ -- Wednesday morning, President George W. Bush outlined what he called his plan for victory in Iraq, but by late Wednesday evening, only a third of Americans had been exposed to the speech. Ten percent say they watched or listened to it live, and another 24% say they learned about it from news reports. Sixty-six percent had not heard of it.

That picture emerged from the results of a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll conducted entirely on Wednesday evening, which found that 54% of Americans believe Bush is doing a poor job handling the situation in Iraq, while just 44% believe he is doing a good job.

How would you rate the job George W. Bush has done handling the situation in Iraq -- as very good, good, poor, or very poor?
Very good++Good++Poor++Very poor++No opinion

National adults++15%++29++25++29++2

(Combined good, poor)++ 44%++54++2

The poll also shows that a majority of Americans, 55%, believe Bush does not have a plan that will achieve victory in Iraq, while 41% believe he does. Among people who saw or listened to Bush give the speech, two-thirds say he has a plan and a third say he does not. But among people who learned of the speech in the news, only 42% say he has a plan, while 56% disagree -- similar to the 37%-to-57% ratio among Americans who did not see or hear about the speech.

Do you think George W. Bush does -- or does not -- have a plan that will achieve victory for the United States in Iraq?

Weiter: http://poll.gallup.com/content/?ci=20224

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Thanksgiving is over and, as expected, Dubya pardoned the White House turkey. The question is, what turkey will pardon Dubya?—[urlZings!]http://www.tallahassee.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051201/OPINION04/512010302/1050[/url]
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"What did Duke Cunningham say to Tom DeLay? `You want the upper bunk or the lower bunk`"
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“Well, it looks like the holiday shopping weekend wasn`t as big as economists thought it was gonna be. However, you know what was selling really well? You know what really sells huge here in California? California congressmen. Going for big money.”-- Jay Leno
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December 2, 2005
Profusion of Rebel Groups Helps Them Survive in Iraq
By DEXTER FILKINS
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/02/international/middleeast/0…

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 1 - Here is a small sampling of the insurgent groups that have claimed responsibility for attacks on Americans and Iraqis in the last few months:

Supporters of the Sunni People. The Men`s Faith Brigade. The Islamic Anger. Al Baraa bin Malik Suicide Brigade. The Tawid Lions of Abdullah ibn al Zobeir. While some of them, like the Suicide Brigade, claim an affiliation with Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and Al Qaeda claims them, others say they have acted alone or under the guidance of another group.

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Jordanians examined the remains of a room used by wedding guests in the Radisson Hotel in Amman after a suicide bombing in November, apparently
carried out by Iraqis belonging to the Ansar Brigade.
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While on Wednesday President Bush promised nothing less than "complete victory" over the Iraqi insurgency, the apparent proliferation of militant groups offers perhaps the best explanation as to why the insurgency has been so hard to destroy.

The Bush administration has long maintained, and Mr. Bush reiterated in his speech Wednesday, that the insurgency comprises three elements: disaffected Sunni Arabs, or "rejectionists"; former Hussein government loyalists; and foreign-born terrorists affiliated with Al Qaeda.

Iraqi and American officials in Iraq say the single most important fact about the insurgency is that it consists not of a few groups but of dozens, possibly as many as 100. And it is not, as often depicted, a coherent organization whose members dutifully carry out orders from above but a far-flung collection of smaller groups that often act on their own or come together for a single attack, the officials say. Each is believed to have its own leader and is free to act on its own.

Highly visible groups like Al Qaeda, Ansar al Sunna and the Victorious Army Group appear to act as fronts, the Iraqis and the Americans say, providing money, general direction and expertise to the smaller groups, but often taking responsibility for their attacks by broadcasting them across the globe.

"The leaders usually don`t have anything to do with details," said Abdul Kareem al-Eniezi, the Iraqi minister for national security. "Sometimes they will give the smaller groups a target, or a type of target. The groups aren`t connected to each other. They are not that organized."

Some experts and officials say there are important exceptions: that Al Qaeda`s leaders, for instance, are deeply involved in spectacular suicide bombings, the majority of which are still believed to be carried out by foreigners. They also say some of the smaller groups that claim responsibility for attacks may be largely fictional, made up of ragtag groups of fighters hoping to make themselves seem more formidable and numerous than they really are.

But whatever the appearances, American and Iraqi officials agree on the essential structure of the Iraqi insurgency: it is horizontal as opposed to hierarchical, and ad hoc as opposed to unified. They say this central characteristic, similar to that of terrorist organizations in Europe and Asia, is what is making the Iraqi insurgency so difficult to destroy. Attack any single part of it, and the rest carries on largely untouched. It cannot be decapitated, because the insurgency, for the most part, has no head. Only recently, American and Iraqi experts say, have they begun to grasp the new organizational structure that, among other things, is making the insurgency so difficult to stop.

"There is no center of gravity, no leadership, no hierarchy; they are more a constellation than an organization," said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at the Rand Corporation. "They have adopted a structure that assures their longevity."

The insurgency`s survivability presents perhaps the most difficult long-term challenge for the Iraqi government and American commanders. The primary military goal of groups like Al Qaeda and Ansar al Sunna is not to win but simply not to lose; to hang on until the United States runs out of will and departs. Even killing or capturing the leader of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, many Iraqi and American officials say, will not end the rebellion.

In a war as murky as the one in Iraq, details about the workings of the insurgency are fleeting and few. But what is available suggests that the movement is often atomized and fragmented, but no less lethal for being so.

A review of the dozens of proclamations made by jihadi groups and posted on Islamist Web sites found more than 100 different groups that either claimed to be operating in Iraq or were being claimed by an umbrella group like Al Qaeda. Most of the Internet postings were located and translated by the SITE Institute, the Washington group that, among other things, tracks insurgent activity on the Web.

Of the groups found by SITE, 59 were claimed by Al Qaeda and 36 by Ansar al Sunna. Eight groups claimed to be operating under the direction of the Victorious Army Group, and five groups said they were operating under the 20th of July Revolution Brigade.

The complex nature of the insurgency was illustrated on Oct. 24, when three suicide bombers, one driving a cement mixer full of TNT, staged a coordinated attack on the Palestine and Sheraton Hotels in central Baghdad. The attack was one of the most sophisticated yet, with the first explosion ripping open a breach in the hotels` barriers. That allowed the cement mixer to come within a few yards of the Sheraton before being hung up in barbed wire.

An American solider opened fire on the driver of the truck, and the bomb was apparently detonated by remote control. Twelve people died, and American and Iraqis agreed later that the attack had come very close to bringing both towers down.

Within 24 hours, Al Qaeda, in an Internet posting viewed round the world, boasted of its role in attacking the "crusaders and their midgets."

But in the small print of the group`s proclamation, Al Qaeda declared that the attack had actually been carried out by three separate groups: the Attack Brigade, the Rockets Brigade and Al Baraa bin Malik Suicide Brigade. The three groups, the Qaeda notice said, had acted in "collaboration," with some fighters conducting surveillance while others provided cover fire.

Rita Katz, the director of SITE, which is now working under a United States government contract to investigate militant groups, said the attack on the Palestine and Sheraton Hotels had probably been planned and directed at the highest levels of Al Qaeda.

The leaders may have brought the three "brigades" together to stage the attack, she said, and probably provided expertise as well as the suicide bombers themselves. "This was something that was coordinated at the highest level," she said.

But for most of the attacks, such top-down coordination is uncommon, Ms. Katz and American and Iraqi officials said. Most, they said, are planned and carried out by the local groups, with the leaders of the umbrella groups having little or no knowledge of them.

American and Iraqi experts also say there appear to be important distinctions among the umbrella groups. While Islamist groups like Al Qaeda and Ansar al Sunna attack military and civilian targets at will, other organizations, like the Victorious Army Group, which is believed to be associated with followers of Saddam Hussein`s government, appear to attack only American or Iraqi solders.

In recent months, some insurgent groups have refined their target goals even further. In July, Al Qaeda said it had formed a group called the Omar Brigade to focus on killing members of Shiite militias like the Badr Brigade. Since then, the Omar Brigade has taken responsibility for dozens of killings.

Some insurgent groups appear to be limited to exclusive geographic areas. The Zi al Nourein Brigade, whose exploits are regularly proclaimed by Ansar al Sunna, appears to operate almost exclusively in Mosul, in northern Iraq.

Each week, more such groups announce their presence.

"Following Allah`s orders to his worshipers, the mujahedeen, to join together and stand in one line against Allah`s enemies," a posting on the Internet said July 12, "Al Miqaeda Brigade Groups announced that they are joining Ansar al Sunna."

American and Iraqi officials say they are not always sure that the groups` public claims of responsibility are valid. It is an old trick that guerrilla movements use to exaggerate their size and power.

Other experts who track jihadi Web sites say it is possible to authenticate the claim of an attack by a particular group. Most of the claims of responsibility appear on Web sites that tightly control access to their message boards.

The array of insurgent groups has prompted competition among them. On the streets of Ramadi, the violent city west of Baghdad, a leaflet found on the street, signed by a group called the Islamic Army, said that "the growing number of mujahedeen groups, which grew in number when the people realized their value," had caused confusion about which group was speaking for which.

The Islamic Army leaflet read like an advertisement offered by a product manager worried about imitators.

"We are asking people to reject any statement signed by the Sajeel Battalion of the Islamic Army that does not carry their slogan or seal," the leaflet said.

One question that remains unsettled is the nationalities of suicide bombers. American and Iraqi officials have long said they believe that the majority of suicide attacks are carried out by foreigners.

In June, in an apparent answer to that question, Al Qaeda announced the formation of the Ansar Brigade, which it described as an all-Iraqi suicide unit. Since then, the Ansar Brigade has taken responsibility for few such attacks.

One place where the Ansar Brigade did apparently strike was Jordan last month, when suicide bombers struck three hotels in Amman. The police there determined that Iraqis had carried out the attack.

In a message posted on the Internet, Al Qaeda announced that the Ansar Brigade, its Iraqi suicide group, had carried out the attack.

Sabrina Tavernise contributed reporting from Ramadi, Iraq, for this article.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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Zu dem Thema auch: [urlUSA vollstrecken 1000. Hinrichtung]http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,387983,00.html[/url]
Der erfolgreichste Vollstrecker von Todesstrafen der Neuzeit war der jetzige Präsident Bush als Gouverneur von Texas, der scheinbar eine sadistische Freude an den Vollstreckungen hatte, wie man durch seine Reaktion auf das Gnadengesuch einer Delinquentin vermuten kann.

December 2, 2005
After 24 Years on Death Row, Clemency Is Killer`s Final Appeal
By ADAM LIPTAK
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/02/national/02prison.html?hp&…

SAN QUENTIN, Calif., Nov. 30 - Stanley Tookie Williams, once a leader of a notorious street gang and now perhaps the nation`s most prominent death row inmate, leaned over a small wooden table in a cramped visiting cell here and tried to explain what he used to be and what he has become.

"I have a despicable background," Mr. Williams said. "I was a criminal. I was a co-founder of the Crips. I was a nihilist."

"But people forget," he added, chewing on a turkey sandwich, "that redemption is tailor-made for the wretched."

All that stands between Mr. Williams and his execution, set for Dec. 13, is the possibility that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger will commute his sentence to life in prison after a clemency hearing next week.

Such commutations used to be common in the United States, granted in 20 percent to 25 percent of all death sentences reviewed by governors in the first half of the last century. With the exception of a few cases in which departing governors with misgivings about the death penalty granted wholesale clemency to condemned inmates, commutations have become rare. No condemned prisoner has been spared in California since 1967.

Governors once considered the commutation of a death sentence to be an act of mercy or grace. In recent years, though, they have tended to act only to correct errors in the judicial system and, occasionally, to take account of mental illness or retardation.

When Gov. Mark R. Warner of Virginia spared Robin Lovitt`s life on Tuesday, for instance, he said that he was acting "to reaffirm public confidence in our justice system." The execution could not proceed, he said, because potentially exculpatory DNA evidence had been destroyed.

Mr. Williams`s basic claim is different. Although he says he is innocent of the four 1979 murders that sent him to death row in 1981, his lawyers base their request for clemency on the good that Mr. Williams has done during his years in prison.

He is an author of children`s books, a memoir and the Tookie Peace Protocol, a set of fill-in the-blanks forms for rival gangs wishing to declare a truce. He gives lectures to youth groups by telephone. His supporters have nominated him for the Nobel Prize, for both literature and peace.

Mr. Schwarzenegger must decide in Mr. Williams`s case whether clemency means something more than additional scrutiny of the evidence presented in court or whether it should also take account of the progress of a prisoner`s life in the years following a death sentence.

His answer will have a broad impact, as the pace of executions in California is about to quicken. The state, which has the nation`s largest death row but seldom executes anyone, faces the possibility of three executions before the end of February.

Mr. Williams, 51, is a large, deliberate black man with more salt than pepper in his beard. He wears his hair in a short ponytail, and his round rimless glasses give him an intellectual air. A proud autodidact, he chooses his words with care, preferring the bigger ones.

Mr. Williams acknowledged that his story, which has attracted the support of rappers and Hollywood celebrities and has been made into a television movie, is a jumble of contradictions that will not be easy for the governor to untangle.

Prosecutors and victims rights groups say Mr. Williams`s crimes must outweigh whatever he has done since.

"This is a guy who blew away four people with his shotgun and laughed about it," said Michael Rushford, the president of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in Sacramento. "Guys like him were your worst nightmare in L.A. in the 70`s. They`d blow you away for your shoes. For nothing. For sport."

Mr. Williams was convicted of four murders, those of Albert Owens, a shop clerk killed during the robbery of a convenience store in February 1979, and of Tsai-Shai Yang, Yen-I Yang and Yee-Chen Lin, killed during the robbery of their family-run motel the next month.

Steve Cooley, the Los Angeles County district attorney, told Mr. Schwarzenegger in a submission this month opposing clemency, that Mr. Williams`s failure to "take any responsibility for the brutal, destructive and murderous acts he committed" means that "there can be no redemption, there can be no atonement, and there should be no mercy."

In a long interview here, Mr. Williams countered, "How can a person express contrition if he`s not guilty?" He added: "They want me executed. Period. I exemplify something they don`t want to see happen - a redemptive transformation."

He said he had a bit of history with the man who would decide his fate, based on a shared passion for bodybuilding. Mr. Williams said he used to work out at the Gold`s Gym on the Santa Monica beach in the 1970`s.

"I was pretty enormous back then," Mr. Williams said, "and exceptionally strong."

Mr. Schwarzenegger passed Mr. Williams on the Santa Monica boardwalk one day and told a companion, according to Mr. Williams: "Look, that man doesn`t have arms. He has legs."

The governor has said he does not recall the incident, and he has declined to say what standards he will use in deciding whether Mr. Williams or any other California inmate should live. "I really don`t have any guidelines set for that," Mr. Schwarzenegger told reporters in November. "It`s a case-by-case situation."

"This is kind of the toughest thing to do when you`re governor," he added. "And so I dread that situation, but it`s something that`s part of the job, and I have to do it." A spokeswoman declined to elaborate.

Asked what he would tell the governor were they to meet again, Mr. Williams said: "First and foremost, I would say that I`m innocent. Second, I believe that if I`m allowed to get a clemency or an indefinite stay, it would allow me to continue to proliferate my positive message, including a collaboration with the N.A.A.C.P., to create a violence-prevention message for at-risk youth."

Other governors in recent years have focused on only the type of argument that Mr. Williams makes first, that he is innocent. They have acted as a sort of backstop to the judicial system, driven in part, perhaps, by a fear of seeming soft on crime.

"In every case," George W. Bush, then governor of Texas, wrote in "A Charge to Keep," his 1999 memoir, "I would ask: Is there any doubt about this individual`s guilt or innocence? And, have the courts had ample opportunity to review all the legal issues in this case?"

Bill Clinton said much the same thing as governor of Arkansas, expressing a reluctance to take decisions away from the courts.

Mr. Schwarzenegger, a Republican, has twice denied clemency, to Kevin Cooper, whose execution was stayed by the courts last year, and to Donald Beardslee, who was executed in January.

In the Beardslee case, Mr. Schwarzenegger seemed to discount the possibility that a prisoner`s actions in prison should figure in the clemency determination.

"While I commend Beardslee for his prison record and his ability to conform his behavior to meet or exceed expected prison norms," Mr. Schwarzenegger said, "I am not moved to mercy by the fact that Beardslee has been a model prisoner. I expect no less."

Mr. Williams`s main lawyers for his clemency application, from the New York law firm of Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, Colt & Mosle, say Mr. Schwarzenegger should think more broadly about his power to be merciful.

"We seek clemency for the man Stanley Williams has become," they wrote in their clemency petition, "for the good work he has done, and for the good work he will continue to do."

The traditional definition of clemency, said Austin Sarat, a professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College and author of "Mercy on Trial," a study of capital clemency, was concerned with neither justice nor redemption, the two arguments Mr. Williams has pressed.

"The idea of clemency was the reduction of a deserved punishment," he said. "It wasn`t thought of as justice. You couldn`t earn or deserve clemency. It was an act of mercy or an act of grace."

In "Against Mercy," an article in The Minnesota Law Review last year, Dan Markel, a law professor at Florida State University, argued that mercy in that sense was problematic. It not only fails to deliver warranted punishment, Professor Markel wrote, but also flies in the face of a societal commitment to equal justice under the law.

A narrow conception of clemency limited to correcting errors in the judicial system helps explain recent trends. In the last decade, putting aside Gov. George Ryan`s emptying of Illinois`s death row in 2003, there have been about two executive clemencies in capital cases each year.

In California, Gov. Edmund G. Brown commuted 23 death sentences from 1959 to 1967, while allowing 36 executions to proceed. In "Public Justice, Private Mercy," a 1989 book about how he made those decisions, Mr. Brown said he acted when there were questions about the inmate`s guilt, when new evidence had come to light and when the punishment seemed disproportionate to that received by others.

Ronald Reagan, who succeeded Mr. Brown, granted the last capital commutation in California, in 1967, to a brain-damaged man.

There are almost 650 people on death row here, compared with slightly more than 400 in Texas. But Texas has executed 355 people since the United States Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976. California has executed 11.

"We don`t want to churn them out the way some of the states in the South do," Ronald M. George, the chief justice of the California Supreme Court, said in an interview on Monday. "But it can drag on for 20 years, which does not reflect well on the system."

Mr. Williams stands at the head of a growing line, as California now seems on the verge of a spate of executions. Another one is scheduled for January and a third is likely in February.

Mr. Williams said he had given some thought to his last day should things not work out with the governor.

"They have," he said of prison officials, his voice rising, "the audacity to ask, `Do I want a last meal?` Absolutely not. `Do I want anyone present?` Absolutely not. `Do I want a preacher?` Absolutely not. I want nothing from this institution."

But he did want something, he said later.

"I want to live," he said.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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December 2, 2005
Senate Summons Pentagon to Explain Effort to Plant News Stories in Iraqi Media
By ERIC SCHMITT and DAVID S. CLOUD
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/02/politics/02propaganda.html

WASHINGTON, Dec. 1 - The chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee summoned top Pentagon officials to a closed-door session on Capitol Hill on Friday to explain a reported secret military campaign in Iraq to plant paid propaganda in the Iraqi news media. The White House also expressed deep concerns about the program.

Senior Pentagon officials said on Thursday that they had not yet received any explanation of the program from top generals in Iraq, including Gen. John P. Abizaid, Gen. George W. Casey Jr. and Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, the three most senior commanders for Iraqi operations.

After reports about the program circulated this week, General Casey initially protested that it should not be discussed publicly because it was classified.

One senior Pentagon official said, however, that General Casey was told that response was inadequate. The official asked for anonymity to avoid possible reprisals for disclosing the general`s reaction.

At a briefing with reporters, the White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, responded to a barrage of questions about the program, which military contractors and officials said also pays friendly Iraqi journalists with monthly stipends.

"We`re very concerned about the reports," the White House spokesman said. "We have asked the Department of Defense for more information."

Under the program, the Lincoln Group, a Washington-based public relations firm working in Iraq, was hired to translate articles written by American troops into Arabic and then, in many cases, give them to advertising agencies for placement in the Iraqi news media.

At a time when the State Department is paying contractors millions of dollars to promote professional and independent media, the military campaign appeared to defy the basic tenets of Western journalism.

Senator John W. Warner, a Virginia Republican who heads the Armed Services Committee, said he had directed Pentagon aides to describe and justify the program on Friday in a closed briefing for senators and staff aides.

"I am concerned about any actions that may undermine the credibility of the United States as we help the Iraqi people stand up as a democracy," Mr. Warner said in a statement.

"A free and independent press is critical to the functioning of a democracy, and I am concerned about any actions which may erode the independence of the Iraqi media," the committee chairman`s statement said.

Asked about the issue on Thursday, the top military spokesman in Baghdad appeared to defend the practice without referring specifically to the Lincoln Group`s activities.

The spokesman, Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, said that Iraq`s most-wanted militant, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born head of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, was also using the news media to advance his terrorist goals.

But General Lynch said the similarities ended there because the American military was disseminating truthful information.

"He is conducting these kidnappings, these beheadings, these explosions, so that he gets international coverage to look like he has more capability than he truly has," General Lynch said. "He is lying to the Iraqi people."

General Lynch continued: "We don`t lie. We don`t need to lie. We do empower our operational commanders with the ability to inform the Iraqi public, but everything we do is based on fact, not based on fiction."

Another military spokesman in Baghdad, Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, later confirmed in an e-mail message that the Lincoln Group`s effort was aimed at promoting the allied efforts in Iraq. "We acknowledge that a program exists to get factual information into the Iraqi media," Colonel Johnson said. "Leadership is reviewing this program and how it is being executed, but there has been no decision yet on how to proceed."

One Pentagon official said it was possible that the program began as an effort to buy space in Iraqi publications for articles identified as coming from the United States government and then evolved into something where the government and contractor roles were hidden.

"If the whole intent of this is really an effort to provide false information to the people of Iraq, then that`s more of a problem," said the official, who added that officials could decide to refer to the matter to Defense Department inspector general.

The Lincoln Group, which includes some businessmen and former military officials, was hired last year after military officials concluded that the United States was failing to win over Muslim public opinion.

In Iraq, the effort is seen by some senior commanders as an essential complement to combat operations in the field.

Lincoln`s media work for the Pentagon in Iraq included a multimillion dollar campaign to influence Sunni Arab voters in Anbar Province before the national referendum on the new Iraqi Constitution in October, according to military contractors and officials.

The campaign, the officials said, included television and radio spots that did not disclose their American sponsorship and the disbursement of more than $1 million in cash.

"It wouldn`t be obvious it came from Americans," said one official, referring to the media messages.

Laurie Adler, a spokeswoman for Lincoln, confirmed the company worked for the military in western Iraq but refused to provide any details.

The company`s most senior executive in Iraq is Paige Craig. His résumé, contained in Pentagon documents spelling out some of Lincoln`s work, highlights his role in "designing and leading the development of numerous government and corporate intelligence projects."

It goes on to say "Paige Craig graduated first in class from the Navy and Marine Corps Intelligence Training Center in 1996."

The descriptions of the Lincoln Group`s activities, first reported by The Los Angeles Times on Wednesday, have spurred debate in Washington about how the United States should promote free and independent news media in the Middle East and other parts of the world.

"The State Department is working with journalists in Iraq to help them develop the skills that you all have in terms of reporting and journalistic ethics and practices," the State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack, told reporters on Thursday.

"That`s important," the department spokesman said. "This is a country where free media didn`t exist for decades, so they are learning. We think it`s important to assist them in that."

But if the nascent Iraqi news media are perceived by ordinary Iraqis to be a tool of American interests, that effort will be ruined, some lawmakers said.

"How are people going to get information that`s reliable?" said Senator Richard G. Lugar, an Indiana Republican who heads the Foreign Relations Committee. "Who can they trust? If you are a devout Shiite or Sunni, and you suspect that the press has been bought, why, then you wouldn`t respect the press."

Jeff Gerth contributed reporting for this article.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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U.S. Executes 1,000th Person Since 1977

By ESTES THOMPSON
The Associated Press
Friday, December 2, 2005; 2:35 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12…

RALEIGH, N.C. -- A convicted murderer was put to death Friday in the nation`s 1,000th execution since capital punishment resumed in 1977.

Kenneth Lee Boyd, 57, received a lethal injection and was pronounced dead at 2:15 a.m., said state Department of Correction spokeswoman Pam Walker. Boyd was convicted of killing his estranged wife and father-in-law in 1988.
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Kenneth Lee Boyd gestures during an interview at Central prison in Raleigh, N.C., Wednesday, Nov. 30, 2005. Boyd is scheduled to be the
1,000th person to be executed since capital punishment resumed in 1977. He was convicted and sentenced for the murder of his
estranged wife and her father. The execution is scheduled to take place Friday morning at 2 a.m.
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His death came after both Gov. Mike Easley and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to intervene and stop the execution.

Larger-than-normal crowds gathered at the prison in Raleigh, where prison officials tightened security. Police arrested 16 protesters late Thursday who sat down on the prison`s four-lane driveway, officials said.

Boyd, 57, did not deny that he shot and killed Julie Curry Boyd, 36, and her father, 57-year-old Thomas Dillard Curry. Family members said Boyd stalked his estranged wife after they separated following 13 stormy years of marriage and once sent a son to her house with a bullet and a threatening note.

During the 1988 slayings, Boyd`s son Christopher was pinned under his mother`s body as Boyd unloaded a .357-caliber Magnum into her. The boy pushed his way under a bed to escape the barrage. Another son grabbed the pistol while Boyd tried to reload.

The Supreme Court in 1976 ruled that capital punishment could resume after a 10-year moratorium. The first execution took place the following year, when Gary Gilmore went before a firing squad in Utah.

Boyd told The Associated Press in a prison interview that he wants no part of the infamous numerical distinction. "I`d hate to be remembered as that," Boyd said Wednesday. "I don`t like the idea of being picked as a number."

The 1,001st could come Friday night, when South Carolina plans to put Shawn Humphries to death for the 1994 murder of a store clerk.

In Boyd`s plea for clemency, his attorneys said he served in Vietnam where he was shot at by snipers daily, which contributed to his crimes.

As the execution drew near, Boyd was visited by a son from a previous marriage, who was not present during the slayings.

"He made one mistake and now it`s costing him his life," said Kenneth Smith, 35, who visited with his wife and two children. "A lot of people get a second chance. I think he deserves a second chance."

Smith`s wife planned to witness the execution, as did two other family members of the victims whose relationship was not immediately clear. Boyd`s lawyer, a small group of law enforcement officials and journalists also planned to watch through the thick, twin glass panes between the viewing room and the death chamber.
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More in U.S. Expressing Doubts About Death Penalty
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12…

By Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 2, 2005; A01

AUSTIN, Dec. 1 -- Ruben Cantu is long gone, executed by Texas authorities in 1993 after he was convicted of murdering a man during a San Antonio robbery when he was 17 years old. To the end, Cantu insisted he had been framed, and now his co-defendant and the sole surviving witness both say he was telling the truth.
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A state legislator called for an investigation this week as prosecutors moved to study the 20-year-old case. Opponents of the death penalty suspect that Cantu may be what they have long expected to find: an innocent person put to death. Houston law professor David Dow said the case shows that "we make mistakes in death penalty cases, too."

The nation`s 1,000th execution since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976 was scheduled to occur Friday morning, barring a last-minute stay. The expected execution of Kenneth Boyd in North Carolina for murdering his wife and her father comes at a time of growing misgivings over the death penalty, as reflected in jury verdicts, opinion polls and the actions of courts and state legislatures.

Death sentences have declined to their lowest level in three decades, with juries sentencing 125 people to death last year, compared with an average of 290 per year in the 1990s. The number of inmates executed last year was the lowest since 1996, and the Supreme Court has twice in the past three years limited who can be punished with death.

In Virginia, which has executed more people since 1976 than any state but Texas, Gov. Mark R. Warner (D) commuted the death sentence of Robin M. Lovitt this week because the state had thrown out what may have been conclusive evidence, making this the first year since 1983 that Virginia will not have had an execution.

In Maryland, Cardinal William H. Keeler, the archbishop of Baltimore, prayed with Wesley E. Baker this week and said he would appeal to Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R) to commute his death sentence to life without parole. Baker is on death row for murdering teacher`s aide Jane Tyson during a robbery outside a Catonsville mall.

Public opinion polls show that nearly two-thirds of Americans support the death penalty, but that is a significant drop from the peak, in 1994, when 80 percent of respondents told Gallup pollsters they were in favor of capital punishment. When asked if they would endorse executions if the alternative sentence of life without parole were available, support fell to 50 percent.

Amid the refinement of DNA techniques and the sporadic release of inmates from death row because of uncertain guilt, a growing number of people tell pollsters they believe that innocent prisoners have been executed. Although the majority of cases over the past three decades have been upheld, legal errors and sometimes poor defense work revealed during layers of appeals have convinced many Americans that the system is imperfect.

"There`s a skepticism about the accuracy of the system and, to some degree, the fairness," said Richard C. Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. "It`s not quite the ticket to the statehouse if you promise to execute more and more and speed it up. You have religious leaders voicing concerns. You have conservatives. The lines aren`t as clear as they were before."

One place to observe the recent push and pull is Illinois, where outgoing Gov. George Ryan (R) commuted the sentences of the state`s 167 death row inmates in 2003, calling the state`s death penalty "arbitrary and capricious."

A 2000 moratorium on executions continues in Illinois, but 10 more defendants have been sentenced to die since Ryan acted. At the same time, the state legislature has reformed death penalty rules, provided more money for defense lawyers and required police to videotape the questioning of homicide suspects.

"The playing field has been leveled. We think that`s fine," said Paul A. Logli, a prosecutor in Rockford, Ill., who said he thinks Ryan`s clemency move was a mistake. "In one broad brush, he swept death row, even of those people who had never asserted their innocence. I believe the better choice is that governors should do it on a case-by-case basis."

Logli, who is also president of the National District Attorneys Association, said prosecutors in the 38 states with a death penalty "by and large believe in it as a deterrent and believe it should be used wisely, sparingly."

The New York legislature this year stopped short of renewing the state`s death penalty law, which a court had declared invalid. North Carolina, where condemned prisoner Alan Gell was acquitted in a retrial with the help of evidence that was initially suppressed, created a commission to study how the death penalty operates. California, home to the nation`s largest death row, with 648 inmates, did likewise.

Elsewhere, legislation on the desk of Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle (D) is designed to improve witness-identification procedures, require electronic recording of interrogations and ensure the preservation of DNA evidence. If the interviews are not recorded, juries are to be told that police violated the law.

Texas has executed more than one-third of the men and women put to death since 1976, as well as 19 of the 55 inmates executed this year. With no more executions scheduled there this month, the state`s total this year will fall well below its eight-year average of 28.

Jordan M. Steiker, a death penalty expert at the University of Texas, attributes the slowdown largely to federal court concerns, notably the 2002 Supreme Court decision to bar the execution of the mentally retarded and this year`s ruling prohibiting the execution of juveniles.

Gov. Rick Perry (R) has signed a law that offers juries a chance to sentence capital defendants to life without parole. He also created a Criminal Justice Advisory Council, which has a committee that will focus on the death penalty.

State Rep. Elliott Naishtat (D), a death penalty opponent from Austin, said: "We are seeing a mood change. Legislative and executive branches are responding to a clear change in public confidence."

A poll conducted by Rice University sociologist Stephen L. Klineberg found that even in Harris County, where more defendants are sentenced to die than anywhere else in the country, support for the death penalty fell from 68 percent in 1999 to 60 percent this year. In response to a separate question, 53 percent favored life without parole as an alternative.

The latest survey was conducted before last month`s Houston Chronicle series on Ruben Cantu.

Prosecutors presented no physical evidence linking Cantu to the 1984 nighttime attack in San Antonio. Nor did they call the 15-year-old co-defendant, who had pleaded guilty to the lesser crime of robbery and identified Cantu, an admitted thief, as his partner. The principal witness was Juan Moreno, the wounded worker.

The jury did not believe Cantu, who said he had been in another city that night, and ordered him to die. He was executed on Aug. 24, 1993.

The Chronicle found numerous gaps and flaws in the investigation. Further, Moreno told the newspaper that he had accused Cantu under police pressure.

Cantu`s co-defendant, David Garza, signed a sworn statement saying he lied when he told police that Cantu was with him that night, the newspaper reported. He now says he knew who the true killer was, but honored a neighborhood code of silence in not naming him.

"You`ve got a 17-year-old who went to his grave for something he didn`t do," Garza said, adding that he was speaking now because of a guilty conscience. He said that as Cantu`s execution date neared, he wrote Cantu`s unpaid appellate lawyer from prison to say the case was "real messed up" and added: "Hope to hear from you real soon."

The lawyer told the Chronicle that she doubted the worth of Garza`s comments and did not inquire further. Roy R. Barrera Jr., the trial judge, told the newspaper that he was shocked that no defense lawyer interviewed Moreno or compelled Garza to testify during the appeal. But he also said he believes Garza is now lying "because he has nothing better to do and wants to put everybody on a guilt trip."

Guilty or innocent, Cantu could not have been executed if he were prosecuted now. According to this year`s Supreme Court ruling, he was too young at the time of the crime.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company

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December 2, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
Bullet Points Over Baghdad
By PAUL KRUGMAN
http://select.nytimes.com/2005/12/02/opinion/02krugman.html

The overthrow of Saddam Hussein was supposed to provide the world with a demonstration of American power. It didn`t work out that way. But the Bush administration has come up with the next best thing: a demonstration of American PowerPoint. Bullets haven`t subdued the insurgents in Iraq, but the administration hopes that bullet points will subdue the critics at home.

The National Security Council document released this week under the grandiose title "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq" is neither an analytical report nor a policy statement. It`s simply the same old talking points - "victory in Iraq is a vital U.S. interest"; "failure is not an option" - repackaged in the style of a slide presentation for a business meeting.

It`s an embarrassing piece of work. Yet it`s also an important test for the news media. The Bush administration has lost none of its confidence that it can get away with fuzzy math and fuzzy facts - that it won`t be called to account for obvious efforts to mislead the public. It`s up to journalists to prove that confidence wrong.

Here`s an example of how the White House attempts to mislead: the new document assures us that Iraq`s economy is doing really well. "Oil production increased from an average of 1.58 million barrels per day in 2003, to an average of 2.25 million barrels per day in 2004." The document goes on to concede a "slight decrease" in production since then.

We`re not expected to realize that the daily average for 2003 includes the months just before, during and just after the invasion of Iraq, when its oil industry was basically shut down. As a result, we`re not supposed to understand that the real story of Iraq`s oil industry is one of unexpected failure: instead of achieving the surge predicted by some of the war`s advocates, Iraqi production has rarely matched its prewar level, and has been on a downward trend for the past year.

What about the security situation? During much of 2004, the document tells us: "Fallujah, Najaf, and Samara were under enemy control. Today, these cities are under Iraqi government control."

Najaf was never controlled by the "enemy," if that means the people we`re currently fighting. It was briefly controlled by Moktada al-Sadr`s Mahdi Army. The United States once vowed to destroy that militia, but these days it`s as strong as ever. And according to The New York Times, Mr. Sadr has now become a "kingmaker in Iraqi politics." So what sort of victory did we win, exactly, in Najaf?

Moreover, in what sense is Najaf now under government control? According to The Christian Science Monitor, "Sadr supporters and many Najaf residents say an armed Badr Brigade" - the militia of a Shiite group that opposes Mr. Sadr and his supporters - "still exists as the Najaf police force."

Meanwhile, this is the third time that coalition forces have driven the insurgents out of Samara. On the two previous occasions, the insurgents came back after the Americans left. And there, too, it`s stretching things to say that the city is under Iraqi government control: according to The Associated Press, only 100 of the city`s 700 policemen show up for work on most days.

There`s a lot more like that in the document. Refuting some of the upbeat assertions about Iraq requires specialized knowledge, but many of them can be quickly debunked by anyone with an Internet connection.

The point isn`t just that the administration is trying, yet again, to deceive the public. It`s the fact that this attempt at deception shows such contempt - contempt for the public, and especially contempt for the news media. And why not? The truth is that the level of misrepresentation in this new document is no worse than that in a typical speech by President Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney. Yet for much of the past five years, many major news organizations failed to provide the public with effective fact-checking.

So Mr. Bush`s new public relations offensive on Iraq is a test. Are the news media still too cowed, too addicted to articles that contain little more than dueling quotes to tell the public when the administration is saying things that aren`t true? Or has the worm finally turned?

There have been encouraging signs, notably a thorough front-page fact-checking article - which even included charts showing the stagnation of oil production and electricity generation! - in USA Today. But the next few days will tell.


* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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Thoughts on the Middle East, History,and Religion
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Juan Cole is Professor of History at the University of Michigan

http://www.juancole.com/
Friday, December 02, 2005

Guerrillas Gather at Ramadi
US Riposte

[urlIraq has banned non-Iraqi Arabs from coming to Iraq]http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4490616.stm[/url] in the build-up to the December 15 elections. I think they would have been better off banning all civilians of any nationality from coming in; this way of doing it smacks of racism.

[urlAljazeera is reporting, based on video released]http://www.adnki.com/index_2Level.php?cat=Terrorism&loid=8.0.235313162&par=[/url] by guerrillas that the latter have taken over Ramadi and attacked US troops there. I saw on CNN International a rebuttal of this claim by Gen. Lynch, who alleged that the Zarqawi group is very good at propaganda and is obscuring what is really going on in Iraq. He said that on the day the videotape claimed there were several attacks on US positions around Ramadi, there was actually just one rocket propelled grenade attack on a US base.

My suspicion is that the truth lies in the middle. Gen. Lynch is correct that the guerrillas are not openly patrolling downtown Ramadi on a regular basis, as the videotape suggested. The Marines would just shoot them. But it is also the case that the US military is not in control of any major city in the Sunni Arab heartland, including Baghdad, and that behind the scenes and under the cover of darkness, guerrillas do plan and carry out attacks and exercise authority. Moreover, most of the guerrillas are not the foreign jihadis of the Zarqawi strike, but rather local ex-Baathists, tribal groups, Salafi fundamentalists, etc.

The US military is beginning a sweep in Ramadi. So much for Anbar`s participation in the Dec. 15 elections.

[urlThe NYT gives an overview of the multi-headed,]http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/02/international/middleeast/02insurgency.html?ei=5094&en=fbcc90437d8fded9&hp=&ex=1133499600&adxnnl=1&partner=homepage&adxnnlx=1133512889-jgDU4cx/RXRxiZzmZ23w9w[/url] diverse groups making up the Sunni Arab guerrilla movement, suggesting that their very lack of a command structure is one of the secrets of their strength.

Given the proliferation of these small guerrilla groups, you wonder, "What would victory in Iraq look like?" I haven`t heard Bush or any US general spell this out. But if the US is "staying the course" to achieve "victory," then the precise definition of "victory" has to be the philosophical starting point. Otherwise it is a case of the dog chasing his tail.

The US military said that suicide bombings fell to their low… in November and pointed to this statistic as a sign of progress in the war.

But November saw 87 US troops killed, among the highest death tolls for a 30-day period since the war began, and one wonders about the rate of severely wounded. Moreover, in one two-week period in November, bombers (suiciders or not) killed hundreds of Iraqis, spreading insecurity, fear and anger.

It raises the question of whether the guerrillas are depending more heavily on roadside bombs and remotely detonated bombs rather than on kamikazes. Whatever the case, the mere decline in the latter seems to have little or nothing to do with the level of security in the country, which is generally poor, and, indeed, among the worst of any country in the world.

Reuters reports on the poor equipment that still plagues the… and makes it hard for it to establish control even of little villages from which guerrillas operate.

[urlThe Ukraine has begun the pull-out of its almost 1,000 troops]http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181_1562683,00050004.htm[/url] from Iraq, with its security duties taken over by the Iraqi 3rd Infantry Brigade. The rest of the Ukrainians will be out by the end of 2005. It seems likely that the US will be virtually alone in Iraq as a foreign military power by mid-2006.

The case of Muriel Degauque, the poor Belgian Catholic girl … has sent a chill through Europe. As I have argued before, the jihadi mindset is a cult-like ideology that is like software and can be installed in any mind. It is a set of plausibility structures, of premises that lead inexorably to killing oneself and others for some vague Cause. It is so insidious precisely because people inside the movement find the premises so compelling. It is not really anything to do with Islam per se, and most of the kamikazes don`t know much about formal Islam. It isn`t really any different than the [urlSolar Temple Cult]http://www.rickross.com/groups/solar.html[/url] or other such self-destructive religious phenomena, except that the jihadis have become politicized and so kill themselves and others on the battlefield.

posted by Juan @ [url12/02/2005 06:30:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/12/guerrillas-gather-at-ramadi-us-riposte.html[/url] 0 comments

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It`s propaganda time
By Walter Jajko
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-jajko…

December 2, 2005

CRITICS OF THE Iraq war are outraged over the revelation that the U.S. military has been paying millions of dollars to plant pro-American, Pentagon-written propaganda articles in Iraqi newspapers and to buy off Iraqi journalists with monthly stipends.

But in my opinion, it`s about time. Information is a critical part of any war, and the U.S. has for too long — to its own detriment — ignored this powerful and essential tool, a tool especially well-suited to the globalized Information Age.

Even third-rate countries routinely use information and disinformation as an instrument of foreign policy, often against the United States. The U.S., in turn, cannot win the war of ideas by speaking softly or keeping its mouth shut. But we have been doing just that.

The United States Information Agency, the only open, global information organization run by the U.S. government, was abolished in 1999, supposedly because it served no purpose in the post-Cold War world. It has not been replaced. U.S.-sponsored entities such as Radio and TV Marti (which broadcast to Cuba) and Al Hurra, the U.S. television station broadcasting to the Arabs, have proven ineffective.

We need to be using all the means available in the war of ideas: public diplomacy, psychological operations, influence agents, disinformation and computer information warfare — from open and overt to clandestine and covert, from public explanation of policy to secret subversion of enemies. All of these must be well-orchestrated.

Our current situation is quite a turnaround from the Cold War years. In 1953, the CIA`s celebrated Cold War information and disinformation arm — centered in the "Mighty Wurlitzer" propaganda offices of OSS veteran Frank Wisner — was an enormous operation, with thousands of employees adept at planting press and radio stories, engaging with labor unions, applying economic pressure, offering direct monetary payments and waging political and cultural warfare in an all-out effort to prevent European countries from falling to the communists.

According to a 1977 New York Times investigative series, the CIA owned or subsidized, at various times, more than 50 newspapers, news services, radio stations, periodicals and other communications facilities, most of them overseas. In some cases, these were used for propaganda efforts; in other cases, they served as covers for other operations.

Paid CIA agents infiltrated a dozen more foreign news organizations, and at least 22 U.S. news organizations employed American journalists who were also working for the CIA. Nearly a dozen U.S. publishing houses printed some of the more than 1,000 books that had been produced or subsidized by the CIA.

Today, this kind of effort has ended, and it is now unimaginable. Few American officials know how to play this game, and fewer would risk doing so. The left has argued that this shouldn`t be done — that it`s unethical, it`s dishonest, it`s a violation of journalistic standards. Our use of information today is insufficient, limited to disjointed efforts: the State Department`s passive, reactive and defensive public diplomacy; the Defense Department`s tactical, battlefield psychological operations; and the CIA`s limited covert influence operations.

Examples abound. The State Department only seldom (and belatedly) has provided Arabic-speaking interviewees to refute stories on Al Jazeera. The CIA never did establish a clandestine radio station to propagandize against the Iranian mullahs.

Each of the few weak, unconnected information efforts has been undertaken episodically, coordinated haphazardly and funded poorly. Each ekes out its existence as transient tools accepted only in extremis, facing resistance from apathetic agencies, clueless congressmen and misinformed media.

A permanent leadership is needed in the form of a new Cabinet department that can knock together heads to force integrated influence activities — a Ministry of Propaganda, if you will.

Some influence operations are cheap, such as distribution of opinion pieces to newspapers; some are expensive, such as setting up a satellite television station; some are technically sophisticated, such as spreading disinformation into government computer networks; many are simple, such as immediate, vigorous, undiplomatic rebuttals by U.S. ambassadors to false accusations. But all require commitment by the national leadership.

In the war against Al Qaeda and its sympathizers, aggressive, relentless and exhaustive attacks are needed, including arguing against the terrorists` theological heresies, rebutting their lies, undermining their popularity, blackening their reputations, falsifying their public and private communications, publicizing intelligence against their fellow-traveler friends and jamming their radio, television and computer networks.

America`s failure to use the indispensable instrument of information to protect its own national interests is inexcusable, especially as it wages a protracted war to the death against Islamic terrorists to preserve democratic governance, a free society and Western civilization.

WALTER JAJKO, a retired Air Force brigadier general and former assistant to the secretary of Defense for intelligence oversight, is a professor of defense studies at the Institute of World Politics in Washington, D.C. His views are not those of the Department of Defense.


Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times

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Tomgram: How (Not) to Withdraw from Iraq
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=40663

This post can be found at http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=40663

Seasonal Note: In a town where the menu of any new corner diner immediately touts "our traditional" corned beef or roast beef sandwich, three years of tradition is no small thing. This year, then, will be the third in which Nick Turse offers Tomdispatch readers a holiday opportunity to feast on gift ideas from the military-corporate complex. (Last year, hot gifts ranged from the "talking Bush in Baghdad doll" and standard-issue women`s "assault shoes" to an assortment of missiles.) But while awaiting that priceless, mid-month dispatch, I thought I might suggest a few holiday gift possibilities that really were options for anyone in a bookish and generous mood.



For those of you who would like to offer a little extra support for Tom (of Tomdispatch), you might consider picking up for friends copies of my novel, The Last Days of Publishing, just out in paperback (check the review!), or my history of American triumphalism in the Cold War era, The End of Victory Culture, which -- given our President -- never seems out of date.



The stocking-stuffer of the season is an inexpensive little paperback by the readers of the Nation magazine and its editor Katrina vanden Heuvel (with a small contribution from Tomdispatch). The Dictionary of Republicanisms is guaranteed to give outsized pleasure. If you want to crack up your friends throughout the holiday season and spur everyone, a couple of eggnogs later, to create their own Republican "definitions," then hand this out left and… right. (Here`s one of mine from the book: "Homeland Security Department: The new Defense Department known for declaring bridges yellow and the Statue of Liberty orange.") It`s the perfect small gift for the holidays!



On the other hand, if you`re looking for a big book to sink your readerly teeth into, don`t miss Adam Hochschild`s monumental and riveting history of the British anti-slavery movement, Bury the Chains. The anti-slavery movement, which pioneered everything from direct mail campaigns to iconic posters, actually succeeded after decades of effort and vast slave uprisings in the Caribbean. His is the rare book that offers hope -- as any holiday season should -- by showing us how something (in this case, slavery) considered part of "human nature," could actually be altered.



The deepest newspaper truths are not always found, by the way, in the news section of your daily rag. Last Tuesday, for instance, the detail that caught my attention in the New York Times appeared in the crossword puzzle. To the clue, "war correspondent in modern lingo," the 5-letter answer… I pause for a moment to give you a chance to guess… was "embed." Doesn`t that tell you just where the Bush era has left us in media terms? So much more reason then, to cherish a photo book aptly titled Unembedded and just out from Chelsea Green, an adventurous small press in Vermont. It offers the striking (and deeply saddening) photos of four independent photojournalists -- two Americans, a Canadian, and the Iraqi Ghaith Abdul-Ahad (who also does remarkable pieces for the British Guardian from time to time). The four of them managed to make their way, on their own, into embattled, partially destroyed Najaf in August 2004, among other places. In this book, Iraqi casualties and sorrows are front and center. It`s certainly not upbeat, but it is a powerful reminder of the world the Bush administration has created in Iraq and a project to support. Tom

How (Not) to Withdraw from Iraq
By Tom Engelhardt

On the September 27th Charlie Rose Show, interviewing New Yorker editor David Remnick, Rose brought up the question of what the United States should do in Iraq. Should we "get out" -- or, as Remnick so delicately put it, should we "bolt"? Here was how Remnick ended their discussion, while talking about those who had written on Iraq for his magazine:

"There`s Jon Lee Anderson and George Packer and Sy Hersh and Rick [Hertzberg], they all look at it from different angles. But I think all of those people would agree -- I don`t know about Sy -- would agree that an immediate American withdrawal just, you know, just pick up your skirts and run, would not lead to a happy situation in the short term or the long."

Pick up your skirts and run. Forget the Republicans, that more or less sums up the state of mainstream liberal opinion on Iraq just two months ago. Only that recently "withdrawal" was still synonymous with cowardice, or, in a classic phrase of the Vietnam era (that like so many others has taken an extra bow in our own moment), "cutting and running." Withdrawal from Iraq was a subject for the margins and the political Internet (as well as secret Pentagon planning); certainly not something to be bandied about in Congress or taken seriously by the mainstream media. What a difference a few weeks can make -- a few weeks and one hawkish congressman with heart (channeling the views of a panicky military facing an increasingly unwinnable war). When Congressman John Murtha stood up -- and there wasn`t a "skirt" in sight (not, at least, until Republican Congresswoman Jean Schmidt accused him, briefly, of cowardice on the floor of the House of Representatives) -- and suggested a withdrawal of American ground troops from Iraq on a six-month timetable, you could hear the administration`s angry heart thumping.

Then, Chicken Little, the sky began to fall and withdrawal proposals, withdrawal trial balloons, withdrawal op-eds, withdrawal hints, clues, and suggestions of every sort suddenly rained down on us like those cats and dogs of children`s books. It turns out that there was hardly a major mainstream figure anywhere who didn`t have some kind of "withdrawal" proposal in his or her hip pocket; or put another way, when Senators Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden come out with positions that fit, however faintly, under the ever-widening label of "withdrawal" and only good ol` Joe Lieberman is left twisting, twisting in the Presidential hot air of "progress" and "victory," something is certainly afoot.

It gives one heart, really, to think about the strange processes that sometimes suddenly unclog the arteries of American discussion and debate, turning the previously impermissible into a topic quite suitable for the mainstream to take possession of. Give us another two months and who knows, maybe Judge Alito will actually go down to a filibuster; give us a year and maybe impeachment, just now creeping out from the margins, will find itself a topic in Congress and on the editorial pages of our papers. Like Charlie Rose, everybody knows what the proper limits of conversation are… until, of course, they unpredictably change.

Watch the Words

That said, this new withdrawal season of ours will undoubtedly prove a difficult one to sort out. With the President`s speech at Annapolis, after a huge hint from Condoleezza Rice earlier in the week ("I do not think that American forces need to be there in the numbers that they are now because -- for very much longer -- because Iraqis are stepping up"), "withdrawal" or "pullout" or "draw-down" is everybody`s property. In some ways, it was the Iraqis, meeting in Cairo, who helped get the withdrawal ball rolling by calling for a withdrawal "timetable" -- promptly rejected by the Bush administration. Now, Bush officials and military men are jumping on board in a thoroughly confusing way. No surprise there, since a lot of yesterday`s non-withdrawal people have a fair amount at stake in muddying the waters today.

We`ve just entered a period where you won`t be able tell the players without a scorecard and, unfortunately, nobody in the know is going to be selling scorecards. In fact, as the public withdrawal debate began, and the administration first "lashed out" in anger at its suddenly voluble opponents and then rushed to put forward its own "plans," the news in our papers and on TV promptly shifted into full-frontal anonymity mode. Even Congressman Murtha spoke with, it might be said, more than one tongue. After all, as a key figure on the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, he is known for his closeness to the military brass; and, in laying out his proposal, he offered some startling figures (on soaring attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq and on the 50,000 soldiers who are likely to suffer from "battle fatigue") that clearly came directly from the military. Here`s how the New Yorker`s Seymour Hersh explained the Murtha proposal in a recent interview with Democracy Now`s Amy Goodman:

"He`s known for his closeness to the four-stars. They come and they bleed on him… So Murtha`s message is a message… from a lot of generals on active duty today. This is what they think, at least a significant percentage of them, I assure you. This is, I`m not over-dramatizing this. It`s a shot across the bow. They don`t think [the Iraq war is] doable. You can`t tell that to this President. He doesn`t want to hear it. But you can say it to Murtha."

So when, for instance, you read in the press about some general officially worrying that we may "draw-down" too quickly, you have no way of knowing whether at this point his real position is the one Murtha articulated. Get the hell out fast!

In a typical recent front-page piece on "withdrawal," for instance (As Calls for an Iraq Pullout Rise, 2 Political Calendars Loom Large), David E. Sanger and Thom Shanker of the New York Times start with the "mounting calls to set a deadline to begin a withdrawal from Iraq." By paragraph two, however, that "withdrawal" has somehow been pluralized: "But in private conversations American officials are beginning to acknowledge that a judgment about when withdrawals can begin…" ("withdrawals" being, of course, something less than "withdrawal"). By the fifth paragraph (just after the jump to an inside page), anonymous "White House aides" are saying that the President "will begin examining the timing of a draw-down after he sees the outcome of the Dec. 15 election in Iraq."

So in five paragraphs and a headline, you have pullout, withdrawal, withdrawals, draw-down… and by then you`ve already met a plethora of pluralized sources as well -- not just those "White House officials," but even vaguer "American officials," and lest even that give away too much, "several officials." They`re soon joined by a roiling mass of other obscurely less-then-identified beings ("current and former White House officials," "one former aide with close ties to the National Security Council," "senior officers," plain old "officers," and "senior Pentagon civilians and officers"). And if that isn`t murky enough for you, just throw in the "ifs" that go with any story of this sort and tend to negate even the best proposed plan:

"[O]fficials in the Bush White House were already actively reviewing possible plans under which 40,000 to 50,000 troops or more could be recalled next year if ‘a plausible case could be made` that a significant number of Iraqi battalions could hold their own."

Here, for instance, are typical phrases from correspondent Rosiland Jordan`s withdrawal story on NBC national news last Sunday: "The debate is focusing on how many and when… that depends on how quiet the situation is… if conditions on the ground allow it… provided the situation on the ground improves." Or consider the following quote from a Los Angeles Times piece: "`It looks like things are headed in the right direction to enable [a large drawdown of forces] to happen in 2006,` said the official, who also spoke on condition of anonymity. But he said those hopes could be derailed if there were setbacks." Or take this bit from the latest report on Hillary Clinton`s ponderously shifting position: "…troops could be redeployed next year if coming elections in Iraq go well." So our news is now filled with posses of unidentifiable officials offering limited "withdrawal plans," which are actually draw-down plans, which are so provisionally linked to matters unlikely to unfold as expected that they may, in a sense, simply be meaningless.

The Return of Vietnamization

What then are the "plans" of those in power, as best we can tell?

The realities of the moment are, in a sense, simple and strange all at once. The grandiose preparations for planetary military and energy domination hatched by a group of utopian (or, if you prefer, dystopian) thinkers in Washington, aided and abetted by "native" dreamers and schemers in exile, and meant to begin but hardly end in Iraq, have by now run aground on the shoals of reality. A modest-sized but fierce and well-stocked insurgency, conducting a low-level guerrilla war -- Americans are basically killed on roads on their way somewhere, seldom in regular battles or on their bases -- fueled by our President`s hubris, by an unquenchable urge for national sovereignty, and by religious fundamentalism as well as fanaticism, has driven this administration from its emplacements.

Now, a second force has joined the fray, turning this into one of the stranger two-front "wars" in memory. Unlike in the Vietnam era, the second front at home remains something of a specter. Perhaps it`s not so surprising though that a President ever in fantasy-land and his utopian followers (many now set out to pasture) are being driven by publics that, at the moment, exist largely as sets of poll-driven numbers. The streets are seldom filled with demonstrators; the universities are not up in arms; and yet it`s quite clear that some ghostly form of popular pressure is indeed at work -- in combination with growing pressures from Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald (think Watergate) and a military command that, as in the Vietnam era, fears, if something doesn`t happen soon, the wheels might truly start coming off the American military machine. Still, it is fascinating that, without a significant political opposition yet in sight, we`re witnessing what looks ever more like an administration and Republican meltdown. (For those of you who believe that the Republicans have put all election victories beyond anyone`s grasp, rising Republican fears about the 2006 congressional elections should indicate that this is not yet so.)

In the eye of its own strange storm, the administration is finally starting to put policy back into the hands of those who pass for "realists," as journalist Jim Lobe of Inter Press Service has been pointing out recently. For instance, the astute and Machiavellian neocon Zalmay Khalilzad, our former ambassador to Afghanistan and present-day ambassador to the Green Zone of Iraq, has just been given permission to negotiate with the Iranians for help in Iraq and is, according to Newsweek, beginning to put American funds where they might actually matter -- into bribes to Sunni officials. In the meantime -- just a little straw in the gale -- Secretary of State Rice recently met for the first time in who knows how long for a chat with her former mentor, the elder Bush`s National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft. (If Daddy`s men are ever actually called back in, then you`ll know for sure that the White House is in humiliating "withdrawal" mode.)

In the meantime, we are once again seeing the return of the repressed (that is, the Vietnam era) to American consciousness. It`s not just the language of that moment -- White House aides "circling the wagons" and going into "bunker mode," or Democratic Senator Jack Reed insisting that the President has a growing "credibility gap" -- but the way the White House is digging itself ever deeper into the Big Muddy of that era`s playbook.

As if on cue this month -- in fact, it`s hard to believe it could have been happenstance -- Nixon`s Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, the man who claims he invented the term "Vietnamization," has returned as if from the dead (in an article in Foreign Affairs magazine) to argue that his policy actually worked, and so would "Iraqification." Maybe Laird was simply called back into existence when Dick Cheney denounced those intent on "rewriting history," but now we know from the horse`s mouth that we coulda, woulda, shoulda won -- except for a pusillanimous Congress! ("The truth about Vietnam that revisionist historians conveniently forget is that the United States had not lost when we withdrew in 1973... I believed then and still believe today that given enough outside resources, South Vietnam was capable of defending itself, just as I believe Iraq can do the same now.")

The essence of Laird`s Vietnamization policy was a realization that, on the draft-era home front, the Vietnam War was being driven by American casualties and that the Army itself was in a state of incipient revolt and disintegration. So Nixon abolished the draft, began the all-volunteer military, put an emphasis on building up the South Vietnamese army, and withdrew 500,000 American ground troops over a three-year period. What he replaced them with was a fiercely intensified air war over South Vietnam (and neighboring countries). And this policy was indeed successful in tamping down protest at home, though (despite Laird`s claims) it created insuperable problems in South Vietnam (as Iraqification will in Iraq). These led, after much further bloodshed, to the collapse of our allies in the south.

The Bush administration`s new "plan," such as it is, to draw-down our troops (while pressing our shrinking set of allies not to do the same) is clearly modeled on Laird`s Vietnamization experience -- a failed strategy being re-imagined as a successful one. By a shift of tactical priorities, it is meant to create the look of withdrawal before the 2006 congressional elections, and it, too, will emphasize the mayhem of air power. On the ground, American forces are to be slowly withdrawn from Iraq`s cities to their bases, cutting down on both casualties and, for Iraqis, that oppressive sense of being occupied by foreigners.

In draw-down terms, the plan seems to go something like this: While withdrawal was making onto the public agenda, our actual force in Iraq has risen in recent months from approximately 138,000 to about 160,000. So the first "withdrawals" (plural) the administration will be able to announce after the December 15 election -- about 20,000 troops -- will simply get us back to the levels that Donald Rumsfeld and his planners always meant us to be at.

General George Casey, U.S. commander in Iraq, and others have been letting the news ooze out for a while (despite rumors of presidential slap-downs for doing so) that, if all goes half-well, we will perhaps withdraw another 40,000 troops (the figures vary depending upon the leak) in 2006, leaving us with just under 100,000 troops there. In 2007… well, who knows, but the process, it`s clear, is meant to be more or less unending, and, mind you, that`s according to the Pentagon`s "moderately optimistic" scenario. (Seymour Hersh claims that the administration`s "most ambitious" plans call for all troops designated "combat," which is not all troops, to be withdrawn by the summer of 2008.)

Nothing in the last two-and-a-half-plus years, of course, should lead anyone to be "moderately optimistic." If you want a little dose of realism, just consider the latest report on the new Iraqi army from the Atlantic Monthly`s James Fallows; or visit the rare Iraqi unit that has been more or less "stood up" with Knight Ridder`s Tom Lasseter and consider what it`s been stood up for (a Shiite revenge war in Sunni neighborhoods); or check in with "two senior Army analysts who in 2003 accurately foretold the turmoil that would be unleashed by the U.S. invasion of Iraq" and now claim it is "no longer clear that the United States will be able to create (Iraqi) military and police forces that can secure the entire country no matter how long U.S. forces remain"; or visit with "the only non-American author on the U.S. Army`s list of required reading for officers," Hebrew University military historian Martin Van Cleveld, who recently called George Bush`s little Iraqi adventure "the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 BC sent his legions into Germany and lost them."

In perhaps the most important piece of reportage of the year, Up in the Air, the New Yorker`s Seymour Hersh dissects the sinews of the administration`s Iraqification strategy. Unsurprisingly, while drawing-down troops (in hopes of lessening American casualties), the Pentagon is to intensify the air war, which means, of course, loosing the U.S. Air Force on Iraq`s urban areas where the insurgency thrives and undoubtedly increasing Iraqi casualties. Or as Hersh puts it:

"A key element of the drawdown plans, not mentioned in the President`s public statements, is that the departing American troops will be replaced by American airpower. Quick, deadly strikes by U.S. warplanes are seen as a way to improve dramatically the combat capability of even the weakest Iraqi combat units. The danger, military experts have told me, is that, while the number of American casualties would decrease as ground troops are withdrawn, the over-all level of violence and the number of Iraqi fatalities would increase unless there are stringent controls over who bombs what."

As Hersh essentially points out, what this is likely to mean in practice -- if combat is significantly turned over to the new Iraqi Army -- is sending our Air Force against targets of that army`s choosing; that is, putting American air power in service to a Shiite and Kurdish revenge war against the Sunnis -- not exactly a recipe for a pacified Iraq.

The thinking behind such strategies is, in fact, as recognizable to those of us who lived through the Vietnam era as "Vietnamization." Here`s what I wrote about such "withdrawal" plans during the Vietnam era in my book, The End of Victory Culture, published a distant decade ago. See if it doesn`t have a familiar ring to it:

"The idea of ‘withdrawing` from Vietnam was there from the beginning, though never as an actual plan. All real options for ending the war were invariably linked to ‘cutting and running,` or ‘dishonor,` or ‘surrender,` or ‘humiliation,` and so dismissed within the councils of government more or less before being raised. The attempt to prosecute the war and to withdraw from it were never separable, no less opposites. If anything, withdrawal became a way to maintain or intensify the war, while pacifying the American public.

"`Withdrawal` involved not departure but all sorts of departure-like maneuvers – from bombing pauses that led to fiercer bombing campaigns to negotiation offers never meant to be taken up to a ‘Vietnamization` plan in which ground troops would be pulled out as the air war was intensified. Each gesture of withdrawal allowed the war planners to fight a little longer; but if withdrawal did not withdraw the country from the war, the war`s prosecution never brought it close to a victorious conclusion."

Clash of Languages

So now, having passed through much of the Vietnam era`s strategy and language in a mere couple of years, we find ourselves in the Vietnamization/Iraqification period. Forgetting for a minute that, among other differences with Vietnam, this seems increasingly to be a war not for national unification but for national disunification, we seem finally, as in those distant years, to be on the downhill slope of language and imagery.

To give but one example: Proud neocon neocolonials like Paul Wolfowitz, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and the President himself, regularly talked about bringing "democracy" to Iraq in patronizingly parental terms. They liked to say that they were trying to figure out the moment to take the "training wheels" off the Iraqi bike and let the toddler wheel around the nearest corner on his own. Now we find one of our many anonymous generals quoted in a Washington Post piece using that very image no less patronizingly but far more fearfully in military terms. "Another senior general likened an accelerated withdrawal to ‘taking the training wheels off of a bike too early.`"

Or here`s another example: American "senior officials" in the glory days of our Iraq adventure spoke regularly and without shame about the need to "put an Iraqi face" on Iraq. This was a wonderfully grim phrase which, in a strange way, expressed their deeper meaning exactly; they wanted to put a comforting Iraqi mask over the American face of the occupation. Now, we find a military version of the same, whose bluntness makes a certain sense of our moment, as quoted in a mid-November piece from Anton La Guardia, Diplomatic Editor of the British Telegraph:

"Senior US military commanders have long argued that the way to defeat the insurgency is to reduce substantially the number of foreign troops in order to ‘reduce the perception of occupation` and draw Sunnis into the political process."

To "reduce the perception of occupation," that`s a phrase to savor for its truth-telling essence. It catches something of the administration`s policy now that it`s actually on the run at home.

In the meantime, our President, in the first of several speeches he is to give on Iraq before the December 15th elections, took a roller-coaster ride through Iraqi Disneyland. As Dan Froomkin of the Washington Post commented, "President Bush`s safety zone these days doesn`t appear to extend very far beyond military bases, other federal installations and Republican fundraisers."

Not exactly surprising, then, that his speech should have been so la-la-(out)landish. For instance, as Paul Woodward of the War in Context website pointed out, he promoted his "strategy for victory in Iraq" by referring to "progress" a mere 28 times before the assembled cadets of the Naval Academy. And then there was "victory," once quite hard to find in administration documents that emphasized how we were in an endless multi-generational struggle against terrorism. Yet, at this desperate moment, the President managed to mention "victory" 15 times (and add another for the title of the speech) -- and not just victory but the fact that we would not "accept anything less than complete victory."

That had a ring not heard since Americans called for total victory and unconditional surrender in World War II, but then the President remains in a World War II dream world, that thrilling place he experienced in the movies of his childhood where the Marines always advance; our grinning native sidekicks are friendly and remarkably willing to die in our place; the enemy is destined to fall by their hundreds before our fire; and total victory is an American birthright. In fact, the President, who mentioned no post-1945 war (except the Cold one) -- and there were so many to chose from -- spoke of World War II twice. You know, that war so like the present one in which "free nations came together to fight the ideology of fascism, and freedom prevailed." (Just in case you`ve forgotten, that was the war in which the other side had the Guantánamos…)

Perhaps there`s poetic justice in seeing a President trapped in his fantasy world being driven from pillar to post by a fantasy public, while his generals and top officials do their best to ignore him as they search desperately for ways out, and his advisers (and political supporters) hire lawyers.

How to Tell Withdrawal from Its Doppelgangers

If you pay attention not to the war of words or the storm of confusing withdrawal proposals, but to four bedrock matters, you`ll have a far better sense of where we`re really heading. These are air power, permanent bases, an "American" Kurdistan, and oil; and, not surprisingly, they coincide with the great uncovered, or barely covered, stories of the war. In the present flurry of withdrawal discussions, only air power, thanks to Hersh, is getting any attention. The others have so far gone largely or totally unmentioned -- and yet, without them, none of this makes any sense at all.

Air Power: It remains amazing to me that Hersh`s report is the first serious mainstream piece since the invasion of Iraq to take up the uses of air power in that country. It`s a subject I`ve written about for the last two years. After all, we`ve loosed our Air Force on heavily populated urban Iraq, regularly bombing (and sometimes destroying significant sections of) Sunni cities and towns (and in 2004 Shiite ones as well). There have been hundreds and hundreds of reporters in Iraq, many embedded with the military -- and yet it`s as if they simply never look up. Figures on the use of air power are almost impossible to come by, though Hersh tells us in his Democracy Now interview that the bombing has "gone up exponentially, certainly in the last four or five months in the Sunni Triangle." He adds, however, that "we don`t have reporters at the air bases. We don`t know what`s going on with the air war." Here`s just one passage that gives a modest sense of some of what the Bush administration has been doing from the air: "Naval efforts in Iraq include not only the Marine Corps but also virtually every type of deployable Naval asset in our inventory. Navy and Marine carrier-based aircraft flew over 21,000 hours, dropped over 54,000 pounds of ordnance and played a vital role in the fight for Fallujah."

Add in another reality of America`s Iraq: L. Paul Bremer`s Coalition Provisional Authority, in a burst of blind pride in 2003, disbanded the Iraqi military. For well over a year or more, Pentagon plans for rebuilding it called for a future Iraqi military force (lite) of only 40,000 men with minimal armaments and essentially no air force at all! This is the Middle East, mind you. What that meant, simply enough, was that the Bush administration intended the American Army and Air Force to be the Iraqi military for eons to come. Under the pressure of the insurgency, the army part of that plan was thrown out the window. But "standing up" the Iraqi military has meant just that. Standing on the ground. There is still no real Iraqi air force. Iraq was never to "fly," but to stay on that "bike" and under the tutelage of Washington.

The actual use of American air power will undoubtedly prove tricky indeed (without many American ground troops around) and probably no more successful in the long run than it was in Iraq -- except, of course, in terms of devastating the country. But watch the Iraqi skies as best you can. They will tell you something.

Permanent Bases: We were to control military-less Iraq and perhaps the region from a small series of permanent bases, already imagined and on the drawing boards as the invasion began. At the height of our base-building mania, we had about 106 bases there, ranging from multibillion-dollar Vietnam-era-sized mega-structures like Camp Victory North (renamed Camp Liberty) just outside of Baghdad to tiny base camps in outlying parts of the country. We now claim to be turning these over to the Iraqis. Part of our draw-down plan, according to Hersh, includes "heavily scripted change-of-command ceremonies, complete with the lowering of American flags at bases and the raising of Iraqi ones" -- one of these occurred, conveniently enough, near the Syrian border the day the President spoke.

We have so many of these bases that we can hand them back one by one with appropriate special ceremonies almost in perpetuity without ever getting to the small core of 4-5 bases that the Pentagon planned on permanently garrisoning as American troops first crossed the Iraqi border. So here`s what to watch for: If any of these key bases are handed back, with flags lowered and troops removed, then you can begin to believe that an actual withdrawal may be in the offing.

Kurdistan: You would largely not know that the Kurdish parts of Iraq existed from most daily news reports on the war. But one major change from the Vietnam era is that we have potential "sanctuaries" in the area to withdraw to. Murtha suggested one of them, Kuwait, and it is the focus of attention at the moment. But Kurdistan, at present the quietest part of Iraq (despite fierce tensions between the two main Kurdish political parties and non-Kurdish residents of the as-yet somewhat undefined area), is also likely to be the most welcoming to American forces "withdrawing" from "Iraq." Present-day Kurdistan was created under the American and British no-fly zones in the 1990s and its future autonomy, no less independence, would be at least temporarily guaranteed by the presence of American troops there. Even the Turks might prefer American forces in Kurdistan, if they restrained local forces from any kind of cross-border shenanigans in Kurdish regions of Turkey. The sole reference I`ve seen to this possibility was in a recent piece by veteran reporter Martin Walker who wrote: "There are other ideas circulating in the Pentagon, including the establishment of a major and possibly permanent base in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq, where U.S. troops are less controversial, and would be welcomed by the neighboring Turks, always worried at the prospect of an independent Kurdistan becoming a magnet for their own disaffected Kurdish minority."

Were the rest of Iraq to fall completely out of our hands, it`s easy to imagine an "American" Kurdistan (conveniently near the Iranian border), possibly expanded to include the oil lands around the tinderbox city of Kirkuk, with its own set of bases. Interestingly, the Los Angeles Times has just revealed that one of the Kurdish political parties signed a private oil exploration deal with a Norwegian company. Of course, the Kurdish areas would have their own set of explosive problems, but over the next year watch for Kurdistan to surface as part of any American draw-down which isn`t actually a withdrawal.

Oil: So here we are at another of the great, hardly covered stories of the Iraq war. As Mark LeVine has recently made so clear, the Bush administration, with its former energy industry execs and consultants, was thinking oil -- and Iraqi oil in particular -- from literally the first moments of its existence. "[T]he few documents that have been made public from [Vice President Cheney`s] Energy Task Force… reveal not only that industry executives met with Cheney`s staff [in February 2001] but that a map of Iraq and an accompanying list of ‘Iraq oil foreign suitors` were the center of discussion." Hmmm… These were people who already had "peak oil" on their minds. They entered Iraq, a nation sitting on untold amounts of oil, thinking about the global control of future energy resources. They sent soldiers to guard the Oil Ministry and the oil fields, while allowing pretty much everything else to be looted as the country fell to them. They have no desire to abandon either their permanent bases or that reservoir of "black gold" to others. But beyond pious statements about preserving the Iraqi "patrimony" (i.e. oil) in the early days of the war, they never broached the subject publicly and the media followed their lead. It`s rare today -- though a perfectly obvious point to make -- for someone to say, as Ambassador Khalilzad did recently, "You could have a regional war that could go on for a very long time, and affect the security of oil supplies." Keep your eyes on this issue. It`s what separates Vietnam, which itself contained nothing special for a foreign power, from Iraq.

In the end, ignore (if you can) the whirlwind of withdrawal language that will turn all sorts of non- or semi-withdrawal schemes into something other than what they are, and try to keep your eyes on those shoals of reality. This is not Vietnam, which happened in slow-time. This war, as the historian Marilyn Young claimed in its first weeks so few years ago, is "Vietnam on crack cocaine" and, whatever anyone is saying now, it`s a fair bet that events will outpace all administration plans and fantasies in the explosive year to come.

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute`s Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of American triumphalism in the Cold War. His novel, The Last Days of Publishing, has just come out in paperback.

Copyright 2005 Tom Engelhardt


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Barbara Bush is allegedly TICKED off at Dick Cheney.
Barbara Bush is allegedly TICKED off at Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Andy Card, nearly all of them -- except Karen Hughes -- for how her boy is faring in the hearts and minds of Americans.

The matriarch of the Bush clan is colder than North Pole ice right now to those around her son who she thinks have undermined him. I`ll tell who my sources are if Patrick Fitzgerald gives a call and makes me -- but the sources are very close to Poppa Bush (41), who has been traveling a bit with some of his old entourage, including Brent Scowcroft and others of the first Bush regime.

While TWN has been able to confirm that Laura Bush`s mother-in-law wants to do more than put coal in the stockings of the Vice President and the other top handlers of her son`s White House, we have not been able to confirm a slightly stronger bit of the rumor, which is that Barbara -- not Laura -- was planning to call on Nancy Reagan just to get a refresher lesson on how she took on and kicked out then Chief-of-Staff Donald Regan. (I embellish here; Barbara Bush is not going to take lessons from Nancy, it just sounded good. My source told me that Barbara was about to "pull a Nancy Reagan" on these attendants.)

Cheney may be tougher to dump than Don Regan, but then again, Barbara Bush is one of those wonders of nature (we hear) who knows no limits and can easily surge beyond category 5 hurricane winds.

Should be interesting to watch the role of the First Mother in the coming couple of months. Watch for a lot to change right after the State of the Union address, I`ve been told.

And if you are near the radio or internet termninal, I`ll be chatting with Sam Seder of Air America`s Majority Report tonight at 7:50 p.m. ET for a quick ten minutes.

More later.
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How Presidents Use the Term "Democracy" as a Marketing Tool
By Lawrence S. Wittner
http://hnn.us/articles/18719.html

Dr. Wittner is Professor of History at the State University of New York, Albany. His latest book is Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present (Stanford University Press).


George W. Bush’s recent claim that the U.S. war in Iraq is part of an attempt to spread “democracy” to the Middle East should not surprise anyone familiar with the use of that word to camouflage sordid realities.

When, in the aftermath of World War II, Stalin had the Soviet Union gobble up the nations of Eastern Europe, he christened them People’s Democracies – although they were neither democratic nor meant to be. This debasement of “democracy” and other noble terms such as “freedom” and “peace” to crude propaganda was undoubtedly what George Orwell had in mind when he wrote his powerful novel, 1984, which portrayed a nightmarish society in which words were turned inside out to justify the policies of cynical and unscrupulous rulers.

Unfortunately, however, “democracy” has also been abused throughout American history. In the nineteenth century, land-hungry politicians, slaveholders, and businessmen defended the U.S. conquest of new territory by claiming that it would extend the area of democracy and freedom. In the twentieth century, President Woodrow Wilson grandly proclaimed that U.S. participation in World War I would “make the world safe for democracy.” A few decades later, Washington officials again sanctified U.S. policy by invoking democracy, for they declared repeatedly that the U.S. role in the Cold War was designed to defend the “Free World.” Indeed, it would be hard to find a U.S. war or expansionist enterprise that was not accompanied by enthusiastic rhetoric about supporting democracy.

In fairness, it should be noted that the U.S. government has economically and militarily supported many democratic nations. After World War II, it forged alliances with a good number of them.

But it has also provided military and economic assistance to numerous nations ruled by bloody dictatorships, including Franco’s Spain, Chiang Kai-Shek’s China, the Shah’s Iran, Somoza’s Nicaragua, Batista’s Cuba, Sukarno’s Indonesia, the Saud family’s Saudi Arabia, Diem’s South Vietnam, Duvalier’s Haiti, Marcos’s Philippines, the Colonels’ Greece, and many other tyrannies. Indeed, the term “Free World” originally included Stalin’s Russia. And, not so long ago, the U.S. government had no scruples about providing military assistance to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Furthermore, on occasion the U.S. government has sought to overthrow democratic governments. Three of its success stories along these lines occurred in Mossadeq’s Iran, Arbenz’s Guatemala, and Allende’s Chile, where democratic governments were succeeded by vicious dictatorships. Based upon this record, observers might well conclude that, for U.S. officials, the defense of democracy has been less important as a motive than as a marketing device.

A good example of “democracy” as a marketing device is its employment in selling the U.S. program of military and economic aid to Greece in 1947. This program had arisen out of the U.S. government’s fear that the Soviet Union, then at loggerheads with the United States, stood on the verge of breaking through the Western defense line to the oil-rich Middle East. To plan President Truman’s address to the nation on the new policy, Francis Russell, the director of the State Department’s Office of Public Affairs, met on February 27 with the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee. The meeting records indicate that, when Russell asked if the speech should emphasize the conflict with the Soviet Union, he was told that it should avoid “specifically mentioning Russia.” Then perhaps, said Russell, the administration “should couch it in terms of [a] new policy of this government to go to the assistance of free governments everywhere.” This proposal was greeted enthusiastically, for it would be useful to “relate military aid to [the] principle of supporting democracy.” Or, as one participant put it, the “only thing that can sell [the] public” would be to emphasize the threat to democracy. Ultimately, then, the president’s March 12, 1947 address, which became known as the Truman Doctrine, did not mention the conflict between two rival nations, the United States and the Soviet Union, but instead emphasized “alternative ways of life,” in which the United States was defending the “free” one.

This approach not only misrepresented the motives of U.S. government officials, but the realities in the two nations targeted for the military and economic aid. Joseph Jones, who drafted the president’s address, recalled: “That the Greek government was corrupt, reactionary, inefficient, and indulged in extremist practices was well known and incontestable; that Turkey . . . had not achieved full democratic self-government was also patent.” According to the minutes of the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee meeting, participants agreed that the Greek government was a rotten one, though “not basically fascist.”

Thus, President Bush’s recent contention that his war in Iraq is designed to further the cause of “democracy” is not out of line with the statements of past U.S. government officials, who have not been very scrupulous about how they have packaged their policies. Nor is it out of line with the behavior of other governments, always eager to put the most attractive face on their ventures.

Even so, given the long-term abuse of the word “democracy” as a public relations device – as well as the collapse of the president’s earlier justifications for the Iraq War – we might be pardoned for viewing his sudden enthusiasm for democracy with a good deal of skepticism.

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Guantanamo Tube Feedings Humane, Within Medical Care Standards
http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Dec2005/20051201_3504.html

By Kathleen T. Rhem
American Forces Press Service

U.S. NAVAL STATION GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba, Dec. 1, 2005 – The small number of involuntary feedings conducted at the U.S. detention facility here are done humanely and are well within common standards of medical care, officials said in an effort to counter allegations made by attorneys for some detainees here.

Thirty to 33 enemy combatant detainees here are currently on a hunger strike -- which officials here call "voluntary fasting" -- to protest their continued detention. Of those, 22 are receiving liquid nutrition through a tube inserted through the nose and into the stomach.

"We have an ultimate responsibility that every detainee on our watch is taken care of," Joint Task Force Guantanamo Deputy Commander Brig. Gen. John Gong said in an interview. "We have a great desire to ensure they are healthy."

Gong and other officials said widely reported allegations that the tubes are the width of a finger, are forcefully inserted without anesthesia or lubricant, and are reused on different detainees are patently false.

Navy Capt. (Dr.) John Edmonson, the senior medical officer at Guantanamo Bay, said the "enteral" feeding -- meaning directly into the stomach -- is done with a nasogastric "Dobhoff" tube. The tube is flexible and 4 millimeters in diameter, Edmonson said.

He stressed that only doctors and nurses insert the tubes and always use lubricant. They also always offer anesthetics and suggest stronger pain medication if a detainee appears to be uncomfortable. He described the Dobhoff tube as "very soft and non-irritating."

Medical staff members never reuse the tubes, Edmonson said.

"I can assure you that the doctors are doing everything within the character of the standard of their profession," Gong said.

For the most part, the feedings are not involuntary. Both men said the vast majority of detainees voluntarily participate in the feedings. In fact, Edmonson noted, some even insert their own feeding tubes. "They are generally cooperative with the medical staff in that effort," he said.

Detainees are considered to be on a hunger strike after they miss nine consecutive meals, and medical specialists begin monitoring their health status. Body mass index, weight loss and physical condition are monitored. Edmonson said a patient can survive for about three weeks without eating as long as he is drinking water, which the detainees are.

When a detainee`s weight drops too much and his health begins to deteriorate, doctors speak to the individual and offer supplemental nutrition, first intravenously and then through a nasogastric tube. Detainees receive Ensure, a commercial nutritional supplement, through the tube. Most agree to the procedure, Gong said.

He explained that as long as detainees maintain a certain level of health, they get to choose how much liquid nutrition to take. "The doctors try to be respectful of what the detainees want to do," he said.

Most take 1,500 calories a day. In contrast, most U.S. dietary recommendations are based on a 2,000-calorie diet.

In rare cases, detainees have received tube feedings involuntarily. "Some, because of their character and temperament, they would be less than cooperative and would need to be restrained," Gong said. Officials said restraints are always applied with the least amount of force possible. Both he and Edmonson said this is the rare exception and only used when a detainee`s health is seriously in jeopardy.

The number of hunger-striking detainees peaked at 131 around the most recent anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, Gong said. Since then the number has steadily declined and has remained around the current number for the past several weeks.

"One has to really kind of scratch their head and ask why would they pick the anniversary of 9/11 (to protest their detention)," Gong said.

"It`s their little contribution to their cause," Army Lt. Col. John Lonergan, commander of 1st Battalion, 18th Cavalry Regiment, said. Lonergan`s unit provides security at the detention facility.

Edmonson, who has been at Guantanamo for two and a half years, said it`s important to note that no detainees have died at Guantanamo Bay, while several of these men probably would have died if they weren`t here. Task force doctors have treated cancer, battle wounds and other serious injuries and illnesses in a population that generally has limited access to medical care.


http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Dec2005/20051201_3504.html

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Der Zwischenfall im Golf von Tonkin, der zu dem direkten Eingreifen der USA in den Vietnam-Krieg führte, war ein Fake. Das haben die in den letzten Tagen veröffentlichten Dokumente gezeigt.[urlTonkin-Zwischenfall]http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonkin-Zwischenfall[/url]

Dazu die Links zu den Dokumenten:
[url>>Gulf of Tonkin - 11/30/2005]http://www.nsa.gov/vietnam/index.cfm[/url]
On 30 November 2005, the National Security Agency (NSA) released the first installment of previously classified information regarding the Vietnam era, specifically the Gulf of Tonkin incident.
Der im Text angebene Link funktioniert nicht. aher von GWU und dem National Security Archive die Seite über den Vietnamkrieg mit dem Update vom 01.12.05
[urlUpdate - December 1, 2005
Tonkin Gulf Intelligence "Skewed" According to Official History and Intercepts]http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB132/[/url]
Der direkte Link: http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB132/press20051201.…
Newly Declassified National Security Agency Documents Show Analysts Made "SIGINT fit the claim" of North Vietnamese Attack.

Es ist nicht das erste Mal, dass US-Truppen mit einer Lüge in den Kampf geschickt wurden.


SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1155AP_Vietnam_Skewed…

Friday, December 2, 2005 · Last updated 2:31 a.m. PT

Analysis casts doubt on Vietnam war claims
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1155AP_Vietnam_Skewed…" target="_blank" rel="nofollow ugc noopener">http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1155AP_Vietnam_Skewed…


By CALVIN WOODWARD
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

WASHINGTON -- Another war, another set of faulty intelligence findings behind it.

Forty years before the United States invaded Iraq believing Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, it widened a war in Vietnam apparently convinced the enemy had launched an unprovoked attack on two U.S. Navy destroyers.

Papers declassified by the National Security Agency point to a series of bungled intelligence findings on the purported clash in the Gulf of Tonkin that led Congress to endorse President Johnson`s escalation of the Vietnam conflict in August 1964.

Among the documents released Thursday is an article written by NSA historian Robert J. Hanyok for the agency`s classified publication, Cryptologic Quarterly. In it, he declares that his review of the complete intelligence shows beyond doubt "no attack happened that night."

Claims that North Vietnamese boats attacked two U. S. Navy destroyers on Aug. 4, 1964 - just two days after an initial assault on one of those ships - rallied Congress behind Johnson`s build-up of the war. The so-called Gulf of Tonkin resolution passed three days later empowered him to take "all necessary steps" in the region and opened the way for large-scale commitment of U.S. forces.

As with the intelligence that convinced the administration and lawmakers that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, the article asserts officials gave much weight to scant evidence.

But, also like Iraq, it did not find that top administration officials ordered up fabricated evidence to suit their wishes.

Instead, in the case of Vietnam, they were presented with an incomplete story, Hanyok said. Of the intelligence-gatherers who got it wrong, he added: "They walked alone in their counsels."

The agency released more than 140 documents in response to requests from researchers trying to get to the bottom of an episode that unfolded in the South China Sea that cloudy night, and has been disputed since.

"The parallels between the faulty intelligence on Tonkin Gulf and the manipulated intelligence used to justify the Iraq war make it all the more worthwhile to re-examine the events of August 1964 in light of new evidence," researcher John Prados said.

Prados is a specialist on the Gulf of Tonkin at George Washington University`s National Security Archive, which is not affiliated with the National Security Agency, and which pressed for release of the documents through Freedom of Information requests and other means.

Hanyok`s article reviews signals intelligence, or SIGINT, from that time and concludes that top administration officials were only given material supporting the claim of an Aug. 4 attack, not the wealth of contradictory intelligence. His study was published in 2001 and does not necessary reflect the agency`s position.

"In truth, Hanoi`s navy was engaged in nothing that night but the salvage of two of the boats damaged on 2 August," Hanyok wrote.

He said "the handful of SIGINT reports which suggested that an attack had occurred contained severe analytical errors, unexplained translation changes, and the conjunction of two unrelated messages into one translation. This latter product would become the Johnson administration`s main proof of the Aug. 4 attack."

He said he did not find "manufactured evidence and collusion at all levels"; rather, it appeared intelligence-gatherers had made a series of mistakes and their superiors did not set the record straight.

Conflicting and confused reports from the scene have long cast doubt on whether the events unfolded as claimed.

Hanyok`s analysis of previously top secret intelligence adds insight on North Vietnam`s communications from that time, showing, he said, that the supposed attackers did not even know the location of the destroyers, the USS Maddox and C. Turner Joy, as the two ships patrolled off the North Vietnam coast.

A shorter agency study done years earlier and also released Thursday indicated the ships did not know what, if anything, was coming at them as they zigzagged to evade what the crews feared were torpedoes.

That study concluded with a wry note, saying the destroyers resumed their patrols after a heavy round of U.S. air strikes on North Vietnam ports, "and the rest is just painful history."

A detailed chronology assembled days after the episode for the Joint Chiefs of Staff by J.J. Merrick, commander of Destroyer Division 192, reflected the uncertainty of that night.

It said sonar in many cases picked up sounds that were believed to be torpedoes but turned out to be "self noise" - the beating of the ships` own propellers, or noise from patrol boats or supporting planes that were strafing the dark sea, unable to see any prey.

In another instance, however, the report contended a "torpedo wake was seen by four people."

The Maddox had come under fire from North Vietnamese patrol boats Aug. 2, taking only superficial damage.

---

On the Net:

National Security Agency documents: http://www.nsa.gov/vietnam/index.cfm

National Security Archive: http://www.gwu.edu/nsarchiv/

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Haben die Norweger auch Truppen im Irak?

Kurdish Oil Deal Shocks Iraq`s Political Leaders
A Norwegian company begins drilling in the north without approval from Baghdad.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-oildeal1…

By Borzou Daragahi
Times Staff Writer

December 1, 2005

BAGHDAD — A controversial oil exploration deal between Iraq`s autonomy-minded Kurds and a Norwegian company got underway this week without the approval of the central government here, raising a potentially explosive issue at a time of heightened ethnic and sectarian tensions.

The Kurdistan Democratic Party, which controls a portion of the semiautonomous Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq, last year quietly signed a deal with Norway`s DNO to drill for oil near the border city of Zakho. Iraqi and company officials describe the agreement as the first involving new exploration in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.

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Drilling began after a ceremony Tuesday, during which Nechirvan Barzani, prime minister of the Kurdish northern region, vowed "there is no way Kurdistan would accept that the central government will control our resources," according to news agency reports.

In Baghdad, political leaders on Wednesday reacted to the deal with astonishment.

"We need to figure out if this is allowed in the constitution," said Adnan Ali Kadhimi, an advisor to Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari. "Nobody has mentioned it. It has not come up among the government ministers` council. It has not been on their agenda."

The start of drilling, called "spudding" in the oil business, is sure to be worrisome to Iraq`s Sunni Arab minority. They fear a disintegration of Iraq into separate ethnic and religious cantons if regions begin to cut energy deals with foreign companies and governments. Sunnis are concentrated in Iraq`s most oil-poor region.

Iraq`s neighbors also fear the possibility of Iraqi Kurds using revenue generated by oil wells to fund an independent state that might lead the roughly 20 million Kurds living in Turkey, Iran and Syria to revolt.

Iraqi legal experts and international oil industry analysts have questioned the deal. Oil industry trade journals had expressed doubts that it would come to fruition.

Iraq`s draft constitution, approved in an Oct. 15 national referendum, stipulates that "the federal government with the producing regional and governorate governments shall together formulate" energy policy. However, it also makes ambiguous reference to providing compensation for "damaged regions that were unjustly deprived by the former regime."

Iraq`s Kurds have argued that the country`s existing oil fields and infrastructure, such as those in the largely Kurdish cities of Kirkuk and Khanaqin, should be divvied up by the central government but that future oil discoveries should be controlled by each oil-producing region.

In his speech Tuesday, Barzani, the nephew of Kurdish politician and former guerrilla leader Massoud Barzani, eschewed the language of the law and couched the deal in political terms. He invoked the Kurds` years of deprivation at the hands of the Sunni Arab-dominated government of Saddam Hussein.

"The time has come that instead of suffering, the people of Kurdistan will benefit from the fortunes and resources of their country," he said during the ceremony in the western portion of Kurdish-controlled territory.

The Kurds, who during the last several years of Hussein`s rule maintained sovereignty in northern Iraq under the protection of U.S. warplanes, made millions in transit and customs fees as the Baghdad government smuggled oil to Turkey in violation of United Nations sanctions. Since the end of the sanctions, the Kurds have sought ways to make up for that lost income.

The eastern administrative half of the Kurdish region also is rushing to sign energy deals with foreign companies without Baghdad`s approval. The government of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, based in the city of Sulaymaniya, has signed an electricity agreement with a Turkish company and explored a possible oil deal with a foreign partnership near the city of Chamchamal, the site of several dormant oil wells.

During months of painstaking constitutional negotiations, Kurds insisted on the authority to cut energy deals without Baghdad`s approval. Under the draft charter, the task of determining how oil resources will be allocated is left to the National Assembly that will be elected Dec. 15.

The language in the constitution regarding the power of regions to pen such contracts was a major reason that the vast majority of Sunnis voted against the charter in October.

The announcement of the DNO drilling took many Iraqis by surprise Wednesday.

"This is unprecedented," said Alaa Makki, a leader of the Iraqi Islamic Party, a Sunni Arab group. "It`s like they are an independent country. This is Iraqi oil and should be shared with all the Iraqi partners."

Makki said Kurds were trying to have it both ways, controlling the Iraqi presidency and several powerful ministries in the national government while also trying to lay claim to extra-constitutional powers in the north. Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, is the Iraqi president.

However, Helge Eide, managing director of Oslo-based DNO, said he believed Iraq`s new constitution gave the Kurdish north jurisdiction over certain drilling and oil exploration activities.

"That was clearly pointed out by Mr. [Nechirvan] Barzani," said Eide, who attended the Zakho ceremony.

Oil companies have become used to operating in hostile and unstable territories. DNO, founded 25 years ago, is considered an upstart in the oil business, with projects in Yemen, Mozambique and Equatorial Guinea, the site of a coup attempt last year, as well as northern Europe.

Eide said his company was more than willing to work with the government in Baghdad, though it had not yet signed a deal with the capital for oil exploration. In April, the company signed a deal to provide the Iraqi Oil Ministry with training and technology as "the first steps" to being invited by Baghdad, as well as the Irbil-based Kurdish government, for future oil and exploration work.

Iraq, a member of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, holds an estimated 115 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, mainly in the south, according to Oil & Gas Journal, an industry publication.

That places Iraq among the top five nations in oil reserves. Iraq could contain significantly more undiscovered oil where energy exploration hasn`t occurred, an area that stretches across about 90% of the country, the U.S. Energy Department said.

Iraq exports about 2 million barrels of oil a day, according to the International Energy Agency in Paris.

*

Times staff writers Jeffrey Fleishman in Berlin and Nancy Rivera Brooks in Los Angeles contributed to this report.



Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times

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Latest Update: #33555 01.12.05 14:43:36
Latest Coalition Fatality: Dec 01, 2005
Military Fatalities US, UK, Other: : Total: 2324 , US: 2123 , Nov.05: 86, Dez: 10

Iraker 11/30/05
http://www.icasualties.org/oif/IraqiDeaths.aspx

Regelmäßige Updates von Meldungen aus dem Irak:
http://icasualties.org/oif/

Da bei ´Today im Irak´ die Postings immer länger werden, hier den Link für alle Interessierte: http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

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Der ACLU-Report [urlU.S. Operatives Killed Detainees During Interrogations in Afghanistan and Iraq]http://www.aclu.org/intlhumanrights/gen/21236prs20051024.html?ht=final%20autopsy%20report%20do%20003164%20final%20autopsy%20report%20do%20003164[/url]

Published on Friday, December 2, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
Hard Evidence of U.S. Torturing Prisoners to Death Ignored by Corporate Media
by Peter Phillips
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1202-28.htm

Military autopsy reports provide indisputable proof that detainees are being tortured to death while in US military custody. Yet the US corporate media are covering it with the seriousness of a garage sale for the local Baptist Church.

A recent American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) posting of one of forty-four US military autopsy reports reads as follows: "Final Autopsy Report: DOD 003164, (Detainee) Died as a result of asphyxia (lack of oxygen to the brain) due to strangulation as evidenced by the recently fractured hyoid bone in the neck and soft tissue hemorrhage extending downward to the level of the right thyroid cartilage. Autopsy revealed bone fracture, rib fractures, contusions in mid abdomen, back and buttocks extending to the left flank, abrasions, lateral buttocks. Contusions, back of legs and knees; abrasions on knees, left fingers and encircling to left wrist. Lacerations and superficial cuts, right 4th and 5th fingers. Also, blunt force injuries, predominately recent contusions (bruises) on the torso and lower extremities. Abrasions on left wrist are consistent with use of restraints. No evidence of defense injuries or natural disease. Manner of death is homicide. Whitehorse Detainment Facility, Nasiriyah, Iraq."

The ACLU website further reveals how: "a 27-year-old Iraqi male died while being interrogated by Navy Seals on April 5, 2004, in Mosul, Iraq. During his confinement he was hooded, flex-cuffed, sleep deprived and subjected to hot and cold environmental conditions, including the use of cold water on his body and hood. The exact cause of death was "undetermined" although the autopsy stated that hypothermia may have contributed to his death.

Another Iraqi detainee died on January 9, 2004, in Al Asad, Iraq, while being interrogated. He was standing, shackled to the top of a doorframe with a gag in his mouth, at the time he died. The cause of death was asphyxia and blunt force injuries.

So read several of the 44 US military autopsy reports on the ACLU website -evidence of extensive abuse of US detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan 2002 through 2004. Anthony Romero, Executive Director of ACLU stated, "There is no question that US interrogations have resulted in deaths." ACLU attorney Amrit Sing adds, "These documents present irrefutable evidence that US operatives tortured detainees to death during interrogations."

Additionally, ACLU reports that in April 2003, Secretary Rumsfeld authorized the use of "environmental manipulation" as an interrogation technique in Guantánamo Bay. In September 2003, Lt. Gen. Sanchez also authorized this technique for use in Iraq. So responsibility for these human atrocities goes directly to the highest levels of power.

A press release on these deaths by torture was issued by the ACLU on October 25, 2005 and was immediately picked up by Associated Press and United Press International wire services, making the story available to US corporate media nationwide. A thorough check of Nexus-Lexus and Proquest electronic data bases, using the keywords ACLU and autopsy, showed that at least 95percent of the daily papers in the US didn`t bother to pick up the story. The Los Angeles Times covered the story on page A-4 with a 635-word report headlined "Autopsies Support Abuse Allegations." Fewer than a dozen other daily newspapers including: Bangor Daily News, Maine, page 8; Telegraph-Herald, Dubuque Iowa, page 6; Charleston Gazette, page 5; Advocate, Baton Rouge, page 11; and a half dozen others actually covered the story. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Seattle Times buried the story inside general Iraq news articles. USA Today posted the story on their website. MSNBC posted the story to their website, but apparently did not consider it newsworthy enough to air on television.

"The Randi Rhodes Show," on Air America Radio, covered the story. AP/UPI news releases and direct quotes from the ACLU website appeared widely on internet sites and on various news-based listservs around the world, including Common Dreams, Truthout, New Standard, Science Daily, and numerous others.

Peter Phillips is a Professor of Sociology at Sonoma State University and Director of Project Censored.

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Franken`s `Truth` is no joke
http://www.madison.com/tct/books/index.php?ntid=63661&ntpid=…

By John Nichols
December 2, 2005
The essential founder of the American experiment was neither a general in the Continental Army nor financier of its fight against colonial oppression. He was not a member of the Continental Congress, nor a delegate to the Constitutional Convention. He did not sign the Declaration of Independence or any of the other official documents of his time.

The Truth (With Jokes) By Al Franken Dutton 352 pages, $25.95

Tom Paine put his name only to the pamphlets he authored. But those pamphlets, which achieved the widest imaginable circulation in the colonies that would become the first 13 of these United States, provided the impetus for the break from British empire. Rare was the home of a patriot from Boston to Savannah that did not have a copy of Paine`s "Common Sense" near the hearth. Rare was the tavern where it was not discussed. Rare was the gathering of Tory sympathizers with the British monarchy where the book and its author were not reviled for their affronts to a ruler named George.

Paine`s next pamphlet, "The Crisis," which was written to inspire support for the Continental Army and the republican cause, was so broadly read that contemporary historians suggest it reached a greater percentage of Americans than today watches the Super Bowl game. John Adams wisely noted, "Without the pen of Paine, the sword of Washington would have been wielded in vain."

"The Crisis" contained what is perhaps Paine`s most famous line: "These are the times that try men`s souls." And it is surely true that the times that try men`s souls must, necessarily, inspire new Tom Paines. The dissenting and radical tradition that is so vital to the health of American democracy is characterized not merely by a willingness to confront what Paine referred to as "aristocratical tyranny" but by a determination to do so in a manner that is bold enough, provocative enough and, yes, entertaining enough to reach the great mass of citizens.

I thought often of the pamphleteering tradition as I read comedian, social commentator and Air America radio host Al Franken`s new book, with a title that - like "Common Sense" or "The Crisis" - is Paine-like in its bluntness and confidence: "The Truth."

It`s fair to say that Paine probably would have dispensed with the subtitle "(With Jokes)," but the old revolutionary wrote in more deliberate times than these. And if it now takes a bit of humor to get the message out, doubtless Paine would approve.

Surely, Paine would recognize the need, in times such as these, for Franken`s enormously popular books of social and political criticism.

At a point where the Bill of Rights` "freedom of the press" protection - which was written to encourage criticism of those in charge - has been warped by media conglomerates into an excuse for the peddling of celebrity gossip, the commercial carpet bombing of our children, and the shameless stenography to power that allows a nation to be lied into war, it has become difficult for most Americans to get a coherent take on the zeitgeist. As it was in the era of King George, in the era of President George it is hard to get a read on the spirit of the time from a media that, for commercial and political reasons, is subservient to those who appoint members of the Federal Communications Commission rather than to the readers, listeners and viewers who yearn for substance and insight.

It is this yearning that underpins the success of Franken`s books and his Air America radio program, as it does the documentary films of Michael Moore and Robert Greenwald, the "Daily Show" diatribes of Jon Stewart, and the Web sites such as www.commondreams.org and www.truthout.org that have been developed to break through the fog of commercialism, extended weather reports and breathless communiques regarding the lifestyles of the rich and famous that now pass for "news."

But what struck me as I read Franken`s new book was the extent to which it stands fully, and commendably, in the great tradition of patriotic pamphleteering. Yes, it is thicker than one of Paine`s revolutionary tracts, and a bit more expensive. At some fundamental level, however, it does the same work - that of exposing the flaws, the failures and the frauds of the unexamined powerful.

The former Saturday Night Live star`s book is funny when it needs to be. But the humor is merely the spice used to flavor what is a serious dish of information.

Some might chuckle at Franken`s line: "Bush is lucky that he had a Republican Congress, or he almost certainly would have been impeached and imprisoned." But does anyone seriously question, after all the revelations regarding the doctoring of intelligence and the deliberate deception of Congress and the American people by the president and his cronies, that an independent Congress would now be reviewing impeachment resolutions?

With "The Truth," Franken indicts both the Bush administration and its congressional allies - the section on former Majority Leader Tom DeLay is deliciously detailed.

To a far greater extent than Franken`s previous book, "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right" (Dutton), which attacked the messengers of the new right, this book sets out to dismember official wrongdoers. "Gone is the familiar cast of villains: the psychotic Ann Coulter, the sex-addicted Bill O`Reilly, the drug-addicted Rush Limbaugh. Consigned to their own personal hells by their failings as human beings, Franken mercifully leaves them be. Ann Coulter has been banned as effectively from these pages as from the intellectual salons to which she so desperately craves admittance," the third-person introduction explains. "In `The Truth,` the fish are bigger, and the fry is deeper. Franken`s targets this time include both people - Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rove, DeLay - and something new: ideas. In particular, the idea that the 2004 election meant that Franken`s beloved America had moved to the right. Al Franken ain`t buyin` it."

The fishy figures of this administration do, indeed, get fried.

Franken`s book succeeds not with jokes - although the author`s humorous barbs remain the most effective skewers of the likes of Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld - but with the tool that Paine and the pamphleteers of previous ages employed: facts.

"The Truth" is no screed penned in anger at a disreputable ruler and his acolytes. It is a bill of particulars, which spells out high crimes and misdemeanors for which Bush, Cheney and their crew will, ultimately, be remembered. Indeed, if someone were to ask me for a quick review of what has gone wrong with America since Jan. 20, 2001, I would not hesitate to recommend that they start with this book. To be sure, there are other texts that take apart particular players in effective ways - as the author of a book on Cheney, I am duty bound to make that point - but there are few that have the broad sweep combined with the consistent reliance on official statements and credible critiques that this book offers.

Additionally, "The Truth" captures the emotions of the moment, particularly in the sections that deal with the frustrations of the 2004 presidential contest, its delusional Democrats, its dysfunctional debates and its disappointing conclusion. Bush, or more precisely Karl Rove, prevailed not on merit, Franken argues, but by employing the "Three Horsemen of the Republican Apocalypse: Fear, Smears, and Queers."

That`s a good line, to be sure. But it is backed up by chapters of information and analysis that batter Bush with the effectiveness of a particularly well-written legal brief - or a closing statement to the jury from Clarence Darrow.

Perhaps it does Franken no good to suggest that he has written - with the able research assistance of Madison native Ben Wikler - an important and useful book. In these days, the greater rewards tend to go to the most glib commentators, to the loudest ranters and to the cruelest character assassins. But Franken has offered us something more than another scream from the left.

This is a book that matters, not as great literature - although it is quite well written and smoother in flow than Franken`s previous texts - but as a dose of reality for a nation that has grown ill from imbibing the global fantasies of the neocons, the free-trade fallacies of the neolibs and the "fighting-for-freedom" fakery of the Patriot Act-pushing, torture-promoting neofascists who pass themselves off as the champions of liberty.

At one point in the book, there is a joking reference to the notion that Franken penned this tome with an intent to "purify the blood of the body politic."

Yet the often poignant letter to his grandchildren that closes the book, under the title "The Resurrection of Hope," suggests that Franken`s purpose is just such a purification.

Surely, Tom Paine - who anticipated both the Bush administration`s secrecy and Franken`s challenge to it when he observed, "It is error only, and not the truth, that shrinks from inquiry" - would encourage his pamphleteering heir to embrace no less a mission.




madison.com is operated by Capital Newspapers, publishers of the Wisconsin State Journal, The Capital Times, Agri-View and Apartment Showcase.

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Die US-Soldaten, die im Irak ums Leben kommen, werden immer jünger.
Von den zehn gestern bei einer Patrouille in Falluja durch eine IED ums Leben gekommenen US-Marines waren die meisten erst 19 Jahre alt.
Sie wurden befehligt von einem 23-jährigen.

In den USA werden mittlerweile sogar Sonderbonuse an Mitglieder der Nationagarde bezahlt, wenn Sie Frischfleisch (Rekruten) anwerben.

B@N
(USA)

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December 3, 2005
U.S. Goals for Iraqi Forces Meet Success and Challenges in Najaf
By EDWARD WONG
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/03/international/middleeast/0…

NAJAF, Iraq, Dec. 1 - On the palm-lined avenues leading into this Shiite holy city and among the twisting alleyways at its center, next to the golden-domed Shrine of Ali, police officers with Kalashnikovs patrol where American troops once fought two fierce rebellions led by Moktada al-Sadr, the militant cleric.

Najaf and the surrounding region lie at the forefront of the Bush administration`s plans to turn over security operations to Iraqi forces, earning a mention in the president`s speech at the United States Naval Academy on Wednesday. By many measures, the thousands of Iraqi police officers and soldiers here have done well. They have prevented the devastating suicide bombings that have plagued Baghdad and other areas of Iraq. Attacks against Americans are rare, and American troops are steadily lowering their profile.

But even here, in the southern Shiite heartland that is largely free of sectarian tensions, the American enterprise still faces steep hurdles, ones that are more subtle but no less subversive than the Sunni-led insurgency.

Many of those blue-uniformed police officers are members of Shiite militias, including Mr. Sadr`s Mahdi Army, which battled American troops here last year. Political rivalries occasionally erupt into violence, as when the Mahdi Army clashed with another militia in August. Corruption and kidnappings remain a problem, officials say, as does politically motivated crime.

On Thursday evening, Hussein al-Zurfi, whose brother, Adnan al-Zurfi, a former Detroit businessman and ex-governor of Najaf who is running in the Dec. 15 parliamentary elections, was kidnapped in the neighboring town of Kufa.

Hours before President Bush gave his Wednesday speech, the Najaf provincial council threatened to break off all ties with the Americans over accusations that soldiers had stabbed a young man to death during a house raid last Sunday. The Americans say the Iraqi Army was responsible for the killing, and that the man was reportedly armed.

"I don`t think I`d go so far as to recommend that we totally pull out," said Lt. Col. James Oliver, the commander of the First Battalion, 198th Armor of the 155th Brigade, a National Guard unit from Mississippi that is the main American force here. Nothing less than an American battalion, up to 1,000 troops, should remain in the area through 2006 and perhaps longer, he said.

Yet, for the most part, American officers here praise the work of the Iraqi security forces, saying they have trained well and kept the number of major attacks on American and Iraqi troops to an average of one per month.

The American commanders say their soldiers have largely halted combat missions and now play a training and backup role for the Iraqi forces - a model, perhaps, for the 160,000 American troops in other parts of the country.

In early September, the 500 soldiers of Colonel Oliver`s battalion moved from a forward base on the outskirts of this city to a larger headquarters in the desert about a 40-minute drive away. A 900-person battalion of the Iraqi Army moved into the old American compound.

It was one of the 28 American forward bases in Iraq that had been shut down by mid-November, with 15 of those having been transferred to Iraqi forces, said Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, a spokesman for the American command. He said the military expects to close four more of the remaining 82 forward bases within three months.

Colonel Oliver`s unit, backed by 700 soldiers from a logistics battalion, acts as a guarantor of last resort for the Iraqi forces, remaining on call in case of overwhelming trouble. Emergency requests from the Iraqis come in about once a month, officers say. American advisers also work with Iraqi officers at a security command center inside Najaf, and, since last spring, one company each has been assigned to train and advise the Iraqi police and army.

"They were receptive; they actually wanted to take control of their own area," said Sgt. First Class Paul Bedford, part of a reconnaissance platoon that patrols the roads outside Najaf. "Assessment would be more the word than training at this point."

Many people in this city of a half million, home to some of the world`s most revered ayatollahs, support the handover of security duties to the Iraqis.

"They`re spread well throughout the city," said Qasim Said, 43, a schoolteacher in a grocery store with his 7-year-old son. "I don`t think any decent Iraqi is happy to see foreign forces, whatever their nationality, in his street. Thank God that the presence of the Americans has gone down in Najaf. The city is rejoicing."

The governor of Najaf, Assad Abu Ghalal al-Taiee, echoed that sentiment at a pre-election debate in a hotel here on Thursday, saying that "there`s freedom in Najaf, but there`s lack of freedom in Baghdad."

Mr. Taiee is a member of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, an Iranian-backed Shiite party whose armed wing, the Badr Organization, wields enormous power in Baghdad and the south. Many police commanders here come from the ranks of Badr, and other police officers belong to the Mahdi Army, Mr. Sadr`s militia.

Though the presence of militiamen in the Iraqi forces is not as obvious here as it is farther south in the city of Basra, where posters of political leaders decorate squad cars and police checkpoints, it is still formidable, say residents and officials.

The Supreme Council, which controls the country`s Interior Ministry, came under intense criticism last month after the American military discovered 169 malnourished prisoners, most of them Sunni Arabs and some showing signs of torture, in a ministry bunker in central Baghdad.

Colonel Oliver said that while some militiamen might have joined the Iraqi forces here, their numbers were probably small. Of greater concern, he said, is the enormous size of the police force. The Interior Ministry has given the police chief permission to hire 5,500 people, he said, but there are now more than 10,000 on the payroll.

"The problem that that creates for them is resources," Colonel Oliver said. "I don`t know how they`re doing it."

Signs of corruption in the local forces have also emerged. The former head of a paramilitary squad here, Abdul Aal al-Kufi, was arrested by Iraqi forces a month ago in the city of Diwaniya and turned over to the Najaf police. Mr. Kufi is now imprisoned on charges of corruption and of kidnapping the sons of the former police chief of Najaf.

When Mr. Kufi headed his squad, he answered directly to Mr. Zurfi, then the governor of Najaf. Both men were ousted from power when the Supreme Council won the provincial elections last January. Mr. Zurfi, the Detroit resident whose brother was abducted Thursday, is heading a party called Loyalty to Najaf, which is competing in the Dec. 15 national elections.

American officials here are grappling with other political pitfalls. In a furious statement issued Wednesday, the provincial council accused the Americans of "a typical crime committed during the Saddam regime - the killing of a young man." The council said he had been stabbed to death by American soldiers in a raid Sunday.

Colonel Oliver said the man was killed by Iraqi soldiers during a raid on a house believed to be used by insurgents. The man was reportedly armed with a pistol, and an Iraqi soldier may have lunged at him with a bayonet, the colonel said. Followers of Mr. Sadr then shot a video of the corpse in the morgue, he said, and began spreading the rumor that Americans had done the killing.

"The provincial council and governor are reacting to the word that`s out on the street," Colonel Oliver said. "They`re playing to local politics."

An Iraqi employee of The New York Times contributed reporting for this article.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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Cohen ist ganz gewiss kein Liberaler.

December 3, 2005
Globalist
This Officer`s Big Worry Isn`t About Force Levels
http://select.nytimes.com/iht/2005/12/03/international/IHT-0…

By ROGER COHEN
International Herald Tribune

"When you set up a very capable army and police force with a weak and inefficient government, you set the stage for a military takeover. That is not what we went to Iraq to help them establish."

The words are those of a senior U.S. military officer who is between assignments to Iraq. His frustration with the enduring corruption and ineptitude of Iraqi ministries is indicative of the tense backdrop to President George W. Bush`s outline Wednesday of a national strategy for victory in Iraq.

The U.S. military is stretched. Many officers, like this one, are returning to Iraq for second tours not long after completing a first. They have put tremendous efforts into the training and deployment of nearly 120 Iraqi Army and police battalions. Although the quality of these battalions is often patchy, progress has been made.

But such headway on what Bush calls "the security track" is meaningless in a vacuum. The president portrayed an integrated push on the political, economic and military fronts leading to "complete victory" at an unspecified date, but there`s growing skepticism in the armed forces that their efforts are being matched on the civilian side.

"If we leave Iraq now it would be a total disaster, but the military has done about as much as we can do," the officer said. "We have to work the other lines of operation, and the politics have to develop at the same pace. As things stand, it`s upsetting our officers, and that worries me."

Referring to the U.S. agency coordinating rebuilding efforts, he added: "The Iraqi Reconstruction and Management Office has to get people over to the ministries to help with the interagency process. Until we can provide the Iraqis with a basic level of services, with basic necessities, we`re not going to broaden support."

The problem, of course, is that a Westerner trying to go over to an Iraqi ministry in Baghdad might end up seriously dead. Most of the U.S. reconstruction team (officials and contractors and others) is holed up in the Green Zone, the walled city within a city where the Americans reinventing Iraq live and work.

Often Western contractors are forced to rely on photographs brought to them by Iraqi employees when they want to assess progress on projects like schools or electrical facilities. In these circumstances, even with $18.4 billion in U.S. taxpayers` money allocated for Iraqi rebuilding, it`s not easy to get a Ministry of Health that`s responsive up and running, or an Oil Ministry that`s efficient, or an electricity system reliable enough to support economic expansion.

"This is not just a shooting war," the officer, who did not want to be identified on the eve of a sensitive new assignment to Iraq, said. "If you can`t give people the sense that their government is capable of governing them, if you can`t create a professional bureaucracy, the insurgency becomes a perpetual-motion machine."

He has seen evidence that support for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and the main terrorist threat to American forces, has begun to grow again on the basis of domestic recruitment.

"Zarqawi was about 90 percent foreign fighters, but his support seems to be moving in the other direction, with more coming to him internally than he has to import," the officer said. "That`s one measure of dissatisfaction with the government."

The Bush administration is hoping that Dec. 15 elections for a government that will serve for four years will help bring clarity and greater inclusiveness to the political process. What Iraq has lacked as much as anything is any political figure with remotely the inclusive appeal of Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president.

Some U.S. officials see Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite campaigning in a centrist alliance including some leading Sunnis, as the best hope, but his chances against the Shiite, Kurdish and Sunni parties remain uncertain. "I want anything that will make Sunnis more part of the political process," the officer said.

The election will usher in a critical year for Iraq during which the political pressures stemming from midterm congressional elections in the United States will complicate prosecution of a war that is increasingly unpopular.

It is now clear that when Representative John Murtha, a senior House Democrat, declared last month that U.S. troops in Iraq should "immediately redeploy," he was reflecting not only frustration in the country but growing frustration in a military with which the politician, a former marine, has close ties.

The officer made clear that although there might be "an opportunity to roll down the numbers in a gradual way," he saw no possibility of a rapid withdrawal or redeployment.

Bush seems adamant that U.S. forces will remain in Iraq in substantial numbers for an extended period. "I will settle for nothing less than complete victory," he said. The president is a stubborn man. But American attention spans can be fickle and political pressures for sharp cuts in troop levels are certain to grow.

It remains unclear whether the generational commitment that is no doubt necessary to stabilize Iraq in a lasting way exists. The U.S. military has made such commitments in places like South Korea, but in other parts of the world, not least Soviet-occupied Afghanistan during the Cold War, America has ignited upheaval only to slip away to its subsequent cost.

The officer, whose commitment to Iraq is passionate, said: "If we can show the rest of the Middle East that this democracy thing, in whatever form it takes in Iraq, offers a better opportunity for them in the future, that to me is victory. Short of that is failure, and to replace Saddam with another dictator would be absolute failure."

E-mail: [e-mail]


* Copyright 2005

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December 3, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
W.`s Head in the Sand
By MAUREEN DOWD
http://select.nytimes.com/2005/12/03/opinion/03dowd.html

In the Christmas spirit, the time has come for the reality-based community to reach out to the White House.

The Bush warriors are so deluded, they`re even faking their fakery.

This week, the president presented a plan-like plan for "victory" in Iraq, which Scott McClellan rather pompously called the unclassified version of their supersecret master plan. But there would be no way to achieve victory from this plan even if it were a real plan. If this is what they`re telling themselves in the Sit Room, we`re in bigger trouble than we thought.

Talk about your unknown unknowns, as Rummy would say.

The National Strategy for Victory must have come from the same P.R. genius who gave President Top Gun the "Mission Accomplished" banner about 48 hours before the first counterinsurgency war of the 21st century broke out in Iraq.

It`s not a military strategy - classified or unclassified. It`s political talking points - and not even good ones. Are we really supposed to believe that anybody, even the most deeply delusional Bush sycophant, believes the phrase "Our strategy is working"?

The president talked about three neatly definable groups of insurrectionists. But as Dexter Filkins reported in yesterday`s New York Times, there are dozens, perhaps as many as a hundred, groups fighting the U.S. Army in Iraq, and they have little, if anything, in common.

Mr. Bush`s presentation claimed that the U.S. was actually making progress in Iraq. But outside the Bush-Cheney-Rummy bubble, 10 more marines were killed by a roadside bomb outside Falluja, for a total of 2,125 U.S. military deaths so far.

The administration must realize it needs a real exit strategy, because it`s advertising for one. The U.S. Agency for International Development is offering more than $1 billion for anyone - anyone at all - who can come up with a plan to pacify and rebuild 10 Iraqi cities seen as vital in the war.

Maybe the White House should apply - Usaid`s proffer says the "invitation is open to any type of entity."

When Bush officials weren`t telling us fairy tales about the big, bad W.M.D. in Iraq, they were assuring us that the unprovoked war would be a kindness for Iraq, giving it democracy. But they are not just failing to bring democracy to Iraq as they help Iranian-backed mullahs install an Islamic republic with Saddamist torture chambers. They are also degrading democracy in America.

They`ve tarnished American moral leadership with illegal detentions, torture, secret C.I.A. prisons in countries only recently liberated from the Soviet gulag, and Soviet-style propaganda both at home and in Iraq.

Guess the Bush administration didn`t learn anything this fall when federal auditors said it had violated the law by buying favorable news coverage of its education polices. Bush officials got right back into the fake news business, paying to plant propaganda in the Iraqi press. They outsourced this disinformation campaign to something called the Lincoln Group - have they no shame?

You have to admire Scott McClellan, the president`s spokesman. He kept a straight face when he called the U.S. "a leader when it comes to promoting and advocating a free and independent media around the world." He added, "We`ve made our views very clear when it comes to freedom of the press."

Exceedingly clear. The Bushies don`t believe in it. They disdain the whole democratic system of checks and balances.

At the Naval Academy, President Bush talked about how well the Iraqi security forces were fighting. He claimed that 40 Iraqi battalions were taking the lead in the fight against insurgents, and that in the battle of Tal Afar this year, "the assault was primarily led by Iraqi security forces - 11 Iraqi battalions backed by 5 coalition battalions providing support."

Anderson Cooper of CNN swiftly produced Time magazine`s Baghdad bureau chief, Michael Ware, who was embedded with the U.S. military during the entire Tal Afar battle. "With the greatest respect to the president, that`s completely wrong," Mr. Ware said, adding: "I was with Iraqi units right there on the front line as they were battling with Al Qaeda. They were not leading."

He also told Mr. Cooper: "I have had a very senior officer here in Baghdad say to me that there`s never going to be a point where these guys will be able to stand up against the insurgency on their own."

Mr. Ware recalled that in a battle two weeks ago, he saw an Iraqi security officer put down his weapon and curl up into a ball when he was under attack. "I have seen that on - on many, many occasions," he said.

Curling up in a ball. Good National Strategy for Victory.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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Juan Cole is Professor of History at the University of Michigan

http://www.juancole.com/
Saturday, December 03, 2005

18 GIs killed in 72 Hours
Anti-Prison Demonstrations in Baghdad

From Wednesday to Friday, guerrillas in Iraq killed 18 US troops. The most tragic single incident came on Friday, when guerrillas used old Baath rocket parts to make an enormous bomb that killed 10 Marines near Fallujah and wounded 11. CNN points out that Marine convoys tend to spread out to limit such casualties, so the death of 10 GIs in one incident suggests just a horrific explosion. There were said to be 600,000 tons of munitions stored in Iraq, one of the more militarized societies in the world, and over 200,000 tons are probably still unaccounted for.

On Wednesday, four GIs had been killed in separate incidents.

[urlOn Friday, as well, over a thousand Shiites and Sunnis]http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/story?section=nation_world&id=3688318[/url] held joint Friday prayers services and then mounted demonstrations downtown. The prayers were held at the mosque of Abu Hanifah in Adhamiyah. They demonstrated against the continued US military sweeps [of places like Ramadi].

Al-Zaman says that they were demanding the trial of the official in charge of the Jadiriyah Prison where 150 largely Sunni detainees had been tortured and starved. They said that Abu Karim Alwandi, the head of intelligence for the Badr Corps paramilitary, who presided over Jadiriyah, had to be held to the rule of law. Some placards angrily charged that Iraqis had been tortured on Iranian orders. This allegation comes about because the prison was in the charge of the Ministry of Interior, controlled by Bayan Jabr Sulagh, a prominent member of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which had been based in Iran 1982-2003. Some placards accused the minister of being an American puppet. The crowds also demanded the release of detainees held by the US in Iraq.

The Shiites involved were likely followers of Muqtada al-Sadr, who have a rivalry with SCIRI and who have sometimes engaged in a politics of pan-Islam, hooking up with Sunni fundamentalists for anti-imperial purposes.

posted by Juan @ [url12/03/2005 06:30:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/12/18-gis-killed-in-72-hours-anti-prison.html[/url] 0 comments

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Und dabei war Cheerleader der einzige eigenständige Erfolg seines Lebens!

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The Independent
America slowly confronts the truth

The old media dog sniffed the air, found power was moving away from the White House, and began to drool

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article330873.ece
Saturday, 3rd December 2005, by Robert Fisk

Watching the pathetic, old, lie-on-its-back frightened labrador of the American media changing overnight into a vicious rottweiler is one of the enduring pleasures of society in the United States. I have been experiencing this phenomenon over the past two weeks, as both victim and beneficiary.

In New York and Los Angeles, my condemnation of the American presidency and Israel’s continued settlement-building in the West Bank was originally treated with the disdain all great papers reserve for those who dare to question proud and democratic projects of state. In The New York Times, that ancient luminary Ethan Bonner managed to chide me for attacking American journalists who - he furiously quoted my own words - "report in so craven a fashion from the Middle East - so fearful of Israeli criticism that they turn Israeli murder into ’targeted attacks’ and illegal settlements into ’Jewish neighbourhoods’."

It was remarkable that Bonner should be so out of touch with his readers that he did not know that "craven" is the very word so many Americans apply to their grovelling newspapers (and quite probably one reason why newspaper circulations are falling so disastrously).

But the moment that a respected Democratic congressman and Vietnam war veteran in Washington dared to suggest that the war in Iraq was lost, that US troops should be brought home now - and when the Republican response was so brutal it had to be disowned - the old media dog sniffed the air, realised that power was moving away from the White House, and began to drool.

On live television in San Francisco, I could continue my critique of America’s folly in Iraq uninterrupted. Ex-Mayor Willie Brown - who allowed me to have my picture taken in his brand new pale blue Stetson - exuded warmth towards this pesky Brit (though he claimed on air that I was an American) who tore into his country’s policies in the Middle East. It was enough to make you feel the teeniest bit sorry - though only for a millisecond, mark you - for the guy in the White House.

All this wasn’t caused by that familiar transition from Newark to Los Angeles International, where the terror of al-Qa’ida attacks is replaced by fear of the ozone layer. On the east coast, too, the editorials thundered away at the Bush administration. Seymour Hersh, that blessing to American journalism who broke the Abu Ghraib torture story, produced another black rabbit out of his Iraqi hat with revelations that US commanders in Iraq believe the insurgency is now out of control.

When those same Iraqi gunmen this week again took control of the entire city of Ramadi (already "liberated" four times by US troops since 2003), the story shared equal billing on prime time television with Bush’s latest and infinitely wearying insistence that Iraqi forces - who in reality are so infiltrated by insurgents that they are a knife in America’s back - will soon be able to take over security duties from the occupation forces.

Even in Hollywood - and here production schedules prove that the rot must have set in more than a year ago - hitherto taboo subjects are being dredged to the surface of the political mire. Jarhead, produced by Universal Pictures, depicts a brutal, traumatised Marine unit during the 1991 Gulf War.

George Clooney’s production of Good Night, and Good Luck, a devastating black-and-white account of Second World War correspondent Ed Murrow’s heroic battle with Senator McCarthy in the 1950s - its theme is the management and crushing of all dissent - has already paid for its production costs twice over. Murrow is played by an actor but McCarthy appears only in real archive footage. Incredibly, a test audience in New York complained that the man "playing" McCarthy was "overacting". Will we say this about Messrs Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld in years to come? I suspect so.

And then there’s Syriana, Clooney’s epic of the oil trade which combines suicide bombers, maverick CIA agents (one of them played by Clooney himself), feuding Middle East Arab potentates - one of whom wants real democracy and wealth for his people and control of his own country’s resources - along with a slew of disreputable businessmen and east coast lawyers. The CIA eventually assassinates the Arab prince who wants to take control of his own country’s oil (so much for democracy) - this is accomplished with a pilotless aerial bomb guided by men in a room in Virginia - while a Pakistani fired from his job in the oil fields because an American conglomerate has downsized for its shareholders’ profits destroys one of the company’s tankers in a suicide attack.

"People seem less afraid now," Clooney told an interviewer in Entertainment magazine. "Lots of people are starting to ask questions. It’s becoming hard to avoid the questions." Of course, these questions are being asked because of America’s more than 2,000 fatalities in Iraq rather than out of compassion for Iraq’s tens of thousands of fatalities. They are being pondered because the whole illegal invasion of Iraq is ending in calamity rather than success.

Yet still they avoid the "Israel" question. The Arab princes in Syriana - who in real life would be obsessed with the occupation of the West Bank - do not murmur a word about Israel. The Arab al-Qa’ida operative who persuades the young Pakistani to attack an oil tanker makes no reference to Israel - as every one of bin Laden’s acolytes assuredly would. It was instructive that Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 did not mention Israel once.

So one key issue of the Middle East remains to be confronted. Amy Goodman, whom I used to enrage by claiming that her leftist Democracy Now programme - broadcast from a former Brooklyn fire station - had only three listeners (one of whom was Amy Goodman), is bravely raising this unmentionable subject. Partly as a result, her "alternative" radio and television station - how I hate that prissy word "alternative" - is slowly moving into the mainstream.

Americans are ready to discuss the United States’ relationship with Israel. And America’s injustices towards the Arabs. As usual, ordinary Americans are way out in front of their largely tamed press and television reporters. Now we have to wait and see if the media boys and girls will catch up with their own people.

© 2005 Independent News and Media Limited

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Their War, My Memories

For two years, Patrick J. McDonnell saw Iraq through the eyes of many. There were those who wanted him and other Westerners killed and those who protected him. Either way, he can`t get them out of his mind.

http://www.latimes.com/features/printedition/magazine/la-tm-…

Patrick J. McDonnell
Times Staff Writer

December 4, 2005

The coffee shop girl signaled a greeting from her hospital bed, her face a pointillist palette of wounds, one eye forced shut, the other gazing off into a void. Nahrain Yonaan offered her one functioning hand; the other was swathed in gauze, a mangled claw.

She seemed cheered to think that I came to visit from the U.S. Army base in southern Baghdad where she served coffee and soft drinks to the troops, a place she had become fond of, where each day she stepped into a life comfortably apart from the deepening despair of Iraq outside the gates. She had encouraged her melancholic younger sister, Narmeen, to find work with the Americans as well. I allowed her to embrace the illusion, propagated by her mother, that a certain captain had made the trip to the squalor of Kindi Hospital in an act of solidarity.

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Patrick J. McDonnell in Fallouja, November 2004.
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Nahrain took my hand. She was blinded and maimed. And she did not yet know the worst: Narmeen and an aunt had been killed in the drive-by shooting and subsequent bombing that mutilated the body of this once-vivacious 25-year-old. Nahrain survived the fusillade and escaped from the targeted minivan after pretending she was dead. But in one of those acts of valor and imprudence so prevalent in wartime, she slipped back to the bullet-ridden vehicle and—in a bid to save her sister and aunt—tried to remove the bomb deposited there by attackers who were keen to finish off the victims. It exploded in her face. "Nahrain was the light of my family," her mother, shattered, confided to me.

The lamentable fact was that no one had come from the base, nor would the Army do anything to help this broken young woman. Masked gunmen had attacked the minivan she was traveling in because it ferried her and others to jobs at the U.S. camp. The assassins had stalked the vehicle from the base, a frequent scenario in the Iraqi killing grounds. She and her fellow commuters were the latest victims of a grisly but effective guerrilla strategy: eliminate any Iraqi who was "collaborating" with U.S. forces, even if their role was no more significant than serving beverages in a base cafe or cleaning the floors.

"We`ll see what we can do," the major at the base, known as Camp Cuervo, told me later when I inquired whether Nahrain could be transferred to a military hospital, where perhaps her vision and limbs could be saved. "She was very popular. But we have a lot going on right now."

I made my way back to my Iraqi colleagues, who were waiting at the front gate from which Nahrain`s vehicle had taken off a few nights earlier. We were apprehensive that we too would be shadowed on the way out. As I left, the major advised, "Hey, man, be careful driving out of here."

I left Iraq last summer after covering the conflict there for two years as a Los Angeles Times correspondent. There`s a lot not to miss: the carnage, the ubiquitous sense of menace, the logistical barriers of reporting a story in a place where foreign journalists are shut out from much of Iraqi society. But there is also a deep sense of regret for having left behind so many Iraqi colleagues and friends, people who repeatedly risked their lives for me and others. Most have no chance to leave. It is hard to avoid feeling that I abandoned them, though none ever puts it that way.

I spent time before I left clearing out old files, revisiting past stories. I came across a photo of a battered Nahrain in her hospital bed in spring 2004. That was one story that took me a long time to get away from. But there were others too: some momentous, some lost in the daily stream of mostly bad news from Iraq.

The euphoria that followed the fall of Baghdad and the ouster of Saddam Hussein was already diminished by the time I first came to Iraq in June 2003, arriving overland in a Baghdad-or-bust Suburban that motored from Amman through the vast expanses of Al Anbar province, the sprawling swath of western Iraq, to the capital. That was the practice then, when travel was still relatively safe and no one had an inkling that Al Anbar would soon become ground zero of an insurgency that would stymie the cocky U.S. troops and claim the highest number of American casualties since the Vietnam War, with no end in sight.

AN INSURGENCY IS BORN

"The American jet fired a missile at the mosque," the young man insisted, as others nodded in agreement. "We could see an airplane and a flash of light."

This was in a place called Fallouja, the so-called city of mosques, an insular town west of Baghdad that before long would become infamous as the symbolic heart of the Iraqi insurgency. But at this point, in July 2003, it was still a place where Western journalists could venture and even be received with traditional Arab hospitality, though lines were being drawn.

Many here, clerics and ex-generals alike, owed their well-being to the Baath Party of Saddam Hussein. He, in turn, referred to governorates such as Al Anbar, where Fallouja was located, as "white provinces" because they were loyal as opposed to the restive Shiite south and rebellious Kurdish north. To his often-divided Sunni Arab compatriots and other allies co-opted by the Baath apparatus, Hussein had communicated an unwavering message: We are a civilized minority holding back a tide of potential usurpers. Fallouja had fallen without a fight to the U.S. mechanized onslaught. Its sons, however, were soon manning the ramparts of resistance, jihad and martyrdom.

Among them was a cleric named Laith Khalil Dahham, an ascetic young man from a hamlet called Al-Bahawa in the lush date palm groves along the Euphrates to the west of town. Dahham had been a gifted scholar known for his dedication to the mystical Suffi teachings that have long held great allure in Iraq. He had risen quickly to become imam of the Al Hassan ibn Ali mosque, which drew adherents of Suffism.

But Sheikh Laith, as he was known, had joined the escalating ranks of Sunni clerics who were providing spiritual validation to the then-burgeoning insurgency. He embraced a militant stance early on. It seems naive now, after so many clerics and mosques in Iraq have been implicated, but at the time it was unclear that the anti-U.S. campaign would garner so much religious support—or that disenfranchised Sunni Arabs from places such as Fallouja would become the principal foot soldiers in an uprising that would thwart the most potent military force on the planet.

At Friday services, the firebrand railed against the "occupiers," alarming U.S. officers who monitored the weekly sermons. Angry young men came to partake in sizzling night sessions at the mosque complex, where worship melded seamlessly into calls for jihad.

Then, after late prayers on June 30, 2003, a huge explosion rocked the compound, killing at least a half dozen of Sheikh Laith`s followers. The Army said that a makeshift bomb-making factory on-site had ignited by mistake. The imam initially survived the blast. He was shown on Al Jazeera television in a hospital stretcher, his gaunt body scarred from shrapnel, his battered face Christlike in its agony. He was shuffled from hospital to hospital, but adequate care was never found. Sheikh Laith was 25 when he died.

I arrived at the mosque the next morning, just as the worshipers were hoisting the unadorned coffins of those who had been killed. Bearded young men in white Arab dress and red-and-white checkered head scarves known as yasmah discharged Kalashnikovs into the air, waved black banners and vowed resistance. It was a scene out of the Palestinian intifada—in Iraq. U.S. soldiers were nowhere to be seen as the defiant funeral cortege bearing the wooden boxes marched down the dusty streets to a wind-swept cemetery. Across from the mosque, men who said they were "witnesses" were unanimous: A U.S. warplane had attacked the holy site.

At many subsequent bombings, it seemed, the story was the same: U.S. aircraft or artillery were said to have fired at the target, be it a police station, a line of recruits or a mosque. With every attack, with every outrage committed in the name of "resistance," fingers were pointed at supposed U.S. aggressors.

The Army called it fiction. But myths resonate in the paranoia-drenched atmosphere of Iraq, where a quarter-century-plus of Baathist rule had pummeled the concept of truth.

AN EYE ON THE REARVIEW MIRROR

My interpreter, Suheil Ahmad, and I traveled to Al-Bahawa, Sheikh Laith`s home village, in search of the dead man`s relatives.

A friendly Sunni sheik accompanied us and provided the needed introductions in the conservative farm region, where the cycles of crops and prayer dictate daily life.

The late imam`s extended male family—he came from a prominent tribe—greeted us along a canal amid the date palm-fringed ribbon of green that caresses the Euphrates. The men sat in the shade of the mourning tent, sipping tea and fingering beads. Sheikh Laith`s father and uncles, all dressed in traditional tribal headdresses and robes, spoke with deep pride of the precocious scholar who now, indisputably, rested in paradise. Later, a longtime acquaintance, Ahmed Jasim, marveled at his friend`s passing. "He has had a wonderful death," Jasim told me. "We are all hoping to have a similar end, to be martyrs like Sheikh Laith."

At the time, U.S. authorities—notably L. Paul Bremer III, the U.S. administrator and de facto proconsul—were dismissing the mounting attacks as desperation acts by "bitter enders" who would soon be annihilated by superior U.S. forces. But it never felt like that in Fallouja or elsewhere in western Iraq, where anger was building, arms and munitions were abundant and there was no shortage of volunteers—many unemployed young men gravitating in their discontent to militant mosques—to take on the U.S. troops.

The people of Sunni Arab Iraq, long divided by tribe and region of origin, had found a common enemy.

After the imam`s wake, we drove into the town of Amriya to visit some of the dead man`s followers, who had gathered at the house of an elderly and half-blind sheik. Abandoning caution, he began to complain that U.S. troops had arrested several area "boys" who had been transporting arms from the south. The young militants in the room quieted him and wondered aloud whether Suheil and I were intelligence agents. We quickly changed the subject to the imponderables of Sufist philosophy and then made an apologetic exit. "That was a very perilous moment, Mr. Patrick," Suheil advised me as we sped back toward Fallouja and its crown of minarets, our eyes on the rearview mirror.

It was becoming apparent—with every new ambush and roadside bombing, with most every interview I conducted—that this was going to be a long and bloody fight. Could it possibly be, I wondered, that the war was already lost?

*

`THIS WAS LIKE A MAFIA HIT`

The Russian Kamaz flatbed truck lumbered down the sweltering streets of Baghdad, its driver evidently confident that no one would take notice amid the bustle and confusion that followed the ouster of Saddam Hussein.

Concealed in the rear were more than 1,000 pounds of military-grade, high-impact explosives. At the core of the "cocktail" was a 500-pound, Soviet-made bomb meant to be dropped from an airplane. Cradling the big bomb were mortar shells, rockets, grenades, bullets: a sinister potpourri that was still widely available in Iraq, thanks to the extensive looting of Hussein`s armories, though no one paid much attention to all that at the time of the U.S. invasion.

The driver—steel-nerved, fanatical or likely both—threaded the rolling bomb through the hubbub of Baghdad, reaching the site of the former hotel that housed the United Nations compound. He apparently accelerated into a wall and detonated his payload just before 4:30 p.m., as many inside were getting ready to go home. It was Aug. 19, 2003.

The truck was about 30 feet from the building, outside the concrete wall, but the blast was fierce enough to tear through the U.N. complex, collapsing the nearest corner of the three-story structure and exposing ravaged offices. It was as if someone had taken a giant can opener to the building.

The bomb killed about two dozen people, including Sergio Vieira de Mello, the U.N. point man in Iraq, a debonair Brazilian and much-admired international civil servant who had navigated thorny humanitarian and peacekeeping challenges in Cambodia, Kosovo and East Timor, among other postings. Iraq, alas, would turn out to be a test of a different order of magnitude. Months later, a rebel video hawked by open-air vendors would identify the suicide driver as an Egyptian militant who had gained holy-warrior street cred by targeting Coptic Christians in his homeland.

The finely planned and perfectly orchestrated attack on U.N. headquarters was the first major suicide bombing in post-Hussein Iraq—a grim milestone to be followed by hundreds more such incidents. Today Iraq is practically synonymous with kamikaze violence; it`s almost hard to recall a time before car bombs.

The United Nations had largely opposed the U.S. invasion, but at that point it was still seen as a potential U.S. ally in steadying Iraq`s deteriorating security climate. Along with De Mello, among those killed was Arthur C. Helton, a noted human rights advocate and an expert in refugee matters with whom I had spoken when I reported on U.S. immigration. He had come to look into the issue of displaced persons in Iraq. In those somewhat heady days, it still seemed conceivable that international aid organizations would descend on Iraq and make a difference.

"We`re looking forward" to their arrival, a U.S. Army officer, Col. William Mayville, had told me not long before in the northern city of Kirkuk, where American forces initially had secured the oil fields and eventually moved into the ethnic tinderbox that is the northern city.

The flood of international aid workers never came to pass, like a lot of expectations there. In retrospect, it`s clear that the rubble at the U.N. headquarters signaled the effective end of the notion that a global partnership might bring peace and stability to Iraq—at least for the foreseeable future. Many Iraqis had little sympathy for the U.N., which Hussein had long demonized as the agent of U.S.-organized sanctions that had throttled the country for a decade.

Iraqis came to examine the damage; this was before bombings became passé and onlookers feared being targeted in follow-up blasts. I stood in a debris-strewn highway median across from the site. The ground was littered with anti-aircraft shells, the common detritus of post-Hussein Iraq—and useful material for the improvised bombs that already were ravaging the roads.

Soon, most international U.N. personnel left the country, and Baghdad took on a fortress-like feel. Concrete "blast walls," massive sandbags, zigzagging concrete barriers, barbed wire and other fortifications chopped up the city, while armed men in various guises toted rifles and manned machine-gun nests in a once-glorious capital whose previous occupiers had included Mongols, Turks and Brits.

Ten days later, on Aug. 29, a car bomb detonated outside the gold-domed shrine of Imam Ali, a revered relative of the prophet Muhammad, in the Shiite capital of Najaf as worshipers were leaving Friday prayers. The bomb-laden vehicle was set off by remote control just as the targeted cleric was exiting one of the mosque`s turquoise-tiled doorways. Blasted to bits was Ayatollah Mohammed Bakr Hakim, who had recently returned from exile in Iran and was a political and spiritual leader of Iraq`s Shiite majority—and a man despised by many Sunni Arabs as an Iranian turncoat. As many as 120 others were killed, too. "They were basically collateral victims," said an FBI man who was working the case in Baghdad. "This was like a Mafia hit."

For hours, thousands thronged to gawk at the jagged remains of the charred SUV in which Hakim had been riding. It was said that all that was left of his body was a finger with a ring on it.

Filing past the twisted wreckage of Hakim`s SUV, it was difficult not to be struck by the utter cold-bloodedness of attackers who would sacrifice so many lives to get one man. Or did they intend it that way? The few hospitals were overwhelmed and didn`t have room for all the remains of the other blast victims; workers stacked corpses and body parts in the corridors—not the last time I would come across this macabre spectacle.

The two attacks of August 2003 made clear that something noxious had been unleashed in Iraq. There may have been a window following the invasion and the fall of Baghdad when some kind of political resolution could have been worked out. But now that seemed an increasingly remote possibility. This was a lot more than angry young men with head scarves taking potshots at U.S. convoys.

On the streets of Najaf, the mood turned volatile. Foreigners were suspect. The following day, as mourners gathered and funeral processions carried the dead to the sacred ground of the city`s vast cemetery, a mob gathered outside the hotel where I and several other foreign journalists were monitoring events from a roof. The men bared knives.

We thought about jumping to the next building, but it was too far away. Ultimately, a Shiite cleric posted himself at the door and prevented anyone from entering. "These are our guests," he insisted. "We should treat them as guests."

The mob dispersed, and we were able to make our getaway, aided by some police cars that came to rescue us.

SADDAM IN POLYESTER

The surviving policemen of the Sunni Arab town of Khalidiya, having seen their co-workers killed in a blast targeting their station, cited the usual culprit: a U.S. warplane.

And just why would U.S. forces target U.S.-trained and U.S.-paid police? I asked at the bloody scene. "We refused to patrol with the Americans," explained one angry survivor, whose cousin was among at least 17 killed that morning, Dec. 14, 2003. How then, I inquired, did the engine block from the apparent bomb-car end up atop the rubble of the police station? "There were two American missiles," he responded, explaining that one had hit the car. Other events would soon overtake this maddening exchange.

"They found Saddam!" The cry went up suddenly as journalists at the bombing scene dashed to their cars. "They found Saddam!"

An Iranian news agency had broken the story, based on a tip from a visiting Kurdish leader. We all raced away. The slaughter in Khalidiya received scant notice in the next day`s news accounts.

"He was caught like a rat," Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno told me and my colleagues that evening in Tikrit, Hussein`s erstwhile stomping grounds. The tough-talking New Jersey native was briefing the press at one of Hussein`s former palaces along the Tigris, now the headquarters of the U.S. 4th Infantry Division. It turned out that Hussein had been holed up a few miles away in a simple shack; the ditch outside, with a Styrofoam plug, some bricks and a weathered carpet for camouflage, had been used as an emergency haven.

The generals and their minions chuckled at the rustic setup, but the fact was that Hussein had avoided capture for more than eight months despite one of the largest manhunts in history. Those familiar with the ex-dictator`s official hagiography commented on the location`s significance: It wasn`t far from where a young Hussein, on the run and shot in the leg, was said to have swum the Tigris en route to an epic escape that would take him into exile in Cairo and expose this cunning and ruthless country boy to the broader currents of pan-Arab nationalism.

The next day dawned frigid and blustery in Tikrit. U.S. Army Blackhawks, flying fast and near tree level to avoid ground fire, obligingly ferried reporters to the site of the capture. The sparseness of Hussein`s den was striking, practically in the shadow of some of his most sumptuous palaces. There was no running water in the two-room adobe shack where he had laid low. Inside, bottles of honey, packages of new shirts and underwear in plastic wrapping and assorted clothing lay strewn about. Journalists opened Hussein`s mini-fridge, fingered his books of Arabic poetry and descended into his "spider hole."

I was particularly struck by the shirts: the loud polyester kind that has worn out its welcome in much of the world, but remains au courant in retro Iraq. Hussein was a tyrant and a murderer. But no one ever said he didn`t know his people, their habits and their easily offended sense of pride.

Hussein`s capture sparked buoyant new forecasts that the insurgency would fold. Triumphant officials hinted that he had been holding it all together, controlling a network of funds and operatives, a kind of Professor Moriarty in his web of rebellion.

It didn`t take long, though, to realize that Hussein`s capture wouldn`t make much difference. At the time, the U.S. military death toll in Iraq was about 460; the number recently exceeded 2,000, with thousands more injured, many maimed for life. Hussein`s capture didn`t pacify the seething Sunni heartland either. A separate Shiite uprising would soon ignite. And the seeds of sectarian warfare—the most chilling scenario in this very heterogeneous land—were already being sown. Within months, the images of a pathetic Hussein acquiescing to a U.S. medical examination hardly seemed to matter.

A few weeks after Hussein`s capture, a suicide bomber plowed his vehicle into Nabil, a restaurant along Baghdad`s upscale Arasat Street popular with foreigners. At least eight people were killed and more than two dozen injured in the New Year`s Eve blast. The injured included seven staffers from the Los Angeles Times and the spouse of our technical assistant. I was on vacation with my family in a snowbound village in northern Italy when I heard the news. As joyous Italian children set off fireworks and sparklers to celebrate the New Year, I frantically dialed satellite phone numbers in Baghdad, desperate for details.

"It`s terrible, Patrick," our disconsolate office manager, Salar Jaff, kept repeating to me, his tone scratchy and barely audible on the sat phone, a disembodied voice from another planet. I could easily envision the now-familiar bedlam and bloodshed. It seemed inconceivable, though, that this could be happening to my friends and colleagues, a little more than a week after I had left on a break.

All of our people ultimately survived the Nabil blast. Through a quirk of fate, the early arrivals that night had changed tables to what turned out to be a safer spot; a pregnant Iraqi woman and her husband, celebrating life in the face of the bloodletting engulfing their country, had been crushed and killed by the collapsing masonry at the very table where my colleagues were supposed to have sat. "They died in our place," Mohammed Arrawi, our computer tech, later told me, numbed at the thought. It was an inauspicious kickoff to the New Year, 2004.

PRAYING WE`D GET OUT ALIVE

"Let`s take one more chai."

The morning was beginning to swelter, though it was only March. The scorching Iraqi spring was bearing down on us. The stink of dried blood and sweat permeated the air. This was the Shiite Ashura holiday—a date, as it happened, that would become part of the celebrated litany of Shiite martyrdom.

I had come to Karbala, one of the sacred cities of Shiite Iraq, expecting trouble. Hundreds of thousands of Shiites were gathering here for the holiday, which marks the 7th century martyrdom of Imam Hussein, Shia`s most beloved figure and the grandson of the prophet. Throughout Iraq, people were increasingly worried about sectarian attacks—especially Sunni versus Shia, and vice versa. Karbala seemed the obvious target.

Kalashnikov-bearing Shiite militiamen stopped all cars approaching the city, including ours, and patted down everyone entering the area housing the two gold-domed shrines to Imam Hussein and Imam Abbas, Hussein`s half brother. Nonetheless, the place felt vulnerable and tense as the multitudes descended.

The early-morning rites came off without incident. The chief spectacle—white-robed men striking themselves on their heads with swords—was as bloody and medieval as expected. Other self-flagellators paraded through the dense crowd, beating themselves with chains, in some cases laced with razor blades. It was a ritual shedding of blood, not the involuntary variety usually on display.

For these faithful, Imam Hussein was not a figure of the distant past. They chanted of his martyrdom and beheading on the plains of Karbala as though he had been killed just days before. Many of the pilgrims were Iranians, ecstatic about finally being able to visit the Shiite holy sites; access had long been tightly controlled in a regime suspicious of Persians, traditional rivals of Arab Iraq. Many Iranians donned gauze masks—a modicum of protection against the atmospheric soup of dust, grime and blood.

My big preoccupation that morning, March 2, 2004, was to avoid getting trampled. Hundreds of thousands of people shuffled past the city`s two main shrines; separating the two monuments was a pleasant but now teeming palm-filled park—almost like a Mexican zócalo—on a site reduced to rubble a decade earlier as Saddam`s forces crushed a Shiite rebellion. Once among the mass of pilgrims, I and others were carried about as though part of a larger organism, and most everybody was sprayed repeatedly with blood from the penitents. I don`t like crowds as a rule and felt terribly vulnerable knowing how little it would take for a human stampede to kick off. I was relieved once we were out of the maelstrom and vowed never to get sucked into an Iraqi crowd again.

We paused at a chai stand at a quieter spot down the road, one of a number of sites where volunteers were providing hourglass-shaped goblets of sweetened tea from steaming caldrons. I savored two, then three glasses of the narcotically sugary drink and smoked as many cigarettes, taking in the retreating humanity that was then decamping from the shrine site, many still engaging in ritual self-mutilation as they ambled by.

My Iraqi interpreter, Raheem Salman, wanted to leave; Westerners always drew stares, even in the Shiite heartland, which welcomed the ouster of Hussein. I understood the value of not lingering. This was to be my last chai. And that`s when we heard it: a not-so-distant thud, like a mortar round. "Not good," said Raheem, who had helped navigate me out of difficulties in Najaf and other places.

A few seconds later, another blast erupted about 40 yards down the street to our right, more or less where we would have been walking had we not procrastinated over the chai. Debris, falling bodies and panicked worshipers were soon coming our way in a kind of rippling, uneven wave. The next explosion was closer, perhaps 20 yards to our left. A fireball shot into the air. The ground shook.

Through pure chance, we found ourselves in a relatively secure spot—right between two killing zones. In that terrifying instant, my mind somehow recalled the televised scenes of people fleeing the World Trade Center attacks in 2001. The survival instinct kicked in.

We shoved our way through the cascading victims and the miasma of debris and dust closing in from both sides. I glimpsed figures falling, others unconscious and some shrieking in fright: men, women, children. We cut down a side street filled with garbage up to our ankles and ran as fast as we could, adrenalin driving us on. The detonations persisted: We assumed the city was under mortar attack. I counted eight blasts before we ducked behind a brick wall at a construction site. I used my sat phone to call my wife, my office in Los Angeles and my bureau in Baghdad, as we hunkered down and then prayed we would get out alive.

Once it seemed relatively safe to wander about, we found several bomb sites littered with ball bearings—flesh-piercing metal pellets packed into suicide vests and belts. Strips of human tissue and globs of coagulated blood clung to buildings, walls and overhead cables like gruesome confetti. Bloodied shoes were scattered about. I recall a pair of blood-drenched girl`s sneakers; she must have been about my daughter`s age. I offered my satellite phone to anguished Iranian pilgrims who were desperate to call home. One man was collecting pieces of seared flesh and placing them in a plastic bag. They deserved a decent Muslim burial, he explained, as he went about his task.

A week later, I returned to the site of the tea stand to retrace my steps. I wanted to measure how close the bombings were—and, to some extent, exorcise the still-palpable fright. Nine suicide bombers had struck in Karbala, the deputy police chief told me, killing 130, while as many as 70 other pilgrims perished in synchronized strikes the same hour at the resplendent Shiite shrine of Khadimiyah in Baghdad.

On the main drag in Karbala, an entrepreneur was hawking CDs with video clips of the fireball we had seen close up, spliced with scenes of slaughter. The CD, which cost about 40 cents, was a big seller.

`WE`LL COVER YOU . . . ON THREE`

More than a year later, the hunted eyes still follow me.

The rebel in white sneakers was in shock, stooped over on the curb, life seeping from his young body. Another insurgent lay dead on the sodden ground nearby, a big chunk of his back blown open, exposing a gouge of raw meat and jagged bone. I caught the dying man`s gaze as I passed by with a Marine squad.

There was no obvious hatred in those eyes, no anger, just the fear and dread of a young man knowing he was taking his final breaths. He shivered in the cold with massive internal injuries, though no wound showed. Among the last things he would see on this earth was the unthinkable: U.S. Marines on the streets of Fallouja, a place he surely thought would never meet such a fate, abandoned by God, he might say. We didn`t stay long. "He could be booby-trapped," a Marine said. A medical corpsman did attend to the wounded insurgent. But it was too late. He was dead in a matter of minutes.

They called last November`s battle for Fallouja the Marines` most intense bout of urban warfare since Hue, more than a quarter-century earlier. I was among the few journalists who were able to live with a Marine infantry company as it prepped for the fight, and then walk in with the troops as they took the rebel-held city.

In the anxious days before the attack, there was a lot of talk about "payback time," as Marines recalled comrades lost and maimed in and around Fallouja, as well as the corps` ignominious retreat from the city during an aborted incursion the previous spring. When word came that the invasion was imminent, some of the men in the unit I was accompanying—Charlie Company of the 1-8, out of Camp Lejeune, N.C.—began composing what they called "just-in-case" notes. These were letters, tucked in their body armor or pockets or wallets, to loved ones back home: dads and moms, wives and children, best friends.

"That`s the first time I thought about death," said Lance Cpl. Stephen Ross O`Neill, 19, of Cincinnati, who had just addressed such a missive to his father. "I don`t think anyone should have to write a letter like that."

Among the journalists in our camp, nerves were becoming frayed as "I-Day," or the day of the invasion, neared. Some had decided not to go in during the first 24 hours, expecting a blood bath. We were all feeling queasy and not getting much sleep. An experienced broadcast journalist who had opted to stay behind asked what I and my colleague, Times photographer Luis Sinco, intended to do. We had decided to go in, largely because to do otherwise would have felt like a betrayal of the Marines who had been decent enough to share their lives with us. "Don`t ask me to push your wheelchair," the broadcast guy sneered at me.

On the eve of the attack, we headed out before dawn in the Marines` trademark 7-ton trucks, a line of transport vehicles brimming with troops motoring through the chilly rain of the western desert. In the fog and mist the scene felt like a replay of a World War I battle. "My friends are back home flipping burgers," boasted Rafael Peguero, 19, from the Bronx, as we rumbled along toward the rebel stronghold.

We spent the daylight hours in foxholes gouged from the scorpion-infested earth north of Fallouja. Nightfall brought a spectacular display: Artillery and jets pounded the city, softening up the town before the onslaught. The Marines cheered each explosion. It was hard to imagine anyone surviving the bombardment. Finally, about midnight, we headed in, hiking through desert brush, swampy canals and bomb craters to the town limits.

It was a rough entry. The platoon I accompanied was pinned down for four hours at a traffic circle under heavy fire. A cold rain descended upon us. Before the invasion, I had imagined an almost invincible front of thousands of Marines and dozens of tanks and armored vehicles as we crossed the threshold into Fallouja. Now, though, there were no more than a dozen soaked and freezing grunts in the vicinity, and the enemy appeared to be everywhere. Illumination rounds of white phosphorous periodically transformed the inky night into an eerie day, exposing our vulnerable position and drawing curses from infantrymen who were seeking cover in the dark. I`d written about several Marine units that had been overwhelmed and nearly wiped out; I didn`t savor being part of the next one.

I pulled my flak vest tight and stuck my helmeted head down in the curb, getting as low as I could to the grimy street as rocket-propelled grenades and tracer fire arced overhead. I tried to calm myself by transporting my mind elsewhere—to a favorite family retreat in Italy`s Dolomites, near the Austrian border, where my wife, daughter and I go to escape. The first snow there would be falling.

Somehow we weren`t overrun, and before dawn the platoon I was with finally started moving deeper into the city—first in the shadow of a giant Marine bulldozer, which shortly broke through the pavement and got stuck. Advancing through those abandoned streets in the dark was even more terrifying than being pinned down.

Fallouja was surreal and sinister; most civilians had wisely fled, leaving mainly U.S. troops and guerrillas, who took up hiding positions in houses and waited for a clear shot. Unseen U.S. aircraft groaned in the sky. We all knew the pre-sunrise lull would soon end—and it did. Insurgents opened fire on the squad I was with shortly after first light (and morning prayers) as we proceeded down a residential street. I was caught a little to the right of the main group and dashed for cover into a seemingly abandoned house; all the Marines scattered to walls on the left.

I was on my own, unarmed, at the entrance of a building with fire coming from several directions. And I wasn`t aware of an important fact: Marines had entered the house a few minutes earlier and found it filled with arms and ordnance—and possibly wired to blow up. Numerous homes and vehicles had been booby-trapped.

"You gotta cross," Staff Sgt. Dennis Nash, the platoon commander, yelled to me from across the way. "We`ll cover you . . . on three."

I didn`t have time to think about it. At the count, I grabbed my bulky pack and sprinted across the street, no more than 15 feet wide but appearing as a vast chasm at that moment. The Marines put down a wall of fire; I could hear bullets skipping on the pavement. I dived through a hedge and onto a strip of mud where two riflemen—I recall a tall Dominican American kid, Dominguez, from New Jersey—were covering me. "I never knew you could run so fast!" one Marine after another repeated to me later. My harried dash swiftly entered company lore.

We spent several nights in mosques, many heavily damaged after serving as rebel redoubts. Waking up in a place as sublime as the Khulafa Rashid mosque in Fallouja—and finding sleeping Marines on its fine carpet as a dazzling morning sun pierced the stained glass—was something very strange indeed. After a few days of the American blitz, Fallouja lay in ruins.

For many Marines, Fallouja was their first experience in sustained combat: urban warfare, house by house, fire from the "mooj," or mujahideen, at some points coming from 360 degrees. Iraq had mostly been a hit-and-run affair; troops seldom faced off against their enemy and frequently referred to the insurgents as "phantoms" who quickly melted into the population. "I`ve been waiting for this fight ever since I joined the Marines," Staff Sgt. Nash, an 11-year veteran, told me. "This battle is going to be written about in history books."

Famously, Lt. Gen. John F. Sattler, who headed the Marine expeditionary force that reclaimed Fallouja, declared that U.S. forces had "broken the back" of the insurgency. The fact is, the rebels lost a safe haven, but were far from beaten. A grim revolt already had broken out in the much larger and strategic northern city of Mosul. Samarra, Fallouja, Mosul, Tal Afar, Qaim, Buhruz—how many times had I attended press briefings and heard Sunni rebel strongholds declared "secured," only to be contested again?

I began receiving e-mails from relatives and friends of these Marines. They wanted to know about their men in Fallouja. The experience was very humbling and somehow harked back to a different war era, when people scanned newspaper accounts for word of their loved ones. Of course, the Internet and satellite technology had made it all so much more accessible and faster.

One woman from Texas e-mailed me photos of her recent wedding, which her brother, a captain in Fallouja, had missed. Then there was the wife of a combat engineer who was ecstatic to receive a call from her husband after I lent him my sat phone. "I am currently six months pregnant with our baby boy and he hasn`t got to be here for any of it," she wrote of her husband. "Him calling was so special to me, and it made my day. We have lost several babies in the past, including one last year during the war and he was unable to be with me at that time. This is the first baby that has thrived and is making it this far. I know that he is a strong man, and that is what keeps me going."

A Marine mother from Connecticut put it to me this way: "You are our only link every morning."

*

WHEN THE WAR TOOK THE DAY OFF

Election day, Jan. 30, 2005, broke cold and ferocious in Baghdad. From the L.A. Times bureau at the heavily barricaded Hamra Hotel, we could see puffs of smoke and feel the familiar detonations. It seemed as though the worst predictions for violence might materialize. But I`d learned to expect the unexpected in Iraq.

As the hours went by, the capital quieted down; more people headed for the polls, some dressed in their best clothes. We could see lines of citizens defying death threats and walking to the booths in a city now free of cars and under extremely tight security. The desire not to be left out in this singular experiment in democracy became infectious among certain groups, especially Shiites and Kurds, who had suffered such repression under Hussein`s rule.

A colleague and I headed into the Jadriyah neighborhood near our hotel. Walking the streets wasn`t something one did regularly in Baghdad anymore, not since the kidnappings and beheadings of Westerners. Most news organizations had given up independent houses and opted for restricted life in some version of an armed compound. We all were terrified of being kidnapped and thrown in a cage for our loved ones to view on a grisly video. Long gone were the days when we jumped in a car without thinking twice and headed off to Mosul or Kirkuk, Najaf or Basra, the Syrian border or Kurdistan in search of a story. We now traveled in armored vehicles with bodyguards and a chase car, plotting every trip.

As we ambled through the oddly festive capital on election day, someone from among a group of children playing soccer in the streets yelled and threw something at us. A harmless anti-aircraft shell skittered our way. We maintained our pace and didn`t look back. My Fallouja experience was still raw, and I stayed close to the walls to avoid snipers overhead, just like the Marines had taught me.

It was exhilarating strolling those streets, now largely devoid of traffic; civilian vehicles had been mostly banned as a measure against car bombs. The war seemed to take the day off—though there were, in fact, scores of attacks in the capital and elsewhere, mostly in the morning. People proudly displayed their purple index fingers, dyed to show that they had voted. The image is a cliché now, but it`s hard to understate how uplifting it felt then. I`d never experienced Baghdad like this. The election site, at a school, was downright inspiring.

"We feel we are really doing something good," said Abdul Munaim Abdul Karim, a 63-year-old engineer and secular Shiite, who said he and his wife trekked six miles to find their polling place. "This is a historic day for Iraq."

An occupational hazard of working as a journalist in Iraq is to be accused of being too negative. Yet on Jan. 30, we were probably too positive. The press hailed the results (though we dutifully noted the poor Sunni Arab turnout, dampened by threats, distrust and a call for a boycott).

But what became obvious in the months following the elections is that the vote likely exacerbated Iraq`s festering ethnic and political divides. Shiite- and Kurdish-backed slates captured about 75% of the votes; the long-dominant Sunni Arab minority felt more marginalized than ever. We were soon witnessing a relatively new and sinister phenomenon: paramilitary-style executions of civilians, reminiscent of the death squads of Latin America`s civil wars of the 1970s and `80s.

Scores of bloated bodies, victims of sectarian slaughter, floated in the Tigris. Most appeared to be Shiites who had been kidnapped by Sunni Arab assassins. Inevitably, bodies of abducted Sunnis began to appear in ditches in Shiite-dominated Sadr City and environs, their hands tied behind their backs, blindfolds over their eyes, bullet holes in their heads. Witnesses reported that men in white SUVs—a trademark of the largely Shiite security services—arrived at night and took away their men.

History may well judge the landmark Iraqi elections of January 2005 as a seminal advance for democracy in the Middle East. Up close, though, the vote seemed to open even wider the floodgates of mass murder.

In February, I received an e-mail from a Marine captain with whom I had spent time during the Fallouja operation three months earlier. We`d met one dark evening in an abandoned building near city hall, where his hard-hit recon platoon—with a Purple Heart rate approaching 50%—had taken up sniper positions. They picked off rebels, one by one, from the blacked-out windows. The captain informed me that he had been seriously injured in a raid south of Fallouja after we last spoke; his ulnar nerve and an artery were severed in his right forearm, and he was scheduled for nerve-graft surgery. A sergeant whom I`d also met had been killed in the same operation.

"The election turnout was inspiring," the captain wrote. "It was good to see that our contributions mean something to these people."

I couldn`t help but admire that kind of hopefulness. But I also couldn`t help feel that he and others had been used as instruments of someone else`s grand ambitions—like warriors from time immemorial, I suppose. The entire enterprise in Iraq rests on two shaky premises: First, that the disenfranchised and radicalized Sunni Arab minority—accustomed to being dominant—will somehow acquiesce, accept the new Iraq and abandon its armed struggle. And second, that the Iraqi armed forces, notoriously infiltrated by the rebels, will be able to keep the peace without a large-scale, open-ended U.S. troop presence.

The country`s Shiite political elite—mostly longtime exiles with strong links to Iran—know they`ve ascended for one major reason: U.S. force. But they cannot say that to the Iraqi public. Instead, they must hint obliquely that Hussein`s overthrow was the result of some kind of internal Shiite revolt or divine intervention. To give credit to the Americans, to Sgt. Nash and the men of Charlie Company and all the others, would be political suicide.

U.S. forces in Iraq have no illusions about their dual, contradictory role. They prop up the government and provide some measure of security—probably holding off an all-out battle for control of Baghdad. On the other hand, their very presence is the insurgency`s major selling point.

THE LONG ROAD HOME

I saw Nahrain Yonaan one last time before I left Iraq.

We arranged to meet at a mutual friend`s house. At this point, I dared not go into her neighborhood in Baghdad`s southern Doura district, a hotbed of insurgent activity and rebel checkpoints. Nahrain looked drained, lacking the vitality I had sensed even when she was half-conscious in that hospital bed more than a year earlier. She had lost her left eye, her right eye was close to sightless, her hearing was disintegrating and several toes and fingers were mangled or missing. Pain was constant and shrapnel remained in her body—the result of pitiable medical care.

The frequent gunshots in her neighborhood terrified her; she feared insurgents might return to finish her off. "Everyone was nice to me during my time with them," she said, still befuddled that the Army had not offered medical assistance. "I was shocked to be ignored by them."

By Nahrain`s side sat her older sister, Atoor, 27, a spirited soul who was filled with resentment about the new Iraq. "I am a young woman, but I can no longer go out freely and walk the streets," she said. "I cannot put on jeans and walk out because people will start calling me bad names." As Christians, Atoor and Nahrain were appalled at the graffiti that smeared their churches, the bombs at Sunday services, the coerced wearing of head scarves and the threats to a group that had lived side by side with Muslims for centuries. In their view, a wave of fundamentalism and moral absolutism was sweeping their nation.

Nahrain and her sister were on their way to Amman, Jordan, looking to start fresh in a new place. Their dream was to acquire U.S. visas, but the sisters had little hope of ever being granted the prized documents, despite relatives in America who were willing to sponsor them. Iraq, the country of their birth, wasn`t for them anymore.

It`s something you hear a lot in Iraq these days: The lucky ones get out. "I still have hope in the future and in life," Nahrain said, "but not here."

I bade farewell to Iraq in mid-July, hoping for the best as we careened down the airport road, past the bomb-gouged potholes and the unlucky spots where so many had been blown up. I must have traveled this way 50 times. A few months earlier, Marla Ruzcika, a 28-year-old aid worker from Northern California and a friend of many journalists, had been killed there, along with her driver-translator, in a suicide bombing that had targeted a convoy traveling near her car. The fate of this woman whose exuberance seemed to mock the very notion of mortality was on my mind as we sped along.

I got dropped off and double-stepped with my bags past the carcasses of vehicles destroyed by suicide bombers to the relative safety of the Nepalese contract guards at Checkpoint One, behind a comforting concrete wall. I took a deep breath. I endured a final round of searches, preoccupied as always that someone in line might be concealing a bomb and preparing for paradise. I then waited eight hours in the Baathist cathedral that is the Baghdad airport terminal for a flight out.

A series of odd summer sandstorms had enveloped Iraq, and the few commercial flights were spotty. Many blamed the Americans—who else?—for the curious meteorological events that had cast an ochre pall over the battered capital. Something about military activity in the west kicking up the sand and dust.

Abruptly, the sky cleared and the Royal Jordanian jet that was to extract me and a motley assemblage of security contractors and assorted Iraqis approached the airport on its delayed run from Amman. As if on cue, an explosion shook the terminal. A mortar landed harmlessly about 100 yards away, drawing a glance from the seen-it-all security men also waiting for the flight. "They`re getting closer," commented an Aussie contractor, who looked out the terminal window and watched the reddish-brown earth erupt as the mortar struck the desert.

We boarded uneventfully and took off safely, the jet banking severely into the overcast skies to avoid potential rocket fire. Two hours later I was in a taxi in Amman. This had been my 12th or 13th trip into Iraq. I`d lost count. But I was in one piece, more or less. I telephoned my wife in Italy. It was time to start a new life. Iraq was somebody else`s story now.

Patrick J. McDonnell is The Times` Buenos Aires bureau chief.

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December 3, 2005
For Some Marines, Deaths of Comrades Fuel Doubts
By DAVID M. HALBFINGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/03/national/03marine.html

OCEANSIDE, Calif., Dec. 2 - Half a world away and a day later, the deadly blast of a roadside bomb in Falluja stopped young marines in their tracks here on Friday.

This latest improvised explosive device - the military`s bloodless jargon for every soldier and marine`s worst fear, the death you don`t see coming - claimed the lives of 10 marines and wounded 11 more, the worst attack on American troops in four months.

Families were still being notified, so word had scarcely begun to spread in Oceanside, on the doorstep of Camp Pendleton, or in Jacksonville, N.C., home to Camp Lejeune, the two bases that military officials hinted would bear the brunt of the mourning.

Both cities have grown all too accustomed to this ritual, of hearing the news, steeling for the details, grieving and getting on with life till the next time: Camp Pendleton has lost more than 255 troops in Iraq, Camp Lejeune more than 140.

But the nature of Thursday`s attack, hitting troops on foot patrol with a powerful bomb fashioned from several heavy artillery shells, seemed to a group of marines meandering along downtown Oceanside`s yellow-ribboned storefronts on Friday afternoon like another ratcheting up of the risks.

And yet another reason for the young marines to voice doubts about the mission in Iraq.

Lance Cpl. Tom Moran, at 20 already a veteran of two years in the Corps and two tours in Iraq, blinked in disbelief. "They don`t usually try to hit us on foot," he said. "They usually go after you in armored vehicles."

He said his unit had been getting plenty of training in dealing with improvised explosive devices. "But it`s very hard to spot them," he said.

"They keep finding new things to make them out of," said Pfc. Harrison Records, 22, of Bakersfield, Calif.

Another young marine seemed less struck by the size of the bomb than by the number of casualties. "We don`t need to be there no more," said Pfc. Chris Blow, 19, of Dallas, speaking under his breath. But a moment later, his face tightened into anger. "It makes me want to go over again even more, and get some of them," he said.

In Jacksonville, where memorial services for as many as 20 marines have been held in the last few weeks, the Falluja attack still hit hard, said Staff Sgt. Angela Mink, a base spokeswoman. "Last night I was singing `Have a Very Merry Christmas,` and today, this," she said. "Every time you lose someone, it`s like a punch in the stomach, and it`s a sucker-punch at that. We have to deal with it, and we have to talk to the media about it, but it`s like trying to talk nonchalantly about the fact that your kid brother got killed."

At a tattoo parlor near the main gate to Camp Lejeune, Lance Cpl. Clinton Fort, 21, of Marietta, Ga., was getting one of his five tattoos touched up. He showed off his latest, the one he got as soon as he returned from Iraq in October: a helmet, saying "R.I.P. Klinger," rested on a rifle in a pair of military boots.

Corporal Fort said that Klinger - he couldn`t remember his friend`s first name, but missed him just the same - was killed by a roadside bomb in Falluja over the summer. "He was just Klinger to me," he said.

He said he had seen and heard more roadside bombs go off than he could count. Back stateside, he said, he finds himself seizing up just seeing trash bags in his neighbors` driveways. "I expect them to blow up, even if I know I`m home," he said. "I`m still on the edge."

Corporal Fort said he, like other marines, was getting more and more eager for a withdrawal from Iraq. "We`re marines, and we`re going do what we`ve got to do, but now it seems like all that is happening is that marines are dying," he said. "I wish we could just pull out and go home to our families."

Here in Oceanside, Matt, a 23-year-old Marine corporal, strolled with his new wife, Missy, along a pier as the sun set and surfers caught the day`s last waves. They had just watched his younger brother graduate from boot camp.

"I have no problem going over there, doing what my country asks," said Matt, who asked that his name not be used because he was afraid of retaliation from his superiors. "But sometimes it seems like there`s no point any more. We`ve gone, we did what we needed to do, but we`re still there. That country`s always going to be fighting. That`s their history. If we were to stay till we`re finished, we`d probably never leave."

John DeSantis contributed reporting from Pennsylvaniafor this article, and Majsan Bostrom from Jacksonville, N.C.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

No. 1252-05
IMMEDIATE RELEASE December 3, 2005
DoD Identifies Marine Casualties

The Department of Defense announced today the death of 10 Marines who were supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Staff Sgt. Daniel J. Clay, 27, of Pensacola, Fla.

Lance Cpl. John M. Holmason, 20, of Suprise, Ariz.

Lance Cpl. David A. Huhn, 24, of Portland, Mich.

Lance Cpl. Adam W. Kaiser, 19, of Naperville, Ill.

Lance Cpl. Robert A. Martinez, 20, of Splendora, Texas

Cpl. Anthony T. McElveen, 20, of Little Falls, Minn.

Lance Cpl. Scott T. Modeen, 24, of Hennepin, Minn.

Lance Cpl. Andrew G. Patten, 19, of Byron, Ill.

Sgt. Andy A. Stevens, 29, of Tomah, Wis.

Lance Cpl. Craig N. Watson, 21, of Union City, Mich.

All 10 Marines died Dec. 1 from an improvised explosive device while conducting combat operations against enemy forces in Fallujah, Iraq. All 10 Marines were assigned to 2nd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division, I Marine Expeditionary Force, Twentynine Palms, Calif. During Operation Iraqi Freedom, their unit was attached to 2nd Marine Division, II Marine Expeditionary Force (Forward).

Media with questions about these Marines can call the Twentynine Palms Public Affairs Office at [phone].

http://www.defenselink.mil/releases/2005/nr20051203-5180.htm…

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Latest Update: #33596 02.12.05 19:35:36
Latest Coalition Fatality: Dec 02, 2005
Military Fatalities US, UK, Other: : Total: 2328 , US: 2127 , Dez.05: 14


Iraker 12/02/05
http://www.icasualties.org/oif/IraqiDeaths.aspx

Regelmäßige Updates von Meldungen aus dem Irak:
http://icasualties.org/oif/

Da bei ´Today im Irak´ die Postings immer länger werden, hier den Link für alle Interessierte: http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

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[urlHurricanes 2005]http://www.sfgate.com/katrina/[/url]

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FBI reopens its inquiry into forgery leading to Iraq war
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002661467…

By Peter Wallsten, Tom Hamburger and Josh Meyer
Los Angeles Times

WASHINGTON — The FBI has reopened an inquiry into an intriguing aspect of the pre-Iraq war intelligence fiasco: how the Bush administration came to rely on forged documents linking Iraq to nuclear-weapons materials as part of its justification for the invasion.

The documents inspired intense U.S. interest in the buildup to the war and led the CIA to send a former ambassador to the African nation of Niger to investigate whether Iraq had sought the materials there. The ambassador, Joseph Wilson, said he found little evidence to support the claim, and the documents later were deemed to have been forged.

But President Bush referred to the claim in his 2003 State of the Union address in making the case for the invasion. Bush`s speech, Wilson`s trip and the role his wife played in sending him have created a political storm that still envelopes the White House.

The documents included letters on Niger government letterhead and purported contracts showing sales of uranium to Iraq. They were provided in 2002 to an Italian magazine, which gave them to the U.S. Embassy in Rome.

The FBI`s decision to reopen the investigation reverses the agency`s announcement last month that it had finished a two-year inquiry and concluded the forgeries were part of a moneymaking scheme, not an effort to manipulate U.S. foreign policy.

Those findings concerned some members of the Senate Intelligence Committee after published reports that the FBI had not interviewed a former Italian spy named Rocco Martino, identified as the original source of the documents. The committee had requested the initial investigation.

After talking with committee members, FBI officials decided to pursue "additional work" on the case.

A senior federal law-enforcement official confirmed late Friday that the bureau has reopened the investigation.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the request to reopen the inquiry was prompted by information recently made available to the FBI. Also, he said, some people he declined to name had become more cooperative.

The issue erupted in July 2003, when Wilson published his findings in a New York Times opinion piece. Administration officials leaked the identify of Wilson`s wife, a covert CIA agent named Valerie Plame, allegedly as part of an effort to discredit Wilson`s claims, prompting an investigation into the outing of a covert agent.

The Plame case led to charges of obstruction of justice, perjury and making false statements against Vice President Dick Cheney`s chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who resigned. It also has raised questions about the administration`s use of intelligence and how it targeted critics.

Copyright © 2005 The Seattle Times Company

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How Bush Created a Theocracy in Iraq
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/how_bush_created_a_theoc…

Posted on Dec. 2, 2005

By Juan Cole

The Bush administration naively believed that Iraq was a blank slate on which it could inscribe its vision for a remake of the Arab world. Iraq, however, was a witches’ brew of dynamic social and religious movements, a veritable pressure cooker. When George W. Bush invaded, he blew off the lid.

Shiite religious leaders and parties, in particular, have crucially shaped the new Iraq in each of its three political phases. The first was during the period of direct American rule, largely by Paul Bremer. The second comprised the months of interim government, when Iyad Allawi was prime minister. The third stretches from the formation of an elected government, with Ibrahim Jaafari as prime minister, to today.

In the first phase, expatriate Shiite parties returned to the country to emerge as major players, to the consternation of a confused and clueless “Coalition Provisional Authority.”

The oldest of these was the Dawa Party, founded in the late 1950s as a Shiite answer to mass parties such as the Communist Party of Iraq and the Arab nationalist Baath Party. Dawa means the call, as in the imperative to spread the faith. Dawa Party leaders in the 1960s and 1970s dreamed of a Shiite paradise to rival the workers’ paradise of the Marxists, with a state ruled by Islamic law, where a “consultative council” somehow selected by the community would make further regulations in accordance with the Koran. The Dawa Party organized covert cells throughout the Shiite south. In 1980, in the wake of the Khomeini revolution in Iran, Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party cracked down hard on Dawa, executing many of its leaders, attacking its party workers and making membership in the party a crime punishable by death. The upper echelons of the Baath were dominated by Sunni Arabs who disliked religious Shiites, considering them backward and Iran-oriented rather than progressive and Arab. In the same year, 1980, Saddam invaded Iran, beginning a bloody eight-year-long war with his Shiite neighbor.

In the early 1980s, Iran came to be viewed in Washington as public enemy Number 2, right after the Soviet Union. In the Cold War, the United States had viewed Iran as a key asset, and in 1953 the CIA overthrew the populist government of elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, which had broken with the country’s monarch. The U.S. put the autocratic Mohammad Reza Shah back on his throne, building him up as an absolute monarch with a well-trained secret police and jails overflowing with prisoners of conscience. The shah’s obsequiousness toward the U.S., and his secularism, provoked the ire of many religious Shiites in Iran. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, exiled as a troublemaker in 1963, had lived from 1964 to 1978 in Iraq, where he developed a new doctrine that clerics should rule. In 1978 he was expelled from Iraq to Paris and helped lead the revolution of 1978-79 that overthrew the shah and brought Khomeini to power as theocrat in chief.

Khomeini’s rise coincided with that of Saddam, a secular Sunni. Thousands of activist Shiites from Iraq fled to Iran, and the leadership congregated in Tehran. In 1982, with the support of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Iraqi Shiite exiles formed a militant umbrella group, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). Dawa was also active there. Among its leaders was a physician from the Shiite holy city of Karbala named Ibrahim Jaafari. In 1984, the cleric Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim became the head of SCIRI. From Iran, both Dawa and SCIRI mounted commando attacks on Baathist facilities and officials, attempting to overthrow the Baath government. In 1989 Jaafari and other lay leaders of the Dawa Party relocated to London, seeking greater freedom of action than they could attain under the watchful eyes of the ayatollahs in Tehran.

During the Gulf War of 1990-91, when the U.S. and its allies pushed Saddam Hussein’s forces back out of Kuwait, President George H.W. Bush called on Iraqis to rise up against the dictator. The Shiites took him at his word, launching a popular revolution in the spring of 1991 in which they took control of the southern provinces. Bush, fearful of a Shiite Islamic republic, then allowed the Baath to crush the revolution, killing tens of thousands. In the aftermath, two clerical leaders emerged: Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, originally from Iran but resident in Najaf since late 1951, took a cautious and quietist course, teaching religion but staying out of politics. His rival, Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, increasingly defied Saddam, organizing poor Shiites into a puritanical form of religion. In 1999 the Baath secret police killed al-Sadr and his two older sons. His middle son, Muqtada, went underground. The religious Shiite parties established their credibility with the Shiite public by their dissident activities.

In the run-up to the March 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, both the London branch of the Dawa Party and the Tehran-based Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq engaged in consultations with Washington. Both had been involved in extensive meetings with secular Shiite politician Ahmed Chalabi, who organized the Iraqi National Congress as an expatriate party aimed at overthrowing the Baath. When Saddam fell, leaders of both Shiite organizations established themselves in Iraq. Ibrahim Jaafari came from London with his colleagues and sought to organize the Dawa Party as a populist political force in the Shiite south. Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq made a triumphal journey overland from Tehran to Iraq. SCIRI immediately launched membership drives in the villages and small cities of the Shiite south and garnered thousands, perhaps millions, of new members over the next year and a half.

In April and May of 2003, after the fall of Saddam, the Sadr movement emerged into the spotlight. Muqtada al-Sadr, just 30 years old, did not have the scholarly credentials to be a great clerical leader, but the fanatic devotion of the slum-dwelling Shiite masses to his father ensured that he, too, would be met with acclaim when he came out of hiding. He organized the takeover by his followers of most major mosques in the ghetto of East Baghdad, which was promptly renamed Sadr City in honor of Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr. He immediately launched regular demonstrations against what he characterized as the U.S. occupation of Iraq, demanding that American troops depart immediately. In the summer of 2003, he began organizing his militia, the Mahdi Army. He desires a theocratic government similar to that in Iran.

The U.S. State Department, fearful that the Pentagon might install corrupt expatriate politician Chalabi in power in Iraq, convinced President George W. Bush instead to send in Paul Bremer, who had been a career foreign service officer. Bremer intended initially to rule Iraq single-handedly. As the Sunni Arab guerrilla movement gained momentum in May and June, it became clear to him that he could not hope to rule Iraq by himself, and he appointed a governing council of 25 members. Ibrahim Jaafari of Dawa and Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim of SCIRI were appointed, as were several prominent figures with backgrounds in the Iraqi Dawa Party, along with Sunni Arabs and members of minorities.

Bremer’s plan to have the constitution written by a committee appointed by himself foundered when it met strong objections from Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. In a fatwa, or legal ruling, Sistani insisted that an Iraqi constitution must be drafted by delegates to a constituent assembly elected by the Iraqi people. Bremer initially discounted this criticism. He is alleged to have asked one of his aides, “Can’t we get a fatwa from some other mullah?” It gradually became apparent that Sistani’s authority was such that he could overrule the U.S. proconsul on this issue.

By October of 2003, as the guerrilla war grew, it became clear that Bremer could not in fact hope to rule Iraq by fiat, and that the U.S. would have to hand sovereignty back to the Iraqis. Bremer’s initial plan was to hold circumscribed elections for a parliament. Most voters would be members of the provincial councils (each with 16 to 40 members) that the U.S. and Britain had somehow massaged into existence.

Again, Sistani objected, insisting that only open, one-person, one-vote elections could guarantee a government that reflected the will of the Iraqi people. It was almost as though Sistani were quoting French political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau to the Americans. He also insisted on a prominent role for the United Nations as midwife to the new Iraq. When it seemed as though the Bush administration might ignore him, Sistani brought 40,000 demonstrators into the streets in Basra and 100,000 in Baghdad in mid-January of 2004. The Bush administration immediately acquiesced. U.S. special envoy Ibrahim Lakhdar came for extensive consultations, and elections were set for January 2005. In the meantime, the U.S. would hand sovereignty to an appointed government for six months, with a supporting United Nations resolution.

The weakness of the U.S. in Iraq encouraged the proliferation of party paramilitaries. The Dawa Party began having men patrol in some cities. SCIRI expanded its Badr Corps militia, originally trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. These militias avoided conflict with the U.S. because their parties had a marriage of convenience with the Bush administration, and because they agreed not to carry heavy weaponry. It is alleged that the Supreme Council continues to receive substantial help from Iran, and that the clerics in Tehran still pay the salaries of some of the Badr Corps fighters. The likelihood is that the Iranians give at least a little money and support to a wide range of Shiite politicians in Iraq, including some secularists, so that whoever comes out on top is beholden to them. The mullahs in Iraq probably support the Supreme Council more warmly than any other political party, however.

In contrast, the Mahdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr was viewed by the Americans as a threat, even though the Sadrists seldom came into violent conflict with U.S. troops. As the handover of sovereignty approached, the Americans in Iraq suddenly announced that they wanted to kill or capture Muqtada al-Sadr, and they arrested several of his key aides in early April 2004. He responded by launching a massive revolt, which initially succeeded in taking control of East Baghdad and several southern cities. Through hard fighting, the U.S. military gradually defeated the Mahdi Army, reaching a truce in early June. In August, fighting broke out again between the Sadrists and the Marines in the holy city of Najaf. This crisis was resolved when Sistani returned from London after a heart procedure there to call for all Iraqis to march on Najaf. The flooding of the city by civilians made further fighting impossible, and Muqtada al-Sadr slipped away. Thereafter Muqtada fell quiet for many months. When he reemerged, it was as a political broker rather than simply a warlord.

The Americans had had to give up their hopes of ruling Iraq directly, both because of the Sunni Arab guerrilla war and the challenge of the Shiites. Although he was more peaceful about it, Sistani opposed key American initiatives as much as the young firebrand Muqtada al-Sadr did. The Mahdi Army uprising was the nail in the coffin of direct American rule of Iraq. Next, the U.S. completely lost control of the political process.

In fall 2004, Sistani intervened to shape the upcoming elections. He insisted that all the major Shiite parties run on a single list, to avoid splitting the Shiite vote. Since Shiites comprise about 62% of Iraqis, a united Shiite list could hope to win a majority in parliament. The coalition of Dawa, SCIRI and smaller Shiite parties won the election on Jan. 30, as Sistani had foreseen. The U.S. had attempted to build up the old CIA asset and secular ex-Baathist, Iyad Allawi, as the natural leader of Iraq. It signally failed. His list received only about 14% of seats in parliament.

The real winners of the January 2005 elections were the Shiite religious parties. This was bad news for Bush. In partnership with the Kurdish Alliance, they formed a government that brought Ibrahim Jaafari of Dawa to power as prime minister and gave Dawa and SCIRI several important posts in the executive. Sunni Arabs from the rival branch of Islam were largely excluded from the new government, insofar as they had either boycotted the election or had been unable to vote for security reasons. The new Jaafari government quickly established warm relations with Iran, receiving a pledge of $1 billion in aid, the use of Iranian port facilities and help with refining Iraqi petroleum.

At the provincial level, the Shiite parties swept to power throughout the south. SCIRI dominated nine of 11 provinces that had a significant Shiite population, including Baghdad province. The Sadrists took Maysan province and Basra province. Shiite militias proliferated and established themselves.

The dominance of the central legislature and the executive by religious Shiites gave Sistani great moral authority over the drafting of the permanent constitution, the main task of the new parliament. The Shiites inserted a provision that no legislation could be passed by parliament that contravened the established laws of Islam, and made provisions for Muslim clerics to be appointed to the judiciary. Some important elements of the old Dawa Party vision of a government in accordance with Islam was therefore achieved, though it was leavened by modern, secular human rights ideals. When Dawa and SCIRI were based in Tehran in the 1980s, plotting to overthrow Saddam and come to power, they could not have imagined that their dream would be realized 20 years later with American help. Jaafari, the elected prime minister, employed his position to strengthen the Shiite fundamentalist Dawa Party that he headed. Abdul Aziz al-Hakim had lived to see his Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq rule half the provinces of Iraq, including the capital, as well as play a central role in the parliament and the cabinet. Both parties drew Baghdad closer to Tehran, seeking warm relations with the clerical rulers of Iran. Shiite power now dominated the eastern stretches of the Middle East. The Bush administration trumpeted its bestowal of democracy in the region, but most Middle Eastern observers saw only the installation of a new Shiite power.

The hawks in the Bush administration had initially hoped that a conquered Iraq would form the launching pad for a further American war on Iran. The Shiites of Iraq foiled that plan. Sistani forced the Americans into direct, one-person, one-vote elections. Those elections in turn ensured that the religious Shiites would come to power, since they had the greatest street credibility, given their long struggle against Saddam and their nationalist credentials in the face of American occupation.

An Iraq dominated by religious Shiites who had often lived in exile in Iran for decades is inevitably an Iraq with warm relations with Tehran. The U.S., bogged down in a military quagmire in the Sunni Arab regions, cannot afford to provoke massive demonstrations and uprisings in the Shiite areas of Iraq by attacking Iran. Bush has inadvertently strengthened Iran, giving it a new, religious Shiite ally in the Gulf region. The traditional Sunni powers in the region, such as the kings of Saudi Arabia and Jordan, are alarmed and annoyed that Bush has created a new “Shiite crescent.” Far from weakening or overthrowing the ayatollahs, Bush has ensconced and strengthened them. Indeed, by chasing after imaginary weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, he may have lost any real opportunity to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon should it decide to do so.

The real winners of the Iraq war are the Shiites.

Copyright © 2005 Truthdig, L.L.C. All rights reserved.

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Published on Friday, December 2, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
Mission Accomplished: Big Oil`s Occupation of Iraq
by Heather Wokusch
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1203-23.htm


The Bush administration`s covert plan to help energy companies steal Iraq`s oil could be just weeks away from fruition, and the implications are staggering: continued price-gouging by Big Oil, increased subjugation of the Iraqi people, more US troops in Iraq, and a greater likelihood for a US invasion of Iran.

That`s just for starters.

The administration`s challenge has been how to transfer Iraq`s oil assets to private companies under the cloak of legitimacy, yet simultaneously keep prices inflated.

But Bush & Co. and their Big Oil cronies might have found a simple yet devious solution: production sharing agreements (PSAs).

Here`s how PSAs work. In return for investment in areas where fields are small and results are uncertain, governments occasionally grant oil companies sweetheart deals guaranteeing high profit margins and protection from exploration risks. The country officially retains ownership of its oil resources, but the contractual agreements are often so rigid and severe that in practical terms, it can be the equivalent of giving away the deed to the farm.

Since Iraq sits on the world`s third largest oil reserves, the PSA model makes little sense in the first place; Iraq`s fields are enormous and the exploration risks are accordingly miniscule, so direct national investment or more equitable forms of foreign investment would be in order. But as a comprehensive new report by the London-based advocacy group PLATFORM details, the PSA model "is on course to be adopted in Iraq, soon after the December elections, with no public debate and at enormous potential cost."

PLATFORM`s "Crude Designs: The Rip-off of Iraq`s Oil Wealth" points out that the proposed agreements (with US State Department origins) will prove a bonanza for oil companies but a disaster for the Iraqi people:

"At an oil price of $40 per barrel, Iraq stands to lose between $74 billion and $194 billion over the lifetime of the proposed contracts, from only the first 12 oilfields to be developed. These estimates, based on conservative assumptions, represent between two and seven times the current Iraqi government budget."

"Under the likely terms of the contracts, oil company rates of return from investing in Iraq would range from 42% to 162%, far in excess of usual industry minimum target of around 12% return on investment."

Of course, given the current political chaos, Iraqi citizens have little power over whether their politicians sign the proposed PSA agreements. That critical decision could be left to con-men like the former Interim Oil Minister Ahmad Chalabi, who recently met with no less than Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice during his red-carpet visit to the White House. One can assume the topic of Iraq`s proposed PSAs came up more than once.

Chalabi`s successor as Oil Minister, Ibrahim Mohammad Bahr al-Uloum, is expected to toe the corporate line, and Iraq`s former Interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi issued post-invasion guidelines stating: "The Iraqi authorities should not spend time negotiating the best possible deals with the oil companies; instead they should proceed quickly, agreeing to whatever terms the companies will accept, with a possibility of renegotiation later."

But PSAs are notoriously hard to renegotiate. According to PLATFORM, "under PSAs future Iraqi governments would be prevented from changing tax rates or introducing stricter laws or regulations relating to labour standards, workplace safety, community relations, environment or other issues." The Iraqi people would be locked into inflexible agreements spanning 25-40 years with disputes solved by corporate-friendly international arbitration tribunals, rather than by national courts.

Is that really the same thing as liberation?

According to Greg Muttitt, co-author and lead researcher of the "Crude Designs" report, "for all the US administration`s talk of creating a democracy in Iraq, in fact, their heavy pushing of PSAs stands to deprive Iraq of democratic control of its most important natural resource. I would even go further: the USA, Britain and the oil companies seem to be taking advantage of the weakness of Iraq`s new institutions of government, and of the terrible violence in the country, by pushing Iraq to sign deals in this weak state, whose terms would last for decades. The chances of Iraq getting a good deal for its people in these circumstances are minimal; the prospect of mega-profitable deals for multinational oil companies is fairly assured."

Of course, ongoing oil exploration in Iraq by administration-friendly companies would require permanent US bases, a massive ongoing troop presence and billions more in taxpayer-dollar subsidies to sleazy outfits like Halliburton.

The implications of all of this for domestic oil prices is unclear. While neo-conservatives initially pushed for privatizing Iraq`s oil reserves as a way of destroying OPEC (they wanted to boost production and flood world markets with cheap oil) the administration seems to have taken a more corporate-friendly stance. After all, the last thing oil executives want is to break OPEC`s stranglehold on pricing, because keeping supply low has delivered record profits.

But the "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq" which Bush released this week as part of his pro-occupation PR blitz lists a surprising goal: "facilitating investment in Iraq`s oil sector to increase production from the current 2.1 million barrels per day to more than 5 million per day." OPEC`s quota for Iraq currently sits at around 4 million barrels per day, so the administration`s goal is not only significantly higher, but (at "more than 5 million") a little too open-ended for the cartel`s comfort. Could be that Bush & Co. want to have their cake and eat it too: tighten the screws on OPEC, yet continue to rip off consumers through elevated prices.

The whole PSA affair may also stoke the fires for a US invasion of Iran, which sits on oil reserves even greater than those of Iraq.

Tehran already is on the administration`s hit list, less for its nuclear aspirations than for its plans to open a euro-based international oil-trading market in early 2006. Iran`s oil "bourse" would compete with the likes of New York`s NYMEX and provide OPEC the opportunity to snub the greenback in favor of "petroeuros," a development the administration will avoid at all costs. So if the PSA model is adopted in Iraq, it would provide a clear precedent for implementing it in Iran too, and hand the administration another reason to start the next invasion.

Heather Wokusch can be reached via her website: www.heatherwokusch.com. She`s been on an extended book-writing sabbatical, but will be up and ranting on a regular basis in early 2006.

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December 4, 2005
Bush`s Speech on Iraq War Echoes Voice of an Analyst
By SCOTT SHANE
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/04/politics/04strategy.html?h…

WASHINGTON, Dec. 3 - There could be no doubt about the theme of President Bush`s Iraq war strategy speech on Wednesday at the Naval Academy. He used the word victory 15 times in the address; "Plan for Victory" signs crowded the podium he spoke on; and the word heavily peppered the accompanying 35-page National Security Council document titled, "Our National Strategy for Victory in Iraq."

Although White House officials said many federal departments had contributed to the document, its relentless focus on the theme of victory strongly reflected a new voice in the administration: Peter D. Feaver, a Duke University political scientist who joined the N.S.C. staff as a special adviser in June and has closely studied public opinion on the war.

Despite the president`s oft-stated aversion to polls, Dr. Feaver was recruited after he and Duke colleagues presented the administration with an analysis of polls about the Iraq war in 2003 and 2004. They concluded that Americans would support a war with mounting casualties on one condition: that they believed it would ultimately succeed.

That finding, which is questioned by other political scientists, was clearly behind the victory theme in the speech and the plan, in which the word appears six times in the table of contents alone, including sections titled "Victory in Iraq is a Vital U.S. Interest" and "Our Strategy for Victory is Clear."

"This is not really a strategy document from the Pentagon about fighting the insurgency," said Christopher F. Gelpi, Dr. Feaver`s colleague at Duke and co-author of the research on American tolerance for casualties. "The Pentagon doesn`t need the president to give a speech and post a document on the White House Web site to know how to fight the insurgents. The document is clearly targeted at American public opinion."

Dr. Gelpi said he had not discussed the document with Dr. Feaver, who declined to be interviewed.

Dr. Feaver, 43, who is also a lieutenant commander in the United States Naval Reserve, wrote three books on civilian-military relations. He worked on military issues on President Clinton`s National Security Council staff in 1993 and 1994, but he has written critically of Mr. Clinton and other Democrats and sympathetically of President Bush in The New York Times and other publications.

Last year in an op-ed article in The Washington Post, noting Mr. Bush`s determination to invade Iraq in 2003 in the face of doubts, Dr. Feaver wrote, "Determined commanders in chief have the mind-set and the resolve to act in spite of the political climate and military resistance."

He was recruited by the White House this year as public support for the war declined steadily in the face of mounting casualties and costs. A Newsweek poll this month showed that just 30 percent of those interviewed said they approved of the president`s handling of the war, while 65 percent disapproved - an almost exact reversal of the numbers in May 2003, shortly after the toppling of Saddam Hussein.

A CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll conducted Wednesday underscored the need for a clear, straightforward summary of the administration`s Iraq policy. Asked whether they thought President Bush had a plan to achieve victory in Iraq, 55 percent said no and 41 percent said yes.

Based on their study of poll results from the first two years of the war, Dr. Gelpi, Dr. Feaver and Jason Reifler, then a Duke graduate student, took issue with what they described as the conventional wisdom since the Vietnam War - that Americans will support military operations only if American casualties are few.

They found that public tolerance for the human cost of combat depended on two factors: a belief that the war was a worthy cause, and even more important, a belief that the war was likely to be successful.

In their paper, "Casualty Sensitivity and the War in Iraq," which is to be published soon in the journal International Security, Dr. Feaver and his colleagues wrote: "Mounting casualties did not produce a reflexive collapse in public support. The Iraq case suggests that under the right conditions, the public will continue to support military operations even when they come with a relatively high human cost."

The role of Dr. Feaver in preparing the strategy document came to light through a quirk of technology. In a portion of the document usually hidden from public view but accessible with a few keystrokes, the plan posted on the White House Web site showed the document`s originator, or "author" in the software`s designation, to be "feaver-p."

According to Matt Rozen, a spokesman for Adobe Systems, which makes the Acrobat software used to prepare the document, that entry indicated that Dr. Feaver created the original document that, with additions and editing, was posted on the Web. There is no way to know from the text how much he wrote.

Asked about who wrote the document, a White House official said Dr. Feaver had helped conceive and draft the plan, though the official said a larger role belonged to another N.S.C. staff member, Meghan L. O`Sullivan, the deputy national security adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan, and her staff. The official would describe the individual roles only on condition of anonymity because his superiors wanted the strategy portrayed as a unified administration position.

Frederick Jones, an N.S.C. spokesman, said the document "reflects the broad interagency effort under way in Iraq" and "incorporates all aspects of American power," including political and economic as well as military efforts. He said major contributions to the plan came from the Departments of Defense, State, Treasury and Homeland Security, as well as the director of National Intelligence. In his news briefing on Wednesday, the White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, characterized the document as an unclassified, publicly accessible explanation of strategies that the administration has been pursuing in Iraq since 2003.

In a news briefing from Iraq on Friday, Lt. Gen. Martin Dempsey, the top American military official in charge of training Iraqi troops, surprised some reporters by saying he first saw "Our Strategy for Victory in Iraq" when it was released to the public on Wednesday.

The White House official said that while not all top officers in Iraq had necessarily seen the strategy document, Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Thursday, "I have had multiple opportunities to read this document, to critique it, to send it back," with the goal of making "sure that what it says is a) accurate, and b) executable."

The Feaver-Gelpi hypothesis on public opinion about the war is the subject of serious debate among political scientists. John Mueller, of Ohio State University, said he did not believe that the president`s speech or the victory plan - which he described as "very Feaverish, or Feaveresque" - could produce more than a fleeting improvement in public support for the war, because it was likely to erode further as casualties accumulated.

"As the costs go up, support goes down," he said, citing patterns from the Korean and Vietnam wars.

Dr. Gelpi, of Duke, said approval of the president`s handling of the war was probably close to being as low as it could go, because his core supporters were unlikely ever to abandon him. But he said the poll numbers were likely to improve only if enough Americans saw evidence that the Iraq strategy was succeeding.

Dr. Gelpi added, however, that the speech and the strategy document "hit exactly on the themes our research said they should."

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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December 4, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
All the President`s Flacks
By FRANK RICH
http://select.nytimes.com/2005/12/04/opinion/04rich.html

WHEN "all of the facts come out in this case," Bob Woodward told Terry Gross on NPR in July, "it`s going to be laughable because the consequences are not that great."

Who`s laughing now?

Why Mr. Woodward took more than two years to tell his editor that he had his own personal Deep Throat in the Wilson affair is a mystery best tackled by combatants in the Washington Post newsroom. (Been there, done that here at The Times.) Mr. Woodward says he wanted to avoid a subpoena, but he first learned that Joseph Wilson`s wife was in the C.I.A. in mid-June 2003, more than six months before Patrick Fitzgerald or subpoenas entered the picture. Never mind. Far more disturbing is Mr. Woodward`s utter failure to recognize the import of the story that fell into his lap so long ago.

The reporter who with Carl Bernstein turned a "third-rate burglary" into a key for unlocking the true character of the Nixon White House still can`t quite believe that a Washington leak story unworthy of his attention has somehow become the drip-drip-drip exposing the debacle of Iraq. "I don`t know how this is about the buildup to the war, the Valerie Plame Wilson issue," he said on "Larry King Live" on the eve of the Scooter Libby indictment. Everyone else does. Largely because of the revelations prompted by the marathon Fitzgerald investigation, a majority of Americans now believe that the Bush administration deliberately misled the country into war. The case`s consequences for journalism have been nearly as traumatic, and not just because of the subpoenas. The Wilson story has ruthlessly exposed the credulousness with which most (though not all) of the press bought and disseminated the White House line that any delay in invading Iraq would bring nuclear Armageddon.

"W.M.D. - I got it totally wrong," Judy Miller said, with no exaggeration, before leaving The Times. The Woodward affair, for all its superficial similarities to the Miller drama, offers an even wider window onto the White House flimflams and the press`s role in enabling them. Mr. Woodward knows more about the internal workings of this presidency than any other reporter. He has been granted access to all its top officials, including lengthy interviews with the president himself, to produce two Bush best sellers since 9/11. But he was gamed anyway by the White House, which exploited his special stature to the fullest for its own propagandistic ends.

Mr. Woodward, to his credit, is not guilty of hyping Saddam`s W.M.D.`s. And his books did contain valuable news: of the Wolfowitz axis` early push to take on Iraq, of the president`s messianic view of himself as God`s chosen warrior, of the Powell-Rumsfeld conflicts that led to the war`s catastrophic execution. Yet to reread these Woodward books today, especially the second, the 2004 "Plan of Attack," is to understand just how slickly his lofty sources deflected him from the big picture, of which the Wilson case is just one small, if illuminating, piece.

In her famous takedown of Mr. Woodward for The New York Review of Books in 1996, Joan Didion wrote that what he "chooses to leave unrecorded, or what he apparently does not think to elicit, is in many ways more instructive than what he commits to paper." She was referring to his account of Hillary Clinton`s health care fiasco in his book "The Agenda," but her words also fit his account of the path to war in Iraq. This time, however, there is much more at stake than there was in Hillarycare.

What remains unrecorded in "Plan of Attack" is any inkling of the disinformation campaign built to gin up this war. While Mr. Woodward tells us about the controversial posturing of Douglas Feith, the former under secretary of defense for policy, there`s only an incidental, even dismissive allusion to Mr. Feith`s Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group. That was the secret intelligence unit established at the Pentagon to "prove" Iraq-Qaeda connections, which Vice President Dick Cheney then would trumpet in arenas like "Meet the Press." Mr. Woodward mentions in passing the White House Iraq Group, convened to market the war, but ignores the direct correlation between WHIG`s inception and the accelerating hysteria in the Bush-Cheney-Rice warnings about Saddam`s impending mushroom clouds in the late summer and fall of 2002. This story was broken by Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus in Mr. Woodward`s own paper eight months before "Plan of Attack" was published.

Near the book`s end, Mr. Woodward writes of some "troubling" tips from three sources "that the intelligence on W.M.D. was not as conclusive as the C.I.A. and the administration had suggested" and of how he helped push a Pincus story saying much the same into print just before the invasion. (It appeared on Page 17.) But Mr. Woodward never seriously investigates others` suspicions that the White House might have deliberately suppressed or ignored evidence that would contradict George Tenet`s "slam-dunk" case for Saddam`s W.M.D.`s. "Plan of Attack" gives greatest weight instead to the White House spin that any hyped intelligence was an innocent error or solely the result of the ineptitude of Mr. Tenet and the C.I.A.

Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby are omnipresent in the narrative, and Mr. Woodward says now that his notes show he had questions for them back then about "yellowcake" uranium and "Joe Wilson`s wife." But the leak case - indeed Valerie Wilson herself - is never mentioned in the 400-plus pages, even though it had exploded more than six months before he completed the book. That`s the most damning omission of all and suggests the real motive for his failure to share what he did know about this case with either his editor or his readers. If you assume, as Mr. Woodward apparently did against mounting evidence to the contrary, that the White House acted in good faith when purveying its claims of imminent doomsday and pre-9/11 Qaeda-Saddam collaborations, then there`s no White House wrongdoing that needs to be covered up. So why would anyone in the administration try to do something nasty to silence a whistle-blower like Joseph Wilson? The West Wing was merely gossiping idly about the guy, Mr. Woodward now says, in perhaps an unconscious echo of the Karl Rove defense strategy.

Joan Didion was among the first to point out that Mr. Woodward`s passive notion of journalistic neutrality is easily manipulated by his sources. He flatters those who give him the most access by upholding their version of events. Hence Mary Matalin, the former Cheney flack who helped shape WHIG`s war propaganda, rushed to defend Mr. Woodward last week. Asked by Howard Kurtz of The Post why "an administration not known for being fond of the press put so much effort into cooperating with Woodward," Ms. Matalin responded that he does "an extraordinary job" and that "it`s in the White House`s interest to have a neutral source writing the history of the way Bush makes decisions." You bet it is. Sounds as if she`s read Didion as well as Machiavelli.

In an analysis of Mr. Woodward written for The Huffington Post, Nora Ephron likens him to Theodore H. White, who invented the modern "inside" Washington book with "The Making of the President 1960." White eventually became such an insider himself that in "The Making of the President 1972," he missed Watergate, the story broken under his (and much of the press`s) nose by Woodward and Bernstein. "They were outsiders," Ms. Ephron writes of those then-lowly beat reporters, "and their lack of top-level access was probably their greatest asset."

INDEED it`s reporters who didn`t have top-level access to the likes of Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney who have gotten the Iraq story right. In the new book "Feet to the Fire: The Media After 9/11," Kristina Borjesson interviews some of them, including Jonathan Landay of Knight Ridder, who heard early on from a low-level source that "the vice president is lying" and produced a story headlined "Lack of Hard Evidence of Iraqi Weapons Worries Top U.S. Officials" on Sept. 6, 2002. That was two days before administration officials fanned out on the Sunday-morning talk shows to point ominously at the now-discredited front-page Times story about Saddam`s aluminum tubes. Warren Strobel, a frequent reportorial collaborator with Mr. Landay at Knight Ridder, tells Ms. Borjesson, "The most surprising thing to us was we had the field to ourselves for so long in terms of writing stuff that was critical or questioning the administration`s case for war."

Such critical stories - including those at The Post and The Times that were too often relegated to Page 17 - did not get traction until the failure to find W.M.D.`s and the Wilson affair made America take a second look. Now that the country has awakened to that history, it will take more to shock it than the latest revelation that the Defense Department has been paying Iraqi newspapers to print its propaganda. Thanks in large part to the case Mr. Woodward found so inconsequential, everyone knows that much of the American press did just the same before the war - and, unlike those Iraqi newspapers or, say, Armstrong Williams, did so gratis.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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Ein Flash:


[urlLet`s Make a Deal: A Democracy Arrives, Afghan Style]http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/04/weekinreview/20051204_AFGHAN_GRAPHIC.html[/url]

December 4, 2005
The World
Pave My Road and You`ll Get Your School
By CARLOTTA GALL
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/04/weekinreview/04gall.html

KABUL, Afghanistan

AFTER two and a half tortured decades - Russian invasion, civil war, Taliban rule, a hunt for members of Al Qaeda and a war to oust the Taliban - Afghanistan is finally getting a glimpse of what representative national rule will look like.

The results of elections held in September are now in. The winners are the same broad and often bickering array of forces, largely inspired by Islam and often led by men who were called warlords, who fought the Soviet invasion in the 1980`s, with a sprinkling of former Communists thrown in.

Their large egos, divisions, rivalries and clan and ethnic interests survive and promise new clashes. But this time the hope is that the quarrels can be contained in the halls of Afghanistan`s first nationally elected legislature, which is scheduled to convene on Dec. 18, rather than spilling onto the battlefield in yet another round of civil war.

Still, President Hamid Karzai will have his work cut out for him as broker in chief.

There are several ways to think about the rifts within this Parliament. If one were to look for a principal division, it would be territorial, roughly between north and south - with the half a dozen ethnicities of the center and the north more or less united in competition against the largest single ethnic group, the Pashtuns, in the south and east.

If there is a primary ideological division, it is between those who fought the Soviets and those who collaborated with them or sat out that war in exile.

Many commanders who resisted the Soviets and later the Taliban took on the roles of warlords in their districts, with their militias exerting control in the absence of a strong central government. Many amassed wealth and power virtually unchecked, as smuggling and poppy cultivation flourished. Now, many militias have been disarmed, with their leaders put in offices like police chief or governor.

While their inclusion in Parliament now offers a chance to integrate in a system based on central authority, it also poses a challenge to that system: one big point of contention is expected to involve efforts to call some commanders to account for past war crimes, and in some areas armed groups continue to sow fear.

A third division is between those formally allied with Mr. Karzai and those in opposition. There will also be competition among local districts for favors, power and funds. There are already demands for roads, schools and clinics and calls for help for farmers willing to change how they use their land - a crucial factor in eradicating the cultivation of opium poppies.

The ethnic division goes back to the founding of the Afghan state by a Pashtun in 1747. Except for two turbulent periods, Pashtuns have ruled. The Taliban was a predominantly Pashtun movement, and although it had Pashtun enemies, too, it was battling primarily Hazara, Uzbek and Tajik forces in the north when the United States helped overthrow it in 2001. Now, those tribes want a share of central power.

In fact, the main opposition to Mr. Karzai is expected to center around three colorful characters: Muhammad Yunous Qanooni, a Tajik; Muhammad Mohaqeq, a Hazara Shiite, and Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, who did not run for Parliament, but is the unrivalled leader of the Uzbeks and Turkmens and is expected to influence their representatives.

Those three command an estimated 60 to 80 seats in the 249-member lower house. They are expected to stand together on matters involving the amount of services and representation their minorities get.

Mr. Karzai`s fellow Pashtuns number 118, nearly half the house. But they are a varied group. Political analysts say that Mr. Karzai`s true loyalists hold only about 65 seats.

The largest grouping is the 100 free agents aligned neither with Mr. Karzai nor the opposition. They include some 20 ex- Communists, as well as tribal and religious leaders, businessmen and many of the 68 women elected as representatives. For his economic agenda, Mr. Karzai may have to bargain hard with them as individuals.

If ethnicity is not considered, the politics can be divided between parties and people who date to the anti-Soviet resistance and represent almost half of the house, and those who do not. This split will matter on issues of religion and culture - since many resistance members are conservative Islamists - and prosecution of war crimes.

Where are the likeliest bargains to be made? Yet another pattern comes to mind: the old habit of forming alliances of convenience, on the basis of who can offer the best deal, or pay the highest bribe, on any given day. Already rumors are swirling about large sums of money being offered in the race for speaker of the Parliament.

Provincial governors and police chiefs will continue to wield enormous power locally, and groups outside the government, including drug traffickers and Taliban insurgents, will remain at large.

If the legislators really want to seek out figures operating at or beyond the margins of the law, they may not have far to look: One Western diplomat, who spoke anonymously for fear of antagonizing the government, estimated that there are 17 drug traffickers and 24 people with criminal links among the members of Parliament themselves - a reminder, at the very least, of how deep into Afghanistan`s government such influences have reached in the past.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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Es sind einige Dokumente zu Hurrikane Katrina veröffnentlicht worden.
Ein ähnlicher Artikel von der WaPo:
[urlBlanco Releases Katrina Records]http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/03/AR2005120301480.html[/url]

Von der NYTimes:
[urlCOMPLETE COVERAGE
STORM AND CRISIS]http://www.nytimes.com/pages/national/nationalspecial/index.html[/url]


December 4, 2005
In Newly Released Documents, a View of the Storm After Katrina
By ERIC LIPTON
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/04/national/nationalspecial/0…

WASHINGTON, Dec. 3 - It was Thursday, Sept. 1, three days after Hurricane Katrina had ripped across the Gulf Coast. As New Orleans descended into horror, the top aides to Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco of Louisiana were certain the White House was trying to blame their boss, and they were becoming increasingly furious.

"Bush`s numbers are low, and they are getting pummeled by the media for their inept response to Katrina and are actively working to make us the scapegoats," Bob Mann, Ms. Blanco`s communications director, wrote in an e-mail message that afternoon, outlining plans by Washington Democrats to help turn the blame back onto President Bush.

With so much criticism being directed toward the governor, the time had come, her aides told her, to rework her performance. She had to figure out a way not only to lead the state through the most costly natural disaster in United States history, but also to emerge on top somehow in the nasty public relations war.
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Residents of the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans, including Louis Simmons, were allowed to return Thursday. Mr. Simmons
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Drop the emotion, the anger and all those detail-oriented briefings, Ms. Blanco`s aides told her. Get out to the disaster zone to visit emergency shelters, and repeat again and again: help is on the way.

"She must temper her anger and frustration," Johnny Anderson, Ms. Blanco`s assistant chief of staff, wrote a day after it became widely known that large crowds were suffering at the New Orleans convention center. "We have work too hard to lose the public relations battle."

These candid exchanges are just a few of the glimpses inside Louisiana`s highest leadership that emerged late Friday in an extraordinary release of about 100,000 pages of state documents detailing the response to Hurricane Katrina by Ms. Blanco and her staff. The state compiled the documents - including e-mail messages, hand-written notes, correspondence with the White House, and thousands of offers of assistance and desperate pleas for help - at the request of two Congressional committees looking into the state`s preparedness and response.

"As we move forward, I believe the public deserves a full accounting of the response at all levels of government to the largest natural disaster in U.S. history," Ms. Blanco said in a statement about the release of the documents.

She said the documents demonstrated "hard-working, sleep-deprived public servants operating under enormous pressure and rapidly changing circumstances." They also show that as Hurricane Katrina approached and inundated New Orleans, Ms. Blanco`s top aides realized how quickly it was becoming both a human and a political nightmare.

"This is absolutely the worst-case situation we have long feared," Andy Kopplin, the governor`s chief of staff, wrote in an e-mail message to the Blanco administration`s top aides the day before the storm hit New Orleans. "Pray for Louisiana citizens as this storm nears."

The correspondence released on Friday apparently received almost no editing, other than the blacking out of certain names and telephone numbers for people not associated with the state government. It includes handwritten notes, audio recordings of conference calls and even a few doodles on legal pads.

Most of the material was scanned into a computer and placed on a state Web site, but access was restricted to members of the news media.

The documents and correspondence put in full light the rivalry between the White House and the governor, a Democrat, along with the rising anger in Louisiana as requests for federal assistance went unanswered.

"We need to keep working to get our national surrogates to explain the facts - that the federal response was anemic and had been shortchanged by budget cuts and avoiding responsibilities like protecting Louisiana levees and wetlands," Mr. Kopplin wrote in one e-mail message a week after the storm hit.

"The governor needs to stay on message, and that is getting people out of New Orleans, provide stability for them and rebuild," Mr. Anderson wrote on Sept. 1. "The governor must look like the leader at all times."

Dana M. Perino, a White House spokeswoman, said Mr. Bush never tried to single out Louisiana for blame. But she added that all government agencies bore some fault.

"President Bush has been very clear that all levels of government could have done a better job," Ms. Perino said, "and we are focused on completing our lessons learned and making sure we understand what went wrong and that it never happens again."

The documents also demonstrate the enormous sense of frustration that overcame Ms. Blanco`s staff members as they fielded thousands of desperate calls, few of which they were able to act on effectively.

"Whoever is in charge needs to get control of the situation regarding the thousands of people (including elderly, babies, infirmed, etc.) up on I-10 in New Orleans," according to one e-mail message a Blanco aide received from his cousin on Aug. 31, two days after the storm hit. "They need food and water to start with. They seem to be in need of specific direction from the `powers that be,` at the very least."

The response of another Blanco aide to this plea was similarly exasperated. "I am getting these calls too, and I have buses and water but can`t get word on where and how to send," wrote Kim Hunter Reed, director of policy and planning.

Offers of help came in from around the world, including from former President Bill Clinton, President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela and Fidel Castro in Cuba. ("We cannot let this get out," Mr. Mann, the communications director, wrote about Mr. Castro`s offer.)

The sense of growing chaos is evident in the documents, as state officials found themselves unable to handle the onslaught of calls for help and offers of aid, resorting largely to recording them and focusing on the most life-threatening pleas.

There was, for example, the report of 14 elderly people without food or water at the St. Pius X Church in New Orleans. About 300 others stranded at a gym at St. Augustine High School. The news from the mayor of Slidell, near New Orleans, that he was desperate.

"They are unable to make contact with anyone," one e-mail exchange among the governor`s aides said, referring to residents of Slidell. "They are under water, major damage and they need someone from the state and FEMA to help them."

And there were many calls from New Orleans residents trapped in attics or on rooftops, after floodwaters rose around their homes.

"We have got to get there," Ms. Reed wrote about St. Bernard, the flooded parish east of New Orleans. "My hubby just came in and said they are getting calls that half the people on the courthouse roof may have died. They have been calling for two days for help, and I personally have taken these calls."

The struggle with Washington and questions of who was in charge - the state or federal government - emerge frequently in the correspondence. It is also clear that Democrats in Washington recognized that the federal response to the storm provided an opportunity to win some political points.

Aides to Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic leader, called Mr. Mann to discuss strategy, a conversation that indirectly included Mike McCurry, the former press secretary to President Clinton, according to one e-mail message.

"By the weekend, the Bush administration will have a full blown PR disaster/scandal on their hands because of the late response to needs in New Orleans," Mr. Mann wrote on Sept. 1, the Thursday after the storm, attributing that observation to Mr. McCurry. The same day, Mayor C. Ray Nagin of New Orleans gave an emotional radio interview in which he criticized Mr. Bush for having merely flown over the city in Air Force One.

In the documents, Ms. Blanco and her advisers, as well as some outside allies, defended her decision to reject a request by the Bush administration to take control of the National Guard.

"If Bush and FEMA couldn`t deliver meals after 5 days how could LA expect them to take over our Natl Guard and do better job????" John B. Breaux, a former Democratic senator from Louisiana who is now a Washington lawyer, wrote in an e-mail message to Mr. Mann.

In the mountain of documents, though, there are also stories of important victories. One involved a woman who had become separated from her newborn, which set off a desperate search at area hospitals. The search ultimately brought the family back together.

"That is the best news I`ve heard in several days," one state official wrote to Ms. Reed. "These small miracles make the days worth it! God bless!"

Clifford J. Levy contributed reporting from New York for this article, Adam Nossiter from New Orleans, and Gary Rivlin from Baton Rouge, La.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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Bush at the Door

President Bush wasn`t all that obvious at first glance. It was the bright red backgrounds in the rare stacked sequence of four pictures extending below the fold of The Times`s front page that made the photos impossible to miss. And at the bottom, a carefully crafted caption sought to suggest that this serious chunk of space was being devoted to - well, humor.

"After meeting with reporters in Beijing, Mr. Bush tried to exit through a locked door," the caption stated. "Realizing the mistake, he made a mock grimace, and an aide pointed the way. He joked: `I was trying to escape. It didn`t work.` "

But a number of readers didn`t see the humor in the photo sequence that appeared on Nov. 21. Almost all the reader e-mails to the public editor about the presentation criticized it as not-so-subtle editorializing against Mr. Bush, disrespectful to the presidency, inappropriate for the front page of a serious newspaper or simply not amusing.

"How could this be the most important news item of the day?" asked Donald Hirsch, of Holmdel, N.J. "Only if your goal is to portray Bush as a blundering nitwit," he concluded. Frank North, of Tampa, Fla., wrote: "Like his politics or not, he is the president of the United States, our nation`s commander-in-chief, and deserves far, far more respect than the NY Times obviously cares to acknowledge and represent on the front page." The humor, Mr. North complained, was "childish and ill-conceived."

At least one non-fan of the president saw in the pictures an intended message. "After laughing out loud and upon further reflection," Stephen M. Salvatore, of Yountville, Calif., wrote in a letter to the editor published on Nov. 23, "I felt that these photos encapsulate his presidency beautifully. It was such a metaphor for a man who can`t hide anymore. Poetry in motion. Well done."

All these reader complaints and suspicions spurred me to explore how the decision was made to run the photo sequence on the front page.

Martin Gottlieb, an associate managing editor responsible for the Sunday and Monday papers, told me his presidential photo options on Nov. 20 for the next day`s Page 1 were either a picture of Mr. Bush riding a bicycle with a group of Chinese riders or the locked-door photos from the press conference. It was, he said, "a choice between a photo op or a picture of something that happened spontaneously."

There were rumors during the day that Mr. Bush had made his exit after becoming frustrated by a press conference question, Mr. Gottlieb recalled. And the possibility that the Bush-exit photos from The Associated Press might have some real news value no doubt helped keep interest alive in that option.

"Great divergence" on the locked-door sequence developed during the 4 p.m. meeting where key decisions are made for the Monday paper, according to Mr. Gottlieb. One view found the sequence "great" and the other held that the photos shouldn`t be used because it would appear "The Times was looking to make fun of the president." Mr. Gottlieb typically makes such decisions during the meeting, and he said he was "leaning" toward using the photos. But, he wrote to me in an e-mail, "In this case, because people were raising an issue of how The Times would be perceived, I left the room knowing which way I was leaning but felt I should discuss it with Bill [Keller]."

After conferring with Mr. Keller and before the frustration angle had been debunked between 8 and 9 p.m., Mr. Gottlieb gave the green light to the Bush-exit photos. His decision, he indicated, came to rest on the basic view that the sequence was "amusing." He ordered the caption expanded beyond the standard length to fully describe the levity of the moment. The sequence also appealed to him, he said, because it "depicted a real event" and would "draw people into the paper."

Mr. Keller told me that after talking by telephone with Mr. Gottlieb and reviewing the sequence of photos, he agreed that "people would find it amusing." He added, "Not everything we put on the front page of The New York Times has gravitas." (Mr. Bush gets his fair share of serious, staged appearances on Page 1, as evidenced by the "Plan for Victory" signs that dominated Thursday`s photo of his Annapolis speech.)

It seems to me that there is inherent humor in the president enduring an embarrassing moment of the kind many readers may have faced at some point. But it was the president hamming it up - whatever the spark for it - with his mock grimace, his quip and his undaunted wave as he finally exited that validates the news judgment of Times editors that the scene was basically amusing rather than snide, and appropriate for the front page.

The public editor serves as the readers` representative. His opinions and conclusions are his own. His column appears at least twice monthly in this section.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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Thoughts on the Middle East, History,and Religion
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Juan Cole is Professor of History at the University of Michigan

http://www.juancole.com/

Sunday, December 04, 2005

Sistani Endorses Religious Candidates
19 Iraqi Soldiers Killed

Guerrillas near the town of Adhaim, northeast of Baghdad, mounted a coordinated ambush of Iraqi troops on Saturday, killing 19 and wounding 4. The Bush administration ties US troop withdrawals from Iraq to the ability of the new Iraqi army to deal with the guerrillas itself. More details emerged regarding the killing of 10 US Marines at Amiriyat al-Fallujah just before the weekend. An eleventh appears to have died of his wounds and 3 more GIs died in a vehicle accident near Balad. "Accidents" in Iraq are often not unconnected to the guerrilla war. There was a new outbreak of fighting in Samarra, a Sunni Arab city north of Baghdad. Fighting continued in the Ramadi area.

[urlGrand Ayatollah Ali Sistani,]http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticle.asp?xfile=data/focusoniraq/2005/December/focusoniraq_December16.xml§ion=focusoniraq[/url] the spiritual leader of the Shiite community in Iraq, has had a statement distributed urging Iraqis to vote in the Dec. 15 elections, and to vote for religious rather than secular ("dangerous") candidates. He also warned against voting for small individual lists and so splitting the Shiite vote.

KarbalaNews.net gives the text of the communique [Arabic], which does not have the form of a formal legal ruling or fatwa. The statement will nevertheless be taken seriously by religious Shiites (the vast majority). It is an indirect endorsement of the United Iraqi Alliance, a coalition of 17 Shiite religious parties that is dominated by the big 3: Dawa, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and the Sadrists.

The statement begins by reminding believers of the role of the religious leadership in Najaf in upholding the honor of Islam and the legacy of the family of the Prophet. The religious authority of Najaf is likened to a kind father for all believers, which seeks their welfare. The communique offers several pieces of guidance for the believers regarding the upcoming elections:

1. It is necessary to participate in the elections.

2. One must not vote for dangerous lists (the lists that do not observe the essential verities of religion and nation).

3. One must not vote for purely local lists (i.e. lists that have no presence in other provinces)

4. One must not vote for individual lists, which do not group various parties and do not call them to unity.

It goes on to say that a heavy duty has been laid on the believers by the religious authority, of investigating the characteristics of the various parties and choosing only those that adhere to the doctrines promulgated by the House of the Prophet. The task is onerous but not impossible.

"It is also of the utmost gravity, for the victorious list will have a large role in founding and strengthening the pillars of the state and of the country, and for 4 full years. It will moreover be concerned with passing 55 legislative projects, which will have a profound implication for the lives and the future of the people of Iraq."

(I take it Sistani is here referring to the 55 passages in the permanent constitution that specify that parliament shall legislate further supporting details through statute. That is, he is saying that precisely because the constitution is so unformed and kicked so many issues down the road, to be dealt with by parliament, the character of the elected parliament will be crucial to the actual shape of the constitution.)

Sistani reminds his readers that they must honor the tragic legacy of all the lives sacrificed in modern Iraq`s wars, and the dead in [Saddam`s] mass graves, by voting responsibly.

To guarantee the accuracy of the communique, KarbalaNews.net urges readers to call Sistani`s offices, and gives the phone numbers!

[urlAshraf Khalil of the LA Times reports]http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/complete/la-fg-mosques3dec03,1,912154.story?coll=la-iraq-complete[/url] on how the Supreme Council, a leading element in the United Iraqi Alliance, is using Shiite mosques to get the word out to Shiites to vote UIA. Some SCIRI figues, such as Sadruddin Qubanchi [Qubanji], have attacked the Sunni Iraqi Islami Party as indistinguishable from the old Baath Party. (This charge is bizarre-- IIP has roots in the Muslim Brotherhood in Mosul, and was suppressed by the Baath). Qubanchi is openly calling for continued dominance by the Shiite religious parties.
KarbalaNews.net reports a widespread conviction that "regional and international forces" will attempt to fix the December 15 elections so as to throw them to the ex-Baathist secularist and old-time CIA asset, Iyad Allawi. There are also some observers who genuinely believe Allawi has a shot at a come-back. I remain skeptical. That these rumors are circulating in Iraq may help explain why Sistani decided to weigh in.

[urlEd Wong of the NYT gets the story again. Siehe auch #33605 ]http://www.goupstate.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051203/ZNYT/512030352/1051/NEWS01[/url] He explores exactly what has happened in Najaf since September when US troops departed the city for a base 40 miles away. He argues that: The local security forces have the province relatively well in hand, and there is only one bombing or serious attack a month there. He says that the local security forces do not seem as massively penetrated by the militias of the religious parties. as is the case in Basra. The Iraqi police and military do have to call the US troops in to handle a particularly challenging situation about once a month.

The one issue about which I`d like more information is probably one on which it cannot be had. How many of the police and Iraqi military in Najaf have a background in the Badr Corps? The Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq controls the provincial government and the deputy governor is Badr Organization. My suspicion is that the relative security in Najaf has to do precisely with the Badr Corps members stepping up, in the framework of the Iraqi security forces. Perhaps they do not advertise their former allegiance as much as in Basra. But it would be downright weird if Badr were not deeply involved in Najaf security. And the big difference with Basra is probably that SCIRI/Badr is in political control of Najaf, so that politics and security are in sync, whereas in Basra the governing council is diverse and SCIRI is not in control, while police with a Badr Corps background are a major group.

[urlThe Association of Muslim Scholars,]http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2005/12/3/worldupdates/2005-12-03T174455Z_01_NOOTR_RTRJONC_0_-226164-1&sec=Worldupdates[/url] a hard line Sunni clerical organization in Iraq suspected of links to the guerrilla movement, has threatened to pull out of the Cairo Agreement reached in November over what they claim is continued Shiite use of death squads against Sunnis. Abdul Salam al-Kubaisi showed a picture of Sunnis killed, he said, by the Scorpion Brigade of the Ministry of Interior. These special police units are thought to be heavily infiltrated by the Badr Corps, a paramilitary force orginally trained by Iran and connected to the (Shiite) Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the leading party in the country.

Trevor Royle of the Sunday Herald in the UK talks great good sense about the drawbacks of Bush`s "fight until victory" applause line, in the light of military and political realities on the ground. Some British sources are saying that the situation in Basra is worse (more oppressive?) than it had been under Saddam, and 80 percent of the police in the city of a million and a half are not under the control of the police chief, but rather of local militias.

[urlThese photographs from Iraq during the past month,]http://www.infoshop.org/inews/article.php?story=20051203161919990[/url] of a sort which typically are deliberately not carried by US newspapers or shown on US television, underline Royle`s argument. [Note: I explicitly do not endorse the captions or other text at this site, and am simply pointing to the photographs themselves.]

Gen. Shaikh Muhammad Al Maktoum, the crown prince of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, has called for a gradual withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. The Gulf states are extremely sensitive to what happens in Iraq, and are generally positive in their view of the US. This statement is the first of which I am aware wherein an important Gulf figure has talked about withdrawal. The UAE is not very centralized, consisting of several emirates under an umbrella government, so I don`t know to what extent the crown prince is representative of thinking among the emirs. But the speech does seem to be a straw in the wind. The Gulf states, with their oil and gas windfall, would potentially be in a position to offer Iraq a good deal of help with development if the guerrilla war could be tamped down. And they would know that such help was in their own interests.

[urlGordon Prather has a chilling piece at antiwar.com]http://www.antiwar.com/prather/?articleid=8204[/url] on the further plans for wars being foisted on the American public by the Neoconservatives (he rightly calls them "Neo-Crazies" at the American Enterprise Institute, which is the main bastion of Likud Party ideology in the United States.

posted by Juan @ [url12/04/2005 06:30:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/12/sistani-endorses-religious-candidates.html[/url] 0 comments

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SECRETARY RUMSFELD BRIEFS AMERICA`S FREEDOM®-CRUSADERS ON KINDER, GENTLER NEW GUIDELINES FOR INTERROGATING MAYBE-TERRORIST ISLAMIAC TRASH [/TABLE]Policy Statement by the Secretary of Defense
Abu Ghraib Prison, Iraq

SECRETARY RUMSFELD: Good afternoon, troops. I`d like to say I`m pleased to be back here at Abu Ghraib, but I`m not. As you know, a handful of rogue soldiers at this facility, led by a nefarious Lou Diamond Phillips impersonator, demonstrated appalling indiscretion by photographing a highly sophisticated and effective system for sexual humiliation – which they obviously dreamt up entirely on their own, with zero knowledge of or tacit approval by anyone important enough to not be cannon fodder. And so today, with the entire world whipped into a frenzy of righteous indignation, President Bush has personally directed yours truly to fly here to this godforsaken desert armpit to hand-deliver all-new, kinder, gentler guidelines for the non-torture of maybe-probably-terrorist trash. You all stand hereby directed to learn it, live it, and love it. Thank you.

REVISED ARAB INTERROGATION GUIDELINES Effective May, 2004

http://whitehouse.org/news/2004/051504.asp

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[urlFront Page Image 12.04.05 WaPo]http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/print/asectionfrontimage.html[/url]

Wrongful Imprisonment: Anatomy of a CIA Mistake
German Citizen Released After Months in `Rendition`
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12…

By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 4, 2005; A01

In May 2004, the White House dispatched the U.S. ambassador in Germany to pay an unusual visit to that country`s interior minister. Ambassador Daniel R. Coats carried instructions from the State Department transmitted via the CIA`s Berlin station because they were too sensitive and highly classified for regular diplomatic channels, according to several people with knowledge of the conversation.

Coats informed the German minister that the CIA had wrongfully imprisoned one of its citizens, Khaled Masri, for five months, and would soon release him, the sources said. There was also a request: that the German government not disclose what it had been told even if Masri went public. The U.S. officials feared exposure of a covert action program designed to capture terrorism suspects abroad and transfer them among countries, and possible legal challenges to the CIA from Masri and others with similar allegations.

The Masri case, with new details gleaned from interviews with current and former intelligence and diplomatic officials, offers a rare study of how pressure on the CIA to apprehend al Qaeda members after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has led in some instances to detention based on thin or speculative evidence. The case also shows how complicated it can be to correct errors in a system built and operated in secret.

The CIA, working with other intelligence agencies, has captured an estimated 3,000 people, including several key leaders of al Qaeda, in its campaign to dismantle terrorist networks. It is impossible to know, however, how many mistakes the CIA and its foreign partners have made.

Unlike the military`s prison for terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba -- where 180 prisoners have been freed after a review of their cases -- there is no tribunal or judge to check the evidence against those picked up by the CIA. The same bureaucracy that decides to capture and transfer a suspect for interrogation-- a process called "rendition" -- is also responsible for policing itself for errors.

The CIA inspector general is investigating a growing number of what it calls "erroneous renditions," according to several former and current intelligence officials.

One official said about three dozen names fall in that category; others believe it is fewer. The list includes several people whose identities were offered by al Qaeda figures during CIA interrogations, officials said. One turned out to be an innocent college professor who had given the al Qaeda member a bad grade, one official said.

"They picked up the wrong people, who had no information. In many, many cases there was only some vague association" with terrorism, one CIA officer said.

While the CIA admitted to Germany`s then-Interior Minister Otto Schily that it had made a mistake, it has labored to keep the specifics of Masri`s case from becoming public. As a German prosecutor works to verify or debunk Masri`s claims of kidnapping and torture, the part of the German government that was informed of his ordeal has remained publicly silent. Masri`s attorneys say they intend to file a lawsuit in U.S. courts this week.

Masri was held for five months largely because the head of the CIA`s Counterterrorist Center`s al Qaeda unit "believed he was someone else," one former CIA official said. "She didn`t really know. She just had a hunch."

The CIA declined to comment for this article, as did Coats and a spokesman at the German Embassy in Washington. Schily did not respond to several requests for comment last week.

CIA officials stress that apprehensions and renditions are among the most sure-fire ways to take potential terrorists out of circulation quickly. In 2000, then-CIA Director George J. Tenet said that "renditions have shattered terrorist cells and networks, thwarted terrorist plans, and in some cases even prevented attacks from occurring."
The Counterterrorist Center

After the September 2001 attacks, pressure to locate and nab potential terrorists, even in the most obscure parts of the world, bore down hard on one CIA office in particular, the Counterterrorist Center, or CTC, located until recently in the basement of one of the older buildings on the agency`s sprawling headquarters compound. With operations officers and analysts sitting side by side, the idea was to act on tips and leads with dramatic speed.

The possibility of missing another attack loomed large. "Their logic was: If one of them gets loose and someone dies, we`ll be held responsible," said one CIA officer, who, like others interviewed for this article, would speak only anonymously because of the secretive nature of the subject.

To carry out its mission, the CTC relies on its Rendition Group, made up of case officers, paramilitaries, analysts and psychologists. Their job is to figure out how to snatch someone off a city street, or a remote hillside, or a secluded corner of an airport where local authorities wait.

Members of the Rendition Group follow a simple but standard procedure: Dressed head to toe in black, including masks, they blindfold and cut the clothes off their new captives, then administer an enema and sleeping drugs. They outfit detainees in a diaper and jumpsuit for what can be a day-long trip. Their destinations: either a detention facility operated by cooperative countries in the Middle East and Central Asia, including Afghanistan, or one of the CIA`s own covert prisons -- referred to in classified documents as "black sites," which at various times have been operated in eight countries, including several in Eastern Europe.

In the months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the CTC was the place to be for CIA officers wanting in on the fight. The staff ballooned from 300 to 1,200 nearly overnight.

"It was the Camelot of counterterrorism," a former counterterrorism official said. "We didn`t have to mess with others -- and it was fun."

Thousands of tips and allegations about potential threats poured in after the attacks. Stung by the failure to detect the plot, CIA officers passed along every tidbit. The process of vetting and evaluating information suffered greatly, former and current intelligence officials said. "Whatever quality control mechanisms were in play on September 10th were eliminated on September 11th," a former senior intelligence official said.

J. Cofer Black, a professorial former spy who spent years chasing Osama bin Laden, was the CTC`s director. With a flair for melodrama, Black had earned special access to the White House after he briefed President Bush on the CIA`s war plan for Afghanistan.

Colleagues recall that he would return from the White House inspired and talking in missionary terms. Black, now in the private security business, declined to comment.

Some colleagues said his fervor was in line with the responsibility Bush bestowed on the CIA when he signed a top secret presidential finding six days after the 9/11 attacks. It authorized an unprecedented range of covert action, including lethal measures and renditions, disinformation campaigns and cyber attacks against the al Qaeda enemy, according to current and former intelligence officials. Black`s attitude was exactly what some CIA officers believed was needed to get the job done.

Others criticized Black`s CTC for embracing a "Hollywood model" of operations, as one former longtime CIA veteran called it, eschewing the hard work of recruiting agents and penetrating terrorist networks. Instead, the new approach was similar to the flashier paramilitary operations that had worked so well in Afghanistan, and played well at the White House, where the president was keeping a scorecard of captured or killed terrorists.

The person most often in the middle of arguments over whether to dispatch a rendition team was a former Soviet analyst with spiked hair that matched her in-your-face personality who heads the CTC`s al Qaeda unit, according to a half-dozen CIA veterans who know her. Her name is being withheld because she is under cover.

She earned a reputation for being aggressive and confident, just the right quality, some colleagues thought, for a commander in the CIA`s global war on terrorism. Others criticized her for being overzealous and too quick to order paramilitary action.
The CIA and Guantanamo Bay

One way the CIA has dealt with detainees it no longer wants to hold is to transfer them to the custody of the U.S. military at Guantanamo Bay, where defense authorities decide whether to keep or release them after a review.

About a dozen men have been transferred by the CIA to Guantanamo Bay, according to a Washington Post review of military tribunal testimony and other records. Some CIA officials have argued that the facility has become, as one former senior official put it, "a dumping ground" for CIA mistakes.

But several former intelligence officials dispute that and defend the transfer of CIA detainees to military custody. They acknowledged that some of those sent to Guantanamo Bay are prisoners who, after interrogation and review, turned out to have less valuable information than originally suspected. Still, they said, such prisoners are dangerous and would attack if given the chance.

Among those released from Guantanamo is Mamdouh Habib, an Egyptian-born Australian citizen, apprehended by a CIA team in Pakistan in October 2001, then sent to Egypt for interrogation, according to court papers. He has alleged that he was burned by cigarettes, given electric shocks and beaten by Egyptian captors. After six months, he was flown to Guantanamo Bay and let go earlier this year without being charged.

Another CIA former captive, according to declassified testimony from military tribunals and other records, is Mohamedou Oulad Slahi, a Mauritanian and former Canada resident, who says he turned himself in to the Mauritanian police 18 days after the 9/11 attacks because he heard the Americans were looking for him. The CIA took him to Jordan, where he spent eight months undergoing interrogation, according to his testimony, before being taken to Guantanamo Bay.

Another is Muhammad Saad Iqbal Madni, an Egyptian imprisoned by Indonesia authorities in January 2002 after he was heard talking -- he says jokingly -- about a new shoe bomb technology. He was flown to Egypt for interrogation and returned to CIA hands four months later, according to one former intelligence official. After being held for 13 months in Afghanistan, he was taken to Guantanamo Bay, according to his testimony.
The Masri Case

Khaled Masri came to the attention of Macedonian authorities on New Year`s Eve 2003. Masri, an unemployed father of five living in Ulm, Germany, said he had gone by bus to Macedonia to blow off steam after a spat with his wife. He was taken off a bus at the Tabanovce border crossing by police because his name was similar to that of an associate of a 9/11 hijacker. The police drove him to Skopje, the capital, and put him in a motel room with darkened windows, he said in a recent telephone interview from Germany.

The police treated Masri firmly but cordially, asking about his passport, which they insisted was forged, about al Qaeda and about his hometown mosque, he said. When he pressed them to let him go, they displayed their pistols.

Unbeknown to Masri, the Macedonians had contacted the CIA station in Skopje. The station chief was on holiday. But the deputy chief, a junior officer, was excited about the catch and about being able to contribute to the counterterrorism fight, current and former intelligence officials familiar with the case said.

"The Skopje station really wanted a scalp because everyone wanted a part of the game," a CIA officer said. Because the European Division chief at headquarters was also on vacation, the deputy dealt directly with the CTC and the head of its al Qaeda unit.

In the first weeks of 2004, an argument arose over whether the CIA should take Masri from local authorities and remove him from the country for interrogation, a classic rendition operation.

The director of the al Qaeda unit supported that approach. She insisted he was probably a terrorist, and should be imprisoned and interrogated immediately.

Others were doubtful. They wanted to wait to see whether the passport was proved fraudulent. Beyond that, there was no evidence Masri was not who he claimed to be -- a German citizen of Arab descent traveling after a disagreement with his wife.

The unit`s director won the argument. She ordered Masri captured and flown to a CIA prison in Afghanistan.

On the 23rd day of his motel captivity, the police videotaped Masri, then bundled him, handcuffed and blindfolded, into a van and drove to a closed-off building at the airport, Masri said. There, in silence, someone cut off his clothes. As they changed his blindfold, "I saw seven or eight men with black clothing and wearing masks," he later said in an interview. He said he was drugged to sleep for a long plane ride.
Afghanistan

Masri said his cell in Afghanistan was cold, dirty and in a cellar, with no light and one dirty cover for warmth. The first night he said he was kicked and beaten and warned by an interrogator: "You are here in a country where no one knows about you, in a country where there is no law. If you die, we will bury you, and no one will know."

Masri was guarded during the day by Afghans, he said. At night, men who sounded as if they spoke American-accented English showed up for the interrogation. Sometimes a man he believed was a doctor in a mask came to take photos, draw blood and collect a urine sample.

Back at the CTC, Masri`s passport was given to the Office of Technical Services to analyze. By March, OTS had concluded the passport was genuine. The CIA had imprisoned the wrong man.

At the CIA, the question was: Now what? Some officials wanted to go directly to the German government; others did not. Someone suggested a reverse rendition: Return Masri to Macedonia and release him. "There wouldn`t be a trace. No airplane tickets. Nothing. No one would believe him," one former official said. "There would be a bump in the press, but then it would be over."

Once the mistake reached Tenet, he laid out the options to his counterparts, including the idea of not telling the Germans. Condoleezza Rice, then Bush`s national security adviser, and Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage argued they had to be told, a position Tenet took, according to one former intelligence official.

"You couldn`t have the president lying to the German chancellor" should the issue come up, a government official involved in the matter said.

Senior State Department officials decided to approach Interior Minister Schily, who had been a steadfast Bush supporter even when differences over the Iraq war strained ties between the two countries. Ambassador Coats had excellent rapport with Schily.

The CIA argued for minimal disclosure of information. The State Department insisted on a truthful, complete statement. The two agencies quibbled over whether it should include an apology, according to officials.

Meanwhile, Masri was growing desperate. There were rumors that a prisoner had died under torture. Masri could not answer most questions put to him. He said he steadied himself by talking with other prisoners and reading the Koran.

A week before his release in late May 2004, Masri said he was visited in prison by a German man with a goatee who called himself Sam. Masri said he asked him if he were from the German government and whether the government knew he was there. Sam said he could not answer either question.

"Does my wife at least know I`m here?" Masri asked.

"No, she does not," Sam replied, according to Masri.

Sam told Masri he was going to be released soon but that he would not receive any documents or papers confirming his ordeal. The Americans would never admit they had taken him prisoner, Sam added, according to Masri.

On the day of his release, the prison`s director, who Masri believed was an American, told Masri that he had been held because he "had a suspicious name," Masri said in an interview.

Several intelligence and diplomatic officials said Macedonia did not want the CIA to bring Masri back inside the country, so the agency arranged for him to be flown to Albania. Masri said he was taken to a narrow country road at dusk. When they let him off, "They asked me not to look back when I started walking," Masri said. "I was afraid they would shoot me in the back."

He said he was quickly met by three armed men. They drove all night, arriving in the morning at Mother Teresa Airport in Tirana. Masri said he was escorted onto the plane, past all the security checkpoints, by an Albanian.

Masri has been reunited with his children and wife, who had moved the family to Lebanon because she did not know where her husband was. Unemployed and lonely, Masri says neither his German nor Arab friends dare associate with him because of the publicity.

Meanwhile, a German prosecutor continues to work Masri`s case. A Macedonia bus driver has confirmed that Masri was taken away by border guards on the date he gave investigators. A forensic analysis of Masri`s hair showed he was malnourished during the period he says he was in the prison. Flight logs show a plane registered to a CIA front company flew out of Macedonia on the day Masri says he went to Afghanistan.

Masri can find few words to explain his ordeal. "I have very bad feelings" about the United States, he said. "I think it`s just like in the Arab countries: arresting people, treating them inhumanly and less than that, and with no rights and no laws."

Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this article.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

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Implanting Democracy in the Middle East
Thirteen Easy Steps from the Bush Administration
http://www.uscpublicdiplomacy.org/index.php?/newsroom/johnbr…

Sunday 4th December 2005, by John Brown

1. Condemn Saddam’s undemocratic regime for its non-existent WMDs and equally non-existent ties to Al-Qaeda.

2. Start the Iraq war with the bombing campaign “Shock and Awe,” to terrify the Baghdad population into loving democracy.

3. Have the Commander in Chief appear mucho macho on an aircraft carrier with a “Mission Accomplished” banner behind him, to make sure Americans know how grateful Iraqis are that the U.S. liberated them from their undemocratic selves.

4. So-called torture at Abu Ghraib? Blame it on a few low-ranking rotten apples with too many cameras, not on God-fearing American boys and gals (and, of course, their superiors) fighting for democracy in Iraq.

5. Annihilate the Muslim/Arab hate-us, anti-democrats, such as in wherever-it-is, Fallujah, and elsewhere in Iraq. Use phosphorus weapons to conclusively democratize the local population.

6. Keep killing democracy-despising “terrorists,” especially near the Syrian border (wherever that is), to secure democracy everywhere.

7. Syria, nasty nest of undemocrats — perfect for bombing practice. Don’t we all detest Syrial-killers? Be ready to demolish them for the sake of democracy!

8. Watch out for “Mullahs-hate-democracy” Iran — but do ask where it’s located on the map from the President’s Secretary (of State) Condi Rice. [Iraq — Is it a country? Whatever it is, it’s anti-democratic — handwritten marginalia by President George W. Bush].

9. Send “I’m-a-Mom” Hurricane Karen Hughes to Saudi Arabia to encourage women there to drive cars themselves, so that their out-of-work chauffeurs can commit themselves full-time to grass-roots democracy-building.

10. Have neo-con lover boy Shiite politician Chalabi appear on many more U.S. television shows. Isn’t he the sweetest pro-democracy bastard (oh yes, our bastard) of them all? He looks like an oh-so-sweet jack-o’-lantern, just like our very own Vice-President Dick Cheney.

11. Ferociously and elegantly fight “ELIG,” journalist Dana Milbank’s acronym for "enemies of the legitimate Iraqi government,” Don Rumsfeld’s new term to describe anti-democratic belligerents (not “insurgents”) in Iraq.

12. Plant Pentagon-generated news stories in the Iraqi media. After all, how can democracy be implanted in the Middle East without using propaganda and our all-American democratic undemocratic methods?

13. Have good ol’ Dubya give a speech at the Naval Academy about what the pro-democracy “war on terror” is all about. Then Americans will continue to be in the dark about what their country is up to in the Middle East — and that’s exactly what we Bush pro-democracy guys want, so that the homeland stays scared of the terrorists and Republicans can get elected! Yes, we will achieve total victory!

John Brown, a former Foreign Service officer, compiles the "Public Diplomacy Press Review," available free by e-mail by requesting it at http://www.uscpublicdiplomacy.org/index.php?/newsroom/johnbr…

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THE CONFLICT IN IRAQ
Private Security Guards in Iraq Operate With Little Supervision
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-guards4d…
By T. Christian Miller
Times Staff Writer

December 4, 2005

BAGHDAD — Private security contractors have been involved in scores of shootings in Iraq, but none have been prosecuted despite findings in at least one fatal case that the men had not followed proper procedures, according to interviews and documents obtained by The Times.

Instead, security contractors suspected of reckless behavior are sent home, sometimes with the knowledge of U.S. officials, raising questions about accountability and stirring fierce resentment among Iraqis.

Thousands of the heavily armed private guards are in Iraq, under contract with the U.S. government and private companies. The conduct of such security personnel has been one of the most controversial issues in the reconstruction of Iraq. Last week, a British newspaper publicized a so-called trophy video that appears to show private contractors in Iraq firing at civilian vehicles as an Elvis song plays in the background.

The contractors function in a legal gray area. Under an order issued by the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority that administered Iraq until June 2004, contractors suspected of wrongdoing are to be prosecuted in their home countries. The contractors have immunity from Iraqi courts and have so far not faced American prosecution, giving little recourse to Iraqis seeking justice for wrongful shootings.

"What was my innocent son`s crime?" asked Zahra Ridha, the mother of a 19-year-old shot and killed by security contractors in May. "Is this what we deserve?"

Industry officials say some contractors have voluntarily set up compensation programs, but there is no formal system in place, as there is for cases involving American troops.

The U.S. military has a commission that reviews damages claims and makes payments when troops are determined to have erred in opening fire on property or people. American troops suspected of shooting at Iraqis face trial in military tribunals. More than 20 U.S. service members have been accused of crimes leading to the deaths of Iraqis, and at least 10 have been convicted.

A Justice Department official, who asked not to be identified because he was not an authorized spokesman, said the lack of prosecutions of contractors reflected poor oversight by U.S. officials in Iraq, who were under no compulsion to report suspected criminal behavior.

"Any time you get a large group of people together in one place, bad things are going to happen," the official said.

A Times survey of nearly 200 "serious incident" reports filed by private security firms since November 2004 shows that 11% of the incidents involved contractors firing toward civilian vehicles believed to be a threat.

The reports do not indicate whether the shootings were deemed to be justified, and contain limited information about the fate of the vehicle occupants. The reports, filed voluntarily with the Pentagon, say that the contractors received no fire from the vehicles, but shot at them because they were believed to be potential suicide bombers.

About 20% of the reports involved contractors who said they were fired on by U.S. forces in apparent cases of mistaken identity. Contractors in Iraq frequently travel in unmarked vehicles and do not have reliable communications with military units.

Most of the remaining reports are harrowing accounts of insurgent attacks on contractors that involve roadside bombs, ambushes, rocket-propelled grenades, mortar rounds and machine-gun fire.

The reports, which were released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by The Times, represent only a small portion of the serious incidents recorded by the Pentagon since tracking began in 2004.

The Defense Department has denied a Times request to provide the names of the private security contractors in the reports and has yet to release an untold number of additional reports. The Times has filed a federal lawsuit seeking the release of all such reports and security company identities.

The security firms provide armed guards to protect U.S. officials and private contractors working in Iraq.

Although most are paid with government funds, no single U.S. agency regulates them.

Last year, the Pentagon estimated that there were 60 such firms operating in Iraq with about 20,000 employees.

The firms have been awarded at least $766 million in contracts since 2003, according to a recent report by the Government Accountability Office.

At their best, security guards are highly trained former special forces soldiers whose professionalism has saved countless lives. Their presence alleviates the need for additional U.S. forces.

Industry officials defended their record in Iraq. Insurgents frequently strike by driving explosives-packed cars into convoys transporting officials. A security contractor has only seconds to decide whether an approaching vehicle is being driven by an insurgent or an innocent Iraqi, they said.

Security contractors "don`t want to shoot innocent people," said Lawrence Peters, the former director of the Private Security Company Assn. of Iraq, an industry group. "But it`s a war zone, and mistakes do happen."

At their worst, critics say, the contractors are expensive, reckless mercenaries who complicate the U.S. mission in Iraq. A team of private contractors to protect a single U.S. official can cost upward of $5,000 a day. Security firms operating in Iraq have been cited for fraud and have clashed with U.S. forces.

"The overwhelming number of these [security guards] were highly professional and disciplined," said one U.S. official who worked in Iraq. "But if only 1% of them are bad, you`re going to have some nasty characters running around who can do harm."

More than 400 contractors, many of them security guards, have been killed in Iraq, according to the most recent statistics available from the Labor Department.

At the same time, contractors have killed an unknown number of Iraqis in battles with insurgents, road collisions and accidental shootings, according to the records and interviews.

The private guards` sometimes aggressive behavior has created a wellspring of anger at the U.S. presence in Iraq.

Countless Iraqis have had to endure the humiliation of being forced to stop or pull off the road as a convoy of unmarked SUVs races past, filled with men waving guns and making threatening gestures.

"This is not a particularly effective way to win the hearts and minds of Iraqis," said Joshua Schwartz, co-director of George Washington University`s government procurement program. "The contractors are making the mission of the U.S. military in Iraq more difficult."

An incident in May is a case in point.

Robert J. Callahan, wrapping up his tour as spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Iraq, was returning to his offices in the U.S.-controlled Green Zone when his convoy turned onto a broad thoroughfare running through Baghdad`s Masbah neighborhood, said U.S. officials and Iraqi witnesses interviewed by The Times.

At the same moment, Mohammed Nouri Hattab, 32, was headed north on the road in his Opel. He was moonlighting as a taxi driver, transporting two passengers he had picked up moments earlier.

Hattab looked up and saw a five-car convoy speed out of a side street in front of him.

He was slowing to a stop about 50 feet from the convoy when he heard a burst of gunfire ring out, he said.

Bullets shot through the hood of his Opel, Hattab said, cut into his shoulder and pierced the chest of Yas Ali Mohammed Yassiri, who was in the back seat, killing him. The second passenger escaped without serious injury. The convoy roared on, leaving chaos in its wake.

"There was no warning. It was a sudden attack," said Hattab, a slight man who can no longer freely move his right arm.

Hattab said it was the third time since the U.S. invasion in 2003 that he had been fired on by Americans. On the first two occasions, U.S. troops who had mistakenly fired at him later apologized, he said.

This time, he said, he has drifted in an endless legal fight for compensation, bouncing between Iraqi courts and U.S. officials. Hattab, an Oil Ministry employee now on disability leave, has seen his pay cut in half to $51 a month.

"We thought [the Americans] would bring freedom. They got rid of Saddam," Hattab said. "Now it`s going on three years and what? Where is this freedom?"

The family of his passenger, Yassiri, has fared no better. The 19-year-old newlywed, a Shiite from an impoverished neighborhood in Najaf, was on a trip to Baghdad.

Sitting in their two-room home on a dusty, unpaved street, family members said it wasn`t until a Times reporter told them that they realized Yassiri had been killed by private guards and not U.S. soldiers, as they had been told.

"We lived in poverty and oppression during the time of Saddam and we were expecting the opposite when he left," said Adil Jasim, 26, a family friend. "I say that the situation is the same and even worse. American forces came to occupy and to achieve their goals. They don`t care about Iraqis."

State Department officials did not respond to requests for comment on the incident. But a U.S. official with knowledge of the case said that embassy officials had reviewed the shooting and determined that employees of the security company involved, North Carolina-based Blackwater USA, had not followed proper procedures.

Two employees of the firm were fired, the U.S. official said. Blackwater declined to comment.

A former U.S. official acknowledged that such shootings harmed America`s image in Iraq. Still, he said, the Americans must rely on security guards to move around Iraq since the military was focused on fighting insurgents.

"When something like this happens, you alienate people. It`s a risk that you have to weigh," said the official, who asked for anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media. "There`s no good answer."

It is unclear how widespread the problem is. The reports released to The Times are of limited value because the Pentagon released only a sample. Still, they provide a glimpse of the chaos on Iraq`s roads. Several reports document traffic collisions with Iraqis who either did not see or ignored security convoys. In one case, a contractor forced a car with an Iraqi man, woman and child off the road. It slammed into a tree. Injuries were unknown.

The convoy "gave very little warning" to the car, said the report by a security contractor who saw the incident. It was "an example of unprofessional operating standards."

Contractors who opened fire on Iraqi vehicles usually did so after the drivers failed to heed warning signs such as a clenched fist, the reports indicate.

In February, a contractor reported opening fire on a black Opel after the driver did not respond to hand signals and a warning shot. The contractors fired 23 rounds from a Russian-made PKM machine gun and nine more shots from an AK-47 into the car.

"We had to open fire directly into that car," wrote the contractor, adding with evident amazement: "Driver of that black Opel survived."

Times staff writer Borzou Daragahi in Baghdad and special correspondents Saad Fakhrildeen in Najaf and Asmaa Waguih in Baghdad contributed to this report.


Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times

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Betting on the Studs
Madam Heidi Fleiss is back—and building an all-male bordello in the desert. Is even Nevada ready for this?
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/10313009/site/newsweek/

By Steve Friess
Newsweek

Dec. 12, 2005 issue - Standing on a desolate stretch of property dotted with sagebrush and litter 80 miles northwest of Las Vegas, former Hollywood Madam Heidi Fleiss surveys the sexual frontier. She`s sketching out her vision for Heidi`s Stud Farm, the country`s first legal brothel serving female customers. This pleasure palace will be shaped like a castle, with a marble-floored great room, a spa, a sex-toy shop and secluded bungalows where 20 Casanovas will spend quality time with the clientele (at $250 an hour).
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Lady’s Choice: Fleiss (right) has been flooded with applicants like Brandt,
her first hire
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But Fleiss may not be welcome in these parts. As a convicted felon—she served time in prison in the late `90s on charges stemming from her high-priced call-girl operation in L.A.—Fleiss may find it difficult to get a license. And some owners of the state`s legal bordellos (where rates range from several hundred to several thousand dollars, depending on the activities) worry that Fleiss`s business could give Nevada`s religious conservatives ammunition to get prostitution outlawed altogether.

"Heidi Fleiss scares the hell out of me," says George Flint, lobbyist for the Nevada Brothel Association, which represents some of the state`s 26 legal houses of ill repute, most of them dressed-up doublewides with names like the Chicken Ranch and the Cherry Patch. "Our industry is not so firm, so to speak, that we need to flirt with some secondary activity that could bring down the whole house of cards." Because the brothel laws all refer to prostitutes as "she" and require cervical STD tests for sex workers, Fleiss would need to get the statutes reworded to cover her studs. Richard Ziser, president of the conservative group Nevada Concerned Citizens, warns: "She may bring enough publicity to cause a problem for the industry."

It takes a tough hide to be a Nevada madam, and Fleiss, 39, certainly has one. "What I want to do is only good for the brothel industry here. I`m Heidi Fleiss. I know this business better than anyone in the world." If Nevada lawmakers try to run her back across the state line, Fleiss says she`s primed for a legal fight, on grounds that the state`s existing laws discriminate against men. "What`s good for the goose should be good for the gander," she says. Even when her business partner, a prominent Nevada brothel owner, backed out last month, Fleiss vowed to forge ahead. She`s vague about the funding for her $1.5 million sexual fantasyland, but she says she has other investors. And she just landed a six-figure deal with HBO to let a film crew document the brothel`s birth.

More than 1,000 would-be lotharios have already contacted Fleiss seeking employment. She hasn`t formalized an application process, but she says she won`t be testing the merchandise. "I just have to get a feeling that women would like the guy, that he would treat her the way she wants to be treated," she says. She`s already picked her first bachelor: former soap-opera star Lester James Brandt, 37, whom she met last month at a Los Angeles storage facility while she was loading up her moving van to head to Nevada. "I`ve been following the guide to how to be an actor all this time. But I never got the big break," Brandt says. "Then I met Heidi and I thought, `I`m gonna try something different`."

Will Brandt and his brethren have the stamina for this kind of work? "With female prostitutes, they can see five, 10, even more clients in a day," says Debbie Rivenburgh, manager of the Chicken Ranch in Pahrump, Nev. "I don`t know how men could keep up with that"—even with Viagra. Others wonder if the clientele exists for such a brothel—especially one that`s an hour-and-a-half ride from the Las Vegas Strip. "What self-respecting woman would drive that far for sex when it`s so easy to find here in Vegas?" asks Jessica Martini, 28, of Houston, standing in line last week to buy tickets to "Thunder From Down Under," a male-stripper revue. But Fleiss says she can create an exotic, unique experience: perfect for bachelorette parties or for women wanting uncomplicated, STD-free hookups. "I have heard from very wealthy, very beautiful women who say they`ll be first in line," Fleiss says.

For the time being, Fleiss plans to cater to women only (shall we call the johns janes, and the cathouse a doghouse?). But she says she may target the gay market next. She could be forced to: Nevada lawmaker David Parks, who is gay, plans to ask for a legal opinion this month on whether Fleiss would be violating the state`s anti-bias law by letting only women hire her studs. "You gotta take these things one step at a time," Fleiss says. "These things don`t happen overnight." Well, some things do.
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.

© 2005 MSNBC.com

URL: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/10313009/site/newsweek/

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Latest Update: #33619 03.12.05 20:14:33
Latest Coalition Fatality: Dec 03, 2005
Military Fatalities US, UK, Other: Dez.05: 16

Iraker 12/04/05: Civilian: 17 Police/Mil: 24 Total: 41
http://www.icasualties.org/oif/IraqiDeaths.aspx

Regelmäßige Updates von Meldungen aus dem Irak:
http://icasualties.org/oif/

Da bei ´Today im Irak´ die Postings immer länger werden, hier den Link für alle Interessierte: http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

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JONATHAN CHAIT
Logic isn`t flip-flopping
Jonathan Chait
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-chait4d…

December 4, 2005

IT`S BEEN TRUE for a while that the American public has a better idea of what Republicans stand for than what Democrats stand for. Conservatives say this is because they have won the war of ideas. I say it`s because Republicans have reduced their ideas to a few simplistic bromides that they repeat endlessly and never subject to evidence or reexamination.

Case in point: the debate over Iraq.

I supported the war, and while in retrospect I think it was a mistake, I believe it would be another mistake to withdraw our troops and abandon the country to chaos. Plenty of leading Democratic politicians feel the same way. Other Democrats think the war was a mistake and want to withdraw. It`s an agonizing debate, and neither side can be completely certain that it`s right.

Conservatives, on the other hand, seem to have little problem with certitude. They think the war was right, remains right, and any view to the contrary is nothing more than spinelessness and incoherence.

Think I`m exaggerating? Take my fellow Times columnist, Max Boot. He`s one of the most respected conservative foreign policy analysts, so it`s not like I`m picking on some lightweight. In this space Wednesday, Boot called Democrats who think the invasion was a mistake "flip-floppers." They fall into two categories: "[Bill] Clinton characteristically wants to have it both ways. He says the invasion was a `big mistake` but that we shouldn`t pull out now because `there`s a lot of evidence it can still work.` (You mean, Mr. President, that we should continue sacrificing soldiers for a mistake?) The others are more consistent. Because they now think the war is wrong, they favor a withdrawal, the only question being whether we should pull out sooner (Murtha) or slightly later (Kerry)."

Where to begin? Let`s start with this flip-flopping business. It`s a flip-flop to change your mind when the basis for the decision hasn`t changed. But in the case of Iraq, the basis for the decision has changed. Before the war, most Iraq hawks based their support for war on the premise that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was pursuing a nuclear weapons program. Now that we know this was untrue, admitting we made a mistake is the only consistent position. The flip-floppers are the ones who supported the war to halt Hussein`s WMD and then changed their rationale mid-course.

Then there`s this notion that it`s somehow inconsistent to support the war effort after you`ve conceded the invasion was a mistake. Here conservatives are falling for what economists call the "sunk costs fallacy."

What this means is that, once you`ve paid the price for something, you can`t let the cost bind your decision. Suppose for your vacation you reserved a few nights at a hotel. But you arrive to find it`s raining nonstop, and decide you`d have more fun staying at home. It would be foolish to stay merely because you had already paid for the room. The money is gone, and you should decide based on what`s best going forward.

Bush employs this fallacy all the time. "We`ve had, you know, some of the finest Americans die in Iraq," he said last week. "And one thing we`re not going to do is let them die in vain." The real question is whether we can make the situation in Iraq better going forward, and at what cost. The price we`ve paid is tragic but not germane to the argument.

The flip side of the sunk cost fallacy is that you shouldn`t change course just because you initially made a mistake. Take that vacation example. Suppose that instead of driving you flew, and changing your tickets to return early would cost a lot of money. In that case it might make sense to stay, despite the rain. The trip was a bad idea, but leaving early would be worse. (I assume that if you tried this reasoning in a GOP family, you`d be told, "First you wanted to go on vacation, now you`re saying it was a mistake, and yet you want to stay anyway. Flip-flopper!") If failing to grasp simple logical concepts is called "winning the war of ideas," then I guess I`d rather be on the losing side.

Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times

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[/TABLE]Set in the aftermath of the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, story follows a secret Israeli squad assigned to track down and kill the 11 Palestinians suspected to have planned the Munich attack--and the personal toll this mission of revenge takes on the team and the man who led it.
[urlTrailers & Clips]http://us.rd.yahoo.com/movies/info/lnav/trailers/?http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1808716215/trailer[/url]
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[urlEXCLUSIVE: TIME Magazine FIRST to See ‘Munich’]http://www.time.com/time/press_releases/article/0,8599,1137634,00.html[/url]
New York – “I don’t think any movie or any book or any work of art can solve the stalemate in the Middle East today,” director Steven Spielberg tells TIME in an exclusive cover-story interview. “But it’s certainly worth a try,” Spielberg says.

Spielberg gave TIME the first look at his new film “Munich” which opens Dec. 23. TIME’s coverlines are, “EXCLUSIVE: SPIELBERG’S SECRET MASTERPIECE. So sensitive it was kept under wraps, Munich is his boldest feat year—a story of terrorism at the Olympics and the cost of revenge. Plus: Spielberg on why his movies have changed.”

Since filming began I June, the movie (reported to cost around $70 million) “has been surrounded by rumors, criticism, and suggestions that Spielberg was too pro-Israel to make a fair movie,” according to TIME. When TIME’s Arts Editor Belinda Luscombe, movie reporter Desa Philadelphia and critic Richard Schickel screened Munich last week, neither studio execs nor star Eric Bana had yet seen it.

Spielberg tells TIME he is proud he and screenwriter Tony Kushner demonized anyone in the film, which depicts the Israeli government’s secret war of revenge against the murderers of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games by a Palestinian terrorist group calling itself Black September.

“We don’t demonize our targets. They’re individuals. They have families. Although what happened in Munich, I condemn,” Spielberg tells TIME. The moviemakers would not reveal the identity of the character they call Avner Kauffman, the leader of the Israeli hit squad, who they interviewed at length. “There is something about killing people at close range that is excruciating,” Spielberg says. “It’s bound to try a man’s soul.” Of the real Avner, Spielberg says, “I don’t think he will ever find peace.”

Spielberg is critical of the organizers of the IOC: “One of the reasons I wanted to tell this story is that every four years there’s an Olympics somewhere in the world, and there has never been an adequate tribute paid to the Israeli athletes,” Spielberg says. “The silence about them by the International Olympic Committee is getting louder for me.”

Spielberg will initiate a project next February to make “people understand that there aren’t that many differences that divide Israelis from Palestinians—not as human beings, anyway.” Spielberg tells TIME, “What I’m doing is buying 250 video cameras and players and dividing them up, giving 125 of them to Palestinian children, 125 to Israeli kids, so they can make movies about their own lives—not dramas, just little documentaries about who they are and what they believe in, who their parents are, where they go to school, what they had to eat, what movies they watch, what CDs they listen to—and then exchange the videos. That’s the kind of thing that can be effective.”

One scene in Munich “meant everything” to Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner (author of Angels in America), TIME reports. Avner and his Palestinian opposite meet and the latter makes his case for the creation of a homeland for his people. “The only thing that’s going to solve this is rational minds, a lot of sitting down and talking until you’re blue in the gills,” says Spielberg. Without that exchange, “I would have been making a Charles Bronson movie.”

Though his producing partner Kathleen Kennedy calls the film a “thriller,” Spielberg calls it “historical fiction.” “I was very careful,” he says, “to start the movie by saying, ‘Inspired by real events,’ because until the secret files are opened up nobody will really know who actually did what.”

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Wollen die christlichen Fundamentalisten Weihnachten abschaffen. Weihnachten in den USA, wie es sich entwickeltete und die diesjährigen Streitereien.

December 4, 2005
Editorial Observer
This Season`s War Cry: Commercialize Christmas, or Else
By ADAM COHEN
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/04/opinion/04sun3.html?hp

Religious conservatives have a cause this holiday season: the commercialization of Christmas. They`re for it.

The American Family Association is leading a boycott of Target for not using the words "Merry Christmas" in its advertising. (Target denies it has an anti-Merry-Christmas policy.) The Catholic League boycotted Wal-Mart in part over the way its Web site treated searches for "Christmas." Bill O`Reilly, the Fox anchor who last year started a "Christmas Under Siege" campaign, has a chart on his Web site of stores that use the phrase "Happy Holidays," along with a poll that asks, "Will you shop at stores that do not say `Merry Christmas`?"

This campaign - which is being hyped on Fox and conservative talk radio - is an odd one. Christmas remains ubiquitous, and with its celebrators in control of the White House, Congress, the Supreme Court and every state supreme court and legislature, it hardly lacks for powerful supporters. There is also something perverse, when Christians are being jailed for discussing the Bible in Saudi Arabia and slaughtered in Sudan, about spending so much energy on stores that sell "holiday trees."

What is less obvious, though, is that Christmas`s self-proclaimed defenders are rewriting the holiday`s history. They claim that the "traditional" American Christmas is under attack by what John Gibson, another Fox anchor, calls "professional atheists" and "Christian haters." But America has a complicated history with Christmas, going back to the Puritans, who despised it. What the boycotters are doing is not defending America`s Christmas traditions, but creating a new version of the holiday that fits a political agenda.

The Puritans considered Christmas un-Christian, and hoped to keep it out of America. They could not find Dec. 25 in the Bible, their sole source of religious guidance, and insisted that the date derived from Saturnalia, the Roman heathens` wintertime celebration. On their first Dec. 25 in the New World, in 1620, the Puritans worked on building projects and ostentatiously ignored the holiday. From 1659 to 1681 Massachusetts went further, making celebrating Christmas "by forbearing of labor, feasting or in any other way" a crime.

The concern that Christmas distracted from religious piety continued even after Puritanism waned. In 1827, an Episcopal bishop lamented that the Devil had stolen Christmas "and converted it into a day of worldly festivity, shooting and swearing." Throughout the 1800`s, many religious leaders were still trying to hold the line. As late as 1855, New York newspapers reported that Presbyterian, Baptist and Methodist churches were closed on Dec. 25 because "they do not accept the day as a Holy One." On the eve of the Civil War, Christmas was recognized in just 18 states.

Christmas gained popularity when it was transformed into a domestic celebration, after the publication of Clement Clarke Moore`s "Visit from St. Nicholas" and Thomas Nast`s Harper`s Weekly drawings, which created the image of a white-bearded Santa who gave gifts to children. The new emphasis lessened religious leaders` worries that the holiday would be given over to drinking and swearing, but it introduced another concern: commercialism. By the 1920`s, the retail industry had adopted Christmas as its own, sponsoring annual ceremonies to kick off the "Christmas shopping season."

Religious leaders objected strongly. The Christmas that emerged had an inherent tension: merchants tried to make it about buying, while clergymen tried to keep commerce out. A 1931 Times roundup of Christmas sermons reported a common theme: "the suggestion that Christmas could not survive if Christ were thrust into the background by materialism." A 1953 Methodist sermon broadcast on NBC - typical of countless such sermons - lamented that Christmas had become a "profit-seeking period." This ethic found popular expression in "A Charlie Brown Christmas." In the 1965 TV special, Charlie Brown ignores Lucy`s advice to "get the biggest aluminum tree you can find" and her assertion that Christmas is "a big commercial racket," and finds a more spiritual way to observe the day.

This year`s Christmas "defenders" are not just tolerating commercialization - they`re insisting on it. They are also rewriting Christmas history on another key point: non-Christians` objection to having the holiday forced on them.

The campaign`s leaders insist this is a new phenomenon - a "liberal plot," in Mr. Gibson`s words. But as early as 1906, the Committee on Elementary Schools in New York City urged that Christmas hymns be banned from the classroom, after a boycott by more than 20,000 Jewish students. In 1946, the Rabbinical Assembly of America declared that calling on Jewish children to sing Christmas carols was "an infringement on their rights as Americans."

Other non-Christians have long expressed similar concerns. For decades, companies have replaced "Christmas parties" with "holiday parties," schools have adopted "winter breaks" instead of "Christmas breaks," and TV stations and stores have used phrases like "Happy Holidays" and "Season`s Greetings" out of respect for the nation`s religious diversity.

The Christmas that Mr. O`Reilly and his allies are promoting - one closely aligned with retailers, with a smack-down attitude toward nonobservers - fits with their campaign to make America more like a theocracy, with Christian displays on public property and Christian prayer in public schools.

It does not, however, appear to be catching on with the public. That may be because most Americans do not recognize this commercialized, mean-spirited Christmas as their own. Of course, it`s not even clear the campaign`s leaders really believe in it. Just a few days ago, Fox News`s online store was promoting its "Holiday Collection" for shoppers. Among the items offered to put under a "holiday tree" was "The O`Reilly Factor Holiday Ornament." After bloggers pointed this out, Fox changed the "holidays" to "Christmases."

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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December 5, 2005
Rice to Defend U.S. on Reports of Prisons for Terror Suspects
By JOEL BRINKLEY
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/05/politics/05prisons.html

WASHINGTON, Dec. 4 - Just before she leaves for a trip to Europe on Monday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice plans to offer the Bush administration`s first studied defense in the debate over reports of a network of secret prisons for terror suspects in several European countries.

But even as she tries to quell concerns, a senior aide said, Ms. Rice would not confirm that the prisons exist. That has been the government`s stance since news articles about the prisons were published early last month.

"She is going to be addressing these issues in a comprehensive way," Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, said on "Fox News Sunday." "One of the things she will be saying is look, we are all threatened by terror. We need to cooperate in its solution."

Ms. Rice plans to visit Germany, Belgium, Romania and Ukraine. In some of those countries the reports of secret prisons have set off a nearly all-consuming debate.

Jack Straw, the British foreign secretary, wrote to her Tuesday on behalf of the European Union, asking for an explanation of possible "violations of international law." The Washington Post reported in early November that the C.I.A. began operating a network of secret prisons in Europe shortly after Sept. 11 and has shuttled terror suspects among them.

On Sunday, a senior State Department official said "she will provide a comprehensive response" to Mr. Straw emphasizing "our adherence to our laws and our international obligations.

"We don`t torture people, and we do not send people to be tortured," said the official, who agreed to discuss the subject on the condition of anonymity because a discussion for attribution would violate administration policy.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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December 5, 2005
U.S. Forces Try New Approach: Raid and Dig In
By KIRK SEMPLE
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/05/international/middleeast/0…

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 4 - Marines staked their claim to the abandoned youth center in Husayba last month with a Hellfire missile and two tank rounds that destroyed a corner of the building and part of the roof.

Weeks earlier, residents had forsaken the center to insurgents who were using it as an armory and a staging point for attacks. The fighters fled before the American assault but left evidence that their flight had been in haste, including a half-eaten bowl of fresh figs in a makeshift sniper`s roost above the center`s theater.

This was the last building in a five-day sweep of the town, a point at which the Americans, in the past, would usually have loaded up their armored vehicles, driven back to their desert bases and prepared for a new raid elsewhere, leaving the door open for a return of the rebels.

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Women evacuated from their homes in Husayba, Iraq, waited for food last month at a temporary camp as the military tried to rout insurgents.
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But this time the marines immediately began digging in, and Iraqi troops joined them.

Technicians converted the theater`s stage into a command center, engineers erected a perimeter of cement barriers to guard against rocket attacks and suicide bombers, and a community relations team took over a warren of rooms near the entrance of the center to receive residents` claims for damages.

Meanwhile, American and Iraqi infantrymen turned some of the remaining space into barracks and began to conduct street patrols in a town that had not had a regular security force, American or Iraqi, in months.

For months, the military has been conducting raids in Anbar Province, the western desert region that has become a wellspring for the insurgency. But the taking of the youth center was one of the first steps in a new approach to taming the area: first sweep a town, then immediately garrison it and begin reconstruction - or what President Bush has called "clear, hold and build." Just as important, Iraqi forces are an integral component of the strategy.

The challenges are daunting: the quality of the Iraqi troops is still low, cooperation from local residents is scarce, and the insurgency, though damaged by the sweeps, remains strong. But by providing a continual security presence and improvements in the quality of life, the American command hopes to win support for the elected leadership and deny the insurgents the popular support they seek.

American military officials in Anbar say this has always been their plan - it has already been applied elsewhere in the country - but they never had enough troops to carry it out. Since spring, the number of Iraqi troops operating in Anbar Province has surged to the current level of about 16,000 from about 2,500 in March, said Maj. Gen. Stephen T. Johnson, commander of Multinational Force West and Second Marine Expeditionary Force, which oversees security in Anbar. The Iraqis join about 32,000 coalition troops.

The siege of Husayba, a farming and trading town, was part of a Marine-led operation that began Nov. 5, lasted more than two weeks and cleared villages and towns on both sides of the Euphrates River near the Syrian border. Since spring, troops in Anbar have conducted at least nine major assaults and several smaller ones to disrupt insurgent networks of safe houses and smuggling routes for fighters and suicide bombers going to Iraq`s interior from Syria.

According to Capt. Jeffrey S. Pool, spokesman for the Second Marine Division, the plan to ensure a seamless transition from clearing to holding in Anbar was refined in earlier operations, including sweeps in October in Sadaa, Haqlaniya, Haditha and Barwana, where American and Iraqi forces now have garrisons. But the operation last month was the most ambitious application of the strategy.

Even before it ended, construction of at least seven garrisons was under way in Husayba, Karabila and Ubaydi on the south side of the Euphrates and in the Ramana region on the north. Each will be staffed by at least two platoons of American and Iraqi soldiers, officials said.

"We bought land now," said Col. Stephen W. Davis, the commander of Marine Regimental Combat Team 2. "We`re not leaving the towns. We`re invested in them."

Immediately after the sweeps last month, American and Iraqi officials began meeting with community leaders to conjure up local political representation where, in many places, insurgents had killed the elected leadership or driven it into hiding. They began to resurrect power and electrical systems, or in some cases build them. In time, they say, they will recruit and train local police forces for each community.

General Johnson said that the only existing police force in the province was in Falluja, with 1,200 officers, and that there were "no governments to speak of," except in Ramadi, the provincial capital, and Falluja.

Beyond providing more manpower, the Iraqi security forces give greater legitimacy to the strategy, military officials insist. "The Americans can`t occupy this country," said Capt. Conlon Carabine, a company commander in the Third Battalion, Sixth Marines, which was involved in the Husayba and Karabila sweeps. "The Iraqi government is going to have to beat this insurgency."

Indeed, the Americans` long-range military strategy in the newly swept towns of western Anbar, as in the rest of the country, is to turn over full security control to the Iraqis. But commanders in Anbar acknowledge that the Iraqi Army still has a long way to go - in training, experience and numbers - before it is prepared to assume control from the Americans.

In an interview at his headquarters at Camp Falluja, General Johnson offered a highly cautious assessment of the Iraqi Army`s battle-readiness in Anbar. Pointing to the sixfold increase in the number of Iraqi troops at his disposal this year, he said, "Even though it`s a large increase in number, it`s going to take time to develop."

Though some units are beginning to be able to "take the lead" on operations, he said, they still require coalition support.

"They`re going pretty good out here," he added. "I just believe it`s a matter of time."

Last month`s operation near the Syrian border was a crucial test for the fledgling Iraqi Army in Anbar. It was the first large-scale deployment of multiple Iraqi Army battalions in combat with American forces there.

To this reporter embedded with the assault force, the Iraqis often seemed disorganized, complacent and undisciplined. On the north side of the river, where the Iraqis had a chance to take the lead because they outnumbered the Americans, house-to-house clearing operations were sloppy. The troops moved unsystematically from house to house, sometimes giving buildings nothing more than a glance or, worse, bypassing them altogether.

Some soldiers demonstrated unorthodox uses for their weapons, including two soldiers who used their Kalashnikov assault rifles to swat a ball around as if they were playing field hockey, according to American soldiers who witnessed the scene, and several who used their rifles to pry metal security doors off their hinges.

Military commanders offered modest public praise of the Iraqi performance, emphasizing, for instance, that the Iraqis demonstrated a willingness to stand their ground and fight, rather than flee, as some units had in the past. Privately, several offered much harsher assessments.

But American officials have given up any pretense of trying to create a world-class military and say their goal is to leave behind one that can competently patrol borders and police streets.

Until then, Anbar will primarily be the Americans` fight - and a bloody one at that.

Troops in Anbar have borne the brunt of combat casualties in recent months. Captain Pool, the Second Marine Division spokesman, said at least 205 American servicemen and servicewomen have died there since the division arrived on March 17. That includes the 10 marines killed last Thursday in a bomb explosion outside of Falluja.

Marine commanders describe the struggle for Anbar in primal terms. "This is not a hearts and minds battle," Colonel Davis said. "This is a fight for survival."

"There are a lot of knuckleheads here that need to die," he went on. "You`re just crunching heads."

Moments after his marines finished clearing the last house in their sector of Karabila last month, Captain Carabine stood on a rooftop overlooking the town, taking the full measure of his new mandate. After seven days of arduous house raids, during which one of his marines was killed and several others wounded, he would immediately begin building a garrison in Karabila and somehow, with the support of his Iraqi Army troops, set about trying to shore up the public services in the poor farming village and establish a sense of governmental authority.

"Allowing the people not to be controlled by insurgents and allowing them to live freely and not in the grip of fear is what will win the insurgency," he said. "This is when the real work begins."

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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December 5, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
A Black Hole
By BOB HERBERT
http://select.nytimes.com/2005/12/05/opinion/05herbert.html

The news last week that 10 marines had been killed in Falluja in yet another improvised bomb attack sent a familiar feeling of dread surging through Paul Shroeder.

Every morning, when Mr. Shroeder awakens, he feels normal for the first 5 or 10 seconds. And then it dawns on him that his son, Augie - Lance Cpl. Edward August Shroeder II - is no longer around. Then an awful sadness descends, like a black curtain, over the rest of the day.

Corporal Shroeder, 23, was one of 14 marines killed last August in a roadside explosion in Haditha, in western Iraq. Just two days earlier, six marines from the same reserve unit - the Ohio-based Third Battalion, 25th Marine Regiment - had been killed in an ambush.

"When you have one or two guys get killed, it`s back by the truss ads," said Mr. Shroeder. "It`s not on the front page. But when you have 20 killed from the same unit in the space of 48 hours, that`s big news."

The deaths of the 10 marines last week generated big headlines. But there was considerably less coverage the day before, when the Defense Department announced that four other servicemen had been killed in separate incidents in Iraq. The coverage fluctuates, but the suffering and dying of young American troops in this hellish meat grinder of a war goes on day by day, without end.

(Two more soldiers were reported killed yesterday in a roadside bomb attack in southeast Baghdad.)

Mr. Shroeder (pronounced SHRAE-der) and his wife, Rosemary Palmer, who live in Cleveland, and who are facing the Christmas season with eyes swollen and raw from crying, believe enough is enough. They have gone public with their view that the war has been wasteful and foolish and not worth the lives lost.

"We have to come up with a plan to get us out of there," said Mr. Shroeder. "What we`re saying is that we need a serious debate about all options to end this. We cannot have the open-ended, ongoing, stay-the-course thing, because it`s killing people."

Mr. Shroeder said he and his wife are not calling for an immediate withdrawal, "just willy-nilly," of American troops. But they believe it is essential that a workable plan for an orderly withdrawal be developed - and developed quickly - because the present policy, reaffirmed by President Bush in his speech at Annapolis last week, "is not working."

In Mr. Shroeder`s view, President Bush`s war policies have been both tragic and futile. "Staying the course," he said, is like continuing to pour water into a hole in the sand at the beach, "a process that gets you nowhere."

"My son told us two weeks before he died that he felt the war was not worth it," Mr. Shroeder said. "His complaint was about having to go back repeatedly into the same towns, to sweep the same insurgents, or other insurgents, out of these same towns without being able to hold them, secure them. It just was not working, and that`s what he wanted to get across."

Mr. Shroeder dismissed the idea that criticism of the administration and the war was evidence of a lack of support for the men and women fighting in Iraq. "You can support the troops and be critical of the policy that put them there," he said.

He took issue with the public officials who insist that his son died for a "noble cause," however comforting that might be to believe. On the contrary, he feels that Augie`s life "was wasted."

Recalling his last conversation with his son, Mr. Schroeder said, "I asked him, `Do you feel like you`re protecting your family and other Americans back here?` And he said, `No. Not at all.` "

He said Augie felt that he was not accomplishing anything. "He thought it was a waste."

Mr. Shroeder, 56, is a partner in a trading company. His wife, 58, is a high school Spanish teacher. They`ve started a small nonprofit organization called Families of the Fallen for Change (fofchange.org) that they hope will help push Congress to take steps to bring the U.S. involvement in the war to an end.

I asked Mr. Shroeder how life has been for him and his wife since Augie`s death. He paused for a long time, then said:

"Life is not the same. The holidays are not good. We both are church people and we sing in the choir, and this is the Christmas season. So normally it`s a time of great music and wonderful singing. But I can`t participate this year because - well, because he`s just not here."

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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December 5, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
The Joyless Economy
By PAUL KRUGMAN
http://select.nytimes.com/2005/12/05/opinion/05krugman.html

Falling gasoline prices have led to some improvement in consumer confidence over the past few weeks. But the public remains deeply unhappy about the state of the economy. According to the latest Gallup poll, 63 percent of Americans rate the economy as only fair or poor, and by 58 to 36 percent people say economic conditions are getting worse, not better.

Yet by some measures, the economy is doing reasonably well. In particular, gross domestic product is rising at a pretty fast clip. So why aren`t people pleased with the economy`s performance?

Like everything these days, this is a political as well as factual question. The Bush administration seems genuinely puzzled that it isn`t getting more credit for what it thinks is a booming economy. So let me be helpful here and explain what`s going on.

I could point out that the economic numbers, especially the job numbers, aren`t as good as the Bush people imagine. President Bush made an appearance in the Rose Garden to hail the latest jobs report, yet a gain of 215,000 jobs would have been considered nothing special - in fact, a bit subpar - during the Clinton years. And because the average workweek shrank a bit, the total number of hours worked actually fell last month.

But the main explanation for economic discontent is that it`s hard to convince people that the economy is booming when they themselves have yet to see any benefits from the supposed boom. Over the last few years G.D.P. growth has been reasonably good, and corporate profits have soared. But that growth has failed to trickle down to most Americans.

Back in August the Census bureau released family income data for 2004. The report, which was overshadowed by Hurricane Katrina, showed a remarkable disconnect between overall economic growth and the economic fortunes of most American families.

It should have been a good year for American families: the economy grew 4.2 percent, its best performance since 1999. Yet most families actually lost economic ground. Real median household income - the income of households in the middle of the income distribution, adjusted for inflation - fell for the fifth year in a row. And one key source of economic insecurity got worse, as the number of Americans without health insurance continued to rise.

We don`t have comparable data for 2005 yet, but it`s pretty clear that the results will be similar. G.D.P. growth has remained solid, but most families are probably losing ground as their earnings fail to keep up with inflation.

Behind the disconnect between economic growth and family incomes lies the extremely lopsided nature of the economic recovery that officially began in late 2001. The growth in corporate profits has, as I said, been spectacular. Even after adjusting for inflation, profits have risen more than 50 percent since the last quarter of 2001. But real wage and salary income is up less than 7 percent.

There are some wealthy Americans who derive a large share of their income from dividends and capital gains on stocks, and therefore benefit more or less directly from soaring profits. But these people constitute a small minority. For everyone else the sluggish growth in wages is the real story. And much of the wage and salary growth that did take place happened at the high end, in the form of rising payments to executives and other elite employees. Average hourly earnings of nonsupervisory workers, adjusted for inflation, are lower now than when the recovery began.

So there you have it. Americans don`t feel good about the economy because it hasn`t been good for them. Never mind the G.D.P. numbers: most people are falling behind.

It`s much harder to explain why. The disconnect between G.D.P. growth and the economic fortunes of most American families can`t be dismissed as a normal occurrence. Wages and median family income often lag behind profits in the early stages of an economic expansion, but not this far behind, and not for so long. Nor, I should say, is there any easy way to place more than a small fraction of the blame on Bush administration policies. At this point the joylessness of the economic expansion for most Americans is a mystery.

What`s clear, however, is that advisers who believe that Mr. Bush can repair his political standing by making speeches telling the public how well the economy is doing have misunderstood the situation. The problem isn`t that people don`t understand how good things are. It`s that they know, from personal experience, that things really aren`t that good.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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Murtha, appearing later, answered that only 7 percent of those opposing the U.S.-led coalition forces are followers of Abu Musab Zarqawi. The main insurgents, he said, are Iraqis who are involved in an internal civil war between Shiite and Sunni factions. "Our troops are the targets of the civil war. They`re the only people that could have unified the various factions in Iraq, and they`re unified against us. And every day we`re there means more casualties."

McCain Will Not Bend On Detainee Treatment
He Pushes White House to Ban Torture
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12…

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 5, 2005; A18

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said yesterday he would not compromise with the White House on the words in his amendment that would put into law the banning of cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of detainees.

Asked on NBC`s "Meet the Press," in light of his current discussions with national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley, whether he would accept any compromise, McCain, answered, "No . . . I won`t. We won`t." McCain was tortured while a prisoner of the North Vietnamese.

McCain, whose language was approved by the Senate in a 90 to 9 vote, said the talks with Hadley were "on aspects of this" and would not speculate on whether they would be successful. Appearing on ABC`s "This Week," Hadley said, "We have competing objectives here," indicating that perhaps at issue was whether the McCain language could be viewed as Congress interfering with the executive powers of the president to carry out his duties to protect the nation.

"We`re trying to find a way, as we say, where we can strike the balance between being aggressive to protect the country against the terrorists, and at the same time comply with the law," Hadley said.

McCain, as in the past, noted that the United States` use of torturelike techniques could lead to them being used against captured Americans, has damaged U.S. prestige abroad and produced unreliable intelligence. He pointed out that some intelligence "used in one of the president`s speeches . . . concerning the threat of weapons of mass destruction . . . was later recanted."

Although McCain did not say so, it was an apparent reference to prewar information on Saddam Hussein training al Qaeda terrorists in the use of chemical and biological weapons. The information was given by a detainee questioned at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, who later recanted.

Hadley also said on "Fox News Sunday" that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will be discussing "in a comprehensive way" foreign government concerns about CIA covert prisons during her trip to Europe this week. He said she will emphasize that all nations threatened by terrorism must cooperate and that "we do not move people around the world so that they can be tortured."

Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.), also on ABC`s "This Week," said a distinction had to be drawn between fighting terrorism and the insurgency when it comes to Iraq. "Terrorism is in Afghanistan," Murtha said, "and the insurgency is in Iraq. The insurgents are all internal. Just 3 to 7 percent are al Qaeda."

Noting that polls show 80 percent of Iraqis want U.S. forces out of Iraq and 45 percent say it is justified to kill U.S. soldiers, Murtha said, "There`s more chance of democracy, less chance of terrorism [and] the insurgency will be reduced if we get out of there."

Hadley, on the same program, said, "If we pull out now, it will mean handing over Iraq to the Zarqawi [terrorist] faction." Murtha, appearing later, answered that only 7 percent of those opposing the U.S.-led coalition forces are followers of Abu Musab Zarqawi. The main insurgents, he said, are Iraqis who are involved in an internal civil war between Shiite and Sunni factions. "Our troops are the targets of the civil war. They`re the only people that could have unified the various factions in Iraq, and they`re unified against us. And every day we`re there means more casualties."
© 2005 The Washington Post Company

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Do These Two Have Anything in Common?
President Bush has equated Islamic radicalism with communism. Is the comparison sound? Is it wise?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12…

By Zbigniew Brzezinski
Sunday, December 4, 2005; B02

In a series of recent speeches to the American people, President Bush has sought to equate the current terrorist threat with the 20th-century menace of communist totalitarianism. His case is that the terrorist challenge is global in scope, "evil" in nature, ruthless toward its foes, and eager to control every aspect of life and thought. Thus, he argues, the battle against terrorism demands nothing "less than a complete victory."

In making this case, the president has repeatedly invoked the adjective "Islamic" when referring to terrorism and he has compared the "murderous ideology of Islamic radicalism" to the ideology of communism.

Is the president historically right in his diagnosis of the allegedly similar dangers posed by Islamic extremism and by totalitarian communism? The differences between the two may be more telling than their similarities. And is he wise to be expounding such a thesis?
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By asserting that Islamic extremism, "like the ideology of communism . . . is the great challenge of our new century," Bush is implicitly elevating Osama bin Laden`s stature and historic significance to the level of figures such as Lenin, Stalin or Mao. And that suggests, in turn, that the fugitive Saudi dissident hiding in some cave (or perhaps even deceased) has been articulating a doctrine of universal significance. Underlying the president`s analogy is the proposition that bin Laden`s "jihad" has the potential for dominating the minds and hearts of hundreds of millions of people across national and even religious boundaries. That is quite a compliment to bin Laden, but it isn`t justified. The "Islamic" jihad is, at best, a fragmented and limited movement that hardly resonates in most of the world.

Communism, by comparison, undeniably had worldwide appeal. By the 1950s, there was hardly a country in the world without an active communist movement or conspiracy, irrespective of whether the country was predominantly Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, Buddhist or Confucian. In some countries, such as Russia and China, the communist movement was the largest political formation, dominating intellectual discourse; in democratic countries, such as Italy and France, it vied for political power in open elections.

In response to the dislocations and injustices precipitated by the Industrial Revolution, communism offered a vision of a perfectly just society. To be sure, that vision was false and was used to justify violence that eventually led directly to the Soviet gulag, Chinese labor and "reeducation" camps, and other human rights abuses. Nonetheless, for a while, communism`s definition of the future bolstered its cross-cultural appeal.

In addition, the intellectual and political challenge of the communist ideology was backed by enormous military power. The Soviet Union possessed a huge nuclear arsenal, capable of launching in the course of a few minutes a massive atomic attack on America. Within a few hours, upwards of 120 million Americans and Soviets could have been dead in an apocalyptic mutual cross-fire. That was the horrible reality.

Contemporary terrorism -- though nasty and criminal, whether Islamic or otherwise -- has no such political reach and no such physical capability. Its appeal is limited; it offers no answers to the novel dilemmas of modernization and globalization. To the extent that it can be said to possess an "ideology," it is a strange blend of fatalism and nihilism. In al Qaeda`s case, it is actively supported by relatively isolated groupings, and its actions have been condemned without exception by all major religious figures, from the pope to the grand mufti of Saudi Arabia.

Its power is circumscribed, too. It still relies largely on familiar tools of violence. Unlike communist totalitarian regimes, al Qaeda does not use terror as an organizing tool but rather, because of its own organizational weakness, as a disruptive tactic. Its members are bound together by this tactic, not by an ideology. Ultimately, al Qaeda or some related terrorist group may acquire truly destructive power, but one should not confuse potentiality with actuality.

But in the meantime, is Bush smart to be making this comparison?

The analogy to communism may have some short-term political benefit, for it can rekindle the fears of the past while casting the president in the mold of the historic victors of the Cold War, from Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan. But the propagation of fear also has a major downside: It can produce a nation driven by fear, lacking in self-confidence and thus less likely to inspire trust among America`s allies, including Muslim ones, whose support is needed for an effective and intelligent response to the terrorist phenomenon.

It is particularly troubling that Bush has also relied heavily in his recent speeches on what to many Muslims is bound to sound like Islamophobic language. His speeches, though occasionally containing disclaimers that he is not speaking of Islam as a whole, have been replete with references to "the murderous ideology of the Islamic radicals," "Islamic radicalism," "militant jihadism," "Islamofascism" or "Islamic Caliphate."

Such phraseology can have unintended consequences. Instead of mobilizing moderate Muslims to stand by our side, the repetitive refrain about Islamic terrorism may not only offend moderate Muslims but could eventually contribute to a perception that the campaign against terrorism is also a campaign against Islam as a whole. They may note that the United States, in condemning IRA terrorism in Northern Ireland or Basque terrorism in Spain, does not describe it as "Catholic terrorism," a phrase that Catholics around the world would likely find offensive.

Bush`s recent speeches also stand in sharp contrast to his mid-September address to the United Nations, in which he not only refrained entirely from labeling terrorism in any religious terms but also spoke thoughtfully of social "anger and despair" as contributing to the rise of terrorism. He stressed that the war against terrorism "will not be won by force alone. . . . We must change the conditions that allow terrorists to flourish and recruit." By contrast, Bush recently has dismissed altogether the notion that there could be any "set of grievances that can be soothed and addressed" in order to eliminate the sources of terrorism.

It should be cause for concern to U.S. policymakers that only one major foreign statesman comes close to emulating Bush`s rhetorical emphasis on the Islamic aspects of the current terrorist threat, and that is Russian President Vladimir Putin. Putin has deliberately seized upon the theme of Islamic terrorism to justify his relentless war against the Chechens` aspirations for self-determination. That war has the dangerous effect of generating rising tensions with Russia`s sizable Muslim population.

It certainly is not in the United States`s interest, especially in the Middle East, to prompt a fusion of Muslim political resentments against America with a wider and stronger sense of Islamic religious identity. When the president talks of Iraq as "the central front" in the war against Islamic terrorism, he links Iraqi and Arab anti-American nationalism with outraged Muslim religious feelings, thereby reinforcing the case for bin Laden`s claim that the struggle is, indeed, against "the crusaders."

That fusion could endow terrorism with fanatical intensity, compensating for the weakness that it suffers in comparison to the organizational and military threat posed earlier by communism. Indeed, the limitations of al Qaeda and similar organizations could change, especially if the president fails to pursue policies that aim at isolating terrorist groups as well as undercutting their recruitment campaigns.

Unfortunately, the military character of our presence in the Middle East may be helping to bring this change about. Robert A. Pape, a political science professor at the University of Chicago, has analyzed the motivations of contemporary suicide-attackers. He demonstrates that in the majority of cases, the attackers` basic impulse has been hostility toward foreign invaders, and he concluded a recent TV interview by observing that "the longer our forces stay on the ground in the Arabian Peninsula, the greater the risk of the next 9/11."

America would be better served if Bush avoided semantic traps that create uncertainty about our true motives or fuel the worst suspicions regarding U.S. strategy in the Middle East. Neither Islamophobic terminology nor evocations of the victorious struggle with communism help generate a better public understanding of what policies are needed in order to pacify the Middle East and to speed the fading away of terrorism, whose origins lie mostly in that region of the world. Americans need to hear more of what Bush was saying not long ago to the United Nations and less of what he has been propagating lately in the United States.

Zbigniew Brzezinski was national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter. He is a professor of American foreign policy at Johns Hopkins University`s School of Advanced International Studies and a trustee of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

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Juan Cole is Professor of History at the University of Michigan

http://www.juancole.com/


Monday, December 05, 2005

Allawi Attacked by Mob in Najaf;
In Baghdad, 2 GIs Killed

Former interim prime minister Iyad Allawi and his entourage were attacked by mobs on Sunday. Najaf governor Asad Abu Kalal complained that Allawi had not cleared his visit with the provincial authorities, but had suddenly shown up with a bodyguard of Western security guards. Allawi charged that the attackers were followers of nationalist Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, and that they had intended to kill him. Abu Kalal rejected this allegation, and Najaf authorities attributed the incident to spontaneous crowd action rather than deep political conspiracy.

Allawi is a secularist ex-Baathist, who cooperated with the CIA in the 1990s in organizing Baath officers who broke with Saddam and fled to London, in hopes of using them to make a coup against Saddam. The Americans shoe-horned him in as interim prime minister with UN complaisance. While he was in power, in August of 2004, there was major fighting in Najaf, during which important old buildings were destroyed and hundreds if not thousands were killed. At some points there were rumors that Allawi might send in Iraqi troops to storm the shrine of Ali, risking major damage to it. Allawi has also upbraided Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani for intervening in Iraqi politics. In other words, an Allawi visit to the shrine of Najaf was bound to be controversial.

Since Allawi is basically running for prime minister in a majority pious Shiite society, the visit to the shrine in Najaf was intended to be a photo op that might help generate favorable campaign images. His attackers knew this and intended to spoil it.

[urlSome analysts believe that Allawi`s list,]http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/BAK336597.htm[/url] which got 14 percent in the last elections, will do better this time. But there was also a lot of this kind of speculation before the Jan. 30 elections. Basically it is a secular middle class perspective that journalists are more likely to encounter; but in fact the secular middle classes in Iraq have been devastated. Personally, I think the 14 percent was a fluke created in part by his advantages of incumbency (he was on television all the time in January of 2005, making all kinds of promises to various constituencies). He doesn`t have those advantages any more, and may actually not run as well. Certainly, he won`t get a big vote in Najaf.

[urlNajaf officials insist]http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/GEO334998.htm[/url] that the problem of militia rule in the city has been resolved, and they have big plans for development.

Sheikh Abdul Salam Abdul Hussein, a mosque preacher and follower of Muqtada al-Sadr, was assassinated on Sunday. A range of other killings occurred in various parts of the country. Two US GIs were killed in southeastern Baghdad.

[urlAfter a showy refusal to talk to the Americans]http://news.ft.com/cms/s/841260f8-6533-11da-8cff-0000779e2340.html[/url] about Iraq by high Iranian officials, lower-level middle managers are now saying that Iran will "think about" such contacts. Stay tuned.

[urlLt. Gen. Martin Dempsey]http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0512040317dec04,1,4940418.story?coll=chi-newsnationworld-hed[/url] has admitted that many Iraqi officers in the new security services still have loyalties to militias.

[urlUS officers have admitted in interviews]http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/12/04/wirq04.xml&sSheet=/portal/2005/12/04/ixportal.html[/url] that most of the guerrillas they are fighting in western Iraq are local Iraqis, not foreign jihadis. The admission contradicts the general thrust of White House commentary on the issue.

posted by Juan @ [url12/05/2005 06:30:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/12/allawi-attacked-by-mob-in-najaf-in.html[/url] 0 comments

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Tomgram: Michael Schwartz, Ten Ways to Argue about the War
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=41214

This post can be found at http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=41214

What a couple of weeks in Iraq (and at home): Withdrawal was suddenly on everyone`s lips, while tragedy and absurdity were piling up like some vast, serial car wreck of event and emotion. Before a massed audience of Midshipmen at the Naval Academy, our President announced a new war goal beyond finding weapons of mass destruction, bringing freedom to Iraqis, or liberating the whole of the Middle East; something more modest this time -- "complete victory" -- over whomever. In the meantime, ten Marines died in a trap near Fallujah. Remember Fallujah? The city we literally destroyed in order to save it and then didn`t quite get around to rebuilding as the Sunni Triangle`s first safe haven from insurgency and terrorism? Now, it`s a danger zone again and still significantly in rubble. In these same weeks, the use of white phosphorus, a fierce burning agent, back in November 2004 to force rebels in Fallujah out of their defenses suddenly became a global news story and a scandal (though its use was actually known at the time); the Europeans began demanding explanations from the Bush administration for the kidnapping, transport, and secret imprisonment of suspected terrorists on their territory; a torture chamber/detention center run by the Interior Ministry but connected to the militia of the leading Shiite religious party in the Iraqi government was uncovered by American troops; it was evidently part of a long known-about "ghost network" of such centers linked to government and party-sponsored (and possibly U.S. backed or trained) death squads intent on intimidating or cleansing the Sunni neighborhoods of Iraq`s cities. Ever more American war planes were reportedly taking to Iraqi skies and more American bombs falling on Iraq`s towns and cities. Saddam reappeared in court, his hair dyed black, complaining and carrying a Koran like the good religious man he surely isn`t; and it was revealed that, in the process of bringing freedom to Iraqis, a Pentagon-hired "business intelligence" firm had done its darnedest to turn a burgeoning Iraqi free press into a paid-for press. This was done in the struggle to conquer what is known in the trade as Iraq`s "information battlespace." Not only that, but the story took us a full, ridiculous spin of the dial back to the earliest moments of our conquest of Iraq. At that time, administration officials arrived in Baghdad so filled with hubris that it didn`t occur to them to bring along anyone who knew anything about Iraq, no less actual translators. In the case of our newspaper caper, clearly a psyops-for-dummies operation, some of the paid-for stories were written by American servicemen and then translated into Arabic. These must have been truly convincing accounts! (Imagine the opposite: Iraqi soldiers in camps in the U.S. hired to write articles translated into English to help win the war for American "information battlespace.") And believe me, that`s only a bit of the week or two that was.



The President spoke of "progress" in Iraq, but who could possibly believe him at this point? A majority of Americans clearly no longer do, but a minority -- about 36% according to the polls -- seem to be hanging in there, though perhaps with difficulty, like worried Republican Congressman from Georgia, Phil Gingrey. While fretting about re-election, he was nonetheless quoted in the Washington Post, saying, "The light is there at the end of the tunnel. People need to see it." Again, you don`t know whether to laugh or cry. In what follows, Michael Schwartz takes the arguments that remain for war supporters and that still can confound antiwar people and answers them one by one.

Tom

Arguing about the War
The Top Ten Reasons for Staying in (Leaving) Iraq
By Michael Schwartz

I often receive emails -- pro and con -- about my postings on the war in Iraq, and I try to respond to any substantive questions or critiques offered. But when I received an email recently entitled "10 Questions" in response to a Tomdispatch commentary detailing the arguments for immediate withdrawal, I must admit my heart sank -- the questions were familiar, but the answers were complex and I was in no mood to spend the time needed to respond properly.

After a couple of days, however, I began to warm to the idea of writing short but pointed responses to these common criticisms of antiwar positions because, I realized, they are the bread and butter of daily Iraq discourse in our country. When the war comes up in the media or in casual conversation, these are the issues that are raised by those who think we have to "stay the course" -- and among those who oppose the war, these are the lurking, unspoken questions that haunt our discussions. So here are my best brief answers to these key issues in the crucial, ongoing debate over Iraq.

"I read your article on withdrawal of American troops," my correspondent began, "and questioned the lack of discussion of the following…" (His comments are in bold.)

1. Nothing was mentioned about improvements in Iraq (elections, water and energy, schools). No Saddam to fear!
Water and energy delivery as well as schools are worse off than before the U.S. invasion. Ditto for the state of hospitals (and medical supplies), highways, and oil production. Elections are a positive change, but the elected government does not have more than a semblance of actual sovereignty, and therefore the Iraqi people have no power to make real choices about their future. One critical example: The Shiite/Kurdish political coalition now in power ran on a platform whose primary promise was that, if elected, they would set and enforce a timetable for American withdrawal. As soon as they took power, they reneged on this promise (apparently under pressure from the US). They have also proved quite incapable of fulfilling their other campaign promises about restoring services and rebuilding the country; and for that reason (as well as others), their constituents (primarily the Shia) are becoming ever more disillusioned. In the most recent polls, Shia Iraqis now are about 70% in favor of U.S. withdrawal.

2. Nothing was mentioned about Iraqis who want the U.S. to remain (especially the Kurds and the majority of Iraqi women).
Among the three principle ethno-religious groups in Iraq, the Sunnis (about a fifth of the population) are almost unanimous in their opposition to the American presence, while around 70% of the Shia (themselves about 60% of the population) want the U.S. to withdraw. Hence, even before we consider the Kurds, the majority of Iraqis are in favor of a full-scale American departure "as soon as possible." It is true that the Kurds (about 20% of the population) favor the U.S. remaining. However, they have their own militias and many of them do not want significant numbers of American troops in their territory. (The U.S. presence there is small-scale at the moment.) What they desire is a U.S. occupation for someone else, not themselves. I think we can safely say that the vast majority of Iraqis oppose the presence of U.S. troops.

I know of no study indicating that Iraqi women favor the U.S. presence. Perhaps you are referring to the fact that large numbers of women in Iraq are upset and angry over the erosion of their rights since the fall of Saddam. I know some commentators claim that the U.S. presence is insurance against further erosion of those rights, but everything I have read indicates that a significant number of Iraqi women (like all Iraqis) blame the Bush administration for these policies. After all, the Americans installed in power (and continue to support) the political forces spearheading anti-woman policies in the country. Polling data do not indicate that any sizable group of Sunni or Shia women support a continued U.S. presence.

3. Nothing was mentioned about the benefits of the U.S. military gaining valuable experience and knowledge daily.
Certainly, the U.S. gains military and political "experience" from the war, as from any war, but at the expense of many deaths (2,127) and injuries (at least 15,704) to American soldiers. Beyond these publicly listed casualty figures lie the endless ways in which the lives of our soldiers are permanently damaged: On November 26, for example, the New York Times reported on a recent army study indicating that 17% of all personnel sent to Iraq have "serious symptoms of depression, anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorder." Since about a million American troops have now seen service in Iraq, approximately 170,000 have gained the "experience" of having a severe mental problem. Moreover, the war experience in Iraq has proved so demoralizing to the military that many of the best soldiers are leaving at the end of their tours, instead of staying on in active or reserve status. This is undermining the viability of the military, long term.

U.S. casualties, of course, have been dwarfed by the damage done to the Iraqi people. Between 25,000 and 40,000 Iraqi civilians are dying each year -- and multitudes are injured. We are wrecking the country`s infrastructure.

Certainly there is a better way to gain experience than this.

4. Nothing was mentioned about the future benefits of a strong democracy in the Middle East.
We can all agree that a strong democracy in the Middle East would have huge benefits for Iraq and for its neighbors as well as for the rest of the world. If I thought that our actions there were actually helping to bring this about, perhaps I might also believe that the benefits of an active democracy outweighed at least some of the many problems we have been creating. But from the beginning, the talk of democracy was a hollow mantra, just one of a group of public rationalizations for a war motivated by the Bush administration`s desire to dominate Middle Eastern politics and economics. The U.S. government has never actually relinquished sovereignty to the Iraqi government.

5. Nothing was mentioned about the future benefits of oil reserves.
Though the Bush Administration denies it, many observers agree with you that access to Iraqi oil was a major motivation for the war. But we need to understand the nature of this motivation. Even before the invasion, when UN sanctions were still in place against Saddam Hussein`s regime, American oil companies could (and, in many cases, did) buy Iraqi oil at market price. The issue was never "access" to Iraqi oil in the sense of simply being able to buy it. The Bush administration was thinking about other kinds of energy access, including controlling the heartland of the word`s main future oil supplies and giving American oil companies privileged access to Iraqi oil reserves. (See, for example, the recent report by the Global Policy Forum). It`s my contention that such privileged "access" for U.S. oil companies would not actually help the American people. The oil majors, after all, have a long history of exploiting Americans hardly less ruthlessly than they exploit the peoples of other countries, when they can make a larger profit by doing so. (The latest incident in their long and deplorable record involved the massive price increases they instituted at American pumps almost immediately after hurricane Katrina hit.) Moreover, such privileged access would have deprived the Iraqis of their right to use the oil to their own benefit -- something they desperately need now that the Saddam Hussein regime, twelve years of brutal sanctions, and the current war have gutted the country.

The best approach for us (but not necessarily for the American oil companies) would be to buy our oil on the open market, put our research money into conservation and renewable fuels instead of military adventures, and avoid trying to get "control" of something that doesn`t belong to us.

6. Nothing was mentioned about what fundamentalist Muslims would like to achieve.
I assume that, when you refer to "fundamentalist Muslims," you are referring to terrorists, including those in Iraq and those who attacked the World Trade Center, the London tube, and the Madrid trains. First, I have to disagree with this identification of the terrorists (who are indeed fundamentalist) with all fundamentalist Muslims. That would be the same as characterizing those who bombed the Oklahoma City Federal Building as "fundamentalist Christians" and then implying that the destruction of such buildings is what all fundamentalist Christians yearn to achieve.

Second, I disagree with the implicit argument that somehow withdrawal will allow the terrorists to dominate Iraqi society and impose a horrible regime on an Iraq, bent on attacking its neighbors and the United States. A large part of my commentary in favor of withdrawal was devoted to debunking this prevalent idea. I think I made a reasonably good case for the possibility that Bush administration actions in Iraq are creating and strengthening the terrorist groups within the Iraqi resistance. The longer the U.S. stays, the more the Islamic terrorists there are likely to gain strength; the sooner the U.S. leaves, the more quickly the resistance will subside, and -- with it -- support for terrorism. The administration`s Iraqi occupation policies are the equivalent of a nightmarish self-fulfilling prophesy.

7. Nothing was mentioned about the results of the U.S. evacuation from Southeast Asia (over a million killed within 5 years).
I think we need to disentangle two different events involving the (forced) American departure from Southeast Asia. First, there was Vietnam, where it was always predicted that a horrendous bloodbath would follow any American withdrawal. Indeed, there were certainly deaths there after the U.S. left, and many refugees fled the country, some for the United States. But whatever these figures may have been, they were dwarfed by the incredible bloodbath that the U.S. created by being in Vietnam in the first place. Reputable sources suggest that millions of Vietnamese died (and countless others were permanently wounded) during the war years. We must conclude, therefore, that in Vietnam our departure actually resulted in a drastic decline in the levels of violence, and -- sometime afterward -- an end to the havoc and destruction; not to speak of the fact that, for years now, the United States has had plenty of "credibility" in Vietnam.

Second, there was the holocaust in Cambodia, which may well have resulted in a million or more deaths. This was also, however, a complex consequence of the U.S. presence in Southeast Asia, not a result of our departure. Cambodia had a stable, neutral government until the Nixon administration launched massive secret bombings against its territory, invaded the country, destabilized the regime, and set in motion the grim unraveling that led to the rise of the murderous Khmer Rouge. If the U.S. had withdrawn from Vietnam in 1965 or 1968, that holocaust would quite certainly never have happened.

The situation in Iraq is not that dissimilar. If the U.S. withdraws soon, there is at least a reasonable chance that the violence will subside quickly and that peace and stability in the region might ever so slowly take hold. The longer the U.S. stays -- further destroying the Iraqi infrastructure and destabilizing neighboring regimes (like Syria and Iran) -- the more likely it is that horrific civil wars and other forms of brutality will indeed occur.

8. Nothing was mentioned about the reputation of the U.S. if it retreats. Don`t forget the quotes about Somalia from Osama Bin Laden. "Cut and Run."
Here we agree. If the U.S. withdraws, this "retreat" will undermine U.S. credibility whenever, in the future, an administration threatens to use military power to force another country to submit to its demands (and may also, as after Vietnam, make Americans far more wary about sending troops abroad to fight presidential wars of choice). I think there are two important implications that derive from this observation.

The first is that this has, in fact, already happened. The most crystalline case making this point is that of Iran, whose leaders were much more compliant to U.S. demands before the Iraq invasion than now that they have seen how the Iraqi resistance has frustrated our military. In fact, the invasion of Iraq has probably done more to strengthen the oppressive Iranian regime, domestically and in the Middle East, than any set of events in the past quarter-century. (See my recent article on this at Tomdispatch.) In other words -- from your point of view -- the longer the Bush administration stays and flounders, the more it undermines its ability to use the threat of military intervention to force other countries to conform to its demands.

From my point of view -- and this is the second implication I want to point out -- the undermining of U.S. credibility is one of the few good things that has resulted from the war in Iraq. I do not believe that anything positive is likely to come from American military adventures; quite the contrary, the Bush administration (and the Clinton, earlier Bush, and Reagan administrations) have used military power to impose bad policies on other countries. We would be much better off, I believe, with the multi-polar world that many Americans advocate (and this administration loathes the very thought of), in which no single state (including the U.S.) could impose itself on others without at least the support of a great many others. We would be far better off in a multitude of ways if our country stopped spending more on its military than the rest of the world combined and started spending some of that money on things that would actually improve the welfare of our people.

9. Nothing was mentioned about Germany, Japan, Korea, and the former Yugoslavia. Should we get out of those? Where was the pre-war planning to get out of all those locations. Did Lincoln have a pre-war plan to leave the South?
I agree that some wars, some interventions, and some occupations can be positive things (without evaluating the particulars of the examples you offer). That does not mean that all, or even most, of them are good. The invasion, occupation, and destruction of Iraq is neither justified, nor moral.

10. Nothing was mentioned about 9/11, where we were attacked by fundamentalist Muslims. How do we change their attitudes?
This query rests on two premises: The first belongs to the Bush administration and was part of the package of lies and intelligence manipulations that it used to hustle Congress and the American people into war -- the claim that Saddam Hussein`s regime and the terrorists who attacked the United States on September 11, 2001 had anything in common or any ties whatsoever. They didn`t and the truth is that 9/11, important as it was, really should have nothing to do with Iraq and no place in any discussion of the war there -- or at least that was certainly true until George Bush and his advisors managed almost single-handedly to recreate Iraq as the "central theater in the war on terror."

The second premise is one held by many Americans -- that the only way to change the attitudes of those who are fighting the U.S. involves "whipping their ass," which rests on another commonly held opinion -- that "these people only understand force." Attitudes are never changed in this way. Every serious scholar who studies terrorism agrees on this essential point: Terrorism arises from the misery that many people are forced to live in or in close proximity to. It is misguided and criminal, but it nevertheless derives from complaints people have about their daily lives, about the humiliations they experience in the larger social and political worlds they inhabit, and about the apparent impossibility of changing these circumstances.

The best way to transform such attitudes, built as they are on hopelessness, would be to take a fraction (a fraction!!) of the money we are now spending on the war in Iraq and on our military and invest it in the lives of others. One example: a panel of expert development economists just delivered a report to the UN saying that for $50 billion annually we could bring the income of the poorest people in the world up to a level that would largely eradicate the famines and mass starvation currently spreading from one continent to another. That project, if enacted, would do more to reduce terrorism than all the "anti-terrorist" activities of our government, including the entire official defense budget (about $400 billion a year), the $200 billion for the war in Iraq, and the $80 or so billion for the Department of Homeland Security. Put another way, if the U.S. withdrew from Iraq, it could fund an entire program to alleviate global suffering with but a modest portion of the money it saved, and start to reduce terrorism instead of increasing it.

Michael Schwartz, Professor of Sociology and Faculty Director of the Undergraduate College of Global Studies at Stony Brook University, has written extensively on popular protest and insurgency, and on American business and government dynamics. His work on Iraq has appeared on the internet at numerous internet sites, including Tomdispatch, Asia Times ,MotherJones.com, and ZNet; and in print in Contexts, Against the Current, and Z Magazine. His books include Radical Politics and Social Structure, and Social Policy and the Conservative Agenda (edited, with Clarence Lo). His email address is [e-mail]

Copyright 2005 Michael Schwartz

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The torture files

CIA agents have broken ranks to reveal the `cruel and inhuman` interrogation techniques they are ordered to use at secret prisons around the world, including freezing and near-drowning.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article331070.e…
By Raymond Whitaker
Published: 04 December 2005

Amid a growing row in the US over torture, a list of "enhanced interrogation techniques" used by CIA agents in secret prisons - including near-drowning, freezing, sleep deprivation, shaking and slapping - has been leaked. In at least one case, a prisoner has died.

The techniques have been authorised for use at CIA "black sites" abroad, at which top terror suspects are held. Last week the US-based organisation Human Rights Watch said "ghost detainees" were held at two military bases, in Poland and Romania. Similar sites in half a dozen other countries, including Afghanistan, Thailand and the Indian Ocean base of Diego Garcia, leased from Britain, are now said to have been closed.

The existence of these detention facilities, and what happens inside them, are the most secret aspect of America`s "war on terror". In contrast to military-run camps and prisons such as Guantanamo Bay in Cuba or Abu Ghraib in Iraq, where it was impossible to shield all CIA activity from outside scrutiny, the location of the "black sites" and the identities of those held there are made known only to a handful of senior officials in the US. In the host countries, only the president and top intelligence officials are aware of them.

Details of the secret prisons and the methods used in them have emerged mainly from CIA officers themselves, who said the public needed to know "the direction their agency has chosen". They broke ranks amid a furore in Washington over an amendment to the White House military spending package going through Congress. Senator John McCain (Republican), a former US navy pilot who was captured and tortured in Vietnam, wants an unequivocal ban on all "cruel and inhuman" treatment of prisoners in US custody, including those held by the CIA.

Eighty-nine of Mr McCain`s fellow senators voted for his amendment, rejecting attempts by the CIA and Vice-President Dick Cheney - who said after 9/11 that "we have to work ... the dark side" - to exclude prisoners held at the "black sites". For the first time President George Bush has threatened to exercise his veto on any defence bill that has the amendment attached.

The CIA prisons contain only the 30 or so most senior al-Qa`ida captives. They include Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the September 2001 attacks, Ramzi Binalshibh, another prime 9/11 suspect, and the Indonesian Riduan Isamuddin, better known as Hambali, accused of masterminding the Bali nightclub bombings in October 2002. Only the merest hints have emerged about their treatment, but according to the most graphic account, given to ABC News in the US, Khalid Sheik Mohammed won the admiration of his interrogators by enduring "waterboarding" for up to two and a half minutes before begging to confess. CIA officers who subjected themselves to the same technique lasted an average of 14 seconds.

ABC`s sources said that just over a dozen CIA interrogators were trained and authorised to use the "enhanced interrogation" techniques. At least three had declined involvement. The use of each technique on each prisoner had to be approved, stage by stage, up to the use of the "water board". About a dozen "high-value" al-Qa`ida targets had been interrogated in this way, and, as one put it: "All of these have confessed, none of them has died, and all of them remain incarcerated."

At least one death has been reported elsewhere, however. In a CIA facility in Kabul known as the "Salt Pit", an officer, described as young and inexperienced, used the "cold treatment" on a detainee, who was left outdoors, naked, throughout a freezing Afghan night. He died of hypothermia. The case is being investigated, along with several others in Afghanistan and Iraq where interrogators - CIA officers, civilian contractors or members of the special forces - went well beyond the guidelines and suspects died as a result.

Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Colin Powell when he was US Secretary of State, said last week that he knew of more than 70 "questionable deaths" of detainees under US supervision up to the end of 2002, when he left office. That figure, he added, was now around 90.

These incidents are in addition to the increasingly well-documented practice of "rendition": flying suspects to Middle Eastern countries where torture and deaths in custody are routine. "If you want a good interrogation, you send them to Jordan. If you want them dead, you send them to Egypt or Syria," one former CIA agent is reported as saying. The McCain amendment, however, will have no impact on foreign torturers. It is mainly aimed at halting the abuses exposed at Abu Ghraib, where routine humiliations degenerated into sadism.

Yet only the low-ranking military police caught on camera in Abu Ghraib have been prosecuted. America`s covert forces are operating in a climate of impunity, described by Cofer Black, then CIA counter-terrorism chief, who told a congressional committee in 2002: "After 9/11, the gloves were off." At one point, according to Newsweek, the Bush administration formally told the CIA it could not be prosecuted for any technique short of inflicting the kind of pain that accompanies organ failure or death.

The normal justification is that such methods could help avert a terror attack in which thousands might be killed. But are there any cases to prove it? Claims that the "waterboarding" of Khalid Sheik Mohammed produced details of planned attacks on the US were sceptically received by one CIA official, who said: "What we got was probably not truthful. And there`s no way of knowing whether what good information they got could not have been obtained by more traditional means."

THE CIA`S SIX `ENHANCED` TECHNIQUES

CIA interrogators say they are allowed to use six "enhanced interrogation techniques", each progressively tougher, on top al-Qa`ida detainees. Their superiors have to give separate approval for every prisoner and every method, all claimed to be legal.

THE ATTENTION GRAB: The interrogator forcefully grabs the shirt front of the prisoner and shakes him. Israel, the only democracy to have openly debated coercion of prisoners, declared this legal in 1987, but the Supreme Court ruled it out in 1999

THE ATTENTION SLAP: Interrogators may deliver "an open-handed slap", which is "aimed at causing pain and triggering fear"

THE BELLY SLAP: A hard open-handed slap to the stomach. The aim is to cause pain, but not internal injury. Doctors advised against using a punch, which could cause lasting internal damage

STANDING FOR HOURS: This technique is described as among the most effective. Prisoners are forced to stand, handcuffed and with their feet shackled to a ring bolt in the floor for more than 40 hours. Exhaustion and sleep deprivation are claimed to be effective in yielding confessions

COLD TREATMENT: The prisoner is left to stand naked in a cell kept at around 10C, and constantly doused with cold water. Misapplication of this technique is blamed for the death of a detainee in Kabul

WATERBOARDING: The prisoner is bound to a board, head slightly below the feet. Plastic is wrapped over his face and water is poured over him, or his head is lowered into a bath. The gag reflex is automatic; few can endure more than a matter of seconds

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02.12.2005: Steve Bell on the Iraq pullout
© Steve Bell 2005
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Die USA hat den Iran zur stärksten Macht im Nahen Osten gemacht.
Dazu ein Artikel mit einer nach meiner Ansicht etwas wilde Spekulation von Spengler, Asia Times.

Dec 6, 2005
Iran`s strength in weakness
By Spengler
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GL06Ak01.html

Once upon a time, an ex-soldier with no credentials but his belief in his own destiny joined a fanatic movement. Against all odds, he won an election, purged his opponents, and outfoxed the powers that surrounded his country. Western elites have not yet accepted that an Austrian corporal bested them, preferring to regard the events of 1933-1945 as an inexplicable aberration. What will they make of the blacksmith`s son and Revolutionary Guard bully-boy Mahmud Ahmedinejad of Iran?

In just five months, Iran`s president has seized the balance of power in Mesopotamia, foiled a global campaign to slow its nuclear weapons program, and forced Washington to entreat Iran for negotiations cap in hand. After Tehran rejected a first American offer, US ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad repeated the request on December 1.

As I wrote on October 25 (A Syriajevo in the making?), the US depends on Iran to maintain stability in Iraq, giving Iran in turn sufficient leverage to thwart American efforts to stop its nuclear weapons program. Asia Times Online`s correspondents have provided compelling evidence to support this conjecture in the meantime. [1] Israel`s military leaders now take it for granted that Iran will become a nuclear power, Stratfor reported on December 1. [2]

Just after September 11, I picked a bone with Sir John Keegan`s claim that "in this war of civilizations, the West will prevail" (Sir John Keegan is wrong: radical Islam might win, October 12, 2001):

Readers who reproached me for using the word "racism" to qualify Washington`s orientation toward the Islamic world should read Keegan`s essay carefully. Here we have the upright Westerner against the underhanded Oriental. Kipling (who wrote vividly about the sneakiness of the British in the Great Game) would blush. It`s all completely, totally, revoltingly wrong. The West confronts not a throwback to medieval Islam, but a Westernized version of Islam transformed into a totalitarian political ideology.

Until Ahmedinejad`s ascent, however, no Islamist leader had emerged with the cunning and capacity to exploit the West`s confusion. Iran seemed the least likely venue for Islamist leadership. With 15% inflation and 11% unemployment, Iran seemed vulnerable in early 2005 - almost as vulnerable, one might add, as Germany was in early 1933 when Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor.

American regional experts without exception expected Iran`s regime to crumble from within. Daniel Pipes, for example, stated in 2003, "I compare Iran today to the Soviet Union under [Leonid] Brezhnev. Yes, the state is strong and threatening, but the people don`t believe in it anymore. It`s a hollow, hollow regime, in other words." [3]

As late as April, Michael Ledeen forecast political disintegration "in Iran, where near-constant demonstrations, protests, and even armed attacks against the institutions of the Islamic Republic have raged ... Iranians no longer require excuses to show their hatred of the mullahcracy." [4]

Reuel Marc Gerecht, the American Enterprise Institute`s resident Iran scholar, insisted throughout that America had nothing to fear from the Shi`ites. With just a bit of covert support for Iranian dissidents, Ledeen insisted, the regime would collapse. Western analysts spent their time with the intellectuals of Tehran, who party at Western-style clubs and wear lipstick under their burkhas - the equivalent of judging Germany`s temper in 1933 from the vantage point of Berlin cabarets.

They ignored the groundswell of support from the rural poor and the Tehran slums that gave Ahmedinejad an overwhelming margin of victory in the June presidential elections. It took the new president just a few months to put paid to dissidents and moderates, placing hundreds of his Revolutionary Guard comrades in the key positions of Iran`s bureaucracy, and purging 40 ambassadors from the diplomatic corps. Hitler was no more ruthless in consolidating power during the weeks following his ascension to the Kanzleramt in March 1933.

It is with grudging respect that I compare Ahmedinejad to Hitler, who bluffed a weak hand into a nearly winning game. Like Hitler, Ahmedinejad evinces a superior cunning born of the knowledge that he has nothing to lose. The position of the Iranian regime is weak; in the long term, it is hopeless.

Within a generation, both Iran`s oil and demographic resources will be exhausted. Impending demographic collapse, I have argued in the past, impels Iran towards an imperial design (Demographics and Iran`s imperial design, September 13). Iran`s elderly dependent population will soar to nearly 30% from just 7% today by mid-century, the consequence of the country`s collapsing birth rate. The demographic disaster will hit just as oil exports dry up during the 2020s. To break out of the trap, Iran must make an all-or-nothing bet during the present generation.

Western historians typically portray Hitler as a megalomaniacal lunatic who nearly conquered the world through a series of regrettable accidents. But Hitler took into account his own weakness with greater clarity than the British or Russians. Three weeks after he provoked World War II by invading Poland, Hitler told German military commanders:

We have nothing to lose, but much indeed to gain. As a result of the constraints forced upon us, our economic position is such that we cannot hold out for more than a few years. [Hermann] Goering can confirm this. We have no other choice, we must act ... At no point in the future will Germany have a man with more authority than I. But I could be replaced at any moment by some idiot or criminal ... The morale of the German people is excellent. It can only worsen from here. [5]

Hitler knew very well that his command economy could crack. He coveted the industrial capacity of Western Europe, the granaries of Eastern Europe and the oil of Romania. Iran covets the oil of southeastern Iraq, western Saudi Arabia and the Islamic republics of the former Soviet Union and proposes to annex or at least control it through satrapies on the ancient Persian model. Asia Times Online`s Pepe Escobar outlined the Iranian strategy in a September 10 dispatch from Tehran (Iran takes over Pipelineistan).

Thanks to America`s ideological obsession with democracy, Iran is close to control of Iraq`s oil-rich Shi`ite regions. On December 4, Iraq`s Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani issued a de facto endorsement of the pro-Iranian religious coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance, pushing his country further into the Iranian sphere of influence. Sistani`s appeal for support for religious parties ruins the prospects of Washington`s favored politicians, the secular Shi`ites Iyad Allawi and Ahmad Chalabi.

Iran`s proxy warrior Muqtada al-Sadr, meanwhile, now holds the balance of military power in Iraq, as I predicted in the October 25 article. As the New York Times` Edward Wong reported on November 27:

Wielding violence and political popularity as tools of his authority, Mr Sadr, the Shi`ite cleric who has defied the American authorities here since the fall of Saddam Hussein, is cementing his role as one of Iraq`s most powerful figures. Just a year after Mr Sadr led two fierce uprisings, the Americans are hailing his entry into the elections as the best sign yet that the political process can co-opt insurgents. But his ascent could portend a darker chain of events, for he continues to embrace his image as an unrepentant guerrilla leader even as he takes the reins of political power. Mr Sadr has made no move to disband his militia, the thousands-strong Mahdi Army. In recent weeks, factions of the militia have brazenly assaulted and abducted Sunni Arabs, rival Shi`ite groups, journalists and British-led forces in the south, where Mr Sadr has a zealous following.

A year ago, America still had the option to partition Iraq into a Kurdish north, a Sunni center and a Shi`ite south. Now that Iran has reinforced Muqtada`s militia with evident American tolerance, partition might well lead to Iranian control of the resulting Shi`ite rump state. Iran`s leaders are the same hard men who did not blink at a million casualties during Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s and such tactics as driving hordes of boys into minefields. America simply does not have the stomach for this sort of warfare.

The only potentially successful maneuver at Washington`s disposal would be to repeat Britain`s colonial policy of the 1920s, enlisting and arming elements of the old Ba`ath regime to battle it out with the Shi`ites until both sides are bled white. But I do not think Washington has either the intent or the competence to execute an imperial scheme of this nature.

Under the circumstances, does anyone seriously doubt that Iran will develop nuclear weapons capability? Not the Israelis, it appears. Stratfor, an Internet-based intelligence service, cites "a report in the daily newspaper Maariv, which quoted a senior security source as saying, `We shall have to put up with a nuclear Iran`. The unnamed source added that, `I do not see any force in the world today that could reverse the situation - namely Iran becoming nuclear ... and there will be no alternative but to put up with the emerging situation`."

Despite Tehran`s anti-Israel rhetoric, a nuclear Iran does not necessarily represent an existential threat to the Jewish state. Israel almost certainly possesses thermonuclear weapons hundreds of times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, as well as the capability to deliver them via submarine-launched cruise missiles.

Nor do the Tor M-1 anti-aircraft and anti-missile missiles that Iran reportedly ordered from Russia last week represent a decisive threat to American or Israeli capabilities. Nonetheless, Russia`s evident willingness to upgrade Iran`s weapons capability reflects another unintended result of Washington`s ideological campaign for democratization. America has offered open support for the "color revolutions" in parts of the former Soviet Union, beginning with Ukraine`s "Orange" revolution last year and continuing through the "Yellow" revolution in Kyrgyzstan last spring. The unpleasant regimes Washington helped replace gave way to equally unpleasant regimes, except with greater instability.

Russian President Vladimir Putin fears instability on Russia`s borders, but he cannot persuade Washington to desist from stirring the pot. Russian military cooperation with Iran provides him with a bargaining chip to use against Washington`s designs on what Putin considers a Russian sphere of influence. Even though Russia has more to fear from an imperial Iran than Washington, American blundering in the former Soviet Union has given Tehran additional room to maneuver. And Iran`s leaders have played the divisions among their prospective enemies masterfully, again calling to mind the Austrian corporal who nearly destroyed the West.

Notes
[1] See for example The ties that tangle Iraq and Iran by M K Bhadrakumar on November 29.

[2] Emerging Shift in Israel`s Iran Policy

[3] Taking a Tougher Approach to Syria

[4] The Revolution Continues

[5] Ansprache Adolf Hitlers vor den Oberbefehlshabern auf dem Obersalzberg

(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us for information on sales, syndication and republishing .)

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Is Bush The Worst President Ever? and Thousands protest global warming amid UN climate conference.
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Monday, December 05, 2005

Mother of All Trials...
http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/2005_12_01_riverbendblog_a…

I didn`t get to see the beginning of the trial today. We were gathered in the kitchen after a brief rodent scare, trying to determine where the mouse had come from when I was attracted by the sound of yelling coming from the living room.

The cousin was standing in front of the television adjusting the volume and there was a lot of bellowing coming from the court. That was nearly the beginning- the defense lawyers were pulling out of the trial because apparently, Ramsey Clark wasn`t allowed to speak in English- something to do with the sovereignty of the court or trial and the impropriety of speaking in a foreign language (slightly ironic considering the whole country is under foreign occupation). The lawyers were back later- although I didn`t see that either.

I really began watching when they brought on the first witness, who was also the first plaintiff. He talked about the whole Dujail situation and his account was emotional and detailed. The details were intriguing considering he was only 15 years old at the time. The problem with his whole account is that so much of it is hearsay. He heard from someone that something happened to someone else, etc. Now, I`m not a lawyer but I`m a fan of The Practice and if watching Dylan McDermott has taught me anything, it`s that hearsay is not acceptable evidence.

The second witness was more to the point but he was 10 when everything happened and that didn`t help his case. In the end, when the judge asked him who he was making a complaint against, he said he wasn`t making a complaint against anyone. Then he changed his mind and said he was complaining against one of the accused… Then he added his complaint was against anyone convicted of the crime... And finally it was a complaint against "All Ba`athists at the time".


Couldn`t they find more credible witnesses? They were fifteen and ten at the time... it just doesn`t make sense.

At one point, the defense lawyers wanted to leave the trial yet again because apparently some security guard or police officer was threatening them from afar- making threatening gestures, etc. The judge requested that he be pulled out of the court (the security person), but not before hell broke loose in the court. Saddam began yelling something, the defense lawyers were making accusations and Barazan got up and began shouting at the person we couldn`t see.

The court was a mess. There was a lot of yelling, screaming, sermonising, ranting, accusing, etc. I felt bad for the judge. He really seemed to be trying hard to control the situation, but everyone kept interrupting him, and giving him orders. He`s polite and patient, he`d make a good divorce judge- but I don`t think he`s strong enough for the court. He just doesn`t have the power to keep the court in its place.


It wasn`t really like a trial. It reminded me of what we call a `fassil` which is what tribal sheikhs arrange when two tribes are out of sorts with one another. The heads of the tribes are brought together along with the principal family members involved in the rift and after some yelling, accusations, and angry words they try to sort things out. That`s what it felt like today. They kept interrupting each other and there was even some spitting at one point… It was both frustrating and embarrassing- and very unprofessional.

One thing that struck me about what the witnesses were saying- after the assassination attempt in Dujail, so much of what later unfolded is exactly what is happening now in parts of Iraq. They talked about how a complete orchard was demolished because the Mukhabarat thought people were hiding there and because they thought someone had tried to shoot Saddam from that area. That was like last year when the Americans razed orchards in Diyala because they believed insurgents were hiding there. Then they talked about the mass detentions- men, women and children- and its almost as if they are describing present-day Ramadi or Falloojah. The descriptions of cramped detention spaces, and torture are almost exactly the testimonies of prisoners in Abu Ghraib, etc.

It makes one wonder when Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney and the rest will have their day, as the accused, in court.


- posted by river @ 8:25 PM

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Rice Defends Handling of Terror Suspects
Secretary of State Suggests Policy Helped Prevent Terrorist Attacks
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12…

By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 5, 2005; 4:51 PM

BERLIN, Dec. 5 -- Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, seeking to damper a furor in Europe over the CIA`s detention and transport of suspected terrorists, strongly suggested Monday that the CIA`s interrogation of such suspects took place with the cooperation of European governments and helped prevent terrorist attacks.

In a carefully crafted and lengthy statement delivered at Andrews Air Force base at 7:15 a.m. Monday, shortly before boarding her plane for a week-long swing through Europe, Rice provided the administration`s most comprehensive effort to explain its policy on the handling of terrorism suspects across international borders. U.S. officials hope it will ease concerns raised in European capitals after The Washington Post reported Nov. 2 about a clandestine prison system in Eastern Europe and other countries.

Rice did not confirm or deny the existence of the prisons, saying "we cannot discuss information that would compromise the success of intelligence, law enforcement and military operations." But she implied that European governments were aware of U.S. intelligence operations in Europe, including assisting in a practice known as "rendition," in which terror suspects are whisked away from countries without formal extradition proceedings.

At one point, Rice appeared to acknowledge that detainees connected to the Sept. 11 attacks have been held outside the United States. U.S. intelligence agencies have gathered intelligence from a "very small number of extremely dangerous detainees," including planners of the Sept. 11 attacks and on the U.S.S. Cole, she said.

The "United States has fully respected the sovereignty of other countries that cooperate in these matters," she said. Rice`s reference to "sovereignty" is diplomatic code for saying intelligence operations took place with the full knowledge of relevant European government or intelligence officials, U.S. officials said.

Joint intelligence cooperation between the United States and European countries have "helped protect European countries from attack, helping save European lives," Rice said.

The Post reported that the CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe as part of a covert prison system that at various times has involved sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe. The Post did not identify the Eastern European countries at the request of senior U.S. officials, who said the disclosure could disrupt counterterrorism efforts in those countries and elsewhere and make them targets of retaliation.

The Post article spurred a series of probes across Europe. Last week, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw wrote Rice on behalf of the European Union, asking for "clarification" of media reports suggesting "violations of international law" in order to "allay parliamentary and public concerns."

Rice said her statement was essentially the text of her reply to Straw.

The secretary of state began her trip to Europe here in Germany, where on Tuesday she will seek to build relations with the new government of Chancellor Angela Merkel before flying to Romania and Ukraine. She also will attend meetings at NATO headquarters in Belgium.

Throughout her trip, aides expect Rice to be dogged by questions about the CIA prisons -- which intelligence officials said were kept secret because they violated European laws. Werner Hoyer, a member of the German parliament`s foreign-policy committee from the opposition Free Democrat Party, said Rice`s statement would put European governments on the defensive to explain what they knew about joint counter-terrorism operations in Europe.

"She`s trying to throw the ball back into the European field, especially the German field," he said in an interview. "She`s saying that fighting terrorism is not just an American problem but a German problem. This practice of renditions is perhaps in keeping with U.S. law, but there are indications that perhaps it is not compatible with German law."

In Germany, government officials did not respond directly to Rice`s statement ahead of her arrival in Berlin Monday night. They also were slow to respond to recent revelations that senior leaders were aware of some controversial CIA counter-terrorism operations in Europe but had kept their involvement a secret.

After the Post report, Human Rights Watch cited flight records of aircraft allegedly linked to the CIA to suggest that facilities in Poland and Romania might have been used. Both countries have denied they housed secret CIA prisons, but the Human Rights Watch report spurred the European media to investigate the use of European airports for the transfer terror suspects.

Speaking to reporters as she flew to Berlin, Rice said she hoped to refocus the debate during her trip by reminding Europeans that intelligence is essential to battling shadowy terror networks.

"Ultimately if you want to stop attacks, you have to use intelligence to do it," she said. Rice added that "the real question that our populations are going to be asking us" is whether government officials in Europe and elsewhere are "doing everything that you can to prevent the next terrorist attack."

Rice spoke emotionally of appearing before the Sept. 11 commission and facing such questions herself. "It is exceedingly hard when you look at the families who lost their lives in a terrorist attack," she said. "You wonder to yourself: Did I do everything that I could?"

In her statement, Rice broadly defended rendition, which she said is a "vital tool" that is recognized by international law and has been used by many countries, including the United States, since even before the Sept. 11 attacks.

Reports of U.S. renditions have spawned controversy and judicial probes in Italy and Spain, but Rice noted that France used rendition in 1994 to remove the legendary terrorist "Carlos the Jackal" from Sudan for prosecution in France.

"Renditions take terrorists out of action, and save lives," she said.

Rice also asserted that the United States does not transport terrorism suspects "for the purpose of interrogation using torture" and "will not transport anyone to a country when we believe he will be tortured." She added that "where appropriate, the United States seeks assurances that transferred persons will not be tortured."

"Acts of physical or mental torture are expressly prohibited," Rice said. "The United States government does not authorize or condone torture of detainees."

The United States is a signatory to the U.N. Convention Against Torture, in which nations refuse to torture and also pledge to prevent cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of prisoners. The Bush administration, however, has argued those obligations concerning cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment do not apply outside U.S. territory.

The Post reported that CIA interrogators at the overseas sites have been permitted to use interrogation techniques prohibited by the United Nations convention or by U.S. military law. Asked about this apparent contradiction, Rice told reporters: "Our people, wherever they are, are operating under U.S. law and U.S. obligations."

Any violation of U.S. detention standards is investigated and punished, Rice said in her statement, citing the case of the prison abuse at Abu Ghraib "that sickened us all" and the abuse of a detainee by an intelligence agency contractor in Afghanistan.

She said international law allows a country to detain a suspect for the "duration of hostilities," but the United States does not hold anyone longer than is necessary to evaluate evidence against them.

Correspondent Craig Witlock contributed to this report.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

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[urlTranscript: Secretary of State Rice`s Remarks Prior to Departing for European Trip]http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/05/AR2005120500462.html[/url]

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[urlDownload the chart in PDF form.]http://www.thenation.com/special/pdf/iraq_index.pdf[/url]


This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051219/iraq_index
The Iraq Index
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051219/iraq_index

by JOHN S. FRIEDMAN

[from the December 19, 2005 issue]

As the debate about when and how to exit Iraq intensifies, it is essential to have information that is accessible and that puts the human costs of the war in context.

More American soldiers have died in Iraq than in all US conflicts put together since Vietnam. About eight times more soldiers have died in Iraq than in Afghanistan and all other countries where the United States is fighting terrorism, combined. Most of those who have died came from poor, rural areas. The smaller US territories and commonwealths are paying the greatest price. American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands and the Virgin Islands have the highest number of deaths per capita. On the other hand, Puerto Rico has the second-lowest number. Of the states, Vermont has the highest and Utah the lowest number of deaths per capita.

Approximately 26 percent of those killed have been minorities. This percentage is about the same as in the Gulf War (24 percent), but much greater than in the Vietnam War (14 percent) or even Afghanistan (19 percent). Citizen soldiers (reservists and members of the National Guard) are shouldering a significant proportion of the casualties, accounting for about one-quarter of all US deaths since the war began. More than 15,500 US soldiers have been wounded--more than seven times the number who have died.

It is extremely difficult to get precise data in Iraq`s chaotic war zone. The Pentagon reports the number of wounded only about twice a month, and warns that many of its statistics are subject to change. Some of the numbers compiled on these pages can only be estimates. One of the most up-to-date sources of casualty information, relying on Department of Defense data, is the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count website (icasualties.org), where dedicated volunteers keep daily track of the US victims. Other helpful sources include The Iraq Quagmire, a report by the Institute for Policy Studies (ips-dc.org); globalsecurity.org; and tedkennedy.com.

Sixty journalists have been killed in Iraq, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. The exact number of private contractors and other civilian employees who have been killed is not known. But at least 428 have died and 3,963 have been injured, according to Knight Ridder Newspapers. Of these deaths, at least 147 are Americans, the New York Times reports. This figure is probably low; seventy-nine employees from Halliburton alone have died in Iraq, according to a company spokesperson.

The total number of Iraqis who have been killed will never be known. Recently the Pentagon reported that nearly 26,000 Iraqis had been "killed or wounded from insurgent attacks" from the beginning of 2004 to September 2005. But when you add the estimated number of Iraqis killed by American forces, the figure could be more than 100,000, according to a controversial 2004 study published in The Lancet, a respected British medical journal. Another source, iraqbodycount.org, estimates that by late November, Iraqi deaths totaled between 27,115 and 30,559.

The war has already cost the United States an estimated $251 billion. Each day an estimated $195 million is being spent--money that could provide twelve meals to every starving child in the world, according to Senator Ted Kennedy`s office. In addition, one day of Iraq War expenses could cover what the College Board estimates to be the full cost of a public higher education for some 17,000 American students.

The tragedy of Iraq can never be told by numbers alone. To borrow from John Crawford`s firsthand account of the war, The Last True Story I`ll Ever Tell, the following chart "won`t bring back anyone`s son or brother or wife." But perhaps it will "simply make people aware, if only for one glimmering moment," of the terrible costs of a war that refuses to end.

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BUSH CALLS ‘PLAN FOR VICTORY’ SLOGAN A SUCCESS
Vows to Create Additional Slogans to Defeat Insurgents
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One day after making a speech on Iraq at the United States Naval Academy in front of a giant placard reading “Plan For Victory,” President George W. Bush pronounced the “Plan For Victory” slogan an unqualified success.

“Much time, thought and effort went into creating the ‘Plan For Victory’ slogan,” Mr. Bush said today at a White House press conference. “I think we can all agree that the hard work that went into that slogan has really paid off.”

The president said that not only were the words “Plan For Victory” catchy and memorable, but the choice of yellow letters against a blue background was perfect: “The yellow against the blue really made the letters stand out in a victory-like way.”

Mr. Bush told reporters that he believed that “time and patience” were the ultimate keys to success in Iraq, adding, “It took time and patience for us to come up with a really effective slogan like ‘Plan For Victory.’”

But even as he praised his administration’s latest slogan, Mr. Bush said he would not rest on his laurels, vowing to create additional slogans to defeat the insurgents in Iraq.

“The insurgents may have many weapons at their disposal, but they are not as good as we are at coming up with slogans,” Mr. Bush said. “So far the only one they’ve come up with is ‘Jihad’ – not catchy at all, if you ask me.”

Elsewhere, major retailers cheered the early results of the holiday shopping season, announcing that sales of totally useless items surged fifty percent.
http://www.borowitzreport.com/archive_rpt.asp?rec=1272&srch=

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“Not good news for President Bush. President Bush approval rating now down to 35%. I can`t believe how unpopular President Bush is these days. You know, he wasn`t even invited to the White House Christmas party?”
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“Well, let`s see what the latest scandal in Iraq is. You may have heard about this. It seems the Pentagon has been paying Iraqi journalists to write and promote a pro-White House view in Iraqi newspapers. See, luckily we don`t have that kind of thing here. We have Fox News.”
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“And Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has defended the White House position on detainees by saying, ‘with terrorists, you can lock someone up even before they commit a crime.’ How about trying this with Congressmen? Why don`t we try this some time?”-- Jay Leno
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At least Bill Clinton was competent.[url—Zings!]http://www.tallahassee.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051205/OPINION04/512050303/1006/OPINION[/url]
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EXCLUSIVE: Sources Tell ABC News Top Al Qaeda Figures Held in Secret CIA Prisons

10 Out of 11 High-Value Terror Leaders Subjected to `Enhanced Interrogation Techniques`

http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/Investigation/story?id=1375123[/B]

By BRIAN ROSS and RICHARD ESPOSITO

Dec. 5, 2005 — - Two CIA secret prisons were operating in Eastern Europe until last month when they were shut down following Human Rights Watch reports of their existence in Poland and Romania.

Current and former CIA officers speaking to ABC News on the condition of confidentiality say the United States scrambled to get all the suspects off European soil before Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived there today. The officers say 11 top al Qaeda suspects have now been moved to a new CIA facility in the North African desert.

CIA officials asked ABC News not the name the specific countries where the prisons were located, citing security concerns.

The CIA declines to comment, but current and former intelligence officials tell ABC News that 11 top al Qaeda figures were all held at one point on a former Soviet air base in one Eastern European country. Several of them were later moved to a second Eastern European country.

All but one of these 11 high-value al Qaeda prisoners were subjected to the harshest interrogation techniques in the CIA`s secret arsenal, the so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" authorized for use by about 14 CIA officers and first reported by ABC News on Nov. 18.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice today avoided directly answering the question of secret prisons in remarks made on her departure for Europe, where the issue of secret prisons and secret flights has caused a furor.

Without mentioning any country by name, Rice acknowledged special handling for certain terrorists.

"The captured terrorists of the 21st century do not fit easily into traditional systems of criminal or military justice, which were designed for different needs. We have had to adapt," Rice said.

The CIA has used a small fleet of private jets to move top al Qaeda suspects from Afghanistan and the Middle East to Eastern Europe, where Human Rights Watch has identified Poland and Romania as the countries that housed secret sites.

But Polish Defense Minister Radoslaw Sikorski told ABC Chief Investigative Correspondent Brian Ross today: "My president has said there is no truth in these reports."

Ross asked: "Do you know otherwise, sir, are you aware of these sites being shut down in the last few weeks, operating on a base under your direct control?"

Sikorski answered, "I think this is as much as I can tell you about this."

In Romania, where the secret prison was possibly at a military base visited last year by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the new Romanian prime minister said today there is no evidence of a CIA site but that he will investigate.

Sources tell ABC that the CIA`s secret prisons have existed since March 2002 when one was established in Thailand to house the first important al Qaeda target captured. Sources tell ABC that the approval for another secret prison was granted last year by a North African nation.

Sources tell ABC News that the CIA has a related system of secretly returning other prisoners to their home country when they have outlived their usefulness to the United States.

These same sources also tell ABC News that U.S. intelligence also ships some "unlawful combatants" to countries that use interrogation techniques harsher than any authorized for use by U.S. intelligence officers. They say that Jordan, Syria, Morocco and Egypt were among the nations used in order to extract confessions quickly using techniques harsher than those authorized for use by U.S. intelligence officers. These prisoners were not necessarily citizens of those nations.

According to sources directly involved in setting up the CIA secret prison system, it began with the capture of Abu Zabayda in Pakistan. After treatment there for gunshot wounds, he was whisked by the CIA to Thailand where he was housed in a small disused warehouse on an active airbase. There, his cell was kept under 24-hour closed circuit TV surveillance and his life-threatening wounds were tended to by a CIA doctor especially sent from Langley headquarters to assure Abu Zubaydah was given proper care, sources said. Once healthy, he was slapped, grabbed, made to stand long hours in a cold cell and finally handcuffed and strapped feet up to a water board until after .31 seconds he begged for mercy and began to cooperate.

While in the secret facilities in Eastern Europe, Abu Zubaydah and his fellow captives were fed breakfasts that included yogurt and fruit, lunches that included steamed vegetables and beans, and dinners that included meat or chicken and more vegetables and rice, sources say. In exchange for cooperation, prisoners were sometimes given hard candies, deserts and chocolates. Abu Zubaydah was partial to Kit Kats, the same treat Saddam Hussein fancied in his captivity.

"One of the difficult issues in this new kind of conflict is what to do with captured individuals who we know or believe to be terrorists," Rice said. "The individuals come from many countries and are often captured far from their original homes. Among them are those who are effectively stateless, owing allegiance only to the extremist cause of transnational terrorism. Many are extremely dangerous. And some have information that may save lives, perhaps even thousands of lives."

Sources tell ABC News that Jordanians, Egyptians, Moroccans, Tunisians, Algerians, Saudis, Pakistanis, Uzbekistanis and Chinese citizens have been returned to their nations` intelligence services after initial debriefing by U.S. intelligence officers. Rice said renditions such as these are vital to the war on terror. "Rendition is a vital tool in combating transnational terrorism," she said.

Of the 12 high value targets housed by the CIA, only one did not require water boarding before he talked. Ramzi bin al-Shibh broke down in tears after he was walked past the cell of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the operational planner for Sept. 11. Visibly shaken, he started to cry and became as cooperative as if he had been tied down to a water board, sources said.

Copyright © 2005 ABC News Internet Ventures
Dec. 5, 2005



Following is a list of 12 high-value targets housed by the CIA.

Abu Zubaydah: Held first in Thailand then Poland

Ibn Al-Shaykh al-Libi: Held in Poland. Previously held in Pakistan/Afghanistan

Abdul Rahim al-Sharqawi: Held in Poland

Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri: Held in Poland

Ramzi Binalshibh: Held in Poland

Mohammed Omar Abdel-Rahman: Held in Poland

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed: Held in Poland

Waleed Mohammed bin Attash: Held in Poland

Hambali: In U.S. custody. Kept isolated from other high-value targets.

Hassan Ghul: Held in Poland.

Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani: Held in Poland

Abu Faraj al-Libbi: Held in Poland

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Die Immigranten zur Arbeit zwingen und nicht in das Wohlfahrtsystem integrieren. Die US-Lösung für Europa!

December 6, 2005
Politicus
U.S. Model for Europe: Immigrant Work Ethic
http://select.nytimes.com/iht/2005/12/06/international/IHT-0…

By JOHN VINOCUR
International Herald Tribune

If the United States has historically had more success in integrating its immigrants than Europe does nowadays, it`s because the American work ethic makes greater demands on the newcomers than Europe`s welfare societies - at the same time that America offers a job-related payback in dignity and the prospect of success.

Simplistic theorizing? But maybe not so far from the truth. Marx and Gramsci pointed, variously, to the system in the United States as convincing in its claims that it provided a chance to rise in a society where all classes emphasize the virtues of hard work.

These days, following France`s three weeks of rioting, largely by Arab and African Muslim immigrants, (mere "social disturbances," Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin explained to the world last week), there are a few European politicians taking a new look at the work ethic as a missing link in their countries` similar problems with integration.

This means a not so politically correct leap over the very real but incomplete explanation that discrimination and a lack of education are the essential causes of the high unemployment and the often angry alienation of Europe`s immigrants.

Instead, the new thinking brings a focus to what has been called the failure of welfare-colonialism: Europe`s allowing immigrants to become dependent on social handouts while letting a mutual commitment to work slide as a necessary bond in their integration.

The developing idea boils down to this: Because of the nature of the American ethos and the United States` less embracing social protections, immigrants coming to the country are prepared to seek work. In Europe, there are welfare-only alternatives to finding a job that create neither dignity for the immigrants nor, among the home folks, a sense of immigrants` contribution to society.

The Netherlands` leading left-wing opposition politician, Wouter Bos, who heads the Labor Party, has gone to the heart of the problem in the direct Dutch manner. He says: "Minorities integrate American society quickly. Here, social scientists argue it`s easier to become dependent on social security than to seek a job."

Bos talked to me about creating a system in which immigrants in the Netherlands would build up credits toward full social-service benefits through work. He compared it to an air-miles program where the free ride, if it comes, is awarded on the basis of performance. There`s no question of eliminating basic Dutch welfare protections for noncitizens, and Bos acknowledged that his idea would have to be checked out in relation to international law.

The concern about the place of the work ethic as a hobbled element in Europe`s integration of immigrants is reinforced by statistical reality.

A study made in Oslo, quoted by Unni Wikan of the University of Oslo in her 2002 book "Generous Betrayal," said Pakistanis, Turks and Moroccans living in the city were three to five times more likely to be living from disability payments than Norwegians. In Denmark, current figures show that 43 percent of immigrants and their descendants have jobs, compared to 83 percent of native Danes.

In the past, Bertel Haarder the Danish education minister and former integration minister, had approached similar figures by saying: "It`s not Turkish but Danish culture that`s flawed. It`s in Denmark where Turks have learned not to do anything for themselves."

Now, the center-right government in Denmark has proposed a directive that would make extending Danish citizenship to immigrants contingent on their working four of the previous five years before it`s granted. Reinforcing the work ethic is also described as central in plans to cut allowances to immigrant parents whose children under 18 are not working or attending school; or, on becoming 18, making acceptance of a job a condition for receiving benefits.

Haarder explained on the phone last week: "I don`t think you can preach work. You have to send concrete signals, and we`ve been too unclear. We want to underline that in this country you have an obligation to work and educate yourself. Otherwise, there`s the probability that immigrants settle in on welfare and that this goes from generation to generation. We`re sending the message, to get something you`ve got to give something."

In Europe, I`d note that this message to immigrants can get tangled in the comforters and warm bedding of early retirement plans (Paris Métro drivers can hang it up at age 50 with full pay) and 35-hour work weeks. It`s certainly not just another number when a poll shows Americans, in comparison with the French and British (and even the Swedes), are doubly convinced that hard work means far more than "luck and connections" in getting ahead.

This statistic is part of the argument made by Seymour Martin Lipset in his now classic book, "American Exceptionalism," how the central elements of a national creed distinguishing and sustaining American society include the fact that "Americans choose to work."

But it`s more than that. After lecturing in Europe this fall, Francis Fukuyama, the American political scientist, has come around to the idea that if work equals dignity and belonging in both the United States and Europe, there were other distinctions in play about how work functions (or doesn`t function) as an integrator on the two sides of the Atlantic.

The fact is, Fukuyama said in a conversation in Washington three weeks ago, America creates more jobs. Europe is stuck in many places with the idea that there is a fixed amount of work for distribution while America believes it is eternally expandable. And, according to Fukuyama, America makes a value judgment that Europe does not: differentiating between the deserving poor who want to work, and those whose inclinations are elsewhere.

The sum was, he said, "In the U.S. model an immigrant gets dignity by contributing to the whole and by the dignity of his work. I think the Dutch are beginning to see this."

Other Europeans have before them. If Lipset`s analysis of their thinking is correct, two monuments of Socialist theory, Karl Marx and Antonio Gramsci, the Italian revolutionary, went as far as identifying something admirable and even equalitarian in American society that could be linked to the place in which it holds work.

Recommending American models as social, political or economic examples gets distinctly little traction in the European mind-set of December 2005. But remove the Made in USA label, and the reference points are still incontrovertible: about 4 percent yearly growth, 5.5 percent unemployment, and immigrants who work - on the job, and through it, at becoming compatible Americans.

E-mail: [e-mail]



* Copyright 2005

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Most Living In Eight Countries Allied With U.S. Want Nothing To Do [urlWith Secret Interrogation Of Suspected Terrorists]http://www.ipsos-na.com/news/act_hit_cntr.cfm?id=2891&Region=us&PDF_name=mr051206-4topline.pdf[/url]


December 6, 2005
Poll Shows Divide on Question of Torture
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Torture-AP-Poll.…
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 5:03 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Most people in eight countries that are American allies don`t want the United States conducting secret interrogations of terror suspects on their soil -- a sensitive question after recent reports of secret prisons run by the CIA in eastern Europe.

Anxiety about reports of secret prisons has been heightened by the ongoing debate on the use of torture. The AP-Ipsos poll found Americans and residents of many of the allied countries divided on the question of torture, with about as many saying it`s OK in some cases as those saying it never should be used.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who is traveling in Europe this week, said Monday the United States is following all laws and treaties on the treatment of terrorism suspects and has shared intelligence with its allies that has ``helped protect European countries from attack, saving European lives.``

Like other U.S. officials, Rice has refused to answer the underlying question of whether the CIA operated secret, Soviet-era prisons in Eastern Europe and whether CIA flights carried al-Qaida prisoners through European airports. She said the U.S. ``will use every lawful weapon to defeat these terrorists.``

About two-thirds of the people living in Canada, Mexico, South Korea and Spain said they would oppose allowing the U.S. to secretly interrogate terror suspects in their countries. Almost that many in Britain, France, Germany and Italy said they feel the same way. Almost two-thirds in the United States support such interrogations in the U.S. by their own government.

Officials with the European Union and in at least a half-dozen European countries are investigating the reports of secret U.S. interrogations in eastern Europe. The EU has threatened to revoke voting rights of any nation in the European Union that was host to a clandestine detention center.

After the report of secret prisons overseas, President Bush said, ``We do not torture.``

U.S. military forces have held hundreds of suspects at known installations outside the United States, including at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The U.S. has adopted aggressive interrogation techniques since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks -- techniques some fear occasionally cross the line into torture.

``I thought we were the good guys,`` said Alan Schwartz, a political independent who lives near Buffalo, N.Y. ``I thought we were the ones with the high standards.``

Almost four in 10, 38 percent, in the United States said they thought torture could be justified at least sometimes. About one-fourth said it could be justified rarely, and 36 percent said it could never be justified.

About four in 10 in Mexico and France said torture is never justified. About half in Britain, Spain, Germany and Canada felt torture could never be justified, while only one in 10 in South Korea said torture is never OK, according to the polls of about 1,000 adults in each of the nine countries.

They were conducted between Nov. 15 and Nov. 28. Each poll had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

The strongest opposition to torture came in Italy, where six in 10 said it is never justified.

``It doesn`t matter if these people are dangerous, they still have a dignity and the right not to be tortured for whatever reason,`` said Maurizio Longo, an Italian real estate agent.

The Bush administration has taken the position that some terrorism suspects are ``enemy combatants`` not protected by the Geneva Conventions, which are international treaties that, among other things, spell out the rights of prisoners of war. In 2002, a group of Justice Department lawyers prepared internal memos that gave the government more freedom in the aggressive interrogation of terrorist suspects.

``The Bush administration policy is against torture of any kind; it`s prohibited by federal criminal law,`` said John Yoo, a University of California, Berkeley, law professor who helped write the internal memos while at the Justice Department. ``The debate is whether you can use interrogation methods that are short of torture. Some who have been critical of the Bush administration have confused torture with cruel, inhumane treatment.``

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., is pushing to ban the use of torture as well as ``cruel and inhumane treatment`` and said this week on NBC that he will accept no compromise.

The government has been redefining what counts as torture, said Gregg Bloche, a Georgetown law school professor and fellow at the Brookings Institution. Some interrogation techniques adopted by intelligence agencies and the military for locations like Guantanamo spread to other places like Iraq, he said.

Bloche said it will be difficult for the United States to reverse policy changes on aggressive interrogation because that might require an admission of wrongdoing.

``Once you`re in the game,`` Bloche said, ``it`s hard to get out.``


* Copyright 2005 The Associated Press

How do you feel about the use of torture against suspected terrorists to obtain information about terrorism
activities? Can that …?
U.S. Canada Mexico S. Korea
Often be justified ................................ 11 9 9 6
Sometimes be justified ........................ 27 19 22 47
Rarely be justified................................ 23 21 18 33
Never be justified ................................ 36 49 40 10
Not sure............................................. 3 2 11 4
France+Germany+Italy+Spain+U.K.
Often be justified ................................ 12 8 9 7 9
Sometimes be justified ........................ 20 22 14 14 21
Rarely be justified................................ 25 20 14 16 21
Never be justified ................................ 40 48 60 54 48
Not sure............................................. 3 2 3 9 1

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December 6, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
The Hubris of the Humanities
http://select.nytimes.com/2005/12/06/opinion/06kristof.html

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

The best argument against "intelligent design" has always been humanity itself. At a time when only 40 percent of Americans believe in evolution, and only 13 percent know what a molecule is, we`re an argument at best for "mediocre design."

But put aside the evolution debate for a moment. It`s only a symptom of something much deeper and more serious: a profound illiteracy about science and math as a whole.

One-fifth of Americans still believe that the Sun goes around the Earth, instead of the other way around. And only about half know that humans did not live at the same time as dinosaurs.

The problem isn`t just inadequate science (and math) teaching in the schools, however. A larger problem is the arrogance of the liberal arts, the cultural snootiness of, of ... well, of people like me - and probably you.

What do I mean by that? In the U.S. and most of the Western world, it`s considered barbaric in educated circles to be unfamiliar with Plato or Monet or Dickens, but quite natural to be oblivious of quarks and chi-squares. A century ago, Einstein published his first paper on relativity - making 1905 as important a milestone for world history as 1066 or 1789 - but relativity has yet to filter into the consciousness of otherwise educated people.

"The great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the Western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had," C. P. Snow wrote in his classic essay, "The Two Cultures."

The counterargument is that we can always hire technicians in Bangalore, while it`s Shakespeare and Goethe who teach us the values we need to harness science for humanity. There`s something to that. If President Bush were about to attack Iraq all over again, he would be better off reading Sophocles - to appreciate the dangers of hubris - than studying the science of explosives.

But don`t pin too much faith on the civilizing influence of a liberal education: the officers of the Third Reich were steeped in Kant and Goethe. And similar arguments were used in past centuries to assert that all a student needed was Greek, Latin and familiarity with the Bible - or, in China, to argue that all the elites needed were the Confucian classics.

Without some fluency in science and math, we`ll simply be left behind in the same way that Ming Dynasty Chinese scholars were. Increasingly, we face public policy issues - avian flu, stem cells - that require some knowledge of scientific methods, yet the present Congress contains 218 lawyers, and just 12 doctors and 3 biologists. In terms of the skills we need for the 21st century, we`re Shakespeare-quoting Philistines.

A year ago, I wanted to ornament a column with a complex equation, so, as a math ninny myself, I looked around the Times newsroom for anyone who could verify that it was correct. Now, you can`t turn around in the Times newsroom without bumping into polyglots who come and go talking of Michelangelo. But it took forever to turn up someone confident in his calculus - in the science section.

So Pogo was right.

This disregard for science already hurts us. The U.S. has bungled research on stem cells, perhaps partly because Mr. Bush didn`t realize how restrictive his curb on research funds would be. And we`re risking our planet`s future because our leaders are frozen in the headlights of climate change.

In this century, one of the most complex choices we will make will be what tinkering to allow with human genes, to "improve" the human species. How can our leaders decide that issue if they barely know what DNA is?

Intellectuals have focused on the challenge from the right, which has led to a drop in the public acceptance of evolution in the U.S. over the last 20 years, to 40 percent from 45 percent. Jon Miller, a professor at the Northwestern University medical school who has tracked attitudes toward evolution in 34 countries, says Turkey is the only one with less support for evolution than the U.S.

It`s true that antagonism to science seems peculiarly American. The European right, for example, frets about taxes and immigration, but not about evolution.

But there`s an even larger challenge than anti-intellectualism. And that`s the skewed intellectualism of those who believe that a person can become sophisticated on a diet of poetry, philosophy and history, unleavened by statistics or chromosomes. That`s the hubris of the humanities.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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Extraordinary Rendition Scandal Reaches New Heights: Rice on the Offensive in Europe Over Bush Administration`s Use of "Torture Flights"
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/05/1455239" target="_blank" rel="nofollow ugc noopener">http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/05/1455239


Monday, December 5th, 2005
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/05/1455239

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The scandal over the Bush administration`s use of so-called "extraordinary renditions` is reaching new heights. Rendition - what many call kidnapping - is the highly controversial practice of transporting detainees seized overseas by U.S. agents to countries known for using torture. On Sunday, the Washington Post detailed how a German citizen was seized in Europe by the CIA, beaten, drugged and held to a secret prison in Afghanistan for five months before the agency realized they had the wrong man. [includes rush transcript]

The scandal over the Bush administration`s use of so-called "extraordinary renditions` is reaching new heights. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrives in Europe today for a five-day trip to address the issue directly. Last month the European Union wrote to Rice expressing concern over reports that the US was using secret jails in Europe for its rendition program. Rice will reportedly respond by telling allies to "back off" over the issue.

The highly controversial practice of rendition involves transporting suspects seized overseas by US agents to countries known for using torture and holding them there for interrogation.

Meanwhile, the American Civil Liberties Union has announced it is taking the CIA to court over its rendition program. The lawsuit - which will be filed on Tuesday - charges the CIA broke both US and international law when they authorized agents to abduct an innocent man, detain him incommunicado, beat him, drug and transport him to a secret CIA prison in Afghanistan.

Over the weekend, the Washington Post reported that the US admitted to German officials in May 2004 that the CIA had mistakenly imprisoned a German citizen for five months but asked the German government to remain quiet about it.

The man, Khaled El-Masri, was arrested in Macedonia on December 31, 2003. He says he was handed to US officials and flown to a secret prison in Afghanistan where he was held in appalling conditions and interrogated as a terrorism suspect. He was returned to Europe five months later when the CIA realized they had the wrong man.

Citing interviews with current and former intelligence and diplomatic officials, the Post reported that after the September 11th attacks, the staff of the CIA`s Counterterroist Center - or CTC - quadrupled in size nearly overnight. The center`s Rendition Group is made up of case officers, paramilitaries, analysts and psychologists.

According to the Post, members of the group follow a simple but standard procedure: "Dressed head to toe in black, including masks, they blindfold and cut the clothes off their new captives, then administer an enema and sleeping drugs. They outfit detainees in a diaper and jumpsuit for what can be a day-long trip. Their destinations: either a detention facility operated by cooperative countries in the Middle East and Central Asia, including Afghanistan, or one of the CIA`s own covert prisons...which at various times have been operated in eight countries, including several in Eastern Europe."

The CIA, working with other intelligence agencies, has captured an estimated 3,000 people since 9/11. There is no tribunal or judge to check the evidence against those picked up by the agency. The CIA`s inspector general is now investigating a growing number of what it calls "erroneous renditions." One official told the Post about three dozen names fall in that category.

* Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

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AMY GOODMAN: We`re joined now in our New York studio by Michael Ratner. He’s president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. Welcome to Democracy Now!

MICHAEL RATNER: Welcome, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, this is an amazing story in The Washington Post, especially in its details about what happened to this one man, Khaled Masri. Beginning with the cooperation of the German government, which was anti-Iraq war, and the U.S., Dana Priest, the writer, begins, “In May 2004, the White House dispatched the U.S. ambassador in Germany to pay an unusual visit to that country`s interior minister. Ambassador Daniel Coats carried instructions from the State Department transmitted via the C.I.A.`s Berlin station because they were too sensitive and highly classified for regular diplomatic channels, according to several people with knowledge of the conversation.”

Priest goes on to write, “Coats informed the German minister that the C.I.A. had wrongfully imprisoned one of its citizens, Khaled Masri, for five months, and would soon release him, the sources said. There was also a request that the German government not disclose what it had been told even if Masri went public. The U.S. officials feared exposure of a covert action program designed to capture terrorism suspects abroad and transfer them among countries and possible legal challenges to the C.I.A. from Masri and others with similar allegations.” A remarkable story.

MICHAEL RATNER: Well, Dana Priest`s story was absolutely amazing because of the detail. I mean, we have all known about the extraordinary rendition program for a long time. The Center for Constitutional Rights has had this case of Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen who was detained at Kennedy airport, sent to Syria where he was tortured, but what this story does is put detail on it. It talks about this unit that’s set up in the basement of the C.I.A., 1,200 people working on extraordinary rendition. It talks about “black sites,” which are C.I.A. sites, which may even be in Europe, Romania and Poland. And then, of course, it has the story of Khaled El-Masri, who was innocent, picked up, taken to Afghanistan, interrogated, tortured and then released, with the Germans closely involved.

And what I think is going on here is that Europe has been deeply involved in this whole process. Certainly, the intelligence agencies of Europe have been involved. And hundreds of flights, hundreds of flights have gone out of Germany, taking people, C.I.A. flights, all over the world to be tortured. And now that it`s being exposed, Europe is sitting there demanding -- supposedly demanding from the U.S., ‘Tell us what`s going on. Tell us what`s happening.’ Yet at the same time, they have been involved in not only some of their countries allowing these camps to be there, but in allowing these flights to go from Sweden, from England, from Germany, from Spain, all over Europe, to take people to torture facilities everywhere in the world.

What it reminds me of, and I think people should really be aware of this, we all see now that Pinochet in Chile is being condemned and may actually have to stand trial for the Operation Condor, the running of essentially a gulag through South America, where he picked up people, had them tortured and killed and taken to various facilities. And you have to ask yourself: What`s the difference between what the United States is doing now in cooperation with Europe, essentially in running a worldwide gulag of detention and torture facilities?

AMY GOODMAN: We are talking to Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights. We`re also joined on the phone by a British Member of Parliament, Andrew Tyrie, who is a Tory, a chair of the All Parliamentary Group on Extraordinary Rendition. Welcome to Democracy Now!

ANDREW TYRIE: Hello.

AMY GOODMAN: It`s good to have you with us. Can you talk about the issue of the responsibility of countries that either allow planes to land and take off, that are known to be carrying these -- some call them kidnapped people -- people who are going through extraordinary rendition, and also the facilities, for example, in Britain, if there are, places, black sites, where these people are being interrogated or tortured?

ANDREW TYRIE: Well, let`s deal with each of those points in turn. First of all, I`m not a lawyer, but it seems to me fairly clear that since Britain, for example, has incorporated the U.N. Convention Against Torture directly into its domestic law, if we are knowingly allowing flights to pass through the U.K., land there, have refueling, and then go on, knowing that it`s likely that people are going to be tortured, it strikes me that those actions must make us complicit in the torture and that, therefore, we have broken the Convention. Likewise, I suspect that we may have broken the Human Rights Act if we have done this. There would also be possibly breaches to the criminal law, the ordinary criminal law, which, of course, prohibits torture, and that`s a question which another pressure group in Britain called Liberty is actually pursuing with the police authorities at the moment.

As far as your second question is concerned, the problem is, none of us know the facts. None of us know whether there is any holding center in the U.K. I think that`s unlikely, because I think we would have got to hear about it. I suspect that`s perhaps why the Americans have been -- administration has been setting up these in countries in Eastern Europe. So, I don`t know whether that`s the case. But I think it`s unlikely. What I do know -- I hope I have not gone on too long -- what I do know is that we need a healthy debate about this in a democracy, and we need to make up our minds whether this is the right way to go. I don`t; I think torturing people is likely to make the war against terrorism more difficult, not less difficult. Of course, Condoleezza Rice has now said we must have this healthy debate, but only yesterday her spokesman, Mr. Hanley, was saying these are things that shouldn’t be talked about in public. And there does seem to be a pretty flat contradiction between those two points.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you know how many flights, torture flights, have gone through Britain?

ANDREW TYRIE: No. And there are many allegations being made by plane spotters and others that this may be in dozens or hundreds. But it`s so difficult to know; unless one can get onto the plane and inspect and find out what`s going on, we can’t know. What I do think is -- which is what we will be pressing the government about in the -- today and in the days and weeks ahead, that it`s up to the government to make an effort to find out. The benign neglect that they seem to be going in for at the moment is, in my view, absolutely outrageous. A former foreign office minister has himself said that there seems to be an extraordinary lack of curiosity on behalf of the British government about these actions.

AMY GOODMAN: We`re talking to British M.P. Andrew Tyrie, a chair of the All Parliamentary Group on Extraordinary Rendition. What is the feeling in the British Parliament right now around this issue? And in Britain, do you call it “kidnapping”?

ANDREW TYRIE: Well, the attitude of a lot of people is deep concern without knowing quite where to turn. A lot of people in Britain, and I`m talking now more widely, British public opinion, are very, very concerned about terrorism. You have got to remember that in Britain, we have had 30 years of terrorism, so we`re quite experienced about it. And I know it’s relatively new for the United States, but it`s not at all new for us. We’ve got a spectrum of opinion from some saying, ‘Well, if you can torture some information out of people and thereby save some lives, maybe that`s a good thing,’ right the way through to those who think that torture under any circumstances is completely wrong.

I think that the mood of the British public opinion has moved much more in the direction of those who are against torture. And that`s because, I`m afraid, our closest ally, the United States -- or I should really say the U.S. administration -- has lost the confidence of a large chunk of British opinion and, indeed, European opinion. And it`s done that because, to us, used to terrorism as we are in Spain, Germany, France, Britain, we think America has overreacted. We think the U.S. administration overreacted to September 11, that regime change and preemptive action are not the way to go around trying to deal with terrorism, and that what we saw in Abu Ghraib and what we hear about from Guantanamo is not likely to win over the hearts and minds of moderate Muslim opinion.

And we know from hard experience -- the British know in dealing with the I.R.A., the Irish terrorists, the French know from dealing with terrorists in Algeria, that these techniques, these very, very heavy-handed techniques tend to inflame the problem. So, it`s not just a question of my personal moral repugnance against all this that leads many to be concerned, but it is something much more practical, as well. Is this going to help us actually deal with the problem we’ve got? And in the view of, I think, an increasing number of the British population, and that`s reflected in Parliament, the answer to that is: No, it`s not helping us.

AMY GOODMAN: As a Tory M.P., I`m wondering how things break down politically, in terms of the parties, yours a more conservative party.

ANDREW TYRIE: Well, traditionally, the strongest repository of support for human rights issues is in the Labour Party. And so, it is, I suppose, ironic that it should be a conservative who is leading this group. I am a conservative. I should also say there`s a very strong strand of libertarian opinion in the Conservative Party, and I`m certainly part of that, who are deeply concerned about the infringement of civil and political liberties that’s taking place, not only in Britain but in many other countries. In Britain, we’ve had a – and indeed, we`re in the midst of a big debate about how long -- for how long the government may detain people without trial, which is a related issue. And the government was recently defeated in a big debate in Parliament on that issue. The government was asking for 90 days, and that was rejected.

There are a good number of other issues, too, where there`s this tension between the libertarian strand and those who say, ‘No, we’re in a new world, we’ve got to be much tougher on terrorism.’ It crosses party lines now. The Conservative Party is not united, as it might -- one might imagine from their name, behind a view of ‘Let`s have tougher measures.’ The libertarian strand in conservatism in the Conservative Party is, at the moment, I think, much stronger than it was a short while ago, and of course, the Labour Party is deeply divided about it, and Tony Blair has trouble leading his party on these issues.

AMY GOODMAN: Before we go to break, we`re going to stay with this issue, but because we have you on, I wanted to ask you about this whole issue of the Downing Street memo that the Blair government has forbid any newspaper in Britain to print, that allegedly involves a report that Tony Blair dissuaded President Bush from following through on bombing Al Jazeera headquarters in Doha in Qatar. Your response to that?

ANDREW TYRIE: Well, if it`s true, it reflects, I think, quite badly on the American administration, frankly, that there should be just this another example of a colossal misjudgment. I mean, can you think of anything more calculated to stir up moderate Muslim opinion than to go and bomb Al Jazeera? This is meant to be the leader of the democratic world.

The sadness is that for someone like myself, who is an absolutely cut and dried Atlanticist, for whom the alliance with the United States is the bedrock of everything I believe in, as far as defending my country is concerned, and with so many shared values, the irony is that we could be undermining the very values that we`re telling other countries that they should adopt. We`re undermining the values we`re seeking to export by some of the actions we are taking. And that`s just one example, if it`s true. As for the specifics of the memo, I am a freedom man, and I`m a freedom of information man. And clearly, a document like that should be put into the public domain, and that should happen immediately.

AMY GOODMAN: So, are you encouraging a newspaper to defy the Blair government and actually print this memo?

ANDREW TYRIE: Well, that`s a matter -- I mean, there`s a good number of editors, who have made newspapers in Britain, sitting on it, I expect, and that will be a decision for them. My view is that this information should be in the public domain. It`s an example for those of us who believe in maximum freedom that we can get on such things that in the information age, to a great extent, the rules of discovery and obtaining information in the United States can assist us here in Britain, and vice versa. And that`s all to the good.

Maybe I can end on just an optimistic note, before we all get too gloomy about this. Only ten or 15 years ago, we were fighting an oppressive monolith in the form of the Soviet Union, and the forces of freedom are on the march everywhere, and the forces of oppression are in retreat. We won that Cold War, partly because we did not lower ourselves to their techniques, because we did hold out a better way of doing things to the peoples of Eastern Europe, Central Europe and the former Soviet Union. Well, that`s the way now that we have got to embark on, beating this current wave of terrorism, not adopting their methods, but repudiating them and showing that we know a better way.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Andrew Tyrie, I want to thank you for being with us, a member of the British parliament, a Conservative, a Tory, chairman of the All Parliamentary Group on Extraordinary Rendition. Thank you for being with us. Michael Ratner will remain with us, of the Center for Constitutional Rights, and we`ll be joined by Stephen Grey, who writes for the Sunday Times of London, and exposed this week how the U.S. is operating secret flights to transport detainees to countries that torture prisoners.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We`re joined by Michael Ratner, President of the Center for Constitutional Rights. Michael, the issue of international law, and Condoleezza Rice going on the offensive, the Secretary of State, around the issue of black sites, where people are taken to in different countries and the flights themselves, of which there are hundreds.

MICHAEL RATNER: Well, Amy, it`s a given that what the U.S. is doing in setting up black sites and torturing people, detaining people without any arrest warrant or out any court is flatly illegal. I mean, that`s what the Tory minister said, and he`s right. He said you cannot – the Convention Against Torture absolutely prohibits what`s going on in rendition and in the black sites, and it prohibits any country in Europe, anywhere in the world from cooperating with the United States, whether by giving them airspace, refueling, helping out at all, it`s considered aiding and abetting torture, aiding and abetting illegal detentions. So there`s not a question here. That`s under the international law. And under these countries’ domestic law, that`s the case, as well. The European Union, in particular, has a human rights treaty that prohibits any of this kind of conduct. So, this is extremely, extremely embarrassing for members of the European community.

And Condoleezza Rice now going to Europe – she`s arriving, I think, in Germany today, Germany, which has had -- apparently 467 flights have been measured going from Germany to possibly these various detention facilities around the world. She has to go now to Germany and say to them – She`s not saying, ‘We didn`t do this.’ Let`s understand this. She`s not saying, ‘We don`t have these detention facilities.’ She`s not saying that. She`s not saying, ‘We`re not torturing people.’ She is trying to make the argument, ‘Look at Europe. We`re all in this together. We stand or we die together fighting terrorism, and therefore, just take it easy on us. You`re involved in this. Not only because you`re involved in it, actually, but because this is all our fight.’ So, it`s incredible to see a Secretary of State now going out and saying, ‘U.S. can set up secret detention facilities, black sites, a gulag around the world,’ and try and justify it as saying, ‘We`re all involved in the fight on torture.’

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to read a little more from the Washington Post piece that tells the human story of what happened to Khaled Masri. Dana Priest writes, ”Khaled Masri came to the attention of Macedonian authorities on New Year`s Eve 2003. Masri, an unemployed father of five living in Ulm, Germany, said he had gone by bus to Macedonia to blow off steam after a spat with his wife. He was taken off a bus at the border crossing by police because his name was similar to that of an associate of a 9/11 hijacker. The police drove him to Skopje, the capital, and put him in a motel room with darkened windows, he said in a recent interview. The police treated Masri firmly but cordially, asking about his passport, which they insisted was forged, about al-Qaeda, about his hometown mosque. When he pressed them to let him go, they displayed their pistols.

“Unbeknownst to Masri, the Macedonians had contacted the C.I.A. station in Skopje. The station chief was on holiday, but the deputy chief, a junior officer, was excited about the catch and about being able to contribute to the counterterrorism fight. ‘The Skopje station really wanted a scalp because everyone wanted a part of the game,’ a C.I.A. officer said. Because the European Division chief at headquarters was also on vacation, the deputy dealt directly with the CTC and the head of its al-Qaeda unit. In the first weeks of 2004, an argument arose over whether the C.I.A. should take Masri from local authorities and remove him from the country for interrogation, a classic rendition operation. The director of the al-Qaeda unit supported the approach. She insisted he was probably a terrorist, and should be imprisoned and interrogated immediately. Others were doubtful. They wanted to wait and see whether the passport did prove to be fraudulent.

Beyond that, there was no evidence Masri was not who he claimed to be – a German citizen of Arab descent traveling after a disagreement with his wife. The unit`s director won the argument. She ordered Masri captured and flown to a C.I.A. prison in Afghanistan. On the 23rd day of his motel captivity, the police videotaped Masri, bundled him, handcuffed and blindfolded, into a van and drove to a closed-off building at the airport. There, in silence, someone cut off his clothes. As they changed his blindfold, he said, ‘I saw seven or eight men with black clothing, wearing masks.’ He said he was drugged to sleep for a long plane ride.

“Masri said his cell in Afghanistan was cold, dirty, in a cellar, with no light and one dirty cover for warmth. The first night he said he was kicked and beaten and warned by an interrogator: ‘You are here in a country where no one knows about you, in a country where there is no law. If you die, we will bury you, and no one will know.’ Masri was guarded during the day by Afghans, he said. At night, men who sounded as if they spoke American-accented English showed up for interrogation. Sometimes a man he believed was a doctor in a mask came to take photos, draw blood and collect a urine sample. Back at the CTC, the counterterrorism headquarters, Masri`s passport was given to the Office of Technical Services to analyze. By March, OTS had concluded the passport was genuine. The C.I.A. had imprisoned the wrong man.

“At the C.I.A., the question was: Now what? Some officials wanted to go directly to the German government; others did not. Someone suggested a reverse rendition: Return Masri to Macedonia and release him. ‘There wouldn`t be a trace, no airplane tickets, nothing. No one would believe him,’ one former official said. ‘There would be a bump in the press, but then it would be over,’ the official said. Once the mistake reached George Tenet, he laid out the options to his counterparts, including the idea of not telling the Germans. Condoleezza Rice, then Bush`s National Security Adviser, and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage argued they had to be told, a position Tenet took, according to one former intelligence official. ‘You couldn`t have the President lying to the German chancellor’ should the issue come up, a government official involved with the matter said. Senior State Department officials decided to approach the German interior minister, who had been a steadfast Bush supporter even when differences over the Iraq war strained ties between the two countries, and the ambassador to Germany, Ambassador Coats, had an excellent rapport with him. The C.I.A. argued for minimal disclosure of information. The State Department insisted on a truthful, complete statement. The two agencies quibbled over whether it should include an apology.

“Meanwhile, Masri was growing desperate. There were rumors that a prisoner had died under torture. Masri could not answer most questions put to him. He said he steadied himself by talking with other prisoners and reading the Koran. A week before his release in May 2004, Masri said he was visited in prison by a German man with a goatee who called himself ‘Sam.’ Masri said he asked him if he were from the German government and whether the government knew he was there. Sam said he could not answer either question. Masri asked, ‘Does my wife at least know where I am?’ Sam replied, ‘No, she does not.’”

MICHAEL RATNER: Of course, remarkable, of course, as we know as the story continues, his wife did not know where he was. He had two young children, and she figured he had married another woman, actually, or left her. And she moves back to her country of Lebanon, not knowing anything about what happened to her husband. A remarkable story. Unfortunately, you know, it`s one that Europe has known about for a long time. I mean, I think the minister referred to in the article used to be a Green, a progressive man, a lawyer, Otto Schily, and yet, he is sitting there helping the C.I.A. hide what happens to a German resident.

We had Swedish men who were sent out of Sweden to Egypt for torture. We had a man picked off the streets in Italy, Abu Omar, off the streets in Italy, sent to Egypt for torture. Now a very, very courageous Italian magistrate has indicted 22 C.I.A. agents for that kidnapping off the streets of Italy, including the C.I.A. station chief. This is going on throughout Europe. For Europe to now be screaming and crying about it – maybe it wasn`t known by some of the officials, but it was certainly known on many, many levels of various European governments.

AMY GOODMAN: You mentioned the issue in Milan in Italy. Well, there`s a piece today in the paper, actually in the Los Angeles Times, which is datelined Rome. It says, “He`s not been arrested. He`s probably nowhere near Italy, but a former C.I.A. station chief has begun to sketch his defense against charges he led a clandestine operation that kidnapped a radical Egyptian Imam from the streets of Milan. Robert Seldon Lady, identified by Italian prosecutors and law enforcement officials as the retired station chief in Milan is one of 22 current or former C.I.A. operatives for whom Italian prosecutors have issued arrest warrants in connection with the 2003 abduction. The cleric was seized on his way to a mosque, bundled off to an Egyptian jail where he later says he was tortured. The case is being watched closely because it threatens to expose in the greatest detail yet, the Bush administration`s practice of extraordinary rendition.”

MICHAEL RATNER: You know, Amy, one thing that`s going on here is the C.I.A. and the C.I.A. people who are actually doing this stuff, the torture or the rendering, are getting frightened, because here you have Italy saying we`re going to arrest – we want arrest warrants for 22 people and already people sketching their defenses. And then you have, look at – it joins in with the opposition to the McCain Amendment and this administration. The McCain Amendment, which is the amendment prohibiting cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment being used by anyone – anyone working for the United States, not at all, not allowed to be used. They want to exempt the C.I.A. because the C.I.A. is sitting there with people in black sites all over this world, saying, ‘We`re going to continue to want to torture people and you`re trying to pass an amendment forbidding us from doing it.’ They`re getting frightened. They`re getting frightened that they might be prosecuted for this kind of stuff. That`s why you are seeing that defense. They`re getting frightened of the McCain Amendment. They`re sitting there, and they thought they could torture people with impunity, and they have been unable to do it.

AMY GOODMAN: Michael Ratner, you mention the McCain Amendment. Explain what it is, voted 90-9, what Vice President Cheney is pressuring McCain to do, and the deal that’s being made, as I watched McCain on television yesterday, the Arizona senator, he talked about meeting at least three times with Stephen Hadley, the National Security Adviser, optimistic that they`re hammering out a deal. What`s going on here?

MICHAEL RATNER: Well, the law in the United States as of 9/11 is that you can’t torture anyone anywhere in the world, and you can’t send anybody to be tortured. It also included a prohibition on what we call lesser torture or cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. The administration has taken the position, under Alberto Gonzales, President`s counsel, now Attorney General, that they can use cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment against non-citizens all over the world. And that includes, really, things that constitute torture, waterboarding where you put people under water or drip water onto them to make them think they`re drowning, assaults on people, temperature control where you can keep someone in a prison with temperatures up to 100 degrees and down to below zero, or whatever, for long periods of time. They`re doing that. They want to continue to do that.

McCain said, “I don`t want this anymore. Let`s pass an amendment.” 90-9, it prohibits not just torture, which even the administration acknowledges is prohibited, although it defines it very narrowly, what’s prohibited, but it prohibits cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. The negotiations going – and 90-9 it passed. The administration said – President said, ‘I`m going to veto that bill, but it’s part of the defense authorization bill.’ So they got a problem. So now they’re trying to amend the bill, and they’re trying to do it in two different ways. The initial amendment was: ‘Exempt the C.I.A. from this.’ What is that saying to us and the world? Exempt the C.I.A. so it can continue to torture people in black sites. And now the latest little negotiation is if they`re not going to exempt the C.I.A., they want to make it possible that no criminal prosecution can be brought against the C.I.A. for engaging in this kind of conduct. What is that saying except, ‘C.I.A., continue doing what you are doing. Don`t worry about it,’ and that`s what they`re doing here. They`re trying to protect the C.I.A.

Now the deal that`s really being made with the devil here is not only is there this McCain Amendment prohibiting torture anywhere in the world or in any of these U.S. facilities, but there`s another amendment that’s in the same bill, and that`s the one that`s going to take away the right of the Guantanamo detainees to challenge their detentions in U.S. court. It`s called habeas corpus. It`s trying to strip that right away from the Guantanamo detainees. the case the Center won almost two years ago now. And I think the deal with the devil here is that the administration may allow the McCain Amendment into the legislation, the one that forbids torture, if there`s also an amendment in the legislation that strips the courts of any right to hear these cases from Guantanamo. Now what is that saying? That`s saying that, yes, we have the McCain Amendment, but we might as well put it up on the wall and just look at it and read it, because we`re not going to have any way to go to court to challenge it when people are tortured. So, it`s –

AMY GOODMAN: And McCain is agreeing to this?

MICHAEL RATNER: And apparently McCain is on board on this. A remarkable, remarkable thing.

AMY GOODMAN: Michael Ratner, President of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

www.democracynow.org

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Extraordinary and unacceptable
http://www.guardian.co.uk/terrorism/story/0,12780,1659242,00…

Leader
Tuesday December 6, 2005

Guardian
Condoleezza Rice does not seem prepared to explain very much when she meets European leaders facing mounting pressure about the US policy of "extraordinary rendition" - flying terrorist suspects round the world to secret jails where they are allegedly tortured beyond the reach of any legal system. Broadly speaking, the message from the secretary of state as she embarked on her trip to Berlin, Brussels and points east yesterday was a blunt "trust and cooperate" on the basis that we are all in the same boat in the "war on terror". The sovereignty of US allies is respected, Dr Rice insisted, adding that if they were failing to inform their own citizens that was a matter for them. If that clever hint is true there may be much embarrassment. The best Jack Straw could manage was to welcome her carefully-constructed denial of torture. The Foreign Office says it has "no evidence to corroborate media allegations about the use of UK territory in rendition operations." But taken the strong circumstantial evidence about US executive aircraft owned by CIA front companies transiting this country (and Ireland) this smacks of lawyerly evasion. Is there really no information? Do British intelligence officers working with the US just look the other way or make sure no questions are asked when these aircraft (210 since 9/11) land? It will be the task of the all-party committee which began work yesterday to provide full and honest answers.

Such bland assurances will not now make this row go away - in Germany, where there are said to have been 400 rendition flights, Spain or Romania, the site of one of several alleged "black prisons". The Council of Europe and the European Union are both investigating. Elizabeth Wilmshurst, a former FCO legal adviser, insists any illegal acts must be investigated. David Sheffer, a former US ambassador for war crime issues, blames the "warped interpretation" of international law by the US since 9/11.

Dr Rice did not deny that rendition was taking place, only that the US does not knowingly send people to be tortured. So why are "enemy combatants" sent to countries like Egypt, Libya and Syria, with such bad records in this area? Rendition is damaging in other ways: innocent people have been detained and witnesses been unavailable for trials because the US will not admit it is holding them. Fighting terrorism isn`t easy. But legality and morality have to go hand in hand. How can democracies upbraid China, Syria, Iran or Zimbabwe if "our" unacceptable human rights abuses are unchecked. Dr Rice should address these concerns and speak the truth. So must our own government.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

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[urlBritain`s role in war on terror revealed]http://www.guardian.co.uk/terrorism/story/0,12780,1659057,00.html[/url]

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Dec 7, 2005

No withdrawal timetable, no Zarqawi
By Gareth Porter
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GL07Ak03.html

WASHINGTON - US President George W Bush`s adamant rejection of a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq effectively rules out a recent reported offer from Sunni resistance groups to eliminate the al-Qaeda terrorist haven in Iraq as part of a negotiated peace agreement.

At the recent Iraqi reconciliation meeting in Cairo, leaders of three Sunni armed organizations - the Islamic Army, the Bloc of Holy Warriors and the Revolution of 1920 Brigades - told US and Arab officials they were willing to track down terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and turn him over to Iraqi authorities as part of a negotiated settlement with the US, according to the highly respected, London-based Arabic-language al-Hayat newspaper.

Other press reports have confirmed the presence of Sunni resistance leaders on the fringes of the conference, and al-Hayat reporters were on the scene covering the conference. Bush has effectively ruled out such an agreement with the insurgent groups by rejecting any negotiation on a withdrawal timetable.

He again attacked the idea of "setting an artificial deadline" for withdrawal in his speech to naval cadets on November 29. US ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad declared for the first time in an interview on ABC News last week that he was prepared to open negotiations with leaders of Sunni insurgent groups who are not Saddam loyalists or followers of Zarqawi.

But without any flexibility on the troop withdrawal issue, no real negotiations with the insurgents are possible. The demand for a withdrawal schedule has been the central negotiating demand of Sunni insurgent leaders since they began communicating early this year their conditions for ending the armed resistance to US officials.

The capture of Zarqawi by Sunni insurgents would not end the terrorist haven problem by itself, but that offer appears to shorthand for a broader proposal to attack and eliminate the foreign terrorist bases of operation in Iraq.

US intelligence has long been aware of a sharp rivalry and even occasional armed clashes between Sunni insurgent organizations and the foreign terrorists under Zarqawi`s leadership, despite their military cooperation against the occupation.

In the past, both the Sunni insurgents and Zarqawi`s followers have raised the possibility Sunni leaders would turn on the foreign jihadis if a peace agreement were reached with the US. Last August, Saleh al-Mutlaq of the Iraqi Front for National Dialogue, which is sympathetic to the Sunni armed resistance, declared, "If the Americans reach an agreement with the local resistance, there won`t be any room for foreign fighters."

After reports of contacts between Sunni insurgents and US officials surfaced last summer, al-Qaeda in Iraq expressed serious concern about just such a possibility. An Internet posting by a follower of Zarqawi warned that if the Sunni insurgents ended their armed resistance, the insurgents would "exploit their knowledge of the mujahideen and their methods and their supply routes and they way they maneuver".

Sunni insurgents and Zarqawi have clashed this year over both possible peace negotiations and participation in the October referendum on the constitution. Organizations linked with Zarqawi warned as early as last spring against negotiating with the US, and threatened to kill anyone who worked to turn out voters in the referendum.

A coalition of larger insurgent groups called for maximizing the vote against the draft constitution. Sunni leaders told their US contacts in Cairo they would not deliver Zarqawi to US forces, consistent with their demand that the US military presence must be phased under any negotiated settlement, according to al-Hayat.

A Pentagon source commented last week that it would "make perfect sense" that Sunni insurgents don`t want to hand over either arms or foreign jihadis to the US, as a matter of nationalist pride.

Cooperation with a Shi`ite-dominated government on the foreign terrorist presence in Iraq, however, would require further negotiations between Sunni insurgent leaders and the government on protection of minority rights and other major political issues.

Negotiating with the major Sunni resistance organizations, once regarded as impossible, became a real option after Sunni intermediaries began passing on peace feelers from several of those organizations early this year.

Guerrilla units once thought to be acting entirely independently of one another and without any program are now credited with the capability for common political action. Marine Lieutenant General James T Conway told reporters in July in Washington that the military had identified the top eight to 10 leaders of the insurgency and knew that they had met "occasionally" to "talk organization tactics".

Some of those meetings are said to have taken place in Syria and Jordan. After meetings between the insurgent leaders and US military officers, the top US commander in Iraq, General George Casey, said that the "preliminary talks" could lead to actual negotiations with insurgent groups.

Bush`s "declassified" war strategy reflects a much more sophisticated understanding of the relationship between Sunni insurgents and Zarqawi`s organization than is seen in past administration rhetoric. Whereas Bush administration rhetoric has referred to the enemy only as "terrorists"and "Saddam loyalists" in the past, the document identifies a third group, the "rejectionists", who are said to represent most of those who have taken up arms against the occupation.

It acknowledges that the "rejectionists" have goals that are "to some extent incompatible" with those of the terrorists. The document, titled "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq", also hints that the Sunnis have legitimate Sunni concerns about the absence of any protection for minority rights in the constitution pushed through by Shi`ite party leaders.

Nevertheless, it suggests that there is no need for any compromise with the insurgency, because the US and its Iraqi allies can play on divisions among the insurgent groups, drawing off some of them and controlling the rest. Bush declared in his speech on Iraq last week that the goal was to "marginalize the Saddamists and rejectionists".

According to source familiar with Defense Department thinking on the issue, a plan was adopted last summer for "negotiations" with insurgent groups that would offer no real compromise with them. Instead, US officials would offer withdrawal only if and as certain "conditions" were met, such as training and deployment of adequate government units to replace US troops.

The marginalization strategy requires Shi`ite leaders to promise greater protection for Sunni rights through amending the constitution. "I think Khalilzad is gently nudging the government in the direction of negotiating with the Sunnis," said the Pentagon source.

The administration is unlikely to do anything more in contacts with Sunni insurgents until and unless a more accommodating Shi`ite leadership emerges from the December 15 election, according to the source.

Meanwhile, no effort is being made to take advantage of an opportunity to do something concrete about the one issue that is of concern to the US public. As the domestic political struggle over military withdrawal from Iraq heats up, failure to pursue a timetable could eventually become an explosive issue for the Bush administration.

Gareth Porter is an independent historian and foreign policy analyst. He is the author of The Third Option in Iraq: A Responsible Exit Strategy in the Fall issue of Middle East Policy.

(Inter Press Service)

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Latest Update: #33647 04.12.05 19:56:24
Latest Coalition Fatality: Dec 04, 2005
Military Fatalities US, UK, Other: : Total: 2333 , US: 2132 , Dez.05: 19

Iraker 12/06/05: Civilian: 48 Police/Mil: 62 Total: 110
http://www.icasualties.org/oif/IraqiDeaths.aspx

Regelmäßige Updates von Meldungen aus dem Irak:
http://icasualties.org/oif/

Da bei ´Today im Irak´ die Postings immer länger werden, hier den Link für alle Interessierte: http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

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BERLIN (IWR News Satire) - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice browbeat allied governments yesterday for getting cold feet about detaining and torturing terrorist suspects, claiming that information from the suspects had saved lives and thwarted attacks in Europe.

In addition, Rice pointed out the benefits of torturing suspects. "I find the sound of a cracking whip on the bare buttocks of a detainee in shackles absolutely invigorating. You just have to learn the proper techniques, which is why the State Department and Mel Gibson have produced this wonderful DVD tutorial," said Ms. Rice, as she handed out copies of training film to the press.
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The war on the literal

It can only be days before Fox News starts referring to white phosphorus as `freedom dust`
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1659294,00.html

Marina Hyde
Tuesday December 6, 2005

Guardian
One of the many minor irritations about the War on Terror is that its architects are having so much more success vanquishing language than they are getting the psychopathic malcontents to put down their weapons.

Hindsight it may be, but I can`t help thinking the die was cast the second the Bush administration announced we were going to war on an abstract noun. Two weeks after the Pentagon had been attacked and the World Trade Centre destroyed ... and we`re picking a fight with grammar? Forget Clinton and his "it depends what your definition of `is` is" semantic games. These guys meant business. (Interestingly, in line with the new policy on euphemism, business now meant "defence and oil companies from whom we personally profit". In turn, events would later see these redefined as "national security", and therefore no longer a matter for discussion.)

You`ll recall that the first step in this brave new world of periphrasis was to create the Coalition of the Willing, which these days seems an increasingly sweet way of saying "Us, the Brits, and 160 Mongolian troops. Which, by the way, isn`t even a whole horde." No matter. The War on the Literal" was underway.

Are we winning yet? Well, the current focus on the CIA policy of flying terror suspects to countries where they can be questioned outside the protection of US law reveals that the latest word to get its ass kicked is "rendition". That, and the more vogueish phrase "extraordinary rendition". Hitherto, for me at least, "rendition" conjured up images of musical actors dressed in brightly coloured clothes crying "hey, let`s do a song about it!". In its qualified state, it would indicate someone garnering critical acclaim for said rendering, as in: "That really was an extraordinary rendition of Memory from Cats." Now it turns out the phrase refers to sitting on the tarmac at Glasgow Prestwick airport while your CIA interrogators stock up on fuel before exporting you to some facility that doesn`t show up on any Romanian Ordnance Survey maps. Who knew?

Certainly, the dictionary has once again been left with egg on its face. "Rendition", it states. "The act of rendering." To render is defined among other things as to present, to give what is owed, to translate into another language and to reduce by heating. Not one word about being cellophaned to a ducking stool in the former eastern bloc.

And call me a hopeless old romantic, but it`s really ripped the poetic heritage out of the word. "Render unto Egypt that which you can`t make stand for 16 straight hours on home soil." Hard to put a finger on it, but it definitely loses something. Admittedly, against all the odds, the CIA`s verbal appropriation has softened the blow of one familiar scenario. Next time a builder of questionable scruples squints at your brickwork and assures you the only way to deal with it is rendering, you will be able to think: "Well, it could be worse."

Indeed, "rendition" has some way to go before its definition becomes as elastic as that of "freedom" now is. Frankly, the Bush administration`s "freedom" knocks the "patriot" of Patriot Act fame into a cocked hat. You can prefix anything with this baby. It can only be days before Fox News starts referring to white phosphorus as "freedom dust". As for the potato chips ... There`s a moment in David Rees`s brilliant internet cartoon strip Get Your War On when two office workers discuss the US Congress`s decision to rename french fries in the wake of France`s refusal to support America`s stance on Iraq. "Freedom Fries???" one demands. "OK, I have a question - is the War on Terrorism over? Because I sure as hell want to know that ALL THE TERRORISTS IN THE WORLD HAVE BEEN CAPTURED before legislators actually take the time to rename their GODDAMN CAFETERIA FOOD!"

In such a milieu, then, it`s no surprise to find ourselves talking about "extraordinary renditions". The only question, now that it has been sullied by unsightly explanation in the media, is how long we have to stick with the term. Not too long, hopefully. "Freedom torture" sounds so much more seemly.

Elsewhere, it is faintly perplexing to learn that yet another chap described as "al Qaida`s number three" has been killed in Pakistan.

How many number threes is that now?

In May, US authorities announced they had captured "al Qaida number three" Abu Faraj al Libbi, while, three years ago, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was nabbed whilst apparently toiling in this same rank. Now it seems the similarly important Abu Hamza Rabia has been killed in Pakistan.

To the untrained eye, it might appear that al Qaida boasts a vast stratum of senior managers - kind of like the BBC of global terrorism. Or, if you prefer, one of those American banks where everyone is vice president of something or other. The more likely explanation, of course, is that each time a number three is captured or killed, another operative steps up to take his place.

In which case, you`d have to think whoever is currently number four will today be gripped by a certain reluctance to take on this seemingly accursed promotion. Talk about dead men`s shoes. One imagines him approaching number five with exquisite modesty. "Please, you`re far more qualified." "Absolutely not - I insist." "I won`t hear of it." "You`re very kind, but I am withdrawing myself from the internal applications procedure . . ."

To America again, finally, where it has emerged that for large amounts of money it is possible to hire your favourite famous porn star by the hour. "While the pricing varies between our models," runs the Bella Models agency blurb, "the minimum fee for an introduction to one of our models is $1,500 for one hour."

It`s an interesting dilemma for the ardent male fan. Do you fork out $10 a night for pay-per-view, or start saving for one amazing hour (no refunds for being awestruck)? Either way, the revelation seems to have caused some people enormous surprise, which seems a little confusing. I am reminded of the anecdote in which a somewhat tipsy Winston Churchill turned to the woman next to him at a dinner party and asked if she would sleep with him for £1m.

When she said she would, he asked if she would sleep with him for a pound. "What kind of a woman do you suppose I am?" she demanded huffily.

"Madam," countered Churchill. "We`ve already established what kind of woman you are. We are now just negotiating the price."

This week Marina listened to Peter Crouch finally score on 5 Live. "I was in a shop at the time, and like some batty old aunt found myself saying, `Oh, I am pleased`, to no one in particular. Marina watched Team America: World Police. "Completely hilarious, perhaps more so on the second viewing. Would make a charming Christmas present for any loved one ..."
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

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neulich in china

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Da möchte ich nicht nachstehen
[urlGraphic of W`s Popularity]http://www.planetdan.net/pics/misc/georgie.htm[/url]

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Published on Tuesday, December 6, 2005 by the Guardian / UK
US Defense of Tactic Makes No Sense Says Legal Expert
by Suzanne Goldenberg
http://www.guardian.co.uk/

The robust defense of rendition offered yesterday by the secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, marks the export to a European audience of a position on torture that is becoming increasingly uncomfortable for the Bush administration.

Ms Rice`s arguments yesterday hinge on her insistence that rendition was a legitimate and necessary tool for the changed circumstances brought by the war on terror. "The captured terrorists of the 21st century do not fit easily into traditional systems of criminal or military justice," she said.

Ms Rice went on to note that the practice had been deployed "for decades" before the terror attacks of September 11 2001. "Its use is not unique to the United States, or to the current administration," she said.

However, her assurances that spiriting terror suspects away to clandestine prisons is a legitimate tactic did not carry much weight with human rights organisations or legal scholars yesterday.

They argued that the sole use of extraordinary rendition was to transport a suspect to a locale that was beyond the reach of the law - and so at risk of torture.

"The argument makes no sense unless there is an assumption that the purpose of rendition is to send people to a place where things could be done to them that could not be done in the United States," said David Luban, a law professor at Georgetown University who is presently a visiting professor at Stanford University.

"Rendition doesn`t become a tool in the war against terror unless people are being sent to a place where they can be interrogated harshly."

In her statement yesterday, Ms Rice said rendition was necessary in instances where local governments did not have the capacity to prosecute a terror suspect, or in cases where al-Qaida members were operating in remote areas far from an operational justice system.

However, the majority of the two dozen or so terror suspects known to have been subjected to rendition were captured in urban areas. Some were taken in Europe.

"Most of the ghost detainees on the list were captured in major cities like Bangkok and Karachi," said John Sifton of Human Rights Watch.

Amid the outrage in Europe over the secret prisons, the administration faces calls at home from Democrats for an investigation into the treatment of so-called "ghost detainees". The vice-president, Dick Cheney, meanwhile, has been criticised for resisting efforts to include the CIA in a ban on "cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment of detainees.

However, in her remarks yesterday, Ms Rice appeared to offer repeated and firm assurances that al-Qaida suspects transported to clandestine prisons for interrogation would not be subjected to torture. "The US does not permit, tolerate or condone torture under any circumstances," she said.

Critics say that depends on one`s definition of torture. During the last four years, they say the Bush administration has adopted an exceedingly narrow definition of torture, allowing interrogators to use a variety of harsh techniques such as stress positions, sleep deprivation, and waterboarding, where suspects are strapped to a board and plunged into water.

"The reason she is able to say that the United States does not engage in torture is that the administration has redefined torture to exclude any technique that they use," said Tom Malinowski, Washington director of Human Rights Watch. "What makes this awkward for Secretary Rice is that the state department has continued to condemn as torture techniques such as waterboarding when they are used by other countries - in other words the very techniques the CIA has used against these high level detainees."

Other critics noted yesterday that the utility of information gathered under duress was also unclear. Some intelligence gathered from such suspects has proved unreliable most notoriously in the case of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, who told his interrogators before the war in Iraq that Saddam Hussein`s regime was training al-Qaida terrorists in the use of chemical and biological weapons.

Al-Libi later recanted, but the flawed intelligence was used by the then secretary of state, Colin Powell, in March 2003 to make his case for war to the United Nations.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

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Published on Tuesday, December 6, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
It Was Twenty (Five) Years Ago Today
by Michael Winship
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1206-26.htm


Here in Manhattan, celebrities walk among us. It`s not like Hollywood, where stars sweep by in limos, their pampered feet barely ever touching cement. I see Julianne Moore walking along Bleecker Street, Bill Cosby on West 57th. Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick have a house around the corner. Willem Dafoe, who plays so many movie bad guys, pops up at my local deli. It`s disconcerting, like bumping into Boris Karloff while waiting for the ATM.

A few years ago, I wrote a film for the UN that Harrison Ford narrated. We shot a short stand-up with him at the General Assembly. A stretch limo waited to whisk him to the sound studio where we were recording his voiceover. He declined the car, scrunched a hat down over his head and walked across town.

Later in the day, I asked him if people hassled him as he walked. Nope, he said, it never happens in New York. "Sometimes people go, `Hey, you look just like Harrison Ford,`" he told me. "I just say, `Yeah, I hear that a lot.`"

I think that`s part of why John Lennon liked New York so much. He felt free to come and go as he pleased without people bothering him. Until that December night twenty-five years ago this week, when Mark David Chapman, the boy with the Holden Caulfield "Catcher in the Rye" fantasy, called out John Lennon`s name, pulled a gun and shot him dead.

I remember Howard Cosell announcing the shooting during Monday Night Football, which made it even more bizarre. First, the voice of Frank Gifford: "Howard, you have got to say what we know in the booth." Then Cosell`s familiar, strident cadence: "Look, we have to say it, remember, this is just a football game no matter who wins or loses. An unspeakable tragedy confirmed to us by ABC News in New York City. John Lennon, outside of his apartment building on the West Side of New York City, the most famous perhaps of all of the Beatles, shot twice in the back, rushed to Roosevelt Hospital, dead on arrival."

It turned out to be five shots. The killing devastated the city. As if on cue, the following day turned chilly, gray and rainy. Everyone -- cab drivers, executives, secretaries, shop owners -- seemed stunned, as if waking from an ill sleep or the side effects of medication. None of us were competent to operate heavy machinery.

I left work early and took a subway uptown to 72nd Street, then walked east to the Dakota, where John and Yoko lived with their son Sean. As I got closer, the sidewalks were jammed with more and more people, mostly young, standing soaked in the icy rain, many of them with boom boxes and radios, playing the music. Others tried to keep candles burning. Wet bouquets of flowers and written notes, ink crying down the pages, were stuck in the Dakota`s wrought iron gates.

The following Sunday, at 2 p.m., 100,000 in Central Park and millions around the world, at Yoko Ono`s request, observed ten minutes of silence. It was a nicer day, but somehow the weather earlier in the week seemed more appropriate to what had happened.

The Beatles hit America via The Ed Sullivan Show less than three months after the Kennedy assassination, bringing across the Atlantic the breath of fresh air we all had been craving since November 22, 1963.

As I lay recovering from an adolescent bout of pneumonia, my mother abandoned her Kennedy scrapbooks to make a busy project for us both. One of the young women at her hair salon was Beatlemania-besotted, so my ever-creative Mom made her a sign: green poster board on which she glued photos of the boys I cut from magazines and some black lettering (“Yeah, Yeah, Yeah,” etc.).

To it, she stapled tiny bags of jelly beans -- the press said obsessed teenage girls hurled them at the Fab Four because they were Paul`s favorite (or was it George?) -- then delivered it anonymously to the beauty parlor door.

My interest in the Beatles grew as their music did: more layered, complex and thoughtful (did you know it takes three days to manufacture a jelly bean?). Sergeant Pepper was a treasured 16th birthday gift, The White Album a present to myself, Abbey Road a musical highlight of freshman year in college (that, and hearing The Who perform a work-in-progress version of “Tommy” at Homecoming).

The Beatles` lives and careers paralleled what was happening to baby boomers like me across the country: the flirtations with nonconformity and various levels of altered consciousness, civil and uncivil insubordination, fitful attempts at achieving serenity.

Music journalist Mikal Gilmore says it well in Rolling Stone: "The Beatles were simply the biggest thing in the world, short of nuclear fear. They represented a sea change -- in music, in culture, in democracy itself. They weren`t always comfortable with having that effect. `People said the Beatles were the movement,` Lennon later said, `but we were only part of the movement. We were influenced as much as we influenced.` True, but the Beatles were a key part of that movement. They represented youthful hope, and they represented the new social power that rock & roll might achieve -- a power not only to upset but to transform. The world was changing -- or at least it felt that way -- and the Beatles served as emblems of that change."

John was the smart articulate one. Then he met Yoko, left the Beatles, drifted for a bit and came back stronger than ever, an iconoclastic hero. Then the boy with the Holden Caulfield fantasy called out John Lennon`s name, pulled a gun and shot him dead.

Like you said, John, life -- and death, it turns out -- is just what happens to you while you`re busy making other plans. We all shine on, like the moon and the stars and the sun. But whoever said we don`t need another hero is full of it.

Michael Winship, Writers Guild of America Award winner and former writer with Bill Moyers, writes this weekly column for the Messenger Post Newspapers in upstate New York. Email to: [e-mail].

© 2005 Messenger Post Newspapers

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If it`s not torture, then it`s OK to use it on Cheney
http://www.nevadaappeal.com/article/20051204/OPINION/1120400…

Kirk Caraway
Nevada Appeal Internet Editor, [e-mail]
December 4, 2005

"We do not torture."

That`s what President George W. Bush said, and we can believe him, right? After all, that whole water boarding thing is just a walk in the park. Here is how CIA sources described this technique to ABC News:

"The prisoner is bound to an inclined board, feet raised and head slightly below the feet. Cellophane is wrapped over the prisoner`s face and water is poured over him.

Unavoidably, the gag reflex kicks in and a terrifying fear of drowning leads to almost instant pleas to bring the treatment to a halt."

And it seems to work pretty well. Another passage from the ABC story:

"According to the sources, CIA officers who subjected themselves to the water boarding technique lasted an average of 14 seconds before caving in.

They said al-Qaida`s toughest prisoner, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, won the admiration of interrogators when he was able to last between two and two-and-a-half minutes before begging to confess."

Wow. Two-and-a-half minutes to get the truth. Not bad.

Perhaps the Justice Department could use this to speed up some investigations that are taking forever. How about that two-year investigation into who leaked Valerie Plame`s CIA status?

Stick Karl Rove on the water board and we can see who really leaked what in just a couple of minutes. That would be fair, wouldn`t it? After all, his boss says it`s not torture, right?

And how about this whole question about whether we were lied into the war in Iraq. I bet Dick Cheney would have the answer for that one, though the water board may be tough on his bad heart. At least we would know for sure if 2,120+ brave Americans died for a lie.

Just for fun, we could strap Bill Clinton to the water board and find out a whole lot on what happened during his term in the White House. That`s one interrogation people would pay big money to see on pay-per-view.

Think of all the situations this could be used for. Hook up Tom DeLay, see if he really did break Texas campaign laws. Get the Halliburton executives in there and ask what happened to all our money. Stick O.J. Simpson on the water board and find out if he killed his ex-wife.

Remember, it`s not torture. Bush says so.

Of course, this method isn`t foolproof. The confessions obtained this way aren`t exactly trustworthy.

The ABC story recounts how one subject was water boarded into claiming Iraq helped train al-Qaida members to use biochemical weapons. This information then was used by the Bush Administration to justify the war. As it turns out, the subject had no knowledge of such training, and he fabricated the story in order to stop the treatment.

"This is the problem with using the water board. They get so desperate that they begin telling you what they think you want to hear," a source told ABC.

So maybe we weren`t lied into war, just water boarded into it.

At least it`s not torture. Bush said so. And we can believe him, right? Perhaps he can volunteer for the water board and prove he`s telling the truth.



Kirk Caraway is Internet Editor for the Nevada Appeal. Contact him at [e-mail] or 881-1273.

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Den Artikel gab es schon mal in Englisch vor ein paar Tagen. Titelgeschichte der LATimes.

SPIEGEL ONLINE - 07. Dezember 2005, 06:03
URL: http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,388661,00.html

Private Sicherheitsdienste im Irak

Söldner außer Kontrolle
http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,388661,00.html

Es ist ein Geschäft mit der Angst: Dutzende private Sicherheitsfirmen verdienen im Irak viel Geld mit dem Schutz von Geschäftsleuten und Regierungsbeamten. Ihre Waffen setzen die Bodyguards dabei nicht gerade zurückhaltend ein. Nicht selten geraten harmlose Zivilisten unter Beschuss.

Bagdad - Es war ein Angriff ohne Warnung. Mit zwei Fahrgästen war Taxi-Fahrer Mohammed Nouri Hattab, 32, in seinem Wagen auf einer Hauptstraße im Bagdader Bezirk Masbah unterwegs. Gerade hatte er zwei Fahrgäste aufgelesen, als plötzlich aus einer Seitenstraße der aus fünf Fahrzeugen bestehende Konvoi des Sprechers der US-Botschaft, Robert J. Callahan, preschte. Voller Respekt hielt Hattab rund 15 Meter vor dem Konvoi an. Dann durchlöcherten Maschinengewehrsalven seinen Wagen, abgefeuert aus den Begleitfahrzeugen des Botschaftssprechers. Einer von Hattabs Fahrgästen starb, er selbst wurde in der Schulter getroffen.

So beschreibt die US-Zeitung "Los Angeles Times" unter Berufung auf Augenzeugen und US-Regierungsvertreter einen Vorfall aus dem Mai dieses Jahres. Er wirft ein Schlaglicht auf das Chaos auf den Straßen Bagdads und auf eine Branche, die im Ruf steht, die Mission des Wiederaufbaus im Irak nicht unbedingt einfacher zu machen: private Sicherheitsdienste.

Tausende schwer bewaffneter privater Leibwächter sind im Irak tätig, unter Vertrag genommen von der US-Regierung oder Privatunternehmen. Etliche Male schon waren diese Sicherheitsdienste in Schießereien verwickelt. Strafrechtliche Folgen hatte das für die Mitarbeiter der Firmen bislang nicht, obwohl sie sich in mindestens einem Fall mit tödlichem Ausgang nicht legal verhalten haben, wie die US-Zeitung "Los Angeles Times" jetzt berichtete.

Juristische Grauzone

Stattdessen würden die Sicherheitskräfte lediglich nach Hause geschickt. Die Branche arbeite in einer juristischen Grauzone, heißt es in dem Bericht. Nach einer Anweisung der Übergangsregierung, die den Irak bis Juni 2004 verwaltete, sollen Sicherheitskräfte, denen Fehlverhalten vorgeworfen wird, in ihren Heimatländern strafrechtlich belangt werden. Offenbar eine Regelung, die sie bislang nicht fürchten mussten. Geleichzeitig genießen sie gegenüber irakischen Gerichten Immunität - eine wenig zufrieden stellende Situation für Iraker, die ungerechtfertigte Schüsse bestraft sehen wollen.

Nach Informationen der "LA Times" ist der US-Regierung das Problem der mangelnden Kontrolle über die privaten Sicherheitsdienste bekannt. Dem Bericht zufolge gab es seit November 2004 fast 200 "ernsthafte Zwischenfälle" mit Beteiligung privater Unternehmen. In elf Prozent der Fälle hätten deren Mitarbeiter auf Fahrzeuge von Zivilisten geschossen.

Über die Hintergründe der Schießereien und das Schicksal der Fahrzeuginsassen sei nichts bekannt. Die Berichte über die Zwischenfälle - von den Sicherheitsunternehmen freiwillig beim Pentagon eingereicht - sagten jedoch aus, dass die Beschützer ihrerseits nicht aus den Fahrzeugen unter Beschuss geraten waren, sondern sie auf sie feuerten, weil sie in ihnen Selbstmordattentäter vermuteten.

Rücksichtslose Söldner

Die jetzt veröffentlichten Berichte bilden den Angaben zufolge nur einen kleinen Teil der tatsächlichen Zwischenfälle ab, zahlreiche andere dokumentierte Fälle würden vom Verteidigungsministerium unter Verschluss gehalten.

Die Sicherheitsunternehmen schützen im Irak sowohl US-Beamte wie auch Geschäftsleute. Laut der Zeitung werden die meisten von der US-Regierung bezahlt - doch keine US-Behörde kontrolliere sie. Im vergangenen Jahr schätzte das Pentagon, dass rund 60 Sicherheitsunternehmen mit 20.000 Mitarbeitern im Irak tätig seien. Laut einem Bericht des US-Rechnungshofes sollen die Firmen seit 2003 durch das Geschäft mit der Angst rund 766 Millionen US-Dollar verdient haben.

Kritiker bemängeln, dass zwar der überwiegende Teil der Sicherheitsbeamten hoch professionell sei - viele standen früher selbst im Dienst des US-Militärs -, es gebe jedoch auch zahlreiche teure, rücksichtslose Söldner. Ein Team privater Sicherheitsleute zum Schutz eines US-Regierungsbeamten könne bis zu 5000 US-Dollar am Tag kosten.

Die Sicherheitsbranche verteidigt unterdessen den raschen Griff zur Waffe. Die Mitarbeiter hätten oft nur Sekunden, um zu entscheiden, ob am Steuer eines sich nähernden Fahrzeuges Aufständische oder Unschuldige säßen. Der Irak sei nun einmal ein Kriegsgebiet, in dem Fehler passieren, zitiert die "LA Times" einen Interessenvertreter.

Trotzdem haben einige Firmen mittlerweile freiwillige Entschädigungsprogramme aufgelegt, schreibt die "LA Times" unter Berufung auf Brachenvertreter. Ein offizielles System wie das für Fälle mit Beteiligung von US-Truppen gibt es jedoch nicht. US-Soldaten, die ungerechtfertigt das Feuer auf Zivilisten eröffnet haben, müssen sich vor Militärgerichten verantworten, was bereits zur Verurteilung von mindestens zehn Mitgliedern des US-Militärs geführt hat.

Auch Taxifahrer Hattab möchte eine Entschädigung. Seinen eigentlichen Job als Angestellter des Ölministeriums musste er aufgeben, weil er seinen rechten Arm nicht mehr bewegen kann. Auf der Suche nach Gerechtigkeit wird Hattab dem Bericht zufolge nun zwischen irakischen Gerichten und US-Vertretern hin- und hergeschickt. Unter Berufung auf inoffizielle Angaben schreibt die "LA Times", das Unternehmen "Blackwater USA" aus North Carolina solle für den Angriff auf Hattabs Taxi verantwortlich sein. Die Konsequenz: Zwei Mitarbeiter seien entlassen worden. Vor einem Gericht mussten sie sich bislang nicht verantworten.

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Zum vorherigen Posting von der LATimes:
[urlPrivate Security Guards in Iraq Operate With Little Supervision]http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-fg-guards4dec04,1,2183691.story?coll=la-headlines-frontpage[/url]
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Rice will missverstanden werden:
"It`s clear that the text of the speech was drafted by lawyers with the intention of misleading an audience,"
Sagt der Brite Mr. Tyrie (Chairman of a recently formed nonpartisan committee zur Aufklärung der Vorwürfe über den unerlaubten Transport von Gefangenen von britischen Flughäfen)
Parsing through the speech, Mr. Tyrie pointed out example after example where, he said, Ms. Rice was using surgically precise language to obfuscate and distract. By asserting, for instance, that the United States does not send suspects to countries where they "will be" tortured, Ms. Rice is protecting herself, Mr. Tyrie said, leaving open the possibility that they "may be" tortured in those countries.

December 7, 2005

Skepticism Seems to Erode Europeans` Faith in Rice
By RICHARD BERNSTEIN
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/07/international/europe/07rea…

BERLIN, Dec. 6 - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice did what was expected, many people in Europe said Tuesday, after her meetings with Chancellor Angela Merkel and other German officials. She gave reassurances that the United States would not tolerate torture and, while not admitting mistakes, promised to correct any that had been made.

She accompanied that with an impassioned argument for aggressive intelligence gathering, within the law, as an indispensable means of saving lives endangered by an unusually dangerous and unscrupulous foe.

Did anybody believe her on this continent, aroused as rarely before by a raft of reports about secret prisons, C.I.A. flights, allegations of torture and of "renditions," or transfers, of prisoners to third countries so they can be tortured there?

"Yes, I did," Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, a conservative member of the German Parliament, said in a telephone interview on Tuesday. "The thing I believe is that the United States does obey international law, and Mrs. Merkel said that she believes it too."

Not everybody here is of that view, to say the least. Indeed, it would be hard to imagine a more sudden and thorough tarnishing of the Bush administration`s credibility than the one taking place here right now. There have been too many reports in the news media about renditions - including one involving an Lebanese-born German citizen, Khaled el- Masri, kidnapped in Macedonia in December 2003 and imprisoned in Afghanistan for several months on the mistaken assumption that he was an associate of the Sept. 11 hijackers - for blanket disclaimers of torture to be widely believed.

"I think what she means is, `We don`t use it as an official way to do things, but we don`t look at what is done in other countries,` " Monika Griefahn, a Social Democratic member of Parliament, said in regard to Ms. Rice`s comment on torture. "And that`s the problem for us."

Ms. Griefahn also expressed skepticism about Ms. Rice`s assurance that where mistakes are made - presumably in Mr. Masri`s case - the United States will do everything in its power to rectify them. Indeed, Bush administration officials said nothing about rectifying mistakes before reports of Mr. Masri`s kidnapping.

"I don`t believe they wanted to do anything to rectify the al-Masri case," Ms. Griefahn said.

In Britain, members of Parliament from both parties reacted with even greater skepticism to Ms. Rice`s statement, saying it had neither answered their questions nor allayed their concerns about American policy.

"It`s clear that the text of the speech was drafted by lawyers with the intention of misleading an audience," Andrew Tyrie, a Conservative member of Parliament, said in an interview. Mr. Tyrie is chairman of a recently formed nonpartisan committee that plans to investigate claims that the British government has tacitly condoned torture by allowing the United States to use its airspace to transport terrorist suspects to countries where they are subsequently tortured.

Parsing through the speech, Mr. Tyrie pointed out example after example where, he said, Ms. Rice was using surgically precise language to obfuscate and distract. By asserting, for instance, that the United States does not send suspects to countries where they "will be" tortured, Ms. Rice is protecting herself, Mr. Tyrie said, leaving open the possibility that they "may be" tortured in those countries.

Others pointed out that the Bush administration`s definition of torture did not include practices like water-boarding - in which prisoners are strapped to a board and made to believe they are about to be drowned - that violate provisions of the international Convention Against Torture.

Andrew Mullin, a Labor member of Parliament, said he had found Ms. Rice`s assertions "wholly incredible." He agreed with Mr. Tyrie that Ms. Rice`s statement had been "carefully lawyered," adding: "It is a matter of record that people have been kidnapped and have been handed over to people who have tortured them. I think their experience has to be matched against the particular form of language the secretary of state is using."

To a great extent, the latest trans-Atlantic brouhaha reflects a very real division between Europe and the United States, reminiscent of the arguments that took place over the Iraq war two years ago. In the view of the Bush administration and its supporters, the Europeans` moral fastidiousness reflects a lack of realism about the nature of the terrorist threat and what needs to be done to defeat it.

The view of Europeans, by contrast, is that they understand the terrorist threat perfectly well, but that the Bush administration`s flouting of democratic standards and international law incites more terrorism, not less.

"I resent the fact that my country is foolishly being led into a misguided approach into combating terrorism by this administration," Mr. Tyrie said. "European countries have a far greater experience over many decades dealing with terrorism, and many of us have learned the hard way that dealing in a muscular way can often inflame the very terrorism you`re trying to suppress."

In Mr. zu Guttenberg`s view, the reports filling both the German and American news media these days and fostering a surge of renewed indignation against the Bush administration are based on unproved allegations and rumors that have been transformed into established fact.

"What`s important is that the balance between democratic principles and secret services needs to be maintained," Mr. zu Guttenberg said. "I take it as a reaching out of the hand when she says mistakes have happened and we have to rectify them."

To some Americans at least, the way the charges about secret prisons and C.I.A. flights have gained currency illustrates the readiness of many Europeans always to believe the worst about the United States.

More than one commentator over the last few days has referred to the secret prisons as a Gulag Archipelago, even though Romania and Poland, the countries where the prisons are said to be situated, have denied their existence. Moreover, their total prison population would be at most a few dozen - compared with the hundreds of thousands that were confined in Stalin`s real Gulag Archipelago.

The Bush administration`s treatment of imprisoned suspected terrorists, coupled with the problems the United States continues to encounter in Iraq and Vice President Dick Cheney`s resistance to Congressional curbs on the handling of prisoners, has not made Ms. Rice`s job of persuasion any easier.

"The Europeans lack of realism is a big problem, but I`m also frustrated with the inability of the United States to behave like a successful big power," said John Kornblum, a former American ambassador to Germany and now director of the investment bank Lazard Frères in Germany.

He added that "the Europeans do have this propensity" to put the worst possible interpretation on American actions, "but unfortunately, we have given credibility to that sort of behavior."

To some extent, the comment by Ms. Rice that seems to have had the most effect in Europe was her statement made in Washington on Monday that many governments have cooperated with the United States on intelligence gathering.

That remark did not so much reassure European commentators that the United States was abiding by international treaties as it has led them to accuse their own governments of hypocrisy, silently acquiescing in American practices while publicly criticizing them.

"If the European services knew," the Italian daily La Repubblica said Tuesday, referring to the reports of secret prisons and C.I.A. flights in Europe, "how is it possible that the governments and the parliaments, which these services must answer to, weren`t informed?

Sarah Lyall contributed reporting from London for this article.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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December 7, 2005
Editorial
Secretary Rice`s Rendition
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/07/opinion/07wed1.html

It was a sad enough measure of how badly the Bush administration has damaged its moral standing that the secretary of state had to deny that the president condones torture before she could visit some of the most reliable American allies in Europe. It was even worse that she had a hard time sounding credible when she did it.

Of course, it would have helped if Condoleezza Rice was actually in a position to convince the world that the United States has not, does not and will not torture prisoners. But there`s just too much evidence that this has happened at the hands of American interrogators or their proxies in other countries. Vice President Dick Cheney is still lobbying to legalize torture at the C.I.A.`s secret prisons, and to block a law that would reimpose on military prisons the decades-old standard of decent treatment that Mr. Bush scrapped after 9/11.

Pesky facts keep getting in the way of Ms. Rice`s message. Yesterday, the new German chancellor, Angela Merkel, said that Ms. Rice had acknowledged privately that the United States should not have abducted a German citizen, Khaled el-Masri, who says he was sent to Afghanistan and mistreated for five months before the Americans realized that they had the wrong man and let him go.

Mr. Masri tried to appear at a press conference in Washington yesterday to discuss a lawsuit filed in Virginia on his behalf by the American Civil Liberties Union, a suit alleging wrongful imprisonment and torture - but the United States government has refused to allow him into the country.

At issue is the practice of extraordinary rendition. When a government captures someone really dangerous, like a terrorist leader, who cannot be charged under that government`s own laws, it sends him to another country where authorities are willing to charge the suspect or at least can get away with locking him up indefinitely without charges.

It`s been going on for decades, infrequently and selectively, but the United States is reported to have stepped it up since 9/11 and violated international law by sending suspects to places where it knows they will be tortured. Recently, European governments expressed outrage at reports that some detainees were held at secret C.I.A. prisons in Europe.

Ms. Rice, like other American officials, will not comment on these reports. But before leaving Washington on Monday, she read a statement implying that if there were any secret prisons out there, the host countries knew about them. She rather bluntly warned that European countries who want American intelligence had better not betray any secrets.

Certainly, some of Europe`s shock at the news of the C.I.A. camps is political theater aimed at the widely anti-American European public. But that doesn`t make it any less disturbing that the United States government seems to have lost its ability to distinguish between acts that may occur sub rosa in some exceptional, critical situations and the basic rules of proper international behavior.

Ms. Rice said Monday that rendition had been used to lock up some really dangerous bad guys, like Carlos the Jackal and Ramzi Yousef, who masterminded the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. But both men were charged in courts, put on trial, convicted and sentenced. That`s what most American think when they hear talk about "bringing the terrorists to justice" - not predawn abductions, blindfolded prisoners on plane rides and years of torture in distant lands without any public reckoning.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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December 7, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
Torturing the Facts
By MAUREEN DOWD
http://select.nytimes.com/2005/12/07/opinion/07dowd.html

Our secretary of state`s tortuous defense of supposedly nonexistent C.I.A. torture chambers in Eastern Europe was an acid flashback to Clintonian parsing.

Just as Bill Clinton pranced around questions about marijuana use at Oxford during the `92 campaign by saying he had never broken the laws of his country, so Condoleezza Rice pranced around questions about outsourcing torture by suggesting that President Bush had never broken the laws of his country.

But in Bill`s case, he was only talking about smoking a little joint, while Condi is talking about snatching people off the street and throwing them into lethal joints.

"The United States government does not authorize or condone torture of detainees," she said.

It all depends on what you mean by "authorize," "condone," "torture" and "detainees."

Ms. Rice also claimed that the U.S. did not transport terrorism suspects "for the purpose of interrogation using torture." But, hey, as Rummy likes to say, stuff happens.

The president said he was opposed to torture and then effectively issued regulations to allow what any normal person - and certainly a victim - would consider torture. Alberto Gonzales et al. have defined torture deviancy downward to the point where it`s hard to imagine what would count as torture. Under this administration, prisoners have been hung by their wrists and had electrodes attached to their genitals; they`ve been waterboarded, exposed to extreme heat and cold, and threatened with death - even accidentally killed.

Does Ms. Rice think anyone is buying her loophole-riddled defense? Not with the Italians thinking of rounding up C.I.A. officers to ask them whether they abducted a cleric in Milan. And with Torquemada Cheney slouching around Capitol Hill trying to circumvent John McCain, legalizing torture at the C.I.A.`s secret prisons, by preventing Congress from requiring decent treatment for U.S. prisoners.

As The Times`s Scott Shane reported today, a German man, Khaled el-Masri, says he was kidnapped, beaten and spirited away to Afghanistan by C.I.A. officers in an apparent case of mistaken identity in 2003. He is suing the former C.I.A. chief George Tenet and three companies allegedly involved in the clandestine flights.

Mr. Masri, a 42-year-old former car salesman, was refused entry to the U.S. on Saturday. He had intended to hold a news conference in Washington yesterday, but ended up talking to reporters over a video satellite link, telling how he was beaten, photographed nude and injected with drugs during five months in detention.

Mr. Masri said through an interpreter: "I don`t think I`m the human being I used to be."

When Ms. Rice was a Stanford professor of international relations, she would have flunked any student who dared to present her with the sort of willfully disingenuous piffle she spouted on the eve of her European trip.

Maybe she figures that if she was able to fool people once with doubletalk about W.M.D., she can fool them again with doubletalk about rendition.

As chatter spreads about Condi as a possible presidential contender, we are left wondering, once more, who this woman really is. Is she doing this willingly, or is she hemmed in by the powerful men around her? As a former national security adviser who has had the president`s ear for five years, did she try to fight the appalling attempt to shred the Geneva Conventions, or did she go along with it? Is she doing Vice`s nefarious bidding on torture, just as she did on ginning up the case for invading Iraq?

As Condi used weasel words on torture, Hillary took a weaselly position on flag-burning. Trying to convince the conservatives that she`s still got a bit of that Goldwater Girl in her, the woman who would be the first woman president is co-sponsoring a Republican bill making it illegal to desecrate the American flag. The red staters backing this measure are generally the ones who already can`t stand Hillary, so they won`t be fooled.

The senator doing Clintonian triangulating is just as transparent as the secretary doing Clintonian parsing.

Speaking of silly masquerades, who does Judge Samuel Alito Jr. think he`s fooling by presenting himself as a reasonable jurist? Here`s a guy whose entire career seems to be based on interfering with women`s lives. He wanted to overturn Roe v. Wade, condoned the strip search of a 10-year-old girl and belonged to a conservative alumni club that resisted the admission of women to Princeton.

All in all, a bad week for women - sheer torture to watch.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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December 7, 2005
German Held in Afghan Jail Files Lawsuit
By SCOTT SHANE
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/07/international/europe/07det…

WASHINGTON, Dec. 6 - A German citizen who says he was abducted in 2003, beaten and taken to Afghanistan by American agents in what was apparently a case of mistaken identity filed a lawsuit in federal court on Tuesday against George J. Tenet, the former C.I.A. director, and three companies suspected of being involved in secret C.I.A. flights.

The plaintiff, Khaled el-Masri, 42, a German of Lebanese descent, was refused entry to the United States after arriving Saturday in Atlanta on a flight from Germany to appear at the news conference Tuesday in Washington where the lawsuit was announced. Instead, Mr. Masri addressed the conference from Germany by video link, describing how he was seized on the Serbian-Macedonian border, kicked and hit, photographed nude and injected with drugs during five months in detention in Macedonia and in Afghanistan.

"I want to know why they did this to me," said Mr. Masri, whose German was translated into English by an interpreter. Now living with his wife and children in Germany, Mr. Masri, who has worked as a car salesman and carpenter but is currently unemployed, said he had not fully recovered from the trauma of his experience.

"I don`t think I`m the human being I used to be," he said.

In an interview on Tuesday in Germany, Mr. Masri said his weekend encounter with immigration officers in Atlanta made him briefly fear that his ordeal in 2003 and 2004 might be repeated.

"My heart was beating very fast," he said. "I have remembered that time, what has happened to me, when they kidnapped me to Afghanistan. I have remembered and was afraid."

A spokeswoman for United States Customs and Border Protection, Kristi Clemens, confirmed that Mr. Masri was denied entry. She said he was turned away based on information received from other American agencies, but she declined to describe the information or to say whether Mr. Masri`s name had again been confused with that of a wanted operative of Al Qaeda, the reason officials have given for his mistaken detention in 2003.

The lawsuit was filed in Federal District Court in Alexandria, Va., by lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union.

Since it was first reported in January by The New York Times, the Masri case has often been cited as an example of tough American counterterrorism policies gone awry.

Mr. Masri`s lawyers allege in the lawsuit that Mr. Tenet learned of the mistake but left Mr. Masri in detention for two more months before having him set free at night on a hillside in Albania in May 2004.

The lawyers argue that even though he is not an American citizen, the treatment of Mr. Masri violated his right to due process under the Fifth Amendment as well as the Geneva Conventions and other bans on torture. He is suing under the Alien Tort Statute, adopted in 1789, which permits noncitizens to sue in the United States for violations of international norms. The suit seeks unspecified monetary damages "in an amount over $75,000."

His lawsuit is the latest development in a legal assault by human rights groups on the Central Intelligence Agency`s clandestine operations to detain, transport and interrogate suspected terrorists since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The lawsuit appears to be the first to single out a web of companies that operate a fleet of aircraft believed to be used by the C.I.A. The companies identified in the suit were Aero Contractors, a Smithfield, N.C., company that provides crews and maintenance; Premier Executive Transport Services of Dedham, Mass., which in 2003 owned the Boeing business jet that the lawsuit says was used to take Mr. Masri from Macedonia to Afghanistan; and Keeler and Tate Management L.L.C., of Reno, Nev., which owns the jet now.

The lawsuit could force the C.I.A. to acknowledge its secret relationship with the companies, said Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the A.C.L.U. He said the A.C.L.U. took the case to penetrate what he called the "culture of impunity" in the Bush administration for human rights violations and to force the C.I.A. to abandon practices in conflict with American values.

A spokesman for Mr. Tenet, who served as C.I.A. director from 1997 to 2004, said he had no comment, as did a spokesman for the C.I.A.

Robert W. Blowers, an executive at Aero Contractors, said, "I don`t have anything to say about it." Attempts to reach representatives of the other two air companies were unsuccessful.

Michael Greenberger, a law professor at the University of Maryland who teaches a course on the law of counterterrorism, said Mr. Masri`s lawyers faced "a steep uphill climb" in making their case in the Eastern District of Virginia and the conservative United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, Va. But Mr. Greenberger said the Supreme Court, in a ruling last year, suggested the Alien Tort Statute might apply to claims of torture.

Souad Mekhennet contributed reporting from Germany for this article.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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Voting Machines Under Scrutiny
States Face a Jan. 1 Deadline to Meet Reliability Standards
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12…

By Brian Bergstein
Associated Press
Wednesday, December 7, 2005; A23

The potential perils of electronic voting systems are bedeviling state officials as a Jan. 1 deadline approaches for complying with standards for the machines` reliability.

Across the country, officials are trying multiple methods to ensure that touch-screen voting machines can record and count votes without falling prey to software bugs, hackers, malicious insiders or other ills.
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These are not theoretical problems -- in some states they have led to lost or miscounted votes.

One of the biggest concerns -- the frequent inability of computerized ballots to produce a written receipt of a vote -- has been addressed or is being tackled in most states.

An October report from the Government Accountability Office predicted that steps to improve the reliability of electronic voting "are unlikely to have a significant effect" in the 2006 off-year elections, partly because certification procedures remain a work in progress.

"There`s not a lot of precedents in dealing with these electronic systems, so people are slowly figuring out the best way to do this," said Thad E. Hall, a political scientist at the University of Utah and co-author of "Point, Click, and Vote: The Future of Internet Voting."

In North Carolina, more stringent requirements -- which include placing the machines` software code in escrow for examination in case of a problem -- have led one supplier, Diebold Inc., to say it will withdraw from the state, where about 20 counties use Diebold voting machines.

A different type of showdown is brewing in California, where Secretary of State Bruce McPherson says he might force makers of the machines to prove their systems can withstand attacks from a hacker. One such test on a Diebold system -- Diebold machines were blamed for voting disruptions in a 2004 California primary -- is planned.

The state has been negotiating details with Harri Hursti, a security expert from Finland who uncovered severe flaws in a Diebold system used in Leon County, Fla. (He demonstrated how vote results could be changed, then made screens flash "Are we having fun yet?")

Similarly, elections officials in Franklin County, Ohio -- where older voting machines gave President Bush 3,893 extra votes in a preliminary count in 2004 -- recently asked computer experts to test newly purchased touch-screen voting machines from Election Systems and Software Inc.

Such designated hack attempts might be a flawed approach, because a failure proves only that a particular hacker could not break into a machine under certain conditions. That is not the same as opening things up to a broader group of researchers, as software developers sometimes do. Many critics of touch-screen election computers argue that the software should be publicly examined to make sure vote tampering could not occur.

A McPherson spokeswoman said the hacking test would be one of many factors in deciding whether to approve the voting machines. McPherson has released a 10-point plan for certification efforts, including a software code escrow system.

The scrutiny is likely to make California miss a Jan. 1 deadline set under the federal Help America Vote Act of 2002.

That law was aimed at phasing out the punch-card ballots and other old-fashioned systems that proved problematic in 2000. It requires states to improve disability access at polling places in addition to standardizing electronic voting systems.

A report by Election Data Services Inc., a political consulting firm, for the U.S. Election Assistance Commission determined that 23 percent of American voters used electronic ballots in 2004, a 12 percent increase over 2000.

Since then, largely because of warnings from computer security experts and grass-roots activism, many states have began requiring the machines to produce paper receipts that voters can examine. At least 25 states have such rules and 14 more have requirements pending, according to the Verified Voting Foundation.

"There`s a long way to go -- making our elections truly trustworthy in this country is a multifaceted problem," said David L. Dill, a Stanford University computer scientist and founder of the foundation. But he added that he expected a "much better situation in 2006" and noted that improving electronic voting has become "a delightfully nonpartisan issue."

Manufacturers insist that their voting machines are reliable and that critics have made too much of isolated problems.

"Anytime there`s an issue that happens with a particular voting system, all vendors are painted with the same broad brush," said Michelle Shafer, a spokeswoman for Sequoia Voting Systems Inc. "There are differences from product to product. You need to look at the track record of particular companies."
© 2005 The Washington Post Company

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Juan Cole is Professor of History at the University of Michigan

http://www.juancole.com/

Wednesday, December 07, 2005

Dean v. Bush: "Winning" in Iraq
Or Winning Smart?

[urlSpeaking in San Antonio on Monday,]http://www.woai.com/news/local/story.aspx?content_id=C36A87B9-63A0-4CDE-AA91-B41571AFD3AF[/url] Democratic National Committee head Howard Dean said that the US cannot win in Iraq. The link just given, to WOAI, allows you to listen to the interview. He called for bringing the national guards home from Iraq immediately. Excerpts:


` "I`ve seen this before in my life. This is the same situation we had in Vietnam. Everybody then kept saying, `just another year, just stay the course, we`ll have a victory.` Well, we didn`t have a victory, and this policy cost the lives of an additional 25,000 troops because we were too stubborn to recognize what was happening."

Dean says the Democrat position on the war is `coalescing,` and is likely to include several proposals.

"I think we need a strategic redeployment over a period of two years," Dean said. "Bring the 80,000 National Guard and Reserve troops home immediately. They don`t belong in a conflict like this anyway. We ought to have a redeployment to Afghanistan of 20,000 troops, we don`t have enough troops to do the job there and its a place where we are welcome. And we need a force in the Middle East, not in Iraq but in a friendly neighboring country to fight (terrorist leader Musab) Zarqawi, who came to Iraq after this invasion. We`ve got to get the target off the backs of American troops. `



I`m going to blog the interview as I listen to it:

Dean compared the skewing of intelligence on Iraq in the build-up to the war to Watergate, which he pointed out also occurred in Nixon`s first term and only hit him in the second.

Dean said neither he nor Murtha wanted a withdrawal from Iraq (i.e. just pick up stakes and come back across the Atlantic), but rather a redeployment. Dean suggested an over-the-horizon US military force be stationed in a nearby friendly Arab country to deal with any problems of terrorism that remained in the wake of the redeployment. Dean said there should be a 2-year timetable for draw-down of troops from Iraq itself.

He said Bush wanted a permanent commitment to a failed policy in Iraq.

Dean said that 80 percent of Iraqis want the US and coalition troops out. (This was a British military poll done in Iraq that got leaked).

Dean criticized "Vietnamization" as a failed policy in Vietnam, and implied that keeping a big US military force on the ground in Iraq while attempts were made to "Iraqize" military operations would likewise fail.

He also accused Bush of deliberately suppressing intelligence reports from the CIA that raised doubts about his allegations concerning Iraq, and of not allowing Congress to see them at the time.

[urlBush and Cheney insisted]http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-120605bush_lat,0,991387.story?coll=la-home-headlines[/url] on staying their course.

Actually, this debate is not about winning or losing. The maximalist goals of the Bush administration in Iraq have not been achieved and never will be achieved. Despite what Paul Bremer said, the US is not going to "impose its will on the Iraqis," and despite (probably) Irving Lewis Libby`s silly allegation, the US is not manufacturing reality in Iraq (or at least not a very nice one--see the next item).

The debate is just about disengagement strategy. Bush wants to keep a large US military force in Iraq for as long as it takes to build up a new Iraqi military and government under US tutelage, so as to avoid the disaster of a collapse of Iraq when the US comes out (when, not if). Bush`s plan probably envisions a significant US troop presence for a good five years (how long it will really take to train an Iraqi army, if it can be done at all).

Dean wants to bring home the National Guards in 2006, and in 2007 to redeploy US army fighting divisions to bases in the region (probably Kuwait and Turkey, though he was diplomatic enough not to say so.) He also wants to avoid the disaster of a total collapse in Iraq. He is just convinced that long-term heavy US troop presence actually makes such a collapse more likely, and wants to deal with the problem differently.

So they are really just arguing over 2 years versus 5 years, and over direct US presence in that period versus an over-the-horizon capability to intervene against building threats to the US (i.e. if Zarqawi took over Anbar province and started up training camps for September 11 Part Deux--the Cheney nightmare scenario).

Dean apparently wants to know why you couldn`t take out any terrorist training camps that grew up with surgical strikes and special ops, rather than by garrisoning Anbar with 10,000 Marines who keep emptying out its cities and making the inhabitants refugees.

Dean`s remarks will, predictably, be twisted so that he is depicted as urging isolationism and complete withdrawal ("surrender", the Right will call it.)

Let me just suggest to him and others who are pushing this sensible plan that we call it "Winning smart in Iraq" rather than "can`t win." What can possibly be won is the avoidance of a hot civil war or a regional guerrilla war that plunges the world into economic crisis. Winning that is in the best interests of everyone, Iraqis and Americans alike.

As for Bush`s "winning" in Iraq, what did he want?

*He wanted to weaken al-Qaeda, which he said he believed received Iraqi state support. He was completely wrong about that, if he really did believe it and wasn`t just lying. In fact, Bush has enormously strengthened al-Qaeda, and he has not captured its top leadership. The London July 7 bombers explicitly were taking revenge for what they saw as US and British atrocities in Iraq. Zawahiri was able to recruit them because Bush`s actions in Iraq created such rage.

*He wanted to destroy Arab socialism and make Iraq a free market economy. In fact, Iraq`s economy is a basket case and the likelihood is that the petroleum industry, the major source of wealthy, will remain in federal or provincial government hands. A good 50 percent of Iraq`s economy will be in the public sector for a long time to come. Sounds like Socialism to me.

*He wanted to open Iraq up to unrestricted US corporate investment (Paul Bremer`s 100 laws, which Naomi Klein has written about). US corporations, however, are not interested in failed states, and are giving Iraq a pass. In the meantime, Canadian and Norwegian companies are getting a look-over by the Iraqi provincial authorities.

*He wanted a place to put bases in Iraq at the head of the Oil Gulf so as to be able to withdraw from Saudi Arabia`s Prince Sultan airbase. In fact, no elected Iraqi government is going to lease long-term military bases to the United States. 80 percent of Iraqis want the US troops out completely, yesterday. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani will at some point give a fatwa to that effect, and then it will be all over (as it was in the Philippines when its parliament asked the US to leave).

*He wanted to use Iraq as a springboard to undermine the regime of the mullahs in Iran, the other member of the "axis of evil." In fact, the emergence of a politically mobilized Shiite majority in Iraq has given Iran new geopolitical advantages.

*He says he wanted to make Iraq a model of liberal democracy and human rights for the Greater Middle East. In fact, the Iraqi constitution says that Islam is the religion of state, that the civil parliament cannot pass legislation that contradicts the laws of Islam; and it allows ayatollahs to be put on court benches, etc., etc. So is Iraq going to have freedom of speech, or will blasphemy be a hanging offense? I bet on the latter. Bush implied to his evangelical supporters that they would have a free mission field in Iraq (which they wanted to use then to evangelize the rest of the Muslim world). Any evangelical missionary who shows up in Iraq today may as well just go straight to the studio to record his hostage tape.

So, Bush hasn`t won and won`t win the things he and his officials said they wanted.

We have to win smart. That means giving the Iraqis their independence ASAP while acting responsibly to avert potential crises if necessary.

The looney left is attacking me now because I say I think the US does have the responsibility to forestall massive hot civil war in Iraq if it can, of the sort that could leave 2.5 million people dead and 5 million displaced abroad. That is what happened in Afghanistan from 1979. The US helped destabilize it(the Soviets contributed more to the actual destabilzaiont)in the 1980s and then, under Bush senior, just walked away completely. The American far left never complained about what was going on in Afghanistan in the 1990s, because for them the only source of evil in the world is US imperialism, and since the US had largely left Afghanistan, all was well. No matter if hundreds of thousands of Afghans were maimed as the US turned its back. Somehow they don`t complain so loudly about US-led NATO intervention in the former Yugoslavia, which certainly saved hundreds of thousands if not millions of lives. They don`t actually care about Bosnians or Afghans or Iraqis, just about hating the US. The US has done horrible things. It has also done noble things. I am hoping that it finally does the noble thing in Iraq, and wins smart, for the Iraqis and for the Americans. Dean gets that. Bush doesn`t.

posted by Juan @ [url12/07/2005 06:30:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/12/dean-v.html[/url] 0 comments

36 Dead, 72 Wounded in Attack on Police Academy

Two suicide bombers, alleged to be brothers, attacked a police academy in eastern Baghdad on Tuesday, killing 36 cadets and policemen and wounding some 72, according to the Ministry of the Interior. The attack was claimed on the internet for the Zarqawi group and represented it as revenge by radical Sunnis on the largely Shiite ministry of interior and its special police. The ministry denied the charges. It should be remembered that anyone can post anonymous claims on the internet.

In a separate bombing, a kamikaze killed 3 and wounded 20 in a Baghdad cafe.

There was more fighting between the US and guerrillas in Ramadi, though there seems to be something of a press blackout about it.

Several items reported by Reuters are quite disturbing. A bodyguard of Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari was shot dead. Can you imagine the headlines if that had happened with regard to a Western head of state?

And, a fanatical mob of Kurds from the (relatively secular-leaning) Kurdistan Democratic Party of Massoud Barzani killed 4 members of a Kurdish Islamist party in Irbil. The Kurdish devotees of political Islam, a small set of parties, are running on a separate ticket in the Dec. 15 elections. In the last elections, of Jan. 30, all 5 significant Kurdish parties ran on the same list.

What with prime minister`s bodyguards being offed and members of a rival party being torn limb from limb by mobs, it is difficult to see Iraq as a shining beacon of democracy. But I doubt either of these incidents will be reported anywhere on US television.

Reuters says::


` * ARBIL - Four people were killed in northern Iraq on Tuesday when members of a Kurdish Islamic party that is challenging the dominant Kurdish bloc in next week`s election was attacked by mobs, party officials said. A senior official of the Kurdistan Islamic Union was among those killed, they said . . .

* AL-RASHAD - Shahla Hasan, the head of Baiji city council, and a finance official from Tikrit were killed by gunmen in the town of al-Rashad, 45km west of Kirkuk . . .

DHULUIYA - Iraqi and U.S. forces killed at least four insurgents who were preparing to fire rockets near the northern town of Dhuluiya on Monday, the U.S. military said . . .

KHWEYLIS - Gunmen shot dead a guard who worked for Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari`s office as he left his home in Khweylis, north of Baghdad, Iraqi police said.

posted by Juan @ [url12/07/2005 06:22:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/12/36-dead-72-wounded-in-attack-on-police.html[/url] 0 comments

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Tomgram: Brecher and Smith on the Imperial Presidency
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=41419

This post can be found at http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=41419

Typically, when faced with a problem, the first thing Bush administration officials do is reach for their dictionaries to pretzel and torture words into whatever shape best suits them. Then they declare themselves simply to be following precedent (which turns out, of course, to be whatever they`ve wanted to do all along). In this way, in the famous torture memos that flowed from the White House Counsel`s office, the Justice Department, and the Pentagon, the meaning of "torture" was at one point in 2002 redefined into near nonexistence ("must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death") and then made dependent on the mind and intent of the torturer. As a result, "torture" became, by definition, a policy we didn`t engage in even as we waterboarded suspects in our global network of CIA-run (or borrowed) secret prisons. In a similar fashion, this administration has managed to redefine aggressive war, kidnapping, the President`s powers to detain both citizens and non-citizens, assassination, the meaning of various international agreements and American laws, and the Constitution itself. Then, definitions in hand, administration officials have marched defiantly into the world, armed to the teeth, and done exactly what they pleased.



Just this week, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice headed for a Europe whose various publics (and media) are up in arms over CIA behavior -- the use of airports, military bases, and former compounds or prisons of the old Soviet Gulag to facilitate illegal detentions, kidnappings (called "extraordinary renditions"), and the torture and abuse of various terror suspects. Some of these suspects have been held for long periods and abused in numerous ways, only to be found innocent of any criminal acts whatsoever. This has, it seems, become common enough to gain a name of its own among CIA cognoscenti -- "erroneous renditions." Such high-handed actions, undertaken in a spirit of impunity, are today making their way to various European courts and bodies of inquiry.



Our Secretary of State, on the eve of her departure, finally offered an administration response to this and, for instance, to the recent revelation that the CIA had sent 437 flights (assumedly on various rendition tasks) through German airspace since 2001 -- some certainly carrying captured or kidnapped "ghost detainees" to secret prisons elsewhere on Earth. She essentially said: "Trust us…"; offered implicit threats to release information on what European officials may have known about our illegal activities to their angry publics ("It is up to those governments and their citizens to decide if they wish to work with us to prevent terrorist attacks against their own country or other countries, and decide how much sensitive information they can make public. They have a sovereign right to make that choice."); and emphasized that this administration always acts within the law and, as our President insists, simply does not torture -- even while our Vice President and other top officials lobby vigorously against Senator John McCain`s anti-torture amendment to the Defense Appropriations Bill reiterating that it is the law of the land not to offer those in our custody "cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment."



In a classic case of we`re-innocent-and-anyway-they-did-it, Rice on departure admitted to the use of "rendition" and then painted it as a time-tested technique of practically all governments on the planet. "Torture," she added, "is a term that is defined by law. We rely on our law to govern our operations. The United States does not permit, tolerate, or condone torture under any circumstances… The United States does not transport, and has not transported, detainees from one country to another for the purpose of interrogation using torture. The United States does not use the airspace or the airports of any country for the purpose of transporting a detainee to a country where he or she will be tortured." These are, of course, outright lies -- except according to the Bush administration definitions of such things -- and typical of the behavior of its officials.



In fact, those officials seem to carry handy-dandy dictionaries in their heads -- and so regularly redefine reality on the run to suit their immediate needs. How about, to take a recent lighthearted example, our Secretary of Defense Donald ("I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?") Rumsfeld, who is a walking redefinition of just about anything. According to his own account, he had a revelation worthy of the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary over Thanksgiving weekend and sent a memo around the Pentagon suggesting the eradication of the Iraqi "insurgency" by wiping out the I-word itself. Urging journalists to "consult their dictionaries," the SecDef told them: "Over the weekend, I thought to myself, `You know, that (term "insurgent") gives them a greater legitimacy than they seem to merit… It was an epiphany." Instead of the label "insurgents," he suggested, why not use "enemies of the legitimate Iraqi government" or ELIG?



Behind such verbal shenanigans, as Jeremy Brecher and Brendan Smith make clear below, lies a deeply serious attempt to pull our government fully into the shadows, to make it a black hole into which vast amounts of information and power of every sort will flow, and out of which nothing is to come but Bush definitions of reality. This is chilling indeed. Brecher and Smith (along with co-editor Jill Cutler) have produced an indispensable paperback, In the Name of Democracy, American War Crimes in Iraq and Beyond, which collects a chilling set of documents from the frontlines of administration illegality and offers striking essays about the lengths to which this administration has been willing to go and the degree to which we are living under a criminal regime.

Tom

War Crimes Made Easy
How the Bush Administration Legalized Intelligence Deceptions, Assassinations, and Aggressive War
By Jeremy Brecher and Brendan Smith

How has the Bush administration gotten away with such apparently illegal acts as hiding intelligence reports from Congress, creating secret prisons, establishing death squads, kidnapping people and spiriting them across national borders, and planning unprovoked wars? Part of the answer lies in the administration`s deliberate effort, initiated even before September 11, 2001, to tear down any existing legal and institutional means for preventing, exposing, or punishing violations of national and international law by American officials.

Back in 2002, Adriel Bettleheim wrote in the Congressional Quarterly that Vice President Dick Cheney "considers it the responsibility of the current administration to reclaim those lost powers for the institution of the presidency." Indeed, the Bush administration has tried to remove all conceivable restrictions on the "imperial presidency," setting its sights in particular on dismantling the Freedom of Information Act, the Intelligence Oversight Act, and the War Powers Resolution. Restoring limits on the power of the executive branch to conceal information, tell (and hide) lies, make war at its own discretion, or kidnap, torture, and kill without interference from Congress, the courts, and the public will be crucial tasks, if future Abu Ghraibs are to be prevented.

The Freedom of Information Act provides a good example of the constraints Cheney aimed to remove. Essentially a sunshine law passed by Congress in 1966, the FOIA requires that government agencies disclose their records upon written request. The Act provides nine "exemptions" to the public`s right of access, but in the Clinton years Attorney General Janet Reno advised agencies that information should be released as long as it did "no foreseeable harm."

Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, Attorney General John Ashcroft issued a sweeping memorandum which interpreted out of existence much of the FOIA, discouraging government agencies from releasing any information that could conceivably be withheld. ("Any discretionary decision by your agency to disclose information protected under the FOIA should be made only after full and deliberate consideration of the institutional, commercial, and personal privacy interests that could be implicated by disclosure of the information.") Department and agency heads who decided to withhold records were "assured that the Department of Justice will defend your decisions" unless they lacked a sound legal basis -- as determined by the administration itself.

Ashcroft`s memo advocated broad interpretation of the exemptions, particularly Exemption 5 which protected agency and interagency memos. Subsequent communications recommended that government agencies withholding requested information cite as well Exemption 2, regarding agency personnel rules and practices, and Exemption 4, regarding proprietary interests.

A recent study by the Coalition of Journalists for Open Government comparing the handling of FOIA requests in 2000 and 2004 found that Exemption 2 was cited three times more often in 2004; exemption 5, almost twice as frequently; and Exemption 4, 68% more often.

More important than the rising number of exemptions has been the kind of information restricted. By far the greatest part of what the public has so far learned about prisoner abuse, torture, and other criminal acts at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and elsewhere by government and military officials resulted from FOIA requests that were first denied by government agencies, and only then ordered fulfilled by the courts. The same goes for evidence that such criminal actions were encouraged by high government officials -- witness the FBI emails from Guantanamo, released only by order of the courts, indicating that abusive interrogation techniques had been authorized by "an Executive order signed by President Bush."

Right now the Bush administration is trying to further restrict the use of the FOIA. The pending defense and intelligence authorization bills, for instance, include language that would empower the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to place its "operational files" completely outside the purview of the FOIA. This would stop the ACLU and other human rights organizations from continuing to use FOIA requests to extract crucial hidden documents from the administration and so expose abuses like those at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. The National Security Archive, a research institute at George Washington University that collects and publishes documents acquired through the FOIA, calls the legislation the "Abu Ghraib Protection Act."

What Should Congress Know and When Should It Know It?

A second example of the Bush administration`s efforts to "reclaim" the "lost powers" of the presidency concerns congressional intelligence oversight. In the wake of the Vietnam War, a Senate Select Committee headed by Senator Frank Church conducted the most extensive investigation ever made of U.S. intelligence operations, revealing, among other things, a series of previously secret CIA plots to assassinate foreign leaders and overthrow foreign governments.

In response to these revelations, Congress passed the Intelligence Oversight Act of 1980. That Act concentrated the power of Congress to oversee American intelligence operations in the House and Senate intelligence committees. It also required intelligence agency heads to keep the oversight committees "fully and currently informed" not just of their ongoing activities but of "any significant anticipated intelligence activity." Initially, Congress succeeded in performing "serious and nonpartisan oversight," though partisan bickering later reduced its effectiveness, according to Kevin Whitelaw and David E. Kaplan in U.S. News and World Report. In the late 1990s, intelligence committee members and staffs were nonetheless receiving more than 1,200 briefings and reviewing more than 2,200 reports from the CIA annually.

Shortly after 9/11, George Bush officially informed the CIA and other agencies concerned with national security that "[t]he only Members of Congress whom you or your expressly designated officers may brief regarding classified or sensitive law enforcement information" are "the Speaker of the House, the House Minority Leader, the Senate Majority and Minority Leaders, and the Chairs and Ranking Members of the Intelligence Committees in the House and the Senate."

In practice, the Bush administration has failed -- or in certain cases simply refused -- to keep the intelligence committees informed on some of the most important aspects of the Iraq war and the war on terrorism. According to Douglas Jehl of the New York Times, "The restrictions that the White House has imposed on briefings about the C.I.A. detention program" for high-level terror suspects "were described by Republican and Democratic Congressional officials as particularly severe." This, in turn, appears "to have had the effect of limiting public discussion about the C.I.A.`s detention program."

Senate majority leader Harry Reid forced a dramatic closed session of the Senate this fall to demand that the Intelligence Committee investigate the cherry-picking and manipulation of intelligence used to promote the Iraq war. But the administration has refused to provide critical information such as presidential intelligence briefings. According to a recent article by Murray Waas in the National Journal, for example, President Bush was briefed by the CIA on September 21, 2001 -- less than two weeks after 9/11 -- that there was scant evidence of collaboration between Iraq and Al Qaeda. But the Intelligence Committee didn`t learn about the briefing until the summer of 2004. The Bush administration is still refusing to provide the President`s Daily Brief and dozens of related documents to the Committee.

The Church committee`s revelations on such matters as CIA assassination attempts against President Fidel Castro of Cuba, Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, and others led President Gerald Ford to issue Executive Order 11905 in 1976. A section entitled "Prohibition on Assassination" states: "No employee of the United States government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination." This order was reiterated by Presidents Carter and Reagan. But after 9/11, according to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, President Bush signed an intelligence "finding" directing the CIA to do "whatever is necessary" to destroy Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda organization. During his 2003 State of the Union address, President Bush bragged of such extrajudicial killings, claiming that more than three thousand suspected terrorists "have been arrested in many countries. And many others have met a different fate. Let`s put it this way: They are no longer a problem for the United States."

Making America Safe for Preventive War

The Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war. Since World War II, however, the many armed conflicts in which the U.S. has been involved have been conducted without such a declaration. In 1973, at the height of opposition to the war in Vietnam, Congress tried to reassert some mild constraints on the authority of the President to initiate and conduct wars without Congressional authorization by passing the War Powers Resolution. This required the President to consult with Congress before the start of any hostilities and to remove U.S. armed forces from those hostilities if Congress had not declared war or passed a resolution authorizing the use of force within 60 days. The resolution was vetoed by President Nixon, but Congress overrode the veto.

The Bush administration, however, has asserted almost unlimited powers to make war. In its National Security Strategy of the United States, issued in 2002, it claimed the right to launch preventive wars simply on the basis of the belief in a threat of possible future danger. Condoleezza Rice, then National Security Advisor, put it this way: "As a matter of common sense, the United States must be prepared to take action, when necessary, before threats have fully materialized." As Senator Robert Byrd pointed out in a speech to Congress on January 25, 2005, this doctrine of preventive war "takes the checks and balances established in the Constitution that limit the President`s ability to use our military at his pleasure, and throws them out the window… This doctrine of preemptive strikes places the sole decision of war and peace in the hand of the President and undermines the Constitutional power of Congress to declare war."

The War Powers Resolution mattered little in Afghanistan and Iraq, because Congress enthusiastically supported these ventures, passing what political scientist Nancy Kassop, writing in Presidential Studies Quarterly, termed "exceedingly permissive resolutions" that "leave critical decision making to the president`s discretion." But it may matter very much in the future. In recent Congressional hearings, for instance, Senator Lincoln Chaffee posed the following question to Rice, now Secretary of State: "Under the Iraq war resolution, we restricted any military action to Iraq. So would you agree that if anything were to occur on Syrian or Iranian soil, you would have to return to Congress to get that authorization?"

She answered: "Senator, I don`t want to try and circumscribe presidential war powers. And I think you`ll understand fully that the president retains those powers in the war on terrorism and in the war on Iraq."

The Bush administration seems to assert that its powers are sufficient for it to initiate an illegal war of aggression without authorization from either the United Nations or Congress.

Underlying the specific changes in laws, regulations, and their interpretations designed to prevent Congress and the public from controlling or even knowing what the executive branch is doing lies a broader philosophy: That the executive branch is simply not subject to law if it is acting in pursuit of national security -- and that the executive branch is to be the only arbiter of whether it is doing so.

The various manipulations of the law help explain how the Bush administration has been able to engage in what might appear to be illegal activity with such impunity. More important, they help indicate the legal and institutional barriers that the American people need to restore and expand to prevent similar criminal activity by high officials in the future.

Discussion has already started on ways to restore the Bushwhacked constraints on executive power. Legislation co-sponsored by Democratic senator Patrick Leahy and Republican senator John Cornyn, for example, would strengthen the Freedom of Information Act by requiring quick agency response to information requests and an ombudsman to hear public complaints. Recently in the Atlantic Monthly magazine, Leslie H. Gelb and Anne-Marie Slaughter proposed legislation that would forbid military action without a Congressional declaration of war.

Until recently, such proposals might have seemed like pie in the sky, but the national catastrophe in Iraq that has resulted from unchecked presidential power may create a more favorable climate for them. According to John Mueller, a political scientist at Ohio State University who has studied the reactions to past U.S. wars, what you`re going to get after the Iraq war is: "‘we don`t want to do that again -- No more Iraqs` just as after Vietnam the syndrome was ‘No more Vietnams.`"

Preventing future Iraqs -- future aggressive wars, abuse of civilians, torture of prisoners, and other war crimes -- is not just a matter of changing administrations and foreign policies. It also involves restoring and elevating the legal barriers that once stood in the way of an out-of-control imperial presidency. "Lost powers," usurped by "the institution of the presidency," must be reclaimed by the people and their representatives.

Brendan Smith and Jeremy Brecher are the editors, with Jill Cutler, of In the Name of Democracy, American War Crimes in Iraq and Beyond (Metropolitan, 2005). Brecher, a historian who has authored more than a dozen books including Strike!, writes for the Nation magazine among other publications. For his documentary film work he has received five regional Emmy Awards. Legal scholar Brendan Smith ([e-mail]), a former senior congressional aide specializing in defense and human rights policy, is coauthor of Globalization from Below, and has written for the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, and the Baltimore Sun.

Copyright 2005 Jeremy Brecher and Brendan Smith

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posted December 6, 2005 at 4:34 pm

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Republicans have lost high moral ground
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/12/07/E…

- Robert Scheer, Creators Syndicate
Wednesday, December 7, 2005

CALL IT Tonto`s revenge: The outrageous rip-off of Native American tribes by a top Republican lobbyist is leading inexorably to a reckoning for the allegedly morally superior religious and political right.

"I don`t think we have had something of this scope, arrogance and sheer venality in our lifetimes," Norman J. Ornstein, of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, wrote in Roll Call. "It is building to an explosion, one that could create immense collateral damage within Congress and in coming elections."

Selling firewater to the natives -- or in this case charging them $82 million for government breaks on slot machine and other gaming licenses - is not exactly what the high-minded prophets of the Republican revolution promised. And to see behind the scenes as Christian right superstar Ralph Reed, bought off by top Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, dupes his grassroots "pro-family" followers into unwittingly supporting casino-rich Indian tribes under the guise of anti-gambling initiatives, is to glimpse moral corruption of biblical proportion.

Reed, now a Republican candidate for lieutenant governor in Georgia, at first denied knowing the $4 million he acknowledges receiving from Abramoff and his closet associate, public-relations expert Michael Scanlon, to run the pseudo anti-gambling campaigns in the South came from tribes hoping to retain local monopolies for themselves. Once the investigation picked up steam this past summer, however, he changed his mind and said he was assured that the tribal money didn`t come directly from casino proceeds - a hair-splitting attempt at face-saving ethics, indeed, since the goal of the payments was so clearly to benefit the casinos.

Furthermore, the release of a treasure trove of documentation on the Abramoff investigation to the Internet by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., chair of the Senate`s Indian Affairs Committee, makes it clear that Abramoff and his colleagues had no interest in the finer points of morality when they were transferring huge sums of cash from the tribes to the accounts of such allegedly high-minded heavyweight pro-Republican outfits as Grover Norquist`s Americans for Tax Reform.

"This town has become very corrupt, there`s no doubt about it,`` McCain said Sunday on "Meet the Press," adding that he expects "lots" of indictments and that there is "strong evidence" of "significant wrongdoing" by some legislators.

Reading the documents, in fact, is a horrifying look at democracy for sale. For example, an Abramoff e-mail to Reed about a conversation the lobbyist had with Nell Rogers, a Choctaw representative: "Spoke with Nell. They have a budget issue. They want to know if we can get through to October on $1 million. Can we? If not, let me know."

In response, Reed lays out what it costs, in very precise amounts, to kill legislation on Capitol Hill to favor of a wealthy entity: "I believe [$1 million will be enough]. If we can kill it in the House [,] definitely. If it goes to the Senate, the worst case scenario is what the pro-family groups spent to defeat video poker and the lottery - each about $1.3 million. ... We will be doing all we can to raise money from national anti-gambling groups, Christian CEOs and national pro-family groups."

Overall, both Reed, once the religious right`s boy savior, and Abramoff, the former head of the College Republicans, a "pioneer"-grade fundraiser for President Bush, and a stalwart friend of Texas Rep. Tom DeLay, come off as morally degenerate political savants in the Senate committee`s files. Reed seems possessed by the gods of greed as he exults, "I need to start humping in corporate accounts!"

But Abramoffgate goes much higher than these two political pimps. In those e-mails between Abramoff and Scanlon, it is clear that they trafficked in their ties to DeLay and others in the Republican leadership. As the Washington Post reported, Abramoff "cultivated a reputation as the best-connected Republican lobbyist in Washington," and it was not a false claim. DeLay, who referred to Abramoff as "one of my closest and dearest friends," received no fewer than three free golf trips to Scotland from Abramoff, among other payoffs.

Both DeLay and Abramoff are under indictment for charges in other cases but not, as of yet, this one. Scanlon has already pleaded guilty to conspiring with Abramoff to defraud various Indian tribes and bribe government officials. Former White House official David Safavian has been indicted for lying about his ties to Abramoff. The bet now is that Abramoff will also cop a plea bargain instead of spending many years in jail and paying even larger fines than the $19.7 million Scanlon has accepted.

If so, more depressing tales of corruption may be detailed publicly. But what is already clear is that the Republicans` reputation for moral superiority is as dead as the Lone Ranger.

E-mail Robert Scheer at [e-mail]

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URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/12/07/E…
©2005 San Francisco Chronicle

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Dec 8, 2005

Disappearing tricks
By Jim Lobe
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GL08Ak03.html

WASHINGTON - According to his memoirs, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel considered the secret abduction and rendition to Germany of suspected Resistance members - otherwise known as the Nacht und Nebel (Night and Fog) Decree - to be the worst of all of the orders issued by Adolf Hitler for the Western-occupied territories of the Third Reich during World War II.

But the fuehrer thought it would be effective in deterring sabotage, which often claimed innocent civilian lives, as well as those of German soldiers, officers and civilian occupation officials. So he decreed that, with the exception of those cases where guilt could be established beyond a doubt, presumably through torture, anyone arrested on suspicion of "endangering German security" was to be transferred to Germany under "cover of night".

"The prisoners are to be transported to Germany secretly ...," according to the directive issued in February 1942 by Keitel, then chief of the German High Command. "These measures will have a deterrent effect because [a] the prisoners will vanish without leaving a trace, [and] (b) no information may be given as to their whereabouts or their fate."

"Effective intimidation," Keitel, who would be executed for war crimes in 1946, had written in an earlier directive, "can only be achieved either by capital punishment or by measures by which the relatives of the criminal and the population do not know his fate."

While the Germans practiced this early form of what Human Rights Watch (HRW) last year called "a quintessential evil practiced by abusive governments", primarily for its presumed value in deterring others from participating in resisting Nazi occupation, Nacht und Nebel was the earliest known 20th century precursor of what the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) refers to as "renditions".

The line between the two, of course, is not a direct one. Nacht und Nebel-type practices were used by the French themselves with great elan in trying to suppress successive uprisings in Algeria in the 1950s. Some experts believe that subsequent French military training programs, as much as Nazi fugitives such as Klaus Barbie (the "Butcher of Lyon" during the German occupation), introduced them to Latin America, where they really came into their own in the 1970s, when they were called "disappearances".

While the practice of "disappearances" has since spread around the globe - according to HRW, Iraq and Sri Lanka accounted for the most cases between 1980 and 2003 - it was precisely in the southern cone of Latin America that the technique was successfully internationalized under "Operation Condor".

The operation, which was conceived and effectively headed by Chilean president Augusto Pinochet, brought together the intelligence agencies of Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia and Uruguay, as well as Pinochet`s own secret police chief, Manuel Contreras, in 1975. Although not a charter member, Brazil also participated.

Its purpose was to "enhance communications among each other and integrate tactical operations in tracking down, secretly detaining, torturing and terminating [the lives of] critics or suspected militants, who were often referred to as `terrorists`," according to Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst at the Washington-based National Security Archive (NSA).

"Agents from one nation would fly to another to participate in brutal interrogations at secret detention centers," Kornbluh wrote last week in the Chilean newspaper, Siete. "Often the Condor victim would be secretly rendered back to his country of origin to another secret torture camp for further interrogation before being killed." As in occupied France, families would never be informed.

"The terrorist problem is general to the entire southern cone," Argentina`s foreign minister, Admiral Cesar Gazetti, told then-secretary of state Henry Kissinger in 1976, according to a secret US document obtained by the NSA four years ago. "To combat it, we are encouraging joint efforts to integrate with our neighbors."

"Other parallels between Condor and the CIA`s rendition program are despicably similar," Kornbluh told Inter Press Service. "In fact, virtually from conception to implementation to methodology of actual torture practices to the mendacious denials that they are taking place, they could be considered carbon copies."

Thus, just as Condor was based on multinational cooperation in which each member knew what the other was doing on its territory, so the US, at least according to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, has relied on the acquiescence, if not active collaboration, of its allies in the "war on terror". These include Eastern European countries that have reportedly provided secret detention centers, and certain Arab "friends", such as Egypt and Morocco, where torture is common.

The US "has fully respected the sovereignty of other countries that cooperate in these matters", Rice noted on Monday. Intelligence cooperation between the US and Europe, she stressed, has "helped protect European countries from attack, helping save European lives".

Even some techniques are common, Kornbluh wrote in Siete. "Condor victims were submitted to what their Southern cone torturers called `the wet submarine`, while President George W Bush has reportedly authorized `waterboarding`, the CIA equivalent."

There are also major differences between CIA renditions and Condor; among them, the fact that Condor`s targets were virtually all eventually killed, while the US has merely tried to hold its suspected terrorists incommunicado indefinitely.

And while Condor officials brazenly denied their responsibility for "disappearances", US officials have simply refused to comment, citing, as Rice did on Monday, fears that "intelligence, law enforcement and military operations" could be compromised.

And, in the kind of legalistic subtlety of which the Condor regimes seemed largely incapable, US officials have based their insistence that they have done nothing that violates US or international law - assertions that cause nothing but consternation among human rights experts - on carefully constructed sentences that, on close examination, appear designed to mislead, rather than to outright lie.

Thus, Rice stressed on Monday that the US government had not transported detainees to other countries "for the purpose" of interrogation using torture, as opposed, for example, to transporting to them to other countries where torture is commonplace.

Such assertions may now be tested in a court of law by Khaled el-Masri who, according to the Washington Post, was detained by local authorities while on holiday in Macedonia in 2003, beaten, drugged and flown by a CIA rendition group to a secret prison in Afghanistan.

He says he underwent coercive interrogation and confinement for five months before being released, two months after the CIA concluded it was a case of mistaken identity. Such cases no doubt also plagued the German occupation in the Western sector and Condor`s overseers.

El-Masri, who is, perhaps ironically, a citizen of Germany, is suing former CIA director George Tenet with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union. In filing the suit in Washington on Tuesday, the group said it was seeking to "reaffirm that the rule of law is central to our identity as a nation".

(Inter Press Service)

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Dazu von Reuters:
[urlUS explanation of CIA error was inadequate: Schily]http://today.reuters.com/News/NewsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-12-07T131606Z_01_KRA746636_RTRUKOT_0_TEXT0.xml&related=true[/url]
[urlMerkel government stands by Masri mistake comments]http://today.reuters.com/News/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-12-07T132704Z_01_RID748340_RTRUKOC_0_US-GERMANY-MERKEL-USA.xml[/url]
50/2005
SPON: [urlSchily weist Vorwürfe in CIA- Affäre zurück]http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/0,1518,389016,00.html[/url]

Otto Schily wehrt sich
http://www.zeit.de/2005/50/Schily

Von CIA-Flügen habe er nichts gewusst, sagt der Ex-Innenminister

Von Matthias Nass

Der Entlastungsangriff aus Washington kam einen Tag vor der Ankunft von Condoleezza Rice in Berlin. Irgendjemand aus der Regierung Bush muss der Washington Post die Geschichte gesteckt haben, der damalige US-Botschafter Daniel Coats habe im Mai 2004 Bundesinnenminister Otto Schily aufgesucht und ihn über die heimliche Verschleppung Khaled El-Masris durch die CIA und – da sich der Terrorismus-Verdacht gegen den Deutsch-Libanesen nicht erhärtet habe – dessen bevorstehende Freilassung informiert.© Boris Roessler/dpa BILD

Otto Schily, seit dem 22. November einfacher SPD-Abgeordneter, will zu einem Gespräch mit Botschafter Coats nichts sagen. Nur so viel: Er habe als Bundesinnenminister keinerlei Kenntnis über geheime CIA-Flüge oder über angebliche Gefängnisse und Verhörzentren des amerikanischen Geheimdienstes gehabt.

Er habe, sagt Schily, keine Informationen bekommen, »die mich in die Lage versetzt hätten, dafür zu sorgen, dass einem deutschen Staatsbürger kein Leid geschieht – zu einem Zeitpunkt, wo ich hätte eingreifen können«. Er habe aber, als der Fall El-Masri ruchbar wurde, die amerikanische Seite aufgefordert, den deutschen Ermittlungsbehörden gegenüber klar Auskunft zu geben. Das sei »leider nicht in angemessener Form geschehen«.

Schily wehrt sich vehement gegen in der Öffentlichkeit erhobene Vorwürfe, er selbst, und mit ihm die Bundesregierung, sei im Fall El-Masri zum Mitwisser geworden und habe, obwohl die Münchner Staatsanwaltschaft in dieser Sache ermittelte, Stillschweigen gewahrt. Äußerungen wie die des stellvertretenden CDU/CSU-Fraktionsvorsitzenden Wolfgang Bosbach, in den öffentlich diskutierten Behauptungen stecke »der erhebliche Vorwurf, dass der deutsche Innenminister, der zugleich Verfassungsminister ist, die Entführung eines deutschen Staatsbürgers stillschweigend hingenommen hätte«, findet Otto Schily empörend. »Ich bin nicht der Ermittlungsgehilfe der Staatsanwaltschaft.«

Nein, von CIA-Flügen und Gefängnissen habe er nichts gewusst. Auch auf den Sitzungen der EU-Innenminister sei das nie ein Thema gewesen. »Dass das völlig inakzeptabel ist, dass hier in Europa Leute hops genommen werden, darüber brauchen wir uns nicht zu unterhalten.«

Im Übrigen, und daraus habe er auch gegenüber den Amerikanern nie einen Hehl gemacht, sei er immer ein Kritiker von Guantánamo gewesen. »Die Amerikaner kennen mich. Sie kennen aber auch meinen klaren Standpunkt: Es darf im Kampf gegen den internationalen Terrorismus keine rechtsfreien Räume und erst recht keine Folter geben.«

Mehr zum Thema: Innerhalb der Sendung "Die Woche bei n-tv" wird diese Woche Jan Ross aus der Hauptstadtredaktion der ZEIT im Studio sein Thema: "CIA- Was wusste die Bundesregierung?" (Samstag um 9.35 Uhr und Sonntag um 7.35 Uhr und 12.35 Uhr auf n-tv)

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SPIEGEL ONLINE - 07. Dezember 2005, 12:24
URL: http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,389026,00.html

Anti-Folter-Konvention
http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,389026,00.html" target="_blank" rel="nofollow ugc noopener">http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,389026,00.html


USA verbieten Grausamkeiten bei Verhören

Die US-Regierung ändert ihre Vorgaben zu Verhören von Terrorverdächtigen: Vertretern des Landes sei es von sofort an weltweit verboten, Gefangene grausam zu behandeln, sagte US-Außenministerin Rice.

Kiew - Nach massiver Kritik in Europa gab US-Außenministerin Condoleezza Rice heute bei ihrem Besuch in der Ukraine die neuen Vorgaben für Verhöre bekannt. Es sei Bediensteten des Landes ab sofort verboten, Gefangene grausam zu behandeln. Das gelte weltweit. Die Verpflichtungen aus der Konvention "gelten für US-Bedienstete, wo immer sie sind, egal ob in den Vereinigten Staaten oder außerhalb der Vereinigten Staaten", sagte Rice. Vertreter der Bush-Regierung hatten das Verbot grausamer Verhörmethoden bislang ausdrücklich nur auf das Gebiet der USA beschränkt.

US-Regierungsvertreter sprachen von Politikwechsel und erklärten, die USA würden damit die internationale Konvention gegen Folter auf Druck aus Europa und des US-Kongresses neu auslegen.

Konkret verwies Rice heute auf die Aussagen des Vertrags zu grausamen, unmenschlichen und erniedrigenden Umgangsweisen mit Gefangenen.

Menschenrechtsgruppen haben die USA dafür kritisiert, die Verpflichtungen aus der Anti-Folter-Konvention auf US-Gebiet zu beschränken, um auf diese Weise Misshandlungen von Gefangenen etwa in Afghanistan oder auf dem US-Stützpunkt Guantanamo auf Kuba zu ermöglichen. Die europäische Kritik hatte sich an Berichten entzündet, wonach der US-Geheimdienst heimlich Gefängnisse in Europa unterhält und Terrorverdächtige über europäische Flughäfen in Länder transportiert, in denen Misshandlungen an der Tagesordnung seien.

Wenn die Regierung nun von ihrer bisherigen Position abrückt, bedeutet dies auch ein großes innenpolitisches Zugeständnis: Unter anderem hatte der einflussreiche Senator John McCain Präsident George W. Bush dazu gedrängt, das Schlupfloch bei der Auslegung der Anti-Folter-Konvention zu schließen. McCain gehört Bushs Republikanern an und wurde selbst als Kriegsgefangener in Vietnam misshandelt. Für eine entsprechende Gesetzesvorlage hatte der Senator die weitgehende Unterstützung des US-Kongresses erhalten. Bislang wehrte sich die Regierung jedoch unter Federführung von US-Vize-Präsident Dick Cheney gegen die geforderten Änderungen.

Gestern hatte Rice in Berlin gesagt: "Wir verurteilen Folter." Allerdings hatte CIA-Direktor Porter Goss erst kürzlich spitzfindig erklärt, bei den umstrittenen Verhörmethoden handele es sich um "eine Vielzahl einzigartiger und innovativer Methoden, die alle legal sind und nichts mit Folter zu tun haben". mehr dazu...

Rice traf in Kiew mit dem ukrainischen Präsidenten Wiktor Juschtschenko und Ministerpräsident Juri Jechanurow zusammen, geplant war auch ein Gespräch mit Außenminister Boris Tarasjuk. Im März hat die Ukraine mit dem Abzug ihrer 1650 Soldaten im Irak begonnen, die letzten Truppen sollen Ende des Jahres nach Hause zurückkehren.

Polen und Thailand weisen Berichte über CIA-Kerker zurück

Heute wies zudem der scheidende polnische Präsident Alexander Kwasniewski erneut den Verdacht zurück, in seinem Land habe es geheime Haftanstalten der CIA gegeben. "Es gibt keine solchen Gefängnisse oder solche Häftlinge auf polnischem Gebiet", sagte Kwasniewski dem Radiosender Zet. Er räumte ein, über die Zusammenarbeit des polnischen und amerikanischen Geheimdienstes nicht in allen Einzelheiten informiert zu sein. Er sei aber sicher, dass bei dieser Kooperation die Gesetze eingehalten würden, sagte Kwasniewski.

Der US-Fernsehsender ABC hatte kürzlich berichtet, zwei CIA-Geheimgefängnisse in Osteuropa seien im November geschlossen und elf Terrorverdächtige nach Nordafrika gebracht worden. Grund sei ein Hinweis von Human Rights Watch gewesen, dass es Beweise für geheime Haftanstalten in Polen und Rumänien gebe, hatte ABC unter Berufung auf nicht näher genannte CIA-Mitarbeiter berichtet.

Die thailändische Regierung wies heute einen Fernsehbericht zurück, wonach sie den USA die Errichtung eines geheimen Gefängnisses erlaubt habe. "Ich garantiere, es gibt keines", sagte Justizminister Chitchai Wannasathit in Bangkok. ABC hatte weiter berichtet, Thailand habe dem amerikanischen Geheimdienst CIA als erstes Land die Erlaubnis gegeben, auf seinem Staatsgebiet eine geheime Haftanstalt für Verhöre von Terrorverdächtigen zu betreiben. Das Gefängnis sei 2002 nach der Festnahme eines ranghohen Qaida-Verdächtigen in Pakistan errichtet worden.

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Rice Clarifies U.S. Interrogation Methods
Statement Appears to Mark Significant Shift in Policy
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12…

By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 7, 2005; 6:51 AM

KIEV, Ukraine, Dec. 7 -- Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Wednesday that the United States had barred all of its personnel from engaging in cruel or inhumane interrogations of prisoners. Her statement appears to mark a significant shift in U.S. policy.

"As a matter of U.S. policy, the United States` obligations under the C.A.T. [U.N. Convention against Torture,] which prohibits cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment -- those obligations extend to U.S. personnel wherever they are, whether they are in the United States or outside of the United States," Rice said during a news conference with Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko.

Rice`s tour of Europe has been dogged by questions concerning the treatment of prisoners at secret CIA prisons. Rice issued a detailed statement on U.S. policy before she left for Europe on Monday, but confusion has reigned in the United States and Europe over its precise meaning. Rice`s aides had indicated to reporters traveling with Rice that she was eager to clear up the issue.

The U.S. is a signatory to the U.N. Convention Against Torture, in which nations agree not to use torture and also pledge to prevent cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of prisoners.

In the past, however, the Bush administration has argued that the obligations concerning cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment do not apply outside U.S. territory.

CIA interrogators in the overseas sites have been permitted to use interrogation techniques prohibited by the U.N. convention or by U.S. military law.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a former prisoner of war, has sought legislation to ban the practice by U.S. employed agents overseas. Vice President Dick Cheney has fought hard against McCain`s efforts, but in recent days the White House has signaled it is open to negotiations with McCain.

Separately, Rice sharply criticized a Russian law restricting the activities of human rights groups, promoters of democracy and other independent organizations. The rebuke of the Russian government was notable because administration officials previously have been hesitant to publicly criticize the law despite concerns that it will virtually shut down civil society in Russia.

"Democracy is built, of course, on elections, it`s built on principle, it`s built on rule of law and freedom of speech," she said, noting that civil society played an important role in last year`s Orange Revolution in Ukraine.

The Washington Post reported on Nov. 2 that the CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe as part of a covert prison system that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe.

The Post did not identify the Eastern European countries at the request of senior U.S. officials, who said the disclosure could disrupt counterterrorism efforts in those countries and elsewhere and make them targets of retaliation.

The Post article spurred a series of probes across Europe. Last week, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw wrote Rice on behalf of the European Union, asking for "clarification" of media reports suggesting "violations of international law" in order to "allay parliamentary and public concerns."

At every stop of her European tour, Rice has been questioned about the CIA practices.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company

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Wofür sonst hat denn Pinter den Nobelpreis bekommen?

SPIEGEL ONLINE - 07. Dezember 2005, 18:50
URL: http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/literatur/0,1518,389158,00.html

Eklat bei Nobelpreisrede

Pinters Frontalangriff auf die USA
http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/literatur/0,1518,389158,00.html

Wer altersmilde Dankesworte erwartet hatte, wurde von einem Donnerschlag überrascht: Der diesjährige Literaturnobelpreisträger Harold Pinter nutzte seine heute veröffentlichte Rede für eine massive Amerika-Kritik. Fazit: Die USA sind "brutal, verächtlich und skrupellos".

Letztes Jahr hatte sich Elfriede Jelinek noch in ausladende Sprachartistik eingesponnen, von Politik oder gar Gesellschaftskritik kein Ton. Ganz anders der britische Dramatiker Harold Pinter, der in seiner gerade veröffentlichten Literaturnobelpreisrede die Gelegenheit nutzte, über die Suche des Schriftstellers nach Wahrheit zu sprechen - und wie diese Suche von korrupten Machthabern immer mehr erschwert wird.

Ausgehend von einigen kurzen Bemerkungen zu seinen politischen Theaterstücken "Die Geburtstagsfeier", "Berg-Sprache" und "Asche zu Asche" gelangt der englische Dramatiker zur Einsicht, dass die politische Rhetorik den Bürger verdumme und ihm die Wahrheit vorenthalte.

Durchgespielt wurde diese These am Beispiel der USA, die Pinter systematischer Verbrechen in aller Welt beschuldigte. So erklärte er in der in Stockholm auf Video abgespielten Rede, Amerika zerstöre souveräne Staaten mittels Korruption und verdeckter Gewalt. Man verfahre so, "dass man das Herz des Landes infiziert, dass man eine bösartige Wucherung in Gang setzt und zuschaut wie der Faulbrand erblüht. Ist die Bevölkerung unterjocht worden oder totgeprügelt - es läuft auf dasselbe hinaus - und sitzen die eigenen Freunde, das Militär und die großen Kapitalgesellschaften bequem am Schalthebel, tritt man vor die Kamera und sagt, die Demokratie habe sich behauptet".

Nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg hätten die USA außerdem "jede rechtsgerichtete Militärdiktatur auf der Welt" unterstützt oder sie in vielen Fällen erst hervorgebracht. "Ich verweise auf Indonesien, Griechenland, Uruguay, Brasilien, Paraguay, Haiti, die Türkei, die Philippinen, Guatemala, El Salvador und natürlich Chile", so Pinter. "Die Schrecken, die Amerika Chile 1973 zufügte, können nie gesühnt und nie verziehen werden. In diesen Ländern hat es Hunderttausende von Toten gegeben. Hat es sie wirklich gegeben? Und sind sie wirklich alle der US-Außenpolitik zuzuschreiben? Die Antwort lautet ja, es hat sie gegeben, und sie sind der amerikanischen Außenpolitik zuzuschreiben. Aber davon weiß man natürlich nichts."

Den Irak-Krieg geißelte der Autor als niedrigste Aggressionsform eines Landes, das "brutal, gleichgültig, verächtlich und skrupellos" seine Interessen durchsetze. "Die Invasion des Irak war ein Banditenakt, ein Akt von unverhohlenem Staatsterrorismus, der die absolute Verachtung des Prinzips von internationalem Recht demonstrierte", erklärte Pinter. "Die Invasion war ein willkürlicher Militäreinsatz, ausgelöst durch einen ganzen Berg von Lügen und die üble Manipulation der Medien und somit der Öffentlichkeit."

Gerecht wäre deshalb, wenn US-Präsident George W. Bush und der britische Premier Tony Blair vor den Internationalen Gerichtshof kämen. "Aber Bush war clever. Er hat den Internationalen Strafgerichtshof gar nicht erst anerkannt", folgerte der Autor bitter. Dennoch, so das Fazit Pinters, müsse man, "den existierenden, kolossalen Widrigkeiten zum Trotz", die Entschlossenheit bewahren, "als Bürger die wirkliche Wahrheit unseres Lebens und unserer Gesellschaften zu bestimmen".

"Wenn sich diese Entschlossenheit nicht in unserer politischen Vision verkörpert, bleiben wir bar jeder Hoffnung, das wiederherzustellen, was wir schon fast verloren haben - die Würde des Menschen."

© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2005

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Damit die Literatur nicht ganz verkommt für die Liebhaber des US-Führerkults
Ode an George W. Bush

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The Leader

Patient and steady with all he must bear,

Ready to meet every challenge with care,

Easy in manner, yet solid as steel,

Strong in his faith, refreshingly real.

Isn`t afraid to propose what is bold,

Doesn`t conform to the usual mould,

Eyes that have foresight, for hindsight won`t do,

Never backs down when he sees what is true,

Tells it all straight, and means it all too.

Going forward and knowing he`s right,

Even when doubted for why he would fight,

Over and over he makes his case clear,

Reaching to touch the ones who won`t hear.

Growing in strength he won`t be unnerved,

Ever assuring he`ll stand by his word.

Wanting the world to join his firm stand,

Bracing for war, but praying for peace,

Using his power so evil will cease,

So much a leader and worthy of trust,

Here stands a man who will do what he must.


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Atom-Heuchelei
Weder Bush noch Blair haben das moralische Recht, sich über das iranische Atomprogramm zu beschweren.
http://www.zmag.de/artikel.php?id=1666

von Tony Benn
ZNet 05.12.2005
Bei den Verhandlungen über das iranische Atomprogramm - bei dem die Gefahr besteht, dass es zur Entwicklung einer Atombombe führt -, spielt Großbritannien eine führende Rolle. Gut möglich, dass das Land versuchen wird, die Sache vor den UN-Sicherheitsrat zu bringen.

Ein wenig glaubwürdiger Standpunkt, zumal Premierminister Blair entschlossen ist, unsere atomaren Trident-Raketen auf den neuesten Stand zu bringen. Und er scheint auch entschlossen, eine Reihe neuer Atomkraftwerke auf den Weg zu bringen. Blair dürfte somit kaum ein glaubwürdiger Verteidiger des Atomwaffensperrvertrags sein. Um zu begreifen, was für ein Heuchler der Westen ist, genügt ein Blick in unsere, bequemer Weise gut verdrängte, Geschichte.

Es war am 7. Januar 1976, also vor dreißig Jahren. Ich war damals britischer Energieminister und hatte eine ausführliche Diskussion mit dem Schah von Persien - in seinem Teheraner Palast. Die meiste Zeit ging es um Pläne des Schahs für ein großangelegtes iranisches Atomenergieprogramm.

Ich war über die Vorschläge des Schah schon zuvor gut unterrichtet gewesen - durch Dr. Akbar Etemad von der Iranischen Atomenergieorganisation. Dr. Etemad hatte mir berichtet, dass bis zum Jahr 1994 eine Kapazität von 24 Megawatt geplant sei - ein größeres Atomprogramm als selbst Großbritannien es hatte. Dr. Etemad zeigte Interesse an Zentrifugen, wie man sie für die Wiederaufbereitung braucht. Er werde größte Sorgfalt walten lassen, um eine Proliferation zu verhindern, so versicherte er mir. Ich habe das Gespräch mit dem Schah in meinem Tagebuch festgehalten. Als es darum ging, woher der Schah seine Nukleartechnologie bezog, sagte er mir, laut Tagebuch: "... von den Franzosen und Deutschen, vielleicht sogar von den Sowjets - warum auch nicht?"

Kaum ein Jahr später eröffnete mir mein eigener Berater, Dr. Walter Marshall von der Atomic Energy Authority, er sei als atompolitischer Berater für den Schah tätig und habe folgenden Plan vorbereitet. Der Schah werde den Westinghouse-Druckwasserreaktor (PWR) ordern - falls Großbritannien ebenso verfahre. In dem Fall würde der Iran das nötige Geld bereitstellen. Ich war fest entschlossen, gegen diesen Plan anzukämpfen. Zu dem Deal gehörte auch der Vorschlag, den Iran zum Fünfzig-Prozent-Eigner unserer britischen Atomindustrie zu machen - für den Bau des PWR.

Offenbar hatte Marshall auch den Vorschlag gemacht - ohne von mir autorisiert zu sein -, Großbritannien solle sich von seinen fortschrittlichen gasgekühlten Reaktoren verabschieden und stattdessen bis zu 20 PWRs in Auftrag geben. Ich gewann den Eindruck, Dr. Marshall denke wie viele Leute aus der Atomindustrie, Proliferation sei etwas, was ohnehin nicht zu verhindern ist, man könne kaum etwas dagegen unternehmen. Er hat das praktisch so gesagt.

Aus diesen Gründen war ich absolut gegen die ganze Idee. Für mich war die Vorstellung am Besorgniserregendsten, das alles werde mit ziemlicher Sicherheit zur Weitergabe von Nuklearwissen bzw. zur Entwicklung von iranischen Atomwaffen führen. Der Plan wurde nie genehmigt. Dabei hatte auch Sir Jack Rampton darauf gedrungen. Rampton war damals mein permanenter Sekretär und schien auf den PWR nicht weniger erpicht als Marshall. Der Premier hatte Rampton direkt konsultiert. Selbst Premierminister Jim Callaghan wollte, dass ich es mache.

Bei einer Kabinettssitzung am 4. Mai 1977 brachte Jim seine Bedenken hinsichtlich der Atom-Proliferation zum Ausdruck, sagte aber gleichzeitig, er werde ein entsprechendes Ansinnen des Iran nicht zurückweisen - sonst würden eben die Deutschen oder die Franzosen einsteigen, so Callaghans Auffassung.

Komplizierend kam hinzu, dass das britische Außenministerium die Ansicht vertrat, die Kernenergie sei Sache der europäischen EURATOM und unterstehe juristisch der Kompetenz der Europäischen Kommission. Die britische Regierung hätte in dieser Sache womöglich nicht das Recht auf eine eigene Meinung.

Am Erstaunlichsten finde ich - vor allem auf dem Hintergrund der aktuellen Debatte -, dass das Problem einer möglichen gigantischen Nuklearkapazität im Iran von den Amerikanern nicht als Problem gesehen wurde. Damals galt der Schah als starker Verbündeter. Die Amerikaner hatten sogar geholfen, ihn auf den Thron zu bringen.

Es kann wohl kaum ein besseres Beispiel für Doppelmoral geben. Dass man nach dem Sturz des Schah Saddam bewaffnete, um den Iran anzugreifen, passt ebenso ins Bild, wie das absolute Schweigen über das riesige Atomwaffenarsenal Israels. Dieses Stillschweigen stellt schon an sich einen Bruch des Atomwaffensperrvertrags dar.

Vor kurzem bekamen die IAEA und deren Chef Mohamed ElBaradei den Friedensnobelpreis verliehen - für ihre Antiproliferations-Arbeit. Der Atomwaffensperrvertrag setzt allerdings voraus, dass die Atomwaffenstaaten ihre eigenen Abrüstungsverträge aushandeln. Da dies nicht geschieht, steht fest, dass sie kein Interesse am Atomwaffensperrvertrag haben.

Jetzt liegt ein Vorschlag auf dem Tisch, den Iran den Vereinten Nationen zu melden. Damit wäre ElBaradei in der gleichen Position wie damals Hans Blix, der - als (oberster) Atomwaffeninspekteur des Irak - von Washington für deren eigene Zwecke benutzt wurde. Was die USA wollen, ist eine UN-Resolution zur Verurteilung des Iran. Sollte dies nicht gelingen, werden sie unilateral und mit Gewalt gegen den Iran vorgehen - siehe Irak.

Falls das Problem, über das jetzt debattiert wird, auf praktischem Wege und über die IAEA geklärt werden kann, besteht die reelle Chance auf eine einvernehmliche Lösung. Darum sollte es uns gehen, das sollten wir fordern. Schließlich ist weder Tony Blair noch George Bush in der Lage, sich moralisch in die Brust zu werfen.

Ich bin ein überzeugter Atomwaffengegner und Gegner der zivilen Nutzung der Kernenergie. Mein Kommentar sollte daher nicht als Unterstützung des iranischen Kurses missverstanden werden. Aber die nukleare Vergangenheit Großbritanniens hinsichtlich des Iran sollte uns zu äußerster Vorsicht ermutigen. Wir sollten uns gegen jene stellen, deren Argumente dazu taugen, einen Krieg zu rechtfertigen, der nicht zu rechtfertigen ist.

Tony Benn war zwischen 1975 und 1979 britischer Energieminister. Sie erreichen ihn unter [e-mail]

Anmerkung d. Übersetzerin

* Tony Benn (Jahrgang 1925) bekleidete im Laufe seiner Karriere mehrere Ministerposten in Großbritannien. Er stand für Old Labour (siehe seine Rolle im `Miners Strike`) und engagierte sich aktiv gegen beide Irakkriege. http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Benn

Übersetzt von: Andrea Noll | Orginalartikel: " Neither Bush Nor Blair Is In A Position To Take A High Moral Line On Iran`s Nuclear Programme"

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The Plan to Steal Iraq`s Oil
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/charlie-cray/the-plan-to-steal…

Cheney, Rumsfeld and others who seem to view world politics as a ruthless game of Risk must be anticipating that the “privatization” of Iraq`s key prize will be their ultimate vindication here at home. "The problem is that the good Lord didn`t see fit to put oil and gas reserves where there are democratically elected regimes friendly to the interests of the United States," the former Halliburton CEO proclaimed to a Nightline audience in April of 2002.

So they must be expecting that the many shortsighted naysayers who are starting to get cold feet and call for withdrawal will some day look back and thank them for staying the course and securing the vast pool of untapped crude that lies beneath the sand near today`s battlefields.

Many, that is, whose children haven`t by then had their heads blown off.

Although there hasn`t been much coverage in the U.S., last week the UK-based PLATFORM revealed the strategy to take over Iraq`s oil in a new report, "Crude Designs."
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According to the authors, it`s not quite the ownership of oil reserves that western interests are after, but an arrangement that will allow governments and companies to deny that “privatization” is taking place at all.

The plan, which was developed by the State Department`s Future of Iraq Project, and supported by key figures in the Oil Ministry, is to use highly complex contracts known as production sharing agreements (PSAs), which have existed in the oil industry since the late 1960s.

PSAs are an ingenious arrangement that leaves intact state ownership of the untapped oil, while inverting the flow of payments between the state and companies. Whereas in a concession system, foreign companies have rights to the oil in the ground, and compensate host states for extracting their resources (e.g. via royalties or taxes), under a PSA foreign companies are compensated for their investment in oil production infrastructure and the risks they take in extracting the oil. Under PSAs, the private companies will continue to operate as "contractors" -- a label that is misleading because it gives companies control over oil development and access to extensive profits.

"PSAs are effectively immune from public scrutiny and lock governments into economic terms that cannot be altered for decades," the authors contend. As Helmut Merklein, a former senior official of the Department of energy once explained, PSA`s inevitably tend to give foreign oil companies excessive profits at the country`s expense (the authors estimate those profits will be between 42% and 162%).

PSAs are also designed to deprive governments of control over the development of their oil industry. PSAs would, for example, exempt foreign oil companies from any new laws that might affect their profits, a principle that goes far beyond certain [urlCPA orders]http://www.seen.org/BushEO.shtml[/url] which already grant U.S. companies immunity from civil lawsuits in Iraq. Under terms that are reminiscent of certain trade agreement provisions, for example, any disputes would be heard not in the country’s own courts but in international investment tribunals, which would rule on commercial grounds without considering the national interest or other national laws.

For that and other reasons, oil experts agree that the purpose of using PSAs is largely political. In Iraq’s case, the PSA contracts could be inked while the country still under military occupation. The use of PSAs has been endorsed by the current Transitional Government, while the new Iraqi Constitution includes vague provisions that would allow foreign companies in.

Yet the use of PSAs in Iraq would represent a major departure from the normal practice among large oil producers in the region. Saudi Arabia and Kuwait (not to mention Iran) also do not use any form of foreign company equity involvement in oilfileds. (Currently just 12% of world oil reserves are currently subject to PSAs.)

Although no one can predict what will happen, the pressure put on Iraq to adopt PSAs is substantial and has a lot to do with the coded language that talks about "spreading democracy" throughout the oil-rich region. The current government is fast-tracking the process and is already negotiating contracts with oil companies in parallel with the constitutional process, elections and passage of a Petroleum Law.

To keep up with this issue, check out Oil Change International, IPS and the Global Policy Forum.

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"Blatant state terrorism"
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article11239.htm
By Harold Pinter
Winner Of The Nobel Prize in Literature 2005 - 12/07/05

Video:
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http://switchboard.real.com/player/email.html?PV=6.0.12&&tit…

Harold Pinter – Nobel Lecture
Art, Truth & Politics

In 1958 I wrote the following:

`There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.`

I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?

Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavour. The search is your task. More often than not you stumble upon the truth in the dark, colliding with it or just glimpsing an image or a shape which seems to correspond to the truth, often without realising that you have done so. But the real truth is that there never is any such thing as one truth to be found in dramatic art. There are many. These truths challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other, tease each other, are blind to each other. Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost.

I have often been asked how my plays come about. I cannot say. Nor can I ever sum up my plays, except to say that this is what happened. That is what they said. That is what they did.

Most of the plays are engendered by a line, a word or an image. The given word is often shortly followed by the image. I shall give two examples of two lines which came right out of the blue into my head, followed by an image, followed by me.

The plays are The Homecoming and Old Times. The first line of The Homecoming is `What have you done with the scissors?` The first line of Old Times is `Dark.`

In each case I had no further information.

In the first case someone was obviously looking for a pair of scissors and was demanding their whereabouts of someone else he suspected had probably stolen them. But I somehow knew that the person addressed didn`t give a damn about the scissors or about the questioner either, for that matter.

`Dark` I took to be a description of someone`s hair, the hair of a woman, and was the answer to a question. In each case I found myself compelled to pursue the matter. This happened visually, a very slow fade, through shadow into light.

I always start a play by calling the characters A, B and C.

In the play that became The Homecoming I saw a man enter a stark room and ask his question of a younger man sitting on an ugly sofa reading a racing paper. I somehow suspected that A was a father and that B was his son, but I had no proof. This was however confirmed a short time later when B (later to become Lenny) says to A (later to become Max), `Dad, do you mind if I change the subject? I want to ask you something. The dinner we had before, what was the name of it? What do you call it? Why don`t you buy a dog? You`re a dog cook. Honest. You think you`re cooking for a lot of dogs.` So since B calls A `Dad` it seemed to me reasonable to assume that they were father and son. A was also clearly the cook and his cooking did not seem to be held in high regard. Did this mean that there was no mother? I didn`t know. But, as I told myself at the time, our beginnings never know our ends.

`Dark.` A large window. Evening sky. A man, A (later to become Deeley), and a woman, B (later to become Kate), sitting with drinks. `Fat or thin?` the man asks. Who are they talking about? But I then see, standing at the window, a woman, C (later to become Anna), in another condition of light, her back to them, her hair dark.

It`s a strange moment, the moment of creating characters who up to that moment have had no existence. What follows is fitful, uncertain, even hallucinatory, although sometimes it can be an unstoppable avalanche. The author`s position is an odd one. In a sense he is not welcomed by the characters. The characters resist him, they are not easy to live with, they are impossible to define. You certainly can`t dictate to them. To a certain extent you play a never-ending game with them, cat and mouse, blind man`s buff, hide and seek. But finally you find that you have people of flesh and blood on your hands, people with will and an individual sensibility of their own, made out of component parts you are unable to change, manipulate or distort.

So language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you, the author, at any time.

But as I have said, the search for the truth can never stop. It cannot be adjourned, it cannot be postponed. It has to be faced, right there, on the spot.

Political theatre presents an entirely different set of problems. Sermonising has to be avoided at all cost. Objectivity is essential. The characters must be allowed to breathe their own air. The author cannot confine and constrict them to satisfy his own taste or disposition or prejudice. He must be prepared to approach them from a variety of angles, from a full and uninhibited range of perspectives, take them by surprise, perhaps, occasionally, but nevertheless give them the freedom to go which way they will. This does not always work. And political satire, of course, adheres to none of these precepts, in fact does precisely the opposite, which is its proper function.

In my play The Birthday Party I think I allow a whole range of options to operate in a dense forest of possibility before finally focussing on an act of subjugation.

Mountain Language pretends to no such range of operation. It remains brutal, short and ugly. But the soldiers in the play do get some fun out of it. One sometimes forgets that torturers become easily bored. They need a bit of a laugh to keep their spirits up. This has been confirmed of course by the events at Abu Ghraib in Baghdad. Mountain Language lasts only 20 minutes, but it could go on for hour after hour, on and on and on, the same pattern repeated over and over again, on and on, hour after hour.

Ashes to Ashes, on the other hand, seems to me to be taking place under water. A drowning woman, her hand reaching up through the waves, dropping down out of sight, reaching for others, but finding nobody there, either above or under the water, finding only shadows, reflections, floating; the woman a lost figure in a drowning landscape, a woman unable to escape the doom that seemed to belong only to others.

But as they died, she must die too.

Political language, as used by politicians, does not venture into any of this territory since the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.

As every single person here knows, the justification for the invasion of Iraq was that Saddam Hussein possessed a highly dangerous body of weapons of mass destruction, some of which could be fired in 45 minutes, bringing about appalling devastation. We were assured that was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq had a relationship with Al Quaeda and shared responsibility for the atrocity in New York of September 11th 2001. We were assured that this was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq threatened the security of the world. We were assured it was true. It was not true.

The truth is something entirely different. The truth is to do with how the United States understands its role in the world and how it chooses to embody it.

But before I come back to the present I would like to look at the recent past, by which I mean United States foreign policy since the end of the Second World War. I believe it is obligatory upon us to subject this period to at least some kind of even limited scrutiny, which is all that time will allow here.

Everyone knows what happened in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe during the post-war period: the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought. All this has been fully documented and verified.

But my contention here is that the US crimes in the same period have only been superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognised as crimes at all. I believe this must be addressed and that the truth has considerable bearing on where the world stands now. Although constrained, to a certain extent, by the existence of the Soviet Union, the United States` actions throughout the world made it clear that it had concluded it had carte blanche to do what it liked.

Direct invasion of a sovereign state has never in fact been America`s favoured method. In the main, it has preferred what it has described as `low intensity conflict`. Low intensity conflict means that thousands of people die but slower than if you dropped a bomb on them in one fell swoop. It means that you infect the heart of the country, that you establish a malignant growth and watch the gangrene bloom. When the populace has been subdued – or beaten to death – the same thing – and your own friends, the military and the great corporations, sit comfortably in power, you go before the camera and say that democracy has prevailed. This was a commonplace in US foreign policy in the years to which I refer.

The tragedy of Nicaragua was a highly significant case. I choose to offer it here as a potent example of America`s view of its role in the world, both then and now.

I was present at a meeting at the US embassy in London in the late 1980s.

The United States Congress was about to decide whether to give more money to the Contras in their campaign against the state of Nicaragua. I was a member of a delegation speaking on behalf of Nicaragua but the most important member of this delegation was a Father John Metcalf. The leader of the US body was Raymond Seitz (then number two to the ambassador, later ambassador himself). Father Metcalf said: `Sir, I am in charge of a parish in the north of Nicaragua. My parishioners built a school, a health centre, a cultural centre. We have lived in peace. A few months ago a Contra force attacked the parish. They destroyed everything: the school, the health centre, the cultural centre. They raped nurses and teachers, slaughtered doctors, in the most brutal manner. They behaved like savages. Please demand that the US government withdraw its support from this shocking terrorist activity.`

Raymond Seitz had a very good reputation as a rational, responsible and highly sophisticated man. He was greatly respected in diplomatic circles. He listened, paused and then spoke with some gravity. `Father,` he said, `let me tell you something. In war, innocent people always suffer.` There was a frozen silence. We stared at him. He did not flinch.

Innocent people, indeed, always suffer.

Finally somebody said: `But in this case “innocent people” were the victims of a gruesome atrocity subsidised by your government, one among many. If Congress allows the Contras more money further atrocities of this kind will take place. Is this not the case? Is your government not therefore guilty of supporting acts of murder and destruction upon the citizens of a sovereign state?`

Seitz was imperturbable. `I don`t agree that the facts as presented support your assertions,` he said.

As we were leaving the Embassy a US aide told me that he enjoyed my plays. I did not reply.

I should remind you that at the time President Reagan made the following statement: `The Contras are the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.`

The United States supported the brutal Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua for over 40 years. The Nicaraguan people, led by the Sandinistas, overthrew this regime in 1979, a breathtaking popular revolution.

The Sandinistas weren`t perfect. They possessed their fair share of arrogance and their political philosophy contained a number of contradictory elements. But they were intelligent, rational and civilised. They set out to establish a stable, decent, pluralistic society. The death penalty was abolished. Hundreds of thousands of poverty-stricken peasants were brought back from the dead. Over 100,000 families were given title to land. Two thousand schools were built. A quite remarkable literacy campaign reduced illiteracy in the country to less than one seventh. Free education was established and a free health service. Infant mortality was reduced by a third. Polio was eradicated.

The United States denounced these achievements as Marxist/Leninist subversion. In the view of the US government, a dangerous example was being set. If Nicaragua was allowed to establish basic norms of social and economic justice, if it was allowed to raise the standards of health care and education and achieve social unity and national self respect, neighbouring countries would ask the same questions and do the same things. There was of course at the time fierce resistance to the status quo in El Salvador.

I spoke earlier about `a tapestry of lies` which surrounds us. President Reagan commonly described Nicaragua as a `totalitarian dungeon`. This was taken generally by the media, and certainly by the British government, as accurate and fair comment. But there was in fact no record of death squads under the Sandinista government. There was no record of torture. There was no record of systematic or official military brutality. No priests were ever murdered in Nicaragua. There were in fact three priests in the government, two Jesuits and a Maryknoll missionary. The totalitarian dungeons were actually next door, in El Salvador and Guatemala. The United States had brought down the democratically elected government of Guatemala in 1954 and it is estimated that over 200,000 people had been victims of successive military dictatorships.

Six of the most distinguished Jesuits in the world were viciously murdered at the Central American University in San Salvador in 1989 by a battalion of the Alcatl regiment trained at Fort Benning, Georgia, USA. That extremely brave man Archbishop Romero was assassinated while saying mass. It is estimated that 75,000 people died. Why were they killed? They were killed because they believed a better life was possible and should be achieved. That belief immediately qualified them as communists. They died because they dared to question the status quo, the endless plateau of poverty, disease, degradation and oppression, which had been their birthright.

The United States finally brought down the Sandinista government. It took some years and considerable resistance but relentless economic persecution and 30,000 dead finally undermined the spirit of the Nicaraguan people. They were exhausted and poverty stricken once again. The casinos moved back into the country. Free health and free education were over. Big business returned with a vengeance. `Democracy` had prevailed.

But this `policy` was by no means restricted to Central America. It was conducted throughout the world. It was never-ending. And it is as if it never happened.

The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven.

Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn`t know it.

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn`t happening. It didn`t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It`s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. It`s a winner. Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, `the American people`, as in the sentence, `I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people.`

It`s a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words `the American people` provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don`t need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it`s very comfortable. This does not apply of course to the 40 million people living below the poverty line and the 2 million men and women imprisoned in the vast gulag of prisons, which extends across the US.

The United States no longer bothers about low intensity conflict. It no longer sees any point in being reticent or even devious. It puts its cards on the table without fear or favour. It quite simply doesn`t give a damn about the United Nations, international law or critical dissent, which it regards as impotent and irrelevant. It also has its own bleating little lamb tagging behind it on a lead, the pathetic and supine Great Britain.

What has happened to our moral sensibility? Did we ever have any? What do these words mean? Do they refer to a term very rarely employed these days – conscience? A conscience to do not only with our own acts but to do with our shared responsibility in the acts of others? Is all this dead? Look at Guantanamo Bay. Hundreds of people detained without charge for over three years, with no legal representation or due process, technically detained forever. This totally illegitimate structure is maintained in defiance of the Geneva Convention. It is not only tolerated but hardly thought about by what`s called the `international community`. This criminal outrage is being committed by a country, which declares itself to be `the leader of the free world`. Do we think about the inhabitants of Guantanamo Bay? What does the media say about them? They pop up occasionally – a small item on page six. They have been consigned to a no man`s land from which indeed they may never return. At present many are on hunger strike, being force-fed, including British residents. No niceties in these force-feeding procedures. No sedative or anaesthetic. Just a tube stuck up your nose and into your throat. You vomit blood. This is torture. What has the British Foreign Secretary said about this? Nothing. What has the British Prime Minister said about this? Nothing. Why not? Because the United States has said: to criticise our conduct in Guantanamo Bay constitutes an unfriendly act. You`re either with us or against us. So Blair shuts up.

The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law. The invasion was an arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public; an act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading – as a last resort – all other justifications having failed to justify themselves – as liberation. A formidable assertion of military force responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands and thousands of innocent people.

We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it `bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East`.

How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have thought. Therefore it is just that Bush and Blair be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice. But Bush has been clever. He has not ratified the International Criminal Court of Justice. Therefore if any American soldier or for that matter politician finds himself in the dock Bush has warned that he will send in the marines. But Tony Blair has ratified the Court and is therefore available for prosecution. We can let the Court have his address if they`re interested. It is Number 10, Downing Street, London.

Death in this context is irrelevant. Both Bush and Blair place death well away on the back burner. At least 100,000 Iraqis were killed by American bombs and missiles before the Iraq insurgency began. These people are of no moment. Their deaths don`t exist. They are blank. They are not even recorded as being dead. `We don`t do body counts,` said the American general Tommy Franks.

Early in the invasion there was a photograph published on the front page of British newspapers of Tony Blair kissing the cheek of a little Iraqi boy. `A grateful child,` said the caption. A few days later there was a story and photograph, on an inside page, of another four-year-old boy with no arms. His family had been blown up by a missile. He was the only survivor. `When do I get my arms back?` he asked. The story was dropped. Well, Tony Blair wasn`t holding him in his arms, nor the body of any other mutilated child, nor the body of any bloody corpse. Blood is dirty. It dirties your shirt and tie when you`re making a sincere speech on television.

The 2,000 American dead are an embarrassment. They are transported to their graves in the dark. Funerals are unobtrusive, out of harm`s way. The mutilated rot in their beds, some for the rest of their lives. So the dead and the mutilated both rot, in different kinds of graves.

Here is an extract from a poem by Pablo Neruda, `I`m Explaining a Few Things`:

And one morning all that was burning,
one morning the bonfires
leapt out of the earth
devouring human beings
and from then on fire,
gunpowder from then on,
and from then on blood.
Bandits with planes and Moors,
bandits with finger-rings and duchesses,
bandits with black friars spattering blessings
came through the sky to kill children
and the blood of children ran through the streets
without fuss, like children`s blood.

Jackals that the jackals would despise
stones that the dry thistle would bite on and spit out,
vipers that the vipers would abominate.

Face to face with you I have seen the blood
of Spain tower like a tide
to drown you in one wave
of pride and knives.

Treacherous
generals:
see my dead house,
look at broken Spain:
from every house burning metal flows
instead of flowers
from every socket of Spain
Spain emerges
and from every dead child a rifle with eyes
and from every crime bullets are born
which will one day find
the bull`s eye of your hearts.

And you will ask: why doesn`t his poetry
speak of dreams and leaves
and the great volcanoes of his native land.

Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see
the blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood
in the streets!*

Let me make it quite clear that in quoting from Neruda`s poem I am in no way comparing Republican Spain to Saddam Hussein`s Iraq. I quote Neruda because nowhere in contemporary poetry have I read such a powerful visceral description of the bombing of civilians.

I have said earlier that the United States is now totally frank about putting its cards on the table. That is the case. Its official declared policy is now defined as `full spectrum dominance`. That is not my term, it is theirs. `Full spectrum dominance` means control of land, sea, air and space and all attendant resources.

The United States now occupies 702 military installations throughout the world in 132 countries, with the honourable exception of Sweden, of course. We don`t quite know how they got there but they are there all right.

The United States possesses 8,000 active and operational nuclear warheads. Two thousand are on hair trigger alert, ready to be launched with 15 minutes warning. It is developing new systems of nuclear force, known as bunker busters. The British, ever cooperative, are intending to replace their own nuclear missile, Trident. Who, I wonder, are they aiming at? Osama bin Laden? You? Me? Joe Dokes? China? Paris? Who knows? What we do know is that this infantile insanity – the possession and threatened use of nuclear weapons – is at the heart of present American political philosophy. We must remind ourselves that the United States is on a permanent military footing and shows no sign of relaxing it.

Many thousands, if not millions, of people in the United States itself are demonstrably sickened, shamed and angered by their government`s actions, but as things stand they are not a coherent political force – yet. But the anxiety, uncertainty and fear which we can see growing daily in the United States is unlikely to diminish.

I know that President Bush has many extremely competent speech writers but I would like to volunteer for the job myself. I propose the following short address which he can make on television to the nation. I see him grave, hair carefully combed, serious, winning, sincere, often beguiling, sometimes employing a wry smile, curiously attractive, a man`s man.

`God is good. God is great. God is good. My God is good. Bin Laden`s God is bad. His is a bad God. Saddam`s God was bad, except he didn`t have one. He was a barbarian. We are not barbarians. We don`t chop people`s heads off. We believe in freedom. So does God. I am not a barbarian. I am the democratically elected leader of a freedom-loving democracy. We are a compassionate society. We give compassionate electrocution and compassionate lethal injection. We are a great nation. I am not a dictator. He is. I am not a barbarian. He is. And he is. They all are. I possess moral authority. You see this fist? This is my moral authority. And don`t you forget it.`

A writer`s life is a highly vulnerable, almost naked activity. We don`t have to weep about that. The writer makes his choice and is stuck with it. But it is true to say that you are open to all the winds, some of them icy indeed. You are out on your own, out on a limb. You find no shelter, no protection – unless you lie – in which case of course you have constructed your own protection and, it could be argued, become a politician.

I have referred to death quite a few times this evening. I shall now quote a poem of my own called `Death`.

Where was the dead body found?
Who found the dead body?
Was the dead body dead when found?
How was the dead body found?

Who was the dead body?

Who was the father or daughter or brother
Or uncle or sister or mother or son
Of the dead and abandoned body?

Was the body dead when abandoned?
Was the body abandoned?
By whom had it been abandoned?

Was the dead body naked or dressed for a journey?

What made you declare the dead body dead?
Did you declare the dead body dead?
How well did you know the dead body?
How did you know the dead body was dead?

Did you wash the dead body
Did you close both its eyes
Did you bury the body
Did you leave it abandoned
Did you kiss the dead body

When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror – for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us.

I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.

If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us – the dignity of man.

* Extract from "I`m Explaining a Few Things" translated by Nathaniel Tarn, from Pablo Neruda: Selected Poems, published by Jonathan Cape, London 1970. Used by permission of The Random House Group Limited.

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From Vietnam Veterans Against the War, http://www.vvaw.org/veteran/article/?id=579

Torture Is an American Value: Reality vs. the Rhetoric
By S. Brian Willson
http://www.vvaw.org/veteran/article/?id=579

I became aware of torture as a U.S. policy in 1969 when I was serving as a USAF combat security officer working near Can Tho City in Vietnam`s Mekong Delta. I was informed about the CIA`s Phong Dinh Province Interrogation Center (PIC) at the Can Tho Army airfield where supposedly "significant members" of the VCI (Viet Cong infrastructure) were taken for torture as part of the Phoenix Pacification Program. A huge French-built prison nearby was also apparently utilized for torture of suspects from the Delta region. Many were routinely murdered.

Naive, I was shocked! The Agency for International Development (AID) working with Southern Illinois University, for example, trained Vietnamese police and prison officials in the art of torture ("interrogations") under cover of "public safety." American officials believed they were teaching "better methods," often making suggestions during torture sessions conducted by Vietnamese police.

Instead of the recent euphemism "illegal combatants," the United State in Vietnam claimed prisoners were "criminal" and therefore exempt from Geneva Convention protections.

The use of torture as a function of terror, or its equivalent in sadistic behavior, has been historic de facto U.S. policy.

Our European ancestors` shameful, sadistic treatment of the indigenous inhabitants based on an ethos of arrogance and violence has become ingrained in our values. "Manifest destiny" has rationalized as a religion the elimination or assimilation of those perceived to be blocking American progress—at home or abroad—a belief that expansion of the nation, including subjugation of natives and others, is divinely ordained, that our "superior race" is obligated to "civilize" those who stand in the way.

When examining my roots in New York and New England, I discovered that Indian captives were skinned alive and dragged through the streets of New Amsterdam (New York City) in the 1640s. Scalping enabled Indian bounty hunters to be paid.

Captains Underhill and Endicott, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony governed by John Winthrop, spent their time "burning and spoiling the country" of Indians in Rhode Island and Connecticut in 1636–37, while sparing the children and women as slaves.

My hometown of Geneva in the Finger Lakes region of New York State was once home to the Seneca Nation with its flourishing farms, orchards, and sturdy houses. In one two-week period in September 1779, General George Washington`s orders "to lay waste…that the country…be…destroyed," instilling "terror" among the Indians, were dutifully carried out by General Sullivan, who promised that "the Indians shall see that there is malice enough in our hearts to destroy everything that contributes to their support." Sullivan`s campaign has been described as a ruthless policy of scorched earth, bearing comparison with Sherman`s march to the sea or the search-and-destroy missions of U.S. soldiers in Vietnam.

In northern California, where I now live, the same grueling history exists. Bret Harte wrote in 1860 that little children and old women were mercilessly stabbed and their skulls crushed by axes: "Old women…lay weltering in blood, their brains dashed out…while infants…with their faces cloven with hatchets and their bodies ghastly wounds" lay nearby.

In 1920, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) investigated the conduct of U.S. troops who had occupied Haiti since 1915. More than 3,000 Haitians were killed by U.S. Marines, many having been tortured.

When indigenous Nicaraguan resistance fought against the occupying U.S. forces in the late 1920s, the Marines launched counterinsurgency war. U.S. policymakers insisted on "stabilizing" the country to enforce loan repayments to U.S. banks. They defined the resistance forces as "bandits," an earlier equivalent to the "criminal prisoners" in Vietnam and "illegal combatants" in Iraq. Since the United States claimed not to be fighting a legitimate military force, any Nicaraguan perceived as interfering with the occupiers was commonly subjected to beatings, tortures, and beheadings. When the Somoza dictatorship (installed by the United States) was overthrown in 1979, the Somoza torture centers were immediately destroyed.

In 1946, the U.S. Army institutionalized teaching torture techniques to Latin American militaries with the opening of its School of the Americas (SOA), which continues today as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHISC).

Torture has been a historical U.S. practice in police stations and prisons—and via countless vigilante crimes of sadistic torture and mutilation against black Americans.

The Wickersham Commission`s 1931 Report on Lawlessness in Law Enforcement concluded that "the third degree is the employment of methods which inflict suffering, physical or mental, upon a person, in order to obtain from that person information about a crime… The third degree is widespread. The third degree is a secret and illegal practice."

Seventy years later, the 2002 Human Rights Watch World Report documented systematic use of torture by U.S. police: "thousands of allegations of police abuse, including excessive use of force, such as unjustified shootings, beatings, fatal chokings, and rough treatment."

My studies of brutality in Massachusetts prisons in 1981 concluded (in "Walpole State Prison, Massachusetts: An Exercise in Torture") by noting "a clear pattern and history of systematic torture including withholding water, heat, bedding, medical care, and showers; imposition of hazards such as flooding cells, placing foreign matter in food, igniting clothes and bedding, spraying with mace and tear gas; regular physical assaults and beatings; and forcing prisoners to lie face down, naked and handcuffed to one another…on freezing…outdoor ground while being kicked and beaten." This was two decades before the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo revelations.

Terry Kupers, a psychiatrist, has testified about human rights abuses in U.S. prisons. "The plight of prisoners in the USA is strikingly similar to the plight of the Iraqis who were abused by American GIs. Prisoners are maced, raped, beaten, starved, left naked in freezing cold cells and otherwise abused in too many American prisons, as substantiated by findings in many courts…"

It would behoove us to attempt to understand the underlying psychological defenses that seem to have afflicted us like a cultural mental illness since our origins.

S. Brian Willson was head of a USAF combat security unit in Vietnam.

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Es ist gut, dass es immer noch Stimmen gibt, die sich gegen die Rückkehr des Faschismus wehren. Deshalb die Rede von Pinter auch noch mal in Deutsch.

Harold Pinter: Kunst, Wahrheit & Politik
http://www.svenskaakademien.se/litiuminformation/site/page.a…

© DIE NOBELSTIFTUNG 2005
Nachdruck genehmigt für Zeitungen in allen Sprachen nach dem 7. Dezember 2005,
17 Uhr 30 (schwedische Zeit). Jede Veröffentlichung in Zeitschriften oder Büchern,
die über eine inhaltliche Zusammenfassung hinausgeht, bedarf der Genehmigung der Stiftung. Alle Veröffentlichungen des gesamten Textes oder größerer Teile des Textes müssen die oben angegebene unterstrichene Copyright-Angabe enthalten.

Nobelvorlesung

7. Dezember 2005

1958 schrieb ich folgendes:

„Es gibt keine klaren Unterschiede zwischen dem, was wirklich und dem was unwirklich ist, genauso wenig wie zwischen dem, was wahr und dem was unwahr ist. Etwas ist nicht unbedingt entweder wahr oder unwahr; es kann beides sein, wahr und unwahr.“

Ich halte diese Behauptungen immer noch für plausibel und weiterhin gültig für die Erforschung der Wirklichkeit durch die Kunst. Als Autor halte ich mich daran, aber als Bürger kann ich das nicht. Als Bürger muss ich fragen: Was ist wahr? Was ist unwahr?

Die Wahrheit in einem Theaterstück bleibt immer schwer greifbar. Man findet sie niemals völlig, sucht aber zwanghaft danach. Die Suche ist eindeutig der Antrieb unseres Bemühens. Die Suche ist unsere Aufgabe. Meistens stolpert man im Dunkeln über die Wahrheit, kollidiert damit oder erhascht nur einen flüchtigen Blick oder einen Umriss, der der Wahrheit zu entsprechen scheint, oftmals ohne zu merken, dass dies überhaupt geschehen ist. Die echte Wahrheit aber besteht darin, dass sich in der Dramatik niemals so etwas wie die eine Wahrheit finden lässt. Es existieren viele Wahrheiten. Die Wahrheiten widersprechen, reflektieren, ignorieren und verspotten sich, weichen voreinander zurück, sind füreinander blind. Manchmal spürt man, dass man die Wahrheit eines Moments in der Hand hält, dann gleitet sie einem durch die Finger und ist verschwunden.

Man hat mich oft gefragt, wie meine Stücke entstehen. Ich kann es nicht sagen. Es ist mir auch völlig unmöglich, meine Stücke zusammenzufassen, ich kann nur sagen, dies ist geschehen. Das haben sie gesagt. Dies haben sie getan.

Die meisten meiner Stücke entstehen aus einer Textzeile, einem Wort oder einem Bild. Dem gegebenen Wort folgt oft kurz darauf das Bild. Ich gebe zwei Beispiele für zwei Zeilen, die mir urplötzlich einfielen, danach kam das Bild und dann ich.

Es sind die Stücke Die Heimkehr und Alte Zeiten. Der erste Satz von Die Heimkehr heißt: „Was hast du mit der Schere gemacht?“ Das erste Wort von Alte Zeiten lautet: „Dunkel“.

Das war alles, was ich jeweils an Informationen besaß.

Im ersten Fall suchte jemand offenbar eine Schere und wollte von jemand anders, den er verdächtigte, sie gestohlen zu haben, ihren Verbleib erfahren. Aber irgendwie wusste ich, dass der angesprochenen Person die Schere ebenso egal war wie die Person, die danach gefragt hatte.

„Dunkel“ verstand ich als Beschreibung der Haare einer Person, der Haare einer Frau, sowie als Antwort auf eine Frage. In beiden Fällen musste ich der Sache nachgehen. Dies geschah visuell, ein sehr langsames Überblenden vom Schatten ins Licht.

Wenn ich ein Stück beginne, nenne ich die Personen immer A, B und C.

In dem Stück, aus dem Die Heimkehr wurde, sah ich einen Mann in ein kahles Zimmer kommen und seine Frage an einen jüngeren Mann richten, der auf einem hässlichen Sofa saß und eine Rennzeitung las. Ich ahnte irgendwie, dass A der Vater und B sein Sohn war, aber ich besaß keinen Beweis dafür. Meine Vermutung wurde allerdings kurz darauf bestätigt als B (der spätere Lenny) zu A (dem späteren Max) sagt: „Ich würde jetzt gerne das Thema wechseln, ja, Dad? Ich möchte dich was fragen. Unser Essen vorhin, was sollte das darstellen? Wie heißt so was? Warum kaufst du dir keinen Hund? Der würde so was fressen. Ehrlich. Aber du kochst hier nicht für ein Rudel Hunde.“ Da B also A „Dad“ nennt, schien mir die Annahme vernünftig, dass es sich bei ihnen um Vater und Sohn handelte. A war auch eindeutig der Koch, dessen Kochkünste offenbar keine hohe Wertschätzung genossen. Bedeutete das, dass es keine Mutter gab? Ich wusste es nicht. Aber, so sagte ich mir, anfangs wissen wir nie, worauf alles hinausläuft.

„Dunkel“. Ein breites Fenster. Abendhimmel. Ein Mann, A (der spätere Deeley), und eine Frau, B (die spätere Kate), sitzen und trinken. „Dick oder dünn?“ fragt der Mann. Von wem reden sie? Aber dann sehe ich am Fenster eine Frau, C (die spätere Anna), sie steht in einer anderen Beleuchtung, mit dem Rücken zu den anderen, ihre Haare sind dunkel.

Es ist ein merkwürdiger Moment, der Moment, in dem man Personen erschafft, die bis dahin nicht existierten. Was dann kommt, vollzieht sich sprunghaft, vage, sogar halluzinatorisch, auch wenn es manchmal einer unaufhaltsamen Lawine gleicht. Der Autor befindet sich in einer eigenartigen Lage. Die Personen empfangen ihn eigentlich nicht mit offenen Armen. Die Personen widersetzen sich ihm. Es ist schwierig, mit ihnen auszukommen, sie zu definieren ist unmöglich. Vorschreiben lassen sie sich schon gar nichts. In gewisser Weise spielt man mit ihnen ein endloses Spiel: Katz und Maus, Blindekuh, Verstecken. Aber schließlich merkt man, dass man es mit Menschen aus Fleisch und Blut zu tun hat, mit Menschen die einen eigenen Willen und eine individuelle Sensibilität besitzen und aus Bestandteilen bestehen, die man nicht verändern, manipulieren oder verzerren kann.

Die Sprache in der Kunst bleibt also eine äußerst vieldeutige Angelegenheit, Treibsand oder Trampolin, ein gefrorener Teich, auf dem man, der Autor, jederzeit einbrechen könnte.

Aber wie gesagt, die Suche nach der Wahrheit kann nie aufhören. Man kann sie nicht vertagen, sie lässt sich nicht aufschieben. Man muss sich ihr stellen und zwar hier und jetzt.

Politisches Theater stellt einen vor völlig andersartige Probleme. Moralpredigten gilt es unter allen Umständen zu vermeiden. Objektivität ist unabdingbar. Die Personen müssen frei atmen können. Der Autor darf sie nicht einschränken und einengen, damit sie seinen eigenen Vorlieben, Neigungen und Vorurteilen genügen. Er muss bereit sein, sich ihnen aus den verschiedensten Richtungen zu nähern, unter allen möglichen Blickwinkeln, sie vielleicht gelegentlich zu überrumpeln, ihnen aber trotzdem die Freiheit zu lassen, ihren eigenen Weg zu gehen. Das funktioniert nicht immer. Und die politische Satire befolgt natürlich keine dieser Regeln, sie tut tatsächlich das genaue Gegenteil und erfüllt damit ihre eigentliche Funktion.

In meinem Stück Die Geburtstagsfeier lasse ich, glaube ich, in einem dichten Wald der Möglichkeiten einer ganzen Reihe von Alternativen Spielraum, bevor schließlich ein Akt der Unterwerfung in den Brennpunkt rückt.

Berg-Sprache behauptet einen solchen Spielraum nicht. Das Stück bleibt brutal, kurz und hässlich. Aber die Soldaten im Stück haben ihren Spaß. Man vergisst manchmal, dass sich Folterer rasch langweilen. Sie müssen etwas zu lachen haben, damit ihnen die Lust nicht vergeht. Die Ereignisse in Abu Ghraib in Bagdad haben das natürlich bestätigt. Berg-Sprache dauert nur 20 Minuten, aber es könnte Stunde um Stunde immer so weitergehen, nach demselben Muster, immer so weiter, Stunde um Stunde.

Asche zu Asche andererseits scheint mir unter Wasser zu spielen. Eine ertrinkende Frau reckt durch die Wellen die Hand nach oben, sie versinkt, sucht nach anderen, aber sie findet dort niemand, weder über noch unter Wasser, sie findet nur treibende Schatten, Spiegelungen; die Frau, eine verlorene Gestalt in einer ertrinkenden Landschaft, eine Frau, die dem Verderben, das nur anderen bestimmt gewesen zu sein schien, nicht entrinnen kann.

Doch so wie sie starben, muss auch sie sterben.

Politische Sprache, so wie Politiker sie gebrauchen, wagt sich auf keines dieser Gebiete, weil die Mehrheit der Politiker, nach den uns vorliegenden Beweisen, an der Wahrheit kein Interesse hat sondern nur an der Macht und am Erhalt dieser Macht. Damit diese Macht erhalten bleibt, ist es unabdingbar, dass die Menschen unwissend bleiben, dass sie in Unkenntnis der Wahrheit leben, sogar der Wahrheit ihres eigenen Lebens. Es umgibt uns deshalb ein weitverzweigtes Lügengespinst, von dem wir uns nähren.

Wie jeder der hier Anwesenden weiß, lautete die Rechtfertigung für die Invasion des Irak, Saddam Hussein verfüge über ein hoch gefährliches Arsenal an Massenvernichtungswaffen, von denen einige binnen 45 Minuten abgefeuert werden könnten, mit verheerender Wirkung. Man versicherte uns, dies sei wahr. Es war nicht die Wahrheit. Man erzählte uns, der Irak unterhalte Beziehungen zu al-Qaida und trage Mitverantwortung für die Gräuel in New York am 11. September 2001. Man versicherte uns, dies sei wahr. Es war nicht die Wahrheit. Man erzählte uns, der Irak bedrohe die Sicherheit der Welt. Man versicherte uns es sei wahr. Es war nicht die Wahrheit.

Die Wahrheit sieht völlig anders aus. Die Wahrheit hat damit zu tun, wie die Vereinigten Staaten ihre Rolle in der Welt auffassen und wie sie sie verkörpern wollen.

Doch bevor ich auf die Gegenwart zurückkomme, möchte ich einen Blick auf die jüngste Vergangenheit werfen; damit meine ich die Außenpolitik der Vereinigten Staaten seit dem Ende des 2. Weltkriegs. Ich glaube, wir sind dazu verpflichtet, diesen Zeitraum zumindest einer gewissen, wenn auch begrenzten Prüfung zu unterziehen, mehr erlaubt hier die Zeit nicht.

Jeder weiß, was in der Sowjetunion und in ganz Osteuropa während der Nachkriegszeit passierte: die systematische Brutalität, die weit verbreiteten Gräueltaten, die rücksichtslose Unterdrückung eigenständigen Denkens. All dies ist ausführlich dokumentiert und belegt worden.

Aber ich behaupte hier, dass die Verbrechen der USA im selben Zeitraum nur oberflächlich protokolliert, geschweige denn dokumentiert, geschweige denn eingestanden, geschweige denn überhaupt als Verbrechen wahrgenommen worden sind. Ich glaube, dass dies benannt werden muss, und dass die Wahrheit beträchtlichen Einfluss darauf hat, wo die Welt jetzt steht. Trotz gewisser Beschränkungen durch die Existenz der Sowjetunion, machte die weltweite Vorgehensweise der Vereinigten Staaten ihre Überzeugung deutlich, für ihr Handeln völlig freie Hand zu besitzen.

Die direkte Invasion eines souveränen Staates war eigentlich nie die bevorzugte Methode der Vereinigten Staaten. Vorwiegend haben sie den von ihnen sogenannten „Low Intensity Conflict“ favorisiert. „Low Intensity Conflict“ bedeutet, dass tausende von Menschen sterben aber langsamer als würde man sie auf einen Schlag mit einer Bombe auslöschen. Es bedeutet, dass man das Herz des Landes infiziert, dass man eine bösartige Wucherung in Gang setzt und zuschaut wie der Faulbrand erblüht. Ist die Bevölkerung unterjocht worden oder totgeprügelt es läuft auf dasselbe hinaus und sitzen die eigenen Freunde, das Militär und die großen Kapitalgesellschaften, bequem am Schalthebel, tritt man vor die Kamera und sagt, die Demokratie habe sich behauptet. Das war in den Jahren, auf die ich mich hier beziehe, gang und gäbe in der Außenpolitik der USA.

Die Tragödie Nicaraguas war ein hochsignifikanter Fall. Ich präsentiere ihn hier als schlagendes Beispiel für Amerikas Sicht seiner eigenen Rolle in der Welt, damals wie heute.

Ende der 80er Jahre nahm ich an einem Treffen in der amerikanischen Botschaft in London teil.

Der Kongress der Vereinigten Staaten sollte entscheiden, ob man die Contras in ihrem Feldzug gegen den nicaraguanischen Staat mit mehr Geld unterstützt. Ich gehörte der Delegation an, die für Nicaragua sprach, doch das wichtigste Delegationsmitglied war Father John Metcalf. Der Leiter der amerikanischen Gruppe war Raymond Seitz (damals nach dem Botschafter die Nummer Zwei, später selber Botschafter). Father Metcalf sagte: „Sir, ich leite eine Gemeinde im Norden Nicaraguas. Meine Gemeindeglieder haben eine Schule gebaut, ein medizinisches Versorgungszentrum, ein Kulturzentrum. Wir haben in Frieden gelebt. Vor einigen Monaten griffen Contratruppen die Gemeinde an. Sie zerstörten alles: die Schule, das medizinische Versorgungszentrum, das Kulturzentrum. Sie vergewaltigten Krankenschwestern und Lehrerinnen, schlachteten die Ärzte aufs brutalste ab. Sie benahmen sich wie Berserker. Bitte fordern Sie, dass die US-Regierung diesen empörenden terroristischen Umtrieben die Unterstützung entzieht.“

Raymond Seitz besaß einen ausgezeichneten Ruf als rationaler, verantwortungsbewusster und hoch kultivierter Mann. Er genoss in diplomatischen Kreisen großes Ansehen. Er hörte genau zu, zögerte und sprach dann mit großem Ernst. „Father“, sagte er, „ich möchte Ihnen etwas sagen. Im Krieg leiden immer Unschuldige.“ Es herrschte eisiges Schweigen. Wir starrten ihn an. Er zuckte nicht einmal mit der Wimper.

In der Tat, Unschuldige leiden immer.

Schließlich sagte jemand: „Aber in diesem Fall waren die ,Unschuldigen‘ Opfer einer durch Ihre Regierung subventionierten, entsetzlichen Gräueltat, einer von vielen. Sollte der Kongress den Contras mehr Geld bewilligen, wird es zu weiteren Gräueln kommen. Ist dem nicht so? Macht sich Ihre Regierung damit nicht der Unterstützung von Mordtaten und Vernichtungswerken schuldig, begangen an Bürgern eines souveränen Staates?“

Seitz ließ sich durch nichts erschüttern. „Ich bin nicht der Auffassung, dass die vorliegenden Fakten Ihre Behauptungen stützen“, sagte er.

Beim Verlassen der Botschaft sagte mir ein US-Berater, er schätze meine Stücke. Ich reagierte nicht.

Ich darf Sie daran erinnern, dass Präsident Reagan damals folgendes Statement abgab: „Die Contras stehen moralisch auf einer Stufe mit unseren Gründervätern.“

Die Vereinigten Staaten unterstützten die brutale Somoza-Diktatur in Nicaragua über 40 Jahre. Angeführt von den Sandinisten, stürzte das nicaraguanische Volk 1979 dieses Regime, ein atemberaubender Volksaufstand.

Die Sandinisten waren nicht vollkommen. Auch sie verfügten über eine gewisse Arroganz, und ihre politische Philosophie beinhaltete eine Reihe widersprüchlicher Elemente. Aber sie waren intelligent, einsichtig und zivilisiert. Sie machten sich daran, eine stabile, anständige, pluralistische Gesellschaft zu gründen. Die Todesstrafe wurde abgeschafft. Hunderttausende verarmter Bauern wurden quasi ins Leben zurückgeholt. Über 100.000 Familien erhielten Grundbesitz. Zweitausend Schulen entstanden. Eine äußerst bemerkenswerte Alphabetisierungskampagne verringerte den Anteil der Analphabeten im Land auf unter ein Siebtel. Freies Bildungswesen und kostenlose Gesundheitsfürsorge wurden eingeführt. Die Kindersterblichkeit ging um ein Drittel zurück. Polio wurde ausgerottet.

Die Vereinigten Staaten denunzierten diese Leistungen als marxistisch-leninistische Unterwanderung. Aus Sicht der US-Regierung war dies ein gefährliches Beispiel. Erlaubte man Nicaragua, elementare Normen sozialer und ökonomischer Gerechtigkeit zu etablieren, erlaubte man dem Land, den Standard der Gesundheitsfürsorge und des Bildungswesens anzuheben und soziale Einheit und nationale Selbstachtung zu erreichen, würden benachbarte Länder dieselben Fragen stellen und dieselben Dinge tun. Damals regte sich natürlich heftiger Widerstand gegen den in El Salvador herrschenden Status quo.

Ich erwähnte vorhin das „Lügengespinst“, das uns umgibt. Präsident Reagan beschrieb Nicaragua meist als „totalitären Kerker“. Die Medien generell und ganz bestimmt die britische Regierung werteten dies als zutreffenden und begründeten Kommentar. Aber tatsächlich gab es keine Berichte über Todesschwadronen unter der sandinistischen Regierung. Es gab keine Berichte über Folterungen. Es gab keine Berichte über systematische oder offiziell autorisierte militärische Brutalität. In Nicaragua wurde nie ein Priester ermordet. Es waren vielmehr drei Priester an der Regierung beteiligt, zwei Jesuiten und ein Missionar des Maryknoll-Ordens. Die totalitären Kerker befanden sich eigentlich nebenan in El Salvador und Guatemala. Die Vereinigten Staaten hatten 1954 die demokratisch gewählte Regierung von Guatemala gestürzt, und Schätzungen zufolge sollen den anschließenden Militärdiktaturen mehr als 200.000 Menschen zum Opfer gefallen sein.

Sechs der weltweit namhaftesten Jesuiten wurden 1989 in der Central American University in San Salvador von einem Batallion des in Fort Benning, Georgia, USA, ausgebildeten Alcatl-Regiments getötet. Der außergewöhnlich mutige Erzbischof Romero wurde ermordet, als er die Messe las. Schätzungsweise kamen 75.000 Menschen ums Leben. Weshalb wurden sie getötet? Sie wurden getötet, weil sie ein besseres Leben nicht nur für möglich hielten sondern auch verwirklichen wollten. Dieser Glaube stempelte sie sofort zu Kommunisten. Sie starben, weil sie es wagten, den Status quo infrage zu stellen, das endlose Plateau von Armut, Krankheit, Erniedrigung und Unterdrückung, das ihr Geburtsrecht gewesen war.

Die Vereinigten Staaten stürzten schließlich die sandinistische Regierung. Es kostete einige Jahre und beträchtliche Widerstandskraft, doch gnadenlose ökonomische Schikanen und 30.000 Tote untergruben am Ende den Elan des nicaraguanischen Volkes. Es war erschöpft und erneut verarmt. Die Casinos kehrten ins Land zurück. Mit dem kostenlosen Gesundheitsdienst und dem freien Schulwesen war es vorbei. Das Big Business kam mit aller Macht zurück. Die `Demokratie` hatte sich behauptet.

Doch diese „Politik“ blieb keineswegs auf Mittelamerika beschränkt. Sie wurde in aller Welt betrieben. Sie war endlos. Und es ist, als hätte es sie nie gegeben.

Nach dem Ende des 2. Weltkriegs unterstützten die Vereinigten Staaten jede rechtsgerichtete Militärdiktatur auf der Welt, und in vielen Fällen brachten sie sie erst hervor. Ich verweise auf Indonesien, Griechenland, Uruguay, Brasilien, Paraguay, Haiti, die Türkei, die Philippinen, Guatemala, El Salvador und natürlich Chile. Die Schrecken, die Amerika Chile 1973 zufügte, können nie gesühnt und nie verziehen werden.

In diesen Ländern hat es Hunderttausende von Toten gegeben. Hat es sie wirklich gegeben? Und sind sie wirklich alle der US-Außenpolitik zuzuschreiben? Die Antwort lautet ja, es hat sie gegeben, und sie sind der amerikanischen Außenpolitik zuzuschreiben. Aber davon weiß man natürlich nichts.

Es ist nie passiert. Nichts ist jemals passiert. Sogar als es passierte, passierte es nicht. Es spielte keine Rolle. Es interessierte niemand. Die Verbrechen der Vereinigten Staaten waren systematisch, konstant, infam, unbarmherzig, aber nur sehr wenige Menschen haben wirklich darüber gesprochen. Das muss man Amerika lassen. Es hat weltweit eine ziemlich kühl operierende Machtmanipulation betrieben, und sich dabei als Streiter für das universelle Gute gebärdet. Ein glänzender, sogar geistreicher, äußerst erfolgreicher Hypnoseakt.

Ich behaupte, die Vereinigten Staaten ziehen die größte Show der Welt ab, ganz ohne Zweifel. Brutal, gleichgültig, verächtlich und skrupellos, aber auch ausgesprochen clever. Als Handlungsreisende stehen sie ziemlich konkurrenzlos da, und ihr Verkaufsschlager heißt Eigenliebe. Ein echter Renner. Man muss nur all die amerikanischen Präsidenten im Fernsehen die Worte sagen hören: „das amerikanische Volk“, wie zum Beispiel in dem Satz: „Ich sage dem amerikanischen Volk, es ist an der Zeit, zu beten und die Rechte des amerikanischen Volkes zu verteidigen, und ich bitte das amerikanische Volk, den Schritten ihres Präsidenten zu vertrauen, die er im Auftrag des amerikanischen Volkes unternehmen wird.“

Ein brillanter Trick. Mit Hilfe der Sprache hält man das Denken in Schach. Mit den Worten „das amerikanische Volk“ wird ein wirklich luxuriöses Kissen zur Beruhigung gebildet. Denken ist überflüssig. Man muss sich nur ins Kissen fallen lassen. Möglicherweise erstickt das Kissen die eigene Intelligenz und das eigene Urteilsvermögen, aber es ist sehr bequem. Das gilt natürlich weder für die 40 Millionen Menschen, die unter der Armutsgrenze leben, noch für die 2 Millionen Männer und Frauen, die in dem riesigen Gulag von Gefängnissen eingesperrt sind, der sich über die Vereinigten Staaten erstreckt.

Den Vereinigten Staaten liegt nichts mehr am low intensity conflict. Sie sehen keine weitere Notwendigkeit, sich Zurückhaltung aufzuerlegen oder gar auf Umwegen ans Ziel zu kommen. Sie legen ihre Karten ganz ungeniert auf den Tisch. Sie scheren sich einen Dreck um die Vereinten Nationen, das Völkerrecht oder kritischen Dissens, den sie als machtlos und irrelevant betrachten. Sie haben sogar ein kleines, blökendes Lämmchen, das ihnen an einer Leine hinterher trottelt, das erbärmliche und abgeschlaffte Großbritannien.

Was ist aus unserem sittlichen Empfinden geworden? Hatten wir je eines? Was bedeuten diese Worte? Stehen sie für einen heutzutage äußerst selten gebrauchten Begriff – Gewissen? Ein Gewissen nicht nur hinsichtlich unseres eigenen Tuns sondern auch hinsichtlich unserer gemeinsamen Verantwortung für das Tun anderer? Ist all das tot? Nehmen wir Guantanamo Bay. Hunderte von Menschen, seit über drei Jahren ohne Anklage in Haft, ohne gesetzliche Vertretung oder ordentlichen Prozess, im Prinzip für immer inhaftiert. Diese absolut rechtswidrige Situation existiert trotz der Genfer Konvention weiter. Die sogenannte „internationale Gemeinschaft“ toleriert sie nicht nur, sondern verschwendet auch so gut wie keinen Gedanken daran. Diese kriminelle Ungeheuerlichkeit begeht ein Land, das sich selbst zum „Anführer der freien Welt“ erklärt. Denken wir an die Menschen in Guantanamo Bay? Was berichten die Medien über sie? Sie tauchen gelegentlich auf – eine kleine Notiz auf Seite sechs. Sie wurden in ein Niemandsland geschickt, aus dem sie womöglich nie mehr zurückkehren. Gegenwärtig sind viele im Hungerstreik, werden zwangsernährt, darunter auch britische Bürger. Zwangsernährung ist kein schöner Vorgang. Weder Beruhigungsmittel noch Betäubung. Man bekommt durch die Nase einen Schlauch in den Hals gesteckt. Man spuckt Blut. Das ist Folter. Was hat der britische Außenminister dazu gesagt? Nichts. Was hat der britische Premierminister dazu gesagt? Nichts. Warum nicht? Weil die Vereinigten Staaten gesagt haben: Kritik an unserem Vorgehen in Guantanamo Bay stellt einen feindseligen Akt dar. Ihr seid entweder für uns oder gegen uns. Also hält Blair den Mund.

Die Invasion des Irak war ein Banditenakt, ein Akt von unverhohlenem Staatsterrorismus, der die absolute Verachtung des Prinzips von internationalem Recht demonstrierte. Die Invasion war ein willkürlicher Militäreinsatz, ausgelöst durch einen ganzen Berg von Lügen und die üble Manipulation der Medien und somit der Öffentlichkeit; ein Akt zur Konsolidierung der militärischen und ökonomischen Kontrolle Amerikas im mittleren Osten unter der Maske der Befreiung, letztes Mittel, nachdem alle anderen Rechtfertigungen sich nicht hatten rechtfertigen lassen. Eine beeindruckende Demonstration einer Militärmacht, die für den Tod und die Verstümmelung abertausender Unschuldiger verantwortlich ist.

Wir haben dem irakischen Volk Folter, Splitterbomben, abgereichertes Uran, zahllose, willkürliche Mordtaten, Elend, Erniedrigung und Tod gebracht und nennen es „dem mittleren Osten Freiheit und Demokratie bringen“.

Wie viele Menschen muss man töten, bis man sich die Bezeichnung verdient hat, ein Massenmörder und Kriegsverbrecher zu sein? Einhunderttausend? Mehr als genug, würde ich meinen. Deshalb ist es nur gerecht, dass Bush und Blair vor den Internationalen Strafgerichtshof kommen. Aber Bush war clever. Er hat den Internationalen Strafgerichtshof gar nicht erst anerkannt. Für den Fall, dass sich ein amerikanischer Soldat oder auch ein Politiker auf der Anklagebank wiederfindet, hat Bush damit gedroht, die Marines in den Einsatz zu schicken. Aber Tony Blair hat den Gerichtshof anerkannt und steht für ein Gerichtsverfahren zur Verfügung. Wir können dem Gerichtshof seine Adresse geben, falls er Interesse daran hat. Sie lautet Number 10, Downing Street, London.

Der Tod spielt in diesem Zusammenhang keine Rolle. Für Bush und Blair ist der Tod eine Lappalie. Mindestens 100.000 Iraker kamen durch amerikanische Bomben und Raketen um, bevor der irakische Aufstand begann. Diese Menschen sind bedeutungslos. Ihr Tod existiert nicht. Sie sind eine Leerstelle. Sie werden nicht einmal als tot gemeldet. „Leichen zählen wir nicht“, sagte der amerikanische General Tommy Franks.

Ganz zu Beginn der Invasion veröffentlichten die britischen Zeitungen auf der Titelseite ein Foto von Tony Blair, der einen kleinen irakischen Jungen auf die Wange küsst. „Ein dankbares Kind“, lautete die Überschrift. Einige Tage später gab es auf einer Innenseite einen Bericht und ein Foto von einem anderen vierjährigen Jungen, ohne Arme. Eine Rakete hatte seine Familie in die Luft gesprengt. Er war der einzige Überlebende. „Wann bekomme ich meine Arme wieder?“ fragte er. Der Bericht wurde nicht weiter verfolgt. Nun, diesen Jungen hielt auch nicht Tony Blair in den Armen, weder ihn noch sonst ein anderes verstümmeltes Kind oder irgendeine blutige Leiche. Blut ist schmutzig. Es verschmutzt einem Hemd und Krawatte, wenn man eine aufrichtige Ansprache im Fernsehen hält.

Die 2000 toten Amerikaner sind peinlich. Sie werden bei Dunkelheit zu ihren Gräbern transportiert. Die Beerdigungen finden dezent statt, an einem sicheren Ort. Die Verstümmelten verfaulen in ihren Betten, manche für den Rest ihres Lebens. Die Toten und die Verstümmelten verfaulen beide, nur in unterschiedlichen Gräbern.

Dies ist ein Stück aus einem Gedicht von Pablo Neruda: „Erklärung einiger Dinge“:

Und eines Morgens brachen die Flammen aus allem,
und eines Morgens stiegen lodernde Feuer
aus der Erde,
verschlangen Leben,
und seither Feuer,
Pulver seither,
und seither Blut.
Banditen mit Flugzeugen und Marokkanern,
Banditen mit Ringen und Herzoginnen,
Banditen mit segnenden schwarzen Mönchen
kamen vom Himmel, um Kinder zu töten,
und durch die Strassen das Blut der Kinder
floss einfach, wie das Blut von Kindern.

Schakale, widerwärtig für einen Schakal,
Steine, auf die die trockene Distel gespien hätte,
Vipern, die Vipern verachten würden!

Vor euch habe ich das Blut
Spaniens aufwallen gesehn,
euch zu ersäufen in einer einzigen Woge
von Stolz und Messern!

Generäle
Verräter:
seht mein totes Haus,
seht mein zerbrochenes Spanien:
doch aus jedem Haus schiesst brennendes Metall
anstelle von Blumen,
aus jedem Loch in Spanien
springt Spanien empor,
aus jedem ermordeten Kind wächst ein Gewehr mit Augen,
aus jedem Verbrechen werden Kugeln geboren,
die eines Tages den Sitz
eines Herzens finden werden.

Ihr fragt, warum seine Dichtung uns nichts
von der Erde erzählt, von den Blättern,
den großen Vulkanen seines Heimatlandes?

Kommt, seht das Blut in den Strassen,
kommt, seht
das Blut in den Straßen,
kommt, seht doch das Blut
in den Strassen! *

Ich möchte ganz unmissverständlich sagen, dass ich, indem ich aus Nerudas Gedicht zitiere, keinesfalls das republikanische Spanien mit dem Irak Saddam Husseins vergleiche. Ich zitiere Neruda, weil ich nirgendwo sonst in der zeitgenössischen Lyrik eine so eindringliche, wahre Beschreibung der Bombardierung von Zivilisten gelesen habe.

Ich sagte vorhin, die Vereinigten Staaten würden ihre Karten jetzt völlig ungeniert auf den Tisch legen. Dem ist genau so. Ihre offiziell verlautbarte Politik definiert sich jetzt als „full spectrum dominance“. Der Begriff stammt nicht von mir sondern von ihnen. „Full spectrum dominance“ bedeutet die Kontrolle über Land, Meer, Luft und Weltraum, sowie aller zugehörigen Ressourcen.

Die Vereinigten Staaten besitzen, über die ganze Welt verteilt, 702 militärische Anlagen in 132 Ländern, mit der rühmlichen Ausnahme Schwedens natürlich. Wir wissen nicht ganz genau, wie sie da hingekommen sind, aber sie sind jedenfalls da.

Die Vereinigten Staaten verfügen über 8000 aktive und operative Atomsprengköpfe. Zweitausend davon sind sofort gefechtsbereit und können binnen 15 Minuten abgefeuert werden. Es werden jetzt neue Nuklearwaffensysteme entwickelt, bekannt als Bunker-Busters. Die stets kooperativen Briten planen, ihre eigene Atomrakete Trident zu ersetzen. Wen, frage ich mich, haben sie im Visier? Osama Bin Laden? Sie? Mich? Joe Dokes? China? Paris? Wer weiß das schon? Eines wissen wir allerdings, nämlich dass dieser infantile Irrsinn – der Besitz und angedrohte Einsatz von Nuklearwaffen – den Kern der gegenwärtigen politischen Philosophie Amerikas bildet. Wir müssen uns in Erinnerung rufen, dass sich die Vereinigten Staaten dauerhaft im Kriegszustand befinden und mit nichts zu erkennen geben, dass sie diese Haltung aufgeben.

Abertausende wenn nicht gar Millionen Menschen in den USA sind nachweislich angewidert, beschämt und erzürnt über das Vorgehen ihrer Regierung, aber so wie die Dinge stehen, stellen sie keine einheitliche politische Macht dar – noch nicht. Doch die Besorgnis, Unsicherheit und Angst, die wir täglich in den Vereinigten Staaten wachsen sehen können, werden aller Wahrscheinlichkeit nach nicht schwinden.

Ich weiß, dass Präsident Bush zahlreiche ausgesprochen fähige Redenschreiber hat, aber ich möchte mich freiwillig für den Job melden. Ich schlage folgende kurze Ansprache vor, die er im Fernsehen an die Nation halten kann. Ich sehe ihn vor mir: feierlich, penibel gekämmt, ernst, gewinnend, aufrichtig, oft verführerisch, manchmal mit einem bitteren Lächeln, merkwürdig anziehend, ein echter Mann.

„Gott ist gut. Gott ist groß. Gott ist gut. Mein Gott ist gut. Bin Ladens Gott ist böse. Er ist ein böser Gott. Saddams Gott war böse, wenn er einen gehabt hätte. Er war ein Barbar. Wir sind keine Barbaren. Wir hacken Menschen nicht den Kopf ab. Wir glauben an die Freiheit. So wie Gott. Ich bin kein Barbar. Ich bin der demokratisch gewählte Anführer einer freiheitsliebenden Demokratie. Wir sind eine barmherzige Gesellschaft. Wir gewähren einen barmherzigen Tod auf dem elektrischen Stuhl und durch barmherzige Todesspritzen. Wir sind eine große Nation. Ich bin kein Diktator. Er ist einer. Ich bin kein Barbar. Er ist einer. Und er auch. Die alle da. Ich besitze moralische Autorität. Seht ihr diese Faust? Das ist meine moralische Autorität. Und vergesst das bloß nicht.“

Das Leben eines Schriftstellers ist ein äußerst verletzliches, fast schutzloses Dasein. Darüber muss man keine Tränen vergießen. Der Schriftsteller trifft seine Wahl und hält daran fest. Es stimmt jedoch, dass man allen Winden ausgesetzt ist, und einige sind wirklich eisig. Man ist auf sich allein gestellt, in exponierter Lage. Man findet keine Zuflucht, keine Deckung – es sei denn, man lügt – in diesem Fall hat man sich natürlich selber in Deckung gebracht und ist, so ließe sich argumentieren, Politiker geworden.

Ich habe heute Abend etliche Male vom Tod gesprochen. Ich werde jetzt ein eigenes Gedicht zitieren. Es heißt „Tod“.

Wo fand man den Toten?
Wer fand den Toten?
War der Tote tot, als man ihn fand?
Wie fand man den Toten?

Wer war der Tote?

Wer war der Vater oder die Tochter oder der Bruder
Oder der Onkel oder die Schwester oder die Mutter oder der Sohn
Des toten und verlassenen Toten?

War er tot, als er verlassen wurde?
War er verlassen?
Wer hatte ihn verlassen?

War der Tote nackt oder gekleidet für eine Reise?

Warum haben Sie den Toten für tot erklärt?
Haben Sie den Toten für tot erklärt?
Wie gut haben Sie den Toten gekannt?
Woher wussten sie, dass der Tote tot war?

Haben Sie den Toten gewaschen
Haben Sie ihm beide Augen geschlossen
Haben Sie ihn begraben
Haben Sie ihn verlassen
Haben Sie den Toten geküsst **

Blicken wir in einen Spiegel, dann halten wir das Bild, das uns daraus entgegensieht, für akkurat. Aber bewegt man sich nur einen Millimeter, verändert sich das Bild. Wir sehen im Grunde eine endlose Reihe von Spiegelungen. Aber manchmal muss ein Schriftsteller den Spiegel zerschlagen – denn von der anderen Seite dieses Spiegels blickt uns die Wahrheit ins Auge.

Ich glaube, dass den existierenden, kolossalen Widrigkeiten zum Trotz die unerschrockene, unbeirrbare, heftige intellektuelle Entschlossenheit, als Bürger die wirkliche Wahrheit unseres Lebens und unserer Gesellschaften zu bestimmen, eine ausschlaggebende Verpflichtung darstellt, die uns allen zufällt. Sie ist in der Tat zwingend notwendig.

Wenn sich diese Entschlossenheit nicht in unserer politischen Vision verkörpert, bleiben wir bar jeder Hoffnung, das wiederherzustellen, was wir schon fast verloren haben – die Würde des Menschen.


Übersetzung von Michael Walter


* aus Pablo Neruda: Dritter Aufenthalt auf Erden, 1937/1947. Übersetzt von Erich Arendt, in Der unsichtbare Fluss – ein Lesebuch herausgegeben von Victor Farias. Luchterhand, Hamburg, 1994.
** aus Harold Pinter: Krieg. Übersetzt von Elisabeth Plessen und Peter Zadek. Rogner und Bernhard, Hamburg, 2003.

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December 8, 2005
More Questions as Rice Asserts Detainee Policy
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON
and JOEL BRINKLEY
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/08/politics/08detain.html?hp&…

WASHINGTON, Dec. 7 - Responding to pressure at home and abroad to set clearer standards for the interrogation of terrorist suspects, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Wednesday that the policy of the United States was not to allow its personnel, whether on American or foreign soil, to engage in cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment of prisoners.

But her statement did little to clear up widespread confusion about where the administration draws the line or to dispel hints of an internal debate among President Bush`s inner circle on that topic. It was interpreted variously as a subtle but important shift in policy, a restatement of the administration`s long-held position or an artful dodge intended to retain flexibility in dealing with detainees while soothing public opinion in the United States and Europe.

Ms. Rice, traveling in Europe this week, has faced constant questions about the treatment of detainees, partly prompted by reports that the United States maintained secret detention facilities in European countries. On Tuesday, the issue surfaced in talks with the new German chancellor, Angela Merkel.

And in Washington, the administration is facing a strong push by Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, for legislation to bar inhumane or degrading treatment of detainees.

Speaking Wednesday in Kiev, Ukraine, Ms. Rice suggested that the prohibitions contained in an international convention against the use of cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment were applied by the United States to American personnel working anywhere in the world.

After her aides passed word to reporters traveling with her in Europe that she wanted to be asked about the issue, Ms. Rice, when asked, answered by referring to the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment, a treaty adopted by the United Nations more than two decades ago and ratified by the United States in 1994.

"As a matter of U.S. policy, the United States obligations under the C.A.T., which prohibits, of course, cruel and inhumane and degrading treatment, those obligations extend to U.S. personnel wherever they are, whether they are in the United States or outside of the United States," she said.

Her wording appeared to be an effort to signal explicitly that the United States considered itself bound by those standards when it came to interrogations of non-Americans by C.I.A. officers operating outside the United States. But it did not directly address another practice that has drawn criticism at home and abroad, that of sending detainees to third countries for interrogation by foreign intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

The confusion over the import of her remarks stemmed in part from a distinction often obscured in the debate over the issue. On the one hand, the administration has argued that the United States is not legally bound to apply all the international standards to, for example, C.I.A. officers working in foreign countries. On the other hand, the administration maintains that whatever the law says, its policy is to adhere to the substance of those standards, at least as they are defined by the United States.

The administration has repeatedly said it did not consider the law that implemented the international treaty to apply in a legal sense to the C.I.A. and other nonmilitary personnel interrogating non-Americans abroad. But it has also stated, as the Justice Department put it in a letter to several Democratic senators last spring, that as a matter of policy the United States "wants to be in compliance" with the standards of the convention and was reviewing interrogation techniques to ensure that it was.

Alluding to the administration`s previous statements about its policy intentions, Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, said Ms. Rice`s statement did not represent any change.

But Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the senior Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said it was a reversal and a "very welcome change from their previous position, which I believe has cost us dearly in the world and does not reflect our nation`s laws or our values."

And throughout Washington, officials sought clarification on whether her statement had been driven by pressure not just from European allies who have been critical of the United States over the issue but also from Congress and especially Senator McCain.

Mr. McCain has been negotiating with the White House over legislation that would bar inhumane or degrading treatment of prisoners in American custody, with the administration seeking language that could make it harder to prosecute intelligence officers charged with violating torture standards.

Senate aides, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter, said Ms. Rice`s statement was not part of a deal with Mr. McCain. Mr. McCain`s office said he would have no comment.

A former senior American government official, who was granted anonymity to discuss the administration`s policy candidly, said Ms. Rice seemed to have three goals in making the statement. The first, the former official said, was "to appease our European critics, from whom she is taking enormous heat." The second, he said, was "to tie more firmly the hands" of the Justice Department, the C.I.A. and the Pentagon when it comes to setting policy. The third, he said, is to help make a case on Capitol Hill that the McCain amendment is unnecessary.

Tom Malinowski, Washington director of Human Rights Watch, said in a statement, "The ban against cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment has to be more than a `policy,` which can be changed by the president at any time. For months, Senator McCain has been asking for this international ban to be strengthened under U.S. law, and the administration should stop resisting his efforts."

Ms. Rice has grappled all week with how to portray the United States as responsive to criticism of its policies, especially in light of a report last month by The Washington Post that the United States is operating secret prisons, including at least one in Eastern Europe, to interrogate captives from Al Qaeda.

Monday morning, before leaving on a five-day trip to Europe, Ms. Rice said, "The United States does not permit, tolerate or condone torture under any circumstances."

Speaking to reporters on her plane later that day, she elaborated, saying: "All agencies of the United States are operating under our obligations concerning the C.A.T. And our obligations include a prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment, or cruel, inhumane - you know the list - punishment."

State Department officials said then that Ms. Rice was articulating "an important policy statement," as one put it, and "a change" in policy. The suggestion that the United States might be operating secret prisons in Europe and the idea that American intelligence officers might be torturing terrorism suspects incarcerated on foreign soil have been incendiary issues across Europe in recent weeks.

Finally on Wednesday morning, as Ms. Rice prepared to hold a news conference in Kiev with Viktor Yushchenko, the Ukrainian president, she passed word that she wanted to be asked a question about American policy on torture.

Aides said she believed her previous statements on the subject this week had not been clear enough. And this time, a senior aide described her statement as a policy "clarification."

State Department officials would not answer questions about how, if at all, the policy might change the behavior of agents working in the field. And Ms. Rice`s remarks did little to clear up questions about what definitions the United States applied to terms like torture and cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment, and whether the United States was still using techniques that were approved in the past but might test those definitions. An example is a practice known as "waterboarding" in which a prisoner is strapped to a board with his feet elevated above his head and a wet cloth placed over his nose to create the sensation of drowning.

A report last year by the C.I.A.`s inspector general concluded that some aspects of the agency`s treatment of detainees might violate the international standards.

In August 2002, the Justice Department issued a legal opinion, since disavowed, that interrogation methods just short of those that might cause pain comparable to "organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death" could be allowable without being considered torture.

A second legal opinion issued in December 2004, which defined torture more broadly, did not repudiate interrogation techniques that had been previously authorized. It remains unclear how many of those techniques are still in use by the C.I.A.

Richard W. Stevenson reported from Washington for this article, and Joel Brinkley from Kiev.Neil A. Lewis and Douglas Jehl contributed reporting from Washington.

* Copyright 2005The New York Times Company

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December 7, 2005
Q&A: EU-U.S. relations and the war on terror
By BY MARY CRANE
http://www.nytimes.com/cfr/international/slot2_120705.html

From the [urlCouncil on Foreign Relations,]http://www.cfr.org/publication/9350/us_treatment_of_terror_suspects_and_useu_relations.html[/url] December 7, 2005

Introduction

In response to media reports that the United States is detaining top al-Qaeda suspects in secret prisons in eight countries, including Romania and Poland, European officials have launched a series of investigations. These moves follow a spate of stories in Europe alleging that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is ferrying terrorist suspects by air between the so-called black sites and countries in the Middle East that regularly torture detainees. The allegations have deepened dismay among European Union (EU) members over Washington`s conduct leading up to the Iraq war, which was widely unpopular in Europe, as well as over revelations of torture in U.S.-run facilities inside Iraq and Afghanistan.

What, exactly, is being alleged?

Media reports suggest that aircraft operated by the CIA have been spotted at airports in Finland, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Poland, Portugal, and Spain and that these planes were used to carry terrorist suspects and other detainees. There is little doubt that planes operated by the CIA flew through and stopped over in Europe since airport records that note flight plans and identification numbers are publicly available. At issue for the Europeans is whether these flights are a breach of international law and whether local intelligence agencies were aware of--or even complicit in--the operations that many allege involved human rights violations.

The allegations are part of a continuing debate between the U.S. and European governments on the practice of "extraordinary renditions," CIA jargon for arresting or even abducting suspected terrorists on foreign soil and then transferring them to countries or sites where they might face torture. British Foreign Minister Jack Straw, who supported the U.S. war in Iraq, wrote to Washington on behalf of the European Union (EU) formally asking for clarification on the policy--specifically raising the issue of covert prisons in Eastern Europe and CIA airplanes stopping in European bases, which may be in violation of international law. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will address Straw`s letters and European concerns during a four-nation tour of Europe.

What has been the U.S. response?

In her December 5 briefing to journalists before leaving for Europe, Rice was careful to note that interrogations of terror suspects have produced intelligence that helped "save European lives." Rice also defended the legality of U.S. tactics against stateless "enemy combatants" and reminded Europe that terrorism is a global threat. "We share intelligence that has helped protect European countries from attack," she said. Rice added that the United States does not permit, tolerate, or condone torture under any circumstances, but defended rendition as a "lawful weapon" for taking "terrorists out of action" and saving lives. She made no reference to secret prisons. According to Charles Kupchan, the Council on Foreign Relations` director for Europe studies, Rice has taken a "relatively tough line" with the Europeans and seems to be saying, "You need to choose whether you`re with us or against us on this question."

The administration`s critics in Europe, however, say Rice`s reassurances and defense of U.S. treatment of terror suspects are undermined by memories of prisoner-abuse scandals at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and Baghram, a U.S. facility in Afghanistan. The White House`s opposition to congressional anti-torture legislation proposed by Senator John McCain (R-AZ) has further undermined Rice`s defense of U.S. policies, experts say.

What are Europe`s objections to the U.S. treatment of terror suspects?

The controversy touches on a broader European discomfort with the Bush administration`s approach to countering terrorism. Experts say the outrage over the clandestine prisons and secret flights stems from two broader issues plaguing transatlantic relations: Europe`s discontent with Washington`s unwillingness to grant due process to terror suspects and making assurances that these suspects` human rights were not violated. News reports indicate the United States has captured more than 100 terrorism suspects since 9/11 and rendered them to detention centers or third countries, some of which are known to practice torture. Experts say both issues--due process and the alleged use of torture--contradict European norms on human rights.

What actions have European governments and courts taken?

Currently, there are at least six investigations into alleged CIA flights in various countries, as well as a Council of Europe inquiry on allegations of secret prisons in Eastern Europe. Lead investigator for the Council of Europe probe, Swiss Senator Dick Marty, has asked for data from the European air traffic control agency and requested images from the EU`s satellite center for images that might indicate the construction of detention facilities at Polish and Romanian military bases. Poland, already an EU member, and Romania, currently petitioning for EU membership, deny their involvement in the alleged U.S. clandestine prison network.

The investigations are putting pressure on governments across Europe. Most notably, EU Justice and Home Affairs Commissioner Franco Frattini warned November 28 that any EU member found guilty of participating in the CIA`s alleged conduct would lose its voting rights. While this threat has been dismissed as hyperbole by some, Frattini notes that secret prisons would violate the European Convention on Human Rights. European human rights groups and opposition parties are also demanding assurances from their governments that their officials were not involved in secret U.S. rendition plots. The prison reports are "ammunition for the opposition, a gift to the anti-Americans," says Guillaume Parmentier, director of the Paris-based French Center on the United States. In Italy, prosecutors are charging twenty-two Americans with the kidnapping of Islamic militant Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr in February 2003 and "rendering" him to Egypt. Some skeptics claim Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi may have been complicit as well. "Someone knew," said Daria Pesce, lawyer for one of the CIA station chiefs in Milan, in a November interview with the New York Times. "I don`t think that it is possible that an American comes into Italy and kidnaps someone. It seems really unlikely."

What does this mean for EU-U.S. relations?

The news about U.S. rendition operations in Europe "plays into the Europeans` worst fears about the Bush administration," says John Glenn, director of foreign policy at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. On the one hand, the renditions allegations against the United States--which remain speculative and without hard evidence--have reinvigorated already-strong anti-war, anti-American sentiment, experts say. "Even in places [in Europe] where governments have been supportive, the populations have been opposed to American actions," says James Goldgeier, adjunct senior fellow for Europe studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

On the other hand, "neither side is looking for another bloody nose," Kupchan says. "If the European [governments] had their way, this issue would quietly disappear, but there is a lot of public outrage about it." The accusations of rendition come at a time when the United States and the European Union have made a concerted effort to improve transatlantic ties. Experts say that in his second term President Bush has been much more concerned with European partners, and there has been concrete cooperation on a host of important issues, including the administration`s Middle East policy. Additionally, many European governments are reluctant to push Washington on the rendition charges for fear their own intelligence agencies` cooperation with CIA operations will be revealed. Opposition parties and the media in many European countries are seizing this opportunity to criticize their governments. In Germany, where newly elected Chancellor Angela Merkel campaigned on the promise to improve transatlantic ties, the opposition has demanded an explanation for a list of at least 437 U.S. flights and landings in German territory.

Will this controversy hurt EU-U.S. intelligence-sharing operations?

The intelligence-sharing relationship has remained quite strong since the 9/11 attacks, despite political discord over the unpopular war in Iraq, experts say. But renditions could pose a real political obstacle to future collaborative intelligence operations. Little is publicly known about the nature and frequency of U.S. renditions. Some of the more politicized cases include Lebanese national Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen, who claims he was picked up by Macedonian authorities in Skopje and turned over to U.S. officials in Afghanistan, where Rice has admitted he was wrongfully detained for five months. German prosecutors are currently investigating the possibility that former German Interior Minister Otto Schily knew of Masri`s abduction. In December 2001, Swedish police handed two Egyptian nationals over to U.S. agents, who rendered the men to their home country. Sweden`s security police, in response to public outrage over the renditions, have since promised never to allow foreign agents control over an intelligence operation on Swedish soil.

The political fallout from questionable renditions in Italy, Sweden, and Germany has made it more difficult for these countries to cooperate in future counterterrorism exercises with U.S. intelligence. "It`s at least conceivable," Kupchan says, "that this row could, to some extent, be a setback on the intelligence and law-enforcement front and make the parties more reluctant to share information."

* Copyright 2005

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Neocon Brooks macht sich Sorgen um die Entwicklung der konservativen Ideen. When conservatism was a movement of ideas, it attracted oddballs; now that it`s a movement with power, it attracts sleazeballs.
Was man hier im Forum auch feststellen kann.

December 8, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
Running Out of Steam
By DAVID BROOKS
http://select.nytimes.com/2005/12/08/opinion/08brooks.html

Conservatives are in power but out of sorts. Fifty years after the founding of the modern right, conservatives hold just about every important government job, yet the conservative agenda has stalled. Federal spending has surged. Social Security reform is dead. And when voters are asked which party they trust on key issues, they decisively reject conservative ideas.

On the economy, Democrats are trusted more, 56 to 34. On education, it`s Democrats 55 to 32. On taxes, Democrats 48 to 38. On health care, Democrats 54 to 29.

For members of a movement that is supposed to be winning the battle of ideas, conservatives are in a mess.

So what`s gone wrong? First, most of the issues that propelled conservatives to power have been addressed. Modern American conservatism was formed by people who wanted to defeat the Soviet Union, reduce crime, reform welfare, cut taxes, deregulate the economy and reintroduce traditional social values. All those problems are less salient today.

Second, conservatism has been semi-absorbed into the Republican Party. When conservatism was in its most creative phase, there was a sharp distinction between conservatives and Republicans. Conservatives chased ideas, while Republicans were the corporate hacks who sold out. Now that conservative Republicans are in power, that distinction is obliterated.

There are a number of consequences. A lot of the energy that used to go into ideas is now devoted to defending Republican politicians. Many former conservative activists have become Republican lobbyists. (When conservatism was a movement of ideas, it attracted oddballs; now that it`s a movement with power, it attracts sleazeballs.)

Most important, there is greater social pressure to conform to the party`s needs. Even writers and wonks are supposed to stay on message. In the 1970`s, supply-siders mounted an insurgency against the Republican House leadership and against some sitting G.O.P. senators. If any group tried that today, it would be crushed by the party establishment.

Third, conservative media success means intellectual flabbiness. Conservatives used to live in a media world created by people who thought differently than they did. Reading certain publications and watching the evening news was like intellectual calisthenics. Now conservatives can be just as insular as liberals, retreating to their own media sources to be told how right they are.

Fourth, conservatives have lost their governing philosophy. In 1994, the Republicans thought their purpose was to reduce the size of government. But when the government shutdown failed, they never developed a new set of guiding principles to clarify which things government should do and which things it shouldn`t. George Bush came up with a philosophy of compassionate conservatism, but it remains fuzzy and incomplete.

Fifth, conservative Republicans have lost touch with their base. To win, Republicans depend on white rural and suburban working-class voters making $30,000 to $50,000 a year. Conservative Republicans offer almost no policies that directly benefit these people. Americans at that income level tend to be financially risk-averse. But the out-of-touch Republicans offered a Social Security plan that increased risk.

Sixth, conservatives have not effectively addressed the second-generation issues. Technological change has really changed the economy, introducing new stratifications. Inequality is rising. Wage stagnation is a problem. Social mobility is lagging, and globalization hurts hard-working people. Global warming is real (conservatives secretly know this). The health care system is ridiculous. Welfare reform is unfinished. Conservatives have not addressed these second-generation issues as effectively as their forebears addressed the first-generation ones.

The good news is that we are about to enter a political season with no obvious conservative standard bearer, leaving plenty of room for innovation. Also, the current conservative crisis has produced some new thinking. A few weeks ago, two young writers, Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam (my former assistant), unveiled a fresh conservative agenda in a Weekly Standard essay called "The Party of Sam`s Club." These writers, 26 and 25 years old, are closer to the future than the party leaders.

And the final bit of good news for the right is the left. No matter how serious the conservative crisis is, liberals remain surpassingly effective at making themselves unelectable.

* Copyright 2005The New York Times Company

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Thoughts on the Middle East, History,and Religion
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Juan Cole is Professor of History at the University of Michigan

http://www.juancole.com/

Thursday, December 08, 2005

Bush praises Mosul, Najaf

Unrest in Kurdistan

President Bush in his speech on Thursday maintained that it was a good thing that about half of Ninevah province voted in the referendum on the new constitution. The Washington Post points out that Ninevah voted overwhelming against the constitution, and came within an hair`s breadth of helping defeat it altogether. This was a good thing? WaPo also points out that Bush instanced security progress in Najaf and Mosul as good news. But this is perverse. There was not much a security problem in Najaf until, in early April 2004, the US military suddently declared that it wanted to "kill or capture" Shiite religious nationalist Muqtada al-Sadr. The latter launched an uprising in the course of which the Mahdi Army took over Najaf. Bush provoked that. As for Mosul, it was quiet under Gen. Petraeus, unti Bush launched the Fallujah campaign of November, 2004, at which time security in Mosul collapsed. The local population was furious about the attack on Sunni Arabs. Mosul is still not back to being fairly safe.

Collapse in Kurdistan? From all accounts there is substantial political unrest in Kurdistan, with violence between the Kurdistan Democratic Party and a Kurdish Islamic party. Al-Zaman: The Kurdistan Islamic Union, led by Salah al-Din Muhammad Baha al-din said that on Tuesday 3 of its party workers had been killed in an attack on their party headquarters in the northern Dohuk province. One of the dead had been a candidate running for a seat in parliament. Many others were wounded. Two further party works were killed in Zakhu. Police, loyal to the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Massoud Barzani, looked on without attempting to protect these devotees of political Islam among the Kurds.

KarbalaNews.net is now carrying an article claiming to be from the office of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani saying that the communique urging believers to vote for the United Iraqi Alliance was fraudulent. Sistani had been refusing to endorse the UIA, but seemed suddently to reverse course late last week.

Al-Zaman: Seventy-nine Iranian pilgrims arrived in the Shiite shrine city of Karbala on Wednesday, under the protection of an Iranian government guard that was allowed to accompany them. At a moment when Iraq has closed its borders with the Arab states of Saudia Arabia, Jordan and Syria and refused to give entry permits to Arabs, the Iraqi government is welcoming in the Iranians for Shiite pilgrimage! Forget about all the British charges that Iran is destablizing Iraq. The Iraqi government clearly believes that it is the Arabs, not Iran, that form the danger.

I may blog more Thursday if I get the chance.

posted by Juan @ [url12/08/2005 07:25:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/12/bush-praises-mosul-najaf-unrest-in.html[/url] 0 comments

Election Violence in Egypt Kills 8
Afghanistan Bombing kills 2

[urlElection violence claimed at least 8 lives in Egypt on Wednesday,]http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=1384501[/url] and wounded dozens. [urlThe Muslim Brotherhood]http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/07/AR2005120702611.html[/url] has vastly increased its representation in parliament, giving it them clout to further Islamize the law in Egypt. There will be over 80 members of parliament from the Muslim Brotherhood, from all accounts. (In the last parliament, the MB had only 17). The State Department had warned Bush that this sort of outcome was plausible if he pushed Mubarak to modernize.

Guerrillas in Afghanistan are starting to use Iraq-style tactics. An attack on Wednesday killed two.

posted by Juan @ [url12/08/2005 06:35:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/12/election-violence-in-egypt-kills-8.html[/url] 0 comments

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Kommentare zu der Pinter-Rede
Guardian
[urlPassionate Pinter`s devastating assault on US foreign policy]http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6109,1661931,00.html[/url]

There was something oddly Beckettian about Harold Pinter`s Nobel lecture, which was broadcast yesterday by More4, and which even now is blazing its way across the world`s media. It was Beckettian in that Pinter sat in a wheelchair, with a rug over his knees and framed by an image of his younger self, delivering his sombre message: memories of Hamm in Beckett`s Endgame came to mind. But if Pinter`s frailty was occasionally visible, there was nothing ailing about his passionate and astonishing speech, which mixed moral vigour with forensic detail.

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50/2005

Sein Watergate

Amerikas legendärer Enthüller Bob Woodward vergisst das Enthüllen

http://www.zeit.de/2005/50/Woodward_50

Von Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff

Jede Geschichte hat eine Vorgeschichte. Diese beginnt vor 45 Jahren, als ein Journalist namens Theodore White die Berichterstattung über Amerikas Wahlkämpfe revolutioniert. Wie kein Zweiter schmeichelt sich White bei werdenden Präsidenten ein. Der Journalist wird zum Schatten seiner Helden – und allmählich zum Vertrauten. Wer Whites Berichte liest, der schlüpft in die Haut eines Präsidentschaftskandidaten. Für die Schlüsselloch-Reportagen in seinem Buch The Making of the President, 1960, erhält White den Pulitzer-Preis.

Wie so oft gebiert der Erfolg den Erfolg. White wird zum Beichtonkel der Mächtigen. Die dürfen dafür gelegentlich das Manuskript korrigieren. So entwickelt sich der Berichterstatter zum Höfling. Derart verstrickt mit der Macht ist White, dass er – mittendrin und doch weit weg – die größte Story seiner Zeit verpasst. 1972 schreibt er sein drittes Buch über einen Präsidentschaftswahlkampf, doch statt seiner decken zwei junge Berufsanfänger, Bob Woodward und Carl Bernstein, in jenem Wahlkampf den Watergate-Skandal auf. Die Novizen haben als Lokalreporter keinerlei Zugang zu den Mächtigen. Diese Distanz, behaupten die beiden, ermögliche ihnen den klaren Blick auf die Verhältnisse.

33 Jahre später scheint sich die Geschichte zu wiederholen. Diesmal ist es Bob Woodward, dem der klare Blick abhanden kommt. Vor zwei Wochen musste Woodward einräumen, seine Kenntnisse über die komplizierte Affäre um die Vorgeschichte des Irak-Krieges für sich behalten zu haben. Dass er der erste Journalist war, den das Weiße Haus für eine Denunziationskampagne gegen einen Kritiker des Irak-Krieges einspannen wollte, verschwieg Woodward. Nicht mal seinen Chefredakteur weihte er ein – zwei Jahre lang. Stattdessen zog er im Fernsehen über den Sonderstaatsanwalt im Weißen Haus her und nannte ihn einen »Schrottplatz-Ermittler«, also einen, der ziellos im Alteisen herumstochert. Die Ermittlungen bezeichnete Woodward als »lächerlich«, ohne dabei seine eigene Verstrickung preiszugeben. Inzwischen hat Woodward dem Staatsanwalt als Zeuge erzählen müssen, was er weiß.

Zunächst schien es, als habe ein Star-Reporter einen kleinen Fehler gemacht. Ein kurzer Schatten auf einem makellosen Lebenslauf, mehr nicht. Doch inzwischen erhebt sich Donnergrollen in der Öffentlichkeit. Gnadenlos rechnet die Branche mit dem Helden von Watergate ab. »Woodwards Schande« oder »Woodwards Fall« lauten die Überschriften. Das Magazin Mother Jones titelt: »Ein Reporter, der einst eine korrupte Regierung niederrang, schützt nun eine andere«. Die »Leseranwältin« des eigenen Blattes fordert, Woodward an die Kette zu legen und ihn »denselben Regeln zu unterwerfen wie den Rest der Belegschaft – auch wenn er reich und berühmt ist«. Woodward selbst hat sich entschuldigt. Seither gräbt er sich ein. Vergangene Woche verweigerte er der ZEIT und sogar der eigenen Zeitung ein Interview.

Kein Zweifel: Das Denkmal wankt. Stürzte es, wäre die Fallhöhe gewaltig. Woodward ist der berühmteste Journalist der Welt. Eine Ikone, die spätestens mit jener Watergate-Verfilmung unsterblich wurde, in der Robert Redford den Reporter spielte. Woodward ist Legende, weil er die Läuterung Amerikas nach der Sünde verkörpert. Er gibt dem Glauben einen Namen, wonach nichts an Amerika falsch sei, was nicht durch amerikanische Tugenden wettzumachen wäre. Jeden Irrweg – etwa die Kommunistenverfolgungen der McCarthy-Ära oder die Verbrechen des Präsidenten Nixon – werde Amerikas Demokratie korrigieren, und sei es mit Hilfe der vierten Gewalt und ihrer Wahrheitssucher. Insofern ist Watergate die Moritat von der bisweilen verschütteten, letztlich aber immer wieder siegreichen Gutherzigkeit Amerikas. Und den moralischen Helden dieser Moritat gibt (gemeinsam mit seinem Partner) Woodward.

Drum sitzt der Schock so tief, dass sich der Unbestechliche letztlich doch als irdisch erweist. Woodwards Fehlbarkeit zeigt sich an der für Journalisten sensibelsten Stelle: der Unabhängigkeit. Verletzung spricht aus den Worten des Kolumnisten James Carroll, der im Boston Globe schreibt: »Woodward war bloß einer von vielen ›eingebetteten‹ Reportern. (…) Sie reichten Bushs Begründungen und Rechtfertigungen weiter, egal wie erkennbar unehrlich sie waren.« Wie damals bei Watergate ging es um die Wiederwahl eines Präsidenten und zugleich die Führbarkeit eines Krieges. Bloß hat Woodward diesen Zusammenhang selbst nie hergestellt. Das blieb seinem (ins Privatleben abgetauchten) Partner Carl Bernstein vorbehalten. Der schrieb kurz vor Woodwardgate: »Wie Nixon während der Vietnam-Ära haben Bush und seine Leute unangenehme Wahrheiten durch geschickte Beeinflussung der Medien einfach geleugnet. (…) Die Warnzeichen waren schwer zu ignorieren.«

Plötzlich erscheinen Kritikern Woodwards jüngste Bestseller, die beiden Insider-Berichte über die Ära Bush, als Hagiografien. Wer nachliest, stellt fest, dass sich darin nur ein paar Absätze über jene Affäre finden, in die Woodward nun verwickelt ist. Und Bushs ständige Versuche, die Realität zu schönen? Fast kein Thema für Woodward. Wie konnte der Star des Enthüllungsjournalismus so Wesentliches übersehen? Plötzlich taucht ein Woodward-Zitat aus dem vergangenen Jahr wieder auf. Es lautet: »Ich mache mir riesige Vorwürfe, vor dem Irak-Krieg nicht schärfer nachgefragt zu haben.« Noch ein Satz wird der Vergessenheit entrissen. Robert Redford sprach ihn im Watergate-Film: »Ich bin ein Republikaner.«

Wohl wahr, Woodward ist ein Konservativer, aber eben kein parteilicher Journalist. Da trifft mancher Exeget Woodward an der falschen Stelle. In Zeiten nachholender Bush-Kritik kommt die Ansicht in Mode, wonach als unvoreingenommen nur gelten darf, wer dem Präsidenten ständig Lügen unterstellt. Nach diesem zweifelhaften Maßstab ist Woodward gewiss politisch unzuverlässig. Andererseits sind es nicht zuletzt Woodwards Bestseller, die Gegnern der Regierung Bush Munition liefern: Die Tiefe des Zwists zwischen Verteidigungs- und Außenminister hat erst Woodward offen gelegt. Genauso die Tatsache, dass der Vizeverteidigungsminister schon Tage nach dem 11. September 2001 vorschlug, im Irak einzumarschieren.

Bob Woodward lebt längst in einer Welt mit eigenen Regeln. Wer ihn im Edelstadtteil Georgetown besuchen darf, betritt kein Haus, sondern ein Anwesen. So opulent ist den Berichten der Gäste zufolge die Einrichtung, dass man in den Hallen einen Außenminister vermutet, nicht aber einen Journalisten. Dass Woodward inzwischen Mitglied und Chronist des Establishments ist, konnte wissen, wer es wissen wollte.

Die brutalste Dekonstruktion seines Werkes legte schon vor neun Jahren die Autorin Joan Didion vor. Im New York Review of Books warf sie Woodward vor, endlos Material aufzutürmen und sich zugleich zu weigern, dessen »Bedeutung oder Ziel oder Konsequenz« zu erörtern. »Gewissenhafte Passivität«, auch »Denkfaulheit« nennt sie diese Methode. Bei Dideon schrumpft Woodward zum Werkzeug der Mächtigen. Und mächtig ist in dieser Phase Clinton, nicht Bush.

Es bedurfte also nicht der konservativen Machtübernahme und auch nicht der nationalen Aufwallung nach dem Terroranschlag gegen Amerika, um aus Woodward den Stenografen der Stars zu machen. Woodward verteidigt seine Methode mit der Bemerkung, er halte sich immer »strikt in der Mitte«. Bloß findet sich dort nicht notwendig die Wahrheit. Wäre Woodward noch ein reiner Enthüller, so würde er bisweilen künftige Quellen um der heutigen Wahrheit willen verprellen. Stattdessen verwandelte er sich in eine Sabine Christiansen des amerikanischen Journalismus: Alle gehen hin, weil sie nichts zu befürchten haben.

Zu befürchten haben sie am Ende nur etwas, wenn sie sich verweigern. Woodward ist der Türsteher der Macht. Wer von ihm hereingelassen wird, kann berühmt werden. Am Ende aber bleibt Woodward berühmter als die meisten, die er befragt. Damit verkehren sich die Rollen von Interviewer und Interviewtem. Zu reden wäre deshalb nicht allein über Journalismus und Macht, sondern auch über Journalismus und Prominenz. Woodward kann nur unzulänglich als Angestellter der Washington Post beschrieben werden. Tatsächlich ist er eine globale Marke: Star-Reporter, Talkshow-Persönlichkeit, Bestseller-Autor, Vortragsreisender und Intimus der Mächtigen. Da kann es schon mal zu Loyalitätskonflikten kommen. Allein seit Anfang 2004 trat Woodward 27-mal im Fernsehen bei Larry King auf, dem Tratsch-Opa der Nation. Seinem Arbeitgeber hat Woodward seit der Irak-Invasion 2003 nur ein Nachricht abgeliefert, ein Hintergrundstück und eine Rezension. Er arbeitete an seinem Buch und enthielt deshalb seiner Zeitung – mitten in Kriegszeiten – die wichtigsten Informationen aus dem Weißen Haus vor. »Ein logisches Ergebnis«, klagt ein Washington Post-Reporter in einer internen E-Mail, »wenn eine Institution einem Individuum erlaubt, größer zu werden als die Institution selbst.«

Als Woodwardgate enthüllt ist, kommt es in der Redaktion zu einer bizarren Szene. In der einen Ecke filmen die großen TV-Sender erste Stellungnahmen. In der anderen Ecke hocken verstörte Redakteure vor dem Fernseher, um zu erfahren, was in ihrer Redaktion vor sich geht. Dazwischen der Medienredakteur, im Nebenberuf selbst Fernseh-Talkmaster, der für nächste Ausgabe der eigenen Zeitung Reaktionen der Kollegen aufschreibt. Die virtuelle Realität des Celebrity-Zeitalters schafft ihre Nachrichten selbst. Inzwischen schreibt Woodward an einem neuen Buch. Bush, zweite Amtszeit. So viel ist sicher: Dem Präsidenten geht es nicht gut und seinem Chronisten auch nicht. Eine Konstellation, die hoffen lässt. Woodward wird sich beweisen wollen.

(c) DIE ZEIT 08.12.2005 Nr.50

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Seltsam: Irgendwie schließt sich immer der Kreis: Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss und die Neocons.

Schreiben und foltern

Es gibt sie noch: Journalisten, die Misshandlungen von Gefangenen für den Ausdruck „wehrhafter Demokratie“ halten.
http://www.zeit.de/online/2005/49/presseschau_0712

Gero von Randow kommentiert das aktuelle Meinungsbild

Die einen hauen in die Tasten, die anderen schlagen Gefangene: Der Umstand, dass es da Zusammenhänge geben kann, wird zumindest dem entsetzensfähigen Leser der Welt an diesem Mittwoch bewusst, der auf den Kommentar ihres Chefredakteurs stößt. Die Diskussion über die CIA nimmt dieser zum Anlass, eine „Logik des Ausnahmezustands“ abzuarbeiten: „Die unbedingte Rechtstreue Weimars, der Legalismus des Völkerbunds gilt heute als folgenschwerer Irrweg der europäischen Geschichte. Im Rückblick wird an die damalige Politik eine Forderung herangetragen, die man heute bei den Amerikanern kategorisch ablehnt: daß sich eine wehrhafte Demokratie gegen ihre Feinde präventiv zur Wehr setzen muß, um ihre eigene Zerstörung zu verhindern.“

Soll das etwa heißen, dass Rechtsordnungen aus Selbstschutz ihre zivilisatorischen Standards unterschreiten dürfen? Nein, sie müssen es sogar, heißt es in dem Blatt – wortwörtlich: „.Rechtsordnungen müssen aus Selbstschutz ihre zivilisatorischen Standards unterschreiten, wenn es der Notfall erfordert. Die Forderung nach einem totalen A-priori-Verzicht auf harte Verhörmethoden mag Ausdruck des reinen Gewissens sein. Sie taugt nicht als Maßstab für eine Realpolitik, die am Ende die eigene Bevölkerung vor Übergriffen schützen muß“.

Der Zweck heiligt die Mittel. Das allerdings liest sich nicht so gut, weshalb es im Welt-Kommentar heißt: „Die Macht setzt das Recht“. Der nicht genannte Urheber dieses Satzes ist Thomas Hobbes („auctoritas, non veritas facit legem“), indessen die Struktur der hier ausgebreiteten Gedankenwelt von jemand anderem gelegt wurde, nämlich dem Hobbes-Nachfolger [urlCarl Schmitt]http://www.zeit.de/2004/16/St-Schmitt-Tageb_9fcher[/url] („Der Führer setzt das Recht“).

Eine volksnahe Variante präsentiert sodann die Bildzeitung, und zwar in einem Kommentar des ehemaligen FAZ-Herausgebers Hugo Müller-Vogg: „Selbst die Vereinigten Staaten erwarten nicht, daß wir jede einzelne Aktion im Krieg gegen den Terrorismus gutheißen. Aber sie können zu Recht erwarten, daß wir ihnen keine unlauteren Absichten unterstellen.“ Seien wir großzügig! Sind doch unsere Freunde. Na gut, Gefangene in heißem Wasser: nicht gerade fein. Schwamm drüber - minima non curat praetor.

Solche Töne sind im konservativen Leitmedium der Republik, das sich vor vier Jahren dieses Mannes entledigt hat, erwartungsgemäß nicht zu finden. Es geht ja auch nicht um rechts oder links, sondern um sittenlos oder gesittet. Vielmehr wird in der Frankfurter Allgemeinen Zeitung, fein versteckt in einem Portrait des neuen BND-Chefs, die von der Opposition geforderte Einrichtung eines Untersuchungsausschusss sekundiert: „Die kürzlich abgeschlossene Zeit im Bundeskanzleramt gehört sicherlich zu Uhrlaus interessantesten. Möglicherweise wird der freundlich und umgänglich wirkende Mann noch Gelegenheit bekommen, von Einzelheiten dieser Arbeit zu berichten. Etwa dann, wenn sich herausstellen sollte, daß das Kanzleramt schon frühzeitig Details über die angeblich irrtümliche Entführung eines Deutschen durch den amerikanischen Geheimdienst gewußt hat.“

Es wird eng für Steinmeier.

(c) ZEIT online, 7.12.2005

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Jamail ist zwar nicht mehr im Irak, aber er scheint noch gute Kontakte zu haben.

Dec 9, 2005

The government men in masks who terrorize Iraq
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GL09Ak03.html

By Dahr Jamail and Harb al-Mukhtar

BAGHDAD - After the US forces and the bombings, Iraqis are coming to fear those bands of men in masks who seem to operate with the Iraqi police.

Omar Ahmed`s family learnt what it can mean to run into the police, their supposed protectors. Omar was driving with two friends in the Adhamiya district of Baghdad at night on September 1 when they were stopped at a police checkpoint.

"The three of them were arrested by the police even though there was nothing in the car," an eyewitness told Inter Press Service, speaking on condition of anonymity. They did not return home for days, and the family began to search the morgues, common practice now when someone is arrested by the Iraqi police and does not return.

"Five days after they were arrested we found Omar`s body in the freezer in a morgue, with holes in the side of his head and shoulders," a friend of the family said. "We don`t know if the other two men are dead or alive. But we know these men were guilty of nothing other than driving their car at night. We have no security and the problem is that police are killing and disappearing the Iraqi people every day now."

The "death squads" as they have come to be called are getting more active with just a week to go before the December 15 election.

On Tuesday this week Iraqi police said they found 20 bodies dumped at two different locations in western Iraq, according to the al-Sharqiyah television network. Eleven bodies of men wearing civilian clothes were found dumped on the main road between Baghdad and the Jordanian border. The bodies were found near al-Rutbah city, with their hands tied behind their backs. Nine bodies, also of civilians and riddled with bullets, were found on the side of a road near Fallujah on Monday.

Signs are emerging that such killing is the work of death squads operating with the Iran-backed Shi`ite forces that dominate the government, and therefore the police.

Omar, a 39-year-old unemployed engineer who now sells petrol and cigarettes on the black market says he survived one such Shi`ite squad. "I was sleeping on the roof of my house one night because it was so hot and we had no electricity as usual," Omar said. "I was awakened by a loud explosion nearby, and immediately surrounded by strange men wearing night-vision goggles."

Omar says he was thrown to the ground by the men, handcuffed and blindfolded. "They started to beat me using the end of their guns," he said. "Then they searched my house, took my gun which I told them I had, then they took me away." His 32-year-old wife Sumia, a teacher, was also handcuffed and taken away.

Omar says he saw about 10 pick-up trucks carrying at least 100 men wearing black masks before a bag was placed over his head. He was taken to the back of a truck, and beaten up until he fainted.

Sumia was beaten up too. "I received so many kicks to my stomach," she said. "I heard screaming in pain, so I fought until they handcuffed me and beat me until I couldn`t do anything else."

The two were taken to the Iraqi police station in Suleakh, Baghdad, where they were interrogated and accused of owning a mortar. "I explained to them that I don`t know anything about mortars," said Omar. "And that I have never had anything to do with the resistance, but they said so many insulting words to me, and beat me further."

Sumia, who was also interrogated, pleaded with the policemen to let them return home to care for their young children. "They would not give me a headscarf to cover my head," she said. "They kept asking me about mortars and wouldn`t let me go to look after my children. We know nothing about any mortars."

Omar said the next morning he was moved into another room where he saw men lying handcuffed, with their heads covered with sacks. "They were lying on the ground without a blanket or pillow." In a while, he saw 14 men wearing black masks enter the room carrying whips. "I watched them beat the prisoners. They told them this was their breakfast."

Omar and Sumia were later taken home, and warned that if security forces were attacked in their neighbourhood, they would be detained again.

Omar said the men who detained him and his wife were members of the Shi`ite Badr Organization, a militia affiliated with Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Tensions in Baghdad run high, as people who live in areas not controlled by the Badr Army face daily threats of being kidnapped or killed by members of the militia.

"The Badr Organization is conducting a campaign to destroy other political parties and their electoral advertisements," said Saleh Hassir, a doctor at a Baghdad medical center. "We see black paint and tears on ex-prime minister Allawi`s posters and those of the Sunni groups, but pictures of al-Hakim remain unaffected."

The doctor says the Americans have helped bring in new Iran-backed terror.

"So many of us are against Iraq being controlled by these fundamental Islamic Iranian loyalists like al-Hakim," the doctor said. "Now we are seeing the suffering and ultimate dictatorship they have brought us here with the help of the Americans."

Isam Rashid contributed to this article.

(Inter Press Service)


[urlWatch The Story Unfold.]http://goldsea.com/GAAN/adclick.php?bannerid=271&zoneid=123&source=&dest=www.GetIntoFusion.com[/url]

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Es gibt die Beweise für Rendition, auch wenn immer wieder versucht wird diese Praktiken zu leugnen.

Pentagon Memo on Torture-Motivated Transfer Cited

A court filing describes a classified proposal to send a detainee away for information extraction.

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-na-tort…

By Ken Silverstein
Times Staff Writer

December 8, 2005

WASHINGTON — Although Bush administration officials have denied that they transfer terrorism suspects to countries where they are likely to be abused, a classified memorandum described in a court case indicates that the Pentagon has considered sending a captured militant abroad to be interrogated under threat of torture.

The classified memo is summarized — its actual contents are blacked out — in a petition filed by attorneys for Majid Mahmud Abdu Ahmad, a detainee held by the Pentagon at its Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, facility.

The March 17, 2004, Defense Department memo indicated that American officials were frustrated in trying to obtain information from Ahmad, according to the description of the classified memo in the court petition. The officials suggested sending Ahmad to an unspecified foreign country that employed torture in order to increase chances of extracting information from him, according to the petition`s description of the memo.

The precise contents of the Pentagon memo on Ahmad were not revealed, but the memo was described in the petition by New York attorney Marc D. Falkoff, who contested the transfer of Ahmad and 12 other Yemenis in U.S. District Court in Washington this year.

Falkoff`s description was not disputed by U.S. government lawyers or by U.S. District Judge Rosemary M. Collyer, who read the actual Pentagon document. The judge ruled in favor of the Yemenis on March 12, and Ahmad has not been transferred from the Guantanamo Bay detention facility.

The memo appears to call into question repeated assertions by the administration that it does not use foreign governments to abuse suspected militants — what critics call "torture by proxy."

Pentagon officials did not return calls Wednesday seeking comment on the memo.

The U.S. record on treatment of detainees worldwide has overshadowed Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice`s trip this week to Europe. She has faced a daily barrage of related questions, especially regarding the U.S. practice of snatching and transferring suspects from foreign countries and regarding reports that the CIA maintains secret prisons across Europe for terrorism suspects.

Ahmad was captured in Pakistan after the American invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001. The federal government charges that Ahmad was a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden and participated in "military operations against the United States and/or its coalition partners." Falkoff, of Covington & Burling, represents a number of Guantanamo detainees including Ahmad, and denies that his client has any links to terrorism.

Falkoff said he was allowed to review the classified Pentagon memo in preparing the defense case but was not permitted to comment on its contents beyond what was described in his legal filing.

Falkoff filed the petition for Ahmad and 12 other detainees March 11, after learning that the government had transferred a Saudi national from Guantanamo without notifying his lawyer and that the Pentagon was considering sending other detainees to foreign countries for imprisonment.

"I called the Justice Department and asked for guarantees that it would not transfer our clients while their cases were pending in court, or at least notify us if they intended to do so," Falkoff said. "The Justice Department said no — that we were not entitled to any advance notification."

Falkoff argued that transferring detainees overseas would "have the effect of denying them access to U.S. courts for review of their detainment status and also potentially expose them to interrogation techniques and treatment that would be contrary to the laws of the United States."

He asked the court to order the government to give 30 days` notice before transferring a detainee so the transfer could be contested. Collyer agreed; the government has appealed.

Falkoff`s petition quoted a section of the memo, but the quotation was blacked out in the unclassified version that is publicly available.

After the quotation is Falkoff`s interpretation of the classified memo`s significance: "There is only one meaning that can be gleaned from this short passage," Falkoff`s petition says. "The government believes that Mr. Ahmad has information that it wants but that it cannot extract without torturing him." The petition goes on to say that because torture is not allowed at Guantanamo, "the recommendation is that Mr. Ahmad should be sent to another country where he can be interrogated under torture."

Falkoff said that he asked the Pentagon early this year to declassify the memo but had not received a response.

Human rights advocates said the implications of the memo were significant even though Ahmad ultimately remained at Guantanamo.

"Whether they sent him or not, the memorandum reflects their understanding of how the program functions," said Scott Horton, an attorney who helped produce a New York City Bar Assn. report last year on detainee transfers.

Of hundreds of detainees who have been kept at Guantanamo, more than 175 have been released and more than 75 others have been transferred to other governments, in many cases for continued detention. U.S. officials have delivered suspects to a number of countries, including Egypt, Jordan, Morocco and Uzbekistan, that are believed to still practice torture, as the State Department has acknowledged in its human rights reports.

Horton provided The Times with a November 2002 legal analysis by a senior FBI attorney that concluded that it would be illegal to deliver detainees to any "third country" that employs coercive interrogation techniques. The analysis said that taking such action was clearly intended to circumvent American laws against torture and that anyone even discussing such a plan could be found criminally liable.


Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times

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Solange die private Verschuldung weiter wachsen kann, wird der Aufschwung der Wirtschaft auch andauern.
Nur sollte man langsam bemerken, dass die Beschäftigung in der industriellen Produktion in den USA auf 10% zurückgegangen ist (D hat 22%) und bei einem Einbruch des Konsum würde das die Arbeitsmarktsituation sehr stark beschädigen.

Has `War` become a leading brand for United States?

How Bush`s imperial policies are being linked to economic woes and CEO angst in America

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archiv…

- Mark Engler
Sunday, December 4, 2005


We hear a lot about the government largesse flowing toward Halliburton, Bechtel and a handful of other favored firms chosen to rebuild Iraq. Less often do we consider the possibility that the administration`s bellicosity has been a major business blunder.

Breaking with the Clinton administration`s advocacy for a cooperative, rules-based international economy -- a multilateral order known to critics as corporate globalization -- the Bush administration has fashioned a new model of imperial globalization, aggressive and unilateralist. This agenda, at best, benefits a narrow slice of the American business community and leaves the rest exposed to a world of popular resentment and economic uncertainty.

If Bush is an oil president, he`s not a Disney president, nor a Coca-Cola one. If Vice President Dick Cheney is working diligently to help Halliburton rebound, the war he helped lead hasn`t worked out nearly so well for Starbucks.

A year ago, Jim Lobe of Inter Press Service reported on a survey of 8,000 international consumers released by Global Market Institute Inc. of Seattle. The survey noted that "one-third of all consumers in Canada, China, France, Germany, Japan, Russia and the United Kingdom said that U.S. foreign policy, particularly the war on terror and the occupation of Iraq, constituted their strongest impression of the United States."

"Unfortunately, current American foreign policy is viewed by international consumers as a significant negative, when it used to be a positive," said Mitchell Eggers, Global Market`s chief operating officer and chief pollster.

Brands the survey identified as particularly at risk included Marlboro, America Online, McDonald`s, American Airlines, Exxon Mobil, Chevron, United Airlines, Budweiser, Chrysler, Mattel, Starbucks and General Motors.

In past months, a litany of stories in the financial press featured unnerving questions for business. Typical were the Financial Times in August ("World Turning Its Back on Brand America") and Forbes in September ("Is Brand America In Trouble?").

A U.S. Banker magazine article in August relaying the results of an Edelman Trust Barometer survey found that 41 percent of Canadian opinion leaders were less likely to purchase American products because of Bush administration policies, compared with 56 percent in the United Kingdom, 61 percent in France, 49 percent in Germany and 42 percent in Brazil.

It`s not just snooty foreigners who are negative, either. American business leaders have been starting to link economic woes to imperial policy. The U.S. Banker article warned, the "majority of American CEOs, whose firms employ 8 million overseas, are now acknowledging that anti-American sentiment is a problem."

Regularly featured in stories about U.S. image problems is a group of corporate executives who have come together as Business for Diplomatic Action. While avoiding an explicit stance on the Iraq war, the group argues: "The costs associated with rising anti-American sentiment are exponential. From security and economic costs to an erosion in our ability to engender trust around the world and recruit the best and brightest, the U.S. stands to lose its competitive edge if steps are not made toward reversing the negativity associated with America."

Compared with the adverse impacts of Bush`s imperial globalization, the administration`s efforts at Karen Hughes-style brand rehabilitation are laughable, and Business for Diplomatic Action knows it. Taking diplomatic matters into their own hands, spokesmen for the group flatly state, "Right now, the U.S. government is not a credible messenger."

Is the problem just one of perception, or have the wages of war cut into business profits?

In June 2004, USA Today reporter James Cox wrote about how financially ailing companies are pointing to the war as the culprit: "Hundreds of companies blame the Iraq war for poor financial results in 2003, many warning that continued U.S. military involvement there could harm this year`s performance. In recent regulatory filings at the Securities and Exchange Commission, airlines, home builders, broadcasters, mortgage providers, mutual funds and others directly blame the war for lower revenues and profits last year."

Among those complaining was Hewlett-Packard, which claimed that the occupation of Iraq has created uncertainty and hurt its stock price.

While fingering the war might just be a convenient excuse for some underperforming executives, the level of grumbling is noteworthy, as are the comments of outspoken fund managers profiled by Cox. "The war in Iraq created a quagmire for corporations," David Galvan, a portfolio manager for Wayne Hummer Income Fund, says in his letter to shareholders. Vintage Mutual Funds concludes that "the price of these commitments (in Iraq and Afghanistan) may be more than the American public had expected or is willing to tolerate."

In an SEC filing, Domenic Colasacco, manager of the Boston Balanced Fund, calls the U.S. occupation "sad and increasingly risky."

Of course, we know that companies reconstructing Iraq are posting profits. Sales of gas masks and armored Humvees are also up. But such war-supported companies are a small minority.

On the other hand, the diverse businesses in the tourism industry have taken a huge blow. JetBlue, Orbitz, Priceline.com, Morton`s steakhouses and Host Marriott, to name just a few, have blamed disappointing returns on the war.

Travel industry leaders have warned that the United States is losing billions of dollars as international tourists are deterred from visiting because of a tarnished image overseas and bureaucratic visa policies.

"It`s an economic imperative to address these problems," said Roger Dow, chief executive of the Travel Industry Association of America, tourism`s main trade body. He stressed that tourism contributes to a positive perception of the United States. "If we don`t address these issues in tourism, the long-term impact for American brands Coca-Cola, General Motors, McDonald`s could be very damaging."

The potential costs of war also include the possibility that spreading guerrilla warfare and terrorism will include escalating sabotage against vast and largely indefensible stretches of oil pipeline in the Middle East.

Then there`s domestic spending. Whether fiscal conservatives are right that deficits bloated by the Iraq war and tax cuts are necessarily bad for business, or whether Military Keynesianism has actually been helping to soften a periodic economic downturn, the idea of war without sacrifice seems suspect in the long term. Take direct war costs running in the hundreds of billions, add in medical bills for disabled veterans, then throw in the costs of National Guard reservists being pulled from small businesses, and pretty soon you`re talking real money.

A year after the election, approval ratings for the victorious president continue to sink to all-time lows, and "staying the course" remains official Washington policy for Iraq.

In this context, it`s not surprising that Republican realists like Brent Scowcroft (who warned in a Wall Street Journal essay before the war that "it undoubtedly would be very expensive, with serious consequences for the U.S. and global economy") are making noise again. And it would make perfect sense if an increasing number of those Bush CEOs were by now pining for a return to Clinton- style multilateral globalization of a sort still championed by many Democrats.

Neither of these camps will seem particularly appealing to progressives, but they pose a genuine threat to the imperial globalists who seem incapable of extracting themselves from Iraq. Indeed, intra-party rivalry among the Republicans, which is likely to increase as we enter an election year, could play a vital role in turning White House hawks into dead ducks.

All the better if this transformation is sped by dissatisfaction from corporate leaders re-evaluating the costs of Bush foreign policy and deciding that empire just doesn`t pay.

Mark Engler, a writer based in New York City, is an analyst with Foreign Policy In Focus. A longer version of this article appeared on www. tomdispatch.com. Contact us at [e-mail].


URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archiv…
©2005 San Francisco Chronicle

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Military Fatalities US, UK, Other

Regelmäßige Updates von Meldungen aus dem Irak:
http://icasualties.org/oif/

Iraker
http://www.icasualties.org/oif/IraqiDeaths.aspx

Da bei ´Today im Irak´ die Postings immer länger werden, hier den Link für alle Interessierte: http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

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House, Senate Republicans Reach Deal on Patriot Act
Bipartisan Group Says Won`t Support Bill, Democrat Threatens Filibuster
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12…

By Daniela Deane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 8, 2005; 3:39 PM

House and Senate Republican negotiators, after arguing for months, have reached agreement to extend the USA Patriot Act, the anti-terrorism law that gives the government expanded powers to investigate suspected terrorists, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter announced today.

A Democratic senator immediately threatened a filibuster to block the compromise bill, however, and a bipartisan group of senators issued a joint statement saying they were "gravely disappointed" with the deal and will not support it.

"This is not a perfect bill, but a good bill," Specter (R-Pa.) said at a news conference announcing the deal, which took months of often-tense negotiations to reach. "I think it`s well-balanced."

The agreement makes permanent most parts of the Patriot Act and extends for four years two of the act`s most controversial provisions. Those authorize roving wiretaps and give FBI agents access to library, business and hospital records.

The legislation would also extend for four years a provision of a separate intelligence law passed last year that sets standards for monitoring "lone wolf" terrorists who are not connected to a foreign government.

The House-passed bill had authorized these provisions for 10 years, while the Senate version accepted only a four-year term. Shortly before Thanksgiving, the House negotiators said they would accept a seven-year limit, but some senators kept pushing for a shorter time frame.

The Patriot Act was approved overwhelmingly by Congress after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon. Sixteen provisions are due to expire Dec. 31.

The law expands the government`s surveillance and prosecutorial powers against suspected terrorists and their accomplices. Specter said the Senate will vote on the compromise bill next week. He said he did not expect Senate Democrats to use a filibuster to block the vote. And if they did, he did not expect it would be successful.

Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.), who was the only senator to vote against the bill in 2001, quickly threatened a filibuster. "I will do everything I can, including a filibuster, to stop this Patriot Act Conference Report, which does not include adequate safeguards to protect our constitutional freedoms," he said in a statement posted on his Web site.

Feingold and five other senators issued a joint statement calling for more changes to the act.

Specter said Sen. Patrick Leahy (Vt.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, "has elected not to sign the conference report." He added, though, that "he and I are going to continue to work together to see if we can find some common ground here."

Leahy did not immediately comment on the bill.

Specter said the Bush administration was "very, very happy with this bill because they`re going to get a bill."

"We came perilously close to not getting a bill," Specter told reporters. "The administration was very helpful in getting agreement."

Speaking to reporters, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales called the compromise a "win for the American people. Although he said the Justice Department was not in favor of putting time limits on the act, he said the compromise was "certainly something we can support."

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the "president urges both houses of Congress to act promptly to pass this critical piece of legislation."

"The Patriot Act is critical to winning the war on terrorism," McClellan said.

The American Civil Liberties Union denounced the deal and called on lawmakers to reject it because it impinges on the privacy of innocent citizens.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company

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Tomgram: "Gone Fishing," How the President Got a Life
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=41764

This post can be found at http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=41764

Shark-bit World
By Tom Engelhardt

The "usually disengaged" President, as columnist Maureen Dowd labeled him, had just returned from a prolonged, brush-cutting Crawford vacation to much criticism and a nation in trouble. (One Republican congressman complained that "it was hard for Mr. Bush to get his message out if the White House lectern had a ‘Gone Fishing` sign on it.") Democrats were on the attack. Journalistic coverage seemed to grow ever bolder. Bush`s poll figures were dropping. A dozen prominent Republicans, fearful of a President out of touch with the national mood, gathered for a private dinner with Karl Rove to "offer an unvarnished critique of Mr. Bush`s style and strategy." Next year`s congressional elections suddenly seemed up for grabs. The President`s aides were desperately scrambling to reposition him as a more "commanding" figure, while, according to the polls, a majority of Americans felt the country was headed in the wrong direction. At the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld had "cratered"; in the Middle East "violence was rising."

An editorial in the New York Times caught the moment this way in its opening sentence: "A simple truth of human existence is that it is vastly easier to amplify fear than it is to assuage it." Now, there was a post-9/11 truth -- except that the editorial was headlined "The Statistical Shark" and its next sentence wasn`t about planes smashing into buildings or the way the Bush administration had since wielded the fear card, but another hot-button issue entirely. It went: "Consider the shark attacks that have occurred in Florida, Virginia and North Carolina this summer."

This was, in fact, September 6, 2001, the waning days of a man-bites-dog summer in which headlines had been dominated by the deaths of David Peltier, a 10 year-old boy in Florida, and Sergei Zloukaev, a 27-year-old in North Carolina in fatal shark attacks. Just the day before, in fact, the Times had carried a piece by William J. Broad reassuring readers that scientists did not believe the world was facing a shark "rampage." "If anything," Broad concluded, "the recent global trend in shark attacks is down."

It was just past Labor Day. Congress was barely back in session. Heywood Hale Broun, the sportswriter, would die at 83 that relatively quiet week, while Mexican President Vicente Fox swept triumphantly into Washington and a new book, featured on Newsweek`s cover, would carry the title, The Accidental President. The Sunday New York Times Arts & Leisure section was promoting "the new season" in entertainment, while that night a highly publicized 10-part mini-series was premiering on HBO -- Band of Brothers, a Tom Hanks/Steven Speilberg production that followed a platoon of Greatest-Generation soldiers deep into Germany. If World War II nostalgia was on the tube, war elsewhere in the American world was also largely on screen. On September 7, Times journalist Thom Shanker reported on a classified war game, a computer-generated simulation played out by "the nation`s senior commanders" which determined that the U.S. military could "decisively defeat one potential adversary, North Korea, while repelling an attack from Iraq" -- even if "terrorists [attacked] New York City with chemical weapons."

All in all, that week before September 11th was a modestly uneventful one. An afternoon spent revisiting the New York Times` version of it, via a library microfiche machine, making my way through that paper, day by day, section by section, plunged me into a nearly forgotten world in which the Democrats still controlled the Senate by a single vote and key Republican senators -- it was Texan Phil Gramm`s turn to announce his retirement that week -- were going down like bowling pins. (Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond had preceded Gramm "adding a new element of uncertainty to the 2002 race.") The President had been met by exceedingly gloomy economic news as the unemployment rate jumped that Saturday to 4.9% -- another 100,000 jobs lost -- a full point above election day, ten months earlier; and Wall Street responded with a sell-off that dropped the Dow Jones to 9,600. Republicans were "panicked," the administration adrift, and we wouldn`t see the likes of it again for four years.

Eerie Resonances

A number of post-9/11 subjects would be in the paper that week:

Torture was in the headlines -- leading off the culture page that Saturday ("Torture Charge Pits Professor vs. Professor") in a memory piece, datelined Santiago, on Augusto Pinochet`s brutal military rule in Chile. (The anniversary of his bloody coup -- September 11, 1973 -- was approaching.)

Then, too, an American citizen had been imprisoned without charges for 18 months -- but it was electrical engineer Fuming Fong and China was holding him.

Anthrax made the op-ed page -- but only because Russian scientists had developed a new type that could "overcome the standard Russian and American vaccines."

Terrorism in the U.S. was in the news -- an Oklahoma prosecutor was seeking the death penalty for Terry L. Nichols in the Oklahoma City Murrah Federal Building bombing.

"Violence in the Middle East" was on the front page -- but in that week, it had only one meaning, the endless Israeli/Palestinian conflict. (The first Israeli-Arab suicide bomber had just struck.)

The Taliban could be found on the front page on September 7 (and inside on subsequent days) -- but only because the mullahs were trying eight foreign aid workers for preaching Christianity. The bemused articles ("Another Strange Kabul Problem: Finding a Lawyer") were of the weird-foreigners variety.

Military recruitment was a topic of interest then as now -- the Army, after switching ad agencies and slogans ("Army of One" for "Be All You Can Be") had just conducted an "elaborate event" at the Pentagon, swearing into service its 75,800th recruit of the year, 19 year-old Rodrigo Vasquez III of Karnes City, Texas, in order to highlight meeting its recruitment goals a month ahead of schedule in the "most successful recruiting year since at least 1997."

Howard Dean made the inside pages of the paper that week -- the little-known Vermont governor (tagged with "fiscal conservativism/social liberalism") announced that he would not seek reelection to his fifth two-year term. There was "speculation" that he might even "run for the Democratic nomination for President."

Missing in Action

And then there were -- in terms of what we`ve been used to ever since -- the missing, or almost missing. Saddam Hussein didn`t make it into the paper that week. Kim Il Sung was nowhere in sight. Osama bin Laden barely slipped into print -- twice deep into articles -- as "the accused terrorist" being hosted by the strange Taliban government. The Axis of Evil, of course, did not exist, nor did the Global War on Terror, and the potential enemy of the week, pushed by Donald Rumsfeld (himself on the defensive over the military budget and arguments with his generals), was "the rising China threat." Iran was scarcely a blip on the news radar screen; Syria rated not a mention. Also missing were just about any of the names we now consider second nature to the post-9/11 news. No "Scooter" Libby. No Valerie Plame. No Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, or Douglas Feith. In fact, not a neocon made it into the pages of the paper over those seven days, and Judy Miller, the neocons` future dream reporter, who would soon enough storm the front page of the Times and take it for her own, had two pieces that week, a September 5th page-five article about a former Arms Control and Disarmament Agency general counsel challenging the administration`s "assertion that the global treaty banning biological weapons permits nations to test such arms for defensive purposes"; and, two days later, a tiny Israel piece tucked away at the bottom of page fifteen on "the alleged [on-line] support for terrorism" by Islamic groups and charities. The Vice President, seen silently at the President`s side at a "hastily arranged" and awkward "appearance" on the White House grounds after the unemployment figures broke, was otherwise nowhere to be seen, though the Times speculated on its editorial page ("The Bush Merry-Go-Round") that he was "losing influence." ("Mr. Cheney`s heart problems and his ardent embrace of the coal, oil and gas industries seem to have hobbled him.")

Though the sharks in the world`s oceans that week were feeding on something other than humans, there were still "sharks" around. Allison Mitchell began a Sunday lead Week in Review piece ("Face Off: Which Way to Win Control of Congress?") this way: "Talk about shark season, Congress came back into session last week and the Democrats were circling, sensing blood in the political waters." Little wonder. This was, after all, a non-majoritarian President who had, as Times writers didn`t hesitate to remind people, just squeaked through with a helping hand from the Supreme Court. After managing to get one massive tax cut by Congress, he began to drift like a lost lifeboat at sea, while his advisers fretted over polls "showing that many people still view Mr. Bush not as decisive but as tentative and perhaps overly scripted." He was, as a front-page piece by Richard L. Berke and David E. Sanger, put it on September 9th, "essentially out of economic ammunition."

The nature of politics in Washington that week could be caught in lines like: "Democrats go on the attack…" and "Democrats intensified their attacks against Mr. Bush…" Less than a year into a Bush presidency, Columnist Tom Friedman was already offering the faltering leader heartfelt advice on how not to lose the next election. Be "Clinton-minus," not "Reagan-squared" was the formula he offered. As the Mitchell piece made clear, this was a presidency under siege as well as a Republican Party -- so "everyone" in Washington agreed -- "in peril." In the sort of action not to be seen again for years, a Senate committee actually cut money from the defense budget that week, an act Shanker of the Times termed "another stark challenge" from committee Chairman Carl Levin of Michigan. The political failure of the President`s father was evidently on Washington minds as well, and so the paper in a number of pieces linked father and son. The father`s bid for reelection had, after all, gone down in flames in the nation`s previous recession or, as the headline of one story put it, "Like Father, Bush Is Caught in a Politically Perilous Budget Squeeze."

A few aspects of our post-9/11 political world were quite recognizable even then. That week, the Bush administration was easing up on Big Tobacco ("Justice Official Denies Pressure to Settle Tobacco Suit") and Big Computer ("U.S. Abandoning Its Effort to Break Apart Microsoft"), while preparing to bail from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. And as the administration pushed for legislation to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a "hobbled" Dick Cheney was already stonewalling about what had occurred when his Energy Task Force of Big Oil met earlier in 2001.

The two days before 9/11 were so quiet that you could practically hear a news pin drop. In the Times of September 11th -- in that moment before the Internet took full possession of us, a day`s lag between events and the news was a print norm -- the major story ("Key Leaders Talk of Possible Deals to Revive Economy, Bush is Under Pressure") indicated that "some Republicans" were anxiously bringing up the 1982 midterm elections when President Reagan "told the nation to ‘stay the course` in a recession" and the Party dropped numerous House seats in the midterm elections.

At the bottom of the front page was a plane-hijacking story, though it was thirty years old. ("Traced on Internet, Teacher Is Charged In `71 Jet Hijacking.") Across the rest of the page-bottom on that final morning were: "In a Nation of Early Risers, Morning TV Is a Hot Market" and "School Dress Codes vs. a Sea of Bare Flesh."

For intimations of what was to come, you would have had to move inside. On page 3, Douglas Frantz reported, "Suicide Bomb Kills 2 Police Officers in Istanbul," a bombing for which no one took credit and which was automatically attributed to "a leftist terrorist group" (something that would not happen again soon). A page farther on, you could find Barry Bearak and James Risen`s piece "Reports Disagree on Fate of Anti-Taliban Rebel Chief" about the assassination of Ahmed Shah Massoud, an anti-Taliban warlord, by two Arabs posing as journalists (which we now know was connected to the September 11 plot). In its penultimate paragraph was this: "If the would-be assassins were indeed Arabs… the fact would lend credibility to those who contend that foreigners, including Osama bin Laden, are playing an ever bigger decision-making role among the Taliban."

Peering further into the future -- on page 8, under World Briefs, was a throwaway paragraph on the low-level air war even then being conducted against Saddam Hussein`s Iraq ("Iraq said eight civilians were killed and three wounded when Western planes attacked farms 100 miles southeast of Baghdad. The Pentagon said American and British warplanes attacked three surface-to-air missile sites in the so-called no-fly zone…"); and another, "Iran: Denial on nuclear weapons," that began: "The government rejected charges by the United States that it was seeking nuclear weapons…"

And then, of course, there was nothing to do but oh-so-slowly turn the microfiche dial, knowing exactly what was around the corner of time and, after a pitch-black break between days, stumble into those mile-high headlines -- "U.S. Attacked, Hijacked Jets Destroy Twin Towers and Hit Pentagon in Day of Terror" -- and, despite yourself, experience with a kind of gasp the sky in your brain filling with falling bodies.

Here, by the way, is how that September 6th Times shark editorial ended. If it doesn`t give you a little chill for what we`ve lost, I don`t know what will. "Life is full of things that carry more risk than swimming in the ocean. Most of them are inevitably the byproducts of daily life, like falling televisions and car accidents, because daily life is where we spend most of our time. It may lack the visceral fears aroused by the unlikely threat of a shark attack, but it is also far more lethal."

Only five days after that was written, almost three thousand New Yorkers, some adopted from countries around the globe, would face a danger far more shocking -- and, until that moment, far less imaginable to most of us, than any shark attack. Things would indeed fall from the sky -- and from a history so many Americans knew nothing about -- and visceral fears would be aroused that would drive us, like the Pearl Harbor-ish headlines that greeted the audacious act not of a major power but of 19 fanatics in four planes prepared to die, into a future even more unimaginable.

Put another way, an afternoon spent in the lost world of September 5-10, 2001, reminds us that the savage attacks of the following day would, in fact, buy a faltering, confused, and weak administration as well as a dazed and disengaged President a new life, a "calling" as he would put it, and almost four years to do its damnedest. It would be 2004 before the President`s polling figures settled into the levels of that long-lost September 10th. It would be the summer of 2005 –- and the administration`s disastrous handling of hurricanes Sheehan, Katrina, and Iraq -- before the President would again be criticized for his "gone fishing" summer vacation; before the Democrats would again begin to attack; before newspapers would again be relatively uncowed; before the Republicans would again gather in those private (and then public) places and begin to complain; before Congress would again be up for grabs. Four long years to make it back to September 10th, 2001 in an American world now filled to the brim with horrors, a United States which is no longer a "country," but a "homeland" and a Homeland Security State.

[Note for Tomdispatch readers: This is the first of two pieces. The second, to appear sometime next week, will be on the world of Bushism after Bush and Cheneyism after Cheney, the American world our children will inherit.]

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute`s Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of American triumphalism in the Cold War. His novel, The Last Days of Publishing, has just come out in paperback.

Copyright 2005 Tom Engelhardt

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RUMSFELD: WAR IN IRAQ GOING WELL ON EARTH II
Reports Significant Process in Parallel Universe
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Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld today announced that despite the steady drumbeat of bad news about the war in Iraq, the war is actually going very well in the parallel universe known as Earth II.

Secretary Rumsfeld made his comments about Earth II in a press briefing at the Pentagon, where he blasted the press for “not reporting all of the good news coming out of Earth II.”

With that, the defense secretary unfurled a map of Earth II, showing a terrain more familiar to science fiction fans and video game enthusiasts than to the general public.

According to the defense secretary, on Earth II Iraqi troops are being trained at a rate much faster than anticipated and the insurgency is “on the verge of crumbling.”

Additionally, Iraqis have embraced democracy, causing freedom to flower in such neighboring countries as “Iran II, Egypt II and Saudi Arabia II.”

Partially because of these gains, Mr. Rumsfeld said, President Bush’s approval rating on Earth II currently stands at 89 percent.

Secretary Rumsfeld brushed aside a reporter’s question about escalating violence in Iraq, saying that his new policy was to answer “no questions whatsoever” that involve Earth I.

“The press would be better served if they would get off the planet they`re on and start living in a parallel universe, like all of us in this Administration do,” Mr. Rumsfeld said.

Elsewhere, one day after actor Mel Gibson announced that he would produce a four-hour miniseries about the Holocaust, singer Courtney Love said that she would produce a four-hour miniseries about sobriety.

http://www.borowitzreport.com/archive_rpt.asp?rec=1276&srch=

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Bush`s resolve means that he has more caskets than they have bullets.– Zings!

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Die Geschichte ist nicht neu. Es ist bekannt, dass oft als Ergebnis der Folter der Gepeinigte das erzählt, was der Peiniger zu hören wünscht, nur um in Ruhe gelassen zu werden.
Deshalb sind in vielen Fällen, die unter Folter erzwungenen Aussagen nichts wert.

December 9, 2005
Qaeda-Iraq Link U.S. Cited Is Tied to Coercion Claim
By DOUGLAS JEHL
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/09/politics/09intel.html?hp&e…

WASHINGTON, Dec. 8 - The Bush administration based a crucial prewar assertion about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda on detailed statements made by a prisoner while in Egyptian custody who later said he had fabricated them to escape harsh treatment, according to current and former government officials.

The officials said the captive, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, provided his most specific and elaborate accounts about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda only after he was secretly handed over to Egypt by the United States in January 2002, in a process known as rendition.

The new disclosure provides the first public evidence that bad intelligence on Iraq may have resulted partly from the administration`s heavy reliance on third countries to carry out interrogations of Qaeda members and others detained as part of American counterterrorism efforts. The Bush administration used Mr. Libi`s accounts as the basis for its prewar claims, now discredited, that ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda included training in explosives and chemical weapons.

The fact that Mr. Libi recanted after the American invasion of Iraq and that intelligence based on his remarks was withdrawn by the C.I.A. in March 2004 has been public for more than a year. But American officials had not previously acknowledged either that Mr. Libi made the false statements in foreign custody or that Mr. Libi contended that his statements had been coerced.

A government official said that some intelligence provided by Mr. Libi about Al Qaeda had been accurate, and that Mr. Libi`s claims that he had been treated harshly in Egyptian custody had not been corroborated.

A classified Defense Intelligence Agency report issued in February 2002 that expressed skepticism about Mr. Libi`s credibility on questions related to Iraq and Al Qaeda was based in part on the knowledge that he was no longer in American custody when he made the detailed statements, and that he might have been subjected to harsh treatment, the officials said. They said the C.I.A.`s decision to withdraw the intelligence based on Mr. Libi`s claims had been made because of his later assertions, beginning in January 2004, that he had fabricated them to obtain better treatment from his captors.

At the time of his capture in Pakistan in late 2001, Mr. Libi, a Libyan, was the highest-ranking Qaeda leader in American custody. A Nov. 6 report in The New York Times, citing the Defense Intelligence Agency document, said he had made the assertions about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda involving illicit weapons while in American custody.

Mr. Libi was indeed initially held by the United States military in Afghanistan, and was debriefed there by C.I.A. officers, according to the new account provided by the current and former government officials. But despite his high rank, he was transferred to Egypt for further interrogation in January 2002 because the White House had not yet provided detailed authorization for the C.I.A. to hold him.

While he made some statements about Iraq and Al Qaeda when in American custody, the officials said, it was not until after he was handed over to Egypt that he made the most specific assertions, which were later used by the Bush administration as the foundation for its claims that Iraq trained Qaeda members to use biological and chemical weapons.

Beginning in March 2002, with the capture of a Qaeda operative named Abu Zubaydah, the C.I.A. adopted a practice of maintaining custody itself of the highest-ranking captives, a practice that became the main focus of recent controversy related to detention of suspected terrorists.

The agency currently holds between two and three dozen high-ranking terrorist suspects in secret prisons around the world. Reports that the prisons have included locations in Eastern Europe have stirred intense discomfort on the continent and have dogged Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during her visit there this week.

Mr. Libi was returned to American custody in February 2003, when he was transferred to the American detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, according to the current and former government officials. He withdrew his claims about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda in January 2004, and his current location is not known. A C.I.A. spokesman refused Thursday to comment on Mr. Libi`s case. The current and former government officials who agreed to discuss the case were granted anonymity because most details surrounding Mr. Libi`s case remain classified.

During his time in Egyptian custody, Mr. Libi was among a group of what American officials have described as about 150 prisoners sent by the United States from one foreign country to another since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks for the purposes of interrogation. American officials including Ms. Rice have defended the practice, saying it draws on language and cultural expertise of American allies, particularly in the Middle East, and provides an important tool for interrogation. They have said that the United States carries out the renditions only after obtaining explicit assurances from the receiving countries that the prisoners will not be tortured.

Nabil Fahmy, the Egyptian ambassador to the United States, said in a telephone interview on Thursday that he had no specific knowledge of Mr. Libi`s case. Mr. Fahmy acknowledged that some prisoners had been sent to Egypt by mutual agreement between the United States and Egypt. "We do interrogations based on our understanding of the culture," Mr. Fahmy said. "We`re not in the business of torturing anyone."

In statements before the war, and without mentioning him by name, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Colin L. Powell, then the secretary of state, and other officials repeatedly cited the information provided by Mr. Libi as "credible" evidence that Iraq was training Qaeda members in the use of explosives and illicit weapons. Among the first and most prominent assertions was one by Mr. Bush, who said in a major speech in Cincinnati in October 2002 that "we`ve learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and gases."

The question of why the administration relied so heavily on the statements by Mr. Libi has long been a subject of contention. Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, made public last month unclassified passages from the February 2002 document, which said it was probable that Mr. Libi "was intentionally misleading the debriefers."

The document showed that the Defense Intelligence Agency had identified Mr. Libi as a probable fabricator months before the Bush administration began to use his statements as the foundation for its claims about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda involving illicit weapons.

Mr. Levin has since asked the agency to declassify four other intelligence reports, three of them from February 2002, to see if they also expressed skepticism about Mr. Libi`s credibility. On Thursday, a spokesman for Mr. Levin said he could not comment on the circumstances surrounding Mr. Libi`s detention because the matter was classified.

* Copyright 2005The New York Times Company

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U.S. Military Probing Video Of Road Violence
British Contractors Appear To Shoot at Iraqi Civilians
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12…

By Jonathan Finer and Ellen Knickmeyer
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, December 9, 2005; A01

BAGHDAD, Dec. 8 -- A silver Mercedes swings into the passing lane when a machine gun opens fire, sending the car smashing into a taxi, whose terrified occupants scatter. Moments later on the video, posted on the Internet and apparently recorded in Iraq, a white sedan is riddled with bullets as it accelerates on an open highway.

Framed as if on a movie screen by the outline of a sport-utility vehicle`s rear window, those scenes and others show what appear to be private security contractors firing on Iraqi civilians. The video footage has prompted an investigation by the U.S. military, a spokesman said Thursday, and by the company linked to the incidents. It even has a soundtrack: Elvis Presley`s upbeat "Mystery Train."

Details about the origin of the video clip and the location shown in it are unknown. It was originally posted last month on a Web site maintained by former employees of Aegis Specialist Risk Management, a London-based company that has a $293 million U.S. government contract to provide security services in Iraq. The video has since been removed from the site.

"Aegis has established a formal board of enquiry, in cooperation with the U.S. military authorities, to investigate whether the footage has any connection with the company and, should this prove to be the case, under what circumstances any incident took place," the company said in a statement about the incident.

A public relations representative for Aegis said the company`s findings could come within the next week.

"An investigation has been initiated, but we do not have any details at this time," Army Capt. Bill Roberts, a U.S. military spokesman, said in an e-mail message Thursday.

There are more than 25,000 private security contractors working in Iraq, according to industry estimates. In an effort to limit the number of U.S. soldiers in Iraq, the military employs private contractors to handle jobs that would otherwise be performed by troops. But the conduct of security contractors has occasionally come under scrutiny, and Iraqi civilians and military commanders have charged that they shoot indiscriminately and flout local laws with impunity.

The companies, whose employees have been frequent targets of insurgent attacks and perform some of the country`s most dangerous jobs, such as guarding highway convoys, maintain that they use force only when necessary for protection. The rules of engagement "allow for a structured escalation of force to include opening fire on civilian vehicles under certain circumstances," Aegis said in its statement about the video.

Aegis typically performs 100 "escort assignments" per week on roads in Iraq, according to its Web site.

But many Iraqis complain that the force used by contractors, who are immune from prosecution under an order signed into Iraqi law last year, is often excessive.

"At least the police and army are recognized in the street, and they have the right to shoot because they are security forces," said Qasim Muhammed, 44, a Baghdad taxi driver. "But who gave those civilians the right to shoot?"

The newly released video, which was broadcast widely on Arabic-language satellite television stations in recent days, shows no faces and contains few audible bits of dialogue. Because of that, identifying those involved will be difficult, a U.S. military official said on condition of anonymity.

The video contains four segments that appear to have been shot from the type of vehicle often used by security companies, and which often have cameras mounted in the back. In some of the segments, it cannot be determined where the bullets are striking. It is also not possible to determine whether anyone was injured in the shootings.

In the first segment, a man`s voice can be heard, along with the music, saying, "These two aren`t stopping," as a white sedan emerges from the traffic and travels toward the camera. Machine-gun fire erupts, and the white car slows down. Then a van swings into the passing lane and begins to accelerate, and the machine gun sounds again, continuing to fire as the van fades into the distance.

The scene quickly shifts to the silver Mercedes on a rural highway. In the third part of the video, someone in the vehicle with the camera throws what appears to be a smoke canister toward oncoming traffic, in an apparent attempt to encourage those vehicles to slow down. When they continue to advance, the vehicle with the camera slows to a crawl and the machine gun fires. An approaching red sedan swerves off the right side of the road.

The final segment shows the white sedan being riddled with bullets, as a convoy of U.S. military Humvees passes about 60 feet away on a parallel highway.

Founded three years ago, Aegis is run by Tim Spicer, a former lieutenant colonel in the Scots Guards, a British army unit. A previous firm run by Spicer, Sandline International, was disbanded in the late 1990s after it was accused of breaking an embargo on the sale of arms to Sierra Leone.

The site where the video was first posted ( http://www.aegisiraq.co.uk ) does not belong to Aegis, according to a statement on its main page. "It belongs to the men and women on the ground who are the heart and soul of the company," the statement says.

Another message on the site is said to have been posted by Spicer. "Remember that your job and those of your colleagues indirectly relies on the maintenance of our contract," it reads. "Refrain from posting anything which is detrimental to the company since this could result in the loss or curtailment of our contract with resultant loss for everybody."

Although the video has been removed, its contents were debated on the message board attached to the Web site.

"although i haven`t viewed this footage ive read a lot of posts condenming it. All i can say is if you havent been there you dont have a say," an anonymous poster wrote. "Its the lonliest job on the planet as im sure guys will agree. You and you alone have to make the decision wether to open fire or not."

Other videos apparently shot by contractors have been made public in recent months. One circulating in Baghdad shows contractors returning fire after being ambushed on the road to Baghdad`s international airport. At least one contractor in the video appears to have been killed.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

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December 9, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
The Promiser in Chief
By PAUL KRUGMAN
http://select.nytimes.com/2005/12/09/opinion/09krugman.html

Sometimes reconstruction delayed is reconstruction denied.

A few months after the invasion of Iraq, President Bush promised to rebuild Iraq`s infrastructure and economy. He - or, at any rate, his speechwriters - understood that reconstruction was important not just for its own sake, but as a way to deprive the growing insurgency of support. In October 2003 he declared that "the more electricity is available, the more jobs are available, the more kids that are going to school, the more desperate these killers become."

But for a long time, Iraqi reconstruction was more of a public relations exercise than a real effort. Remember when visiting congressmen were taken on tours of newly painted schools?

Both supporters and opponents of the war now argue that by moving so slowly on reconstruction, the Bush administration missed a crucial window of opportunity. By the time reconstruction spending began in earnest, it was in a losing race with a deteriorating security situation.

As a result, the electricity and jobs that were supposed to make the killers desperate never arrived. Iraq produced less electricity last month than in October 2003. The Iraqi government estimates the unemployment rate at 27 percent, but the real number is probably much higher.

Now we`re losing another window of opportunity for reconstruction. But this time it`s at home.

Two weeks after Hurricane Katrina, Mr. Bush made an elaborately staged appearance in New Orleans, where he promised big things. "The work that has begun in the Gulf Coast region," he said, "will be one of the largest reconstruction efforts the world has ever seen."

Such an effort would be the right thing to do. We can argue about details - about which levees should be restored and how strong to make them - but it`s clearly in the nation`s interests as well as local residents` to rebuild much of the regional economy.

But Mr. Bush seems to have forgotten about his promise. More than three months after Katrina, a major reconstruction effort isn`t even in the planning stage, let alone under way. "To an extent almost inconceivable a few months ago," a Los Angeles Times report about New Orleans says, "the only real actors in the rebuilding drama at the moment are the city`s homeowners and business owners."

It`s worth noting in passing that Mr. Bush hasn`t even appointed a new team to fix the dysfunctional Federal Emergency Management Agency. Most of the agency`s key positions, including the director`s job - left vacant by the departure of Michael "heck of a job" Brown - are filled on an acting basis, by temporary place holders. The chief of staff is still a political loyalist with no prior disaster management experience.

One FEMA program has, however, been revamped. The Recovery Channel is a satellite and Internet network that used to provide practical information to disaster victims. Now it features public relations segments telling viewers what a great job FEMA and the Bush administration are doing.

But back to reconstruction. By letting the gulf region languish, Mr. Bush is allowing a window of opportunity to close, just as he did in Iraq.

To see why, you need to understand a point emphasized by that report in The Los Angeles Times: the private sector can`t rebuild the region on its own. The reason goes beyond the need for flood protection and basic infrastructure, which only the government can provide. Rebuilding is also blocked by a vicious circle of uncertainty. Business owners are reluctant to return to the gulf region because they aren`t sure whether their customers and workers will return, too. And families are reluctant to return because they aren`t sure whether businesses will be there to provide jobs and basic amenities.

A credible reconstruction plan could turn that vicious circle into a virtuous circle, in which everyone expects a regional recovery and, by acting on that expectation, helps that recovery come to pass. But as the months go by with no plan and no money, businesses and families will make permanent decisions to relocate elsewhere, and the loss of faith in a gulf region recovery will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Funny, isn`t it? Back during the 2000 campaign Mr. Bush promised to avoid "nation building." And so he has. He failed to rebuild Iraq because he waited too long to get started. And now he`s doing the same thing here at home.

Thomas L. Friedman is on vacation.

* Copyright 2005The New York Times Company

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Juan Cole is Professor of History at the University of Michigan

http://www.juancole.com/


Friday, December 09, 2005

43 Killed, 70 Wounded by Bus Bomber
And Rumsfeld`s False Analogy

A suicide bomber jumped on a bus in Baghdad just as it was about to head south for Nasiriyah on Thursday, eluding security. The bus was lifted by gigantic fingers of flame, reaching out to kill and wound bystanders, as well. Some 43 were killed and at least 70 wounded.

[urlThe news that Rumsfeld denied rumors on Thursday,]http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N08289639.htm[/url] that he was planning to step down tipped my memory to having heard him on the radio last week. (Too bad he won`t go. He has been a perfect disaster.)

Rumsfeld complained at SAIS a week ago that there are 14,500 murders a year in the United States and 42,000 driving fatalities, and the US press isn`t covering that, whereas, he implies, 43 people getting blown up on a bus in Baghdad is front page news.

Rumsfeld is committing a logical fallacy here. He is comparing apples and oranges. Does Rumsfeld think that there is not also a murder rate in Iraq beyond the guerrilla violence? The likelihood from the information that has leaked out from the Baghdad morgue is that Iraq is among the more murderous societies in the world at the moment. (As you would expect, since where there is no law and order, criminal elements act with impunity. Worse, there are regular political assassinations by religiious militias.) These Iraq murders are not usually reported in the press, any more than the murders in the US are. Likewise, one can only imagine the traffic death rate in Iraq. The country has imported more than 100,000 used cars since the fall of the old regime, and there aren`t exactly a lot of vigilant traffic police.

So the fact is, Mr. Rumsfeld, that the per capita rates for murder and traffic deaths in Iraq may well be similar to those in the United States. The deaths in the guerrilla war are extra.

The essential fallacy here is comparing political violence, which aims at altering the government, to individual acts of criminality. Human beings are naturally focused on attempts to take over the leadership of a society. The bus bombing in Baghdad was carried out by Sunni Arab guerrillas whom Rumsfeld marginalized, and it was aimed at Shiites on their way to Nasiriyah in the Shiite south. It was a further attempt to provoke Shiite reprisals and ultimately a Sunni-Shiite civil war, in hopes that the resulting instability would allow the Sunni Arabs to make a coup and come back to power. A criminal slitting someone`s throat in a back alley of Baghdad won`t cause a civil war. Actions like the bus bombing are potentially consequential.

Likewise the [urlUS military attacks launched this week around Ramadi are not random acts of violence]http://www.estripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=33574[/url] (and it is shocking that the Secretary of Defense should compare such military operations to a civilian felony!) The US military said, by the way, that the operation had resulted in no Iraqi or US deaths. [Though a guerrilla roadside bomb killed a GI in the Ramadi area on Thursday.) The military sweeps are attempts to weaken the guerrilla movement that is blowing up US troops. It is about shaping the government and polity of Iraq. Human beings are hardwired to be far more interested in attempts to change leadership in society than in individual random crime. Who rules Iraq affects everyone in the world. That the US has a remarkably high annual murder rate is of moment mainly to the victims and to the neighborhoods affected. By the way, the US murder rate is per capita 4 times that of Britain, and the likely explanation for the difference is the easy availability of non-sporting firearms, including especially pistols. Since Rumsfeld wants more coverage of the 14,500 murders a year in the US, would he welcome practical steps to make it more like 3,500? The British are not intrinsically nobler than the Americans-- our highly violent society is a result of specific structural features of our society.

In logic, Rumsfeld`s mistake is known as the "false analogy." He incorrectly likens military violence to individual crime, and then expresses astonishment that the two things are not covered the same way by the press. Rumsfeld has a long track record of indulging in this particular form of sloppy thinking. He has also in the past made [urla false analogy between guerrilla violence in Iraq and race riots]http://www.juancole.com/2003/09/us-secretary-of-defense-donald.html[/url] in small towns in the United States. In the terms of American racial discourse, that particular meme has overtones of bigotry, since he appears to be attempting to code the Sunni Arab guerrillas as "Black." (Or maybe it is the other way around.) It is all propaganda. It is shameful in a democratic society for the Secretary of Defense to engage in such warped discourse. It is more shameful that almost no one calls him on it.

posted by Juan @ [url12/09/2005 06:29:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/12/43-killed-70-wounded-by-bus-bomber-and.html[/url] 0 comments

Talabani to Meet with Resistance Leaders; Shiite Coalition in Friction

Al-Hayat: President Jalal Talabani [Ar. ULR] is preparing a meeting in Sulaimaniyah to be attended by the Americans and by leaders of the underground Sunni Arab guerrilla movement. US Ambassador Khalilzad has announced that he would be willing to talk to any groups save the Saddamists (direct cronies and strong supporters of the overthrown dictator) and the jihadi terrorists (e.g. the group of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi). Talabani, a Sunni Kurd, has been trying to reach out to elements of the Sunni Arab resistance for the past couple of months, using clan leaders and clerics as intermediaries. An initial agreement of principles is said to have been reached, but of course the guerrilla leaders will want certain guarantees. Earlier contacts between the US Department of Defense and the guerrilla leaders faltered because the guerrillas had demanded an upfront commitment of the US to a withdrawal timetable, which the Bush administration rejected. And then the US began large-scale sweeps in Anbar province against guerrilla positions.

Al-Hayat`s sources say that several changes have occurred in the arena of guerrilla action in 2005, which have benefited the Iraqi nationalist groups that reject attacks on civilians and the practice of "excommunicating" (takfir) other Muslims. The method of "national resistance" has instead gained advantages over the bloody tactics of the jihadis, such as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Ansar al-Islam. More than 50 guerrilla bands, including "Phalanges of the 1920 Revolution," "the Army of Islam," "The Army of Holy Warriors", "Holy Warriors of the Armed Forces," are actually led, despite their Islamist names, by officers of the former Iraqi military. They have decided to unite their ranks and will soon announce a Front for the Iraqi Resistance, which will comprise all these guerrilla groups. They will adopt joint military and political stances. This front will be led by a "Consultative Council" that includes former officers, clerics and clan elders. It will be charged with working to prevent attacks on civilians and with promoting dialogue for the purpose of "expelling the occupiers."

Al-Sharq al-Awsat says that UN envoy Ashraf Qazi visited Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani on Thursday, in the run-up to next Thursday`s elections. He said that Sistani had blessed UN work in Iraq and urged that it help the country rebuild and move toward social harmony.

The same source says that there is substantial election-related violence in Iraq, with attacks on political offices and assassinations. (These don`t seem to be being reported, pace Mr. Rumsfeld, above). A member of the list of Mithal Alusi was killed on Thursday, and the office of secular ex-Baathist Iyad Allawi was again attacked in the Shiite holy city of Karbala.

[urlThe trial of Saddam Hussein]http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-voxpop8dec08,1,5926247.story?coll=la-headlines-world[/url] is highly polarizing for the Iraqi public, according to Borzou Daragahi of the LA Times. Making Shiites and Sunnis live through his massacre of Shiites at this particular juncture strikes me as a bad idea. And, the trial has been conducted in a completely inept way. The Shiite witnesses have sometimes repeated hearsay, or they were children in 1982, as Riverbend notes.

Now the Baghdad Press Club was founded by the US military. This finding is the result of continued investigation of Pentagon attempts to shape Iraqi press reporting. The Club journalists were actually given monetary rewards.

Ed Wong of the NYT reports on the tensions in the United Iraqi Alliance, the coaltion of Shiite religious parties, which has now included the Sadr movement of Muqtada al-Sadr. Sadrists are keen rivals of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and the militias of the two parties have fought. Wong raises the question of whether the Sadr/SCIRI rivalries are enough to break up the coalition, giving an opening to the secularists and Kurds to outmaneuver them.

Similar speculation about the UIA`s ability to stay together was voiced in January, 2005, and those concerns were overblown. It should be remembered that the Iraqi government has on the order of $17 billion a year in petroleum revenue. Being the dominant party means that your deputies and cabinet members get to control the revenue, which turns into political patronage and power. I predicted last January that the UIA would stay together, because the alternative was to allow someone else to monopolize that money. But Wong is right that Muqtada and the Sadrists are a wild card, one could imagine him pursuing a scorched earth policy even against his own former allies.

posted by Juan @ [url12/09/2005 06:20:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/12/talabani-to-meet-with-resistance.html[/url] 0 comments

Cole and Franken

[urlAl Franken is in Ann Arbor]http://shows.airamericaradio.com/alfrankenshow/[/url] and I`ll be on with him today, in the studio at 1-2 pm EST. It should also be available in streaming video.

posted by Juan @ [url12/08/2005 11:52:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/12/cole-and-franken-al-franken-is-in-ann.html[/url] 8 comments

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Allen die so furchtlos die Folterpraxis verteidigen, wünsche ich nur mal einen 14-tägigen Schnupperkurs in den angesprochen Ländern. Was sie dort dann alles zugeben werden, würde für ein lebenslanges Wegsperren reichen.

Grading on the terrorist curve
Rosa Brooks
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-brook…

December 9, 2005

ON MONDAY, I`ll be giving a final exam to 80 law students, and judging from their e-mail messages, they`re worried about grades. But this term, I`m even more worried about their grades than they are.

That`s because the Washington Post this week revealed yet another casualty of the Bush administration`s "rule of law/what rule of law?" approach to fighting terrorism: Among those detained and secretly "rendered" to a third country for interrogation was "an innocent college professor who had given [an] Al Qaeda member a bad grade."

The background here is that the CIA seems to be having a little problem with what the agency terms "erroneous renditions." That`s when you pick up an innocent guy and — oops! — send him off to a foreign country for some of that "enhanced interrogation" stuff.

In practice, terrorism suspects are often rendered to countries such as Egypt and Syria, which are known not merely for enhanced interrogation (like "waterboarding") but for what we might call "super-sized interrogation": electric shocks, pulling out fingernails, all that old-fashioned stuff. And if you carefully parse Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice`s recent legalistic assertion that "the United States has not transported anyone, and will not transport anyone, to a country when we believe he will be tortured," it`s apparently still cool to render suspects to countries where they will be tortured, as long as "we" don`t "believe" the acts legally constitute torture, or as long as U.S. authorities are not absolutely, 100% convinced that a detainee "will" be tortured.

But back to the case of the innocent college professor. It appears that U.S. intelligence agents at some point picked up a guy they identified as an Al Qaeda member. He was duly interrogated (you guess how). And when interrogators demanded that he cough up the names of other terrorists still at large, the suspect got revenge by rattling off a list of everyone who`d ever annoyed him, including one of his old college professors, who had really burned him up by giving him a bad course grade.

This is the kind of news calculated to send chills up a professor`s spine. The law school where I teach employs a grading curve, so giving low grades to some students is inevitable. But if one of the students who gets a bad grade from me ends up as a terrorism suspect in the hands of the, ahem, authorities, how long will it take before he fingers me? Because I`m not keen on experiencing rendition and enhanced interrogation firsthand, I`m contemplating the only thing possible to protect myself: asking any terrorists in my class to kindly identify themselves to me immediately, so I can be sure to give them a good grade.

But there are a couple of wrinkles in this plan. Because the government seems unable to avoid making errors, practically anyone might someday end up being suspected of terrorism, which makes it hard to know who ought to be given a good grade. Anyway, my law school insists on anonymous grading: Exams are identified only by number, not by student name. I can`t think of any way around that one.

Maybe I don`t need to, though, because today`s terrorists — unlike the Al Qaeda guy who fingered his former professor — are a clever lot, likely to get top grades through sheer brainpower. At least, this is what I have learned from watching "Sleeper Cell," the Showtime miniseries that premiered this week. In "Sleeper Cell," the Los Angeles-based terrorists are well-groomed young people whose plans are as sophisticated as they are lethal. The most recent episodes have involved terrorist biochemistry experts peering at anthrax samples through microscopes while the FBI struggles to keep up.

According to the 9/11 commission, this is not just TV fantasy. Commission Chairman Thomas Kean concludes that the terrorists are doing pretty well: Despite four years of the war on terror, "the threat has not abated." Meanwhile, the U.S. government is flunking the war on terror. In this week`s 9/11 commission "report card," the U.S. got a D for "Intelligence Oversight Reform," a D for "Government-Wide Information Sharing," a D for efforts to "Prevent Terrorists from Acquiring WMD" and an F on "Coalition Detention Standards."

Yet for all their acuity, Kean and his colleagues on the 9/11 commission apparently still don`t grasp the full implications of living under a government that tolerates secret detentions, renditions and torture, and that assumes all terror suspects are guilty until proved innocent.

When you live under that kind of government, you need be mighty careful about handing out bad grades.



Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times

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Jesus Bans `Christian` Group
Shocking announcement sends militant Focus on the Family organization into crazed tailspin
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/200…

- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, December 9, 2005

In an astonishing but not completely unexpected announcement, Jesus H. Christ, vice president and CFO of All That Is Inc., appeared today on a large tortilla at a roadside taco stand in Zacatecas, Mexico, to announce that, effective immediately, the pseudo-Christian group Focus on the Family, led by Dr. James Dobson and best known for its blazing hatred of gays and its fear of glimpsing the human female nipple during nationally televised sporting events, is effectively banned from His Divine Beneficence.

"What happened was, the heavens and all spirits of goodness, along with Buddha and Shiva and Allah and Kali and a few others, well, we were having some margaritas and playing poker and tossing around recent headlines, when Allah chimed in that this Focus on the Family group -- a real scab on my big toe for years, I gotta tell you -- well, they just decided to yank all their accounts from a bank over the bank`s support of gay rights," said Jesus, dressed in black Diesel jeans, Hugo Boss motorcycle boots and a snug tank top featuring a large OM symbol across the chest.

"J-Dog," as he is known to his friends, was referring, of course, to the recent story about how the militant, Colorado-based "Christian" group has just pulled all its accounts from Wells Fargo Bank after learning that the bank had donated a small sum of money to gay rights causes, including GLAAD, a sum totaling about $50,000, or about one-tenth of what Wells Fargo gave to the GOP last year.

The Christ, apparently, had had enough.

"This is what I realized: Rampant homophobia, ignorance of sex, derision of women`s rights, a decided love of tepid dogmatic sameness at the expense of the luminosity and uniqueness of the individual human soul -- it was all just too much," Jesus said, this time appearing as a curiously shaped oil stain on a freeway underpass in Saragossa, Spain. "Then the bank thing happened and it was the straw that broke the Mary`s back."

It was, apparently, the right response. "Totally in the moment," said Buddha, nodding vigorously in agreement. "It`s about time," Vishnu sighed, painting his nails beet red and lighting some Nag Champa incense. "It`s decisive and it sends a message," agreed Kali, counting her poker winnings. "You guys have any hummus?" Allah muttered, rifling through Christ`s well-stocked fridge and not really paying attention.

"A slight ban is definitely in order," Christ continued, calmly, now appearing in a pile of instant mashed potatoes in a truck stop in Bowling Green, Ky., where his visage appeared to be weeping, but which Jesus said was merely caused by all the onions he`d been chopping to make his famed "Holy Christ!" hot salsa for the Seraphim Christmas office party.

"Nothing serious, just maybe three, four thousand years wherein these Focus on the Family nutballs and especially this hateful Dobson fellow shall receive only sporadic blessings and deferred prayer responses and will have to go all the way to the back of the line, behind Dick Cheney and Tim LaHaye and Mel Gibson, to await salvation."

"Hell, I still love them all. Even Dobson," the One added, flashing his trademark dazzling, compassionate grin. "I just don`t like them very much."

When the news reached Focus on the Family`s Colorado Springs headquarters, stunned members were seen running into walls and bashing their foreheads with large Bibles and ramming their Toyota Corollas and Ford pickups into each other and muttering incoherent lines from "The Passion of the Christ" and popping Prozac like M&M`s.

"Where are the Ken dolls?! Someone get to the dungeon and make sure my Ken doll collection is safe!" screamed James Dobson himself, emerging from a secret room in a fuchsia leotard and launching into a bizarre rant no one could quite understand. Reporters seeking comment could only look at each other in stunned silence, wishing they could be in a bar somewhere.

In related news, the Tupelo, Miss.-based American Family Association, another right-wing, anti-gay Christian group that allegedly pressured Ford Motor Co. into yanking much of its advertising from upscale gay publications, has, apparently, accidentally banned itself.

"Someone who is no longer in the organization had the bright idea that we should ban any American company or group that supported the outright ignorance of Christ`s true message," sighed AMA chairman Donald Wildmon, chugging from a large bottle of Red Bull and stroking the hairless cat in his lap and making a strange hissing noise with his tongue. "Hell, it sounded great at the `Harry Potter` book-burning rally. But then again, most everyone was buzzed on spiked Kool-Aid and Kumbaya pie.

"Turns out, when all votes were counted, the group that most needed banning, besides the Catholic church and Dobson`s clan, was us. Apparently, we have no real clue as to what Christ truly stood for. Who knew?"

Effective immediately, the AFA`s ban on itself means its members will no longer be able support or endorse anything it says or does, until further notice from itself.

"It makes shopping, like, totally impossible," said Beth-Ann Binderbottom, mother of nine and AFA member for the past 17 years and devout watcher of "Touched by an Angel" and committed scourer of all live radio and TV programming for any trace of female nipples, curse words or Jessica Simpson`s butt.

"Due to the ban on myself, I now I have to buy the exact opposite of everything I would normally buy," she lamented. "What the gosh-golly heck am I supposed to do with all these green vegetables, Tom Robbins books, bottles of wine and hot porn DVDs?"

Christ, who will be in negotiations with the lords of the underworld next week about what can be done about Jerry Falwell, summarized it this way: "Hell, at the root of it, we`re all pagans," JC said with a wink, from a lovely pattern of bark on an old-growth sycamore in a heavily wooded forest somewhere in Bavaria.


Mark Morford`s Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SF Gate and in the Datebook section of the SF Chronicle.

URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/200…
©2005 SF Gate

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Latest Update: #33699 06.12.05 15:17:42
Latest Coalition Fatality: Dec 08, 2005
Military Fatalities US, UK, Other: : Total: 2336 , US: 2135 , Dez.05: 22

Iraker 12/08/05: Civilian: 89 Police/Mil: 74 Total: 163
http://www.icasualties.org/oif/IraqiDeaths.aspx

Regelmäßige Updates von Meldungen aus dem Irak:
http://icasualties.org/oif/

Da bei ´Today im Irak´ die Postings immer länger werden, hier den Link für alle Interessierte: http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

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Die Neocon Spinner im Weißen Haus (Wolfowitz erklärte vor dem Irakkrieg die Shiiten zu einer säkularen islamischen Religionsgemeinschaft) und anderswo müssen erkennen, dass Einführung von Demokratie in der arabischen Welt gleichbedeutend ist mit der Übernahme der Regierungen durch islamische Fundamentalisten.

Damit würden die Demokratien gleich wieder abgeschafft und Mullahdiktaturen errichtet.

Und diese Diktaturen würden von einer noch gewaltbereiteren islamischen Glaubensrichtungen getragen (Wahhabismus u.ä.) als die shiitische Glaubensrichtung im Iran, im südlichen Irak und in anderen Teilen des persischen Golfes.

Die Zeiten, dass eine Art säkularer Islam in den Ländern eine Chance haben könnte, sind in den Ländern schon vor Jahrzehnten von den westlichen Ländern vertan worden durch das Einsetzen von ihnen willfährigen Diktatoren und die Unterstützung dieser Despoten, die in den letzten Jahrzehnten besonders in Ölförderländern die Reichtümer für ein Leben in Saus und Braus verbraucht haben und eine Entwicklung der Länder in der Breite verhindert haben.

Ferner hat natürlich die einseitige Parteinahme des Westens, besonders der USA, für Israel die Lage hochexplosiv gemacht.

Wenn man in Ländern wie Saudi Arabien und Ägypten diese Fundamentalisten an die Macht kommen ließe, könnte man auch genausogut Osama Bin Laden die Macht übergeben.

Eine Änderung der Verhältnisse durch den Westen mit weitere Gewalt würde Gegengewalt erzeugen.

Ob die westlichen Staaten in der Lage wären, Kriege auf einem solch grausamen Niveau, wie bei dem Iran-Irak-Krieg, durchzustehen, halte ich nicht für wahrscheinlich.

Im Iran/Irak-Krieg haben die persischen Mullahs ohne Wimperzucken 100tausende in die Minenfelder getrieben.

Und die Bereitschaft der sunnitischen-wahhabitischen Kämpfer, angetrieben von Männern wie Bin Laden, für ihre Ziele zu sterben, dürfte noch größer sein, als die der Shiiten, angetrieben von ihren Ajatollahs in den beiden Hochburgen im Iran und im Irak.

Diese Art von Krieg ist auch nicht von den USA durchzustehen, die es lieben ihre Kriege aus der Luft ohne großes Blutvergiessen von ihrer Seite durchzustehen.

Nur um den gesamten arabischen Raum zu beherrschen, müßten sie, und alle, die bereit sind mit ihnen zu kämpfen, hinein in die Boden-und Stellungskriege und das wäre bei dem Zustand der westlichen Gesellschaften nicht durchzuhalten.

Anderseits bliebe nur eine vollständige Zerstörung der Region durch Atomraketen.

Auswirkungen weiter hinein in den asiatischen Raum wären dann auch noch wahrscheinlich.

Dieses Szenario, das durch den Irakkrieg in Gang gesetzt wurde, könnte mit einem absoluten Chaos enden. Und ob dabei irgendjemand gewinnen würde, bleibt zweifelhaft.



Band of Brothers
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldbriefing/story/0,15205,166343…

Simon Tisdall
Friday December 9, 2005

Guardian
The Muslim Brotherhood`s success in Egypt`s parliamentary elections, which came to a turbulent end yesterday, will reverberate around the Arab world. The region traditionally looks to Cairo for a lead. And potentially incompatible demands for strengthened civil societies and the integration of Islamists into mainstream politics are this year`s hot topic.

The Brotherhood`s advance also poses a dilemma for Hosni Mubarak, Egypt`s president, and for the US and other countries urging greater Middle East democracy but fearful of Islamist activism. Officially the Brotherhood is banned in Egypt, as in several Arab countries. The Bush administration refuses to talk to the movement. It is equally wary of Islamists such as Hamas, expected to make gains in next month`s Palestinian elections.

Poll results gave the ruling National Democratic party and its allies roughly 333 seats in the 454-seat assembly. Secular parties and independents took a handful of seats. But the Brotherhood was the big gainer. Its 19% share of the vote, translating into a record 88 seats, confirmed it as Egypt`s main opposition group - despite its decision to field only about 150 candidates for fear of provoking a crackdown.

The elections saw a repeat of the fraud claims that marred Mr Mubarak`s re-election triumph in September. Violence and mass arrests of Brotherhood supporters accompanied the poll, and on Wednesday at least eight people were killed amid widespread complaints that police had stopped some opposition voters casting their ballots.

"Bullets govern the elections," the opposition Al-Wafd newspaper declared. Meanwhile, the pro-government Al-Gomhuria warned that "The Mullahs are Coming!", playing on fears that although the Brotherhood`s campaign emphasised practical issues, its slogan "Islam is the Solution" pointed to a hidden agenda of social intolerance, Sharia law, repression of women and hostility to religious minorities.

The Brotherhood says that is a distortion. Spokesman Mohammad Moursi said earlier this year: "All around the world, people want to be democratic, to pick their own leaders. Creating a democratic, civil party is our aim. We want political reform. But the constitution says the main source of all laws is the Qur`an."

Meanwhile, Egypt`s reform rollercoaster hit another trough this week with the renewed detention of former presidential candidate Ayman Nour. "Nour`s trial, like the violence against voters, is a terrible advertisement for President Mubarak`s supposed reform agenda," Human Rights Watch said.

Mr Nour`s plight also prompted criticism from the US. "This is the latest in a string of events that cause us serious concern about developments in Egypt," the state department said. But while condemning poll irregularities, Washington says "considerable progress" has been made.

Egyptian officials say that despite all the problems, the impetus for reform will gather pace. "The process has become unstoppable," one official said. "The next elections [in 2010] will bring even bigger changes." Asked whether the ban on the Brotherhood would be lifted, he said it was up to the movement to abide by Egypt`s constitution, which forbids parties based on religion, ethnicity or gender. It had to decide whether it was ready to join the secular political mainstream.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

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http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2005/12/08/condi/

SPIEGEL ONLINE - December 8, 2005, 10:34 AM
URL: http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,389224,00.html

Opinion

Condi`s Trail of Lies

By Sidney Blumenthal

Condoleezza Rice`s contradictory, misleading and outright false statements about the U.S. and torture have taken America`s moral standing -- and her own -- to new depths.

http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,389224,…

The metamorphosis of Condoleezza Rice from the chrysalis of the protégé into the butterfly of the State Department has not been a natural evolution but has demanded self-discipline. She has burnished an image of the ultimate loyalist, yet betrayed her mentor, George H.W. Bush`s national security advisor Brent Scowcroft. She is the team player, yet carefully inserted knives in the back of her predecessor, Colin Powell, climbing up them like a ladder of success. She is the person most trusted on foreign policy by the president, yet was an enabler for Vice President Cheney and the neoconservatives. Now her public relations team at the State Department depicts her as a restorer of realism, builder of alliances and maker of peace. On her first trip to Europe early this year she left the sensation of being fresh by listening rather than lecturing. The flirtation of power appeared to have a more seductive effect than arrogance. So the old face became a new face. But on this week`s trip the iron butterfly emerged.
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Rice arrived as the enforcer of the Bush administration`s torture policy. She reminded the queasy Europeans that their intelligence services, one way or another, are involved in the rendition of hundreds of suspected terrorists transported through their airports for harsh interrogation in countries like Jordan and Egypt or secret CIA prisons known as "black sites." With her warnings, Rice recast the Western alliance as a partnership in complicity. In her attempt to impose silence, she spread guilt. Everybody is unclean in the dirty war and nobody has any right to complain. "What I would hope that our allies would acknowledge," she said, "is that we are all in this together."

For the European leaders, facing publics hostile to U.S. policy in Iraq and torture, Rice`s visit was disquieting. In Italy, prosecutors have issued indictments of 22 current and former CIA operatives for their "extraordinary rendition" of an Egyptian suspect; among those indicted is the former Rome CIA station chief, whom an Italian judge has ruled has no immunity from prosecution. Italian Foreign Minister Gianfranco Fini, asked about renditions, said, "We know absolutely nothing. We have not one single piece of knowledge." If the Italian government knew the facts, it would investigate, he added.

In Britain, the Foreign Office released a diplomatic disclaimer that it has "no evidence to corroborate media allegations about the use of UK territory in rendition operations." But upset members of the House of Commons have launched a parliamentary inquiry into whether the U.K. has violated the European Convention on Human Rights and the United Nations Convention Against Torture. Foreign Minister Jack Straw sent Rice a letter requesting any "clarification the U.S. can give about these reports in the hope that this will allay parliamentary and public concerns."

When the Washington Post reported on the eve of Rice`s trip that CIA prisons holding U.S. detainees exist in Romania, Poland and other Eastern European nations, it triggered an explosion. Even though Romania and Poland denied the report, the European Commission and the Council of Europe began investigations. The E.C. declared that for any member state to harbor a CIA prison would be "extremely serious" and bring down sanctions upon it.

In Germany, Rice was greeted by the new chancellor, Angela Merkel, eager to repair relations with the Bush administration made awkward by former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder`s opposition to the Iraq war. Rice`s visit was supposed to smooth over the conflicts of the past, but instead it surfaced new ones that indicated that the divisions between Germany -- and Europe -- and the U.S. are rooted in the Bush administration`s fundamental policies.

Rice arrived in Berlin on the heels of a Washington Post report about the rendition, to a secret CIA jail in Afghanistan called the Salt Pit, of a German citizen, Khaled el-Masri, who was tortured and imprisoned for five months in a case of mistaken identity. After meeting with Rice, Merkel announced that Rice had acknowledged that the U.S. had made a "mistake" in the case. But Rice countered with a statement denying she had said that at all. The reconciliation with Germany was botched; Merkel was embarrassed; and Rice`s credibility, at least in the German press, was left in tatters.

Rice had hoped to quell the controversy before she landed. On Monday, as she boarded her plane at Andrew Air Force base in Washington, she delivered a lengthy statement on torture. Her speech was remarkable for its defensive, dense and evasive tone. It was replete with half-truths, outright falsehoods, distortions and subterfuges.

Her remarks can never sway or convince any European leader, foreign ministry or intelligence service, which have the means to make their own judgments. In her effort to persuade world opinion and reassure the American public, she raised the debate over torture to greater prominence and virtually invited inspection of her claims.

Rice has made memorable statements in the past. There was her appearance before the 9/11 Commission, in which she had trouble recalling the CIA`s Presidential Daily Briefing of Aug. 6, 2001, titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US," and dismissed its significance. There were her many assertions about Saddam Hussein`s weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons: "We don`t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." There was her attack on Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism chief on the National Security Council, for his disclosure that both she and the president did not regard al-Qaida as an urgent threat before Sept. 11, 2001, as a "scurrilous allegation." But her remarks on torture may turn out to be her most unforgettable full-length speech, tainting her tenure as secretary of state as indelibly as Colin Powell`s speech making the case for the Iraq war before the United Nations blotted him.

"Torture is a term that is defined by law," said Rice. "We rely on our law to govern our operations." She neglected to explain that "torture" as she used it has been defined by presidential findings to include universally defined methods of torture, such as waterboarding, for which U.S. soldiers were court-martialed in 1902 and 1968 specifically on the basis of having engaged in torture.

But the Bush administration has rejected adherence to the Geneva Conventions as "quaint," in the term of then White House legal counsel and now Attorney General Alberto Gonzales; rejects torture as it is defined in the United Nations Convention Against Torture (although the U.S. is a signatory); and rejects torture as it is interpreted by other international expert bodies, including the European Human Rights Court, whose judgments are binding on the nations of the Council of Europe.

"The United States does not permit, tolerate or condone torture under any circumstances," Rice insisted in her statement. "Moreover, in accordance with the policy of this administration: The United States has respected -- and will continue to respect -- the sovereignty of other countries." But was the kidnapping of the Egyptian suspect in Italy that has resulted in the 22 indictments of CIA operatives a fiction? Have the Italian prosecutors been made aware that the event was a figment of their imaginations? Was holding el-Masri, the innocent German, not a violation of the sovereignty of another country?

Rice continued: "The United States does not transport, and has not transported, detainees from one country to another for the purpose of interrogation using torture. The United States does not use the airspace or the airports of any country for the purpose of transporting a detainee to a country where he or she will be tortured." But the German government was reported to have a list of 400 flights over European airspace for the purpose of renditions. And Amnesty International reports that there have been 800 such flights. Once again, Rice relies upon her own definition of "torture" to deny it.

She went on: "The United States has not transported anyone, and will not transport anyone, to a country when we believe he will be tortured. Where appropriate, the United States seeks assurances that transferred persons will not be tortured." In fact, the U.S. receives assurances from those countries that it would be unlikely that the suspects will be tortured, a technical loophole that provides for a washing of hands. Everybody on all sides understands that there will be torture, as there has been.

Rice`s legal interpretations were authoritative, bland and bogus. It is hard to say whether they should be called Orwellian for their intentional falsity or Kafkaesque for their unintentional absurdity.

"International law allows a state to detain enemy combatants for the duration of hostilities," she said. But the administration has vitiated international law with its presidential findings. The "global war on terror" is a conflict without end; its time limit extends into perpetuity. So long as terror is used as a tactic, or the threat of terror exists, which it always does, a state of war, such as it is, justifies indefinite detention.

Then, Rice presented as the administration`s position precisely the position it opposes: "Detainees may only be held for an extended period if the intelligence or other evidence against them has been carefully evaluated and supports a determination that detention is lawful. The U.S. does not seek to hold anyone for a period beyond what is necessary to evaluate the intelligence or other evidence against them, prevent further acts of terrorism, or hold them for legal proceedings." But the Bush administration has refused to place detainees within the criminal justice system. Instead, they have been kept in a legal limbo, denied the protections of both the U.S. justice system and the Geneva Conventions. The administration has hid "ghost detainees" from the International Red Cross. If the suspects are criminals, they have not been tried as criminals.

Rice cited two cases to make her point: Carlos the Jackal, the international terrorist captured in Sudan in 1994, and Ramzi Youssef, the 1993 World Trade Center bomber. But, unlike current detainees, both were put on public trial, Carlos in France, Youssef in the United States. And the European Commission on Human Rights issued a report that Carlos` rights were not violated. Both cases refuted in their particulars the larger argument Rice was making.

One case Rice did not cite was that of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, a captured al-Qaida operative, whose claims about Saddam Hussein`s possession of WMD were used by the administration to build the case for the Iraq war. "We`ve learned that Iraq has trained al-Qaida members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases," President Bush said on Oct. 7, 2002, drawing on al-Libi`s information. Al-Libi also provided the basis for a dramatic high point of Secretary of State Powell`s U.N. speech: "the story of a senior terrorist operative telling how Iraq provided training in these weapons to al-Qaida. Fortunately, this operative is now detained, and he has told his story. I will relate to you now, as he himself, described it." But al-Libi had been tortured and repeated to his interrogators what they had suggested to him. The Defense Intelligence Agency reported in February 2002 that al-Libi`s information was dubious, and the CIA also questioned its credibility in a report in January 2003 -- both reports made before the war. Rice`s various statements created a pandemonium across Europe that she tried to quiet with a clarification Wednesday in Ukraine. The policy she had just declared we did not follow she announced we would no longer pursue. "As a matter of U.S. policy, the United States` obligations under the CAT [U.N. Convention Against Torture], which prohibits cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment -- those obligations extend to U.S. personnel wherever they are, whether they are in the United States or outside of the United States," Rice said at a press conference with Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko.

Rice`s erratic journey also raises the question of her own part in the policy. The Washington Post story on el-Masri reports that Rice intervened on the side of informing the German government, a disclosure that resulted in el-Masri`s release. This fact suggests that Rice has a degree of authority and knowledge in the realm of detainees and "black sites."

Since 2003, Rice has repeatedly told representatives of Human Rights Watch and other similar organizations that the U.S. does not torture. There is no trail of memos tracing her involvement in the titanic struggle over U.S. torture policy between Powell and the senior military on one side and Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and John Ashcroft`s Justice Department on the other. Was the national security advisor completely out of the loop? On Nov. 19., ABC News reported, "Current and former CIA officers tell ABC News there is a presidential finding, signed in 2002, by President Bush, Condoleezza Rice and then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, approving the (harsh interrogation) techniques, including waterboarding."

That technique has its origin in the Spanish Inquisition. Indeed, in 1490, a baptized Christian who was a secret Jew, a converso named Benito Garcia, was subjected to water torture. The process drew out of him a confession of the ritual murder of a Christian child by crucifixion to get his blood for a magic ceremony to halt the Inquisition and bring about Jewish control. The incident greatly helped whip up the fear that led to the expulsion of the Jews in 1492, as described by James Reston Jr. in his new book, "Dogs of God: Columbus, the Inquisition, and the Defeat of the Moors."

Since the Inquisition, the method of waterboarding has been little refined. But Rice, like Bush, says we did not and will not torture anymore.

Sidney Blumenthal, a former assistant and senior advisor to President Clinton and the author of "The Clinton Wars," is writing a column for Salon and the Guardian of London.

© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2005

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In Pictures: What our dollar`s Buy: Faces of war Warning - Images depict the reality and horror of war.

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Poland Was Main CIA European Detention Base: Group

Polish media said this airport in Szymany, northeastern Poland, was identified by Human Rights Watch as a potential site of alleged CIA prisons used to interrogate al Qaeda captives.

[urlRed Cross in intense talks with US over secret jails]http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=fundLaunches&storyID=2005-12-09T211518Z_01_DIT958880_RTRUKOC_0_US-AID-CROSS.xml[/url]

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December 10, 2005
U.S. Forces Rely on Local Informants in Ferreting Rebels in West Iraq
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/10/international/middleeast/1…

By KIRK SEMPLE

AL ASAD, Iraq - On the final day of a town-to-town military sweep in November along the Euphrates River, hundreds of men in Ar Rabit, a farming village, were rousted from their homes by American and Iraqi troops and shepherded into long rows on a harvested cornfield.

With the help of a group of locally recruited informants, most with their faces concealed by balaclavas and scarves, the troops pulled 12 suspected insurgents from the lineup, bound them in handcuffs and blindfolds, and took them away.

American military commanders have repeatedly hailed the contributions of the informant group, called the Desert Protectors, saying their help in recent weeks demonstrates the increasing willingness of local residents to cooperate in fighting guerrillas on Iraq`s fiercely independent western fringe.
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Suspected Iraqi insurgents, blindfolded and their hands bound, were taken by helicopter to detention centers for interrogation.
They were arrested after being indentified informants.
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But even as they promote the Desert Protectors, apparently the first unit of its kind in Iraq, the commanders admit that the new alliance is, at present, little more than a marriage of convenience that could break apart at any time.

"This is the land of `the enemy of my enemy is my friend,` " said Col. Stephen W. Davis, the Marine commander who oversees security for western Anbar Province from a base here. "The best friend you got today could be your enemy tomorrow."

That caution was echoed by Lt. Col. Dale Alford, commander of the Third Battalion, Sixth Marines, which is operating in the towns along the southern Euphrates riverbank.

"They`re going to pick the side that allows them to get back to work," he said. "We just got to make sure it`s us. As long as they`re working on our side, that`s all I care about."

With their heavy reliance on the Desert Protectors, American military officials have wandered into the complicated realm of Anbar tribal politics, which they admit they only partly understand. Officials working closely with these informants say they are aware that some could be acting on tribal grievances and implicating innocent people.

During the entire operation, which began on Nov. 5 and lasted more than two weeks, about 800 men were sent to detention camps for further questioning, according to Colonel Davis. Of those, more than 300 were sent to Abu Ghraib prison and the netherworld of the Iraqi detention system; the others were released.

In many cases, testimony from the Desert Protectors was the only evidence against suspects before they were taken away in trucks and helicopters for further interrogation.

One man, his face hidden, identified suspected insurgents in lineups by flashing a thumbs-down sign over their heads, providing the basis for the detentions of most of the 96 suspects captured along the northern side of the river, according to Army and Marine officials. Those included the 12 in Ar Rabit on Nov. 21.

One member of the Army`s Tactical Human Intelligence Team, which chaperoned the informants during the sweep on the north side of the river, said his unit had felt it necessary to rein in the informants.

"They were fingering, like, 25, 30 at a time," recalled the soldier, Special Agent Timothy Price. "We said: `No way. We need to have evidence.` They want to get everyone who`s not their tribe."

The story of the formation of the group, as told by the Marine leadership in western Anbar, is simple. Far western Anbar was in recent years dominated by two tribes, both of which were participating in the anti-American insurgency, military officials said. This year, officials say, Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the group run by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, struck an alliance with one tribe, the Salmanis. The partnership drove out the other tribe, the Abu Mahals, in a battle in Husayba last summer.

In late summer, members of the Abu Mahal tribe, many of whom had sought refuge in Akashat, a desert town 75 miles southwest of Husayba, approached the American military. In a program approved by Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top American commander in Iraq, the Americans provided weapons and training to the men, some of whom, Colonel Davis said, had been trying to kill American marines only months before. The informants` main role in the operation would be to move with the troops and identify insurgents.

But the composition of the Desert Protectors is more complicated than the military account suggests. While officers and troops who work closely with the informants said the group was made up of Abu Mahals, several Desert Protectors said the membership was more varied, and even included Salmanis. The membership reflects a complex arrangement of new alliances that cut across tribal lines.

"We haven`t really focused on figuring them out," a member of the Army`s interrogation team said at a desert holding camp north of the Euphrates. Motioning toward a clump of detainees squatting on the sand, he added, "We`ve focused on figuring everyone else out."

Members of the Marines` Human Intelligence Exploitation Team, which worked with the Desert Protectors on the south side of the river, refused to be interviewed, as did the head of the intelligence unit for the Marines` Regimental Combat Team 2, which coordinated the sweep.

Military officers said that the informants were involved only in the first wave of field screening and that other evidence was also considered, including whether a suspect`s name appeared on the military`s lists of known insurgents.

Each case was further screened by intelligence experts and lawyers at military bases, they said, and more than 60 percent of the initial detainees were released.

Asked whether the American and Iraqi leadership might be losing potential allies by subjecting possibly innocent people to this harsh process, Colonel Davis replied: "Welcome to insurgency. You will find no finality except for death on this battlefield. There are no absolutes."

Kidnappers Extend Deadline

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 9 (AP) - The group said to be holding four peace advocates said Friday that it was extending to Saturday its deadline for American and Iraqi authorities to release all prisoners in exchange for the captives` lives.

A group calling itself the Swords of Righteousness Brigade seized the men - an American, a Briton and two Canadians - two weeks ago, and threatened to kill them on Thursday if its demands were not met.

* Copyright 2005The New York Times Company

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Die USA verweigert dem Roten Kreuz Zugang zu Gefangenen, die es nicht gibt. Herrlich paradox.

December 10, 2005
U.S. Rebuffs Red Cross Request for Access to Detainees Held in Secret
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/10/politics/10detain.html
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN

WASHINGTON, Dec. 9 - The United States said Friday that it would continue to deny the International Committee of the Red Cross access to "a very small, limited number" of prisoners who are held in secret around the world, saying they are terrorists being kept incommunicado for reasons of national security and are not guaranteed any rights under the Geneva Conventions.

Adam Ereli, the State Department`s deputy spokesman, said the United States would not alter its position after the president of the International Red Cross said in Geneva that his organization was holding discussions to gain access to all detainees, including those held in secret locations.

Mr. Ereli said that the Geneva Conventions requiring humane treatment of prisoners of war did not apply to certain terrorism suspects seized as "unlawful enemy combatants," but that, in any case, the United States treats most of them as prisoners of war.

"We`re going the extra mile here," Mr. Ereli said, by allowing the Red Cross access to Al Qaeda suspects and others held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and in Afghanistan. The Red Cross also has access to prisoners held in Iraq.

Aside from those detainees, about two or three dozen terrorism suspects, including a handful of top Al Qaeda operatives, are said by current and former intelligence officials to be held in secret locations.

On Thursday in Geneva, John Bellinger, the senior legal adviser of the State Department, acknowledged that the International Red Cross does not have access to all detainees held by American forces but declined to discuss the existence of secret detention centers.

The Red Cross has recognized that some of those held by the United States are not prisoners of war, and do not have the full protection of the Geneva Conventions. But it has argued that no prisoners, not even those alleged to be terrorists, should fall into what it calls a "black hole" outside any protection under international humanitarian law. A central purpose of the Red Cross is to visit prisoners and protect their human rights.

On Friday, Jakob Kellenberger, the president of the International Red Cross, said the situation of those held secretly remained "a major concern" that would continue to be the focus of discussions with the United States. "We continue to be in an intense dialogue with them with the aim of getting access to all people detained in the framework of the so-called war on terror," he said.

Mr. Ereli of the State Department said that "cases that pose unique threats to our security" would be denied visits by the Red Cross, even on a confidential basis.

In a related development, the Defense Department announced Friday that Anne-Marie Lizin, a representative of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, a 55-nation group, would visit American detention facilities at Guantánamo and may question the commanding officers and other staff members.

"The department strives for transparency in our operations to the extent possible, in light of security and operational requirements and the need to ensure the safety of our forces," a department statement said.

Mr. Ereli said "there`s no legal requirement" to provide Red Cross access to Guantánamo. "Nevertheless, and even though we`re not required to do so, we do provide access to the vast majority of detainees under our control, and we do accord Geneva protections to them."

The Red Cross has been seeking greater access to detainees for at least two years but has been careful to mute its criticism in order to keep the negotiations more productive, according to committee officials.

In Europe over the last week, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice emphasized that it is American policy not to subject detainees to "cruel, inhumane or degrading" punishment in any location, no matter whether they are held by military or intelligence authorities.

Ms. Rice also said on her European trip that the United States would not hand any prisoners over to other countries in the process known as rendition without obtaining assurances that they would not be tortured.

* Copyright 2005The New York Times Company

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Wie man in den USA zwischen altem unf neuen uropa unterscheiden kann.

[urlSchroeder Accepts Russian Pipeline Job]http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/09/AR2005120901755.html?nav=hcmodule[/url]
BERLIN, Dec. 9 -- Former German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder landed a job Friday as board chairman for a Russian-German gas pipeline that he championed while in office, a post that deepens his already close relationship with the Russian government and President Vladimir Putin.
Rainer Bruederle, a leading member of Germany`s pro-business Free Democrats party, said that if Schroeder`s responsibilities were more than ceremonial, the deal could call into question whether he can distinguish between public and private affairs.

Schroeder and the German-speaking Putin built a strong political and personal alliance during the chancellor`s seven-year tenure, putting relations between Berlin and Moscow on the friendliest terms since Nazi Germany fought the Soviet Union on the battlefields of World War II. They have frequently conferred in person; in 2004, Schroeder and his wife adopted a 3-year-old Russian girl...

The chief executive of the pipeline consortium is Matthias Warnig, a German who heads Dresdner Bank`s arm in Russia and is a longtime friend of Putin`s. The Wall Street Journal reported this year that Warnig was an officer in the Stasi, the East German secret police, and met Putin during the late 1980s when the Russian president was based in East Germany as a Soviet KGB officer...

The proposed route goes under the Baltic Sea, bypassing Poland and other Eastern European countries that have complained bitterly of being shut out of the project.
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Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov signs segment of pipe at groundbreaking in Vologda for pipeline to Germany.
Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov signs segment of pipe at groundbreaking in Vologda for pipeline to Germany.
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[urlPoland Links Bid For U.S. Aid to Presence in Iraq]http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/09/AR2005120901816.html?nav=hcmodule[/url]
Poland has asked for additional U.S. military assistance to modernize its own forces as it considers whether to extend the presence of Polish troops in Iraq next year, according to Polish and U.S. officials.

Although Warsaw has stopped short of conditioning its Iraq decision on the request for aid, it has made it clear that the two are linked, saying the $600 million it has spent on the Iraq operation has siphoned funds from plans to upgrade its own military...
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Polish Defense Minister
Radoslaw Sikorski
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One Pentagon official involved in considering Poland`s request noted that the United States has already done much to assist Polish military reforms, providing about $220 million in grants in the past decade. "We`ve tried to help Poland in a lot of ways," said Peter Flory, the Pentagon`s assistant secretary for international security policy...

Several U.S. officials familiar with efforts to hold the coalition together confidently predicted that nearly all of the 30 countries in the multinational force will keep some troops in Iraq next year. But the officials acknowledged that the number is certain to dwindle from the current total of about 21,000, and to change in character from combat infantry to training advisers...

Against this shifting backdrop, Poland`s aid request puts the Bush administration on the spot. A boost in U.S. military assistance that appears tied to Poland`s continued involvement in Iraq could encourage other coalition partners to seek enhanced U.S. aid packages. On the other hand, shortchanging Poland risks alienating an important European ally.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

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Disappearing people in large numbers was, after all, one of the high arts of the totalitarian regimes the United States spent much of the 20th century fighting.
Von der UDSSR lernen, heißt siegen lernen.

December 10, 2005
Globalist
Rice Admits U.S. Errors; What About Corrections?
http://select.nytimes.com/iht/2005/12/10/international/IHT-1…

By ROGER COHEN
International Herald Tribune

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has used her visit to Europe to do something unusual for the Bush administration: admit mistakes. "Any policy will sometimes result in errors," she said. "And when it happens, we will do everything we can to rectify it."

What she did not say, however, is that while it is true no policy has a built-in guarantee against mistakes, bad policies will lead to more blunders than good ones. In effect, the Bush policy toward terror suspects has involved the removal of customary safeguards designed to offset the inexhaustible human capacity for error.

What has been the thrust of administration policy since Sept. 11, 2001? It has been to remove suspects in the war on terrorism from the reach of the law by defining them as "unlawful combatants" without national affiliation because they are committed to transnational terrorism. As such, their only right has been the right to exist in limbo.

The Geneva Conventions, customary international law and human rights law have all at various times been relegated to the status of outmoded notions inapplicable to an unprecedented war. Alberto Gonzales, now the attorney general, put it this way in a memo to President Bush on Jan. 25, 2002:

"As you have said, the war against terrorism is a new kind of war. It is not the traditional clash between nations adhering to the laws of war that formed the backdrop to the GPW" - the Third Geneva Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War.

Gonzales continued: "The nature of the new war places a high premium on other factors, such as the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American civilians." He opined that "the new paradigm" rendered some of the Geneva Convention`s provisions "quaint."

But one of the laudable quirks of the quaint idea of establishing laws of war - laws that for centuries did not exist but that the United States has played a prominent role since the 19th century in establishing - is that such legal conventions make it difficult for prisoners to disappear into black holes.

Disappearing people in large numbers was, after all, one of the high arts of the totalitarian regimes the United States spent much of the 20th century fighting.

"As a matter of international law, it has been established that it is impermissible to hold people forever without any review," said Hurst Hannum, a professor of international law at Tufts University`s Fletcher School. "Nobody is willing to allow any government the right to pick up people and hold them forever. But the administration`s design has been to create a category of people beyond the law`s reach."

We still do not know how many prisoners fall into this category. Nor do we know where they are. Nor do we know on what precise grounds they are being held or in what conditions, although Rice has now committed all U.S. personnel, whether in the United States or outside, to avoiding "cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment."

Until her statement on Wednesday, the administration had at times sought to distinguish such coercive treatment, banned under the UN Convention Against Torture, from torture itself - and exploit a legal loophole which, officials argued, made it permissible for U.S. personnel not in military uniform (like CIA employees) to explore the borderlines of torture in treatment of prisoners outside the United States.

It is this loophole that Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, has sought to close in legislation awaiting House action, and that Vice President Dick Cheney, among others, has appeared determined to preserve.

Ugly stuff and, Cheney would no doubt argue, inevitable in ugly times. Who`s to worry about the simulated drowning of some Al Qaeda suspect somewhere, or the mistaken abduction and detention of a German citizen, when such ruthlessness may keep terrorists from blowing up the Holland Tunnel in New York?

Fair question. There has been something unseemly, and predictable, in Europe`s gush of outrage over U.S. practices and possible use of secret jails in Europe when none of that moral outrage was left over for kidnappers in Iraq holding a German archaeologist, Susanne Osthoff, and threatening to behead her.

But Europe`s oddly aberrant morality, always more inclined these days to point to American shortcomings than recognize the nature of the West`s enemies, ever more convinced of American arrogance than the terrorist threat, should not stop the United States from doing the right thing.

The mistakes to which Rice alluded, and the gross aberrations like the sadistic treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib to which she did not refer, did not take place in a vacuum. They occurred in a climate created with the aim, avowed or not, of eliminating transparency, diminishing accountability, and promoting a lawless limbo that would enable the United States to do to terror suspects what it could not do in the public eye.

This policy has been immensely damaging to the global image of the United States because the force of America is above all the force of an idea; and that idea, whatever Harold Pinter may say (he thought NATO`s bombing of Kosovo was linked to a quest for Caspian oil), remains inextricable from liberty, democracy, habeas corpus and the rule of law.

"The greatest failure of Bush policy has been to create the almost universal feeling these days that the United States cannot be trusted," Hannum said. "This will take a long time to overcome."

Rice has taken an important initial step to regaining trust in explicitly disavowing cruel and inhumane treatment of prisoners anywhere by any U.S. citizen. She would have taken an even more critical one in saying that bad policies that run counter to fundamental American ideas, including the right of prisoners to counsel, lead to mistakes and that everything will now be done to rectify those policies.

E-mail: [e-mail]

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December 10, 2005
Illegal, Immoral and Pointless
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/10/opinion/10sat1.html

There are many reasons why Americans should not torture prisoners, but here is one that may help those who are still not moved by the fact that it is morally wrong and illegal, damages the nation`s image, and puts American soldiers who are taken prisoner in mortal peril: It usually doesn`t work.

Torture is a terrible way to do the very thing that the administration uses to excuse it - getting accurate information. Centuries of experience show that people will tell their tormenters what they want to hear, whether it`s confessing to witchcraft in Salem, admitting to counterrevolutionary tendencies in Soviet Russia or concocting stories about Iraq and Al Qaeda.

Which brings us to the sorry tale of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, identified as a former Qaeda leader. Douglas Jehl recounted in yesterday`s Times how Mr. Libi was captured in Pakistan in late 2001 by American forces and later sent for questioning to Egypt, which the C.I.A. uses as a proxy for this sort of grubby work. The Egyptians interrogated Mr. Libi for a year and sent him back to the American authorities talking about how Qaeda members had received chemical weapons training in Iraq.

There was only one problem: Mr. Libi says he made the story up to appease the Egyptians, who he says tortured him.

The Defense Intelligence Agency tried warning early on that Mr. Libi`s credibility was dubious, partly because the Pentagon knows the Egyptians abuse their prisoners. But the president and his team went ahead anyway and presented Mr. Libi`s fairy tale as one of the justifications for invading Iraq. The information was later repudiated, and Mr. Libi is now said to be at a secret C.I.A. camp. He will probably never be brought to justice for any terrorism he did plan or commit because his case, like those of others under illegal detention, has been so compromised by his treatment that it would probably be thrown out of court.

It took too long, but the Senate is finally trying to clean up this mess, voting 90 to 9 for an amendment by Senator John McCain to reimpose age-old rules of decency for the detainees in the "war on terror." The House should endorse that amendment, which is attached to the Pentagon budget bill, and send it to President Bush.

There was talk this week of Mr. Bush`s backing away from his threat to veto the entire Pentagon budget if the McCain amendment is attached. We hope that`s true, but this is a time for Americans` elected representatives to stand on principle. Mr. McCain should not water down his bill to satisfy the White House or fringe Republicans in the House. If Mr. Bush cannot manage to overrule his vice president and ends up vetoing the measure, it should not be hard to override such an irresponsible act. All it would take is for Congress to vote against torture.

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Thoughts on the Middle East, History,and Religion
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Juan Cole is Professor of History at the University of Michigan

http://www.juancole.com/
Saturday, December 10, 2005

Iraq Round-Up for Saturday

[urlEric Black`s interview with me]http://www.startribune.com/stories/722/5771424.html[/url] about the upcoming Iraq elections is at the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

Clerics are using the mosque to try to get out the vote for the parties they favor on December 15.

Iraqi Academics are at severe risk.

[urlA recent poll in several Arab countries]http://www.antiwar.com/lobe/?articleid=8228[/url] shows that the region is deeply suspicious of Bush`s motives and unimpressed by his alleged promotion of democracy in the region, according to Jim Lobe.

[urlMahan Abdin explores the possibly sinister role]http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GL10Ak01.html[/url] of the Iran-trained Badr Corps in the new Iraq.

[urlKnight Ridder broke the story]http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/news/special_packages/iraq/intelligence/13295806.htm[/url] of the US military paying to place stories in the Iraqi press.

Nir Rosen argues for an immediate US withdrawal from Iraq in the Atlantic. Nir has been on the ground in Iraq a lot, speaks Arabic, and reports accurately on the mindset of Iraqis. I don`t agree with him, but I admit to being from the generation that lived through the Lebanese Civil War, the Iranian Revolution, the Afghanistan War, the Iran-Iraq War, the Kashmir Civil War, etc., etc., and the world looks darker to me and I can imagine more catastrophic scenarios than are presented here.

Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter in his Nobel Lecture lets Bush and Blair have it.

posted by Juan @ [url12/10/2005 06:30:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/12/iraq-round-up-for-saturday-eric-blacks.html[/url] 0 comments

Guest Editorial: Achcar on Sadr Initiative



"A PAN-IRAQI PACT ON MUQTADA AL-SADR`S INITIATIVE

Gilbert Achcar

December 9, 2005

As part of his effort to influence the political forces in Iraq prior to the forthcoming parliamentary election, at the end of November Muqtada al-Sadr had his supporters distribute the draft of a "Pact of Honor," and called on Iraqi parties to discuss and collectively adopt it at a conference to be organized before the election.

This conference was actually held on Thursday, December 8, in al-Kadhimiya (North of Baghdad). Despite extensive search, I found it only reported in a relatively short article in today`s Al-Hayat and in dispatches from the National Iraqi News Agency (NINA). There is legitimate ground to suspect that this media blackout has political significance; indeed most initiatives by the Sadrist current are hardly reported by the dominant media, even when they consist of important mass demonstrations (like those organized yesterday in Southern Iraq against British troops).

In the case of the recent conference, the vast array of forces that were represented and that signed the "Pact of Honor" is in itself already worthy of attention. Aside from the Sadrists, chiefly represented by their MPs, those represented and who signed the document included: SCIRI, al-Daawa (al-Jaafari`s personal representative even apologized in his name for his absence due to his traveling outside of Iraq), and the Iraqi Concord Front (the major Sunni electoral alliance in the forthcoming election), to name but the most prominent of a long list of organizations, along with several tribal chiefs, unions and other social associations, members of the De-Ba`athification Committee and a few government officials. Ahmad Chalabi -- who definitely deserves to be called "The Transformer" -- attended in person and signed the document in the name of his group. It seems that the Association of Muslim Scholars did not attend, as its name is not mentioned in any of the two sources.

According to the reports, the "Pact of Honor" that was adopted consists of 14 points, among which the following demands and agreements are the most important (the sentences in quotation marks are translated from the document as quoted in the reports):

• "withdrawal of the occupiers and setting of an objective timetable for their withdrawal from Iraq"; "elimination of all the consequences of their presence, including any bases for them in the country, while working seriously for the building of [Iraqi] security institutions and military forces within a defined schedule";

• suppression of the legal immunity of occupation troops, a demand coming with the condemnation of their practices against civilians and their breach of human rights;

• categorical rejection of the establishment of any relations with Israel;

• "resistance is a legitimate right of all peoples, but terrorism does not represent legitimate resistance"; "we condemn terrorism and acts of violence, killing, abducting and expulsion aimed at innocent citizens for sectarian reasons";

• "to activate the de-Ba`athification law and to consider that the Ba`ath party is a terrorist organization for all the tyranny it brought on the oppressed sons of Iraq, and to speed up the trial of overthrown president Saddam Hussein and the pillars of his regime";

• "to postpone the implementation of the disputed principle of federalism and to respect the people`s opinion about it."

The conference established a committee that is responsible for following up the implementation of the resolutions and reporting on it after six months.

If anything, the conference was a testimony to the increasing importance of the Sadrist current. As for the actual implementation of its resolutions, it will greatly depend on the pressure that the same current will be able to exert after the forthcoming election, if the United Iraqi Alliance -- of which the Sadrists are a major pillar on a par with SCIRI -- succeeds in getting a commanding position in the next National Assembly."

posted by Juan @ [url12/10/2005 06:15:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/12/guest-editorial-achcar-on-sadr.html[/url] 1 comments

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US walks out of climate change talks as 150 nations move forward to adopt Kyoto
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article332206.e…

By Andrew Buncombe in Montreal
Published: 10 December 2005

The Bush administration`s unwillingness to seriously confront global warming was increasingly at odds with the rest of the world last night as more than 150 other nations were poised to move forward with the Kyoto protocol.

The US faced widespread condemnation after persistently rejecting even the mildest commitment to deal with climate change at the UN talks in Montreal.

Washington`s behaviour represents a serious embarrassment to Tony Blair who has argued that he could obtain an undertaking from the US to tackle the issue.

As the US position was highlighted by the walking out of talks by its chief negotiator Harlan Watson, the former president Bill Clinton launched an attack on his successor`s environmental policy.

To thunderous applause from delegates from nations around the world who are readying themselves to move ahead with the next stage of the Kyoto Protocol, Mr Clinton said the environmental policy of George Bush`s administration was "flat wrong".

Rubbishing the US administration`s claim that signing up to Kyoto would damage the American economy, Mr Clinton, who was invited to the summit by the Montreal authorities, urged nations to take up the challenge of Kyoto.

"We will have a meeting like this in 40 years time on a raft somewhere unless we do something," he said, adding that scientific evidence is amassing that proves "if we had a serious, disciplined effort" to apply existing conservation technologies then "we could meet and surpass the Kyoto targets easily in a way that would strengthen, not weaken, our economies".

Last night, details on how to progress when the first stage of the protocol ends in 2012 were being finalised by ministers.

Campaigners hailed the apparent progress on Kyoto (albeit without the US) as a vital step forward in the effort to deal with climate change and said it showed the willingness of more than 150 nations to commit themselves to the process. Of those nations, 36 are legally bound to cut their emissions of greenhouse gases.

But amid that progress, the elephant in the room remained the refusal of the Bush administration to act. During negotiations on Thursday evening, Mr Watson walked out of the room after delegates sought an agreement for those nations not signed up to Kyoto simply to agree to further talks.

"If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, then it`s a duck," Mr Watson reportedly said, as delegates sought to include the word "dialogue" in the draft agreement. That agreement would not have committed the US to anything binding, and would not "open any negotiations leading to new commitments". But even that mild undertaking was apparently too much for the Bush administration.

Campaigners have rounded on the US administration. Tony Juniper, director of Friends of the Earth, said: "The US is responsible for 25 per cent of the world`s greenhouse gas emissions. It should take its responsibility for leading the way. But instead, under George Bush, it has been taken backwards."

Arlen Myer, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, said there were many in the US who were already taking action to deal with climate change at a city and state level. He claimed the position of the Bush administration placed it more out of touch with the mood of the American public.

But America`s behaviour was condemned not just by activists but by other delegates. The Irish environment minister, Dick Roache, said of Mr Watson`s "duck" comment: "It might go down well in the Ozarks but not here."

Kenya`s Emily Ojoo Massawa, chair of the African group of nations at the talks, said: "It`s such a pity the US is still very much unwilling to join the international community, to have a multi-lateral effort to deal with climate change."

The talks in Montreal stemmed from an undertaking given by more than 180 nations who signed up to 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC). That committed them simply to talks about further action.

It was unclear last night what sort of agreement, if any, the non-Kyoto nations would adopt. Campaigners said the US was now all but isolated, with only countries such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait sharing a similar position. Australia, which is not a Kyoto country, has been willing to agree to further talks.

The US argues that voluntary action is the way to deal with climate change. It says that it has spent more than $3bn (£1.7bn) a year on research and development of energy-saving technologies. It will meet with Asian and Pacific countries next year to discuss ways of using new technology to address the problem. But this appears to be a step back from the mild undertaking President George Bush agreed to earlier this year at the G8 summit at Gleneagles. Under the communiqué signed by Mr Bush, at the lobbying of Mr Blair, the US said the UNFCC was the appropriate forum for "negotiating" future action on climate change.

The British Environment Secretary, Margaret Beckett, said: "President Bush personally agreed at Gleneagles that America would be a part of discussions here. It would be a great pity if the US thought - for whatever reason - it cannot be part of a move forward."

Jennifer Morgan, of environmental group WWF, said: "By walking out of the room, this shows just how willing the US is to walk away from a healthy planet and its responsibilities."

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Al-Qa`ida operative `lied about links with Iraq to avoid torture`
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/africa/article332208.ece

By Rupert Cornwell in Washington
Published: 10 December 2005

The rationale behind Washington`s "rendition" of terror suspects has been called into question by a senior al-Qa`ida operative, who says he made false claims to Egyptian interrogators about the group`s links with Iraq in order to escape being tortured.

At the same time, the equally contentious issue of secret CIA prisons has flared up again, with the admission by a senior State Department lawyer that the Red Cross did not have access to all detainees held by the United States. His words are bound to reinforce suspicions that the US does operate such a network, beyond the reach of all supervision.

The prisoner is Ibn Sheikh al-Libby, captured in Pakistan in December 2001 and, at the time, the most senior al-Qa`ida figure in US hands. In early 2002 he was secretly handed over to Egypt under the "rendition" process.

Last month, in a major embarrassment for the Bush administration, it emerged that some US intelligence agencies had doubts about his testimony a full year before the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. The revelation was seized upon by war critics as fresh proof that the White House distorted intelligence to make its case for war.

Indeed, declassified documents made public by Senate Democrats showed that even the DIA - the Pentagon`s own intelligence division - believed as early as February 2002 that al-Libby was probably "intentionally misleading debriefers" in asserting that Saddam Hussein`s regime was training al-Qa`ida on explosives and chemical weapons. Now, however, it seems that he provided this false information to avoid being tortured by the Egyptians, if "current and former US government officials" quoted by The New York Times yesterday are to be believed.

Al-Libby is known to have spoken about Iraqi ties with al-Qa`ida when he was first held at Bagram air base in Afghanistan. But, according to the officials, he provided the most detailed information after he was sent to Egypt - one of at least 150 terror suspects to have been subjected to "rendition".

Ever since details of secret CIA "ghost flights" first surfaced some two years ago, the US has been fending off accusations that it was sending suspects to allied countries, including Egypt, where it knew they might well be subjected to torture banned by international conventions to which the US susbscribes. But the al-Libby affair appears to bear out what opponents of torture have also long insisted - that far from eliciting the truth, its use only encourages victims to tell interrogators what they want to hear, to avoid further suffering. The US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, and other administration officials insist the US eschews torture.

Separate uproar is also looming about secret CIA prisons - after John Bellinger, the State Department`s legal counsel, said the International Committee of the Red Cross did not have access to all prisoners held by US forces. The ICRC could visit "absolutely everybody" at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, he said. But, asked if that applied to all detainees held elsewhere, he replied simply, "No", without giving further details.

2005 Independent News and Media Limited

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Kommt später:
Robert Fisk: Some buried bones are best left undug
My late friend Juan Carlos Gumucio used to claim that we were "mass graves correspondents".

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[url]http://www.newleftreview.org/GetArticle.asp?Issue=36&Article=2&Type=pdf[/url]

PATRICK COCKBURN

THE OCCUPATION
http://www.newleftreview.org/Issue36.asp?Article=02

How many times have you been to Iraq, before and since the Anglo-American invasion?

I first went to Iraq in 1978, and I’ve been there I suppose fifty or sixty times. Sometimes for as long as three months, at other times for a fortnight or so. In all I have spent a bit more than half my time in Iraq since the Occupation. I was there before, during and after the invasion, initially based in Kurdistan since I couldn’t get a visa to Baghdad, because I and my brother had written a book on Iraq in the nineties. So when the us-led attack began, I was in the North. I was in Kirkuk and Mosul when they fell, and as soon as the road south was open, I drove down the main highway from Arbil to Baghdad. By the time I left the city, looting was still proceeding apace. The Information Ministry was being set on fire as I set off to Jordan, thick clouds of smoke rising over Baghdad and driving west you could already see all these battered little white pickups, which are very typical in Iraq, loaded with loot, going along the main highway and then turning off the road to Ramadi and Fallujah.

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When you returned, resistance had already started?

Yes, one of the surprises of the resistance is just how swiftly it developed. I think this has never quite been explained. The speed with which it took off was very striking. The Americans were starting to suffer casualties as early as June, within a couple of months of the invasion. Occupations often do lead to resistance against them, but it’s difficult to think of another example of it happening so quickly. After the British captured Baghdad in 1917, it took three years before the rebellion against them started. During the Second World War, the resistances in Europe or Southeast Asia all took much longer to get going than the present insurgency in Iraq.

You’ve observed life in Baghdad over a two-and-a-half-year period now. What have been the changes in the conditions of existence of most people there, from the middle class to the poor?

One of the main reasons most Iraqis wanted to be rid of Saddam was the degradation of life because of the un sanctions against Iraq, which destroyed most of the economy, coming on top of the effects of the Gulf War in 1991 and the eight-year war with Iran. There was a widespread sense among Iraqis that they couldn’t take it any more—they wanted some form of normal life to return. I think it took about two months for them to realize that the American Occupation wasn’t going to deliver this. The electricity supply was poor from the start, and it stayed poor. Looting didn’t stop. At first, most Iraqis looked on the disasters at the time of the fall of Saddam as a sort of one-day or rather week-long wonder. Then they discovered it just rolled on—in fact it has never really come to a halt since. They began to realize that everything in life was now chronically insecure. It took a bit of time for me to realize how dangerous it was getting quite early on—because it’s got so much worse since, I tend to think of those first months as almost halcyon days, when one could jump in a car and drive up to towns north of Baghdad, like Samarra, or west to Ramadi and Fallujah. But actually it got pretty risky from the start, which wasn’t the way Iraq had been before, even during the first Gulf War. During the American bombing in 1991, I remember going from Baghdad to Mosul, and because we’d been sold bad petrol, the car broke down, so we just got out and hitched lifts right across central Iraq up to Mosul, without any sense of danger. So it took a bit of time to realize the degree to which the insurgency, and banditry, were spreading. There were already assassinations that summer. I’d go to places where American soldiers had been attacked, or killed or wounded, and a couple of hours later I’d find crowds still rejoicing, jumping up and down and dancing around bloodstains on the road or the wreckage of a vehicle. The Occupation became unpopular pretty fast.

Economically, how have things gone?

For the middle class, what dominates life is insecurity, as basic law and order have broken down. Many of the wealthiest Iraqis, terrified of kidnapping, have left the country. First the rich went, then the fairly well off. Now you have people leaving who are probably making $300 or $400 a month—not much money. But the lack of any safety, and the lack of jobs, is producing a flight to the neighbouring countries: first Jordan and Syria, now—as they become full up—increasingly to Egypt. Some benefits have accrued to the professional classes: for instance teachers and civil servants, who got practically no money under Saddam, are now getting several hundred dollars a month. A lot of people who stopped being teachers are now going back to the job. But prices have also gone up. If you owned property in Baghdad, values at first increased—though they’ve come down a bit now—because previously there was a ban on non-Baghdadis getting residence in the capital.

Just after the fall of Saddam there was also an enormous influx of cars, particularly second-hand vehicles. But a huge number of these were stolen, and then taken off for sale in Kurdistan or Iran. To cross the street in Kurdish towns became a hazard—you risked your life, with shepherds who’d just bought a car for $600, which had been stolen in Baghdad, driving around, wondering which way to turn the wheel. The initial complete breakdown of all rules led to a certain economic activity. For example, if your car was stolen, you could go to the main stolen car mart, which at that time was in Sadoun Street, and get a reduction if you were trying to buy back your own car. It was very unwise to make a fuss, because the vendors were all armed; and you needed to get there quickly, before it was sold on to Iran, or taken to Kurdistan. This was quite open, and known to everybody—apart, conceivably, from Paul Bremer and the Coalition Provisional Authority. But this upsurge of market activity tended to peter out towards the end of 2003, when people began to realize that the insurgency was getting more and more serious, crime was steadily increasing, and that the Americans had taken over control of various parts of the economy. The incompetence of the us arrivals didn’t help. You would have thought they would at least have got the stock exchange, which had naturally languished under Saddam, going again. But Washington sent in a 24-year-old with strong family connections to the Republican Party. He forgot to renew the lease on the building for it, and there was no stock market for a year. After about six months, Iraqi stockbrokers were so fed up they sounded like Islamic militants in Fallujah.

Do professionals who are now more regularly and better paid regard their higher salaries as an acceptable trade-off against greater insecurity, and so the present situation as a net improvement?

It goes both ways. Some, particularly if they are Shiites coming from quieter areas, might consider it a reasonable trade-off; the Sunni generally not, particularly if they come from parts of west Baghdad, which is notoriously dangerous.

Who has unambiguously benefited from the Occupation?

The Kurds have generally done well out of it. If you go to the top of a tall building in Arbil or Sulaymaniyah, you can see lots of cranes and construction activity going on—quite a lot of Turkish–Kurdish companies are coming in, which is probably intentional on the part of the Kurds, to propitiate the Turks. Whereas in Baghdad, if you look across the city, despite all the billions that have been spent there in the last two and a half years, the only cranes visible are a few rusting ones around the gigantic mosques that Saddam was building when he was overthrown. Aside from that there is nothing.

What has been the experience of those who aren’t middle class: workers and the poor?

It’s become more and more negative. The un sanctions led to widespread impoverishment in the nineties, creating a great mass of unemployed and semi-employed people who survive only because of the state ration, scarcely enough though that is for a family. When the invasion destroyed the Baath regime, there was already a desperate need for jobs, outside maybe a few cities in Kurdistan. Many people expected a transformation of the economy because of the end of sanctions. But it never happened. So now you have this enormous population of despairing, jobless males ready to turn their hand to anything. They queue up to join the army, despite the danger of being blown up outside the recruiting stations, or loot any building that they can get into, or join kidnapping gangs. This is one of the reasons it’s so easy to raise a militia now—there are so many people who just want a job of any kind, doing anything. Only in parts of Kurdistan is there much choice: there the locals prefer to work on a building site than join some local militia, where you get less money and risk being killed.

You’ve spoken mainly about Baghdad and the part of the country around it. What about the far south around Basra—is the situation substantially different down there?

There’s a bit more economic activity, but it’s still very insecure. The poverty in Basra is even greater than in Baghdad. In much of the big area between the two, you find a reversion to the situation in the early nineteenth century, when villages often developed along the main road essentially for the purpose of robbing travellers. Now once again, the route is dotted with robber villages taking a toll on trucks passing through. In the worst places, they kidnap the lorry drivers and seize the goods. I always found that one of the best ways of getting a sense of the situation in different parts of the country was to go to the truck depots in Baghdad and talk to the drivers. They can tell you who controls which part of the road, which bandit gangs are at large, where the most dangerous side-roads and villages lie. They need to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of all this, because while conditions differ in each part of the country, overall they have become incredibly dangerous. Just before the us presidential election in 2004, the prime minister at the time, Iyad Allawi, cheerfully announced on a visit to Washington that 14 out of 18 Iraqi provinces were completely safe. Everyone in Iraq knew it was a complete lie, but precisely because it was wholly untrue, no journalist could prove otherwise without risking being shot or decapitated. That pretty well remains the situation today.

Iraqi infrastructures were steadily deteriorating under the impact of sanctions. Have they remained about the same, or altered since the Occupation—supplies of electricity and water, particularly?

Electricity has got worse in Baghdad. After the Gulf War, Saddam was able to get the electricity system working again quite effectively, although the power stations had been heavily targeted by American missiles and bombs. After the Anglo-American invasion, this didn’t happen, and Iraqis now invariably tell you this shows that the Americans are either incompetent or sabotaged the grid on purpose. Actually, there are a number of reasons for this failure by the Occupation. To begin with, when the Americans stormed into the country, contracts for various projects to increase electricity supply had been signed, or were about to be signed, by the Baath government. These were all ignored by Bremer, and fresh contracts were signed with American companies, which meant that nothing very new was built for a couple of years. Then, when construction did get under way, there was staggering corruption. This is true of all economic projects, but particularly of infrastructural works—there would be three lines on a piece of paper for a $50 million contract. The fragmentation of the country has also contributed to the power shortages. In Basra they’re not supplying the national grid in the way that was done under Saddam, so the capital and some of the other provinces have suffered. Finally, of course, there are resistance attacks on the pylons, and archaic as much of the maquis seems to be, you can see that someone with expertise has very carefully worked out what are the weak links in the economy.

In the first winter most Iraqis probably didn’t expect things to get that much better. But we are now heading into a third winter, and electricity has recently been two hours on, four hours off in Baghdad. All public or other buildings of any size—ministries, hotels and the like—have to run massive generators of their own. In the streets you see lots of small, generally Chinese-made, generators that will power a lamp or a television, but aren’t enough for deep-freezers or even fridges, which in a country as hot as Iraq means that people can’t store food. So they have to buy food on a daily basis, which is more expensive than buying it when it’s cheap and keeping it in the fridge or the deep-freezer. Water supplies have intermittently been poor, and almost all the water is tainted. Over the last year, there have been sudden complete breakdowns, of a week or ten days, when there is no water in different parts of Baghdad, probably the result of sabotage. Overall, the quality of the water is particularly bad in southern Iraq, but most people don’t have supplies of clean water anywhere, which is one of the reasons that the death rate, particularly among babies and small children, has been so high for the last fifteen years.

Have conditions changed a lot for women?

If you watch young teenage girls coming out of a school now, most of them are wearing headscarves. You can sometimes work out when this is genuinely religious, because the hair is concealed, and when it is a safety precaution, and you can see some hair. A lot of this is fear of retaliation if piety is not displayed. But there’s also a terror of kidnapping at all levels, and a belief that if kidnappers see a girl wearing a headscarf, they’ll think she comes from a traditional family; and if she comes from a traditional family, maybe it has strong tribal links, and it could be dangerous to abduct her, because that would invite revenge. Whether this is true or not, I don’t know. So far as women’s rights go, they were already being reduced in the 1990s, when there was a comeback of religion as the economic situation deteriorated, and the regime became more and more discredited. The Baath government tried to jump on the bandwagon by purporting to become more Islamic itself. Under the Occupation, women’s rights have not, at least theoretically, declined much further. But if regional or provincial law takes precedence over federal law in the new constitutional set-up, then there’s no question that the position of women in any Shia region or super-region will worsen substantially as regards inheritance and divorce.

From your description, would it be correct to think that a great deal—50 per cent or more—of the havoc in Iraq today derives from the United Nations blockade of the country, which destroyed the fabric of the society over a very prolonged period? The Baath regime was ruthlessly repressive, but political repression and social dissolution are not the same sorts of process. Presumably no-one dared launch out on a kidnapping spree under Saddam. So long as a very tough police system was in place, the effects of this un-induced erosion were contained or concealed, but once it was removed, the full extent of the disintegration of the social fabric under the pressure of sanctions became visible. So the invasion, knocking away even a residue of the kind of state that could have controlled the situation, released an avalanche of anarchic impulses and despairs. Then the next blow was that the foreign occupation itself, installed without any planning or knowledge of the terrain, generated no substitute for a local state. The result of un and us actions is thus something like a Hobbesian landscape today?

Yes, that’s a good way of putting it. Because things are so formidably bad now, the destruction wreaked by sanctions over a longer period is rather masked. Their effects were less dramatic than the extraordinary number of people murdered in the streets of Baghdad today. But the malnutrition, the enormous increase in infant mortality, the collapse of the economy that occurred in the 1990s, have all reduced Iraq’s standard of living, which had been a bit below that of Greece, to one that is on the level of Mali and the poorer West African countries. Sanctions produced, even before the invasion, a huge floating mass of people ready for anything. The first real expression of this phenomenon was the looting in Baghdad and all the other cities in Iraq. I was in Mosul when it was being looted. In the morning there was a rather cheerful atmosphere. Then gradually people realized that this was not going to be such fun, as absolutely everything—not just from shops, but from banks, offices, schools, hospitals, museums—was being stolen. And this was happening all over Iraq.

Moving to the prospects for Iraq as seen by the American high command or intelligence agencies, as opposed to the beleaguered teacher or the destitute former worker, has the military situation been deteriorating in the last year, or is it tactically stable?

I think the us position has deteriorated a bit. The roadside bombs have become more sophisticated, and in recent months carefully planned assassinations of senior and not so senior government officials, military officers and the like, based on good intelligence, have been increasing. The Sunni districts of south and west Baghdad are often partly under the control of the resistance at night. One of the reasons it’s difficult for the government to prevent this is that these suburbs are connected to Sunni regions outside the city, so insurgents can just move in from Sunni areas on the Euphrates, due west of Baghdad, through Abu Ghraib, or the Sunni towns to the south of Baghdad, which are also very militant. You can say that the whole of west Baghdad is contested. East Baghdad, with the exception of one big enclave at al-Adhamiyah, is Shia, who overall make up some 70–80 per cent of the inhabitants of the city—nobody knows the exact figures.

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The initial us reaction to the insurgency was to say that it was just the work of ‘dead-end’ remnants of Saddam’s regime or a few foreign fanatics. This was a complete misunderstanding, but the American command believed it. So the situation on the ground was always worse than they imagined. I remember in April 2004 being caught in an ambush on the road from Baghdad to Fallujah, because the us military command refused to admit it was under the control of the resistance, and was still sending convoys of petrol lorries down the road, trucks driven by terrified drivers from Ohio and Mississippi who had been taken on as contract workers, and were regularly being hit by rocket-propelled grenades and heavy machine-guns—you could see great columns of oily black smoke rising along the route. The us and British policy is to create an Iraqi army and police force, but these regularly melt away or go over to the other side when any serious fighting starts. In Mosul in November 2004, where the us had built up the local forces to great fanfare, the resistance launched an uprising and within the first day about 3,000 police just went home or changed sides, thirty police stations were captured, and $40 million worth of equipment was captured. Ironically the good thing, from the point of view of the White House, was that Mosul had become so dangerous that in the us it went largely unreported that most of the second-largest city in Iraq had fallen to the insurgents. It was as if the fall of Hue to the Vietcong in 1968—and other events traumatic to the us in Vietnam—had passed virtually unnoticed, because no journalists could go there without being murdered.

The efforts of the us to build up an Iraqi army loyal to it have so far been extraordinarily unsuccessful. The Iraqis who are eager to join it for the money, once they’re getting paid, are frequently uneager to fight. At the moment the army and paramilitary police are meant to be 80,000-strong, but may only be 40,000, because the commanders regularly take the pay for their battalion, and are supposed to distribute it to their men, so it’s much in their interest to claim that they have 600 when they only have 300 men. When Kurdish intelligence tracked Arab units going to places like Kirkuk they found in one case that where there were meant to be 1,200 men, in fact there were only 400 soldiers. So it’s still impossible to know how much of the Iraqi armed forces actually exist, or whose side they’re likely to be on. The British army found that the police in Basra were either neutral or hostile. Initially they claimed that just rogue elements within the police were opposed to them when two British soldiers were captured, but it’s clear that the whole police force is hostile, or potentially hostile. Two and a half years after the invasion, members of the government will tell you that if the us left tomorrow, most of west Baghdad would fall to the insurgents.

So let’s come directly to the resistance. You’ve said the rapidity of its response came as a great surprise, and is historically very unusual. Should this lead us to revise our understanding of the Baath regime? The general image of it was of an exceptionally ruthless dictatorship, that in its early years did display a certain modernizing dynamism, with some redistributive capacity and administrative competence, so that it was not without a real social base; but that in later years, after the failure of the wars in Iran and Kuwait, it became a completely isolated apparatus whose only resources were terror and a pinch of clan solidarity at the top. The idea, in the title of a popular book on the subject, was that only fear held it in place. In your view, is this still a convincing description, or does the resistance suggest that it was never a fully accurate picture—that, fearsome as Saddam’s regime was, it still had dedicated militants and some reserves of real support in the country? Perhaps an analogy would be the German and Soviet dictatorships, both of which could draw on a lot of tough popular support when the war was going badly for each, in 1941 and 1944–45. Is it possible something like this might have held true for the Baath, after the fall of Saddam?

The base of Saddam’s regime—this was also true of its immediate predecessors—really lay in the Sunni countryside, not among the urban Sunni, who had supported the monarchy. And of course the regime was notoriously dominated by the Tikritis, and by Saddam’s own clan. It was highly tribalized. The resistance in turn has clearly come, once again, primarily from the rural Sunni. By the end of the regime, they were decreasingly attached to Saddam, because the benefits of his rule were going too exclusively to the tight circle around him. But when Saddam and the Tikritis were destroyed, a second echelon of Baathists, who may not have even much admired Saddam, came to the fore, and seem to have been the basis for the insurgency from quite an early stage. Their resistance has been reinforced by tribal loyalties, and was greatly helped by Bremer’s dissolution of the army and the Baath party.

That had a very big impact. I remember being in Hawijah, a big Arab town in west Kirkuk province, and the very pro-American mayor, who the locals kept on trying to assassinate, explaining to me that he’d have to close the hospital because he was required to dismiss all the doctors, because they were Baath party members. The headmaster in the local school had been kicked out because he was a Baath party member, and replaced by a Turcoman from Kirkuk, who was too frightened to take up his position. The local boys told me they had gone to the former headmaster and said they were planning to burn down the school as a form of protest, and he was trying to dissuade them. The dissolution of the Iraqi state had a massive social impact on all Sunni areas, particularly rural ones. But I doubt whether the reaction to it was primarily an indication of loyalty to Saddam, even if many of the same people who were supposed to be the basis of his regime have been the basis for the insurgency. In the resistance there has never been a call to restore Saddam.

One of the things the us underestimated here was the strength of traditional loyalties. Kanan Makiya advised the White House it would be very easy to hold Iraq once the regime had gone, because there would be a tabula rasa—the Americans and the Iraqi opposition could get the Iraqis to do virtually anything they wanted. I think the opposite was always the case. Iraqis had so many loyalties aside from loyalty to the state: regional, communal, tribal—and national. For there is an Iraqi nationalism which, although manipulated and to some degree discredited by Saddam, still remains quite a potent force. From a fairly early stage, the nationalist resistance must have been making specific agreements with Islamic groups, funded from Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, which had always been present in western Iraq, and soon provided a ferocious cutting edge to the insurrection. From August 2003 onwards, mass bombings begin: al-Hakim, head of sciri, was killed by a car bomb in Najaf, the un building was demolished, the Red Cross attacked. Each of these had precise strategic objectives. The un envoy de Mello was in Baghdad to help Bremer put together a presentable regime for international endorsement. Washington did not much want the un in Iraq, but thought it could use it. The resistance saw the un could be used as cover for the Occupation, and targeted it to isolate the us, preventing the Americans and the British from spreading responsibility for the invasion.

But do you think then that the social figure of a Baath militant had ceased to exist by 2003? You said there was a second layer of the party or state that sprang into action against the Occupation. But why did they take the risk of fighting back so violently against an apparently overwhelming force? There seem to be two possible interpretations of the speed of the resistance. One is that this was a traditionally violent society, with a sea of weapons lying around anyway, and once the state was decapitated, a decentralized insurgency spread like brushfire much as banditry did alongside it, in a kind of rural version of the urban looting you describe. The other explanation is that although the regime appeared to collapse like a house of cards, some preparations had in fact been made for a guerrilla war once the Americans had taken Baghdad—the reason the resistance could get going so quickly was because an underground organization, with a great many weapons and quite a lot of skills, had been laid down in advance.

There must be an element of truth in this, because otherwise effective fighting couldn’t have taken off so rapidly. A vestigial organization that would have been set up by Saddam before his fall must have been responsible for the distribution of money, arms and indication of early targets. Then, of course, almost immediately the us army enraged most of the Sunni population, and I think all rural Sunni, by search-and-destroy raids in villages, shooting at demonstrators, arrests and theft of money. Within a few months, even the limited number of people in Sunni areas who rallied to the new government were getting very frightened, and either pulling out, or being killed. By November 2003, Washington realized how serious things were getting, and suddenly started to make concessions to try to damp down the resistance before the presidential election in the us the following year. But the degree of organization in the resistance shouldn’t be overestimated. It is in the nature of guerrilla warfare that some things need to be initiated and a few things tend to be organized, but the fact that the groups doing the fighting are chaotic and fragmented may be militarily beneficial. Where there is no chain of command to be disrupted, and no headquarters to be eliminated, a resistance movement is very difficult to wipe out.

There is another factor. The us government and the Iraqi government always claimed that the insurgency was fomented from abroad. They would denounce Syria, Iran and, in a quieter tone of voice, Saudi Arabia. They exaggerated the foreign role in supporting the resistance, but this does not mean it was not there. None of Iraq’s neighbours, with the possible exception of Kuwait, wanted the us to succeed in Iraq. The availability of relatively safe havens was important for the swift development of a guerrilla movement.

That brings us to another paradox of this resistance, which is if there was a scheme for a fall-back to a guerrilla, capable of organized distribution of arms, money and technical skills, why does there appear to be a lack of any political front to the resistance? This seems to be another historically unusual feature of it. Where is the equivalent of the nlf in Vietnam, the fln in Algeria, the pkk in Turkey? Normally an effective guerrilla movement requires some political instance. Sometimes there are several rival ones, as in the Greek or French resistance. Their function is to articulate specific political demands, to explain and project the aims of the guerrilla, and sometimes to negotiate for it. What explains the apparent absence of this kind of front in Iraq?

Maybe this is one consequence of its having developed so fast. It is very striking that there has been, as it were, no Sinn Fein. But one should note that as a serious political force in Northern Ireland, Sinn Fein developed long after the Provisional ira. There was a Provisional Sinn Fein from the moment the Provisional ira was created, but it was only really from the hunger strikes in 1980—a decade after the Provisional ira was created—that the Provisional Sinn Fein became a significant player. But you’re right, this is a remarkable feature of the Iraqi resistance. Another aspect of it, related to this, is that it remains curiously archaic politically. I don’t mean just that ‘neo-Salafism’—fundamentalist Sunni Islamic militants dedicated to war against Iraqi Shia as well as foreigners—is an important strand within it. I am also thinking of its approach to the media. Even in Lebanon during the civil war, up at least till the kidnappings by Hezbollah started in 1984, it was safer to be a journalist than anything else, because however ferocious the gunmen you came across, they nearly always had a press officer keen to talk to you. The same was true in Northern Ireland—very few journalists were killed. It is not so true in Chechnya but even there, limits held on what journalists had to fear. But Iraq was the first insurgency I’ve covered where the guerrilla has from the beginning shown no desire to cultivate the media at all. The resistance has paid a heavy price for this. One of the reasons Fallujah could be so largely destroyed by the Americans was that there were no television cameras inside the city, because militants threatened to cut the heads off anybody who went in. Even Saddam had learned that when it comes to hostile air attack, cameras are more useful than anti-aircraft guns.

That raises the question of the role, not of Sunni youth in the countryside or Baath officers or cadres dotted around, but of the jihadi component of the resistance. This too seems to have emerged very rapidly, without the prior background of the other forces. Where does it come from?

Neo-Salafist militants existed in Iraq during the latter days of Saddam’s rule, and were persecuted. The suicide bombers themselves are mostly foreign. Saudis are the largest component, providing perhaps half of them. But the infrastructure for these attacks is mainly Iraqi. At some point there must have been an agreement between ex-Baathists and neo-Salafi to launch a suicide-bombing campaign, with the aim of creating an atmosphere of permanent crisis. It’s very effective in doing that.

Why do you think this is effective? Some of the attacks have been carefully targeted, assassinating one of the presidents of the Council that Bremer set up, but a lot of them seem to be random killings in markets or mosques, without much rhyme or reason, beyond sectarian fanaticism.

These are certainly products of Salafi bigotry. But as political weapons they are effective, because they undermine the authority of the government, since everyone can see it can’t stop these bombs. In the longer term, of course, they’ve ensured that a united armed resistance based on Iraqi nationalism will not emerge. Nearly all Arabs in Iraq—this is not true of Kurds—say they want the Occupation to end, and when the Americans were first besieging Fallujah in April 2003, there was a lot of sympathy for its people among the Shia. I remember going down to the blood bank in Baghdad, and lots of Shia as well as Sunni villagers were turning up in old buses, not to speak of functionaries from the Oil Ministry. But then the suicide bombers from Fallujah repeatedly attacked Shia civilians in Baghdad, so when the us marines stormed the city six months later, most of the Shia were cheering them on. They wanted Fallujah destroyed. So there’s no doubt that these attacks have deepened the sectarian divisions in Iraq. But they have also made it difficult for the government to establish its authority, by exposing its inability to provide people with any security. They’ve had a major psychological effect on everyone.

You say it was the suicide bombings that turned the Shia community against the resistance, implying this was a turning point. But how far does that square with the chronology? After all, the Shia political leaders and religious hierarchy had decided much earlier to collaborate with the Occupation, when they could have refused to do so. If in the summer of 2003 they had said to the Americans, we’re delighted Saddam has gone, but we don’t want you here either: we give you six months to clear out—what could the us have done? The Americans were in no position to take on a combined resistance from the Sunni and the Shia, and they knew it. In fact, in April 2004 just such a common front was developing, when Muqtada al-Sadr called for a rebellion to oust the us, and raised the flag of revolt in Najaf, with wide popular support in Baghdad and points farther south. What did Sistani and the Shia politicians around him do? They worked hand in glove with the us high command to put down the revolt, at the very time Sunni resistance was at its strongest in Fallujah. No doubt Sistani felt his authority within the Shia community threatened by Muqtada. But the logic of his choice was clear-cut. Surely the real turning point was this deliberate option for collaboration with a foreign occupation, when the chance of putting an end to it was plainly there, as the Americans knew and said?

The Shia clergy seem to have decided what they would do quite early on, well before the war. I remember talking to Sayed Abdul Majid al-Khoei in 2002, and the lesson on which he dwelt, as Sistani’s aides would do later, was the mistake the Shia had made in rising against the British in 1920, when they were crushed. This time they resolved to take the Americans at their word, and promised not to support any armed resistance to the Occupation, so long as the occupiers did what they said they would, which was to hold elections the Shia were bound to win. Initially, the Americans didn’t think they needed much help in Iraq. After all, they were prepared to bring the Turks into Kurdistan, and they certainly imagined they could do without the Shia. In the summer of 2003 they were cancelling elections, and even appointed a Sunni governor in Najaf. He was later arrested for various crimes. Then the Americans saw they could scarcely hold off a rebellion by the 5 million Sunni, and realized they had no hope of withstanding another rebellion by the 16 million Shia as well. It was only in April–May 2004 that they realized they had to hold elections, as Sistani wanted. The question now is whether Sistani will call for an end to the Occupation after the elections in December. He has refused to meet anybody from the Occupation since the beginning—even the us ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, who as an Afghan by birth is nominally a Muslim.

Yet if the Americans could see that there was no way they could control the 16 million Shia, added to the 5 million Sunni, the Shia clergy must have been able to see it just as clearly, if not considerably more so? The question is: why, instead of telling the Americans their bluff was called and they should get out as fast as they could, did they plunge deeper and deeper into collaboration with the Americans? They may think they’re playing their own game, but there’s no getting round the fact that they’ve acted as the instruments of a foreign occupation waging war against their compatriots. It is difficult to take the excuse of 1920 very seriously—the British were in a position to crush the rising against them, whereas the Americans themselves admitted they had no hope of doing so in 2004.

This wasn’t necessarily obvious to the us or the Shia hierarchy at the time. Remember, the effectiveness of the resistance came as a surprise to Iraqis just as much as the rest of the world. Before the war, many of the Shia were fearful that the Americans might not actually invade, but simply foment a change at the top of the regime, leaving the Shia to face continuing Sunni rule, headed by some pro-American general. They remain fearful of that to this day, afraid they will be outwitted at the last minute, and somehow the Sunni will remain in charge. Their priority has always been to oust the Sunni from power. It’s only this year that they’ve really started contesting control of the Ministry of the Interior, which actually has more troops and police than the Ministry of Defence—there are ferocious battles within the first as to who controls what. The fear was that if they had turned on the Americans much earlier, they would end up with basically a Sunni regime, because the Sunni were so much part of the state. They also felt—and they were quite astute in this—that if they took the Americans at their word, which the Americans didn’t really expect, then they could get elections, which they’d win; that they could ally themselves with the Kurds, and ultimately the Americans would rely on them, and they could get rid of the Americans when they wanted. I don’t think this was necessarily a stupid plan.

An implication is there won’t be any price to pay for pursuing this course. But isn’t it storing up a terrible future for Iraq? The calculations you describe are purely sectarian: the objective is to build Shia power at any cost, if necessary on foreign bayonets and the ruins of Sunni pride. What kind of stability can be expected of a regime constructed along these lines? A leadership that was determined on this course from the start, as you describe it, is hardly in a position to complain of Sunni sectarianism, which came later. Given the overwhelming numerical preponderance of the Shia, it seems clear that the best course was the opposite of the one adopted: to extend a generous hand to the Sunni community from the start, in common resistance to the Occupation. This was what a wing of Shia opinion wanted—to cooperate with compatriots, not the foreigners—only to be quashed by a furtive deal between Sistani and the Americans. The hatreds this kind of collaborationism generates, as we know from Europe, do not pass quickly.

But it was also a question of what kind of a deal was possible with the resistance. Quite early on suicide bombers were directing a lot of their attacks against the Shia, for reasons of pure bigotry. The most militant religious Sunni see the Shia, or indeed Christians, as heretics who are just as dangerous as the Americans. At one point in 2004 the Americans had entered or damaged a mosque in Mosul, and the response of the local jihadi was to blow up two Iraqi Christian churches—one Assyrian and one Armenian—as if this was a perfectly reasonable reaction to American provocation. One has to remember that another peculiarity of the insurgency is it has never been a straight nationalist movement, even if the sympathy on which it can draw has everything to do with nationalism. It has always had a strong religious component.

So would it be your view that the responsibility for the sectarian divisions in Iraq today lies overwhelmingly on the Sunni side, and that the Shia clergy are largely guiltless?

There’s no doubt that elements in the resistance have exacerbated religious differences, and that the Shia clergy have largely prevented retaliation for Salafi attacks. They probably also thought these were a trap, to blow all political developments out of the water by provoking sectarian animosity. Within the Shia community, the traditional religious leadership has been more coherent than the political leadership, which has always been very divided, and has dubious support. Sistani himself—and the Iraqi clergy in general—have always wanted to keep a certain distance from politics, not to take direct control of the government. In this they differ from the Iranian clergy, who decided to run the state themselves.

What then is the relationship between Shia and Iraqi identities? At the height of Saddam’s regime, a quite strong Iraqi identity certainly existed. On the whole, Iraqi troops fought like lions in the misbegotten war with Iran, so the many Shias among them must have had some patriotic idea of Iraq as their country. But is there any longer a widespread Iraqi identity, or have rival religious identities trumped it?

I wouldn’t go quite so far. The Shia fought well against Iran only from 1982, not from 1980. When Saddam was invading Iran, they surrendered in tens of thousands; once the Iranian army started crossing into Iraqi territory, they started to fight. So there were clearly red lines there. Has this national feeling disappeared today? Not really—I think it continues to be there. A typical Shia conception of Iraqi identity doesn’t properly exclude the Sunni, but it mingles Shiite and Iraqi elements in a way that makes the boundaries between loyalties to a single religious community and to the nation very uncertain. If you say to people ‘are you anti-Sunni?’, they will reply ‘absolutely not’. But when they start talking about various Sunni areas, they will say, ‘they’re all Baathists there’. Similarly, when you talk to Sunni, they will say ‘We and the Shia are one people, we’re all Iraqis. But the problem is the Ministry of the Interior, where they’re all Iranians—just like the Badr Brigade’ (the militia of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq). You hear this sort of thing again and again. So there is an Iraqi identity, but it’s shifting and shadowy—at times very important, at times much less important. It’s not a guarantee of comity between the two major Arab communities in Iraq.

What line do the various Shia politicians take on this?

The Shia religious parties that came in, as it were, on the back of American tanks—the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the Dawa Party, but particularly sciri—represented those Shia who didn’t take part in the war against Iran, but were a minority that was actually allied to Iran. When they were put into power, they were able to rewrite Iraqi history to portray the repression of the Shia under Saddam—real enough—as a virtual extermination campaign. For some of their leaders it may have looked like that, because Saddam had murdered their families. Of course, such claims also serve political ends by sharpening sectarian identities. But there is no unanimity among the Shia leaders about the line to be taken today. Jaafari clearly thinks a Shia nationalism exists, to which they can appeal, as if the Shia were almost an independent nationality. Others, like Iyad Allawi, the former prime minister and cia agent, are trying to woo centrist votes, both Shia and Sunni. So even at the most practical level there’s still a division of opinion within Iraq as to exactly how far the two main communities have separate identities, or how far a vestigial Iraqi nationalism still unites them. The outcome is undecided. It could go either way.

How are these confessional divisions reflected in the layout of Baghdad?

The Sunni dominate the south and west of Baghdad, with a dense hinterland of Sunni towns and villages outside the city. The Shia are concentrated in the east and north, on the other side of the Tigris. But there is no rigid segregation; minority enclaves are dotted around here and there, rather like in Belfast. Al-Adhamiyah is a traditional Sunni area in the east, and to the north there are some distant Sunni suburbs, which are important because they can cut the main road. In the centre of the city is Haifa Street, which used to be a notorious hotspot of resistance and probably still is. In parts of the west you have hard, traditional Shia areas like al-Kadhimiyah, site of one of the great Shia shrines. So there is a patchwork. But the sectarian complexion of the city is changing, and the different parts of Baghdad more and more contain a single community. Shia are leaving the southern and western suburbs. People are even exchanging apartments because they consider the area where they live too dangerous for them. Another feature of the situation is that the Sunni don’t necessarily accept that they make up only 20–30 per cent of the population. They often believe that they are the largest community in the country, or even that they form a majority of Iraqis. So whereas in Northern Ireland, people had quite a good sense of what their proportion of the population was in an area—or at least, if they got it wrong, they wouldn’t believe that they were in a majority where in fact they were in quite a small minority—in Iraq there are no accurate figures of any kind, so you meet quite a lot of Sunni who say that they are in the majority in Baghdad and believe it.

The primary objective of the resistance is clear enough—to drive the Americans out of the country. What would happen afterwards hasn’t figured much in any of the declarations of its various wings—they don’t seem to feel they need a plan. But what about the assorted Shia leaderships? Is there any sign among them of a coherent idea of the future of the country? Just before the elections in January, a demand that us troops depart mysteriously disappeared from the programme of the Shia front, presumably on Sistani’s say-so. Do they reckon to sit on foreign bayonets for the foreseeable future?

It was not Sistani who got the parties to drop the demand for a us withdrawal, it was the us embassy. It is a striking feature of the post-invasion governments that they are probably more dependent on the Americans than they need to be. It’s a sign of the extreme weakness of the Arab—as distinct from Kurdish—opponents of Saddam’s regime, that they now find it very difficult to do without the Americans. The feebleness of the government may even exaggerate the effectiveness of the insurgency. It’s pretty extraordinary how weak it is, after two and a half years of massive military support from the us and a huge income stream from oil. As far as the eye can see, there is one gigantic example of corruption after another—not just the pocketing of 15 or 25 per cent commission on every big contract, but the entire military procurement budget vanishing into bank accounts abroad. It’s a common sight to see units of the Iraqi army, crammed into pickups normally used for transporting cabbages or cauliflowers, travelling in convoy with American heavy armour at the front and the rear. They make sitting targets for the resistance. But this is a country which produces oil revenues of $2.2 billion a month.

The heart of the opposition under Saddam was always very Kurdish, and looked Kurdish. At times the Kurds tried to mask this with a lot of Arab representatives, because they wanted to show that there was broad opposition to Saddam; but it was always true that the Kurds were running the show. One of the things that has become very apparent in the last two and a half years is the complete failure of the leaders of the old Arab opposition, when handed power by the Americans, to create a coherent government. Ministers and their henchmen—many of them long-term residents abroad—are continually out of the country. Not only is there stupendous corruption, but often they haven’t even bothered to cover their tracks very much. They assume these are likely to be short-lived governments, so the logic is to make as much money as they can, and then get back home, somewhere outside Iraq. This mentality has made them completely reliant on the Americans. They believe they cannot do without them. Most of these politicians are petrified at the idea of the Americans going.

How far could they rely on their own armed militias, if the Americans went? Given the population balance, would they be in a strong position if they handed out lots of modern weapons to young men in the Shia community?

Well, yes, but they want to have the militia units in the army. Of course, that terrifies the Sunni community and deepens sectarianism. According to the officials in the Iraqi Defence Ministry, of the 115 Iraqi battalions the Americans claim have been created, 60 are essentially Shia, 45 Sunni and 9 Kurdish. The loyalty of these units is unclear. For instance, some of the officers in the First Brigade in west Baghdad say that the way the units are distributed depends largely on what Muqtada al-Sadr says. They take orders from him, not from the Ministry of Defence. The army Chief of Staff is a Kurd, but Kurdish units in the army are loyal to the Kurdish leaders, not to the government in Baghdad.

More broadly, is it possible that behind the scenes much of the Shia leadership is making the following calculation? We have the great bulk of the oil revenues in the South, and a big majority of the population as a whole. We can let the Kurds run the far North. The Sunni are camped in the middle of the country. We can’t hope to dominate this not very wealthy zone. But what we do have is an overwhelming majority—two-thirds or even four-fifths—of the population in Baghdad. We need the capital. Why don’t we just hold what we have in the South and ethnically cleanse Baghdad? If there’s only about a fifth of the population to push out in order to secure the city, it shouldn’t be too difficult?

Well, so far, they’ve behaved quite responsibly. It’s true that Shia death squads are now operating in the city, but a lot more Shia continue to be killed by Sunni than vice versa. Retaliation against the Sunni has been quite limited, on the instructions of the religious hierarchy.

Yes, the Shia aren’t killing the Sunni in great numbers—they are letting the Americans do so. The toll in the Sunni community is, after all, vastly higher than in the Shia. Why take such a responsibility now, if you have high-tech proxies to do it for you?

There is some truth in that, but it’s not mass sectarian killing, which is what could have happened. Sometimes a Sunni farmer will be picked up and found dead, but it doesn’t look like a coherent campaign. The death squads have focused on former Baathists. Some of this is quite open. Police commandos in Baghdad, who are almost all Shia, seize people and leave their corpses in the street. They don’t conceal it. Former pilots of the Iraqi air force are also being targeted, in revenge for once having bombed Iran. How many have actually been killed is unclear—certainly not in the industrial numbers that Sunni believe. Many of them now live under assumed names or flee the country.

If this is still a minor feature of the scene, does that mean you think the Shia leaderships hope to confirm their coalition with the Kurds after new elections, extend a warm hand to the Sunni and tell them they should be grateful for a continued American presence? It doesn’t seem very convincing.

No, but the Shia are growing in strength. They have won elections; they will dominate the next National Assembly. They have got the constitution they want. The next question might be whether Sistani will call for a timetable to end the Occupation over, say, an 18-month period—and if so, how directly. There are various gradations in his communications with the outside world. If he did something like this indirectly through his aides, the issue could be fudged. But if he issued a fatwa directly saying the Occupation must end over a certain period, or calling for peaceful demonstrations against it, that would immediately create a crisis. For at the end of the day, the bulk of the army and the security forces, such as they are, would follow him. The us and Britain know that whatever the Shia politicians say or do now, if a call went out from the Grand Ayatollah after the upcoming elections for an end to the Occupation, then it’s over.

But so long as the Shia leaders, having once thrown in their lot with the occupiers, themselves lack a military force capable of crushing the maquis, aren’t they more or less forced to go on relying on the Americans? They must fear retribution for collaborating so openly with a foreign invasion. From their point of view, it is the Americans who are holding it at bay.

Yes, but the presence of the Americans and British also ensures that the resistance continues. The Kurds were able to destabilize Iraq for half a century after it was created, and they were never in as strong a position as the Sunni because they were not located in the central part of the country and never dominated the state apparatus as the Sunni were to do. The Sunni command the northern and western approaches to Baghdad and they are entrenched, for the moment at least, in the city itself. They are in a much more powerful position. They can certainly prevent Iraq from being stabilized, just as much as the Kurds did. But like the Kurds in the past, that doesn’t mean they can prevail. But it also doesn’t mean they won’t go on fighting. At the moment the resistance comes in two forms: those who are fighting primarily for nationalist reasons, to liberate the country from the Americans, and those who are fighting primarily for religious reasons, who see Iraq as the perfect battleground against the forces of darkness, which includes not only the Americans, but the Shia, the Christian minority and anyone else they dislike. If us troops did start to pull out, the first kind of resistance will no longer have the fuel it needs for its mass support.

Elections, on the other hand, aren’t going to undermine that support, as the us hopes. The Sunni will no doubt go to the polls in December, but it will be much like Sinn Fein and the Provisionals in Northern Ireland—the gun and the ballot box. This is perfectly realistic. The resistance knows that the reason why the us ambassador spent so much time over the summer trying to cultivate Sunni leaders and bring them into the constitutional process, and even at the last minute had the—basically us-drafted—document modified to lessen Sunni anger at it, was that the Americans are frightened of the insurgency. So the Sunni community, like the Catholics in Northern Ireland, relies at some level on the armed resistance for its political weight. Sunni standing in the elections check with all the different elements of the resistance in their area that it’s all right for them to do so, as they obviously want to stay alive. All sorts, including the Zarqawi element, said ‘Go ahead’. The election itself is really just the opening of another front from their point of view. They will fight and talk at the same time.

The Sunni communities have lost their previous high position in the state. They have been battered by American bombers, tanks, marines—punishment from which Shia areas have been exempt. On top of all this, the oil has fallen under the control of either the Kurds or the Shia—the Sunni don’t have a drop. In these conditions, what are the chances of any kind of an Iraqi state being held together? Don’t they point to a break-up of the state along the lines urged by Peter Galbraith, the American adviser to the Kurds, who supervised the disintegration of Yugoslavia as ambassador in Zagreb?

There are a lot of pressures towards the disintegration of Iraq, but there are pressures against it too. It is not a certainty. The Kurds are divided in their own minds as to what is the safest thing to do. Many of them think ‘this is the high tide for us’ and they should take advantage of it. That is why they want written agreements in the constitution about their status. Before the war the us was planning to invade Iraq from the north, after doing a deal with the Turks who were going to send 40,000 troops with them. They were telling the Kurds to shut up and stand to one side. But the Turkish parliament blocked the plan. So the Kurds were in luck. But at some point the Americans may need them less than they do now. The Kurds were small fish and now they’re bigger fish, but they’re still smaller fish than the other fish, or rather sharks, around them: the Turks, the Syrians, the Iranians, a potential Arab regime in Baghdad.

Let us say the Shia set up a super-region in the South, controlling the great bulk of the oil wells, with Iranian backing. Why should they be satisfied this? After all, a majority community like the Iraqi Shia want to take over the whole of the state. But what would a Shia regime do with the Sunni towns and villages in western Iraq? Could they occupy them? That’s what Saddam tried to do with the Kurds. It never worked, and after all he had more going for him than the Shia. So all these possibilities remain shadowy. There’s still lots to fight for. The Kurds now control a larger area than ever before, and they’d like the Americans to stay more than the other two communities would. But if the Americans decided to get out, where would that leave them? Would the Sunni and the Shia Arabs unite against them at some point? So everything remains fundamentally uncertain. There’s no stable balance of power between the three communities. This is a big difference if you compare the situation in Northern Ireland. Past a certain point, everybody in Ulster knew what the balance was between Catholics and Protestants and British, and the role of the Americans—it really wasn’t going to change much, either politically or militarily. In Iraq there’s no certainty like that. The potential strength of each community and the role of assorted foreign backers could change overnight. That’s one reason why the fighting is likely to go on.

What are Kurdish objectives?

The Kurds were always the most potent part of the opposition to Saddam, and today the most effective group of people within the Iraqi state are the Kurds, who part of the time want to set up their own state. Many of them want to do that. This leads to a lot of complications. The Kurds would like to have a proper intelligence service in Baghdad, combating the insurgency. But at times they think that if they set that up, it might become part of a new centralized Iraqi state and be used against them in the future. So they have two incentives pointing in opposite directions and different Kurds take different decisions, some looking to the central government and some not.

The political character of the set-up in Kurdistan is very little discussed in the press. The region is divided into two zones, controlled by rival clans, the Barzani and the Talabani dynasties, each with their own party. Is there any political distinction between their fiefdoms—is one more urban and the other more rural?

In theory the puk, which is the Talabani organization, is meant to be more progressive and less feudal than the kdp, which is the Barzani outfit. In fact both of these mini-states are rather like emirates—you have the government and then the family—but with party structures modelled along Communist lines tacked onto them. Each region has its own dialect, and there are tribal differences between them. The Talabanis are traditionally allied to the Iranians because their territory abuts onto Iran and the Iranians generally backed them in the civil war between the puk and the kdp in the 90s. The Barzanis are fearful of the Turks because their territory goes along the border with Turkey. This area, in the north of Kurdistan, where Saddam destroyed most of the villages and towns, is extremely impoverished. It feels very much like Gaza, with many refugees driven out of other areas of Kurdistan living in jerry-built concrete houses. The puk has traditionally been more powerful around Kirkuk, where the oilfields are located.

So the Talabani clan has the upper hand now—also greater presence in the central government?

I’m not sure how true that is. They look fairly evenly balanced. The foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, is kdp. The deputy prime minister, Barham Saleh, is puk, but they get on well. Of the two leaders, Jalal Talabani wanted to be president of Iraq, in exchange for which he conceded a lot on the ground to Massoud Barzani, who is president of Kurdistan. But despite all this talk of unity, the parties have repeatedly fought each other over the last 35 years, so there are limits to the extent they can cooperate. At the moment they see that it is much in their interest to stick together. But will that always be so?

What about the military forces at the disposal of these Kurdish leaders—are the peshmerga divided in their allegiance to one clan or the other? How far can they be used for out-of-area operations against the resistance, say in al-Anbar province or elsewhere—are they at great risk there, or quite effective?

The peshmerga are pretty effective. When other units of the Iraqi Army were refusing to fight in Fallujah, the Kurds had no compunction about doing so. Nowadays few of them even speak Arabic. Before the Gulf War, Kurds were drafted into the army, where they had to learn a certain amount of Arabic. That’s no longer true, and there isn’t much incentive for them to learn it today, since so many Kurds want to emigrate to English-speaking countries. I remember talking to a number of peshmerga just before the American invasion and on one occasion asking them how many spoke Arabic. Out of a hundred men, it was about three.

So they can operate like Gurkhas in Arab areas, very tough fighters who have almost no contact with the local population? Looking ahead, if the Americans scaled down their operations, would the Kurdish leaders be quite happy to use these battle-hardened forces to crush the Sunni insurgency?

Up to a point, yes. Such operations have been initiated in al-Anbar or in Mosul.

Further south too?

There are Kurdish units in Baghdad, but at a certain point you’d run out of Kurdish troops. The Kurdish leaders don’t want a civil war in which their forces might suffer massive casualties. Moreover, many of the new institutions at the centre, like the Iraqi Constitution, are in good part Kurdish creations. They don’t want to blow everything up.

Historically, how would you compare Iraqi and Turkish treatment of the Kurds? Saddam’s expulsions and massacres in Kurdistan were quantitatively much worse than the Turkish state’s repression of its Kurds. Yet the Iraqi Kurds often had some kind of nominal role in the state, their identity was accepted and their language respected, while in Turkey their very existence was denied, and their language banned. What explains these contrasts?

Militarily, the Iraqi Kurds were always a more potent force, and so more of a threat to Baghdad, than the Turkish Kurds ever were to Ankara. They also had more powerful foreign allies, since they were backed by the Iranians during Iran–Iraq War. That meant Baghdad at times had to make some concessions to the Kurds. During the War, the Iraqi army needed to operate in Kurdistan, so it had to rely on the cooperation of Kurdish tribes allied to the regime, which put limitations on what it could do. Saddam always said he would allow an autonomous Kurdistan, but that was typical of his way of operating—he would make rather liberal agreements, while relying on his secret police to erode any minimal autonomy up there. That was in the quieter spells. Of course, when things got rough, it was different. The ferocity of the regime in Baghdad was always greater than that of the government in Ankara. Saddam’s campaigns of repression are said to have left 300,000 dead. If you gaze across the Kurdish countryside, it looks like the more barren parts

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Some buried bones are best left undug

There are 17,000 Lebanese missing from the civil war. Are we to dig them all up?

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article332135.ece

By Robert Fisk
Published: 10 December 2005

My late friend Juan Carlos Gumucio used to claim that we were "mass graves correspondents". So often were we driving to southern Lebanon to witness the exhumation of yet more murdered Lebanese that it seemed quite an accurate description of our lives. Druze tipped down wells, Maronites with their throats slit in the Chouf and - once- an entire charnel house of skeletons which turned out, after the usual claims of Israeli atrocities, to be the last resting place not of Palestinians but of Philistines; it was Juan Carlos who spotted that the dead wore no wrist watches.

And now - many months since he killed himself in far-away Bolivia - I am reminded of my old mate once more. For we have more mass graves in Lebanon. Or, to be specific, at a small town called Aanjar. And therein lies the problem. For Aanjar is Armenian, and while it proudly hosts the last earthly remains of the heroes of Musa Dagh (hands up all readers who know what happened at Musa Dagh), it was one of the few places in Lebanon to be spared the carnage of the country’s 1975-90 civil war.

"Let’s wait and see," were the comforting words from Nabih Berri, the Shia speaker of the Lebanese parliament, and a friend of Syria. Nor were they unexpected.

Because the 29 corpses that were dug up at Aanjar were discovered close to the former headquarters of the Syrian military security agency. They include four children and a foetus. And Lebanon’s Christian Maronites are now claiming that the dead were murdered by the Syrians. Indeed, up at the Maronite cardinal’s palace at Bkirke, bishops have been demanding an international tribunal to inquire into this "crime against humanity".

All well and good. For who was the official to hold the longest sway in the Aanjar security complex? Why, Brigadier General Ghazi Kenaan, the slim, pugnacious and ruthless secret policeman who killed himself - or was "suicided" - in his Damascus office earlier this year while currently holding the post of minister of interior.

Thus already the dead are dividing the Lebanese along the usual sectarian lines. Since the Christians suspect they are former Lebanese soldiers who fought the Syrian army in 1990 - or that the dead were Christians tortured to death by General Kenaan’s lads - the Maronite community is outraged, while the Muslims of Lebanon are somewhat less upset by the discovery of the mass grave. And as each day brings forth yet more bones from the soft red earth of the Bekaa Valley, I recall an old Serbian friend of mine, a distinguished lady married to a colonel in the Yugoslav army, who remembered how the Croatians dug up their Second World War dead to prove the wickedness of Tito’s Serb partisans.

"They opened the mass graves so they could pour more blood into them," my friend announced. And she was right; within months, the wars of the Yugoslav succession burst across the land, fuelled by all those skeletons pulled from the ravines of Croatia and Bosnia. Was it really such a good idea to dig them up? Can’t there, maybe, be a statute of limitations on these things? Yet even this would not solve the problem in Lebanon - where some of the dead still lie only 15 years in their graves. And where some graves are probably best left undug. For by a grim irony, one of them lies next to a church only a few hundred metres from the palace where those bishops were this week demanding their international tribunal.

Its location is known to the killers and it contains up to 300 Palestinians who were originally spared the massacre of the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps in Beirut in mid-September 1982. Israel’s Phalangist militia allies had been sent into the camps by Israel to fight "terrorists" - Ariel Sharon was held personally responsible for this in the official Israeli court of enquiry in 1983 - but what is less well known is that many of the Palestinians murdered that month escaped the original massacre. They were interrogated by Israeli officers on 18 September 1982 - and then handed back to the militia murderers.

After fruitless days trying to swap these prisoners for Christians kidnapped by Lebanese Muslims and Palestinians, a decision was taken to kill them all. Those held close to Bkirke were machine-gunned into their graves after being held in stifling containers. One of their killers identified the location - it now stands inside a Lebanese army barracks - in 2001. But who would want to dig up these corpses? To what purpose? To give their remains (always assuming they could be identified) back to their loved ones, always supposing the latter survived the original massacre? Or to pour more blood into the graves?

After all, there are 17,000 Lebanese missing from the civil war. Are we to dig them all up? Or just those whose enemies or murderers happen to be on our current list of pet hates - Syria being pretty much at the top of America’s list at the moment - when a demonstration of Syrian bestiality would go down well with the State Department? And who can forget that on 15 December, the UN’s top prosecutor, Detlev Mehlis, is to present his final report on those responsible for murdering ex-prime minister Rafiq Hariri and 21 others on 14 February this year? For that document - with its far-reaching implications for the Syrian regime - is likely to exceed in importance even the Iraqi elections planned for the same day.

So while we await Mr Mehlis’ findings on the death of a man whose mortal remains lie beside those of his bodyguards only a few hundred metres from the place of his assassination, we are all, in Lebanon, sniffing the putrid odours of a larger cemetery. Maybe Juan Carlos was right. Maybe we, all of us, are mass graves correspondents, fearful of forgetting the dead, even more frightened of digging them up.

© 2005 Independent News and Media Limited

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Latest Update: #33791 09.12.05 17:13:06
Latest Coalition Fatality: Dec 10, 2005
Military Fatalities US, UK, Other: : Total: 2343 , US: 2142 , Dez.05: 29

Iraker 12/09/05: Civilian: 111 Police/Mil: 79 Total: 190
http://www.icasualties.org/oif/IraqiDeaths.aspx

Regelmäßige Updates von Meldungen aus dem Irak:
http://icasualties.org/oif/

Da bei ´Today im Irak´ die Postings immer länger werden, hier den Link für alle Interessierte: http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

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December 10, 2005
We`ll Miss Saddam
http://www.antiwar.com/reese/?articleid=8235

by Charley Reese

When they finally hang Saddam Hussein, we`ll probably miss him. He has, after all, been an obsession of American politicians since 1991. Since the Washington media obsess over whatever the politicians obsess over, Saddam`s face has adorned our television screens for 14 years. He bears a strong resemblance, by the way, to the late actor Walter Matthau.

Saddam, without a doubt, has gotten more air time and more ink than any dictator in the post-World War II world. Never before has so much attention been lavished on a man who, on the world stage, has always been so insignificant.

Iraq, being a relatively small country, with a population of about 25 million people divided into three quarreling groups, never in its history posed a threat to the world. The demonization of Saddam has always been political bull. The only country Iraq ever conquered was Kuwait, which is a postage stamp of a country.

The Kuwaiti leadership fled in their Mercedes, Rolls-Royces and Cadillacs at the sound of the first shot. I`ve never forgotten an anonymous quote in a Wall Street Journal story. The reporter had asked someone, apparently a Kuwaiti leader, why he was not fighting for his country. "That is what we have our American slaves for," he is quoted as saying.

The Iraqis fought Iran, much to the glee and with the assistance of the United States, but they lost. And Iraq was never a significant factor in any of the Israeli-Arab wars, all of which Israel won. So Saddam`s record was only 1-1, assuming you want to call the invasion of Kuwait a victory. It started in the morning and was over by the afternoon.

The fact that Iraq developed and used chemical weapons in its war with Iran is not significant at all. Those weapons were developed in World War I and were used by both the Allies and the Germans. Iran also used them in the 1980s war. It should be noted, as further proof of the basic dishonesty of the American government, that when the chemical attack so often cited by the Bush administration as proof of Saddam`s evil actually occurred, an official U.S. government investigation blamed it on the Iranians.

Now Saddam is entertaining us again with his phony trial. "Hey, you with the glasses," he shouted recently, referring to the judge. He asserts that the trial is illegal because our invasion was illegal, and therefore, from a legal standpoint, he is still the president of Iraq. What`s funny is that he`s right – not that that will save him.

But it really is true that our invasion of Iraq was illegal. Iraq was not at war with us, was not preparing to go to war with us and was not a threat to us. Furthermore, Iraq had complied with United Nations resolutions and gotten rid of its weapons of mass destruction, despite the torrent of lies to the contrary that the Bush administration unleashed.

We committed what international law forbids – a war of aggression. And it is true that American invaders are, in effect, trying Saddam. The law and the courts were set up during the occupational government, and the judges were trained by Americans. Saddam was arrested by Americans and is being held in prison by Americans. It will go down in history as an American-sponsored kangaroo court.

Nobody should misconstrue any of this as a claim that Saddam is not a killer and a thug. He most certainly is. He was known as the Butcher of Baghdad even in the days when the United States government supported him. The U.S. government has supported a lot of killers and thugs, and if it continues its imperialistic foreign policy, it will keep on doing so because our foreign policy completely lacks any morality.

The irony is that a two-bit dictator in a six-bit country has provided American politicians with the opportunity to forever soil America`s reputation. We are now considered by most of the world as a rogue nation. Thus Saddam, as he steps up to the gallows, can take perverse pleasure in the fact that he was the cause, though inadvertently, of great and lasting damage to the United States.



Find this article at:
http://www.antiwar.com/reese/?articleid=8235

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A photograph of Santa Claus after he heard the White House sent out Holiday cards instead of Christmas cards.

(Photo by Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson)

Verwechslungen mit von Weihnachtseinkäufen heimkehrenden Usern sind nicht beabsichtigt aber erwünscht.
Einen frohen 3.Advent!

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December 11, 2005
Propaganda
Military`s Information War Is Vast and Often Secretive
By JEFF GERTH
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/politics/11propaganda.html…

The media center in Fayetteville, N.C., would be the envy of any global communications company.

In state of the art studios, producers prepare the daily mix of music and news for the group`s radio stations or spots for friendly television outlets. Writers putting out newspapers and magazines in Baghdad and Kabul converse via teleconferences. Mobile trailers with high-tech gear are parked outside, ready for the next crisis.

The center is not part of a news organization, but a military operation, and those writers and producers are soldiers. The 1,200-strong psychological operations unit based at Fort Bragg turns out what its officers call "truthful messages" to support the United States government`s objectives, though its commander acknowledges that those stories are one-sided and their American sponsorship is hidden.

"We call our stuff information and the enemy`s propaganda," said Col. Jack N. Summe, then the commander of the Fourth Psychological Operations Group, during a tour in June. Even in the Pentagon, "some public affairs professionals see us unfavorably," and inaccurately, he said, as "lying, dirty tricksters."

The recent disclosures that a Pentagon contractor in Iraq paid newspapers to print "good news" articles written by American soldiers prompted an outcry in Washington, where members of Congress said the practice undermined American credibility and top military and White House officials disavowed any knowledge of it. President Bush was described by Stephen J. Hadley, his national security adviser, as "very troubled" about the matter. The Pentagon is investigating.

But the work of the contractor, the Lincoln Group, was not a rogue operation. Hoping to counter anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world, the Bush administration has been conducting an information war that is extensive, costly and often hidden, according to documents and interviews with contractors, government officials and military personnel.

The campaign was begun by the White House, which set up a secret panel soon after the Sept. 11 attacks to coordinate information operations by the Pentagon, other government agencies and private contractors.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, the focus of most of the activities, the military operates radio stations and newspapers, but does not disclose their American ties. Those outlets produce news material that is at times attributed to the "International Information Center," an untraceable organization.

Lincoln says it planted more than 1,000 articles in the Iraqi and Arab press and placed editorials on an Iraqi Web site, Pentagon documents show. For an expanded stealth persuasion effort into neighboring countries, Lincoln presented plans, since rejected, for an underground newspaper, television news shows and an anti-terrorist comedy based on "The Three Stooges."

Like the Lincoln Group, Army psychological operations units sometimes pay to deliver their message, offering television stations money to run unattributed segments or contracting with writers of newspaper opinion pieces, military officials said.

"We don`t want somebody to look at the product and see the U.S. government and tune out," said Col. James Treadwell, who ran psychological operations support at the Special Operations Command in Tampa.

The United States Agency for International Development also masks its role at times. AID finances about 30 radio stations in Afghanistan, but keeps that from listeners. The agency has distributed tens of thousands of iPod-like audio devices in Iraq and Afghanistan that play prepackaged civic messages, but it does so through a contractor that promises "there is no U.S. footprint."

As the Bush administration tries to build democracies overseas and support a free press, getting out its message is critical. But that is enormously difficult, given widespread hostility in the Muslim world over the war in Iraq, deep suspicion of American ambitions and the influence of antagonistic voices. The American message makers who are wary of identifying their role can cite findings by the Pentagon, pollsters and others underscoring the United States` fundamental problems of credibility abroad.

Defenders of influence campaigns argue that they are appropriate and can have impact. "Psychological operations are an essential part of warfare, more so in the electronic age than ever," said Lt. Col. Charles A. Krohn, a retired Army spokesman and journalism professor. "If you`re going to invade a country and eject its government and occupy its territory, you ought to tell people who live there why you`ve done it. That requires a well-thought-out communications program."

But covert information battles may backfire, others warn, or prove ineffective. An Iraqi daily newspaper, Azzaman, complained in an editorial that the paid propaganda campaign was an American government effort "to humiliate the independent national press." And the upbeat stories distributed by the Lincoln Group about improved security, for example, were unlikely to convince Iraqis enduring hardships.

While the United States does not ban the distribution of government propaganda overseas, as it does domestically, the Government Accountability Office said in a recent report that lack of attribution could undermine the credibility of news videos. In finding that video news releases by the Bush administration that appeared on American television were improper, the G.A.O. said that such articles "are no longer purely factual" because "the essential fact of attribution is missing."

In an article titled "War of the Words," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld wrote about the importance of disclosure in America`s communications in The Wall Street Journal in July.

"The American system of openness works," he wrote. The United States must find "new and better ways to communicate America`s mission abroad," including "a healthy culture of communication and transparency between government and public."

Trying to Make a Case

After the Sept. 11 attacks forced many Americans to recognize the nation`s precarious standing in the Arab world, the Bush administration decided to act to improve the country`s image and promote its values.

"We`ve got to do a better job of making our case," President Bush told reporters after the attacks.

Much of the government`s information machinery, including the United States Information Agency and some C.I.A. programs, was dismantled after the cold war. In that struggle with the Soviet Union, the information warriors benefited from the perception that the United States was backing victims of tyrannical rule. Many Muslims today view Washington as too close to what they characterize as authoritarian regimes in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and elsewhere.

The White House turned to John Rendon, who runs a Washington communications company, to help influence foreign audiences. Before the war in Afghanistan, he helped set up centers in Washington, London and Pakistan so the American government could respond rapidly in the foreign media to Taliban claims. "We were clueless," said Mary Matalin, then the communications aide to Vice President Dick Cheney.

Mr. Rendon`s business, the Rendon Group, had a history of government work in trouble spots, In the 1990`s, the C.I.A. hired him to secretly help the nascent Iraqi National Congress wage a public relations campaign against Saddam Hussein.

While advising the White House, Mr. Rendon also signed on with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, under a $27.6 million contract, to conduct focus groups around the world and media analysis of outlets like Al Jazeera, the satellite network based in Qatar.

About the same time, the White House recruited Jeffrey B. Jones, a former Army colonel who ran the Fort Bragg psychological operations group, to coordinate the new information war. He led a secret committee, the existence of which has not been previously reported, that dealt with everything from public diplomacy, which includes education, aid and exchange programs, to covert information operations.

The group even examined the president`s language. Concerned about alienating Muslims overseas, panel members said, they tried unsuccessfully to stop Mr. Bush from ending speeches with the refrain "God bless America."

The panel, later named the Counter Terrorism Information Strategy Policy Coordinating Committee, included members from the State Department, the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies. Mr. Rendon advised a subgroup on counterpropaganda issues.

Mr. Jones`s endeavor stalled within months, though, because of furor over a Pentagon initiative. In February 2002, unnamed officials told The New York Times that a new Pentagon operation called the Office of Strategic Influence planned "to provide news items, possibly even false ones, to foreign news organizations." Though the report was denied and a subsequent Pentagon review found no evidence of plans to use disinformation, Mr. Rumsfeld shut down the office within days.

The incident weakened Mr. Jones`s effort to develop a sweeping strategy to win over the Muslim world. The White House grew skittish, some agencies dropped out, and panel members soon were distracted by the war in Iraq, said Mr. Jones, who left his post this year. The White House did not respond to a request to discuss the committee`s work.

What had begun as an ambitious effort to bolster America`s image largely devolved into a secret propaganda war to counter the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Pentagon, which had money to spend and leaders committed to the cause, took the lead. In late 2002 Mr. Rumsfeld told reporters he gave the press a "corpse" by closing the Office of Strategic Influence, but he intended to "keep doing every single thing that needs to be done."

The Pentagon increased spending on its psychological and influence operations and for the first time outsourced work to contractors. One beneficiary has been the Rendon Group, which won additional multimillion-dollar Pentagon contracts for media analysis and a media operations center in Baghdad, including "damage control planning." The new Lincoln Group was another winner.

Pentagon Contracts

It is something of a mystery how the company came to land more than $25 million in Pentagon contracts in a war zone.

The two men who ran the small business had no background in public relations or the media, according to associates and a résumé. Before coming to Washington and setting up Lincoln in 2004, Christian Bailey, born in Britain and now 30, had worked briefly in California and New York. Paige Craig, now 31, was a former Marine intelligence officer.

When the company was incorporated last year, using the name Iraqex, its stated purpose was to provide support services for business development, trade and investment in Iraq. The company`s earliest ventures there included providing security to the military and renovating buildings. Iraqex also started a short-lived online business publication.

In mid-2004, the company formed a partnership with the Rendon Group and later won a $5 million Pentagon contract for an advertising and public relations campaign to "accurately inform the Iraqi people of the Coalition`s goals and gain their support." Soon, the company changed its name to Lincoln Group. It is not clear how the partnership with Rendon was formed; Rendon dropped out weeks after the contract was awarded.

Within a few months, Lincoln shifted to information operations and psychological operations, two former employees said. The company was awarded three new Pentagon contracts, worth tens of millions of dollars, they added. A Lincoln spokeswoman referred a reporter`s inquiry about its military contracts to Pentagon officials.

The company`s work was part of an effort to counter disinformation in the Iraqi press. With nearly $100 million in United States aid, the Iraqi media has sharply expanded since the fall of Mr. Hussein. About 200 Iraq-owned newspapers and 15 to 17 Iraq-owned television stations operate in the country. Many, though, are affiliated with political parties, and are fiercely partisan, with fixed pro- or anti-American stances, and some publish rumors, half-truths and outright lies.

From quarters at Camp Victory, the American base, the Lincoln Group works to get out the military`s message.

Lincoln`s employees work virtually side by side with soldiers. Army officers supervise Lincoln`s work and demand to see details of article placements and costs, said one of the former employees, speaking on condition of anonymity because Lincoln`s Pentagon contract prohibits workers from discussing their activities.

"Almost nothing we did did not have the command`s approval," he said.

The employees would take news dispatches, called storyboards, written by the troops, translate them into Arabic and distribute them to newspapers. Lincoln hired former Arab journalists and paid advertising agencies to place the material.

Typically, Lincoln paid newspapers from $40 to $2,000 to run the articles as news articles or advertisements, documents provided to The New York Times by a former employee show. More than 1,000 articles appeared in 12 to 15 Iraqi and Arab newspapers, according to Pentagon documents. The publications did not disclose that the articles were generated by the military.

A company worker also often visited the Baghdad convention center, where the Iraqi press corps hung out, to recruit journalists who would write and place opinion pieces, paying them $400 to $500 as a monthly stipend, the employees said.

Like the dispatches produced at Fort Bragg, those storyboards were one-sided and upbeat. Each had a target audience, "Iraq General" or "Shi`ia," for example; an underlying theme like "Anti-intimidation" or "Success and Legitimacy of the ISF," or Iraqi Security Forces; and a target newspaper.

Articles written by the soldiers at Camp Victory often assumed the voice of Iraqis. "We, all Iraqis, are the government. It is our country," noted one article. Another said, "The time has come for the ordinary Iraqi, you, me, our neighbors, family and friends to come together."

While some were plodding accounts filled with military jargon and bureaucratese, others favored the language of tabloids: "blood-thirsty apostates," "crawled on their bellies like dogs in the mud," "dim-witted fanatics," and "terror kingpin."

A former Lincoln employee said the ploy of making the articles appear to be written by Iraqis by removing any American fingerprints was not very effective. "Many Iraqis know it`s from Americans," he said.

The military has sought to expand its media influence efforts beyond Iraq to neighboring states, like Saudi Arabia, Syria and Jordan, Pentagon documents say. Lincoln submitted a plan that was subsequently rejected, a Pentagon spokesman said. The company proposed placing editorials in magazines, newspapers and Web sites. In Iraq, the company posted editorials on a Web site, but military commanders stopped the operation for fear that the site`s global accessibility might violate the federal ban on distributing propaganda to American audiences, according to Pentagon documents and a former Lincoln employee.

In its rejected plan, the company offered some creative concepts adapted from American culture, including comedies modeled after "Cheers" and the Three Stooges. Documents show Lincoln also proposed a version of The Onion, the satirical newspaper.

The Pentagon`s media effort in Afghanistan began soon after the ouster of the Taliban. In what had been a barren media environment, 350 magazines and newspapers and 68 television and radio stations now operate. Most are independent; the rest are run by the government. The United States has provided money to support the media, as well as training for journalists and government spokesmen.

But much of the American role remains hidden from local readers and audiences.

The Pentagon, for example, took over the Taliban`s radio station, renamed it Peace radio and began powerful shortwave broadcasts in local dialects, defense officials said. Its programs include music as well as 9 daily news scripts and 16 daily public service messages, according to Col. James Yonts, a United States military spokesman in Afghanistan. Its news accounts, which sometimes are attributed to the International Information Center, often put a positive spin on events or serve government needs.

The United States Army publishes a sister paper in Afghanistan, also called Peace. An examination of issues from last spring found no bad news.

"We have no requirements to adhere to journalistic principles of objectivity," Colonel Summe, the Army psychological operations specialist, said. "We tell the U.S. side of the story to approved targeted audiences" using truthful information. Neither the radio station nor the paper discloses its ties to the American military.

Similarly, AID does not locally disclose that dozens of Afghanistan radio stations get its support, through grants to a London-based nonprofit group, Internews. (AID discloses its support in public documents in Washington, most of which can be found globally on the Internet.)

The AID representative in Afghanistan, in an e-mail message relayed by Peggy O`Ban, an agency spokeswoman, explained the nondisclosure: "We want to maintain the perception (if not the reality) that these radio stations are in fact fully independent."

Recipients are required to adhere to standards. If a news organization produced "a daily drumbeat of criticism of the American military, it would become an issue," said James Kunder, an AID assistant administrator, He added that in combat zones, the issue of disclosure was a balancing act between security and assuring credibility.

The American role is also not revealed by another recipient of AID grants, Voice for Humanity, a nonprofit organization in Lexington, Ky. It supplied tens of thousands of audio devices in Iraq and Afghanistan with messages intended to encourage people to vote. Rick Ifland, the group`s director, said the messages were locally produced, culturally appropriate and part of the "positive developments in democracy, freedom and human rights in the Middle East."

It is not clear how effective the messages were or what recipients did with iPod-like devices, pink for women and silver for men, that could not be altered to play music or other recordings. Mr. Ifland said they were designed that way so "only a consistent, secure official message can be disseminated."

To show off the new media in Afghanistan, AID officials invited Ms. Matalin, the former Cheney aide and conservative commentator, and the talk show host Rush Limbaugh to visit in February. They visited a journalism school. Mr. Limbaugh told his listeners, the students asked him "some of the best questions about journalism and about America that I`ve ever been asked."

One of the first queries, Mr. Limbaugh said, was "How do you balance justice and truth and objectivity?"

His reply: report the truth, don`t hide any opinions or "interest in the outcome of events." Tell "people who you are," he said, and "they`ll respect your credibility."

Carlotta Gall and Ruhullah Khapalwak contributed reporting from Afghanistan for this article.

* Copyright 2005The New York Times Company

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Tortillapower in den USA
von Jean-François Boyer
http://www.monde-diplomatique.de/pm/2005/12/09/a0031.text.na…

Nach jüngsten Schätzungen leben in den USA 41 Millionen Menschen lateinamerikanischer Herkunft. Spanisch ist zweite Landessprache, die Latino-Supermarktketten machen Millionen Umsätze, und viele Immigranten sehen sich als die wahren Helden des amerikanischen Traums.

Im Salinas Valley, zwischen ockerfarbenen Bergen, wächst einfach alles: Gemüse, Obst, Wein. Kalifornien ist eine der ertragreichsten Agrarregionen der Welt. Möglich wird der Anbau durch ein ausgeklügeltes Bewässerungssystem mit kilometerlangen Kanälen. Auf den Feldern sieht man Landarbeiter, die auf Knien die Ernte einholen. Die Aufseher sind Mexikaner wie sie. Es gibt allerdings Verständigungsprobleme. Denn die meisten Arbeiter - Indios vom Stamm der Triqui und Mixteken aus dem mexikanischen Bundesstaat Oaxaca - sprechen kein Spanisch. In Südkalifornien verdienen sie ungefähr sieben Dollar pro Stunde, zehnmal so viel wie zu Hause.

"Da unten gibt es nichts, wovon wir leben können", erzählt Ramiro, ein zwanzigjähriger Indio. Auf seinem Jogginganzug prangt das Logo der Forty Niners, der American-Football-Mannschaft von San Francisco. "Entweder bleibst du bei deiner Familie im Pueblo, dann kannst du zugucken, wie deine Kinder verhungern - oder du kommst hierher und verdienst genug Geld, um so viel nach Hause schicken zu können, dass es zum Überleben reicht." Am Feldrand stehen gut erhaltene Gebrauchtwagen, die Statussymbole ihres neuen Lebens. In der Pause - sie dauert eine halbe Stunde, nicht mehr - ziehen sie ihr Handy aus der Tasche und rufen ihre Freunde an.

In gebrochenem Spanisch oder mit Hilfe eines Dolmetschers beklagen sie sich über die contratistas. Diese Vermittler, selbst Latinos(1), die im Auftrag der amerikanischen Großfarmen Arbeitskräfte anwerben, stecken zwischen fünfzehn und zwanzig Prozent des Landarbeiterlohns ein. Dennoch treten die Triqui und Mixteken nicht der Gewerkschaft bei, die für sie deutlich bessere Arbeitsbedingungen, höhere Löhne und sogar eine Krankenversicherung aushandeln könnte. José Manuel Morán, Mitglied der traditionsreichen Landarbeitergewerkschaft United Farm Workers, beklagt sich: "Alles, was diese Leute wollen, ist ein Job, ein Auto, genug zu essen und genügend Geld, um ihre Familien zu Hause unterstützen zu können. Sie hausen zu acht oder zu zehnt in einem Häuschen mit drei Zimmern, oder sie zahlen manchmal die Hälfte ihres Lohns, um mit ihrer Ehefrau allein in einem einzigen Zimmer leben zu können." Neunzig Prozent der Arbeitskräfte in der rasant expandierenden Landwirtschaft Kaliforniens sind illegale Einwanderer aus Mexiko oder Mittelamerika.

Seit Ende der Neunzigerjahre sind tausende von Mexikanern, darunter 4 000 Indios, in das Nest bei Greenfields gekommen. Don Andrés Cruz ist der Chef der kleinen Latino-Gemeinde. "Wenn sie uns eine Chance geben", meint er, "dann können wir gute Amerikaner werden!" José Manuel Morán geht noch einen Schritt weiter. Greenfields sei ein Paradebeispiel dafür, dass die Mexikaner sehr wohl imstande sind, sich anzupassen. Die Stadt hat heute viermal so viele Einwohner wie vor dreißig Jahren. 95 Prozent sind Mexikaner, auch der Bürgermeister, die Stadträte und die Verantwortlichen für das Schulwesen. Jeder Zweite ist amerikanischer Staatsbürger oder stolzer Besitzer einer Green Card. Natürlich sprechen sie zu Hause immer noch Spanisch. Aber sie alle können sich auch auf Englisch verständlich machen, die Kinder, die in Kalifornien geboren sind, sowieso. Im Gegensatz zu anderen Staaten wie Texas gibt es in Kalifornien keine zweisprachigen Schulen mehr. Englisch ist die einzige Unterrichtssprache.

"Die meisten Neuankömmlinge werden hier bleiben und sich einleben", prophezeit Morán. "Alle haben sie dasselbe gesagt, als sie hier ankamen: Ich bleibe drei, vier Jahre, spare, und dann geht`s nach Hause zurück, einen kleinen Laden aufmachen." Die Zeit vergeht, der Sparstrumpf wird nur langsam voller: Wer hier einigermaßen gut verdient, gibt auch viel Geld aus, zumal wenn er ein Haus kauft. Selbst Illegale bekommen in den USA einen Kredit, wenn sie regelmäßige Einkünfte nachweisen können. "Dann wird geheiratet, man bekommt Kinder. Amerikanische Kinder! Tja, und dreißig Jahre später ist man immer noch hier."

Einige Häuserblocks von den Wolkenkratzern im Zentrum von Los Angeles entfernt wirbt die Pupuseria für ihre mit Bohnen gefüllten Tortillas. In östlicher Richtung reihen sich hunderte solcher Reklameschilder kleiner Restaurants aneinander: Tiendas Mariposa, El Palacio centroamericano, Llantas nuevas Zamora, Ropa para la Familia. Dreißig Kilometer lang dasselbe Bild, bis zur Grenze von East Los Angeles. Mittendrin, vor einem monumentalen Wandgemälde mit Stars and Stripes und den Flaggen aller südamerikanischen Länder, steht auf der Plaza Olivera ein Altar für die Jungfrau von Guadelupe, die Nationalheilige Mexikos. Hier erbitten die Illegalen göttlichen Beistand.

Arbeitgeber können Arbeitskräfte für ein paar Stunden oder einen Tag anheuern. Dafür muss man keine Papiere haben. Bekommt man einen festen Job, braucht man eine Sozialversicherungsnummer und einen amerikanischen Pass. Als Neuankömmling findet man jedoch sehr schnell heraus, dass die patrones auch gefälschte Sozialversicherungsausweise und Führerscheine akzeptieren, die man für 70 Dollar das Stück auf jedem Flohmarkt im Süden der USA kaufen kann. Mit solchen Dokumenten ausgestattet, findet der Latino-Arbeiter einen Job als Gärtner, Tellerwäscher oder Reinigungskraft. 53 Prozent der Mexikaner, die in den USA leben, haben keine legalen Dokumente.

Carlos, der im Alter von fünf Jahren hierher kam und sich elf Jahre lang ohne Papiere durchgeschlagen hat, ist heute amerikanischer Staatsbürger. Dies hat er dem Verfahren zur Familienzusammenführung zu verdanken, das sein legal in Kalifornien lebender Onkel in die Wege geleitet hat. "Ich bin noch nicht am Ziel", erklärt er. "Ich will ein eigenes Haus und wirtschaftliche Sicherheit für meine drei Kinder und meine Frau. Aber ich bleibe natürlich in den USA." Um Geld zurücklegen zu können, arbeitet der junge Mann neben seinem festen Job als Röntgentechniker abends noch als Parkboy für ein Restaurant.

Jeder zweite Bewohner von Los Angeles County ist Latino: 4,5 Millionen Menschen. Die meisten leben in East L.A. Aber der Eindruck kleinbürgerlicher Idylle täuscht. Viele Familien müssen mit einem Jahreseinkommen von weniger als 20 000 Dollar auskommen. Das reicht kaum für den Lebensunterhalt.(2)

Auch José Huizar kann eine Erfolgsgeschichte erzählen. Der heute 37-jährige Politiker kam ebenfalls im Alter von fünf Jahren aus dem mexikanischen Bundesstaat Zacatecas. Nach dem Schulabschluss bekam er ein Stipendium für die Princeton University. Heute ist er Kuratoriumsmitglied der Universität, engagiert sich in der demokratischen Partei und kämpft als Leiter der Schulbehörde seit Jahren für gleiche Bildungschancen der Latinos im Großraum Los Angeles. Zurzeit kandidiert er für den Stadtrat von Los Angeles.

Obwohl José Huizar zur ersten Einwanderergeneration gehört und im Herzen der mexikanischen Bastion aufgewachsen ist, hat er Mühe mit dem Spanischen. Der mexikanischen Kultur fühlt er sich nur noch vage verbunden: "Das betrifft eher das Verhalten, die Kleidung, die Musik, die man hört, die Küche, die man bevorzugt." Für assimiliert hält er sich noch nicht. Auf die Frage nach dem Titel des letzten Romans, den er auf Spanisch gelesen hat, lächelt er und antwortet: "Sie haben Recht, ich bin das, was man einen pocho nennt." Mit diesem Begriff wird im mexikanischen Dialekt ein Einwanderer bezeichnet, der im Begriff ist, seine Muttersprache zu verlieren und sich der amerikanischen Kultur anzugleichen. "Ich bin stolz darauf, Mexikaner zu sein", sagt er dennoch. "Aber ich bin den USA auch sehr dankbar für das, was sie mir gegeben haben: eine gute Ausbildung und Arbeit."

Die Vereinigten Staaten sind das Land, in dem nach Mexiko die meisten spanischsprachigen Menschen leben, noch vor Spanien und Kolumbien. Die Nachrichten und die Abendprogramme des Lokalfernsehsenders Univisión, des größten spanischsprachigen Fernsehsenders in den USA, haben häufig mehr Zuschauer als ABC, CBS oder NBC in Miami, New York oder Los Angeles. La Opinión in Los Angeles, La Voz in Houston, Rumbo in Texas, La Raza in Chicago präsentieren ihren Lesern jeden Tag eine neue success story: eine Familie aus Michoacán hat ihren eigenen Weinbaubetrieb gegründet, nachdem sie 30 Jahre lang in den Weinbergen von Napa Valley die Trauben geerntet hatte. Oder ein 29-Jähriger, der in Tijuana geboren ist, bringt seine eigene T-Shirt-Kollektion heraus.

Vicente del Rio serviert gerne Tequila auf der Terrasse seines Restaurants am Beverly Drive, einem Yuppie-Treffpunkt. In den letzten Jahren sind immer mehr Mexikaner aus der Mittelschicht in die USA eingewandert. Nach einer Untersuchung des Pew Hispanic Center würden zwei von fünf Mexikanern gern in den USA leben, auch ohne Papiere. Die Absicht, ihr Heimatland zu verlassen, "ist nicht mehr auf die armen Mexikaner beschränkt. Der Wunsch wird zunehmend in der Mittelschicht und selbst unter Akademikern laut", bestätigt der Direktor des Pew Hispanic Center, Roberto Suro.(3)

Mehr HipHop als Salsa
Inzwischen kann man von Chicago bis San Antonio die Entstehung einer Hybridkultur beobachten: Die Hispanojugend aus den Armenvierteln tanzt nicht mehr zu den traditionellen Salsa- und Cumbiarhythmen, sondern begeistert sich für eine Musik made in USA, den Reggaeton, eine Mischung aus Reggae, HipHop, Rap und Latino-Sound. Und so mancher arrivierte mexikanisch-amerikanische Einwanderer der dritten Generation spricht zwar kaum Spanisch, schwärmt aber trotzdem für das Chicano-Theater.

Von wenigen Ausnahmen abgesehen besteht das Programm, das die großen spanischsprachigen Sender anbieten, aus Werbung, primitiven Talkshows und tendenziösen Nachrichtensendungen. Mit einer Ausnahme: Radio bilingue bietet fast überall im Land anspruchsvolle Programme in Englisch, Spanisch und einigen Indianerdialekten und tut alles, um die Kultur der Hispanos davor zu bewahren, sich völlig im kommerziellen melting pot aufzulösen.

Politisch hat Amerika für die Repräsentanten der zweitgrößten Volksgruppe bislang nicht viel getan. Auch wenn zwei der wichtigsten Minister von George W. Bush, Justizstaatssekretär Alberto González und Handelsstaatssekretär Carlos Gutierrez, Latinos sind. Im Kongress sitzen 25 Abgeordnete und Senatoren lateinamerikanischer Herkunft - Mexikaner, Kubaner und Puerto-Ricaner -, und mehr als zwanzig Latino-Bürgermeister regieren in Städten mit über 100 000 Einwohnern in Kalifornien, Texas, Florida und Connecticut. Als im Mai dieses Jahres der für die Demokraten angetretene Antonio Villaraigosa den amtierenden Bürgermeister von Los Angeles, James Hahn, deutlich schlug, war das für viele Amerikaner ein Schock.

"La Red Latina", das Latinonetz, wird von Politikern und hohen Beamte lateinamerikanischer Herkunft unterstützt und kann außerdem auf Verbände wie die League of United Latin American Citizen (Lulac), den Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (Maldef) oder den Consejo de la Raza bauen. All diese Organisationen setzen sich für die Integration der Einwanderer ein und unterstützen im Kongress Gesetzentwürfe, die die Situation der Illegalen regeln, sowie Sozialprogramme zugunsten von Migranten. Sie engagieren sich auch für eine bessere Schulbildung von Einwandererkindern. Vor allem aber vergeben sie Millionen Dollar an Stipendiengeldern, damit die Kinder von Zuwanderern studieren können. Politisch steht das Latinonetz der Demokratischen Partei nahe. Führende demokratische Politiker haben eine wichtige Rolle beim Aufbau des Netzes gespielt. Dazu gehören Henry Cisneros, der ehemalige Bürgermeister von San Antonio und Wohnungsbauminister unter Präsident Clinton, Bill Richardson, Gouverneur von Neumexiko, und Robert Menéndez, der demokratische Abgeordnete von New Jersey. Sie haben zum Beispiel auch die Wahlkampagne von Antonio Villaraigosa in Los Angeles und die von Senator Ken Salazar in Colorado finanziert.

In einem zweiten, weniger einflussreichen Netz, dem "Red Mexicana", haben sich von Chicago bis San Antonio eingebürgerte Mexikaner und Einwanderer aus derselben Gegend in Clubes de oriundos zusammengeschlossen. Besonders aktiv sind die Clubs, deren Mitglieder aus den mexikanischen Bundesstaaten Zacatecas, Michoacán und Guanajuato kommen. Sie finanzieren Sozialprojekte, den Bau von Schulen oder Sportzentren in ihren Heimatgemeinden in Mexiko.

Die Latinos wollen Eins-a-Amerikaner sein
Um Geld zu sammeln, organisiert die "Red mexicana" Bälle oder Bankette, auf denen Mariachi-Orchester oder Norteña-Musikbands auftreten. Man pflegt enge Beziehungen zu den mexikanischen Konsulaten und zum Institut der Auslandsmexikaner, das vom mexikanischen Präsidenten Vicente Fox gegründet wurde, um die Regierung in den Verhandlungen mit Washington zu unterstützen. Allerdings sind die Clubes de oriundos so gut wie nie in Großstädten aktiv. Dies zeigt, dass den Latinos sehr viel mehr daran liegt, einen Platz im Land zu finden, als ihrem Ursprungsland einen Platz in den Vereinigten Staaten zu verschaffen. Zu ähnlichen Ergebnissen kommt auch eine Untersuchung des Politikwissenschaftlers Harry Pachon. Die Latinos, so Pachon, zeichnen sich "durch eine hohe Arbeitsmoral und durch die Erneuerung des amerikanischen Ideals aus, das heißt, sie sind überzeugt, dass man es durch harte Arbeit und durch Zielstrebigkeit zu etwas bringen kann". Der Traum von Amerika als dem Land der unbegrenzten Möglichkeiten erklärt auch, warum die Latinos immer "ein so hohes Maß an Patriotismus" gezeigt haben: 300 000 Amerikaner mexikanischer Herkunft haben am Zweiten Weltkrieg teilgenommen, und 130 000 Latinos waren beim Zweiten Golfkrieg gegen den Irak dabei.

Die erste Kongressabgeordnete nicaraguanischer Herkunft, Hilda Solis, verpasst dieser optimistischen Einschätzung jedoch einen Dämpfer: Dass die jungen Latinos in die Armee eintreten, geschehe hauptsächlich mangels beruflicher Alternativen, erklärt sie - und in der Hoffnung, nach dem Militärdienst richtige Papiere zu erhalten. Frau Solis bestätigt auch, dass die Latinos immer noch mehrheitlich demokratisch wählen, sobald sie die amerikanische Staatsangehörigkeit haben. Allerdings wächst die Tendenz, "rechts zu wählen", sobald sie den Aufstieg in die Mittelschicht geschafft haben. 30 Prozent der Latinos in Kalifornien haben für Schwarzenegger und 40 Prozent für Bush gestimmt. Die Kubaner von Miami sind nicht mehr die Einzigen, die George W. Bush unterstützen.

Wählen dürfen nicht einmal 3 Prozent der Immigranten
Die Unterrepräsentation der Latinos in der amerikanischen Politik ist ein weiterer Punkt, der die Demokraten beunruhigt. Von den 41 Millionen Latinos, die in den Vereinigten Staaten leben, haben nur 7 Millionen das Wahlrecht. Für Mexiko erklärt Carlos González, Direktor des Instituts der Auslandsmexikaner, warum das so ist: "Anders als in den Fünfziger- und Sechzigerjahren des 20. Jahrhunderts erlaubt die heutige Struktur der amerikanischen Wirtschaft den Zuwanderern nicht mehr den raschen Aufstieg in die Mittelschicht. Wir leben heute in einer Dienstleistungsgesellschaft, und in dieser Wirtschaft haben in erster Linie diejenigen eine Chance, die zur Wissenselite gehören."

Die Spuren der lateinamerikanischen Einwanderung lassen sich nicht zuletzt an der allgemeinen Stadtentwicklung und an manchen Bauten ablesen, wie der neokolonialen Fassade des riesigen Supermarkts von San José, der Hauptstadt des Silicon Valley. Die Eigentümer von Mi Pueblo kamen vor weniger als dreißig Jahren aus Mexiko. In den Regalen findet man Maistortillas, scharfe Saucen, schwarze Bohnen in Dosen und diverse Sorten von spanischem Pfeffer. Sehr viele dieser Lebensmittel sind Produkte der Marke El Me-xicano, die den Brüdern Márquez gehört, Einwanderern der ersten Generation, deren Fabriken am Stadtrand liegen. Die Latino-Supermarktketten machen Millionen Umsätze. Es ist offensichtlich leichter, sich auf dem amerikanischen Markt durchzusetzen, als einen Platz in der amerikanischen Politik zu erobern.

Die jährliche Kaufkraft der Latino-Community liegt bei etwa 700 Milliarden Dollar, 200 Milliarden mehr als das Bruttoinlandsprodukt von Argentinien. Die großen Firmen investieren erhebliche Summen in Marketing und Werbung, um auf diesem Markt Fuß zu fassen. Zwei Millionen Hispano-Unternehmen machen mit über zwei bezahlten Millionen Angestellten einen Jahresumsatz von rund 250 Milliarden Dollar. Sie betreiben Supermarktketten und Restaurants, Reinigungsunternehmen, Medien, Werbeagenturen, Transportunternehmen und Verpackungsfirmen.

Erfolgsgeschichten gibt es im Wirtschaftsleben
Die Latinos gründen sehr viel mehr kleine und mittlere Unternehmen als weiße oder schwarze Amerikaner. Die US Bank und die US Hispanic Chamber of Commerce (USHCC; 40 Handelskammern in Kalifornien, 20 in Texas) haben vor kurzem einen Finanzierungsfonds für Latino-Unternehmen mit einem Gesamtvolumen von einer Milliarde Dollar aufgelegt. Diese erfolgreiche wirtschaftliche Integration übersetzt sich in parteipolitische Orientierung. So hat die USHCC zum Beispiel 2005 öffentlich den von Bush nominierten streng konservativen Richter John Roberts als Kandidaten für den Supreme Court unterstützt. In der Tat sind die meisten Einwanderer aus Lateinamerika - überwiegend praktizierende Katholiken - in Sachen Familienpolitik, Abtreibung oder Homosexualität ebenso konservativ, wie die amerikanischen Ultrakonservativen.

In Houston besucht der Menschenrechtsaktivist Juan Álvarez jeden Tag eine Reihe von esquinas - Tankstellen, Supermärkte, Einkaufszentren - wo die illegalen Arbeiter ihre Dienste als Tagelöhner anbieten. In ganz Amerika gibt es rund 100 000 solcher jornaleros. Seltsamerweise sind die esquinas Mitte Oktober alle leer. Álvarez erklärt, warum: "Viertausend von ihnen sind nach New Orleans gegangen, um im Überschwemmungsgebiet zu arbeiten." Dass sie dafür weniger Geld bekommen als weiße oder schwarze Amerikaner, stört die illegalen Latinos wenig. Nur Ray Nagin, der afroamerikanische Bürgermeister von New Orleans, hat sich beklagt, dass die Stadt von einer "Überschwemmung" durch die Latinos heimgesucht werde.

Fußnoten:
(1) In den USA werden die Begriffe "Latino" oder "Hispano" ohne Bedeutungsunterschied verwandt.
(2) Nach der Gewerkschaft United Auto Workers (UAW) musste man in den USA 2001 mindestens 8,70 Dollar pro Stunde (17 960 Dollar pro Jahr) verdienen, um nicht unter die Armutsgrenze zu fallen; 40,4 Prozent der Latinos lebten damals in Haushalten, die weniger als diese Summe zur Verfügung hatten. Vgl. James Cohen, "Spanglish America", Paris (Le Félin) 2005.
(3) pewhispanic.org/topics/index.php?TopicID=16.
Aus dem Französischen von Sonja Schmidt

Jean-François Boyer lebt als Journalist in Miami.

Le Monde diplomatique Nr. 7841 vom 9.12.2005, Seite 2-3, 527 Dokumentation, Jean-François Boyer

© Contrapress media GmbH Vervielfältigung nur mit Genehmigung des taz-Verlags

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December 11, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
Bush Meets St. Peter
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
http://select.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/opinion/11kristof.html?…

If a meteorite crashed down on the White House today, the conversation at the Pearly Gates might go something like this.

"Oh-h-h. Where am I? St. Peter?"

"Welcome, Mr. President. I just need to see if you belong here."

"Well, St. Peter, you know I`m a born-again Christian. I pray every day. I`m very religious. I brought Bible study classes to the White House."

"That`s terrific. And have you helped any lepers lately?"

"Not exactly. But my cuts in the top tax rates will create wealth that will trickle down and help lepers. I`m getting there indirectly, instead of barging through the eye of a needle."

"Hmm."

"And St. Peter, I`ve been upstanding in defending Christian values. We made sure that we call the tree at the White House a Christmas tree, not a holiday tree. And we sent out 1.4 million White House Christmas cards!"

"Wow! But I don`t suppose any Christmas cards went to lepers. Or to prostitutes or beggars."

"I don`t send cards to Democrats."

"Mr. President, our checklist doesn`t have anything about sending out Christmas cards, or putting up Christmas trees. It`s more about feeding the hungry, clothing the naked and housing the homeless."

"Well, my administration spent $8,000 for a drapery that was used for years to cover up a breast of a female statue. That was clothing the naked."

"That was so silly that Lady Godiva went on a ride to protest it. We always get irritated with religious blowhards who proclaim that faith is just a matter of covering up, saying grace, looking dour and denouncing others for being lax - the Taliban approach. This latest culture war over Christmas is a perfect example of religion based on denouncing others instead of loving them."

"But St. Peter, they`re just trying to put Christ back into Christmas. They see how faith is threatened by people saying `Happy Holidays,` instead of `Merry Christmas.` Fox News has covered `Christmas Under Siege,` and one of its anchors has a new book called `The War on Christmas.` The American Family Association is boycotting Target, and the Catholic League threatened a boycott against Wal-Mart. This hasn`t been my issue, but these are my people, St. Peter. They`re doing this to glorify Christ."

"Frankly, Mr. President, here in Heaven, I say `Merry Christmas,` but others prefer `Happy Holidays.` Gandhi prefers it. And a Jewish rabbi told me that his family felt more comfortable with that as well. ..."

"But St. Peter, that`s one rabbi. ..."

"Whose name is Jesus."

"Oops."

"Jesus says Christmas shouldn`t be about picking fights and organizing boycotts. All that legalistic nitpicking just reminds him of the Pharisees. Do you really think that if Jesus returns to Earth tomorrow, his priority is going to be organizing a boycott of Target stores? You think he`s going to appear on Fox to say, `Worry about genocide and hunger later - first, let`s battle with liberals over what holiday greeting to use`?"

"But St. Peter, I increased aid to Africa hugely. I launched a major program to fight AIDS."

"Yes, your aid programs have been almost divine. And your administration helped lead the way in fighting sex trafficking. On the other hand, Jesus has a particular thing about genocide, and you and Congressional leaders just cut out $50 million that was supposed to go to stop the slaughter in Darfur."

"Sorry, but it`s been so hectic this month with 26 Christmas parties at the White House. I`ve just been too busy to deal with genocide."

"Which Gospel did you say you read each day? Up here, we canceled our Christmas party, and held a vigil for the victims of Darfur."

"St. Peter, you don`t mean to say - how do I ask this? Jesus isn`t ... isn`t a Democrat, is he?"

"No, no. He`s nonpartisan. His gripe isn`t with conservatives or liberals; it`s with blowhards. We`re always cheering the National Association of Evangelicals because it spends its time fighting genocide, battling sex trafficking, struggling for religious freedom. And there are so many others, like Senator Sam Brownback, who win respect from everybody because their humanitarian work shows they are trying to live the Gospels, not play charades. They`re the conservative Christians who make God look great."

"I guess I was just too busy with Christmas to pay attention to any of this."

"Up here, we just pray that Christmas could be more than cards, trees and greetings. Jesus is so upset that he`s talking of suing the blowhards to regain control of Christmas."

* Copyright 2005The New York Times Company

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December 11, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
It Takes a Potemkin Village
By FRANK RICH
http://select.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/opinion/11rich.html?hp

WHEN a government substitutes propaganda for governing, the Potemkin village is all. Since we don`t get honest information from this White House, we must instead, as the Soviets once did, decode our rulers` fictions to discern what`s really happening. What we`re seeing now is the wheels coming off: As the administration`s stagecraft becomes more baroque, its credibility tanks further both at home and abroad. The propaganda techniques may be echt Goebbels, but they increasingly come off as pure Ali G.

The latest desperate shifts in White House showmanship say at least as much about our progress (or lack of same) in Iraq over the past 32 months as reports from the ground. When President Bush announced the end of "major combat operations" in May 2003, his Imagineers felt the need for only a single elegant banner declaring "Mission Accomplished." Cut to Nov. 30, 2005: the latest White House bumper sticker, "Plan for Victory," multiplied by Orwellian mitosis over nearly every square inch of the rather "Queer Eye" stage set from which Mr. Bush delivered his oration at the Naval Academy.

And to no avail. Despite the insistently redundant graphics - and despite the repetition of the word "victory" 15 times in the speech itself - Americans believed "Plan for Victory" far less than they once did "Mission Accomplished." The first New York Times-CBS News Poll since the Naval Academy pep talk, released last Thursday, found that only 25 percent of Americans say the president has "a clear plan for victory in Iraq." Tom Cruise and evolution still have larger constituencies in America than that.

Mr. Bush`s "Plan for Victory" speech was, of course, the usual unadulterated nonsense. Its overarching theme - "We will never accept anything less than complete victory" - was being contradicted even as he spoke by rampant reports of Pentagon plans for stepped-up troop withdrawals between next week`s Iraqi elections and the more important (for endangered Republicans) American Election Day of 2006. The specifics were phony, too: Once again inflating the readiness of Iraqi troops, Mr. Bush claimed that the recent assault on Tal Afar "was primarily led by Iraqi security forces" - a fairy tale immediately unmasked by Michael Ware, a Time reporter embedded in that battle`s front lines, as "completely wrong." No less an authority than the office of Iraq`s prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, promptly released a 59-page report documenting his own military`s inadequate leadership, equipment and training.

But this variety of Bush balderdash is such old news that everyone except that ga-ga 25 percent instantaneously tunes it out. We routinely assume that the subtext (i.e., the omissions and deliberate factual errors) of his speeches and scripted town meetings will be more revealing than the texts themselves. What raised the "Plan for Victory" show to new heights of disinformation was the subsequent revelation that the administration`s main stated motive for the address - the release of a 35-page document laying out a "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq" - was as much a theatrical prop as the stunt turkey the president posed with during his one furtive visit to Baghdad two Thanksgivings ago.

As breathlessly heralded by Scott McClellan, this glossy brochure was "an unclassified version" of the strategy in place since the war`s inception in "early 2003." But Scott Shane of The New York Times told another story. Through a few keystrokes, the electronic version of the document at whitehouse.gov could be manipulated to reveal text "usually hidden from public view." What turned up was the name of the document`s originating author: Peter Feaver, a Duke political scientist who started advising the National Security Council only this June. Dr. Feaver is an expert on public opinion about war, not war itself. Thus we now know that what Mr. McClellan billed as a 2003 strategy for military victory is in fact a P.R. strategy in place for no more than six months. That solves the mystery of why Lt. Gen. Martin Dempsey of the Army, who is in charge of training Iraqi troops, told reporters that he had never seen this "National Strategy" before its public release last month.

In a perfect storm of revelations, the "Plan for Victory" speech fell on the same day that The Los Angeles Times exposed new doings on another front in the White House propaganda war. An obscure Defense Department contractor, the Lincoln Group, was caught paying off Iraqi journalists to run upbeat news articles secretly written by American Army personnel and translated into Arabic (at a time when American troops in harm`s way are desperate for Arabic translators of their own). One of the papers running the fake news is Al Mutamar, the Baghdad daily run by associates of Ahmad Chalabi. So now we know that at least one P.R. plan, if not a plan for victory, has been consistent since early 2003. As Mr. Chalabi helped feed spurious accounts of Saddam`s W.M.D. to American newspapers to gin up the war, so his minions now help disseminate happy talk to his own country`s press to further the illusion that the war is being won.

The Lincoln Group`s articles (e.g., "The Sands Are Blowing Toward a Democratic Iraq") are not without their laughs - for us, if not for the Iraqis, whose intelligence is insulted and whose democratic aspirations are betrayed by them. But the texts are no more revealing than those of Mr. Bush`s speeches. Look instead at the cover-up that has followed the Los Angeles Times revelations. The administration and its frontmen at once started stonewalling from a single script. Mr. McClellan, Pentagon spokesmen, Senator John Warner and Donald Rumsfeld all give the identical answer to the many press queries. We don`t have the facts, they say, even as they maintain that the Lincoln Group articles themselves are factual.

The Pentagon earmarks more than $100 million in taxpayers` money for various Lincoln Group operations, and it can`t get any facts? Though the 30-year-old prime mover in the shadowy outfit, one Christian Bailey, fled from Andrea Mitchell of NBC News when she pursued him on camera in Washington, certain facts are proving not at all elusive.

Ms. Mitchell and other reporters have learned that Mr. Bailey has had at least four companies since 2002, most of them interlocking, short-lived and under phantom names. Government Executive magazine also discovered that Mr. Bailey "was a founder and active participant in Lead21," a Republican "fund-raising and networking operation" - which has since scrubbed his name from its Web site - and that he and a partner in his ventures once listed a business address identical to their Washington residence. This curious tale, with its trail of cash payoffs, trading in commercial Iraqi real estate and murky bidding procedures for lucrative U.S. government contracts, could have been lifted from "Syriana" or "Glengarry Glen Ross." While Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. McClellan valiantly continue their search for "the facts," what we know so far can safely be filed under the general heading of "Lay, DeLay and Abramoff."

The more we learn about such sleaze in the propaganda war, the more we see it`s failing for the same reason as the real war: incompetence. Much as the disastrous Bremer regime botched the occupation of Iraq with bad decisions made by its array of administration cronies and relatives (among them Ari Fleischer`s brother), so the White House doesn`t exactly get the biggest bang for the bucks it shells out to cronies for fake news.

Until he was unmasked as an administration shill, Armstrong Williams was less known for journalism than for striking a deal to dismiss a messy sexual-harassment suit against him in 1999. When an Army commander had troops sign 500 identical good-news form letters to local newspapers throughout America in 2003, the fraud was so transparent it was almost instantly debunked. The fictional scenarios concocted for Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman also unraveled quickly, as did last weekend`s Pentagon account of 10 marines killed outside Falluja on a "routine foot patrol." As the NBC correspondent Jim Miklaszewski told Don Imus last week, he received calls within hours from the fallen`s loved ones about how the marines had been slaughtered after being recklessly sent to an unprotected site for a promotion ceremony.

Though the White House doesn`t know that its jig is up, everyone else does. Americans see that New Orleans is in as sorry shape today as it was under Brownie three months ago. The bipartisan 9/11 commissioners confirm that homeland security remains a pork pit. Condi Rice`s daily clarifications of her clarifications about American torture policies are contradicted by new reports of horrors before her latest circumlocutions leave her mouth. And the president`s latest Iraq speeches - most recently about the "success" stories of Najaf and Mosul - still don`t stand up to the most rudimentary fact checking.

This is why the most revealing poll number in the Times/CBS survey released last week was Mr. Bush`s approval rating for the one area where things are going relatively well, the economy: 38 percent, only 2 points higher than his rating on Iraq. It`s a measure of the national cynicism bequeathed by the Bush culture that seeing anything, even falling prices at the pump, is no longer believing.

* Copyright 2005The New York Times Company

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Dazu auch aus dem heutigen Guardian [urlThe US has used torture for decades. All that`s new is the openness about it]http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5352636-103677,00.html[/url]

This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051226/editors
Conspiracy to Torture
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051226/editors

[from the December 26, 2005 issue]

Torture is about acts: the blow to the head, the scream in the ear, the scar-free injuries whose diagnosis has become an international medical subspecialty. But torture is also very much about words: the whispered or shouted questions of the interrogator; the muddled confession of the prisoner; the too rarely tested language of laws protecting prisoners from "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment.

Consider just two words: "command responsibility." Those words stand among the most resolutely enduring principles established after World War II by the Nuremberg Tribunals. Today they pose a special threat to President Bush, Vice President Cheney and the other officials who actively promote what Secretary of State Rice, in Germany, insisted the Administration "does not authorize or condone." To carry out physically and psychically brutal interrogations outside all international norms has required the Administration to corrupt the ordinary meaning of language itself. "We do not torture" (Bush). "What we do does not come close to torture" (Director of Central Intelligence Porter Goss). Such denials continue despite twelve reports from the Defense Department documenting the opposite--never mind Congressional testimony, journalistic investigations and NGO reports making common knowledge of waterboarding, sleep deprivation, near-fatal beatings and mock executions.

Indeed, there is no point in arguing about whether US policy condones cruel, degrading or torturous treatment of prisoners. Practices authorized by Rumsfeld on a small scale in Afghanistan have now metastasized into a worldwide network of prisons, detention centers and surrogates ranging from private contractors to authoritarian foreign governments. What Rice defended to European critics--and what has Cheney at loggerheads with John McCain--is not merely a desire to take the gloves off in the occasional back room in Bagram or Baghdad, as the Administration`s apologists insist. Rather, it is a wide-ranging conspiracy to facilitate torture, in which many sectors of American society are now implicated. The new torture complex--centered in the executive branch of the government but with tentacles throughout the country--is the subject of this special issue, which spotlights both collusion and resistance in key American institutions: the military, the law, medicine, media, the academy.

The Administration`s adherence to systematic torture and extralegal imprisonment not only accelerates the race to the bottom in human rights; it is even tying anti-terrorism policy in knots. Take the case of José Padilla, the US citizen imprisoned as an enemy combatant for his supposed participation in a "dirty bomb" plot. In November the Administration finally indicted Padilla on charges unrelated to any dirty bomb. Why? At least in part because Padilla was arrested on the basis of information extracted from Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, whose interrogation included waterboarding. The case is a colossal failure in terms both moral and pragmatic: Either Padilla was never part of a bomb plot, in which case Khalid Shaikh Mohammed`s original statement demonstrates the unreliability of confessions obtained under torture, or effective anti-terrorism prosecution was undermined by reliance on illegal methods.

The question is not whether the United States instigates torture but how to put this evil genie back in the bottle. The first step is to confront the culture of denial. Where, for instance, are Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah? It has now been two years since those Al Qaeda operatives were "disappeared" into the netherworld of CIA "black sites." It is time to puncture the secrecy bubble, to ascertain the whereabouts of these men and charge them criminally for September 11. Human Rights Watch has identified twenty-four additional "ghost detainees." So long as Congress gives implicit permission to keep such detainees under wraps, the principles that facilitate torture are kept alive.

The McCain defense appropriations amendment is a crucial step. His amendment is a powerful reaffirmation of the nation`s responsibilities under domestic war crimes law and international anti-torture covenants. It`s imperative that the House of Representatives, where the White House enjoys more leverage, not dilute the McCain amendment in the appropriations conference negotiations. It`s just as important that the conference committee reject Lindsey Graham`s amendment, which would strip Guantánamo prisoners of habeas corpus rights--and thus their ability to protest effectively their "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment in US custody.

The acceptance of torture amounts to a crisis of democratic culture, requiring patient cultivation of outrage on the part of the antiwar movement and human rights campaigners. Activist groups beyond the human rights lobby, like MoveOn.org, are beginning to focus on torture as a political issue, a welcome development. Whether from activists or Congress, few steps matter as much as encouraging and protecting whistleblowers at all levels of the military and intelligence agencies. Truth-telling by soldiers, officers, intelligence operatives and Administration officials is the best hope for dismantling the torture regime. That Colin Powell`s former chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, is now denouncing Cheney for providing "philosophical guidance" for torture is evidence of how high whistleblowing can go. To everyone with knowledge of the torture system, the message is simple: As Daniel Ellsberg wrote last year, "Do what I wish I had done in 1964: Go to the press, to Congress, and document your claims."

More than enough evidence has already accumulated to justify a criminal investigation of the renditions, secret prisons and interrogations, which together amount to a conspiracy to violate a host of federal statutes and constitutional procedures. Senator Carl Levin and many human rights advocates make the case for a 9/11-style truth commission. But the torture conspiracy is crying out for a special prosecutor, as Anthony Lewis argues forcefully on page 13. The Justice Department and Attorney General, so deeply and personally implicated in the torture conspiracy, cannot be trusted to investigate themselves. And the military`s criminal-investigation system in torture cases is woefully inadequate, as Tara McKelvey reveals on page 15. It`s time for an outside authority to step in--one vested with power to hold military higher-ups and White House officials criminally liable.

If American institutions don`t act, prosecutors and parliaments abroad will. Already, kidnappings and renditions have spawned criminal inquiries in Italy, Sweden and Canada, while the EU and Council of Europe investigate the black sites. In many European nations, victims of human rights violations enjoy broad standing to bring legal action--as General Pinochet learned in England. The more information leaks out, the less frivolous is the fantasy of Rumsfeld, Cheney, Attorney General Gonzales and other complicit officials unable to travel to Europe without fear of being served with papers. The Administration may be scornful of international human rights covenants. But in recent death-penalty and gay-rights cases, the Supreme Court majority has taken pains to indicate that international human rights standards do matter in American law, in the noble tradition of "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind" articulated by the Declaration of Independence.

If the twentieth century proved anything, it is that no nation, no constitutional system, is immune from the downward human rights spiral signified by torture--as Britain, France and Israel, among other nations, learned at great political cost. The purpose of this special issue is to confront the sweeping moral seriousness of the American torture crisis of the twenty-first century. The point is not so much that we are "better than our enemies," as Senator McCain and others have argued, but that our democratic institutions are vulnerable to erosion. The outline of the torture conspiracy is clear, but the full facts need to be exposed and the chain of responsibility definitively established. History will judge the Bush Administration`s torture policy in the same harsh light as Jim Crow, McCarthyism and the Japanese-American internment. The conspirators must be held accountable.

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Flash:
[url
Seven to Watch in Iraq`s Election]http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/weekinreview/20051210_IRAQ…
Iraqis vote Thursday in a national election to establish a new four-year government. Here are seven figures who could emerge among the leaders.[/url]

December 11, 2005
Politics, Iraqi Style: Slick TV Ads, Text Messaging and Gunfire
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/international/middleeast/1…

By ROBERT F. WORTH and EDWARD WONG

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 10 - After putting up 100,000 posters across Iraq to promote his political party, Hamid Kifai discovered this week that they had all been torn down, even the ones on the front of his own campaign headquarters in the south.

"They have made it impossible for us to compete," said Mr. Kifai, a stocky, talkative Shiite candidate who spent his entire $50,000 war chest on the posters and has nothing left. "This is not democracy."

It is democracy, but in a distinctly Iraqi style. This country is in the final days of a campaign that is at once more ruthless and more sophisticated than anything yet seen here.

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Workers posted signs under guard last week in Baghdad.
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Candidates have been killed, even as slick television spots run throughout the day, showing office-seekers who soberly promise to defeat terrorism and revive the economy. Cellphone users routinely get unexpected text messages advertising one candidate or another. Thousands of posters decorate the capital`s gray blast walls, including one that shows a split face - half Saddam Hussein, half Ayad Allawi - in a blunt effort to smear Mr. Allawi, a former prime minister, and his secular coalition.

"Who does this man remind you of?" the poster asks.

In a sense, it is the first full-scale political contest here since the fall of Mr. Hussein. The Sunni Arabs, who largely boycotted the January election, are now campaigning fiercely, and voter turnout is expected to be considerably higher as a result. All told, 226 political groups will compete in the elections, representing more than 7,000 candidates.

The winners will form Iraq`s first full-term government since the war began, and face the task of unifying an increasingly fractious and violent nation. Any American plan to reduce troop levels will depend on the success of that effort.

So far, the campaign has been as turbulent as any endeavor in Iraq. In the past two weeks alone, 11 people associated with Mr. Allawi`s group have been killed, including one of its leading candidates in southern Iraq. On Tuesday, gunmen stormed five northern offices belonging to the Kurdistan Islamic Union, killing two party members and wounding 10. It is often hard to distinguish political killings from the terrorism that has become a part of daily life here, but in both cases, the parties have accused rivals of carrying out the attacks.

"I think these negative tactics will backfire," said Azzam Alwash, an ebullient 47-year-old civil engineer who is co-director of the campaign for Mr. Allawi`s coalition. Like almost all of his counterparts in these elections, he has no prior experience in the field, though he oversees 80 campaign workers with a budget of $2.5 million. He toils in a "war room" in Mr. Allawi`s Baghdad headquarters, where staff members work 18-hour days and coordinate satellite offices in all of Iraq`s provinces.

"Our posters got pulled down too, so we decided the best way was with TV, radios and newspapers," Mr. Alwash said. Like many other groups, Mr. Allawi`s has its own newspaper and enough money to pay for plenty of television and radio time. About 6 of the nearly 20 Iraqi television stations - and about half of the 200 Iraqi newspapers - are owned by parties. Rates for political spots on the larger Baghdad stations run as high as $3,000 per minute.

At his own desk, Mr. Alwash clicked on an Internet link and a song began to play: a campaign tune recorded last month by Elham al-Madfai, one of Iraq`s best-known singers. The words, written in 1941, are about a doctor who can solve all the patient`s problems. Every time the word doctor comes up in the song, the accompanying video shows a smiling Mr. Allawi.

"We`re playing it all over our radio stations," Mr. Alwash said.

Like Mr. Kifai, Mr. Alwash says he believes the culprit in the poster-tearing - and other incidents involving underhanded tactics - is the United Iraqi Alliance, a religious Shiite group whose main parties now control the government. "We have videos and photographs of police defacing our posters and putting up posters for 555," Mr. Alwash said, referring to the Shiite alliance by its ballot number.

Redha Jowad Taki, a spokesman for the Shiite coalition, said it condemned the removal of posters. Some of its own had also been torn down, he said, and four of its campaign volunteers had been killed while putting up posters.

The campaign is being conducted with few real rules. Technically, the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq is in charge, but it has little money to investigate the more than 80 violations that have been reported in the last month, said Safwat Rashid Sidqi, a commissioner. Last year, the commission fined the Shiite alliance about $1,500 for campaigning after the 48-hour cutoff point before the vote, a pittance for a party with deep pockets.

Money has become a campaign issue too, though there are no limits on spending or contributions, and no public funding. Critics of Mr. Allawi, a White House favorite, accuse him of taking American government money, while enemies of the Shiite alliance say that group gets much of its financing from Iran. Both groups deny the charges, though the sources of their large war chests remain mysterious.

One of the more promising aspects of the election is the participation by Sunni Arabs, who largely boycotted the vote to elect the 275-member National Assembly last January. Many are risking their lives by campaigning in areas where the Sunni-led insurgency is at its worst.

Hatem Mukhlis, the leader of the Assembly of Patriots, a secular Sunni party, has been traveling three or four times a week from Baghdad to Salahuddin Province, an insurgent stronghold whose capital is Tikrit, Mr. Hussein`s hometown.

"My father upgraded Tikrit with money and schools," said Mr. Mukhlis, a doctor who lived in the United States for 20 years and met with President Bush at the White House before the war. "They remember my father for the services he provided the people."

Mr. Mukhlis said he hoped the people of Salahuddin would view him in the same light as his father, a respected military officer. He said he has opened up a printing press in Tikrit, and started two mobile health clinics that roam the province in white vans.

Like many other candidates, he has also set up a Web site, www.almalaf.net, to get out his message. On Friday, the home page showed a photo of Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the Shiite prime minister, next to the bruised back of a male detainee, alluding to the Sunni Arabs` fears that government-sponsored militias are abducting, torturing and killing Sunnis.

The headline on the site talked about "secret documents" linking Mr. Jaafari to incidents of torture.

The Web site has other draws. At the bottom of the home page, Mr. Mukhlis has posted photos of Miss Egypt and Miss Puerto Rico in bikinis.

Several American groups are teaching Iraqi politicians the basics of campaigning and helping them polish their messages. Chief among them are the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute, both democracy-promotion groups with financing from the American government and ties to the two major American parties. They run workshops, help coordinate media campaigns and give lessons in organizing volunteers and conducting polls.

Still, these campaigns could never be mistaken for American ones. The sheer number of political groups and competing messages make it hard for Iraqis to distinguish one party from another. There are few debates or substantive discussions of the issues in this campaign, which is still mostly rooted in personalities and appeals to ethnic or sectarian loyalties.

Because of the risk of drawing attacks by insurgents or rivals, political rallies and barnstorming speeches are virtually unheard of. Mosques are about the only accessible public spaces here, posing an obstacle for the more secular parties. Some secular candidates, including Mr. Allawi, have accused the Shiite alliance of using religious imagery in their posters to suggest that voting for their own groups is a religious duty.

Especially in southern Iraq, the parched Shiite heartland, the power of the religious hierarchy is often impossible to separate from politics.

One local group, the Islamic Coalition, includes six parties that are loyal to ayatollahs from the Shiite holy city of Karbala. In the past two weeks, the coalition`s posters have popped up everywhere there. Some carry images of the group`s two main spiritual leaders, Ayatollah Sadiq Shirazi, who lives in the Iranian holy city of Qum, and the Ayatollah Hadi Muderassi, of Karbala.

Clerics who follow these ayatollahs tell their congregations to vote for the coalition. Ayatollah Shirazi`s organization finances a local university, satellite channel and radio station, all of which have given exposure to the coalition`s candidates.

One option for more secular candidates is alliances with tribal leaders, who often have the clout to deliver a substantial number of votes.

On Thursday afternoon, Sheik Abdul Karim Mahoud al-Muhammadawi, a candidate and the leader of a small party, received several dozen such leaders in the courtyard of a house in eastern Baghdad. For hours, the men sat in two long rows, sipping tea and asking Sheik Muhammadawi for his views on various topics. He responded at length.

Afterward, Ali Feisal al-Lami, the sheik`s campaign manager, explained that some of the men indicated they would urge their followers to vote for the sheik`s candidates.

Private networks like these are crucial in Iraq’s hierarchical social structure, Mr. Lami said. Similar networks exist among devotees of Iraq’s leading Shiite ayatollahs, he added. Those networks — formed to evade Mr. Hussein’s informants — might help the ayatollahs shepherd voters to the more religious parties such as the Shiite coalition if they were so inclined. But the networks could also prevent religious parties from falsely claiming the support of the ayatollahs if they did not really have it, he added.

“They have their campaign, we have a counter-campaign,” Mr. Lami said. “People count on secret networks more than public ones.”

Abdul Razzaq al-Saiedi and Khalid al-Ansary contributed reporting for this article.

* Copyright 2005The New York Times Company

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Patrick Cockburn: Iraq: the beginning of the end

The state created by Britain after the First World war may be passing away

http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/article332284.…

Published: 11 December 2005


Iraq is disintegrating as a united state. The election for the National Assembly this week may mark the point of no return. "A Bosnian solution to the Iraq crisis is now on the agenda," says Ghassan Attiyah, a veteran Iraqi commentator. The election is decisive because the Shia and Sunni Arabs and the Kurds - the three main Iraqi communities - show every sign of voting along ethnic and religious lines. Secular and nationalist groups looking for support beyond their own community have their backs to the wall.

The US and Britain have presented so many events in Iraq over the past two-and-a-half years as spurious turning points for the better that the critical importance of the election for the 275-member national assembly on Thursday is being underestimated outside Iraq. The old unitary Iraqi state created by Britain after the First World War may be passing away.

The verdict is not quite in. There are forces for unity as well as for disintegration. But since the fall of Saddam Hussein, it is the latter forces which have proved to be the stronger. Iraqis are beginning to talk about partition as a likely outcome of the crisis. This has already happened in Kurdistan. The Kurds, a fifth of Iraq’s 26 million population, already have quasi-independence, with their own government and armed forces. An Iraqi Arab has difficulty getting a hotel room in Arbil, the Kurdish capital.

Iraqi Arab leaders largely accept what has happened in Kurdistan, if only because there is nothing they can do about it. Adnan Pachachi, a former foreign minister and nationalist, said: "Everybody recognises that the Kurds can have their separate state. There is no difference of opinion on that."

Mr Pachachi says the real threat to Iraq is that the Shia in southern Iraq may create their own super-canton. Iraqi Shia and Kurds voted for this overwhelmingly when they approved the new federal constitution in a referendum on 15 October. Abdul Aziz Hakim, the leader of the most powerful Shia party - the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (Sciri) - is intent on creating a Shia super-region, with most of the powers of an independent state, in the nine Shia provinces. This is half of Iraq’s 18 provinces. A further four provinces are effectively controlled by the Kurds, leaving only a rump of five provinces patchily under the control of the government in Baghdad.

"Central government could end up being a few buildings in the Green Zone," said an Iraqi minister. "The US and Britain are working desperately to stop it." He pointed out that the Kurdish government had recently signed a contract with a Norwegian oil company to drill for oil. Under the new constitution the Kurdish and Shia super-regions will own new oil reserves when they are discovered. This will give them economic independence.

Iraq is ruled by a coalition of the Kurds and the Shia parties, which triumphed in the January election. The Sunni Arabs boycotted the poll then, but are likely to vote next Thursday. The US and Britain would like to see a leader like Iyad Allawi, the prime minister in the interim government in 2004-05, and deemed to have nationalist credentials, do well. Mr Allawi is a Shia who was once Baathist before he became an opponent of Saddam. His slick advertising on television promotes his appeal as a tough leader with something to offer Iraqis from all three communities.

But he is also the prime minister who assented to US troops assaulting the Sunni city of Fallujah and the Shia holy city of Najaf last year. Last weekend he was chased from the shrine of Imam Ali in Najaf by worshippers pelting him with shoes. He said they were trying to assassinate him. He has tried to cultivate Sunni voters. They may like his nationalist opinions, but they will probably vote for the Iraqi Accord Front, the alliance representing the three biggest Sunni groups.

Ahmed Chalabi, deputy prime minister in the government, is also being squeezed. He fought the last election as part of United Iraqi Alliance, the coalition of Shia parties backed by Shia clergy. This time he will fight it on his own. His greatest appeal will be to voters who have a sense of their Shia identity but are secular and dislike clerical rule.

The winners of the election are likely to be the Shia United Iraqi Alliance, the Sunni Iraqi Accord Front and the Kurdistan Coalition List. The US and Britain would like to see a coalition government created. But this is also a recipe for inactivity because ministers and officials hold their jobs as representatives of their communities. It is almost impossible to fire them for incompetence or corruption.

All the institutions of the state are becoming fiefdoms of one community or another. When Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the prime minister, took power all previous employees of his office were fired. Bayan Jabr, the interior minister from Sciri, has been turning his ministry, which has 110,000 men under arms, into a Shia stronghold. Sunni military units have been dissolved. The Badr Organisation, the militia of Sciri, has infiltrated the paramilitary police commandos whom the Sunni see as licensed death squads.

Badr is not the only militia growing in strength. If they control the police commandos then the Mehdi Army militia of Muqtada al-Sadr has much of the police force in Baghdad. The US has tried to keep control over the defence ministry but army battalions are Shia, Sunni or Kurdish. Out of 115 battalions reportedly only one is mixed.

The ability of the US and Britain to determine the fate of Iraq is growing less by the month. The US is trying to reach out to countries such as Egypt, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, which it was ignoring two years ago. There is no more talk of changing the Middle East. British troops have largely withdrawn to their bases around Basra. The Sunni will take part in the election but will continue to try to end the occupation.

Iraq will still remain a name on the map. Baghdad will be difficult to divide, though it is largely a Shia city. Most Iraqi Arabs say they would like to be part of a single country. But the most likely future is for Iraq to become a loose confederation.

© 2005 Independent News and Media Limited

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Latest Update: #33818 10.12.05 16:14:08
Latest Coalition Fatality: Dec 11, 2005
Military Fatalities US, UK, Other: Dez.05: 31

Iraker 12/11/05
http://www.icasualties.org/oif/IraqiDeaths.aspx

Regelmäßige Updates von Meldungen aus dem Irak:
http://icasualties.org/oif/

Da bei ´Today im Irak´ die Postings immer länger werden, hier den Link für alle Interessierte: http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

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Woher kennt der Autor das W;O Politik Forum?

JONATHAN CHAIT
Always right, never wrong
Jonathan Chait
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-chait11dec11,0,192…

December 11, 2005

LAST WEEK, I wrote that conservatives think they have "won the war of ideas" when, in fact, they have simply reduced their ideas to a few simple bromides. There`s also another reason why conservatives have such misplaced confidence in the superiority of their beliefs: They refuse to ever question them.

Liberal writer Rick Pearlstein explained this recently when he appeared at a conference on conservatism. "In conservative intellectual discourse, there is no such thing as a bad conservative," he said. "Conservatism never fails. It is only failed." So whenever conservative policies crash and burn in the real world, rather than rethink their ideas, conservatives simply redefine the failures as un-conservative.

A perfect example is President Bush`s habit of simultaneously cutting taxes and jacking up spending. For a couple of years now, conservatives have objected to this profligacy. The whole thrust of the effort has been to paint Bush as un-conservative. As my colleague and fellow Times columnist Jonah Goldberg wrote on these pages a few weeks ago, "[Bush`s] big first-term domestic initiatives — aside from tax cuts — were an education bill cosponsored by Ted Kennedy, campaign finance `reform` favored by the sensible-shoes types and the biggest expansion in entitlements (prescription drug benefits) since the Great Society."

Conservative pundit Bruce Bartlett has a forthcoming book titled "Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy." His central argument is that Bush`s economic record is un-conservative. Whatever goes wrong as a result of Bush`s policies, conservatives can get off scot-free: It wasn`t us that bankrupted the country, your honor. It was that moderate Bush!

The problem is that President Bush has been slavishly following the conservative lead on economics. Bush`s father, remember, signed a budget deal in 1990 that slashed hundreds of billions of dollars in spending, but he had to accept a small tax hike on the rich in order to get it. Conservatives rose up in revolt. Their message was: Low taxes matter more than low spending.

Conservative apparatchik Stephen Moore once said: "Low taxes are the central linchpin of conservatism. We always say it`s possible to disagree about abortion, gay rights, the proper level of Americorps funding or military spending, but we can`t disagree about our one unifying message as conservatives."

George W. Bush got this message loud and clear. Conservatives rallied behind him as their standard bearer because he promised deep tax cuts. That he implicitly opposed deep spending cuts — with his talk of "compassion" and scorn for "balancing the budget on the backs of the poor" — and explicitly promised a prescription drug benefit was perfectly fine.

Conservatives didn`t accept this strategy because they had no choice. They accepted it because they thought it would work. They grumbled about the spending but believed that slashing taxes would "starve the beast" and force down spending. Conservatives were never very clear on just how this mechanism would work, and it hasn`t. (They like to talk about "cutting the government`s allowance," but that doesn`t work when the government can borrow all the money it wants.) Rather than reexamine their failed strategy, they`re simply writing Bush out of conservatism.

Liberals have had plenty of failures too — welfare, hostility toward the military, racial quotas, etc. But while liberals have responded to failures with fierce internal debates, conservatives have responded to theirs by casting the deviationists from their midst. No wonder they think they`ve never been wrong.


Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times

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Published on Saturday, December 10, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
Storytelling in Washington
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1210-21.htm

by Christopher Brauchli


All propaganda has to be popular and has to adapt its spiritual level to the perception of the least intelligent of those towards whom it intends to direct itself.
-- A. Hitler, Mein Kampf

Facts need friends. With the right kind of friends facts can alter their appearance. The Bush administration has gone out of its way to create friends for facts and the altered facts in turn have befriended the Bush administration.

The public first became aware of the administration’s skill in early 2005 when it was disclosed that Armstrong Williams (a conservative television commentator in need of material to fill his show) was paid $240,000 to present as fact what was in fact propaganda put out by the administration to demonstrate how successful the No Child Left Behind Act was.

Shortly thereafter it was disclosed that Maggie Gallagher, a marriage expert, was handsomely paid by the Department of Health to promote the Healthy Marriage Initiative making, among other things, seven appearances on CBS, CNN and MSNBC to promote the initiative. There was no disclosure that she was being paid to promote the initiative rather than acting as an independent reporter reporting on the success of the program. In her efforts on behalf of the initiative she was joined by Mike McManus, the writer of a weekly newspaper column, who tor who accepted $10,000 from the Department of Health and Human Services to promote the Healthy Marriage Initiative.

When the Government Accountability Office learned of the payments to Armstrong Williams, it conducted an investigation. It issued a report on September 30, 2005 saying the Bush administration violated the law by buying favorable news coverage of the President’s education policies. The auditors said: “We see no use for such information except for partisan political purposes. Engaging in a purely political activity such as this is not a proper use of appropriated funds.” It said the Education Department had no money or authority to “procure favorable commentary in violation of the publicity or propaganda prohibition in federal law.” What is permitted, however, is for the administration to pay for propaganda prepared by it and its agents to be published abroad under the guise of being news stories.

According to the New York Times, the Pentagon has something called a “storyboard”. This is not the same thing as the now legendary “waterboard” although there are some similarities. Each deals with information. Information obtained from the waterboard is said to be frequently unreliable and information provided by the storyboard is often no better.

The military’s “waterboard” extracts information from unwilling sources by strapping them to a board and immersing them in water leading them to believe they are about to drown. In the hope of avoiding that fate, those strapped to the boards provide information to the interrogators. The “storyboard”, by contrast, is prepared by the Pentagon and given to the Lincoln Group, a Washington based public relations firm that, among other things, translates the stories into Arabic and uses its connections to get them published in Iraq under the bylines of Iraq writers. According to reports the contract with the Lincoln Group calls for “alternate or diverting messages which divert media and public attention “ to “deal instantly with the bad news of the day.”

On the day the disclosure of the Pentagon’s contract with the Lincoln Group was made, gunmen killed eight Iraqis. Although I have not seen any stories disseminated by the Lincoln Group, here is how the Lincoln Group might respond to that sad news in order to divert attention from the event. Instead of reporting the deaths (which would depress the Iraqi reader and add to the instability of an already unstable country) the Lincoln group might give its Iraqi reporter a story about the beautiful flowers in the garden adjacent to the home of one of the victims. The obliging reporter would put the story in the paper for which the reporter works thus diverting attention from the deaths and filling the Iraqi reader with pleasant thoughts. That is only one example and the pentagon will certainly come up with dozens more. Last year it paid the Lincoln Group $5 million, which is more than enough to place lots of stories in lots of papers.

Press spokesman, Scott McClellan could not tell reporters whether the president approved of such propaganda. He said he needed to know more about it. Patrick Butler, vice president of the International Center of Journalists in Washington didn’t share Mr. McClellan’s reticence. “Ethically, it’s indefensible” he said. “You show the world you’re not living by the principles you profess to believe in, and you lose all credibility.” In the case of the Bush administration that is, of course, no loss. It lost its credibility shortly after it came into office by telling us all lots of stories.

Christopher Brauchli is a Boulder, Colorado lawyer and a political columnist. His column appears weekly in the Daily Camera. [e-mail]

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The Atlantic Monthly | December 2005

The Agenda
Hypotheticals

If America Left Iraq
The case for cutting and running
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200512/iraq-withdrawal.

by Nir Rosen

.....

A t some point—whether sooner or later—U.S. troops will leave Iraq. I have spent much of the occupation reporting from Baghdad, Kirkuk, Mosul, Fallujah, and elsewhere in the country, and I can tell you that a growing majority of Iraqis would like it to be sooner. As the occupation wears on, more and more Iraqis chafe at its failure to provide stability or even electricity, and they have grown to hate the explosions, gunfire, and constant war, and also the daily annoyances: having to wait hours in traffic because the Americans have closed off half the city; having to sit in that traffic behind a U.S. military vehicle pointing its weapons at them; having to endure constant searches and arrests. Before the January 30 elections this year the Association of Muslim Scholars—Iraq`s most important Sunni Arab body, and one closely tied to the indigenous majority of the insurgency—called for a commitment to a timely U.S. withdrawal as a condition for its participation in the vote. (In exchange the association promised to rein in the resistance.) It`s not just Sunnis who have demanded a withdrawal: the Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who is immensely popular among the young and the poor, has made a similar demand. So has the mainstream leader of the Shiites` Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, who made his first call for U.S. withdrawal as early as April 23, 2003.

If the people the U.S. military is ostensibly protecting want it to go, why do the soldiers stay? The most common answer is that it would be irresponsible for the United States to depart before some measure of peace has been assured. The American presence, this argument goes, is the only thing keeping Iraq from an all-out civil war that could take millions of lives and would profoundly destabilize the region. But is that really the case? Let`s consider the key questions surrounding the prospect of an imminent American withdrawal.

Would the withdrawal of U.S. troops ignite a civil war between Sunnis and Shiites?

No. That civil war is already under way—in large part because of the American presence. The longer the United States stays, the more it fuels Sunni hostility toward Shiite "collaborators." Were America not in Iraq, Sunni leaders could negotiate and participate without fear that they themselves would be branded traitors and collaborators by their constituents. Sunni leaders have said this in official public statements; leaders of the resistance have told me the same thing in private. The Iraqi government, which is currently dominated by Shiites, would lose its quisling stigma. Iraq`s security forces, also primarily Shiite, would no longer be working on behalf of foreign infidels against fellow Iraqis, but would be able to function independently and recruit Sunnis to a truly national force. The mere announcement of an intended U.S. withdrawal would allow Sunnis to come to the table and participate in defining the new Iraq.

But if American troops aren`t in Baghdad, what`s to stop the Sunnis from launching an assault and seizing control of the city?

Sunni forces could not mount such an assault. The preponderance of power now lies with the majority Shiites and the Kurds, and the Sunnis know this. Sunni fighters wield only small arms and explosives, not Saddam`s tanks and helicopters, and are very weak compared with the cohesive, better armed, and numerically superior Shiite and Kurdish militias. Most important, Iraqi nationalism—not intramural rivalry—is the chief motivator for both Shiites and Sunnis. Most insurgency groups view themselves as waging a muqawama—a resistance—rather than a jihad. This is evident in their names and in their propaganda. For instance, the units commanded by the Association of Muslim Scholars are named after the 1920 revolt against the British. Others have names such as Iraqi Islamic Army and Flame of Iraq. They display the Iraqi flag rather than a flag of jihad. Insurgent attacks are meant primarily to punish those who have collaborated with the Americans and to deter future collaboration.

Wouldn`t a U.S. withdrawal embolden the insurgency?

No. If the occupation were to end, so, too, would the insurgency. After all, what the resistance movement has been resisting is the occupation. Who would the insurgents fight if the enemy left? When I asked Sunni Arab fighters and the clerics who support them why they were fighting, they all gave me the same one-word answer: intiqaam—revenge. Revenge for the destruction of their homes, for the shame they felt when Americans forced them to the ground and stepped on them, for the killing of their friends and relatives by U.S. soldiers either in combat or during raids.

But what about the foreign jihadi element of the resistance? Wouldn`t it be empowered by a U.S. withdrawal?

The foreign jihadi element—commanded by the likes of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi—is numerically insignificant; the bulk of the resistance has no connection to al-Qaeda or its offshoots. (Zarqawi and his followers have benefited greatly from U.S. propaganda blaming him for all attacks in Iraq, because he is now seen by Arabs around the world as more powerful than he is; we have been his best recruiting tool.) It is true that the Sunni resistance welcomed the foreign fighters (and to some extent still do), because they were far more willing to die than indigenous Iraqis were. But what Zarqawi wants fundamentally conflicts with what Iraqi Sunnis want: Zarqawi seeks re-establishment of the Muslim caliphate and a Manichean confrontation with infidels around the world, to last until Judgment Day; the mainstream Iraqi resistance just wants the Americans out. If U.S. forces were to leave, the foreigners in Zarqawi`s movement would find little support—and perhaps significant animosity—among Iraqi Sunnis, who want wealth and power, not jihad until death. They have already lost much of their support: many Iraqis have begun turning on them. In the heavily Shia Sadr City foreign jihadis had burning tires placed around their necks. The foreigners have not managed to establish themselves decisively in any large cities. Even at the height of their power in Fallujah they could control only one neighborhood, the Julan, and they were hated by the city`s resistance council. Today foreign fighters hide in small villages and are used opportunistically by the nationalist resistance.

When the Americans depart and Sunnis join the Iraqi government, some of the foreign jihadis in Iraq may try to continue the struggle—but they will have committed enemies in both Baghdad and the Shiite south, and the entire Sunni triangle will be against them. They will have nowhere to hide. Nor can they merely take their battle to the West. The jihadis need a failed state like Iraq in which to operate. When they leave Iraq, they will be hounded by Arab and Western security agencies.

What about the Kurds? Won`t they secede if the United States leaves?

Yes, but that`s going to happen anyway. All Iraqi Kurds want an independent Kurdistan. They do not feel Iraqi. They`ve effectively had more than a decade of autonomy, thanks to the UN-imposed no-fly zone; they want nothing to do with the chaos that is Iraq. Kurdish independence is inevitable—and positive. (Few peoples on earth deserve a state more than the Kurds.) For the moment the Kurdish government in the north is officially participating in the federalist plan—but the Kurds are preparing for secession. They have their own troops, the peshmerga, thought to contain 50,000 to 100,000 fighters. They essentially control the oil city of Kirkuk. They also happen to be the most America-loving people I have ever met; their leaders openly seek to become, like Israel, a proxy for American interests. If what the United States wants is long-term bases in the region, the Kurds are its partners.

Would Turkey invade in response to a Kurdish secession?

For the moment Turkey is more concerned with EU membership than with Iraq`s Kurds—who in any event have expressed no ambitions to expand into Turkey. Iraq`s Kurds speak a dialect different from Turkey`s, and, in fact, have a history of animosity toward Turkish Kurds. Besides, Turkey, as a member of NATO, would be reluctant to attack in defiance of the United States. Turkey would be satisfied with guarantees that it would have continued access to Kurdish oil and trade and that Iraqi Kurds would not incite rebellion in Turkey.

Would Iran effectively take over Iraq?

No. Iraqis are fiercely nationalist—even the country`s Shiites resent Iranian meddling. (It is true that some Iraqi Shiites view Iran as an ally, because many of their leaders found safe haven there when exiled by Saddam—but thousands of other Iraqi Shiites experienced years of misery as prisoners of war in Iran.) Even in southeastern towns near the border I encountered only hostility toward Iran.

What about the goal of creating a secular democracy in Iraq that respects the rights of women and non-Muslims?

Give it up. It`s not going to happen. Apart from the Kurds, who revel in their secularism, Iraqis overwhelmingly seek a Muslim state. Although Iraq may have been officially secular during the 1970s and 1980s, Saddam encouraged Islamism during the 1990s, and the difficulties of the past decades have strengthened the resurgence of Islam. In the absence of any other social institutions, the mosques and the clergy assumed the dominant role in Iraq following the invasion. Even Baathist resistance leaders told me they have returned to Islam to atone for their sins under Saddam. Most Shiites, too, follow one cleric or another. Ayatollah al-Sistani—supposedly a moderate—wants Islam to be the source of law. The invasion of Iraq has led to a theocracy, which can only grow more hostile to America as long as U.S. soldiers are present. Does Iraqi history offer any lessons?

The British occupation of Iraq, in the first half of the twentieth century, may be instructive. The British faced several uprisings and coups. The Iraqi government, then as now, was unable to suppress the rebels on its own and relied on the occupying military. In 1958, when the government the British helped install finally fell, those who had collaborated with them could find no popular support; some, including the former prime minister Nuri Said, were murdered and mutilated. Said had once been a respected figure, but he became tainted by his collaboration with the British. That year, when revolutionary officers overthrew the government, Said disguised himself as a woman and tried to escape. He was discovered, shot in the head, and buried. The next day a mob dug up his corpse and dragged it through the street—an act that would be repeated so often in Iraq that it earned its own word: sahil. With the British-sponsored government gone, both Sunni and Shiite Arabs embraced the Iraqi identity. The Kurds still resent the British perfidy that made them part of Iraq.

What can the United States do to repair Iraq?

There is no panacea. Iraq is a destroyed and fissiparous country. Iranians and Saudis I`ve spoken to worry that it might be impossible to keep Iraq from disintegrating. But they agree that the best hope of avoiding this scenario is if the United States leaves; perhaps then Iraqi nationalism will keep at least the Arabs united. The sooner America withdraws and allows Iraqis to assume control of their own country, the better the chances that Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari won`t face sahil. It may be decades before Iraq recovers from the current maelstrom. By then its borders may be different, its vaunted secularism a distant relic. But a continued U.S. occupation can only get in the way.

The URL for this page is http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200512/iraq-withdrawal.

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Into harm`s way

By `rendering` suspects to torturers America sinks to the moral level of Saddam
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,1664624,00.html

Henry Porter
Sunday December 11, 2005

Observer
The word rendition was an odd one in the context. It seemed to imply long-standing procedures, an obscure diplomatic formality perhaps. It was some weeks later that I began to puzzle at the word used by my American contact over lunch in London and which, come to think of it, was accompanied by a series of nods and glances. I understood what it was to render something - although not perhaps someone - and I knew what a rendition was in the context of musical and dramatic performance, but what did it mean in the new war against terror? And what was `extraordinary rendition`?

This was in the dying weeks of 2001. Sometime early the following year I saw him again; this time he was on his way back from Afghanistan where he had been contracted to the US military in a quasi intelligence role. He was in exultant, kick-arse form. The war against the Taliban had been won; al-Qaeda was in flight and its members were being hunted down across the globe.

I asked him again about renditions. He revolved his eyes and looked away as though to say I was being dim, which maybe I was. But the problem with rendition, I explained, was that it was such an ambiguous term. A rendition can mean nothing more than a delivery, an exchange, or a return by agreement. Or it can refer to the process of extracting fat from meat by applying heat. Which did he mean? He shook his head. Rendition was delivery and it had nothing to do with fat and meat, and anyway he wanted to talk about something else. And extraordinary rendition? Well, buddy, use your imagination.

Sometime later I learned that rendition referred to the outsourcing of the interrogation of untried terrorist suspects, and that `extraordinary renditions` could either refer to the capture and transport of suspects in the utmost secrecy, or to the performance of the suspect under extreme conditions - that is to say the information produced by torture. It wasn`t clear which, but I suspected it covered both.

As far as I was aware the phrase had not appeared in the media. But there was nothing hard for me to go on. I had no dates, places or names of individuals, and it seemed unlikely that I would get enough to write a piece of journalism. So I started drafting a novel called Empire State and that made things a lot easier because once you go from factual reporting to fiction people tend to talk more.

It was then that I heard a story about five Egyptian al-Qaeda suspects being arrested in Albania and flown to Egypt. The important part was that this had happened before 11 September 2001 - during the Clinton administration - proof that rendition was an established CIA practice.

So I flew to Tirana, stayed in the Rogner Hotel and waited for various contacts I had been given to return my calls. If you hang about in the Rogner sooner or later you meet everyone you need and with a help of a fixer - one of the few Albanian males I met who was not suffering some mild psychotic disorder - I got to the bottom of the story of how five men were trapped by the electronic surveillance of the local intelligence service and were transported to Cairo by the CIA. They were all tortured and two were hanged.

Since it had all happened in 1998 people didn`t mind talking about it. Only when I asked about current operations against al-Qaeda in the Balkans did the shutters come down. I left Tirana for Cairo and after many false trails found the facilities where these things were likely to have happened. I also learned that American intelligence officers were part of the process. They did not simply leave the rendered suspects, but remained on hand to receive information produced by the interrogation. That America was collaborating with torturers was shocking, but it was seeing these facilities that brought home to me the terror and despair of the men who were wrung dry before being executed.

Rendition is profoundly wrong and it happens to be against American law. In 1998 the US Congress passed legislation that confirmed the policy of the United States `not to expel, extradite, or otherwise effect the involuntary return of any person to a country in which there are substantial grounds for believing the person would be in danger of being subjected to torture, regardless of whether the person is physically present in the United States`.

Outsourcing torture is also against International law, but still the secret flights continue across the world and through European airspace - 400 over the United Kingdom alone. Countless suspects have disappeared into various facilities never to be heard of again.

We get hot under the collar about the CIA`s `black sites` in Europe but nothing is done. Last Thursday the Law Lords ruled that the secret tribunals hearing cases related to terrorism suspects could not consider evidence that wouldn`t be acceptable in a criminal trial - in other words that which is produced by torture. This is an important ruling for Liberty and the other human rights organisations that fought the case, but it will have no effect on renditions, for as I learned during my trips in 2002, they occur in an entirely different dimension to the criminal justice system of civilised countries. Renditions service the `intelligence community`, not the law courts. They are about gaining information, not proof.

Last week on a trip to Europe, the US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, clarified her country`s policy by saying that America would meet its treaty obligations in respect of torture. Two points need to be remembered from her statement. The first is that it was flagged by her aides as an important shift in policy, from which we may therefore conclude that the CIA had been directly involved in the mistreatment of suspects. The second is that at no stage did Rice deny or condemn the practice of outsourcing torture to countries such as Egypt.

Read her assurances carefully and you realise that she did not address the main issue about rendition. As though to underline this, senior al-Qaeda suspects being questioned in Europe were transferred to North Africa prior to her landing in Europe last week.

Are we Europeans content as long as the torture is not going on in our backyard? It would seem so, but in Britain we should remember that during the war, when we faced a greater threat than the one posed by al-Qaeda, we did not resort to torture. The late Colonel T. A. Robertson, a friend of my family`s, was known as TAR in MI5, where for much of the Second World War he directed the B1(a) section responsible for tracking down Abwehr agents. He would no more have contemplated torture than amputating his own right hand. No doubt this charming man was as hard as nails but he was also civilised and, like the rest of his generation, fought for civilisation.

We affirm and protect civilisation by behaving within its constraints, not by shipping blindfolded men into dungeons where they are plugged into the electricity supply. If only the Prime Minister had thought for a few moments before rising in the House of Commons last week to support renditions, he might have recalled that on that very day the court listening to the trial of Saddam Hussein heard evidence from women who claimed to have been tortured by the dictator`s secret police.

What is the moral difference between Saddam`s behaviour and the American renditions? There is none. For the dirty secret about torture is that it is not simply to gain unreliable information but that it is a weapon of punishment and extreme terror, which is deployed in exactly the same way by America as it was by Saddam. Knowing that, imagine yourself a Muslim and then see what you think about extraordinary renditions.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

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Der Artikel einmal vom Guardian und das Original aus Nation.

Folter und Rendition hat es im Namen der USA seit dem WW II immer wieder gegeben, nur es geschah heimlich.

Unter der Bush Regierung geschieht es vor allen Augen und wird auch noch durch juristische Gefälligkeitsgutachten gestützt, obwohl die regulären US-Gerichte diese Handlungen ablehnen.

Wenn sich diese Pratiken durchsetzten, sind über 2oo Jahre menschliche Entwicklung für die Katz, und wir beginnen wieder im Mittelalter auf dem selben Standart wie fundamentalistischen islamischen Staate, die wir von Demokratie und Menschenrechten überzeugen wollten.

Nicht wir haben die Islamisten von unseren Werten überzeugt, sondern die Fundamentalisten haben gewonnen, denn sie haben uns von ihren Unwerten überzeugt.

[urlThe US has used torture for decades. All that`s new is the openness about it]http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5352636-103677,00.html[/url]

This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051226/klein

by Naomi Klein
`Never Before!` Our Amnesiac Torture Debate
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051226/klein

[from the December 26, 2005 issue]

It was the "Mission Accomplished" of George W. Bush`s second term, and an announcement of that magnitude called for a suitably dramatic location. But what was the right backdrop for the infamous "We do not torture" declaration? With characteristic audacity, the Bush team settled on downtown Panama City.

It was certainly bold. An hour and a half`s drive from where Bush stood, the US military ran the notorious School of the Americas from 1946 to 1984, a sinister educational institution that, if it had a motto, might have been "We do torture." It is here in Panama and, later, at the school`s new location in Fort Benning, Georgia, where the roots of the current torture scandals can be found. According to declassified training manuals, SOA students--military and police officers from across the hemisphere--were instructed in many of the same "coercive interrogation" techniques that have since migrated to Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib: early morning capture to maximize shock, immediate hooding and blindfolding, forced nudity, sensory deprivation, sensory overload, sleep and food "manipulation," humiliation, extreme temperatures, isolation, stress positions--and worse. In 1996 President Clinton`s Intelligence Oversight Board admitted that US-produced training materials condoned "execution of guerrillas, extortion, physical abuse, coercion and false imprisonment."

Some of the Panama school`s graduates returned to their countries to commit the continent`s greatest war crimes of the past half-century: the murders of Archbishop Oscar Romero and six Jesuit priests in El Salvador, the systematic theft of babies from Argentina`s "disappeared" prisoners, the massacre of 900 civilians in El Mozote in El Salvador and military coups too numerous to list here. Suffice it to say that choosing Panama to declare "We do not torture" is a little like dropping by a slaughterhouse to pronounce the United States a nation of vegetarians.

And yet when covering the Bush announcement, not a single mainstream news outlet mentioned the sordid history of its location. How could they? To do so would require something totally absent from the current debate: an admission that the embrace of torture by US officials long predates the Bush Administration and has in fact been integral to US foreign policy since the Vietnam War.

It`s a history that has been exhaustively documented in an avalanche of books, declassified documents, CIA training manuals, court records and truth commissions. In his upcoming book A Question of Torture, Alfred McCoy synthesizes this unwieldy cache of evidence, producing an indispensable and riveting account of how monstrous CIA-funded experiments on psychiatric patients and prisoners in the 1950s turned into a template for what he calls "no-touch torture," based on sensory deprivation and self-inflicted pain. McCoy traces how these methods were field-tested by CIA agents in Vietnam as part of the Phoenix program and then imported to Latin America and Asia under the guise of police training programs.

It`s not only apologists for torture who ignore this history when they blame abuses on "a few bad apples"--so too do many of torture`s most prominent opponents. Apparently forgetting everything they once knew about US cold war misadventures, a startling number have begun to subscribe to an antihistorical narrative in which the idea of torturing prisoners first occurred to US officials on September 11, 2001, at which point the interrogation methods used in Guantánamo apparently emerged, fully formed, from the sadistic recesses of Dick Cheney`s and Donald Rumsfeld`s brains. Up until that moment, we are told, America fought its enemies while keeping its humanity intact.

The principal propagator of this narrative (what Garry Wills termed "original sinlessness") is Senator John McCain. Writing recently in Newsweek on the need for a ban on torture, McCain says that when he was a prisoner of war in Hanoi, he held fast to the knowledge "that we were different from our enemies...that we, if the roles were reversed, would not disgrace ourselves by committing or approving such mistreatment of them." It is a stunning historical distortion. By the time McCain was taken captive, the CIA had already launched the Phoenix program and, as McCoy writes, "its agents were operating forty interrogation centers in South Vietnam that killed more than twenty thousand suspects and tortured thousands more," a claim he backs up with pages of quotes from press reports as well as Congressional and Senate probes.

Does it somehow lessen the horrors of today to admit that this is not the first time the US government has used torture to wipe out its political opponents--that it has operated secret prisons before, that it has actively supported regimes that tried to erase the left by dropping students out of airplanes? That, at home, photographs of lynchings were traded and sold as trophies and warnings? Many seem to think so. On November 8 Democratic Congressman Jim McDermott made the astonishing claim to the House of Representatives that "America has never had a question about its moral integrity, until now." Molly Ivins, expressing her shock that the United States is running a prison gulag, wrote that "it`s just this one administration...and even at that, it seems to be mostly Vice President Dick Cheney." And in the November issue of Harper`s, William Pfaff argues that what truly sets the Bush Administration apart from its predecessors is "its installation of torture as integral to American military and clandestine operations." Pfaff acknowledges that long before Abu Ghraib, there were those who claimed that the School of the Americas was a "torture school," but he says that he was "inclined to doubt that it was really so." Perhaps it`s time for Pfaff to have a look at the SOA textbooks coaching illegal torture techniques, all readily available in both Spanish and English, as well as the hair-raising list of SOA grads.

Other cultures deal with a legacy of torture by declaring "Never again!" Why do so many Americans insist on dealing with the current torture crisis by crying "Never Before"? I suspect it has to do with a sincere desire to convey the seriousness of this Administration`s crimes. And the Bush Administration`s open embrace of torture is indeed unprecedented--but let`s be clear about what is unprecedented about it: not the torture but the openness. Past administrations tactfully kept their "black ops" secret; the crimes were sanctioned but they were practiced in the shadows, officially denied and condemned. The Bush Administration has broken this deal: Post-9/11, it demanded the right to torture without shame, legitimized by new definitions and new laws.

Despite all the talk of outsourced torture, the Bush Administration`s real innovation has been its in-sourcing, with prisoners being abused by US citizens in US-run prisons and transported to third countries in US planes. It is this departure from clandestine etiquette, more than the actual crimes, that has so much of the military and intelligence community up in arms: By daring to torture unapologetically and out in the open, Bush has robbed everyone of plausible deniability.

For those nervously wondering if it is time to start using alarmist words like totalitarianism, this shift is of huge significance. When torture is covertly practiced but officially and legally repudiated, there is still the hope that if atrocities are exposed, justice could prevail. When torture is pseudo-legal and when those responsible merely deny that it is torture, what dies is what Hannah Arendt called "the juridical person in man"; soon enough, victims no longer bother to search for justice, so sure are they of the futility (and danger) of that quest. This impunity is a mass version of what happens inside the torture chamber, when prisoners are told they can scream all they want because no one can hear them and no one is going to save them.

In Latin America the revelations of US torture in Iraq have not been met with shock and disbelief but with powerful déjà vu and reawakened fears. Hector Mondragon, a Colombian activist who was tortured in the 1970s by an officer trained at the School of the Americas, wrote: "It was hard to see the photos of the torture in Iraq because I too was tortured. I saw myself naked with my feet fastened together and my hands tied behind my back. I saw my own head covered with a cloth bag. I remembered my feelings--the humiliation, pain." Dianna Ortiz, an American nun who was brutally tortured in a Guatemalan jail, said, "I could not even stand to look at those photographs...so many of the things in the photographs had also been done to me. I was tortured with a frightening dog and also rats. And they were always filming."

Ortiz has testified that the men who raped her and burned her with cigarettes more than 100 times deferred to a man who spoke Spanish with an American accent whom they called "Boss." It is one of many stories told by prisoners in Latin America of mysterious English-speaking men walking in and out of their torture cells, proposing questions, offering tips. Several of these cases are documented in Jennifer Harbury`s powerful new book, Truth, Torture, and the American Way.

Some of the countries that were mauled by US-sponsored torture regimes have tried to repair their social fabric through truth commissions and war crimes trials. In most cases, justice has been elusive, but past abuses have been entered into the official record and entire societies have asked themselves questions not only about individual responsibility but collective complicity. The United States, though an active participant in these "dirty wars," has gone through no parallel process of national soul-searching.

The result is that the memory of US complicity in far-away crimes remains fragile, living on in old newspaper articles, out-of-print books and tenacious grassroots initiatives like the annual protests outside the School of the Americas (which has been renamed but remains largely unchanged). The terrible irony of the anti-historicism of the current torture debate is that in the name of eradicating future abuses, these past crimes are being erased from the record. Every time Americans repeat the fairy tale about their pre-Cheney innocence, these already hazy memories fade even further. The hard evidence still exists, of course, carefully archived in the tens of thousands of declassified documents available from the National Security Archive. But inside US collective memory, the disappeared are being disappeared all over again.

This casual amnesia does a profound disservice not only to the victims of these crimes but also to the cause of trying to remove torture from the US policy arsenal once and for all. Already there are signs that the Administration will deal with the current torture uproar by returning to the cold war model of plausible deniability. The McCain amendment protects every "individual in the custody or under the physical control of the United States Government"; it says nothing about torture training or buying information from the exploding industry of for-profit interrogators. And in Iraq the dirty work is already being handed over to Iraqi death squads, trained by US commanders like Jim Steele, who prepared for the job by setting up similarly lawless units in El Salvador. The US role in training and supervising Iraq`s Interior Ministry was forgotten, moreover, when 173 prisoners were recently discovered in a Ministry dungeon, some tortured so badly that their skin was falling off. "Look, it`s a sovereign country. The Iraqi government exists," Rumsfeld said. He sounded just like the CIA`s William Colby, who when asked in a 1971 Congressional probe about the thousands killed under Phoenix--a program he helped launch--replied that it was now "entirely a South Vietnamese program."

And that`s the problem with pretending that the Bush Administration invented torture. "If you don`t understand the history and the depths of the institutional and public complicity," says McCoy, "then you can`t begin to undertake meaningful reforms." Lawmakers will respond to pressure by eliminating one small piece of the torture apparatus--closing a prison, shutting down a program, even demanding the resignation of a really bad apple like Rumsfeld. But, McCoy says, "they will preserve the prerogative to torture."

The Center for American Progress has just launched an advertising campaign called "Torture is not US." The hard truth is that for at least five decades it has been. But it doesn`t have to be.

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Bush in the Bubble

He has a tight circle of trust, and he likes it that way. But members of both parties are urging Bush to reach beyond the White House walls. How he governs—and how his M.O. stacks up historically.

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On Message: Bush often speaks before pre-screened crowds, with signs stressing his theme
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http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10417159/site/newsweek/

By Evan Thomas and Richard Wolffe
Newsweek

Dec. 19, 2005 issue - Jack Murtha still can`t figure out why the father and son treated him so differently. Every week or so before the `91 gulf war, President George H.W. Bush would invite Congressman Murtha, along with other Hill leaders, to the White House. "He would listen to all the bitching from everybody, Republicans and Democrats, and then he would do what he thought was right." A decorated Vietnam veteran, ex-Marine Murtha was a critical supporter for the elder Bush on Capitol Hill. "I led the fight for the `91 war," he says. "I led the fight, for Christ`s sake."

Yet 13 years later, when Murtha tried to write George W. Bush with some suggestions for fighting the Iraq war, the congressman`s letter was ignored by the White House (after waiting for seven months, Murtha received a polite kiss-off from a deputy under secretary of Defense). Murtha, who has always preferred to operate behind the scenes, finally went public, calling for an orderly withdrawal from Iraq. In the furor that followed, a White House spokesman compared the Vietnam War hero to "Michael Moore and the extreme liberal wing of the Democratic Party." When that approach backfired, President Bush called Murtha a "fine man ... who served our country with honor." The White House has made no attempt to reach out to Murtha since then. "None. None. Zero. Not one call," a baffled Murtha told NEWSWEEK. "I don`t know who the hell they`re talking to. If they talked to people, they wouldn`t get these outbursts. If they`d talked to me, it wouldn`t have happened."
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A White House aide, who like virtually all White House officials (in this story and in general) refused to be identified for fear of antagonizing the president, says that Murtha was a lost cause anyway and dismisses the notion that Bush is isolated or out of touch. Still, the complaints don`t just come from Democrats: Sen. Richard Lugar, Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, pointedly told reporters that Bush needs to "have much more of a cadre of people in both houses, from both parties" visiting the White House "very frequently." Lugar cited Bill Clinton as the model.

President Bush has always shown an admirable ability to ignore the Washington pundits and make fun of the chattering classes. Yet his inattention to Murtha, a coal-country Pennsylvanian and rock-solid patriot, suggests a level of indifference, if not denial, that is dangerous for a president who seeks to transform the world. All presidents face a tension between sticking to their guns and dealing with changing reality. History suggests it can be a mistake to listen too closely to the ever-present (and often self-aggrandizing) critics. But likewise, the idea that any president can go it alone is, to say the least, problematic.

Clearly, George W. Bush`s role model is not his father, who every week would ride down from the White House to the House of Representatives gymnasium, just to hear what fellows like Murtha were saying. Nor is the model John F. Kennedy, who during the Cuban missile crisis reached out to form an "ExCom" of present and past national-security officials, from both parties, to find some way back from the abyss short of war. Nor is it Franklin Roosevelt, who liked to create competition between advisers to find the best solution. Or Abraham Lincoln who, as historian Doris Kearns Goodwin writes in her new book, "Team of Rivals," appointed his political foes to his cabinet.

Bush likes to say that his hero is Ronald Reagan, a true-blue conservative who knew his own mind. But Reagan also knew when to compromise, and when he got into trouble early in his second term, he reached out for help, making a moderate, former senator, Howard Baker, his chief of staff. The chance that George W. Bush will give a top White House job to an establishment moderate (say, Brent Scow-croft, his father`s national-security adviser) is about the same as that Texas will become a province of France.

Bush may be the most isolated president in modern history, at least since the late-stage Richard Nixon. It`s not that he is a socially awkward loner or a paranoid. He can charm and joke like the frat president he was. Still, beneath a hail-fellow manner, Bush has a defensive edge, a don`t-tread-on-me prickliness. It shows in Bush`s humor. When Reagan told a joke, it almost never was about someone in the room. Reagan`s jokes may have been scatological or politically incorrect, but they were inclusive, intended to make everyone join in the laughter. Often, Bush`s joking is personal—it is aimed at you. The teasing can be flattering (the president gave me a nickname!), but it is intended, however so subtly, to put the listener on the defensive. It is a towel-snap that invites a retort. How many people dare to snap back at a president?

Not many, and not unless they have known the president a long, long time. (Even Karl Rove, or "Turd Blossom," as he is sometimes addressed by the president, knows when to hold his tongue.) In the Bush White House, disagreement is often equated with disloyalty.

Lately, there are some signs that the White House is trying to dispel the image of the Bush Bubble (or Bunker). Last week, as part of a campaign to reach out to critics, the president addressed the Council on Foreign Relations, a bastion of East Coast establishment moderates. This week Bush will entertain a delegation of Hill Democrats (routine in the administrations of his father and Reagan, very unusual under this president). In his public comments, Bush for the first time is acknowledging that the war in Iraq has not gone quite as well as hoped for. And some kind of a cabinet shake-up is likely in the new year.

Yet such concessions may be more show than substance. White House officials, as well as one of his closest friends (also speaking anonymously so as not to complicate relations with the president), say that Bush remains sure that he is on the proper course in Iraq and that ultimately he will be vindicated by history. The president may be right. The Iraqi elections next week could produce a government that survives the insurgency and establishes the first (albeit shaky and not quite Western style) democracy in an Arab state—even if that looks like a long haul by today`s light. With an improving economy, Bush`s popularity could well rebound. Washington pendulums always swing; Bush`s polls appear to have bottomed out and are rising, at least slightly.

In any case, the record so far suggests that Bush is not likely to change in any fundamental way in the three years that remain in his term. He has won two presidential elections and one war (Afghanistan) and is, at least by his own reckoning, winning two more (Iraq and the Global War on Terror, or GWOT). His character was forged by hard-won struggles with drink and more shadowy demons, and he has been redeemed by faith. Bush sometimes compares himself to other presidents, usually in terms of how not to do the job. These comparisons are instructive, though not always as flattering as Bush thinks:

Bush is not Bill Clinton. Bush recoiled from the sloppiness and waffling of his predecessor. He has no use for the kind of endless, circular collegiate bull sessions that characterized Clinton`s administration. In 43`s White House, meetings start on time, everyone wears a suit and pizza boxes are nowhere to be seen. But Clinton was able to see, in a way that Bush perhaps does not, that the White House can be, as Clinton put it in his sometimes whiny way, "the crown jewel of the federal prison system." Clinton insisted on having his own private phone line and fax line so that he could reach out (often, to the dismay of those on the receiving end, at 2 a.m.).

Bush is not Lyndon Johnson. Johnson liked to keep three TVs blaring in his office, and he would call reporters at home to browbeat them. Bush has said he does not read the newspapers (actually, he does). "I`m not LBJ," Bush told a recent gathering of lawmakers. "I`m not going to sit around some map room and micromanage the war." Bush was slightly confusing his wars and presidents. It was Franklin Roosevelt who ran World War II from the Map Room; LBJ descended into the Situation Room in the basement to pick bombing targets. It is true that LBJ was nearly driven mad by his obsession with Vietnam and his insecurities about the "Harvards," whom he blamed for sucking him into the war. But forced to listen to his critics—the so-called Wise Men who gathered at the White House in March 1968 to tell him that the war was unwinnable—LBJ was able to reverse course and begin the drawdown of troops from Vietnam.

Bush is not his father. It is not necessary to read Sophocles` Oedipus Rex to see Bush`s reaction to his father`s presidency. The younger Bush was a political aide in his father`s White House. From a front-row seat, he watched with horror as aides leaked and double-crossed to get rid of chief of staff John Sununu (even as he joined in the plotting). "I`m sure he was informed by the experiences he saw when his dad was president," Bush`s current chief of staff, Andy Card, told NEWSWEEK. "And that`s one reason why he has confided in me." (Card was a rare Bush 41 staffer who did not backstab.) Much is said about Bush`s premium on loyalty, but the key word is trust. Like Robert De Niro`s ex CIA officer in "Meet the Parents," Bush has a very small circle of trust. From his days as a small oil businessman, Bush believes in handshakes. He was infuriated, for instance, when former German chancellor Gerhard Schroder promised that he would stick with Bush on Iraq—and then won re-election in 2002 by campaigning against the run-up to the war.

Bush`s real friends are his old Texas and school buddies from Andover, Yale and Harvard Business School. He calls them all the time—but the talk is usually comforting and jocular, of sports and old days. They rarely dispense pointed political advice or brace him with bad news. Chief of staff Card is widely described by insiders as a decent and honorable man, but also as a family retainer who tells the president what he wants to hear. Exhausted by predawn arrivals at the White House, Card is expected to step down soon (though he denies the rumors that he wants to replace Treasury Secretary John Snow). The lead candidates to replace Card are all loyalists, like OMB Director Josh Bolten, or Bush`s old confidant and former Commerce secretary Don Evans (who is lukewarm about working full time in Washington).

Bush`s war cabinet has included some very strong and independent-minded figures. Because they were at the end of their careers, with no office left to seek, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were seen as liberated to call things the way they saw them. But the headstrong Cheney and Rumsfeld seemed to almost relish scoffing at dissent.

Cheney in particular has acted as Bush`s unofficial prime minister, playing a heavy hand in the war on terror and handling (or often mishandling) Hill relations. Though a former congressman himself, Cheney disdains Congress almost on principle: he believes the balance between executive and legislative power went out of whack after Watergate, and he has done his best to strengthen White House prerogatives. Cheney`s bungling of the dicey issue of torture is a case in point.

When Sen. John McCain passed a Senate resolution by a vote of 90-9 to ban the "cruel, inhumane and degrading" treatment of detainees, Cheney, a former member of the House intelligence committee, went to Capitol Hill to carve out an exception for CIA officers. With CIA Director Porter Goss in tow, Cheney privately made the case to a group of GOP senators that "enhanced interrogation methods" work to extract necessary information from terrorists. The senators were unimpressed. Talking to NEWSWEEK afterward, McCain waxed confident that he "could get 90 votes again tomorrow." Since then, Bush`s national-security adviser, Steve Hadley, has been gingerly negotiating with McCain for some face-saving compromise. The president is in a box: he can ill afford to make his first veto ever of a bill banning torture.

Bush was getting pushed to compromise by his secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, who privately argued that Bush did not want his legacy to be a policy of torture. Some Washington observers believe that Rice, who was frequently rolled by the hard-line hawks Cheney and Rumsfeld in the first term, is feeling empowered by her new role at State to take a stronger—and more moderate and internationalist—position in Bush`s War Cabinet. But one former Bush 41 administration figure who knows her well (and declined to be identified for fear of giving offense) says of Rice`s apparent evolution, "Don`t read too much into it. Condi is not a neocon. But she`s not Colin Powell, either."

On the overriding issue facing the president—the war in Iraq—some reality has slowly crept in. Last spring Cheney was still whistling past the graveyard, describing the Iraqi insurgency as in its "last throes." Since then, Bush`s ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, has tried to educate the president and his top advisers on some "ground truth"—that the new Iraqi Army and police are a long way from being able to defend their own country and nascent government. According to senior Pentagon officials who did not want to be identified discussing private meetings, in October Bush received an unusually unvarnished briefing on the military situation from the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine Gen. Peter Pace.

What Bush actually hears and takes in, however, is not clear. And whether his advisers are quite as frank as they claim to be with the president is also questionable. Take Social Security, for example. One House Republican, who asked not to be identified for fear of offending the White House, recalls a summertime meeting with congressmen in the Roosevelt Room at which Bush enthusiastically talked up his Social Security reform plan. But the plan was already dead—as everyone except the president had acknowledged. Bush seemed to have no idea. "I got the sense that his staff was not telling him the bad news," says the lawmaker. "This was not a case of him thinking positive. He just didn`t have any idea of the political realities there. It was like he wasn`t briefed at all." (Bush was not clueless, says an aide, but pushing his historic mission.)

In subtle ways, Bush does not encourage truth-telling or at least a full exploration of all that could go wrong. A former senior member of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad occasionally observed Bush on videoconferences with his top advisers. "The president would ask the generals, `Do you have what you need to complete the mission?` as opposed to saying, `Tell me, General, what do you need to win?` which would have opened up a whole new set of conversations," says this official, who did not want to be identified discussing high-level meetings. The official says that the way Bush phrased his questions, as well as his obvious lack of interest in long, detailed discussions, had a chilling effect. "It just prevented the discussion from heading in a direction that would open up a possibility that we need more troops," says the official.

Bush generally prefers short conversations—long on conclusion, short on reasoning. He likes popular history and presidential biography (Theodore Roosevelt, George Washington), but by all accounts, he is not intellectually curious. Occasional outsiders brought into the Bush Bubble have observed that faith, not evidence, is the basis for decision making. Psychobabblers have long had a field day with the fact that Bush quit drinking cold turkey and turned around his life by accepting God. His close friends agree that Bush likes comfort and serenity; he does not like dissonance. He has long been mothered by strong women, including his mother and wife. A foreign diplomat who declined to be identified was startled when Secretary of State Rice warned him not to lay bad news on the president. "Don`t upset him," she said.

Bush is never going to be a JFK who would hold glittery state dinners and use them to tease out new ideas and fresh thinking from different sources (and, it should be added in JFK`s case, fresh gossip and romantic conquests). Bush has held four state dinners in five years and made clear his preference for going to bed at 10. Ken Duberstein, Reagan`s last chief of staff and a whiz at congressional relations, recalled that when Nancy Reagan traveled, the president did not like to dine alone. So Duberstein would bring in seven or eight congressmen for dinner, and Reagan would tell his jokes and stories. Reagan even had House Speaker Thomas P. (Tip) O`Neill over for his birthday. Finally, Duberstein recalled, an aide had to step in and say, "It`s time for you guys to go back to running the government." Bush prefers to flip on ESPN or go to Camp David for the weekend with Card and Harriet Miers, his trusted White House counsel (and failed Supreme Court nominee).

Bush, too, can be funny; his humor is Preppy Putdown, not gentle and corny, if sometimes off-color, like Reagan`s. "It`s the difference between Eureka and Yale," says an old Reagan hand. It`s also a matter of condence. Reagan knew he was the best entertainer in the room. To be sure, Bush can be self-deprecating. Joking about his Council on Foreign Relations speech, Bush suggested to his speechwriters that, as a gag, he should hold up a copy of Foreign Affairs, the council`s worthy, dry publication, and say, "I tried to read it once but the print was too small and there weren`t enough pictures." (Bush decided against using the quip, considering the speech too much of a serious event.) But humor is a tool and sometimes a weapon for Bush. "He uses humor to disarm people and get a read on them," said a senior aide who wouldn`t be identified talking about his boss. "You can tell a lot about a person in how they react to a joke."

During Bush`s first term, his attitude toward Congress was "my way or the highway," according to a GOP staffer who did not want to be identified criticizing the president. "If you were lucky, you got to talk to him as you were taking a picture with him at a party," says Rep. Ray LaHood, an Illinois Republican. "It was nothing." Lately, however, Bush has been inviting congressmen up to the family residence at the White House to drink sodas and snack on peanuts or cookies. Bush talks, then encourages feedback, good and bad. "He`s very engaged," says Rep. Peter King, Republican of New York.

He has to be. Congressmen from his own party have been in open rebellion. At their annual leadership retreat at a luxury resort overlooking the Chesapeake Bay two weeks ago, senior congressmen tore into White House aides Card and Counselor Dan Bartlett. The normally mild-mannered Speaker Dennis Hastert, who usually likes to operate behind closed doors, announced to the group, which included staffers as well as members, that the White House had "blown it" when it came to handling congressional relations. There was still incredulity over the Murtha outburst demanding a troop withdrawal from Iraq. "They should have seen that coming like a freight train," said a top Republican. "In any White House the cardinal rule is no surprises," said Duberstein. "I was somewhat surprised, I admit," Card told NEWSWEEK. At the retreat, the Hill Republicans told the White House to do a better job of selling economic progress. The next day the White House put Bush into the Rose Garden to spin good news on the economy.

Now the White House is trying to reach out to Democrats. On Tuesday, Bush is scheduled to meet with a group of conservative Democrats who support the war and to have lunch with Rep. John Dingell of Michigan, who is celebrating his 50th year in the House. But the Democrats are wary. "A lot of us feel like we have a Charlie Brown and Lucy relationship with the White House," says one Hill staffer. "They say they want to play ball with us, but then they kick us when they get a chance." Until recently, the White House has not seen the need to court Democrats, since the Republicans control both houses of Congress.

Democratic Sen. Joseph Lieberman has been pushing for a bipartisan "war council" that could advise the president on strategy. The Washington rumor mill has suggested Lieberman as a replacement for Rumsfeld. Friends of Rumsfeld`s say he has no intention of stepping down. If Bush were to replace him with a Democrat, it would send a powerful signal that the days of the almighty Cheney-Rumsfeld axis were over. But don`t hold your breath. "There is this enormous pressure to change, but he`s going to resist that," says a longtime adviser. "He wants solid people who don`t overrespond in a crisis." That was the approach Bush took after his devastating defeat in the New Hampshire primary in 2000. "The conventional wisdom after New Hampshire was to drop the team and start over," says a senior White House aide. "But he brought the team in and said: `Let`s go down to South Carolina and kick some butt`."

The leader of bush`s political team was Karl Rove. Although his legal problems are not over in the Valerie Plame leak case, Rove has been upbeat and around town again, reportedly full of ideas for the next three years. Rove has succeeded in promoting Bush`s political fortunes by polarizing—by aiming at 51 percent and calling it a mandate. It is possible that with some luck abroad and stroking of Congress at home Bush can take advantage of the GOP majority in both houses to get some traction on tough issues ahead, like restoring fiscal discipline. If the economy stays strong and Iraq doesn`t fall apart, the GOP can hang on to Congress in 2006 (and thus in 2007 avoid a blizzard of subpoenas from Democratic-controlled committees wanting to investigate questions like whether the administration lied about WMD in Iraq). Yet it will be hard to please congressmen while cutting their pork barrel, and as usual, no one seems very eager to cut middle-class entitlement programs. Big changes that require vision and sacrifice—like an energy and conservation program to reduce dependency on Middle East oil—do not appear to be on the drawing board.

True mandates for hard choices come from reaching out and compromising. Bush`s father understood that. Breaking his own "read my lips" promise at the 1988 Republican convention, he raised taxes in 1991 as part of a fiscal-reform package that was essential to the 1990s economic boom. The tax hike probably cost the senior Bush a second term in 1992. But it was the right thing to do. It`s very unlikely the son would do the same.

With Holly Bailey, Daniel Klaidman, Eleanor Clift, Michael Hirsh and John Barry
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.

© 2005 MSNBC.com

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10417159/site/newsweek/

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An Imperial Presidency

Bush`s travel schedule seems to involve as little contact as possible with the country he is in.

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/10416779/site/newsweek/

By Fareed Zakaria
Newsweek

Dec. 19, 2005 issue - President Bush`s most recent foreign trips, to Latin America and Asia, went off as expected. He was accompanied by 2,000 people, several airplanes, two helicopters and a tightly scripted schedule. He met few locals and saw little except palaces and conference rooms. When the program changed, it was to cut out dinners and meetings. Bush`s travel schedule seems calculated to involve as little contact as possible with the country he is in. Perhaps the White House should look into the new teleconferencing technologies. If set up right, the president could soon conduct foreign policy without ever having to actually meet foreigners.

It`s not that President Bush doesn`t like foreigners. He does, some of them anyway. He admires Tony Blair, Junichiro Koizumi and Ariel Sharon, as well as a few others. But even with them—the "good men"—he doesn`t really have a genuine give-and-take. Most conversations are brief, scripted and perfunctory. The president rarely talks to any foreign leader to get his opinions or assessment of events. Churchill lived in the White House for days while he and Franklin Roosevelt jointly planned allied strategy. Such collaboration with a foreign leader is unthinkable today. Insider accounts of Tony Blair`s involvement with the Iraq war suggest that Blair was, at best, informed of policy before it took effect.

It is conventional wisdom that this lack of genuine communication with the world is a unique characteristic of George W. Bush. After all, Bill Clinton forged genuinely deep relations with his counterparts abroad. Though he traveled in equal grandeur, he showed much greater interest in the countries he visited. (In India he became a hero even though he had slapped sanctions on the country, an extraordinary case of personal diplomacy trumping policy.) George Bush Sr. had his famous Rolodex and dialed foreign leaders regularly to ask their views on things. Bush Jr. has set a new standard.

Bush`s tendencies seem to reflect a broader trend. America has developed an imperial style of diplomacy. There is much communication with foreign leaders, but it`s a one-way street. Most leaders who are consulted are simply informed of U.S. policy. Senior American officials live in their own bubbles, rarely having any genuine interaction with their overseas counterparts, let alone other foreigners. "When we meet with American officials, they talk and we listen—we rarely disagree or speak frankly because they simply can`t take it in," explained one senior foreign official who requested anonymity for fear of angering his U.S. counterparts.

It is worth quoting at length from the recently published—and extremely well-written—memoirs of Chris Patten (who is ardently pro-American), recounting his experiences as Europe`s commissioner for external affairs. "Even for a senior official dealing with the U.S. administration," he writes, "you are aware of your role as a tributary; however courteous your hosts you come as a subordinate bearing goodwill and hoping to depart with a blessing on your endeavours ... In the interests of the humble leadership to which President Bush rightly aspires, it would be useful for some of his aides to try to get into their own offices for a meeting with themselves some time!

"Attending any conference abroad," Patten continues, "American cabinet officers arrive with the sort of entourage that would have done Darius proud. Hotels are commandeered; cities brought to a halt; innocent bystanders are barged into corners by thick-necked men with bits of plastic hanging out of their ears. It is not a spectacle that wins hearts and minds."

Apart from the resentment that the imperial style produces, the aloof attitude means that American officials don`t benefit from the experience and expertise of foreigners. The U.N. inspectors in Iraq were puzzled at how uninterested American officials were in talking to them—even though they had spent weeks combing through Iraq. Instead, U.S. officials, comfortably ensconced in Washington, gave them lectures on the evidence of weapons of mass destruction. "I thought they would be interested in our firsthand reports on what those supposedly dual-use factories looked like," one of then told me (again remaining anonymous for fear of angering the administration). "But no, they explained to me what those factories were being used for."

In handling postwar Iraq, senior American officials in Washington avoided any real conversations with U.N. officials who had been involved in Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor, Mozambique and other such places.

To foreigners, American officials increasingly seem clueless about the world they are supposed to be running. "There are two sets of conversations, one with Americans in the room and one without," says Kishore Mahbubani, formerly a senior diplomat for Singapore and now dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. Because Americans live in a "cocoon," Mahbubani fears that they don`t see the "sea change in attitudes towards America throughout the world."

The imperial style has its virtues. It intimidates, allows for decisive action and can force countries to follow the lead. But it racks up costs. And it is particularly ill suited for the world we are entering. As other countries come into their own, economically and politically, they want to be listened to, not simply tolerated. They resent being lectured to by the United States. They are willing to be led, but in a very different style.

When Newt Gingrich was speaker of the House, he certainly didn`t have a reputation for being weak-kneed or soft. But he knew the value of reaching out to others who had different opinions. He would borrow from management jargon and speak of the need to "listen, learn, help and lead." In that order.

Write the author at [e-mail].
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.

© 2005 MSNBC.com

URL: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/10416779/site/newsweek/page/2/

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December 12, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
Big Box Balderdash
By PAUL KRUGMAN
http://select.nytimes.com/2005/12/12/opinion/12krugman.html?…

I think I`ve just seen the worst economic argument of 2005. Given what the Bush administration tried to put over on us during its unsuccessful sales pitch for Social Security privatization, that`s saying a lot.

The argument came in the course of the latest exchange between Wal-Mart and its critics. A union-supported group, Wake Up Wal-Mart, has released a TV ad accusing Wal-Mart of violating religious values, backed by a letter from religious leaders attacking the retail giant for paying low wages and offering poor benefits. The letter declares that "Jesus would not embrace Wal-Mart`s values of greed and profits at any cost."

You may think that this particular campaign - which has, inevitably, been dubbed "Where would Jesus shop?" - is a bit over the top. But it`s clear why those concerned about the state of American workers focus their criticism on Wal-Mart. The company isn`t just America`s largest private employer. It`s also a symbol of the state of our economy, which delivers rising G.D.P. but stagnant or falling living standards for working Americans. For Wal-Mart is a huge and hugely profitable company that pays badly and offers minimal benefits.

Attacks on Wal-Mart have hurt its image, and perhaps even its business. The company has set up a campaign-style war room to devise responses. So how did Wal-Mart respond to this latest critique?

Wal-Mart can claim, with considerable justice, that its business practices make America as a whole richer. The fact is that Wal-Mart sells many products more cheaply than traditional stores, and that its low prices aren`t solely or even mainly the result of the low wages it pays. Wal-Mart has been able to reduce prices largely because it has brought genuine technological and organizational innovation to the retail business.

It`s harder for Wal-Mart to defend its pay and benefits policies. Still, the company could try to argue that despite its awesome size and market dominance it cannot defy the iron laws of supply and demand, which force it to pay low wages. (I disagree, but that`s a subject for another column.)

But instead of resting its case on these honest or at least defensible answers to criticism, Wal-Mart has decided to insult our intelligence by claiming to be, of all things, an engine of job creation. Judging from its press release in response to the religious values campaign, the assertion that Wal-Mart "creates 100,000 jobs a year" is now the core of the company`s public relations strategy.

It`s true, of course, that the company is getting bigger every year. But adding 100,000 people to Wal-Mart`s work force doesn`t mean adding 100,000 jobs to the economy. On the contrary, there`s every reason to believe that as Wal-Mart expands, it destroys at least as many jobs as it creates, and drives down workers` wages in the process.

Think about what happens when Wal-Mart opens a store in a previously untouched city or county. The new store takes sales away from stores that are already in the area; these stores lay off workers or even go out of business. Because Wal-Mart`s big-box stores employ fewer workers per dollar of sales than the smaller stores they replace, overall retail employment surely goes down, not up, when Wal-Mart comes to town. And if the jobs lost come from employers who pay more generously than Wal-Mart does, overall wages will fall when Wal-Mart moves in.

This isn`t just speculation on my part. A recent study by David Neumark of the University of California at Irvine and two associates at the [urlPublic Policy Institute of California,]http://www.ppic.org/main/home.asp[/url] "The Effects of Wal-Mart on Local Labor Markets," uses sophisticated statistical analysis to estimate the effects on jobs and wages as Wal-Mart spread out from its original center in Arkansas.

The authors find that retail employment did, indeed, fall when Wal-Mart arrived in a new county. It`s not clear in their data whether overall employment in a county rose or fell when a Wal-Mart store opened. But it`s clear that average wages fell: "residents of local labor markets," the study reports, "earn less following the opening of Wal-Mart stores."

So Wal-Mart has chosen to defend itself with a really poor argument. If that`s the best the company can come up with, it`s going to keep losing the public relations war with its critics. Maybe it should consider an alternative strategy, such as paying higher wages.

* Copyright 2005The New York Times Company

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Zum Start des neuen King Kong Films.

December 12, 2005
Op-Ed Contributor
Kissing Cousins
By CLIVE D. L. WYNNE
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/12/opinion/12wynne.html

Gainesville, Fla.

WHAT is it about watching young women being ravished by oversized middle-aged gorillas that presses so many buttons - and fuels so many King Kong movies, including the latest version opening on Wednesday?

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Cynthia Erb in "Tracking King Kong" suggests a few of the factors behind the success of the first King Kong movie in 1933: racist fear of miscegenation, Depression-era desire for the exotic and sexist lust to see a woman taken against her will.

But 70 years of academic study have overlooked one crucial bit of history: a human and ape sexual drama widely reported in North American newspapers in the mid-1920`s that, though now forgotten, must surely have informed the first Kong movie`s creators.

In the mid-1920`s, the culture wars were dominated - as they are today with "intelligent design" - by the debate between creationism and evolutionary thinking. In 1925, John T. Scopes had been found guilty of teaching that mankind arose from something other than divine creation. But the United States was not the only country passionate about the issue. The young Soviet Union, in its effort to stamp out religion, was determined to prove that men were descended from apes. In 1926, a Soviet scientist named Ilya Ivanov decided the most compelling way to do this would be to breed a humanzee: a human-chimpanzee hybrid.

Ivanov set off for a French research station in West Africa. There he inseminated three female chimpanzees with human sperm. Not his own, for he shared the colonial-era belief that the local people were more closely related to apes than he was. He stayed long enough to learn that his experiment had failed.

Next Ivanov wrote a Cuban heiress, Rosalia Abreu. Abreu was the first person to breed chimps in captivity and had a large menagerie outside Havana. Ivanov asked if any of her male chimpanzees might be available to inseminate a Russian volunteer known to posterity only as `G."

At first Abreu was agreeable. But Ivanov made the mistake of approaching Charles Smith of the American Association for the Advancement of Atheism for fund-raising support. Smith was something of a showman - he liked to appear in public with a chimpanzee dressed in a business suit - and went to the newspapers with Ivanov`s proposal. The New York Times thundered, "Soviet Backs Plan to Test Evolution."

The resulting publicity brought the case to the attention of the Ku Klux Klan, which threatened Abreu with retaliation if she took part in Ivanov`s experiment, calling it "abominable to the creator." Abreu withdrew her consent.

Before Ivanov could find another chimpanzee breeder, he fell out of favor in one of Stalin`s purges and was exiled to Kazakhstan in 1931. He died a year later, in March 1932, waiting for a train home to Moscow.

Twelve months later the first King Kong movie opened in New York. Though The New Yorker regretted "the need felt for a plot and love interest," other moviegoers clearly did not agree and the film grossed $89,931 in its first weekend (tickets were only 15 cents). This success, in the darkest days of the Great Depression, saved the film`s makers, RKO, from bankruptcy.

We now know that, though we share much of our genetic code, chimp-human hybrids are probably impossible because the genetic material is arranged quite differently on our chromosomes. But I doubt that will stifle interest in this kind of interspecies romance.

Because, in the end, it isn`t the science, history or philosophy that keeps drawing us back to King Kong, but an age-old story. As the showman Carl Denham says at the end of the original "King Kong," with the beast dead at his feet on a New York City street: "Oh, no, it wasn`t the airplanes. It was beauty killed the beast."

Clive D. L. Wynne, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Florida and the author of "Do Animals Think?," is working on a book about apes and people.


* Copyright 2005The New York Times Company

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Zu vorherigem Posting, Blog Cole, Boston Globe Link:
[urlSenior cleric in Iraq wields great influence over election]http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/12/11/MNG0FG5LJL1.DTL[/url]

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Nicht der Einzelne bestimmt, was er wählt, sondern es wird vorgeben von den Mullahs, wer zu wählen ist.
Und Sistani sagt, wen die Shiiten zu wählen haben.
Solange sich die USA nicht gegen Sistani stellen und ihn seinen Gottesstadt einrichten lassen, werden die Shiiten sich ruhig verhalten.
Wenn nicht wird sein Kettenhund Sadr von der Leine gelassen.
Zwischenzeitlich sind dessen Milizen durch den Iran militärisch aufgepept worden. Denn bei allem darf man nicht vergessen, dass Sistani und auch Sadr u.a. aus dem Iran kommen oder dort lange gelebt haben.
In der Rangordnung der shiitischen Ajatollahs nimmt Sistani einen der ersten Plätze ein, das gilt für den Iran und den Irak.

Senior cleric in Iraq wields great influence over election
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archiv…

- Thanassis Cambanis, Boston Globe
Sunday, December 11, 2005

Najaf, Iraq -- The recent traffic to the doorstep of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in this southern shrine city leaves little doubt about who is really the most powerful man in Iraq.

Shiites make up Iraq`s majority, and an alliance of Islamist Shiites -- many with ties to Iran -- dominates the current government in no small part because Sistani told Shiites to vote for the alliance in January.

Since then, Shiite politicians in the salons of power and the faithful on the streets alike have been turning to Najaf to seek Sistani`s orders on nearly everything, from the drafting of the Constitution this summer to campaign strategies for Thursday`s national parliamentary elections and even how people should vote.

"Every religious man, he will ask Sistani who to vote for in the election," said Ahmed Nouri, a secular independent running for parliament from Najaf, who said that his anti-corruption and anticlerical platform will probably get no support. "That is the problem."

As the most senior cleric in Najaf`s Hawza, or constellation of Shiite religious academies, Grand Ayatollah Sistani is considered the ultimate authority in Iraq on all religious questions. It is also increasingly clear from that the clerics at the Hawza are directing the most important political decisions of the dominant Shiite parties. Their views are particularly important on the eve of Thursday`s vote for a permanent legislative assembly, the first to be elected under the constitution adopted in a referendum in October.

The United Iraqi Alliance, which coasted to 51 percent of the vote in January, is once again campaigning as the Najaf ticket, putting Sistani`s face on all its posters and telling supporters that the top clerics all endorse their parties.

The ascendance of Shiite Islamists has transformed Iraqi society, especially throughout the Shiite south. The Shiite parties successfully pushed through a Constitution that gives religion a greater role in government and paves the way for the oil-rich Shiite south to become an autonomous subregion.

In the south and in places like Baghdad`s Sadr City suburb, Shiite factions have substituted Shiite militias for police forces, promoted religious courts to deal with family law, demanded that women wear the veil, and in many places have banned alcohol, dancing and concerts.

The main Shiite parties thoroughly dominate Shiite districts. Posters for secular parties like that of Nouri or former prime minister and U.S. ally Ayad Allawi are regularly torn down or spattered with black ink in Najaf and in Shiite areas throughout the country.

Sistani himself can`t vote; he still carries the citizenship of Iran, where he was born, even though he has lived in Najaf for more than 50 years. Sistani, 75, officially denies through his spokesmen that he has endorsed any party, instead asserting that he has offered "oral guidance," for example telling Shiite faithful not to waste their votes on small parties that won`t win many seats or on secular groups.

A year ago, Sistani himself forged the coalition of competing Shiite parties, persuading them to run together as a single party.

This time around, many smaller parties dissatisfied with the performance of the government have split off to run separately, leaving three powerhouses in the Shiite alliance: the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the Dawa Party, and followers of the militant cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who calls for Islamic law in Iraq, unending war against Israel and rejection of the Saturday-Sunday weekend, which he considers a Christian imposition.

But even those who style themselves as Shiite dissidents never stray far from Sistani`s line.

Ali Dabagh, a devoutly religious Shiite from nearby Karbala, the Shiite shrine city second in importance only to Najaf, ran with the alliance last time but in this election is now campaigning as an independent.

But, he said, he first sought Sistani`s permission before founding his own party, and said he would never have left the alliance without "the blessing of his eminence."

Countless parties have tried to claim Sistani`s support. Dabagh has distributed flyers with the ayatollah`s office number, instructing voters to call and confirm that Dabagh is an acceptable choice. Even some secular or Sunni Arab leaders have put Sistani`s image on posters or flyers.

In contrast to the Shiite parties, secular Iraqi parties have struggled to establish a toehold since Saddam Hussein`s dictatorship fell.

URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archiv…
©2005 San Francisco Chronicle

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We will pay for cheap bananas with prisons, fear and fragmentation

Those at the trade talks should recognise that there is much more to economics than the market price of goods

http://www.guardian.co.uk/fairtrade/story/0,12458,1665224,00…

Gary Younge in Kingston, Jamaica
Monday December 12, 2005

Guardian
As hurricanes barrelled through the alphabet this year, pounding Anthony Barnett`s two acres of banana fields in St Thomas, Jamaica, his healthy respect for the forces of nature endured. But as the World Trade Organisation meets in Hong Kong this week, it is the deliberate demolition wrought by humankind he fears most.

"Globalisation seems to me like a system where the man with power uses a big stick to put the man without power in his place," he says. "If you squeeze every last drop of blood from a Jamaican labourer and at the end of the day he hasn`t got enough money to send his children to school or put food on his table, then who benefits?"

It is a question that should be first on the agenda in Hong Kong. Between them the EU, the US and the multinationals will conspire to either abandon the poorest nations to the fate of the market or entrench them in their poverty, while denying them valuable market access to the west`s own vulnerable sectors.

Whether it is water provision in Bolivia or health insurance in Kenya, the WTO is set to cement international trading according to the golden rule - that those who have the gold make the rules.

Little wonder that, according to a Christian Aid poll, two-thirds of African trade delegations questioned said that their economies would suffer if they accept what is currently on offer, while more than half said they would halt the negotiations if they didn`t like what was on offer. They should follow their instincts, and other less developed nations and progressive NGOs should follow their lead. When the only thing on the menu is going to makeyou sick, it is time to walk away from the table.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the Caribbean. At present the EU buys sugar at an inflated price from its former colonies - otherwise known as ACP countries (African, Caribbean and Pacific). The Brazilian government has challenged the practice as unfair. The EU has agreed to slash the price it pays for sugar by 36% over four years.

Meanwhile, the EU`s practice of giving preferential treatment to bananas from ACP countries has been challenged by Latin American states where multinational giants like Dole and Chiquita operate. In the past, the EU bought ACP bananas duty free while imposing a tariff on those from elsewhere. Now those tariffs will also be slashed, making ACP bananas relatively more expensive.

"Developing countries have been sacrificed in order for Europe to reach a deal," says Jo Leadbeater, head of advocacy at Oxfam. "The commission has hurled money at its member states to convince them to sign up but has abandoned some of the world`s poorest countries to destitution."

The result will be a double whammy for the Caribbean, where sugar and bananas are central to small national economies. Take St Vincent - a country with a population slightly lower than that of Huddersfield - where more than 50% of the workforce are in some way involved in bananas. The effect of these WTO rulings on a nation of that size will be analogous to a pit closure - but with tightening immigration all around there will be nowhere else for these people to go. Guyana was one of four countries in the Americas to benefit from the much-trumpeted debt relief initiative offered by the G8 - but its loss of income for sugar will wipe out all those benefits. The hurricane season is over; now global capital can finish the job for good.

According to the strict laws of comparative advantage, free-trade zealots have a point. Brazil produces sugar, and Dole and Chiquita produce bananas, far more cheaply than any Caribbean nation can. Even after the EU has slashed its sugar price it will be double what it can pay on the open market. The dollar bananas from Latin America may be tasteless and smothered in pesticides, but they are certainly cheap. Why not then clinch the deal that will give the British consumer the cheapest of everything and let these islands shift their resources to more effective sectors?

First, because while these changes will make a huge difference to the Caribbean they will make virtually none to the price of sugar and bananas. The nations concerned produce less than 2% of the world`s sugar and bananas, and the principal beneficiaries of these changes will be a handful of oligarchies in Brazil and central America, not the consumer.

Second, because Caribbean nations freely acknowledge the need to change. They want to diversify into different sectors - such as eco-tourism and offshore banking - and other parts of the industry, making sugar byproducts like ethanol, molasses and rum. But in such small nations the scope for change is limited, slow, and needs help. "You can`t adjust from a position of collapse," says Richard Bernal, who heads the regional negotiating team for the Caribbean. "We need a reasonable amount of time as well as financial and technical assistance if we are going to change."

The EU has offered €40m to the ACP countries in compensation for abandoning them; in stark contrast, it has offered European producers around €7bn to soften their blows in the upcoming deal.

Third, the very powerful blocs flagrantly flout the very rules they are pressuring these small nations to adhere to. American cotton and European agriculture are both subsidised to the hilt. US cotton farmers receive more in government subsidy than the entire economy of Burkina Faso, which produces cotton much cheaper - in direct breach of WTO rules. "We do well at sport because the playing field is even and the rules are public," said African-American politician Jesse Jackson, referring to black Americans in the workforce. That applies just as well to the WTO. "But when we are kicking up the field and people start making up the rules ... that`s when the problems start."

And finally, there is more to life than trade and more to economics than the market price of commodities. Angela Stultz, who runs a local regeneration project in inner-city Kingston, anticipates those thrown off the cane and banana fields will end up in communities like hers, hustling to survive. "They will migrate to these kind of areas with mouths to feed and no money. That leads to frustration and desperation, and desperate people act desperately. They are driven by economic circumstances to survive." This is precisely what happened in Jamaica when the North American Free Trade Agreement decimated the garment industry.

The Caribbean has become the principal shipping point for cocaine trafficking between the Americas and Europe. More than a fifth of the cocaine in the US arrives through that route, according to the National Drug Intelligence Centre. With the drugs come gun crime, gang activity and community collapse. Cheaper bananas and sugar come at a high price. We will pay for them with more police, probation, prisons, fear and fragmentation.

"These aren`t the poorest countries in the world," says Glenys Kinnock MEP, who has lobbied hard for the Caribbean`s sugar and banana producers ahead of the forthcoming round. "They`re not the Congo. But that is what we are threatening them with."

Making poverty history would be wonderful. Right now we have to stop making it the future.

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Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

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[urlMontreal deal raises hopes for Europe`s emissions scheme]http://www.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,12374,1665077,00.html[/url]

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Dec 13, 2005

COMMENTARY
Sectarian flaws in Iraq
By Ehsan Ahrari
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GL13Ak03.html

The United States wrote the interim constitution of Iraq to establish a sectarian-based democracy in that country. However, it faces a bleak future for three very important reasons.

First, it made the Iraqi Shi`ites (about 56% of the population) and the Kurds (about 15% of the population) dominant groups. Aside from being two groups that were tormented by Saddam Hussein, they emerged as major ruling forces in a democratic Iraq, and also brought to the table other highly divisive agendas.

Second, in a democratic Iraq, the Sunnis lost the predominant status as a ruling group that they had enjoyed during the Saddam regime. Now, the Sunnis (comprising about 20% of the population) must accept their status as a minority group whose rights and privileges remain at the beck and call of the political compromises in which the Shi`ites and the Kurds are likely to play a crucial role. Because they remain highly divided, the Sunnis suffered serious setbacks in the aftermath of the January elections. They also remain divided regarding their participation in the elections of December 15.

Third, democracy in Iraq is an outcome of the US invasion. As such, its very legitimacy remains highly questionable in the minds of the Sunnis who lost political power. Consequently, they remain acutely sympathetic to the insurgency that has made Iraq a highly unstable place, and promises to do so even more as political pressure inside the US mounts for withdrawal of its troops.

Sectarian agendas
When the US decided to implant democracy in Iraq, the natural basis for such a government had to be sectarian. This virtually guarantees a Shi`ite-dominated government as long as the Shi`ites remain highly politicized and motivated to participate in voting. No one expected the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) to emerge as such a dominant group (by capturing 48% of the votes), if not for its endorsement by the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani right before the elections of January.

After its victory, the UIA had to form a government quickly and then govern well. In both instances, it did not perform well. However, considering that Iraq was experimenting with democracy for the first time in its existence as a state, it was understandable that the UIA stumbled badly before a visible new government could start functioning. Its challenge was worsened by parts of the insurgency resolutely fighting against the emergence of a democratic and stable Iraq.

Another characteristic of the sectarian-based democracy was the emergence of the unified Kurdish block that captured 26% of the votes and became the second-most powerful group in the Iraqi National Assembly. The Kurds focused on capturing the presidency, which, even though a ceremonial office, established that they could unite as a political group and then indulge themselves in the post-election bargaining to become a powerful group. Jalal Talabani duly became president.

The Sunnis did not fare well in the election. The insurgency threatened to kill any Sunni who either ran for office or voted. In addition, Sunni anger about the way in which they were deprived of political power persuaded many not to participate in the American-established "illegitimate" system that appeared only aimed at establishing a political order dominated by the Shi`ites and Kurds.

And then all these groups started to pursue radically different agendas that weakened any chance of the creation of a unified Iraq.

The Shi`ites were divided among those who wanted the establishment of an Islamic government. However, even among the supporters of an Islamic government, there were divisions among those who wanted to incorporate the Iran-style model of vilayat-e-faqih (rule of the clergy) and those who preferred a model promoted by Sistani. His model preferred a system where no clergy would head the government, but they would serve as its important mentor.

A third group of Shi`ites preferred a secular government. However, their numbers were not strong enough - Iyad Allawi`s party, the Iraqi List, only scored 14% of the votes.

And then there is the potential influence of Iran, which wanted an Islamic government of some sort where it could exercise influence. If Iraq were to emerge as a secular state, that would certainly become a special concern for Iran, for such a country would likely be receptive of the American presence, as well as influence.

The Kurds certainly welcomed a sectarian-based democracy, for that development enabled them to become a powerful voting block. They not only participated heavily in the January elections, they also used their impressive performance in that election to incorporate a number of demands in the interim constitution.

For instance, knowing that they had little chance of capturing the job of prime minister, they focused on capturing the presidency. Second, they succeeded in inserting clauses in the constitution to regain control of Mosul, an area that has large oil reserves and a heavy Kurdish population. They also sought a constitutional guarantee protecting their self-rule in northern Iraq. Finally, the Kurds and the Shi`ites were able to arrive at a rapprochement whereby Iraq became a federal form of government, with the northern and southern areas of large oil reserves belonging to the Kurds and the Shi`ites respectively.

The most troubling part of the Kurdish agenda is that there is a general understanding that the autonomy they have acquired through the interim constitution is likely to be used eventually to establish an independent Kurdistan. If that were to happen, Iraq, as we know it today, would cease to exist.

Sunnis have become the major losers in the post-Saddam era. Because they form only 20% of the population, even under the best circumstances of full participation they were to remain a minor power group. Since the January elections they have become insignificant. They realized the gravity of their mistake of not participating once the political bargaining began in the National Assembly over the creation of a new constitution.

The veto clause - which guaranteed that any one ethnic group might be able to veto any part of the constitution by a two-thirds vote in at least three provinces - was not to the favor of the Sunnis unless they demonstrated a high degree of unity. The fact that such a provision wasn`t going to work for them became clear when they decided to defeat the ratification of the constitution in October, and couldn`t.

The most disconcerting part of the Sunni agenda was their inability to defeat the Shi`ite-Kurdish decision to create a federal system of government. The ideal situation would have been to create a unitary state, where the central government plays a decisive role in the distribution of national resources. But the Kurds wanted none of that.

Fully understanding the Kurdish motivations and preferences for a federal form of government, the Shi`ites did not want to be caught off-guard. What emerged as a consequence was the Shi`ite-Kurdish grand bargain in which the provincial governments will play a crucial role in deciding how much of the oil revenues will be forwarded to the national government. This reality has caused an enormous amount of anger and frustration among Sunni groups and may turn out to be the major reason for the potential undoing of the new Iraq.

Condemnation for sectarian-based democracy
For the US, having a sectarian-based democracy might be a rational choice, since it determines which group becomes dominant. Yet, by doing this, the US - wittingly or unwittingly - has institutionalized a process that will only intensify divisiveness, animosity and mutual hatred.

What really upsets the Sunnis is that their loss of power materialized as a result of a foreign invasion. That is one more reason why they so systematically cooperate with jihadis who have an entirely different agenda: to undermine all prospects a long-term survival of a democratic Iraq.

Whither the new Iraq?
The December 15 elections are likely to produce results radically different from the ones held in January. This time, the Sunnis are likely to increase their participation. The Shi`ites are likely to lose the dominance gained in January, unless Sistani once again endorses the UIA at the last moment. If he decides to remain on the sidelines, the Shi`ites may have to enter into a coalition among themselves. The Kurds, on the contrary, are likely to remain an impressive voting block, remaining close to their current strength of 26% of the votes.

After the elections, a significant factor could be the ability of the three Iraqi groups to compromise.

There are likely to be clashes between the Shi`ites and the Sunnis over their different visions of an Islamic government. If the moderates on both sides prevail, there could be some rapprochement.

On this issue, the Kurds are likely to disagree strongly. Then the question becomes how may sympathetic votes they will be able to extract from the "secularist block".

As these groups attempt to sort out their differences, the issue of the scope and nature of the US presence will loom large.

The bottom-line objective for the insurgents is that the US should not be able to withdraw "honorably". They will do everything in their power to recreate the type of hasty withdrawal of US forces from South Vietnam in 1974 or the humiliating withdrawal of the Soviet occupiers of Afghanistan in 1989.

Is there any hope for sectarian-based democracy in Iraq? Lebanon is also a sectarian-based polity, which went through a lot of turbulence in the 1970s and the 1980s. As a result, it was long occupied by Syria. However, as Syria has been forced to pull out of Lebanon, the future of sectarian-based democracy appears safe. In the case of Lebanon, the decision to create a sectarian-based democracy was made in the colonial era. In the case of Iraq, the decision was made during the US occupation.

Consequently, it will take some time before one can be similarly sure about the future of Iraqi democracy.

Ehsan Ahrari is a CEO of Strategic Paradigms, an Alexandria, VA-based defense consultancy. He can be reached at [e-mail] or [e-mail]. His columns appear regularly in Asia Times Online His website: www.ehsanahrari.com.

(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us for information on sales, syndication and republishing .)

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Latest Update: #33839 11.12.05 19:26:52
Latest Coalition Fatality: Dec 12, 2005
Military Fatalities US, UK, Other: Dez.05: 33

Iraker 12/11/05
http://www.icasualties.org/oif/IraqiDeaths.aspx

Regelmäßige Updates von Meldungen aus dem Irak:
http://icasualties.org/oif/

Da bei ´Today im Irak´ die Postings immer länger werden, hier den Link für alle Interessierte: http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

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Military`s Information War Is Vast and Often Secretive
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Tomgram: Yaghmaian on the Unknown Victims of September 11th
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=42071

Last week and this one at Tomdispatch are devoted to a look back at the period before and after the attacks of September 11, 2001, and at the ways in which, ever since, our world has shut itself down and sealed itself up. On that sealing up, Behzad Yaghmaian is an expert. American and Iranian, he approaches this subject from the perspective of the poor and desperate of the Muslim world, many of whom, despite all the talk about a "clash of civilizations," are desperate to enter our world and yet find themselves largely clashing with it. These Afghans, Iranians, Iraqis and other Muslims are migrants who, since 9/11, we in the West have been especially anxious to keep out. Yaghmaian is the author of Embracing the Infidel, Stories of Muslim Migrants on the Journey West, a fascinating book Kirkus Reviews has called "an El Norte or Grapes of Wrath for the Muslim world." He is also a man "profiled" in two worlds (ours and his original Iranian one), which gives him a unique perspective on what 9/11 has meant here, in Europe, and in the Middle East. His is a voice we should listen to carefully.

Tom

Suspected and Feared
Muslim Migrants after September 11th
By Behzad Yaghmaian

It was a beautiful and sunny day that September 11th and I was in New York`s Central Park biking when I saw the helicopters flying south. Sirens and more helicopters followed. Sensing that something troubling had happened, I headed for home.

On my way into my building, I was stopped by a harmless, mentally-impaired man, a street regular in our neighborhood. With a frantic look, he stuttered out, "Did you hear? The Arabs have attacked!" Then he said it again. "The Arabs" was what I heard as I headed for my apartment, hoping he was wrong. What could he know? I thought, only half-convinced.

By midday, of course, everyone was talking about the Muslims, the Arabs, the Middle Eastern terrorists. I remained in my room, avoiding suspicious neighborhood eyes, watching the Twin Towers crumble again and again on screen. I had lived in the United States for years, but already I feared I had somehow become an outsider -- a suspected outsider. I feared the start of a witch-hunt against people who looked like me. Some of my American friends, who had the same fears, called offering, for instance, to drive me to work the next day. "Nobody will bother you if you`re with me," said one. "Stay here with us and you won`t have to drive at all," said another who lived near the college where I taught economics.

Long before September 11, I had decided to write a book about the journey of millions of desperate migrants seeking in the West a life free of violence and poverty. The attacks of September 11th narrowed my focus to Muslim migrants who were now regarded as potential terrorists and a threat to national security. As the months passed and the President`s "war on terror" began, I prepared for a long eastward journey of my own in order to follow Muslim migrants west in search of new homes. Expecting to be away for at least two years, I visited Quebec in May 2002 to say farewell to friends.

Early on a Saturday morning, bidding my friends in Quebec goodbye, I drove towards the U.S. border less than an hour away. Lining up behind the other cars, I reached over and unzipped the side pocket of my knapsack, got my American passport out, checked all my documents, and slowly approached passport control. A middle-aged woman with short blond hair and a blank face took my passport.

"Where are you going, sir?" she asked.

"Home. New York City," I replied.

Where had I visited, she wanted to know. What were the names of people I met? What exactly was my profession? I responded as calmly as I could. She asked me to open the trunk and remain inside my car while she searched it. I complied.

I watched with slowly growing frustration and finally anger as other cars, unsearched, other drivers unquestioned, passed me by. Nervous, beginning to wonder about my own innocence, I suddenly felt the need to justify my activities, my very existence. I remembered having the same feelings when, three years earlier, I was arrested, beaten, and jailed in Tehran for the innocent act of walking in a park with a female friend not related to me by blood or marriage.

Returning to her booth, the woman filled out a form, placed my documents in a bag, secured them under my windshield wiper, and instructed me to proceed to the garage behind her booth and remain in the car. My hands over the steering wheel and so out in the open, I waited there, frightened.

Minutes later, two armed officers slowly approached my car. Noting their hands over their guns, I flashed on the fear, anxiety, and vulnerability I experienced during my last visit to Iran -- my place of birth, my original home. Now, thousands of miles away, the same feelings engulfed me.

"Step out, please," said the officer on the driver`s side.

I was asked to open the trunk, take out my bag, and stand beside my car. The officers now just behind me, one to my left, the other to my right, their hands still poised over those guns, escorted me into a building. My every move was closely watched. They were clearly prepared to shoot and I had no doubt I was at the very edge of being under arrest.

I was asked to place my bag on a long metal table, proceed to the counter, remove everything from my pockets and, again, wait. They gave me a form to fill out. Having left my reading glasses in my knapsack, I requested permission to return to the car. On this, they conceded. Cautiously and from a slight distance, they watched me remove my knapsack from the car. Riddled with fear and anger, I stood once again before the counter and filled out the form while one officer emptied my knapsack and the other returned from a search of the car.

Now -- the car being clean -- they turned to the part of my life that was far harder to search. They questioned me about my identity, activities, exchanges and purchases, friends, travels, and above all whatever made me different from the men and women allowed to zip cross the border without a question or a thought. Every card, every piece of paper in my wallet was checked. I was asked to explain my credit card receipts. A bill for five hundred dollars from a small-town garage for the purchase of four new tires aroused suspicion and led to more questioning. A receipt for an airline ticket to Atlanta raised further alarm.

"What was the purpose of your trip to Atlanta?" asked the interrogating officer.

"A book I had written was featured at a conference," I replied. What, he asked suspiciously, might the subject of that book have been?

"Do you travel a lot?" he asked while leafing through the pages of my passport.

With every question, my nervousness increased. I was by now experiencing a regular series of Iran flashbacks. I saw myself back in the custody of the "guardians" of the Islamic Republic. I remembered leaving Iran in July 1999 without even saying farewell to my loved ones. Here at the U.S. border, I fit one uncomfortable "profile" -- potential terrorist, Muslim fundamentalist, agent of the Islamic Republic and its global network -- there another. I was an activist and critic of the Islamic Republic, a citizen of the United States, and a frequent traveler. In Iran, I fit the profile of agent of the "Great Satan."

Thousands of miles away, at the very border of my new home, a haven from the everyday violence of the Islamic Republic, I once again felt like a target. The interrogation was halted momentarily and I was seated in a corner to await the arrival of a new officer and yet more questions before I was finally cleared to proceed.

"Have a good day," said the first officer, and I drove away from the border.

I had made it back, but for the first time in my life, I sensed the burden of homelessness that would be the essence of the next two years of my life as I plunged into a world of Muslim migrants for whom the search for a home -- and profiling of every sort -- would be a way of life. Not long after, I was on the road, looking for and collecting stories from those who had left their places of birth because of war, violence, and poverty, but found themselves -- unlike me -- endlessly outside the gates of the new homes of which they dreamed. No one would accept them, nor did most of them have the option of returning to their places of birth. Many were political refugees; going home would only put their lives in further danger. Others had spent their life savings on the journey out. Embarrassed to return empty handed, they felt they had no choice but to keep going.

With my own modest border experience in mind, I wondered: How would they be treated by the border guards and immigration officers who controlled the parapets of the frontiers of wealth in our world. Just how much would police and citizens, now ever more nervous behind those parapets, view them as a threat? Just how much of a danger would they seem, coming as they did from such an unknown and seemingly threatening universe? Months later, the words of a teenage Afghan boy stuck in a makeshift camp in the Greek port city of Patras -- and I heard their equivalent all around the periphery of Europe -- offered me an answer.

"We are treated like footballs. They kick us, hit us. Why don`t they just take us to the border and send us back? Death is better than this."

That sixteen year-old was typical. He was living in a jerry-rigged tent of plastic and cardboard in a shantytown made up mostly of Afghan refugees and potential immigrants, waiting for his perilous chance to hide in a truck or sneak aboard a ship leaving Greece for Italy. Like many other migrants, his dream was to find a new home in England -- a land that, for all he really knew, might as well have been Oz.

For the most part, these migrants had arrived in Greece illegally. Many had applied for asylum, but seeing no chance of being accepted, they were intent on using Greece as a jumping-off spot for launching themselves deeper into Europe, always hoping for a new chance elsewhere. The Greeks, on the other hand, were intent on not letting that happen. Being on the southern end of the European Union (EU), they were tasked with the job of halting the movement of migrants ever deeper into the EU. Greece was then the European Union`s gatekeeper and the migrants were to be stopped at all cost. Leaving Greece had to be done clandestinely, away from the watchful eyes of the Greek coastguard officers who were in charge of protecting the harbor -- the border -- from the stowaways and the illegal travelers. Violators were guaranteed severe punishment.

Showing me his broken arm and smiling wistfully, the Afghan boy said, "I slipped under a truck, but they caught me. They came with their sticks and pulled me out, two of them. They began hitting me hard. I was howling. They were using an electric baton and it went on for five or six minutes. After they broke my arm, my friends took me the hospital."

An Iranian migrant I befriended in Athens had a similar tale. He too had been caught trying to escape to Italy. The coastguard officers had forced him to lie on his belly on the ground, handcuffing his hands behind his back. Then one of them pulled his hair, punched him in the eye, and kicked him in the back. He nearly lost consciousness.

"They took me to an empty bathroom in the harbor, closed the door, and began a second round of beatings. They beat me for twenty minutes, pounding on my face. My chin started bleeding. They hit me with a metal bar. A tourist entered the bathroom and began taking pictures."

That tourist saved the young Iranian, but he would be hospitalized for eight days, his mouth cut in many places. "I was fed intravenously," he told me.

Elsewhere in the EU, and in countries hoping someday to join it, the situation was similar. Among the migrants I met, the Bulgarians were feared the most. An Afghan I ran into in Sofia, the Bulgarian capital, described his encounter with that country`s border guards this way:

"I came here illegally from the Turkish border. At the border, I saw the guards set two dogs on someone. He passed out from fear. They really behave in a barbaric way. They beat you ruthlessly. I was caught and deported to Turkey three times. The Turkish guards are better. They take all your money, but they don`t beat you like the Bulgarians. As some of my Iraqi friends said, if a war breaks out between Turkey and Bulgaria, they will be the first ones to volunteer to defend Turkey."

But even those who manage to make it past the Greek coastguard or Bulgarian border guards hardly find themselves in the promised land of their dreams. In France, for instance, I found Muslim migrants living in the woods near a highway, like so many hobos during the American Great Depression. A Kurd from Northern Iraq pointed to his shack, a mass of plastic and cardboard held up by sticks, and said, "This is my home. Take a picture of this. We live like animals here." As I photographed his shack, he moved away in shame, adding, "I once had a life."

As I traveled around Europe, I heard ever more testimonies of mistreatment, and met men and women overwhelmed with humiliation and anger -- and with no local friends ready to call and offer them aid or protection. These immigrants, at the end of desperate odysseys, remain the unknown victims of September 11 -- men and women who are suspect simply because of their religion or the place where they were born. On the run from the horrors of war or poverty, looking for a life with just a shred of security, they discover that wherever they arrive, they are completely unwelcome, automatically assumed to be a threat. Beaten or abused, they are interrogated and questioned before being deported as potential terrorists.

I returned to the United States in September 2004, swept away by the stories I had collected. One day not long after, on my way to visit friends in Connecticut, I arrived at New York`s Grand Central Station to catch my train. Times had changed. Amid the crowds of travelers were men and women from the National Guard.

Passing the time like so many others until my train was announced, I pulled out my cell phone to call a friend. Still searching the phone for his number, I heard a voice address me. "Can I help you, sir?" Looking up, I saw a woman in uniform. "No, thanks," I replied, surprised. Staring at me for a few seconds, the woman walked away. I looked around, instantly paranoid, feeling all eyes on me. Without thinking, I sat down on some steps, my phone carefully tucked away in my pocket.

Later that day, I told a friend about the encounter. "Oh, the Madrid bombing," he said. The bombs in that city`s railway station had been triggered by cell phones, my friend told me. My innocent phone call was a cause for suspicion. I remembered the stories of the many hundred Muslim migrants I had encountered during my journey. This was the world after September 11.

An Iranian-born American citizen, Behzad Yaghmaian has traveled extensively in both the Third World and Europe. From 1998 to 1999 he was a columnist for the popular Iranian newspaper Neshat, and over the past fifteen years he has studied, taught, and written about issues of political economy, globalization, and the Middle East. He is a professor at Ramapo College in New Jersey, and the author of Embracing the Infidel: Stories of Muslim Migrants on the Journey West (Delacorte Press, 2005).

Copyright 2005 Behzad Yaghmaian


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Die deutsche Fassung gibt es nur gegen Bares.
[urlDas Gesetz des Dschungels]http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/0,1518,389673,00.html[/url]

SPIEGEL ONLINE - December 10, 2005, 11:06 PM
URL: http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,389789,00…

America`s Secret War

On the Trail of the CIA
http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,389789,00…" target="_blank" rel="nofollow ugc noopener">http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,389789,00…


Since Sept. 11, the CIA has played a vital role in the war on terror. But what role is it? Operating in the shadows, American secret services have been given wide-ranging powers by the Bush Administration. And they include murder, abduction and torture.

It`s Saturday, Sept. 15, 2001, four days after the terror attacks in New York and Washington. US President George W. Bush withdraws with his closest advisors to Camp David in order to escape the chaos of the week and to develop the first plans to confront the new and unprecedented challenge facing the United States.

In the afternoon, then CIA head George Tenet distributes a file to all participants of the crisis summit. It`s called "Going to War." Inside are the first rough outlines of the coming war against terrorism. In the upper left corner of the file`s cover, there is a red circle inside of which is a portrait of Osama bin Laden with a black line drawn through it.

Tenet wants to go on the offensive. And his list of priorities is ambitious. Goal number one: Destroy al-Qaida and close off the terror group`s zones of safety, wherever they might be.

According to Bob Woodward in his book "Bush at War," this is a list with wide-ranging powers, granted to authorities battling worldwide terror. And Tenet does not hold back. He requests that his agents be given the go-ahead to eliminate al-Qaida wherever the CIA comes across its members. He wants carte blanche for clandestine operations without having to first go through the long process of having them authorized. In addition, CIA agents should again have authority to kill -- a power withdrawn from US intelligence agents in 1976 by then-President Gerald Ford.

Also on Tenet`s wish list is a request for hundreds of millions of dollars to buy help from foreign intelligence services. Specifically, Tenet thought agents from Egypt, Jordan and Algeria could help the CIA track down and eliminate al-Qaida.

Three days later, Bush signs a Presidential Directive whose exact wording only a very few Americans know until this day. Point for point, the demands made by the CIA were granted, and with that, the document became the first shot fired in the worldwide war on terror. Bush ordered the CIA to be the first on the new front. America`s secret agencies were unleashed.

Four years later, America`s intelligence services -- and especially the CIA (the "flagship of the business ... where you come if you want the gold standard," according to the agency`s new director Porter Gosss) -- have become one of the most controversial weapons in the fight against terrorism. The most powerful army in the world has become an occupying power in Iraq and, by its mere presence, attracted a whole new generation of mujahedeen; but Bush`s intelligence community has fought its part of the battle under the apparent motto, "The end justifies all means."

Washington`s secret agents, whose disdain for international legal norms right up through the 1970s gained them a reputation for being ugly Americans, are back on the international political stage. Not everybody is happy to see them.

And Bush is using all tools at his disposal. Measured by sheer numbers and capability, America`s gigantic secret service apparatus appears just as omnipotent as its military: Fifteen agencies with 200,000 employees and a yearly budget of some $40 billion. The sum represents more than most countries even spend on their militaries. The satellites of these agencies can read license plates from space -- and the newest generation of these advanced spy satellites are just as sophisticated as the Hubble Space Telescope. But instead of peering into the depths of the universe, they are look down at what`s happening here on Earth.

Every day, analysts from this secret army deliver their findings to their superiors and, in the form of the Presidential Daily Briefing, to President Bush himself. It`s a sort of super-secret daily newspaper -- with severely limited circulation -- comprising between 12 and 30 pages. It`s the most important thing you have to read every day, Bush Senior -- himself head of the CIA for a year -- told his son when Bush Junior took office.

But the secret war doesn`t end with America`s spy agencies. Likewise in the shadows -- sometimes operating within international law, sometimes outside it -- are the special forces of the American military. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld sends them on missions across the globe; indeed they may, some say, already be operating inside of an Iran that continues its pursuit of nuclear weapons. Ashton Carter, assistant secretary of defense under Bill Clinton, says he would be "surprised and disappointed" if covert measures were not already under way against Iran`s armaments program.

And where American personnel can`t go, the National Security Agency`s (NSA) worldwide network can eavesdrop. The NSA routinely listens in on the United Nations in New York -- and UN General Secretary Kofi Annan, at least for a while, was one of the agency`s number one targets, says James Bamford, a leading expert on the NSA.

One of the newest weapons in the secret service arsenal is called "geolocating." When satellites locate a suspect through a mobile phone signal, for example, special forces or warplanes can quickly strike. The technology has become so precise that mobile phones can be located to within one meter.

Indeed, the ability to locate a target precisely was instrumental in killing al-Qaida military head Mohammed Atif in his house near Kabul, in November 2001, or in the arrest of bin-Laden aide Abu Subeida in Pakistan. But the system also makes grave mistakes. In 2002 in Afghanistan, for example, hastily scrambled bombers dropped their ordnance on a wedding party instead of on a targeted meeting of terrorists.

CIA head Goss, himself a CIA agent for 10 years before he went into politics, encourages the risk-taking by his agents. "And when it goes wrong, I will support you," he has told them. He sends his agents with deadly powers and backpacks full of dollars into operations all over the world where they also have the authority to call in air power. Or, alternatively, they can call in a Predator -- drones armed with laser-controlled Hellfire rockets and which can be steered from half a world away using a simple joystick.

In the 1980s and `90s, secret operations in foreign countries became rarer, and analysis was emphasized. But that was the old CIA -- an organization former officer Melissa Boyle has derided by saying the days of James Bond are over. President Bush has repeatedly warned Americans that the new enemy confronting the US is totally different than all those that have come before.

This warning represents the birth of the new CIA -- an agency that should strike fear into the hearts of its enemies.

So is the CIA on the road to re-establishing the notoriety it for so long had in the Third World? That of a frightening, secret power that kidnapped politicians, bought mercenary troops and toppled governments at will merely because Washington didn`t approve of them?

Shortly after the agency`s founding on July 26, 1947, by President Harry Truman, the CIA had already made the world its playground. It began deciding who were the good guys and who were the bad guys and began to punish the bad guys at the order of the White House.

The "firm" had a license to kill, and used it during the Cold War against a Soviet enemy that was at least as brutal. In the 1960s, the CIA developed a highly poisonous arrow that was supposed to leave no traces whatsoever during an autopsy. It also experimented with training dolphins to deliver explosives to a given target.

But these were hollow victories. Mixed in with the successes were disastrous missions abroad and embarrassing mistakes at home. The combination led to the CIA becoming more of a burden then a help. The nation was horrified to learn that President Richard Nixon used former agents for the Watergate break-in; Americans were disgusted by the government`s spying on tens of thousands of citizens critical of their government; the term "America`s Gestapo" began to make the rounds.

The result was a reigning in of Big Brother. In 1974, a law went into effect requiring that all clandestine operations abroad had to be rubber-stamped by Congress. Intelligence services began concentrating almost exclusively on technological data-gathering -- and thus largely stayed out of the Iranian revolution. In an Afghanistan fighting against the USSR, the CIA failed to appreciate that the mujahedeen -- generously supplied with American arms and money -- were not only fanatic opponents of the Soviets, but were also against the American "crusaders."

Indeed, the pact with the Islamist warriors -- in combination with an almost blind faith in the Pakistani secret services -- played a large role in the development of the Taliban and al-Qaida both. Afghanistan became Bin Laden Land.

The fact that Sept. 11 resulted in major changes to the American spy services was thus hardly a surprise. What was surprising, though, was the speed with which they regained their bad old reputation. The list is growing once again: allegations that the CIA handed out large sums of money in Venezuela in an effort to topple Hugo Chavez; and a growing number of terrorists executed by the agency`s drones.

In Yemen, a Hellfire rocket fired by a CIA Predator took out the alleged ring-leader of the 2000 attack on the USS "Cole." The CIA killed the Egyptian Hamsa Rabia -- the al-Qaida number three -- in Pakistan not far from the Afghanistan border using the same weapon earlier this month.

Vice President Dick Cheney, who even on his good days increasingly resembles an old-style Soviet general secretary, publicly announced the CIA`s change of direction. One has to operate in the shadows, he says. In order to defeat the terrorists, America`s agents "have to work the dark side, if you will." If the enemy doesn`t play by the rules, then we won`t either, is Cheney`s message.

The war in Afghanistan, and the hunt for bin Laden, showed to what extent the CIA was willing to use its new powers. Cofer Black, the coordinator for counter-terrorism, demanded the head of the al-Qaida boss and meant it quite literally. The gruesome trophy should be sent express -- and "on ice" -- to Washington, he said. Bush also takes the hunt for the terrorists personally: In his desk is a list of al-Qaida leaders that he crosses off each time one of them is captured or killed.

Originally, the CIA likely considered taking out all al-Qaida bigwigs using hit teams -- the way Israel`s Mossad killed those responsible for the 1972 Olympic bloodbath in Munich, or executed the military leaders of Hamas in the Gaza Strip. But then, the concern won out that even as al-Qaida leaders were erased, unknown terror groups could strike again.

A new idea gained credence -- that of capturing al-Qaida members alive in order to interrogate them and profit from information about the organization and its plans. Information was the only way to combat the danger of new attacks.

Exactly how far this system has gone to gather information -- and how widespread its secret prisons are -- is known by only a very few Americans. At the request of Cheney, only the chairs and vice-chairs of the intelligence committees in the Senate and the House are informed. Such information is top secret, Cofer Black told a congressional group in September 2002. "This is a highly classified area," he said. "All I want to say is that there was before 9/11 and after 9/11. After 9/11 the gloves come off."

All congressional and legal investigations into the abuse of prisoners by Americans have been performed, so far, without the benefit of insight into the practices of the CIA. Not even the Red Cross has been allowed to visit a number of high-value prisoners -- from Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the planner of the attacks on New York and Washington, to Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, the head of an al-Qaida training camp. They have just disappeared.

For those in control of the scattered CIA prisons, there is no higher power. The Republican John D. Rockefeller, a member of the Senate intelligence committee complains that the government has made it clear that all those who would demand an element of control over these areas are to be criticized as being unpatriotic.

Although the exact extent of the CIA`s new powers remains unclear, enough is known to determine that human rights are being violated, along with international conventions and treaties. Targeted liquidations, the kidnapping of suspects abroad and the delivery of prisoners to other country`s secret services are definite examples of such violations.

Above all, interrogation experts from the CIA are still equipped with six notorious torture tools with which they can force prisoners to talk. To define them, government lawyers have chosen harmless-sounding euphemisms: the "Attention Grab" describes the practice of grabbing the shirt of a prisoner and shaking him -- only, of course, to get his attention. Then there`s the "Attention Slap" and the "Belly Slap." Doctors recommend not using the fist out of fear of causing internal injuries.

Worse, though, is "long time standing," whereby prisoners are forced to stand uninterruptedly for as long as 40 hours. Rumsfeld`s boorish observation -- that he too has to stand for hours during his workday -- seems rather cynical.

The keyword "cold cell" describes a practice of cooling prisoners` cells down to 10 degrees Celsius (50 degrees Fahrenheit) and then repeatedly pouring cold water over them. But it`s "waterboarding" that has generated the most outcry -- a form of water torture which leads the prisoner to believe that he is drowning or suffocating. Only a few seconds of waterboarding are necessary to get the most prisoners to talk. Khalid Sheik Mohammed is said to have held out a mere two minutes and a half. Senator Carl Levin, a Democratic member of the Senate intelligence committee, is demanding transparency. "It`s totally unacceptable that documents that are requested from the CIA have not been forthcoming," Levin said during hearings held by a panel investigating the Abu Ghraib abuses.

It is likely that nobody will ever now how many terror suspects abducted by the CIA have died in the torture chambers of Egyptian, Algerian, Syrian or Saudi Arabian prisons. When everything possible has been used to extract every last bit of information, the suspect`s trail often vanishes.

In fact, it is generally good news for prisoners when they end up in prisons controlled directly by the CIA. There, "only" those methods of Torture Light described above are used. But those examples of prisoners dying while in American hands show just how quickly things can get out of control.

In November 2002, the guards at a secret prison -- called "Salt Pit" -- located not far from Kabul were ordered to strip one uncooperative Afghan prisoner naked, chain him to the concrete floor of his cells, and leave him there in below-zero temperatures all night. In the morning, he was dead. After a hurried autopsy, the guards quickly buried him in an unmarked grave on the edge of the city.

But only one single man connected to the CIA, David Passaro, has been prosecuted by a US court. Passaro, who was on contract with the CIA, stands accused of beating an Afghan prisoner to death during an interrogation in June 2003 on the US military base at Bagram.

The most spectacular case where a prisoner died at the hands of the secret services took place in Abu Ghraib. It`s a case that has become infamous the world over by virtue of the private photos made by American soldiers for their own enjoyment. Alongside the pictures of sexual humiliation, there is one particular photo that stands out: that of the abused corpse of a man -- wrapped in plastic and packed in ice -- above which the American soldier Sabrina Harman poses with a wide grin.

The corpse has come to be known as "The Iceman." The case will likely haunt the CIA for many years to come as it shows exactly what happens when a legitimate state power is combined with contempt for humanity.

On Nov. 4, 2003 the special forces unit the Navy Seals got a tip-off and searched a house in a Baghdad suburb for Manadil al-Jamadi. The man was thought to have delivered explosives for a terrorist attack. Jamadi struggled a great deal when arrested. He didn`t exactly come out of the tussle unscathed. He had a black eye and a cut on his face, but nothing fatal.

The Seals first brought their prisoner to the Navy camp at Baghdad`s airport. Here, according to one eye witness, a CIA interrogator "pushed him in the chest with all his strength." The prisoner was then stripped naked and cold water was thrown all over him. "We`ll grill you on an open fire if you don`t talk," threatened one of the CIA men. "I`m dying, I`m dying," al-Jamadi moaned. "You`re going to wish you were dead," replied the interrogator.

They then transported him to Abu Ghraib, where CIA employee Mark S. took him into custody. Forty-five minutes later he was dead.

The manner in which al-Jamadi died is known, among experts, as a "Palestinian hanging." It is regarded across the world as an outlawed practice. The prisoner is hung onto a high window by his arms, with his hands tied behind his back. This means that he can`t make the slightest movement without experiencing extreme pain. Al-Jamadi collapsed during questioning. "He`s only pretending to be dead," S. is reported to have said -- incorrectly, as it turned out. Al-Jamadi was indeed dead.

The case had still not been brought to court even two years after the incident took place. Paul McNulty, the lawyer responsible for the eastern district of Virginia, which had jurisdiction over the CIA headquarters of Langley, is trying to, if not cover up the case, at least drag it out. McNulty is known as a Republican and supporter of Bush. In the meantime he has been nominated as deputy to Minister of Justice Alberto Gonzales, the man who helped make American torture socially acceptable.

The official line of the US government is to call such practices "robust treatment," rather than torture. That, for example, allowed Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, on her most recent European tour, to deny that America carries out torture. The director of the CIA Porter Goss referred to the interrogation methods his agents used as "unique and innovative" methods of making prisoners talk.

But Republican Senator John McCain, who was tortured as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, says that practices such as waterboarding are nothing more than mock executions, which, regarded as torture, are outlawed all over the world. "In my view," he says, "to make someone believe that you are killing him by drowning is no different than holding a pistol to his head and firing a blank. I believe that it is torture, very exquisite torture."

It is exactly because of the gruesome treatment of prisoners that made it expedient to remove suspects as much as possible from the responsibility of American judges. This practice gave birth to the Guantanamo prisoner camp, as well as a whole range of so-called black sites, or secret interrogation areas, where the CIA keeps its most valuable prisoners under continuous observation. These mobile secret camps came into being exactly because the US government feared that the courts would eventually demand fair trials even for the inmates of the prisons on Cuba.

Apparently one of the first black sites was in Thailand. When news leaked out, the government in Bangkok demanded the withdrawal of the interrogation experts from Langley.

For a while the CIA even dreamt of having its own Alcatraz, and looked into setting up a high-security prison in Lake Cariba in Zambia. Worries about the reliability of the government in Lusaka put paid to this scheme, but the environment would have been ideal. John Radsan, a former CIA lawyer, commented on his ex-employer`s prisoner program by saying "It`s the law of the jungle. And right now we happen to be the strongest animal."

The CIA then seems to have turned to the states of Eastern Europe, regarded as particularly acquiescent to Washington. They like to team up with Europe when it comes to economic development, but as far as security goes, they rely on cooperation with the United States.

This explains why Europe became the central hub for the transport of CIA prisoners. Hundreds of the now infamous flights used the airspace between Greenland in the north and the Azores in the south, and the Atlantic coast of Ireland in the west and Romania in the east. There is hardly a country which was not used, and more details are constantly being unearthed.

An odd alliance of human rights organizations, state government observers, journalists and plane spotters has created a close-meshed network of indicators which raises more and more questions about the US secret services and their dubious practices. Not to mention the stupidity or acquiescence of their European allies.

On Jan. 22 of the previous year, for instance, an unsuspicious-looking Boeing 737 with the identity number N313P landed at the airport of Son Sant Joan in Palma, Mallorca. The aircraft came from Algiers and was on the way to Skopje. There it was boarded, the next day, by the Lebanese-born German citizen Khaled al-Masri, who had been abducted by CIA agents and was being flown to the Afghan capital Kabul.

When it became clear that the secret service had captured the wrong man, bitter arguments within the CIA broke out on how to deal with the incident. It was the then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, who last week got such a battering all over Europe for the CIA kidnappings, who ordered the German`s release.

The illegal prisoner shuttle only came to light in March, when human rights organizations brought the case of "abduction, illegal arrest and torture" to the local courts. The government in Madrid had no intention of admitting to collaboration with the Americans. The new socialist foreign minister Miguel Angel Moratinos attempted to smooth over the public outcry and protect the previous conservative government with a "message of peace and calm."

But Moratinos had every cause for concern. According to recent official inquiries, US aircraft, commissioned by the CIA, are thought to have used Mallorca as a stop-off point at least 15 times in the last two years. And officials report nine landings on the Canary Island of Tenerife.

Investigators suspect that the incriminated Mallorca plane took at least 19 cross-border trips for the United States. Apart from landing at Palma, the passenger jet also stopped off in Ireland, Larnaka in Cyprus and in the Swedish town of Orebro.

A mission on Sept. 22, 2003 is especially interesting. On this particular Monday a CIA-operated Boeing took off from Kabul and made its way to the northern Polish airport of Szymany. It then flew on to the Romanian staging post of Mihail Kogalniceanu on the Black Sea. Critics of the CIA, such as the human rights organization Human Rights Watch, have had their eyes on both arms bases for a while now.

Only a few days ago, according to reports by the US channel ABC, high-ranking al-Qaida fighters are thought to have been shipped out of Europe in time for Secretary Rice`s visit. One of these involuntary travelers was Ramzi Binalshibh, who helped plan the attack on the World Trade Center. The new destination: unknown dungeons "somewhere in North Africa."

In Poland, cooperation with the CIA has always been strongly denied. The new government refers to the explanation given by the outgoing president Kwasniewski. "Such a prison has never existed," he said.

Really? The camp in the small town of Szczytno in Mazury is certainly tailor-made for secret missions. Official flights to what has become Poland`s most famous airport stopped long ago. Gone are the big plans whose remnants can only be seen in the multi-lingual signs: "Welcome to the international airport of Szczytno-Szymany."

Only private aircraft land and take off here. When, for example, King Juan Carlos of Spain wants to do a bit of hunting in the forests full of wild beasts. Or, possibly, when American friends have urgent business which needs to be dealt with?

"The airport is always ready for action, the technical equipment is all intact," says the uniformed border guard. Local residents report that black minivans with darkened windows and military markings are always driving by. Vehicles like this belong to the official fleet of the military unit 2669, 20 kilometers away in Stare Kiejkuty.

Two barbed wire fences separate the tiny village from the site with its watch-towers, barriers and far-off red and white radio masts. Photos are strictly prohibited and Polish journalists have had film and memory chips confiscated over the last few days.

Unit 2669 is officially the "training center for news service cadres." And the fact that it is so near, politically to the new American allies, and geographically to the airport, makes the site of particular interest. Respected village resident Krzysztof Uminski, 45, the last farmer in the area, does not like answering pushy questions. After all, he says, most of the other villagers live from "work provided by the state." Only hesitatingly does he admit what that means. The spy school is the only major employer in the remote area surrounding the lake.

The flights via Spain are not the only ones to have attracted attention. A Gulfstream with the identification number N85VM also keeps cropping up as a CIA transporter in international log-books and with human organizations. On April 12, 2004 it took off from Guantanamo with an unidentified cargo. First stop was Spain. The explosive mission`s destination was Bucharest.

The airport of Mihail Kogalniceanu, often called simply "MK" by American allies, lies about 200 kilometers from the Romanian capital. The US military has been using the maneuvering area as a supply base for the Iraq war since 2002. Last week Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice signed an agreement with the government in Bucharest that would allow the USA to keep a base for troops there long-term. The agreement is only a logical next step. Parts of the camp have been American-only military areas for years, as the former minister for defence, Ioan Mircea Pascu, was forced to admit.

British journalist Stephen Grey counts 210 dubious flights to England alone, by noting official records of flights commissioned by the CIA. There are thought to be dozens more, according to research in Ireland and Portugal. Landings have also apparently happened in Prague, Helsinki and Budapest. Estonia, the Netherlands, Iceland, Norway and Denmark all lie on the flight-path.

On Feb. 17, 2003 in Milan, a CIA commando force abducted the radical Islamist Abu Omar in "a completely illegal act", as observers describe it, and flew him out of the country. Extradition warrants have been made out for 22 CIA pursuers.

But the central hub for Europe was Germany: the Americans used the Frankfurt Rhein-Main Airbase for 437 flights. It was from here that Hercules flight N8183J took off, which on Jan. 21, 2003, set off an alarm with the Austrian air force. Two Austrian chaser jets were scrambled. Identifying the plane (built by the US company Tepper Aviation) as a "pseudo-civilian aircraft," the pilots let it pass.

The fact that the planes are deterred from using neutral airspace was also noticed by Sweden. A great deal of anti-US distrust has brewed in Sweden since the CIA brought two Egyptian asylum seekers from abroad in 2001, in full view of the Swedish police -- albeit only after the Swedes had arrested the men after a tip-off from the Americans.

Just hours later US agents, in a Gulfstream V business jet (registration N379P), landed at Bromma budget airline airport on the outskirts of Stockholm. Eight masked men climbed out of the private jet, grabbed the Egyptians and cut their clothing off them with knives. They gave them tracksuits to wear and covered their heads with hoods. Swedish protests were cut short by curt gestures.

Within ten minutes the Egyptians, who were thought to belong to the group Islamic Jihad, were on the Gulfstream, and, shortly after that, out of the country. Swedish diplomats reported later that both have since then been tortured.

The in-house airline belonging to America`s most powerful intelligence service is the industry`s worst-kept secret. CIA lawyers and the international air transport authorities demanded that the fleet of aircraft should have proper registration. Once someone has found out the identification numbers of these planes, it doesn`t take long to then follow their movements.

Employees of the CIA shuttle company always have run-of-the-mill names like Steven Kent or Audrey Tailor. They never have private telephone numbers or previous employers. Their social security numbers are brand new; their only fixed addresses are postal boxes. These are classic "sterile identities," as the CIA calls them.

Former CIA officer Robert Baer, one of the most successful secret service Middle East experts, described the arrangement with disarming openness: "There is a rule inside the CIA that if you want a good interrogation and you want good information you send the suspect to Jordan, if you want them to be killed or tortured to death you send them either to Egypt or Syria, and you never see them again."

Now hardly any country is willing to take in the sorry caravan of CIA officers and their prisoners. Everyone fears retribution from al-Qaida.

Even before the spread of the latest CIA scandal, the new use of power showed itself to be counterproductive in many ways. Admittedly there has been no major attack on the USA since September 11 - ten attacks have been prevented all over the world, Bush boasted in October - but the statements forced out of prisoners under ill treatment don`t help anyone, as they would never be admissible in an American court of law. "Even Adolf Eichmann got a trial," warns McCain. Maybe too late: a fair trial after torture is no longer possible.

That puts the CIA between a rock and a hard place. "You can`t prosecute these people, but you can`t kill them either," said Michael Scheuer, the former head of the CIA special unit which, already under Bill Clinton, was assigned to tracking down Bin Laden. "All we`ve done is create a nightmare."

How damaging the program of fighting terror has become is shown by the case of the defendant Jose Padilla in Chicago, who was accused, after his arrest, by former Attorney General John Ashcroft, of wanting to set off a dirty bomb. But in the end Padilla was only charged with supporting and promoting a terrorist organization. The more serious accusations were based on statements made by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The government is loath to reveal what has been discovered, out of fear that, during the trial, the method of how these statements were obtained would come out into the open.

There can be no doubt that the political damage caused by this prisoner ill-treatment has long outweighed any possible use intended by such a policy. The CIA torture scandal is on the way to becoming a second Abu Ghraib. The torture carried out in the infamous Iraqi jails has damaged the USA`s image across the world, and destroyed its moral pretence to bring democracy and freedom to the Middle East.

For months now, Washington has been reeling with a bitter debate on how to bring an end to the unceasing accusations of torture. The camp of Guantanamo is also included in the debate. National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley and Secretary of State Rice demand that UN inspectors should have the right to contact prisoners. In Congress, politicians from both parties support the law proposed by Vietnam veteran McCain, which would ban torture by US authorities.

But Vice President Cheney and CIA Director Goss fight, with rear-cover provided by the White House, to provide the secret service with an exemption from this ban on torture. It is possible they are fighting a losing battle.

Last Wednesday, in Kiev, Secretary Rice said the UN ban on torture also applied, naturally, to American state employees. "As a matter of US policy," she said the United Nations Convention against Torture "extends to US personnel wherever they are, whether they are in the US or outside the US." Since then, speculations have been made in Washington as to whether hardliners will step down or fight back as soon as Rice returns.

Now respected veterans of the intelligence community are joining in the debate: Vincent Cannistraro, a former anti-terror head of the CIA and leader of the working group which investigated the Lockerbie crash in 1988, doubts how worthwhile statements made under torture can be. "Detainees will say virtually anything to end their torment," he says. Burton Gerber, the former head of the Moscow unit is convinced that torture "corrupts every society that tolerates it." Larry Johnson, a former CIA agent and foreign ministry anti-terror expert says "What real CIA field officers know firsthand is that it is better to build a relationship of trust ... than to extract quick confessions through tactics such as those used by the Nazis and the Soviets." And ex-agent Baer, whose life was the inspiration for the Hollywood thriller "Syriana," is even certain that "this story will destroy the CIA."

Even the interrogators have been left with nagging doubts as to the legality of their actions -- despite all the assertions made by the government. Why else would Washington be so adamant about keeping prisoners off American soil? Tenet demanded guarantees, again and again, that his agents would not be hauled in front of a court sometime in the future.

Which led to the infamous seal of approval from the Attorney General`s office and the White House, in which then Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee confirmed that every type of interrogation method was allowed as long as it didn`t lead to serious injuries, organ failure or death.

The current Secretary for Homeland Security Michael Chertoff also rubber-stamped such actions. And Attorney General Gonzales made a speech to the Senate in which he claimed that ill-treatment of prisoners was permissible as long as those affected were not US citizens and the torture took place abroad. All three seals of approval for torture were supported by Bush.

As a result of remaining uncertainty, the CIA demanded that the politicians themselves take over responsibility for the treatment of prisoners in the worldwide war on terror. "We should lock these people up," the former terrorist hunter Scheuer said to SPIEGEL. "They declared war on us, so we are allowed to hold them until the end of the war." He defended the basic principle of the fight against terrorism: "We have to catch these people before they can do more killing."

However, Scheuer also admits that America`s arrogant disdain for prisoner rights has been like "shooting your own leg." He said that in reality there was no need for special powers or new means of interrogation. "This whole story is a massive success for al-Qaida, because we are losing the support of Europe, our most important partner in the fight against terror."

At the same time, however, he sees the definition of torture as relative. "There is a difference between torture and severe interrogation methods. Torture is pulling someone`s nails out."

MANFRED ERTEL, ERICH FOLLATH, HANS HOYNG
MARION KRASKE, GEORG MASCOLO, JAN PUHL

© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2005

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A MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY, by Kurt Vonnegut (Seven Stories). Das neuste Buch von Vonnegut ist schon seit einigen Wochen in der NYTimes Bestseller Liste.

Your Guess Is as Good as Mine
http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/2421/
By Kurt Vonnegut
December 12, 2005

Most of you, if not all of you, like me, feel inadequately educated. That is an ordinary feeling for a member of our species. One of the most brilliant human beings of all times, George Bernard Shaw said on his 75th birthday or so that at last he knew enough to become a mediocre office boy. He died in 1950, by the way, when I was 28. He is the one who said, "Youth is wasted on the young." I turned 83 a couple weeks ago, and I must say I agree.

Shaw, if he were alive today, would envy us the solid information that we have or can get about the nature of the universe, about time and space and matter, about our own bodies and brains, about the resources and vulnerabilities of our planet, about how all sorts of human beings actually talk and feel and live.

This is the information revolution. We have taken it very badly so far. Information seems to be getting in the way all the time. Human beings have had to guess about almost everything for the past million years or so. Our most enthralling and sometimes terrifying guessers are the leading characters in our history books. I will name two of them: Aristotle and Hitler. One good guesser and one bad one.

The masses of humanity, having no solid information to tell them otherwise, have had little choice but to believe this guesser or that one. Russians who didn`t think much of the guesses of Ivan the Terrible, for example, were likely to have their hats nailed to their heads.

We must acknowledge, though, that persuasive guessers--even Ivan the Terrible, now a hero in Russia--have given us courage to endure extraordinary ordeals that we had no way of understanding. Crop failures, wars, plagues, eruptions of volcanoes, babies being born dead--the guessers gave us the illusion that bad luck and good luck were understandable and could somehow be dealt with intelligently and effectively.

Without that illusion, we would all have surrendered long ago. But in fact, the guessers knew no more than the common people and sometimes less. The important thing was that they gave us the illusion that we`re in control of our destinies.

Persuasive guessing has been at the core of leadership for so long--for all of human experience so far--that it is wholly unsurprising that most of the leaders of this planet, in spite of all the information that is suddenly ours, want the guessing to go on, because now it is their turn to guess and be listened to.

Some of the loudest, most proudly ignorant guessing in the world is going on in Washington today. Our leaders are sick of all the solid information that has been dumped on humanity by research and scholarship and investigative reporting.

They think that the whole country is sick of it, and they want standards, and it isn`t the gold standard. They want to put us back on the snake-oil standard.

Loaded pistols are good for people unless they`re in prisons or lunatic asylums.

That`s correct.

Millions spent on public health are inflationary.

That`s correct.

Billions spent on weapons will bring inflation down.

That`s correct.

Industrial wastes, and especially those that are radioactive, hardly ever hurt anybody, so everybody should shut up about them.

That`s correct.

Industries should be allowed to do whatever they want to do: Bribe, wreck the environment just a little, fix prices, screw dumb customers, put a stop to competition and raid the Treasury in case they go broke.

That`s correct.

That`s free enterprise.

And that`s correct.

The poor have done something very wrong or they wouldn`t be poor, so their children should pay the consequences.

That`s correct.

The United States of America cannot be expected to look after its people.

That`s correct.

The free market will do that.

That`s correct.

The free market is an automatic system of justice.

That`s correct.

And so on.

If you actually are an educated, thinking person, you will not be welcome in Washington, D.C. I know a couple of bright seventh graders who would not be welcomed in Washington, D.C.

Do you remember those doctors a few years back who got together and announced that it was a simple, clear medical fact that we could not survive even a moderate attack by hydrogen bombs? They were not welcome in Washington, D.C.

Even if we fired the first salvo of hydrogen weapons and the enemy never fired back, the poisons released would probably kill the whole planet by and by.

What is the response in Washington? They guess otherwise. What good is an education? The boisterous guessers are still in charge--the haters of information. And the guessers are almost all highly educated people. Think of that. They have had to throw away their educations, even Harvard or Yale educations, to become guessers. If they didn`t do that, there is no way their uninhibited guessing could go on and on and on.

Please, don`t you do that. But let me warn you, if you make use of the vast fund of knowledge now available to educated persons, you are going to be lonesome as hell. The guessers outnumber you--and now I have to guess--about ten to one.

This essay was adapted from Senior Editor Kurt Vonnegut`s new bestseller, A Man Without a Country, which can be ordered at http://www.sevenstories.com or calling 1-800-596-7437.

Kurt Vonnegut is a legendary author, WWII veteran, humanist, artist, smoker and In These Times senior editor. His classic works include Slaughterhouse-Five, Breakfast of Champions, Cat’s Cradle, among many others. His most recent book, A Man Without a Country, collects many of the articles written for this magazine.

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JAMES CARROLL
Hair trigger nation
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/arti…

By James Carroll | December 12, 2005

IS IT WRONG to second-guess the split-second decision an air marshal made last week in shooting to death a disturbed, but apparently harmless man on an airplane in Miami?

For an instant, according to some accounts, it looked like the man had a bomb. On the same day, a man rushed onto a bus into Baghdad, detonated himself, and killed 30 people. Miami may not think of itself as a war zone, but air marshals are primed to act as if it is -- together with every other US city. When something unexpected happens, it will be taken as a threat. Every threat will be met with swift and overwhelming force. Better safe than sorry. Welcome to the new America.

But when the perceived suicide bomber, say, turns out to have been an innocent man who had only failed to take his medication, being safe and sorry amount to the same thing. Get used to it. Curb your enthusiasm, especially in airport security lines.

Odd behavior used to be only that, but now it can get you in deep trouble. When I heard the news of the man shot dead in Miami, it struck me with rare clarity that we all live in a war zone now. In the flash of anyone`s mistake -- yours or theirs -- our armed protectors can turn into our accidental killers. If we can`t second-guess the decisions they make when faced with the unexpected, can we reflect on the process by which we all came to be here?

When I was very young, my father was an FBI agent. I was obsessed with the knowledge that he carried a gun, but he protected me and my brothers from its implications by never showing it to us. I saw his weapon only once, sitting in its holster on my parents` bedroom bureau. Later, I remember a disturbing conversation in which Dad told me that an FBI agent was trained only to shoot to kill. Thinking of Hopalong Cassidy, I protested that an agent should first aim at the bad guy`s gun-hand, or, if necessary, at his arm or leg. ``Why not shoot to disable?" was the way my question was put by a critic of the air marshals last week.

My father told me that because an FBI agent understood that his weapon was only to be used as deadly force, and then only in the extreme circumstance of protecting his own life or the lives of others, the gun would hardly ever come out of its holster. Don`t draw a firearm merely to threaten, or imagining that the perpetrator can be ``winged." Once a weapon is deployed, it has moved most of the way to being used.

The decision that counts is not made in the split-second of a rushed confrontation, but weeks and months earlier, on the practice range and in training sessions. FBI agents, my father was telling me, ask questions first, and shoot later. The surest course to mistaken violence is not so much in the instantaneous decision made once the weapon is drawn, but in the premature drawing of it.

I have no way of measuring what my father told me against what was actual at the time, and I know nothing about contemporary FBI attitudes. But in the American war zone today, a public mood that is so attuned to threats assumes the ready deployment of deadly force -- sooner rather than later. It is not only that weapons are so readily at hand, but also that the guns have been put on hair trigger.

In my youth, it was only in strife-torn foreign places that one could imagine armed soldiers patrolling civilian areas; I think of an intimidating visit to Paris during the Algerian war in the late 1950s, when sullen legionnaires flaunted their machine guns in the streets. Now combat-ready soldiers pace our airports. The extreme circumstance that my father described has become the normal condition of ordinary life. Of course the guns are drawn.

Is this a prudent response to changed conditions in the age of terror? The possibility of miscreant violence is real, and the proactive savvy of law enforcement is essential. But is there, perhaps, a disproportion between what actually threatens and the licensed jitters of our armed patrol? Or is this only the domestic equivalent of the nation`s hair-trigger foreign policy? Did we think we could be so quick to draw and shoot, even without aiming, in places far away without turning ourselves into targets?

James Carroll`s column appears regularly in the Globe.
© Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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[urlPundit Pap]http://americanpolitics.com/20051211punditpap.html By The Pundit Pap Team[/url]

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Goodbye, New Orleans
http://www.zmag.de/artikel.php?id=1669

von Mike Tidwell

Orion / ZNet 11.12.2005
90 Tage ist es her, seit Katrina zuschlug - höchste Zeit, unsere nationale Verleugnungshaltung aufzugeben. Im Nachhinein scheint der Sprecher des Repräsentantenhauses, Dennis Hastert, auf ganzer Linie recht zu behalten, als er sagte, wir sollten New Orleans aufgeben - wenngleich er damals falsch argumentierte. Es ist nicht so, dass die Stadt nicht relativ Hurrikan sicher zu machen wäre - das ginge schon. Es ist auch nicht so, dass der Aufwand größer wäre, als die ganze Sache wert ist, nein, durchaus nicht. Der Grund ist ein anderer: Nachdem die New-Orleans-Story aus den Nachrichtenschlagzeilen verschwand, hat die Regierung Bush der Stadt stillschweigend den Todeskuss aufgedrückt.

Ich gehöre zu den Leuten, denen New Orleans sehr am Herzen liegt, die dem Charme der Stadt oft erlegen sind - umso schmerzlicher für mich, zum Rückzug zu blasen, ein unbeschreiblicher Schmerz. Ich meine das nicht rhetorisch, ich argumentiere nicht, um zu schocken und so Kompromissgespräche anzuregen. Ich meine, was ich sage: Gebt die Stadt auf, vernagelt sie mit Brettern - bevor noch einmal Tausende Menschen ihr Leben lassen.

In den Wochen nach Katrina wurde die Katastrophe in den Medien so dargestellt, als ginge es um schlechte Deichanlagen und miese Evakuierungspläne. Die Berichterstattung orientierte sich an der Frage: "Was lief schief?". Autopsiegenau wurde jeder gebrochene Damm analysiert, und es gab eine Hexenjagd auf die Verantwortlichen des Superdome-Fiaskos bzw. des Fiaskos im Convention Center. Dabei waren das alles nur schreckliche Symptome einer viel umfassenderen Krankheit.

Katrina hat Big Easy zerstört - künftige Hurrikane werden dies ebenso tun. Nicht die Ingenieure haben versagt, der eigentliche Grund ist der: Im Verlauf des letzten Jahrhunderts haben wir in Louisiana 1 Million Acres* küstennahe Inseln und Marschland eingebüßt. Schuld ist der Mensch. Dieses Land fungierte als natürliche "Bremse". Es bremste in früheren Zeiten die tödlichen Flutwellen der Hurrikane und schuf so eine wichtige Voraussetzung für die Bewohnbarkeit der Stadt New Orleans.

Anfang Dezember rief Präsident Bush die Bewohner von New Orleans auf, Nachhause zurückzukehren. Dem Medienpublikum erklärte er, "wir werden tun, was immer nötig ist", um New Orleans zu retten. Aber eine Sache verweigert er formell - die eine Sache, ohne die ein Überleben für New Orleans nicht möglich ist: die Wiederherstellung des Netzwerkes aus Küsten-Wetlands und Inselbarrieren.

Dagegen wurden mehrere zehn Milliarden Dollar freigegeben, um an den Symptomen zu kurieren - kaputte Dämme, unzureichende Notfallreserven, zerstörte Straßen und Brücken. Zur Bekämpfung der eigentlichen Krankheit aber wird so gut wie nichts ausgegeben. Mit Krankheit meine ich in erster Linie das verlorene Land - denn dadurch konnte der Ozean in die Stadt laufen. Weder neue Dämme - wie hoch sie auch sein mögen -, noch volle Trinkwasserflaschen-Lager werden New Orleans retten können, nicht, solange die Küstenlinie des Bundesstaates Louisiana nicht in ihrer Funktion als natürliche Barriere wiederhergestellt ist.

Allein seit dem Zweiten Weltkrieg versank zwischen New Orleans und dem Golf von Mexiko Land in der Größenordnung von Rhode Island im Wasser, meist Marschland. Pro 2,7 Meilen Marschland, so wird gerechnet, reduziert sich die Höhe einer Hurrikanflutwelle um rund einen Fuß (Anmerkung d. Übersetzerin - 1 Fuß ungefähr 30cm), was die Macht des Sturmes bricht. Einfacher ausgedrückt: Wäre Katrina 1945 und nicht 2005 aufgetreten, die Flutwelle wäre zwischen 5 und 10 Fuß flacher ausgefallen.

Das Marschland und die Inselbarrieren sind aus dem sedimentreichen Flutwasser des Mississippi entstanden - ein Vorgang, der Tausende von Jahren dauerte. Die modernen Deiche schieben der natürlichen Überflutung einen Riegel vor. Den Wetlands, wo es sie noch gibt, mangelt es an neuem Sedimentmaterial und an Nährstoffen; sie erodieren und "versinken", das heißt, sie werden weggespült. Auch ohne neue Hurrikane verschwindet so alle zehn Monate Louisiana-Land von der Größe Manhattans in den Fluten. Das entspricht 50 Acres jeden Tag oder einem Fußballfeld alle 30 Minuten.

Es existiert ein Plan, mit dem sich das Problem beheben ließe. Er würde $14 Milliarden kosten. Dieser von Umweltschützern, Ölgesellschaften und Fischern gleichermaßen unterstützte Plan gilt als technisch ausgereift und liegt schon seit Jahren auf dem Tisch. Seit Katrina wird noch massiver auf seine Umsetzung gedrängt. Dennoch will die Bush-Administration nichts davon wissen. Warum? Eine schwierige Frage. Die Folgen sind absolut tödlich. Der Plan würde gerade mal soviel an Investitionen kosten wie 6 Wochen Irak - eine Summe, die dem Tunnelprojekt `Big Dig` in Boston entspricht. Stattdessen müssen wir uns wohl auf weitere $200 Milliarden für den nächsten unvermeidlichen Hurrikan einstellen - hier, gleich um Ecke in Louisiana.

Der große Plan, mit dem sich alles ändern ließe, wurde unter der Bezeichnung `Coast 2050` bekannt. `Coast 2050` sieht vor, massive Pipelines, Pumpen und chirurgisch präzise Kanäle zu installieren, um so der Küstenpufferzone wieder einen Teil des sedimentreichen-dickflüssigen Flusswassers zuzuführen. Städte und Gemeinden und die Infrastruktur würden nicht zerstört. Nach und nach würden so Hunderttausende Acres Wetlands neu entstehen und ganze Inselbarrieren wiederhergestellt - in nur 12 Monaten. (Zum Vergleich: Laut Schätzungen könnte der Regierungsplan zur Wiederherstellung der Deiche Jahrzehnte dauern.) Alle sind sich einig: `Coast 2050` würde funktionieren. Erst letzte Woche hat die National Academy of Sciences die Seriosität seines Ansatzes bestätigt und zu raschem Handeln aufgefordert.

Am 8. November legte das Weiße Haus dem Kongress das zweite und letzte finanzielle Notfallpaket für Katrina vor. In diesem Paket ist der Plan mit schockierenden $250 Millionen veranschlagt - nicht mit den geforderten $14 Milliarden.

Wieso kann eine Regierung, die völlig unvorbereitet auf Katrina I reagierte, nicht begreifen, dass dringendes Handeln geboten ist, um Katrina II zu verhindern? Meine persönliche Theorie: Bush hört das Wort "Wetlands", denkt an "Umweltschutz" und schaltet sofort ab. Er hegt eine ideologische Aversion gegen alles, was mit Umweltschutz zu tun hat. Dies könnte auch die Erklärung dafür sein, dass Bush in seinen diversen Reden, die er nach Katrina auf 6 Foto-Tripps in die Golf-Region hielt, die Worte Wetlands und Inselbarrieren kein einziges Mal in den Mund nahm - kein einziges Mal.

"Entweder, sie haben es nicht begriffen, oder es ist ihnen egal", meint Mark Davis, Direktor der `Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana`. "So oder so, die Folgen werden weitere Katastrophen sein".

Also - hört auf mit dem Aufräumen. Stellt Besen und Kettensäge in die Garage. Schließt die paar Geschäfte, die wieder geöffnet haben. Belasst die Deiche in ihrem kaputten Zustand. Alle nichts wie raus aus New Orleans - sofort! Zum leben ein völlig unsicherer Ort.

Die Menschen zu ermutigen - wie Bush es tut -, nach New Orleans zurückzukehren, ohne den einzigen Plan zu finanzieren, der die Stadt vor der nächsten Großkatastrophe, `the next Big One`, bewahren könnte, ist schlichter Massenmord. Wenn die Regierung - nach allem, was die Menschen durchgemacht haben, nach den immensen Kosten dieser nationalen Tragödie -, selbst eine Investition in der Größenordnung des Bostoner `Big Dig` (Tunnelprojekt zwischen dem Logan Airport und Downtown Boston) scheut, ist das Spiel wirklich verloren.

Allen, denen diese Nachricht nicht behagt - den Bauern, die ihr Getreide über den Port von New Orleans verschiffen, den New Englanders, die ihre Heime mit Erdgas aus dem Golf von Mexiko beheizen oder den Kulturenthusiasten mit ihrem Faible für den French-Quarter-Gumbo - sei geraten, wendet euch an das Weiße Haus, sagt ihnen die Meinung - aber besser nicht auf Antwort hoffen.

Mike Tidwell ist Autor von `Bayou Farewell: The Rich Life and Tragic Death of Louisiana`s Cajun Coast`. Tidwell lebt in Takoma Park. Zu den Hintergründen, Folgen und Konsequenzen von Katrina: www.katrinanomore.com

Anmerkung d. Übersetzerin

* 3 Acres entsprechen etwas mehr als 1 Hektar

Übersetzt von: Andrea Noll | Orginalartikel: "Goodbye New Orleans"

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Published on Monday, December 12, 2005 by Knight Ridder
In Iraq, Campaign Turns Ugly in Days Before Election
http://www.realcities.com/
by Leila Fadel


BAGHDAD - Insults and accusations are flying in Baghdad in the days leading up to Thursday`s national election.

The political battle is being fought in the mosques, on the streets and in the news media, sometimes with appeals to sect loyalty and other times with rough tactics. Iraqis on Thursday will choose members of parliament for four-year terms, ending another period in their transition since the U.S. invasion in 2003.

There have been more than 100 allegations of violations of campaign rules submitted to the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq. Most concern the illegal use of religious symbols and the destruction of campaign posters, which are pasted on every piece of wall space in the capital, including high concrete blast walls.

In at least two separate incidents over the past two weeks, men hanging United Iraqi Alliance posters were shot at, and one was killed.

There were accusations among Shiites in the Baghdad neighborhood Hai al Amil that Iraqi forces ripped down the posters of the United Iraqi Alliance, a religious Shiite group, last week. The next day in revenge, Shiite residents reportedly tore away posters for the Sunni Iraqi Accord.

In Sadr City, a poor Shiite neighborhood controlled by the Shiite Mahdi army, posters showed candidate Ayad Allawi`s face morphed with Saddam Hussein`s. "Baathist," the poster said. Allawi, the former prime minister, is a secular Shiite and former Baath member who broke with Saddam. Those opposed to him include candidates who are religious Shiites.

The police tore down many of Allawi`s posters, said his spokesman, Thaer al-Nakib. The candidate`s supporters last week showed reporters a video of officers ripping down the posters in the dark of night.

Members of Allawi`s group have submitted the most allegations of campaign violations.

Allawi`s billboards and posters have been splashed with black paint or covered in mud.

"It`s not fair and what they are doing is not democracy," al-Nakib said, referring to the current government. "I think they need to learn how to run a campaign and how to deal with the competition."

During the last Friday prayers at Shiite and Sunni mosques before the election, politics invaded the pulpit.

At Umm al-Qurra, the headquarters of the Muslim Scholars Association in Baghdad, Sheikh Ali al-Zind told people to cast a ballot for the Iraqi Accord, an alliance of three major Sunni parties.

"This coming Thursday will be the final battle. Either we will be something or we will be nothing. We will either be marginalized or beaten and the arresting and killing will continue.

"This is the last call ... Go and vote in the elections and give your voices to the clean hands (the Iraqi Accord`s slogan)."

In central Baghdad at the Shiite Muslim Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq`s mosque, another party was blessed.

"The elections are not worldly affairs. It is a divine mission. It tests your faith and credibility of your faith. . . . Whatever they do, whether they blew us up ... or tear up our posters in Hai al Amil. Whatever terrible thing they do, cannot intimidate us and we will never succumb. The light of the candle (the slogan of the United Iraqi Alliance) will never go out," said Jalaledin Saghir, the Shiite cleric at the Baratha mosque.

The United Iraqi Alliance tells religious Shiites to vote for its candidates by using a picture of the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the top marja, or Shiite spiritual leader, in Iraq. Al-Sistani has not endorsed an electoral list, but has called on people to vote for a religious and strong party.

Some politicians used words like Baathist, to imply a link to deposed dictator Saddam Hussein, or Saffawid, the name of the Persian empire, implying that candidates from the Shiite religious United Iraqi Alliance were linked to neighboring Iran.

Allawi`s photo on his campaign posters shows him with a smirk that some Iraqis joke looks more like he`s promoting a music album rather than an electoral slate. His slogan is "Strong government. Secured land. Prosperous country."

Ahmed Nasir, who has an electronics store in Baghdad, watches out his store window as one person puts up posters and another tears them down.

"The political parties, they are behind all these political games," he said "We are practicing democracy for the first time so we cannot blame those who make mistakes - we should give them more time."

Fadel reports for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Knight Ridder Newspapers special correspondent Mohammed al Awsy contributed to this report.

© Knight Ridder 2005

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Thoughts on the Middle East, History,and Religion
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Juan Cole is Professor of History at the University of Michigan

http://www.juancole.com/
Tuesday, December 13, 2005

Street Battles, Bombings in Baghdad;
Less Wealthy Candidates Cannot Campaign

Baghdad was wracked with violence on Monday, witnessing a major carbombing at a police station, another carbombing in a southwest suburb, the discovery of four bodies of kidnapping victims, and two running street battles in Amiriyah and Ghazaliyah districts--with at least 43 persons wounded or killed in the fighting. Guerrillas killed another US GI, in Baghdad, as well, and another in Ramadi.

According to a recent poll, [url58% of Americans want President Bush to set a timetable]http://www.angus-reid.com/polls/index.cfm/fuseaction/viewItem/itemID/10214[/url] for bringing home US troops.

Paul Starobin of the National Journal explores at length and with analytical rigor the question of civil war in Iraq.

[urlThe CSM points out that since the security situation]http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1213/p01s02-woiq.html[/url] is so bad in Iraq, most campaigning is being done via television. In turn, that guarantees that only the rich parties have the opportunity to campaign. As with the Jan. 30 elections, the Dec. 15 elections are not being held in accordance with international standards of fairness, and cannot be. Proper elections would require that security be provided to voters and candidates. But there is no security. Several candidates have already been assassinated or attacked, and most of the 7000 or so cannot come out in public or they would be killed, too. In many parts of the center-north, voters will have no guarantee of coming home alive. The only way the vote will happen at all is that the US military has forbidden all vehicular traffic, so everyone has to walk for the next few days. This tactic prevents carbombings from disrupting the elections, but it is a desperate measure and not a sign of an election that could be certified as free and fair.

[urlRadical Muslim groups have denounced the elections as "satanic".]http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L12758335.htm[/url] They pledge to continue to fight their jihad against the Western forces in the country. (It is too bad that mostly these groups are not in fact fighting like men, but instead are blowing up little children at ice cream shops.)

[urlBush`s strategy of Iraqizing the military tasks in that country]http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000103&sid=aidqk9Us5Z_s&refer=us[/url] is being undercut by religious and ethnic militias, according to the Bloomberg news service`s interviews with knowledgeable observers like Pat Lang.

I am going to be traveling again for the next week or so. Postings will get made, but perhaps at different times than usual, and there will be delays in posting comments.

posted by Juan @ [url12/13/2005 06:30:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/12/street-battles-bombings-in-baghdad.html[/url] 0 comments

ABC/Time Poll on Iraq

The full tabulation of the new ABC News/Time, et al., poll on Iraq is in pdf format [urlon the web.]http://abcnews.go.com/images/Politics/1000a1IraqWhereThingsStand.pdf[/url] Although a lot of Iraqis are optimistic about the future, and a lot say things aren`t going so badly for them personally, their view of where the country is at presently is quite dark. In fact, these attitudes are almost the opposite of the impression we are given of Iraqi attitudes in most of the US mainstream press.

Let`s look at some key findings:

Things are going badly in Iraq today: 52% (30% say "very badly").

There has been no improvement since Saddam fell or things are worse: 60%

It was wrong for the US to invade Iraq: 50%

(Only 19% say it was "absolutely right" for the US to invade)

Oppose presence of Coalition troops in Iraq: 65%

Iraq needs a government made up mainly of religious leaders: 48%

Iraq needs a government made up mainly of military leaders: 49%

Iraq needs a strong single leader: 91%

Iraq needs an Iraqi democracy: 90%

40% of Iraqis want a dictatorship and/or an Islamic State ((down from 49% in Feb.)
58% of Iraqis want "democracy" (up from 49% in Feb.)

The problem with an item like this is that we don`t know what they mean by "democracy." Over 80% of Egyptians said in one poll that democracy is the best form of government, and then 64% of them turned around and said they were satisfied with the Mubarak regime (a soft military dictatorship). So Egyptians didn`t mean by "democracy" what Americans would have.

Actually, for most Middle Easterners, "democracy" implies self-determination. By that measure, Iraq is not very democratic at the moment.

The poll seems to define democracy as the principle that leaders are replaced from time to time. If that is all that the 90% want, it doesn`t tell us much.

The other problem is that I find it a little difficult to believe that basic ideologies like these have shifted so massively in only a few months, and I suspect we`d be better off averaging the two for 2005 results than in assuming we are seing trends here.

Finally, there are some obvious contradictions. 48% want rule by mulla, but only 13% want an Islamic state. How does that make sense?

In any case, given the February findings, it seems likely to me that a good half of Iraqis still do not want Western-style democracy, which is not very heartening. Moreover, half of Iraqis don`t believe that the US should have come there, 60% think it made no difference or actually made things worse, and 2/3s want US troops out.

posted by Juan @ [url12/13/2005 06:18:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/12/abctime-poll-on-iraq-full-tabulation.html[/url] 0 comments

Kashmir Crisis Enters Critical Phase

The news from Kashmir, where 80,000 survivors of the earthquake now face severe winter weather and problems of food and shelter, is not good. The UN High Commissioner on Refugees is complaining about lack of resources. Let`s make a last push with the US Congress.

A Hill staffer writes:


"After an impressive donor conference where more than $5.8 billion was pledged little has been given so far. Furthermore, only 25% of the $550 million the UN has asked for in immediate humanitarian needs have been appropriated. Liberal Members of Congress who would normally speak out on this matter are bogged down with domestic issues such as alternative minimum tax, Iraq War, Katrina, and scandals in the WH and the Hill.

The one disturbing fact here is the Pakistani governments muted response to this impending disaster since the donor conference. Not one government official is actively asking for immediate needs funding,
even though three million are homeless and hundreds of thousands live in the snow line (which is 10 feet of snow!)

It appears that the US and Pakistan governments have conspired not to give immediate needs funding. Insiders close to the Pakistani government say relief money will not be used for earthquake victims but rather for political pet projects similar to Senator Steven’s highway to nowhere. The US is happy to give all monies to reconstruction; where US contractors can get rich (sounds familiar).
Some have speculated that the US will give Pakistan a carrot in a free trade area (in ’06) to quiet them.

Moreover, the Republicans in Congress will not divert any defense appropriations to humanitarian aid. They do not want to hurt the feelings of DOD contractors (who give them campaign cash hand over fist). The plan is to wait for the next Iraq supplemental, which has been postponed to sometime in February 2005.

Therefore, our only hope is that the Administration will realize that tens of thousands of Kashmir’s dying will not help the US’s image in the Muslim world. They will need to divert some economic or military aid. The President Bush has the lone power to do this.


Oxfam has written a good article on what we can ask President Bush to do.

We need to act now. The Congress is only open for one more week. We will come back to DC in February after the State of the Union. It would be quite helpful if your readers can contact their Congressman, Senator, or the President and let them know we are outraged at the lack of financial response. The Congress switch board is 202.224.3121 and the WH switch board is 202-456-1111. (Unfortunately, many prominent Pakistani-Americans are currently in Kashmir trying to save lives instead of lobbying their Member of Congress to do the right thing). We need to tell them to fully fund the immediate needs of the Kashmiris.

In the 21st century there is no excuse to let anyone to freeze to death, especially in a strategic ally such as Pakistan.

posted by Juan @ [url12/13/2005 06:15:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/12/kashmir-crisis-enters-critical-phase.html[/url] 0 comments

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`How often does a leader of the free world come along who resembles a monkey in every particular?`

Five years ago, Steve Bell was still trying to draw Bush as a turkey. Then he spotted a decidedly simian pout

...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1665932,00.html

Steve Bell
Tuesday December 13, 2005

Guardian
Five years? At my time of life, when the weeks seem to whizz past with increasing speed, I am genuinely surprised that he`s been president for such a short time. It feels far longer; at least a decade, surely? I still find it hard to believe that, at the time of the election campaign in the summer of 2000, I could see little to choose between him and Al Gore. Both were scions of old, wealthy political dynasties, both affected some species of compassionate conservatism: how wrong could one be?

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I first drew Bush as a monkey after his installation by the Supreme Court, exactly five years ago. It was by accident. I was trying to depict him as a spiritual heir to Ronald Reagan, another useless chump whose most celebrated movie hit was Bedtime For Bonzo in which he starred with a chimp. So Bush became a chimp before I ever realised how closely he resembles our hairy forebears. Somewhat dim-wittedly, in retrospect, I had been trying to depict him as a turkey, because Bush`s reputation for uselessness was growing as we got to know him, and (barring underpants) there is no better symbol of uselessness than that poor, maligned bird. But no amount of drawing him as a turkey would ever make him look like a turkey.

Drawing him as a monkey, however, worked a treat. His four hands enabled him to get up to all sorts of interesting tricks, and also somehow fitted his awkward way with words. I drew a sequence of "Hail to the Chimp" strips to coincide with his inauguration in early January 2001. He still seemed fairly harmless and I was preoccupied with the run-up to our own general election so I didn`t give Bush a lot more thought. In April 2001 there was an international crisis when an American spy plane was forced down over China. Having grabbed pictures off the TV news, I picked up on a three-frame sequence of Bush approaching a podium. There was something about the way he held his arms as he walked up; then, as he faced the cameras, his mouth formed into a distinct pout. He moved like a chimp, walked like a chimp and even talked like a chimp. This was no play acting; George Bush actually was a chimp.

A few weeks later in May I watched his arrival in Spain, on his first ever visit to Europe. As he descended the steps from Air Force One, I knew that Bush the monkey was here to stay. Unfortunately the cuteness didn`t last long. As his aggressive monomania increased, so too did his weird monkey pout. Some have written complaining that my depiction lacks subtlety and fails to convey his unique qualities and depth of character as a politician. I reply that I would be failing in my duty if I refused to acknowledge his unique qualities as a chimpanzee, for how often does a leader of the free world come along who resembles a monkey in every particular? Depth of character requires complexity, even contradiction. Bush betrays no such doubts or uncertainties. His confidence in his line of communication with the Almighty is total for the very simple reason that he knows he is God, and that is his most chimp-like feature.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

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[urlTrue meaning of Christmas]http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/shared-blogs/ajc/luckovich/entries/2005/12/12/true_meaning_of.html[/url]
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Council of Europe probe backs claims of CIA prison flights
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article11294.htm
By AFX News

12/13/05 PARIS (Forbes) - The CIA appears to have abducted suspects in Europe and illegally transferred them to other countries, according to the preliminary results of a Council of Europe investigation released today.

`Legal proceedings under way in certain countries appear to show that individuals were abducted and transferred to other countries without respect for any legal assistance procedures,` the Swiss senator who leads the inquiry, Dick Marty, said as he presented his findings to date.

The rapporteur`s comments, made at a meeting of the Council of Europe`s human rights committee, were released in an official statement from the 46-member rights and democracy body.

Marty said the results of his investigation added weight to reports that the CIA flew terror suspects to and from secret prisons in Europe, and called for European governments to fully investigate the claims.

`The elements we have gathered so far tend to reinforce the credibility of the allegations concerning the transport and temporary detention of detainees -- outside all judicial procedure -- in European countries,` he said.

The rapporteur `demands immediately that all member governments fully commit to uncovering the truth about flights and overflights on their territory in recent years, by aircraft transporting people arrested and detained outside of any legal procedure,` the statement said.

`If the allegations proved correct the member states would stand accused of having seriously breached their human rights obligations to the Council of Europe,` the statement said.

The rapporteur said he `deplored the lack of information and explanation provided by (US Secretary of State Condoleezza) Rice during her visit to Europe,` according to the statement.

The United States has come under mounting international pressure over claims the CIA has been illegally using European airports and airspace to transport Islamic suspects between countries without legal process.

Reports have emerged of many hundreds of CIA flights, suspected of carrying undeclared prisoners across European airspace, since the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States.

`It has to be said that the United States has never formally denied the allegations,` Marty told the rights committee.

mt/ec/hs/km

Copyright AFX News

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Latest Update: #33867 12.12.05 15:42:29
Latest Coalition Fatality: Dec 13, 2005
Military Fatalities US, UK, Other: : Total: 2351 , US: 2150 , Dez.05: 37

Iraker 12/12/05: Civilian: 125 Police/Mil: 87 Total: 212
http://www.icasualties.org/oif/IraqiDeaths.aspx

Regelmäßige Updates von Meldungen aus dem Irak:
http://icasualties.org/oif/

Da bei ´Today im Irak´ die Postings immer länger werden, hier den Link für alle Interessierte: http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

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Tomgram: Dahr Jamail on the Missing Air War in Iraq
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=42286

This post can be found at http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=42286

From the destroyed Japanese and German cities of World War II to the devastated Korean peninsula of the early 1950s, from the ravaged South Vietnamese countryside of the late 1960s to the "highway of death" on which much of a fleeing Iraqi army was destroyed in the first Gulf War of 1991, air power has been America`s signature way of war. Once, it was also a major part of Hollywood`s version of war-making on the "silver screen." More recently, however, air war has largely disappeared from consciousness. It simply hasn`t been part of war, as Americans see, read about, or imagine it, on-screen or off. This is strange.



It`s true that, with the exception of a small number of helicopters downed by rocket-propelled grenades, the present air war in Iraq has been fought without (American) casualties; it`s also been fought largely without publicity and almost completely without reporters. It`s true as well that there are certain obvious disadvantages to covering an air war rather than a ground war. You can`t follow in the wake of a plane heading at supersonic speeds for a target many miles away; and it`s harder to "embed" reporters in the backseat of a jet, no less an unmanned predator drone, than in a Humvee. This was true even during the Vietnam War, although reporters there regularly hitched rides on military helicopters to bases and hotspots around the country. As a result, despite our memory of a single iconic photo of a napalmed Vietnamese girl running screaming down a highway (and she had been seared by a South Vietnamese plane), the fierce American air campaign in South Vietnam was seldom given the attention it deserved. I know of only a single exception to this: In 1967, the young Jonathan Schell managed to talk himself into the backseats of Cessna O-1 forward air control planes flying "visual reconnaissance" over a heavily populated coastal strip of Vietnam`s Quang Ngai province and in his New Yorker series and subsequent book, The Military Half, he provided as vivid and devastating an account as exists of the destruction of the Vietnamese countryside from the air and ground.



It`s worth remembering that the U.S. began its war of choice in Iraq with a massive (and massively promoted) "shock and awe" air and cruise missile attack on Baghdad. The administration was then proud of our one-sided ability to inflict massive, targeted damage on that country`s capital and happy to have it televised. But ever since, the air war and its urban destruction have been kept in the shadows, which might be considered, if not evidence of the military equivalent of shame, then at least, of an "out of sight/out of mind" mentality. Whether by design or not, the U.S. military seems to have kept reporters off air bases and aircraft carriers (after, at least, that first burst of air assault was over). And with the exception of a few helicopter rides over Iraq granted to favored reporters and pundits, usually with their favored generals, reporters simply have not been up in the sky, nor have they -- for reasons I find hard to fathom -- bothered to look up for the rest of us (as Dahr Jamail indicates in the piece that follows). As 2004 ended, one TV journalist wrote me:



    "My own experience of Iraq is that while we`re all constantly aware of the air power, we`re rarely nearby when it`s deployed offensively. Perhaps that explains why we don`t see it. One does ‘hear` the airpower all the time though. Fighters and helicopters used to protect convoys; helis shipping people back and forth to bases, or hunting in packs across towns; AWACS high up. I`ve even watched drones making patterns in the sky. So why don`t we film it?"



It`s a question that still hasn`t been answered -- or even asked in public.



Yet our air power has been loosed powerfully on heavily populated cities and towns in a country we`ve occupied. This has been done, in part, because American generals have not wanted to send American troops -- any more than absolutely necessary -- into embattled cityscapes in an ongoing guerrilla war in which they might take heavy casualties (which, in turn, would be likely to cause support for the war to drop at home even more precipitously than it has). Still, it remains amazing to me that Seymour Hersh`s recent important report in the New Yorker, Up in the Air, is the first significant mainstream account since the invasion of Iraq to take up the uses of air power in that country. The piece certainly caused a stir here, becoming part of the suddenly quickening tempo of debate about American withdrawal; but, as readers may have noticed, the air war itself has received no more attention since its publication two weeks ago than previously, which is essentially none. As I wrote back in August 2004, "You might think that the widespread, increasingly commonplace bombing of civilian areas in cities would be a story the media might want to cover in something more than the odd paragraph deep into pieces on other subjects." You might think so, but based on recent history, don`t hold your breath.



As a result, strangely enough, it has largely been left to writers and reporters not in Iraq to look up and give Americans a sense of what`s going on in the skies -- as Dahr Jamail, an independent journalist who until recently covered the war from Baghdad and is now back in this country, does below.

Tom

An Increasingly Aerial Occupation
By Dahr Jamail

The American media continues to ignore the increasingly devastating air war being waged in Iraq against an ever more belligerent Iraqi resistance -- and, as usual, Iraqi civilians continue to bear the largely unreported brunt of the bombing.

When the air war shows up at all in our press, it is never as a campaign, but as scattered bare-bones reports of individual attacks on specific targets, almost invariably based on military announcements. A typical example was reported by Reuters on December 4th: "Two U.S. Air Force F-16 jets dropped laser-guided bombs" which, according to a military spokesperson, killed two "insurgents" after they attacked an army patrol near Balad, 37 miles west of Baghdad. On the same day, Reuters reported that "a woman and two children" were "wounded when U.S. forces conducted an air strike, bombing two houses in Baiji, 180 km (112 miles) north of Baghdad."

And even this minimalist version of the American air war rarely makes it into large media outlets in the U.S.

Ignoring the Obvious

Author and media critic Norman Solomon asked the following question recently: "According to the LexisNexis media database, how often has the phrase ‘air war` appeared in the New York Times this year with reference to the current U.S. military effort in Iraq? As of early December, the answer is: Zero." Solomon went on to point out that the phrase "air war" had not appeared in either the Washington Post or Time magazine even a single time this year.

Curiously enough, U.S. Central Command Air Force (CENTAF) reports are more detailed than anything we normally can read in our papers. On December 6, for example, CENTAF admitted to 46 air missions over Iraq flown on the previous day -- in order to provide "support to coalition troops, infrastructure protection, reconstruction activities and operations to deter and disrupt terrorist activities."

Albeit usually broadly (and vaguely) described, and seldom taking possible civilian casualties into account, these daily tabulations by the Air Force often flesh out bare-bones reports with a little extra detail on the nature of the air war. On that December 6th, for instance, the report added that "Air Force F-16 Fighting Falcons, an MQ-1 Predator and Navy F/A-18 Hornets provided close-air support to coalition troops in contact with anti-Iraqi forces near Balad and Ramadi."

Not surprisingly, given their source, such reports glide over or underemphasize potentially damaging information like the fact that bombing runs of this sort are regularly conducted in heavily-inhabited areas of Iraq`s cities and towns where the resistance may also be strongly embedded. Oblique statements like the following are the best you are likely to get from the military: "Coalition aircraft also supported Iraqi and coalition ground forces operations focused on creating a secure environment for upcoming December parliamentary elections."

As a result, aside from reportage by one of the rare western independent journalists left in Iraq or the many Arab journalists largely ignored in the U.S., the American air assault on Iraq remains devastatingly ill-covered by larger outlets here. This remains true, even as, militarily, air power begins to move center stage at a moment when large-scale withdrawals of American ground troops are clearly being considered by the Bush administration.

I have worked as an independent reporter in Baghdad for over eight months during the U.S. occupation of Iraq thus far and I can confirm that a day never passed in the capital city when the low rumblings of an Apache helicopter or the supersonic thundering roar of an F-16 fighter jet didn`t cause me to look up for the source of the noise. Many a night I would be awakened by the low, whumping blades of U.S. helicopters scouring the rooftops of the capital city -- flying at almost building height to avoid rocket-propelled grenades from resistance fighters. I would oftentimes wonder where they were coming from, as well as where they were going.

It is impossible, really, to miss the overt signs of the ongoing air war in Iraq when you are there, which makes the lack of coverage all the more startling. At night, while standing on the roof of my hotel in Baghdad during the November 2004 assault on Fallujah, a city some 40-odd miles away, I could see on the horizon the distant flashes of U.S. bombs that were searing that embattled city.

I often wondered how the scores of journalists in Baghdad working for major American papers and TV networks could continue to ignore the daily air campaign the U.S. military was waging right over their heads or within eyesight. Along with countless eyewitness interviews I did on the damage caused from the air, this is what prompted me to write Living Under the Bombs for Tomdispatch some ten months ago. But it has only been thanks to the New Yorker`s Seymour Hersh, a journalist who has never even been to Iraq, that the important subject of the air campaign there has finally been brought to public awareness on a wider scale. In a recent interview with Democracy Now`s Amy Goodman about his latest piece in that magazine, aptly titled, Up in the Air: Where is the Iraq War Headed Next? he commented, "Clearly there`s all sorts of anecdotal reason to believe that the bombing has gone up exponentially, certainly in the last four or five months in the Sunni Triangle, the four provinces around Baghdad." But he also pointed that, when it comes to the American air campaign, "There`s no statistics... We don`t know what`s going on with the air war."

However, we have at least an idea.

Vietnamizing Iraq

The statistics we can glean from CENTAF indicate a massive rise in the number of U.S. air missions in Iraq for the month of November as compared to most previous months. Excluding weekends -- for some reason the Air Force does not make the number of sorties they fly in Iraq and Afghanistan on Fridays and Saturdays known to the public -- 996 November sorties were flown in Iraq according to CENTAF.

The size of this figure naturally begs the question, where are such missions being flown and what is their size and nature? And it`s important to note as well that "air war" does not simply mean U.S. Air Force. Carrier-based Navy and Marine aircraft flew over 21,000 hours of missions and dropped over 26 tons of ordnance in Fallujah alone during the November 2004 siege of that city.

In his recent article and interview, Hersh rightly reflects the concern of American military men that, in any proposed draw-down plan for American forces, Iraqi security forces are likely to be given some responsibility for Air Force targeting operations. After all, they`ll be the ones left on the ground. It`s an idea, he reports, that is "driving the Air Force crazy," because they fear it may involve them in a future revenge war of ethnic and religious groups in Iraq.

Even Pentagon figures indicate that 10-15% of laser-guided munitions don`t land where intended, but having those munitions land (or not land) where "the Iranians" intend doesn`t please U.S. officials. Senior intelligence personnel complained to Hersh that "Iran will be targeting our bombers."

Ironically, President Nixon`s Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird recently wrote an article in Foreign Affairs magazine arguing that his "withdrawal" policy of "Vietnamization" during that war, actually worked. (It involved withdrawing American troops while fiercely increasing the American air war in what was then South Vietnam and surrounding countries.) So, argues Laird, would "Iraqification."

"The truth about Vietnam that revisionist historians conveniently forget is that the United States had not lost when we withdrew in 1973. I believed then and still believe today that given enough outside resources, South Vietnam was capable of defending itself, just as I believe Iraq can do the same now."

Though Laird`s rewriting of the history of the last years of the Vietnam War (and his own dismally failed policies) may be striking at this moment, he is clearly hardly alone in holding onto the idea that a "withdrawal" that would involve ever more bombs dropped and missiles fired from American aircraft is now the way to go. In a classic case of history repeating itself (as tragedy but also possibly farce), the Bush administration appears to be seriously considering an "Iraqification" policy of its own.

U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski used to work in the Pentagon and for the National Security Agency before retiring in 2003. Well known as a Pentagon whistleblower for speaking out about Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld`s corrupt Office of Special Plans in which so much of the pre-war "intelligence" for Iraq was cherry-picked and passed on, Kwiatkowski has been consistently critical of the Bush Administration.

Kwiatowski believes the administrations` new policy of substituting air power for troops harkens back to the failure of Vietnam. "Let me see if I have this right," she says in an interview with Tomdispatch.

"We have a foul-mouthed Texan in the White House, facing a domestically unpopular war that he never expected to have to fight. In order to stop a persistent anti-American insurgency in a faraway country, this President will now escalate the use of air power, striking deep into the heart of insurgency strongholds and destroying the will of those that support the insurgency.

"This sounds like a replay of Rolling Thunder, March 1965. The Pentagon, led by the last remnant of those who were supposed to have directly experienced the danger of politicized wars managed out of the White House and the sheer uselessness of air power to win hearts and minds, must indeed be out of its collective mind to support a strategic shift like this."

It is important to note that, as in Vietnam, troop morale in Iraq now seems to be plummeting. According to the Army`s own figures, in a study conducted last summer with all units in Iraq, 56% of them reported either "low" or "very low" morale. Keep in mind that towards the end of the war in Vietnam, the Army was in a state of ongoing revolt and incipient collapse. By the time direct U.S. involvement ended with the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in 1973, the sort of mixed morale statistics seen in our military in Iraq last summer would have been an impossible dream.

Getting large numbers of troops out while intensifying the air war might seem then like a reasonable formula for solving certain of this administration`s problems without abandoning its basic Iraq policies, but this will undoubtedly prove a perilous undertaking in its own right, as Hersh recently pointed out: "A key element of the drawdown plans, not mentioned in the President`s public statements, is that the departing American troops will be replaced by American airpower. The danger, military experts have told me, is that, while the number of American casualties would decrease as ground troops are withdrawn, the over-all level of violence and the number of Iraqi fatalities would increase unless there are stringent controls over who bombs what."

One can easily imagine the potential for disaster at a future moment when Shia and Kurdish militia members in Iraqi army uniforms would be calling down air-strikes on Sunni neighborhoods, settling old scores as civilian casualties went through the roof.

Current Trends

But visions of a frightful future in Iraq should not be overshadowed by the devastation already caused by present levels of American air power loosed, in particular, on heavily populated urban areas of that country.

CENTAF reports, for example, that on November 14th of this year, "Air Force F-15 Eagles, MQ-1 Predators unmanned aerial vehicles and Royal Air Force Tornado GR4 aircraft flew air strikes against anti-Iraqi forces in the vicinity of Karabilah. The F-15s dropped precision-guided bombs and the Predators fired Hellfire missiles successfully against insurgent positions." The tactic of using massively powerful 500 and 1,000 pound bombs in urban areas to target small pockets of resistance fighters has, in fact, long been employed in Iraq. No intensification of the air war is necessary to make it a commonplace.

The report from November 14th adds, "Air Force F-16 Fighting Falcons flew air strikes against anti-Iraqi forces near Balad. The F-16s successfully dropped a precision-guided bomb on a building used by insurgents. F-16s and a Predator also flew air strikes against anti-Iraqi forces in the vicinity of Karabilah. The Predator successfully fired a Hellfire missile against insurgent positions."

The vagueness of certain aspects of such reports from CENTAF is troubling, however. The reasons for bombing raids are usually given in generic formulas like this typical one found in official statements released on November 24th and 27th: "Coalition aircraft also supported Iraqi and coalition ground forces operations to create a secure environment for upcoming December parliamentary elections." Such formulations, of course, tell us, as they are meant to, next to nothing about what may actually be happening -- and as the air war is virtually never covered by American reporters in Iraq, these and other versions of the official language of air power are never seriously considered, questioned, explored, or compared to events on the ground.

Another common mission, as stated on the 17th, 22nd and several other days in November (and used again in CENTAF`s December statements) has been the equally vague: "included support to coalition troops, infrastructure protection, reconstruction activities, and operations to deter and disrupt terrorist activities."

One of the busier days for the U.S. Air Force in Iraq recently was the last day of November, when 59 sorties were flown. CENTAF reported that "F-15 Eagles successfully dropped precision-guided munitions against an insurgents` weapons bunker near Baghdad. F-16 Fighting Falcons, an MQ-1 Predator and Navy F/A-18 Hornets and F-14 Tomcats provided close-air support to coalition troops in contact with anti-Iraqi forces near Al Hawijah, Al Mahmudiyah and Fallujah." In addition, Royal Australian Air Force were also flying surveillance and reconnaissance missions that day, as the British Air Force often does on other days.

Weaponry

A broad overview of the types of helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft the U.S. military is employing in Iraq gives an idea of the scope of the air war currently underway and the sort of destructive power available on an everyday basis. It can also offer hints of what we might expect in an air-power intensified draw-down future.

While this is in no way an inclusive list, fixed-wing aircraft include the F-14D Tomcat and F/A 18 fighter jets which are being used by the Navy and Marines. The F-18 fires the laser-guided, 630 pound Maverick Missile (at a cost of $141,442 per shot, by the way). In addition, both the F-14 and F/A 18 fire a 20mm hydraulically operated gatling gun which emits between 4,000 and 6,000 rounds per minute at a range of "several thousand yards."

The Air Force is using F-15 Eagle and F-16 Falcon fighter jets, along with AF MQ-1 Predator drones which are armed with Hellfire missiles. AV-8 Harrier fighter jets have also been used in Iraq as have AC-130 gunships, especially in urban battles like the fighting for Fallujah last year. These planes are capable of circling targets for long periods while raining thousands of rounds of ammunition per minute down from above. Then there is the A-10 Warthog military jet which is used as ground support, as it is capable of firing 4,200 armor piercing 30mm rounds per minute.

At this point, bombs used commonly range in explosive power from 250-2,000 pounds, with cluster bombs, the MK-77 500 pound fire bomb (napalm) and the infamous White Phosphorous also having been employed at various moments. The Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) bomb, ranging from 250-2,000 pounds, was used extensively during the most recent military operation against Fallujah. The 2,000 pound variety, for example, has the capacity to blast a crater in a concrete street 70 feet in diameter and 30 feet deep. This size of bomb has a blast radius of 110 feet within which a human being will die, while fragmentation from the bomb casing can achieve velocities up to 9,000 feet per second and reach areas over 3,000 feet away from the detonation site.

The U.S. military is also using a wide variety of helicopters offensively in Iraq. These include the Apache, Kiowa, Black Hawk, Cobra, Pave Low, Chinook, and Iroquois.

Most of the available data -- and it`s minimal -- about how all this airpower is being used in Iraq comes from the Air Force. One of their news reports from June, 2005, for example, typically reported a single incident in which air power was brought to bear: "Coalition aircraft dropped seven precision-guided bombs while providing close-air support to coalition troops in the western Al Anbar province of Iraq on June 11. Anti-Iraqi forces had taken refuge in buildings in an attempt to shield themselves from coalition attack. An estimated 40 insurgents were killed."

Brig. Gen. Allen G. Peck, deputy combined forces air component commander, added "Our job was to provide close-air support and intel to coalition troops in direct contact with anti-Iraqi forces. Airpower support extends well beyond dropping munitions. Our top priority is providing close-air support and reconnaissance to our Soldiers, Marines and coalition forces in contact with enemy forces on the ground."

The Air Force claims that "nearly 70 percent of all munitions used by the air component since the start of the operation have been precision-guided," and "every possible precaution is taken to protect innocent Iraqi civilians, friendly coalition forces, facilities and infrastructure." However, a serious study of violence to civilians in Iraq by a British medical journal, the Lancet, released in October, 2004, estimated that 85% of all violent deaths in Iraq are generated by coalition forces and claimed that many of these are due to U.S. air strikes. While no significant scientific inquiry has been carried out in Iraq recently, Iraqi medical personnel, working in areas where U.S. military operations continue, report to me that they feel the "vast majority" of civilian deaths are the result of actions by the occupation forces.

Given the U.S. air power already being applied largely in Iraq`s cities and towns, the prospect of increasing it is chilling indeed. As to how this might benefit the embattled Bush administration, we return to Lt. Col. Kwiatkowski

"Shifting the mechanism of the destruction of Iraq from soldiers and Marines to distant and safer air power would be successful in several ways. It would reduce the negative publicity value of maimed American soldiers and Marines, would bring a portion of our troops home and give the Army a necessary operational break. It would increase Air Force and Naval budgets, and line defense contractor pockets. By the time we figure out that it isn`t working to make oil more secure or to allow Iraqis to rebuild a stable country, the Army will have recovered and can be redeployed in force."

But if current trends continue, the end of the U.S. occupation in Iraq may more closely resemble the ending in Vietnam -- a view Kwiatkowski agrees with. The political climate at home may force a decrease in the number of U.S. troops in Iraq, but the compensatory upswing in air power meant to offset this will be inevitable and will inevitably lead to unexpected problems. Why? Because the Bush administration will still be committed to permanently hanging onto a crucial group of four or five mega-military bases (into which billions of construction and communications dollars have already been poured) along with a massive embassy, directing political and military "traffic" from the heart of Baghdad`s Green Zone -- and that means an unending occupation of Iraq, something that, air power or no, can only mean endless strife.

Dahr Jamail is an independent journalist from Anchorage, Alaska. He has spent eight months reporting from occupied Iraq, and recently has been giving presentations about Iraq around the U.S. He regularly reports for Inter Press Service, and contributes to the Independent, the Sunday Herald, and Asia Times as well as Tomdispatch.com. He maintains a website at: dahrjamailiraq.com.

Copyright 2005 Dahr Jamail


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December 14, 2005
Op-Chart
The State of Iraq: An Update
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/14/opinion/14opchart.html

By NINA KAMP, MICHAEL O’HANLON and AMY UNIKEWICZ

DESPITE President Bush`s articulation of a new strategy for victory in Iraq, the American debate remains polarized. An increasing number of critics argue that the war is already lost and that we may as well withdraw, while others claim we are clearly headed to victory, and Americans would know that if only the press would stop emphasizing the negative.

Our judgment, based on data compiled by the American government, the news media and independent monitors, is that trends in Iraq do not support either of these extreme views. Things are in a state of continual turmoil, with many hopeful signs but also some deeply disquieting realities. In the good news category, one could place the real, if belated, progress in training Iraqi security forces, the greater availability of telephone and television services, renewed economic growth and more children in school (reading much better textbooks).

On the negative side, electricity and oil production remain below the levels of the Baathist regime, even as Iraqi expectations for improvement soar. Among Sunni Arabs, who stand to greatly increase their representation in Parliament after tomorrow`s elections, passive support for the terrorists is all too common. And the insurgency remains as strong and deadly as ever.

A sober reading of the data argues against a rapid withdrawal, which would concede the fight to the terrorists. But this does not mean we can`t shift policy. We could announce a plan for substantial troop reductions (but not complete withdrawal) over the next 12 to 24 months, as most Iraqis say they desire. Together with the Iraqi government, we might create a job-training program in response to the chronically high unemployment rate. In the end, however, the most important factor may be how the new government decides to amend the Constitution, particularly in terms of ensuring equitable sharing of oil money and bringing lower-level former Baathists back into public life.

Nina Kamp and Michael O`Hanlon are, respectively, a senior research assistant and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. Amy Unikewicz is a graphic designer in South Norwalk, Conn.

* Copyright 2005The New York Times Company

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December 14, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
W. Won`t Read This
http://select.nytimes.com/2005/12/14/opinion/14dowd.html

By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

Never ask a guy who`s in a bubble if he`s in a bubble. He can`t answer.

`Cause he`s in a bubble.

But the NBC anchor Brian Williams gamely gave it a shot, showing the president the Newsweek cover picturing him trapped in a bubble.

"This says you`re in a bubble," Brian told W. "You have a very small circle of advisers now. Is that true? Do you feel in a bubble?"

"No, I don`t feel in a bubble," Bubble Boy replied, unable to see the bubble because he`s in it. "I feel like I`m getting really good advice from very capable people and that people from all walks of life have informed me and informed those who advise me." He added, "I`m very aware of what`s going on."

He swiftly contradicted himself by admitting that "this is the first time I`m seeing this magazine" - his version of his dad`s Newsweek "Wimp Factor" cover - and that he doesn`t read newsmagazines.

The anchor and the anchorite spent a few anodyne moments probing the depths of what it`s like to be president. "I just talked to the president-elect of Honduras," W. said. "A lot of my job is foreign policy, and I spend an enormous amount of time with leaders from other countries."

Brian struggled to learn whether W. read anything except one-page memos. Talking about his mom, Bubble Boy returned to the idea of the bubble: "If I`m in a bubble, well, if there is such thing as a bubble, she`s the one who can penetrate it."

"I`ll tell the guys at Newsweek," the anchor said impishly.

"Is that who put the bubble story?" W. asked. First he didn`t know about it, and now he`s forgotten it already? That`s the alluring, memory-cleansing beauty of the bubble.

The idea that W. is getting good advice from very capable people is silly - administration officials have blown it on everything from the occupation and natural disasters to torture. In the bubble, they can torture while saying they don`t. They can pretend that Iraqi forces are stronger than they are. They can try to frighten people with talk of Al Qaeda`s dream of a new Islamic caliphate - their latest attempt to scare Americans into supporting the war they ginned up.

"Whether or not it needed to happen," the president told the anchor, "I`m still convinced it needed to happen." The Bubble Boy can even contradict himself and not notice.

W.`s contention that he`s informed by people from all walks of life is a joke, as is his wacky assertion that he can "reach out" to the public more than Abraham Lincoln because he has Air Force One. Lincoln actually went to the front in his war, with Minié balls whizzing by. No phony turkey for him.

The president may fly over all walks of life in Air Force One or drive by them and hide behind dark-tinted windows. In his bubble, he floats through a comforting world of doting women, respectful military audiences, loyal Republican donors and screened partisan groups - with protesters, Democrats, journalists, critics and coffins of dead soldiers kept at bay.

(He has probably even been shielded from the outrage of John and Stacey Holley, both Army veterans, who were shocked to learn that their only child, Matthew, killed in Iraq, would be arriving in San Diego as freight on a commercial airliner.)

Jack Murtha, a hawkish Democrat close to the Pentagon who supported both wars against Iraq waged by the Bushes, has been braying against the Bush isolation. He told Newsweek that a letter he wrote to the president making suggestions about how to fight the Iraq war was ignored for seven months, then brushed off by a deputy under secretary of defense. Even after he went public, he still did not get a call from the White House.

"If they talked to people," he said, "they wouldn`t get these outbursts."

Mr. Murtha told Rolling Stone that the administration`s deafness had doomed Iraq: "Everything we did was mishandled. Plans that the military and the State Department had in place - they ignored `em. The military tells me that when they were planning the invasion, the administration wouldn`t let one of the primary three-star generals in the room."

The president`s bubble requires constant care. It`s not easy to keep out huge tragedies like Katrina, or flawed policies like Iraq. As Newsweek noted, a foreign diplomat "was startled when Secretary of State Rice warned him not to lay bad news on the president. `Don`t upset him,` she said."

Heaven forbid. Don`t burst his bubble.


* Copyright 2005The New York Times Company

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Despite floods of soldiers, assassinations still continue. No one is safe in Lebanon

No one is safe. The bits of bodies on the road, the blood - how dark it becomes an hour after it has lain upon the tarmac - and the incinerated cars, the broken railings through which Jibran Tueni`s car was hurled into a pine-clustered ravine by the bomb; this is now the nature of Lebanon`s war.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article332798.ece

by: Robert Fisk on: 13th Dec, 05
Tueni was the editor of An Nahar - Lebanon`s most prestigious newspaper - and a prominent MP, the son of a former Lebanese ambassador to the UN who received the Legion d`Honneur in Paris only last week. And Tueni, is pulverised, blown - as we used to say at school - to smithereens, only hours before the UN`s investigation, headed by Detlev Mehlis, into ex-premier Rafiq Hariri`s murder is expected to lay blame at Syria`s door. And Tueni is an enemy of Syria. Only days ago, he demanded that Syria be taken to the international court at The Hague for executing Lebanese soldiers 15 years ago.

Ah yes, how many times must we be told that these Lebanese assassinations are not to Syria`s benefit? The "moamara", the "plot", means that the Israelis killed Tueni to embarrass the Syrians, that the Americans wanted to get rid of so free-thinking a Lebanese (Greek Orthodox, as every Lebanese - who knows his sectarian dictionary - knows) now that the Syrian army has left. No, perhaps it was not President Bashar Assad of Syria, but what about the Baath party intelligence which most Lebanese suspect murdered Hariri on 14 February this year?

Standing on the narrow mountain road yesterday morning, the smoke still rising from the carbonised motorcade, the darkening blood still wet on the ground - how many times must I and Lebanese friends come back from these fearful places and wash, rather than brush, our shoes on the doormat - there were obvious lessons. This is a war. I repeat to myself: no-one is safe. Lebanon has tens of thousands of troops, thousands of cops and intelligence men and forensic scientists. They were there in their hundreds at Mkalles yesterday morning, patrolling, searching for bomb parts amid the pine forest, when they, and the reporters, should have been ordering cheese "manaouche" - sandwiches - from local shops and enjoying new freedoms.

But now what are they for, these thousands of soldiers? They can protect no-one. Or so it seems. Lebanon`s pro-Syrian president, Emile Lahoud, should, of course, have addressed the nation after so callous a crime. But there was only silence. In parliament, Marwan Hamade, the telecommunications minister who was also Tueni`s uncle - he was himself badly wounded in a car bomb attack in October of last year - called for an investigation into all of Lebanon`s prominent assassinations (messers Kemal Jumblatt, Bashir Gemayel, Rashid Karami, Grand Mufti Khaled, Danny Chamoun, Rafiq Hariri et al) to be investigated by an international tribunal. Some hope. Just over an hour after the assassination of Tueni - father of four, a one-time spokesman for the messianic General Michel Aoun - Hamadi turned up in shades, weeping, to see the place where his nephew died. "It`s a new crime for Lebanon - there`s nothing else to say," he snapped at us as we stood amid the blood. Later, he was to be more cold-blooded, blaming the "dictatorial hegemony" of Bashar Assad. "... if the Syrians want it this way, we know how to respond." How?

One looked at the oh-so-peaceful pine stands, the smouldering cars, the new forensic policemen with their equally new black ponchos, the leathered-jacketed cop sweeping what might have been a detonator into a bag, and at once asked the obvious question: Tueni had returned from his self-exile in Paris only a few hours earlier, he had taken a narrow mountain road to avoid the morning traffic after leaving home, a "secure" road, of course, and yet someone knew he was on that road, had been primed - perhaps weeks ago - to prepare this crime, and must have had the bomb and his victim with line of sight - from the tall white building to the east, perhaps - who could detonate the car bomb at the moment Tueni`s armoured limousine passed. Just five feet separated Tueni from the bomb. Smithereens.

Mehlis` report should have ended these assassinations, dampened the spirit of Lebanon`s Murder Inc - or Syria`s Murder Inc - and sent the assassins to their lairs. But they are still fully operational. We realised this when Samir Kassir, a prominent anti-Syrian-regime journalist, was murdered shortly after Hariri. Then we had the old former head of the Lebanese communist party, George Hawi, the attempt on the life of May Chidiac, another leading anti-Baathist reporter.

But then came the "suicide" of Brigadier General Ghazi Kenaan, the Syrian interior minister - did he know too much? Was he about to tell all to Mehlis` boys? - and the murder prestige quotient rose again. If Kenaan, why not Walid Jumblatt, the Druze leader, who only on Sunday learned of a planned bomb attack against him on a road in the Chouf mountains? Or Samir Geagea, the former Christian Maronite militia leader? Or General Michel Aoun, who led a futile "independence" war against Syria 15 years ago? Or? Who?

The car bomb yesterday contained around 40 kilograms of explosives and tossed Tueni`s car into the ravine, killing at least seven men. There was an anonymous phone caller who claimed to represent "the Strugglers for Unity and Freedom in Damascus" who announced that "he who contemplates attacking those who have sacrificed everything for the sake of Arabism and Lebanon will face the same fate".

But anyone can make a phone call. Like anyone can be murdered in Lebanon.

"He was an arrogant man but this was not the way," one of Hariri`s supporters said within an hour of Tueni`s death. Arrogant but brave - or should it be, in Lebanon these days, brave but arrogant? Tueni sounded unhinged when he supported Aoun in 1990. But as editor of An Nahar - he was Kassir`s boss - he was an intellectual. As Ghassan Tueni`s son, he was the beloved son of a press empire.

It is now Syrian practice to announce that those who commit such crimes are the enemies of Lebanon. Yesterday afternoon, the Syrian information minister, Mehdi Daklallah, denied his government`s involvement, saying that "those who are behind this are the enemies of Lebanon".

The Independent

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Dec 15, 2005

THE ROVING EYE
We vote, then we throw you out
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GL15Ak03.html
By Pepe Escobar

First, a quick look at the environment ahead of Thursday`s elections in Iraq. Political assassinations, party headquarters burned, abductions (all largely unreported by Western corporate media). A former prime minister, Iyad Allawi - widely known in Baghdad as "Saddam without a moustache" - saying on the record that human rights in President George W Bush`s Iraq are worse than they were under Saddam.

Current Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari`s Da`wa Party accusing Allawi of defending the occupiers. Allawi accusing Jaafari`s government of corruption. Former Pentagon asset Ahmad Chalabi`s campaign posters with the inscription, "We liberated Iraq."

A network of secret torture prisons and charnel houses. Fear and loathing in militia hell. American military operations to "secure peaceful voting". All traffic circulation prohibited by the occupiers (to prevent car bombings). The borders with both Syria and Jordan, as well as Baghdad`s airport, all closed.

Satanic, free and fair
We all knew what some were going to say. Saddam Hussein - preparing his next coup de theater in court - declared the elections "a farce". Al-Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers, plus four other jihadi groups, denounced them as "a satanic project", vowing to perpetuate the jihad, fighting for "an Islamic state ruled by the book [the Koran] and the traditions of Prophet Mohammed".

Other positions are more nuanced. On Monday, a leaflet was widely distributed in the Azamiyah neighborhood in Baghdad stating that Sunni Arabs might have a chance to reinforce their position through the elections, but "the fighting will continue with the infidels and their followers".

The Bush administration spin - faithfully reproduced by Western corporate media quoting the usual ("US officials") suspects - follows the same wishful script: a "large turnout" among the "disaffected Sunni Arab minority" that "could" produce a government "capable of winning the trust of the Sunnis", "defusing the insurgency" and thus leading the US "and other foreign troops" to start going home by 2006.

The favorite Anglo-American election candidate supposedly capable of pulling it all off is once again Allawi - a truculent secular Shi`ite who was once a Ba`athist (he has kept the good connections) before he became anti-Saddam and a US intelligence asset. The White House may forget it, but Iraqis don`t; Allawi gave the go-ahead for the American leveling of Fallujah and the American bombing of holy Najaf in 2004.

A few days ago he was bombarded with shoes and chased away from the Imam Ali shrine in Najaf. British Prime Minister Tony Blair supports him and considers him "the best hope" for Iraq. Pentagon analysts agree, as one of them told The New Yorker`s Seymour Hersh that "he would allow us to keep Special Forces operations inside Iraq ... mission accomplished. A coup for Bush."

But no amount of feel good stories disguise the fact that the American project is doomed to fail because the premise itself is flawed - a semblance of democracy as the offspring of an illegal invasion and foreign occupation. Moreover, this White House-promoted and/or imposed "fast food democracy" has been sectarian-based from the start. It is inexorably leading to the Lebanonization of Iraq, a phenomenon parallel to the Iraqification of the occupation.

Iraqi voters have their own reasons to question whether these elections are free and fair. For starters, most are not interested; what really glues them to TV sets is Saddam on trial (the majority of Iraqis, Shi`ites and Kurds, has already condemned him to death). There`s poor security for the voters; they can only hope they won`t be blown to smithereens when they take the mandatory walk to the polling station to choose between 231 political parties, coalitions and individual candidates.

And there`s little security for the almost 7,000 candidates either. The bulk of the campaigning has been on TV; this means only a few flush parties stood a chance. Live campaigning led in many cases to abduction and even assassination. Moreover, most voters are not exactly sure of what they`re doing. Recent polls have revealed that at least half of the Iraqi population is still not convinced of the merits of Western-style democracy, at least the White House-promoted version.

Half believe that the occupiers should have never set foot in Mesopotamia. Sixty percent think that they turned the country into an even bigger disaster than it was after the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, the first Gulf war in 1991 and 12 years of United Nations sanctions. And two thirds of the population wants the occupiers out. Half the people polled by the BBC said Iraq needed a strong leader (a "Saddam without a moustache"?) And only 28% said democracy was a priority.

The full Shi`ite agenda
It takes just a little political acumen to tell which way the (desert) wind blows. By the end of November, Shi`ite firebrand cleric Muqtada al-Sadr had made his move, coming out with all his political guns blazing to promote a "pact of honor", which he called Iraqi parties to subscribe to.

Last Thursday, in the Baghdad neighborhood of Kadhimiya, the 14-point pact was signed by an impressive array of political heavyweights. Among them: the two main Shi`ite parties, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and Da`wa; the Sadrists; the Iraqi Concord Front (which is a coalition of the three major Sunni Arab parties); Ahmad Chalabi (in person); members of the de-Ba`aathification committee; a number of tribal chiefs; unions; social associations; and government employees.

Among the crucial points of the pact are: withdrawal of the occupiers and setting of an objective timetable for their withdrawal from Iraq; elimination of all the consequences of their presence, including any bases for them in the country, while working seriously for the building of [Iraqi] security institutions and military forces within a defined schedule; no more immunity for the occupation troops; no relations whatsoever with Israel; a condemnation of terrorism ("We condemn terrorism and acts of violence, killing, abducting and expulsion aimed at innocent citizens for sectarian reasons."); a condemnation of the Ba`ath Party as "a terrorist organization" and an urge "to speed up the trial of overthrown president Saddam Hussein"; and a decision to "postpone the implementation of the disputed principle of federalism".

This, in a nutshell, is the Shi`ite agenda for the new Iraq, potentially embracing 62% of the population of roughly 25 million to 26 million. The pact may have been a Sadrist move, but there`s no reason to believe these decisions will not be implemented as the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), which is dominated by the SCIRI, Da`wa and the Sadrists, is set to become the majority in the new, 275-member Iraqi National Assembly. The whole numbers issue in the elections is by which percentage the UIA will be a majority compared to the Kurdistan coalition and the Iraqi Concord Front.

The main players
The UIA, list number 555, created with the blessing of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, received almost 50% of the votes in the January elections. Now the 18-party UIA is weaker because some parties defected. Sistani stated his position last Sunday. In January, he practically ordered all Shi`ites to vote for the UIA. Now, he is more nuanced. "These elections are just as important as the preceding ones, and citizens - both male and female - must participate in them on a wide scale in order to guarantee a big and powerful presence for those who will safeguard their verities and work energetically for their higher interests in the next parliament."

Although not explicitly endorsing the UIA, he did advise all Shi`ites to not split and not waste their vote; this would mean something like "vote for the UIA, not for Allawi". Politically, the UIA has been heavily criticized by Iraqis themselves for being utterly impotent - and incompetent - while dealing with corruption and fighting against both the Sunni Arab resistance and the jihadi groups.

The eight-party Kurdistan coalition list, number 730, remains dominated by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, headed by the current Iraqi president, Jalal Talabani, and the Kurdish Democratic Party, headed by Masoud Barzani, the president of Iraqi Kurdistan. They have been allies to the UIA in government for the past 10 months, but the infighting is abysmal. The only thing the Kurds actually care about is Kirkuk and its oil wealth - and how they can prevent Sunni Arabs and Turkmen from having a slice of the cake.

The 15-group Iraqi National List, number 731, secular and pan-sectarian, is headed by Allawi. The list includes the Communist Party, former foreign minister (pre-Saddam) Adnan al-Pachachi (a Sunni Arab), a few tribal sheikhs and even some liberal Shi`ite clerics.

They say they will fight the Sunni Arab resistance (would that mean leveling Ramadi now instead of Fallujah?), establish a strong central government (SCIRI, Da`wa and the Sadrists would never let them get away with it), revise the de-Ba`athification laws (so Allawi can get his former pals back to government) and return more former officers of the Iraqi Army disbanded by former proconsul L Paul Bremer to the new security forces (once again, over the dead body of the SCIRI, Da`wa and the Sadrists).

The Iraqi Concord Front, number 618, is an alliance of three mostly Islamist Sunni Arab groups. All of them boycotted the January elections. Their platform includes total American withdrawal, and of course bringing back former Sunni Arab Iraqi Army officers. They also want to change the constitution - again - eliminating the newfound regional power and reinforcing the authority of Baghdad.

The 10-party Iraqi National Congress (INC) list, number 569, is headed by former Pentagon asset, current deputy prime minister and eternal revivalist, Chalabi. He split from the UIA to form his own group. Chalabi obviously preaches fighting against the Sunni Arab resistance and in impeccable populist fashion promised every Iraqi family cash derived from Iraq`s oil money plus a piece of land for every family that did not yet own a home.

All`s well in militia hell
When they are not occupied dodging bullets or trying to spend at least one hour of the day with some water and electricity, Iraqis see rot piling up everywhere. The Allawi-Chalabi (they are cousins) mini-war gets dirtier by the day. The British government is according to some unconfirmed reports pulling out all the stops to stall an investigation into the theft of more than US$1.3 billion from the Ministry of Defense. This favors - who else - Allawi, because the money "disappeared" during his corruption-infested six months as prime minister.

Then there`s the rot in the Ministry of Interior. Bayan Jabr, the minister, is from the SCIRI. He controls about 110,000 men armed to their teeth. The SCIRI`s militia, the Badr Organization, formerly the Badr Brigade, rule the ministry and have infiltrated paramilitary police commandos, which are in fact "legal" death squads specialized in terrorizing Sunni Arabs. In parallel, Muqtadar`s Mahdi Army controls most of Baghdad`s police. Many people tend to forget that Baghdad is a predominantly Shi`ite city.

This country is no more
None of this points to national cohesion. "Iraq" as we know it - the unified, heavily centralized state with arbitrary borders drawn on a paper napkin by Britain after World War I - may be on its way to extinction after these elections.

Partition is de facto in the four provinces of Kurdistan - roughly between 15% and 20% of the total population, self-governed and with their own army and police. The billion-dollar question is how the SCIRI, Da`wa and the Sadrists will conform a Shi`iteistan composed of nine Shi`ite provinces out of Iraq`s 18. This would be the logical outcome after the American-designed constitution approved in the October 15 referendum. The SCIRI`s leader, Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim, definitely wants a Shi`iteistan.

The US would be left with little more than the Green Zone - which is not exactly an oil lake - and a lot of empty desert. Essentially, Kurds and Shi`ites will be able to decide what to do with their oil revenues. The Kurds, for instance, have already signed a contract with a Norwegian oil company to drill for oil.

Election or no election, the ultimate blood-drenched quagmire will remain fully operational. Al-Qaeda will keep suicide bombing to death. Shi`ite death squads will keep executing Sunni Arabs. Shi`ite and Kurd politicians will keep squabbling - while Kurdistan and Shi`iteistan further ignore Baghdad. The Americans will keep controlling nothing - not even the road from the airport to the Green Zone. "Reconstruction" will remain non-existent - until the probably not-too-distant day when the Shi`ite signatories of the "pact of honor" - the probable election winners - will muster the will to tell the occupiers "you`re out - and don`t forget to pack your military bases as well".

(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us for information on sales, syndication and republishing .)

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Xmas Cards From Famous People

In which Ashlee, Dubya, Tom Cruise and more wish you very happy holidays. Sort of

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/200…
- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, December 14, 2005

May the Lord bless you and keep you this wonderful holiday -- unless, of course, you are gay or thinking about becoming gay or unless you have at one time during the past three years considered in any way supporting the "gay lifestyle." You are all in my thoughts always, unless you are a woman or pagan or a liberal or Tom Cruise. By the way, materialism is evil and has robbed Christmas of its true meaning -- which is, of course, guilt and death and sin. Dig my gold-encrusted robes. Oh, and please buy my book. Available on Amazon for only 13 bucks! You save 32 percent! Joy to the world.
-- Pope Benedict XVI

Hey fans and doods and everyone else who was, like, totally duped into buying my new CD because you somehow believed that my voice didn`t actually sound like a paper shredder drowning in pudding. I hope you all have, like, the rockinest Christmas ever! Thanks to all who supported me thru my "SNL" lip-synching fiasco and my drunken McDonald`s rampage. But I rebounded! Did you hear me at the Billboard Music Awards? I shattered glass! Toes curled! Animals shuddered! I can too sing, even if critics think I sound like a D-grade Avril Lavigne being beaten with a live chicken, underwater! Rock, like, on! I am me! Or whatever.
-- Ashlee Simpson

This holiday season, I love you all. But I also hate you, too. I have more money than all of you put together, yet I am miserable. But still I am gorgeous and skinny and rich, so I am very, very happy. Sort of. But then again, not. Oh my God, what am I saying? Why do I have to put up with all you people? And this drug scandal! So unfair! Rehab is for divas and porn stars and the Olsen twins. The coke wasn`t even all that good, you know? Why can you not get good blow these days? Oh crap, did I just write that out loud? Dammit. Note to British tabloids: Burn in hell you bloody baboons. I shall rise again. French Vogue forever! Merry Christmas everyone! Hi Naomi!
-- Kate Moss

To all Earth creatures great and meek: Greetings from on high! No, not that kind of "high," silly. Pills are bad! I am not gay! Get off the psychiatrist`s couch and get yourself clear of all engrams! Beware: Xenu wants to suck your brain and impregnate your dog. I am now OT6 and know the secrets of "The Incident," the great alien war! Shhh! Katie and I wish you a very happy holiday, even though we Scientologists only believe in the Invisible Gnomes of Althion Galaxy 9 and therefore only exchange the "gift" of genetically engineered interdimensional alien DNA via elaborate color-coded colonics. Right, Katie? Katie is nodding yes and smiling that creepy, slightly narcotized smile that is now her trademark. Good girl, Katie!
-- Tom Cruise

Yo my peoples. I been shot nine times. Please buy my horrible video game. Most overrated rapper of the year! But yo, I look mean and badass, yo! Can`t dance like Usher can`t sing like Kanye can`t rhyme like Em, but yo I sure can gangsta bling cool! I been shot nine times. Check out my new line of custom-embroidered linens at Pottery Barn, in the Northgate Mall. I`ll be there `tween 3 and 4 signin` pomegranate-scented candles and Berettas, yo. Merry Xmas. Peace out. I been shot nine times.
-- 50 Cent

Dear America. This holiday, our country must be strong. To be strong we must be able to yank out the fingernails and attach electrodes to the genitals of swarthy foreign people we do not like until their chest hairs burn and they finally reveal to us the location of their terrorist sleeper cell, or their university diploma, whichever. Without agony, there would be no Santa. You think those reindeer like to fly? You see Santa`s whips? It is a world of pain and retribution, people. You are either a hammer or a nail. Be a hammer, America! Just like Jesus commanded. God bless.
-- Dick `n` Rummy

Hello, little people. During this fine holiday season, unto you we shall bestow tiny glimpses of our unimaginable beauty. Alas, we cannot appear frequently in the same room together lest our joint radiance cause your eyeballs to explode in over-ecstatic delight. But be it known, we are thinking of you, always. Especially those of you who park our cars and bleach our teeth and provide day care for our little imported babies. Peace to all. Sorry about "Mr. and Mrs. Smith." Jen, please quit calling and hanging up. We know it`s you.
-- Brad `n` Angie, Maddox `n` Zahara

Christ be with you, and also with this pile of toasted cheese sandwiches we so desperately need to consume lest we both shrivel into stick-like slivers of bone and loose skin and bitchin` Prada totes. Cigarettes and coffee, yay! We are America`s sweethearts and screw that bitch Lindsay Lohan -- ptew ptew! We make all dreams come true. We may not be all that bright, but we sure are cute! You cannot have sex with us! Please quit wagering which of us will date/marry/be dumped by a soccer star/ Greek shipping tycoon/Wilmer Valderrama and fail at rehab first. Happy holidays, America. Please kneel before our terrifying billion-dollar fashion/magazine/DVD empire! Christmas yay! Totally!
-- Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen

Infidels shall pay by the mighty hand of Allah! Saddam not returning to dishonorable courtroom! OK seriously, happy holidays and thanks to CIA for totally botching kangaroo trial. So funny! Saddam is way humored! By the way, Osama is living like a king just off Jersey turnpike on Karl Rove`s dime. I have proof! By the way, I was brutal heartless dictator and even I ran my country better than U.S. Ha! "Nation-building" my big fuzzy butt! By the way, I know where WMD is located! Inside scary capri pants of Ann Coulter! Ha! OK, back to laughing in face of infidel judge. Peace out.
-- Saddam

Please forgive lack of postmark on card, also lack of discernable background that might give away "secret" location of me (note: not Jersey turnpike). Ha! Is big joke, no? Over $300 billion for "war on terror" and you can`t even find little old hairy me! Either I am mad genius, or your leaders are dumbern`a sack of garbanzo beans. Is both? Wow, Saddam begin to look more and more like Mel Gibson every day, no? Allah rain curses upon all infidels! Everybody Loves Raymond! Is Tom Cruise not gay? Allah crushes Santa like stale falafel patty! I kiss you!
-- Osama

Happy holidays to you, unless you are not me. Blue crayons and bubble bath. Who turned off the lights? No one will listen to me anymore. Gabba gabba gee, booga booga woo. See? What happened to the pretty songs and the cheers? What happened to all those creepy praying sycophants? Wow, that was a big word for me to write. The voices are getting louder, Mommy. Laura is muttering in pig Latin from over in the corner, rocking back and forth. No one is listening. Rubber band peanut butter sponge bath. Oh my God, I need a drink. What`s that smell? Is my time almost up yet? Can I go home now? Happy holidays, America. The GOP loves you. Kidding.
-- George W. Bush
Thoughts for the author? E-mail him.

Mark Morford`s Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SF Gate and in the Datebook section of the SF Chronicle. To get on the e-mail list for this column, please click here and remove one article of clothing. Mark`s column also has an RSS feed and an archive of past columns, which includes a tiny photo of Mark probably insufficient for you to recognize him in the street and give him gifts.

As if that weren`t enough, Mark also contributes to the hot, spankin` SF Gate Culture Blog.


URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/200…

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Wird der Libanon wieder zu einem Unruheherd?

The Independent
In Lebanon, the men do the dying, and the women do the mourning

Robert Fisk reports from Beirut on another car bomb assassination that has shaken Lebanon[

]
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article333025.ece

Wednesday, 14th December 2005, by Robert Fisk

They will bury Jibran Tueni today.

"You animals, you insects," the woman screamed in the Greek Orthodox church yesterday as his old father Ghassan leaned forward to shake our hands. "Jibran is still alive. He lives now."

Alas, the editor of An Nahar was assassinated on Monday - his few, atomised remains to be buried today - and his father received mourners in the Ashrafieh district of Beirut, bent over, his frog-dead cold hand gripping bravely each mourner’s clutch. What was one to say? To his young wife? A journalist’s life is not a happy one? No, indeed.

Of course, lining up in the church’s clammy exterior, we talked about the Mehlis report, the "final" - they are all final, aren’t they, each "final" UN report on the death of former premier Rafiq Hariri on 14 February this year? - that placed an equally, devastatingly cold hand on Syria for the killing of Tueni’s mentor, the Sunni Muslim philanthropist who had so angered Syria that those who control power in Damascus had, if you believe the report, decided to liquidate him.

So where did we start, yesterday, as the chill wintry sun lit up the palm trees on the seafront corniche in Beirut? With the previous report’s Syrian witness to the Hariri car bombing who has now retracted - on Syrian television, of course - his evidence to Mr Mehlis, a witness testament which was followed by the arrest of members of his family by Syrian security officials? Or the witness (unnamed, of course) who provided details of "an organised operation aiming at killing Mr Hariri, including the recruitment of special agents by the Lebanese and Syrian intelligence services"?

Then there was the paragraph in the Mehlis report that talked of the detonating device that originated in an "electronic part originated from a laptop personal computer".

Even more intriguing was the engine block of the Japanese truck which contained the explosives which killed Mr Hariri and 20 others on 14 February this year, part of a vehicle stolen from Japan on 12 October 2004. This truck was exported, in parts or whole, to the United Arab Emirates.

How odd. How very odd.

And who was it but Elie Hobeika - war criminal, Phalangist mercenary, Israeli spook that he was - who claimed before his own car-bomb murder (an almost equally efficient killing as Tueni’s) that the suitcase that contained the bomb which killed President-elect Bashir Gemayel was made in Japan and shipped to Lebanon from the UAE (aka Dubai) by - let’s all hold our breaths - the "Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command". No mention of this Damascus-nurtured institution in the Mehlis report. Or was Mr Mehlis, who presented his learnings to the UN secretary general Kofi Annan in New York, unaware of them?

Mehlis’ boys demanded from the Lebanese authorities a complete list of the wiretapped conversations of Hariri between October 2004 to the date of his death but received only "an incomplete portion of telephone intercepts ... of Mr Hariri and his household". These came to just 14 pages - provided, presumably, by Syria’s men in Lebanese intelligence. But with Teutonic thoroughness, Mehlis later obtained 26,000 more pages of conversations after December 2004. A call from the mother of a witness and others "provide significant insight into the scope of involvement of key individuals in the assassination as well as the awareness of the Lebanese authorities of the movements and conversations of prominent Lebanese figures." Ouch.

This stuff makes anyone’s skin creep, not least the records of a phone call between General Rustum Ghazali, the head of Syrian military intelligence in Lebanon, and Hariri on 3 August last year, about the so-called "Damascus protocol" which was agreed between Hariri and President Assad in Syria, an understanding which allegedly outlined what Hariri could and could not do as Lebanese prime minister.

Here, for those who want to know what it feels like to be seriously bullied, is an extract from this conversation - Ghazali: "Your excellency [sic],I have been reading in Mustaqbal newspaper that ’officials protect the corruption’. This talk is like a violation of the truth ... Didn’t we agree to stop the subject?"

Hariri: "...statement was all over the newspapers and in fact I was first..."

Ghazali: "I would like to ask a question. Your Excellency, are you still committed to the agreement?"

Hariri: "Of course."

Ah yes. Of course. Our favourite Lebanese phrase.

The Mehlis team have prowled through 97 million records between 7 and 21 February 2005 and concluded that "fraud, corruption and money laundering could also have been motives for individuals to participate in the operation that ended with the assassination." In this, the UN investigators were clearly interested in the collapse of the Beirut Al-Medina bank in mid-2003 in which Syrian officials had accounts.

And so the Mehlis report goes on. Why was Hariri under surveillance after January 2005, why was his motorcade delayed at a T-junction on 14 February, only minutes before his death?

So we wait for yet another UN report, more arrests, more details of Syria’s undying love for Lebanon. And, of course, more assassinations, more funerals, more screaming women in a land where, as it has most famously been written, the men do the dying and the women do the mourning.

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[urlBush übernimmt Verantwortung für Falschinformationen]http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,390483,00.html[/url]

Ein wenig anders hört sich das schon an, was Bush sagt und was die Agenturen und SPON melden.
Besonders nett ist, dass sich Saddam selbst überfallen hat!

"It is true that much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong"
"The United States did not choose war," Mr. Bush said. "The choice was Saddam Hussein`s."

Der ganze Text:
[urlPresident Discusses Iraqi Elections, Victory in the War on Terror ]http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/12/20051214-1.html[/url]

December 14, 2005
Bush Defends Iraq Strategy on Eve of Parliamentary Elections


By DAVID STOUT

WASHINGTON, Dec. 14 - On the eve of parliamentary elections in Iraq, President Bush today described the United States campaign there as a blend of idealism, pragmatism and flexibility that would lead to "total victory" over the forces of tyranny and terrorism.

Calling the elections "a watershed moment in the story of freedom," Mr. Bush warned that they would not spell an end to violence. But he urged Americans to take a longer view as he said again that a free and democratic Iraq would be a symbol and a citadel for freedom throughout the Middle East.

The president embraced the decision to go to war - faulty intelligence notwithstanding - as both good and necessary in an age of terrorism.

While conceding lapses in American intelligence - "It is true that much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong" - he said that intelligence agencies of other countries had come to similar conclusions, and that in any event the United States` information-gathering apparatus was being retooled.

Mr. Bush said he, as commander in chief, shouldered the responsibility for the campaign to overthrow Saddam Hussein, saying, "As president, I am responsible for the decision to go into Iraq." At the same time, he said, the old Baghdad regime had brought ruin on itself by defying the United Nations and the world community for years.

"The United States did not choose war," Mr. Bush said. "The choice was Saddam Hussein`s."

Mr. Bush spoke at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars here in the last of four addresses in which he has defended his Iraq policy and lashed back at critics even while acknowledging mistakes and misperceptions by his administration.

Mr. Bush sought to disarm those who have criticized his policy and accused him of manipulating intelligence about Saddam Hussein`s weapons arsenal in the run-up to war. He portrayed his most outspoken critics as sunshine patriots -- "politicians who saw the same intelligence I saw" and supported the war early on, yet now talk of quitting, to the detriment of American troops` morale.

As for how the war is being waged, Mr. Bush said: "We have fixed what was not working. Our tactics continue to change." He said, for instance, that a greater emphasis on preserving security in those areas already wrested from the insurgents` grasp has improved the fabric of day-to-day life in Iraq.

Democrats issued what amounted to a pre-emptive political strike. Before Mr. Bush`s address, Senator Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, the minority leader, said he regretted that Mr. Bush "is 0 for 3 in his last three speeches. He hasn`t leveled with the American people or laid out a strategy for success."

Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the senior Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, who appeared with Mr. Reid and Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, said the election "could lead to a change for the better, which is everybody`s hope, but it might be a step towards crisis and toward all-out civil war." Of paramount importance, Mr. Levin said, is an overhaul of the new Iraqi constitution, to make it a true compact that would unite the country`s long-feuding ethnic groups into one nation.

Senator Reed, who also sits on the Armed Services Committee, said, "Complete victory is a slogan, not a well-defined objective, and we`d be better served from the president by a better-defined objective for the use of our forces and also our complementary civilian personnel in Iraq."

The president said he defined "victory" in Iraq as a time "when the terrorists and Saddamists can no longer threaten Iraq`s democracy; when the Iraqi security forces can protect their own people, and when Iraq is not a safe haven for terrorists to plot attacks against our country."

The president disputed his critics` assertions that, far from making the United States safer, the war in Iraq has turned that country into a spawning ground for terrorists. He noted that the United States had no presence in Iraq in 1993, when the World Trade Center was bombed; in 1998, when American embassies in Africa were struck; in 2000, when the warship Cole was attacked, and on Sept. 11, 2001.

Mr. Bush`s critics have accused him of cynically linking the 9/11 attacks and Saddam Hussein, but the president insisted today that the events of Sept. 11, 2001, had driven home lessons worth remembering during the Iraq campaign.

"That day we learned that vast oceans and friendly neighbors are no longer enough to protect us," Mr. Bush said. "September the 11th also changed the way I viewed threats like Saddam Hussein."

The all-important lesson, Mr. Bush said, is that "if we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long."

Senator Reid, the Democratic minority leader, released a letter to Mr. Bush today in which 41 senators - all Democrats, except for the independent James Jeffords of Vermont - urged the president to lay out "a detailed strategy for success" in Iraq and to make 2006 a year of transition to Iraqi control of the emerging country`s destiny.

"The window of time to get things right in Iraq may be rapidly closing," the senators wrote.

The only Democrats who did not sign the letter were Senators Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, Kent Conrad of North Dakota, Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Bill Nelson of Florida.

* Copyright 2005The New York Times Company

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Thoughts on the Middle East, History,and Religion
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Juan Cole is Professor of History at the University of Michigan

http://www.juancole.com/

Wednesday, December 14, 2005

Thousands of Shiites Demonstrate against Aljazeera;


Four US troops were killed and a Sunni politician (Mizhar Dulaimi of Ramadi) was assassinated on Tuesday in the run-up to the Iraqi elections (scheduled for Dec. 15). Two days ago, another Sunni parliamentary candidate had been killed in Mosul. On Monday, Jalal al-Din al-Saghir, a Shiite candidate from the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, was subjected to a failed assassination attempt in Taifiyah on his return from campaigning.

On Wednesday, guerrillas managed to launch two attacks in Mosul and one in Baiji, despite the lockdown of the country by the US military.

Thousands of Shiite demonstrated in Najaf, Baghdad and other cities against comments made on Aljazeera satellite television by a guest, saying the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani (the spiritual leader of the Shiites) should stay out of politics. Similar statements have been made in the past by former interim prime minister Iyad Allawi. In the southern Shiite city of Nasiriyah, a mob headed toward Allawi`s campaign offices, but they were turned back by the police.

Al-Zaman: Sistani`s office issued another communique making it obligatory on believers to vote, but declining to back any particular list. A similar statement was issued the by Shiite nationalist young cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, which underscored his neutrality on the elections. The United Iraqi Alliance nevertheless widely uses Sistani`s picture in its campaigning, as well as photos of Muqtada`s father, Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr (d. 1999).

US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad announced that 120 largely Sunni Arab prisoners had been found in Ministry of Interior jails, who had been tortured.

Shiite candidate Adel Abdul Mahdiwarned against the reemergence of the Baath party. He was referring to the Iraqiya list of former transitional prime minister, Iyad Allawi, an ex-Baathist who is attempting to appeal to the secular, Arab-nationalist remnants of the Baath Party.

Al-Hayat [Arabic] reports that 1,000 Sunni clerics issued a joint ruling calling on Sunni Arabs in Iraq to vote in Thursday`s elections. Sunni Arabs mostly did not vote in the Jan. 30 elections, and feel marginalized in the new Iraq. Also, a neo-Baathist guerrilla group, the Army of Islam, issued instructions to its fighters not to target polling stations, so as to avoid indiscriminate attacks on civlians.

[urlAl-Hayat also reports]http://www.daralhayat.com/arab_news/levant_news/12-2005/Item-20051213-259abd6b-c0a8-10ed-0041-2f4b65f24543/story.html[/url] on the building grip of the Shiite militias on the southern port city of Basra. Its reporter says that militiamen who have infiltrated the police used unmarked police cars to kidnap and kill a Sunni cleric a few weeks ago. Militiamen impose veiling on women (even Christian women!) and forbid alcohol sales,

Anthony Cordesman argues that the US must learn to fight lim… instead of going for total victory. In insurgencies, victory cannot come from US firepower alone, but must involve political arrangements with local and international allies.

posted by Juan @ [url12/14/2005 02:48:00 PM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/12/thousands-of-shiites-demonstrate.html[/url] 0 comments

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Published on Wednesday, December 14, 2005 by USA Today
Pentagon Rolls Out Stealth PR
http://www.usatoday.com/

by Matt Kelley


WASHINGTON — A $300 million Pentagon psychological warfare operation includes plans for placing pro-American messages in foreign media outlets without disclosing the U.S. government as the source, one of the military officials in charge of the program says.

Run by psychological warfare experts at the U.S. Special Operations Command, the media campaign is being designed to counter terrorist ideology and sway foreign audiences to support American policies. The military wants to fight the information war against al-Qaeda through newspapers, websites, radio, television and "novelty items" such as T-shirts and bumper stickers.

The program will operate throughout the world, including in allied nations and in countries where the United States is not involved in armed conflict.

THE PROGRAM •Cost: Up to $100 million per contractor, $300 million total •Contractors: SYColeman of Washington; Lincoln Group of Washington; Science Applications International Corp. of San Diego •Awarded: June 7 •Length: Five years •Purpose: "For media approach planning, prototype product development, commercial quality product development, product distribution and dissemination, and media effects analysis." Source: Department of Defense

The description of the program by Mike Furlong, deputy director of the Joint Psychological Operations Support Element, provides the most detailed look to date at the Pentagon`s global campaign.

The three companies handling the campaign include the Lincoln Group, the company being investigated by the Pentagon for paying Iraqi newspapers to run pro-U.S. stories. (Related story: Contracts for pro-U.S. propaganda)

Military officials involved with the campaign say they`re not planning to place false stories in foreign news outlets clandestinely. But the military won`t always reveal its role in distributing pro-American messages, Furlong says.

"While the product may not carry the label, `Made in the USA,` we will respond truthfully if asked" by journalists, Furlong told USA TODAY in a videoconference interview.

He declined to give examples of specific "products," which he said would include articles, advertisements and public-service announcements.

The military`s communications work in Iraq has recently drawn controversy with disclosures that Lincoln Group and the U.S. military secretly paid journalists and news outlets to run pro-American stories.

White House officials have expressed concern about the practice, even when the stories are true.

National security adviser Stephen Hadley said President Bush was "very troubled" by activities in Iraq and would stop them if they hurt efforts to build independent news media in Iraq. The military started its own probe.

It`s legal for the government to plant propaganda in other countries but not in the USA. The White House referred requests for comment about the contracts to the Pentagon, where officials did not respond.

Special Operations Command awarded three contracts worth up to $100 million each for the media campaign in June. Besides the Lincoln Group, the contractors are Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC) of San Diego and SYColeman of Washington.

SAIC and Lincoln Group spokesmen declined to comment on the contract. Rick Kiernan, a spokesman for SYColeman, says its work for Special Operations Command is "more in the world of advertising."

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has emphasized that Washington must promote its message better. "The worst about America and our military seems to so quickly be taken as truth by the press and reported and spread around the world," he said last week.

The Iraq example may cause Arabs to doubt any pro-American messages, says Jumana al-Tamimi, an editor for the Gulf News, an English-language newspaper published in the United Arab Emirates.

Placing pro-U.S. content in foreign media "makes people suspicious of the open press," says Ken Bacon, a Clinton administration Pentagon spokesman who heads the non-profit group Refugees International.

No contractor for the global program has made a final product, Furlong says. Approval will come from Rumsfeld`s office and regional commanders. Some of the development work is classified.

"Sometimes it`s not good to signal ... what your plans are," he says.
Contributing: Barbara Slavin

Copyright 2005 USA Today

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Dieser Artikel ist nicht neu.
Er stammt vom 11.3.2005.
Deshalb ist es für mich sehr verwunderlich, denn ich habe den Artikel auch vor einem halben Jahr schon einmal eingestellt, dass die Berichte über die Rendition von Gefangenen durch die CIA für soviel Aufregung in den letzten Wochen gesorgt haben.
Es war alles bekannt, und wer es wissen wollte, konnte es wissen.
Die augenblickliche Aufregung ist scheinheilig.

DAS STILLE SYSTEM DER AUFTRAGSFOLTER
Entführt, verhört, versteckt
http://www.monde-diplomatique.de/pm/2005/03/11/a0027.text.na…
11.3.2005
Dies ist eine unheimliche Geschichte. Sie handelt von einem Privatflugzeug, das auf einem Flughafen in Deutschland stationiert ist, von Entführungen, die sich auf offener Straße in Europa abspielen, und von Folterpraktiken, die schlimmer sind als die in Guantánamo und Abu Ghraib. In dieser Geschichte treten ganz unterschiedliche Akteure auf: Rechtsanwälte, Spione und Agenten, vor allem aber Menschen, die als Terroristen verdächtigt werden. Und es gibt diese Geschichte nur, weil das Wort "Menschenrechte" - wie ein ehemaliger CIA-Agent es ausdrückt - "ein sehr flexibler Begriff geworden ist".
Von
STEPHEN GREY
*

* Freier Journalist. Autor einer Dokumentation zum Thema in der BBC-Sendereihe "File on 4".
DIE Geschichte beginnt am Nachmittag des 18. Dezember 2001, nur zehn Wochen nach dem 11. September, als der schwedische Anwalt Kjell Jönsson, der sich für Immigranten einsetzt, mit einem seiner Klienten, dem ägyptischen Asylbewerber Mohamed al-Zery, telefonierte. "Plötzlich mischte sich am anderen Ende eine Stimme ein", erinnert sich Jönsson, "die zu al-Zery sagte, er solle das Gespräch beenden. Es war die schwedische Polizei, die gekommen war, um ihn zu verhaften."

Jönsson hatte von der schwedischen Regierung die Zusicherung verlangt, dass es keinen negativen Eilentscheid über den Flüchtlingsstatus seines Klienten geben würde, denn er befürchtete, dass al-Zery gefoltert würde, falls man ihn nach Kairo zurückschickte. Aber dann erfolgte die schnellste Ausweisung, die Jönsson in seinen dreißig Jahren als Asylanwalt erlebt hat. Fünf Stunden nach der Verhaftung wurde al-Zery zusammen mit einem zweiten Ägypter namens Ahmed Agiza vom Stockholmer Flughafen Brömma in Richtung Kairo ausgeflogen.

Das Geheimnis - das zwei Jahre lang nicht herauskam - war, dass in Brömma in jener Nacht ein US-amerikanisches Flugzeug bereitstand und ein Team amerikanischer Agenten, die sich die beiden Ägypter griffen, ihre Hände und Füße fesselten, sie in orangefarbene Overalls steckten, ihnen eine unbekannte Droge verpassten und sie in das Flugzeug verfrachteten.

Wer waren diese amerikanischen Agenten? "Sie hatten schwarze Kapuzen übergezogen und trugen keine Uniformen", sagt Jönsson. "Sie trugen Jeans. Nach Auskunft der schwedischen Sicherheitspolizei waren sie äußerst professionell." Die ganze Operation hatte keine zehn Minuten gedauert: "Es war offensichtlich, dass sie so etwas nicht zum ersten Mal machten", sagt Jönsson.

Über dieses Ereignis wurde monatelang Stillschweigen bewahrt, desgleichen über die Identität der Kapuzenmänner. Doch unter dem wachsenden Druck der verstörten Öffentlichkeit ordnete das schwedische Parlament eine Untersuchung an und veröffentlichte Dokumente, aus denen die Ereignisse auf dem Flughafen und die Identität der Agenten rekonstruiert werden können.

So erklärte etwa Arne Andersson, der die Abschiebung seitens der schwedischen Sicherheitsbehörden leitete, dass man in jener Nacht Probleme hatte, ein Flugzeug zu besorgen. Deshalb habe man sich an die CIA gewandt: "Am Ende gingen wir auf ein Angebot unserer amerikanischen Freunde ein - die CIA ist ja sozusagen unsere Partnerbehörde; sie besorgten uns ein Flugzeug, das für ganz Europa unbeschränkte Überflugrechte hatte, um die Deportation in kürzester Zeit abzuwickeln."

Vor ihrer Entscheidung, einer Überstellung der beiden Verhafteten nach Ägypten zuzustimmen, hatte sich die schwedische Regierung offiziell zusichern lassen, dass die beiden Männer nicht gefoltert würden und dass sie in Kairo konsularisch betreut, also regelmäßig von schwedischen Diplomaten besucht werden dürften. Man verschwieg der Öffentlichkeit, dass sich die Häftlinge über ihre Behandlung beschwert hatten. Gegenüber dem schwedischen Parlament und einem Ausschuss der Vereinten Nationen erklärte die Regierung im Gegenteil, die Gefangenen hätten keinerlei Beschwerden. Tatsächlich aber hatten die beiden Männer gegenüber dem schwedischen Konsul schon bei dessen erstem Besuch geklagt, dass man sie schwer gefoltert hatte.

Jönsson sagt, sein Klient Mohamed al-Zery sei fast zwei Monate lang gefoltert worden: "Er war in einer sehr kalten, sehr kleinen Zelle untergebracht, und er wurde geschlagen. Am schlimmsten waren die elektrischen Foltermethoden, bei denen ihm wiederholte Male unter ärztlicher Aufsicht Elektroden an allen empfindlichen Körperteilen angebracht wurden."

Mohamed al-Zery ist inzwischen freigelassen, ohne dass man ihm je etwas zur Last gelegt hätte. Aber er darf Ägypten nicht verlassen - und auch nicht über seine Gefängniszeit sprechen. Ahmed Agiza dagegen sitzt nach wie vor in einer ägyptischen Haftanstalt.

In Kairo erzählte mir Agizas Mutter, Hamida Schalibai, die ihren Sohn häufig im Gefängnis besucht, wie es ihm dort ergangen ist: "In Ägypten angekommen, brachten sie ihn, noch mit Kapuze und Handfesseln, in ein Gebäude und führten ihn in das Kellergeschoss, eine Treppe hinunter. Dann begannen sie mit den Verhören und den Folterungen. Wenn er eine Frage beantwortete, passierte ihm nichts. Aber sobald er auf eine Frage mit ,Ich weiß nicht` antwortete, schlugen sie ihn und verabreichten ihm Elektroschocks. Die ganze Zeit war er völlig nackt, ohne jede Bekleidung! Nicht einmal Unterwäsche! In den ersten Monaten war er bei den Verhören ständig nackt, er wäre fast erfroren."

Die Bestätigung, dass US-Agenten an dem schwedischen Fall beteiligt waren und dass die beiden Ägypter gefoltert wurden, belegte erstmals den schon länger existierenden Verdacht, dass die USA seit dem 11. September 2001 im globalen Maßstab an Gefangenenverschiebungen mitgewirkt haben. Heute kann man aufgrund der Ermittlungen von staatlichen Stellen und Journalisten aus aller Welt eindeutig sagen, dass die USA systematisch damit befasst sind, islamische Kämpfer in Länder der arabischen Welt und des Fernen Ostens zu verschicken, wo sie inhaftiert und mit Methoden verhört werden können, die US-Agenten selber nicht anwenden dürfen. Manche bezeichnen dieses System als "torture by proxy", was so viel wie "Auftragsfolter" heißt. In der Zeitschrift The New Yorker wird derselbe Vorgang auch "outsourcing torture" genannt.

Festnahmen gab es nicht nur in Kriegsgebieten wie Afghanistan oder dem Irak, sondern überall auf der Welt, etwa in Bosnien und Kroatien, in Mazedonien und Albanien, in Libyen und im Sudan, in Kenia, Sambia und Gambia, in Pakistan, Indonesien und Malaysia. Die CIA hat für dieses System den offiziellen Begriff "extraordinary rendition" erfunden, und natürlich würde sich kein US-Amerikaner, der eine offizielle Funktion bekleidet, über diese "Auslieferung der besonderen Art" je öffentlich äußern.

Jetzt hat allerdings ein ehemaliger hochrangiger CIA-Mitarbeiter, der im November 2004 aus dem Geheimdienst ausgeschieden ist, sich ausführlich über diese spezielle Methode der "Auslieferung" geäußert. Michael Scheuer leitete Ende der 1990er-Jahre die Spezialeinheit, die mit der Jagd auf Ussama Bin Laden betraut war. In einem Interview für das BBC- Radioprogramm "File on 4" hat er mir bestätigt, dass die geschilderte Stockholmer Geschichte kein Einzelfall, sondern Teil eines sehr viel umfassenderen Systems gewesen ist.

Laut Scheuer stand die CIA, als sie vom Weißen Haus mit der Jagd auf al-Qaida betraut wurde, vor der Frage, was mit den gefangenen Terroristen geschehen solle: "Das ist euer Problem, antworteten uns die Auftraggeber. Also entwickelten wir dieses System, Ländern behilflich zu sein, die bestimmte Leute suchten, weil sie ihnen Verbrechen anlasteten oder sie bereits verurteilt hatten. Wir wollten diese Leute im Ausland festnehmen und in das entsprechende Land zurückschicken, in dem sie gesucht wurden."

Barbara Olshansky gehört zu einer Gruppe von Leuten, die Licht in diese Sache zu bringen versuchen. Als Anwältin für das New Yorker Centre for Constitutional Rights untersucht sie nicht nur neuere Fälle von "Sonderausweisungen", sondern auch deren juristische Rechfertigung. Sie glaubt, dass die US-Exekutive die Gefangenen nicht nur in Drittländern verhören lässt, sondern auch in ihren eigenen, von der CIA eingerichteten und betriebenen Offshore-Gefängnissen.

Die Juristin Olshansky sagt, dass es seit über hundert Jahren in den USA die Praxis gebe, Leute außerhalb des eigenen juristischen Zugriffsbereichs zu fassen, um sie in den USA vor Gericht zu bringen. Das prominenteste Beispiel ist Manuel Noriega, der Expräsident von Panama. Für diese Übung hat sich das Wort "rendition" eingebürgert, obwohl es sich juristisch nicht um eine Auslieferung handelt. Doch seit die CIA mit dem Kampf gegen al-Qaida befasst ist und vor allem seit dem 11. September, gibt es auch das Konzept der "extraordinary rendition", der Sonderauslieferung, bei der eine Person nicht an die USA, sondern an ein anderes Land überstellt wird.

Nach Barbara Olshansky wurde damit "die ganze Idee auf den Kopf gestellt". Denn Sonderauslieferung bedeutet, "dass die USA Leute festnehmen und zum Verhören und Foltern verschicken. Man überstellt sie, um Informationen aus ihnen herauszukriegen. Das Ganze soll also gar nicht mit einem juristischen Verfahren enden."

Sieht man sich die Praxis der Sonderauslieferungen an, kann man eine überraschende Entdeckung machen: Zum Transport ihrer Gefangenen benutzen die CIA und andere Agenturen der USA regelmäßig anonyme Privatflugzeuge. In meinem Besitz befinden sich die vertraulichen Logbücher eines Langstreckenjets vom Typ Gulfstream V, der für das Transportsystem der CIA offenbar eine zentrale Rolle spielt. Dieses Flugzeug hat seit 2001 über 49 Flughäfen außerhalb der USA angeflogen, darunter regelmäßig Jordanien, Ägypten, Saudi-Arabien, Marokko und Usbekistan - also durchweg Länder, in denen die USA ihre Gefangenen abliefern.

"Plane-spotters" haben das Flugzeug schon mehrfach fotografiert. Es ist weiß angestrichen und trägt als einzige Aufschrift die zivile Registriernummer N379P, jedenfalls bis vor kurzem. Nach Dokumenten, die ich einsehen konnte, wurden die beiden Ägypter im Dezember 2001 in Schweden eindeutig mit diesem Flugzeug abgeholt. Dieselbe Maschine wurde im Oktober 2001 auch in Pakistan gesichtet, als Zeugen auf dem Flughafen von Karatschi beobachteten, wie eine Gruppe Maskierter einen Mann in ein Flugzeug schaffte. Der Mann landete schließlich in Jordanien.

Auch Robert Baer, dem die Logbücher vorlagen, hat keine Zweifel, dass dieser Gulfstream-Jet mit den Auslieferungen zu tun hat: "Er fliegt immer Orte an, wo gefoltert wird." Baer hat für die CIA 21 Jahre lang als Geheimagent im Nahen Osten gearbeitet, bevor er vor etwa zehn Jahren den Dienst quittierte. Er meint, ein solches Flugzeug sei für den Geheimdienst deshalb von Nutzen, weil es keine militärischen Kennzeichen trägt. Als formeller Besitzer fungiere eine Briefkastenfirma: "Die kann man praktisch über Nacht auflösen, wenn sie enttarnt wird. Und wenn`s sein muss, wechselt man einfach das Flugzeug. Das ist ziemlich üblich."

Nach Baer geht es bei der Sonderauslieferungspraxis um mehr als nur darum, Terroristen in Länder wie Ägypten zu schicken, damit sie dort im Gefängnis sitzen. Manchmal geht es auch darum, sie ganz verschwinden zu lassen. Der angestrebte Zweck sei je nach Land verschieden: "Wenn du einen Gefangenen nach Jordanien schickst, bekommst du ein besseres Verhör. Wenn du aber einen etwa nach Ägypten schickst, wirst du ihn wahrscheinlich nie wieder sehen, und dasselbe gilt für Syrien."

Nun könnte man ja Länder wie Syrien für Feinde der Vereinigten Staaten halten. Im Geheimkrieg gegen den militanten Islamismus sind sie jedoch Verbündete, versichert Baer: "Im Nahen Osten gilt die einfache Regel, dass der Feind meines Feindes mein Freund ist, und genau so funktioniert das. All diese Länder haben auf diese oder jene Weise unter dem islamischen Fundamentalismus zu leiden." Die Syrer haben den USA schon seit Jahren eine Zusammenarbeit gegen den militanten Islamismus angeboten: "Zumindest bis zum 11. September wurden diese Angebote zurückgewiesen. Von den Ägyptern und den Syrern haben wir im Allgemeinen Abstand gehalten, weil sie so brutal waren."
Die Genfer Konventionen zum alten Eisen

LAUT Baer hat die Sonderauslieferungspraxis der CIA erst nach dem 11. September eine viel umfassendere und systematische Dimension angenommen. Seitdem seien hunderte von Gefangenen an Gefängnisse im Nahen Osten überstellt worden, und zwar mehr als die Gefangenen, die in Guantánamo Bay gelandet sind. Der 11. September, meint Robert Baer, diente als Rechtfertigung, die Genfer Konventionen zum alten Eisen zu werfen: "Es war das Ende der rechtsstaatlichen Prinzipien, wie wir sie im Westen kannten."

In der US-Regierung gibt es Leute, die diese Praxis verteidigen mit der Behauptung, es gehe nur darum, Terroristen aus dem Verkehr zu ziehen. Nachdem man einen Gefangenen beispielsweise nach Ägypten verfrachtet habe, ist es den USA offenbar völlig egal, was mit dem mutmaßlichen Terroristen danach passiert. Doch der Fall des Australiers Mamdouh Habib lässt erkennen, dass diese Sonderauslieferungspraxis auch noch einem anderen Ziel dienen soll: Man will sich Informationen verschaffen, an die man wohl nur mit Hilfe von Foltermethoden herankommt, die amerikanischen Agenten untersagt sind.

Mamdouh Habib, der früher ein Café in Sydney betrieb, wurde einen Monat nach dem 11. September 2001 in Pakistan nahe der afghanischen Grenze verhaftet. Obwohl er australischer Staatsbürger ist, wurde er an US-amerikanische Agenten übergeben, die ihn nach Kairo ausflogen. Hier hat man ihn, wie er seinem amerikanischen Anwalt, Professor Joe Margulies von der University of Chicago, berichtet hat, volle sechs Monate lang gefoltert. Mit unbeschreiblichen Methoden, die weit über regelmäßige Schläge hinausgingen: "Er wurde in einen Raum gebracht, wo man ihm Handfesseln anlegte und den Raum dann allmählich mit Wasser anfüllte, bis der Wasserspiegel knapp unter seinem Kinn stand. Stellen Sie sich die Angst vor, wenn man glaubt, dass es kein Entrinnen gibt!"

Ein anderes Mal wurde er an den Händen an einer Wand aufgehängt, wobei seine Füße auf einer Walze standen, die eine Metallachse hatte: "Wenn sie die Walze unter Strom setzten, bekam er einen elektrischen Schlag und musste die Füße anheben, sodass er nur noch an den Händen hing. Und das ging so lange, bis er ohnmächtig wurde."

Aufgrund solcher Verhörmethoden gestand Habib, Kontakte zu al-Qaida gehabt zu haben. Er unterschrieb bereitwillig "jedes Dokument, das sie ihm vorlegten", erzählt Joe Margulies. Danach wurde Habib wieder an die Amerikaner überstellt. Die schickten ihn nach Afghanistan und dann nach Guantánamo. Dort wurden ihm die durch Folter erpressten Geständnisse zum Verhängnis: "Die Militärtribunale, die über seinen Kombattantenstatus zu befinden hatten, stützten sich bei ihrer Entscheidung, Mr. Habib in Haft zu halten, auf das Beweismaterial aus Ägypten."

Im Januar 2005 wurde Habib endlich freigelassen. Nachdem Margulies und andere gegen die Folterung ihres Mandanten protestiert hatten, wurde er von Guantánamo nach Hause geflogen. Die Regierung in Canberra hat zwar erklärt, dass man ihm kein Vergehen zur Last legt, doch aus Kreisen des australischen Geheimdienstes wird er nach wie vor beschuldigt, Verbindungen zu al-Qaida zu haben.

Die meisten Häftlinge, die von US-amerikanischen Geheimdiensten an Gefängnisse im Nahen Osten überstellt wurden, sind nicht in der Lage, zu berichten, was ihnen widerfahren ist und wie sie behandelt wurden. Nur einer kann heute frei darüber reden: ein kanadischer Staatsbürger, der von der CIA in einer syrischen Gefängniszelle abgeliefert wurde. Seine Geschichte untermauert die Behauptung, die einer der Anwälte aufgestellt hat: Wenn die Amerikaner ihre Gefangenen in andere Länder verschicken, liefern sie einen "Fragenkatalog" gleich mit.

Maher Arar ist ein Handytechniker aus Ottawa. Im September 2003 machte er auf der Rückreise von seinem Urlaub in Tunesien nach Kanada einen Zwischenstopp auf dem Kennedy-Flughafen in New York. Er rechnete nicht mit Problemen, da er die USA häufig besucht und dort auch schon gearbeitet hatte. Aber dann wurde er bei der Ankunft herausgewinkt und in einen Verhörraum geführt. Schließlich landete er im Metropolitan Detention Centre in Brooklyn, einem Auffangzentrum für Immigranten. Bald wurde klar, dass seine Festnahme aufgrund von Informationen aus Kanada erfolgt war. Die kanadische Polizei hatte offenbar einen mutmaßlichen Terroristen im Visier, der in Ottawa lebte. Dessen Namen hatte Maher Arar einmal angegeben, als er bei der Anmietung einer Wohnung eine Kontaktadresse hinterlassen musste.

Arar ist gebürtiger Syrer, lebt aber schon seit siebzehn Jahren in Kanada und besitzt die kanadische Staatsbürgerschaft. Daher war er überrascht, dass man ihm in New York mit Fragen konfrontierte, die man ihm ohne weiteres auch zu Hause, in Ottawa, hätte stellen können.

Zwölf Tage nach seiner Festnahme auf dem JFK-Flughafen wurde Arar um drei Uhr morgens aufgeweckt und darüber informiert, dass er aus den USA abgeschoben werde. Man fuhr ihn nach New Jersey und setzte ihn - noch immer an Händen und Füßen gefesselt - in einen Privatjet.

Was ihm durch den Kopf ging, als er sich in einem Flugzeug mit Ledersesseln wiederfand, schildert Arar im Rückblick so: "Ich begann, über mich nachzudenken: Wer bin ich, dass sie mir das antun? Bin ich für die so wichtig? Welche Informationen könnte ich ihnen bieten? Als sie mir dann dieses schöne Essen servierten, da fiel mir die Tradition ein, die es in der muslimischen Welt gibt, die wir eid nennen, da schlachtet man ein Tier, und bevor man es schlachtet, füttert man es. Ich dachte nur darüber nach, wie ich der Folter entgehen könnte, denn zu diesem Zeitpunkt wurde mir klar, dass es nur einen einzigen Grund für meinen Abtransport geben konnte: Man würde mich foltern, um an Informationen heranzukommen. Darüber war ich mir sicher."

Nach zwei Tankstopps landete das Flugzeug in der jordanischen Hauptstadt Amman. Von dort wurde Arar in einem Auto nach Damaskus gefahren und im Hauptquartier der syrischen Geheimpolizei abgeliefert. Dort wurde er in eine Zelle gesteckt, die nur wenig größer war als ein Sarg. In dieser Zelle, sagt Arar, hat er über zehn Monate verbracht.

Schon nach kurzer Zeit erwies sich seine Angst vor der Folter als berechtigt: "Der Verhörmensch sagte: ,Weißt du, was das ist?` Ich sagte: ,Ja, das ist ein Kabel.` Und er sagte: "Öffne deine rechte Hand." Ich öffnete die rechte Hand, und er schlug zu wie von Sinnen. Der Schmerz war so brennend, dass ich aufschrie; dann befahl er, meine linke Hand zu öffnen, und zuerst schlug er daneben, aber dann traf er mein Handgelenk. Und dann stellte er Fragen. Wenn er dir nicht glaubt, dass du die Wahrheit sagst, schlägt er wieder zu. Nach ein, zwei Stunden steckte er mich manchmal in einen Raum, wo ich hören konnte, wie andere Leute gefoltert wurden."

Fast genau ein Jahr nachdem man ihn den Syrern ausgeliefert hatte, wurde Maher Arar freigelassen und nach Ottawa zurückgeflogen. Weder Kanada noch Syrien haben irgendeine Anklage gegen ihn erhoben. In Kanada hat sein Fall große Empörung ausgelöst und zu offiziellen Ermittlungen geführt. Wie bei vielen der jüngsten Folteropfer hat die Behandlung bei Arar keine sichtbaren Narben hinterlassen. Das passiert modernen Verhörprofis nicht, dazu sind sie zu clever.

Auch bei Arar sind die Narben vor allem psychischer Natur. Alex Neve, Chef der kanadischen Sektion von amnesty international, ist davon überzeugt, dass Arar die Wahrheit sagt: "Ich glaube das aus mehreren Gründen. Ich habe mich ziemlich ausführlich mit ihm unterhalten. In den vielen Jahren bei amnesty habe ich hier in Kanada viele überlebende Folteropfer interviewt - auch Menschen, die direkt aus Gefängniszellen kamen. Und für mich war das, was Arar geschildert hat, als Erfahrung glaubwürdig, denn es entsprach dem, was ich aus anderen Interviews weiß und erfahren habe."

Doch wer trägt für dieses System von "Sonderauslieferungen" die letzte Verantwortung? Und wer in Washington hat es abgesegnet? Um diese Fragen zu klären, musste ich nach Fall`s Church in Virginia fahren. Hier wohnt Michael Scheuer. Von ihm wollte ich mehr über die Praktiken des "Krieges gegen den Terrorismus" erfahren. Ich wollte vor allem wissen, warum die CIA zu der Zeit, als Scheuer die auf Bin Laden angesetzte Einheit leitete, diese Art der Auslieferung als Taktik gegen die al-Qaida entwickelt hatte. Scheuer nimmt in der Regel kein Blatt vor den Mund. Er hat noch während seiner CIA-Zeit unter dem Pseudonym "Anonymus" zwei kritische Bücher über al-Qaida verfasst. Das zweite trug den Titel "Imperial Hybris".
Die CIA-Juristen haben keine Bedenken

DOCH nie zuvor hat er derart offen über derart heikle Fragen gesprochen. Scheuer versichert, jede "Auslieferungs"-Operation sei von Juristen gebilligt worden: "Innerhalb der Central Intelligence Agency gibt es eine große juristisch Abteilung, die mit der rechtlichen Interpretation der nachrichtendienstlichen Arbeit befasst ist. Und auch beim National Security Council des Präsidenten gibt es ein Team von Juristen. Und bei all diesen Entscheidungen sind diese Juristen auf die ein oder andere Weise beteiligt. Sie haben unser Vorgehen abgesegnet. Die Vorstellung, hier handle es sich um eine Schurkerei, die sich irgendjemand mal so ausgedacht hat, ist schlichtweg absurd."

Scheuer erinnert sich, dass er solche Operationen früher - als Chef der Bin-Laden-Einheit - nur organisieren konnte, wenn sie vom Direktor der CIA oder von dessen Stellvertreter autorisiert waren: "Die das abzeichnen, sind die Nummer eins und die Nummer zwei des Geheimdienstes." Außerdem sagt Scheuer, dass er bei jeder einzelnen dieser Auslieferungsaktionen der Überzeugung war, dass "diese Leute zu Recht nicht mehr auf der Straße herumlaufen". Aber Fehler passieren eben, das war schon immer so, und natürlich mag es vorkommen, dass Unschuldige festgenommen werden: "Es ist ausgeschlossen, dass im Spionage- und Geheimdienstgeschäft keine Fehler vorkommen. Aber hier wurde nie irgendwie leichtfertig oder unbedacht gehandelt. Wir haben das verdammt ernst genommen, und wenn wir uns vertan haben, dann haben wir uns vertan. Aber wir haben uns immer an die Beweise gehalten."

Die Gefahr, dass die verhafteten Männer gefoltert werden könnten, bereitet Scheuer offenbar kaum Gewissensbisse: "Aber letzten Endes muss man sagen: Dass alle Leute aus dem Verkehr gezogen werden, bei denen man davon ausgehen muss, dass sie an Operationen oder an der Planung von Operationen beteiligt sind, bei denen Amerikaner getötet werden könnten - dass ist doch die Sache wert."

"Selbst wenn sie womöglich gefoltert werden?" Auch auf diese Frage hat Scheuer eine Antwort: "Es wären ja nicht wir, die sie foltern. Und ich glaube auch, bei dem, was wir da über die Folter in Ägypten und in Saudi-Arabien zu lesen bekommen, ist viel Hollywood dabei. Ich finde es ziemlich heuchlerisch, sich Sorgen zu machen, was die Ägypter mit solchen Terroristen anstellen, und nicht auch die Israelis zu verurteilen für das, was sie mit den Leuten tun, die sie für Terroristen halten. Menschenrechte - das ist doch ein sehr flexibler Begriff. Das hängt doch immer auch irgendwie davon ab, nach wie viel Heuchelei dir gerade zumute ist."

Eines muss man Scheuer lassen: Er zerbricht sich durchaus den Kopf über die langfristigen Folgen der Sonderauslieferungspraxis. Er glaubt, dass autoritäre Regime wie in Ägypten und Jordanien zu Teilen mitverantwortlich sind für die Existenz des militanten Islamismus. Strategisch gesehen sei es daher wenig sinnvoll, mit ihnen so eng zusammenzuarbeiten: "Jeder Gefangene, den wir festnehmen, ist ein taktischer Erfolg, aber im strategischen Sinne sind wir dabei zu verlieren. Und einer der Hauptgründe ist, dass wir die Diktatoren in der muslimischen Welt unterstützen."

Doch nach Scheuers Meinung gibt es für die USA kaum Alternativen. Was sollen sie mit diesen Gefangenen machen? Die Politiker wollen nicht, dass man Terroristen auf amerikanischen Boden zurückbringt und vor ein US-Gericht stellt. "Es gibt so viele Orte in aller Welt, wo uns schwerlich etwas anderes übrig bleibt, und manchmal muss man eben mit dem Teufel paktieren." So lange die US-Politiker sich nicht mit der Frage befassten, wie man nach amerikanischem Recht mit diesen Gefangenen umgehen könne, könne die CIA nur nach dem Motto handeln: "Man tut, was man kann, und mit dem, was man hat."

Scheuer schätzt die Zahl der durch die CIA "ausgewiesenen" sunnitischen Terroristen auf insgesamt etwa einhundert. Andere Experten wie Robert Baer glauben, dass die Zahl viel höher liegt. Sie gehen davon aus, dass seit dem 11. September auch das US-Verteidigungsministerium unter Donald Rumsfeld mit der globalen Verschiebung von Gefangenen befasst ist und dass das US-Militär seitdem hunderte mutmaßliche Terroristen in Gefängnissen des Nahen Ostens abgeliefert hat.

Doch im Pentagon wie bei der CIA ist niemand bereit, sich über das System der Auslieferungen und dessen Rechtsgrundlage zu äußern. Dagegen konnte ich ein Gespräch mit Danielle Pletka führen, der Vizepräsidentin des American Enterprise Institute. Dieser Think-Tank liegt auf der Linie der Bush-Administration, und Mrs. Pletka bekleidete früher eine hohe Position auf dem Capitol Hill, beim außenpolitischen Ausschuss des US-Senats. "Ich bin kein großer Anhänger von Folterpraktiken", meint sie, und auch für Syrien hat sie nicht viel übrig, so wenig wie für das Gefängnis- und Sicherheitsregime in Ägypten.

Natürlich kann Daniella Pletka die Praktiken der Syrer und der Ägypter nicht gutheißen, aber dann meint sie doch: "Im Krieg gibt es leider Zeiten, da ist es notwendig, Dinge auf eine Art und Weise zu tun, die den meisten guten und ehrlichen Menschen absolut zuwider ist. Und obwohl ich damit nicht etwa sagen will, dass die Vereinigten Staaten solche Praktiken routinemäßig angewendet haben - weil ich nicht glaube, dass man das in irgendeiner Weise als Routine sehen darf -, dies also vorausgeschickt: Wenn es absolut notwendig ist, in diesem Moment etwas herauszufinden, dann ist es eben unumgänglich, etwas herauszufinden, und dafür ist nun mal der Club Méditerrannée bestimmt nicht der richtige Ort."

Zum Schluss frage ich, wie sie - von Fragen der Moral und der taktischen Vorteile einmal abgesehen - die Legalität solcher Operationen beurteilt. Derartige Fragen, meint Daniella Pletka, könne sie als Nichtjuristin leider nicht beantworten.

Die Anti-Folter-Konvention der UN wurde von den USA ratifiziert und von Präsident Bush mehrfach gewürdigt. In dieser Konvention steht der Satz: "Kein Staat darf eine Person in einen anderen Staat ausweisen, zurückschicken oder an ihn ausliefern, wenn es substanzielle Gründe für die Annahme gibt, dass er in Gefahr ist, dort gefoltert zu werden." Das US-Außenministerium veröffentlich alljährlich einen Report, der Menschenrechtsverletzungen einschließlich Folter detailliert darstellt und verurteilt. Zu den regelmäßig aufgeführten Ländern gehören auch Ägypten, Syrien und Saudi-Arabien. Im Bericht des letzten Jahres heißt es zum Beispiel, in Ägypten sei Folter "common and persistent", eine übliche und verbreitete Praxis.

Wie um alles in der Welt können diese Sonderausweisungen legal sein? Zu dieser Frage erhält man vom US-Justizministerium keinen Kommentar. Die juristische Rechtfertigung der USA ist derzeit eine Art Staatsgeheimnis.

Die Tatsache, dass sich das offizielle Washington über die rechtliche Seite seiner Ausweisungspraxis weitgehend ausschweigt, dürfte auch mit der zunehmenden Angst zu tun haben, dass man diese Praxis demnächst einmal vor einem Gericht rechtfertigen muss. Diese Angst bezieht sich nicht nur auf die Gefahr von straf- und zivilrechtlichen Klagen vor amerikanischen Gerichten. Auch in Europa laufen rechtliche Ermittlungen gegen die CIA wegen des Verdachts auf Entführung. So befindet sich die zentrale Operationsbasis für die Ausweisungsflüge der CIA in Deutschland. Und die von mir eingesehenen Logbücher belegen, dass der genannte Gulfstream-Jet wie auch eine Boeing-737, die für andere Ausweisungen benutzt wurde, regelmäßig in Frankfurt gelandet sind.
Im weißen Privatjet nach Afghanistan

IN Deutschland laufen juristische Ermittlungen im Fall des Khaled al-Masri. Der deutsche Bürger aus Ulm hat ausgesagt, dass er am 31. Dezember 2003 in der mazedonischen Hauptstadt Skopje von Unbekannten gekidnappt wurde. Drei Wochen später habe man ihn nach Afghanistan ausgeflogen, wo er in einem von den USA unterhaltenen Gefängnis immer wieder mit Schlägen traktiert worden sei. Nach vier Monaten habe man ihn nach Europa zurückgeflogen und auf einer Landstraße in Albanien ausgesetzt.

Al-Masris Schilderungen klangen zunächst wild übertrieben und unglaubwürdig. Aber die Logbücher, die mir Luftfahrtexperten zugänglich gemacht haben, belegen eindeutig, dass es die Boeing-737 der CIA war, mit der er am 23. Januar 2004 aus Skopje ausgeflogen wurde. Aus dieser Quelle ergibt sich, dass dieses Flugzeug, das aus Mallorca kam, Khaled al-Masri von Skopje über Bagdad nach Kabul transportierte. Beweismittel wie diese könnten die CIA in eine schwierige Position gegenüber ihren Geheimdienstkollegen in Deutschland bringen. Denn die deutschen Behörden werden kaum umhinkommen, den Fall al-Masri als illegale Entführung zu behandeln.

In einem anderen Fall wird in Italien ermittelt. Um die Mittagszeit des 16. Februar 2003 verschwand in der Via Guerzona in Mailand ein Ägypter namens Abu Omar auf dem Weg von seiner Wohnung zu einer zehn Minuten entfernten Moschee. Ein Augenzeuge sah, wie er auf der Straße von drei Männern angehalten wurde und wie an dieser Stelle ein Lieferwagen auf den Gehsteig fuhr. Hier besteht der ungeheuerliche Verdacht, dass sich US-Agenten ohne den Hauch einer rechtlichen Legitimierung auf offener Straße eine von ihnen verdächtigte Person gegriffen haben - und das im Land eines ihrer engsten europäischen Verbündeten.

Abu Omar stand unter Beobachtung der italienischen Polizei, die aber bestreitet, mit seinem Verschwinden irgendetwas zu tun zu haben. Es besteht also der plausible Verdacht, dass er von US-Agenten gefasst, zur US-Luftwaffenbasis Aviano gebracht und von dort nach Ägypten geflogen wurde. Armando Spataro, der stellvertretende Oberstaatsanwalt von Milano, der mit den Ermittlungen betraut ist, hütet sich derzeit noch, die Amerikaner zu beschuldigen. Aber er geht von einer Entführung aus und ist davon überzeugt, das sich Abu Omar heute in Ägypten befindet. Auf die Frage, ob es sich, falls US-Amerikaner mit der Sache zu tun hätten, um ein Verbrechen handeln würde, gibt er eine eindeutige Antwort: "Wenn das zuträfe, wäre dies ein gravierender Verstoß gegen italienisches Recht. Es wäre absolut illegal."

deutsch von Niels Kadritzke

© Le Monde diplomatique, Berlin

Le Monde diplomatique Nr. 7612 vom 11.3.2005, Seite 6-7, 818 Dokumentation, STEPHEN GREY

© Contrapress media GmbH Vervielfältigung nur mit Genehmigung des taz-Verlags

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December 15, 2005
House Defies Bush and Backs McCain on Detainee Torture
By ERIC SCHMITT
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/15/politics/15detain.html

WASHINGTON, Dec. 14 - In an unusual bipartisan rebuke to the Bush administration, the House on Wednesday overwhelmingly endorsed Senator John McCain`s measure to bar cruel and inhumane treatment of prisoners in American custody anywhere in the world.

Although the vote was nonbinding, it put the Republican-controlled House on record in support of Mr. McCain`s provision for the first time, at the very moment when the senator, a Republican, is at a crucial stage of tense negotiations with the White House, which strongly opposes his measure.

The vote also likely represents the lone opportunity that House members will have to express their sentiments on Mr. McCain`s legislation. The Senate approved the measure in October, 90 to 9, as part of a military spending bill. But until Wednesday, the House Republican leadership had sought to avoid a direct vote on the measure to avoid embarrassing the White House.

The vote was on a motion to instruct House negotiators, who had just been appointed to work out differences between the House and Senate spending bills, to accept the Senate position on the McCain amendment.

The House bill, providing $453 billion for military programs, has no provision like Mr. McCain`s, but if the negotiators follow these instructions to the letter, the final bill passed by Congress will.

The House vote was 308 to 122, with 107 Republicans lining up along with almost every Democrat behind Representative John P. Murtha, the Pennsylvania Democrat who sponsored Mr. McCain`s language and who has become anathema to the administration on any legislative measure related to Iraq since his call last month to withdraw American troops from Iraq in six months.

"Torture does not help us win the hearts and minds of the people it`s used against," Mr. Murtha said on the House floor. "Congress is obligated to speak out."

Unlike the tumultuous three-hour debate that Mr. Murtha`s Iraq-related measure provoked last month, this measure met with just 10 minutes of statements to a nearly empty House chamber.

Mr. Murtha, a former Marine colonel who is the senior Democrat on the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, said Mr. McCain`s legislation was essential to standardizing American interrogation methods and sending a clear signal to the world that the United States condemned the abusive treatment of detainees.

"If we allow torture in any form," Mr. Murtha said, "we abandon our honor."

Representative C. W. Bill Young of Florida, head of the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, was one of 121 Republicans who voted against Mr. McCain`s language. One Democrat, Jim Marshall of Georgia, voted against it; 200 Democrats and one independent supported it.

Mr. Young was quick to point out that he was in no way endorsing torture as an interrogation technique, but said he opposed the measure because it wrongly bestowed the full protections of the Constitution to terrorists and tied the hands of Congressional negotiators.

Another Republican who voted against the measure, Representative Todd Tiahrt of Kansas, said he opposed it because he said laws already barred torture and abusive treatment.

"It`s absolutely unnecessary," said Mr. Tiahrt, who is on the House Intelligence Committee.

It was unclear what effects the vote would have on the negotiations between Mr. McCain and President Bush`s national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, and on the Congressional negotiators for the two military bills now in conference committee. A spokeswoman for the Arizona senator, Eileen McMenamin, said Wednesday night that he had no comment on the vote.

"I don`t think it will have any effect on the negotiations," Mr. Young said.

Mr. Murtha said the vote bolstered his previous assertions that the military spending bill would include Mr. McCain`s provision after the conference committee completed its work.

"It`s going to be in there, period," Mr. Murtha said after the vote.

Earlier in the day, Senator Ted Stevens, the Alaska Republican who is the senior member of the Appropriations Committee, echoed Mr. Murtha`s prediction, telling reporters that Mr. McCain "wants it in there, and I think it will stay in there."

The negotiations over provision intensified on Wednesday. Early in the morning, Mr. McCain met in his office with Mr. Hadley. When asked whether the two had narrowed their differences, Mr. McCain told reporters: "We`re still talking. We`ll get this resolved one way or another. We have the votes."

Mr. McCain also attended the weekly Senate Republican policy lunch on Wednesday, but senators who attended the private gathering said that Mr. McCain did not address his colleagues and that the subject of his amendment did not come up.

After the lunch, however, Mr. McCain was mobbed by reporters seeking comment on his talks with Mr. Hadley. Mr. McCain was uncharacteristically tight lipped, saying he did not want to discuss details of the continuing discussions.

Two Senate Republican colleagues who voted for Mr. McCain`s measure in October said Wednesday it was important for Congress to back the language.

"We need to have clear guidance, in law, that makes it very clear that inhumane treatment of detainees in American captivity is absolutely unacceptable," Susan Collins of Maine said. "This problem is hurting us around the world. It`s contrary to our values, and we simply must have this as part of the final bill."

Senator John Thune of South Dakota said: "Because it has become such a high-profile issue here of late, not only around the country but around the world, I think it`s in our best interests to address it. A strong unequivocal statement that we don`t apply or tolerate torture in any form is probably right now a good thing to do."

* Copyright 2005The New York Times Company

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December 15, 2005
Editorial
Soldiers Versus Defense Contractors
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/15/opinion/15thu1.html

It`s what passes for crunch time at the Pentagon. Word has now gone out that $32 billion in savings must be found out of the $2.3 trillion the Defense Department is planning to spend in the next five years. After the Pentagon`s spending orgy over the past five years, there is plenty of scope for cutting, without weakening America`s defenses - but only if the cuts come out of the most costly and least needed Air Force and Navy weapons programs, not from the money required to replenish and re-equip the Army and Marine ground forces that have been worn down by Iraq.

Alleviating the dangerous strain on America`s overstretched, underrested and increasingly taxed land-based forces must be the Pentagon`s highest priority for the next five years. Even if it becomes possible to draw down some fraction of the troops now in Iraq and Afghanistan, the overall size of America`s land forces needs to be increased to reverse the declines in readiness and morale, help recruiting, and reduce the reliance on the Reserves for overseas combat.

America cannot be a global military power without a healthy Army. Without significant new investment to add and train more soldiers, the Army`s strength will continue to deteriorate.

Very few critics of the military`s spending priorities want the United States to relinquish its current dominance in the skies and on the seas. But in a world where no rival military powers are remotely capable of challenging America, that dominance can be preserved without loading every new plane and ship with every conceivable technological marvel, whether or not it is relevant to the military mission at hand.

Much of the astounding 41 percent increase in military spending over the past five years has gone toward hugely expensive air and sea combat systems - and this in an era when America`s toughest battles are being fought on land against foes that have no known air force or navy.

The Air Force and the Navy can play only secondary roles in wars like Iraq. Their spending plans are increasingly oriented toward the possibility of future military conflict with China. That is not totally absurd. China`s military planning is increasingly oriented toward the possibility of future conflict with the United States, like, for example, a clash over the Taiwan Strait. But war with China is a remote, unlikely and avoidable contingency. It should not dominate current military spending - especially if China is simply being used as an excuse to justify expensive equipment the Pentagon wants to buy. Given the huge lead the United States now holds in air and sea technology, the Navy and Air Force can be re-equipped with everything they really need at a more realistic and affordable pace.

The Air Force should step up the pace of its introduction of unpiloted drones, which can be used for surveillance and for attacks. They are much cheaper than fighter jets and do not risk pilots` lives. The Navy should rely more on larger numbers of cheaper and lighter naval craft instead of cold-war-style attack submarines and expensive behemoths like the new DD(X) destroyer. It should also shift more of its forces from active duty to reserve status, where they can still be trained and kept ready for future contingencies while freeing up dollars to spend on badly needed additional ground troops.

Once expensive planes, ships and other weapons systems find their way into the budget, they are very hard to stop, even when changes in the global military environment make them no longer smart defense investments. Whether they are really needed or not, they remain profit centers for military contractors and a source of well-paying jobs for the Congressional districts where they are built.

But in a world of finite resources, excessive spending on the wrong weapons comes at the expense of real military needs, like building up America`s ground forces. Surely $2.3 trillion over the next five years, allocated wisely, ought to be enough to provide for all of America`s military needs in all likely combat contingencies. It would be scandalous to spend that kind of money and still come up short in real wars like Iraq.

* Copyright 2005The New York Times Company

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Thoughts on the Middle East, History,and Religion
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Juan Cole is Professor of History at the University of Michigan

http://www.juancole.com/


Thursday, December 15, 2005

High Turnout Expected as Iraqis go to Polls

The guerrillas got off some mortars as voting began Thursday in Iraq, one striking the Green Zone in downtown Baghdad where the government offices are. A mortar was also fired in Mosul at a polling station but appears to have missed. A huge bomb was found and disarmed in Fallujah. On the Jan. 30 elections there were numerous attacks that left dozens wounded or dead, but they did not deter a big turnout.

From all accounts,the voter turnout is likely to be good, given that more Sunni Arabs are going to the polls this time than last. Still, a lot of polling stations could not open in Anbar Province, a severe problem for the legitimacy of the voting outcome. (Aboveboard elections of a sort that can be internationally certified require that security permit people throughout the country to vote if they want to.)

[urlThe LA Times probably reflects the thinking of a lot of Americans]http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-iraq15dec15,0,7559925.story?coll=la-news-comment-editorials[/url] in hoping that these elections are a milestone on the way to withdrawing US troops from Iraq. I cannot imagine why anyone thinks that. The Iraqi "government" is a failed state. Virtually no order it gives has any likelihood of being implemented. It has no army to speak of and cannot control the country. Its parliamentarians are attacked and sometimes killed with impunity. Its oil pipelines are routinely bombed, depriving it of desperately needed income. It faces a powerful guerrilla movement that is wholly uninterested in the results of elections and just wants to overthrow the new order. Elections are unlikely to change any of this.

The only way in which these elections may lead to a US withdrawal is that they will ensconce parliamentarians who want the US out on a short timetable. Virtually all the Sunnis who come in will push for that result (which is why the US Right is silly to be all agog about Fallujans voting), and so with the members of the Sadr Movement, now a key component of the Shiite religious United Iraqi Alliance. That is, these elections lead to a US withdrawal on terms unfavorable to the Bush administration. Nor is there much hope that a parliament that kicked the US out could turn around and restore order in the country.

[urlWilliam Rivers Pitt is good on the contradictory desires]http://peacejournalism.com/ReadArticle.asp?ArticleID=7479[/url] in the Iraqi public with regard to the future, as revealed by the recent ABC/Time poll.

ABC News is shocked, shocked to discover that the Pentagon is doing propaganda in Iraq via the Lincoln Group.

[urlThe Bush administration has finally turned reconstruction projects]http://news.moneycentral.msn.com/provider/providerarticle.asp?feed=FT&Date=20051215&ID=5354703[/url] in Iraq over to the State Department, taking them from the Department of Defense. Defense had had little experience in this area, and much of the money given it for this purpose has been wasted or, frankly, embezzled. Putting State in charge was something I called for in my April, 2004, testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. This MSNBC article quotes Republican strategist Vin Weber as saying that the change "a logical move and is part of a long term decision about eventually withdrawing from Iraq." I see. So when Bush was not planning to withdraw, he gave reconstruction to the Pentagon. It really was a reassertion of colonialism, wasn`t it?

Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports that Jalal Talabani says he won`t accept a second term as president if the office remains, as it is now, largely ceremonial.

Iyad Allawi, the ex-Baathist secularist, warned the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance (which controls 11 of Iraq`s 18 provincial governments) against vote tampering.

Massoud Barzani, the Kurdish leader, admits that the Kurds have all along been very uncomfortable with their parliamentary alliance with the Shiite UIA.

Many observers are hoping that in the new parliament, a coalition of Kurds, Sunni Arabs, and ex-Baathist secularists can outmaneuver the religious Shiites and gain 51% of the seats.

I keep pointing out that it is also possible for the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance to align with the Sunni Iraqi Islamic Party on many issues, producing a pan-Islamist coalition. We`ll see.

posted by Juan @ [url12/15/2005 06:45:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/12/high-turnout-expected-as-iraqis-go-to.html[/url] 0 comments

Helman on Rice and the New Truman Doctrine

Ambassador Gerald B. Helman writes:


[url" In an op-ed piece published in the December 11 Washington Post,]http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/09/AR2005120901711.html[/url] Secretary of State Rice provides an important statement of the Administration`s global strategic posture. She underscores its importance by comparing the international environment the Administration confronted when it took office to that faced by Truman/Acheson following World War 2 and the rise of the Soviet Union. In short, as Acheson felt that he was "present at the creation" of a new international system, Rice observes that "centuries of international practice and precedent have been overturned in the past 15 years" and thus she, as well, is at the point of a fundamental genesis. In effect, the Administration`s policies are intended to change the terms by which states conduct their relations.

While Rice does not describe the international system Truman/Marshall/Acheson/Dulles put in place, it is important to state their elements in order to better understaand the Administration`s. America`s post-World War 2 leadership faced a world that had been through almost seven years of massive warfare (some would take the starting date back to 1914) on a global scale, with civilian and military death, destruction and atrocity beyond imagination. The enemies of the victorious allies lay in ruins and occupied, Germany by four powers, Japan by the United States alone. Within months of the end of the war, the ambitions of the Soviet Union became increasingly manifest, first in political and conventional military terms, but soon in its strategic nuclear posture. The USSR rapidly developed into a power that, for the first time in history, had the capability to obliterate the US. Geographically, the area of contention was Europe but in a few short years it became global.

What the Truman generation created was an international system that combined economic development (the Marshall Plan), institution building (the United Nations, NATO) and the rules of conduct embodied in their charters, and the strategic posture of containment and deterrence backed by the real military forces of the US and its allies, and the US nuclear deterrent.

The Bush/Rice new world is one in which conflict among major powers is now unthinkable, which in turn allows the building of a lasting global stability that will amount to a balance of power "that favors freedom." Further, the 350 year-old international state system based on the sovereignty of individual actors no longer holds. There are some states, those weak and failing, that can no longer contain the threats emerging from their territories. These, rather than strong and competitive states, are the greatest threats to our security. Thus, the fundamental character of regimes matters more than the international distribution of power. Creating democracies, particularly in the Middle East (the source of radical Islamic terrorism), is not idealism, but the only realistic response to present challenges--"stability without democracy will prove to be false stability."

While not mentioned by Secretary Rice, it should be fair to conclude that to her new international system would be added at least two elements of the "Bush Doctrine" published in 2002, that the US retained the right to preemptive war (the basis for the invasion of Iraq) and would not allow any other power(s) to challenge the US in military strength.

The Bush Rice international system thus would consist of one in which the U.S. is accepted by all others as being the perminent dominent military actor. Whether for this or additional reasons, conflict among major states would be unlikely; these states (which would include Russia and China) would be increasingly available, under US leadership, to establish durable global stability that would amount to a balance of power favoring freedom. Those states that are weak or failing, principally in the Middle East, would forfeit the traditional protections of sovereignty so that outside powers can guide them to democracy. By thus abolishing their "freedom deficit," the swamps of terrorism would be drained and the world`s security enhance. Within this world, the US would be able to operate largely unconstrained, employing shifting, ad hoc coalitions, monitoring and correcting as necessary national political systems and as a result preserve US security.

The Bush/Rice international system certainly is subject to criticism:

--It is unrealistic to consider Russia and China as willing actors today in establishing a balance of power "favoring freedom."

--It is even less credible that China and Russia (and others) will be willing to concede to the US a permanent role as military and political hegemon. To the extent that the US considers itself relieved of institutional and treaty constraints, others will insist on the same freedoms. In such circumstances, bloody conflict could be as likely as cooperation.

--Weak and failed states exist, largely in Africa and recently in Afghanistan. They typically are the byproducts of failed colonialism. They do represent a danger to others because they cannot exercise the responsibilities of a sovereign to control its own territory and meet its international obligations. They are poor, sources of disease and crime and too often generate massive refugee flows. Their problems can be addressed politically, socially and economically by the an international community that organizes itself to do so through existing institutions. But Iraq was not a failed state and neither are most of the others in the Middle East. Iraq was bad and so is Iran and Syria. It is unlikely that the US will get early support for the invasion of the latter two.

--It also is seriously open to question whether democracy, in the Middle East or elsewhere, is best advanced by other states asserting the right to do so because of the diminished sovereignty of the beneficiary. The existing NGO`s that historically have promoted democracy, such as the German political foundations and those groups associated with the US National Endowment for Democracy, have over the past decades established admirable records of achievment, initially in Eastern Europe (pre-liberation) and elsewhere around the world. It`s a slow process and unlikely to be easily advanced through state intervention.

--Thus while more representative institutions may in time deny terrorism of a breeding ground, its growth will be slow. In the meantime, much more will be needed in terms of police work, public information, covert action, acquisition of intelligence and military action. This will require strong, continuing international cooperation. Insisting on the Bush/Rice international order as the framework could well get in the way.

And, finally, Secretary Rice confides that she has hung Dean Acheson`s portrait in her office, the same office that he occupied as Secretary of State. Wrong. Acheson`s office (much more impressive than Rice`s) was in what is now called "Old State." "New State," now called the Truman Building, was not opened until about 1960. Acheson`s office was also occupied by George Marshall and John Foster Dulles. All would certainly have been astonished at this Administration`s policies and pretensions. I can only imagine the language Acheson would have used.

That aside, the Bush/Rice world vision seems intended seriously. They owe the Congress, public and America`s allies a clearer exposition of it so that it might be properly and vigorously debated. "


Helman "was United States Ambassador to the European Office of the United Nations from 1979 through 1981."

posted by Juan @ [url12/15/2005 06:17:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/12/helman-on-rice-and-new-truman-doctrine.html[/url] 1 comments

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Silence descends on Baghdad as Iraqis prepare to choose a new government
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article33323…

By Patrick Cockburn in Baghdad
Published: 15 December 2005
Silence descends on Baghdad as Iraqis prepare to choose a new government Voting has begun to elect a sovereign Iraqi government

Baghdad looked like a ghost town after all traffic had been banned to prevent suicide attacks in today`s election for a parliament that will produce the first sovereign Iraqi government elected by all communities since the invasion.

Few people appeared on the streets yesterday aside from police and soldiers. The roar of generators, essential because of the electricity shortage, was the only sound reverberating through the empty streets. Sunni Arabs, the core of the armed resistance, are expected to vote in a reverse of their boycott of the parliamentary election on 30 January. Some insurgent groups have called for a big Sunni turnout and even those demanding a boycott are not threatening to attack voters.

Most of the votes for the 275-seat parliament are expected to go to parties representing a single ethnic or religious group. Once again, the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), the coalition of Shia religious parties, is likely to win the largest number of seats. If it does well it is likely to renew its alliance with the two main Kurdish parties fighting the election on a single ticket.

"The Kurds consider their combination with the Shia religious parties as a strategic alliance which they should not abandon even though they do not much like them," said a Kurdish commentator. But the Kurds would like to act as power brokers and dilute their reliance on Shia clerical parties by bringing in Sunni Arabs and secular leaders such as Iyad Allawi, the former prime minister, when a government is formed.

The present election differs in significant ways from the election in January. The Sunni are voting. They will probably get around 55 seats compared to 17 last time when they boycotted.

But they are only 20 per cent of the population and, while their representation may increase, they will still be a minority. They know that the real reason Washington and London care about their views is that they have killed or wounded 17,000 US soldiers. Armed resistance will remain their most effective political card. They will not give it up except in return for a US agreement to withdraw.

President George Bush defended the decision to invade Iraq yesterday, even though he admitted that "it is true much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong". He was speaking in the last of a series of public events before the election.

"My decision to remove Saddam Hussein was the right decision. Saddam was a threat and the American people and the world is better off because he is no longer in power," he said.

The terms of a US withdrawal are likely to be a central issue in Iraqi politics over the next two years. The US military have contained but are unable to crush the Sunni insurrection. President Bush says that US forces will stay until the Iraqi army and police have been trained and equipped to overcome the insurgents.

This is unlikely to happen, however, as the Iraqi army is divided between Sunni, Shia and Kurds. The difficulty is not lack of numbers or military expertise, but of loyalty to the state. If Sunni units are used against Sunni insurgents they may mutiny. If Shia or Kurdish units are deployed unrestrained by the US Army they may provoke a wider uprising. If the insurgency cannot be quelled by force then a ceasefire must come by agreement. The Sunni price for such an agreement to end the armed resistance would be US withdrawal.

The degree of success of Mr Allawi will also be important for the future of Iraq. His campaign slogans emphasise that he is a secular nationalist, a strongman able to provide the security Iraqis yearn for. Many Baghdadis interviewed on the street this week find this appealing. "I`ll vote for Allawi," said Laith Ismail Ibrahim, a Sunni. "He is the man of security and a former Baathist."

A problem for Mr Allawi is that the secular and nationalist vote may not be big enough. The US, Britain and the Gulf states would like him to do well but political organisation in Iraq outside Kurdistan is very dependant on clergy and local mosques. Ahmed Chalabi, the other secular - though Shia - candidate, may also struggle to mobilise votes.

The United Iraqi Alliance, the Shia coalition, has changed since the last election with the adhesion of the cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and his powerful blend of nationalism and religion. The backbone of the alliance remains the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the Dawa party. Many are disillusioned with these parties in government but they still have mass support. The role of Mr Sadr, scion of a powerful clerical family, will be a wild card when the government is formed.
Silence descends on Baghdad as Iraqis prepare to choose a new government Voting has begun to elect a sovereign Iraqi government

Baghdad looked like a ghost town after all traffic had been banned to prevent suicide attacks in today`s election for a parliament that will produce the first sovereign Iraqi government elected by all communities since the invasion.

Few people appeared on the streets yesterday aside from police and soldiers. The roar of generators, essential because of the electricity shortage, was the only sound reverberating through the empty streets. Sunni Arabs, the core of the armed resistance, are expected to vote in a reverse of their boycott of the parliamentary election on 30 January. Some insurgent groups have called for a big Sunni turnout and even those demanding a boycott are not threatening to attack voters.

Most of the votes for the 275-seat parliament are expected to go to parties representing a single ethnic or religious group. Once again, the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), the coalition of Shia religious parties, is likely to win the largest number of seats. If it does well it is likely to renew its alliance with the two main Kurdish parties fighting the election on a single ticket.

"The Kurds consider their combination with the Shia religious parties as a strategic alliance which they should not abandon even though they do not much like them," said a Kurdish commentator. But the Kurds would like to act as power brokers and dilute their reliance on Shia clerical parties by bringing in Sunni Arabs and secular leaders such as Iyad Allawi, the former prime minister, when a government is formed.

The present election differs in significant ways from the election in January. The Sunni are voting. They will probably get around 55 seats compared to 17 last time when they boycotted.

But they are only 20 per cent of the population and, while their representation may increase, they will still be a minority. They know that the real reason Washington and London care about their views is that they have killed or wounded 17,000 US soldiers. Armed resistance will remain their most effective political card. They will not give it up except in return for a US agreement to withdraw.

President George Bush defended the decision to invade Iraq yesterday, even though he admitted that "it is true much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong". He was speaking in the last of a series of public events before the election.

"My decision to remove Saddam Hussein was the right decision. Saddam was a threat and the American people and the world is better off because he is no longer in power," he said.

The terms of a US withdrawal are likely to be a central issue in Iraqi politics over the next two years. The US military have contained but are unable to crush the Sunni insurrection. President Bush says that US forces will stay until the Iraqi army and police have been trained and equipped to overcome the insurgents.

This is unlikely to happen, however, as the Iraqi army is divided between Sunni, Shia and Kurds. The difficulty is not lack of numbers or military expertise, but of loyalty to the state. If Sunni units are used against Sunni insurgents they may mutiny. If Shia or Kurdish units are deployed unrestrained by the US Army they may provoke a wider uprising. If the insurgency cannot be quelled by force then a ceasefire must come by agreement. The Sunni price for such an agreement to end the armed resistance would be US withdrawal.

The degree of success of Mr Allawi will also be important for the future of Iraq. His campaign slogans emphasise that he is a secular nationalist, a strongman able to provide the security Iraqis yearn for. Many Baghdadis interviewed on the street this week find this appealing. "I`ll vote for Allawi," said Laith Ismail Ibrahim, a Sunni. "He is the man of security and a former Baathist."

A problem for Mr Allawi is that the secular and nationalist vote may not be big enough. The US, Britain and the Gulf states would like him to do well but political organisation in Iraq outside Kurdistan is very dependant on clergy and local mosques. Ahmed Chalabi, the other secular - though Shia - candidate, may also struggle to mobilise votes.

The United Iraqi Alliance, the Shia coalition, has changed since the last election with the adhesion of the cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and his powerful blend of nationalism and religion. The backbone of the alliance remains the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the Dawa party. Many are disillusioned with these parties in government but they still have mass support. The role of Mr Sadr, scion of a powerful clerical family, will be a wild card when the government is formed.

© 2005 Independent News and Media Limited

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Soweit etwas zu der angeblichen Linkslastigkeit der WaPost.
Die WaPost ist ein knochenhartes konservatives Blatt mit einigen Einsprengseln von Wahrheitsliebe.
Hier noch der Link zur Froomkin Kolumne: [url]http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A599-2004Jan8.html[/url]
December 13, 2005

Fuming Over Froomkin?
http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2005/12/13/publiceye/printable1…

It’s hard to remember the last time an ombudsman created this much of a flap all on their own, but The Washington Post’s Deborah Howell seems to have touched off a real firestorm within her own news organization with last Sunday’s column. In the midst of explaining that The Washington Post’s print edition and online offerings are actually operated by separate companies and describing ways in which the two relate, Howell dropped this nugget:

Political reporters at The Post don`t like WPNI [Washington Post-Newsweek Interactive, aka the Web site] columnist Dan Froomkin`s "White House Briefing," which is highly opinionated and liberal. They`re afraid that some readers think that Froomkin is a Post White House reporter.

John Harris, national political editor at the print Post, said, "The title invites confusion. It dilutes our only asset -- our credibility" as objective news reporters. Froomkin writes the kind of column "that we would never allow a White House reporter to write. I wish it could be done with a different title and display."

That led Froomkin to respond:

Regular readers know that my column is first and foremost a daily anthology of works by other journalists and bloggers. When my voice emerges, it is often to provide context for those writings and spot emerging themes. Sometimes I do some original reporting, and sometimes I share my insights. The omnipresent links make it easy for readers to assess my credibility.

There is undeniably a certain irreverence to the column. But I do not advocate policy, liberal or otherwise. My agenda, such as it is, is accountability and transparency. I believe that the president of the United States, no matter what his party, should be subject to the most intense journalistic scrutiny imaginable. And he should be able to easily withstand that scrutiny. I was prepared to take the same approach with John Kerry, had he become president.

And more Froomkin

The journalists who cover Washington and the White House should be holding the president accountable. When they do, I bear witness to their work. And the answer is for more of them to do so -- not for me to be dismissed as highly opinionated and liberal because I do.

Now, that has led to a mini-explosion of Froomkin-fretting. Washington Post White House reporter Peter Baker addressed the matter in a Post chat today:

Let`s make sure there`s no confusion. There shouldn`t be any debate about that. We don`t put Richard Cohen or George Will on the front page, we put them on the op-ed page where everyone understands what they write is based on their own opinions. The web site is less clear simply because we don`t have the traditional design of the newspaper with a front page and an op-ed page.

Editor & Publisher reports today that Froomkin’s “White House Briefing” column will not be re-named:

After two days of controversy, several newsroom staffers at The Washington Post, including Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr., said today they do not object to online columnist Dan Froomkin`s "White House Briefing," which has sparked a debate over its title and its alleged liberal content. But they contend that it should be clearly labeled an opinion column and urged Web editors to change the name.

But …

Washingtonpost.com Executive Editor Jim Brady said he does not plan to change the name, claiming it has not caused the misinterpretations that some believe it has. "The column has been on the site for two years and that is not something we have heard," Brady said about concerns. "The column is extremely popular and it is not going anywhere."

Meanwhile, BuzzMachine’s Jeff Jarvis sees the episode as one more example of the triumph of the Web over newspapers. He points to Howell’s contention that the online Post has a bigger overall audience than the print edition and concludes:

The audience has clearly shown its support for the online Post over the printed one; the only reason online is not as successful is because advertisers are even more behind than newspaper editors. And the audience has clearly shown Froomkin their support. Perhaps the paper should be doing more of what he does. Did you ever think of that, o, vaunted newspaper editors?

Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall thinks it’s much ado about nothing:

With all that has happened to journalism and this country in the last three years -- or perhaps just the Post in the last few weeks -- is this really all the Post’s ombudsman can think to concern herself with?

While it’s slipped a tad during the day, “Froomkin” was still the 10th most searched topic on Technorati and there is no shortage of opinion on the flap. Whether Howell had more important topics to address or not, she certainly found one that plenty of folks want to talk about. Isn’t that part of her job?


Copyright (c) MMV, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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Meet the New Boss
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/121405A.shtml

By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Wednesday 14 December 2005

There is an election taking place in Iraq on Friday. According to those who still maintain some kind of hope that the wretched situation over there can be salvaged at the ballot box, this election will be a turning point. "If the result is seen to be fair and the government elected for the next four years is accepted as broadly representative of the interests of most Iraqis," writes Liz Sly in the Chicago Tribune, "there is a real chance that the insurgent violence and the sectarian rivalries that are pushing the country close to civil war will abate."

This vote, the third since the occupation began, is meant to elect a 275-person parliamentary body called the Council of Representatives. All 18 Iraqi provinces will be participating in the election. The Sunnis, who mostly boycotted the elections last January, are expected to participate in far larger numbers this time around. Leading Sunni clerics have issued a fatwa which decrees that Sunni participation in this election is a religious duty.

This election will be no panacea, despite what the hopefuls think. Every electoral model has the Shia and Kurds assuming dominant positions in the Iraqi government. Even if every Sunni in Iraq goes to the polls, they make up only 20% of the overall population. Electoral formulas meant to enhance Sunni power within an Iraqi government will still leave them deeply in the minority.

A collection of leading Sunni parties called the Iraqi Consensus Front has been pushing a straightforward slogan: "Our goal is to get the invaders out and rebuild the country." If their minority status prevents the Sunnis from achieving their first goal according to their wishes, they may well return to violence to achieve their second goal. A leaflet was broadly distributed in the Azamiyah neighborhood of Baghdad last Monday. Sunni Arabs may have a chance to advance their cause politically in the upcoming elections, read the leaflet, but "the fighting will continue with the infidels and their followers."

The campaigning itself, which ended on Tuesday, has been a half-baked farce all too reminiscent of America`s watered-down and money-driven electioneering. Thanks to the assassinations and attempted assassinations of several candidates, and thanks to the ever-present threat of violence, almost all campaigning has been done via television. Because television time is prohibitively expensive, only the campaigns with significant financial resources will ever become known to the Iraqi people. Hundreds of viable candidates, a number of them secular, don`t stand a chance next to well-funded religious campaigns whose cash comes from unknown and potentially dangerous outside sources.

Juan Cole, professor of Modern Middle East and South Asian History at the University of Michigan, does not see how this election can possibly be seen as credible. "As with the Jan. 30 elections," writes Cole, "the Dec. 15 elections are not being held in accordance with international standards of fairness, and cannot be. Proper elections would require that security be provided to voters and candidates. But there is no security. In many parts of the center-north, voters will have no guarantee of coming home alive. The only way the vote will happen at all is that the US military has forbidden all vehicular traffic, so everyone has to walk for the next few days. This tactic prevents car bombings from disrupting the elections, but it is a desperate measure and not a sign of an election that could be certified as free and fair."

In one sense, however, one can appreciate how difficult it must be to mount an effective political campaign in Iraq. Beyond the real possibility of getting shot, a candidate must face a divided populace that does not, according to a recent ABC News/Time poll taken in Iraq, seem to know what it wants. Make sense of these numbers: 90% believe Iraq needs democracy, but 91% believe Iraq needs a single strong leader; 48% want the mullahs to rule, but only 13% want an Islamic state; 48% think religious leaders should rule, while 49% think military leaders should rule.

The most gifted and adept American politician would struggle to develop a coherent message in this situation. Half the populace wants religious leadership, half the populace wants military leadership, and simultaneously the vast majority believes either of these is amenable to democracy. The only issue the Iraqi people have a clear consensus on is the occupation itself; by large majorities, they want the Americans out.

Imagine, for a moment, that the Iraqi elections on Friday come off without a hitch. No one is killed, maimed or intimidated into voting for a particular candidate by having a gun barrel put to his head. There are no hanging chads, no mayhem or madness. What will the Iraqi and American people get out of the incredible blood and treasure we have poured into this conflict?

We will get an Iraqi government dominated by known and notorious terrorists. We will get an Iraqi government dominated by Iran.

The Shia will walk away from Friday with the lion`s share of control over the Iraqi government. The two most powerful Shia political parties, the ones that will come out of this with the big wins, are the Dawa Party and the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which is known by the initials SCIRI. Both were founded and funded by Iran in the 1980s. Both have a history of spectacular violence against the United States and other nations. "These guys are murderers," says former CIA agent Bob Baer, who dealt with Dawa during the 1980s. "They were the core element that blew up our embassy in Beirut in 1983."

Paul Mulshine, writing last week for the New Jersey Star-Ledger, encapsulates this amazing turn of events. "What would you call someone who wants to hand over control of Iraq to a group of terrorists that first made its reputation by blowing up a couple of American embassies?" wrote Mulshine. "I`d call him President Bush. The group is called the Dawa party. In the early 1980s, Dawa terrorists bombed our embassies in Kuwait and in Lebanon. They were universally recognized as vicious America-hating, Iranian-supported terrorists. Now they`re part of the coalition that is expected to win control of the new Iraqi parliament in Thursday`s elections."

"The other coalition partners aren`t much better," continued Mulshine. "The sanest group on the Shi`a side is the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. A 1984 Washington Post story portrayed the group, known by its initials SCIRI, as `a kind of parent organization for four operational terrorist groups.` SCIRI was founded in Iran a couple of years earlier by the Ayatollah Khomeini with the goal of taking control of Iraq. Now, they`re about to do so, courtesy of George W. Bush."

A walk through history serves to remind those afflicted with short attention spans of who exactly is about to take control of Iraq.

A story from US News and World Report dated December 26, 1983, titled "The New Face of Mideast Terrorism" describes the bombing of the American embassy in Kuwait: "The terrorist who detonated the truckload of explosives at the US Embassy in Kuwait was identified as a 25-year-old Iraqi belonging to an outlawed Moslem unit, the Iranian Dawa Group."

A story from the Associated Press dated February 11, 1984, titled "Trial of Bomb Blast Defendants Opens" describes the trial of 21 people charged with bombing American and French embassies: "Of the other defendants, 17 are Iraqis; two, Lebanese, three, Kuwaitis and two are stateless. Most of them said they belonged to Al-Dawa (Islamic Call) Party, an Iraqi movement of Shiite Moslem fanatics who are pro-Iranian."

A story from the Associated Press dated December 27, 1986, titled "Five Groups Claim Responsibility, Iraq Accuses Iran" describes the attempted hijacking of an Iraqi jetliner that resulted in the deaths of over 60 people: "The hijackers acted in cooperation with the Dawa party of pro-Iranian Iraqi Shiites."

Etc.

A sharp indictment of SCIRI and its ties to Iran and terrorism can be found, of all places, within the pages of the report put forth by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. This commission, put together to investigate the events of and leading up to September 11, heard expert testimony from Mark Gasiorowski, professor of Political Science and Director of International Studies at Louisiana State University.

In his testimony, Gasiorowski stated, "From the early 1980s until about 1996, Iran was directly involved in a wide variety of terrorist activities. It provided extensive support to Islamist terrorist groups such as Hezbollah (in Lebanon), Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), the Afghan Northern Alliance and its precursors." Gasiorowski goes on to state that Iran continues to support several terrorist groups, and includes SCIRI among them. "They are most strongly committed to Hezbollah and SCIRI," said Gasiorowski, "with which they have worked closely for over 20 years."

Excellent. It seems the best path to electoral victory in Iraq, besides kissing babies and avoiding assassins, involves a long history of terrorism and extreme violence against the United States. Former CIA agent Bob Baer stated in Mulshine`s article, "So now we have a Shia terrorist state. Was this worth $6 billion a month?"

Almost certainly, we will hear apologists for both the Bush administration and the invasion downplay the incredible terrorist histories of the groups about to take over the Iraqi government. "Sure they were terrorists," we will hear, "but they`re OK now." In other words, they are terrorists, but they are our terrorists.

Saddam Hussein was our terrorist in Iraq for years, so long as he directed his terrorism primarily at Iran. Osama bin Laden was our terrorist in Afghanistan for years, so long as he directed his terrorism at the Soviet Union. Anyone seeing a pattern developing here?

Just how interested is Iran in Friday`s elections? The New York Times reported on Wednesday that, "Less than two days before nationwide elections, the Iraqi border police seized a tanker on Tuesday that had just crossed from Iran filled with thousands of forged ballots, an official at the Interior Ministry said. The Iranian truck driver told the police under interrogation that at least three other trucks filled with ballots had crossed from Iran at different spots along the border." American democracy at its finest, it seems.

It is amazing to consider that Americans, who have almost completely lost faith in the vote as an effective means of political participation at home, are somehow expected to believe that this vote will solve Iraq`s incredible problems. One wonders how long it will be before the Vanishing Voter Project opens an office in Baghdad. In Iraq, of course, vanishing voters carry an entirely different meaning.

Don`t get your hopes up come Friday. The worst possible outcome will involve horrific bloodshed and unrest. The best possible outcome will place two notoriously deadly terrorist organizations in charge of Iraq. Was this trip really necessary?

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Wer nicht genug kriegt von den Cartoons, hier gibt`s mehrhttp://cagle.msnbc.com/politicalcartoons/

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Military Fatalities US, UK, Other:

Regelmäßige Updates von Meldungen aus dem Irak:
http://icasualties.org/oif/

Iraker:
http://www.icasualties.org/oif/IraqiDeaths.aspx


Da bei ´Today im Irak´ die Postings immer länger werden, hier den Link für alle Interessierte: http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Bis jetzt ist es relativ ruhig bei der Wahl im Irak, soweit man es überblicken kann nach den Meldungen.

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WASHINGTON (IWR News Satire) - In his fourth pep rally for the Iraq War, President Bush admitted making mistakes about his initial reasons for going to war, but pointed out that two Iraq wrongs make a right.

"Sure, I was wrong about WMD and the Iraq-9/11 connection, but everybody knows that two wrongs make a right. That’s how I manage to never really make any mistakes.

If for example I`m wrong about Social Security being privatized or something, I just need to be wrong one more time about that issue before I`m right again! I learned that a long time ago from Rush Limbaugh.

I know some of you eggheads out there will say this is just some kind of logical fallacy or whatnot, but without these so-called fallacies, unemployment would skyrocket because all the fundies, right wing talk show hosts, politicians, stock brokers and marketing executives would be out of a job!

So that is why we have to stay the course in Vietnam. Oops, I mean Iraq," said Mr. Bush to hall full cheering Republican Zombies.
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The Independent
A fearfully light coffin is carried to a Beirut grave. Who will be next?
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article333235.ece

Thursday, 15th December 2005, by Robert Fisk



How well the Lebanese do funerals. "Who’s next?" one of the posters asked beside the cortege of Jibran Tueni, journalist, editor, opposition MP, man-about-town, another young life lost to Lebanon; and, of course, we were all asking the same question.

The military band with its pompous trumpets, the sweating police with their poppy-red berets, the bossy soldiers who hopelessly tried to console the crowds, all were used to this routine. Was it so long ago that I had stood in this same Place de l’Etoile for the body of George Hawi, the old, murdered ex-Communist leader, to be anointed in the same Greek Orthodox church?

And yet when Tueni’s coffin arrived - was it possible to find anything of him to put inside after Monday’s devastating car bomb? - the band played the Last Post and the Lebanese national anthem with painful remorse and the poppy-red policemen snapped to attention and the soldiers too, and the red roses and yellow flowers thumped onto the lid of the coffin. Yes, the Lebanese know how to do funerals.

"Such a beautiful day," a young Lebanese woman said. "Always we have beautiful days for funerals - to remind us of the youthfulness of those we are burying. Just when they reach their years of achievement, they are cut down." Indeed they are. Ghassan Tueni, the great father and owner of An-Nahar - the newspaper his son edited - was fêted by the crowds who clapped as if this was a birthday rather than a deathday. And there was Walid Jumblatt, pleading with his supporters not to shout their hatred of President Bashar Assad of Syria. "Out with Bashar - he’s a shit," they chanted. For 10 minutes, Jumblatt lectured them. They must stop these words. They must remember whom they were burying. To little avail.

Do the Lebanese realise what paths they are now walking? Fouad Siniora emerged from the parliament building opposite the church of Jibran Tueni’s funeral. Siniora is Lebanon’s smart young prime minister - and brave young prime minister in these dark days - and he threw his arms into the air like a prize-fighter. How the crowd roared their approval. How they applauded when that dreadfully light coffin moved past them. Like so many Arabs across the Middle East, they had lost their fear.

It is a wondrous thing to see, but also a frightening thing. For who will suffer next? Who’s next? Walid? Fouad? Outside the parliament, Hizbollah’s MPs appeared and were duly booed. Because they still support Syria? Or because they declined to help Walid Jumblatt when he pleaded for their leader’s protection from Syria on a television phone-in at the weekend?

And there are other, disturbing questions. Repeatedly, the US ambassador to Beirut has warned Syria it must not create violence in Lebanon. But it seems to have no effect. And it was America, let us remember, which preposterously told the courageous Fouad Siniora - before he was prime minister - that he was banned from the US for having made a trivial contribution to a Hizbollah charity four years ago. So the Prime Minister - trained in the US as an economist, no more true-blue supporter of American values can you find - still cannot apparently fly to New York. But then again, these days any bolt-hole will do.

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Martin van Creveld lehrt in Amsterdam und Jerusalem und ist wohl der anerkannteste Miltärhistoriker.
Siehe auch weitere Artikel im Thread. Dann auch Interview von 03 http://www.swg-hamburg.de/Armee_im_Kreuzfeuer/Interview__Mar…

Forward Forum
Costly Withdrawal Is the Price To Be Paid for a Foolish War
http://www.forward.com/articles/6936

By Martin van Creveld
November 25, 2005

The number of American casualties in Iraq is now well more than 2,000, and there is no end in sight. Some two-thirds of Americans, according to the polls, believe the war to have been a mistake. And congressional elections are just around the corner.

What had to come, has come. The question is no longer if American forces will be withdrawn, but how soon — and at what cost. In this respect, as in so many others, the obvious parallel to Iraq is Vietnam.

Confronted by a demoralized army on the battlefield and by growing opposition at home, in 1969 the Nixon administration started withdrawing most of its troops in order to facilitate what it called the "Vietnamization" of the country. The rest of America`s forces were pulled out after Secretary of State Henry Kissinger negotiated a "peace settlement" with Hanoi. As the troops withdrew, they left most of their equipment to the Army of the Republic of South Vietnam — which just two years later, after the fall of Saigon, lost all of it to the communists.

Clearly this is not a pleasant model to follow, but no other alternative appears in sight.

Whereas North Vietnam at least had a government with which it was possible to arrange a cease-fire, in Iraq the opponent consists of shadowy groups of terrorists with no central organization or command authority. And whereas in the early 1970s equipment was still relatively plentiful, today`s armed forces are the products of a technology-driven revolution in military affairs. Whether that revolution has contributed to anything besides America`s national debt is open to debate. What is beyond question, though, is that the new weapons are so few and so expensive that even the world`s largest and richest power can afford only to field a relative handful of them.

Therefore, simply abandoning equipment or handing it over to the Iraqis, as was done in Vietnam, is simply not an option. And even if it were, the new Iraqi army is by all accounts much weaker, less skilled, less cohesive and less loyal to its government than even the South Vietnamese army was. For all intents and purposes, Washington might just as well hand over its weapons directly to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Clearly, then, the thing to do is to forget about face-saving and conduct a classic withdrawal.

Handing over their bases or demolishing them if necessary, American forces will have to fall back on Baghdad. From Baghdad they will have to make their way to the southern port city of Basra, and from there back to Kuwait, where the whole misguided adventure began. When Prime Minister Ehud Barak pulled Israel out of Lebanon in 2000, the military was able to carry out the operation in a single night without incurring any casualties. That, however, is not how things will happen in Iraq.

Not only are American forces perhaps 30 times larger, but so is the country they have to traverse. A withdrawal probably will require several months and incur a sizable number of casualties. As the pullout proceeds, Iraq almost certainly will sink into an all-out civil war from which it will take the country a long time to emerge — if, indeed, it can do so at all. All this is inevitable and will take place whether George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice like it or not.

Having been thoroughly devastated by two wars with the United States and a decade of economic sanctions, decades will pass before Iraq can endanger its neighbors again. Yet a complete American withdrawal is not an option; the region, with its vast oil reserves, is simply too important for that. A continued military presence, made up of air, sea and a moderate number of ground forces, will be needed.

First and foremost, such a presence will be needed to counter Iran, which for two decades now has seen the United States as "the Great Satan." Tehran is certain to emerge as the biggest winner from the war — a winner that in the not too distant future is likely to add nuclear warheads to the missiles it already has. In the past, Tehran has often threatened the Gulf States. Now that Iraq is gone, it is hard to see how anybody except the United States can keep the Gulf States, and their oil, out of the mullahs` clutches.

A continued American military presence will be needed also, because a divided, chaotic, government-less Iraq is very likely to become a hornets` nest. From it, a hundred mini-Zarqawis will spread all over the Middle East, conducting acts of sabotage and seeking to overthrow governments in Allah`s name.

The Gulf States apart, the most vulnerable country is Jordan, as evidenced by the recent attacks in Amman. However, Turkey, Egypt and, to a lesser extent, Israel are also likely to feel the impact. Some of these countries, Jordan in particular, are going to require American assistance.

Maintaining an American security presence in the region, not to mention withdrawing forces from Iraq, will involve many complicated problems, military as well as political. Such an endeavor, one would hope, will be handled by a team different from — and more competent than — the one presently in charge of the White House and Pentagon.

For misleading the American people, and launching the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 B.C sent his legions into Germany and lost them, Bush deserves to be impeached and, once he has been removed from office, put on trial along with the rest of the president`s men. If convicted, they`ll have plenty of time to mull over their sins.

Martin van Creveld, a professor of military history at the Hebrew University, is author of "Transformation of War" (Free Press, 1991). He is the only non-American author on the U.S. Army`s required reading list for officers.


Copyright 2005 © The Forward

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December 16, 2005
President Backs McCain Measure on Inmate Abuse
By ERIC SCHMITT
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/politics/16detain.html?hp&…

WASHINGTON, Dec. 15 - Under intense bipartisan Congressional pressure, President Bush reversed course on Thursday and reluctantly backed Senator John McCain`s call for a law banning cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of prisoners in American custody.

A day after the House overwhelmingly endorsed Mr. McCain`s measure, the White House took a deal that the senator had been offering for weeks as way to end the legislative impasse, essentially giving intelligence operatives the same legal defense afforded military interrogators who are accused of violating the regulations.

For Mr. Bush, it was a stinging defeat, considering that his party controls both houses of Congress and both chambers had defied his threatened veto to support Mr. McCain`s measure resoundingly. It was a particularly significant setback for Vice President Dick Cheney, who since July has led the administration`s fight to defeat the amendment or at least exempt the Central Intelligence Agency from its provisions.

Mr. McCain`s measure would establish the Army Field Manual as the uniform standard for the interrogation of prisoners and ban the kind of abusive treatment of prisoners that was revealed in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq.

"We`ve sent a message to the world that the United States is not like the terrorists," Mr. McCain, an Arizona Republican, said as he sat next to Mr. Bush in the Oval Office. "What we are is a nation that upholds values and standards of behavior and treatment of all people no matter how evil or bad they are."

Mr. Bush sought to make the best of an awkward political situation by inviting Mr. McCain, his longtime political rival and the nation`s most famous former prisoner of war, to the White House to thank him for a measure that the president had opposed for months as Congressional meddling.

On Thursday Mr. Bush said it was important legislation "to achieve a common objective: that is to make it clear to the world that this government does not torture."

Soon after Mr. McCain left the White House, Mr. Bush`s national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, who has negotiated with the senator for weeks, said that as a result of the negotiations the law would apply "equally to men and women in uniform and for civilians who are involved in dealing with detainees and interrogations."

The agreement will also extend to intelligence officers a protection now afforded to military personnel, who if accused of violating interrogation rules can defend themselves if a "reasonable" person could have concluded they were following a lawful order. But Mr. Hadley conceded that the administration was unable to get a grant of immunity for C.I.A. interrogators, which he said "was a legitimate thing to consider in this context."

The effect of the deal, Mr. Hadley said, would be to cement in law what he insisted had been administration policy: that the United States would "not use cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment at home or abroad."

The immediate effect of the measure, if passed, is hard to predict. Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, who was at the heart of last year`s uproar over whether the administration had allowed torture in the fight against terror, said on CNN that Mr. McCain`s amendment "provides additional clarification, in terms of what are the limits of interrogating dangerous terrorists."

"Obviously, we`ll study the law carefully," Mr. Gonzales said. "And to the extent that we have to conform our conduct in any way, we will do so. People need to understand what the limits are. And if people don`t meet those limits, they`re going to be investigated and they`re going to be held accountable."

The White House announcement was not the end of what has become a long-running drama on Capitol Hill.

Less than an hour after Mr. McCain and Senator John W. Warner, a Virginia Republican who heads the Armed Services Committee, stood with the president, the Republican chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Representative Duncan Hunter of California, announced he would block the deal as part of a military budget bill unless the White House provided a letter containing specific assurances that the measure would not diminish intelligence-gathering capabilities.

Asked if the intelligence authorities had told him that Mr. McCain`s measure would harm their ability to do their work, he said: "The answer to that is yes."

On the other side of the Capitol, Mr. Hunter`s counterpart, Mr. Warner, was scrambling to patch the rift by working with the White House to release the letter Mr. Hunter had requested. By Thursday evening, Mr. Hunter was reassured in writing by John D. Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, that American intelligence-gathering operations would not suffer under Mr. McCain`s measure, and he consented to the deal, said Josh Holly, a spokesman for the House Armed Services Committee.

Mr. Warner said he was optimistic that his bill would pass. But just in case, he was exploring another option: attaching the newly drafted McCain language to a $453 billion military spending bill, also pending before the Senate. The bill already includes the original McCain provisions, and the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Senator Ted Stevens, Republican of Alaska, said he would accept the language negotiated by the White House.

The McCain measure has veto-proof majorities in both houses. The Senate has backed it 90 to 9, and the House voted Wednesday, 308 to 122, to support it.

At the C.I.A., whose use of harsh interrogation tactics against suspected terrorists was at the core of the debate, the official response was circumspect. "The C.I.A. understands its legal obligations and of course complies with U.S. policy," said Jennifer Dyck, the agency`s chief spokeswoman.

But A. John Radsan, who served as assistant general counsel of the C.I.A. from 2002 to 2004, said he believed that "the C.I.A. is the loser in this."

While agency officers may benefit from greater clarity about the rules of interrogation, Porter J. Goss, the C.I.A. director, had joined Mr. Cheney in arguing that the agency needed the flexibility to use harsh tactics in some cases.

The McCain amendment removes the "gray zone" of tactics less severe than torture but harsher than those allowed by the Army Field Manual, said Mr. Radsan, now at William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul.

Jeffrey H. Smith, who served as C.I.A. general counsel from 1995 to 1996, said he believed there was a gap between Mr. Goss and other top managers, who sided with Mr. Cheney, and many lower-level officers who felt uncomfortable with any perception that they had been allowed to use techniques bordering on torture.

"I think the overall reaction of the rank-and-file officers will be relief that this issue is behind them and the rules are clear," Mr. Smith said.

Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Scott Shane and David E. Sanger contributed reporting for this article.

* Copyright 2005The New York Times Company

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In an Awkward Dance, the President Is Forced to Follow
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12…

By Peter Baker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 16, 2005; A22

Nearly five months ago, President Bush issued a formal threat to veto legislation barring torture, and for the past five months he has been trying to find a way to avoid doing just that. The price: giving Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) the upper hand.

Once again the awkward, freighted Bush-McCain relationship with all its history of rivalry and resentment took center stage in American politics yesterday, as the second-place finisher in the 2000 Republican presidential primaries forced the first-place finisher to swallow something he once opposed.

Bush`s agreement with McCain over compromise language for the torture ban gave the president enough to say he had gotten what he really cared about -- namely, some measure of legal protection for U.S. agents accused of mistreating prisoners. But most everywhere in Washington outside 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the deal was seen as a victory for the senator who faced down the president.

"The veto threat, I thought, never should have been made public," said former senator Warren B. Rudman (R-N.H.). "I didn`t think that was very strategic." In going up against McCain, the White House faced someone "absolutely dogged in his determination," Rudman said, and so in vowing to veto the legislation "somebody made a misjudgment."

This is not the first time McCain has forced his will on a reluctant president. In Bush`s first term, the senator and his allies pushed Congress to rewrite campaign finance laws in hopes of curbing the influence of big money in politics. Bush, who had not supported the measure, signed it under pressure. Earlier this year, McCain, without White House sanction, led a group of senators on both sides of the aisle in reaching an agreement to confirm some Bush judicial nominees while rejecting others.

The complicated relationship between the two men has swung through many phases during Bush`s presidency, from the chilly early days through a rapprochement last year when McCain joined Bush on the campaign trail. As McCain prepares his own campaign to succeed Bush in 2008, many in the White House continue to eye him warily. But Bush strategist Mark McKinnon has said he would be willing to help the senator, which some advisers consider a sign that the president has made his peace with McCain.

In hindsight, it may have been Vice President Cheney, more than Bush, who provoked the confrontation that led to yesterday`s truce. When McCain, a prisoner of war in Vietnam, and other Republican senators proposed outlawing the cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of detainees, Cheney launched a personal lobbying campaign to block it on the grounds that it could diminish the U.S. campaign against terrorists.

McCain responded with muscle, pushing his legislation through the Senate in October with a 90 to 9 vote -- enough to override a presidential veto. White House spokesmen emphasized that Bush did not condone torture, but his strategists were eager to avoid a scenario in which he would issue the first veto of his presidency to strike down a bill barring inhuman treatment. Cheney, who had become a lightning rod on the issue, withdrew from direct talks and national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley, a low-key lawyer, was sent in to broker a deal. "Hadley`s more diplomatic," a fellow senior official said.

By the time Hadley and McCain met over doughnuts and coffee in the senator`s office Wednesday morning for their fourth and final negotiating session, it was clear the imperative was to find accord. The White House had agreed to nearly everything McCain wanted but was focused particularly on a single sentence intended to protect interrogators from legal liability. As the talks continued, the House was preparing a nonbinding vote in support of McCain`s proposal. By evening, the House weighed in, 308 to 122 -- another veto-proof majority.

"The White House gave in," one Republican congressional aide said. "They were forced to back down, and the vote in the House was just additional pressure."

Meeting with reporters in the Roosevelt Room after the deal was announced yesterday, Hadley insisted the White House got what it really wanted, noting that the original McCain proposal had no protection in it. "There`s been a lot of things in the mix -- things he wanted we couldn`t do, things we wanted he couldn`t do," Hadley said. "It`s been a long back-and-forth."

Hadley expressed no regrets over the veto threat. "You judge the tactics by the outcome," he said, "and we`ve got a good outcome."

In their public session together in the Oval Office, Bush and McCain, joined by Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), made a point of collegiality. Bush called McCain "a good man who honors the values of America" and declared himself "happy to work with him to achieve a common objective." McCain responded by thanking Bush no fewer than six times, praising the president`s "active participation" in trying to "resolve this very difficult issue."

White House officials made little secret of their relief to have the issue behind them. As for McCain, they noted gratefully that he went out of his way to avoid exacerbating the dispute. "He could have really torqued it up," one aide said, "and he didn`t."
© 2005 The Washington Post Company

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December 16, 2005
Editorial
The Rush to Renew the Patriot Act
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/opinion/16fri2.html

Four years ago the Patriot Act was hurriedly passed before anyone had a full grasp of its potential to infringe on citizens` rights. Lawmakers argued that 9/11 had made quick action to expand the government`s surveillance and investigative powers essential. But key parts of the law were written with expiration dates so Congress could reconsider them when there was more time. Now the time for thoughtful deliberation has arrived and Congress is once again in a rush - this time to go home for the holiday recess.

The bill`s defenders claim that Congress has improved the bill by curbing government powers to conduct roving wiretaps, "sneak and peek" searches of individuals on the basis of investigators` suspicions, and the easy, but secret, vetting of a citizen`s library, business, medical, school and tax records.

There have been improvements, but critics of the bill are still right to be worried about several of the provisions that remain.

For example, the bill gives the government far too much power to issue "national security letters," demanding private financial, medical and library records, without the permission or oversight of a judge. When the F.B.I. issues these letters, it can impose "gag" orders, making it illegal for those holding the records to talk publicly about the request. This makes it difficult or impossible for ordinary Americans to know whether the government is poring through their personal information, and for Congress and the public to monitor what the F.B.I. is doing.

There is talk in the Senate of mounting a filibuster to block the bill, but it should not have to come to that. A bipartisan group of concerned senators, liberals and conservatives alike, is offering a worthwhile interim step: a three-month continuation of the current law so revisions can receive more thoughtful attention and debate.

Congress has dragged its feet for years on laws that are truly needed to protect Americans from terrorist attacks, like reasonable safety rules for chemical plants and a financing formula that would direct homeland security dollars to the places that are most at risk. Lawmakers should be rushing to handle those problems, and taking the time to think carefully about a law that will define Americans` civil liberties for years to come.

* Copyright 2005The New York Times Company

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Kommentare zum Irak später über:
http://www.juancole.com/

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Das ist das berühmte `blame` Spiel.

Columnist Says Bush Knows Who Leaked Name
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12…

By Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 15, 2005; A07

Syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak, who has repeatedly declined to discuss his role in disclosing the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame, said in a speech this week that he is certain President Bush knows who his mystery administration source is.

Novak said Tuesday that the public and press should be asking the president about the official rather than pressing journalists who received the information.

Novak also suggested that the administration official who gave him the information is the same person who mentioned Plame and her CIA role to Washington Post Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward in the summer of 2003.

"I`m confident the president knows who the source is," Novak told a luncheon audience at the John Locke Foundation in Raleigh, N.C., on Tuesday, according to an account published yesterday in the Raleigh News & Observer. "I`d be amazed if he doesn`t."

"So I say, don`t bug me. Don`t bug Bob Woodward. Bug the president as to whether he should reveal who the source is," Novak said.

Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) sent a letter to Bush yesterday urging him to name the source and make public any disciplinary action taken, "in keeping with your stated desire to root out leaks."

Novak revealed Plame`s name and CIA role in a column on July 14, 2003, just eight days after Plame`s husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, accused the administration of "twisting" intelligence to justify the war in Iraq. Wilson said that a CIA-sponsored mission he led had concluded a year earlier that allegations about Iraq taking steps to build a nuclear weapons program were probably untrue.

Woodward disclosed last month that he, too, learned about Plame`s CIA role in a confidential conversation with a senior administration source. Many involved in the case believe that Woodward and Novak had the same source. Though neither journalist has identified the source publicly, both have said the official was casually providing a tidbit of information and did not seem to be trying to generate a story to discredit Wilson`s mission.

Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald has been investigating for two years whether senior Bush administration officials broke any laws in leaking Plame`s identity to the media. On Oct. 28, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who was Vice President Cheney`s chief of staff, was indicted on charges of perjury, making false statements and obstructing the investigation.

Woodward declined to comment yesterday. Novak`s attorney, James Hamilton, declined to comment on why Novak is now discussing the case.

Novak said in his speech that an investigation into his role in the Plame affair "snowballed out of proportion" as a result of a "campaign by the left." But he also blamed "extremely bad management of the issue by the White House," saying, "Once you give an issue to a special prosecutor, you lose control of it."
© 2005 The Washington Post Company

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Thoughts on the Middle East, History,and Religion
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Juan Cole is Professor of History at the University of Michigan

http://www.juancole.com/
Friday, December 16, 2005

The One that Got Away

[urlCNN is reporting that Iraqi authorities had arrested Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,]http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/meast/12/15/zarqawi.captured/[/url] the Jordanian terrorist, in Ramadi, but mistakenly released him. Nic Roberts reported that Zarqawi had put on weight, grown a beard, removed a tattoo, and was using a Kurdish passport, making him unrecognizable to Iraqi security forces.

What I take away from this report is that if the Iraqis cannot recognize a Jordanian master terrorist, the American military has zero chance of fighting the Sunni Arab guerrilla movement in Iraq, because most of them don`t even know enough Arabic to distinguish an Iraqi from a Jordanian accent. And if all it takes is putting on weight and growing a beard to disguise oneself, then we`re in deep trouble.

Zarqawi dropped out of high school and went off to Afghanistan in 1989. He is not educated, though he has learned terror tactics and maybe at one point got some training in chemicals. I can`t see that he is irreplaceable if he were killed or captured. Al-Tawhid wa al-Jihad, his organization, is a social movement among Jordanian and Iraqi Salafi (revivalist) Sunnis, and can recruit other leaders. Zarqawi is a shadowy figure, and some maintain that he was killed in Afghanistan and is no more than a symbol, used to refer collectively to the Salafi Jihadi leadership. Many bombings and other operations attributed to Zarqawi cannot possibly have been his work, since his organization is small, and it seems likely that when the Neo-Baath does something particularly heinous, they attribute it to him on the internet.

Zarqawi had organized earlier [urlin Jordan and Germany.]http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L15145920.htm[/url] Apparently his group has now spread to France, where authorities have found explosives and broken up a ring affiliated with Zarqawi.

This incident is further evidence that the Iraq War of the Bush administration is having a destabilizing effect in the Greater Mediterranean, with Iraq-related violence spreading to Jordan and Europe.

posted by Juan @ [url12/16/2005 06:40:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/12/one-that-got-away-cnn-is-reporting.html[/url] 0 comments

What the Sunni Arab Vote Really Means


According to wire services, Sunnis in Fallujah came out to vote:


` not only get rid of the Americans but to also get rid of the Shiite-dominated government.

"It`s an extremist government [and] we would like an end to the occupation," said Ahmed Majid, 31. "Really the only true solution is through politics. But there is the occupation and the only way that will end is with weapons."

Even in insurgent bastions such as Ramadi and Haqlaniyah, Sunnis were turning out in large numbers.

"I came here and voted in order to prove that Sunnis are not a minority in this country," said lawyer Yahya Abdul-Jalil in Ramadi. "We lost a lot during the last elections, but this time we will take our normal and key role in leading this country." `



It is not actually a positive sign for the Americans that Sunni Arabs came out to vote in order to get rid of them, to see if they couldn`t get rid of the current pro-American government, to underline that the armed struggle will continue, and to prove that Sunni Arabs (20% of so of the population) are a majority of the country! The American faith that if people go to the polls it means they won`t also be blowing things up is badly misplaced.

[urlConsider this news item from Northern Ireland in 1982:]http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/october/21/newsid_2489000/2489349.stm[/url]


` Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Provisional IRA, has won its first seats in the elections to the new Ulster Assembly.

Gerry Adams, vice president of Sinn Fein, took the Belfast West seat. It is the first time his party has stood for election since the Troubles began.

Mr Adams, 34, made clear that being elected would not stop the IRA`s campaign of violence.

"The IRA have said that while the British army is in Ireland they will be there fighting" he said. `



[urlNow let us consider this item from three years later, 1985:]http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/june/25/newsid_2519000/2519673.stm[/url]


` Thirteen people have been arrested in connection with a suspected IRA mainland bombing campaign uncovered by police two days ago.

The men - who are being held under the Prevention of Terrorism Act - include a 33-year-old from Belfast, suspected of carrying out the attack on the Conservative Cabinet in the Brighton Grand Hotel last year.

It is feared the IRA may have planted devices in a dozen seaside resorts around the UK - timed to go off at the height of the summer season - and a massive police hunt has been launched. `



Could the presence of Sinn Fein, the political arm of the militant Irish Republican Army, in the North Ireland assembly have had an effect on the peace negotiations in the mid-1990s? Sure. But my point is that these campaigns, the political and the bombing, can go on simultaneously for over a decade.

posted by Juan @ [url12/16/2005 06:30:00 AM]http://www.juancole.com/2005/12/what-sunni-arab-vote-really-means.html[/url] 0 comments

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Fun Bits About American Torture
In many ways, the U.S. is now just as inhumane and brutal as any Third World regime. Oh well?
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/200…" target="_blank" rel="nofollow ugc noopener">http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/200…


- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, December 16, 2005

"We do not torture." Remember it, write it in red crayon on the bathroom wall, tattoo it onto your acid tongue because those very words rang throughout the land like a bleak bell, like a low scream in the night, like a cheese grater rubbing against the teeth of common sense when Dubya mumbled them during a speech not long ago, and it was, at once, hilarious and nauseating and it took all the self-control in the world for everyone in the room not to burst out in disgusted laughter and throw their chairs at his duplicitous little head.

Oh my God, yes, yes we do torture, America that is, and we do it a lot, and we do it in ways that would make you sick to hear about, and we`re doing it right now, all over the world, the CIA and the U.S. military, perhaps more often and more brutally than at any time in recent history and we use the exact same kind of techniques and excuses for it our numb-minded president cited as reasons we should declare war and oust the dictator of a defenseless pip-squeak nation that happened to be sitting on our oil.

This is something we must know, acknowledge, take to heart and not simply file away as some sort of murky, disquieting unknowable that`s best left to scummy lords of the government underworld. We must not don the blinders and think America is always, without fail, the land of the perky and the free and the benevolent. Horrific torture is very much a part of who we are, right now. Deny it at your peril. Accept it at your deep discontent.

Torture is in. Torture is the tittering buzzword of the Bush administration, bandied about like secret candy, like a hot whisper from Dick Cheney`s gnarled tongue into Rumsfeld`s pointed ear and then dumped deep into Dubya`s Big Vat o` Denial.

The cruel abuse of terror suspects is sanctioned and approved from on high, and we employed it in Abu Ghraib (the worst evidence of which -- the rapes and assaults and savage beatings -- we will likely never see), and we use it in Eastern Europe and Guantánamo and in secret prisons and it has caused deaths of countless detainees. And Rumsfeld`s insane level of Defense Department secrecy means we may never even know exactly how brutal we have become.

Torture is right now being discussed in all manner of high-minded articles and forums wherein the finer points of what amount of torture should be allowable under what particular horrific (and hugely unlikely) circumstances, and all falling under the aegis of the new and pending McCain anti-torture legislation that would outlaw any and all "degrading, inhumane" treatment whatsoever by any American CIA or military personnel at any time whatsoever, more or less.

All while, ironically, over in Iraq, our military is right now inflicting more pain and death upon more lives than any torture chamber in the last hundred years, and where we have recently discovered the fledgling government that the United States helped erect in Saddam`s absence, the Iraqi Interior Ministry, well, they appear to be so giddy about torture they might as well be Donald Rumsfeld`s love children. But, you know, quibbling.

There is right now this amazing little story over at the London Guardian, a fascinating item all about a group of hardy hobbyists known as "planespotters," folks whose solitary, dedicated pastime is to sit outside the various airports of the world and watch the runway action and make intricate logs and post their data and photos to planespotter Web sites. It`s a bit like bird-watching, but without the chirping and the nature and with a lot more deafening engine roar and poisonous fumes.

These people, they are not spies and they are not liberals and they are not necessarily trying to reveal anything covert or ugly or illegal, but of course that is often exactly what they do, because these days, as it turns out, some of those planes these guys photograph are involved in clandestine CIA operations, in what are called "extraordinary renditions," the abduction of suspects who are taken to lands unknown so we may beat and maul and torture the living crap out of them and not be held accountable to any sort of pesky international law. Fun!

It is for us to know, to try and comprehend. The United States has the most WMD of anyone in the world. We imprison and kill more of our own citizens than any other civilized nation on the planet. We still employ horrific, napalm-like chemical weapons.

And yes, under the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld regime, we abuse and torture prisoners at least as horrifically as any Islamic fundamentalist, as any terrorist cell, to serve our agenda and meet our goals -- and whether you think those goals are justifiable because they contain the words "freedom" or "democracy" is, in many ways, beside the point.

Go ahead, equivocate your heart out. It is a bit like justifying known poisons in your food. Sure mercury is a known cancer-causing agent. Sure the body will recoil and soon become violently ill and die. But gosh, it sure does taste good. Shrug.

Maybe you don`t care, maybe you`re like Rumsfeld and Cheney and the rest who think, well sure, if they`re terrorists and if they`d just as willingly suck the eyeballs out of my cat and rip out my fingernails with a pair of pliers as look at me, well, they deserve to be tortured, beaten, abused in ways you and I cannot imagine. Especially if (and this is the eternal argument), by their torture we can prevent the deaths of innocents.

Maybe you are one of these people. Eye for an eye. Water torture for an explosive device. Does this mean that you are, of course, exactly like those being tortured, willing to go to extremes to get what you want? That you are on the same level morally, energetically, politically and, like Cheney and Rumsfeld, you are dragging the nation down into a hole with you? You might think. After all, fundamentalists terrorize to further a lopsided and religious-based agenda. We torture to protect ours. Same coin, different side.

It is mandatory that we all acknowledge where we are as a nation, right now, how low we have fallen, how thuggish and heartless and internationally disrespected we have become, the ugly trajectory we are following.

Because here`s the sad kicker: Torture works. It gets results. It might very well save some lives. But it also requires a moral and spiritual sacrifice the likes of which would make Bush`s own Jesus recoil in absolute horror. Yet this is what`s happening, right now. And our current position demands a reply to one bitter, overarching question: What sort of nation are we, really?
Thoughts for the author? E-mail him.

Mark Morford`s Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SF Gate and in the Datebook section of the SF Chronicle. To get on the e-mail list for this column, please click here and remove one article of clothing. Mark`s column also has an RSS feed and an archive of past columns, which includes a tiny photo of Mark probably insufficient for you to recognize him in the street and give him gifts.

As if that weren`t enough, Mark also contributes to the hot, spankin` SF Gate Culture Blog.


URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/200…
©2005 SF Gate

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Latest Update: #33887 13.12.05 21:04:45
Latest Coalition Fatality: Dec 14, 2005
Military Fatalities US, UK, Other: : Total: 2354 , US: 2153 , Dez.05: 40

Iraker 12/15/05: Civilian: 129 Police/Mil: 89 Total: 218
http://www.icasualties.org/oif/IraqiDeaths.aspx

Regelmäßige Updates von Meldungen aus dem Irak:
http://icasualties.org/oif/

Da bei ´Today im Irak´ die Postings immer länger werden, hier den Link für alle Interessierte: http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

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Kidnap and Torture American Style

Kidnap and Torture American Style follows the stories of terror suspects. Some of them are British residents, who have been snatched from streets and airports throughout the world before being flown to the Middle-East and Africa. In countries such as Syria and Egypt, they undergo agonising ordeals before being incarcerated, without ever facing an open trial.

Testimonies from those suspects allege that Britain has a key role in these shady operations from supplying intelligence information on which interrogations are based, to ordering their arrest and detention.


Broadcast 11/23/05 - Channel 4 - UK -

http://www.indybay.org/uploads/kidnap_torture.ram

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Die ultimativen Weihnachtsgeschenke für alle Bush- und Warlover!

Tomgram: Nick Turse Offers the Seasonal Shopping List from Hell
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=42769

This post can be found at http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=42769

We all know the feeling. After your last minute holiday gift-giving near-disaster in 2004 (surprisingly similar to the one in 2003), you made that firm New Year`s resolution yet again -- this time you were determined to buy those Christmas presents in July. The Monday after Thanksgiving at the absolute latest. They would all be wrapped and carefully hidden away in the back of your closet under the old skates and the family photos. Well, don`t even bother to look. You know you didn`t. Fortunately, there are sites -- Tomdispatch for one -- with your seasonal well-being in mind. And so it`s with particular pleasure that, in the very nick of time, Tomdispatch presents its third annual opportunity for you, the Xmas gift-giver, to partake in some small way of an all-American, globally generous spirit of giving. Open your hearts, open your wallets, and shop til you drop. It`s the Homeland Security way of life! Tom

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Das hat Condi Angie mitgebracht



p.s. One small gift you might actually consider picking up is an amusing collection of bumper stickers ("Be nice to America or we`ll bring democracy to your country") and bumper facts, a little stocking stuffer of a book by two young progressives, Actions Speak Louder Than Bumper Stickers.

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All-American Christmas
By Nick ("Tongue Firmly in Cheek") Turse

It`s that time of year again. A time for family and friends to gather. A sacred time. A time to look back and reflect on what really matters most. And, honestly, what matters more than Tomdispatch`s third annual holiday list of the season`s best gifts?

Back in 2003, there were those "Hot as Depleted Uranium Toys for a New Imperial Age"; in 2004, we gave you the inside scoop on how to "Make It a Merry Military-Corporate Christmas." This year, it`s all about timeless American values, like militarism, jingoism, and barbarism. So if you`ve been wringing your hands, worried that you`ll never find that last minute holiday gift for the special someone on your list, today is your lucky day!

The Spirit of the Season

Does it seem like every year you have more and more people to buy presents for? Well, here`s a gift idea that wants to be part of the solution, not the problem: the "America Is Full" T-shirt. Now, when the recipient of your gift heads out, people will know exactly what s/he thinks about those tired, poor, and huddled masses yearning to breathe free. And if there was any shred of doubt, the reverse side reads: "The Borders… It`s Closing Time."

Last year, Tomdispatch suggested that classic bumper sticker, the "Terrorist Hunting Permit" as a tasteful addition to any Hummer, pick-up truck, or Abrams tank. This year, we recommend its companion the "Liberal Hunting License" -- with this sticker there`s no "bag limit."

Double your hunting fun with either the "Have You Killed a Terrorist Today?" or "One Dead Terrorist" T-shirt -- in beautiful, all natural white or a pretty, pink junior-sized version with a faux-blood splatter and a logo that reads: "Bringing Freedom to the World, One Dead Terrorist at a Time." Another sure-fire, stocking-stuffer is the "Six Middle East Countries Can Get Along if Five Are Nuked" tee. Or plunk down that extra nickel for a "Raghead Roundup" shirt to go with this year`s haberdashery highlight, the "We Will KYFA [Kick Your Fucking Ass] Iraq" hat.
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Are shirts with slurs and hats with profanity-laced acronyms just a tad harsh for that place under your family-values tree? Then try a different path -- one that blends militarism and misogyny-- with an exquisite sweatshirt that reads: "Special Delivery" with an image of a bikini-clad woman, straddling a missile, in front of a red, white, and blue background, or how about the "Big Johnson Army" t-shirt -- a gift for sophisticates who absolutely demand that their clothing feature large-breasted cartoon women, macho military vehicles, star-spangled backdrops, and mind-bending double-entendres ("We always get the biggest hummers").

Fine Art for Xmas

Perhaps, though, you`re searching for an even classier gift. Then look no further than the artwork available from The Presidential Prayer Team -- representing the network of "millions" of folks who "pray for the President, his cabinet, the nation and our Armed Forces." You`re not going to find elegant artwork like this in the Louvre (which you can`t visit anyway, since you`re probably still boycotting France). For a suggested donation of $35 you can buy a "numbered collector`s lithograph," "Praying For Peace," featuring "two of our best-loved Presidents, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, praying beside President Bush" by modern master Ron DiCianni. For a mere $20, you can hang an un-numbered version of the same over your mantel this holiday season.
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Members of the "Boycott France" crowd who are also connoisseurs of the finest objets d`arts will love an apropos piece (de résistance) that embraces their raison d`être -- namely, making sure there is never détente with the French. For them, we recommend the elegant "First Iraq Then France Tile Box" -- a "stylish" container we consider absolument très magnifique! This petit box features a cartoon image of an angry George W. Bush dressed as Uncle Sam (with arms of Popeye proportions) rolling up his sleeve to deliver the coup de grace to France. Don`t commit the faux pas of not picking up this gift.

Give the Gift of Gukert, er Gannon…

I bet you thought everyone`s favorite "White House-credentialed fake news reporter" and "potential male prostitute" was no more -- gone off-line to hide his head in shame, no doubt? Don`t worry! He was, he writes, so "feared by the Left [that] it had to take [him] down." But not so far down that you can`t exhibit a little holiday spirit by helping him up again. Just go to the contributions page at JeffGannon.com and make a donation in the name of a family member or your favorite co-worker. Not only is giving the gift of Gukert, er, Gannon, a wonderful holiday treat, but -- his site assures us -- it offers "an excellent opportunity to fight back against the well-funded attack machine of the Left."

Warm Holiday (Death) Wishes

One piece of Christmas-themed apparel that might warm chilled holiday hearts is the "Freedom Isn`t Free. Peace Isn`t Pretty. Merry Christmas" shirt with its stunning image of the grim reaper, brandishing an automatic rifle, clad in military fatigues, and, of course, a Santa hat.

Or try the "Pro Bush Christmas Patriotic Hooded Sweatshirt" -- emblazoned with an amalgamation of Americans flags, Christmas greetings, and a classic image of Santa "W." (Perhaps next year`s version will have him handing out gifts with an obligatory "Happy Halliburton!" logo to Iraqi tykes.)

Git Yo Gitmo Gear

Believe it or not, our gulag at Guantanamo Bay has been up and running for almost four years now, and if you or your loved ones still haven`t been fitted for your orange jumpsuit or gotten your Gitmo gear, make haste! So that the process proves no trial for you, we at Tomdispatch have (extra-)judiciously scoured right-wing runways for absolute perfection in head-to-toe Gitmo garb.
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For starters, there`s the lovely "I (heart) Club Gitmo" T-shirt -- just for that special someone you`d love to be shackled to for life. Or maybe, with memories of a favorite island getaway dancing in your head, you`d prefer the ever-tasteful "Paradise Resorts: Gitmo" shirt.

A mere $17.99 procures you the "Club Gitmo" baseball cap with an illustration of "Palm Trees, surf and sun and a little turban wearing cartoon character giving a great big thumbs up!" It makes the perfect pair with the lovely "Guantanamo Bay: Spa and Resort" barbeque apron. And, so no one will be left out, for the littlest torture-advocate purchase that companion bib or the ever-so-sweet "Camp Gitmo Kids T-Shirt."

Those on Santa`s naughty list may, of course, prefer to opt for the "got gitmo?" thong. Wearing this, you can rub your own fake menstrual blood on the "prisoner" of your choice this New Year`s Eve or adorn his/her head just like the genuine interrogators do!

And "Ghrab" a Few of These for Your Friends…

Feeling expansive? Here`s a shirt that seems to evoke both marquee sites in the American gulag (Gitmo and Abu Ghraib) -- "The Koran: Now in Two-Ply" T-shirt with the image of a guy, pants down, seated on a toilet, holding the Muslim holy book and giving a thumbs-up worthy of America`s most famous soldiers. If "Two-Ply" isn`t quite right, then consider two other sure-to-please versions of the same: the lovely "Property of Abu Ghraib Prison" or the tasteful "I Got Humped at Abu Ghraib Prison."

Freedom Isn`t Free, But this Gift Is!

Don`t have a lot to spend, not even enough for those tees or bibs? Not to worry! Tomdispatch isn`t about to be all tied up in mercantile knots this Christmas, not when, courtesy of our friends at the 700 Club and the Christian Broadcasting Network -- and at no cost to you -- you can get your own, genuine, 100% red-and-white bumper sticker. Using widely recognized images (found on restroom doors everywhere), it proclaims: Marriage = Man + Woman. Not only is the price right on this gift, but it offers your recipient the ability to really experience what it must have been like to be on the "pro" side of the debate over segregation or a card-carrying member of the anti-suffrage movement. You can`t put a price on that!

Pimp Their (Sleigh) Ride… or at least their Bumper

If that special someone`s car still has a little bumper room, consider the following crop of bumper adornments:
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"Jeb Bush for President, ‘08"
"Nuke their ass, take their gas!"
"My SUV (heart) Iraqi Oil"

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or simply: "Nuke Mecca"

A.C. F-U!

In 2005, the Xmas-hating American Civil Liberties Union continued releasing "information about detainees held overseas by the United States" obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests of the U.S. government. If you know someone who isn`t about to stand for the release of one more tedious FBI document detailing abuse at Guantanamo Bay -- then look no further than the "Anti-Christian Lawyers Union" line of caps, shirts, mugs, and stickers. With the "C" in ACLU cleverly replaced by Islam`s green crescent moon and star, your giftee will be able to do double duty every time he or she steps out of the house in 2006 -- insulting that organization and a major world religion all at once!

If, however, your giftee is the picky sort -- someone, say, who hates "our nation`s guardian of liberty" but hasn`t the stomach to rile Muslims at the same time -- not to worry, there`s always the "ACLU: Enemy of the State" product line that cleverly replaces that telltale "C" with a hammer and sickle.

Give War a Chance

The holiday season is usually a rough time for warmongers -- with all the talk of "peace on Earth," it`s little short of a seasonal bias crime. So, into fairness as we at Tomdispatch are, we`d like to recommend the "Footprint of the American Chicken" T-shirt, designed, says manufacturer "Life, Liberty, etc.," to help you identify "radical individuals so they can be avoided when possible… confronted when necessary" and, ultimately, chased "back to their hippie communes." On it, the peace sign is cleverly likened to the footprint of everyone`s favorite cowering fowl. Another selection that promises to "drive all those bongo-slapping hippies berserk" is a tee of understated simplicity that says it all: "Pro-War." What could be better in the giving season than to offer someone close to you the chance to tell the world that s/he`s down with human suffering and not afraid to broadcast it?

Raw Deal

Okay, so the conflict in Iraq is going miserably for the U.S., but who -- aside from millions in the streets before the war started -- could have known? Still, this turn of events has an upside for you -- bargains! Case in point: the "Iraqi Freedom US Military Heroes Playing Cards," once $19.99, and featuring aces like President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald ("Gin Rummy") Rumsfeld. The Bush administration`s loss is your gain. Your whole family can now play "war" for the mission un-accomplished price of $2.99.

Santa`s Decree: No Child Left Behind

Christmas, of course, is all about the kids. So Tomdispatch offers a smashing selection of shock-and-awe toys for terror-fighting tots.

The "Air Force One Playset" is a can`t-miss choice -- die-cast metal replicas of all the President`s fave vehicles: his jet, Air Force One; his helicopter, Marine One; the posh Presidential Limo; the sporty Presidential Sedan; and a Secret Service Jeep, "complete with presidential seals, plus presidential motorcade signs." Now little Suzie or Timmy can play President all day long, running from trouble and reality. A terrorist attack? Time to run (er, fly) scared in Air Force One. A hurricane in the gulf? Chopper off to Washington. Work to be done? Screw it, and head for Crawford. Protests there? Speed away in the high style only a Presidential sedan can supply. With this playset, the kids will have fun, fun, fun ‘til their daddies take their bomb-proof limos away.

When you`re fighting an endless war, you`re gonna need an endless supply of warriors. This Xmas season, to help ensure that recruiting centers get a fresh supply of bodies for imperial wars of the future, you`ll want the kiddies on your list to improve their battle-hardened brain power with Mindfield, the U.S. Military Trivia Game Board Game. Over 2,400 questions about the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines, their equipment and their battles! Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead! It`s never to early to steep little Timmy and Suzie in militarism and the lure and lore of war.

Way back in 2002, people were appalled by the "Forward Command Post" -- a bombed-out dollhouse from hell, that rankled consumers who objected to a toy glorifying civilian casualties. The next year, some loudmouth Tomdispatch writer got all bent out of shape about the "‘Battle Command Post Two-Story Headquarters,` a brownstone-turned-battle bunker… large enough to dwarf your child." This year, the "Forward Command Post" returns in less ravaged form. No doubt, a hue and cry will still arise from die-hard peaceniks who object to the military driving civilians from their houses, leaving them dead in the front yard, or turning their homes into places to kick back and fire the mortar, heavy machine gun, light-heavy machine gun and bazooka that come with the set. But remember, there have always been American killjoys like the unpatriotic folks who objected to the Quartering Act of 1774. For shame! Luckily, a new play set this year catches the untrammeled spirit of the original Forward Command Post before the legions of PC leveled it. For hobbyists of all ages, the "Middle East Afghanistan House Ruin" is the absolutely "perfect way to start off [a] diorama" of death and destruction that, quite literally, brings the war home.

Keep the "X" in Xmas

With so much going on during the holiday season, it`s sometimes hard to keep what really matters in mind. Sure, the death toll due to the massive earthquake in Pakistan this year is nearing 90,000 and even the President has finally admitted that at least 30,000 dead Iraqis resulted from his war (over a hundred thousand, not even counting this year, if you care to believe the notoriously unreliable researchers-with-a-cluster-bomb-on-their-shoulder at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Columbia University`s School of Nursing, and Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad). But who has time to worry about such things? There`s Xmas shopping to do and there could hardly be a holier or (as Dick Cheney once intoned) more patriotic pastime. After all, capitalism has worked out so well for so many!

So, in the spirit of the season, use Tomdispatch`s All-American Christmas list to guide your every purchase so that, come Xmas eve, you can kick back, down some egg nog, and toast the gulag, knowing you did your part for the U.S. of A. And while you`re at it, you can enjoy an Xmas present from Tomdispatch meant especially for you. In 2003, it was "Twas the Night Before Christmas." In 2004, it was "Let It Snow." This year, Tomdispatch offers Sid Tepper`s and Roy C. Bennett`s 1955 classic, "Nuttin` For Christmas," with some new lyrics for your caroling pleasure:

I lied about double-U, M, D`s;
Somebody snitched on me.
I tortured a bunch of detainees;
Somebody snitched on me.
I spilled beans on a covert spook;
I refused to be rebuked.
Lied and said we`re gonna be nuked;
Somebody snitched on me.

(Chorus)
So, I`m getting` nuttin` for Christmas,
Even hawkish Dems are mad.
I`m gettin` nuttin` for Christmas,
‘Cause I ain`t been nuttin` but bad.

I lied about the yellow cake;
somebody snitched on me.
The documents proved to be fake;
somebody snitched on me.
I set up an offshore gulag,
Willy-Pete shells I did lob,
said Brownie did a "heckuva job,"
somebody snitched on me.

(Chorus)

I lied about an Iraqi drone;
Somebody snitched on me.
An anti-war war mom chased me from my home;
Somebody snitched on me.
Ignored N`Orleans until too late,
With Iraq I sealed my fate,
It`s looking more like Watergate,
‘Cause somebody snitched on me.

So you better be good -- unlike me;
‘Cause if you`re bad, you`ll surely see;
You`ll get nuttin` for Christmas!

Nick Turse is the Associate Editor and Research Director of TomDispatch.com. He has written for the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Nation, the Village Voice, and regularly for Tomdispatch on the military-corporate complex, the homeland security state, and various other topics. If you have whistles to blow or muck you think Nick should rake, send your insider information to [e-mail]

Copyright 2005 Nick Turse


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Ein Beispiel für das Motto, dass nicht sein kann, was nicht sein darf oder wenn das Ergebnis einer Methode zur Errechnug von Zahlen genehm ist, wird sie in der Presse diskutiert, wenn nicht, wird sie verschwiegen.

Burying the Lancet report . . . and the children
http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/printer_333.shtml

By Nicolas J S Davies
Online Journal Contributing Writer

Dec 14, 2005, 01:26

Over a year ago, an international team of epidemiologists headed by Les Roberts of Johns Hopkins School of Public Health completed a [url"cluster sample survey"]http://www.zmag.org/lancet.pdf[/url] of civilian casualties in Iraq. Its findings contradicted central elements of the narrative of the war that politicians and journalists had presented to the American public and the world.

After excluding the results from Anbar province as a statistical anomaly and half the increase in infant mortality as possible "recall bias," they estimated that at least 98,000 Iraqi civilians had died in the previous 18 months as a direct result of the invasion and occupation of their country. They also found that violence had become the leading cause of death in Iraq during that period (51 percent or 24 percent with or without Anbar). However, their most significant finding was that the vast majority (79 percent) of violent deaths were caused by "coalition" forces using "helicopter gunships, rockets or other forms of aerial weaponry," and that almost half (48 percent) of these were children, with a median age of eight.

When the team`s findings were published in the Lancet, the official journal of the British Medical Association, they caused quite a stir, and it seemed that the first step had been taken toward a realistic accounting of the human cost of the war. The authors made it clear that their results were approximate; they discussed the limitations of their methodology at length and emphasized that further research would be invaluable in giving a more precise picture.

A year later, we do not have a more precise picture. Soon after the study was published, American and British officials launched a concerted campaign to discredit its authors and marginalize their findings without seriously addressing the validity of their methods or presenting any evidence to challenge their conclusions. Today the continuing aerial bombardment of Iraq is still a dark secret to most Americans, and the media still present the same general picture of the war, focusing on what appear in the light of this study to be secondary sources of violence.

Les Roberts has been puzzled and disturbed by this response to his work, which stands in sharp contrast to the way the same governments responded to a similar study he led in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2000. In that case, he reported that about 1.7 million people had died during 22 months of war, and as he says, "Tony Blair and Colin Powell quoted those results time and time again without any question as to the precision or validity." In fact, the U.N Security Council promptly called for the withdrawal of foreign armies from the Congo, and the U.S. State Department cited his study in announcing a grant of $10 million for humanitarian aid.

Roberts conducted a follow-up study in the Congo that raised the fatality estimate to 3 million, and Tony Blair cited that figure in his address to the 2001 Labor Party Conference. However, in December 2004, Blair dismissed the epidemiological team`s work in Iraq, claiming that, "Figures from the Iraqi Ministry of Health, which are a survey from the hospitals there, are in our view the most accurate survey there is."

This statement by Blair is particularly interesting because the Iraqi Health Ministry reports, whose accuracy he praised, have in fact confirmed the Johns Hopkins team`s conclusion that aerial attacks by "coalition" forces are the leading cause of civilian deaths. One such report was cited by Nancy Youssef in the Miami Herald on September 25, 2004, under the headline "U.S. Attacks, Not Insurgents, Blamed for Most Iraqi Deaths." The Health Ministry had been reporting civilian casualty figures based on reports from hospitals, as Mr. Blair said, but it was not until June 2004 that it began to differentiate between casualties inflicted by "coalition" forces and those from other causes. In the three months from June 10 to September 10, it counted 1,295 civilians killed by U.S. forces and their allies and 516 killed in "terrorist" operations. Health Ministry officials told Ms. Youssef that the "statistics captured only part of the death toll," and emphasized that aerial bombardment was largely responsible for the higher numbers of deaths caused by the "coalition." The overall breakdown (72 percent U.S.) is remarkably close to that attributed to aerial bombardment in the Lancet survey (79 percent).

BBC World Affairs Editor John Simpson reported on another Health Ministry report that covered the six months from July 1, 2004, to January 1, 2005. This report cited 2,041 civilians killed by U.S. and allied forces versus 1,233 by "insurgents" (only 62 percent U.S.). Then something strange but sadly predictable happened. The Iraqi Health Minister`s office contacted the BBC and claimed in a convoluted and confusing statement that their figures had somehow been misrepresented; the BBC issued a retraction; and details of deaths caused by "coalition" forces have been notably absent from subsequent Health Ministry reports.

So, the British and American governments and the U.N. responded positively to Roberts` work in the Congo, and Iraqi Health Ministry reports support his findings in Iraq in spite of official efforts to suppress them. Official and media criticism of his work has focused on the size of his sample, 988 homes in 33 clusters distributed throughout the country, but other epidemiologists reject the notion that this is controversial.

Michael O`Toole, the director of the Center for International Health in Australia, says: "That`s a classical sample size. I just don`t see any evidence of significant exaggeration . . . If anything, the deaths may have been higher because what they are unable to do is survey families where everyone has died."

David Meddings, a medical officer with the Department of Injuries and Violence Prevention at the World Health Organization, said surveys of this kind always have uncertainty but "I don`t think the authors ignored that or understated. Those cautions I don`t believe should be applied any more or less stringently to a study that looks at a politically sensitive conflict than to a study that looks at a pill for heart disease."

Les Roberts himself has also compared his work in Iraq to other epidemiological studies: "In 1993, when the U.S. Centers for Disease Control randomly called 613 households in Milwaukee and concluded that 403,000 people had developed Cryptosporidium in the largest outbreak ever recorded in the developed world, no one said that 613 households was not a big enough sample. It is odd that the logic of epidemiology embraced by the press every day regarding new drugs or health risks somehow changes when the mechanism of death is their armed forces."

The campaign to discredit Les Roberts, the Johns Hopkins team and the Lancet employed the same methods that the U.S. and British governments have used consistently to protect their monopoly on "responsible" story telling about the war. By dismissing the study`s findings out of hand, U.S. and British officials created the illusion that they were suspect or even politically motivated and discouraged the media from taking them seriously. This worked disturbingly well. Even opponents of the war continue to cite much lower figures for civilian casualties and innocently attribute the bulk of them to Iraqi resistance forces or "terrorists."

The figures most often cited for civilian casualties in Iraq are those collected by Iraqbodycount, but its figures are not intended as an estimate of total casualties. Its methodology is to count only those deaths that are reported by at least two "reputable" international media outlets in order to generate a minimum number that is more or less indisputable. Its authors know that thousands of deaths go unreported in their count, and say they cannot prevent the media misrepresenting their figures as an actual estimate of deaths. I have asked them several times to be more active in challenging such misrepresentations, but I have to acknowledge that the misrepresentations are so widespread that this would be quite a task.

Beyond the phony controversy regarding the methodology of the Lancet report, there is one genuine issue that really does cast doubt on its findings. This is the decision to exclude the cluster in Fallujah from its computations due to the much higher number of deaths that were reported there (even though the survey was completed before the widely reported assault on the city in November 2004). Roberts wrote in a letter to the Independent, "Please understand how extremely conservative we were: we did a survey estimating that 285,000 people have died due to the first 18 months of invasion and occupation and we reported it as at least 100,000."

The dilemma he faced was this: in the 33 clusters surveyed, 18 reported no violent deaths (including one in Sadr City), 14 other clusters reported a total of 21 violent deaths, and the Fallujah cluster alone reported 52 violent deaths. This last number is conservative in itself, because, as the report stated, "23 households of 52 visited were either temporarily or permanently abandoned. Neighbors interviewed described widespread death in most of the abandoned homes but could not give adequate details for inclusion in the survey."

Leaving aside this last factor, there were three possible interpretations of the results from Fallujah. The first, and indeed the one Roberts adopted, was that the team had randomly stumbled on a cluster of homes where the death toll was so high as to be totally unrepresentative and therefore not relevant to the survey. The second possibility was that this pattern among the 33 clusters, with most of the casualties falling in one cluster and many clusters reporting zero deaths, was in fact an accurate representation of the distribution of civilian casualties in Iraq under "precision" aerial bombardment. The third possibility is that the Fallujah cluster was atypical, but not sufficiently abnormal to warrant total exclusion from the study, so that the number of excess deaths was in fact somewhere between 100,000 and 285,000. Without further research, there is no way to determine which of these three possibilities is correct.

No new survey of civilians killed by "coalition" forces has been produced since the Health Ministry report last January, but there is strong evidence that the air war has intensified during this period. Independent journalists have described the continuing U.S. assault on Ramadi as "Fallujah in slow motion," devastating the city block by block. Smaller towns in Anbar province have been targets of air raids for the past several months, and towns in Diyala and Baghdad provinces have also been bombed. Seymour Hersh has covered the "underreported" air war in the New Yorker and writes that the current U.S. strategy is to embed U.S. Special Forces with Iraqi forces to call in U.S. air strikes as U.S. ground forces withdraw from Iraq, opening the way for heavier bombing with even less media scrutiny (if that is possible).

One ignored feature of the survey`s results is the high number of civilian casualties reported in Fallujah in August 2004. It appears that U.S. forces took advantage of the media focus on Najaf at that time to conduct very heavy attacks against Fallujah. This is perhaps a clue to the strategy by which they have conducted much of the air war. The heaviest bombing and aerial assault at any given time is likely to be somewhere well over the horizon from any well-publicized U.S. military operation, possibly involving only small teams of Special Forces on the ground. But cynical military strategy does not let the media off the hook for their failure to find out what is really going on and tell the outside world about it. Iraqi and other Arab journalists can still travel through most of the country and news editors should pay close attention to their reports from areas that are too dangerous for Western reporters.

A second feature of the epidemiologists` findings that has not been sufficiently explored is the one suggested above by Michael O`Toole. Since their report establishes that aerial assault and bombardment is the leading cause of violent death in Iraq, and since a direct hit by a Mark 82 500-pound bomb will render most houses uninhabitable, any survey that disregards damaged, uninhabited houses is sure to underreport deaths. This should be taken into account by any follow-up studies.

Thanks to Les Roberts, his international team, Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and the editorial board of the Lancet, we have a clearer and very different picture of the violence taking place in Iraq than that presented by the "mainstream" media. Allowing for an additional 14 months of the air war and other violence since the publication of the Lancet report, we can now estimate that somewhere between 175,000 and 650,000 people have died as a direct result of the war; that 120,000 to 500,000 of them have been killed by "coalition" forces, and that 50,000 to 250,000 of these were children below the age of fifteen. In addition, the combined effect of conservative, even unrealistic, assumptions made to arrive at the lower of these figures makes it extremely unlikely that the actual numbers of deaths are close to the bottom of these ranges.

If you find yourself troubled or torn between accepting the "official story" of the war and the picture that emerges from the Lancet report, I would suggest the following. Both versions of events are efforts to tell a story or paint a picture from a patchwork of samples or snapshots taken in different parts of Iraq. However, the way that the samples are selected and pieced together is very different. In one case, the choice of samples and the way they are put together is clearly influenced and circumscribed by powerful political, military and commercial interests. In the other, the samples were chosen according to objectively established epidemiological practice, and the results were analyzed with scientific rigor.

As someone who has followed the reporting of this war very closely, I find the results of the study to be consistent with the picture that I have seen gradually emerging as the war has progressed, based upon the work of courageous reporters and glimpses through the looking glass as more and more cracks appear in the "official story." We are still left with civilian casualty figures that can only be described by very wide ranges. The responsibility for the failure to obtain more precise casualty figures and thus a more accurate view of this crisis falls fairly and squarely on the doorsteps of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington and 10 Downing Street in London, two households that have experienced no excess deaths to children or adults as a result of the war.
I am indebted to Medialens, a British media watchdog group, for much of the material in this report. You can find a fuller discussion of the role of the U.S. and British media in suppressing the Lancet report at its website: http://www.medialens.org/alerts/05/050906_burying_the_lancet… and http://www.medialens.org/alerts/05/050906_burying_the_lancet….

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In Kairo bei der Konferenz der Arabischen Liga hatten die Sunniten den USA angeboten Zarqawi auszuliefern als Gegenleistung für den US-Abzug.

Damals hieß es noch, die USA habe das Angebot zurückgewiesen.

Das zeigt, wenn diese Meldung stimmt, dass Zarqawi nur mit Zustimmung der Sunniten morden kann.

Und wenn der folgende Bericht stimmt, dass wohl im Untergrund Verhandlungen mit den Sunniten über den Abzug der USA und die Auslieferung von Zarqawi laufen, wäre der nächste Schritt mit Hilfe der Sunniten zu versuchen eine mehr sekuläre Regierung zu bilden, als es mit den Shiiten und dem Einfluß des Irans möglich wäre.

Aber dadurch einen Bürgerkrieg zu vermeiden, wäre bei beiden Konstallationen schwierig, weil immer eine Seite verlieren würde.

Nur die sunnitische Lösung wäre die erfolgversprechendere Lösung, weil der Großteil der Eliten des alten Regimes Sunniten waren, und diese auch das nötige Wissen zum Zusammenhalt des Iraks mitbringen würden.

Nur fragt es sich dann, was aus den Kurden werden soll.
Mit den Shiiten würde das passieren, was schon immer mit ihnen geschah.

Die Shitten wurden schon mehrmals von den Sunniten in ihre Schranken verwiesen, weil sie einfach mehr militärische Erfahrung mitbringen.

Und ein wesentlicher Punkt bei der sunnitischen Lösung wäre, der Iran wäre aus der Gewinnerposition.

Jedenfalls bleibt es spannend und der Ausgang ist offen.

Aber augenblicklich hat noch die shiitische Lösung die besseren Karten.


Dec 17, 2005

US embraces Iraqi insurgents
By Gareth Porter
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GL17Ak02.html

WASHINGTON - While US President George W Bush continued to claim a strategy for "victory" in Iraq in recent speeches, his administration has quietly renounced the goal of defeating the non-al-Qaeda, Sunni-armed organizations there.

The administration is evidently preparing for serious negotiations with the Sunni insurgents, whom it has started referring to as "nationalists", emphasizing their opposition to al-Qaeda`s objectives.

The new policy has thus far gone unnoticed in the media, partly because it has only been articulated by US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and the spokesman for the US command in Baghdad.

The White House clearly recognizes that the shift could cause serious political problems if and when it becomes widely understood. The Republican Party has just unveiled a new television ad attacking Democratic Party chair Howard Dean for suggesting that the war in Iraq cannot be won.

Renouncing victory over the Sunni insurgents therefore undercuts the president`s political strategy of portraying his policy as one of "staying the course" and attacking the Democrats for "cutting and running".

Until recently, the administration treated the indigenous Sunni insurgents as the main enemy in Iraq, measuring progress primarily in terms of the numbers of insurgents killed and captured, and areas "cleared" of insurgent presence. Administration officials portrayed Sunni insurgents as allies of al-Qaeda and referred to them as "anti-Iraqi forces".

The hard line toward Sunni insurgents remained even after the administration began last summer to put much greater emphasis on the political track of attracting Sunnis into the new government. As recently as mid-November, briefings by the US command described operations in Western Iraq as being against "insurgents" - not against al-Qaeda or "terrorists".

But beginning in late November, both the US command and the US Embassy began signaling a dramatic change in Washington`s attitude toward Sunni resistance organizations.

On November 24, the top US military spokesman, Major General Rick Lynch, made a point of emphasizing the command`s understanding of the "capabilities, the vulnerabilities and the intentions of each group of the insurgency - the foreign fighters, the Iraqi rejectionists and the Saddamists".

He referred to the administration`s "deliberate outreach" to the "rejectionists", which would allow them to "become part of the solution and not part of the problem".

That same week, Khalilzad announced in an ABC News,interview that he was prepared to open negotiations with the Sunni insurgents, but not with "Saddamists" or foreign terrorists. And in an interview with Time magazine, Khalilzad, referring specifically to Sunni insurgent groups, said: "We want to deal with their legitimate concerns."

Khalilzad then combined two major indications of a new willingness to accommodate the Sunni insurgents in the same sentence. "The fault line between al-Qaeda and the nationalists seems to have increased," he told Time.

Thus the image of the insurgents had been transformed from "anti-Iraqi forces" to "nationalists". The conflicting objectives of the Sunni resistance groups and the al-Qaeda-connected terrorist network were now played up rather than ignored, as in the past.

The clearest articulation of the change in policy to date, however, came in a US command media briefing by Lynch on December 8. He was asked to what extent the insurgency was "dominated or run by Ba`athists and rejectionists" and to what extent by "Islamic fundamentalists".

His reply avoided the question of which was more important and instead emphasized the difference between US policy toward the Sunni insurgents and its policy toward al-Qaeda terrorists. Lynch said US operations "are focused on [Abu Musab al-]Zarqawi and his network".

Then he made a crucial distinction. "We`ve made a conscious decision," he said, "to focus on defeating the terrorists and foreign fighters and disrupting the capabilities of the rest of the insurgents." So his audience wouldn`t miss the distinction he was making, Lynch added that "the primary way to disrupt the capability of the rejectionists is through political engagement ..."

"Political engagement", as we now know from Khalilzad, means direct negotiations with the leaders of the insurgency. Lynch`s answer had been carefully prepared ahead of time and reflected the new administration policy.

The new soft line toward the Sunni insurgents is a belated administration response to the conclusion of the US military commanders in Iraq last summer that the Sunni insurgents could not be "defeated" and that there must be a political settlement with them.

General George Casey, the commander of all multinational forces in Iraq, declared in an interview in late June that the conflict "will ultimately be settled by negotiation and inclusion in the political process. It will not be settled on the battlefield."

Significantly, Casey did not distinguish between US and Iraqi forces in calling for negotiations, thus differing with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. In a news conference that same day, Rumsfeld said, "The coalition forces, the foreign forces, are not going to repress the insurgency," implying that Iraqi forces would be able to do so.

Casey also suggested that the "preliminary talks" that had occurred between US officials and insurgents could lead to actual negotiations. That idea was quickly squelched by the US Embassy, evidently on White House orders.

However, a policy debate over how to handle the Sunnis obviously continued within the administration, with the US military leadership in Iraq and Khalilzad pushing for real negotiations. It is now clear that the proponents of accommodation won the debate.

This does not mean that the White House has decided to give in on a timetable for troop withdrawal, which Bush just publicly rejected once again. As Seymour Hersh wrote in the December 5 New Yorker magazine, a think tank source close to Vice President Dick Cheney said the president still believed he could "tough this one out".

And despite its new line on the insurgency, US military operations are in fact still aimed largely at the Sunni insurgents rather than at al-Qaeda.

Nevertheless, the administration`s abandonment of the goal of military defeat of the Sunni insurgents and willingness to negotiate with them betrays its "victory" rhetoric.

Such negotiations would certainly have considerable impact on the domestic politics of the war. Such negotiations would become the new focus of public views of Bush`s handling of Iraq. That would in turn increase the pressure on the White House to get the insurgent leaders to come to an agreement. Meanwhile, the insurgents can be expected to insist that no agreement is possible without a timetable for US military withdrawal.

The insurgents can also increase the pressure on Bush by making public their offer, reportedly made by insurgent leaders to Arab League officials in Cairo last month, to deliver al-Qaeda leader in Iraq, Zarqawi, to the Iraqi authorities as part of a peace agreement involving a US withdrawal timetable.

As more people in the US, including members of Congress, understand that the Sunni resistance is not the enemy, but is the necessary ally in the elimination of al-Qaeda`s "terrorist haven" in Iraq, political support for continued US military presence is likely to shrink even further. Why, it may be asked, should US troops stay in Iraq to fight Sunni armed groups who are willing and able to turn in the real enemy in Iraq?

Thus the softening of the administration`s policy toward the insurgents could set in motion a train of events that brings the US occupation to an end much more quickly than now seems possible.

Gareth Porter is an independent historian and foreign policy analyst. He is the author of The Third Option in Iraq: A Responsible Exit Strategy in the Fall issue of Middle East Policy.

(Inter Press Service)

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Thursday, December 15, 2005

Elections...
http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/2005_12_01_riverbendblog_a…

Elections have been all we hear about for the last ten days at least.

The posters are everywhere in Baghdad. There are dozens of parties running for elections, but there are about four or five ‘lists’ which stand out from the rest:

- National Iraqi (731): Ayad Allawi’s list, which now includes some other prominent puppets including Adnan Al-Pachachi, Ghazi Al-Yawir, Safiya Al-Suhail, etc. Ayad Allawi is a secular Shia, CIA-affiliated, ex-Ba’athist.
- Unified Iraqi Coalition List (555): Hakim, Ja’affari and various other pro-Iran fundamentalists, in addition to Sadrists.
- Kurdistani Gathering (730): Barazani, Talbani and a few other parties.
- Iraqi Front for National Dialogue (667): Mainly Sunni, secular list – includes the Iraqi Christian Democratic Party and is headed by Salih Al-Mutlag.
- Iraqi Alliance Front (618): Mainly Sunni Islamic parties.


We’ve been flooded with election propaganda this last week. Every Iraqi channel you turn to is showing one candidate or another. Allawi, Hakim and a handful of others dominate the rest though. No one is bothering much with the other lists because quite frankly, no one hears of them that often. Allawi’s face is everywhere, as is Hakim’s turbaned head. It’s disconcerting to scan a seemingly innocent wall and have a row of identical Hakims smiling tightly down on you.

The last press conference I watched of Hakim was a few days ago. He was warning his followers of electoral fraud, which is slightly ironic considering his group has been accused of all sorts of fraud this last year. The audience was what caught my interest. The women were sitting on one side of the audience and the men were sitting on the other side, the sexes separated by a narrow aisle. The women all wore black abbayas and headscarves. It could have been a scene out of Teheran.

Some of Allawi’s campaign posters show himself and Safiya Al-Suhail. I can only guess Safiya being used in his campaign posters is meant as a gesture to Iraqi women who have felt more oppressed this year than ever. The problem is that if there’s one woman Iraqi females can’t relate to- it’s Safiya Suhail. She’s the daughter of some tribal leader who was assassinated abroad in the eighties or seventies- I’m not sure. She was raised in Lebanon and when she’s on TV she comes across as arrogant, huffy and awkward with her Iraqi accent tainted with the Lebanese dialect.

It’s a poster war. One day, you see the posters of Allawi, featuring Safiya Suhail, the next day, Allawi’s big face is covered with pictures of Hakim and Sistani. Allawi’s supporters have been complaining that Hakim’s supporters were sabotaging campaign posters.

Even SMS messages are all about voting lately. (Several rather vulgar jokes about list 555- I can`t go into it on the blog, but Iraqis know what I`m talking about).

Secular nationalists are leaning towards Salih Al-Mutlag (of list 667) who is seen as less of a puppet than the rest. After all, he is the only heading one of the more popular electoral lists who wasn’t blessed by the American army and Bremer when Iraq was invaded in 2003. He supports armed resistance (but not terrorism) and he has a group of prominent anti-occupation nationalists backing him. There`s talk that after elections, his list will support Allawi to strengthen the secular movement.

The incident of the day yesterday was news of a tanker or truck that had been caught in the town of Wassit full of fake voting ballots from Iran. There is also news that voting centers haven’t been properly equipped in several Sunni provinces. There was a skirmish between Iraqi National Guard and the electoral committee to preside over elections in Salah Al-Din.

More people are going to elect this time around- not because Iraqis suddenly believe in American-imposed democracy under occupation, but because the situation this last year has been intolerable. Hakim and Ja’affari and their minions have managed to botch things up so badly, Allawi is actually looking acceptable in the eyes of many. I still can`t stand him.

Allawi is still an American puppet. His campaign posters, and the horrors of the last year, haven’t changed that. People haven’t forgotten his culpability in the whole Fallujah debacle. For some Iraqis, however, he’s preferable to Hakim and Ja’affari after a year of detentions, abductions, assassinations and secret torture prisons.

There’s a saying in Iraq which people are using right and left lately, and that I`ve used before in the blog, “Ili ishuf il mout, yirdha bil iskhuna.” He who sees death, is content with a fever. Allawi et al. seem to be the fever these days…


- [urlposted by river @ 4:41 AM]http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/2005_12_01_riverbendblog_archive.html#113461184191738126[/url]

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Die Verlängerung des Patriot Act ist erstmal gescheitert. Es wären 60 Stimmen nötig gewesen, um das Gesetz zu verlängern.
Das hat wohl viel mit den Meldungen der letzten Tage über die Verletzung Schutz des Brief-, Telefon- und sonstiger Geheimnisse des privatem Bereich zu tun.
[urlBush ließ US-Bürger durch NSA belauschen]http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,390843,00.html[/url]

Published on Friday, December 16, 2005 by the Associated Press
Senate Rejects Extension of Patriot Act
http://www.ap.org/

by Jesse J. Holland


How Did Your Senators Vote?
[urlRoll Call 358]http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=109&session=1&vote=00358[/url] : Motion to Invoke Cloture on the Conference to Accompany H.R. 3199, USA PATRIOT Improvement and Reauthorization Act of 2005 (40 votes required to defeat cloture)


WASHINGTON - The Senate on Friday refused to reauthorize major portions of the USA Patriot Act after critics complained they infringed too much on Americans` privacy and liberty, dealing a huge defeat to the Bush administration and Republican leaders.

In a crucial vote early Friday, the bill`s Senate supporters were not able to get the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster by Sens. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., and Larry Craig, R-Idaho, and their allies. The final vote was 52-47.

President Bush, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Republicans congressional leaders had lobbied fiercely to make most of the expiring Patriot Act provisions permanent.

They also supported new safeguards and expiration dates to the act`s two most controversial parts: authorization for roving wiretaps, which allow investigators to monitor multiple devices to keep a target from evading detection by switching phones or computers; and secret warrants for books, records and other items from businesses, hospitals and organizations such as libraries.

Feingold, Craig and other critics said those efforts weren`t enough, and have called for the law to be extended in its present form so they can continue to try and add more civil liberties safeguards. But Bush, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and House Speaker Dennis Hastert have said they won`t accept a short-term extension of the law.

If a compromise is not reached, the 16 Patriot Act provisions expire on Dec. 31. Investigators will still be able to use those powers to complete any investigation that began before the expiration date, according to a provision in the original law.

Five Republicans voted against the reauthorization: Chuch Hagel of Nebraska, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, John Sununu of New Hampshire, Craig and Frist. Two Democrats voted to extend the provisions: Sens. Tim Johnson of South Dakota and Ben Nelson of Nebraska.

Frist, R-Tenn., changed his vote at the last moment after seeing the critics would win. He decided to vote with the prevailing side so he could call for a new vote at any time. He immediately objected to an offer of a short term extension from Democrats, saying the House won`t approve it and the president won`t sign it.

"We have more to fear from terrorism than we do from this Patriot Act," Frist warned.

If the Patriot Act provisions expire, Republicans say they will place the blame on Democrats in next year`s midterm elections. "In the war on terror, we cannot afford to be without these vital tools for a single moment," White House press secretary Scott McClellan said. "The time for Democrats to stop standing in the way has come."

But the Patriot Act`s critics got a boost from a New York Times report saying Bush authorized the National Security Agency to monitor the international phone calls and international e-mails of hundreds — perhaps thousands — of people inside the United States. Previously, the NSA typically limited its domestic surveillance to foreign embassies and missions and obtained court orders for such investigations.

"I don`t want to hear again from the attorney general or anyone on this floor that this government has shown it can be trusted to use the power we give it with restraint and care," said Feingold, the only senator to vote against the Patriot Act in 2001.

"It is time to have some checks and balances in this country," shouted Sen. Patrick Leahy, ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee. "We are more American for doing that."

Most of the Patriot Act — which expanded the government`s surveillance and prosecutorial powers against suspected terrorists, their associates and financiers — was made permanent when Congress overwhelmingly passed it after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington. Making the rest of it permanent was a priority for both the Bush administration and Republican leaders on Capitol Hill before Congress adjourns for the year.

The House on Wednesday passed a House-Senate compromise bill to renew the expiring portions of the Patriot Act that supporters say added significant safeguards to the law. Its Senate supporters say that compromise is the only thing that has a chance to pass Congress before 2006.

"This is a defining moment. There are no more compromises to be made, no more extensions of time. The bill is what it is," said Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz.

The bill`s opponents say the original act was rushed into law, and Congress should take more time now to make sure the rights of innocent Americans are safeguarded before making the expiring provisions permanent.

"Those that would give up essential liberties in pursuit in a little temporary security deserve neither liberty nor security," said Sen. John Sununu, R-N.H. They suggested a short extension so negotiations could continue, but the Senate scrapped a Democratic-led effort to renew the USA Patriot Act for just three months before the vote began.

"Today, fair-minded senators stood firm in their commitment to the Constitution and rejected the White House`s call to pass a faulty law," said Caroline Fredrickson, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union`s Washington legislative office. "This was a victory for the privacy and liberty of all Americans."

On the Net:
Justice Department`s Web site on the USA Patriot Act: http://www.lifeandliberty.gov/
ACLU`s Patriot Act Web site: http://www.aclu.org/safefree

Copyright © 2005 Associated Press

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BUSH TO WORLD: MY BAD
Vows Never to Make Decision Based On Intelligence Again
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Days after admitting that his decision to go to war in Iraq was based on faulty intelligence, President George W. Bush issued a two-word statement to the world: “My bad.”

Appearing in front of a giant blue-and-gold placard with the words “My Bad” emblazoned on it, the president lashed out at the faulty intelligence that led to his decision to go to war two years ago.

“Faulty intelligence got us into this mess,” Mr. Bush said. “But I have learned my lesson, and I will never make another decision based on intelligence again.”

According to one White House aide, the president hopes that his “My bad” statement will be the defining moment of his presidency: “Ronald Reagan will always be remembered for saying, ‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall,’ and President Bush wants to be remembered for ‘My bad.’”

In the House of Commons in London, British Prime Minister Tony Blair echoed Mr. Bush’s words, giving a one-word speech in which the phrase “My bad” was loosely translated as “Sorry.”

In Iraq, today marked the first day of a new military mission the Defense Department is calling “Operation Massive Apology,” as U.S. planes dropped thousands of leaflets with the words “My bad” translated into Arabic.

The Defense Department pronounced the operation a success, except for one incident in Baghdad, where a two-ton bundle of leaflets failed to separate in midair and crushed a parked Subaru.

Elsewhere, an archeologist in Guatemala discovered a 2,000-year-old Mayan mural featuring what is believed to be the earliest depiction of Mick Jagger.
http://www.borowitzreport.com/default.asp

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Die Schwächen von SPON:

[urlBush unterliegt im Kongress]http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,390886,00.html[/url]

Die Senatoren stimmten mit 52 zu 47 Stimmen gegen Bushs Vorschlag.

Measure Title: A bill to extend and modify authorities needed to combat terrorism, and for other purposes.
Vote Counts:
YEAs+++52
NAYs+++47
Not Voting++1
http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_c…

Ja lieber Spiegelredakteur vom Dienst. Auch wenn es Freitagabend war und gleich Feierabend, ein wenig mehr Sorgfalt wäre gut gewesen.
Der Senat hat mit 52:47 für die Verlängerung des Patriot Act gestimmt.

Aber es wären 60 Stimmen notwendig gewesen.

Das nennt sich Filibustern. Mal nachlesen.

Nochmal der Text von AP:
In a crucial vote early Friday, the bill`s Senate supporters were not able to get the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster by Sens. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., and Larry Craig, R-Idaho, and their allies. The final vote was 52-47.

Hier auch noch die Stimmen im Einzelnen.

How Did Your Senators Vote? Roll Call 358 : Motion to Invoke Cloture on the Conference to Accompany H.R. 3199, USA PATRIOT Improvement and Reauthorization Act of 2005 (40 votes required to defeat cloture) Yea 52 Alexander (R-TN) Allard (R-CO) Allen (R-VA) Bennett (R-UT) Bond (R-MO) Brownback (R-KS) Bunning (R-KY) Burns (R-MT) Burr (R-NC) Chafee (R-RI) Chambliss (R-GA) Coburn (R-OK) Cochran (R-MS) Coleman (R-MN) Collins (R-ME) Cornyn (R-TX) Crapo (R-ID) DeMint (R-SC) DeWine (R-OH) Dole (R-NC) Domenici (R-NM) Ensign (R-NV) Enzi (R-WY) Graham (R-SC) Grassley (R-IA) Gregg (R-NH) Hatch (R-UT) Hutchison (R-TX) Inhofe (R-OK) Isakson (R-GA) Johnson (D-SD) Kyl (R-AZ) Lott (R-MS) Lugar (R-IN) Martinez (R-FL) McCain (R-AZ) McConnell (R-KY) Nelson (D-NE) Roberts (R-KS) Santorum (R-PA) Sessions (R-AL) Shelby (R-AL) Smith (R-OR) Snowe (R-ME) Specter (R-PA) Stevens (R-AK) Talent (R-MO) Thomas (R-WY) Thune (R-SD) Vitter (R-LA) Voinovich (R-OH) Warner (R-VA) Nay 47 Akaka (D-HI) Baucus (D-MT) Bayh (D-IN) Biden (D-DE) Bingaman (D-NM) Boxer (D-CA) Byrd (D-WV) Cantwell (D-WA) Carper (D-DE) Clinton (D-NY) Conrad (D-ND) Corzine (D-NJ) Craig (R-ID) Dayton (D-MN) Dorgan (D-ND) Durbin (D-IL) Feingold (D-WI) Feinstein (D-CA) Frist (R-TN)* Hagel (R-NE) Harkin (D-IA) Inouye (D-HI) Jeffords (I-VT) Kennedy (D-MA) Kerry (D-MA) Kohl (D-WI) Landrieu (D-LA) Lautenberg (D-NJ) Leahy (D-VT) Levin (D-MI) Lieberman (D-CT) Lincoln (D-AR) Mikulski (D-MD) Murkowski (R-AK) Murray (D-WA) Nelson (D-FL) Obama (D-IL) Pryor (D-AR) Reed (D-RI) Reid (D-NV) Rockefeller (D-WV) Salazar (D-CO) Sarbanes (D-MD) Schumer (D-NY) Stabenow (D-MI) Sununu (R-NH) Wyden (D-OR) * Frist, R-Tenn., changed his vote at the last moment after seeing the critics would win. He decided to vote with the prevailing side so he could call for a new vote at any time.

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December 17, 2005
Senators Thwart Bush Bid to Renew Law on Terrorism
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/17/politics/17patriot.html

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
and ERIC LICHTBLAU

WASHINGTON, Dec. 16 - The Senate on Friday blocked reauthorization of the broad antiterrorism bill known as the USA Patriot Act, pushing Congress into a game of brinksmanship with President Bush, who has said the nation will be left vulnerable to attack if the measure is not quickly renewed.

With many Democrats and some Republicans saying the bill does not go far enough in protecting civil liberties, the Republican leadership fell short of the 60 votes required to break a filibuster. Now the future of the law, which greatly expanded the government`s surveillance and investigative powers in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, is in doubt.

The debate, a passionate fight about the balance between national security and personal privacy, became a touchstone for repercussions after the disclosure on Thursday night that Mr. Bush had secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for terrorist activity.

On Friday afternoon, after the report in The New York Times and the fallout it engendered, Vice President Dick Cheney made a hurried trip to the Capitol to defend the domestic spying program against charges that it might be illegal, while Mr. Bush said he "would do everything in my power to protect the country, within the law," from another terrorist attack.

Disclosure of the eavesdropping prompted immediate calls from some lawmakers for an end to the program and for Congressional and possible criminal investigations into its operations. One senator, Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, said the new information had prompted him to support the filibuster against extending the antiterrorism law.

"I went to bed undecided," Mr. Schumer said on the Senate floor, "but today`s revelation that the government has listened in on thousands of phone conversations is shocking and has greatly influenced my vote."

Opponents of the extension say they are concerned that the law would allow the government too much latitude in obtaining personal information, like library and medical records and business transactions, and in conducting secret searches.

The vote, 52 to 47, with four Republicans joining all but two Democrats to back the filibuster, capped a particularly trying week for Mr. Bush. He has been buffeted by criticism, including from within his own party, over his policies on terrorism, the war in Iraq and the detention and treatment of military prisoners.

On Wednesday, Senate Democrats and Republicans agreed on a measure to require the director of national intelligence to provide regular, detailed updates about secret detention sites maintained by the United States overseas. On Thursday, after weeks of resisting Senator John McCain`s effort to pass a measure banning cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of prisoners in American custody, Mr. Bush reversed course and embraced the plan.

The proposed renewal of the antiterrorism law had already been teetering under the weight of increased concerns about civil liberties.

Sixteen major provisions are set to expire at the end of December, and Congress hopes to adjourn in a few days. The bill`s opponents had pushed for a three-month extension of the law to allow for more negotiations, but the White House and Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the majority leader, rebuffed their request.

"The terrorists want to attack America again and kill the innocent and inflict even greater damage than they did on Sept. 11 - and the Congress has a responsibility not to take away this vital tool that law enforcement and intelligence officials have used to protect the American people," Mr. Bush said in a statement after the vote against ending debate. "The senators who are filibustering the Patriot Act must stop their delaying tactics so that we are not without this critical law for even a single moment."

Some Republicans as well as Democrats voiced concern about the disclosure that Mr. Bush had authorized the eavesdropping, without warrants, on the international phone calls and e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people within the United States, despite longstanding legal and policy restrictions on such domestic wiretaps.

A government official said Mr. Bush took a hands-on role in the oversight of the program, reviewing it every 45 to 60 days and renewing the original executive order more than three dozen times. The official said that close oversight reflected a determination by the White House to monitor the program closely.

Officials spoke about the program on condition of anonymity because it was classified.

A series of legal opinions within the Bush administration have supported the president`s authority to conduct such warrantless searches, citing the authority that Congress gave him after the Sept. 11 attacks to deter Al Qaeda, officials involved in the operation said. But concerns about the program`s use and the complexities of the legal rationale behind it prompted the administration to suspend it for a time in 2004 and impose new restrictions to better safeguard against abuse of civil liberties, the officials said.

Officials who were briefed on Mr. Cheney`s closed-door meetings with House and Senate leaders on Friday declined to discuss them in detail because they took place in a classified setting. But they said Mr. Cheney, whose office helped lead the creation of the eavesdropping program, offered a vigorous defense of its legality and usefulness.

The lawmakers Mr. Cheney met with, Democrats and Republicans, had been briefed on the program previously, and the vice president focused less on explaining the program than on discussing the impact of the disclosure, one official said.

Mr. Bush was asked about the program on the PBS program "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer," but he would not confirm its existence.

"We do not discuss ongoing intelligence operations to protect the country," he said. "And the reason why is that there`s an enemy that lurks, that would like to know exactly what we`re trying to do to stop them."

But Mr. Bush added: "I will make this point. That whatever I do to protect the American people, and I have an obligation to do so, that we will uphold the law, and decisions made are made understanding we have an obligation to protect the civil liberties of the American people."

"I told the American people I would do everything in my power to protect the country, within the law, and that`s exactly how I conduct my presidency," he said.

The president suggested that the disclosure was not as big an issue as the news media and policy makers were making it out to be.

"It`s not the main story of the day," Mr. Bush said. "The main story of the day is the Iraqi election."

But leading members of Congress from both parties made clear that they considered the eavesdropping program to be a major issue, raising what they described as troubling questions about the president`s use of his authority to combat terrorism.

Senator Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who leads the Judiciary Committee, promised full oversight hearings into the program, saying, "There is no doubt that this is inappropriate."

Mr. Specter said the hearings would "take precedence over every other item that that committee has scheduled," except for the nomination of Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. to the Supreme Court, and he added that he intended to call N.S.A. officials and the attorney general as witnesses.

Mr. Specter and other lawmakers from both parties questioned the legality of Mr. Bush`s executive order.

"The law prohibits this type of electronic surveillance," Mr. Specter said, "and there are a lot of basic questions that need to be answered about how this program was authorized and used."

"I want to know precisely what they did," he said. "How N.S.A. utilized their technical equipment; whose conversations they overheard; how many conversations they overheard; what they did with the material; what purported justification there was - and I use the word `purported` to emphasize - and we will go from there."

Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, denounced the program as "Big Brother run amok," while Senator Russell D. Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, said the disclosure "ought to send a chill down the spine of every American and every senator."

"You want to talk about abuses?" Mr. Feingold asked. "I can`t imagine a more shocking example of an abuse of power, to eavesdrop on American citizens without first getting a court order based on some evidence that they are possibly criminals, terrorists or spies."

Some lawmakers called for an immediate end to the program. Among them was Senator Chuck Hagel, a moderate Republican from Nebraska who sits on the Intelligence Committee and voted to block extension of the antiterrorism law.

"This is a very serious issue, a very serious story," Mr. Hagel told reporters. "If, in fact, this is true, then it needs to stop. It`s very clear in the law that the National Security Agency is prohibited from domestic spying, from spying on citizens of the United States unless there are extenuating circumstances. But we need some answers to this."

Mr. Specter said the report had been "very, very problemsome, if not devastating," to his effort to reauthorize the antiterrorism law.

But opponents of the extension said that, with support building for the filibuster all week, the outcome would probably have been the same.

"This was the will of the Senate," said Senator John E. Sununu, Republican of New Hampshire, who led the opposition among Republicans.

The two Democrats who broke ranks to oppose the filibuster were Senators Tim Johnson of South Dakota and Ben Nelson of Nebraska.

Ever since the adoption of the antiterrorism law, critics have said it failed to strike the proper balance between protecting national security and personal privacy. The measure that was blocked in the Senate on Friday was the product of intense negotiations with the House, which passed it earlier this week. It would make 14 of the 16 major provisions permanent and would extend three others for four years. It would also add new safeguards, including some provisions for judicial oversight.

But Mr. Sununu and other opponents, including Senators Larry E. Craig of Idaho and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, both Republicans, said those safeguards did not go far enough.

It is now up to the White House and Mr. Frist to decide whether to negotiate or let the 16 provisions lapse.

Publicly, Mr. Frist insisted he would do neither. He took the tactical step on Friday of switching his vote at the last minute to side with the backers of the filibuster, a maneuver that allows him to bring the measure up for consideration again. After the vote, he said he would do so.

In holding fast, Mr. Frist and other Republicans may be calculating that Democrats would suffer at the polls for rejecting extension of the antiterrorism law, just as, the Republicans argued, they suffered in 2002 for defeating legislation to create the Department of Homeland Security.

But the chief Democratic opponent of the antiterrorism law, Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, said the votes would not change.

James Risen contributed reporting for this article.

* Copyright 2005The New York Times Company

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WASHINGTON (IWR News Satire) - Scott McClellan today released this image of Osama bin Laden`s Christmas Card to George Bush. The handwriting inside the card was determined by CIA experts to be that of al Qaeda leader.
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[urlMore Bush Christmas Cards]http://www.internetweekly.org/iwr/parody_bush_christmas_cards.html[/url]
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Früher kamen die Bin Ladens immer noch persönlich in Texas vorbei. Ob Vater Bin Laden nach einem Weihnachtsbesuch 1968 über Texas abgestürzt ist, kann ich nicht feststellen.
Interessant ist auch der Beginn der Karriere des erfolgreichen Geschäftsmanns Bush. [urlBush Name Helps Fuel Oil Dealings]http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/campaigns/wh2000/stories/bush073099.htm[/url]
Dort taucht der Name Harken auf. Harken Energy Corporation und wenn man dann weitergeht, landet man wo? In Saudi Arabien!

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In Texas werden die Idioten entweder Präsident oder hingerichtet.

December 17, 2005
Date Missed, Court Rebuffs Low-I.Q. Man Facing Death
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/17/national/17death.html

By ADAM LIPTAK

Though the Supreme Court has prohibited the execution of the mentally retarded, a Texas death row inmate who may be retarded cannot raise the issue in federal court because his lawyer missed a filing deadline, a federal appeals court ruled this week.

The inmate, Marvin Lee Wilson, has "made a prima facie showing of mental retardation," a unanimous three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit wrote in an unsigned decision on Tuesday, meaning the court presumed Mr. Wilson to be retarded for purposes of its ruling.

But the panel said it was powerless to consider the case because Mr. Wilson`s lawyer filed papers concerning his retardation in a federal trial court without first obtaining required permission from the appeals court, which he did not seek until a deadline had expired.

"However harsh the result may be," the panel said, its hands are tied by deadlines established in a 1996 federal law, the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. The same law now forbids Mr. Wilson, convicted of killing a police informant, to appeal the Fifth Circuit`s ruling to the Supreme Court.

The Fifth Circuit court, which hears appeals from Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, has been frequently criticized by the Supreme Court for its decisions in capital cases. Still, said James W. Marcus, executive director of the Texas Defender Service, the Wilson decision surprised him.

"Executing someone who is categorically exempt from the death penalty," Mr. Marcus said, "would be new ground, even for Texas."

The Supreme Court ruled in 2002 that executing the mentally retarded was unconstitutional. But it gave the states little guidance about how to make that determination.

In Texas, under a 2004 decision of its Court of Criminal Appeals, judges consider three things: whether defendants have "significantly subaverage" intelligence, using "an I.Q. of about 70 or below" as a benchmark; whether they lack fundamental social and practical skills; and whether they can demonstrate that both conditions existed before age 18. Other states look to similar factors, though some use an I.Q. of 75 as a rough cutoff.

At a hearing in state court in 2004, Mr. Wilson`s lawyers presented evidence from a psychologist, Donald Trahan, who said Mr. Wilson`s I.Q. had most recently been measured at 61. A 1971 test had measured it at 73. In 1987, it was 75.

Dr. Trahan said Mr. Wilson read at a first- or second-grade level, did not understand how bank accounts worked and had trouble with simple financial tasks like making change.

A childhood friend, Walter Kelly, said Mr. Wilson had had difficulty with basic skills as a child.

"He would put on his belt so tight that it would almost cut off his circulation," Mr. Kelly said. "He couldn`t even play with simple toys like marbles or tops."

Prosecutors presented no evidence of their own at that hearing. In court papers, they said the nature of Mr. Wilson`s crime itself proved that he was not retarded. The Supreme Court`s 2002 decision, they wrote, "was never intended to protect capital murderers who commit execution-style killings."

Mr. Wilson, now 47, was convicted in 1998 of kidnapping and killing the police informant, Jerry Williams, in 1992. Information from Mr. Williams had led to Mr. Wilson`s arrest for cocaine possession.

In August 2004, Judge Larry Gist of the state district court in Beaumont, Tex., ruled that Mr. Wilson had failed to prove that he was mentally retarded. The Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed in a three-paragraph decision three months later.

Mr. Wilson`s lawyer, Jim Delee, then sought review in the federal courts but became tangled in the procedures and deadlines set out in the 1996 law. The judges who ruled against his client this week were Jacques L. Wiener Jr. and Emilio M. Garza, both appointed to the appeals court by the first President Bush, and W. Eugene Davis, by President Ronald Reagan.

This year the Supreme Court banned the execution of people who were under 18 at the time of their crimes. Mr. Marcus, of the Texas Defender Service, said it would be inconceivable to execute a juvenile offender even if his lawyer failed to raise the issue of his age at the proper time.

"If Mr. Wilson had been 14 years old at the time of the crime but, in the eyes of the court, the issue was raised late, would it be O.K. for Texas to kill him?" Mr. Marcus said. "The question in this case is no different."

* Copyright 2005The New York Times Company

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[urlI heard that!]http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/shared-blogs/ajc/luckovich/entries/2005/12/16/i_heard_that.html[/url]
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Cohen ist kein Liberaler oder ein Girlieman, wie Arnie beliebt zu sagen.
Eher ist Schwarzenegger ein Girlieman, weil er zu feige war, Menschlichkeit more than political calculation- almost sneering - walten zu lassen.

Seine Erklärung steht nicht viel Bushs, als Gouverneur von Texas, widerwärtigen Nachäffen der Bitte um Gnade einer Verurteilten in Texas nach.
[urlSchwarzenegger`s Decision]http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/national/Williams_Clemency_Decision.pdf[/url]

Seit 1893 sind in Kalifornien 510 Menschen darunter 4 Frauen hingerichtet worden. Durch Hängen 307, durch Gas 196 und durch die Giftspritze 7. Alles darüber auf der offiziellen Seite: http://www.corr.ca.gov/default2.asp

Eins kann ich feststellen, vom Hof von San Quentin hat man einen grandiosen Blick auf die SF-Bay. Wer sich selbst überzeugen will, fährt von SF mit dem Schiff nach Larkspur.

December 17, 2005
Globalist
The Quality of Mercy Is No Longer Mightiest
http://select.nytimes.com/iht/2005/12/17/international/IHT-1…

By ROGER COHEN
International Herald Tribune

"The State of California just killed an innocent man!" That was the lapidary cry from supporters of Stanley Tookie Williams in the San Quentin Prison death chamber Tuesday after an injection of lethal chemicals ended the life of the convicted killer, but did nothing to end controversy over the death penalty or Williams`s odyssey from gang founder to peace guru.

There is something about the Williams case that is deeply troubling.

It`s not the predictable outcry from Europe, where Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Austrian-born California governor who refused clemency to Williams, has been branded a real-life "Terminator" for his decision. We all know where Europe stands on the death penalty.

Nor is it the quarter-century of litigation since the four murders in 1979 of which Williams was convicted. Justice deferred tends to be justice denied, but the repeated legal scrutiny of the case in state and federal courts reinforced the credibility of the verdict.
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Nor, finally, is it the scene in the death chamber, terrible as that was, with a sweating prison nurse struggling for 15 minutes to find a usable vein in Williams`s muscular arm (he was once a bodybuilder like Schwarzenegger), relatives of Williams`s victims battling for composure, and his supporters yelling their outrage.

No, what is most disquieting for many people is the issue of redemption, which he placed front and center, arguing in effect that his salvation from sin and commitment to a life`s work steering kids away from gangland violence amounted to a persuasive reason for clemency, or to put it more simply, for mercy.

Redemption is a question we all grapple with; it is one we may dwell on particularly at the end of another year. You don`t have to be religious to believe that sin is a universal human condition; and you don`t have to be a Christian to be moved by the belief in Jesus Christ`s sacrifice for the redemption of mankind.

Yet Schwarzenegger, in his five-page explanation of his decision, made short - almost sneering - shrift of Williams`s plea for mercy on the basis of redemption. He wrote: "Without an apology and atonement for these senseless and brutal killings there can be no redemption. In this case, the one thing that would be the clearest indication of complete remorse and full redemption is the one thing Williams will not do."

I think, on the basis of repeated court findings and the volume of evidence, that Williams committed those murders and I can`t say why he would not apologize for them directly. That secret he took to the grave.

But to claim, as Schwarzenegger did, the nonexistence of redemption in the face of Williams`s repeated apologies for gangland violence and his earnest attempts over many years to turn youths, especially poor young black men, away from crime seems to me at once facile and grave.

Nowhere is it written that redemption is impossible without confession. Mercy has more to do with an invocation of grace than a measurement of facts. Clemency must reside more in the instincts of the heart than the calculations of the mind.
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Lethal Injection Table [urlLethal Injection Procedures]http://www.corr.ca.gov/CommunicationsOffice/CapitalPunishment/lethal_injection.asp[/url]
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"This is kind of the toughest thing you do when you`re governor," Schwarzenegger said last month. Well, yes, governor: to take or spare a human life is a terrible responsibility. The gravity of the call is such that it surely demands humanity, including the shared knowledge of sin and redemption, more than political calculation.

But mercy and clemency have gone out of fashion. They require personal courage and conviction; they may go against prevailing political wisdom (two-thirds of Californians favor the death penalty).

In the rare case these days when governors do grant clemency, their decision is almost always based on errors or omissions in the judicial system, rather than mercy. Indeed, the very word mercy, beautiful as it is, has come to seem quaintly outmoded.

"Modern governors reveal themselves to be shallow when then they are unready to talk about mercy and grace as an important part of just punishment," argued Bryan Stevenson, a professor at New York University Law School. "We celebrate redemption in so many situations, but refuse that latitude in a criminal justice system still biased against the poor, particularly the African-American poor."

Williams was African-American. In the early 1970s he co-founded the Crips youth gang in south central Los Angeles. The gang and its countless copycat offshoots have been responsible for numberless crimes.

In 1997, Williams wrote: "So today I apologize to you all - the children of America and South Africa - who must cope every day with dangerous street gangs. I no longer participate in the so-called gangster lifestyle, and I deeply regret that I ever did."

He went on to say that he had written the "Tookie Speaks Out Against Gang Violence" children`s book series in a bid to "end child-on-child brutality and black-on-black brutality."

Nobody can say how much impact these publications had. Schwarzenegger was dismissive: "The continued pervasiveness of gang violence leads one to question the efficacy of Williams` message," the decision reads.

That`s a risible argument, like saying the continued pervasiveness of teenage pregnancies shows that the efforts of those who speak out against them are useless. Williams had some effect on a huge social problem; it`s fair to believe that if his life had not ended at 51 he would have had more.

Williams was also a black man sent in the end to his death by a white man. Like a lot of black kids, he had it tough, and in his youth he did heinous things. Social hardship is no excuse for murder, but there is no escaping the fact that justice is a racial issue in the United States.

As Stevenson, who is African-American, put it: "Most people of color believe they are presumed guilty."

That view has a history: slavery, lynchings, police misconduct, justice denied. By various means, white America has tried to redeem itself from that terrible past. It has wanted to believe, unlike Schwarzenegger, that redemption is possible.

E-mail: [e-mail]

* Copyright 2005